Proven Tips For Growing Your Business, With Robin Waite

Embrace fearlessness in business: where challenges become opportunities, and growth knows no bounds. In this episode, we dive deep into the world of business growth with coach, author, and founder of Fearless Business and CourseApp, Robin Waite. Today, he shares proven tips for taking your business to the next level. Robin shares his story: how he went from selling his marketing agency to becoming a successful business coach. With a focus on strategic thinking and scalable solutions, Robin sheds light on the importance of productizing services, building scalable models, and leveraging partnerships to maximize growth potential. Tune in now and discover proven tips for growing your business!

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/robin-waite

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Proven Tips For Growing Your Business, With Robin Waite

Business Coach, Author, And Founder Of Fearless Business And CourseApp

My guest is Robin Waite. He is an author, public speaker, and business coach. He is the Founder of Fearless Business, which features a twelve-week accelerator program and course app aimed at helping coaches, consultants, and trainers scale their learning curricula. Prior to starting these two businesses, Robin ran a creative agency called The Coconut Group, which he sold in 2016. He is the author of five books, including Take Your Shot, which we’ll cover in this discussion. He and his family live in the Cotswolds in England. Robin, welcome. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate having the opportunity to catch up with you.

It’s a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to the show.

You are a business coach. Describe what you do specifically and the kinds of companies you work with.

There’s a distinction to be made between coaching and mentoring. I like to start with that first, and people will get a flavor of the coach, which I am. There’s a train of thought. The coaches ask meaningful questions and draw out of the person they’re coaching all of their deepest desires and goals that are inside them. You’ve also got the mentor, on the other hand, who has the experience. Their client comes to the mentor, asks them questions, and they say, “Do this. That will work for you.”

I’m a hybrid between the two. Sometimes, clients want to move faster. They want the blueprint. They want to know how to stop making mistakes. They want to crack on. I flip-flop between coach and mentor a lot of the time. The clients we typically tend to work with at Fearless Business are small one-person businesses, grassroots service client businesses, normally coaches, consultants, or freelancers. I get business owners who see me doing great work with that ideal client, and they say, “That’s interesting. Do you think that would work for me?”

I also have clients who run accounting practices. I’ve got clients who run dog grooming, dog training businesses, and several other random businesses. I always take it on the balance of probability. Can I help them with the core topics I help people with? We decide whether it’s a good fit or not. To round the circle in terms of what I help clients with because they’re all service client businesses. Many of them fall into that trap of hourly rate charging my job. It might be something that we go on to discuss later on.

My job is to help them package up their service into something that is based more not on what they do and the time that it takes but more on the results they deliver for their clients. I help them articulate the value around that new product that we’ve created. What that means is we can double, triple, or even more increase their prices. They can effectively not have to take on quite many clients. They can have a more fulfilling business, which gives them more time freedom. They can take their time with delivering to those clients but focus heavily on results.

How’d you get into this?

I ran a marketing agency for several years. From 2004 to 2016, I built websites and did branding for small local businesses. We grew it to a modest size. We didn’t quite get to $250,000 in revenue, but we weren’t far off. I had a small team of slightly dysfunctional employees. It was good fun and exciting. It was small.

We had some great customers, but it got to a point in 2016 where I was my family started to grow. Our first baby, Poppy, was born in 2014, and Sophie was going to arrive in 2016. I had this epiphany that I was spending all of these hours at the agency and not focusing as heavily as I would’ve liked to on my family. One day, I decided I was going to close the agency. We could go into that in more detail because there is a backstory.

I went back to my wife, who’s eight months pregnant at this point, and I was like, “I got some good news and bad news. I decided what I was going to do in the future. We’re going to spend some more time together. That’s the good news, but the bad news is I’m closing my agency on Monday.” I shut it down, and I got an offer. Somebody came in and wanted to buy it. They wanted to buy some of the IP that we’d created in the business. They looked at our client base favorably, and we had some good recurring revenue coming through it. It was a nice little business that I’d created.

