TL;DR

Business coach Robin Waite (Fearless Business) joins Mariska to break down why "exposure" isn't a payment plan, how raising your prices can mean selling less for the same profit, and why waiting for the perfect moment is quietly costing you customers. Plus: his Guinness World Record, his 4Ocean plastic pledge, and a live "build a 100K month" business plan.

Guest Bio:

Robin Waite is a UK-based business coach and the founder of Fearless Business. After 12 years running a marketing agency, he sold it in 2016 and has spent the last decade coaching entrepreneurs on pricing, positioning, and building profitable, sustainable businesses. He is the bestselling author of Take Your Shot and Fearless Pricing, has guested on over 300 podcasts, and has coached creators including Ali Abdaal and Simon Squibb. He also holds a Guinness World Record for taking part in the largest speed-networking event on record.

Takeaways:

• A hobby becomes a business the moment you decide it is one, and start planning six months, a year, and two years out instead of just three weeks ahead.
• "Exposure" is not a business model. Real partnerships are a long-term marketing asset built on trust, not a one-off trade.
• One podcast guest appearance (Robin's on Ali Abdaal's show) generated 3,000 leads and over £300,000 in revenue, three years after the relationship began.
• Pricing at the average makes you average. Aim for the top 10% of your category instead of matching competitors.
• Raise your prices by 5% and you can sell 11% fewer units for the same profit. At 10%, it's 22% fewer units.
• The "build one, sell one" approach (borrowed from Simon Squibb) beats waiting to launch until everything is perfect.
• There's a real difference between being exhausted and having genuinely exhausted your options, and most founders find out the hard way.
• Robin's dogs Wilbur and Twiggy are his cue to stop "procrastiworking": when he catches himself stalling, he closes the laptop and takes them for a walk in the Cotswolds instead.
• Robin donates to 4Ocean with every new client, working toward removing 100kg of ocean plastic, currently at roughly 40kg.

Relevant links mentioned in the episode:

• Robin Waite: Instagram / LinkedIn / TikTok / Website
• Fearless Pricing Scorecard — Robin's pricing tool + book, mentioned on the episode
• Review the podcast on Podchaser
• Sign up to our Tails and Tones newsletter here
• Sign up to our Tails and Tones waiting list for our first product (Elevated Food System) here
• Find Tails and Tones on our socials: Instagram / Facebook / TikTok / LinkedIn / Website

Timestamps to relevant points within the episode:

[00:00] Intro

[02:12] Who is Robin Waite

[04:16] Robin's Guinness World Record

[06:13] When does a hobby become a business

[08:28] Why exposure isn't a business model

[14:57] Building a pet business from zero

[21:27] The biggest mistake creators make

[25:32] Why waiting for perfect is costing you

[28:59] The 3 Fs: Freedom, Fulfilment, Financial success

[34:50] The pricing math that changes everything

[39:08] The first 90 days of a crowdfund

[42:24] Exhausted vs. out of options

[47:52] What Wilbur and Twiggy taught him

[49:14] There's never a perfect time to start

[52:42] 4Ocean and building a business for good

FAQ

What is the difference between a hobby and a business, according to Robin Waite?

Robin Waite says a hobby becomes a business once you're earning a living from it and can plan for it beyond the next three weeks, the point at which most people's forward planning naturally stops.

Why doesn't Robin Waite recommend working for "exposure"?

Because exposure alone is short-term and transactional. Robin recommends treating brand partnerships as long-term relationships built on trust, the kind that can eventually generate leads and revenue for years, as his relationship with Ali Abdaal did.

What is Robin Waite's "one page business plan"?

It's five questions: your dream monthly revenue, your product or service, your average sale price, the number of units needed to hit that revenue, and whether that demand is realistic to stimulate right now.

Where can I find Robin Waite's Fearless Pricing Scorecard?

At fearlesspricing.co.uk, alongside his book Fearless Pricing. His first book, Take Your Shot, is available through his Fearless Business site.

About the Author: Mariska Nell

Mariska is the founder of Tails and Tones, a design-led, sustainable dog product brand. She's also the host of the Tails and Tones podcast, where she explores dog health, product design, and intentional pet parenting with experts, veterinarians, and fellow dog parents.

Background: Mariska holds a Master's degree in Sustainable Design, a Bachelor's in Interior Design, and a Postgraduate qualification in Environmental Science. She's spent over 10 years working as a sustainability designer and strategist across the UAE, Australia, South Africa, the UK, and India. Her previous work includes collaborations with brands like Nespresso, Costa Coffee, and Dubai Airport, and she founded Design By Mariska, known for trash-to-treasure art exhibited at Dubai International Airport. She's also the host and founder of Mama Earth Talk, a sustainability podcast with 200+ episodes on zero waste and climate action, featuring guests including Dr. Sylvia Earle and the late Dr. Jane Goodall. She created the free Living Lighter course for practical sustainable living.

Piper: Mariska shares her life and work with Piper, her French Bulldog rescue dog. Piper joined the family in 2021 at 5 months old and has been the Chief Paw-duct Tester for everything Tails and Tones creates. Piper's journey, including cleft palate repair, luxating patella, arthritis risk, and recent mobility challenges, directly shaped the founding mission of Elevé (Tails and Tones' first product: a modular, height-adaptive feeding system).

Mission: We are on a mission to help modern dog parents simplify everyday care and elevate life with their pets, without sacrificing style or sustainability. Tails and Tones exists to build products that show up for dog parents, beautiful, sustainable, and robust enough to support you on the worst days. Not just the easy ones.

You can find Mariska at @tailsandtones on Instagram, or visit tailsandtones.com to learn more about Elevé and the Tails and Tones mission.

Have you ever looked at your dog's Instagram and wondered, could this actually become a business? Could those likes and comments be turned into something real? Or have you held back because you felt it was too salesy or you weren't sure anyone would actually pay you? Well, you are not alone, and that is exactly what we're diving into on today's episode of Tails and Tones.

But before we dig into that, I just want to give you guys a quick thank you and shout out to everyone that has joined our wait list. We are gearing up to actually launch our crowdfunding, which we are so excited for, and hoping to get enough money on there so that we can bring this bowl to life. so thank you for being part of this journey and supporting us. If you have not joined our list yet and you would love to

I will link it up in our show notes or go to our Instagram. it is in our link in bio. Alrighty, let's dig in. Hi there and welcome to Tails and Tones. I'm your host, Mariska Now, also known as Piper's Mom. So today I am sitting down with Robin Waite.

