In this episode I introduce myself and tell you what lies at the heart of the Fearless Business brand and community. From the age of 18, Robin spent four years as a systems analyst for a medical devices company, helping them increase their turnover by 50 per cent, from £1 million to £1.5 million.
From 2004 to 2016 Robin ran a successful design and advertising agency serving over 250 clients.
Now Robin is the Founder of the 12-Week Fearless Business Accelerator which helps Coaches, Consultants and Freelancers to grow their businesses and fear the things that scare them in business ever so slightly less.
If you want to know more about Fearless Business then please check out:
► https://fearless.biz/
or hook up with my open community group on Facebook:
► https://www.facebook.com/groups/ChargeMore
They are:
About 50% of the Fearless Business Accelerator is about nailing down your offer and building out the full 7-Step Product Architecture Model.
If you nail your pricing you will start to price and sell your way out of scarcity and the Sales Cycle of Doom. Knowing your numbers is the key to success in the FBA.
Generating leads and creating friction-less sales.
If you want to know more about the programme, me or how I work then please jump onto my website:
>>> https://robinwaite.com/case-study
And as I mentioned I'd love it if you bought a copy of Take Your Shot from Amazon:
>>> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Take-Your-Shot-Business-Attract/dp/0995776806/
Equally I am happy to gift you a copy but you MUST PROMISE ME that you'll leave a review.
You can apply for a review copy of Take Your Shot here: http://bit.ly/TYSPromo
Or just email me for a chat!!
I love helping businesses to become more successful, and getting results for my clients is what gets me out of bed each day.
You are listening to the Fearless Business podcast. You're in the best place to learn about how to grow a business, get more clients and make more money without fears and limitations all while having fun in the process. Robin Waite is the founder of Fearless Business, a business accelerator, helping coaches, consultants, and freelancers, double their income and more. This is Fearless Business, and this is Robin Waite.
Hey, Hey, people of Fearless Business. Welcome. I know that a few of you will be having questions about what is this whole Fearless Business thing about and who is this Robin Waite guy? And what can I possibly learn from this guy who wanders around aimlessly in soul rock t-shirts talking about business. So I'm going to tidy a few of those things up for you, a few of those questions up for you. And then we can get deep down and dirty with the content in future episodes of the Fearless Business podcast, which is going to be coming up soon.
So let's start with Fearless Business where that came from, because I think that's probably the most important thing. So I believe that there aren't actually that many things to fear in business. So fear generally arises from the reptilian part of the brain being activated when we were crossing the plains of Africa and being chased by lions and tigers and things like that. And the reality is that in business, there isn't actually that much to be scared of.
Yet, I see many small business owners struggle when it comes to getting clients, putting themselves out there, worrying about rejection, taking on too much and not finishing what they started and all of the other associated fears, which kick in. But most of all, it's down to fear of failure, fear of rejection. So business in my opinion has never been harder, actually. I think actually we live in this world where there's a huge amount of opportunity available to us, with all of the technology and the apps and software and things like that that's available, it's a global marketplace. There has never been a better time to start a business. But actually I think because of all of those different things that are going on, I don't actually think it's ever been harder.
And one of the reasons, so let me quantify that. So one of the reasons why I believe this is because if you rewind, pre-internet, 30 years ago and this is just in the UK, by the way, there was just under half a million, 500,000 registered businesses in the UK. And we fast forward to today and there's 5.9 million registered businesses in the UK. Now I'm pretty certain that that statistic will probably follow through in other countries around the world. So what that tells me is that actually there's 10 times the number of businesses than there were 30 years ago, which means there's 10 times the number of people doing what I'm doing, 10 times the number of people doing what you're doing and, okay, so plenty of opportunity, but equally it makes it 10 times harder for somebody to find you and engage with you and hopefully buy your product or service or whatever it is.
So what that does is it creates a lot of noise to start off with, and it creates an awful lot of uncertainty, especially when you go right down into the micro, small business level. Where it's just one business, one owner of a business going about doing their thing on a daily basis and they are wondering why they're doing all of these marketing things like Facebook, social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, they're doing blog articles, they've got their website live, they're doing videos, they're doing podcasts. They're doing all of this stuff that all of the experts and gurus tell you to do and yet, their business isn't thriving. Okay. So this is where I step in A; as a coach, but also B; as Robin Waites, the guy who has... I've been in business now for going on 20 odd years.