During that time, that intermediary period of enjoying paternity leave with now my family of four. I’m trying to take a step back from life for a while. People got wind of the fact that I’d built and sold this agency. I got approached by several creative agencies and freelancers. They said, “That’s cool. Could you teach us how to do that?”

I started informally mentoring. Originally, I had no intention of setting up a coaching practice. One day, my life coach, as I was trying to figure out some of the next steps in my journey and career, said, “Have you ever heard of a business coach? You’d make a brilliant coach.” I’d heard about the coaching industry, and there is a dark side to the coaching industry. I was a bit hesitant. It’s like a new shirt. You try on for size.

I became Robin Weight, the business coach, for a while, and tried it on and started getting some clients because I built my website for the coaching practice. I started to pick up more clients more frequently. I started to get speaking engagements. About a year into it, I was like, “I’m going to take this thing seriously.” There was an evolution in the journey and a bit of a jolt there along the way.

Apart from managing time better, what are the common themes that the small business owners that you work with are wrestling with?

When you’re a one-person business, time is always against you because you’re constantly changing hats. You’re an accountant, a marketeer, and a salesperson. It’s remarkable. You end up spending only 20% of the time doing the thing you love. It’s the reason why you set up your business in the first place. Eighty percent are doing all this other stuff. You were like, “That’s not why I did this. This isn’t what I wanted.” Time is a big one, but a lack of time is more of a symptom than it is necessarily the cause or underlying problem.

One of the most common mistakes I see small business owners making is the time-for-money trap. They think that what they’ve got to do is sell hours of their time. The more hours that they sell, the more successful they are. If you think about it, hourly rates and having to sell more hours is driven by ego. It’s to put food on my table and pay my bills and mortgage. It’s not necessarily designed to deliver the best outcomes or results for clients, and it limits capacity.

If you’ve got somebody who’s charging $30 an hour and we only have a maximum of about 160 to 200 hours a month where we can earn money, you multiply that out and their earnings capacity, even if they spent those 200 hours purely on client fulfillment, the most they could earn would be $6,000. I dive straight in, and I’m like, “What are your financial goals? Where would you love to see this business going, short-term, midterm, or long-term? They might say, “$10,000 would be nice.” I look at it and go, “You can’t do that. Unless you’re willing to do another 33 and a third percent of hours on top of what you’re doing, you can’t do that.” That’s our first clue that hourly rates are potentially the wrong model.

I see a lot of small and big business owners constantly marketing. All they do is spend their days on social media, creating shorts, posting on Twitter, pushing out, and pumping out all of this content. That’s a symptom. Because their business isn’t delivering to them what they need and isn’t delivering enough money, they think the way to solve that is to go and get more clients. To get more clients, we’ve got to do more marketing. We end up in the sales cycle of doom. We sell and deliver. We get ill, go on holiday, stop for a week or two, take a big deep breath, and we’re back to selling and delivering.

You slow that down. We slow that down by increasing our prices, not a little bit, but increasing them dramatically. It’s like the universe expands. We’ve got more money and a bit more time to deliver a better quality product or service to our end client, which produces better results for them and makes you more referable. There’s more money on the back end. There’s this virtuous cycle through having fewer clients, not more, where we’re earning more money per client. Our average order value goes up, and our customer lifetime value starts to increase.

It’s a much better, more holistic business. It’s a lot more fun because if we do that intentionally, we do it by design and get nice little dopamine hits going, “I did that. That’s how I intended it to be. It’s working like how I meant it to be.” When you’re in that sales cycle of doom frenetically like marketing all the time, it’s like casting a net out and hoping that we’re going to catch some fish. It’s frustrating. It burns many business owners out. They never set out with the intention of being a marketeer and having that be the thing they do like eight hours a day.

