In the Mind of a Mentor: Conversations with Robin Waite the Fearless Business Coach

From time to time in the podcast, we like to go out of the world of hospitality and drag an expert in to share their knowledge because it's always good to dip out. Because when you dip out is when you learn some cool stuff and you can bring it back. Today is no different. So I've, I've known this chap for quite a while. We've been in Facebook groups together. He's a business coach. He is an ex website designer, had an agency, sold it, took a chill out and now is coaching. But he's a, he's a published author. He did a video last year with Ali Abdaal, who's a fantastic YouTuber that went just bananas. It had over 200,000 views. And that's why I rekindled and just sort of restarted chatting to him after that. I said, oh, you're an Ali's channel. I love Ali. Yada, yada, yada. And then he told me about the book and the speaking events and I was just like, hey, do you want to come on the podcast? Because this would be cool. And I really focused on three important questions about hospitality, about productivity, and everything else in, in, in between. He did also give me a link to a free book, but you have to watch the full duration of this to find out the link for that free book. So without further ado, can you please, please, please, please make sure that you drop in the comments and say, and show Robin some love wherever you're tuning in from this Mr. Robin Waite.

Yeah, so I've always had an interest in business, like right from the early years, but I won't bore everybody by going sort of way, all the way back. But the short version of it is I was a systems analyst for several years at a company and learned everything about that I liked about business, but also learned everything about how not to run a business and did that stupid thing that you do as a sort of naive 21 year old, thinking, well, I can do it better. So set up my first business in 2004, which was doing marketing primarily. So we did web design and branding and we heavily productized those towards the latter end of the 12 years of running that business and then in between children. So my wife was quite heavily pregnant with the second, our second daughter, Sophie. I decided that was a really great time to sell my business. So I just reached a point where, you know, and you've got sort of, we probably kind of get this, you know, 200 plus clients, which means you've got 200 bosses that you're that you're at the beck and call of. Had a small, slightly dysfunctional team of, you know, four people working for me. Probably dysfunctional because they were working for me. But it just became a bit too much as my response, like personal, you know, family responsibilities were starting to grow. So made the decision to. To sell the agent. Well, I didn't initially go to sell it. I. I initially. I just went to. I was going to close it down. And then I was very fortunate. I had somebody came in and heard about it and made me an offer and then kind of went on a bit of a hiatus. I had several people that heard that I'd sold a business and were curious. They were like, oh, you sold a business? Could you help us with that? And I was like, yeah, probably. So just did a bit of informal mentoring over coffee. And then it just reached a point where I was having so many conversations, I had to formalize it and sort of figure out how to weed out the tire kickers and the time wasters from the ones who are actually sort of serious business owners. So. Founded Fearless Business, the coaching program, eight years ago. And, yeah, haven't looked back.

And make sure you stick to the end, because what we're going to do is you're going to get a copy of a book that Robin put out. Can you just a little blurb, a little like a little synopsis of that book, if you don't mind.

Yeah, sure. So. So I. Very early on in. In my coaching days, I. I did a webinar that was. Well, really it was for web designers, so that's what I'd done previously. So we had about 50 people on it. And about five minutes after the end of this webinar, I get this call from this really excitable young man, Robin. Robin. That's absolutely brilliant. Like, you know, I'd love to know more about. And I was like, oh, cool. So tell me about your web design business. He's like, web design? I'm a golf pro. I thought, okay, right, interesting. How did you get onto the webinar then? And he. He said, oh, well, a good friend of mine knows you and recommended that. He said, you're great at business. I should jump onto this webinar. Anyway, Russ became my first official coaching client off the back of that webinar and that conversation. And so the story of take your shot, and it's told as a parable of story. It's only a short book as well, but we. We go on Russ's journey effectively through sort of the. The challenges and troubles he has in his business. And then he meets a business coach. The business coach gives him five really, you know, great pieces of advice which he rolls out into his business and then obviously the rest then is sort of history beyond that. Lovely.

So make sure you stick to the end. You're going to get a copy of that book, which is, which is a nice little tease to it. So let's get into the questions. I've got three questions that I have put down. One, the first one is a fearless based question or fear based question. I tried to do a little bit of pun on that one. So you've discussed how fear can be a significant obstacle for entrepreneurs. Can you share a story about someone you've coached who overcame their fear and achieve something great in their business and maybe try and tie it in with old Russ the golf coach?