He's a business coach, he's the best selling author of Take Your Shot, he's the founder of Fearless Business, And someone who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs build profitable businesses and create more freedom in their lives. He's coached some of the biggest names online.

From Ali Abdal to Simon Squibb, and he is also a help bank ambassador. But there is one question I can't wait to ask him, and that is: what is one thing his dogs have taught him about business that no book ever could? Stick around for that one. Please give a pawsome welcome to our guest, Robin Waite.

So Robin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you Mariska, it's a pleasure to be here.

You're most welcome. Robin, for our listeners who may be new to you and your work, could you introduce yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. You can probably tell by a few of the gray hairs in my beard that I've been in business for a little while now. just ticking over 22 years, the first 12 of that were spent running a marketing agency doing web design and branding. I sold that for a small sum in 2016 just for a change of lifestyle and spend a bit more time with my young family. I was between daughters when I sold the business and it gave me a good opportunity just to hang out with them when Soph, my youngest, was little. And then, yeah, it didn't really, it kind of went

a bit of a hiatus, didn't really know what I had as a plan. I started going to networking meetings just because I've always been passionate about business and of course the first question they always ask is what do do? And I said well nothing, which generally piques people's curiosity because they wonder why you're at a networking event when you're doing nothing. And when they found out I sold an agency essentially a lot of people wanted to bribe me with free coffee and cake to pick my brains and figure out how they could build and sell their businesses. I've been coaching now for the last

10

years. Absolutely love what I do. I'm so deeply passionate about small business owners having success in their businesses, growing a business to a point whereby it can run itself, getting to a point whereby they can confidently charge more than their competitors. And really what it's all about is making sure that you're having some fun and fulfillment along the way, creating a bit of freedom for yourself whilst also getting the bills paid. So that's my goal in life. So obviously I'm founder of Fearless Business. I've got several

best-selling books now, multiples, I've got a podcast, a YouTube channel, all sorts of different things as well where people can learn about all things business.

That sounds fantastic and I'm so glad you mentioned that.

you know, coffee and cake. And I believe carrot cake is a favorite. So if you ever come to Dubai, I'm taking you to Lime Tree Cafe, which has got the best carrot cake in the whole of UAE. And fair warning, it is very dog friendly, so you might have some four legged company as well. So yes, definitely next time.

Excellent. the best! Carrot cake and dogs, what's not to like about that? Well

I might be back there in January again for billion followers summit so we'll see.

Amazing,

that sounds great. And there's so many interesting facts around you and what you do. And one of it I heard is that you actually have a Guinness World Record. So please do share a little bit about that story.

Well actually I can show you the Guinness World Record. So here it is.

Woo.

the actual official Guinness World Record that I still keep on my, that's the very hallowed area of my office over there with all of my various different awards and things like that.

Mm.

the Guinness World Record, I'd like to think that it was a solo effort, but it wasn't, it was a team effort. I took part in the largest business networking, speed networking event at the time. So, and it even says on here, we had 487 people who did speed networking over the course of an hour, which was pretty chaotic, but also a lot of fun.

wow,

that sounds so

Thank

so cool. And fun fact, I am also part of Guinness World Records. for one of the people, or actually for the most people wearing capes in a run event, and that was 3957, and that was during the Dubai Marathon earlier this year. So there you go.

That's epic! That's wild! Love it!

I didn't do the whole race with the cape though.

I took it off after some time 'cause yeah, it was my first marathon. I didn't wanna, you know, put too much pressure on myself, but what do you know? So yeah, fun fact.

Very sensible. Love it.

And obviously you have been working with so many different people. And a lot of our listeners are actually dog moms, dog dads that is like dabbling on social media and their dog, you know, has their

own Instagram and following and just like, you know, getting corporate sponsors and all sorts of fun things. At what point would you say does this hobby or Instagram account actually become a business?

Gosh, that's a good question. think it becomes a business whenever you deem it to be a business. If you want to make it, you know, if it's already a massive part of your lifestyle and you're able to monetize it and then it gives you maybe the freedom to start to think about going part-time in your nine to five or even winding it down. Well, I guess once you're earning a living from it, then that's a business, right? But I suppose what a lot of people don't realize is they, most business owners believe it or not, can only think about three weeks into the future. We can only imagine very

short term. And this is something which I've learned a lot over the years as I've come into contact with sort of multiple entrepreneurs, business owners, creators. And you can test this because, and this is an invitation to anyone listening or watching this, if you look at your diary, I can guarantee the next week, chock a block, you've got loads of stuff planned in there. Two weeks out is probably about 40 to 60 % full. By the time we get to three weeks out, you've probably only got about 20 % of your diary filled up and four weeks out, there's nothing in there. So a clue.

that

we can only think sort of short term. So I'm always mind minded and mindful to remind people that basically it's very cliche, but make a plan. Like if you're starting to make that transition from sort of hobby part-time work into turning this into a full-time gig, start to think about what does six months outlook like? What does a year outlook like? What does two years outlook like? How can you start to build up a rainy day fund for yourself, for example, so that, you know, if there's a downturn, you're maybe not getting those sponsorships or

coming through for whatever reason, you've actually got a bit of money to fall back on. So just a little bit of just simple business planning, financial planning, just to give yourself that future security is massively important because it doesn't matter what business you're in, there's ups and downs. It's never a straight line to success.

And for many creatives, they are very often kind of offered this like exposure. And I know when I started out with my art career as well, like everyone wants to give you exposure instead of payment. But honestly, the last time I checked, my bank doesn't accept exposure as like a mortgage payment. So how do people actually start charging for what they do without feeling like very

salesy, like you know, when you get that ick kind of feeling 'cause yeah, it for me it always feels like that.

Yeah, great question. So one of the things to think about is again, bearing in mind what I just said there about sort of short term thinking, I think there's a temptation to kind of make things very short term and transactional. So I'll scratch my back if you scratch your back, excuse the pun, obviously we've got lots of dog owners out there and cat owners out there. I'll scratch my back, you scratch mine. And then we base a success or failure of it based on that one interaction with that exposure.

I

actually like to see partnerships as being probably one of the longest term marketing strategies out of the three sort of time horizons when we're doing marketing. I'll probably see it because obviously I don't want to spend the whole podcast necessarily talking about marketing, marketing happens over three time horizons, short, mid and long term.