I’ve seen it in my own experience. You spend more time worrying about LinkedIn’s algorithms, Google’s algorithms, and how to optimize search engine optimization. If you’re a business pure coach, it’s not why you got into the business to become an expert in how to maximize value from some tech company algorithm.

LinkedIn owns your data. You’re beholden to that particular algorithm. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re in. There are much smarter ways to market your business. I’ll leave it to you, JR, as to which direction you want to take this now because I have a whole rant about the marketing piece that we can go through, but I want to make sure that you keep me on track and that we give value to your audience.

Robin Waite: It doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, there are much smarter ways to market your business.

You do a twelve-week program. Is that where more of your clients tend to come in, or is it more outside? What does that twelve-week program look like?

I’ve done something quite different to a lot of coaching programs. The core part of the program is we tend to deliver over the course of twelve weeks, but there are a lot of coaching programs. Once their clients stop paying them money, they get to the end of a twelve-week program, and they kick them out. I used to do it that way. It’d be twelve weeks in and out as an accelerator. We get great results. There’s no doubt about it.

One of the core values that I hold, especially in growing something like a coaching practice, is a sense of community. I discovered that, with clients coming in and out all the time doing a twelve-week program, the community was constantly shifting, and it didn’t have that sense of community feel. We did something that was out there as far as coaching practices are concerned. We said, “Once you’ve graduated your twelve weeks, you unlock lifetime access to the program.”

It’s a fixed fee for the first part of the accelerator. After that, we don’t restrict any access either. You get full, unfettered access to things like the weekly coaching calls. We’ve got several associate coaches who are allowed to do turbo calls. They keep access to all of the features. The vibe in the community has grown slowly and scaled. We’ve got more clients coming in now. We’ve got a great sense of community in the program, which I love.

We’ve got the twelve-week accelerator side of things, and clients get great results there. Small business owners are agile. We can get double or triple their income within about 3 to 6 months. That’s the bell curve. There are some who get it faster. There are always some who take longer. It’s the way that it is. We have something in the UK called VAT threshold, which is where you start around that six-figure threshold. You have to pay an extra level of tax. You might start to think about taking on your first employee when you hit $100,000. The problems start to shift slightly.

I also have a one-to-one side to the coaching practice. They have to have graduated grassroots, single business owners multiplied themselves into two people and hit that six-figure mark, and we can start to go deeper. That’s fun because the problems change. We’re now talking HR and accounting about people’s problems and how their sales processes need to be systemized.

There’s a lot more that happens as the business scales. I like intensive days with the clients. I’ve got one client flying in from Germany for two days, which I’m excited about. He’s excited about it. We’re going to cover a whole host of different topics with him. He’s going to go away with a completely different mindset around how we seize this business, which is exciting.

You start this process with goal setting. You mentioned earlier starting with what you want in terms of income potential, but there’s more to it than that.

For a lot of business owners, when they first start, they have this great idea. All businesses are based on an exciting and great idea. Many business owners think, “I’ll build the product, and people will come. It’ll work itself out.” This is in the early stages. You can imagine that, like, “I’m going to get in my car and drive.” You could end up anywhere, especially in the US. It’s such a vast country. You could end up on the East Coast to the West Coast and anywhere in about a 3,000-mile span. It’s not terribly constructive.

If you’re traveling a distance, which is what you’re doing in business, you need to set the sat nav and have that reverse engineer and pathway to get to that end goal. A lot of business owners don’t get in a car and wing it. They scratch their heads and go, “I didn’t want to get here. How did I end up getting here?” They end up with a whole load of problems and in a completely different place from where they anticipated they would get to. It’s much more fun if you can get to the end result and it’s done by design.

You mentioned earlier marketing. You can get yourself into being a marketeer and not focus on what you’re trying to do more holistically. There is a lot of what you do that is focused on the classic four Ps of marketing.

