So how did you get started?
Great question.
I love this question.
I'll try to keep it brief, though.
So believe it or not, I've been in business for 20 years.
So I ran a marketing agency, which
we started straight out of university back in 2004.
Predominantly doing web design and branding.
And I learned a lot of what I know now
about the pricing, money mindset, sales, marketing,
all through just practicing, trying out different stuff
in that business.
And we grew it by the end of that 12 years, so 2016.
We'd grown it to about a quarter of a million pounds,
so about $300,000 revenue.
I had a small team of developers and designers.
It's just a fun little business, local sort
of marketing business.
But I reached a point I was in between daughters.
So my first daughter was about one,
and my second daughter was a couple of months away
from being born.
And I was just still doing, even after 12 years,
lots of all-nighters.
My team was a little bit dysfunctional
because I didn't have really the business experience.
I just learnt it on the job and grown my team organically.
We had a lot of demanding clients.
They expected a lot for the money which they paid us.
And I realized I just wasn't really that fulfilled.
I was just doing this thing day to day
without really having much vision or passion
or those sorts of things.
So my immediate thought was, oh, just quit
and then figure it out from there.
Of course, my wife's Mrs. Waits, eight months pregnant.
And the moment I went home and said,
I'm getting rid of the agency, the international sign
of distress, I was like, oh my god,
what a stupid decision, Robin.
What are you doing to us?
But actually, it ended up being the best decision ever.
So when word got out that I was exiting the agency,
somebody came to me and wanted to buy out my client base
and some intellectual property.
So again, not for a huge sum of money,
but enough that I had a bit of security for a year or two.
And I could rethink what it was that I wanted to,
why I was doing what I was doing.
So during my paternity leave, a few people said,
oh, we heard you sold your agency.
Do you think you could help us do that?
So I'm at Jovanco, I'm very easily swayed
when it comes to like cups of coffee and cake.
I'll give as much free advice away
when somebody puts a slice of cake in front of me.
So I did a bit of informal mentoring just for free,
basically, just to very quickly realize
the conversations I loved were the ones
where I was talking about strategy and goal setting
and pricing and going through the numbers
with the business owners.
And in the previous business,
when I tried to raise those conversations,
I used to get like the big hand, no Robin,
I just want you to build me a website.
And they didn't feel like they were interested
in my ideas for business growth.
So it really opened my eyes up
to sort of mentoring and coaching.
I did a couple of qualifications through Rich Litvin
as a big, like my hero when it comes to coaching.
He's one of the best coaches in the world.
He wrote this fantastic book called The Prosperous Coach,
which I think was like the third business book I'd ever read.
And again, just opened my eyes up to the potential
of like helping people, basically,
helping people to achieve stuff
that I got a bit stuck doing in my agency
that I now get to have these amazing conversations
with all sorts of really fun, interesting,
like creative people about how they can then transform
their business and not make the same mistakes
which I made back in my agency days.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it all makes sense.
Once you realize, well, I'm sure Mrs. Waits was like,
wait, literally.
But those are the best moments to me
is when you can transition and it's smooth, right?
That tells you that there's something else.
What does that saying when one window closes,
another door opens kind of thing.
And so you had a bigger way of being able to maneuver
and start something that you truly love doing.
Tell me about your vision with Fearless.
So when I set out, and I'll be very honest,
I didn't necessarily have an external sort of,
a big vision externally for what I was creating.
I had much more of an intrinsic motivation
which I'm kind of like,
I need something specific to work to.
So initially my goal and it's,
I don't know, make of it what you will,
but basically I was like,
I wanna match the revenue in my agency
but do that as a one person,
one person like mighty small coaching practice.
So, yeah, just me on my own,
my goal was to get to 250K.
Initially, and how I kind of quantified the impacts of that
was like, well, if I'm making good money as a coach,
it means that I'm doing good stuff
for the business owners I get to work with.
And it was then through the sort of practice of coaching,
again, I had my eyes open to what the potential was
from coaching.
And I'll give you an example,
one of my early clients,
it was a husband and wife team.
Well, they weren't married at the time actually.
Rich and his wife, Amy, and Rich was a web designer.
So it's similar to what I used to do.
And they were living in a small house in Bristol.
They had two young kids.
Their dreams were they wanted a bigger house that they owned.
They wanted to get married.
Rich wanted an office so he could have somewhere to go
and do his work creatively without getting disturbed
by the family and children all the time.
