How do you sell what you know without selling more hours?

Your calendar is the ceiling

Do the arithmetic once and it stays with you. At $180 a session, 20 sessions a week for 46 weeks is $165,600, before tax, before costs, and with no week off sick. That’s the most your hours can ever earn. Raise the price and the ceiling lifts a little. Sell something that isn’t an hour and it stops being a ceiling. The ceiling on your hours works out yours.

Four things that aren’t an hour

What can you sell besides your time? takes them one at a time.

Start with what you repeat

You already have a product. It’s the thing you explain in every first session, with the same examples and the same sketch on the same napkin. Clients ask for it, which is how you know it works. How do you turn your expertise into a downloadable product? takes it from your head to a file somebody buys.

Arrange them as steps, not a menu

A free first conversation, a small paid thing, the main offer, and something monthly for the people who want to keep going. Four steps a client can climb one at a time. What is a product ladder? explains why four beat ten, and the three questions every offer answers tell you what kind of thing each step is.

Price each one against an hour

A course is priced per seat below your one-to-one rate and above it in total. In the cohort example, 8 seats bring in $384 for each hour you teach, against $180 for an hour with one person.

You can’t make more hours. You can make more of each one.

Everything on selling more than hours

• What can you sell besides your time?

  Five things: a file people download, a group session, a course on set dates, a monthly retainer, and a file that renews each month. You already know how to make every one of them. They’re what you do now, in a shape that doesn’t need you in the room each time.

• What is a product ladder, and do you need one?

  A product ladder is three or four offers at different sizes that a client climbs one at a time: free, small, your main offer, then something monthly. Not ten. Each step should make the next one obvious.

• What should you sell after a client’s package ends?

  A monthly offering, for the clients who want to keep going, offered before the last session, not after it. And nothing at all for the ones who got what they came for. Let them go well, and they send you the next one.

• How do you turn your expertise into a downloadable product?

  Find what you explain in every first session. Write it once, as something to fill in. Test it on three clients, fix where they stop, and sell it beside your sessions. If somebody can use it without you, it’s a product.

• Should you use pay what you want?

  On a file, yes: set a lowest price, suggest the one you’d charge, and let people choose. On your sessions and anything monthly, no. Your time and your ongoing commitment deserve a fixed price, so neither of you has to wonder what they’re worth.

• How do you price a group program or cohort?

  Per seat, well below what the same hours would cost one-to-one, and above your one-to-one rate in total. Each person pays less than they would alone. Each hour you teach earns more than an hour with one client. Both of you come out ahead.

• How do you move clients from sessions to a retainer?

  Watch for the client who keeps booking without being asked, or the package with one session left. Then offer a month, not a pitch: fewer sessions than they’d book one by one, for less, refilled every month, and easy to stop at the end of any paid month.

• What are the three questions every offer answers?

  What the client picks before they pay, what they get once it’s paid, and whether it happens again. Answer those three for anything you sell and you know what it is: a session, a package, a course, a project, a file or something monthly. The name comes last.

• What can a practice of one sell besides hours?

  Forty things, grouped by kind of practice below, and each one is a file, a group, a course on set dates or something monthly. None of them is new. They’re the work you already do, in a shape that doesn’t need you in the room every time somebody buys it.

• What should a workbook or toolkit cost?

  Price it against an hour of your time, not against other people’s PDFs. A workbook that does part of what a session does is worth part of a session. Between a quarter and a half of a $180 session is $45 to $90, and that’s a fair place to start.

• How do you sell a monthly file, like a report or a pack?

  Make each month’s version worth renewing for on its own. A monthly file works when the subject changes every month (prices, a market, a season) and the reader would otherwise have to work it out themselves. Update it on the same day each month, and say what changed at the top.

• When should you start a group program?

  When you find yourself teaching the same thing in every engagement. If three clients this month needed the same explanation, the same exercises and the same examples, that part is a group. Start with the smallest group worth running, about six people, and keep one-to-one for what’s different about each client.

• How many people should a cohort have?

  Small enough that everybody speaks, every time. For a discussion, six to ten. For a workshop where people mostly practice, up to twelve with one teacher. For a talk with questions at the end, as many as you like, but then it isn’t a cohort, it’s an audience.

• How do you run a workshop on set dates?

  Fix the dates before you sell a seat, sell the seat for all of them at once, and say in advance what happens when somebody misses one and what happens if they stop. Then send a short note before each date. The work is in deciding those rules, not in running the sessions.

• How do office hours work as a paid product?

  A slot held each month for one client, paid monthly and booked when it suits them. It’s a retainer for the client who needs you now and then, not every week. The consulting setup on WorkWith starts with a standing monthly slot: one hour a month for $300.

• How do you stop a retainer turning into unlimited work?

  Write down what the month includes, how fast you answer, and what isn’t in it, then look at it with the client once a month. Most retainers grow because nobody said where they stop. A short monthly review turns “can you also” into a conversation about the next month’s scope.

Checked 2026-10-10.