Yeah, of course. So, I mean, well, one of, one of the biggest fears which, which Russ had. So Russ actually shared a very similar sort of background to me. I don't want to do too many spoiler alerts for the book actually, but it's, it's very relevant. Russ's biggest fear was around because he knew that he wasn't charging enough. He kind of had to have all of the, you know, as working like, you know, 12 clients a day with his golf lessons and six days a week and absolutely run down and exhausted. And he was just afraid to put his prices up because ultimately that's what it came down to. He had to increase his prices in order to be able to buy back the time to be able to then spend with his family and, and put into holidays and things like that. And the real version of this story is Russ was really resistant. He had a very deep sort of every, well, everybody does money mindset money story that had been given to him, unfortunately by his parents. And 99% of human beings experience this. So we grow up with those stories that our parents, their arguments really, rather than stories, oh, we can't go on holiday this year because we can't afford it. You can't have those new trainers robbing because we don't have the money or, you know, we can't, we can't help you out with your car. You've got to go out and get a job so you can buy the car yourself. Like, everything's very like scarcity mindset driven and Rush shared this and many of my clients actually share this. The. And what it comes down to is that when they ask for more money, their greatest fear is rejection with tribe animals. At the end of the day, we, we don't like people to not like us. We like to be liked. It's why, you know, for the parents amongst us, when you stood at the school gates and you're the one in the, you know, waiting to pick your kids up and you're still in the, waiting outside the school for your kids and you stood on your own, like, we don't like that. We want the other dads to come up and accept us into their pack and you know, have a bit of banter and a bit of fun and things like that. We want to, we want people to like us. And pricing unfortunately is very much attached to that. Well, one, we've got that story of scarcity which has been given to us, so that's the only blueprint we know. But secondly, when, when we give our prices to somebody and then they say no to us, it's like massive rejection. How dare they? Why don't they understand like how great I am and how much money, you know, what I'm, what I'm worth and what value I can bring to their business. But the reality is like, and I don't know how much you want to dig into this Mark, but like in business, you know, and I'm in business day in and day out. So it's the simplest example. So we have yourself, you know, Robin with his money and issues and mindset issues and fears and things like that going off over here. But a business is like, it's not an entity. It's not, it's not like a human, it's not a living thing. Right? So, but the business, what it needs is strong stable foundations in order to be profitable and sustainable and things like that. So if Robin comes into his business and he's got this, all this crazy going on and then we do that. Well, the business is naturally on rocky foundations all of a sudden. So where I, what I try and help say business owners to see, and actually this is true in life as well, that when somebody rejects you, they're not necessarily rejecting you directly. What, what they're rejecting is the idea or the concept or the thoughts that they have about the thing and they may not align and actually it's just, it's okay to be okay about that.

I can, I'm not in my head like literally as you're going along, because we've recently at Boostly, we've had to put our prices up and I know that so many people in the world of short term rentals, they've had to battle with, with pricing. And it is, it is deep rooted. You know, I'm the son of a Yorkshire farmer, very grew up in, you know, very much as we, you know, can't afford that. Whenever I speak to my mom about the business and I go, you know, this is what we're doing. She goes, how much are you charging? I say we charge us for a website. She goes, really? She goes, people. And people pay that. And I'm like, yeah. And it is, it is funny. I think his can be kind of deep ruid. So yeah, I was literally nodding, nodding around and nodding my head very much so part of that 99. That 99.

So I guess I think we live in a really tough climate as well, like property wise. And you think about, I mean you don't need to go into this because I'm sure your, your clients are sort of well versed in this but mortgage rates and things like that. But the goal isn't to go and collect as many clients as you can. I don't know what, at what point in business this got mixed up. I think it's mostly prevalent because of the Internet and global marketplace at your fingertips and all of those sorts of reasons. We think it's really easy to get clients, therefore we should collect loads of them. But, but the goal of business is to build that profitable, sustainable business. So there's a necessity there that if you're not charging enough and the business is losing money, it's simple. You've got to put your, you've either, well, you have three choices. You can put your prices up, you can reduce your costs which I think again in this current climate where prices are ever increasing, it's really hard to cut your costs these days. Or you can find creative ways to upsell clients onto to more things. Essentially. I, I'm not the biggest fan of cutting costs necessarily because I think it's quite short term thinking. It's like quite a reactionary thing to do and like during the pandemic obviously it made sense to do it then because nobody knew what was going to, you know, going to happen with the world. But pricing, pricing is interesting for me because you can make a decision about pricing today and be charging double the rates tomorrow and 30 days later. It's reflected in your profit and loss and there is nothing else. No other decisions that you can make in business that have that instantaneous impact on profitability.

