It’s Not Rocket Science! Five Questions Over Coffee with Robin Waite, The Fearless Coach (Ep. 6)

Who is Robin?

Robin is the Fearless Business Coach.

Fearless Business helps amazing business owners to FINALLY grow their business and shift away from a value-driven exchange of “time-for money” to charging based on “RESULTS” and RESULTS ALONE. As a direct result of being in the Fearless Business Accelerator many of our clients get a direct return on their investment within the first 4 weeks of the programme and go on to double or treble their turnover within 3-6 months of starting the programme. We’ve helped over 120 business owners to break out of selling their time-for-money over the last 12 months alone.

Key Takeaways

1. Understand what you actually want

2. Take the time to get intimate with your finances

3. Find the positive in your current situation

Valuable Free Resource or Action

Find out more and connect with Robin at

>> www.robinwaite.com

>> https://facebook.com/groups/ChargeMore  (Robin’s Facebook Group for Coaches, Consultants and Freelancers)

>> https://fearless.biz  

Transcript

Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Stuart Webb 0:41

Hi, and welcome to the it’s not rocket science five questions over coffee. I’m here with

white with Mike with my coffee in hand board and Robin got on to

he was robbing me off with our five questions. And Robin is the fearless business coach. He’s someone who’s helping shake things up certainly in the areas of marketing for for small businesses that are, you know, thinking about the way in which they price their businesses. I think we’re gonna have a good chat about that. Today, Robin. So let’s start off with the first of the questions which we normally launch into here. So what’s the biggest challenge you find your ideal client has? And unless you sort of describe that in a few sentences, yeah, absolutely. So I work predominately with them service client businesses, so sort of coaches, consultants, freelancers, and one of the biggest challenges that they have in scaling their, their small business or agency is, well, they perceive it to be a marketing problem. So they see that they need to get more clients. The reality is that most of them haven’t fixed a lot of the inherent problems in their their business in the first place. So imagine this scenario, Stuart, where you’ve got this really cute little fit 500 car, okay, 500 cc engine in it, and you go and fill it up with rocket fuel, well, it’s not going to go any faster, but it’s probably going to the rocket fuel is going to rattle it around, and then eventually, pistons will fire off and the whole thing just implodes. And obviously, as we know, rocket fuel is designed for rockets. So in this really terrible analogy, that the, the 500 cc engine is the business engine. And what they haven’t done is got things like, you know, the accounts, right, the sales and marketing processes, right, they haven’t got their internal systems, functioning properly and efficiently. Maybe they’re not addressing all of them. They’re just not, they’re just not efficient. They’re not a rocket engine yet. And yet, what they want to do is they want to get loads more clients, either rocket fuel adding into this engine, which is a bit rickety. And then eventually, the whole thing’s going to implode. And then I’ve kind of scratch their heads go. Well, I did all the things the experts and gurus told me to do. And I tried to do marketing, and it just didn’t work for me. Yeah, yeah, I love that analogy. Actually, Robin, I really do think that’s a great analogy. because too many people do attempt to fix everything before they’ve got the basics dominate. And you’re absolutely right. people sit there and go, Well, it didn’t work for me. And the answer, the reason why it didn’t work for you is probably because you weren’t in the right place for it in the beginning. 100% Absolutely. And the other thing is, well, it’s like, you know, rocket fuels expensive, let’s not lie, like, you know, if it was, if it was cheap, then we probably will have got to the moon a lot quicker than we have done, you know, but rocket fuel and kind of building Rocket Ships is super expensive. And I think a lot of people misunder or underestimate that fans fact. So, I mean, there’s a couple of ways that, you know, I’ve seen businesses really sort of it, okay, we’ll stick with the rocket ship analogy. You know, it takes a lot of momentum for a rocket ship to do the first 90 miles to get into the upper atmosphere. So you see these huge, great big burners on the side of it, which when you get up to 90 miles, they get blasted off to the side, and then you end up with this tiny little rocket ship, which was sat on the top of the, you know, these big boosters to do the first bit. And then that tiny little the second stage, you know, where the big boosters are blown away the second stage one little engine, which takes you up into, into orbit, you know, so the 250 300 miles above the Earth. And, again, whether it’s a good analogy or a bad one, I don’t know.

