by Celeste Hackett
In This Article Read About:
Intuition and the Economy
My Year Goal of 100K!
State of Texas Runs Me Ragged
Earnings Breakdown Month by Month
Getting OUT of Debt
What the Hell Happened in September?
A dog named Alice and Spiritual Opportunities
The Truth About Hypnosis for Hypnotists
Cal Banyan has a well-known video out called The Truth About Hypnosis. It’s for clients to watch before their first session to help them overcome any fear or misconceptions about hypnosis. In my articles, I’ve done my best to remain true to keeping it real and giving out a whole other perspective on the truth about hypnosis, the truth as it applies to starting and running my hypnosis business on a shoestring.
I started writing very candid articles about running a hypnosis business with frugal means from the onset of my business in 2006. I guess you could say it’s been a sort of diary. That first year I grossed about 34K working out of an apartment, mostly part time. At that time I was only charging $100 dollars per session or $425 for a package of 5. The number of clients and the price increased bit by bit over the year.
In 2007 I grossed about 74K more than doubling my income! My husband and I bought a modest house and I increased my client load as well as the cost of sessions, selling individual sessions at $169 or a package of 5 for $750. From time to time I increased or decreased the cost a bit depending on what it took to encourage clients to book.
Intuition and the Economy
I remember having a strong intuitional feeling that we, as a nation, were in economic trouble way back in about 2002. It was just a strong gut feeling. When I married my husband in October of 2004, he had it too and we talked often about the signs that pointed to a recession. Family members and friends thought we were being pessimistic and generally disagreed with us. It was always the ones who had jobs that argued the against any problems the loudest. They’d say stuff like, there are always jobs for really talented people. The bar for really talented people just kept getting raised, I guess, because the amount of businesses laying off employees nation-wide kept increasing and housing prices kept dropping.
Now Plano, Texas, where I live, is one of the more insulated areas in terms of economy. Our housing prices haven’t gone down as much as others and there have been better stability in terms of employment here too. I was surprised to learn this after seeing two different articles listing the best places to live in 2008 and Plano came up in both of them.
I can’t tell you how many people have contacted me to thank me for being candid about what it takes to make a living as a hypnotist when funds are short. It’s been my pleasure to share information with you and now I’d like to tell you what 2008 was like for Family First Hypnosis.
My Year Goal of 100K!
I started out the year with very high hopes. After all, I had more than doubled my income at the close of my second year in business. I set a goal for my business that I’d gross $100,000.00 for 2008. I thought if I could make the same income as in 2007 with sessions (about 74K) then I could make up the rest with Hypnosis certification classes.
I had gotten my certification to teach Cal Banyan’s 5-PATH® (An NGH approved hypnosis certification class that teaches basic to advanced techniques.) in July of 2007. I was unable to teach these classes in 2007, however, due to delays with the great state of Texas and it’s certification program for a Texas “career school”. I wasn’t too worried though, I thought at any time I’d get the okay to begin once the New Year was upon us.
State of Texas Runs Me Ragged
Later I found out that the state of Texas is known for having one of the most rigorous and confusing processes for opening a school. It was truly a nightmare with phone calls, applications, re-writes and re-mailings. I thought I’d go insane. Maureen, Cal Banyan’s wife, kept me going. She just kept gently urging me to stay the course and not give up. “Sooner or later”, she said, “if you just keep at it, you’ll get the certification.” I thought to myself, yeah, if only to be rid of me they are going to give it to me! I dug in my heels and began being one pretty obvious squeaky wheel. Finally, in August, I got my certificate in the mail!
Needless to say, with more than half the year gone, that kind of messed up my plans to make 100k! Other things that kept me from my goal were what I suppose was the economy issue itself. My January started out paltry which made me nervous. I grossed only $3550. January is supposed to be one of the best months of the year as people call for help implementing New Year’s resolutions. I saw very little of those calls in the first month of 08. Compare this with the year before when the average monthly gross had been about $6200.00.
Earnings Breakdown Month by Month
February and March were a bit better, April felt like old times, I got hopeful. May was back to being less than comfortable, but then for no particular reason that I could figure out I made $9119.00 in June! Holy Moly, I thought, this is cool! Things were up and down after that: July grossed $5625.00, August: $5482.00, September: $1575,00, Yikes! October: $3745.00 November: $4099.00, and December: $2909.00.
In total I grossed $55,690.00 in 2008, not even coming close to my goal, but you know what? We are still in business when loads of other businesses have folded! With some of the more notable failures being Bennigans, Circuit City, Linens and Things, Mervyns, Sharper Image, and Washington Mutual I gotta say I feel pretty darn good that Family First Hypnosis is still chugging along!
Getting OUT of Debt
Of course as the days and weeks passed I knew that we weren’t pulling in the kind of dough as we did in the prior year. My hubby and I held our breath and worried about our mortgage getting paid and like a lot of people we cut costs as much as we could. In fact, In May we cut up our credit cards and took out a bank consolidation loan for $23,500.00 in credit card debt that we had accumulated.
