I Make $25K/Month Coaching People on How to Build Successful Businesses
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hey friends, I am Robin, a Dad, Husband, cyclist, and surfer based in the South West of the UK. I am a business coach and the Founder of Fearless Business which is a business coaching accelerator for coaches, consultants, and freelancers.
I am a bestselling author of several books notably Online Business Startup (sold 15,000 copies) and more recently Take Your Shot (800+ 5* reviews).
I run a successful podcast called, The Fearless Business Podcast and speak at events internationally.
Many of the clients we work with are what I class as “grass-roots” one-person businesses. They join the accelerator because they are trapped exchanging time for money and want to learn how to productize their offer, raise their prices, and improve their sales processes.
The goal behind the accelerator is to build a thriving community of Fearless Business owners who are confidently charging more and doing great things. The accelerator is a group programme with lifetime access for a single set fee, and typically results can be seen within the first 3 months of them joining the programme.
We define their result by way of:
- Being able to pitch their new product to 10-20 prospective clients
- Making their first sale at the new price and
- They went on to achieve the financial goals they set when they joined the Accelerator.
I do work with a small number of businesses on a 1-to-1 basis. Perhaps 5-6 per year but these businesses tend to be what I class as “agency-sized” businesses of 2-10 people.
Coaching is the main revenue stream in my business. I have several other revenue streams now which include speaking at conferences and events, content sponsorships, book sales and publishing, and associate coaching roles.
All in all, I bring in £20k ($25k) in a typical month. This is working around 8-10 core hours of coaching per week, I don’t work Fridays as a rule and aim to take the majority of August off each year to spend with my family during the summer.
Much to my wife’s dismay, I ended up locking myself in my office for several days between Christmas and the New Year to complete the course. This required me to film edit, and organise 30-40 new videos… into something resembling a professional course.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
From 2004 to 2016 I founded and ran a small local marketing agency predominantly doing website design and branding. During this time we innovated around building a 1-Day Branding Workshop, essentially, a logo design in a day, and charged 3-10x the going rate for graphic design work compared to our competitors. I grew the revenue of that business to £225,000 with a small team of 3-4 employees.
In 2016 I got tired of the daily grind of running an agency (and didn’t know what I know now unfortunately) and I chose to sell the agency for a modest sum of circa £90k after taxes which I took as an earnout over 2 years. As word spread that I’d sold the agency, other agency owners started coming to me asking how to grow and sell their agencies, so I started informally mentoring and speaking.
My life coach pushed me to start coaching in the latter part of 2016 and so Fearless Business came to fruition. I had one goal, which was to earn more than my agency but with it just being me and no team. I’ve gone on to do 6-figures every year since then.
Initially, I was mostly doing 1-to-1 work with clients, in my first year, I enrolled 44 clients. Another coach once asked me how I became so successful in my first year, I quickly responded with, “I’m curious, how many consultations have you done recently?” She responded that she had done 4-5 so I asked, “Over how long?” and she explained that this was 4-5 consultations over a year. I did 125 consultations during my first year alone. It was the sheer volume of activity that I put a lot of my success down to during the early years.
However, that volume of activity is also unsustainable so in October 2018 I shifted from 1-to-1 coaching work to online group coaching, and the Fearless Business Accelerator was born.
By early December 2018, I’d enrolled 24 clients into the first cohort (at £897 each) and when we started in January 2019 I’d enrolled a further 6 clients. We launched with 30 members, it was incredibly exciting. I was blown away with doing a nearly £30k product launch in such a short period.
I chose very quickly to shift the programme into an “evergreen” enrolment as I still had a waiting list of people waiting to join, increasing the price to £1,500 and very quickly to £3,000.
The format hasn’t changed much since, it works! We run weekly group coaching calls, I have an extensive online portal, now 5 years of archived call recordings and I also offer 1-to-1 Turbo Calls as well, these are short 15-minute calls around a specific challenge or problem.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
When I started marketing the Accelerator in 2018 I’d had ten professionally shot videos made which became the foundations for the online portal. However, I felt there was a lot of content missing. And having pre-sold 24 clients onto the programme that was due to be launched on 6th Jan 2019 I realized that I was well short of where the programme needed to be.
So, much to my wife’s dismay, I ended up locking myself in my office for several days between Christmas and the New Year to complete the course. This required me to film and edit 30-40 new videos, as well as organize a number of my challenge videos and resources into something resembling a professional course.
It was important to me that clients received something of significant value upon signing up. So, alongside access to the community (Facebook and WhatsApp groups), I designed a Welcome Pack.
