You Got the Client. You’re Three Spreadsheets Deep and Still Can’t Name a Price.

The opportunity just landed. A real one. Bigger scope than you've handled before, a client with actual budget, a project that matches the service you've been building toward for months. You should be excited.

Instead you're at your desk running formulas. What if their budget is this. What if I coach 20 people instead of 40. What if I do half-hour sessions instead of full hours. What if I lower the per-session rate to make the total number less intimidating. You're three spreadsheets deep into scenarios for a conversation you haven't had yet.

You have a vision for how this service should work. You've been developing it. You believe in the methodology. But now that a real client wants to buy some version of it, you're trying to force-fit your vision into constraints you're imagining, because you haven't gone back to ask what the actual constraints are.

Why the Numbers Get Worse the Longer You Sit With Them

The instinct when a big opportunity arrives is to take it home and solve it. You're the expert. You're supposed to have the answers. You've seen enough engagements to know what a project like this should cost and how it should be structured. So you sit down and start building.

But your expertise, no matter how deep, doesn't include mastery of your client's environment. The client lives inside that environment every day. They know the internal priorities, the real budget constraints, the politics, the personalities. You can't access any of that from your desk. What you can access is your methodology, your experience, your framework for how the service should work. That's half of what you need. The other half lives with the person who asked you to do the work.

When you try to solve a two-person problem as a one-person problem, the pressure doubles. Every unknown becomes a scenario to plan for. Every assumption spawns three more assumptions. The formulas multiply because you're compensating for information you don't have with math that can't replace it. That's why it feels so heavy. You're carrying the weight of both sides alone.

What One Leadership Coach Discovered After Days of Running Formulas

A leadership coach had been developing her service model for months. She had a clear vision: structured coaching engagements with assessments, individual development plans, and measurable milestones. The methodology was sound. She believed in it.

Then a government agency approached her about coaching 50 people through a leadership transition. New supervisors, new managers, new assistant commissioners, all three to six months into positions they'd never held before. It was exactly the kind of work she'd been building toward.

She went home and started guessing.

What if the budget only covers 20 people. What if she has to compress 12 sessions into six. What if she drops from hour-long sessions to half-hours to make the numbers work. She was running every possible formula, trying to anticipate what the client might say before going back to ask.

On a group coaching call, she laid out the formulas. The response was direct: what their budget is does not matter right now. You have to understand what she's trying to get solved.

The conversation shifted from price to scope. Not "how much should I charge" but "what is the actual problem these 50 people need solved?" The answer was clear once she said it out loud: 50 people new in their positions who need to become leaders in the roles they're in now.

From there, her service vision stopped being abstract and started fitting inside the client's reality. Group orientation at the start where everyone takes assessments and names their individual challenges. Aggregate those 50 data points into common themes. Those themes become the milestones for individual coaching over six months. Then a group session at the end that mirrors the beginning: reflect the same assessments back, celebrate the growth, name what shifted.

The architecture she'd been trying to design for months took shape in one conversation. Not because someone handed her a new framework. Because she stopped trying to install her methodology in a vacuum and started building it with the client's environment in mind.

A peer on the call added what made it stick: that service structure, once built, becomes the standard. Every future engagement uses the same architecture. The only thing that changes is the client and their specific situation.

She'd been weeks into formula-spinning for a problem that required a phone call.

The Conversation You're Avoiding

If you're at your desk running scenarios for a project you haven't fully scoped with the client, the numbers aren't going to settle. Your methodology is real. Your vision for how the service should work is sound. But it can't be finalized until it includes the client's understanding of their own environment. The fix isn't better math. It's going back to the person who asked you to do the work. The scope clarifies. The price follows from the scope. And the service you've been trying to design stops being theoretical and starts being real.

You don't have to guess. You have to ask.

For consultants sitting at their desk trying to price a project they haven't fully scoped with the client, the pattern underneath is worth understanding fully