Patrick Collins is a sales coach and consultant based in Vilnius, originally from the UK, who moved from a career as a professional footballer into sales, consulting, and startup coaching. He is the founder of The Relationship of Sales, his training practice built around treating sales as trust-building rather than persuasion, and has recently co-founded Unemployable with designer Fausta Mikutaitė, a training and community project for people who no longer fit inside a traditional job.
Our conversation covered why so many people are disillusioned with corporate work right now, how he uses AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement, why he thinks of sales as teaching rather than selling, and the very personal story behind the word “unemployable” itself.
Let’s dive in.
Listen or watch the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Youtube.
A Hundred Years of the Nine to Five
Patrick opens with a detail that reframes the whole conversation. The nine to five workday was introduced in 1926. A hundred years on, most people are still working it, even though the tools available to them have changed completely.
“We’re still working nine to five and I don’t know anybody who uses AI to now work less.”
His point isn’t that AI has failed to help. It’s that nobody has paused long enough to ask what they’d actually do with the time it frees up. Most people, he says, have never sat down and defined what success looks like for them specifically, so any extra capacity just gets absorbed back into more work.
“You need to know what success is for you. What is enough for you?”
The First Years Are a Battle
Patrick doesn’t romanticize the decision to leave a job and build something of your own. When he trains founders or employees who want to start a business, the first thing he tells them is that it will not make their life easier, at least not right away.
Underneath that honesty is a read on the current moment. Companies are reporting higher profits, leaning harder on AI, and treating people worse, and workers are noticing. He sees the disillusionment building into something larger.
“I really feel like there’s a rebellion coming. There’s a feeling that people don’t think that this is the status quo anymore.”
AI as a Force Multiplier, Not a Threat
Patrick is direct about where he thinks AI actually changes things for people trying to go independent. A small creative project used to require a team of four: someone designing, someone marketing, someone selling, someone handling compliance or production. That team had to be paid before the work even started.
“It is a very good assistant that you can do things that four people could do with one very good human and a knowledge of AI.”
He draws a clear line for where AI belongs in that equation and where it doesn’t.
“The things that your hands would do, replace with AI. The things that your brain should do, your brain needs to keep doing it.”
His Brother’s Camper Van
To make the point about defining your own version of success, Patrick tells the story of his brother, a former professional athlete with a highly driven, ADHD personality who started a property company that grew fast and then collapsed, because charisma and sales instinct aren’t the same as knowing how to run a business.
What came out of that failure was a much clearer sense of what he actually wanted: work three days a week, earn two or three thousand euros a month, live in a camper van.
“If you look at his life from an ultra competitive corporate point of view, you would say he’s lazy. If you look at it from a lifestyle point of view, he’s rich.”
His brother’s current filter for people has nothing to do with income or status.
“How kind and how good are you as a person is how he builds his relationships.”
Turning Sales Into Education
Nobody Patrick trains likes the word sales, and he doesn’t think that’s a personal failing. He thinks the word itself is broken, tangled up with the idea of convincing someone to buy something they don’t need.
“Let’s cross it out and call it education.”
Reframed that way, the goal shifts from closing a deal to becoming genuinely useful to a very specific kind of person. He pushes everyone he works with to get sharply specific about what makes them the obvious choice, rather than trying to serve everyone a little.
“Your product at the moment, your service at the moment, is like an all you can eat buffet. A bit of everything, but nobody chooses you when they really want something special.”
From there, his advice narrows into something almost boringly practical: know exactly what makes you unique, then get organized about who you’ve spoken to and when, because most people lose deals not on the call but in the follow-up they never send.
Look Backward Before You Look Forward
The hack Patrick says most people overlook has nothing to do with finding new leads. It’s about the people they already know and have stopped talking to.
“Export your LinkedIn network, run it through something like Claude that hopefully knows about you or your business idea, and just say to it, analyze anybody that’s my perfect target audience that I’ve not spoken to for 60 days.”
That list, built from years of relationships that were never nurtured, is usually far easier to work than any list of strangers.
“Look back before you look forward.”
The Landing Page Argument
Building Unemployable surfaced a real creative tension between Patrick and his co-founder Fausta. To him, a landing page is a two-hour job: a template, a logo, some text. Fausta spent two weeks on theirs, because she wanted people to feel something the moment they landed on it, not just register “coming soon.”
She was right. Their first newsletter wasn’t a product update. It went out and got roughly 150 replies, most of them long, personal stories about the exact frustrations the brand was speaking to.
“If you put them both together, you get fireworks.”
Reading the Room Across Cultures
Living in Vilnius for nine years while training people across Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Asia, and the US has made Patrick unusually attentive to how differently the same message lands depending on where it’s read. He points to the book The Culture Map as a useful map of this territory: an American softening criticism with a compliment sandwich reads, to a French listener, as praise rather than the pointed feedback it was meant to be.
He learned this the hard way delivering the same training in Lithuania that had worked well in England, and getting a room of blank faces back.
“The social cues in Lithuania was we’ll show respect by not smiling.”
His advice for cold outreach follows the same logic: write short, and write for the reader’s attention span, not your own need to explain yourself.
“It should read as if you’ve sent it from a phone. If you could type it and you feel this is too long, it’s too long.”
Earning Trust Before You’re Hired
One of Patrick’s favorite examples comes from a small design studio in Belfast. Once a month, they’d spend a few days completely redesigning a well-known company’s website, unprompted, from the landing page down to the structure, then send it to that company directly and post it publicly. Manchester United was one of their targets.
“Your website’s in the 90s, it’s 2026, maybe you should catch up.”
Manchester United never hired them. Chelsea did. The tactic wasn’t free work handed out indiscriminately; it was proof of skill placed directly in front of the people most likely to need it, which built trust faster than any pitch could.
“Be so good that they can’t not hire you.”
What Unemployable Actually Means
The story behind the name is Patrick’s own. In his early twenties, fresh off a football career, he interviewed for an admin job and was told, fifteen minutes in, that he was perfect for the role. Then he was told he wouldn’t get it.
“You’re just not employable.”
He’d already pointed out that the company’s website didn’t have live chat. That instinct to question and improve things, rather than simply do as told, is exactly what makes him unemployable in the traditional sense, and exactly what he now builds a business and a community around. The people he’s found drawn to it range from young people who’ve never quite fit into a job or education path, to small business owners who can’t figure out how to grow, to established founders who feel like AI has left them behind. What unites them isn’t a shared tactic. It’s the feeling of not belonging to the old model of work anymore.
“The impact is, can we get all these people together? Can we get them supporting each other?”
To connect with Patrick Collins, find him on LinkedIn. To learn more about Unemployable, go here.
