How to Charge for Async Leadership Questions

Charge for async leadership questions by setting a fixed price and a reply time on a text-only Paid Question: the follower types the situation, you reply in writing within your stated window, and payment happens before you write anything. No call, no calendar, no free preview. Paid Questions let a follower pay upfront to ask one private question, and you send one written reply on your own time — no live call or scheduling.

No monthly fee, you only pay a small platform fee when you get paid. 8% platform fee when a follower pays for work, 5% platform fee on tips and goals. Card processing is separate. pricing

Leadership questions rarely wait for a scheduled slot. A manager messages the night before laying someone off, or a first-time director wants a script for a promotion conversation happening in an hour. If the only paid option on your page is a booked call, most of that traffic goes unanswered or gets answered for free. A priced, not-live question format lets followers pay for that answer instead.

Manager quality is not a side issue in how organizations perform — it is close to the whole story. Gallup's engagement research finds that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement (Gallup, "Employees Want a Lot More From Their Managers"). Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report also found that 22% of managers worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, against 19% of individual contributors. Managers facing a hard conversation may value a fast, specific answer they can use before the next meeting.

What counts as an async leadership question?

An async leadership question is one text-based situation a manager or executive sends privately — such as a layoff script, peer conflict, or promotion conversation — and you send back one scoped written reply by the delivery time you set. The follower pays upfront, and you reply in writing within the window you set.

On Brillay, an async leadership question is sold as a Paid Question: the follower pays first, types the situation and context as text, and the creator replies in writing inside the stated window (how it works). Brillay's own product documentation describes the payment-first flow directly: followers pay upfront, and the creator can decline a request.

Typical prompts fit in a paragraph or two:

• "One of my directs is underperforming but well-liked by the team — how do I open that conversation?"
• "I'm about to give feedback that will land badly. How do I frame it?"
• "My manager keeps taking credit for my team's work. What do I actually say?"
• "I have to announce a reorg tomorrow. What's the first sentence?"

A request that needs an uploaded document, such as a full performance-review draft or a town-hall slide deck, belongs in a custom request instead.

The supply of async leadership questions has a documented cause. Gallup reports that only 44% of managers worldwide say they have received management training, and that managers who receive training are half as likely to be actively disengaged (Gallup, "Rebuilding Indian Workplaces for the Future"). An untrained manager facing a layoff script or a peer conflict for the first time is exactly the person willing to pay for one specific, fast answer.

How do you price a single leadership question?

Price a single leadership question by multiplying an hourly anchor by the minutes the answer truly takes — reading, thinking, and writing — then adding a premium for specificity and speed. A $120-an-hour anchor makes a 15-minute general reply about $30 and a 40-minute high-stakes script about $80 before any rush premium.

Two published US wage benchmarks give a defensible floor for an hourly leadership-advice anchor. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median annual wage of $101,860 for management analysts in May 2025 (BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Management Analysts), which works out to roughly $49 an hour across a 2,080-hour year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median annual wage of $133,000 for training and development managers in May 2025 (BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Training and Development Managers), or about $64 an hour on the same basis. Treat roughly $50–$65 an hour as the salaried floor for this kind of judgment and set your own anchor above it, because you are selling scarce, unscheduled availability rather than salaried hours.

The market for paid leadership advice is large and growing, which supports pricing a single question in the low hundreds rather than the low tens. The International Coaching Federation's 2025 Global Coaching Study reported $5.34 billion USD in annual coaching revenue, a 17% increase since 2023 (ICF, "Coaching Industry Continues Global Growth with $5.34 Billion USD Revenue"). The same ICF study counted 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide, and the International Coaching Federation reports that 53% of coaching clients worldwide are sponsored, meaning their fees are paid by a third party such as an employer (ICF, Global Coaching Study). Some managers may be able to expense leadership advice through an employer, but do not assume that every follower has a coaching budget.

The formula: price = (your hourly anchor ÷ 60) × minutes to read, think, and write × urgency multiplier, rounded up to the nearest $5. The dollar amounts in the table below are arithmetic from a $120-an-hour anchor, not surveyed market rates; substitute your own anchor and the tiers move with it.

The suggested list price sits above the raw anchor math because the anchor prices your time, not the specificity premium a manager is actually buying: a usable script for one named conversation is worth more than a generic tip, and an answer promised inside 24 hours costs you schedule flexibility. Audience size should move the anchor rather than the tiers — Brillay has no follower minimum, so a 2,000-follower creator whose readers are directors and VPs can reasonably price above a 200,000-follower creator whose readers are individual contributors.

For each Paid Question, set your price and delivery time and state what one question covers; the offer ends with one written reply conversation. One price, one reply window, one scoped answer. The same fixed-price, reply-window, scoped-answer structure also works for paid async nutrition questions.

Treat every dollar figure in the formula and the pricing table as an illustrative worked example, not a guarantee. What a given leadership question is worth depends on the creator's audience size, positioning, and how specific the answer has to be.

Should a leadership question be a Paid Question or a custom request?

Choose a Paid Question when the follower can describe the situation in text and you can answer in writing. Choose a custom request when a document has to move in either direction — a draft memo, a review outline, a slide deck, or marked-up feedback.

Custom Work supports a creator-set price and a creator-set delivery time, capped at up to 5 days in the product. In practice, most one-off "what do I say in this specific conversation" questions fit a Paid Question cleanly, while a request to review an already-written performance evaluation, restructuring plan, or leadership deck belongs in a custom request.