Remember here that partnerships is actually long-term not short-term so we just want to don't want a quick bit of exposure and then that be it because There might be potential that person we're partnering up with has already built a large audience. There's opportunities there to leverage that

So, but to summarize the three, we've got short-term marketing, which tends to be things like you pay a dollar into the meter every single day, social media and paid ads generally, things which you kind of have to keep on feeding the machine. And then if you stop feeding the machine, you drop off the news feeds and then, you know, there's this constant grind of having to crank that handle. Now, the thing is people think that sponsorships and those partnerships you talked about there have a bit of exposure.

into social media and therefore short-term thinking. It does not. Okay, I'll give you the punchline at the end as to where and how it sits. The second time horizon is the midterm stuff. So this is what we call marketing assets or what I call marketing assets. So these are digital or physical assets which sit out there in the ether in the world and do your marketing for you. So think about you can see behind me two of my books. I've got Simon Squibb's book there and a few other people I follow as well. But I've written seven books. I've guested on over 300 podcasts. I've got

50 podcast episodes my own, produced over 200 YouTube videos, I've produced over 5,000 blog articles. So there's all this stuff out there that I've put out there that I only have to create it once for free or very cheap. And then people can search on Google or AI and they stumble across my stuff, my books or get it referred to them. And then that's what draws people into my world. So those marketing assets tend to take a little while to kind of build and accumulate in a crew. But over time,

you can start to rely on those more so than the short-term stuff because you don't have to keep on cranking the handle quite so much. You know, I give away over 5,000 books a year to people in my network. Obviously, it's a marketing asset and I get names, email addresses and things like that from it, but...

I couldn't sit there and write a fresh book for each one of those 5,000 people. So I write one book, I print it and post it, off it goes, 5,000 times. But the long-term marketing is like where partnerships really come into their own. And so I want the people listening to this to think about when somebody comes to them and says, hey, can you do this for me? I'll give you a bit of exposure.

Wow.

one, two and a half hour conversation, a trip down to London and back to record it.

And but it didn't start there and it hasn't ended there three years before that me and Ali came into one another's world for a mutual connection And I just got in the trenches with him. He was having a few challenges with his business some products He wanted to launch and I helped him reprice them before launch and it was a very successful launch and that one product Part-time YouTube Academy has gone on to do 20 million dollars, right now if I thought

Wow.

short term and thought Hey, can you pay me money for that or can I if it was all about wrong?

open.

I don't think three years down the line after meeting him that I would have had that invitation and opportunity to partner up on the podcast. He has also, so no money has ever exchanged hands between us. We just help each other out. help more.

Mm.

Well, it's more so I help his team out now because Ali's busy being CEO of his company. So I work a lot with Angus and his team and three years on, I'm still doing work for them for free because I know that there's this partnership here, this quid pro quo that we're, we, help him, he helps me.

it's not just one piece of exposure, there's multiple touch points, there's introductions that can be made there. I've been able to introduce them to other people in my network. So I think there are multiple ways to get paid out beyond exposure and money. It's more

about building that long-term partnership so that you can actually leverage that other person's audience at a greater scale, but it's all based on trust.

Yeah, and I think that is something really key that you touched on because, you know, to have this almost as like a relationship you're building. Whereas I feel a lot of the brands that come for these exposure, exposure kind of things, they are also not looking at this as like a long time. It's like a one deal like kind of thing. So I think that is where you can ask these follow up questions and like, you know, what

Mm.

what are we looking at one, three, five and maybe ten years down the line. So yeah, thank you so much for that. And

We'll be.

You've

also only got to look at Steve Bartlett as well, like Dyer for CEO.

yeah.

know, for years he had the bottles of Huel in his Huel t-shirt, you know, sat on the desk when he was interviewing people. Then eventually Huel sponsored him and now he's an investor in Huel. So that's another great example of a symbiotic relationship where the two brands have been able to come together with the product, you know, and do something really incredible there. So I think that's something to bear in mind. The other thing Steve Bartlett has always said is that he only does partnerships

with brands that he believes in, things that he would actually buy.

Mm.

Same as me, I only invest in businesses that I would buy their products or services myself. So I think, again, if a brand approaches you to do a deal, you've really got to be thinking about, I doing this for the money or am I doing it because I really like what that brand is about? And again, you're going to find it far easier to build that relationship up if you both love one another's brands enough that it's going to be a long-term thing.

Yeah. So Robin, if you then kind of had to build a pet business from scratch today, like you've got no audience, you've got no money, what would you do first?

gosh, that's a good question. I do quite a lot of work in the Pet Groomers program that Bill Betts runs. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's called Pet Passion

No.

to Profit. So Bill's got the most incredible community. We do kind of live events as well, of meetups a couple of times a year, regular coaching sessions. So I got quite a good sort of insight into the doggy world basically. So it's Pet Groomers, but it's mostly it's 90 % dog.

I probably think I would set up a dog grooming business and I think it's a matter of like, I mean if you literally had nothing, right, if I had a few things in the garage, I would sell them and go and buy some clippers. I would go and volunteer for a couple of weeks to be a dog groomers apprentice for free. I wouldn't charge them for it. I'd get them to show me the ropes and train me on how to do it. I would start to figure out if there's any qualifications or certifications I need to do it or if maybe grooming is too much of a step.

too far, maybe I could just do a dog washing business basically. So I would start very small and then again, this is playing into Simon Squibb advice. He's very much about like build one, sell one, build one, sell one. So a lot of people are like, right, wanna get to 100K. You cannot, you can, it takes time. You cannot

Yeah.

easily get from zero to 100K.

Right, I'm just going to quit all of those myths. There are outliers who do it and they make it look very easy. But for the average mere mortal, that's a two, three, four, five year journey to get to that point where you're doing 10K a month.

So build one, sell one is literally being prepared, not being too proud that you can't accept small amounts of money, but being prepared to do the hard work. So go and wash a dog and 20 quid, go and wash a dog and 20 quid, go and knock on some doors. Find people in nice rural neighborhoods where they probably got, you know, villages where they probably all got dogs, maybe several dogs go out and on, you know, your local dog walks and the common down into the woods and see if there are people out there walking dogs and hand out your business card. If you've got one or just, you know, WhatsApp them and say, Hey, your dog.

looks a bit dirty do want me to give it a wash when we get back? So it's just about like you think about all of the things I've just said there and how many people would be prepared to walk up to a complete stranger and try and sell them something. Now what we're doing here is we're not

Yeah, not many.

selling something we are serving because if that dog

is dirty and it gets a matted coat and the owner doesn't know how to wash it and groom it properly enough and it gets matting underneath its armpits and various parts of its body that dog could be in pain. So what

we're not doing is we're not

we're actually trying to serve so that we can take away that dog's discomfort through having a matted coat.

think that's a

great way of like kind of rephrasing this instead of like, you know, I'm selling

Thank

this but I'm actually offering you something and, you know, kind of the way you kind of phrase things as well, I think has such an impact on whether someone will trust you to like make the call to actually invest in you and offer you the opportunity to to do that.

