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Today’s episode features an insightful conversation with 
Robin Waite, a seasoned entrepreneur, business coach, and author of Take Your Shot. Robin has helped thousands of coaches, consultants, and service providers build thriving businesses with clarity and purpose. He’s joined by our host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of The Holistic Wealth Strategy. Together, they break down one of the most accessible – yet often overlooked – ways to build wealth: launching and scaling a service-based business.
Robin brings a unique perspective that combines deep business strategy with powerful lessons on pricing, psychology, and money mindset – two critical areas where most entrepreneurs struggle. Drawing from his journey of leaving a traditional job to become successfully “unemployable,” Robin shares hard-earned lessons from 21 years of building, scaling, and selling businesses. He explains why service-based businesses can offer unmatched freedom, creativity, and scalability, especially in today’s world, where tools like AI and online marketplaces make starting up more accessible than ever.
Robin and Dave also dig into common pitfalls, such as the dangers of vanity metrics and the “sales cycle of doom,” while giving actionable advice for anyone considering entrepreneurship or looking to take their existing business to the next level. Whether you’re dreaming of leaving your W2 job or refining your pricing strategy, this episode provides practical frameworks and mindset tools to create true financial and personal freedom.
In This Episode
- How to transition from a job to entrepreneurship and why a gradual approach works
- The advantages of launching and scaling a service-based business
- Pricing strategies and overcoming money mindset barriers
- Why clarity, purpose, and values matter more than chasing vanity metrics
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. In this episode, we’re diving into one of the most powerful and overlooked wealth-building tools available. Entrepreneurship, specifically through launching and scaling a service-based business. Joining me today is Robin Waite, a seasoned entrepreneur, business coach, and author of Take Your Shot. Robin’s helped thousands of coaches, consultants, and service providers build profitable businesses with clarity, purpose, and simplicity. What’s unique about Robin’s approach is that he blends sharp business strategy with deep insights into pricing, psychology, and money mindset, two critical levers that most entrepreneurs struggle to master.
Whether you’re still in a W2 job and dreaming about starting a side hustle, already in a business, but stuck in the sales cycle of doom, or just trying to create more time, freedom, scalability and purpose in your work, this conversation is packed with real world strategies, mindset shifts and financial frameworks to help you create a high impact, high margin business with without sacrificing your sanity or your values. Let’s jump in. Robin, welcome to the show.
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here, Dave. Thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, you bet. Really appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom today with our audience, and really thought it would be quite topical to bring you in and help our audience really understand things from, you know, two standpoints. Right. And you know, one is the fact that our listeners are really trying to build and scale their wealth outside of conventional means. We have a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience or a lot of people actually thinking about creating businesses. And one of the things that I think is the biggest opportunity for people to actually build their wealth is it is on that capital creation side. So how can you, you know, create as much capital as possible? And as entrepreneurs, you and I know that one of the best ways to do that is creating your own business and frankly, you know, these days, AI and the resources that are available to people, you know, starting even a side hustle business, you know, can be something that’s so easy to overcome right now, even if you have a W2 job, you know, or this really could be a transition to, you know, really getting into your passion right. And starting a business.
Right. And I know you focus on coaching and a services-based business. I bet there are a lot of listeners out there, like you know, who really have some expertise, and they have passion. You know, being able to help other people, you know, could be a great jumping off point, but they might not know where to start in terms of, you know, building a business or if you already have a services based business, you know, maybe scaling that business so, you know, help the audience understand a little bit about your origin story and how you kind of transitioned into becoming an entrepreneur and kind of, you know, focusing in, on, on services based businesses.
Yeah, well, I’ve made a profession, Dave, out of essentially making myself unemployable, which has been quite helpful in my career as an entrepreneur. I had a job out of school doing systems analysis, which gave me three years of great experience in understanding deeply the inner workings of a manufacturing business way back when. And I did a degree at the same time as doing that job as well. But at the end of it, I kind of fell out of love with the business owner who was fantastic when it came to product design, but just awful when it came to running a business. I’ve never known somebody to make one and a half $2 million a year in a business and then literally come out of that still making a loss. It still baffles me that there are business owners out there who do that. So as a naive 20 something, I decided that I could probably do a better job than him and then went on this long path over the last 21 years of, I guess, figuring it out, actually realizing that no, running a business can be quite hard work and there are ups and downs and it’s never a straight line pat way to success when you’re running a business. The short version.
I spent 12 years running a marketing agency doing web design and branding. Sold that in 2016, not for a huge sum, but it was enough as my family was growing to be able to spend a bit more time with them when we welcomed my second daughter into the world and start to make a bit of a. Get a bit of a plan together as to what I was going to do. Moving forward. Ultimately, the reason I ended up selling the agency was just because I was unhappy. There were lots of late nights. We had lots of clients sort of clamoring after our attention. I had a small team, possibly, you know, four slightly dysfunctional people because they were led by me, you know, and there was a lot of pressure there.
