IAM522- Best-selling Author Coaches Clients to Reach Their Goals

Robin Waite is a husband and father to two young girls, with a passion to help business owners set fearless goals and achieve great success.

Robin is a business coach, regular speaker at various business events and bestselling author of two books, including the recent popular release Take Your Shot. He puts his decade of business leadership experience to work, coaching clients to reach their goals.

• CEO Hack: Looking at things in these perspectives: Growth, Yellow and Red
• CEO Nugget: More thinking time to innovations as opposed to solving problems
• CEO Defined: Understanding what it is like to be a human being – emotional connections

Website: https://robinwaite.com/

https://fearless.biz

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobinMWaite
Facebook: https://facebook.com/RobinMWaite

Online Business Startup – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00W7LXGL0

Take Your Shot (360+ positive reviews) – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Take-Your-Shot-Business-Attract-ebook/dp/B074679GZ6

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Robin Waite of robinwaite.com. Robin, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Robin Waite 0:37

Oh, it's awesome to be here, Gresh. Thank you so much for having me on.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem, pleasure is definitely all mine. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Robin so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Robin is a husband and father to two young girls with a passion for helping business owners set fearless goals and achieve great success. Robin is a business coach, regular speaker at various business events, and best-selling author of two books including the recent most popular release, Take Your Shot. He puts his decades of business leadership experience to work coaching clients to reach their goals. Robin, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Robin Waite 1:08

Absolutely. 100%.

Gresham Harkless 1:09

Let's make it happen. I wanted to hear my favorite question, which is your CEO story, and hear a little bit more about what led you to start your business.

Robin Waite 1:17

Yeah, absolutely. So straight out of school, I got a job as a systems analyst. I've always been in business deep and deeply entrenched in systems. I have a very numerical kind of brain. I had a very good insight in the four years that I've worked in that business in terms of how to run a business and how not to run a business because the CEO, the owner of that business was super smart when it came to making the medical devices which we manufactured. When it came to running a business, he had absolutely no idea. It was a great education from that perspective because normally people are busy telling you how you should do things or how you shouldn't do things.

At that point, so that was 2004, I finished I ran a marketing agency for 12 years. Really, for me, it was about because I'd seen how not to run a business as I'm sure I can go out there and do this better. I was really into kind of systems and processes and the Internet was kind of really sort of blowing up in terms of kind of creating businesses online, not wanting to get involved in it and yeah, run that business successfully for 12 years family comes along, decide that Campea things are going to change a little bit. I've got to create something that is a bit more sort of family-oriented.

I can spend a bit more time with my girls rather than run my agency. Set up a coaching practice and that means that I have total flexibility over my hours, but also everything that I learned over, were 16 years of running those two businesses. I can now help other small business owners grow their agencies, grow their coaching practices, and not make the same mistakes that my old boss made all those years ago. Then maybe I made one or two mistakes while I was running my marketing agency as well. ,

Gresham Harkless 2:48

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I'm glad you said that. Because a lot of times you're right when a lot of times you hear success leaves clues. In order to be successful, you have to emulate or at least follow and see what people are doing and be successful but you're absolutely right. The best thing you can sometimes learn is by saying I don't want to do that I don't want to follow that path. I know I want to try to do whatever is gonna help me get to where I want to be.

Robin Waite 3:08

That's exactly it. Then thing is as well, like there's a lot of stuff which they don't teach you at business school. You learn all the theories, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and stuff like that. I don't remember the last time I sat in a business meeting going now what was on the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy? Most likely theory is great, but actually, it's the practical implementation that makes the biggest difference and being able to see those results.

Gresham Harkless 3:28

Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a place for it. But I think the problem is, a lot of times when you read a book, or you get that kind of philosophical information, you have to be able to kind of make it super tactical so that people can kind of implement that from day one.

Robin Waite 3:43

Yeah, I mean, that's part of the reason why I was probably a bit early to start plugging the book, but it's the right time. When I wrote that book, it was I wanted it to be relatable, because I think one of the things that a lot of business owners are too afraid to talk about is the emotional side of running a business and the impact that can have on you and your family and everybody else around you. When I read Take Your Shots, it tells us a parable, it's told like a story about one of my early clients. It starts with this guy who's just in dire straits with his business, he's struggling, his wife's giving him a hard time, and wants to turn it around. He kind of has this opportunity to meet with a business coach whilst he's going about his day job.

Then things kind of start to piece together. But I wanted to it was really specific about tapping into people's emotions and you see online so much about like how amazing businesses and have great businesses and look at me with all of my Instagram bullying and all this sort of stuff and it's like, what, actually behind the scenes that people having a tough time like the internet has made marketing like pretty hard. Like all of the successful businesses out there. There's a lot of hard work effort and tears and sweat which have gone into growing that business. It shouldn't be all like all of the glamour and the glitz of what you see on kind of Instagram and Snapchat and all these channels out there.