That's it, absolutely. think, and again, it's, you we're not looking here to like make a million bucks overnight. It's just little and often is actually really, really important I've been through several sort of downturns in my businesses and you get a bit better at it every time it happens. So there's like natural stages that businesses go through. So you have the growth phase, you have the consolidation phase, you have the dip, and then you have the breakthrough to come back out of that dip. And that's happened to me five times. So three times in my agency in

twice in my coaching practice. You'd think, you're a business coach Robin, surely your business shouldn't go through dips. My business is not immune to like stuff that goes on in the world. It's not immune to like my health, my family life, you know, my busyness around, you my life isn't just my business. So there are natural points when you have sort of down times anyway. But if you, what happens is if you, the first time I went into the dip, I was like.

What the heck's going on here? It was the most awful feeling. It was like the worst possible experience I could have gone through. Second time you go into the dip, you're like, this feels familiar.

I think I kind of get what's going on here. This is where I was four years ago. Okay, let's figure out how we get out of this. The interesting thing is when your business goes through hard times, by the way, when you're starting up a business, you're already in hard times. You're already in the dip, because you've got to have a breakthrough to come out of it, right? This is what a lot of people don't realize. Starting a business is fun and exciting for a few weeks or months. Then you realize how hard it is, and then you've got to bust your way out of it. So you're already starting off at a disadvantage. Second time it happened, like,

I get this, your back's against the wall, so you start to think creatively about how to solve problems in your business, and bang, the breakthrough and the growth happens. Third time it happens, you're kinda like, here we go again. By the fourth and fifth time, and this is what the great thing about my situation now is, because I'm desensitized to those other three times, so I'm like, I can already see the slight declines, there's always a slight tail off.

and then whoosh, you end up in the dip. So what do I do now? I purposefully break my businesses, force them into the dip, fix the problems, and my goal is to get in and out of the dip as quickly as I humanly possibly can, because I know that that's where the breakthrough and growth happens. It's very uncomfortable, don't get me wrong, but you learn through that and grow through that experience. And I think, again, like starting out, you've got to be prepared to do that uncomfortable stuff.

Getting comfortable making 50 bucks a day, 100 bucks a day, little and often growth. Right, okay, now I've saved up enough to get a better set of clippers. Now I've saved up to get a better blow dryer. Do you have blow dryers for dogs? I don't know. I probably should know that with a load of drawings.

think so, probably. For the grooming, yeah.

Better products to like groom the dogs with you know so gradually you you get better. Okay now I saved up a thousand dollars right I'm gonna go and pay for a course just to upskill myself so I can do it a bit better a bit faster You know and I'm not gonna drop my prices or charge an hourly rate I'm actually gonna keep my my effective hourly rate Hopefully it's gonna start to go up because I can do a better job Faster, but I'm still gonna charge the same per groom right so you can get through more grooms and earn more money And now right I'm gonna

I've just done the nail clipping course, so I'm gonna start up selling nail clips onto it. So you take an $80 groom now is $100 with the nail clip, right? So it's just these little small incremental steps that you've got to be prepared to take rather than trying to rush through everything.

What do you feel are some of the biggest mistakes that you know, obviously either founders or like creators make when they try to turn like their social media into a business?

So, this is the thing, they think that the social media is the business, it's not. There's like multiple streams of income that run on the back end of the businesses. I I mentioned one, Ali Abdaal yeah, he's got AdSense from his creation, he had sponsorship deals and things like that. But the education side of his business is the one which has actually made the most amount of revenue. Multiple millions of dollars a year, so selling courses. Now, there's a few people, again, maybe listening who think

selling courses is like selling your soul to the devil but

We've helped in part-time YouTube Academy and Ali's recently started something called the Lifestyle Business Academy as well. We have helped thousands of people get out of the rat race and start a successful YouTube channel or start a small side hustle business which has grown into a full-time business. So we're not selling our soul to the devil through selling courses. We're educating people so that they can better their lives. And I think, you there might be some creators out there who are like, I don't really

want to run a course, I don't really want to have to have staff do it, blah blah blah blah blah. There are ways to kind of work around it and make it fit. So for example like again with Ali

He wanted to do like a passive income style course, not teaching people how to do passive income. He wanted PTYA to be, to earn him passive income. I was like, look, Ali, I think you're underselling yourself here. think at the time he had just under a million subscribers, I was like, these people love you. They're like, you're raving fans. They would love to spend some time learning directly from you. And I think you could charge considerably more for that. And he was like, oh, but I don't really want to have to do weekly calls like three months or six months. I kind of just want a bit of freedom and independence, you know, but I was like,

well what would you be prepared to do? And he's like well I think I could probably do six weeks and maybe if I just did one call a week and had a team members to teach people the other stuff I think I could handle that the pressure of it. So we ended up launching PTYA it was a six week course Ali dipped in and but the price Ali was going to launch was just under $300 we ended up launching at $1,500. We got over 450 people signed up.

Right? That was a $650,000 launch. Now again, there's

Wow.

a lot of people out there will be thinking, but I can't sell my audience, can't spend, doesn't want to spend $1,500 on the course. I can guarantee there will be some people who will probably spend considerably more than 1500 pounds to have that experience with you. The way your followers and subscribers see you as a content creator is they already feel like they know you because they have watched dozens of hours of your content.

Right? So I can't remember what there's a specific term for it, but I can't remember what it is, where people already feel like they know you.

Yeah.

And you could literally put a sausage roll in front of them and they would probably spend thousands of dollars on it because it's you selling that product. They feel like they trust you. Don't do that by the way, unless you want to start a business selling sausage rolls, of course. Somebody might, you never know. So.