And so I realized I needed a change. But I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do at the time. Several people heard that I’d sold my agency. So they asked me, they bribed me with coffee and cake. I know you’re a fellow espresso lover. So they, they said, “Well, buy your coffee and cake. Could you tell us how you built and sold your agency?” And they became my first sort of informal mentoring clients. Requalified then as a coach because I discovered I just absolutely love these conversations about the numbers in business and pricing, and how do you package up your offer and various other things like that.
And so for the last nine years, I’ve been working a lot with coaches, consultants, freelancers, and creative agencies to essentially it’s mostly around pricing and money mindset, because for me that’s the fastest way to grow a business. But all sorts of other challenges that business owners have along the way as well.
Yeah, fascinating. It’s interesting. So many people take that journey, and I know I did as well, that when you become an entrepreneur for the first time, the first thing that is a massive distinction is that you actually take responsibility for providing for the financial, you know, responsibility for yourself. Right. So you’re going to take it; it’s incumbent upon you whether the business does well or not. You’re owning, you know, the financial success of that, you know, for yourself as a family as well as the business, you know, versus relying on that. W2. So that’s like the first, you know, really big transition
And then the second piece that I find really interesting is that a lot of people will actually start a business from either relationships, expertise, things that they know in the market, maybe their environment, or things like that. So you start that business from what you already know. And then the next transition is moving to the business that you really are passionate about, the one that really has a calling to you. And it’s interesting cause we have to kind of go through this journey to actually get there. And I can tell, you know, based on your passion, Robin, like you’re just, you know, totally enthusiastic and just love to really help people and focus on that. So I think, you know, for the listeners, it’s like the more clarity you can get on what your skills are, who you are, how you can provide value and serve the market. You know, then you’re going to be closer to that, creating freedom for that business you want, really want.
Yeah, there are a lot of people, unfortunately. I read a stat recently, I don’t know how far afield the stat goes. This was a UK HR journal which kind of reported this statistic, but they said over 40% of people are miserable in their jobs, like literally giving their happiness a score of 1 out of 10. So imagine that 40 people multiply that around everybody. 40% of people multiply that globally. That’s tens or potentially even hundreds of millions of people who are working jobs that they’re just, you know, hugely unfulfilled and very unhappy working within. And why do they keep on showing up doing that? Well, yes, they’re very. They want to provide for their families.
They want to. They do it for the money, essentially, and the security. And I’ve learned, like, there’s a little bit more to life than. Then just kind of showing up for. For the money and the paycheck at the end of it. Something which you’ve alluded to with the W2. So the other thing as well is I think a lot of people see the transition from, say, for example, working a 9 to 5 or an 8 to 6 in many cases, you know, and then making the transition into becoming an entrepreneur and starting up a business. They see it as this very binary decision.
They see it as like, I’ve got to jump out of the frying pan into the fire and start up this business, and it has to produce six figures, you know, otherwise I’m somehow an abject failure. And actually there’s a better way. The better way is just to make a slow and steady transition from one to the other. And the reality is it does. Oftentimes, it doesn’t really matter how long that transition takes. And as an example of this is more recently. So I’ve actually run three businesses that have all successfully, very quickly, past six figures and beyond. But my coaching practice has been doing very well since sort of 2016, 2017.
And then Covid hit and, yeah, I’m still using the C word, I’m still talking about that, but for a very specific reason, out of the blue, during. We were in the middle of lockdown, about a month into lockdown here, and I don’t know if it was similar for you, but we had five months where we literally couldn’t leave our houses. Everything was really locked down. You couldn’t, there’s very little freedom. And also as a result of the, when it was announced here on 23rd March or whenever it was in 2020, I lost about £28,000 worth, $35,000 worth of speaking engagements in person, events that I was due to speak at. So I had this big financial hit. And your back’s a little bit against the wall. You’re thinking, well, nobody knows what’s going to happen here.
And I get this email, and it was a company here in the UK, they said, “We’ll pay you $10. We want you to. We like your blog. We’d like you to paste this article, and we’ll pay you $10 for it.” The article looked legit, the business looked legit, and I thought, well, what’s the worst that can happen? It’s Covid, and I’m not going to be so proud. I can’t accept 10 bucks. And I did it. So, cut and paste the article took me two or three minutes.
A couple of hours later, I get 10 bucks in my PayPal, and this thing escalated. And I’m a successful business coach. I’ve done six figures in every single year that I’ve been a coach. COVID ultimately actually ended up being my second most successful year financially in the practice. But this thing kind of snowballed. And it was then that the company places 20 or 30 orders a month, and then another company comes along, sees we’re working with them, so then that escalates, and I’m the pricing and money mindset guy. So I push my prices up, and then our revenue, you know, doubles from those sponsorships. And in December this year, we did our first 10k month, but that’s over 5 years.
