Consistency & Courage: Pricing Strategies for New Coaches with Marc Mawhinney

Welcome to Live With The Pricing Lady.

I'm Janene, your hostess.

This show is all about helping you build a sustainably profitable

business while making an unbelievable impact on your world.

Learn from my 20 years of experience and from my guests as we discuss their pricing

challenges, failures, and successes.

Pricing is a way of being or behaving in your business.

My mission is to help you confidently charge for the value you deliver.

Pricing is either hurting or helping your business.

Let's make sure it's helping you reach your dreams

In this episode of Live with The Pricing Lady, I sit down with Marc Mawhinney

Marc is a lifelong entrepreneur and owner of natural born coaches.

He's coming on the show to share with us his pricing experience and what he sees

you coaches doing with your pricing that you shouldn't be and how to do it better.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.

So welcome to the show, Marc.

So happy to have you here.

Yes, thank you for having me.

And full disclosure, I had some technical difficulties, which that's

the joys of online business, but I'm glad that we're here now and all's good.

Happy to have you here.

So Marc, why don't you start by sharing with us where you're joining from today?

I am in Atlanta, Canada, more specifically Moncton, New Brunswick, Atlanta, Canada.

So the East coast of the country.

Okay.

Okay.

Haven't been there yet.

Look forward to it one day.

It's a beautiful part of the world.

I say nine, 10 months of the year, I could do without January, February, but besides

that, the rest of the year is great.

Well, we just came off a very hot summer for us here in Switzerland.

And finally, Yes, last night to today it cooled.

So I know what you mean by those nine months of the year.

I love it.

We're in the same boat here.

A lot of people think we live in igloos in Canada.

We have lots of 40 degree Celsius days.

You know, what's at a hundred and low hundreds for American

listeners which is great.

So everyone's, Oh, it gets that hot there.

I'm like, yeah, it gets hot here.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing here in Switzerland, they don't have air conditioning

except for in essential facilities.

Oh, really?

So, it's sometimes it, it, when you have those day after day after

day, it's quite not much fun.

All right, Marc, what would you describe as your superpower?

Oh, boys superpower.

The word that pops into my mind is consistency.

So I've been doing my coaching business for 10 years, but I've been

doing certain things in that business consistently, you know, every day.

So daily emails to my list.

I've done many years of that.

I'm up to almost a thousand podcast episodes released, et cetera.

So it's just, it's not the sexiest superpower to say consistency,

but that's the word that pops up.

That's a good one to have though.

That's amazing.

Excellent.

What's one interesting thing that you'd like to share with us that

most people don't know about you?

Well, I have a twin brother, which a lot of people don't know because

now he doesn't have the beard.

He has a different hairstyle, but we sound the same.

He's a little more behind the scenes.

He has a podcast editing business and they're doing really well with that,

but he's not into the content creation, dancing monkey stuff that we have to do.

Right.

On the other side of the screen, he, his business is very referral based.

They're, they've got some great clients.

He's happy with it.

So a lot of people are like, Oh, you have a twin.

Or they'll go to tag me into something, say on Facebook or whatever.

They tag him by mistake because his name's Matt, M A T T, very close to Marc.

And then he has to say, Oh, you wanted my brother or whatever.

So yeah, I have a twin brother.

I sat on his head for nine months.

That's funny.

You know, I have to confess this because it's quite funny.

So I have a little, a little card here to remind you because I've been

talking to a Matt the last three days.

I was so afraid I was going to call you Matt.

It's happened once

or twice.

Yeah, we The li the life of a twin.

So yeah, we, we look probably more like brothers now, you know?

Mm-Hmm.

Rather than twins, but up until, gee, I don't know, grade five or six, we were

quite at, we're, we are identical twins.

But you, you couldn't tell us the part in grade school.

Oh wow.

Interesting.

Super cool.

So why don't we start by sharing a little bit about how you started your business

and, and got to where you are today.

Yeah, so my business is helping coaches get more clients

organically without paid ads.

I started it in March of 2014, so celebrated 10 years earlier this year.

And how did I start was like anything I do, I just tend to jump into the pool.