You know, it was a really interesting experience that, again, we don't want to discount, we don't want to go in cheap, we want to...

sell a product which is, you know, there's a fair value exchange. We want to decide what is the dream outcome result that somebody wants to get when they work with us. We want to be charging enough money that it makes it economically viable. It's going to build a sustainable profitable business. And we want to make sure that that result can be delivered within a fixed period of time. So when you're starting to think about, and by the way, it doesn't have to be a course. It could be some coaching with the individuals

Yeah.

or as a group. It could be some consulting work where you go into a business or

And I feel that's like such a big opportunity, but often one of the barriers that so many people has talked to me about is that waiting for perfection. So some of us won't launch something until it is like the best and you know, what would you kind of say to some of those people?

I know this is a very extreme example, so it might be a bit of a word of caution here before I say this story. Imagine, you're a doctor working in an accident and emergency ward, and somebody walks in off the street and they've literally got a bleeding neck.

and maybe you've had a long shift, maybe you kind of, you know, the place is a bit messy and maybe you're kind of feeling like, actually, I'm not quite sure whether I'm good enough to fix bleeding necks yet. You know, I'm pretty good at kind of like deep cuts and things like that, but all bleeding necks is an artery. I'm not sure whether I can do that or not. So you just stand there while that person's bleeding to death on the floor of the A &E, right?

And you have to, I know that's a very extreme example, right? But again, I'll say it again, there are people out there who probably need your help and you waiting for perfectionism is letting them down. You're not giving them the opportunity to experience what it might be like to work with you or to experience what results they could potentially get. Same with any aspect of life. You only live once at the end of the day.

I'm one of those people that falls into the camp of I would rather know what the outcome is going to be, whether it's a success or it didn't work. And again, very cliched example, but Thomas Edison always, who created the incandescent light bulb, probably going to massively misquote it, but he said, I didn't fail 10,000 times. I found 10,000 ways that it didn't work. That's what it's about.

there is also, you know, some cost fallacy where you can put too much effort into the wrong area and actually you're just pushing, it's just not working. So there is also that bit where you've of got to listen to your heart and logic and just see whether you are heading in the wrong direction or not and whether that effort is going to get you to that end result. Or like me, just be stubborn and fiercely determined that you're going to get the desired outcome no matter what.

started my coaching practice, I was like...

This is common question. People always, I mean, you don't have VAT or sales tax, I don't think, in Dubai, but in the UK, we have a sales tax, or across most of Europe, actually, there's a sales tax called VAT, V-A-T. And a lot of business owners, small business owners especially, worry about earning 90K or whatever the equivalent is in each country, 90,000 pounds, because then they go into the VAT threshold, they have to start charging VAT to their customers. So it's effectively a 20 % price increase. When I started my coaching practice, the day I registered,

I got my limited company certificate, I registered for VAT. Because I was like, in my head, not achieving or achieving 100k was a certainty. I was going to bust through that VAT threshold because that to me was a sign of success. So I started out with the intention right from the word go by VAT registering. So again, there's these intentions which you can set for yourself that kind of set the stage for when you do have those dips and those tough times that you're to be able to work through that.

that's so good. And I mean yes, now in Dubai also we have that threshold so it's about a hundred thousand dollars as well, and then you start paying. So but you cannot register until you can prove that you've got it. So yeah, so it's a little bit more challenging, but hopefully we'll get there soon. And I mean,

Good.

you talk about you know, like the three Fs and like that's freedom, fulfillment and financial success. So how can we

actually create all of that, you know, how can we basically avoid building a business that is just another job and we can focus on those three Fs.

Yeah, well there's two different ways for a start. So the first one I'm to ask you a question Mariska So what is the one goal in business?

To probably enjoy it, I think. And make money.

Yeah, keep going. Make money, yeah, more specifically.

Make a lot of money?

be more specific.

Like create a six figure business like every yeah. Or an eight yeah.

Okay, I'll you a clue. lead the witness.

I was trying to lead the witness here a little bit, but the goal of business is to build a profitable and sustainable business. again, this just comes from experience, the amount of business owners I've worked with, where you just see themselves working their way into the ground, like to an early death or retirement or having to go back to a full-time job, because they've mistaken the goal of business for being, I need money, therefore I must go and get more clients.

Yeah.

But actually, wouldn't the wouldn't the dream business, let's be hypothetical for a second, wouldn't the dream business be one where we've got doubly income, but half the clients?

Because if we've got more income

Definitely.

and fewer clients, therefore we have more time to do a better job for those clients, to add more value into whatever products or services that we're delivering for them, which generally means that they will get better results, which then means that they're probably going to spend more money with us. They're probably going to tell more of their friends. So actually having fewer clients is better for business.

But this leads me on to the second point. What this means is that you have to raise your prices. You have to be one of the most expensive in your market in order to build that profit, you know, and have the, have the, the profit to then be able to reinvest and grow that business and to buy back your time and give yourself that freedom. The other mistake that people make when they're enrolling all of the clients, just because they want to make more money is that they don't qualify those clients properly. So what inevitable

happens is I've been guilty of this in my agency days certainly where we've taken a client on for the money and then three weeks later you realize that they're just a complete idiot and all they're doing is just causing problems within your business.

and it's very stressful. And next thing you know, you're worrying about like, but I can't, I can't let go because we're on a retainer and we need that retainer because otherwise not gonna make the money and blah, blah. So what happens, and you've got to think about it as well. If you have a business that is not making enough profit and is full of rubbish clients, poorly qualified clients, then adding in more clients actually is compounding this issue of...

of lack of profitability and poor clients. So you're making the problem worse by enrolling even more clients into it. So we've got to solve this pricing problem. You've got to be like one of the most expensive in the market. what happens if, you know, again, a lot of people set their prices, they'll go out and look at all of their competitors, see what everybody else is charging, and they will charge the average. Well, what happens if you charge the average? You are

the

average,

Who wants to be average?

You want to be successful, You want to be

Definitely not us. Yeah.

brilliant, you want to be successful, you want everybody to like you and you want to have profit.

You want the best, right? You don't want to be average. You certainly don't want to be below average. So there are a lot of people who will choose the average price and then they'll undercut it thinking that that is a way to attract clients. So all you get is low value clients who don't really get the value of delivering in your work and it's just messy. So if you're looking at your competitors, at least try and price yourself in that top 10 % of those pricing wise. That's a simple equation.

And then we run into, well, okay, longer term, what does that look like? It's going back to what I said right at the start, when we're starting to think about making a plan, you know, business wise. And I have this sort of framework, it's called a one page business plan. So, and it's five simple questions. So, you know, maybe Mariska, we could go through this live, okay? So, what would your dream revenue be, if you could get to it? Just to get comfortable.

