Why can't anyone tell me what business development help costs?
Nobody can tell you what business development help costs because the category holds completely different things, and each one's price is set by different logic.
| What you're buying | What sets the price | Rough shape |
|---|
| A community | Volume. Many members, light touch | Tens of dollars a month |
| A self-paced course | Production cost, sold repeatedly | Low hundreds, sometimes more |
| Group coaching or a program | Access to a person, plus curriculum and a cohort | Four figures and up |
| 1:1 coaching | One person's time, capped by hours in a week | The widest range of all |
The International Coaching Federation surveyed 14,591 coaches across 157 countries and found fees rise with a coach's experience, that business-coaching specialists charge above average, and that the seniority of a coach's own clients strongly influences their fees (2023 ICF Global Coaching Study, Executive Summary). Read that as the reason no benchmark helps you. Fees track who the person is and who they work with.
So the useful question is narrower: what does THIS specific thing cost, and what am I getting for it. You can only answer that by asking.
What am I actually paying for when I hire help?
You're paying for someone else's judgment and the time it saves you, and everything else in the package is delivery mechanics.
Judgment
Knowing which of several reasonable options fits your business, your client and this quarter. This is the part that can't be produced at scale, which is why it costs what it costs.
Time
The years you don't spend working it out. A B2B consulting sale runs three to eighteen months, so a wrong turn takes a year to reveal itself.
Accountability
Someone who notices when you stop. Cheap to describe, and the thing most people are missing.
Everything else
Curriculum, templates, a portal, a community, calls. Real, and reproducible. When a package is mostly this, the price should reflect it.
Before you compare two options, write down which of those four you're short on. Paying premium rates for materials when your gap is accountability is the most common way this money gets wasted.
How do I know if paying for help is worth it for my business?
Paying for help is worth it when one signed client covers it, so work out what one client is worth to you and read every price next to that number.
Consulting engagements in this market run anywhere from $2,500 to $250,000, so the arithmetic is different for every reader, which is exactly why you have to do it yourself rather than trust a rule of thumb.
- Write down your average engagement value over the last two years. The average, not your best year.
- Write down how many new clients you signed last year, and how many you wanted to.
- Multiply the gap by the average. That's what the problem costs you annually, and it's usually a number that reframes the conversation.
- Read any price against that number. A cost that looks large next to your software subscriptions often looks small next to one engagement.
- Then subtract nothing for the time. If it also takes a year off, that year has its own value and it isn't in the arithmetic yet.
If your revenue last year was under $120,000, do this arithmetic anyway and then wait. Below that line the honest answer is usually that you need more reps at getting clients on purpose before help multiplies anything.
What should I watch out for when comparing coaching prices?
Watch for the things that make a coaching price impossible to compare, because most of them are deliberate.
- A price with no scope attached. "Programs start at" tells you nothing until you know what happens after it starts.
- Access described in hours. Twelve calls is a quantity. Ask what it produces.
- A number that only holds until Friday. A price that moves on a countdown was never a price. It's a lever.
- A total with no payment terms. The headline number and what you'd pay per month are different questions, and only one is usually advertised.
- Nobody asking about your business before quoting. A price given before any diagnosis is a product price, which is fine, as long as you know that's what you're buying.
The one question that cuts through all of it: ask what the price includes when things go wrong, not when they go well. Scope is easy to describe on a good week.
How do I find out what a specific program costs?
Ask the program directly what it costs, in your first message. Most published prices sit at the low end of a category, and most serious programs quote after a conversation, so a missing number is normal.
What to say, and it can be this short:
Three things that message does at once:
- It gets you the number without a sales conversation you didn't want.
- It tells you how they respond to a direct question, which is a preview of working with them.
- It has you asking a direct money question out loud, which is the same thing you'll be doing in your own sales conversations.
If a range comes back and it's out of reach, say so plainly and ask what they'd suggest instead. In this market that usually produces a real answer, because the person on the other end knows you may be the right fit in a year.
Leah's take
Real talk: I'm not going to tell you what anything is worth. You can do that arithmetic better than I can, because you know what a client is worth to you and I don't.
What I'll say instead is that the women I talk to almost never have a money problem with this. They have a certainty problem. The question underneath "what does it cost" is usually "how do I know this will work for me." Price is the easier one to ask about. If that's where you are, the honest move is to ask the harder question out loud instead, to whoever you're considering, and see how they handle it.
And be careful of the arithmetic that only counts one side. Whatever you're weighing has a price. Not solving this also has a price, and it doesn't appear on any invoice, so it tends to get left out: the clients you didn't sign this year, and the year you spend wondering whether you were doing it right.
When you're ready to talk about whether the Academy is the right fit, the application is where that conversation starts, and the numbers come up there.