Hey, we'll be right back with the show. But in the last couple of months I've heard that property managers and holiday let owners Were seeing a decline in revenue which is not good. Operators have started cutting spending in anticipation of what could be a downturn. And this is where I want to bring your attention to. Hostfully Host Fleet is one of the leading property management software programs out there with with all the bells and whistles you need to manage and automate, but at a crazy affordable price. For the average manager switching to host flee there be a saving of nearly $1,000 a month, which is insane. Hostly stands out as one of our go to recommended partners here at Boostly because they can list on not only Airbnb, Vrbo, booking.com, google, Marriott and plus the 16 other major channels which means your property is seen more but it is also an app, automation tools, the best inbox and that award winning 24. 7 customer support. So why pay more for expensive software? Join the Hostfully family. Elevate your property management game without those hefty price tags. Visit www.hostfully.comboostly to get an exclusive deal just for you. So Hostfully is H O S T F U L L Y and when you book a call, tell them that Boostly sent you. All right, let's get back on with the show. So I think this, we've got people that tune in from multiple different angles of the hospitality industry. We've got people that have, they own all their properties. So let's just say they've got five properties, they own them all and they short term let them all and they take all obviously the profit from that. We've got a large majority who then manage other people's properties. So they'll say they've got 20 properties but they've got 10 homeowners that have a mix up of all those that portfolio. And for those that are managers or even somebody that is even owned, you can definitely use that, that sort of mindset. So let's just say for example you're charging 10% commission. So for every booking that comes in, you take 10% of your management fee. You could go to maybe 12, 15% or you could be looking at going well I can't do that. But what I can do is I can add on more services. So you could charge them, you know, you could start up a cleaning business for example on the side and go right, well I will take my cut of the cleaning and I'll do that for this or laundry. So you've got to be able to think, don't just think, just from the guest perspective, don't just think of the person who's going to be staying in your properties because again, when it comes to it, if you've just got one property, and I say this a lot, if you've got an average day of seven days for wherever you are in the world and you've got one property, that's just 50 weeks that you can fill your property, those extra two weeks are for maintenance, Etc. But that's 50 people. The millions of people are looking for vacations, you just got to get 50. So it's, it's a very good like switch of the mind, which why I really wanted to get Robin in, get someone from outside of the industry. But I wanted to move on because we haven't got a lot of time. I want to talk about productivity. So productivity is one that I know a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners or just people they struggle with and I was intrigued by your mention that Joy. Now discipline is a critical key to productivity. How have you seen this play out in real life with clients or even like your own work habits? Have you got any stories around that?

Well, you know, let's talk about discipline first, right? If, if you're David Goggins and you're like you've, you know, ex Navy SEAL and all of that, like your whole mindset is predicated around discipline, like doing the hard stuff. Unfortunately, I think a majority of human beings are like the, they, they we shift towards comfort. So discipline and comfort don't tend to go together. Like discipline means getting out there, it being a painful or uncomfortable journey and yes, there is growth through that. And I, I think there are times when you've got to push yourself into that, you know, be disciplined and push yourself through that discomfort. And I, I remember like, you know, just a really simple example of this. I, I, I'm a keen cyclist and near us there's this categorized, it's the only local categorized climb in Gloucestershire called Froster Hill. And my brother had bought me this when I first started cycling. He bought it, built me this like steel framed bike that was too small for me and triple speed gear on it and trying get, trying to get up this hill was nigh on impossible. I stopped the first one up it, I stopped three times, you know, to catch my breath. So, and one of the time I'm going up this hill, I'm just thinking, am I doing this? Like this is just so hot. I might, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear, but I, why am I doing this? And this guy comes past me in the, you know, the light cricket, the all, you know, everything. All singing or dancing, carbon bike. And I shouted at him just out of frustration. Oh, God, you're making this look uneasy. And I didn't hear what he shouted back because he was so far gone at that point. Anyway, top of the hill. Because there's a great community in cycling. Top of the hill. He waits and he starts talking to me. And he's like that thing you said about, you know, um, I'm making it look easy. He said, it never gets any easier. You just move faster. And that has been such a great mantra for me through, through life and through business as well. It wasn't until I started going faster that I, because I was fitter and had practiced it more. So a bit of discipline at the start to get started. But then when I got better at it, I started to enjoy it more. And you can, I can cruise around the countryside now doing 20 plus miles an hour on my push bike, you know, on the flat, 52 miles and a 52 and a half miles an hour down the hills, on the hills, because I like, like going downhill fast. But cruise around the countryside and you can start to like, take notice of the scenery around you. And I think so many people are, so, they take on too, too much stuff. So imagine if you took on another three activities like cycling to do them all at the same time. You're constantly having to dip into the discipline reserves because you're so busy. It's so frenetic all the time. And business owners, entrepreneurs, I'd say, are probably the worst at this because it's like, oh, shiny, every five minutes trying to bring new stuff in. But every time you dip into new, it requires more discipline. You've got to learn how to do it and before you get to the fun part of it. And I think if you can just choose far fewer things to do, but do them really, really well, you can have a lot more fun. And, and especially I've discovered this in business. You know, I'm quite a capable guy, Mark. And I said this to my wife, like, you know, and my therapist as well. It feels like a curse sometimes because not only can I coach business owners, I can run successful businesses myself. It just so happens I have the brain that can fix cars and bikes. I can the studio I'm in. I managed to build this myself, so I'm pretty handy when it comes to diy. I know how to work a washing machine. I can cook good food. I, you know, I can do so many things really, really well that everybody leans on me. To do it. So I have to be quite conscious about the sorts of things which I say yes and no to. And where I start to have more fun on my daily life is predicated around what I'm saying no to, not what I'm saying yes to. Because I have more time to focus on the stuff that I enjoy. And therefore it comes more easily and.