And if I’d been too proud to accept that, that 10 bucks back in 2020, that business, and that. And now it’s very much a passive business. I have a guy called Tate who runs it for me. I probably spend an hour a week just working with him. Just manage, make strategic decisions in the business, you know, and it’s regularly doing sort of 10 to 12,000 pounds a month, you know, about $15,000 a month. And I think this is a first lesson. Like, first of all, making the transition doesn’t have to be binary. It can be a graduated process.
Once you’ve discovered that thing that you are passionate about that fulfills you, you find it fun. It gives you. Has the potential to give you the freedom that you want as well. And also it can pay the bills. That’s still very important. But quite often you can kind of suck up a bit of a. I’ll, I’ll take a pay cut in order to have the first two a bit more time back and you know, make it money in a bit more of a fun way. But you can make that transition really gradually.
And we’ve worked with people successfully where they’re on a full-time job and they’ll go down to four days a week, three days a week, two days a week because their business starts to sort of grow and turn over more money. And the other thing as well, like you can run some really, as you alluded to with the likes of A.I., you know, we’ve got this global marketplace with fast Internet now. These days, there’s a million and one different ways that you can make money online, you know, relatively straightforwardly if you’re open to just starting off small and then gradually sort of growing it. But I’d say it’s probably like 1 in 10,000 people I know quit their job and instantly make $10,000 a month in their business. It just doesn’t really happen like that. It’s a gradual sort of graduated process.
Yeah, sage advice. I really like that. Right. It’s, you know, a lot of this is, you know, expectation setting and you know, just being honest with yourself, right. About what’s possible. And it’s hard, right, because I. With social media and everything, all we see are these success stories, you know, with these, you know, mega, I mean, billionaires, you know, sent to millionaires like all the time. Right.
But you never hear about all of the learning lessons they took and the trajectory they had to take before they got to actually where they are. So, starting gradually and also having less risk. And one of the things, I’ve actually always been in service businesses, my career, and one of the things that’s great about service businesses is that your overhead is frankly really low. Right. You know, versus, you know, product manufacturing. Right. You’ve got a significant cost up front, and it’s that whole build it, and I hope they come right. But with services, your costs are low.
And then I think the other really big thing for listeners out there to, you know, consider that we talk a lot about on the show is like taxes, right? So if you want to be an entrepreneur, right? One of the best things about it is not only the scalability, right? The flexibility of it and all those things, but your tax base is actually the absolute lowest. You can take, you know, the most amount of tax advantages as a business owner. Right. So, that’s even in Kiyosaki’s book. Right.
His cash flow quadrant. Right. Being a business owner and investor. So that delta, from what you’re making in the W2 job, what you need to actually make to cover your expenses, is likely much less than you’re thinking.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I think there’s other things which you need to, which people may have to have in place. I think, depending on your level of risk tolerance as well, that has quite a big impact on people’s ability to be able to make sound financial decisions. You know, and if somebody’s risk tolerance is low, it might need, might be that they need a bit more security before they actually set up, you know, and jump out of, you know, from a job into running a business. So one of the things I talk a lot about is, you know, what’s your rainy day fund look like? How much do you need to have in a bank somewhere that gives you that security to be able to then make, you know, take that leap of faith and actually start a business up? You can use your side hustle to build up that rainy day fund. And you know, for me that it’s funny though as well. There’s a book called Never Enough. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it or come across it.
It was quite hilarious because. And I’ve, I’ve experienced this when my rainy day fund got to like 5K, I was like, oh, I got 5K. That felt easy. Now go to 10K. And then I got 10K. And I was like, oh, well, I’ll get to 20K next. So it’s like, when is enough? And coming like figuring out what that number is. And in the book Never Enough, they actually talk about these multi-billionaires or multimillionaires, and he interviews them one by one for the book.
And he said it just got to the point where, like the 40 million guy, you know, Steve, he’s making 40 million a year. He wants the boats that Dave’s got down the road and the bigger house and the yard that he’s got, you know, the basketball court in it. And then he goes to Dave’s house, and Dave’s got 80 million net worth, but he wants what, you know, Jeff’s got. And Jeff’s got like the nine-hole golf course and the two bigger yachts and that, you know, and it carries on. He went up to like billionaires and every, every single one of them wanted to have the, you know, what their next, next door neighbor one wanted, and I think as well, like, you have to really heavily focus on like, what’s important to you, what is your dream. So I’ve successfully built my coaching practice up to about $300,000 a year. And there are lots of seven and eight-figure coaches out there who are like, you know, I caught that. The bros, aren’t they? The bros that you see, you know, selling shiny marketing things with the jets and the fast cars and stuff like that.
And I’m like, I get to, with my 300k, I get to lead a really cool life. I get to hang out with my kids, I just meet, you know, greeted my girls when they came home from school. Just now, before we hit record here, I got a wonderful view of this lovely little house, which my wife and I have sort of, you know, spent the weekend outside landscaping the garden with. And you can have a great life with not a huge amount of money these days. And I’ve got sucked in to the whole sort of, of scaling thing several years ago and it almost broke my business because you can actually grow a business too fast. And at one point, it doesn’t sound like a lot now, but the time in the business, I was spending somewhere in the order of about four, four and a half thousand dollars a month on Facebook ads to try and grow the business and get more leads and things like that worked well for eight months, going great guns. And then all of a sudden it just ended like that. We just couldn’t convert off the back of the money we were spending and the leads we were generating.
