Robin Waite on the sales cycle of doom, why hourly rates punish expertise, and the three-step shift to pricing for outcomes instead of time.
Two web designers both charge £50 an hour. The better one earns less. That is not a quirk of the market, it is exactly what hourly billing is built to do.
In this episode of The Next 100 Days Podcast, hosts Kevin Appleby (LinkedIn) and Graham Arrowsmith sit down with business coach Robin Waite to pull pricing apart. They cover the sales cycle of doom, why expertise is penalised by the hour, a three-step route to outcome-based pricing, the glass ceiling Robin hit in his own business, and why one podcast appearance outperformed four and a half years of social media.
This article breaks down their conversation into practical steps for coaches, consultants, and freelancers who want to stop undercharging and start pricing for the result they deliver.
Robin ran a small marketing agency in the Cotswolds for 12 years, growing it to around £250,000 in revenue before selling it. He fell into coaching more or less by accident afterwards, and noticed that whatever a client brought to a conversation, it kept circling back to the same thing: what they charge.
He calls the pattern the sales cycle of doom. You sell, you deliver, you sell again, you deliver again, and you arrive at the end of the month with nothing left. The business is busy and the owner is working hard, yet the bank balance never reflects it. Nearly a decade on, Robin has spent most of his time since working out what actually stops people raising their prices.
The diagnosis is uncomfortable. The problem is rarely the volume of work or the quality of it. The problem is that the pricing model was never designed to reward either.
The clearest illustration Robin gave Kevin and Graham was his three web designers, and it is worth following all the way through.
Stuart charges £50 an hour. He takes six months over the project and the finished site is poor. Because he is inexperienced and slow, he earns a great deal from a job he did badly.
Rachel also charges £50 an hour. She is genuinely expert, and she delivers far better work in ten hours. For doing a superior job she is paid a fraction of what Stuart received. Her skill has been converted directly into lost income.
Gavin charges £10,000 as a fixed fee tied to an outcome: 10 to 15 warm leads within 30 days, or a full refund plus £1,000 in compensation. He is not selling hours or pages. He is selling a result, and he is carrying the risk of not delivering it.
The lesson Robin draws is that once value is articulated as an outcome, price becomes a secondary concern. It is also why he describes charging by the hour as fundamentally unethical: it guarantees that the person who gets better at their craft is the person who takes home less.
Robin's route out of hourly billing is deliberately plain. First, define the dream outcome or result for the client, clearly enough that you could say it out loud without hedging. Second, work out how long it takes you, on average, to deliver that result. Third, charge a fixed fee for the outcome rather than for your time.
The average matters. Some clients will take longer and some will be quicker, and across a sensible number of projects it evens out. What you lose on one you make back on the next, and in exchange you get a price you can state with confidence and a client who knows exactly what they are buying.
Robin flags one phrase as the tell that the model is not ready. If your answer to a pricing question is "it depends", the business is carrying too many variables. It usually means you are serving too many different types of client and producing inconsistent results, and no pricing framework will fix that until the offer is narrowed. Working through exactly that is the bulk of what Robin's pricing work involves.
Robin was candid about hitting this himself. Moving his own fee from £1,800 to £3,200 caused his conversion rate to flatline. Dropping back to £2,800 unlocked it again, and the difference was not the market. It was that he had not yet become comfortable saying the bigger number.
Kevin made the related point that crossing a threshold feels far larger than the arithmetic suggests. Going from £2,000 to £3,000 lands psychologically as a much bigger jump than the £1,000 between them, for buyer and seller alike.
What broke the ceiling for Robin was changing the company he kept. He started associating with coaches charging considerably more than he was, and then invested in one himself. Sitting on the buying side of a high price, and feeling that tension personally, is what made it possible to ask for one. His own coach offered an outcome guarantee rather than a timeframe, promising to keep working with him until he hit six figures, which is confidence expressed as a system rather than a sales line.
Robin framed the marketing conversation around three shifts since 2004. There are now roughly 12 times as many businesses registered in the UK as there were two decades ago. Broadband turned a local market into a global one, so you compete with everyone. And social media has added a great deal of complexity without a matching return.
