by Maureen Banyan
Question:
Now my business is at a crucial place for more growth. I’d like to see the numbers keep going up each month… There is only one of me and I am not as great as I could be yet. Products, teaching, adding hypnotists (yea where?) raising my fees, are all on my mind. How do I go from apartment to center is another thing I am wondering about. Getting a loan.- How? Too early?
And I got this other growth problem, I am afraid to schedule new callers when my clients I am seeing haven’t finished yet. What if they need more sessions and the new clients take all the spaces? I am lucky to have such concerns.
This Is My Advice:
First of all, congratulations on getting to this crucial place! I am sure this is exciting and at the same time a little scary, because you will be moving into new territory. Moving from your apartment office to an office space is a good step.
When you operated out of your home, you did not have to worry about the additional costs of office rent, utilities, etc. and all the overheads of running an office. When we opened our office in 1996, we certainly did it with faith, Cal was so excited about hypnosis that we went out and signed a 3 year lease for a 2000 sq. ft. office space. Now, that we had signed a 3 year lease we had to make sure it worked. Sometimes, these kinds of commitment help motivate us to do the sometimes uncomfortable things, like marketing… talking to strangers, working day and night, etc.
Opening and renting an office space is the easiest step, the next step is marketing, which many people forget is the key to bringing you clients. Unless you already have a great referral source or have a great clientele built up, you need to continue to market yourself, especially if you want your business to grow. If you are fully booked, you may want to consider raising your fees. And if you have large enough space, you may want to consider hiring another hypnotist, your overhead will remain the same except for the hypnotist’s wages.
Another income producing avenue, is to become an instructor and conduct Hypnosis Certification trainings, you will be able to add an additional income of $10,000 – 20,000 per year (basing those figures on training 6-12 students) in addition to selling training materials.
Teach 7th Path Self-Hypnosis® classes once a month, we charge $95.00 per person, do it one Saturday a month, this alone may pay the rent.
You asked about being afraid to schedule new clients because your current clients may need those spots. At our center, we usually book 5-6 sessions at once. Especially now that you are very busy, you may want to tell your clients that it is better that they go ahead and schedule all their appointments right away in order that they are able to get in on those convenient time slots as you cannot promise them that they can get those time slots later on. For the clients that will not or cannot make those appointments, they will just have to take a chance, you should not leave appointment slots open for “just-in-case” clients who may need them. The goal here is to be productive and you do not want to be left with empty appointment slots, an empty appointment slot means you are losing money. Typically, after a couple of sessions with a client, you will have a pretty good idea whether this client will need additional sessions or not, so that will be a good time to advise them to make those additional appointments while you still have a couple of weeks or so to book them. If you are already fully booked, then put them on your “Waiting List”, on your “Waiting List” be sure to have information such as: Preferred times, days of the week, etc. also ask them how much notice they would need.
Hope this information helps. Good luck !