Robin Waite 4:19

A lot of business owners are really under estimating the fact that you need to build up so much momentum just to get through those first sort of stages of growth in the business. That, you know, once you’ve kind of created that momentum, you know, and gone through all of that hard work, it does actually get a little bit easier. But you’ve got to burn through a lot of rocket fuel the super expensive bit to get up to that first stage of growth in the first place. I mean, we probably better stop to make more go down less because NASA will be on the phone was explaining how this actually works. And but I think your knowledge is brilliant. They’re actually welcome because you’re absolutely right. It is super expensive. People don’t necessarily put the burners on at the right time now but they have a Can we do this you know, by just

spending a little bit of money and sort of you know, then when they don’t reach anything more than a few feet off the ground, they look at you and go, how come that didn’t work? Then you go well, because beginning, an enterprise like this takes an awful lot of energy and effort. After that, it’s, it becomes self fulfilling, it becomes one of those things that just carries on and just works without needing quite the same input. So it’s a good analogy, I love it. I do like it allows any sort of common mistakes, you find that people try to solve that problem without any sort of help they get they know when to put the right effort in, they put in too much effort, or they put in the wrong sort of effort. And it just, it burns through money. It burns through through their projects, they burn through their energy before they got anywhere. Yeah, well, what it comes down to is, it’s it’s that perception to just wrong about understanding what marketing is all about. So I built my first commercial website for a client, when that’s not what I do. Now, by the way, I don’t, I used to run a marketing agency for 12 years where we did web design and branding. And I’ve been coaching businesses now for four and a half years. But my first commercial website in 2004, all he needed back then was website, business card and BMI networking.

And you could get clients, it was like, it was super easy, then, you know, you look at sort of Tick tock, Instagram, YouTube link to all the platforms just didn’t exist back then. Or if they did, they were in their infancy. And so we’re in this like, bubble now where the Internet has created this global marketplace, this, this business world at your fingertips. So it’s made it super easy to get online and to reach people, but the 10 times the number of businesses is that worth.

Which means that, you know, 10 times the number of cases 10 infinitely more web designers, because websites didn’t exist back then. But 10 times the number of marketers 10 times the number coaches, consultants, you know, you name it, whatever industry you’re in, it’s hugely oversaturated. Not least, because there’s lots more businesses locally, but now also this global marketplace. So we’ve solved this dream that marketing and getting online as the business owner is really easy. The reality is there’s too much choice massively oversaturated Not only that, then you’ve got the platform, like complex or dynamic going on here, which is, you know, I want to market my business. But which platform do I market it on? Because it’s there’s too much choice. And the challenge with that is, you know, Stuart, if I knocked on your came knocking on quite a bit weird during the pandemic, but if I came knocking on the door, with a box of encyclopaedias, and you you asked me a simple question, Robin, do I need an encyclopaedia? What do you think I’m going to tell you?

Stuart Webb 7:30

Yes.

Robin Waite 7:33

Yeah. So you’d say, Yeah, well, I would say, yeah, you need an encyclopaedia. And it’s the same with Twitter, you go and speak to a Twitter expert, you need Twitter, LinkedIn expert, you need LinkedIn website, you need a kick ass website, you know, you name it, all of the platforms, every expert says, use my my chosen platform. So which one do we actually know is the best, it’s like, you know, $50 million question. And so the simplest way around that is to just go through a process of testing, like and validating the different platforms and working out which one your ideal client hangs out on, and then go there regularly, and often with the same consistent content. And eventually, you’ll start to build an audience that way. Imagine, imagine, if you were on 10 platforms, if you put 10% effort into one thing, you’re not going to get very far with it. And that’s what’s happening, you just, you know, wasting a lot of energy and time. Whereas actually, if you just double down on one, two or three platforms, it’s more than likely you could build a successful small business. And you’re right, the the secret to that is to test test test, isn’t it, it’s to test one, see the result test another see the result, testing. And then I always use that the the the figure two people that I talk to, that if you find success in one, double down on it, because once you’ve managed to, to get that success, if you put 20% 30% 40% more effort into each one of those, you’ll double every time you do it. So stop sort of you know, as you were saying, spreading all your energy thin, learn what works. And then once you’ve got that, that ratio of sort of, you know, this one works, Double, double double every time, until such time as you, you know, you’re actually beginning to get the results you need to see from. That’s it 100%. And one of the other challenges while like marketing can be super expensive. I’m touched on that sort of in the intro. So how do we afford to do all of the different marketing activities are out that are out there? And kind of this is where it comes into going back to that original business engine? Like what what can we fix that’s going to have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time. So this is where we get on to sort of the productization process. I guess you’d call it my superpower where you you restructure somebody’s offer and teach them how to articulate their value. And I don’t know where most of the listeners are Stuart, but if a lot of them are in the UK, this will probably sound quite familiar. A lot of people in the UK are very humble human beings and don’t like to shout about the amazing results which they get for their clients. And so as a result of that they’re naturally sort of

