Robin Waite reveals why hourly rates are flawed, how to find your real price point, and the Pricing Auction that helps coaches charge their worth.
Most business owners never find out what clients will actually pay. Not because the market will not stretch, but because they never ask.
In this episode of Homegrown CEO, host Matt Coleborne (LinkedIn | Instagram) sits down with business coach Robin Waite to unpack why service-based businesses undercharge and the exact frameworks for changing that. Together they cover the Three Web Designers framework, capacity-based pricing, the BANT sales framework, the psychology of money mindset, and the Pricing Auction that Robin has used with hundreds of business owners. Robin also shares how he 5x'd his agency's care plan pricing during the 2008 financial crisis and the bet he has never once lost.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to raise their prices confidently, escape the sales cycle of doom, and build a business around profit rather than volume.
Robin opens with an unambiguous position: charging by the hour is a flawed pricing model. Not because business owners intend harm, but because the structure creates misaligned incentives. The only lever available for earning more money under an hourly rate is selling more hours, and that dynamic works against the client's interests from the outset.
He illustrates this with the Three Web Designers framework. The first designer quotes $50 an hour, estimates 20 hours, then reappears three months later with a half-finished website and a request for ten more hours to cover features that were in the original brief. The client is frustrated; the designer is resentful. The model manufactured conflict before a single line of code was written.
The second designer has years of experience and completes the same brief in ten hours for $500. She delivers a better result in a fraction of the time, yet earns half of what the inexperienced first designer charged. The hourly model penalises speed, competence, and quality; it rewards dragging out the clock.
The third designer operates entirely differently. She quotes $10,000 for a focused landing page, guarantees 15 to 20 qualified leads within 30 days, and offers a full refund plus $1,000 for the client's wasted time if the result does not materialise. She is not selling time; she is selling an outcome. The price reflects the value of that outcome to the client's business, not the hours required to produce it. As Robin explains: "You can see that the value proposition is completely different when you shift from hourly rates into results and outcomes."
Most service businesses set prices reactively: look at what competitors charge, land somewhere in the middle, and hope clients find the number acceptable. Robin argues this is backwards. The goal is not to attract as many clients as possible at a competitive rate; it is to build a business that is genuinely profitable on every sale.
He calls the alternative the Sales Cycle of Doom: the relentless chase for the next client, mistaken for progress. When a business prices for volume, the owner is perpetually busy but rarely prosperous. A modest price increase creates space to deliver a better service, generate better results, and earn referrals rather than chase cold leads indefinitely.
Robin's capacity-based pricing framework reduces the calculation to five questions. Take a coach charging £1,000 per programme who wants to reach £100,000 a year: that requires 100 clients. For most coaches, that figure is unrealistic. The next question is straightforward: what is a genuinely manageable number of clients to serve well? If the answer is 20, the target price is £100,000 divided by 20, which is £5,000. The pricing problem has become a positioning problem, and that is far easier to solve. Robin's pricing strategy work with clients typically starts here, stress-testing these numbers against real capacity before touching anything else.
The reluctance to charge more is rarely a market problem. It is almost always a money mindset problem, and its roots reach back well before the business started. Robin describes two separate entities inside every small business: the person, and the business. The person carries money stories accumulated over decades, and those stories walk through the door every morning.
The narrative is familiar: parents arguing about money, a teenage job taken to prove independence, university debt that opened adult life in the red. Each chapter reinforces the same belief: money is scarce and earning it requires grinding. When that person opens the door to their business, the business inherits every page of that story.
Robin frames the consequence plainly: cash flow in a business is like oxygen, and a wobbly money mindset starves the business of it. What most owners describe as a cash flow problem is actually two separate problems: not making enough money, and not keeping enough of what they make. The solution is a clear separation between personal money stories and the business entity. Show up for the business with stability and confidence. Lock the door at the end of the day and leave the personal money worries where they belong.
When a prospect says "can you send me a proposal?", most service providers treat it as progress. Robin calls it what it usually is: a polite no. The prospect could not grasp the value from the conversation, and they are hoping a PDF will do the job the salesperson failed to do in person.
Before drafting anything, Robin recommends a direct question: what specifically would you like to see in a proposal? Is there anything from today's conversation, or anything not yet covered, that needs to be addressed in writing? This reframes the exchange from order-taking to consultancy and surfaces the real barriers before any document is created.
The BANT framework (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) structures the qualifying conversation. A prospect who says "that seems expensive" has raised a budget concern; but budget is only one of four elements. Robin's approach is to acknowledge it briefly, then open the discussion on the other three. Does the prospect have authority to commit today, or does a CFO need to be in the room? Is the pain large enough to justify the investment? Is this an urgent priority or an enquiry for something twelve months away? A prospect who cannot answer yes on all four is not ready for a proposal.