More naturally in that one answer. Like there's a little nugget there. I love that. The bike analogy. And, and again, focusing on what you and enjoy and, you know, saying no before saying yes. It's. Yeah, there's, there's loads of little takeaways there for everybody that is, that is tuning in. So thank, thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, we, we say it a lot at the Boostie podcast. You know, if you, if you are doing a job or if you are doing business and you are just not enjoying it, you're doing everything, then it's not, it isn't a business. It's just an expensive hobby. You know, at the end of the day, you don't want it to be an expensive hobby. You've got to enjoy it. And, you know, there's so many sort of little caveats to take from that. Obviously, you got to be able to bring people in to help you. And I was so many good books. And we've had Mr. Mike McCallowicz on this podcast talking about clockwork, talking about doing all those things, so ties in nicely. But I wanted to finish with a hospitality ish related question because obviously this is a hospitality podcast. So as an entrepreneur in hospitality, embracing change and innovation is critical. What strategy would you recommend for our hospitality entrepreneurs, our hospitality hosts, looking to refresh or expand their business model in today's market?

Yeah, I mean, so I'm, I'm gonna be, like I mentioned all the things that I'm good at. Hospitality is not something I've invested, you know, huge amounts of time into my learning. But I think one of the things is just being prepared to sort of. Well, it's the cliched one, isn't it? Sort of fail fast, fail forward. So if there's something you're thinking about doing, there's no point in just being sat on that for like three months or six months, just go and give it a go. And typically there's like a, there's what they call like a minimum viable version of that idea that you can launch and you can launch it within like 48 hours and just try it and see whether it makes a difference. So, for example, if the. Where you were talking, Mark, about adding in extra value, you know, and maybe starting to look at the cleaning side of it, and this is where you people kind of have to push through the discomfort a little bit. My view is rather than go out and set up a cleaning business, for example, to work alongside your hospitality business, it might be that for the first two weeks, the next two stays, rather than pay a cleaning company, you go in and clean it yourself. And probably a lot. I know a lot of people may have started out doing that, for example, with Airbnbs and things like that, just to see whether the model works and whether there's a way to draw some profitability out of it. And part of that is about being able to. I see too many business owners who delegate responsibility rather than delegate responsibly. So what I mean by that is that in order to understand what it takes to bolt a cleaning business onto your existing property business, for example, you've got to understand the inner workings of how to clean houses. Otherwise it's just not going to work because you're not going to be able to tell other people how to do it. So there's a slightly clunky version, which is. Which is imperfect, that you just go out and give it a shot yourself first, learn about it, all of the ins and outs, and then you can go away and then build a business model around it. And the faster you do that, the better, because you might give it a go and go. Do you know what? No. The company we're using, they were doing it much better. I can understand why we were paying them that much in the first place. Actually. Let's focus on, you know, fixing a different part of. Part of our business.

Yeah, I like that. I feel like whenever a Boostie, for example, or End of Grainery, which is our family business that we exited a couple of years ago, it was always a case where when we decided to do something, we had to learn how to do it first. Because you're right. How else are you going to explain to somebody else, you know, otherwise you'll go through the process, you'll read all the books, you'll retraction and profit Clockwork and all those sort of cool books about hiring, not how. And then you actually come to it and you. And there's somebody there and you. And you've got them and they're like, right, tell me everything. And like, oh, I wish you could help me to do that. Unless you go out and hire an absolute A player, if you've got the budget to do so which a lot of people don't, then, you know, it's got to be very, very tricky to do. But luckily, I think in the world of hospitality there is a lot of people who are like you said, skilled at doing a lot of the things or their partner and then they make a real good team to be able to be able to do it.