And it took to figure out what the problem was behind that. And I spoke to numerous experts. None of them can tell me what was wrong with our campaign that transpired. All that happened was, you know, I didn’t have a big enough audience, so I didn’t have enough people coming into the sort of top of the funnel to then filter through to be clients. And I burnt through my warm audiences. So there’s this kind of technical side of marketing and growing a business as well, which you have to learn about on the job, make a few mistakes, and be open to that and adapt when those sorts of things come. But that was a great lesson because I was like, I just didn’t enjoy that process. I was like, That’s not for me.
I’d rather have a business that grows slowly and steadily, brings in a sustainable, recurring revenue each and every month that pays a bit into my pension, it pays a bit into my rainy day fund. I can start to build a really great team around me. To run other aspects of my business, but doesn’t take the edge off it when it comes to like, it has to be fun, that’s like non-negotiable, but it also has to give me the freedom so I can be around, you know, when the kids come home from school.
Yeah, no, absolutely love that. And I think there’s, there’s such a difference, right? Between being rich and being wealthy, you know, and it is again, it’s constantly played up that we need to be rich. Right. It’s kind of in our face, like more material things. But as you poignantly said, right. It’s all about, you know, realizing your dream book, the holistic wealth strategy. That’s step one, which is creating your vision.
You know, what does your vision actually look like? Because money is really just energy, right? To be able to utilize to fulfill that vision. And it really does not have to be material things. And I think running a business it’s very easy to get caught up in some of these. They’re vanity metrics are what I call them. Like gross revenue, for instance. Instance. Right.
You know, someone, someone’s got an eight-figure business, he’s got a nine-figure business. Right. But what is the profit margin? Right. What does the debt load look like? Right. As you know, do you actually have any freedom in running any of those businesses?
Money is really just energy, to be able to utilize for fulfilling your vision.
Yeah, I’m going to go a little bit. Woo woo. Because if that’s okay, I’ll just share.
Yeah, go for it.
So I do vanity metrics have their place, you know, but turnover is vanity, profit, sanity, and cash is king. So you can have that business doing a million bucks a year, you know, minus 100,000 pounds net profit. And because cash flow is poor, you can have a business that’s doing $200,000 with a 100,000 net profit, and cash flow is really strong, making 18, 20k a month. And those are the businesses I like where their cash flow is very strong, very positive. So one of the best things about service-based businesses is that if you structure your packages in such a way that. Well, there are three things that really go into building a service-based. So, first one is what’s the dream outcome you’re delivering for your clients? You’ve got to be hyper-specific on that. The second thing is that it can be delivered over a clearly defined period of time.
So, for example, if there was a fitness coach and they were going to help somebody to, I don’t know, lose 20 pounds over the course of eight weeks, for example, I don’t even know if that’s realistic or not. I’m trying to convert UK to US metrics here, but say 20 pounds over eight weeks and can it be, be can you deliver that for a fixed fee? Well, would it be fair to charge fifteen hundred dollars for that package? And the thing is, what you can do with that package is you can charge up front for it in full if you want to, if that’s how you want to run your business. So you create, you know, 100 positive cash flow cycles within the business. And I think that’s where a lot of, you know where, where a lot of people when they’re starting to think about side hustles are starting up businesses and they look online on social media especially and they’re like I’m going to start up a Shopify shop a store or I’m gonna go on to Tikt monetized on TikTok so I can sell products on there. Or they go for these very, very shiny sort of, you know, marketing-based type businesses. Well there’s actually the cash flow cycles are poor because you deliver a product on Shopify, you’re not going to get paid probably for at least 10 to 14 days at which point you’ve got to re, you know, you’ve got the stock to cycle through and various other things like that. So you know, 12 to 14 days doesn’t sound like much. But if the cash is stopped for 14 days, you’ve got the energy you talked about there, there, well, there’s no energy because you don’t have the cash there.
So service-based businesses in my eyes are the best way to kind of be able to design a business that you like. You can scale it as well as fluctuate it the scale up and down, depending on what resources you’ve got available to you. So starting out it might be that maybe you can only work with if you were a coach, one or two people in your spare time at the weekend, for example, if you can, then get an extra day back. So now you don’t work Fridays anymore, well, all of a sudden, you’ve doubled up on your capacity. If you’re working Friday and Saturday to work with clients and you can start to scale it up if that process to help somebody drop 20 pounds is systemized so it’s teachable, learnable, and repeatable. You could start to train other coaches up to work with your clients, and probably if they don’t know what you know about pricing and packaging and things like that, you could just pay them 20 bucks, 25 bucks an hour to work with those clients. And so now you’ve got additional scalability, a teachable learnability, like a system and process. And then, you know, next thing you know, when you’ve got all five days back of, you know, to run the business, you can be very heavily focused on sort of what we call the key person of influence activities at the top.