My past life, I was in real estate.

I got started right when I was in university.

And I remember coming home One day to my girlfriend at the

time, and I, she had no clue.

I was even thinking real estate.

I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna get my real estate license or whatever.

And that, that turned into a decade long journey where I did

quite well with real estate.

Mm-Hmm, . Same.

Same thing with coaching.

I had actually been helped by a couple different coaches, mentors.

I thought, I wanna do something that's online.

It's flexible.

I can work with people all over the world.

And coaching was a no brainer to jump into this.

So that's how I, I just jumped in and that's learned as I went along.

I didn't definitely didn't have it all figured out.

I still don't have it all figured out.

I don't think I ever will or anyone.

I think

it's often, it's just changing all the time.

So just as soon as you think you figured it out, something shifts and you know,

everything needs, not everything, but you know, things need to be done differently

or, you know, You need to shift things.

Is that?

Exactly.

Yeah.

There's been a big shift in the Marcet.

We'll probably touch on this.

I imagine with your niche and around pricing and stuff, but the last few

years, I think around 2022, probably started 2023 and into this year, there's

been some changes in the online space.

Not necessarily bad, just means that you have to do things

differently to grow your business.

Exactly, exactly.

If you go back to the very first time you had to set a price for something that you

were offering, what was that like for you?

For coaching, of course, you know that it's (pricing) a wild west, right?

You've got coaching that's peanuts, you know, 25 bucks an hour.

While you have free coaching all the way up to six figures a year.

You got Tony Robbins steve Hardison is another one that comes to mind

and, and everywhere in between.

It can be difficult to set a price, especially if you're a new coach.

When I started, I set a price and this was not you know,

any deep research or whatever.

It sounded good to me at the time.

500 bucks a month, 1 on 1 weekly calls supporting between

500 a month, month to month.

I wasn't selling package either, you know, stupid Marc.

But anyways I learned very quickly that wasn't the best approach to it.

And that's fine.

You don't know until you try it.

But I look at My experiences with the clients, so their experience versus

now when I'm charging much more.

Mm-Hmm.

. And it, it seems very silly or naive the way I was doing it before, but I

didn't know any better, so I just plucked it outta the air and just got started

Why in retrospect do you see that as not being the right way to do it?

You know, well, there's, for somebody right now who's listening and, and

either doing it that way or thinking about doing it that way, I think

it's interesting for them to know.

Yeah, I mean, there's two parts to that.

Of course, there's two ways.

I believe I was doing it wrong.

I believe I was charging too little because if we're looking at 500

for weekly calls, whatever, 125 a week for one on one, very intimate.

I say intimate sounds dirty.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, close coaching with them one on one but also, but also the month,

to month means that you're having to resell the person every single month,

as opposed to if you sell three months, six months, one year engagement.

And a lot of times people think a month is a long time.

A month really goes by very quickly.

We know cause our summer went so quick right?

I'm like, geez, where did the summer go and it just felt like it

was just starting, now it's gone.

So I'm not a fan of doing single sessions or month to month, you know,

I recommend bare minimum three months, but ideally more and it's not helping

the client if you're doing the shorter ones as well, cause if you're only

doing one session or a couple sessions.

It's very difficult to get what needs to be done that quick.

There's two things I believe I was wrong with the pricing.

I was too low and I was also wrong with the way that I set it up.

The Packaging.

Yeah.

Those are really valid points.

When you made the shift, when you started shifting your pricing over,

how did you go about making that shift from this time based because it was

really a monthly, a monthly offer into something else and where you are now.

The impetus to make the change came from dealing with a client who

I call my what about Bob client.

Do you remember that movie with Bill Murray back in the day?

Vaguely.

It may be before everyone's time, but in a nutshell, Bill Murray was

this kind of kooky, crazy client.

He had a therapist or a psychiatrist or whatever.

Who, well, he was driving nuts because he needed so much

hand holding and everything.

And that professional referred him to Richard Dreyfuss, who was a shrink which

should have been the first red flag.

Back in my real estate days, whenever I had a competitor refer me a

client, I knew something was up.

Why are they giving me a client, not working myself?

