How Robin Waite sold his design agency and built a six-figure coaching business

At Founder Reports, we publish in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs that give behind-the-scenes access to show how they grew their businesses. This story features Robin Waite, the founder of Fearless Business.

Robin Waite ran a successful design agency for over a decade but eventually sold it to escape the busyness of agency life. After selling the agency, Robin started a coaching business to help others avoid the same feelings of unfulfillment that he experienced.

In this interview, Robin goes deep into the strategies he's used to grow his coaching business while also maintaining a healthy work-life balance and keeping his family first.

Robin's lessons are practical and applicable to all kinds of entrepreneurs and founders, and you're sure to come away with at least a few tactics you can implement right away.

Key Takeaways

⚡ The power of personal branding
📚 How Robin constantly uses free books to land new clients
🎙️ How Robin got 1,300 leads and £135k of new business from a podcast interview
💸 Why pricing is the biggest mistake Robin sees from his clients

Overview

• Business Name: Fearless Business
• Website URL: https://www.robinwaite.com/
• Founder: Robin Waite
• Business Location: Online (UK)
• Year Started: 2016
• Number of Employees/Contractors/Freelancers: 3 Associate Coaches and 1 full-time VA

How much revenue and profit does the business generate?

Currently, my monthly revenue is averaging £20k/$25k per month for the financial year 2023/24 and our projected revenue for this year is forecast to be $250k with a net profit of approximately $125k.

Tell us about yourself and your business.

I am a husband and Dad first and foremost. My girls are now 9 & 7 and thankfully my career means I am around at home a lot to be able to do school runs and so forth. Outside of the home I am a keen cyclist and surfer and have been known to cycle down hills (with my cycling club) at 50+mph.

I run a coaching practice, called Fearless Business, where I mostly help coaches, consultants, and freelancers to escape charging hourly/day rates, package up their offer, and then confidently charge more money for it.

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How does your business make money?

I run two coaching programmes. The Fearless Business Accelerator is a group coaching programme where we have weekly coaching calls and provide accountability to our clients. The current investment for that programme is £4,500, but for that clients get lifetime access to the programme, which I feel offers great value for money for businesses looking to grow.

Outside of that, I do also offer 1-2-1 business coaching sessions as well. These tend to be for what I consider to be “agency-sized” businesses of 2+ employees. They tend to have bigger problems around systems, scaling, HR, and accounting. 1-2-1 starts from £12k now and I only work with maybe 5-6 clients per year on a 1-2-1 basis.

Alongside my core coaching sessions, I am an associate coach on several other programmes, including Creative Life run by Matt Essam, Pet Passion to Profit with Bill Betts, and Shifts to Success run by Alexander Seery. These are regular group coaching sessions.

I have several paid speaking engagements per year, and due to my audience and website traffic now I have started to acquire sponsorships for my content, which makes up a small portion of my income.

What was your inspiration for starting the business?

The business was a bit of a happy accident with a sad story and a happy ending! While out on a ride with my cycling club, I broke down one day as we were returning home. In that moment, I realised I was feeling unfulfilled with my agency (I ran the agency from 2004 to 2016) and wanted to escape the busyness of agency life. I decided to close the agency but also knew that I wanted to help others avoid feeling like I did.

How and when did you launch the business?

I launched Fearless Business in 2016 after exiting my marketing agency. I was lucky enough to have a 3 year earn-out from the agency which allowed time for me to think about my next move. After selling the agency I was approached by several freelancers and agencies who were interested in mentoring around how to build and sell their businesses, so I almost fell into coaching.

How much money did you invest to start the business?

There was actually very little expense in starting up the coaching practice. Essentially with it being just me talking to clients, I had small amounts to invest in things like an iPad Pro to be able to capture my client notes.

My biggest investment was a marketing event which I put on to promote the business. I booked the Aerospace Museum in Bristol to host the event. When the expenses started to climb north of £3k, I put a message out to my network and advertised sponsorship spaces available. I ended up with five sponsors each paying £500 each to have a stand at the event which covered most of the costs.