So that’s where you’re focusing heavily on sort of brand and assets, marketing assets for your business, and systems and processes, building and training the team. And then you’ve got other people within the business who are then starting to take on responsibility for, you know, the various bits of client fulfillment and admin, finance, and various other tasks like that. So that there are. But again, it’s a graduated sort of process. And I can’t remember what you said at the start, Dave. I think I went off on a bit of a tangent there.
Yeah, that was good. Let’s. Let’s unpack a little bit more. We were talking about kind of, you know, some vanity metrics and things. And how do you write in terms of, you know, running a services business? Right. And creating wealth for yourself? Right. You know, what, what is, what is your approach and philosophy around?
So you mentioned about sort of turnover as being a vanity metric. Actually, I see it being more like the zip code in the GPS because it gives you that direction of travel, which you’re sort of heading in. And at that point, you can then start off on that course or direction, and if there’s a roadblock in the way, you can kind of divert around it and figure it out. So, a good example of this. So let’s say, let’s stick with our personal trainer, our PT, and they want to earn $100,000 a year, perhaps to replace their income from their current job that they’re unhappy in. And we start the pricing conversation, and we say, okay, well, how much are you going to sell that package for? And they say $1,000. So we literally take the big number, the revenue, dream revenue, which they want to get, and divide it by the little number, the package price. So then we get our third metric, which is the number of clients they’ve got to work with in order to get that 100k.
In this case, it’s 100 clients. And quite often, this is the point where their eyes will pop out of their head. And I say, “Oh, my God, there’s no way that I can work with 100 clients.” Like, first of all, like, that’s too many clients for me to work with concurrently. But second of all, like why do I find them? That’s too much. And what, so what we’re looking at is we’ve, we’ve taken that vanity metrics, but it’s, it’s, it’s relevant because it gives us direction and we’ve worked out that our pricing is wrong because it, it doesn’t give us match up with the capacity that we’ve got. So, essentially, we’re kind of just basic like first principles around business. We have supply and demand metrics.
So we’re just talking about our level of supply here. And then I might ask that person, trainer, okay, well, what would a more realistic capacity be for you? How many clients do you feel you would like to work with each year, you know, and keep the fulfillment, the freedom, the finance? And they might say, well, 20 clients. So at that point again, we take the big number 100k, we divide it by 20 clients, and again, their eyes will pop out of their heads at this point because we’re like, well, actually maybe we need to develop a 5k package. What does a 5k personal training package look like for somebody, you know, over the course of 12 months or six months, whatever, like 5K? Oh my God, I thought 1,000 was a lot. And now we’re charging 5K. So you can start to see that getting an idea about this sort of thing, you know, it’s almost like a one-page business plan, just using some basic numbers. What five questions do I ask there? We can sense check whether the business model or idea that you’ve set for yourself holds water or not.
It might be. Then it’s like, well, what you can ask different questions. So this is what I do, obviously as a coach, is then, well, what does, what would a 5K PT package look like? Well, maybe actually they get biweekly training Sessions with you one-to-one. They get WhatsApp support around the clock, you know, obviously within reason. And maybe you do an annual retreat for your clients where you take them away and kind of reward them for working with you for 12 months. So you can be like adding these, like, you know, create the dream sort of coaching package or whatever it might look like, because you’ve got more resources to be able to deliver that dream package. And it’s a bit like I talk about this thing called the sales cycle of doom. So if you don’t charge enough, it’s like sell, deliver, sell, deliver, sell, deliver, sell, deliver.
You’re constantly like having to fulfill clients’ work and get more clients on board and going around in circles essentially, and then you get ill or you have a holiday or something like that, and then you stop for a bit and you start again. It’s like sell, deliver, sell, deliver, off you go. The sales cycle of doom just starts all over again. But imagine that we charge more money for it, and I’m not a big fan of just doubling your prices, and you’ve got to stack extra value in there if you’re going to raise the price. That’s what it gives you the bandwidth to do. But all of a sudden if you charge more money for that product or service, you’ve got more time to deliver a better result or outcome to the client, which on the back end produces better results and more money. So because you become more referable plus they buy other add on services because you’re doing such a great job job which then means you have to do less marketing because if you get more referrals in because you’re doing such a great job, you don’t have to be out there shouting on social media or things like that 24 7. So charging more is like it, it goes against a lot of people’s sort of mindset around how to run a business.
Most people assume we’ve got to drop our prices in order to attract buyers, and that works for places like Walmart because Walmart has something called latent demand. They have people whom I don’t know again. I’ve only been to America three times, so again, I’m probably going to show my naivety around how the shopping system works in America. But going to Walmart, and let’s say you want to buy a loaf of bread and some milk, and then you walk past the beans aisle or the chips aisle, and you go “Oh, there’s a two-for-one on beans, I’ll get some beans.” Okay, so the latent demand is people walking through that shop, then they see an offer and think, “Oh well, whilst I’m here I’ll pick up some extra because it’s on offer.” Most small business owners, especially when you’re starting out, just don’t have that footfall. You don’t have the latent demand. So discounts and offers don’t, and cheap prices don’t attract buyers. What attracts buyers is you.
