Robin Waite on the price rise that cost 40% of his clients and raised revenue, why an 80% close rate means you're too cheap, and building partnerships.
Robin Waite once raised his agency's care plan prices fivefold and lost 40% of his clients in the process. Thirty days later the revenue on that line had gone up two and a half times, and support calls had dropped by 80%.
In this episode of The Brand Mixology Podcast, host Claire Marshall (LinkedIn) sits down in the studio with business coach Robin Waite to take apart the idea that growth means more clients. They cover the price rise that halved the workload, how a logo service went from £50 an hour to an £18,000 workshop, why an 80% close rate is a warning sign, the five steps Robin uses to build partnerships with people who already have the audience, and why neediness goes straight on ice.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to make more money without taking on more clients.
Robin spent 12 years running a web design and branding agency in the Cotswolds. It ended on a Sunday morning ride, descending one of his local climbs at 52 and a half miles an hour, when the adrenaline gave way and he broke down halfway down the hill. He went home to his heavily pregnant wife, told her he had made a decision about the agency, and closed it the following Monday.
Someone stepped in and bought it, not for a fortune but enough to give him breathing space with his young family. With hindsight, Robin says he would have handed the business to his standout team member, taken a hit on the margins and stepped back. Instead he fell into coaching by accident, when people at networking events heard he had sold a business and bribed him with coffee and cake to pick his brains.
The common thread, he told Claire, is that the agency made every pricing mistake in the book. His latest book, Fearless Pricing, which came out in June, is essentially those mistakes and the decade of coaching since, written down so other people do not have to repeat them.
Three years into the agency, the 2007 financial crisis hit. Competitors started a race to the bottom on hosting and care plans, and Robin watched several of them go out of business almost overnight because the numbers no longer worked. At the time the agency charged £10 a month for its entry-level plan.
Robin wanted to multiply that by five. His business partner thought he meant 5 or 10%, and the two of them had more than one blazing row about it. So Robin quietly tested it with new clients first: buy a website, and you sign up to a care plan starting from £50 a month. There was a little more resistance, but the yeses kept coming.
Then came the harder part, moving the 150 or so existing clients across. Rather than announcing it by email, Robin invited each client in for an annual review and told them in person. In the end, 40% of them left. Thirty days later, the care plan line on the profit and loss had risen two and a half times, and the clients who remained generated 80% fewer support calls. The ones who left because the agency seemed too expensive were the same ones who had been taking up most of the time.
Logo design at the agency ran like most traditional design work, at around £50 an hour, and it produced what Robin calls design agency ping-pong. Quotes went back and forth, then composites, then requests to combine the emblem from one, the colours from another and the font from a third, for months. Most of that back and forth was never billed.
The fix came from an audiobook: Built to Sell by John Warrilow, about an agency owner whose business is worthless because it does too many things for too many people. Robin mapped the agency's design work into seven steps, which halved delivery time but left the billing untouched. So he asked what it would take to deliver all seven in a single day, with a designer and Robin in the room and the client giving feedback as it happened.
The first test was a returning client who needed a logo for a product launching the following week. Robin blurted out £1,500, three times the usual rate, and the client paid in full before leaving the office. Soon after, his mentor Nick rang about a client in York who wanted the same workshop. Robin initially refused to drive that far for £1,500, until Nick rang back to say the client was happy to pay £18,000. The process was the same; the outcome and the speed were what the client was buying.
Robin's framework is simple, and he says he has yet to meet a service business it does not apply to. First, define the dream outcome the client is buying and learn to articulate it. Second, decide whether you can deliver it over a fixed period of time. Third, charge a fixed fee for it.
For something as intangible as confidence coaching, he measures it directly: ask the client to rate their confidence out of ten at the start and again at the end, and aim to move a two to an eight. Then look past the number to what the confidence is for, whether that is a promotion or being able to speak on a podcast without falling apart. When coaches tell him every client is different and it depends, he is unmoved. At Fearless HQ "it depends" is a swear word, because it is code for doing too many things for too many types of people with no repeatable process.
Claire asked whether someone newly qualified should charge by the hour until they are confident. Robin's answer was an emphatic no: sell packages from the outset. Where results cannot ethically be guaranteed, as in therapy, he suggests guaranteeing perceived value instead, refunding anyone who genuinely feels they did not get value for money. In 22 years Robin says he has given three refunds. Building offers like this is the core of Robin's pricing strategy work.
Undercharging traps people in what Robin calls the sales cycle of doom: sell, deliver, sell, deliver, frantically, until illness or a holiday forces a stop. Hire help to cope and delivery time turns into management time on even thinner margins. The way out is to charge more, which buys the time to do better work, which produces better results, repeat business and referrals, and lowers the number of clients you need. Five clients paying £20,000 each, he argues, will feel far more impact than 400 rushed ones.