pegging themselves back in terms of their potential success. So, the way it the way we start to go through the productization process is one, well, if you’re charging by the hour, you know, or by the grey, you’re actually doing it all wrong. That’s not how we price products or services, because what you’re doing is every time you sell an hour of your time, while you’re selling a little piece of your soul that you’re never going to be able to get back.

What we try and do is we try and get clients much more focused on our business owners much more focused on what is the the amazing or remarkable result or outcome which you produce for your clients, and then price based on that. And typically, it’s normally worth about two or three times what their existing hourly rate is.

Because two key things they forgotten to include in that because I could sell an hour of my time and, you know, you might, you could sell an hour of your time, they’re probably gonna be different values, and everybody will place a different value on their time. But there’s two key ingredients missing one, most business owners when they’re pricing their time, forget about the overheads that that it takes in order to sell some of that time. So like most consultants that I know, they might be busy four or five days a month, they forget the other 15 days a month, they’re spinning their wheels, do networking meetings, like sales, calls, marketing, all of the different sort of platforms and things like that. Probably, you know, school runs and all the rest of it. So they’ve got their home life bumping into their work life, but they’re actually only getting paid for four or five days a month. And then scratch your head Go, why am I making enough money?

And it but it’s because they’re not taking into consideration all of that, you know, the 15 days that support the five days in terms of overheads. The second thing, which they’re not taking into consideration is their intellectual property and their knowledge.

Stuart Webb 11:44

So a great great story, which probably many people have heard about is Picasso, or the famous I think, is about Picasso famous artists, you know, he’s in a cafe and this woman recognised him says, oh, you’re that famous artist, aren’t you? Can you draw me a picture? So he gets a napkin, spends five minutes sketching out a picture, and then he’s handing it over to and he says, that will be 10,000 francs, please. And she goes, that can be 10,000 francs only took me five minutes. And he said, No, my dear, it took me 40 years in it to learn the skills and the expertise in order to be able to draw a picture that good and that quickly. So again, most experts don’t take that into account. So by the time you add in intellectual property and knowledge, and your overhead, she should probably be charging, it’s like a third, a third, a third for me. So a third of your time, a third for overheads a third for IP. So you should be charging three times of going rate, and At which point, International Sign of distress comes out. I can possibly charge that much nobody will ever buy from me at those prices, all my customers will leave and then you have to start that next conversation, which is right, okay, well, how can we articulate the value so people do want to buy from you at that price? thing is as well, when you charge more, it’s quite interesting what happens because

what you can afford to have far fewer clients, okay, so previously were cells, liver cells, liver cells, liver cells cycle of doom going on, right? And, and then you get ill or take holiday, deep breath, cells, liver cells, and the moment you put your prices up, like your world, your universe expands, sorry, we’re going back into space analogies here, universe expands, right. And you get, you can have far fewer clients, you get more time to deliver a better quality product, which produces more income on the back end of that, which you know, and so everything slows down at that point. And it is great. You get a really nice sort of pace of life to things. And it feels much more like a lifestyle business, which is what everybody wants.