It’s Dave, who is, you know, ex-captain in the Marines, runs, you know, numerous successful businesses, you know, coaches people around, and talks to people around. Well, wealth has its own unique spin on things. You know, you don’t need to be the best wealth creator. Out there or the best coach in your niche, or anything like that. And the example I always use. So you’re familiar with Jamie Oliver. So he’s a British chef.
Right.
So if you speak to any Michelin star chefs, they will, they’ll scoff. You mentioned Jamie Oliver, and they’re like, I spit on Jamie Oliver. Right, because. Because to many of them, he’s just a school chef, essentially. But what he’s good at is just being Jamie Oliver. He’s quirky, he’s got flowery language, and he makes talking about school meals interesting. Basically, he’s really great at marketing and PR, and he’s got some amazing products with the recipe books, which he creates. Again, he’s great at sort of branding and marketing and being able to kind of get people excited about cooking food again.
But he’s not the best chef, he never will be. And he knows that. And I think this is a thing where a lot of people will, they’ll not start businesses because they don’t see themselves as being the best in that industry or maybe they don’t have as much experience or I won’t charge as much because I’ve only been doing this for a few months. No, if you’re good enough at what you do and you can connect with people and be yourself, you’ll have no trouble getting clients in the long run. And it’s just about being, being really aware of, like, not intellectually, like what value you’re worth, but down here, what am I actually worth? And having a bit more belief behind that. But yeah, essentially you do need to start with that one-page business plan to figure out, how many clients do I need, how much can I charge, how many leads do I need to get in in order to generate, you know, that number of clients for the business?
Pricing isn’t just a number, it’s a reflection of your self-worth and mindset.
Yeah. What are some money mindset barriers that people have?
So the first one is the realization around. Well, it’s interesting, I mean, I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t comment on the deep psychology around money, but it’s something that I’ve studied a lot about. And most of our money blueprint is imprinted on us probably even before many of our memories, our conscious memories came into existence, so when we were children. And typically that’s around, you know, most commonly arguments which happen in the home between mum and dad or mum and mum, dad and dad, you know, around like, oh, you know, can they afford their bills this week? You know, and who’s, who’s going to work harder in order to make, bring more money in? So that we can actually just go and fill up the fridge with some food. And in many cases, quite volatile arguments. Then as you become sort of more conscious, you’re sort of, you know, entering into your teens, you know, oh, Rob, you can’t have that. Those sneakers, because we can’t afford them. We’re not going on holiday this year because we don’t have the money, you know, why is Dad not around? Oh, because he’s always working so hard.
So there are all of these, like, things that we learn as children and, you know, our parents are trying to protect us. And there’s the cliché, you know, money doesn’t grow on trees. Money is the root of all evil. And that’s massively misquoted. That quote is, by the way. It’s that the love of money is the root of all evil, actually, which has a very different meaning behind it when you actually think about it. But there are all these things which our parents say to us to try and protect us, because they didn’t have an abundance. Unfortunately, though, when you become an adult, maybe running a job and running your own household, it’s not helpful then.
But certainly as a business owner, all of our scarcity sort of beliefs around money are very heavily projected because typically what happens is we tend to sell things in the same way that we buy things. So if you walk into a shop and you’re first seeing it, your first response is, “Oh, my God, that’s expensive.” And you put it back on the shelf, shelf. I can guarantee that it will almost be reflected when you actually come to sell something. So somebody will say, “Well, how much is it, Rob?” And then you’ll find yourself retreating like Gollum with the ring, saying, “Almost like $5,000.” Because we don’t want to. Like, it’s. We don’t want to talk about money.
We don’t want to. There’s that doubt or like, are we actually worth it? And things like that. The second thing is, as well, pricing is, especially in terms of money beliefs it has. Or money mindset. Pricing has a massive influence on two of our brains. So we have our intellectual brain and then our subconscious brain. So, probably, maybe I can try and illustrate this. If you’re open to it.
I can just ask. We’ll ask you a few questions, and we’ll see if we can demonstrate it. So is there a product, Dave, that you’re thinking about kind of launching a.
Product or service, actually? Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so can you? Do you want to share? Can you give me a bit of?