Amy wasn't particularly happy in her job.
And so it was a long journey.
I mean, through the time that we spent working together,
they achieved all of those goals.
They bought their first house together.
They got that spare bedroom, which they wanted.
They got married.
They were able to afford to kind of save up and get married.
They got Rich his first office down in Clevedon.
And then Amy eventually was able to leave her job
in the public sector
and come and work in the family business now.
And I realized that that's the stuff
that's really, really important to me and to other people
and the impact which I can create.
And to give the balanced side of things,
whilst I was figuring this out,
there were other projects and businesses
that I got to work with.
But one was this,
and I'm really grateful I got this opportunity,
but it helped me kind of discern who it was
that I wanted to work with, what direction I wanted to take.
I got to work with a local law firm.
There was 160 people who worked in this law firm.
And I got to set up a pilot program,
use my knowledge around goal setting
and seeing what kind of turned people on
within their business that they were working within,
things like that.
And I was really grateful for the team
which I got to work with and the HR director there,
they took the pilot program and created
and rolled it out to the business.
But I couldn't see the tangible results and outcomes
from that big corporate entity.
And for me, with Rich and Amy,
now I get to work with dozens of Rich and Amys
on a daily basis almost.
Those little tiny things,
if they just increase their prices by 50%,
all of a sudden their profit grows by 120%
and then they can do all these amazing things,
persons like, brilliant, that fills me up.
Yeah, yeah.
And so the corporate was just a bit too corporate-ish,
if I may say.
And then, and I think when you do work
with a corporate business, it's a whole lot of people, right?
And then to bring them on and to collaborate
and get them all to be so engaged in the process
is a big difference from helping a couple
to start their business.
And it's also much easier to be able to see their path, right?
And then to get feedback on what you've done
to know that they've actually are succeeding
in the business that they set out for.
So when it comes to the strategies that you have
in helping businesses articulate their value,
what resonates with potential clients?
Yeah, so the story I always like to lead with
around the clients which I work with,
so I work a lot with what we call
service client businesses.
So a lot of coaches, consultants, freelancers,
they're typically charging or exchanging time for money
in some way, shape or form.
And what I've noticed a lot around sort of the fearless crew
is that they are like super smart people,
like really bright, they've got amazing ideas,
they get really great results for their clients
when they work with them.
And they absolutely love the thing which they do.
But a couple of problems come out of that
that they end up essentially becoming busy fools
and they get to the end of the month,
having done all this work and then they're like,
where's all the money?
Like, where's my reward for all of this hard work
which I'm putting in?
So when you start to unpack it,
when people sort of maybe shift from doing a job
and setting up their own company,
and I think more people should do it
because nobody really wants to work for the man these days.
Like it's so crushing sometimes
unless you're in a job you absolutely love.
But what they forget is that when you're in a job,
you're kind of getting paid just for doing one function,
one thing within that business, right?
When you're a business owner,
all of a sudden you've got your marketing hat,
your sales hat, your admin hat, your accounts hat,
like all of the different hats as well as doing the job.
So when you charge like an hourly rate or day rate
for the work you do,
you probably only maybe as a service provider
doing two to three days a week worth of paid work,
your earnings potential is limited.
So the first step which we typically take
with the clients we work with
is we do something called productizing their services.
So we build packages out of the thing which they do.
And the important thing is that rather than,
well, let's take a web design as a business
which I obviously know well.
So a lot of web designers are like,
well, we'll build you an HTML standards
compliant on WordPress
and it'll be search engine friendly
and we'll add 20 pages of content on there.
Well, all of that's great.
But like, why?
Why is that important?
Like what actually is the,
what are your clients really interested in?
People don't really want a website.
What they actually want is leads and inquiries
for their business and for that to turn into money, right?
So the first thing, there's three steps.
We go, right, what's the dream outcome
which you deliver for your clients?
Put yourself in their shoes for a moment rather than yours.
What is it that they really need?
And often it comes down to typically saving
their clients more time and making them more money
or maybe giving them a bit more freedom
or happiness within the business which they run, for example.
So, but what is the dream outcome that you sell?
The second thing is, can it then be delivered
in a fixed period of time?
Okay.
And quite often this is where the first swear word comes out.
I'm not actually gonna swear by the way.
Yeah.
Fearless HQ, this is a swear word.
It depends.
It depends on the client.
It depends on the product.
It depends on what they need.
It depends, it depends on what they, right.