Robin Waite 13:40

Interesting. You put it like that. And I don’t want to steal your thunder on this. But I had a client who had a similar problem. One of the things that we he did was he almost it did almost collapse, he almost killed himself with working and working and working. And so overnight, he just thought there’s only one way to break this cycle. And he just doubled his prices. And he doubled his prices. And I said, Are you afraid of this? And he went, No. I don’t want as many clients because I’m burnt out. And he had people coming to him and saying, Well, I’d like you to do this work. And while my process of changes, let’s know when, when if you’re going to deliver the same results you did last time, I’m still prepared to pay it. And he thought one of the things that he first thought was, why didn’t I do this years ago, because apparently they really value the results. They just weren’t telling me in their invoice payment. But the other thing he said he found he get people coming to him and saying, I understand you’re very expensive, therefore you must be good. And as a result, he was getting more people coming speaking to him and saying, well, you’re one of the most expensive people around, you must get good results. And he sort of was going, I’m doing the same work. But there was a perception issue that apparently being expensive, meant that you were much better. And he would start saying to me, I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago and I said to him I

It’s an invalid model. Largely, Michael, you hadn’t realised just how good you were, it’s about you. It’s not about them or about your work. It was your it was particularly your mindset. There are some, I’ve got a couple of really interesting stories, actually, which one should I pick, I pick the copywriter. So that one of my mentors was then he’s one of the best copyrights used to work and work for a door and actually trains up a lot of their writers nowadays. And he had to do used to write so the two page sales letters and still does, like proper, you know, for direct mail, direct response copywriting. And he used to charge $5,000 to write two page sales letter and he said, one day, this chap comes along and says, I need it. I need the two page sales letter. It’s got to be absolutely, you know, brilliant, and it’s got to be like with me in 24 hours, okay, how much is that going to cost me and my mentor didn’t really like the guy that much. And so he first of all, he was like, Well, first of all, you get the quick tax put on it, you need it tomorrow. Second of all, you’re going to get the pitov tax pain in the ass facts tax, which we’re also going to add on to that. So you put it in for 50k. And the guy said, Yes. Why you don’t negotiate as well. And that there’s a there’s a

hook to this story as well. But what he also negotiated in that same project was a point two 5%. commission for instead

generated, it was a $400 million campaign, right, so you do the math worth one or two pounds. But the hook to it was, he was like, he never charged less than $50,000. again after that, because at that point, he didn’t realise he could charge that much for writing itself. They didn’t realise he was that good or could get, like, he got good results. But it wasn’t really it was, you know, difficult sometimes to quantify, especially with direct response. So that’s, I mean, that’s like a 10x price increase, you know, and you could afford to have like, you know, he at one point, he said, I was doing like three or four sales letters every six months travelling around the world. And that was brilliant, what a lifestyle. And fantastic example, which was along what you said, as well was, I’m gonna do both sorry, Stuart.

The second example, another mentor of mine, told me about sales, he’s run a printing company. So they used to do packaging, product packaging. And at the time, this is back in I think, the like late 80s, early 90s, when the design was generally done for free, because they did design for free. So the warehouse could then make the packaging the products, and they that that was where they thought the money was. And so that mental capsule catalogue was designed for free, and then people just go and shop around for the cheapest price in design, and then they disappear. So they they put on a 10k price tag for the design element of it. Nobody else was doing this. So to back up what you’re saying on first of all, the first thing everybody said was, well, you must be good if you’re charging for it. The second thing is when you pay 10k for a design back in the late 80s, early 90s, which was a lot of money then even then, who do you think they weren’t people that packaging? Yeah, absolutely.

Stuart Webb 17:57

Yeah, yeah, you’ve already you’ve already made that much spend, you might as well keep it hidden. Yeah. 100%. And what was remarkable from a business perspective, the, they had for four people, four people, there we go. For people working in the design team, they have 40, working in the production warehouse.