There's somebody who I think does incredibly well. It's Gary Vaynerchuk, he's a bit like Marmite, you either love him or hate him. You get to see, like the real side of the, I've had the pleasure of seeing him speak live a couple of times, but you get to see like the hard work that that guy's kind of put into it. He's got such a clear vision for where he wants to take the VaynerMedia business. Even when he was it was back when he was kind of running Wine Library and building that shop p for his dad and doing internet marketing. He still had like a really clear vision that he wanted to help his dad get to, like, it's a family-run business, but like to multimillion-dollar business, to prove that he knew what he was talking about when it came to marketing. They took all of that knowledge and now lay it down for the vision, not sure about his plans to buy the Jets I think he wants to buy which is cool, I wouldn't buy that team. I don't know.

Gresham Harkless 5:45

Yeah well, he might be able to get them at a low even though they think they won this weekend that we're recording this. You never know, maybe they're on a high right now. I know it makes so much sense. I appreciate you for talking about your book and writing the book for one because I think there isn't as much information about the emotional side of running a business.

Because I think a lot of times, as we talked about, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or accounting, or bottom line, and all those things are very business focus, but they're not necessarily as much people focus and the emotional aspect of running a business, the ups and downs that go with it, the frustrations, the joys, the highs and everything in between a lot of times, you forget that aspect. Even when you're running it, it can be kind of frustrating, because those things do kind of help determine if you're going to be successful, or you're not going to be successful.

Robin Waite 6:27

That's exactly it. I think as well, that not many people are honest with you when you set up a business to start with, nobody tells you that it's going to need a bit of hard work. It's not necessarily hard, I learned a really valuable lesson. I do a lot of cycling in my spare time, like road cycling. I, when I first started, I was going up, local categories climbed quite a steep hill and I was totally out of shape, I had to stop two or three. It probably would have been quicker if I just got off the bike and walked up this hill. But this guy comes whizzing past me with all the like Kirinda gear on glasses and a hat and stuff and I shouted at the road. How are you making that look easy, and that he was so far out there? I didn't hear what he said. But it's a great community. He around cycling, so he stopped at the top of the hill and he must have waited there for ages it took me about 20 minutes to get up this thing.

We had a good chat and then he said that thing you said when I went past he said that like cycling never gets any easier, you just go faster. Now it's such a valuable lesson to learn not just for cycling, but in sport, whatever you lay your hand to just through practice, you just get better and better and better. In getting better at it through that hard work, you start to enjoy the process even more, because that like all of that practice is starting to pay off, you start to score the goals and get clients that you never thought you could get and everything the business starts to grow, because of how you've designed it not just through luck and a bit of trial and error and luck. No, it's through sheer practice and hard work. That's when business becomes so satisfying.

Gresham Harkless 7:53

Yeah, then it makes so much sense and that you kind of forget that, you know, when that person was whizzing by. You think that he's not working as hard as he was before. He might be working as hard if not even harder, but he's still putting in that work to execute that process to get to where he wants to be just the end game or what exactly the output, I guess everything is maybe a lot better than probably when he started. I appreciate you for sharing that perspective with us. Yeah, absolutely. I know you touched on your book. Were there any other things? I know you do like coaching as well, too. Are there any other things that you do to kind of support the clients you work with? What do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

Robin Waite 8:28

In terms of from a coaching perspective, despite the fact to run a marketing business for 12 years, I was like, right, this coaching thing, like I don't want it to be about marketing, one of the bits that I enjoyed about the marketing business. We used to do web design and branding, basically like a glorified logo design process. This goes back a few years and about sort of 2013-2014 I started to innovate what we were doing and a lot of service-based businesses, you end up with this. I call it agency ping pong, this back and forth between client and supplier. It starts in the whole process of them asking for a quote, and it gets back over and we had this clunky design process. It's the same for any graphic design business where it would take three months to deliver a logo to somebody because the communication goes back and forth the ping pong.

I was like there has to be a better way so I worked out what the seven steps were in the process and it cut it down to like four to six weeks and it still isn't good enough it has to be better. This is the brain of my old system kicking in systems analysis brain kicking. Then I thought wouldn't it be cool if we could do this whole process of seven steps in one day? We created this one-day branding workshop. The first client we did it for was like I need I've got some I've got an exhibition coming up. I need some printed stuff like we need this logo tomorrow Can you do it? It's like well yeah, we've got the capacity we'll get a designer, one of my designers in and we delivered it and when we delivered it, we it delivered it for like three times the going rate for like the going hourly rate for graphic design.

We ended up doing about 40-45 of these throughout the next 12 months. One of them somebody wanted to put me in a room with 23 of their like basically their entire team and I said, Well, that'll be 10k. Because it's like less, I've got to work harder for that. It's going to cost you a bit more money. Actually, in those days, like graphic design, especially logo design, you do like 1010 or 12, like billable hours, like 50 pounds an hour. We were charging, like a really good rate, but people started to see those one-day branding workshops. I like, that's cool what you did with your service Like, do you think you could do that with my business, my products? I was like, Yeah, I reckon I probably can.

