How to Start and Price an Outplacement Services Business

1. 1

   Understand what the company is actually buying

   Outplacement is bought by HR and legal, not by the departing employee, and what they are buying is a softer landing they can point to: severance packages that include support look better in the exit conversation, reduce the sting that leads to lawsuits and bad reviews, and reassure the employees who remain. Learn the buyer's language (reduction in force, severance agreement, notification day) and the standard shape of the product: tiered per-head packages by employee level, active for 30 to 90 days or until landed.

2. 2

   Build two or three per-head packages and price them properly

   A working starter menu: a staff package (group workshops, resume rewrite, LinkedIn overhaul, two one-on-one coaching sessions), a professional package (more one-on-ones, interview prep, recruiter introductions), and an executive package (dedicated senior coach, positioning strategy, networked search support). Legacy firms commonly charge from several hundred dollars per staff head into five figures per executive; price yours against your real delivery hours and coach costs with the Outplacement Pricing Calculator on our Calculators page (/calculators) so volume deals stay profitable when a client asks about 40 heads at once.

3. 3

   Assemble delivery before the first contract lands

   You need repeatable delivery on day one: a workshop curriculum (resume, search strategy, interviewing, LinkedIn), templates and guides drafted with the AI Business Tools (/ai) and polished by you, a scheduling and session system, and one or two contract coaches you can activate for volume, paid per participant so your costs scale with revenue. Deliver virtually by default; it widens your market to any US company and keeps margins honest.

4. 4

   Sell before the layoff, through the people who see it coming

   By the time a layoff is public it is usually too late to be included in the severance package, so build relationships upstream: HR directors and CHROs at mid-sized companies (the majors are locked up by legacy firms), employment attorneys who draft severance agreements, PEOs and fractional HR consultants who advise smaller companies, and CFOs at companies in visibly contracting sectors. The pitch is one sentence: when you have to do a reduction, we make sure your people land, at a per-head price that fits the severance budget.

5. 5

   Deliver like the participants are the clients too

   The company pays, but your reputation is built by the departing employees, so measure and report what matters: participation rates (the legacy firms' dirty secret is how few people use the benefit), time to landing, and participant satisfaction. Check in personally, celebrate landings, and send the sponsoring HR team an anonymized outcomes report; that report is what gets you the next reduction, the referral to a peer company, and the case study. A landed participant who says the support was real is your entire marketing department.

6. 6

   Grow into retainers and the quieter revenue nearby

   One-off projects become steadier through standing agreements (a negotiated per-head rate on file so HR can activate you in 48 hours), volume pricing tiers, and adjacent services: career transition workshops for companies not in layoffs, redeployment coaching that helps employers move people internally instead of out, and alumni-network support after big reductions. Publish honest content about doing layoffs humanely with the Social Media Studio (/social), because the HR leader searching how to run a compassionate layoff at midnight is your best future client.

Do not take our word for the money. Put your own numbers in and see what this idea has to earn before it works. Free, instant, no account needed.

Best for: Career coaches, recruiters, and HR veterans who can sell calmly to companies during their hardest weeks

Not for: Not for anyone who can only sell to the job seeker, because the entire advantage is flipping the payer to the company that has budget and motive. Not for a founder who cannot sell calmly to HR and legal during a company's hardest weeks, or who would copy the legacy firms' impersonal webinars, since genuinely human delivery and honest outcomes are what win the next reduction.