Robin Waite is one of the coaches that we found this month and we did a little interview with him. He impressed us with his experience and analytical mindset.
He started coaching as a result of a happy accident. He sold his marketing agency in order to spend more time with his daughters, and during that time few business owners and entrepreneurs who heard about the sale asked him to coach them how they can develop successful businesses.
He slowly developed his Fearless Business and now he helps people do the same, to find clarity, adopt a money mindset and reach their financial goals. It’s called “Fearless Business” because it teaches you how to fear less in your business so you are not held back by illusions and can reach your goals.
His approach is straightforward, he uses facts, numbers and reason to break through mental fallacies and show a path not many people see that will help them 100x their results. Here is what he said.
Name: Robin Waite
Pillar: The Mind
Who is this coach for: Anyone who wants to develop a money mindset, optimize their prices, and create a Fearless Business.
How they can help: By using various analysis, coaching strategies, and tools to change the mindset and bring results.
We are good, it was a shock to the system.
My youngest daughter had only just started school in the September before, so I was getting used to the pace of life of regular working hours with both the girls being in school.
And then boom! Several months of home schooling.
It was a good thing though as it provided me with lots of time for reflection and I realised that my life balance was out of whack.
Now I feel I have a good balance of things, able to work, my hours are flexible and I can be Dad whenever I need to be.
On the work front, I had over £20,000 of speaking engagements cancel within 24 hours of the lockdown being announced here in the UK.
I did encourage 2 clients to run virtual events and secured £9k of speaker fees as a result, but with far fewer events and conferences being run now it’s taken time to get my speaking engagements back up to pre pandemic levels again.
Many of our clients were supported through either of the Grant Scheme or the Bounce Back Loans which gave them a financial cushion.
And because so much was up in the air, how long would it go on for? What impact would it have on the wider business community? Would businesses have money? Will I be able to survive?
We chose to focus a lot on cost saving exercises to help our clients reduce their outgoings.
We also introduced an additional weekly group coaching call which was solely focussed on Mindset.
Our two amazing mindset coaches, Kate Hunter and Paul Wilson, ran weekly sessions
throughout the pandemic and up to December 2022.
This helped to calm their chimp mind and have somewhere to let it all out with a community of amazing and supportive business people.
For me, we had our best year ever in terms of enrolments and income in 2021.
We have a rigid enrollment process and I found that pandemic created some incredibly determined business owners who would do anything to succeed.
So for Fearless Business, the pandemic helped us to grow.
Attempting to “teach” 7 and 5 year olds outside of school is challenging (I have a whole new level of respect for teachers) so learning what motivates the girls, how they learn, and what they want to explore has to come from them and not me.
I would say I’ve took on more the role of “guide” during the pandemic and the outdoors is a fun place to explore when we’ve had enough of trying to do homework.
My girls taught me that if somebody is made to do something they don’t really want to do then it is generally unfulfilling, restricts freedom and doesn’t generate any great return, either enjoyment or financial.
If you do the thing you are most passionate about it increases the desire to learn and encourages mastery.
I fell into coaching as a bit of a happy accident.
From 2004 to 2016 I was running a successful local marketing agency, and just before my second daughter was born I decided I wanted a life away from the late nights and constant demands from clients.
Initially I wound the agency back and let my team go, but word spread and someone made an offer to buy the business.
It was only a modest sum of money but enough to provide some financial security for a while.
During the down time, and then my paternity leave, several freelancers and agency owners
approached me to mentor them, having heard I’d built and sold the agency.
As I mentored more business owners, and started to get great results, although many of them leaned on me to give them the answers.
I felt it was important to upskill and learn a more holistic coaching approach with clients so they could start to solve their problems on their own.
I’ve been very fortunate to have not had many big obstacles to overcome, my father dying nearly a decade ago from leukaemia was incredibly hard.
He was my biggest fan, so whenever things get a bit tough I know he’s always watching me with a supportive hand on my shoulder.
I am a numbers geek and love taking complex business ideas and simplifying them for clients.
In the beginning this started with me sketching the concept on my iPad as I explained the idea.
This evolved into a framework of about 50 ideas, all of which have a simple diagram and can be explained in five minutes.
This then opens up the discussion and helps the client to start figuring out the journey and what it looks like to them.