I would like to do at least,

let's say, like get to a point where I'm doing like a hundred K a month.

Okay, 100K a month, okay, so big business, right? So that's first question.

Yes. Big dreams.

Second question is, so what products or service are you going to sell?

So basically our pet products, so our elevated food and water bowls, 'cause there's so many dogs that need this instead of going for extra expensive medical treatments.

Okay, so average sell is how much?

About

betwe between one forty nine and a hundred ninety nine dollars.

So you've got to sell 5,000 products a month to make 100K. On the

Yes.

more expensive, okay. So 5,000, so what we do now is we, so all I did there, sorry, was I took the big number, 100K a month, divided by the smaller number, the cost of your product, which I rounded up to 200 pounds, because it was just easy, or $200, because it was just easier.

And then what we ended up with was the amount of capacity we need to fulfill. So 5,000 units. OK, so is that realistic, achievable?

I think so. If I look at what my competitors are doing, I I feel it it

Okay, but right now.

it won't be something we can do day one. No.

Okay.

So this is probably at goal kind of I would say year two, three, maybe.

Okay, so,

but this is where we've got to figure out, well actually, if we want to get to the 100K, we've to do 5,000 products, but actually this year we can only do, I don't know, 500 products. We know

Mm.

then that we're only going to hit 10K a month. It might be that we've got to kind of, the other thing as well is, do you feel that you can stimulate enough demand to sell 5,000 products a month?

the moment? no, but

Okay.

we're growing growing to get there. So that's kind of working on a crowdfunding

So.

and

So think about, you know, the economics around supply and demand, okay, business 101. So we have supply, we have demand, okay. Now in an ideal world, supply equals demand. We need 5,000 products, we've got 5,000 buyers, boom. Like match made in heaven.

Mm.

But the moment we've only got 4,999 buyers and 5,000 products.

Demand is lower than supply, which devalues your product. And it forces people then, because they want to stimulate demand, and they think the way to do that is to reduce prices. So we'll reduce our prices, and we think that that's going to be the thing which will stimulate demand to sell that 5,000th product. It's very counterintuitive, but it doesn't actually work like that. What happens is when you reduce your prices, you're signaling to the market that we have an oversupply in the market. We've got too many products now, not enough supply, not enough demand.

Now all of a sudden you're kind of like moving towards the average. You're decreasing the perceived value of your products. Who wants to buy the lower value product? Who wants the low price Ferrari, the low price Rolex, the low price whatever. Like nobody really does aspirationally wise. There are some people who just buy the cheapest of everything, but you'll find that they, you know, buy cheap, twice, right? So instead what we want to do, if we want to start to stimulate more demand is we want to signal to the market that we're exclusive. So we raise

Mm.

our prices.

Okay.

And actually it's okay then if demand drops a bit because we're making far more profit every time we raise our prices. Most people assume that if they raise their prices by just 5%, they've only got to sell 5 % more of the same product, or sorry, they can sell 5 % less of the same product to make the same net profit. It doesn't work like that. You raise your prices by 5%. You can actually afford to sell 11 % fewer products to make the same net profit because the money gets gobbled up by, there's a slight compounding effect which happens in your profit and loss.

So by the time you get to 10 % of a price increase, you can sell 22 % fewer products. Right? So we're working less and making the same, if not more money. Okay. So there's all these kinds of metrics, which most people just don't take into consideration when they're just going through their business plan. How much revenue? What's the average selling price? How many units capacity do I need to sell? Is that realistic? Can I stimulate the demand for it? Those five factors.

The other thing as well, and this is quite, I find all this stuff fascinating because I'm a numbers guy. I've loved maths ever since I was a little boy. So there's never just one lever either. It's not just raise your prices and that's it. There's other levers that we can start to pull with your business Mariska that you could start to, so if we increase our prices by 10%,

If we increase our average order value by 33%, so somebody buys a second or third or fourth product from you. If we increase the number of times those people come back every year and buy products from you from one to three, so it goes on. If we have multiple streams of income, if we can generate 23 % more leads, if we can increase conversions from our website by 13%.

All of those different levers you're pulling overall will double, treble, quadruple the amount of revenue you're bringing into your business. And those are all things that you should be measuring as a product-based business. And I think this is what a lot, they think, I'll make the product. I'll make, I don't know, water bottles and people will buy it.

It does not work like that. have to be

Yeah.

a master at stimulating demand. You have to be a master at understanding pricing and the economics in your business. And then, you know, that's where kind of the real magic happens. All of those different things kind of lining up in your business.

Well that's so interesting. And kind of, you know, looking at that and like at that perspective, because obviously we are trying to get crowdfunding started because I made lots of mistakes in my business and decided to design the most advanced elevated food and water bowl I possibly could. And obviously, you know, getting all the cost involved and stuff is quite expensive, but

So launching a crowdfunding, hoping to actually fund it through that and by selling our our first MOQs through that. So what would be some of the biggest things that you would focus now, like on over the the next ninety days before you know, the the crowdfunding?

really great question. mean, first and foremost, I would find 10, 10 influencers in the, in the, in the pet space who

get your product. They just like the brand, the product, the concept behind it. They don't have to have big followings. And what I would do is I'd actually give them a bit of equity in the business to be a brand ambassador. That'd be one of the first things that I would do. And so they stand to benefit from the upside or potential exit of the business if you, not if, when you hit that million dollar a year sort of, you know, revenue goal that you've set for yourself, if that's your plan, or they just share, get a share in the profits.

probably I would set aside up to 10 % of equity to give away. So they get 1 % each for having a small slice of the pie to be an advocate for the brand for a period of time. Also, there might be other, what else would I do if I was launching this business? That would be the first and main one.

The second thing, there might be some other partnerships which you could get. mean, obviously distribution with physical products is quite important. So are there any other brands out there that your product would sit nicely alongside that aren't currently being serviced? That they, again, would they be interested in equity or just to be, you know, put in one of those first big orders into the business just to help sort of support you. But I would also be sort of taking the Hormozi style approach to it of having a second, third and fourth product available for

people to buy. So that once you've built the trust up with the first product, you can then do some email marketing and reach out with the second, third and fourth products. It's a bit like Starbucks and Costa, the big coffee chains. They don't make their profit on a small or medium cup of coffee. They make it on the extra shot and the large cups of coffee. That 20 or 30 cents which they put on the top for those is all profit for them.

that's where they make the most amount of money. The little squirt of vanilla into it or whatever it might, into your chai latte. Those are the things which eke out the most amount of profit, having that upsell, that second product which people can buy. And then also, customer win back.