But Bob in the movie ended up, you know, he'd be called him a million times and

they end up tracking him down on vacation to the little lakeside town or whatever,

where Richard Dreyfuss took his family.

The client I had in the coaching end wasn't that extreme, but he would send

a message and then he would expect, and if I didn't answer within an hour,

it's a barrage of other messages.

Okay, geez, what's going on here?

It's not like you waited a week to get a message, you know, come on.

That's not to knock him, but what I've found in the past since then is that

the more people pay, I've had clients pay me 10,000 that I'm reaching out to

them and checking in it's not them, you know, or whatever, And that's generalized

because there's a holes that are paying little and there's a holes paying a lot.

But generally speaking, the more people pay that they don't engage in jackassery

as much, I would say, if that's a word.

So I had a what about Bob client.

I said, this isn't worth it for 500 bucks a month, because this is

a full time job holding his hand.

And that's when I made the change.

The other thing that really helped me was I read a book down the road a little bit

called Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port

. In Book Yourself Solid, he has a concept in there.

He talks about the red velvet rope strategy.

He suggests that whether you're a coach, consultant, whatever service provider,

really, that you treat your business like the hot new club restaurant in town.

That not anyone can just walk off the street and get a

table or get a spot in there.

You know, you need to be on the list and then you've got the security

guard, the bouncer at the door checking the list, making sure everyone's

waiting in the line up there.

That was a mind changing for me because I thought, wow, it flips the power.

A lot of times we give away the power to the prospect because we all want business.

We want to grow.

We want to get clients.

We need money to, You need to make a profit to stay in business.

And that one simple change, Michael Port alerted me to with the Red Velvet

Road Strategy or policy changed things.

Suddenly you as the entrepreneur are in a position of power, which I think

is very attractive for clients because they don't want to work with a desperate

person who doesn't have any clients and doesn't value what he or she's doing.

And so I went through my list.

Create a list of my criteria and it stayed the same right to

this day of my ideal clients.

So I have certain things on there like they must be action takers, you

know, I don't want to have to drag them along and chase them to do stuff.

They have to have big goals.

I, that motivates me.

People that want to work with somebody has a big goal as opposed to, Oh,

I just want to make some spare pocket change or whatever they say.

They have to you know, like to have fun cause I joke around, you know,

and my coaching sessions and things.

I don't want to be too uptight.

And there's other things too, obviously be pay me what I'm worth, pay me on time.

That's an important one as well.

So I put those I have, I think five piece of criteria down on a list.

I looked at the people I was currently working with.

I said, anyone who doesn't match at least four of the five, I'm going to

have to say so long, you know, good luck.

All right.

And anyone who's going forward has to match that criteria.

And I've been pretty good.

I mean, the odd one sneaks in when you're doing high volume, that

isn't going to be perfect, but, or whatever, but overall a knock on wood.

I haven't worked with a lot of a holes so.

Well, that's, that's also on my list, not to, that was one of the very first

things when I started my business.

And I think you bring up a really important point with both of the

points you just made, and that's that boundaries are also very important

when it comes to your pricing.

Yeah.

And so what you're talking about here is really setting boundary conditions for the

way that you want to work and how you want to work and who you want to work with.

Yes.

So people.

It's human nature to try to get a discount, right?

Like some cultures and more than others, some it's a national sport haggling

at the markets and things, right?

Right.

I found this back in my real estate days.

The standard commission in my marketplace was 6 percent

pretty much across the board.

And I would go into a listing appointment to put someone's home in the market.

And when we're getting ready to sign the paperwork, they would

say, what's the commission?

I'd say, okay, it's 6%.

And they say, are you flexible on it?

And I would fire back without wasting a second.

I'd say, sure, I'll take 7%.

Aha.

You know, , they'd laugh and then they'd sign in the dotted lines.

As opposed to other agents, if they're like, well, it's 6%, you

know, maybe I could do it for five.

You know, and they're just sort of waffling there and it's not gonna be good.

In the coaching world, it's the same thing.

Not with commissions, obviously, but with pricing, it's not uncommon.

Are you flexible?

