Robin Waite on why more clients won't fix an unprofitable business, the five questions that expose a pricing problem, and what a discount really signals.
A 10% discount does not mean selling 10% more to break even. It means selling 22% more. Most business owners have never run that number, which is exactly why discounting feels harmless.
In this episode of The Art of Value Whispering Podcast, host Melitta Campbell (LinkedIn | Instagram) sits down with business coach Robin Waite to take pricing apart properly. They cover why adding clients to an unprofitable business compounds the problem, the five questions that expose a broken price in minutes, how to earn the right to charge more, and what to do when somebody says you are too expensive.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to price their expertise for profit rather than for approval.
Robin spent 12 years running a marketing agency before closing it in 2016, with more than 150 clients, a team of four and a run of all-nighters behind him. What stayed with him is a first-principles question most owners skip: what is the goal in business? Not more clients, and not six figures for its own sake. It is to build a profitable and sustainable business.
That matters because of what people do when money feels tight. They turn to marketing, decide they need more clients, and pile into social media. But if the clients you have are not generating profit, adding more compounds the problem. You end up busier, with less capacity to improve the service or look after the people already paying you.
Melitta frames the alternative as less but better: fewer of the right clients, better work, and a model that supports you to keep doing it. Robin's version is the one running through everything he teaches, double the income with half the clients, and it only works if the pricing underneath is right.
The most common trap Robin sees is charging by the hour or the session. Plenty of people believe they have escaped it because they sell packs of five, ten or twelve sessions, but as Melitta points out, that is still a pack of hours. Worse, those packs usually come discounted: buy twelve, pay for ten. If twelve sessions get better results, discounting them is precisely backwards.
Robin is blunt about the shift required. People are not paying for your time or your materials. They are paying for the results and outcomes you deliver, and productising a service means running the offer through three tests.
First, what is the dream outcome the client is paying for, and can you articulate it clearly? Not "some sessions until things improve", but something specific: doubling revenue, or moving a confidence level from two out of ten to eight. Second, can it be delivered over a fixed period? When people answer "it depends", Robin treats it as an excuse: if clients not showing up is the risk, build in accountability, and if clients not doing the work is the risk, qualify them better. Third, can it be delivered for a fixed fee?
Early on Robin charged £1,500 for six months of one-to-one coaching, paid at £250 a month. The maths never added up, and when he looked closely clients were averaging 4.6 months out of six: some got their result and cancelled, some gave up, some had life get in the way, and with no contract he simply stopped collecting.
The fix was a contract setting out the term, 50% up front, and the balance over five instalments. Once most of the fee was paid, clients saw out the full six months, which is how long they needed to get the whole result anyway.
Robin's fastest diagnostic is five questions, and it usually takes about a minute to make someone uncomfortable.
What is your dream income over the next 12 months? A coach typically says £100,000. What are you thinking of charging? Perhaps £1,000. Divide the big number by the small one and you need 100 clients. That is the moment the eyes widen, because serving 100 clients well is a lot of work and enrolling them is a different problem entirely.
So you turn it around. How many clients would you genuinely like to work with, and could realistically enrol? Say 20. Divide £100,000 by 20 and the offer needs to be £5,000. Now you have useful information instead of a price chosen because it felt comfortable.
This is a litmus test rather than an instruction to reprice overnight. You might start at £3,000 while you gather testimonials and confidence, then increment until you reach the number the business actually needs. Getting fluent in these figures is what Robin means by knowing your numbers.
There is a confidence dimension too. A £100 session sold twelve times is £1,200, but people say "it's just £1,200" because the small number feels safer. Robin's remedy is repetition: pitch the packaged price twenty, thirty, forty times until the muscle memory is there, then increment.
Robin does not believe in doubling your prices and adding no extra value. What the increase buys is the bandwidth to create that value, because when you are undercharging and overloaded there is no room to ask where clients are getting stuck.
He calls the additions moments of delight, and his own have accumulated over a decade. A welcome pack that began as a couple of his own books and now includes a printed workbook and a stack of titles. A personal Loom video in response to every application, three to five minutes, with a couple of tips before the booking link. The last two clients who joined Fearless Business said they signed up because no other coach did that.
Crucially, the experience starts long before anyone pays, which is why Robin is not an advocate of putting prices on a service business website. Around 40% of people need to experience your brand before deciding, even though they present as price-first shoppers, so the job is to replace the number with an experience.
Robin ran this experiment across six businesses and lifted conversion rates by 40 to 50% on average. One went up by 147%: a medical aesthetics clinic that had been quoting prices over Messenger and never hearing back, while a cheaper injector in the same town undercut them by two-thirds.