A little bit? Yeah. So we actually have a software product. The product that we are building. We’ve already launched the MVP and now we’re taking it out to market to help real investors solve that same problem of, you know, how do you, you know, measure and manage your building your wealth outside of conventional means? Stocks, bonds, mutual funds. How can I track and actually see, you know, my, my projection towards financial independence? How can I measure my tax rate so that I have it dead set in my crosshairs and I’m focused on improving that? How can I do asset allocation across multiple different asset classes? How can I share with my spouse? Like, “Hey, honey, we have these 13 different private assets and they all have different terms, and what is that doing to our cash flow?” What does my balance sheet look like if something were to happen to you? You know, how are you doing that and making sure you have progress? So similar to your example of like getting healthy and getting on the scale every day and tracking towards some kind of plan. We all have like 23 different spreadsheets on all of these different, you know, how we’re kind of tracking our wealth. But if you could have one centralized thing to make, intelligent decision making, utilizing AI, and the latest tech stack to be able to get there.
That’s, ‘s the goal of our latest software product.
Yeah, nice one, one. It sounds very awesome to. How much were you thinking of sort of charging for that?
So the base model will be 400 a month.
400 a month. Okay.
Yeah.
And so the base, base model for that. So what are the other models? What’s the other sort of breakdown of the price?
There’ll be a tier base, there’s a B2B version in addition to a B2C version. And we are still kind of working through what those look like, but there’ll be tiered pricing, so it’ll be a discounted model per volume, the B2B side, and you know, and then there’s probably like a, you know, gold, silver, platinum in terms of functionality. So.
Okay, because. So out of curiosity, would you, would you do any sort of like coaching alongside that?
Yes.
Product as well?
Yeah, there’s implementation support to get everything set up as well as provide. Basically, have a financial advisor kind of help you with some of the, you know, population of the data and some of the initial decisions, decision making.
Okay, and what, what about on an ongoing basis in order to sort of help coach people around sort of wealth building once they’ve got all their data in there?
Yeah, that’s going to be available as well
Well, on the 400 plan.
Yeah.
Wow. Okay, so we’re talking that’ll, it’ll be.
An ad, that’ll be an add on the service, will be an add on to this.
How much, what are you thinking of charging for that?
1200.
So 1200 a month?
Well, no, that’s 1200 a year will be kind of the setup fee and have some type of support to it.
Okay. So that feels a little on the low side, potentially.
Yeah, we’re still, we’re still early in the, kind of working through all of that. So those prices aren’t set in stone at all. That’s just some initial draft and some ideas. Yeah.
Okay, what, what if maybe in like three years in the future we’re having this conversation again, and actually maybe you’re charging 12, 12k for that.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Okay. So the good thing is that, so we first of all, we future project and we’re like, you’re absolutely fine with that. You didn’t put up any resistance at all. But we come back to now, present day, and you’ve got that setup fee, which you’re thinking about charging at the moment. And then what if you had to charge 12k for that today?
Yeah, I mean, we want to be able to deliver value. So that value, know it’s, it’s going to be a trajectory to be able to build to that. So, and we’re, you know, we’re kind of working on that, but I have no, I have no barriers as long I always want to ensure that I’m over delivering for clients. Like you’re, you’re receiving more value than you know, than you’re paying for. For sure.
Yeah.
Right.
And I’m not going to coach you on that. But there’s a, when people say that again, that’s because generally there’s been something in the past which has happened, which you’re like, I feel like I haven’t received value for money for something which I bought. So therefore that felt painful. So when I sell something, I want to make sure the clients get value for their money. So that’s just one little example there. So when we’re thinking about pricing, quite often people see it as binary. So it’s too cheap, too expensive. It’s yes, no, I’m in or I’m out.
So at the moment, you’ve seen that there’s actually bandwidth between the pricing, where it’s like a thousand dollars today, and there’s a potential to charge $12,000 for it in the future. We’ve actually got a load of numbers in the middle there. So, I’m going to challenge you to potentially raise that price today. So, because I think the head and heart, I think there’s a difference there which I’ve, I may have, may or may have picked up on, you can tell me if I’m right or wrong. Okay. So I kind of want you just to tune into your body and not try and hold a poker face. Just allow your body to kind of do the talking for now. Okay. And you don’t necessarily have to say anything.
If you feel like you want to, then please do. But I’m going to say some numbers, and let’s see what happens. Remember, this is selling that package at a higher price as of today. Okay. So thousand dollars, $1500, $1800, $3000, $3600, $4500, $5000, $6000. See, we haven’t broken at all yet. So yeah, so seven and a half thousand dollars, $9,000. My question is like why aren’t you selling it for more today?
Well, first of all, I mean the product isn’t even launched, or we’re building out the whole next thing, so it’s really in progress. And then we’re thinking through the different packages right now. So I honestly don’t have anything solidified. But I know there’s an interesting model. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it on the services side, but it’s all about the cost of a job. Job. Right. So, what is the cost of a job? Right.
So, for instance, if I can provide visibility into someone’s passive income modeling and then optimize their portfolio by say 5%. Right. By having this visibility on, you know, 5 million, $10 million portfolio, that’s absolutely massive. So it’s way more than 12,000. Right. You know, if you got, what is.
The number then, if we went up to like 25k, 50k, 90k.
Yeah.
Again, where do we start to go outside your comfort zone for something like that?
