How To Stop Underselling Yourself – In Just 7 Minutes with Robin Waite

Resources/Links:

• Have You Been Wanting to Take Your Shot and Find Out How to Price Right in Your Business? Learn how you can stop underselling yourself and start pricing what you and your services are worth: https://fearless.biz/tys/

Summary

Have you been always struggling with pricing your products or services that you just end up selling by the hour?

Are you always trying to compare your price to other competitors that you end up finding yourself underwhelmed with your price?

Do you want to know how you can stop underselling and give your service the luxurious price it deserves?

Robin Waite is a dedicated husband and father, a multiple, bestselling author, and the founder of the Fearless Business Accelerator.

In this episode, Robin talks about the three ways to price a product and how you can find the right price to give. He also shares his tips and insights on what you need to stop doing and instead what are the three important levers you need to focus on to get the price that you deserve.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 00:37 – Robin’s ideal client: “So ideal clients are coaches, consultants, and freelancers who are typically selling time for money, either hourly rates or day rates.”
• 01:32 – Problem Robin helps solve: “Essentially, what we do is we help them to get out of selling time for money. So, stop selling by the session or by the hour and package up whatever it is that they do, and then get them very heavily focused on the results or outcomes which they deliver.”
• 02:31 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Robin: “So, generally speaking, they’re very intelligent people. They get amazing results for their clients already, but what they haven’t figured out is, you know, they get to the end of the month, and I’m scratching my head and going well, “Where’s all the money? I’ve done all this work this month.”
• 05:24 – Robin’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): “So the typical way people price sort of services is they look at their competitors. And they assume that their competitor- well, the mistake is assuming that their competitors know what they’re talking about.”
• 07:20 – Robin’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Robin’s Website: https://fearless.biz/tys/
• 07:49 – Q: What’s the one piece of advice that I would have listened to if I’d listened to myself years ago? A: The answer to that is JFDI. If you’re thinking about putting a price up, if you’re thinking about starting a business, just effing do it. Life’s too short.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“The reality is there are three ways to price a product– you can either be the cheapest in the market, the middle of the road, or the most expensive.” -Robin Waite Click To Tweet

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Greetings, everyone, and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from a little sunshine coast in Queensland, Australia, joined today by Robin Waite, on the top of the world. I mean, literally, he’s on top of the world! Robin, where are you hanging out?

Robin Waite 00:24
I’m down in the southwest of the UK, England. So, if you can imagine a chocolate box or biscuit, 10 of like, what England is like, I’m in the middle of England in the Cotswolds. It’s lovely here! Rolling hills.

Tom Poland 00:34
Yeah, I’ve only had beautiful things about the Cotswolds. So, Robin’s on top, I’m down under. What we’re going to do is rock and roll here. We’ve got a terrific little interview around, not underselling yourself, which is a plague upon humanity, and probably has been for 1000s of years. And with Robin’s help, we’ll put a bit of a dent in that in a moment. But for those of you who don’t know him, apart from being one of Britain’s best chocolate biscuits, he is a dedicated husband and father, a multiple, best-selling author. He’s also the Founder of Fearless Business Accelerator. And I just love the theme, Robin, that you bring through, which is around stepping up and stepping into destiny and backing yourself. You’ll say this a lot better than I could, so we’ll get on with the interview. The title is, “How to Stop Underselling Yourself”. Robin, our seven minutes, sir, start now. Question number one, who is your ideal client?

Robin Waite 00:37
So ideal client is coaches, consultants, and freelancers who are typically selling time for money, either hourly rates or day rates.

Tom Poland 1:26
Perfect! Question two, sir. What’s the problem you solve for them?

Robin Waite 01:32
Essentially, what we do is we help them to get out of selling time for money. So, stop selling by the session or by the hour and package up whatever it is that they do, and then get them very heavily focused on the results or outcomes which they deliver. So rather than selling features, we get them to focus on the remarkable outcome that they deliver for their clients. And generally speaking, when they manage to do that, and they can articulate their value a bit better, they can double, triple, quadruple their price. We’ve even had somebody go out there and 10x their prices.

Tom Poland 02:06
Wow!

Robin Waite 02:06
So, you can, it’s one of the fastest ways to grow a business. If you can get to grips with packaging up your services, and then confidently charging a bit more for it.

Tom Poland 02:14
Music to many coaches’ ears and consultants, I’m sure! Six minutes left, sir. Tell us about some of the typical symptoms that your ideal clients are experiencing prior to working with you. What’s going on in their life or their business that would kind of give the listener a heads up that they should be listening even harder?

