Robin Waite reveals the five-number business plan that exposes flawed pricing. Plus how one client landed a £120,000 contract by naming their number.
What if the price you're charging reveals more about your self-worth than your market research? In this episode of the Genius Talk Podcast, host Atul Raj sits down with business coach Robin Waite to explore why most service providers drastically undercharge - and how a simple five-number business plan can reveal exactly what you should be charging. They discuss the psychology of pricing, why copying competitors is dangerous, and how one client landed a £120,000 contract by simply naming their number. This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to escape the time-for-money trap.
Robin spent 12 years running a marketing agency focused on web design and branding before selling in 2016 when his family started growing. After time out with his two daughters, he returned to networking where the inevitable question arose: "What do you do?" His honest answer - "Nothing" - sparked curiosity. When people learned he'd sold an agency, they wanted to know how. Coffee conversations turned into informal mentoring, which turned into surprisingly good results. By 2017, Robin retrained as a coach and initially focused on traditional goal setting. But he quickly discovered that pricing strategy and profitability created far faster, more significant changes. For the past eight years, he's doubled down on pricing and money mindset.
Most service providers make the same mistake when asked about pricing: they immediately justify their price by listing features. Robin challenges this directly. Clients aren't buying what you do - they're buying the result or outcome from it.
Criterion 1: Define the dream outcome. What transformation do you deliver? In B2B, it typically comes down to making clients more money, saving them money, or saving them time.
Criterion 2: Deliver within a defined timeframe. This is where Robin's banned phrase appears - "it depends." At Fearless HQ, clients pay a fine for saying it because it's code for deeper problems: too many services, too many client types, no robust systems.
Criterion 3: Charge a fixed fee. Once you deliver a specific outcome for a specific client type within a specific timeframe, you can attach a fixed price. This positions you as selling transformation rather than time.
One of the biggest mistakes Robin sees is researching competitor prices and charging somewhere in the middle. Consider five web designers all looking at each other's pricing. None have a coach. None are pricing experts. You have no idea whether any are actually profitable. Copy their prices and you might be copying a flawed business model - one that's quietly losing money. Observe competitors, but never assume they know what they're doing. Their rates might be a path to bankruptcy dressed up as market research.
Robin uses a remarkably simple framework to reveal whether a business model is fundamentally broken.
Now the conversation shifts productively. Instead of "who would pay $5,000?", the question becomes "what outcome would justify $5,000?" Suddenly, clients don't need a shopping cart or blog - they need a lead generation machine delivering 15-20 qualified leads monthly.
Once supply makes sense, shift to demand. Robin recommends a 20-30% conversion rate as a benchmark. For 20 clients, that means 60-100 consultations yearly - roughly one or two weekly. That's finding two people per week who might need a $5,000 website. Manageable. These five numbers create a dashboard you can measure monthly to track whether you're hitting targets.
A communications and leadership coach was struggling to price a project beyond his standard £25,000-£100,000 packages. Robin asked what transformation the client was seeking. The coach admitted he hadn't asked - he'd assumed they wanted coaching sessions. It turned out they wanted to transform communications across their entire business over 90 days. Robin's advice: "Name your number. What would make a difference to your life?" The coach was moving from London to the Midlands and wanted to be mortgage-free. That number was £100,000. Robin told him to quote £150,000. The client negotiated slightly, and the final contract landed at £120,000 for 90 days - more than double his previous largest contract of £40-50,000. Sometimes pricing isn't about calculators. It's about naming a number that matches the transformation delivered.
Another client worked in digital fundraising, contracted by UNICEF Indonesia with a $10 million budget to generate $60 million. Impressive, but he wanted broader impact. Robin helped him reframe: what if any charity marketing person could learn his methodology in eight weeks? He built the programme, priced it at $4,500 per head. His first customer - Greenpeace South America - enrolled 10 people: $45,000 from one organisation. In eight months, he generated $650,000 teaching charities to replicate his results. The leverage of a group programme made it scalable.
When asked what pricing lesson he'd tell his younger self, Robin offered this: There's a difference between how we value ourselves intellectually and our genuine internal self-worth. Your head and heart argue over how much you're worth. Robin's advice: whatever your head thinks you should charge, double it. That's closer to what your heart believes you're worth.
"I can't charge five times more." You're not charging more for the same thing. You're shifting from selling activities to selling outcomes. A website generating 20 qualified leads monthly is worth dramatically more than one with a shopping cart and blog.
"My competitors charge less." You don't know if they're profitable, happy, or slowly going broke. Their prices are data points, not instructions.
"I don't know what outcome I deliver." Start with what your best clients actually achieved. The outcome already exists - you just haven't articulated it yet.
The gap between struggling and thriving service providers rarely comes down to skill. It comes down to positioning and pricing. Robin's approach - productising services around outcomes, using simple maths to pressure-test pricing, and naming numbers that match the transformation delivered - offers a clear path out of the time-for-money trap. The five-number business plan alone can reveal in minutes whether your model is sustainable. The question isn't whether clients will pay more. It's whether you'll stop letting your head talk your heart out of what you're actually worth.
Robin Waite is offering signed copies of his book Take Your Shot to listeners. Visit fearless.biz/tys to claim yours - postage is optional, and Robin will ship anywhere in the world. Connect with Robin on YouTube or LinkedIn, or learn more about Fearless Business at robinwaite.com.
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This Scorecard has been designed to show Coaches, Consultants and Freelancers their blind spots and provide instant, actionable steps on how to increase their prices.
