Know Your Worth: Pricing Strategies for Creative Entrepreneurs | Robin Waite

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Gilbert, South Carolina. Uh, never been to South Carolina or Gilbert, but it sounds like a lovely place. Joining me today, Robin Waite with Fearless Coaching. Robin, Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Christian. Pleasure to be here.

So I can tell from your funny accent that you may not be from the United States of America.

Yeah, you've nailed it. I'm in England. It's a bit of a giveaway, isn't it?

A little bit. Although some people can't distinguish, say, English, Irish, Australian, South African. They get them all confused, those accents. Run together. Not me, not an experienced host like myself. So whereabouts in England are you?

So I'm based down in the southwest of England. So if you imagine you put a chocolate tin with the English countryside on it, that's basically where I live. So right out in countryside, about 90 miles west of London.

Well, actually, one of the only places I've visited in England is Henley-on-Thames. So I'm— is that anywhere near you?

That's probably about equidistant. So between where I am. So I live probably about 15 miles away from the source of the Thames. So Henley-on-Thames is obviously on the Thames just before it gets to London. But yeah, about midway between where I am in London.

Yeah. And it was one— I went there as a much younger man and it was so beautiful. I'm kind of an Anglophile anyway. I was raised on Monty Python and you know, Doctor Who. So, but Henley was a lovely town and I would definitely live there for sure. So, Robin, we're not here to talk about the English countryside. Tell us who Robin is and what he does.

Yeah, so I'll keep it brief because believe it or not, Christian, I've been in business for 20 years, although some people say I don't look old enough for that. I started out life as a systems analyst straight out of school, which gave me a very good understanding of kind of the ins and outs of business and especially the numbers, which is one of the things I'm particularly— I love my numbers, anything to do with numbers. And I don't think there's any excuse for any business owner who says that numbers isn't their thing because you break it down like anything from profit and loss accounts to conversion rates to, you know, anything, basically pricing of your products when you market things, growing your audience, everything comes down to numbers in business. I'm very passionate about numbers. But unfortunately, the boss in that business, he was a fantastic product designer, but rubbish when it came to running a business. So I didn't— I was there for about 3 and a half years and thought, I know what, Christian, I can do a better job than he can. So I set up my first proper business in 2004. It was a marketing agency, probably doing sort of web design and branding. Got to again go into a lot of depth with people about their business strategy and things like that, albeit I didn't know that was going to be my superpower at the time. Sold it in 2016 for a modest sum, mostly for lifestyle changes. So I was between daughters. My second daughter was about to arrive, and agency life is not really congruent with having a stable sort of family life with lots of late nights and stressed clients and various other things like that. So when I sold it, it came at the right time, and I started informally mentoring other agency owners and freelancers because word spread on the networking circuit as I told my story about how I'd sold my agency. And essentially they bribed me with coffee, free coffee and cake to pick my brains about what I'd done and how did I get there and how did I sell it? And that eventually morphed into, as I got more and more sort of demand for speaking and consulting and people wanted sort of to pick my brains, I thought, well, maybe I should make a business out of this thing. And that became Fearless Business in 2017. Frankly, I haven't looked back. I've been really fortunate to have a very happy accident landing on something like coaching because I absolutely love it. And especially when I get to have meaningful, very insightful conversations with clients. They take away what they learn from our conversations and implement it. And then lo and behold, they end up making a bit more money. You know, there's nothing more satisfying, I think, in my line of work. So I can't see myself doing anything different now.

So that, that is an interesting story. So a systems analyst, uh, avowed lover of numbers, goes into marketing, um, is successful, sells the business, and then lands in coaching. Uh, probably not a trajectory you had, uh, mapped out. As a young man?

No. Well, I always knew I wanted to get into business. So, and you have to remember, so when I was a sort of teenager and I was making my choices about what, you know, my educational path and various things like that, the internet was very much in its infancy. So we're talking like the late 1990s. The internet had been around for sort of, you know, half a decade. And I started to build websites and tinker with online, but I couldn't in my head figure out how to what an online business was even back then or what I might do. And I ended up taking on the systems analysis job really just to kind of fill time over a summer holiday. And it ended up being, you know, 3 and a half years worth of my life working for that business, probably, probably better than any other education which I could have got. But as time went on and I started tinkering with sort of websites and learning more about, you know, YouTube started to sort of get bigger as well. Internet speed sped up, so video was more accessible. And I started to get into people like Gary Vee and Frank Kern and some other sort of internet marketers back then. And I just got hooked, just absolutely loved it. But it was weird, like when I was sort of 17, 18 thinking about my career, I was like, I'd love to do a business. But the only thing that could come to me at that time was an internet cafe, which would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up, just totally impractical. And as a teenager, I couldn't, I couldn't figure it out. I had no business mentors either at the time. So sort of, you know, guiding me and helping me sort of harness that energy and put it into something meaningful. But I think these things always happen for a reason. And so I was able to sort of, as side hustles went on through that first job, building websites for other people, I started building computers. I started getting far more into sort of internet marketing and again, was just hooked on it.

