Pricing yourself when you sell more than one thing

Almost all pricing advice for independent practitioners assumes a single service sold to a single kind of client at a single rate. Very few practices actually look like that. A typical one has some one-to-one clients, a group or a cohort, two or three distinguishable skills, and a mix of ongoing and one-off work — and the moment you have more than one of those, an hourly rate stops being the right unit to think in.

Start from capacity, not from rate

The binding constraint in this kind of practice is almost never what you can charge. It is how many hours of actual delivery you are willing and able to do, which is a much smaller number than the hours you work.

Delivery is demanding in a way that admin is not. Most people can do a certain number of intensive sessions in a week before the quality declines, and that ceiling is personal but real. Setting income targets that require exceeding it does not produce more income; it produces a worse service and, eventually, a shorter career.

The second row matters more than people account for. Preparation and notes scale directly with session count, so they do not sit outside the capacity calculation — they are part of what each session actually costs you in time.

Two skills are two markets

If you deliver two genuinely different things — say, one where you have deep specialist standing and one that is more generalist — those sit in different markets with different rates, and blending them into a single hourly figure is a mistake in both directions.

The blended number underprices the specialist work, which is where your advantage actually is, and overprices the generalist work, where you are competing with people who do only that. The result is predictable: you win more of the work you should be doing less of.

Group work is a different shape, not a discount

The instinct with group or cohort work is to price it as a discounted version of one-to-one: fewer of your hours per person, so a lower price per person. That framing undersells it and misses what it is for.

Group work is the only structural way out of the hourly ceiling, because it is the only format where your income rises without your delivery hours rising. Eight people in a two-hour session is two hours of your capacity producing eight people's worth of value. That is a different economic object from a one-to-one hour, and pricing it as a fraction of one throws away the advantage.

It is also worth being honest that group delivery is not simply one-to-one work divided. It is a different skill, it needs more preparation, and it serves people whose needs are common rather than particular. Some clients are badly served by it and should be steered to one-to-one, which is a reason to run both rather than a reason to run neither.

Putting the mix together

1. Fix your weekly delivery ceiling first. This is the number everything else works within.
2. Split that ceiling across the formats you want to run — how many one-to-one hours, how many group hours.
3. Price each skill against its own market, not a blend.
4. Add preparation as a multiplier on session count rather than as a separate afterthought.
5. Account for slots that go unfilled or unrefilled. A cancellation policy is part of the pricing model, not an administrative detail.
6. Check the total against what you need. If it falls short, the lever is the mix — more group hours — before it is the rate.

The fifth point is where most practices leak. A no-show in a booked slot costs the full slot, because the time cannot be sold retrospectively. Whether you charge for it is a judgement about the relationship; whether you have decided in advance is not optional.