I compiled, edited, and designed a 100-page workbook to accompany the portal content. And then bought 30 copies of each of my favorite books (Profit First, Built to Sell, and Detox Declutter and Dominate) plus a couple of my resources (my book Marketing Machine, an activity planner and a commemorative medal) which all make up the Welcome Pack clients receive on joining the Accelerator. It’s expensive but a wonderful moment of delight that clients love receiving.
I donate $20 to 4Ocean whenever a client joins as well as I believe businesses should be a force for good. Being a surfer, water charities are close to my heart. Clients receive a 4Ocean bracelet to remind them of the donation.
In designing the content for the accelerator there were 3 core pillars that I’d identified during my agency days which helped me to scale the agency and make it more profitable:
1.) Productising Architecture - Most business owners have one or more service offerings in their business but they only focus on these core products and “hope” they sell some of them. But there are 7 Steps in the product architecture process, from attracting customers via valuable marketing assets, to qualifying clients, the consultations/sales process, the core offer, follow-on products (building sustainable, recurring revenue), and finally social proof.
2) Pricing - Most business owners undersell themselves, or play it safe and sell their time-for-money. Let’s face it, it’s much easier to sell something 20 times at £50 than it is to sell one thing for £1,000. I work hard with clients to uncover their money story, dig into their money mindset, and challenge them on their beliefs around their self-worth. Through a gradual process, we slowly build their confidence in their pricing so they can confidently charge more.
3) Sales - Most small business owners have never had any formal sales training, and also I have a big problem with how a lot of sales training is delivered. Trainers offer the theory and then send their people out into the wild with very little feedback. So, we do Sales Role Play on our weekly calls to build muscle memory around sales, and then I encourage all Fearless Crew to get into the habit of recording their sales calls so I can deliver a critique, second by second, and watch how they’re applying their new sales knowledge out in the wild. It’s incredibly effective.
Our clients typically get results within 3-6 months, so it’s a heavy lift to begin with and then things settle down, but they continue to get value from the group for several years after.
Describe the process of launching the business.
The very first website I launched, in 2016, under robinwaite.com was just a one-page website that I created using about.me. It’s still live, even now!
Having spent 12 years building websites, I could finally take off my web designer hat. I was now a business coach. So I needed a simple online presence in case anyone checked me out after meeting at a networking event.
This was ok to a point, but I started to release marketing assets and lead magnets to my growing audience. It wasn’t possible to deliver lead magnets via the about.me page.
In 2017 I decided to design and launch the very first iteration of the Fearless Business Accelerator. I purchased the fearless.biz domain and built a very basic website using my old HTML knowledge from the agency days.
I created a landing page for the Accelerator which had a video of me introducing the programme and what clients would expect to get from the course. Underneath the video, I had a simple application that offered people the chance to pay in full or pay over 3 installments.
The costs were very low with this being an online course, I had no costs for hiring venues, etc however I did have to upgrade my Zoom license so I could support more people. The workbooks and welcome packs worked out to be approximately £40-50 per person to create, pack and ship.
I was fortunate that because my book, Online Business Startup, had sold quite well and with the networking I’d done in the first 2-3 years, I’d already built up an email list of approximately 2,000 and a Facebook Group of close to 1,200 members. Having those communities was key to the success of the launch.
The Facebook Group had been slightly neglected and I knew it wasn’t 100% full of my ideal client so I went through a process of “waking up the group”. This meant kicking out inactive members and doing daily posts for a 2-3 week period. I ended up removing about 400 people from the group and 500+ from my email list, but what I ended up with was a smaller cohort of raving fans, excited about what I was launching.
The posts and email sequence were designed to get people excited about coaching and being a part of a community of business owners who wanted to confidently charge more and do more with the services they offered.
The process I used was something called a Product Launch Formula which Jeff Walker talks about in his book, Launch. After warming the audience up for 2 weeks, I opened the doors for applications for 72 hours and enrolled 24 people.
My goal was 30 enrolments, so I continued to nurture those who had missed the open-cart period and was able to close out with 32 sales in the end.
I used a combination of chatting with people in Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, answering their questions, I ran several open Q&A sessions, and even a trial group coaching session. Some people needed a quick 1-to-1 call, and while the launch felt busy, with lots of moving parts it required very little of my time.
I ran a single launch event down at the Aerospace Museum in Bristol, which was loads of fun. The costs started to spiral with the event, costs rose over £3,000. I put a post out on Facebook offering a “unique opportunity to sponsor an event” with 100+ business owners.