Oh, I, or I only have this much money and whatever.

So a couple of, here's a great example in the coaching world.

I'm in Canada.

My pri my.

Fees are in us.

'cause most of my clients are in the us Mm-Hmm.

or they're elsewhere.

You know, I've dealt with people in Europe and things like that.

Everyone knows what their dollar is compared to the US for the most part.

Mm-Hmm.

. I've had

the odd Canadian person who's looked at working with me and

they're like, what's the pricing?

I'll say X dollars.

They'll say, oh, is that Canadian?

Now our Canadian dollar is crap versus the US It's like, you know, usually

70 cents on the dollar, whatever.

And I'll say, no, that's American.

And then they're like, oh, okay.

Cause you know, there's more money and they're like, well, can we

do that pricing Canadian, which is essentially a discount, right?

If if, if I'm, if I'm charging, well, I'll just take a flat number here.

Cause it's easy if, if you're charging a thousand dollars for something

American, and then they say, well, you know, is it American or Canadian?

That's roughly a dollar, 25, 30.

Sorry!

1, 300 Canadian.

If I charge them a thousand Canadian, in reality, I'm dropping down to whatever

800 American, so it is a discount,

yeah, so

I say to them in that case, like look my, I don't want to get into

different types of prices and fees on my website, different stuff like that.

I said I could charge you Canadian, but it's going to be Whatever

the exchange rate is today.

Yeah.

So if you, if you feel better me charging you 1, 300 Canadian instead

of a thousand dollars us, I could do that if you want to feel better.

And then people are usually like, oh, okay, I get it.

And that's a good example in one way with pricing.

This is why it's important to have a couple of different options on

your menu, because if you've got a one on one that you're charging

$5000 for someone who can't do that.

You don't want to be like, okay, well I'll cut the price down or whatever.

But if you have something that's a little more hands off and do it

yourself digital Program, Group Program or something, then you could

pull that out of your back pocket.

5,000, this isn't going to work for you.

That's cool.

I do have a group program.

It's $2500 small group of six people.

Would you be interested in hearing more

? Right.

Right.

And I love that.

There's so many creative ways to hold value and what I've found over the years,

because I used to, well, sometimes I still do it, but I used to quiz people at the

beginning of a web class and ask them, make me a list of all the ways you can

think of to discount or lower your prices.

Now make me a list of all the ways you can think of to raise them.

Yeah.

That's a good way to look at it.

There's so, you know, we're so creative when it comes to ways to

lower our prices, but most people.

Don't nearly have the same level of creativity when it comes to raising them.

Yeah.

I mean, unfortunately the online space is, again, it's human nature,

but there are a lot of people who I would prefer not to work with.

You know, you get the Christmas refunders is one of the terms in

there where Christmas is coming.

They want to buy their kid that PS5 and the other stuff coming in.

And what, Oh, what can I refund from earlier in the year that I bought or

whatever online I have been really clear on my agreements, on everything.

There's no con's and no guarantees You know I can't guarantee my staffs gonna

work if you're laying on the couch watching Netflix 24/7 so whatever so I

think we have to be very clear on it.

Now, that being said, if you know, I'm, I'm experiencing a situation

now I won't get into the whole thing.

Good guy.

But a client who didn't show up to many of our six months of calls, you

know, like roughly half the calls and then summer hit or whatever.

And he was musing about a refund or whatever.

And like, that's the first I'd heard anything of it.

Like he, I thought he was traveling, all this other stuff I was checking in.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

And we have to have that conversation.

I don't mind if there's something I could do.

Were you stuck in something?

Do you need to do a little bit more?

Because I want people to be happy, but I, I don't do like

refunds and things like that.

Just cause like, yeah, you have to do it.

And it's not helping him either.

Cause as he's growing his coaching business, I want him to be firm on

what he's accepting for his as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a, there's a time and place for that compassion.

There's a time and place to, you know, to do what you lead by example

is what I'm trying to say there.

Yeah.

I like that.

So Marc, you work with so many coaches.

I'm curious, what types of struggles do you see your coaches having most when

it comes to pricing in their businesses?

Well, determining the price is a big one because they have a

bunch of people giving advice.