So would you consider yourself, would you identify as a creative?

Well, no, I guess I wouldn't really. There's a difference, isn't there, between a creative and a creator, I identify probably more so as a creator. So I like writing, like telling my stories through books. I like making videos. I love sort of guesting on podcasts and making my own podcast. So I'd say I'm more of a creator in that marketing agency. So we ran that for 12 years and I was very fortunate that my business partner at the time, he was probably more of the creative in our organization. So he would take care of things like designing the websites, building the coding them and things like that. And my role was very much more around sort of building the brand for the business and marketing and sales and the financial side of the business as well. But again, since sort of transitioning into coaching, you know, very much you have to be on the stage, you know, doing podcast interviews, speaking and things like that. So I've had to get a lot more, you know, be more of the creator since I think I've shifted into coaching. But probably back then, no, it was more like just practical, tactical business skills?

Well, you know, I think when I first got— the term that was used for me was artist, not creative, but I use them interchangeably. The first time I was called that, you know, I'm a CPA, you know, analytical brain. I'd never identified as that, as a creative or as an artist. But when it was described to me, Perry Marshall, author of 80/20 Marketing and Sales, I was at an in-person event with him and he called me an artist entrepreneur. I was kind of taken aback. I'm like, no, that doesn't describe me. But the way he defined it was, you know, there in entrepreneurship, there are artists and there are builders. And, you know, I've kind of come to see that as a continuum, you know, of people that are strictly opportunistic. They see some opportunity in the market or a problem that needs to be solved, and that's why they create a business. And so those are builders where artists are more passion-driven. They're driven by some purpose. And when he defined it that way, I'm like, yeah, no, okay, I can get behind that because my business is definitely passion-driven. If I define it that way, does that change your answer?

Yeah. I mean, 100%. I mean, the coaching business now very much came from a place of passion when I could start to see the transformations which were happening in my clients' sort of lives. So, you know, some of the early transformations which I saw were things like, I remember Rich and Amy, they were another web design business I worked with, and they saved up enough money to pay for a deposit on their first house together. They saved up enough money for their dream wedding. Rich was eventually able to go and shift from working from the spare room in his house. I think he was underneath his stairs, actually, in a closet before, in their old place.

Kind of like Harry Potter.

Say again?

Kind of like Harry Potter.

Yeah, a little bit like that. That's it. Yeah. I love that reference. And he got his first office and then Amy eventually was able to leave her job in public sector in the NHS here and eventually go and work with Rich. And I think I've been far more driven by seeing those sorts of results with clients. And I think part of that was because I spent the vast majority of my agency years just grinding it out and not really feeling like I was, you know, the inputs justified the rewards. Basically, it wasn't until we got to about sort of 9, 10 years into that business where things started to shift and I was like, there has to be a better way of working here. I'm a massive fan of Perry Marshall. I'm so glad you mentioned him. So I have his book Detox, Declutter and Dominate, which I think is a Summary of one of his other books, and I give, gift that to all of my clients when we start working together because it's, he's just so on point, especially around 80/20 in a business. But I suppose the first, first time when I started to transition into that more artist creative mode that you're sort of talking about, we used to do a design process, so a logo design process, and it was one of those really annoying things where we used to charge by the hour. So we charge like $50 an hour, say, for the design work. But because of all the back and forth, the design agency ping pong, it would take months, you know, weeks or months for us to deliver a logo to somebody whilst we're waiting for the client to come back to us. And then we'd send out the invoice at the end of the project and be like 10 billable hours or something like that because we're efficient when we got to do the work. But waiting for client stuff took ages, right? I was like, there has to be a better way. And, you know, I started to— I read some, some of Perry Marshall's work where he was talking about 80/20 in the business and also another of my favorite books by an author called John Warrillow. It's called Built to Sell. And in that he talks about this process of sort of essentially like stripping out, like finding the products which, you know, least amount of input but contribute the most amount of revenue. So typical sort of Perry Marshall 80/20 in the business.. So I took both of those concepts and I was like, has to be a better way. How can we fix this design agency ping pong experience? And I, I broke down the steps in the process and I identified 7 steps as we went through the logo, the creative sort of process with, with people's logos. And once I identified those steps, well, it cut the time down by about half, but it still wasn't perfect. It was still taking like 4 to 6 weeks and slowing down in terms of the billable time. So I do. I didn't realize I was being fearless at the time, but I was like, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this in a day? My business partner thought I'd lost it. He thought I was absolutely bonkers. He's like, how can you compress a 4-week process into a day? I was like, well, we know what the 7 steps are. We know what resources we need, a designer and a strategist, if we can get the client in so we can ask them questions and we get immediate feedback. It's like, why don't we just try it? It so happens that Whilst I was coming up with that concept, an existing client came into my office and said, look, Rob, we've got a new product launching next week. We need a new logo. We want you guys to do it. I was like, we don't have capacity. We can't do it in that time. He said, come on, there must be a way. And I've been ruminating over this idea. So I just said, well, there is this thing I've been thinking about where if I can get a designer in, you've got a day, if you've got a day free between now and next Tuesday or whatever day it was, I think we could probably figure something out and like get it knocked out in a day. So yeah, absolutely, let's do it. And then he asked that $1 million question, like how much? And I was like, previously when we've been doing sort of $50 an hour and 10 billable hours, so it had been like $500. I thought, you know, time, quality, cost triangle. I was like, well, he wants it quickly, he wants us to do a good job of it, so therefore it's got to be expensive. So I just said £1,500, like 3 times our previous sort of rate for that. We're a successful local agency, but look, You know, it's not much money, but for us it was like 3 times the going rate, more expensive than anybody else in the local area. And he immediately said yes. And he said, do you want me just to transfer it? And I was like, yeah, okay. And he transferred it.