And immediately got 5 offers from local businesses to sponsor the event at £500 each just about covering the costs. I didn’t get many enrolments from that event, however, it was great for my profile and several guests from the event did eventually go on to join over time.
My proudest moment though, my Mum came and helped out at the event - the photo below is of the both of us standing underneath the wing of the Concorde in the museum.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
During the first 6 months, I made several pivotal changes to the programme.
Originally when I launched the Accelerator it was a 20-week programme. I experimented with making it a 12-week programme however this was too short. Around week 10 clients complained as they felt they were about to lose access to the community and training and this didn’t sit well with me.
I experimented with an ongoing retainer to keep access to everything (on top of the original enrolment fee) but this created friction as it involved a second sales cycle and we noticed a big drop off. The feedback was mostly that people had all of the information they needed from the programme and wanted time to execute it.
The community grew to about 50 Crew Members but churn started to match enrolments. It was a very frustrating period. Especially as many new clients came from referrals and if the community wasn’t growing neither were the referrals.
In January 2020 I made a Fearless decision! I offered the Accelerator with lifetime access (with a couple of caveats) with the main objective being to grow the community.
At this point, the investment for the programme had tipped over £3k and we were able to structure the investment for the programme so that there was an enrolment fee and clients could pay down the balance over 6, 12, or 18 months. Knowing that when it’s paid-in-full they get ongoing access to the programme (which includes the weekly calls, portal, and turbo calls).
I often get asked how I came up with the price/investment for the Accelerator. It was a combination of two things, firstly demand; my profile was growing and I got a lot of inquiries from people wanting to work with me.
The second factor was “Customer Lifetime Value”. I worked out the value of a customer staying for 3 years on a fixed monthly fee alongside how much input was required on my part to help them achieve their dream outcome for their business.
Our clients typically get results within 3-6 months, so it’s a heavy lift to begin with and then things settle down, but they continue to get value from the group for several years after.
It was a really simple calculation, imagine someone subscribed for 2-3 years at £100/month…I’ll take the total and charge that to the client.
It works. Clients love the fact that it’s a fixed fee for the programme and the flexibility of payment plans reduces friction in the sales process.
This brought about a renewed energy, I invited back some alumni Crew to join on the lifetime membership, and during the lockdown (great timing for an online coaching programme) we went on to enroll 44 new Crew Members.
If one marketing activity is powerful enough to break a system I’d designed and relied upon then you know it’s effective…Don’t be afraid to let things break.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Right now the investment for the Fearless Business Accelerator is £5,400. The community is now at 150+ Crew Members and engaged and thriving. My long-term goal is to hit 300+ members.
Conversion rates sit at about 1:4 which I’m happy with. I want access to the Accelerator to be exclusive. People can access my books, Podcast interviews, videos, and free courses if they’re not ready to invest.
We currently have clients in Canada, the USA, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Shanghai, Hong Kong, UAE, and several countries across Europe. It makes me incredibly proud to have a truly international audience now spanning the globe.
Many of my clients come from speaking engagements, podcast interviews, and from reading my book, Take Your Shot. I have a goal to give away 100+ copies of the book every month. This is a matter of knowing my numbers. On average, for every 100 books I give away, I enroll 2+ clients. This year I’ve gifted 3,000+ copies of the book. There is a cost to this in terms of printing and postage. It works out to be about £2 to print a book, and £3 on average to ship it. I do sell a lot of books as well so the costs roughly cancel each other out and it’s a worthwhile investment in marketing as I know my ROI from giving the book away.
More recently I guested on popular YouTuber, Ali Abdaal’s Deep Dive Podcast. It’s gone on to be viewed 150,000 times and generated 1,300+ leads for me in just four months. This resulted in 15 clients joining the Fearless Crew during those four months and £100k+ in additional revenue.
It continues to bring in leads and inquiries. I was very intentional about getting onto the podcast as I knew Ali and I shared a similar audience. I did underestimate how busy it would make me though. I’d planned a quiet month in August but was overrun with calls. The challenge is that I like the personal nature of still doing 1-to-1 sales calls with prospective clients. However, it’s created a huge bottleneck for me.
I’ve purposefully kept my marketing costs as low as possible. Overall with my software subscriptions and book costs my spending ranges between £1-1,5k per month. My cost per acquisition is therefore quite low and I’m able to focus on doing a small number of high-value marketing activities each year.