How do you write the reply window and scope?

Write the reply window and the scope as two short commitments in the listing itself: an exact number of hours you will answer within, and an exact definition of what one question covers. Vague wording like "I'll get back to you soon" invites follow-up messages that were never priced in.

State the reply time in the listing text — for example, "one leadership question, answered within 24 hours."

What does a recommended leadership-question setup look like?

Example: Set the price at $150 per question, set a 48-hour reply time, and define the scope as one situation; if a question falls outside that scope, you can decline it, the request closes, and the follower keeps their money. Those four numbers are enough to publish; adjust the fee up or down once you have seen ten real submissions land in your inbox.

Copy this configuration into your Brillay listing and change only the numbers:

• Fee: $150 per question.
• Reply window: 48 hours from payment.
• Scope line for the listing: "One leadership situation, answered in writing within 48 hours. Include the situation, the people involved, and what you need to say or decide. I'll reply with a recommended approach and language you can use."
• Scope boundary for the listing: "If your message contains more than one unrelated situation, I'll decline it, you will not be charged, and I'll point you to the right offer; choose Custom Work for a document review."

At a $150 list price, Brillay's 8% platform fee on paid work is $12 (tips and goals carry 5%) and Stripe's typical US online-card processing of 2.9% + $0.30 is $4.65, so the creator nets about $133.35 per answered question (pricing and Stripe, Pricing). The $133.35 net is fee arithmetic on a $150 list price, not a forecast of how many questions any creator will receive.

Why not just answer leadership questions for free in DMs?

Answering leadership questions free in DMs costs the same judgment and time as a paid question, with no payment and no reply-time boundary: the message can sit indefinitely or expand into a long back-and-forth. A priced, not-live format fixes both, because the follower pays before you write and your stated window replaces the open conversation. The same paid-question boundary works for async career advice from your bio, especially interview prep, salary negotiation, and job-search decisions.

Creators redirect followers who message them to a Brillay link, where the price and reply window are already set. The demand behind those messages is measurable rather than anecdotal: Gallup reported that low employee engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP, and Gallup attributes a large part of the recent decline specifically to managers.

"Lower engagement among managers accounts for much of the recent downturn in employee engagement since 2023." — Gallup, "Global Employee Engagement Continues Decline"

Disengaged and overloaded managers are the people sending "can I ask you something" messages, and a priced async question turns the ones you would have answered anyway into paid work with a defined boundary.

What does it cost to run a paid leadership-question offer on Brillay?

Running a paid leadership-question offer costs an 8% platform fee only when a follower pays for work, and 5% on tips and goals; each question is a one-time purchase, not a membership, and creators can receive payouts in 41 countries. Stripe's processing is separate, at roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 for typical US online-card payments, so a $150 question nets about $133.35 to the creator.

Brillay's pricing documentation states the split plainly: the follower pays only the displayed price, and there is no follower minimum to enable the offer. Stripe's published US rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per successful online card charge is the typical US domestic online-card price, not a universal rate — international cards, currency conversion, and other payment methods are priced differently.

What else should be on a leadership-focused Brillay page?

A leadership-focused Brillay page usually carries the paid question plus three or four adjacent offers: Custom Work for document review, Personalized Videos for a recorded pep talk, Tips for people who benefited from free content, and Goals for funding a defined project such as a resource library.

See executive coaching's full offer breakdown for how a paid question, services, Personalized Videos, tips, and goals combine on one page, or how much to charge for a coaching call if you also run live sessions:

• Custom Work: document-based leadership feedback, such as reviewing a written performance review or a reorg communication plan before it goes out.
• Personalized Videos: a short recorded pep talk before a hard conversation or a big presentation.
• Tips: a way for someone who benefited from your public content to contribute without buying a specific answer.
• Goals: funding toward a defined project, such as building out a leadership-question archive or resource library.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about pricing, scope, attachments, follow-ups, and platform fees for a paid async leadership-question offer are answered below. Each answer reflects Brillay's documented product behavior for Paid Questions — followers pay upfront, and creators set the price and reply time — as published on the Brillay how-it-works and pricing pages.

What's the difference between charging for a leadership question and running paid coaching calls?

A Paid Question is one written question with one written reply inside a stated window — no live call, no scheduling. A coaching call is real-time and better suited to back-and-forth dialogue, practice, or a conversation that needs to adapt as it happens; see how much to charge for a coaching call for live-session pricing.

What should I charge for my first paid leadership question?

Start at $150 for one specific, high-stakes situation with a 48-hour reply window, then adjust after ten submissions. The $150 starting price is arithmetic from a $120-an-hour anchor applied to a 40-minute answer plus a specificity premium, and it sits well above the US Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 median of $101,860 a year for management analysts, or roughly $49 an hour (BLS).

Can a follower attach a document to a leadership question?

No. Paid Questions use one typed question and one written reply. A request that requires reviewing an uploaded document belongs in a custom request instead.

Can I set how many follow-up messages are included?

No. A Paid Question includes one written reply, so price that answer for the full value of your time and judgment. A document review belongs in Custom Work, where the client can attach files and you send one completed delivery by the delivery time you set.

What does Brillay charge to run a paid leadership question?

Brillay's platform fee applies only when a follower pays, as described above. Stripe's own processing runs separately, at roughly 2.9% + $0.30 for typical US online-card payments. A $150 question therefore nets about $133.35 before the creator's own income tax.

Create your free Brillay page and turn the next "quick leadership question" DM into a priced answer with a set reply window.