Damn it, I left money on the table.

Yeah, no, exactly. And so I had this massive epiphany. I was like, wow, gosh, actually. So if people want it fast and we can do it well, they're willing to spend more money on it and you've just got to ask for what you want. And so this evolved. We delivered the project. It was a bit clunky the first time we did it with this guy, but he came in early, he left late, we got the job done and he was happy with it. And we did about another 10 or 15 and then I got my next big epiphany. So I'd started working with a mentor at this point and a guy who we called Nick, who was just fantastic with sales and he was part of a very big coaching company. And I get a phone call from him at sort of 4:00 on a Wednesday or Thursday evening, I think it was. And he said, Rob, you know that logo design process that you've been telling me about? He said, I've got a client for you. Okay, tell me about it. He's like, well, they're up in York. I know in the US, England is like a state for you. So traveling long distance is not unusual. But for me to travel from south of England to basically the north of England, it's like a 5-hour journey. And I was like, Nick, no, I'm not doing that for 1,500 quid. It's just not. 'Not worth my time, you know, to do it.' He's like, 'But it's tomorrow, we can get the gigs, it's all fine.' I was like, 'No.' He said, 'Well, give me 5 minutes.' He went away and then the phone rings 5 minutes later and he's like, 'Nick— Rob, you're going to want to hear me out on this,' he said. 'You're going to want to get in your car and you're going to want to drive up to York.' I was like, 'But why? I'm not doing it.' He said, 'Well, I've secured you £18,000 for this project,' he said. 'They want the whole department in on it. They really want you to do it. I've really bigged you up.' said they'll pay tonight. Can you do it? I was already in the car to York at this point, like driving up there. And sure enough, again, they paid the money. By the time I arrived at my hotel in York at sort of midnight, the money was in my account. You know, I gave Nick his share because he wanted sort of a 15% cut. But it blew my mind that we could possibly even get paid that, you know, that sum on a day rate to go and deliver this piece of work. And my final lesson came and this is like, this is all in the space of about 3 months. So I'm there in York delivering this workshop and we again, we did a great— we got 90% of the way there, enough that they were happy with it and they could work with it. I popped upstairs at lunchtime and I managed to speak to the CEO of this company and it's a big— we're talking at the time, I think they were like £60 million turnover and they wanted to grow to £300 million revenue a year. Big construction sort of recruitment company. I looked around his office and they had these like massive canvases, 5 of them, like 20-foot-wide canvases that have been printed out with logos on them. It's like, what are these things? He said, oh, we're rebranding the mothership as a company. You know, you're just working on the tech arm of it, so we're rebranding the mothership. And I was like, well, how much does it cost to get 5 canvases printed out? And he said, well, it cost us quarter of a million pounds. So we've gone from £500, like 10, you know, $50 an hour, £1,500 to then £18K, and then I go upstairs and somebody is doing essentially the same work as us, but with these ridiculous canvases for like, you know, 10 times that again. And it was just a brilliant lesson in like pricing and understanding like how to position and sell and articulate your value and things like that. So I think that's when like the, that creative, that artist that you mentioned, like really came alive in me because it showed me what was possible around this really basic concept of like graphic design.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Yeah. And, and, you know, fast forward to today, uh, designers are being replaced by, by AI. And, you know, it's this, uh, the conversation is around, oh my God, what are we going to do? You know, we're going to have to, you know, we're going to be out of a job or we're going to have to charge a pittance. But I talk about this in my book, uh, Profit First for Creatives, and I have a whole chapter on value pricing. And I think one of the things fundamental that most businesses fail at, and we failed at, not to mean the business failed, but like we didn't get this right until, you know, just recently, is really understanding the problem that you're solving for the customer. And instead of focusing on what you do, what your deliverables are, what, you know, like from an accounting firm standpoint, it's not that you're doing bookkeeping and taxes and payroll. That, those are things that you do. That has nothing to do with the problem that you're solving. And flipping that around to understanding what the problem is that you're solving not only allows you to tweak your offering that solves that problem more completely. But then it unlocks that pricing. Because if you don't really understand what value it is that you're delivering, you can't charge for it. The second thing that that story tells me is that you're a true entrepreneur. So you weren't locked into this mindset of, well, I I create logos, like, or I create websites, or you're looking for the opportunity. You're seeing what is the problem that needs to be solved and you're not being locked into what it is that you are delivering or doing.