We ended up hosting 200 guests at the event and I enrolled several onto an early version of my group accelerator. Beyond that, the setup costs for a coach are minimal.

I collaborated with people and did a “skill swap” for other services such as branding and building my website. Had I paid for these they would have cost in the order of £3k and £5k respectively however they were “free” bar me giving up some time to coach those two partners.

Another investment I made in myself at that time was joining the Key Person of Influence programme run by Dent Global Founder, Daniel Priestley. It was about £3k at the time in 2014 and the most I’d ever spent on ANYTHING to date on myself. It was single-handedly the best investment I ever made in myself.

How did you find your first few clients or customers?

About 18 months into running my coaching practice, a prospective client said to me, “Robin, I feel I’m as good a coach as you but I don’t understand why you’re so much more successful than me!” I asked them how many consultations they had booked recently, and they replied, “4 or 5!” I initially thought they meant that week, but they actually said, “In the previous year!”

My response shocked them, “Well, I’ve booked 125 consultations in my first year alone, spoken at 57 events, launched my own event in Bristol, and hosted a dozen networking events in Stroud, leading to 44 clients enrolling!”

In short, I just got busy and met with as many local business owners as I possibly could.

I am fortunate also to be a published author and so having my first book, Online Business Startup, which sold 15,000 copies in the first 3 years after publishing really helped put my personal brand on the map.

What was your first year in business like?

My first year in business was very busy, I was regularly attending networking events, speaking at various events around the UK, and booking as many prospective clients onto a free coaching session as I possibly could.

I focussed on delivering value to these clients as well as anyone who would consider partnering with me. I’d say I was probably working a “standard” working week. You have to bear in mind my second daughter had just been born and so I had my Dad duties to attend to as well.

Looking back I don’t know how I managed to fit it all into the small number of hours that I had.

What strategies did you use to grow the business?

Having already published one book, I’d recorgnised that people needed to see some value in advance, so I tended to give copies of my book away to anyone who would have one. However copies of my book were costly at £6 per copy to buy and then £3+ postage, depending on where the recipient was. So scaling this was hard on the marketing budget I had at the time.

I made a very commercial decision to self-publish my second book, Take Your Shot, which has now accumulated over 840+ reviews on Amazon. At £1.82 to print and £2 to publish it’s half the price.

Whenever I speak at an event now, they get Robin + a box full of books for their guests. And even now, my goal is to give away as many books as I can, typically 2,500-3,000 copies per year.

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The reason books are so effective as a marketing tool is because they take people 2-3 hours to read and deliver a ton of value to the reader. Take Your Shot has five simple business frameworks inside it and it’s told as a story which is easier for the reader to engage with. Books are a remarkable marketing “asset”. When busy business owners kill themselves publishing social content millions of times a day, I can have hundreds of prospective clients quietly reading my book and then reaching out to me when they are ready.

Speaking and podcast appearances are also great tools for growing one’s personal brand. I was fortunate to be a guest on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal in August 2023, and that one interview led to 1,300 leads in the first 60 days after it went live, and approximately £135,000 in new business.

Podcasts are a fantastic way to build credibility and authority in the business world if you can leverage them properly.

Tell us about your team.

I have deliberately kept my team small. While my girls are still young I feel I already have lots of responsibility so I don’t want to manage a large team (for now anyway!).

I have a small team of associate coaches who support me and my clients in the Fearless Business Accelerator. And then I have a VA in the Philippines called EJ, who manages my website and content partnerships.

Aside from this, I work with freelancers on things like graphic design, my websites, video, and social.

What are your future plans for the business?

I have a new book which is about 80% complete and will be working with a publisher to get that live in 2024/25, but there is no rush right now as my existing books are working well for me.