I'm 37. I started my first business when I was 18 as a side hustle. At the same time I was at uni. At the same time, I was also working as a systems analyst for a medical company. I did that for four years. I helped that business, that medical company grow from about 800 K turnover to 1.5 million during those four years. And pretty much ended up running the company at the end of it. In part, and I don't mean this to sound arrogant, but the systems that I built were very good and so they replaced manpower basically. So whilst the turnover doubled, the workforce halved. So it went from 15 people down to about nine, so eight or nine. And most of that was my responsibility. As a naïve 22 year old, I didn't realise what negative impact I was having on the workforce so far as those individuals are concerned.
So in 2004 I then setup a marketing agency and wanted to do my own thing and I actually built my own team up. Rehire some of those people. Over the course of the next 12 years, this takes me out to 2016, we grew that business, I did have a business partner, awesome guy called Caleb. And we grew that business to about quarter million pound turnover. We had a team, small team, three or four people working for us, sort of intervals throughout that period of time. But 2016, things changed. I'd already had one daughter, Poppy. My second daughter, Sophie was imminent about three weeks away and we had a planned caesarean so knew that D-Day was approaching. I just panicked and realised that I'd been working in this business for 12 years and we were delivering serious value to our clients who we worked with, but it really wasn't fulfilling me.
So wanted to change that basically, and what that meant to me was being out for her or finding a niche, a business outlet for myself that would enable me to help businesses grow, not just through websites, marketing, branding, but I was starting to understand the economics around businesses, using the systems analysts, the numbers part of my brain to understand the economics of growing a business and making it sustainable. And we've done a lot of work around pricing within our business, how we productized our own services and stuff like that. So I shut the agency down. I didn't know what I was going to do, but closed the agency down. It's now since been sold, which is fantastic. And in the ensuing three months, enjoyed my paternity leave, but also started to work out what path I wanted to take.
And so I landed upon coaching, took on my first couple of coaching clients. This guy called Russ who I wrote, Take Your Shot about. So if you want to know more about what I do, I've got a couple of books out, which you might want to check out. So one is called Online Business Startup. The second one is called Take Your Shot, which is a story basically about Russ who is a golf pro and how we turned his business around and got him on a path to achieving his dreams, his goals within his business and whatnot.
And yes. Here we are today with Fearless Business, which is the coaching brand, coaching product which I offer and all of the great stuff that happens within that. So what Fearless Business is about is really about three core pillars. Before I go into what those three core pillars are, I think it's really important for me to say, what are the core values which underpin Fearless Business brand as a whole. One of the most important things to me is, there's a tonne of different coaches out there, okay. So I'm just going to be honest with you. 90% of them are awful. I was about to swear then. Most of them are awful. 10% of them are brilliant because they really deeply understand the needs of small business owners.
And I'm going to call out a couple of things here, which rightly or wrongly, I don't really care. It's important for people to understand exactly what Fearless Business is all about. The sorts of coaches that I'm talking about, that I don't think really serve the world that well, and I'm going to get a lot of backlash for this, and that's cool. I'm just going to have to deal with it. But it's things like the multilevel marketers, who've grown some great MLM businesses, don't get me wrong, they should be really proud of what they're doing, but then they go out there and try and coach other businesses. Experts in e-commerce who then try and coach service-based businesses. Maybe people who've come out of the corporate world and then rather than leaving corporate world and focusing on working with executives, managers, that sort of thing, exec coaching, they then decided that because they've worked in corporate, they can help small businesses.
And actually the business world is like so diverse. It is so deep. There's a massive divide. I feel between like big business and small business and the mindset, especially that goes into running a small business for a small business owner. So in short, like I've designed Fearless Business on a very like intellectual model. Like we do some mindset, but we remove a lot of the emotional side of, I guess, from running a business, which sounds weird. But from an intellectual standpoint, like when you run a business and you understand the economics and the numbers that go into building a business, understanding about how to set goals, understanding about the financial forecasts that are going to, and the activities that you're going to do within your business to achieve those goals. All of a sudden it becomes an intellectual challenge or problem that needs to be sold as opposed to necessarily an emotional one where you're breaking through barriers and limiting beliefs and all that sort of stuff.