Well, the example I always use is like, imagine you're in the market for a website, for example, and you've got 3 web designers in a beauty parade in front of you. Okay. And web designer number 1 comes along and they're like, right, Christian, I can build you a website. It's going to take me about 20 hours and it's $50 an hour. And you're kind of going, okay, seems reasonable. $1,000 to build a website. Yep, sounds good. So off they trot. And, you know, several months later they kind of come back and you're like, okay, well, show me the website then. It's taken you a bit long. You know, what they forgot to tell you was because they've only just started, that's why it took so long. And they weren't charging enough, $1,000 for a website. So they got loads of orders. So it's taken ages and you look at it, where's the shopping cart and the blog that you promised me? And you're like, and so now, like, the first bit of resentment starts to build up because they go, oh, Christian, I can add those on for you, but it's going to cost you an extra 10 hours. And you're like, well, that's not what we agreed. We agreed $1,000. So you're a bit resentful. Web designer number one decides, okay, well, look, I'm an ethical, nice human being, so I'll just build it for you. But now I'm a bit annoyed. So You know, we're probably not going to do some good work together in the future. So that's our first clue that hourly rates don't really work. And that's what most sort of creatives start out doing. Certainly what we did was charging by the hour because we thought, oh, well, they'll pay us to do these things, these features. But web designer number 2 comes along and they're far more experienced, but they also don't know what Christian and Robin know about pricing. So they're still charging $50 an hour. But because they've been doing it ages, because they're more experienced, they come back a week later, it's got the shopping cart and the blog on it. Looks really good. You can see that it's nicely SEO optimized, but actually billable time, it's only taken them 10 hours because they are good. They've been doing it while more experienced, right? So here's our second clue that hourly rates are just broken because, you know, why should the guy who is more experienced and does a better job, why does he get paid less than the person who's less experienced? And takes longer and does a poor job. Right. So you get a penalty on hourly rates for lack of experience and skills. But then we've got web designer number 3. Now she's a ninja. She's been doing this like since the internet was minus 1, and she can knock out a landing page for you and a website in 72 hours. And her promise to you, Christian, is that within 30 days of this website going live, it's going to be producing 15 solid qualified leads for your practice. You know, and if she can't do that, if it only produces 14, she'll refund you all of the money you've spent on it and pay you $1,000 for wasting your time, which you can go and hire one of the other two guys to do it. And you're thinking, wow, that sounds really good. But her price, though, is $10K to do that. So significantly more than the others. But she has that, that promise, that guarantee and that confidence that she's able to deliver those results for you because she understands, Christian, that every client you get, you know, qualified lead that you get and you convert maybe a third of those, but every client you convert is worth $20K, $50K or however much it is to you. Right. If she just has to get you a small handful of people through organically through the website, she's got you your money back, your ROI like tenfold over the course of the next 12 months.