Yeah.

But no, that was amazing. Thank you very much. All right, we teased the book earlier. Now can you please just tell us a little bit more about it and where can people go and grab a free copy from, please?

Yeah, of course. So. So it's only a short read as well because sometimes people are like, oh, not another book because there's tons out there. But I designed it to be a very, like an hour and a half, like two hour short flight read basically. And, and within it there's five very simple business models around sort of pricing a goal setting which again, remarkable how many business owners skip over the goal setting piece and like, that's, that's the bit. The bit which is like business by design, which I think, you know, it's probably something for another episode altogether, I'd imagine. So we go into goal setting, pricing, packaging up your offer and things like that and just understanding your numbers a bit better. But yeah, I, I've got some. A stack of copies ready to be signed and sent out and the place to get them is Fearless Biz forward slash Tys for take your shot.

Fantastic. And how we spelling Fearless.

Fearless as in fear. F E R F E A R L E double S dot biz.

Brilliant. Make sure you do dot bears.com.co.uk make sure it's dot bears forward slash T for Terry, Y for yogurt, S for sugar.

All right.

And then the main domain, robin waite.com and obviously LinkedIn as well. Which is your best social media to. To sort of get in touch with you and like sort of follow your journey if there is one.

Yeah, LinkedIn's probably the best bet. If you've got any questions off the back of this that you want to fire across to me, by all means. And I always accept the connection requests and answer questions. I know there's lots of people out there who are like Johnny Big Bollocks, who don't bother replying to anything. But I'm like, no, I like to reply to people when they've got. Got an interesting question and I've got a newsletter on LinkedIn as well which is worth subscribing to where all of the concepts that we've talked about today, you know, regularly. I post a newsletter up there as well.

Fantastic. And what is coming up in 2024 for you? We're four months in. We're in Q2 right now. So what's coming up for the rest of your 2024?

Yeah, I've got. Got a couple of really interesting speaking engagements, so I'm speaking at Tube Fest in, In May and then another event I'm sponsoring called Atomicon in June, which is really cool. So. And really I'm just focusing on partnerships this year. So last year I had a. A great interview with a guy called Ali Abdul, which just went absolutely crazy on, you know, it's had something like 200,000 views and it was just really fun. So I'm taking some of my learnings from 2023 and bringing them into this year and kind of doing less marketing, but more focus on partnerships, really. Oh, man.

So Atomicon, that's been Newcastle, is it?

Newcastle, yeah, Newcastle, yeah. Big event. They've got over a thousand people booked already, so it's going to be mega this year, like. Like double what it was already last year. So. Crazy.

Yeah, I know the chaps well. And Tube Fest, where's that happening?

Tube Fest is in Birmingham, so near the airport and the nec, so. And it's that the nice thing is it's, it's for. It's for YouTubers and business owners. So there's two tracks to the. To the event. Obviously, I'm speaking on the. With my 3,000youtuber subscribers. I didn't qualify for the YouTube track, so I'm on the business track, which is fine. I'm fine with that. And I'll be talking about partnerships, actually, funny enough, on, on. On that.

Nice. And so the cool thing about these events is that they're not hospitality first focus. This is very much a generic. I always say you got to. You got to dip outside the industry and bring in teachings and trainings and tactics and then bring it back in. Because there's literally loads of ways to do this. And hospitality, yes, we are in our own little niche, but it works so well when you can go out, learn from other experts and then bring it back, bring it back in. So thank you very much for that. And of course, all of these links, all of these places will be in the show, notes and descriptions and wherever you are tuning in from, whether you're listening or watching. So, Robin, thank you very much. Any final words of wisdom before we let you go?

No, I think sometimes people just they hold themselves back for whatever reason. And I think, like, there's only two things that can ever go wrong in business. You might lose a little bit of money, which can. Can feel like a disaster at the time, but you can always mitigate that or you can look a bit stupid. And the reality is neither of that bad. So just take your shot, everybody.

That was epic. I hope you all really, really, really enjoyed that one as much as I did. There's some really cool little nuggets, some little takeaways, and make sure you do go and check out that free copy of the book and go and see if Mr. Robin White is speaking at an event near you, because like I said, going outside of the industry sometimes can be really effective for the industry. So without further ado, we'll be back very soon with another edition of the Boostly podcast. Make sure that wherever you are tuning in from you, like, you subscribe, you share, you download and tell loads of people about it. We are on a mission this year to get past 1.5 million downloads, see if we can beat 2023. And the only way we'll do that is through your help. So thank you very much. We're back again very soon.