A healthy conversion rate for most service businesses is around one in three. If you are closing 80 or 90% of the people you speak to, the ego says you are good at sales, but the honest reading is that you are too cheap. Robin points to analysis from Alex Hormozi suggesting a business converting at that rate could raise prices around four and a half times, let its close rate fall to about 30%, and still make as much or more.
To find the right number, he uses a one-page business plan. Want £100,000 at £250 per client? That needs 400 clients. Can you realistically serve 40? Then the price needs to be £2,500. When clients say nobody would pay that, Robin asks how many times they have actually pitched it, and sets them a bet: pitch it to ten people. Usually one to three say yes, and the message that follows is always some version of "you'll never guess what". He also rejects the rule that prices only rise once a year. With costs having risen so sharply in recent years, a safe 5% increase is effectively a discount.
Robin is wary of using price as a filter, posting it on a website or replying to an Instagram message with a number. Big buying decisions need what Daniel Priestley calls 7-Eleven: seven hours of engagement across eleven touch points in four different places. A price in a direct message gives the buyer none of that.
Partnerships are how Robin earns those hours at scale. His appearance on Ali Abdaal's podcast produced 3,000 leads, when building a list of 3,000 the old way had taken him four and a half years. It also briefly broke his business, because he had merged his booking link and application form and was suddenly flooded with poor-fit calls; putting the application first fixed it.
His five steps are deliberately unglamorous. Be intentional and list ten people whose audiences align with yours. Be in the same room, ideally on the front row. Add value abundantly with no expectation of return, as he did by coaching Ali Abdaal's team for free. Find your inside person, because the busiest people are best reached through their team. Then offer the silver platter when the moment is right. He has been in Daniel Priestley's world for 12 years and is only now doing work with him. Robin's business development coaching builds this approach into client plans.
For the show's closing ritual, Robin put neediness on ice first. He would rather be poor than take on a client just for the money, because the clients you take out of need are the ones where the red flags were everywhere. The same applies in delivery: early in his coaching career he came home from full days exhausted until another coach pointed out that he was making the sessions about himself, worrying what clients thought of him and holding back hard questions.
Into the cocktail shaker went fearless, which Robin defines carefully. It is not recklessness. It is fearing the little things in business ever so slightly less, whether that is doubling your prices or standing up to do your pitch. The worst that happens is you say something daft or lose a little money, and both are recoverable.
Days 1 to 30 - Package the offer: Write down the dream outcome you deliver and how long it typically takes. Map your process into clear steps and look for the ones you could compress. Run the one-page business plan to see how many clients your current price actually demands.
Days 31 to 60 - Reprice and test: Set a fixed fee for the outcome and decide what guarantee you can honestly offer. Pitch the new number to ten people and track the close rate. Book existing clients in for reviews and explain price changes in person rather than by email.
Days 61 to 90 - Build partnerships: List ten people whose audiences align with yours. Show up where they are and add value with nothing asked in return. Make sure your enquiry process puts an application before the calendar link, so success does not swamp you.
"If I raise my prices, I'll lose clients." You may, and Robin lost 40%. His revenue still rose two and a half times and the workload fell, because the clients who left were the ones who valued the work least.
"I'm newly qualified, so I should charge by the hour first." Robin disagrees. Sell packages from day one, and if you are worried about results, guarantee perceived value rather than discounting your time.
"I've already put my prices up this year." That is a rule you made up. You can raise prices whenever the evidence supports it, and given recent inflation, a small rise is often a cut in real terms.
This conversation keeps returning to one counterintuitive idea: the route to a better business usually runs through fewer clients, not more. Robin learned it the hard way, through a price rise that cost him 40% of his clients and a logo service that turned into an £18,000 workshop once it was packaged around an outcome.
What makes it work is not bravado but structure: a clearly defined outcome, a fixed fee, a healthy close rate, and partnerships that bring the right people to you. Get those in place and the neediness that drives undercharging has nowhere left to live.
If you want help building that structure into your own offer, Robin's business coaching starts exactly there.
The Brand Mixology Podcast is hosted by Claire Marshall, founder of Brand Mixology, which helps founders and experts build personal brands, positioning and marketing they are proud of. Each episode is a frank conversation with a founder or expert about the ingredients that go into building a business and a brand.
Every guest ends the same way, choosing one word to put into the cocktail shaker for success and one to put on ice. It is made for founders who are ready to be seen, found and known.
Watch this episode on YouTube, or read the episode notes on Brand Mixology.
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