Yes. Now that's a perfect example because it illustrates a couple of things. One, she understood the problem that she was solving. It wasn't a website. It was lead generation. Yeah. Right. And like a lot of people in the marketing space, they miss that. Like it's not about branding. It's not about messaging. It's not about, you know, any of the vanity metrics. It's about putting money in the, in your customer's account, right? And, and if you don't understand that dynamic, that problem that you're solving and what it's worth to them, in your example, $25,000, $50,000, then you really don't know what value you're bringing to the table. I had a couple of examples in my own life. Early on, I had a client, a prospect come, and they said, well, we've got all of this back work that we haven't done our taxes in years and we need someone to fix it. And I said, great. This was back when I still had an hourly component in my business. I said, it'd be $100 an hour to do this work. And the guy was incensed. He said, I don't even pay my lawyer $100 an hour. That's outrageous. And so I'm thinking on my feet and I'm like, okay. And I knew how much work generally was there. I really didn't know specifically, but I said, okay, how about if we charge you $1,500? He goes, okay, that's reasonable. And when it was all said and done, you know, we might have had 10 hours in it. We made more per hour than I quoted, right? But he was stuck on that hourly rate, right? The other example was, and I have this illustration in the book, is when we really implemented value pricing, it was on a transaction where a business, one of our clients was getting sold. And I asked my brother, at the time was my partner, and I said, let's try this value building thing. And we're going to do a 100% tip. So we're not going to set the price. The client's going to set the price at the end of the engagement. And he said, okay. And so We went through it and said, you know, bill us, tell us what you want us to bill you. And they came back and it was like $15,000. And I asked my brother, I said, okay, how many hours did you have in that? And he goes, I maybe, maybe 12. I said, if you were going to bill that at an hourly rate, that you just think is outrageous, what would that have been? And he said, well, I don't know, like $250. So I said, okay, so you would have billed him $4,000 for that? He goes, yeah. And you would have been happy, right? And he goes, yeah. But you would have left $11,000 on the table. And it's this idea that value can only be set by the purchaser. You can't set the value. They're the only ones that can set it.

Yeah, 100%. I completely agree with that. I think the challenge is, though, a lot of the things when we're growing up, when we're sort of getting into our formative years, especially as business owners, there are very typical things that we see. So, so first and foremost, the reason, the reason why a lot of people struggle to have the conversation around money and value is because for 99% of the population around the globe, you know, who weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouth or a trust fund, they will have been very used to hearing conversations from their parents talking about, oh no, we can't— you can't have those new sneakers, Christian, because we don't have the money. Or, you know, we can't go on holiday this year because we can't afford it. Money doesn't grow on trees. Money is the root of all evil. All of that sort of stuff. And that quote, by the way, out of the the Bible is massively misquoted as well. It's the love of money which is the root of all evil. Let's not go there. Um, so we've—

actually, I would love to have that conversation, but go ahead.

But we— but most people have been brought up with a version of that even from before they can speak, you know, when their earliest memories are being formed. So we have this— most of us have this blueprint of like scarcity emblazoned on us by our parents. Bless them, they love us and they're trying to protect us and they don't want us to grow up wanting and needing more because, you know, all of these grotesque things that you can spend your money on these days, like Range Rovers and yachts and stuff like that. Right. So they're trying to protect us, but ultimately it ends up being quite damaging. So what we do is we then go through our teenage years and into adult, like early adulthood. Everything is, you know, and the education system forces us into debt straight away. Again, that's a whole nother conversation for another episode, probably. So there's all these things that are working against us to build a really positive framework around money. And even, you know, I can't even believe in 2025 that schools aren't teaching like money lessons and money mindset and things like that. Literally, like, money goes around the world and it makes the world go around. And it's the thing which causes the most amount of arguments between people, not just personal relationships, but also in business. Business owners falling out because one is it's unfair and things aren't working out between two people, or if somebody doesn't deliver what they promise on and then the unfairness comes out of it. And that's purely based on people's childhood and their money story, which they've developed. So it's just not helpful when you're then a grown-up trying to run a business and you've still got that dragging along behind you. It's just not helpful. And so then when somebody asks us that question, that really difficult question, Christian, where they say, how much? We always retreat like Gollum.

You're embarrassed, you're ashamed.