There has been a big shift. It was different back in 2004 when I was building that marketing agency. The internet was relatively still in its infancy. It was over a decade old. You think about it back then. In 2004, Facebook and all these different social media platforms didn’t exist. YouTube was rubbish because people had dial-up, and they couldn’t stream videos in the same way that you can now. There were fundamentals to how you marketed your business that existed pre-internet.

There’s a brilliant book by Eugene Schwartz called Breakthrough Advertising. It was written in 1967. It was predated on the internet by several years. He goes into this huge amount of detail about how sophisticated the audience that you are marketing to is. We confuse ourselves these days because we’ve got access to this global marketplace and world domination at our fingertips. We can blast stuff out, and people automatically want to buy it.

It doesn’t work like that because you’ve got to make sure that you’re marketing in the right place. That’s important. You have to make sure that your product connects with your audience. There are many people that I see who are blasting out their marketing message in completely the wrong place. Nobody is going to buy it. The product isn’t going to connect with the people. It’s never going to sell to that audience. They’re still scratching their heads, going, “Why is that?”

It’s these basic fundamentals around market sophistication and understanding your client’s biggest problems first and foremost, and whether they’re aware of those problems and various different solutions that they can buy to start fixing. Even then, you’ve still got three more stages to get through before somebody’s ready to buy because you’ve built enough trust with them. Are they even aware of your brand? If they picked five solutions, are you on that shortlist?

Google talks about this. It’s the zero moments of truth. It’s a bit boring because it’s long, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there. They talk about 7-11-4. Before somebody buys a product or service online especially, you’ve got to have engaged with them for seven hours across eleven different touch points and four different locations.

Locations are easy because it’s online, offline, traditional PR, and media printed stuff. Touch points could be a number of different ways. Let’s put it in context. This might be the first time that somebody’s come across Robin Waite. Thanks to JR for inviting him onto the show. This is the first time I’ve been introduced to you. If I’m engaging and they’ve read the whole episode, is it 30 or 40 minutes worth of engagement? The seven hours of engagement, when you start to break it down, is the hardest to tick off. We’ve got the show touchpoint. We’ve got 30 or 40 minutes of engagement.

One of the things I like to do is give away copies of my book because I know that if somebody sits down and takes the time to read it, that’s 2 or 3 hours worth of engagement across another touch point. I have no bones in giving it away as a gift, even though there’s a cost associated with that. Somebody might go and join my Facebook group, jump into my email list, reach out to me, and say, “Rob, that chat you had with JR was interesting. I’d love to know more.”

She can start to see I’m ticking off the engagement and the touch points slowly and patiently. I’m not in that sales cycle of doom because I’m not desperate for clients. I need clients because I have a living to earn. I see 7-11-4 deliver as much value as you can and a client, and the money comes as a byproduct of being able to change somebody’s life with no expectation of anything in return. The money and clients happen much later.

This is where most business owners are because of the internet, and they see everybody else on social media all the time. They think that’s how they can get clients. They’re in this short-term thinking scarcity mindset. They’re like, “I need a client. I’ll post on social, and that will get me a client tomorrow.” They scratch their head and say, “It’s not working. I’ll do more of it.” It doesn’t make sense. If business owners were more patient, they were more thoughtful about how they marketed their business. There are cool ways to market your business that don’t involve social. You have to be more patient.

Give examples of some of those because I hear you talk about, like, “If I’m a small business, a solopreneur, and sole proprietor, I’m not pricing at a crazy level.” I hear seven hours, eleven different times, and four different places. It feels daunting.

Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game talks about this. The book is more about corporate business and leadership. There are still some fundamentals we can learn as small business owners. A lot of people in the small business communities see businesses as short-term. It’s wins and losses. It’s a yes or a no. It’s binary thinking. They don’t consider the long-term consequences of that process of winning and losing. What I mean by that is they’re all about going out and winning sales. They’re like, “Let’s go and get clients, leads, and prospects. That is win sales.”