My whole coaching program is fearless business, based around taking traditional service-based businesses kind of wrapping them up into like. You ended up with a very specific set of features very clearly defined outcomes and results from it over a very specific time. It's for a fixed price, which is normally a lot higher than the typical hourly rate most service providers are doing. With that comes higher prices and better products, high price, they've got to get better at selling. We kind of cover off those three core pillars. With a little bit of sprinkling of kind of marketing stuff in between, obviously want to help our clients, like get more clients as well.

It's not just about kind of maximizing those opportunities, but how can we also get more opportunities? There works incredibly well like we've had people, we had a coach who hadn't any clients like nine, nine months since starting his practice. Within eight days of starting to work with us, he got his first client for 1800 bucks. It's like when we've got, we've had clients who've got like, they've been able to afford to get married, they've been able to afford to get deposits for houses and like move into their first home. Two of our clients had babies in the last 12 months and it's like that side of business, which is really where it's at.

Gresham Harkless 11:33

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I wanted to switch gears, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be what you've kind of touched you. It could be like an app, book, or a habit, but is it that ability to realize that there is a human aspect of business that you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you more effective and efficient?

Robin Waite 11:49

I think one of the most important things is about time and how we use that time. So not just in the workplace, obviously, but outside the workplace now. Outside the workplace, tend to kind of just look after yourself, exercise and sleep, and things like that. I think within the workplace ad is a very good friend of mine. You won't have heard of him. He's he's kind of very new on the scene in terms of from a coaching perspective. I wanted to share with you guys because he's just put his ideas into a book guy called Paul Holbrook, and his book called What Are You Doing has just come out. I did some work with him last year around time and he talks about the fact that like, you break time down into four key activities.

The first one is about growth activity, thinking, communicating, and improving. You then have the yellow activities, which the next ones are the management activities, so it keeps business going at the same level. You've got growth, and you've got to keep business at the same level. That's like monitoring and directing management-type activities. Then actually, you've got and this was interesting was when he said, You've got then the red activities, which pushes the business backward and I was like, so what are those and he's like, well, it's all the doing activities within the business. It's actually like, because if you're not going out and speaking to people if you're not going out and creating new ideas, like growth, but the business is naturally just going to start to lag behind, like all your competitors. It's a really interesting way of like, looking at things.

Gresham Harkless 13:13

Yeah, that makes so much sense. Now, I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. Or if you could happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Robin Waite 13:23

My younger business self, I wish that I'd actually in 2004, rather than building websites for other people started building apps and myself, 2004 was the year. What, actually a pop quiz Gresh? What do you reckon happened? It's pivotal. What happened in 2004?

Gresham Harkless 13:38

What was I doing in 2004? I was, I have no idea. I was in 2004.

Robin Waite 13:45

This game or that website, which came into the year, it was built. Half the world is on it now.

Gresham Harkless 13:51

Half the world. I wanna say Google, but close, Facebook.

Robin Waite 13:58

Zack was in his dorm room, and he just launched Facebook, what's called Facebook then. He went to his college students at Harvard. I wish that sometimes I'd paid more attention. I'd say I didn't have enough thinking time. As a challenge. I think if I'd had more thinking time, I'd come up with the idea. It wouldn't been Facebook, let's face it can only be one Facebook. I wish I'd spent more time focusing on innovation as opposed to like, for my own business, as opposed to like, focusing on helping other people's problems. It's important that helped me get here today. Now we know that piece of advice. I'm doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes to innovate. But definitely, that thinking time needs to be put into innovation.

Gresham Harkless 14:38

That makes so much sense. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favourite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We are gonna have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Robin, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Robin Waite 14:48

Being a CEO? To me? Just it's I think it's the definition of being a human being, just pure and simple. I think it's just you've got to have a very deep understanding of it. What it's like to be a human being. I know that sounds a bit dumb because like, sometimes we just take it for granted. We think that we're all decent human beings and we miss a lot of stuff and the emotional connection with other people. That's the bit of being human, which I am kind of alluding to.

Gresham Harkless 15:14

Robin, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I appreciate that definition. Appreciate your time even more, what I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Robin Waite 15:27

Yeah, absolutely. If you Google Robin Waite, and that's wait with me on the end of it, I have to tell people because otherwise they'll just end up I don't know, there's some random Kitsap soccer coaching candidate like you'll find his website, but I'm the one with the E on the end of it. But if you just Google me, you'll find I've got a YouTube channel with about 150 videos on there, all things sort of coaching. Also, we've got a website which is Fearless.biz, and we've got some other free resources on there just to talk just to introduce people to the concepts around sort of fearless business and like the product pricing and sales side of things that we talked about.

If anybody wants to help out, I'm kind of looking for people to review and take your shots. If you've got any lessons based in the UK, I'm happy to send out ship out paperback copy of that book. You can, there's a form to fill in on fearles.biz, but also, if any of you listen over insights, it'll be a PDF version of it, but I'm happy to give people a free copy of the book. If they're happy to leave a review of the book. That'd be super helpful.

Gresham Harkless 16:19

Thank you so much again, Robin. Truly appreciate it and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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