Yeah, but that's purely because of all of that old story, that baggage that we've created around it. And I remember I finished a project, my first house. I spent 4 years renovating it and I met my now wife partway through that journey. And when we finished it together, acknowledged the work that I'd done. She said, Rob, you need to really celebrate this moment. You should buy yourself something to signify it. And I'd always been very much reserved about how I spend my money, but I had been— there was this watch that I liked. It wasn't like a Rolex or anything like a Patek Philippe. It was just a TAG Heuer. It was a lovely little watch that I've just had my eye on when I walked past my local watch shop. So I went into the shop and I kid you not, I stood outside the shop for 15 minutes. This is on like Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve. So it's snowing where I am. It's cold. Kids are in like with my wife in the bookshop next door and I'm looking at this watch. This wonderful woman comes out and she says, you've been stood outside in the snow for 15 minutes, why don't you come in? And I was like, because I know that if I come in, I'm probably going to buy it. I'm going to walk out with it. And she went, well, what's the problem with that? And I was like, do you know what? What is the problem with that? Why should— why is this— why have I built this up to be such a big thing? And again, this is before some of the experiences around like my coaching journey as a coach and even that example of the logo design workshop which we ran. So I come in and we're having this conversation. She lets me try on this watch and I'd already committed I was going to buy it anyway. But she said, she asked me that fateful question. She said, what would— it's Christmas Eve. What would it take for you to walk out the shop with this watch today? And I knew that it was only on for— I think it was ticketed price was like £1,300. Tags always go up on New Year's Day, so I knew it was going to jump to 1,500 on 1st of Jan. And so I just said to her, well, 1,100. And that was it. First time when somebody had asked me how much and I'd said my price. I know it's the wrong way around because she was the vendor, I was the buyer, right? But I just went 1,100 because that was the number that I'd had in my mind that was like a no-brainer that I would buy it. And very confident, just no hesitation. 1,100. So she went, I'll go and speak to the manager. I'll see what I can do. Of course, she comes back and she says yes. And I'm like, the little part of me which is like, ding, Pavlov's dog. I've just won the negotiation. So I felt really good about that. But then I walked out with this watch and I was looking at this and I still have it and I save it for special occasions when I wear it because it reminds me of that, what I put into that project and the way I look at that. When somebody asks you how much and you're having that conversation about price at the end of the sales conversation,. And around that value articulation, I think about in that moment how excited I was as a buyer, right? I was— I had bought this watch. It was a lot of money. I'd saved up a long time for it. I was excited. There was no buyer's remorse there, but I was excited about and anxious and nervous and all of those feelings were coming up around this whole buying experience. And I know the woman who sold me that watch, she wasn't like, oh no, no, retreating like Gollum. When we had that conversation, she was really excited with me. And I think this is what business owners forget is like when somebody is about to buy your product or service and they are about to spend a lot of money with you, this is their hard-earned money. And if it's a heck yes, that they're in and they're going to buy this thing. It's a really exciting moment for them to be enjoying, right? Yes. This purchase. So rather than retreating, we need to lean into that energy and like celebrate with them because we know genuinely if, if we've removed all the variables and we're amazing at our craft and we know we're going to get them great results, like we should be celebrating for this, this the start of this journey which they're about to embark on with this. And I think that that's like the nub of being able to articulate your value sits in that sort of energy, which a lot of people forget because typically what tends to happen is this is retreating back a bit in the conversation. But typically what tends to happen is somebody says, how much? And you'll be like, you know, how much for your website? And you'd be like, oh, $2,000. But, but we're the best in the area and we've got the most Google reviews and we'll make sure that it's HTML standards compliant and we'll you know, we'll make sure that it's found in Google and we'll get you 20 pages of content set up. And so we jump straight into this like justification mode, rationalization and excuses like, this is why you should buy with me. And we get really desperate, whereas it should be delivered just in a really calm and simple way. So when somebody says, how much? You say, well, the investment for this website is just $10K.

Yes. Because what you're, what, what you're doing in justifying is dragging it back into the rational, and the buying decision is made in the emotions. You know, they've already done their own rationalization. They, they want to buy because of the way it feels. And, and people— I'll argue with people on that point, uh, until the cows come home, because every buying decision is an emotional one. It is not a rational one. And if you try to interject rational into the conversation, you're talking yourself out of the sale.

Yeah, 100%. I do an exercise. It'd be interesting to see whether it would work with you. I mean, you know a lot about value pricing and things like that. I mean, we could have a bit of fun. If it backfires, we'll just edit it out. If it doesn't, if it works, go for it. So I'm going to do a little bit of just coaching with you just to demonstrate like the process, because there is a, there is a really simple way to demonstrate the difference between the intellectual way that we work out our pricing versus like what, what our subconscious, our heart feels that we're actually worth. So, uh, this, this can be made up, or this can be— maybe it would— it works better if it's a real product which you're thinking about potentially selling. So think of either a side hustle or in your actual business, a service that you were thinking 'God, I'd love to do that.' Have you got something in mind?

Well, I'll give you an example. We're actually going to have our first live event, nationwide, not a local event, here in Oklahoma City in October. And so we've been talking about the pricing of what we're going to charge. So we can use that as an example.

Cool. Okay, let's work around that and see if it works. But bearing in mind, you know a lot about pricing a lot more than the typical sort of person I speak with. So, well, maybe pretend a little bit that you don't and we'll just see where we end up.

I'm good at playing stupid.

What kind of conclusion have you come to so far in terms of like how you're going to price the event?

Well, you know, honestly, I was comparing it to other events that were similar, not exactly the same, but similar. And so, you know, we were thinking it's a 2-day in-person workshop. We were thinking about pricing it around like $500.