Oh, you should be pricing this much, should be pricing that one.

And I, I don't shame people for what they set for a price.

You know, it's, this isn't terribly scientific, but I think

it has to feel good in your gut.

So right now, if I could be like, yeah, I'm going to charge as much as

you can, you're worth it or whatever.

If I went out there and started advertising a million dollar

coaching package million dollars a year I'd love to pay a million

if anyone is watching us once I get my Paypal at the end and I fired it over

sit, but I've never sold a million dollar coaching package I'm not feeling that

I want to put everything on my basket so that doesn't feel good and that

being said, if I'm charging 500 dollars I mentioned as a rookie coach I was

doing, that wouldn't feel good either so you have to pay attention to yourself

and I consistently increase my feast and There's always a little bit of hesitation

regardless right how long you been at it.

And then usually it's like, Oh, okay.

It's selling and it's like, oh, that worked out really well.

But you can tell if I'll give you an example.

I the 5, 000 offer a few years back was selling like hotcakes.

Just being taken orders.

I said, you know what I'm going to charge 6, 000.

Cause you know, it's going great at 5, 000 and then it got quieter and I still

had people booking calls and stuff.

They weren't doing six and I ended up the saying after an experiment, you know

what, I'm gonna move it back to five.

And the Marcet was telling me, and the Marcet will tell you it's

just like a real estate Marcet.

You know, you could have a nice house and, you know, beautiful paint

and the best nails or whatever.

But if you're pricing it up a hundred thousand over what it's

worth, it's not going to sell the market's going to tell you that.

So that's probably a big one.

Cool.

Another question.

So a lot of coaches, they they'll go through a training program

to get accredited or certified.

And a lot of the training programs tell them, this is what they've told me,

tell them that they should price really low at the start because they're new.

And I'm curious what your take on that is.

I don't like it because I think confidence wise if you're busting your butt and

you're doing this coaching you've already spent hundreds of hours probably

doing buddy coaching, accountability coaching for free in the certification

program, and then you get out into the real world and you're charging peanuts.

It's gonna be pretty discouraging and it's gonna be tough to move the needle

in this arena as well I've seen a lot of new coaches going back to the

selling individual sessions that will put a price at like 50 on a session

And their goal is you know, whatever if their shooting for 10k a month They're

selling a hundred dollar packages.

You're well, first off, you're gonna be, if you're lucky enough to fill all those

slots, you're going to be spending all the rest of time selling them, right?

Then you have to do the fulfillment, the actual coaching, you're

gonna be burnt out really quick.

It's much easier if your goal is 10, 000 to sell two 5, 000 packages a

month, three times 3000, 333, whatever, as opposed to, you know, a hundred or

whatever packages need the other way.

it.

It's, it's much easier.

So yeah I'm not, and you can tell I'm not a fan of the bargain basement coaching

fees, I just think it's too difficult and I don't think it helps the client either.

No, I don't think it helps the client.

I also think like with the time based rates, if you, like as you get better

and more efficient at your coaching, you can deliver better results, maybe even

in a slightly shorter period of time, not always, but You, but in the end you end

up somehow charging less for them getting better results out of it quite often.

And so it doesn't scale and grow with you as your business evolves and you, and you

find your niche and your way of working.

And I think that's

unfortunate.

I'm glad you mentioned that because a lot of coaches don't realize

they're improving every year.

You're not the same person you were 365 days ago.

You've read more books, you've worked more clients, you've taken

more courses, you have more skills.

It's a lot like my son years ago.

He's 16 now, but when he was younger, we bumped into a friend at the mall

who hadn't seen him in a couple years.

Friends like bowled over like, oh my God, he's so bigger, whatever that.

And like I see him every day.

I'm like, no, he isn't, he's not much, that much bigger.

Right.

But he was probably like six inches taller or whatever at this time.

And yeah, same goes with our businesses, you know, comes down to

valuing ourselves and our skills.

Coaches are Addicted To Personal Development And Growth.

I mean, they're just, most every coach is a but I see you're a reader.

I'm a reader.

I've got 20 totes of boxes besides those books.