My long-term (10 year) goal is to save up to invest in a property abroad, perhaps in Ibiza or somewhere in a warmer climate, where I can invite clients out for retreats and intensive coaching sessions.

How did you make the transition from side hustle to full-time?

I would say the coaching practice has always been a full-time gig, but I’d actually like to transition it back to being a very prosperous side hustle. I don’t feel I get enough time right now to express myself through my writing and making videos for my YouTube channel. I’d love to dedicate 2-3 days per week to this again.

Right now the business is scaling so I need to address these growing pains first - find the right partners to help me with these, then I can turn my attention back to what I love doing the most; coaching and creating.

What was the turning point when you knew your business was successful?

During the lockdown in COVID, I had an epiphany; I was spending a lot of my time juggling home-schooling my girls and one day I just “let go” of the business. I was still able to enroll clients and coach them to a very high standard even during those five months of the first lockdown.

I enrolled 44 clients during that year in 2020 and had my biggest year to date (excluding this year). And all of that felt easy and effortless outside of the chaos of the lockdowns.

How much traffic does your website receive, and what are your primary sources?

My site is currently averaging 19,000 unique visitors per month. The primary source of traffic is through Google’s organic search. I have an extensive blog now (2,300 articles) as well as a well-structured set of top-level “services” pages which my SEO team pushed me to add to the site.

We are now on the first page of Google for the terms “business coach” and “business coaching”. My goal is to be Top 3 in the UK for those terms, so we are doing A LOT of content and link building at the moment. As you can imagine, these are incredibly competitive search terms. I will get to the top!!

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned growing the business?

Pricing!

Hands down. The biggest mistake I made and I now see others making is not charging enough. Business owners end up trying to solve the “make more money” problem by enrolling more clients; however, imagine that the business has inherent problems that exist already in their business.

The inherent problems are WHY their business isn’t currently making more money. It makes sense that more clients or customers will compound these issues and so they’ll make even less money for their efforts.

In my agency, we productised a logo design process which meant we could charge anywhere between 5x and 18x the going rate for graphic design. I’ve brought the productisation piece into my coaching programme now and the first thing we do is restructure our clients’ offers so what they charge is no longer attached to how many hours they work, but the amazing results they get for their clients.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

Right now, I would say, I am experiencing one of my biggest challenges. Since the interview with Ali Abdaal, I’ve been run off my feet with sales consultations with prospective clients. As many as 15-18 calls some weeks.

A nice problem to have; however, I am exhausted some weeks.

I am now moving into a group format for the first introduction to new prospective clients so they still get to meet me personally but in a group setting. We are testing new formats for that group coaching session to make it more effective and demonstrate how good the accelerator is.

I’ve given myself three months to nail it or rethink the process again. It might mean reverting to 1-to-1 sales calls again but perhaps have someone screen and qualify prospects before they speak to me to better protect my time.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

The small things that you fear will always stop you from achieving the goals you set out to achieve in your business. Whether it be recording a video for social, giving a 60-second pitch during a networking meeting, or asking for a partnership with your hero.

In business, there are only two things that could happen: 1) You look a bit stupid, or 2) You lose some money. And neither of these are as bad as being eaten by a hippo or lion.

So, you need to “Fear the things in business ever so slightly less, in order to achieve your goals” - this is one of the core values we deliver in Fearless.

Community is one of our other core values. 1+1=3. Accountability and friendships in business are the two things that will carry you through any difficult situation that you’re facing.

What is your favorite quote?

“Easy things, hard life. Hard things, easy life!” - Jerzy Gregorek

If you had to start from scratch, where would you begin?

I would definitely have charged more from the word go in my agency days. And I’ve thought a lot about this; in 2004 I was busy building websites and apps for other people and I wish I’d spent more time building my own apps and software projects back then.

I’m not suggesting that it would have been the next Facebook, but I was so busy building other people’s dreams that I forgot about my own. It’s got me to where I am today, so I can’t complain!

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