How To Have a Successful Money Mindset with Robin Waite

Your money mindset can make or break you as an entrepreneur. I discuss how to create a successful money mindset in this episode with my guest, Robin Waite. Robin is a dynamic and inspiring public speaker, author, and international business coach. He has a passion for helping others succeed and reach their full potential, and his energy and enthusiasm are contagious. With over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and business coach, Robin has a wealth of knowledge and practical insights to share with his audiences. I asked Robin about his story and he said “I’ve only been in business for 21 years, so maybe I’m a bit of a slow learner. I don’t know. But I finally feel I’ve nailed it when it comes to pricing and money mindset.” Robin ran a marketing agency for the first 12 years of his career, predominantly doing web design and branding up until 2016, and ultimately ended up selling that agency. It was a good time because he was between kids and it meant he could spend a bit of time with his family and just enjoy my earnout that he had. Robin eventually needed to make a decision about his professional life; start a new career or start a new business? Because the first question everybody asked you at networking meetings is “What do you do?” And I’m like. I don’t really do anything ’cause, you know, and then I tell ’em I sold my agency and naturally you get a lot of freelancers and agency owners, small networking events. Robin did some informal networking over coffee and cake and turns out actually I was quite good at it. While explaining the agency he sold Robin realized that the reason somebody wanted to buy his agency was because there was some really cool stuff which he’d done around sort of how we packaged up our offer, how we priced it, and various things like that. During the 12 years of running that agency, with a bit of help from therapists and various mentors and coaches, he started to realize this mountain of value that he’d actually create. He also realized he had gotten rid of the negative money mindset which he had inherited as a child. Robin had undone a lot of that during those 12 years running the agency. He decided to start a new business as a business coach. Your Money Mindset Starts in Childhood Many people’s money blueprints are actually formed before their earliest memories. You’re building emotions even as a toddler based on what’s going on in the home. Many of the people speaks with they typically say most of the arguments were about money. They’ve adopted the sort of stuff that people say, such as, money doesn’t grow on trees and money’s the root of all evil and all those sorts of things. But a lot of, um, you know, home-based arguments are familial arguments around money of some sort. In Robin’s home growing up it was a bit traumatic. There were fights between his mother and father over household bills, holidays, and things like that. It got a point where Robin and his brother used to go and hide upstairs. It was very volatile. So, you can imagine at a very young formative age Robin’s associations with money were scary. That’s the same for many people. Much of the population are born into not necessarily born into poverty; but they’re born into working class family homes where money is tight. You know, we’re not all built, born with trust funds and silver spoons in our mouths. Financial Mindset Growing Up And then go into your teenage years where you want a bit of financial independence. You don’t want to rely on your parents for money, so you go out and get a paper route or you go and work in a restaurant waiting tables or something like that. Then you start to earn your own money. But now what you’re teaching yourself is that money comes through hard work and getting paid a wage. Part of that is repeating what your parents did because many of our parents worked for a wage throughout their lives. Then your parents are trying to educate you about money. They start telling you to be careful and make wise investments and that you eventually need to buy a house with a mortgage and everything else like that. Then they tell you to plan for college. Robin was privileged to go to college but came out of that with a lot of debt. So, you’ve got these amazing young human beings who are starting off their adult life in debt with a very poor attachment to money. They spend most of their twenties and thirties recovering from that and trying to get back into a state whereby they no longer owe money. Then consider business owners. You can see how all of this baggage isn’t particularly helpful when you’re then running a business as a grownup, right? Because everything still feels like hard work and how many times do you see business owners tearing their hair out? That’s because they’ve ended up working solid fifty plus hour weeks and they’re scratching their head thinking “I’m not making the money that I thought I’d...