You don't want to be a product to be so good that people never have to buy another one again. But what you want, right,

That's what I designed, yeah.

but you want it to be good enough that they buy two or three of them.

for their friends, family or things like that. So this is a bit of a random one, but I used to get so annoyed at having to go out into my garden and pick up dog poo using poo bags, right? And I had a crazy plan that I was going to dig a hole in the ground and I was going to compost it and things like that. But then what was worried about smells and rodents and various other things, I thought that's not the best solution. So I managed to find these.

what they call Pet Genie. So the brand's called Pet Genie and they've got these wonderful bins which come with compostable bags and it's just brilliant.

just totally changed my approach to picking up my dog's poo, believe it or not. So I bought one for my

love it.

mum, because I thought it was so good, because every time we took the dogs up to my mum, she'd be out there like trying to use the bags and stuff like that, or we'd have to take bags up with us. And it was just really nice. So I bought one for mum so that she's got it for her dog. And whenever we take the dogs up there, just scoop it up, chuck it in bin, nice and easy.

Yeah.

So good products people will buy for other people as well.

Mm, definitely. And like coming into this space with entrepreneurs and business owners and things, you know, like when do you know when you've genuinely exhausted all of your options in business versus when are you just exhausted?

Oof.

Well, I think it's easier to know when you're just exhausted. When you wake up on that Monday morning and just the fire's gone and you're just like, ugh, like you're disappointed about the fact that you've to show up for your business. again, I'd love to like it for it to all be, you know, rainbows and fairies and things like that, but it's not. There are...

I've managed to work myself into a very privileged position where I'm not chained to my desk. My income isn't tied to my time necessarily. I do obviously still have to work, but typically if I, like this week, my family have actually gone away and I thought I'm here with the dogs, I thought it was a great opportunity just to have a bit of chill time for Robin. So I coach probably maybe six to eight hours this week and any other time that I get to work is completely optional. I'll still make the same money that I make most months, irrespective.

22 years to get to that point where I can decide I don't want to work on Fridays anymore I'll go and do archery on a Tuesday morning or just I can't be bothered to work for now I'll just go Netflix and chill for a bit but there's been times when I've woken up on the Monday morning with a call book to my diary and I'm like god your heart kind of sinks a little bit and I think that that's the first sign you get when you're approaching burnout

Mm.

That's like an early warning sign. Most people fall into this whole hustle grind culture, which I just vehemently disagree with, especially as a permanent thing. Short term, when you're starting your business up, bit of hustle, bit of hard work, put the hours in. Yeah, you've got to build that momentum up. But once the flywheel's going, it should get, well, I wouldn't say it gets easier. You just start to learn how to move a little bit faster and more efficiently.

With a business though, my marketing agency pushed me to the point where, it's something I've talked a little bit about on other podcasts, one Sunday morning I was out with my cycling buddies on a ride. I went down a hill at 52 and a half miles an hour on this push bike and I broke down.

I just burst into floods of tears at the bottom of this hill, just because obviously all the adrenaline and everything like kind of kicked in and then washed away and then bang.

just had a breakdown. And my buddies are like, geez, Rob, what's up? And I was like, don't worry, go get me some coffee and cake lined up at the shop and I'll meet you there, because we're only a few miles off the ride. I just need a bit of space. And in that moment, I realized, I just knew that I was done with the agency, the late nights, the difficult clients, the being away at weekends quite regularly trying to work just to grow the business and things like that. But I didn't know, unfortunately, what I know.

now back then I also didn't have the right mentors I don't think around me to give me the best advice at the time and so the only thing that I the only option I saw in my head and bearing in mind my wife was eight months pregnant I went home and said look I've made a decision with the business and she's like yay what are gonna do and I said I'm gonna close it

Yeah.

on Monday so of course it's like went from yay to international sign of distress went up few choice words from

wow.

Yeah.

But

she's been incredibly supportive and obviously, because here we are on

the flip side of that 10 years later and I've got an incredibly successful coaching practice and amazing wife and family.

You know, we've got a great, great life in the Maya though. I just knew that it was the right thing to close the business down. I was fortunate that somebody did cut the swoop in and say, Hey, listen, I'd like to buy your, your client list and some IP off you. And, and I had a good earn out over a couple of years. So it took the pressure off financially. Not everybody gets that opportunity when you hit breaking point, it's kind of like the wheels fall off and you're left with a load of debt. I was very careful with, I've always been very careful with my businesses, not to borrow money if I can get away with it.

So

Yeah.

I have no debt in my coaching practice if I just decided, right, I'm going to close it today. I'd probably be able to withdraw a bit from my business bank account, pay HMRC and I'm the tax man and I'm kind of done at that point. So

there's a few things that you can put in place to kind of shore yourself up. think building up a rainy day fund is so important. People who run businesses like the world over, they literally live hand to mouth.

They earn money,

Yeah.

they spend it, earn money, spend it. They treat the business's money like it's their own. It's not, it's your business, it is your finances. They're two separate entities and you need to keep them that way. And the business like cash is like oxygen to your business. It needs cash in order for it to survive and breathe and grow. And so I'm always, and like everybody has their number. You've talked about your revenue goals.

But I bet there's a number as well that if you had that sat in a bank, you wouldn't wake up in the morning worrying.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

Right. I know what my number is.

My number is 50k. When my rainy day fund sinks below 50k, I'm like, shit, I need to, I need to knuckle down for a bit here and get that, get

that back up a bit if I can. you know, and that number changes by the way, first of all, it was 10k and I hit 10k and I was like, that's not enough. I need 20k hit 20k and it's not enough. And so it went on until 50k was the point where I was like, can breathe.

and I mean there's so many business advice that you have been given us through this episode and also have been taken, you know, from different books and through your books. and there's a question I wanna ask you and we've been peeking at this fr from our intro. so what is something in business that your dogs have actually taught you? So Wilbur and Twiggy about

You

b about business that absolutely no business book could ever. Yes.

Would you like to meet Twiggy?

hello

She needs a bit of a trim actually.

She's getting into the, I trimmed her about four weeks ago, so she's starting to get a little bit hairy. So she's a wire haired dachshund. She had no idea what's going on at all.