Going back to what Simon Sinek talks about. Think about sports. There are boundaries there and rules. It’s designed to have a winner or a loser in it. The goal in business is to stay in business for as long as you possibly can. Not to win or lose. It’s to stay in business. Not only that, but to be a sustainable and profitable business. The second goal in business is to have profit.

A lot of business owners forget about the long game or the infinite game of wanting to stay in business and designing a business that can operate without them, that could potentially be sold, or that they find it fun to be involved in their business. There are many miserable business owners out there. Let’s be fair. Let’s at least have a business that gives us the freedom and flexibility to step into it if we want to, but instead, step out and have fun and spend some time with our family when we want to.

We’re talking a little bit earlier about the 4 Ps. One of the things you mentioned earlier that I don’t want to let sneak by is this element of dramatically increasing your pricing. It’s contrarian thought for a lot of people to think, “I’m struggling to get enough business as it is, and you want me to dramatically increase my pricing.” Talk about how you think about that.

It’s around how you articulate the value proposition. Most business owners get trapped selling what they do and not the results and outcomes of what the client gets and the products delivered. The other thing to remember is that when things are more expensive, you get a better quality client. The third point is when you are selling things cheaply commoditized to try and attract people into your business.

I don’t know about you, but if you walk into a supermarket, Heinz has a 2-for-1 deal on baked beans. It’s not the baked beans that drew you into the supermarket in the first place. It is not the cheap offer because you were in the supermarket in the first place to go and buy your bread, milk, and your essentials. You walk past the beans aisle, and you are like, “They’ve got an offer on beans. I’ll buy a couple of tens.”

Supermarkets and big businesses have latent demand because they already have this audience in their shops, but small business owners don’t have this. They’re constantly trying to stimulate that latent demand to get people through. They typically tend to think that offering discounts and being cheap are the things that will attract people to buy. That’s not what people are buying. We come back to the results and outcomes and how they’re going to feel once they’ve bought the product and got the result that you’re delivering to them.

An example of knowing your value is there are lots of coaches out there who would charge $100 to $200 to have coaching with them. I was fortunate enough to work with a competent divorce coach. She worked with high-net-worth individuals. What was interesting was when we started to look at how she was pricing herself, she was charging $200 a session to the client she worked with. It was a mismatch between her clients having a net worth of 8 to 9 figures.

If they got divorced, it was going to cost them a significant amount of money, which was still out of $200 an hour. It was fascinating because, on the one hand, she was a qualified divorce lawyer, but she didn’t like that side of it. She retrained as a coach to help people stay together, not facilitate them moving apart. She had both sides of the wheel nailed.

What we did was when we started to look at the size of the clients that she was working with and their net worth, we came to the conclusion that the average divorce that she was helping her clients through previously cost the order of $2.5 million to both parties in legal fees, splitting up the assets and all the various taxes associated there. We decided what would be a fair and reasonable amount for her to charge if she could keep them together as a coach. We felt 10% was fair.

She went out. She had far fewer clients, but when they said yes, they were saying yes to a $250,000 coaching program because if they stayed together, it saved them significant sums of money. Her goal was a seven-figure coaching practice. Four clients a year is all she needed, and she’d work intensively with her clients.

If you start to ratchet that back and put it in the context of, like, “Are we promoting our products in the right place?” Some of the other 4 Ps. If she promoted that $250,000 coaching package to a newlywed couple, a tenth of the price, $25,000, they wouldn’t buy it. They’ve got no need to buy it. They don’t have a problem yet. They’ve not been married long enough for all of those problems to start to arise and to be even thinking about divorce. Even the 10th of the price means that it was incongruent.

You could go down another $2,500 and have a single guy in his twenties. He’s not going to buy that package because he’s not even married yet. He does not even have a partner. He’s out having fun with his boys. The value proposition and how you articulate it is an important part of the process of productizing a service.