The credit card debt wasn’t just business debt. It was mostly personal debt, but when your business is a sole proprietorship (DBA), it’s ALL personal debt and the debt was mounting even with our best efforts to make extra payments on our cards. On the advice of a friend who is a CPA, (“Celeste the interest on those credit cards is killin’ you!”) I called Bank of America and got a loan with a fixed rate of 8.99% which is way better than the double digit interest rate we had.
As I am writing, hmmm, I’m wondering something. Since we were personally responsible for our business debt, I sure took a lot of personal cut backs as did my husband. Could this be why the business made it and why so many big companies didn’t – such as the billion dollar federal government bail out recipients? To my knowledge not one executive at those banks that got our tax money has cut back in the slightest or lost their job. Seems I had a lot more to lose than they did huh? Ahhh but I digress :o).
By the way, even with the reduction in our gross income, we have managed to already whittle the loan down to $15,000.00. So we have been able to do more than just pay our bills and exist. We actually thought we’d grossed about $10-12K more than we did. We had to watch what we spent, but we still were able to eat out, get birthday gifts, help out a few times when a family member ran into a crises, and I even went on an awesome weekend in the Hill country to a spa!
It was a pretty good year because our needs were met and then some. In my book if your needs are met (not your desires) you are wealthy.
What the Hell Happened in September?
Anyway, what about September you may be wondering. I grossed only $1575.00! What happened? What caused that? Well, in late July, my niece who has cerebral palsy came for a visit. “Christy” and I have always been especially close and when she complained of a horrible home life, with her mom and step-dad, and begged to move in with us, I couldn’t say no. She had a long visit with my mother in August and in September she was here, with us, to stay. I had a big, BIG task of being the facilitator and advocate for her starting her new life here.
Here are just some of the things I accomplished on her behalf mostly in September and October:
- Got her registered for school
- Got the bus to come to the house to pick her up
- Got her SSI checks moved here
- Got her Medicaid card
- Got her physical therapy
- Got her a new physical therapist to come to the house
- Got her physical therapy in the school
- Got her a computer
- Got her back into the church/faith she wanted
- Got her new clothes
- Got her a checking account and a debit card
- Trained her how to do on-line banking
- Got her a general practitioner doctor
- Got her a psychiatrist that would be sensitive to lowering her meds when appropriate
- Got her a “K” walker for walking.
Along with these very practical things, I also was busier on a daily basis cooking for her, doing more washing, helping with homework and working on helping her overcome issues such as skin picking, mood swings, bathroom accidents etc. See Cal Banyan’s Hypnosis Etc with Celeste Hackett for more on this with the “Working with Family Members” episode at www.calbanyan.com.
I guess you could say I just wasn’t focused on my business during September. Not only was I doing all this work to help my niece, but my husband was not exactly happy with what was involved with having someone new live here, so I had his emotions as well as my own and Christy’s to wade through! Yeah, I guess you could say I wasn’t exactly focused on my business!
A dog named Alice and Spiritual Opportunities
Time passed. Even though things were progressing positively, I went through a dark period for a little while where I became depressed. I have had the blues before, but this was a very different feeling. I didn’t want to get out of bed and I was crying at the slightest thing and feeling rather hopeless. Wow, I thought, this is what I’ve seen in some of my clients!
Thank God I had the tools I learned as a hypnotist, my meditation practice and great help from and faith in God. I used all I had and was able to pull out of it.
On top of all this personal stuff with my niece and husband, in the latter part of the 2008 my husband’s mother began having, hmmm, let’s call it unrest, with a family member she lived with. She called crying on the phone to us daily and before long she was spending nights on a fold-out chair in, of all places, the hypnosis room. The spare room had gone to my niece, remember?
By the way, once my husband saw me be kind, welcoming, and compassionate with his mother, he became much better about my niece being here. The truth is, I was way more able to be good to his mother, too, knowing the strain I had put him through by having my niece come and live with us. I had known that there would be some spiritual opportunities for my inner growth with my mother-in-law one day and I knew my niece was going to be a part of mine and my husband’s personal growth too. It’s wonderful how everything played out. Things improved for all of us beyond anything I could have dreamed.
Oh and did I tell you we got another dog last year too? Alice. We found her wandering on a country road all covered in fleas and matts. After cleaning her up we realized she was a red merle Australian Sheppard. She is the best therapy dog I’ve ever seen. I sometimes let her out to greet clients who love dogs. She doesn’t jump or bark and she looks like a Kaleidoscope of color. She is so beautiful and sweet! My but our household has grown!
I do wonder what kind of financial year we would have had with the business if personal issues hadn’t gotten in the way, but I wouldn’t change anything. I had more beautiful moments with family, I became stronger within, I saw amazing miracle-like changes happen and I watched love and respect grow, but most of all, I got closer to God. Because of all these things, last year will be remembered as one of the best years of my life. And you know what? You can’t put a price on that.