What it depends is code for is that we do too many things
for too many different types of customers.
Ah, okay.
Which kind of means we wing it
and we don't really have any systems or processes in place.
And every time they want something,
we just kind of make it up on the spot
and we give them whatever it is that they've asked for
irrespective of whether that's the thing they actually need.
Right.
So I help clients try and identify
what is the one thing you do really well
for one specific type of client.
Okay.
Because when you do one thing really well
for one specific type of client,
you can build systems around it, processes,
and step-by-step frameworks deliver the same
and predictable results for each of those clients
that you work with.
It helps you to discern which clients
do you actually wanna work with, qualify them formally,
which helps you to identify them
where you're gonna market yourself,
what niche are you gonna go into
and how are you gonna attract those clients.
So doing that one thing really well
has so many positive knock-on impacts,
but the challenge though,
and it means you can deliver then the results
within a predetermined like timeframe.
And yeah, it's a bell curve.
Some might take a little longer,
some might be a bit shorter,
but on the whole, you want a majority of clients
for your product to be delivered the result
within this set amount of time.
Okay.
But a lot of clients get very hung up on that concept
because they're like, oh, but if I niche,
if I only work with one client, it's gonna be boring.
Yeah, it will be.
The most successful businesses is like so boring, right?
We graced in 2024 to have these wonderful devices, right?
These iPhones and Samsung devices,
computers and the internet and stuff, right?
But yeah, it looks great.
It's very sexy products,
but it goes on a production line,
the same bit added to millions of different phones.
Imagine if they have to customize every single iPhone
that went out there
for every single different type of client, right?
It'd be impossible.
Yet they're one of the biggest companies on the market.
And you look at all the big companies,
actually at base level, they're a really boring business.
They just do the same thing really well
over and over and over again, right?
Yes, yes.
We know they're gonna release a new iPhone
every September, right?
It's predictable.
And it will look pretty much the same,
but we'll still buy it
because it's the same good quality over and over and over.
So what's the dream outcome that your clients want?
Can it be delivered in a fixed period of time?
And then the final part of the jigsaw puzzle is,
can we then put a fixed fee on that?
Okay.
Okay, so rather than,
let's say on the website side of things,
imagine like somebody's charging 50 bucks now
to build a website and they think,
they quote you 20 hours to do it.
So a thousand dollars for a website?
Okay, that seems fair enough.
And go away and start building it.
But then imagine what they forgot to tell you
is they haven't been doing it very long.
So they're not very good.
And because they're not charging enough,
they've taken on too many projects.
So your website eventually gets delivered
like three months later.
And then you're in the shopping cart
and then you're there like going,
hang on, that's not what I asked for.
And it's really late.
Like, so you're getting frustrated.
And they say, oh, well, I can add the blog
and the shopping cart on,
but I'll charge you an extra 10 hours for that.
And you're like, no, we agreed a thousand dollars.
Like why change it?
And then they reluctantly agreed to do the work.
So they're resentful because they've got to do this
extra work for free.
And you're resentful because you didn't get
what you've asked for in the first place.
So that's our first clue that hourly rates
really don't work, right?
The second clue, web designer number two comes along,
but they don't know what Robin and Jovan can know
about pricing.
So they're still charging $50 now.
However, brilliant, they've been doing it for years.
They like, they know all of the internet,
so yeah, all that sort of stuff.
And they're gonna build this great website.
It's gonna get you leads, got the blog,
got the shopping cart.
And they deliver it within a week.
But the thing is, because they're so good,
it's only taken them 10 hours.
Yeah.
Hang on.
The one who does the worst job takes a day to deliver.
It doesn't give you what you want, gets paid double
what the more experienced one is who does a better job.
Well, they do it faster and better
because they've been doing it for so long, right?
Yeah.
And then we've got web designer number three.
So Audrey comes into the mix, right?
She's a website ninja.
She's been building websites for years,
but she's really heavily focused on the dream outcome.
All right, I'm gonna, Jovanka,
Audrey's website is gonna generate you 15 to 20 solid leads
each and every month for your website, for your business.
But she charges 10K for those sites.
But now here's where it gets really interesting for me, okay?
So it is significantly more expensive,
but you probably know if you get 10 to 15
really good, well-qualified leads for your business,
probably you're gonna get your money back
pretty quickly off the back of that.
Yeah.
