In this immensely practical episode, Robin Waite, Founder of Fearless Business, shares how he empowers coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs to double their income and happiness while significantly reducing their client load.
You will discover:
– How to boost your confidence when selling
– How you can double your income without doubling your workload
– How to find the right price for your services
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And joining us from the other side of the pond is a truly high demand coach in the one and only Robin Waite, who’s the founder of fearless business, and he’s an expert on pricing, a regular keynote speaker at business events, and a best selling author of several books, including online online business, startup marketing machine and the recent popular release, take your shot. His expertise is productizing services and helping people to articulate the fantastic results these products deliver so that they can confidently charge more. He believes that crafting a successful business isn’t about working harder, it’s about working smarter. I fell in love with this Robin just to let you know out of the gate here, because what I found is, as I was writing my book for founders in this kind of pre founder phase, a lot of it is just about winning the chance to take a shot, right like that. You do all this work to become a founder, to become an entrepreneur, to get into the game, and then so many, few, so many people just drop the ball there. They never really take this shot. So from, from the man who literally wrote the book on the topic, what does it mean to take your shot?
Robin Waite
Yeah, well, I think one of the things which has helped me be successful is just because I’m so pig headed and stubborn. Scott, I’m not going to lie. I think the most successful businesses typically have been around for the longest amount of time. And what that’s meant is that they’ve, you know, they they’ve learned all of the learned through all of the mistakes which they’ve made over that time. They’ve been through all of the ups and downs that the economy and all the external, you know, environment has thrown at them over the years. But also what that’s meant is that they’ve got a little bit long in the tooth in terms of understanding, like, when is the right time for an opportunity, when to make the right ask or request. You know, to which person do you need to make that request to? So taking your shot is all about all of those different constituent parts all coming together at the right time, and making your ask so that you can actually step up to the next level. As a lot of reasons why business owners struggle to do that. It’s why my brand is called fearless, because there’s genuine fears which business owners really struggle with it. Could be something as simple as coming onto a podcast like this, or maybe standing up and doing a 62nd pitch, or increasing your prices, or putting your business in front of a new audience, or something like that. But there’s lots of business owners which really struggle with those sorts of things. So yeah, it’s about fearing the things in business ever so slightly less that stop us from achieving those goals and ambitions that we set out to achieve.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. I love that now you’ve got a pleasant habit, I’d say, of helping businesses that you work with to double their revenue in a relatively short period of time as those three months. How do you do it?
Robin Waite
So the the first part of it, there’s kind of three, three sides to the triangle here. So there’s the first part is productizing services. And there’s too many business owners out there in the service sector. So coaches, consultants, freelancers who are still trading time for money, and I have quite a strong opinion on this, actually, that trading time for money, hourly rates, day rates, is actually unethical, and the reason for that is if hourly rates really work in the favor of the person who was selling those hours. So imagine if you were in the market for something simple, say, a website, and the person is charging you 50 bucks an hour, and initially they say, Oh, we think it will take you 20 hours. Now, 1000 bucks a website probably say, might be fair. It might be too cheap, too expensive. It’s irrelevant. But what they missed out was that they haven’t been doing it for very long, so they’re not terribly, you know, good at doing it, and so when they eventually deliver your website, there’s bits of it missing, and it’s not very good at being found in Google search engine. Website designer number two comes along, and they don’t know what Robin and Scott knows about pricing either, but because they’ve been doing it 20 years, for example, they’re much better at doing it. They build better quality websites. They put bonus features in there, because they know what business owners need in a website, and they deliver it in a much shorter period of time, because they’re so much more experienced, and actually their billable hours only end up being, say, 10 hours. So while of a sudden, does the guy who is much more experienced get paid half of what the guy who is less experienced and does a lesser quality job of the website, and that’s rife in a lot of different industries. And so all that ends up happening as well. And most people are ethical, morally above board, and they wouldn’t necessarily do this, but in order to make more money, you’ve effectively got to sell more hours, which means you could either choose to work slower, so you end up charging, you know, getting more hours sold, or you’re constantly having to top up and get more clients to get those hours sold. So it’s a real grind. And so what we look at when we’re productizing a service is there’s three questions we want to ask. The first question is, what’s the dream outcome that your client’s looking for? So if somebody doesn’t do. Buy a website because they want something that’s standard compliant, and, you know, got HTML code in it, and a blog and a shopping cart, they buy something which is going to generate leads and inquiries from their business and ultimately money. So you’ve got to try and identify what is the dream outcome that we’re delivering here for our client. Second question is, can we deliver that in a fixed period of time? And this is where the first swear word comes up. It’s not actually a swear word, but fearless. HQ is so when I say, Can you deliver in a fixed period of time? Most people will answer, well, it depends. And what it depends means is that there’s too many variables in the business. They’re doing too many things, too many different types of people. The results are very