To get an idea of the first 6 months of my financial year to date, the income and expenditure to support a coaching business here is a snapshot of my profit and loss account:
The operating expenses are relatively similar month-in and month-out. But you can see that the revenue fluctuates from month to month depending on the enrolments. I’ve also recently added an extra revenue stream with content sponsorships due to my social media following and increased website traffic.
The interview with Ali Abdaal was eye-opening. As far as marketing goes it was easy and effortless and one of the most successful marketing activities I’ve ever done (aside from perhaps launching the Accelerator). The interview came from being super intentional about my marketing strategy this year and focusing on just 2-3 really specific activities, the Deep Dive interview being one of them.
I believe in “giving without taking” so to thank Ali and the team I’ve volunteered some coaching time for them as a thank you and to further solidify the partnership.
Heading into 2024 I’m going to be redesigning my sales process and customer journey replacing the 1-to-1 calls with a 90-minute Group Workshop either weekly or twice per month. This will hopefully save me approximately 8-10 hours per week of calls and follow-up calls.
My worry is whether it takes away from the personal side of what I’ve created with Fearless Business, but honestly, I’m burning out with the volume of inquiries and lead flow, so it makes sense to optimize the process, test, and measure the results and keep iterating.
I’m mindful too of setting a good example to my Crew Members. They can’t have a coach who is burning the candle at both ends. I can take my learnings from this back to the Crew to help them evolve their businesses based on what I learn.
And marketing-wise, I’ll be looking to replicate the success of the Deep Dive interview with other influential people. Partnerships like these are incredibly important in growing a business. It’s hard in 2024 for a small business owner to grow an audience without spending 93 hours a day posting on social media, especially with the responsibility of a family as well. Strategic partnerships where someone already has your audience is a much better leverage of time provided it works commercially for all involved.
As an idea of how the business is tracking, and bearing in mind that I am only 6 months into the 2023/24 financial year, I’m on track to hit £200k this year:
Through a combination of diversifying my revenue streams adding in professional spelling and sponsorships over the past 4-5 years.
What’s interesting is that during the Pandemic 2020/21 was my previous best financial year. Those who were taking their business seriously wanted to invest in their business that year to ensure they stayed ahead of the curve and also for the extra emotional support during that time. We introduced a Weekly Mindset Call alongside our traditional Weekly Coaching Call to help people with their emotional struggles during, what was, an incredibly scary time for many.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The biggest mistake I’ve had in the past is two-fold; firstly not doing my due diligence when enrolling clients and/or potential partners. Sadly I’ve been bitten several times by unscrupulous people.
They will see your success and want a shortcut. It’s just part of being in business and the spotlight. Lots of good people will gravitate towards you but so will some bad eggs. Your job is to be slightly skeptical of everyone and weed out the bad eggs.
Secondly, being legally savvy. Ensure you have legal contracts and agreements with clients. In the start, I was naive and assumed everything would run fine on a handshake. Again, as per my first point, some people will try it on. Maybe ending agreements early or stopping their payments without your knowledge or consent.
So have a lawyer draft up a legally binding contract and make sure you use it!!
On a positive note, having spent 19 years running various businesses now, I have seen many different approaches to business, in particular marketing.
I have to say this, social media is the biggest time-suck out there right now heading into 2024. I see so many business owners turning themselves inside and out, spending several hours daily, posting multiple times a day across multiple social media platforms…and getting really poor results.
My advice, if this is you, is to stop doing social media right now and look at bigger and better opportunities. I am incredibly fortunate to have guested on podcasts with the likes of Ali Abdaal. And that single two-hour conversation has netted me countless clients and £100k in business in the first four months alone. It was easy and effortless. There was work to get the gig in the first instance, lots of work. But as marketing activities go it was the single most effective piece of marketing I have ever done in the last 19 years.
By all means, if you know a better way to generate 1,300+ leads in four months, then email me and let me know!! I am all ears.
This one interview pressure-tested my sales processes too…and broke them, for the first time in 8 years since founding the Fearless Business. If one marketing activity is powerful enough to break a system I’d designed and relied upon then you know it’s effective.
That would be my final learning here, don’t be afraid to let things break. There are four stages a business cycles through roughly every 2-3 years:
- Consolidation - This happens after a sustained period of growth, the business feels like it’s built on stable foundations, and you feel congruence (“I designed my business to work this way!”) and any problems are easy to fix.
- Imposter - Things have been the same for a while, doubt starts to creep in, you wonder when things are going to start going wrong, uncertainty lurks and you sense a lack of clarity.