Okay, fab. Thank you for sharing that. So slight diversion, and then we'll come back to that. So it's really common for people to compare prices, and I always say like, imagine if, you know, you've got all of the— I'm gonna use web designers as an example because that's what I did for 12 years of my life. But imagine if you've got Derek, the web designer, looking at Steve and Steve's looking at Tracy's price, Tracy's looking at Tricia's price, and Tricia's looking back at Dave's prices. Well, which one of those 4 or 5 web designers are experts in pricing? Probably none of them. None of them. Right. Right. Do we— have we got any evidence to demonstrate that they're actually successful in making profit? Probably not. Right now. So there's a potential 5 of them could be losing money because they're all copying one another's pricing. And we're about to copy a flawed business model. So I always say to people, do look at your competitors, but don't assume they actually know what they're doing because they might be losing money. So you don't want to be that, you know, let's go and gather some intel. However, we want to figure out economically what numbers are going to stack up for our business because we don't know that they're all freelancers and have no overheads and so they can charge small amounts. But if you've got a practice where you've got a big office and a team, you know, big insurances, premiums and things like that. Your outgoings are more expensive, therefore your prices have to be higher. Just as a simple example. Anyway, so $500 a ticket. What outcome are people— what outcome are you promising people from the two days?

Well, they're going to solve some fundamental problems in getting their business unstuck. So it's going to be things like, uh, you're going to have a very clear idea of the— your value proposition. Yeah, like, why are you— why are people buy from you as opposed to someone else? Uh, we're going to show you how to, uh, market that, you know, find your target market and market to it. We're going to, uh, have a session on the entrepreneurial mindset. So like what's different? What are your self-limiting beliefs that are holding you back? And then we're going to have a session on systems. So, you know, having processes for your operations, your marketing, your finances, et cetera.

Okay, fab. So, wow, tons of content for a start. So that's already our first indication that maybe it's 500 a little on the low side. So we'll come back to that. Um, what, what's the typical size of business would you say that's going to be showing up on average?

Um, probably on average it's going to be a solopreneur doing, you know, $250,000 in revenue. That's, that's probably, I mean, that's probably 80% of the people that'll show up.

Great. Okay. So would it be fair to assume that if over the 2 days that Hopefully all of them are going to have an insight which makes a significant impact in their business. Just one insight.

Absolutely.

Okay. And what if that one insight, on average, the difference which it made in their businesses was that it increased their revenue by 10% over the next 12 months. But what they learned through that insight, they get to keep forever. So it could be 10 years or 20 years worth of amortized, like, extra income which they make. So already the outcome on a per-person basis is $25,000. Yes. So to create that insight, $500 already feels a little bit on the low side to me to create $25K worth of extra value, right? Yes. So there's a second clue that maybe our pricing we've tried to figure out intellectually isn't quite firing, you know, 100% right. Okay. Now imagine we fast forward into a few years into the future and this event which you're putting on, you've— it's become an annual thing. It's grown bigger and bigger every year because people hear about these amazing results which you're getting. And actually, you know, you only release 200 seats a year for this event, so it's limited capacity. Is there a future version now of this event where you're charging, I don't know, $10,000 a seat for people to come and join this mastermind? Yeah. Okay, yeah, good. So what, what I'm trying to establish here, just to kind of— so people listening and watching in, and for your benefit as well— when people perceive pricing, they see it as very binary. So it's a yes or a no, I'm in or I'm out, it's expensive or it's cheap. That's how most people's perception is. And one person's expensive or cheap is very different to another person's expensive or cheap. It's all relative. To your situation. But what we, what we actually have created for you is this notion of bandwidth. So we've now got a series of numbers between today selling the ticket for $500 and potentially in some point in the future that it could be worth $10,000 to 200 people. Okay, so we've got 9,500 numbers of bandwidth between where we're at and where we— the potential of where we could get to. Now, if your eyes had popped out of your head at $10K, I'd have probably just drawn that back a little bit and we would have settled on a slightly lower number. But you're kind of actually thinking about it now, Rob, I can see that. Okay, so what we're going to do now is, um, and would you agree now with the— bearing in mind the conversation we just have, do you think 500 maybe is a little bit on the low side? Is it a bit cheap?

Yes.

Okay, so we're going to try and figure out what, what a natural price point is for the tickets as you've got it at the moment. Okay, and, and there's a way that we can test this, and I'm actually going to make a bet with you as well, and we have witnesses because this is recorded and people are going to hear this. So be prepared for that. So I'm going to start at $500. Allow your body to sort of do the talking. If you have to make a noise as well, that's fine. $600, $750. This is what we're actually going to launch it at. $800, $900, $1,000, $1,200, $1,500.

$1,500 is where we actually landed.

Okay. It's really typical when I do this exercise, we always end up about 2 or 3x what we started off with. Okay. So where you felt that bit of tension, that's where your subconscious just said, actually, that's what I'm really worth. And there would have been a point, a certain point where you transgressed from just inside your comfort zone, round about that $1,200 mark to just outside it. $1,500. So where do you like to play? Do you like to be just inside or just outside your comfort zone?