The clue was that the clinic kept treating people who had suffered reactions from that cheaper provider, who was rushing patients through and cleaning the rooms herself between them. So they stopped quoting prices and offered a free skin consultation instead. Walk in and you find something closer to a five-star spa: matching uniforms, a nurse-led practice, professional cleaners twice a day. Price stopped being the deciding factor because people could see what they were buying.
Most people assume a discount stimulates demand. Robin argues it does the opposite: it signals oversupply, capacity you need to shift quickly. Supermarkets can run a two-for-one on baked beans because they have latent demand walking the aisles all day. A small service business has no such footfall, so the discount simply devalues the offer.
Raising the price sends the opposite signal, what Robin calls a red rope policy: we work with a select group of clients we know we can deliver remarkable outcomes for.
Then there is the arithmetic. Discount by 10% and you need to sell 22% more to stand still, because the money gets eaten by overheads, expenses and tax on the way down the profit and loss. Discount by 25 to 30% and you need to sell double, working twice as hard for the same money. Run it the other way and a 10% increase falls straight to the bottom line; on a 10% net margin, that one change doubles your profit.
Robin's estimate is that one time in ten, price is the genuine objection and the person simply cannot pay. That is real, and the answer is a payment plan rather than a lower price, because the price is the price.
The other nine times something else is happening, and the way to find it is curiosity. He asks where someone is on a scale of one to ten, and when they say seven, he asks why not three. People then list all the reasons they want to work with you, which is the moment to ask what is missing.
The technique underneath all of it is what Robin calls STFU. Say the price, then stop talking. If you are working hard to persuade and push, you are doing it wrong. The person on the other side usually just wants to be heard, and needs space to process what you have told them.
He tells the story of a mentor who pitched a dockyard business on 10% of the upside, a £9 million fee on a £90 million growth plan, then sat in silence for 22 minutes while the chief executive talked himself into it. Melitta's own version is gentler: a silence close to ten minutes after naming her price, a yes at the end of it, and a client who thanked her for the space to think.
Robin adds a harder truth: if you need the sale, you are doing it wrong. Desperation makes the conversation about your mortgage rather than the client's problem, and he would rather turn work away than take money from someone he cannot help.
The last piece is how you decide whether a new price works. Most people pitch three people, hear one no, and retreat. Robin wants statistical significance: test the price across 30 conversations, within 30 days, aiming for a 30% conversion rate. If you are converting at 80 or 90%, you are far too cheap. In practice, clients often come back after four or five pitches with two yeses and raise their prices themselves.
Days 1 to 30 - Diagnose: Run the five questions on your own business and see how many clients your current price demands. Rewrite your core offer against the three tests: a clear dream outcome, a fixed period, a fixed fee. Put a contract and a deposit structure in place if you do not have them.
Days 31 to 60 - Earn the number: Map your client journey from first enquiry to final session and find three places to insert a moment of delight. Remove anything that has aged out of your offer. Take your prices off your website and replace them with a consultation or an application that lets people experience the brand first.
Days 61 to 90 - Test it: Start the 30/30/30 clock. Practise saying the packaged price out loud until it stops feeling dangerous, then pitch it 30 times over 30 days. Track your conversion rate. If it clears 30% comfortably, increment again rather than settling.
"Charging premium prices doesn't feel ethical." Robin's view is the reverse. You can help people for free, but not for very long. A business that does not make a profit cannot keep serving anyone, so sustainability is the ethical position, not the cheap one.
"My coach told me to just double my prices." Robin does not agree, and neither does Melitta. Double the price without adding value and you invite disappointment. Earn the increase first by using the extra bandwidth to close the gaps your clients keep pointing at.
"One person told me I was too expensive." One data point is not a pricing strategy. Test the number across 30 conversations before you conclude anything, and remember that a 30% conversion rate means two-thirds of people saying no is exactly what success looks like.
Robin's closing point is about fear, specifically the fear of rejection underneath most undercharging. A 30% conversion rate means turning away more people than you take on, and that is the design rather than a failure. Nobody is rejecting you when they say no; they simply do not see the value in the offer.
The encouraging part is that the shift compounds. Better pricing buys back capacity, capacity lets you do better work, and better work justifies the price. Robin describes it as a long run of hard, hard, hard, followed by a moment you cannot predict where it is suddenly a little bit easier.
Nobody starts a business hoping to work 60 hours a week and stay poor. If you would rather build the other kind, Robin's approach to business coaching starts exactly where this conversation did.
The Art of Value Whispering Podcast is hosted by Melitta Campbell, creator of Value Whispering, an award-winning business strategist, TEDx speaker and three times bestselling author. Each week she brings conversations and practical ideas to help service-based experts uncover the value inside their expertise, communicate it clearly, and attract the right clients through smarter rather than louder marketing.
It is made for experienced experts who would rather become the obvious choice through trust than compete on volume.
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