Robin Waite on booking himself as his own first speaker, learning to coach from the best, and why partnerships are networking on steroids.
In his first year as a coach, Robin Waite could not get booked to speak anywhere. So he set up his own networking event and booked himself as the first speaker. By the end of that year he had given somewhere between 40 and 50 talks.
In this episode of Small Business, Big Network, host Liz Drury (LinkedIn | Instagram) talks to business coach Robin Waite about the power of partnerships. They cover how a breakdown on a bike ended his agency, how he learned to coach without the usual certificates, the first year he describes as hitting it with a sledgehammer, and why he now treats partnerships as networking on steroids.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to grow through relationships rather than relentless posting.
Robin set up his marketing agency in 2004 as an enthusiastic twenty-something fresh out of university. With a business partner and a team of four, it became a successful local agency doing web design and branding, reaching around £250,000 in turnover in its best year. But agency life meant late nights, Friday launches that broke over the weekend, and clients pulling constantly on the team's time.
By the time he was married with one daughter and a second on the way, it no longer fitted. The breaking point came on a Sunday ride with friends: descending a hill at 52 and a half miles an hour, he had a mental breakdown. He told Liz candidly that men are not always good at talking about these things until they come to a head. Three weeks before his second daughter was due, he went home, told his wife he had made a decision about the business, and closed it the following Monday.
His team were understanding, and before long someone offered to buy the client list and the intellectual property in his workshops. With the pressure off for the first time in years, Robin spent time with his family until he wanted some grown-up conversation again and went back to networking. When people asked what he did, he said nothing, and their curiosity did the rest. People bribed him with coffee and cake to pick his brains, and he found the value was less in strategy than in telling them every mistake he had made so they could avoid them.
Liz asked whether he went down the formal qualification route. He did not. Rather than the traditional International Coaching Federation path, Robin looked for the coaches performing at the very highest level and learned from them directly.
One was Rich Litvin, a British coach based in Los Angeles whom Robin regards as one of the best and most expensive coaches in the world, and he completed several of Rich's trainings on holding a powerful coaching conversation. He also had a mentor through the business coaching firm Shirlaws, who trained him by apprenticeship: watch the mentor coach two sessions, co-lead two more, then run two of his own with feedback from the client. It is the same watch, assist, lead pattern that works for almost any skill.
Robin had an unfair advantage in knowing how marketing worked, and he noticed that the coaches he admired all wrote books, spoke at events and guested on podcasts. The difficulty was that he had spent 12 years as an introverted web designer, happiest behind a screen. Listening back to one of his first podcast appearances, on Google's partners podcast nearly a decade ago, he finds it cringeworthy: the knowledge was there, but the delivery was not.
He did it anyway, and at volume. Unable to get booked, he set up his own networking event and booked himself as the first speaker, which led to three more invitations, and it snowballed from there. That first year he gave somewhere between 40 and 50 talks, did more than 60 podcast interviews and ran around a dozen of his own networking events, including marketing events held under Concorde in the aircraft hangar at Bristol's aerospace museum.
The local, one-to-one start was a heavy lift. As his books and podcast appearances travelled further, the work moved online, and in 2019 Robin went fully online. Today he has clients in 30 countries and a group accelerator community of nearly 200 people, which he is keen to point out took ten years rather than happening overnight.
It is a little ironic, Robin admits, that after 12 years running a marketing agency he is adamant he is not a marketing coach. His work is about building the business engine first and only then switching on the afterburners with marketing.
That engine has three parts. First, productise the service so you sell outcomes and results rather than time. Second, fix the pricing and the money mindset behind it, because so many owners struggle to articulate their value and fall back on undercharging, then wonder why hard work is not reflected in the bank. Third, relearn how to sell, because a more expensive offer changes the relationship with the client. Robin teaches people to slow the sales process down and focus on fit, which produces better clients who receive a better service, because there is now time to deliver more value.
Robin's route into writing ran through Daniel Priestley's Key Person of Influence, which treats publishing as one of the essentials of a personal brand. He went to around 15 of Daniel's brand accelerator events in London and did the full programme, so a book was inevitable. That first book, Online Business Startup, sold around 25,000 copies and spent two and a half years swapping the number one spot in its Amazon category with Daniel's own book, a running joke between them.