unpredictable, because they’re kind of like full service and and maybe it takes too long. There’s no processes or systems. So if you can do one thing really well for one specific type of client and it’s repeatable, you get the same outcome for those clients each and every time you build systems and processes, you should be dial it dial be able to dial it into delivering that product or service in a fixed period of time. Yeah. And from there, we can then ascertain the price, and this is the price based on the result of the thing which you do. So it doesn’t matter whether it takes somebody five years or five minutes to build a website, but if that website is delivering 15 to 20 qualified leads each and every month, the value of that website and the price of it is tied to the result at the end of the day. So yeah, so it’s all about the dream outcome in a fixed period of time and for a fixed fee. And there’s a second side to this as well, because, again, a lot of business owners don’t seem to plan, so they don’t really go through their books and really understand their numbers. So we help them, especially when it comes to pricing, we look at something called goal focused pricing, and it’s exactly that we’ll look at whatever their financial goal is. And then so it could be, let’s say, I’ll keep the numbers easy for argument’s sake. But so it could be, they want to win $100,000 next year in their business. And so I might then ask them, or how much are you going to be charging for your product or service or widget that you’re selling? And they might say $1,000 we take the big number, divide it by the little number, and we know then that we’ve got to deliver 100 units of that thing. And quite often, when I ask that question of people, the majority of their eyes pop out of their head or through their glasses, and they’re like, oh my god, I can possibly deliver 100 you know, units or widgets or whatever it might be. So we already know then they’re pricing slightly out of whack for what it is, because they don’t have the capacity to be able to deliver that many units. So we’ll then just do a bit of a thought process around, well, what is your capacity? How many clients could you work with this year? And if they say maybe 20 clients, well we take 100k divided by 20, and we’re at 5k now. So with 5x the price, and again, their eyes might pop out the head, and there’s things which come up around, sort of their money mindset and their money story, their attachment to value and their own personal value and things like that. This their own self worth. But what we’ve then got to do is get creative about, well, how do we we don’t just 5x our price and add no extra value. I don’t believe in that. You’ve got to, if you charge five times the price, that gives you a little bit of extra time and resources to then put more value into that product, which ultimately delivers a better quality result and outcome for the client, which makes you more referable. So there’s like, a really holistic side to, you know, positive, a virtuous cycle when it comes to increasing your prices as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s so much in there. Where do I start? Okay, so your point number two, can we deliver in a fixed period of time? I’ve interviewed a ton of coaches now, some of them amazing, some of them on the road to amazing. And the thing that separates amazing, high demand coaches from everyone else. The number one common thread was what I would call a structured process. It’s exactly what you’re speaking to. It’s this time frame. We did this number of things, and the only way you can do that is if you’ve dialed it in on who you work for, right, becoming that ideal person for your ideal clients. So I couldn’t agree more with that folks that are in the professional services in any way, shape or form would universally benefit from a structured process. So I love that point the other there are lots of eyes popping out of heads, and it’s it’s such a great illustration. And I want to see your thoughts on this. Folks ask about pricing, and you’re way further down the road in terms of strategy and how to get there, but one of the things that I’ll say oftentimes for coaches is your price is however much you can confidently charge, right? Because I could give you a number, you could come up with a number, but if you aren’t confident in that number, nobody’s going to pay it. Would you agree?
Robin Waite
Yeah, absolutely. You have to have belief in your ability to be able to deliver those results otherwise, like, Well, again, there’s a there’s an ethical line there. Should you actually be selling it if you don’t really fully believe that you can deliver those results to clients? So I mean, we I play a numbers game, and sometimes I do do it on interviews as well. I don’t. Whether it work or not, but, um, where once we’ve kind of set the price point that there’s, there’s two sides to it. There’s the price that I would charge today, like right now, based on my current Money Story and comp level of confidence, and where that lies. But there’s also another version of this game where, where we look at 12 or 24, months into the future, and is there a price point that you can kind of grow into. So it might be that your confidence is like, well, today I might charge two and a half k, but in 12 months time, I can see myself selling this coaching program for, say, 5k and over the course of the next 12 months again, we just figure out how we can, well, what is it? What evidence do you need to see in order to be able to grow into those prices? One thing which I do is I quite often have a bit of a bet with clients. So when we pick their price point, and I always push them to go slightly outside their comfort zone, I normally challenge them to go and pitch at least the next 10 prospects at that price point that we’ve agreed and the bet is that if they can document the process. So I, you know, do a recording on Zoom, for example, so that they can report back to me. But if they can document the process of those 10 sales calls, and I can see them out in the wild selling, and if they make 10 pitches at whatever their new price point is, and don’t sell a thing, I’ll buy their product off them, which is, sounds like it should be quite risky, but I’ve never lost that bet, and I’ve made it over 1500 times so but I do occasionally buy my clients products because they’re great, so because I actually, genuinely want them. And normally, when people get into a situation where they feel they can’t lose because they’re at least going to get one customer, whether it’s a customer through the process, or it’s going to be me. So that takes the edge off. It takes the worry off of it, because