Robin Waite shares how raising prices, productising services and partnerships built a six-figure coaching business without social media.
Most business owners think winning work means being the cheapest option in the room. Robin Waite did the opposite during the 2008 crash; he raised his prices fivefold, lost 40% of his clients, and within a month was making two and a half times the money.
In this episode of Telling My Story, host Chiwetelu Henry sits down with business coach Robin Waite to trace how a website agency that once competed on price became the foundation for everything he now teaches about value-based pricing. They cover the decisions that turned the agency around, the one-day workshop that tripled his fees and got him paid upfront, the breakdown that made him walk away, and the partnership model that replaced 40 hours of weekly social media with a handful of carefully chosen relationships.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to charge what they are worth and grow without living on social media.
Robin's first real business education came from an unlikely place: a part-time job as a systems analyst at a medical device manufacturer. His task was to simplify the company's production and financial systems, and he was good at it. Good enough that six or seven people were made redundant over four years because the processes he built made their roles unnecessary. As a 20 year old he did not grasp the human cost at the time; later it reshaped how he thought about hiring and building teams of his own.
The same company taught him a harder commercial lesson. Revenue grew from just under £1 million to roughly £1.5 million in four years, yet the business lost more money the more it sold. The owner was brilliant at manufacturing and clueless about profit, selling products as cheaply as possible to win sales. Robin watched this and concluded he could at least do better; in 2004 he co-founded a website design and branding agency to prove it.
What he learned quickly was that running a profitable business is harder than it looks. The agency grew over 12 years to around £250,000 in revenue with a small team of four, but the early years exposed the same trap he had seen at the medical company: selling on price leaves nothing behind.
In the early days the agency charged an hourly rate and sold hosting and care plans cheaply, convinced that being less expensive than competitors was how you won work. Robin now calls this one of the biggest mistakes he made. The 2008 financial crisis brought it to a head; every local agency raced to the bottom on price as clients grew desperate, and Robin had a gut feeling they should do the precise opposite.
Against his business partner's strong objections, they made themselves the premium option. The basic care plans went from £10 a month to £50, a fivefold rise. They lost roughly 40% of their clients. Thirty days later, when Robin checked the profit and loss accounts, the agency was making two and a half times the money it had before.
The hidden bonus was time. Support calls fell by at least 80%, because the clients who left were the low value ones who wanted the moon on a stick and never saw the value being delivered. The clients who stayed were better served, and the agency had effectively trained its market to treat it as a high value service. It is the same principle Robin now teaches through his pricing strategy work with clients.
The clearest example was logo design. The old process was what Robin calls Design Agency Ping Pong: a brief gets haggled down, composites go back and forth for weeks, and the agency earns maybe £500 or £600 for a basic logo while everyone grows frustrated. Reading Built to Sell by John Warrillow gave him the idea to break that drawn out process into a single, high value day.
The concept was tested almost by accident. An existing client needed a logo for a launch in a matter of days; Robin offered the new one-day branding workshop and, when asked the price, blurted out £1,500. The client said yes immediately and offered to transfer the money that afternoon. Same outcome, triple the fee, paid upfront.
The model scaled further than he expected. When clients wanted more decision makers in the room, the price rose to reflect the extra effort. On one occasion a mentor lined up a workshop in York for £18,000, of which the mentor took 20%. By packaging the same skill into a defined process, Robin could charge anywhere from three to 10 times the going rate for work he had previously sold by the hour.
Agency life was relentless. By the end Robin had around 150 clients clamouring for attention and a small team that was not functioning as well as it could have. One morning, out cycling with his club, he had a breakdown. His first daughter was about a year old and his second was on the way, and he did not want them growing up with a father who was always working late and through weekends.
He decided that day to close the agency. As it happened, someone heard it was winding down and offered to buy the client base and the intellectual property behind the one-day workshops. The sale gave Robin a few months to step back, spend time with his young family, and work out what came next.
