The Only 3 Ways To Increase Profits In Your Hypnotherapy Practice
My friend Mark Cunningham often says, "there are a lot of starving hypnotists out there". You might be even be one of them.
Listen, you spend good money on top notch certification training(s), you have all this amazing knowledge and the skills to make powerful positive changes in people’s lives, yet you can’t get enough business to get ahead. Many people only do hypnosis as a sideline business, because they are afraid to quit their day job or they won’t be able to support themselves.
Maybe you haven’t even yet started the first steps to getting your business going. If so… you are not alone.
In fact, the field of hypnosis is in a sad state as far as people like you getting the rewards you deserve for all of the value you bring to the world. Hypnosis as a field is in a similar place that chiropractic care was in the 1960′s. People didn’t trust chiropractors then, regular doctors spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them. Their biggest problem was lots of skills at helping people, lousy skills for running a business.
Chiropractors now routinely make a median salary of $76,483 (swz.com) and after 10 years are expected to make an average of over $125,000 per year (princetonreview.com).
The good news is, that hypnosis has that same upside potential. There are hypnotists who make over 100k/year, and you can too! In fact, there is no good reason you can’t make over $100,000 a year with only seeing 4-6 clients a day.
I know of a hypnosis center located in a small town in Minnesota that makes over $400,000 per year.
The key to all of this is getting prospective clients in the door… or more accurately in your chair. I will cover many ways to do this in future tips articles.
The key point for you to get now, is that you must think like an entrepreneur and work ON your business instead of IN your business as the hypnotist. The classic mistake small businesses make, is that the owner falls into the habit (and we all know about habits) of only doing that which they already knew how to do. The printer only prints, the stylist only cuts hair, the dentist only works on teeth.
An entrepreneur looks at the business as a whole and says I am a business owner that runs and manages a hypnosis practice, and begins to look at all the different ways to maximize the potential of that business.
This includes giving top quality service to your clients. The quality of what you do does not suffer when you adopt this mindset. In fact it will improve since as the owner, you will understand the value of customer relationships, continual education, and the value
you bring to the community.
Now that your are thinking as an entrepreneur, you can assign your subconscious the task of understanding these three core ways of maximizing your business revenue and how you can leverage them to increase your sales.
Fundamentally there are only three ways to grow any business:
- Increase the number of people who buy your services or products.
- Increase the amount of profit on each sale.
- Increase the number of times they buy from you.
Most business owners, and especially hypnotherapy businesses ONLY focus on the first one.
When you have a complete and successful marketing strategy, you will have maximized each of those areas. However, I bet you can think of at least one thing to do in each of those areas right now that would have an immediate impact on your business.
Here are three suggestions to prime your idea pump.
For #1 – Implement and test a 2-step lead generation system for your pracitce.
For #2 – Create three packages of some combination of office visits, self hypnosis classes, audio CD’s for home use, coaching, etc. Why three? If you have too many choices, it acts like a confusion induction. The easiest way out of confusion is to not choose, and you will get the "I need to think about it" response.
By creating 3 packages you make the decision easy and you sell more of your services. You may also realize that this also will do #3 and increase the number of times (visits) they buy from you.
For #3 – The easiest person to sell is someone that is already happy with a previous purchase. Keep a database of addresses and every time you create a new product, email all your former clients with a special offer.
Example: you come up with a stress reduction CD which provides a quick 10-15 minute session that can be done in their workplace when the day gets overwhelming. Send out an offer for your special clients, that they can get 2 for 1 deal on these and suggest they give one as a gift to someone in their family or office.
Example: Create a basic hypnosis class, and offer it to your previous clients. Cal Banyan gets a number of former clients as students in his hypnosis classes.
One of the great secrets to successful marketing in any industry is to "borrow" from other industries. From now on, you should be analyzing each and every ad, flyer, poster, radio spot you come across. Notice the ones that run continuously over a long period of time… they are the ones that are the most successful. What are they doing you can learn from?
You should definitely at a bare minimum check out what your competitors are doing by at least looking in the yellow pages under hypnosis. I would also look under counseling, psychology, and any other service a person might consider. They are your competition too.
What you find will be enlightening