- Fear Zone - Your team starts playing up and asking for more money, your revenue/profits may dip and customers keep on creating problems. You think this is the end.
- Breakthrough - When your back is against the wall you are forced to solve problems in creative ways, all of a sudden your revenue/profits take a huge leap forward, team spirit is high and business is fun again.
Whenever I talk about this with a room full of business owners they can all tell me which of the four stages they are currently in. The good news is that a big breakthrough is always around the corner and if you stick it out (think Simon Sinek’s Infinite Game) then you’ll be fine.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Some of my favorite tools include:
- Webflow - Managing my websites and personal blog
- ToDoIst - Keeping me on track with my daily tasks and BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals!)
- PipeDrive - Following up with Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
- ScoreApp - A great tool for qualifying prospects before speaking with them i.e. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Xero - I’m obsessed with the numbers in my business and check in with Xero almost daily so that I always know my tax, VAT, and cash position. Any business owner who shies away from the numbers will likely have a shock in the future!
- Starling - For banking Starling is excellent, the savings “Spaces” ring-fence money for various things. It helps you to apply the Profit First principles to your money.
- PayPal and Stripe - With international clients, it’s important for people to be able to pay you no matter where they are in the world. And I always say, “If you’re worried about PayPal/Stripe fees then you’re not charging enough!”
- Google Analytics - What gets measured, gets improved. Keeping tabs on my website traffic and conversions means I can measure the lead indicators and be curious about where leads are coming from.
- WhatsApp - For communicating with prospects, clients, and my team. My favorite feature is the VoiceNote feature.
- Audible - I rarely have time to pick up a physical book these days so prefer listening to books on the go.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Oversubscribed and Key Person of Influence are two fantastic books by Daniel Priestley, Founder of Dent Global. The KPI Methodology was very influential in shaping my brand.
When it comes to scaling and selling a business Built to Sell by John Warrilow is utterly brilliant. It’s a story told similarly to Take Your Shot about an agency owner who meets a mentor and grows and sells his agency.
The Deep Dive Podcast by Ali Abdaal is excellent for anyone interested in productivity, business, and entrepreneurship.
And for budding coaches out there The Prosperous Coach by Rich Litvin and Steve Chandler is excellent if you want to know how to enroll high-paying coaching clients and how to have powerful coaching conversations with your clients.
Chris Do runs a fabulous YouTube channel called The Futur and has outlined his thoughts in his book A Pocket Full of Do. His channel is all about personal branding for creatives and creative agencies and he too talks a lot about pricing, value, and self-worth.
Finally, Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz is the holy grail when it comes to understanding advertising and copywriting. If a copywriter or marketeer DOESN’T have their physical copy of this book then run a mile. It was written in 1966 so predates internet marketing and sets the gold standard for marketing psychology. It’s the ONLY book that lives on my desk permanently and that I refer to daily. You’ll have to look harder than Amazon for a copy of this book too (or ask me where to find it!!)
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
I often see people starting out underselling themselves. A good example is newly certified coaches and therapists who have been told to do 100 hours of free coaching/therapy work. This is total bunkum. All this is teaching you is that you aren’t worth anything. When you go out into the market it is important to be at the more expensive end of the pricing bandwidth. The more expensive you are the less competition (the red line in the diagram below) there is:
Most people assume that being the most expensive will prevent them from getting clients. Yes, you may convert fewer clients or customers, however, your profit margins will increase and also being the most expensive signals to the market that you are a scarce resource instead of a cheap commodity. Rare products tend to be more desirable.
A good conversion rate on most service/client businesses is about 1:5 to 1:3 so you’re turning away more clients than you’re taking on. You want more, “No’s” than “Yeses!”. A dream business is one with half the clients and double the profit.
My second top tip is around productizing services and how to do this well, a product requires 3 key ingredients:
- What is the dream outcome your client desires?
- Can the dream outcome be delivered within a fixed period of time?
- And for a fixed fee?
When you can articulate the value around these three key ingredients you have every right to be the most expensive in your market.
Finally, there is such a thing as a “bad customer” and the “customer isn’t always right” especially when it comes to your business. They don’t know how you work, what your systems or processes are, what results they can expect, or even how they will feel when they buy and experience your products…therefore how can they always be right?
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Right now I’m not hiring for any specific roles. I’d love to work with a local videographer to help me capture footage for my YouTube channel, although they are hard to find in The Cotswolds!! Or even someone who wants to learn videography and can capture footage and send it to my editor. And potentially someone who can then share short-form video content efficiently across Shorts, Reels, and TikTok.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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