But she's so confident, Audrey, that she turns around
and she says, it's 10K, but if by the end of next month,
you haven't got 20 leads, we'll refund you the 10K
and I'll pay you a thousand dollars for wasting your time
so you can go and spend it on the other two guys.
Right, 10 times the price, but which of those three
would you probably most likely want to work with?
Absolutely, I'm going with the third.
Yeah, absolutely.
We all would, right?
Yeah.
So those three things, what it comes down to is like,
there's a lot of people who'll be thinking,
that's all well and good, Robin,
but I'm not sure I could do that.
And that immediately tells me
if there's a slight lack in confidence around,
like most people are like,
I'm not sure I could deliver those kinds of results.
I wouldn't want to guarantee that.
Yeah.
That doesn't say anything about the clients.
It says more about confidence in your ability
to deliver your processes, your systems,
and like refining what it is that you do.
And use that as good positive feedback to make it better.
And then you can elevate your prices from there.
And I love the analogy that you used for the iPhone
because like you said, every September,
we're going to get a new one.
And then every September, there's a waiting list
before September comes and we all buy the same thing.
And it's not individually set for us to do it, right?
But yet it's a package deal.
And it's a package deal where you know,
you're going to pay that price,
you're going to get a phone,
and it's going to do exactly what you need it to do
eventually when you learn it
in the next two to three years, that one iPhone.
So I love the analogy of that.
And then so it's one, do you provide the dream outcome
of what you're selling, right?
And of what your client needs.
What's the outcome of that?
Two, can it be delivered in a fit time, right?
And then third, can we put a fixed fee,
not putting a fixed fee on it, right?
Which is what you're saying is an hourly fee.
It makes it a little bit more challenging.
However, if you package it,
then you have a different outcome
such as the last example that you gave me,
which was the 10K and then delivered.
And then if you don't like it,
you get money back plus, you know, plus some.
So I truly like the fact that you've been able
to tell the audience and how that works for you.
I just have a few more questions for you.
How do you measure business impact beyond the revenue?
Is it more about their successes?
Do they come back to you and give you feedback?
How do you measure the impact beyond the revenue?
Yeah, great question.
So things I look for is like the intangible stuff.
So my best clients, believe it or not,
are the ones who've never spent a penny with me.
They've never like, but it's because they haven't had
to invest in the coaching because they've got like enough
value out of all of the other stuff that I put out there.
One of the things, I'm in a bit of a,
one of those over the last year,
I've kind of been developing this concept around the fact
that good quality business advice should be democratized.
It should be free.
Cause I do believe that like free and good business advice
is gonna help people get the freedom which they wanna get.
But let's face it, there's a lot of people on this planet
who can't afford, you know, to pay for,
to hire a coach or get a mentor,
or maybe just don't have access to the same opportunities
which I've had.
So the way I look at it is we probably only work
with about 30 or 40 clients a year,
but those 30 or 40 clients pay enough in amongst them.
And I've got a couple of other businesses as well
that I can give away, my goal is to give away 3000 copies
in my book every year to make sure that I'm contributing
to things like putting my content on YouTube,
having a blog which we update regularly
so that those who can't afford an expensive coach
or any coach for that matter can access business information
for free that might just be the catalyst
they need to get started.
So those are my measures at the moment.
It's like, how many books can I get into people's hands?
Can I get more subscribers to my YouTube channel
so they can watch like helpful videos?
At the moment, as part of this,
I'm doing a bit of a podcast tour.
So that again, there's limitations on how much
I can grow my audience.
You know, I try my best to grow as best I can,
but people like yourself, Jevank,
who've already got free built audiences,
let's partner up, let's spread good word
and give some advice out there.
If one person off the back of this podcast goes,
right, I'm gonna start a business
or I'm gonna charge more,
you know, they elevate their vision for themselves,
then we're winning, right?
Absolutely, absolutely.
I love that.
And as we begin to close, what tips do you have,
my apologies, what tips do you have for entrepreneurs?
You can just give me one.
Sure.
You've got me now because you know I talk a lot.
So that everybody has one little idea blossoming
that's just been sat in their head
for goodness knows how long.
And my advice is I'm one of those people,
I would rather know whether something's gonna work or not.
So my advice is my tip is like,
if you've got that thing bubbling away,
do something with it, JFDI,
because otherwise like you'll never know,
you're just sit on it and procrastinate for like years
and maybe take it to your grave, I don't know.
Maybe have some regret around it.
I don't want that for you, just do it.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.