And in regards to the numbers, data and validation of ideas is the glue that hangs the coaching together.
For example, if I’m helping clients to raise their prices, their first response is nearly always, “I can’t put my prices up, nobody will buy from me!” to which my response would be something along the lines of, “Great, so now you have a hypothesis, it’s your task to go and either prove or disprove that, how many people do you need to ask about your new prices before we have enough evidence to know?”
Fearless Business is about fearing the things in business less so they no longer stand in the way of your goals or success.
The reality is that in business you’re not running from lions or about to get eaten by crocodiles, the only things that generally go wrong are:
1) you look a bit stupid
or
2) you might lose some money
We show people that neither of these are that bad and the potential upside is 100x better than the low possibility of the downside.
Many of our clients are “busy fools” before they work with us. They are very smart people, get amazing results working with their clients and love their work, however they are selling time for money and so end up having to do more sales, marketing, and admin to sell more hours… but have fewer and fewer hours to deliver actual paid client work.
We specialise in Pricing and Money Mindset.
It’s a very British thing to avoid the conversation about money, so our job is to help our clients package up their offer, articulate their value and then confidently go out and close bigger deals.
We also help our clients to identify things they are doing that they absolutely hate doing and stop doing those things.
If they have to be done for the business’ survival, delegate it.
If they don’t have to be done, then delete them.
In an ideal world our clients will have half the clients they had before working with us but double the income.
Or if they’re in startup land we help them to acquire clients at rates far higher than they would do without us working together.
We’ve helped:
To name a few!
Yes, we use Acuity Scheduling (now owned by Squarespace).
We recommend all coaches have some kind of diary booking system in place.
It saves so much time and can be fully automated.
Alongside that I’d also recommend they have a CRM in place.
My preferred choice is Pipedrive.
This allows you to track enquiries and ensure you introduce multiple touch points with prospects to take them on a fun, educational experience when working with you.
I also recommend using a tool like ScoreApp to qualify prospects before you work with them and assess their progress when they do become clients.
Again it’s simple and automated and you’ll be amazed to see a client’s improving scores through a simple self assessment tool like this.
Life’s too short, charge your worth!!
It has to be said, parenthood has taken my patience to a whole new level.
Running a business on barely any sleep.
There are times when I had to put the business down and focus on family and it focuses the mind on what’s important.
Parenthood has also taught me that so much is out of one’s control, that sometimes it’s better to let life come to you.
I don’t chase clients or spend my days marketing.
I create clients through meaningful and powerful conversations and then invite them to work together.
It’s not a struggle when it’s effortless in this way.
The fastest way to grow any business is to package up your offer with the sole focus around understanding your clients’ biggest pain points.
The package you create needs to lead your clients on a transformational journey to achieve their dream outcome.
Therefore a packaged up coaching offer has three constituent parts:
If you find yourself saying, “It depends…” followed by, “All my clients are different…” then you have too many variables in your business.
Your job as a coach is to create a robust system or process to deliver predictable results for your clients.
A business with too many variables will undoubtedly deliver poor results and give unpredictable outcomes.
So the laws of subtraction come into play… you need to remove the variables to create the best experience for your clients.
“It depends” is just code for, “It’s not my responsibility if my clients don’t get the results they want.”
And this is quite controversial, but most coaching accreditations will advise you not to make promises or guarantees on grounds of ethics.
I actually believe the opposite. It’s unethical to abdicate responsibility for creating predictable results for clients.
There’s a caveat here, if the coaching is based on a medical or mental health need, you absolutely cannot guarantee results to clients.
It is possible, however, to talk about something called a Perceived Value Guarantee which is based on your clients’ perceived value of the coaching they’ve received and base your guarantees on that.
It sounds like, “If we get to the end of your coaching and you genuinely believe you’ve not
received value for money then let’s have a conversation.”
If you liked this interview and you would love to adopt a money mindset then go to https://www.robinwaite.com and see how Robin can help you develop a Fearless Business.
If you want to learn more about Fearless Business, here is a short case study that might interest you. And here you can take your FREE copy of Take Your Shot.
If you’d like to peak a glimpse of his coaching, follow his Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok accounts.
If you’d like to connetc more personally with him, you can do that through LinkedIn or by sending him a direct message on his Email robin@robinwaite.com. It was an honor having this interview with him.
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