Robin Waite 02:31
Yeah, well, that’s the obvious stuff. So, generally speaking, they’re very intelligent people. They get amazing results for their clients already, but what they haven’t figured out is, you know, they get to the end of the month, and I’m scratching my head and going well, “Where’s all the money? I’ve done all this work this month.” So, things that typically happen with our coaches and consultants is they’ll work out how much money they want to earn on an annual basis. And then they will divide it by 2000 hours, which is the typical number of hours that you can work in a year, so about 160 hours a month. And the challenge with that, though, is that- well, there are several challenges with that. So, the first one is that they haven’t taken into account the fact that they’ve also got to do marketing, admin, sales, and all of the other good stuff that comes around running a business, instead of just client fulfillment. And so inevitably, what that means is their kind of working about 40 or 50 hours worth of, you know, deliverable work to a client, charging out at, say, 50 bucks an hour. And then that means that they’ve inadvertently gone and limited their earnings potential. So, one of the ways that we have to look at it is, first of all, it’s just a process of working out the economics of a running small business. So, let’s just say, for example, a business owner wants to earn $100,000 a year, okay? And what we might do is we’d say, “Okay, well, you know, how are you currently charging?” And they might say, “50 bucks an hour.” Okay, cool. So that means that you need to sell somewhere on the order of, you know, 4000 hours this year in order to earn $100,000. And then they start going, “Well, that’s just a ridiculous number. I couldn’t possibly sell that many hours.” So, we can already see that supply and demand is just a bit sort of out of kilter. And the second mistake, which we see people making, biggest mistake, or symptom, which we see people making is they’re just a bit burnt out, really. You know, they’re doing all of this great work, and they feel just, you know, unjustly unrewarded for it so, or justly- you know what I mean? Not justly rewarded for it.

Tom Poland 03:11
Indeed. And it is unjust.

Robin Waite 04:13
There we go! And so eventually, just their energy levels start to deplete. They get, you know, this thing which they started off doing, that they’re sure incredibly passionate about. A couple of years down the line, they’re starting to lose their passion for it, which obviously creates this sort of vicious cycle, if you like, of, you know- just really, it just breaks business owners. And, you know, the thing is, like, I’ve done corporate, by the way, in terms of like from a coaching perspective. And for me, I love the impact that small business owners make. So, getting one-man bands, you know, into creating highly profitable businesses really fills me up with joy because you can see the immediate impact when they get pricing.

Tom Poland 04:59
Perfect! Thank you, sir. Let’s get to question five, a top tip, a valuable free action. We’ve got this cultural consultant who feels a bit trapped with the time for money, wants to break out of that, needs to shift to a more benefit-orientated value proposition, looks at pricing, etc. How could they get started on this? What’s the top tip you can give them that’s really going to take them a step forward, might not solve the whole issue, but it might take them a step in the right direction?

Robin Waite 05:24
Yeah, so the typical way people price sort of services is they look at their competitors. And they assume that their competitor- well, the mistake is assuming that their competitors know what they’re talking about. The reality is like, there are three ways to price a product– you can either be the cheapest in the market, the middle of the road, or the most expensive. So cheap is the way people choose because they think that’s the way to acquire clients. But the reality is if you’re copying somebody else’s business model, and they’re cheap, it means that they’re probably not very profitable. Why would you copy a broken business model? It doesn’t make sense. So, you’ve got to rethink the way that we charge, you know, for products or services. So, the other option is you go middle of the road, which is what everybody else is doing. So, it doesn’t really differentiate you in some aspects. And then the third option is, well, you could be the most expensive in the marketplace, but there are actually some clues here. The reason people don’t choose to be the most expensive is that they believe it’ll put people off buying their products or services. But the reality is, in every industry, there’s somebody out there who is the most expensive, and the clues are, they’ve got the most reviews. They’ve been around the block a bit. They’ve got enough clients, and they’re still able to make, you know, healthy profit margin because they’re the most expensive, and they’re still able to acquire clients. So, when it comes to actually like productizing service, how do we get out of these hourly rates that are trapped. There are three levers at work, which we have to bear in mind, so this is-

Tom Poland 06:37
Real quick because we’ve got 90 seconds left, and still two questions to go.

Robin Waite 06:40
That’s cool. No, I’m on it. Don’t worry. We can do this! So, the three things we’ve got to do when we productize a service. Number one, we need to focus on the remarkable outcome or result we’re going to deliver for our client, okay? So, you need to go to articulate that. The second thing that needs to be delivered over a fixed period of time. So, say three months, six months, 12 months, however long it is. And the third thing for a fixed fee. And if you can nail those three things, you’ve managed to successfully productize your service and you can charge more for it.

Tom Poland 07:07
So, define the transformational benefit, articulate that, set a period of time for the transformation to occur, and then set the price based on that value within that time frame. Perfect! Thank you, sir.

Robin Waite 07:18
Articulated it better than I!

Tom Poland 07:20
Not sure I did, better in my mind. 35 seconds left, one valuable free resource. I’m going to say this for the sake of time. Fearless, as in no fear, fearless.biz/tys. Real quick, what will people find there, Robin?

Robin Waite 07:34
Yeah, they’re going to find a free download of “Take Your Shot”. Or if there’s a bit of ethical bribery in there and maybe some beer tokens, then I may even sign a copy and paste it wherever you are in the world as well. So, a free copy of the book, Take Your Shot.

Tom Poland 07:45
12 seconds left. What’s the one question I should have asked you? Real quick.

Robin Waite 07:49
The one question you should have asked me. Oh gosh, we’re only going to get six seconds. What’s the one piece of advice that I would have listened to if I’d listened to myself years ago? And the answer to that is JFDI. If you’re thinking about putting a price up, if you’re thinking about starting a business, just effing do it. Life’s too short.

Tom Poland 08:05
If you’re thinking about it, do it. That is such wise advice. And you’ll tap into a whole string of intuitive consciousness in doing that, folks. Robin Waite, thank you so much for your time and over-delivering. Even if we did go but over time, it was well worth it. Thank you.

Robin Waite 08:18
It’s my pleasure. Thanks, Tom.

Tom Poland 08:21
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.