they’re like, Oh, well, I can’t lose so I might as well just do the 10 things, and at least I’m going to make $3,000 out of it, so whatever the price point is. So that’s quite a good way just to remove those immediate fears, taking away the thought process around loss, and then the other side of it as well. So for more established coaches that maybe are still struggling to raise their prices or they’re having confidence issues around prospects saying no, for example, one thing which I found is really helpful is to make sure you’ve got a rainy day fund saved up. So again, a lot of business owners will focus on turnover. So they’re like, I’m a seven figure business, an eight figure business, whatever it might be, on paper as a profit and loss. You know, if you look at the profit and loss, a seven figure business looks great, but how does that actually reflect profitability? How does it actually reflect cash in the bank? And quite often, you see people who are very good at invoicing and talking good story and getting clients enrolled, but they’re really they don’t have the cash flow side of things sorted out, so they kind of front load the cash and are able to build a cash collection machine. Because I think it would be fair to say that, you know, but most small business owners out there, if they had $100,000 sat in the bank as a rainy day fund, they wouldn’t be they wouldn’t care so much whether the client says yes or no. They’d be more interested to see whether actually, it’s a it’s a good fit or not. And yes, I think that’s much more important.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s nothing more, you know, the more repellent right for your services than desperation. You know, it’s just us, particularly in the coaching space. So Robin, I’ve got this question for you that I want to ask. I could go on forever on this, but I want to get to this question. And the question is, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Robin Waite
So it’s actually it’s not my secret, but I don’t mind. I’m sure this guy won’t mind me sharing it. So as a guy called Perry Marshall here is a fantastic consultant. He’s actually based over on in the States, and he’s you can read about this. There’s a book called detox, declutter and dominate, which he wrote. It’s a really short book. It’s almost like a 36 page workbook, but in it, he talks about this concept of the espresso machine, and the idea behind it is that most businesses set products and prices based on what they perceive as within their capability, and it’s very safe. And Perry Marshall tells the story about, I think it was Starbucks, that every Starbucks, years ago, used to have a you could go in there and get your coffee a bag of beans. But they also used to have an espresso machine on the counter behind them, and that espresso machine was more expensive than like your, you know, your local Home Depot, or or John Lewis in the UK here, you sort of your, your your local store. And every time they sold an espresso machine, it was the profit on it was worth something like 3000 cups of coffee. And the idea is that they they weren’t proactively selling the espresso machine. The concept it was just there and then, if people wanted it, if they’re a raving fan, they would come in and buy it. So every, every small business owner, especially in the coaching world, um, should have some kind of really big, expensive offer that, conceptually, they’ve got an idea of you don’t need. To write it down. You don’t need to put all of the features of it or any of the like they need to put on your website or really market it. But again, just be ready when the right client comes along, where you feel your espresso machine could really solve like a big, meaningful problem in their business, then dive in and pitch it. And typically, that espresso machine is four or five times the price of your current most expensive product, and again, it’s down to confidence. You’ll you’ll know when it’s the right time to pitch that it’s something I wish I’d known like 20 years ago when I first started in business. But hey, it’s hindsight, isn’t it?
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. Have your special machine ready. I I’ve got mine in the back. I use it for other purposes, but I probably need to add it here. So we’ve been great illustration. I love that Robin. There’s some folks listening, and they want the confidence, they want to be able to take their shot, and they want someone who can guide them through that process. How can they connect with you, learn more about you and the work that you do?
Robin Waite
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve got a lot of videos which talk about this on my YouTube channel. So if you just jump onto YouTube and search for Robin Waite with an E on the end of it, hopefully you’ll find my channel on there. And I’ve also got a gift, Scott, if it’s okay, to share this with all of your listeners, some free signed copies of my book. Take your shot. I’d love to send those out to people who are listening in. So that’s over at fearless.biz/tys for take your shot. And I literally I ship them anywhere in the world. I think this year I’ve sent them to like Mongolia and Algeria and a few other random places dotted all over the globe.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. We’ll get that link in the show notes, absolutely. Check it out. I had a chance to read through the book, and it’s fantastic. It’s easy read. It’s a lot of fun. Parable form, you did a great job with it, Robin, and just some practical stuff, and that’s really, really helpful as well. Thanks so much for being on the show. This is one of those conversations that could have gone probably about nine times as long, at least for me. I don’t know about our audience, but, but yeah, it could have gone on and on. Thanks again for being here. For those of you listening today, you do know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Robin Waite
Robin Waite is the Founder of Fearless Business, an expert on pricing, a regular keynote speaker at business events, and bestselling author of several books, including Online Business Startup, Marketing Machine, and the recent popular release Take Your Shot. His expertise is productizing services and helping people articulate the fantastic results these products deliver so they can confidently charge more. He believes that crafting a successful business isn’t about working harder, it’s about working smarter.
Want to learn more about Robin Waite’s work at Fearless Business? Check out his website at https://www.robinwaite.com/ and get a copy of his book at https://amzn.to/4eQja5P
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