Robin Waite: The value proposition and how you articulate are really important parts to the process of productizing a service.

You flashed your book up a few minutes ago. I don’t want to let time go by without giving you a chance to talk about it. It’s a fable that explains the way that you think about some of these things. Do you want to describe it?

I’m the business coach now. This is after selling the agency. I was gonna focus on web design companies because that’s what I’d known best. I put on this webinar. I had 50 web design agencies on there. Afterward, I got a phone call about five minutes after I’d hung up the Zoom. This excited guy on the phone was like, “Rob, this is brilliant. I loved your webinar. I’d love for us to work together.” I said, “Tell me about your business.” He went, “I’m a golf pro.” I said, “How did you get onto my webinar for web designers?”

Russ and I ended up working together. He became one of my first official business coaching clients. I won’t do a complete spoiler alert on this, but it is based on a story of his journey from when we met to the point where he productized his service. He dramatically increased his prices. How it’s told as a story, Russ goes and meets this business coach at the golf course. They exchange services, and he gets coached through my process.

There are five core principles that I go through in the book about the story of Russ and David working together. You mentioned one of them earlier on the goal setting side of things, how important that is, the productization process, increasing your prices, and how you go about selling it and customer lifetime value. There are five simple but key principles that business owners need to understand. By page 76, there is a bit of artistic license in there because I wrote the book way back when Russ hadn’t gotten to that point where he was starting to travel and speak. He has gone since I published it. He has gone to do a few of those things, which is quite exciting. He ran his first retreat shortly after lockdown.

It’s good fun. I enjoyed writing the book. I love giving it away because one of the things that is key to me is people should have access to good quality business advice. I’m the pricing guy, but they shouldn’t have to, as a starting point, pay through the nose for that. The best reviews I get from the book are when somebody writes, “I read your book. I implemented it, and I managed to double my prices.” I’m like, “Brilliant job done.” The nice thing is, at that point, they don’t need me, but they might choose to come and work with me because I’ve already helped them transform their business and life.

How’s your reaction? How has it helped your business?

I can give you some statistics on this. For every 100 books I ship, I sign it, pack it, print a postage label out, go down to see Pauline at the post office, and do all of that personally because it means a lot to me to do that. For every 100 books I ship, it produces 1.8 clients on average. It was interesting. I did an interview with a popular YouTuber called Ali Abdaal. He’s got a ridiculous following. He’s got 5 million subscribers. I knew I was going to be big when I got invited to do that. I took fifteen copies of the book down to London with me. I got me, and Ali signed those fifteen copies. The idea was we were going to give away the fifteen as a prize for the first fifteen people who applied for it.

That interview had 175,000 views. Within the first 60 days, I signed and shipped 600 copies of the book. It generated 1,300 leads. In total, it’s produced somewhere in the order of about £135,000 worth of revenue off the back of that one interview, and I had another client sign up from it. It’s transformed my view on how to market a small business.

How?

It’s more around the short-term thinking I alluded to earlier about getting clients one by one. I had fallen into that trap from coming out of my marketing agency to start up the coaching practice. It’s remarkable. Sometimes, it takes you several years in business to learn a valuable lesson. I did that podcast. It was easy and effortless. I got trained down to London with two and a half hours to record the episode. I got trained back. All of a sudden, I got this flood of inbound leads. It made me realize the power of influence, the power of partnerships, and having marketing assets you can deliver to people.

Had I not had the book? I wouldn’t have had something valuable for those people who want to reach out and connect with me. They wouldn’t have been able to request a book if the book didn’t exist. Having a little suite of marketing assets at your disposal is massively important. It made me realize that the one-by-one approach to marketing, which 99% of business owners do, is completely flawed.

Imagine if you had a challenge set whereby, this time next Friday, you have to get 100 clients or your daughter’s favorite cat dies. We put a bit of jeopardy in there to make it difficult. When you have to answer, where’s my next client coming from?” I’ll do a bit of social media posting. Where are my next 100 clients coming from? You’re like, “Social media is not going to deliver that. Even ads at scale with a massive investment probably isn’t going to deliver that.”