That last point is where he pushed back hardest. Plenty of business owners pour 30 to 40 hours a week into LinkedIn and social platforms and see very little for it. Robin's counter-example is stark: one appearance on Ali Abdaal's podcast, a channel with around seven million subscribers, generated 3,000 leads over the following 12 months. He puts that at roughly four and a half years of equivalent social media effort.
His method is narrow on purpose. Identify ten influential people whose audiences genuinely overlap with the people you want to reach. Lead with value rather than a commercial ask. Then build a real relationship and let the opportunities follow. The partnerships he works with now include Daniel Priestley, Simon Squibb and Chris Do, none of which started with a pitch.
He has run the same play locally. The Stroud Entrepreneurs Network grew to 80 events and 1,200 members by focusing on education and genuinely good speakers, and Robin validated the demand before launching it by building a waiting list of 200 people first.
The conversation closed on tooling, where Robin is enthusiastic and selective in equal measure. He has used Lovable to rebuild his entire software stack, which has saved him around £1,000 a month while improving both lead generation and conversion.
He was more cautious about AI avatar tools such as HeyGen. His worry is overuse tipping into something that feels inauthentic, which he likened to wearing a fake Rolex. Graham has been experimenting with it and had a video land well with a marketing figure he respects, so the two were not in flat disagreement, more weighing where the line sits.
The thread underneath it, which Kevin and Graham drew out, is that AI has commoditised articles, courses and presentations. If all of that is now cheap and abundant, the thing that is genuinely scarce is human connection, and that is the thing most business owners are still pricing as though it were free.
Days 1 to 30 - Define the outcome: Write down the dream result a client actually buys from you, in one sentence, with no hedging. Look at your last ten projects and work out how long delivering that result really took on average. Notice every place you would normally say "it depends" and decide what you would have to narrow to remove it.
Days 31 to 60 - Set the fee and say it out loud: Turn that average into a single fixed price for the outcome. Practise saying the number until it stops catching in your throat, then test it on real conversations rather than friendly ones. Consider what guarantee you could honestly attach, and what it would take to be able to stand behind it.
Days 61 to 90 - Build the partnerships: List ten people whose audiences overlap with yours and go and be useful to them, with no ask attached. Cut back the social posting that is not returning anything and put the hours into those ten relationships instead. Audit your software stack while you are at it and see what is genuinely earning its keep.
"Every client is different, so I can't quote a fixed fee." That is the "it depends" problem rather than an argument against fixed fees. If the work varies that wildly, the issue is the range of clients you take on, not the pricing model.
"A guarantee like Gavin's is far too risky." It is only risky if you cannot reliably produce the result. If you can, the guarantee simply moves the risk from the buyer to the person better placed to carry it, and that is precisely why it closes.
"I'd rather just post more and get my name out there." Robin spent years testing that. Thirty to 40 hours a week on social media produced far less than one conversation with the right partner, and partnerships compound in a way that a feed never does.
What connects every part of this conversation is that the constraint is rarely external. The market is more crowded than it was in 2004 and the competition is global, yet the thing holding most people at their current fee is the discomfort of naming a bigger one.
Robin's answer is not to charge more for the sake of it. It is to change what you are selling, from hours to outcomes, so the number stops feeling arbitrary and starts being defensible. Do that and the conversation with a prospect changes shape entirely, because you are both looking at the same result rather than haggling over a rate.
If you recognise the sales cycle of doom in your own business, that is where Robin's business coaching tends to begin.
The Next 100 Days Podcast is the UK's longest-running independently produced weekly business interview show, hosted throughout by Kevin Appleby and Graham Arrowsmith. Kevin specialises in finance transformation and is COO of GrowCFO; Graham founded Finely Fettled and MicroYES, working with marketers targeting affluent customers.
The show is unscripted, which is rather the point. It is built for business owners, entrepreneurs, coaches and authors who want practical lessons from people who have actually done the thing.
Listen to this episode on Spotify, or read the full show notes on The Next 100 Days.
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