Here you go Twigs. She was just sleeping. we go. Anxious yawning. The biggest lesson I've learned from these two, so Twiggy and Wilbur

The amount of people who just sit and stare at their screen procrastinate working and just, you know, trying to push stuff out on social media and churning through emails and really not making any progress with their business. I recognise that that became a really big thing for me during lockdown. And I realised the amount of time I was just procrastinate working, just sitting on my desk, not really doing anything sort of massively productive to move the business forward. So what I've learnt now is because these guys always need a walk.

So whenever I start procrastinating, I'm like, right down to switch your computer off and Twiggy and Wilbur normally get a walk out of me somewhere up in the Cotswold Hills and countryside. You know, I think, I think again, like I'm not into hustle and grind culture. I'm not into like busting yourself until you burn out and break yourself. Business should be fun. It should be, you should have the freedom to roam. Yeah, that's my, they're always my reminder.

Awesome.

to take a break.

I love

that. And yeah, it is a great time for people to take a break and, you know, go and have a walk with their dogs as well. So, yeah, and Robin, for anyone that's kind of listening today that has been sitting on maybe like an idea for months or even years, and they are waiting for this perfect moment to start, what would you tell them?

There's never a perfect time. It's like having children. There's never a perfect time to have kids or dogs or start a business. So I'm always a big fan, like I said, of just if you've got a burning idea that you think could help somebody, you just get after it. Just give it a shot. You know, what's the worst case that can happen? One, you might look a bit stupid, but everybody's going to, you know, if it doesn't work out, that's everybody's biggest fear is I'll look a bit, you know, a bit dumb. But actually the reality is most of your peer group friends, you know, your real friends will support you.

the people who don't really get it, they'll be busy tomorrow and just forget about it. The second thing that could happen is you might lose a bit of money. Money is always, we get, I mean, I could do a whole podcast just on money mindset. We get so hung up on money. I, look, I, again, I know I'm speaking from a privileged place, but it's a privileged place that comes from 22 years worth of, you know, just solid focus on growing my businesses and working towards like, you know, my own end goals.

Money can always, you can always make more money, whether it's a job or another business idea or...

Yeah. Definitely.

build that 100K a month business, Mariska, imagine what you could do as a result of that. Imagine the people that you've served and helped as a result of that. the tiny little downside, bit of money and looking a bit stupid, massive potential upside.

Yeah.

Wow. And Robin, where can our Tails and Tones community find you?

Yeah, absolutely. So I have a YouTube channel. So if you just go and search for Robin Waite, I'm sure you'll probably pop a link somewhere around the video as well, the podcast. I'm on LinkedIn as well. So if you want to reach out to me directly and ask any questions, do connect on LinkedIn. Just remind me that you heard me on the podcast here, Tails and Tones podcast. But also I do have a gift as well, Mariska, for your listeners too. So I've got two actually. So take your shot.

So if you do have a business already and you wanna learn how to grow the business, package up your services. So take your shot. You can get that at fearless.business.com. My second book's actually just come out as well. So I have like an interactive digital version of that which people can grab hold of a copy too. that's if you've, again, if you've got an established business but maybe you're not making the money you want to, that's a great book. And that one's at fearlesspricing.co.uk.

And

we will link that all up in our show notes. And I would also definitely recommend to go onto your website and do that fearless pricing scorecard. Cause yeah, I I have to admit that I got forty percent. So I feel there's lots of room for improvement. But yeah, so people can go and, you know, do that. And let us know what your scores are. We would love to know.

Imagine if everybody had a business MBA and they scored 90 % in the scorecard. I'd out of a job with Mariska

exactly, exactly. So you've got like sixty percent push on me to be able to improve. So yeah, ideal,

There you go.

ideal. Well,

I didn't get a chance to ask the question because I

so one of the, one of my big things is about like business should also be a business for good. shouldn't just be there to benefit the founder or the people working that business. think, I think, um, so for ocean, essentially what I do is every time a client joins one of my programs, um, I make a small donation, sounds small, but $20, but actually there's a lot that actually for ocean do with that $20 in terms of getting plastic out of the ocean. um, I used to surf a lot. I love the water. I do think we should.

should

be doing more to look after our planet and why shouldn't my business benefit that happening? So yeah, every time a client joins, I make a small donation. And my goal is, I think I'm up to somewhere approaching about 40 kilos out of my hundred kilos target of getting plastic out of the ocean. and 4ocean really cool, I wish I had mine on actually. So they take all the plastics, rope and things like that, that they pull out of the ocean and they actually recycle it into these really lovely bracelets.

So you actually kind of it's not just like giving

yeah, I have one.

I think so it's not just about you get a little something back for the $20 which you put in but I just feel like every business should be giving something back

Exactly. That is very high on our list once we actually start making, you know, something to be able to join one percent for the planet. That's our first goal to join so that we can give our revenue back. And then, you know, also make sure that that our product is actually fully sustainable in a way that that the end of life is totally worked out. So again, we over-engineered over

everything of this product, but yeah. And fun fact, so I actually wore all of my trash to raise awareness of how much waste people generate. So in one month I was walking around with 60 kilos of trash like in the UAE.

Wow. Gosh.

your next marathon, maybe that could be something which you do to raise awareness is rather than wearing a cape, you actually wear a trash can or something like that.

my gosh. I don't know if I can run even one kilometer in that.

Love it.

Robin,

thank you so much for being on the podcast.

It's been an absolute pleasure. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

If there's one thing I'm taking away from this conversation, it is that you don't need permission or a huge following or a pile of money to start. Robin said it himself. Build it, launch it, make it better later. And when he talked about the grooming business, whatever your business is, that dog account you love,

That community that already shows up for you. That is not someday. That is the beginning of something real. So we talked about pricing, what you're worth, showing up with the same message, even when it feels like very repetitive. And the differences it makes between quitting and simply needing to push a little bit harder.

but the part that'll stick with me the most is that our dogs teach us so much every single day. They show up, they're consistent, they don't overthink, and they kind of lead with heart. And I also loved Robin's like advice or what his dogs has teached him. You know, when you hit that point, just take them for a walk.

Maybe that is the whole business plan. So if you're sitting on an idea waiting for it to be perfect, is your nudge. Take your shot, and whatever stage you're at, know that you are not doing this alone. That is what this community is for. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of Tails and Tones.

If today's episode actually spoke to you, please do feel free to leave us a review.

Or if you can think of a fellow pet parent that might love this episode too. If you've got any questions or just want to come and say hi, I'm always around on Instagram at Tails and Tones, where every tale tells a story and every tone speaks from the heart. See you in the next one!