You have to think hard about what you would do. That’s like having partnerships with people who already share your audience. There’s some overlap. You immediately break through the trust barriers because I could stand here and go, “Look at me. I’m amazing. Look at all the great things that I’ve done.” Whereas appearing on somebody else’s podcast, especially the likes of Ali Abdaal, who’s already got a loyal audience and Ali’s there going, “Robin is brilliant. He got this great book. He’s doing all of these amazing things.” There’s immediate trust built through that, and it cuts through a lot faster.

That was a massive lesson, which I wish I’d learned several years ago to focus more on partnerships, building your influence, and leveraging other people’s audiences. I’m not going to do any marketing this year. It would be great if I could show up and do interviews like this. I see this more as a partnership level because I hope to get to know your business better through our meeting now. I’m not going to be doing any social media or posting anything because I have to. I might do it because it’s fun, I want to, and I enjoy doing that stuff, but my goal is to get 2 or 3 more interviews under my belt. That level of value and building up other partnerships around that and building that sphere of influence. The impact has been ridiculous.

I can’t promise you 5 million followers or 175,000 views, but the point you’re getting at goes back to the beginning of our conversation, where you talked about thinking about hours and billing out on an hourly basis. The amount of time you have as a solopreneur is finite. No matter how hard you want to work, it is finite.

A lot of small business owners, to your point, think linearly. They aren’t thinking like, “How do I build something that’s massively scalable?” The difference between doing one-on-one coaching with somebody and running an online course that theoretically has infinite potential in terms of how many people could log in and take that course. If you start thinking about ways to monetize your product offering in more scalable ways and fashions, it completely changes the dynamic for you.

It’s the opposite of your divorce lawyer and divorce counselor, where four $250,000 clients give her the business she wants. It’s going in the other direction of saying, “How do I take something rather than deliver it one by one? I deliver it to a mass audience at a time, whether it’s my audience or somebody else’s audience.” You can make either of those models work. It’s like the old marketing adage of a mass-market product versus a boutique high-end luxury product. The challenge for a lot of businesses is they get caught in the middle, and they aren’t sure which way they want to go.

It’s what I call the business by design. You get to choose how involved you want to be in your business, what hours you want to work, how much freedom you want to want from that business, and how much it will fulfill you. You get to design all of those things. That’s the beauty of when you productize it. Even the divorce lawyers’ packages are productized. With her, it’s about a six-month coaching program and she sees her clients fortnightly. You could always wind it back to an effective hourly rate, but it’s much more about the results and outcomes at that point. Can we get you back to a place where you are happy with each other, where you’re at each other’s throats in six months? It’s based on that result.

One of the things I’ve noticed about my own business, and hopefully, this is helpful to share, is I have to create a problem first before I find an optimal solution out of it, systemizing or building a process around it. It is a little secret. When that interview went live, I’ve got all that action going on and leads. That time, I was still doing one-to-one sales calls with clients, but it did get to a point by December where I was doing fifteen of these calls a week on top of my other coaching responsibilities, my other businesses where I was like, “This is too much. If I do this for much longer, I’m going to hit burnout.”

I love doing it. That’s the problem. I love having those interactions with people. My ego kept me trapped in that for a while, but now we’ve got through into this new year. I’m trialing doing group workshops instead, but if they’re buying a group accelerator, why should I not be selling as a group call? Having that challenge has forced me to build a better system, process, or way of working. A lot of business owners try to systemize stuff soon before they’ve identified all of the problems, pain points, and challenges they’re experiencing within their business. Sometimes, you have to have your back against the wall to think creatively about how to solve a problem.