Although granted don't get me wrong. Those are some of the things which we go into. Okay. So any three you think about business as being an intellectual problem. Again, if you know your numbers and you're running, you're doing the right sorts of activities to get you close to your goals. All of a sudden it's less, it removes all of the things to be fearful of. So if you know that in order to get two sales, you've got to generate 10 leads to the month. Again, most business owners start to focus on like the two sales and they get hung up on that. But if we know that we're generating the conversations with lead to 10 solid leads, we're going to get sales. So again, like the intellectual side of me is like, we'll focus on the front-end stuff, the activity you need to create on the front-end, in order to generate those sales on the backend.
So how we do that in the Fearless Business programme, if you like, we focused on three different things, three different core pillars. So the first one of those is around the product architecture. What I mean by that is basically rather than having one core product that you sell to everybody. And sometimes it's like proposal based. So you're constantly changing that products for different clients. So I'm talking about service-based businesses here, and I can talk about my target, the Fearless Business target market in a minute. But so rather than having a single core products, we start to build out, well, how could we design three to five core products that satisfy 80% to 90% of the market place? Let's marginalise, let's alienate 10% to 20% of the marketplace because they're needy is anything.
And they're going to be a real pain in the ass when we come to like serving them as clients. So we want to start to create a bit of a Marmite effect, but we create three to five core products that we know will satisfy a majority of the marketplace and getting that offer absolutely nailed is like call. It's [inaudible 00:11:39] core pillar of Fearless Business. But again, it's not just about that core product. It's about what are the marketing assets that sit on the front-end? How do we generate leads? How do we get those people booked into calls? How do we have manage that sales process? Get them on to the core product. How do we then create sustainable revenue within the business? This is something I'll go into deeper on another episode, but how do we build sustainable revenue in our businesses?
So that even if we switched off our funnels, our sales funnels and marketing, we've still got a really solid client base of raving fans that buy our products month in, month out. Okay. So that's core pillar number one, that's the product architecture. The second core pillar is based around pricing. So I work with service-based businesses. Okay. So Fearless Business works with service businesses, service client businesses. So these are typically businesses that charge time for money. So we're talking here about coaches, consultants, freelancers. So if you're any of these, then like this podcast is going to be the thing which you need in your life, basically moving forward, but also bigger. So those tend to be more one man band, smaller businesses, micro businesses. And that's cool. I love working with those guys and I always have some corporate clients as well, who are typically agencies.
So more than one person, they might be accountancy practises. And I've worked with the odd law firm. So right through from your humble web designer, who's maybe making a few hundred pounds a month, maybe a thousand pounds a month, right up to some eight figure law firms locally. So it just gives you a flavour about the sorts of businesses that Fearless Business can help. But one of the key things I've noticed across working with all of the business owners, not just since I started coaching three years ago in 2016, but just if I track back, one of the things that business owners struggle with the most is pricing. So this is core pillar, number two. And most business owners in the service sector charge time for money. So an hourly rate, daily rate, whatever it is they rate.
And the reality is you can always make a bit more money, but you can never make more time. And once you sold off an hour of your life, it's like you've sold off like a piece of your soul that you'll never get back. So we want to maximise that. And we're not just talking about like doubling our hourly rate or doubling our rates willy-nilly, if we get our product right, our offer, right, in the first place, corporate number one, all of a sudden, if that product becomes results focused and not value focused. So it's not time for money, but we're focused on the outcome we deliver for our clients. We can have some fun with how we price it. Okay. And I mean, serious fun, Fearless Business is about shifting people from this position of fair scarcity mindset, where they're struggling to work out what the next steps that businesses are going to be to having a bit of fun with their sales process, up their pricing, and really start to get, take control back in terms of the business.
And a lot of people basically pricing is mindset, lift this three areas, three things, really which factor into pricing, but primarily it's mindset and taking, going through the validation process. So once you put your prices up, there's this waiting period where you have to get your first client as new prices, which then validates that that was the right decision. Okay. So we look at mindset validation and time as part of that pricing process. Okay. So that's core pillar number two, and then finally, core pillar number three. And this is the thing, right? This is the thing that I think most business owners get really stuck on. So like 90% plus a business owners are focused on marketing. The one thing that they think is going to transform their business is marketing.
And that is the only way that's going to grow their business. Okay. So, if we had the scenario where we can have the same number of clients, imagine you had the same number of clients as you had last year, but you weren't double the revenue through them. That'd be pretty cool. Right? So that tells me that actually fundamentally it's not really a marketing problem because you've got clients, it's the economics that sit behind it, how well constructed your product is, how confident you are in your pricing and the value proposition you put forward for your clients. Okay. So that's why we do product first. Get the offers straight. We got the pricing and value proposition nailed. Then finally we switch on lead flow. So we switch on marketing and sales that's core pillar number three. Okay. And when that happens, it's like adding rocket fuel to a rocket.