But they just can't get enough of learning and things.

But unfortunately, they don't always put the proper value on those skills

and that experience and that knowledge.

So that good thing to mention, you said about new coaches, they might

be a brand new coach, but maybe they were in that field doing something

different for 10 or 20 years.

I got all this stuff up here, but they're like, well, I've

only been a coach for a week.

A week.

No, you've been in that world for 20 years.

Yeah.

I, and I, that's one of the things that really.

It drives me a little bit crazy when I hear them being given that advice

because most of them come with quite a lot of experience before they started

getting their coaching credential which they're completely discounting, ha ha ha,

no pun intended, you know what I mean?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So why don't we start wrapping this up, What is it that you would like people

to remember from our conversation today?

There's a really good quote that a past guest on my show said, and it stuck with

me because that episode was in 2015.

He's coming back on the show for episode number 900.

So it's Bob Berg who wrote the book, The Go Giver.

Anyone

who's read that, endless, Referrals.

This is one of his, he's written a bunch of great ones, but the go giver

is the one that people tend to know.

And he mentioned to me way back then, almost 10 years ago, he

said, money is an echo of value.

And what he was saying was that you have to put value out into the marketplace,

but when you do, you're, it's inevitable.

You're going to be rewarded.

with money on your bank or in your wallet so a lot of times when people

are struggling and they don't have much money it doesn't mean that they are bad

person that they'll never make money.

but they need to change the things around them and look and say "Is this what

really people want?" "Is this giving that value that the marketplace needs?".

There's another saying feed a starving crowd, you know, Gary Halbert talked about

that, you know, and he has a whole story about a hamburger stand with a class.

He's teaching marketing, but basically the point of that was to find

out what the crowd is hungry for.

And then you just feed it to them piping hot on a plate.

And I think not enough time goes into that.

People spend a little too much time working on their logo, the

banner on their website and all this other stuff, their webinar.

Great.

But they're not thinking.

Trying to

hack this and that.

Yeah, that's right.

It's such a noisy place too.

It's tough.

You got to put horse blinders on, but the number one thing is what does

the market need help with, you know?

So if I went out there today and started coaching on MySpace,

generating business on MySpace, there's not going to be a lot of takers.

Cause when did that die?

It was big in like what?

Oh five or six or whatever, you know?

There's not a big Marcet for MySpace at the moment.

So there's an example.

Right, right.

Very good.

And what's next for you?

What are you working on?

Or what's coming down the pipeline?

Boys, like anything, when you've done something for a long time, over 10

years, I always want to keep it fresh.

So I've been popping open the hood.

What do I like in my business?

What don't I like as much?

You know, I'm an admitted workaholic, so I have to work, work on that.

I just hired someone.

She started two days ago who's joining the team helping with

Facebook Group admin and stuff.

So I would say that's part of it delegation.

We also have a good new program in my Facebook group.

That's giving people VIP perks, which get going really well.

We launched that earlier this summer, we've got a lot of people in there.

So that's, You know, I would probably direct people you know, if, if they

want to learn more about me and about that, it's at thecoachingjungle.

com.

That's my Facebook group.

There's 26, 000 coaches in there.

Good, good people, good conversations going on.

Excellent.

So you stole my last question here, which is where can people reach out to you?

No problem.

We'll pop that and some of your other links into the show notes as well.

So people can reach out to you as they wish.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Marc, for joining me today.

It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.

Yes.

Well, thank you for having me.

Thank you everyone.

Wish you all the best and as always enjoy pricing.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Live with The Pricing Lady, the podcast.

If you enjoyed the episode, rate, review, and subscribe to it, then share

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com and contact me there.

Not sure where to start when it comes to improving pricing and profits?

At ThePricingLady.

com you can download a copy of my Self Assessment Pricing Scorecard.

Find out where it's going well and where you can begin improving.

Or just simply book a discovery call with me.

There we can discuss what's up with pricing in your business and

how I might be able to help you.

Thanks once again for joining.

Remember, pricing can hurt or help your business.

Let's make sure it's helping you reach your dreams.

See you next time and as always, enjoy pricing.