Paid office hours: the easiest booking product a consultant can sell

The message starts with quick question and ends four paragraphs later. You know the answer. You also know that answering it properly will cost you half an hour, and that the last three people who asked this way never became clients. You are not short of demand for your expertise. You are short of a way to charge for the small version of it.

Why small advice is so awkward to sell

Consulting is priced for projects. The machinery around it, the scoping call, the proposal, the statement of work, the invoice, was built for engagements worth thousands. Point that machinery at a single question and the overhead eats the fee. So most independents do the obvious thing: they answer for free, hope it turns into work, and quietly resent the ones that do not.

Here is the part that is genuinely hard, and no product page will fix it. Selling thirty minutes means committing to give a real answer inside thirty minutes. No discovery phase, no let me look into it and come back. Some questions do not compress that far. If your work depends on reading a codebase, auditing a year of accounts or interviewing a team, a half-hour slot is the wrong container and you should say so on the page rather than disappoint someone who paid.

The other hard part is emotional. Charging for advice you have given away for years feels like a betrayal of the version of you who was generous. It is not. A price is a filter, and the people who pay it turn up with the problem written down instead of vaguely described.

What changes when the slot is the product

The shift is small and structural. Instead of selling an unknown amount of work at an unknown price, you sell a known amount of time at a known price, and everything downstream simplifies. Here is the same request handled both ways.

Building it in an evening

This is a short build. The thinking takes longer than the setup, which is the right way round. Work through it in order in your bookings product.

1. 1Add a product in the dashboard and choose the booking type. Name it for the outcome rather than the format: "Thirty minutes on your pricing page" beats "Consultation".
2. 2Set one duration. Thirty minutes is the easiest length to say yes to and the hardest to waste.
3. 3Set one price. Pick the number you would be pleased to see on a Tuesday morning, not the number that feels defensible in an argument.
4. 4Open your availability windows for the times you actually want to work. Two afternoons a week is a perfectly good calendar.
5. 5Add three order-form questions. Short answer for the situation, long answer for what they have already tried, multiple choice for the outcome they want from the call.
6. 6Connect Google Calendar on a paid plan so bookings land in the diary you already look at, and the Meet link is created for you.
7. 7Write the description as three blocks: who this is for, what you will do in the half hour, and what you will not do.
8. 8Buy your own slot with a real card, sit through the confirmation, and read the brief the way a stranger would.

What the arithmetic looks like

Suppose you price the slot at £90 and open six a week across two afternoons. If two sell in an ordinary week, that is £180 before Stripe's processing fee, and store.fan takes none of it. Whether two sell depends entirely on who is already listening to you, and nobody can promise you a number. What you can promise yourself is that the two people who did book arrived with a written brief.

The second-order effect matters more than the fee. A paid half hour is the cheapest way for a stranger to find out what you are like to work with, and the cheapest way for you to find out whether their problem is one you want. Everyone who books lands in your customer list with what they paid attached, so the people you have actually helped stop living in a search of your inbox. Some of those calls end with "this is bigger than thirty minutes", which is a sentence you can only say credibly once they have paid for the thirty.

The mistake almost everyone makes

They publish a menu. Fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, sixty minutes, three prices, and a free discovery call sitting underneath the lot. Every option added is a decision handed to someone who came to you precisely because they did not want to make decisions. Worse, the free call cannibalises the paid one: nobody pays £90 for the thing they can get for nothing by clicking two rows down. Publish one slot at one price for a month, and only add a second when a real person has asked for it twice.

When the question is too big for the slot

Say so in the first five minutes rather than the last. Use the time to map the problem properly, hand over the two things they can do this week, and tell them what the full piece of work would involve. You have then given complete value inside the container you sold, and the larger conversation starts from trust rather than a pitch. If that larger piece becomes a habit, it belongs on your storefront as its own product, priced accordingly. The plan comparison is worth a look at that point, because per-product analytics starts at Starter and tells you which of the two people actually want.

Office hours are not a business on their own. They are the smallest honest thing you can sell while you work out what the bigger thing should be, and they pay you for the research. Start with one slot, one price, three questions, and let the bookings tell you what people actually need.