Well, in this instance, I want to be outside.

Outside. Okay. Now, it might not be— it might be that you create, I don't know, a VIP package that's $1,500 this year that you can feel you can stack some additional value in there for people, you know, built— you probably already consider this as well anyway, but then build in sort of a VIP dinner or lunch with the speakers, could be some bonus material which they get. Maybe you give some kind of, you know, Profit First audit to a certain number of people who buy this package. I don't know, it could be lots of different ways to stack that value in there. So I'm not a fan of just tripling your prices and then not adding any extra value. What raising your value does or your price does is it gives you that bandwidth to be able to do more for your customers, essentially, because the more you can kind of build in the do for your customers, the better results they're going to get, the more referable you're going to be, the more money they're likely to spend on the back end, because that investment means that likelihood is that they're well invested and they get better results. So therefore they're going to stick around for longer. But my bet with you and ultimately what happened was so, so that just to kind of close the loop on this. So intellectually you came to $500, right? Correct. But your heart said, no, we're worth more than that. And actually it's going to be closer to $1,500. Okay. So my bet with you is, and the only challenge with this is there's a lot of people listening who want to get tickets to this event. You know, they're probably going to listen to this and go, well, I want one of the $500 tickets, Christian. Right. You know, don't listen to what Robin's got to say. But my bet is to you is, could you find 10 people who are absolutely sold on like you and your brand and you're like, you know, that they're pretty much dead certs to come along to the event? And pitch them a $1,500 ticket and see how many of them say yes. Yes. Okay. So you're pretty confident about that.

Okay.

Yeah. Now, I've done this exercise in large audiences. I do it all the time with my existing clients and things like that. So my bet to you is if you can pitch 10 people and you don't sell any, I'm going to buy a ticket for £1,500 and get on a plane and I'm going to come to your event. Okay. Okay, so you win either way, right? You're going to sell some. But I know having done this, I've never lost this bet. I've never had to pony up. I mean, I'd like to come anyway. It sounds like a really cool event, but I can guarantee probably because a good conversion rate on something like this is, you know, it's starting to shift into that higher ticket thing. So you're talking like 1 in 5 to 1 in 3, probably 1 in 3 is a bit more realistic actually. So I reckon if you pitch 10 people, it's $1,500. Package that you're going to get at least 2, 3, 4, maybe even 5 of them saying yes to it. Okay, I have one caveat to this bet if you are going to take it on, though, that if you get to— if you're 5-0, so you've pitched 5 times and you can prove that to me, record the conversations or whatever, and you're 5-0, just give me a chance to do a bit of sales training with you and a bit of coaching work with you privately, just so that I can start to swing the odds back in my favor again for the last 5 pitches. Sure.

Um, now you say 5-0, you mean 0-5, like you haven't sold any.

I'm in 5, so yeah, so 5 pitches and no closes. Yeah. Okay. Um, because again, that I, I like to— I mean, there's a whole— when you start to raise your prices, there is also that bit of imposter syndrome, bit of self-doubt. There's a bit of the confidence starts to creep in, especially if you start to get no, no, no, and you're on your fourth no. The bum tends to start tightening a little bit at that point. You're wondering whether you've made decision or not. But from my experience, when you've productized an offer and you're working on value-based pricing, you've started to increase the price based on outcomes. The way that you have to sell is very different and it's not pushy or persuasive or aggressive. It's just about how you approach the conversation, how you articulate the value and how you actually then start to introduce sort of promises and guarantees and various other things like that. Because And we're not looking for gimmicks or hacks here in order to convert people. We're just looking at ways to communicate confidence in your offer, essentially.

Yes, I love it. I absolutely love it. And yes, we'll keep that piece. Unfortunately, I feel like that we could talk for a very long time, Robin. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. How do people find you and Fearless Business Coaching?

Yeah. So the best bet is YouTube at the moment. So jump onto YouTube and search for Robin Waite. I put up 2 or 3 videos a month now, really talking about a lot of the stuff that we've discussed. I have also got a gift for your audience, your listeners as well. Thank you very much. So I have a book called Take Your Shot, which some of the principles that we've been discussing today are shared in the book. It's a story about Russ, who was one of my first coaching clients. So it's actually told as a parable. But I've got some signed copies ready to send out to wherever your listeners are in the world. So if you want to apply for one of those, just head on over to fearless.biz/TYS for Take Your Shot. We'll make sure we find some homes, happy homes for those books. Thank you very much. Hopefully we'll share a link to that somewhere as well around this.

Yes, we will have that in the show notes. Listeners, if you like what you heard, please rate the podcast. Share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you heard, uh, shoot us a message, let us know what you'd like to hear, and we'll get rid of Robin. Until then, ta-ta for now.