His second, Take Your Shot, tells the story of his first official coaching client, a golf pro called Russ, as a short business parable built around five core principles. It is approaching a thousand Amazon reviews, and Robin gives away thousands of copies a year, partly because it is good marketing and partly because plenty of business owners need sound advice but cannot afford a coach. His latest, Fearless Pricing, came out in June after five years of going deep on pricing and money psychology. You can find all three on his books page. As for whether there will be more, Robin's formula for books is the same as for bikes: the right number is always one more than you have.
On stage, he has moved from local networking groups to niche conferences, including a run of pet industry events and a regular slot at the ATOMICON marketing conference. He has also moved away from reading from slides. In keeping with his principle of always being the coach, he introduces a little theory, invites a volunteer up and coaches them live. It feels risky every time, but it always works, because while he asks one person the questions, everyone in the room answers them in their own head. More on that side of his work is on his speaking page.
For all the digital tools, Robin believes people still crave human connection, and you do not get a true sense of someone until you have looked them in the eye and told them what a good job they are doing. His version of networking now is partnerships, which he calls networking on steroids.
It started with a mindset shift. Early on he walked into rooms full of people like Daniel Priestley and Simon Squibb and asked himself who he was to be there. After years of doing the work, he flipped the narrative: these people are lucky to have him in the room, because he has something to add. From there, the approach is simple. Find people whose audiences, messaging and values you already admire, bring your own audience into their world, and pour into their brand. Eventually reciprocation kicks in and they ask what they can do for you.
The clearest example is Ali Abdaal, whom Robin met through a mutual connection when Ali's YouTube channel had around 800,000 subscribers. Robin spent three years helping his business with no money ever changing hands, before Ali invited him onto his Deep Dive podcast. That one appearance generated 3,000 leads overnight and around £300,000 of revenue in the following 12 months. People call it luck, Robin says, but it was three years of goodwill first.
He finished with a warning about how rare these moments are. He has heard it said that you only get around seven big opportunities in a career, and they arrive in a flash. Imagine being too busy on the day Ali got in touch. The opportunities come from pouring value into the world, but you still have to be alert enough to spot them.
Days 1 to 30 - Fix the engine: Package your service around a clear outcome and price it for the value it delivers. Decide who you serve best, and list the five or ten people whose audiences overlap with yours and whose work you genuinely admire.
Days 31 to 60 - Get visible on purpose: If nobody is booking you to speak, host something yourself and put yourself on the bill. Pitch a handful of podcasts. Expect early appearances to feel awkward and do them anyway, because the reps are the point.
Days 61 to 90 - Pour into partners: Show up for the people on your list, share their work, bring your audience into their world and help without asking for anything. Keep a note of every conversation, and stay alert for the moment someone asks what they can do for you.
"I'm not qualified enough without a coaching certificate." Robin built his practice by learning from the best coaches he could find and through a watch, assist, lead apprenticeship. Credibility comes from results and from your own experience, mistakes included.
"Nobody will book me to speak." Then run your own event and book yourself as the first speaker. That is exactly how Robin's first year of 40 to 50 talks began.
"Partnerships take far too long to pay off." They can take years, as Robin's did. But one partnership produced 3,000 leads and around £300,000, which no amount of instant posting was ever going to match.
Robin's story is not one of overnight success. It is a breakdown on a bike, a business closed on a Monday, a year of saying yes to every stage and podcast, and a decade of steadily building the relationships that now open doors for him.
The lesson Liz draws out is that networking does not stop at handing over business cards. At its best, it becomes partnership: genuine, generous, patient, and focused on what you can add rather than what you can take. Combine that with an offer that is properly packaged and priced, and the right opportunities have somewhere to land.
If you want help building that kind of business, Robin's business coaching is the place to start.
Small Business, Big Network is hosted by Liz Drury, a professional voiceover artist and award-winning small business owner. Running since January 2021 and ranked in the top five marketing podcasts on Apple Podcasts, the show is for small business owners who want to get more out of their networking.
It mixes bite-sized episodes on networking basics with interviews with business owners who are using networking successfully to grow.
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