The first objection Robin hears when a business owner considers raising prices is consistent: "My existing clients will leave." His response is to separate the conversation about existing clients from new pricing for new clients, and to treat existing clients with the respect of a real conversation rather than a mass email announcement.
A broadcast message announcing a price increase will always surface the loudest complainers. The clients who already see the value will stay; they often know the current price is below market rate and are simply waiting for the conversation. As Robin puts it: "A lot of your existing clients already know that you're undercharging. They're just never going to tell you because they know that if they tell you that, you're going to put their prices up." A direct, personal conversation is a second sales cycle, not a confrontation.
During the 2008 financial crisis, with most competitors cutting prices to win business, Robin took the opposite position. Against his business partner's strong objections, he raised the agency's monthly care plan fee from £10 to £50: a 5x increase overnight. 40% of clients left. Revenue for that line item rose 2.5x. Support calls dropped by 80%. The clients who departed took every complaint and difficult conversation with them. Applying the same principle across all of the agency's packages led to the business doubling its total revenue that year.
Every pricing decision, Robin argues, is a negotiation between the head and the heart. The intellect is wired for risk avoidance and will always find a reason to go lower. The heart already knows when a price is too cheap; the challenge is that most business owners have been trained to listen only to the intellect.
The Pricing Auction is Robin's method for surfacing the signal the heart is already sending. He reads a sequence of rising numbers to the business owner and watches for the tell: a smile, a flinch, a body that physically shrinks back in the chair. The intellect thought £1,000 was already ambitious. The heart knows that £2,500 is right. Once that signal is identified, the question is simply whether the business owner prefers to play just inside or just outside their comfort zone, and the next ten pitches are priced accordingly.
Once the right price point is established, Robin makes a direct bet: pitch the next ten prospects at the agreed price. If not one says yes, Robin pays out the agreed amount himself. He has made this bet with hundreds of business owners and has never once paid out. Every single person has closed at least one client at the new price. The fear of asking is always greater than the market's reluctance to pay.
Days 1 to 30 - Audit and Reframe: Run the capacity-based pricing exercise: take your annual revenue target, divide by your realistic client capacity, and find the per-client price that makes the business genuinely profitable. Separate your personal money story from your business entity and use the Pricing Auction to identify the price your instincts accept but your intellect has been vetoing.
Days 31 to 60 - Test and Validate: Pitch the next ten prospects at the new price before changing anything for existing clients. Track each conversation through the BANT framework and identify which element, budget, authority, need, or timing, is the real barrier. If someone says yes and you feel relief rather than disappointment, the price is still too low.
Days 61 to 90 - Communicate and Systemise: Schedule personal conversations with existing clients before any price change takes effect. Frame each as a review, not an apology. Apply the new pricing across all packages, productise the offer so that value is visible before the number lands, and track revenue per client rather than client count as your primary measure of business health.
"I can't charge more because people won't pay that amount." Robin's response is a single question: have you tried? In almost every case the answer is no. The assumption that the market will not pay more has never been tested; it is a belief, not a fact, and it is worth treating it as one before letting it permanently cap the business.
"My existing clients will leave if I raise my prices." Some will. In Robin's experience, far fewer than expected; and those who leave tend to be the highest-maintenance clients at the lowest margins. The ones who stay are often already aware the current price is below what the work is genuinely worth.
"I'm not ready to charge premium prices yet." The website ninja in Robin's framework charged $10,000 not because of decades of experience, but because she was confident in the outcome she could deliver and willing to back it with a money-back guarantee. Readiness is about knowing the result you can produce and being willing to stand behind it.
The through-line of Robin's conversation with Matt Coleborne is straightforward: most business owners are not held back by the market. They are held back by untested assumptions about what the market will accept. The Three Web Designers framework, the Pricing Auction, and capacity-based pricing all point to the same conclusion: the right price is almost always higher than the one currently being charged, and the evidence for that is available the moment anyone tests it.
Raising prices is not about greed or risk. It is about building a business with the margin to deliver excellent work, the capacity to serve fewer clients with greater care, and the financial stability to grow rather than merely survive. Double the income with half the clients is not a catchphrase; it is a model with arithmetic behind it.
If you are ready to move from volume to value, Robin's business coaching programme works through exactly this: the right price, the right packaging, and the confidence to hold it in the room. The bet is still on the table, and he has never lost it.
Homegrown CEO is a podcast and community platform hosted by Matt Coleborne, an entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Growth Gurus. The show brings high achievers from entrepreneurship, sport, entertainment, and business together to share the real stories behind the journey from ambition to accomplishment. Each episode delivers actionable insight on leadership, pricing, strategy, and personal growth.
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