Robin Waite 18:15

And the design team ended up being 10 times more profitable in production, because it’s super, super slim margin. And again, he was like, you know, we never went back from that. In fact, we just started elevating our price when we started to get known for doing really good quality designs. And he’s like, at that point as well. We had skin in the game. Yeah. So a lot of designers, you’d get sort of frustration pent up frustration because they want, you know, a customer would want revisions doing. It’s like we haven’t paid for it now you want more. But in this instance, it was like 10 cantelli designs perfect. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we could we could spend hours possibly talking about this, but it takes me to another one of my big,

big hobbyhorses around this, which is, you know, business owners tend to sell on the feature, not the benefit. You know, if you start thinking about the benefit, you can absolutely sort of sell in terms of what if this w turn off this troubleshoot turnover? I want 10% of that. And you know, when you look at it and go, or 10% of a doubling or tripling that’s that’s that can be hugely valuable. And yet you’re the business you’re working for still gets to keep 90% Why wouldn’t they want an extra 90% over doubling or tripling? And why don’t you if you’re contributing that as a consultant coach, why are you not getting small percentage of it that point two 5% you said of your friend who sort of put in a 50 50,000 pounds sales letter? Absolutely. They should get 2.25% of it. Why not? And if that’s the results they deliver, that’s the benefit they should be selling. Anyway, not we could move on, we ought to move on because we’ll be here for hours and we try to keep these down to hopefully less than two and a half hours. So

Stuart Webb 19:56

go just go through. So what is that valuable free action or

free resource that you want to point people towards the get help with some of its thinking about some of their pricing. Yeah, so Well, there’s several actually. So I, my whole sort of ideology around product, the productization process came from several books actually, you know, combined knowledge plus actually putting it into practice, you know, through the coaching practice. So the first book, which I recommend actually is behind me, that one, they’re Built to Sell by guy called john warrillow, who is a fantastic consultant. But it tells a tale about, you know, an all set

Robin Waite 20:33

what you want to call it, and so an agency that was kind of doing all the different services, and then they narrow it down to one product, which they did really well, that creates a lot of profit, and that was high in demand, people wanted it, I won’t give the game away. But it’s an absolutely fantastic book is told as a parable as a story.

The other the other book, which is quite interesting, which we can kind of bring into the mix, as well as the Lean Startup by area,

which a lot of people kind of assume because it’s it’s based on sort of, I guess, product design theory, you know, bringing bringing software products into market, but actually, you can apply a lot of the principles to a business in general, but even marketing, and also pricing. So a lot of business owners, one of the biggest mistakes they make is they try and reach this sort of point of perfection before they put anything out into the world. Mostly for fear of failure, fear of rejection, like people just not liking it, or maybe they put it out there. And it’s great, but they can’t, they don’t know how to get customers for it. And I, you know, the principles in the lean startup, you know, based around,

sort of, rather than spending 12 months like perfecting this thing, well, actually, let’s do 80% of the work in as fast time as we can and like a month for six weeks, put it out into the market and see what feedback we get. In the meantime, people then you’re you’re educating and telling people about what you’re doing. So you start to build an audience, and then you go through several iterations. And then in sort of 12 months time, you’ve a, you’ve got a product now, which is what people want, not what you think they want, but actually what they’ve told you they want, but you’ve got their feedback, plus, you’ve got an audience and you say, here’s my amazing product, and you’ve got people warm enough to buy. And you can apply the same principles to pricing as well, people think they’ve got to build the ultimate products before they put the prices up. But the reality is, you need to be out there testing price, and price points to work out like supply and demand and whether whether you can push the price point because there’s nothing worse, right? And I get this all the time, should you suddenly say, Oh, I couldn’t possibly put my price up, because all of my existing clients will leave and you go, Okay, well, what evidence do you have to back that up with? Have you put your prices up? And they go? No, because they’re just too afraid to like, well, let’s go and gather some evidence, like, let’s actually prove that your belief is true. And if it’s true, I tell you what, I’ll pay you the difference. Because pretty much everybody who I’ve spoken to has the capacity to be able to, you can’t just go out straight out there and just double your price to triple your prices. But at the very least put your price up by 1020 30%. And still make more profit doesn’t turn over irrelevant, provided your business is making profit, that’s the most important thing. brilliant, brilliant, I think you’re probably right. Even people that end up putting their prices up and turn around, say some of our customers leave, some of those customers probably should leave because they’re costing you more than you’re actually making awesome, shouldn’t like that’s one of the other great tests, you should use. Robin, Robin, brilliant discussion. I’m gonna I’m gonna ask you the last question that I normally ask him, these is always the one that worries me the most, which is basically what’s the one question that I should have asked you, that will give great value that I haven’t yet done. So. So that’s kind of like where you can take over and say, Well, you know, there are loads of things we could talk about, but over to you. Well, I’m going to stick with the pricing theme, if that’s okay, so, great. I get asked as well how do you increase your pricing. So I have a very simple framework called MVT, which is mindset validation and testing. So how we go about doing that is sorry, time not testing as part of validation. So mindset validation and time. So first of all, you have to sow the seed of an idea that you can put your prices up. Interesting what you just said there about,