It's going to take you into out space. Imagine this scenario, perhaps with your business at the moment, when maybe you're feeling a bit stuck, your business isn't serving you financially or time-based or your clients aren't really filling it up or whatever it is. Okay. So imagine that the scenario where you're at the moment, it's a bit like your fit 500 engine that's like 30 years old. Okay. It's a bit rickety. Imagine if we were to add rocket fuel to that. So we switch on marketing and we get a tonne of clients view, if you like if you had rocket filter fit 500 engine, it's going to go super fast for really short credit time and it exploded. Boom, it's gone. Okay. Whereas actually, if you get your product right in your pricing light, then you add the rocket fuel, or your marketing and it's like spinning up a flywheel.
It just has this really positive effect in your business. You get masses of confidence out of it, all of those things that you're worried about before you think, Oh, well, why was I worrying about them? And it's a really beautiful site to watch businesses once they get to that stage to watching grow. Okay. So that'd be great. So that gives you a bit of an insight into a bit of a background about me and what Fearless Business stands for. And the three core pillars around products, architecture, pricing, and lead flow that go into creating a Fearless Business and a Fearless Business owner. Like if you have any questions about that at all, I would love for you to get in touch with me, shoot me, or shoot me a message in media, or drop me an email robin@robinwaite.com. That's with an E on the end of it, robinwaite.com.
Also like one of the things I would love to offer you is if you are, there's two things, okay, I've a book it's called Take Your Shot. You can either support me by going to amazon.co.uk and buying that book because for us humble authors book sales, book reviews are the things which helps boost the rankings. So that'd be super helpful. Equally, if you're a bit tight I'm in kin. If you're a bit tight now I'm joking. If you would just like me to, I have like review copies of my book available. So if you want to review copy of Take Your Shot, then just hit me up a message. I will pop a copy in the post to you and or a PDF. I send that across. All I ask is that if you get a review copy of the book, you do take the time to leave an Amazon review.
One of the things I want to do is like spread the word and help as many business owners as I possibly can. If I could have a positive impact on, let's say 10,000 business owners in the next like year or two, I would be super chuffed. And one of the ways that I can do that is through my books, through the Fearless Business podcast, through the Fearless Business Academy group and various other things like that. So, but one of the ways of doing that is if I build up reviews on Amazon, it helps other people find the book and buy it and it can start to make a really positive, significant impact on their businesses. So you've got email robin@robinwaite.com hit me up on social media. My social media handles are all Robin M Waite, with an E on the end of it on Twitter, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, wherever you want to find me, like I said, if you would like a copy of Take Your Shot, complimentary copy of Take Your Shot provided you're willing to leave a review, then just, just send me, drop me a message.
We'll get a copy of the post to you or through an email and a PDF. And also, one of the other things which I offer as well. And this is like provided you're, if you're thinking like maybe coaching something which would be beneficial for your business, then we can get the ball rolling. We can do like a 30 minute strategy session. Again, just drop me a message is not the cation process for that, because those are limited, but it'd be great to have you on the 12-week Fearless Business accelerator, which is of course, which I run. And get you started on your Fearless Business journey. There is nothing to be afraid of. Like business should be fun. Business is about making money. It's about helping people delivering enormous remarkable value to anybody who comes into contact with not necessarily just people who pay you money.
And just I'd love to be a part. Well, not me. I would love for Fearless Business to be a part of your business journey and help you get to a point like, I'm not going to lie. I felt like the first 10 years of running my agency was a struggle. It was hard work. And I don't want other people to have to go through that. I want people to, I want you guys who are watching and listening to this to fast forward 10 years and your businesses, and just get straight, straight out of the gate, up and running like ASAP and start earning the money and delivering the value that you deserve, basically, that you're worth.
So, Oh, sorry. Somebody's trying to call me. So hopefully that makes some sense. I'm going to be having some guest interviews on it from some awesome entrepreneurs. And also I'll be going through, there'll be some like sales and mindset trainings, which I'll be releasing and various other things like that you can expect. And I try and do like an episode or two a week if I can. And basically just start helping you grow your businesses. That's what Fearless Business is all about. And if you know anybody who also might you think might be interested in this, tag them into any of the posts and let's share it, let's build this thing together.