Well, it just depends on what functionality we drive in, what version, and some of those versions involve services packaged with the software. Right. So we’re kind of going, working through that. But I don’t really have, I don’t have any pricing limitations because that, that, yeah, the yield, the ROI on what you could get. I mean, just, I was thinking about it too. This is another one we talk about a lot, like tax. Right. So everyone is always interested in the yield on an investment.
I can make 12%, 15%, 18%, whatever it is. But what if, if you put your tax rate in the crosshairs of something that you tracked and managed on a regular basis, and each year you’re bringing down your taxes by 5%, 10%, 15% just because you’re managing it and then you’re working proactively with a tax planner to be able to get there. I mean, that’s massive. And you look at the compounding of that over the next 10 to 20 years. Years. It’s huge. Because now you have actual visibility. It’s kind of like you’re measuring like, let’s say, “Okay, I want to lose weight, but I also want to improve my body composition.”
Well, how do you know you’re improving your body composition unless you’re getting on the scale on a regular incremental basis and showing, hey, I just lost like a half a percent, you know, in the past seven days. Like, that’s huge to me. So I’m eating right now. I’m going to keep eating right and keep finding more ways to kind of optimize.
Well, I think the price you’ve set then, based on what you’ve said, is way too low. Just for that initial, that set up and support, I think for the first 12 months, I think you could, I mean, what I said, 125k, and you didn’t even break a sweat or smile or react to that. And this is the difference. So intellectually, you’ve tried to figure out how much you should charge for it, and you’re like, well, a thousand dollars set up kind of makes sense. But your heart actually knows that you’re worth significantly, well, more than 100 times more than that. So I would question. So I’ll rationalize this just in case people are actually listening to this versus watching it. So as I was going through the gears with those numbers, I was just looking for a couple of inflections on Dave’s body language.
Just some people are like, they have a knee-jerk reaction, literally like a gut reaction, like when, when you say the number and you know you’ve hit the limit. Sometimes people, the corners of their mouth just start to smile because they can’t actually believe that that’s what they’re actually worth. Things like that. You, you didn’t react to any of the numbers, as I estimate, escalated those, and kept dropping them in there. So that tells me your heart knows that actually you’re massively underselling that initial setup. I don’t know what the number is because you know, but I think it should be at least probably 10 times or 15 times, what you suggested in the first instance. You know, and actually I, I would challenge you to take that to the first 10 people that you’re going to be onboarding onto the system and position it at like a 15K setup to them because of that. Exactly.
The reasons that you just said there are, you know, yes, we got the capital growth on your wealth, but also there’s the potential tax savings as well. So you’re coming at both ends in that. And that’s like what, hundreds of thousands potentially for some of the more wealthy people that you could be saving or making them.
Yeah, no, great points, great points. Yeah, good stuff. Really appreciate that, Robin. Just, yeah. Thinking through that and creating the value. And I love your analogy too, around actually how, how you buy, how you sell. Right. And that is, that is a really good exercise, I think, for people.
I won’t talk about my wife’s shopping habits, though.
Yeah, share mine, either.
Yeah. Well, this has been an awesome conversation. You know, so many insights, I think, on people who are maybe thinking about setting up a services based business, already have a business or again, you know, it’s, it’s times like this where we can get just different ways of thinking about our business, different things about thinking about our wealth, that we can just get that golden nugget and get that insight. Right. And kind of share that with others. So, Robin, if you could give the listeners just one piece of advice about how they could accelerate their own wealth trajectory, what would it be?
Yeah, I’ve noticed that there’s a trend of very smart people who will talk themselves out of an idea or taking an opportunity. And I think we’re faced with eight sliding doors moments throughout our lives. Somebody did a study on this, and I’ve certainly experienced some of those sliding doors moments when I’ve missed the opportunity because I haven’t acted on a thought or an idea, or a feeling that I’ve had. So my invitation is to whoever’s listening or watching this, if you’ve got this idea that’s bubbling away, kind of eating up a little bit inside of you, just take a shot. Because it could be the thing which kind of gives you that greatest opportunity, the freedom which you want, the wealth which you want to create for yourself. And it could be really fun in the process as well, rather than kind of, you know, if you’re sitting behind a desk doing a job which you don’t really enjoy that much and missing time with your family. Maybe now it’s time to take your shot and actually get out there and, you know, as Nike didn’t quite say, because there’s an extra letter here.
Great. No, that’s, that’s awesome. And wanted to also offer the listeners, you’ve got a new book out that you’re graciously offering to deliver to the audience, and what is the best place they can find that?
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s signed copies, actually of my book. Take your shot. I’ve got a stack of them ready to find new homes. So if you just want to head over to Fearless Biz Tys for take your shot, make sure that I sign those and get them down to Pauline at the post office and send them out to you. Awesome.
Really appreciate your time today and insights. Thanks so much, Robin.
My pleasure. Thank you, Dave.
Cheers.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holistic wealth strategy.com that’s holisticwealthstrategy.com if you’d like. To learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com that’s pantheoninvest.com.