In some ways, this notion of you having your back against the wall is about the lean startup and thinking about, “What’s my minimum valuable product?” I have a friend, Danny Warchol, who teaches entrepreneurship, and one of his key things is that an abundance of resources sometimes works against you when you’re short on resources.” It is like having your back against the wall. You have to figure it out. You’re back to your challenge thing of how do you find 100 clients in a week or your daughter’s cat dies, which is awful, but it’s thinking about it in that context of how do you work with what you’ve got and make as much out of it as possible without killing yourself in the process.

A lot of business owners try to do too much on their own. I was getting into a bit of complacency and felt guilty for doing that towards the end of 2023. A lot of people assume that coaches, mentors, business experts, and leaders have to have everything perfectly together and be infallible. The reality is no, we still have the same problems and challenges that any other business owner experiences. We’re still human.

When things go wrong in my business, I’ll share. It doesn’t matter what that issue is because I believe that everybody can learn from it. There’s a great author called Matthew Syed who wrote a book called Black Box Thinking. There’s a story in there that he tells about the NHS, our National Health Service here in the UK, an operation that went wrong, and sadly, the wife didn’t make it, but the husband fought tooth and nail to make sure that they investigated this.

They discovered that the surgeon was most fearful of the fact that he might lose his job if he fessed up to what happened about these two complications that went wrong in the operation. He was worried about his own job. The husband said, “I’ll get my lawyer. We’ll work together, and we’ll protect your job, but please share what you found and what happened because my fear is that this will happen 10 or 20 times in the future.

Take Your Shot: How to Grow Your Business, Attract More Clients, and Make More Money by Robin Waite

They figured it out, and in the following twelve months after this investigation, the same two complications happened twenty times. They were able to prevent deaths from happening afterward. Business leaders need to be, rather than going on to social and talking about how great everything is, how amazing their life is, and how all things are wonderful, they should spend more time going on there telling and being honest with everybody about all of the problems and challenges they’re facing in their business. Others can learn from it. They would get a lot more trust and respect from the people who are following them if they were more honest about that.

There’s a strong sense of community and support that exists in many places out there. We’re up against time. Any parting thoughts you want to leave us with?

My whole thing about fearless is a lot of people mistake it for being reckless, but the idea is that there are things that are stopping business owners that if they feared them slightly less, they stand a better do the thing which they’re slightly afraid of, they stand a better chance of achieving their goals. Something as simple as putting your prices up and not buying a little bit, let’s stretch it and double them. Start to find creative ways to go and ask for what you want.

If you know that there’s an influencer in your sphere who shares your audience and you want to set up a partnership with them, go and get in the room with them. Go and have a selfie with them, hand over your book if you have one, and ask them, “I would love to work with you.” It’s those little opportunities that we often walk away from because of fear, whereas if we lean into it, it can be game-changing.

Thanks for doing this. We are short on time. We’ll have to do a follow-up at some point sometime soon.

I’d love to.

Stay in touch. It was good catching up with you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Robin.

—

I’d like to thank Robin for joining me to discuss his work as a business coach, the book that he wrote in support of it called Take Your Shot, and his own career and what’s made him successful. If you’d like to make the most of your career, visit PathWise.io and become a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

• Fearless Business
• Take Your Shot
• Breakthrough Advertising
• The Infinite Game
• Black Box Thinking
• LinkedIn – PathWise.io
• Facebook – PathWise.io
• YouTube – PathWise.io
• Instagram – PathWise.io
• TikTok – PathWise.io
• https://RobinWaite.com

About Robin Waite

Robin Waite is an author, public speaker, and business coach. He is the founder of Fearless Business, which features a 12-week Accelerator program, and CourseApp, which is aimed at helping coaches, consultants, and trainers scale their learning curricula. Prior to starting these two businesses, Robin ran a creative agency called the Coconut Group, which he sold in 2016.

Robin is also the author of five books, including Take Your Shot, which we’ll cover in our discussion. He and his family live in the Cotswolds in England.