Coaching arrived by accident. Back in conversation with business owners, the question of what he did had no easy answer, which only made people more curious. They wanted to buy him a coffee and pick his brain about the agency he had built and sold. Those free conversations about pricing, sales and goal setting produced real results, and in early 2017 he retrained and committed to coaching properly.
By late 2022 Robin was spending 30 to 40 hours a week on social media, short form content and blogging, and the output simply did not justify the effort. So he stopped, and replaced it with a deliberate partnership model: find 10 people who already had large, aligned audiences and earn a place alongside them. His list included names like Ali Abdaal, Simon Squibb and Chris Do.
The method had four parts: be intentional about who you choose; show up at their events in person rather than hoping to be noticed online; add as much value as possible without charging for it; and get to know their teams, who are often overlooked and genuinely grateful for the attention. With Ali Abdaal, Robin offered every member of the team a free coaching session.
Ali was grateful enough to invite him onto his podcast, and that single appearance generated around 3,000 leads, somewhere between 50 and 60 clients, and about £300,000 of new business. For comparison, building an email list of 3,000 through social media had taken him four and a half years.
The trade off is patience. Partnerships take perhaps two to three hours a week, a tenth of the time social media demanded, but the big opportunities are less frequent. You might get one Ali Abdaal style podcast a year, so the discipline is being ready to capitalise when it lands.
Asked what advice he would give someone starting today, Robin offers two things. The first is to charge your worth from the very beginning. Undercharging to attract clients only creates a bottleneck of low margin work, and starting out is no reason to charge too little.
The second is simpler: just do it. Most owners have an idea for a product, a book or a project that would add real value, and Robin's view is to give it a fair attempt of three to six months. The downside is small. At worst you might look slightly foolish, and everyone is too busy to notice, or you lose a little money and end up roughly where you started. There is very little to fear.
Days 1 to 30 - Audit and stop the bleed: Review every service you sell by the hour and work out what it actually earns once the back and forth is included. Identify the low value clients absorbing your time, and stop quoting by the hour on anything where the client is really buying an outcome.
Days 31 to 60 - Productise and charge upfront: Take your most common project and package it into a defined, fixed-price offer with a clear outcome, as Robin did with the one-day workshop. Set the price on the value of the result, not the hours involved, and ask for payment upfront.
Days 61 to 90 - Raise prices and build one partnership: Increase prices on your remaining services and accept that some clients will leave; the ones who stay will value you more. Alongside this, choose one person with an aligned audience and start adding value to their world with no expectation of return.
"If I raise my prices I will lose clients." You probably will lose some, and that is the point. When Robin lost 40% of his clients he made two and a half times the revenue and cut support calls by 80%; the clients who leave on price are rarely the ones worth keeping.
"I cannot ask for payment upfront." Robin's clients transferred £1,500, and on one occasion £18,000, before the work was delivered. When the outcome is clearly valuable and the process is defined, paying upfront feels reasonable to the buyer.
"I am just starting out, so I should charge less." Charging too little creates a bottleneck that starves the business of profit. Starting out is a reason to be clear about your value, not to discount it.
"Partnerships take too long to pay off." They do require patience, but they cost a fraction of the time. Two to three hours a week building the right relationships beats 40 hours a week on content that does not convert.
Robin Waite's story is a steady argument against competing on price. Every turning point, from the £10 to £50 care plan rise to the one-day workshop and the partnership with Ali Abdaal, came from charging for value rather than time and being willing to lose the clients who never saw it.
The result is a six-figure coaching business that runs without social media and leaves room for the family time the agency once swallowed. The lesson for any service business is that fewer, better clients paying more is not a risk; it is the route to both profit and freedom.
If you want help applying these ideas to your own pricing and growth, explore Robin's business coaching and start with the offer you already have. Charge your worth, package it well, and give your best idea a fair shot.
Chiwetelu Henry hosts Telling My Story, a podcast that explores real journeys of business growth, career development, entrepreneurship and personal transformation. Through honest conversations, each episode draws out the lessons, setbacks and breakthroughs behind a guest's success, with the aim of helping listeners grow with purpose and confidence.
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