you know, other sort of wins, which you get as a result of putting your price up. So, back in my web design days, we put our hosting fees up by

5x. So we went from 10 pound a month to 50 pound a month 40% of our clients left, our revenues went up two and a half times, but Pixy dust moment, our support calls dropped by 80%. So that was quite safe to some massive like an inordinate, inordinate amount of time. But I had to persuade my business partner at time that it was a good idea to put our prices up and eventually he mindset wise, he was like, okay, so I showed him some proof and we had the confidence pricing up. The next thing to remember is that then we’ve got to go out and gather some data that you know, to prove that it was basically a good idea. So what I normally suggest is, once you’ve decided to put your prices that whether it’s 10% or doubling

Five accessing it, it doesn’t matter. But you’ve got to go and pitch it to enough people to prove that the data is right. So you’ve got to go and pick the next 10 or 20 prospective clients pitch to them. And I can near as dammit guarantee at the probably at least 20% of them will come back and say, yes, they want to buy from you. Okay. So that’s the validation part of it, we’ve got to go out and prove that people will buy at a higher price point. And then the final part of it time is each iteration of a price increase typically takes about four to six weeks. And the reason for that is like, occasionally you get like lucky and the first person you pitch to, you know, comes back and says, Yes, we’re happy to go ahead with it a double the price, that’s fine. More often than not, though clients are like buses. So you’ll pitch to 10. It will be the first eight that say no, and it’ll be the last two, you know, who say yes. And at that point, we’ve got data we’ve we’ve gone out and validated. And what’s really fun about it doesn’t matter whether it’s the first person or the 10th person that says yes, normally what happens is our clients will come back to me and say, Oh, my gosh, Robin, I can’t believe it. I can’t leave a I was so worried about it. You know, Seneca once said, things are much worse than imagination than they are in reality. So I can’t believe I would say worried about it. It was it was so easy to do it. Oh, and another thing, Robin, I’ve already put my prices up again.

Stuart Webb 26:16

Fantastic. Absolutely. Fantastic. Robin, that’s brilliant. I love it. Where can people find out more about you so they can read more about some of this stuff? You do? Yeah, absolutely. So on the on the pricing side of things, shameless plug here, Stuart. But they can grab hold of a copy of take your shot, you can apply if you’re in the UK, you can apply for a free paperback copy of this on fearless doctors go and hit the resources button, there’s an option on there too. And I’ll send you the link as well. But you can go and request a free copy of take a shot, I might sign it. And it depends on how generous and I can’t guarantee the value of the book goes up or down either.

Robin Waite 26:51

Yeah, fellas got it. And then we’ve also got a Facebook group for people who want to know more about sort of actionable techniques to increase your prices as well. Go and check out confidently charge more on Facebook and you’ll be able to find my group in there as well. We’ve got about 1800 members, and tonnes of value in like free videos and things like that in there as well. Brilliant. Thank you, Robin. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Good. Good luck. Take Good luck to change the world view on pricing. I really love it. Thank you very much again, my one man mission. Guys, if you’ve enjoyed what we’ve been doing here today, subscribe to what we do you hear on it’s not rocket science. five questions over coffee. You’ll find it on Facebook. You’ll find us on YouTube. And we’ll be back in about a week or so with another one of these interviews. bt very soon. Oh by Robin J. Stewart.