Session #248: Karen Gray on Consistent Hypnotic Growth

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 248, Karen Gray, on consistent hypnotic growth. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Happy day. To Christmas, happy holidays, happy everything else.

And if not, well have a joyous December 26, it’s Jason Lynette here celebrating the holiday season, and oftentimes we play the game of picking out a specific number episode or specific release of a session and doing something special around it. So specifically just to kind of set the stage. Sharing the podcast stage here with two of my best friends in the industry in the world.

The episode today with Karen Gray, and as a bit of a preview, almost on a bit of a New Year’s theme, we’ve got Dan Kendale back in the program next week on, I believe, January 2nd or whatever Thursday is, and the story behind having Karen back on the program is very simple. Yes, Karen is someone who. Rewind back to when she was on the podcast before.

We’ll link to the previous episode back in the show [email protected]. Basic story, this guy John, comes and takes my hypnosis training, goes back and makes her arm stiff and rigid so she can’t bend it. And she goes, I gotta learn this stuff. And she’ll highlight the rest from here of. Originally the goal of using the hypnosis to enhance her work as a registered nurse, and then eventually just kind of realizing, Oh yeah, let me just do this hypnosis thing.

That’s what I’m excited about, and you’re gonna hear the results of that. Now, the reason I had Karen on the program the first time a while ago, was that quite simply, here was a moment where, yes, she had gone through my online educational program. She had taken the Live Work Smart Hypnosis Life event, and then she was kind of running her own business and doing some.

That even I was off to the side going. Hey, what? What are you doing? That’s cool. I wanna try that out. And having her on to tell the story of utilizing some local email list serves, and it was an offhanded remark of a conversation we had when she was here in Virginia. Once again, whether it was the Train the Trainer event, or even the recent David Snyder event, but the experience of kind of calling it out.

Here she is in her second or third year as a hypnotist, and boom, this just happened, six figure. Hell yeah. This stuff works. So you’re gonna hear the details in terms of how she’s now thinking differently, what’s had to happen in terms of managing the time and really this true passion that you’re clearly gonna hear in the dialogue of creating the best possible experience for her clients for.

For her local community, and even going above and beyond just the time we spend in our offices providing a valuable service of education, not even just for the sake of scaling people into your private services, but education for the local business community. And even on top of that, just putting out this Goodwill project in terms of how we interact with others, the importance of when to scale our opportunities, of how we work with people, how we eventually level up our office spaces and oh man, do we talk an amazing dialogue.

Around the value of having the opportunity of dedicated media, this ease to then put out new content. And yes, we even take this time to do some holiday amends, to make nice with scripts once again. And she’s gonna emulate for you exactly the way that we, as the modern day practitioner, should look at scripts as a resource or as I’d.

Look at the script as if it were a transcript of one specific session with one specific client from one specific practitioner on that one specific day, and this is what they found to be effective with that one person. And then therefore, it’s your right as the practitioner to modify as needed to better customize what that person’s needs.

So this is where you’re gonna hear the brilliance of creating a flexible framework, frameworks equal freedom, the flexible framework of some sort of workshop seminar, and then based on the audience, based on the necessary promotion. That’s how we decide exactly how do we make it that laser focused for the audience that’s in front of us.

Yes, indeed. For. Women that are married and have four dogs, I think that’s the reference that doesn’t make sense to you yet. That will as soon as you get into this amazing dialogue. So check out, check her out [email protected], and all the links are gonna be in the show notes [email protected].

Check her out, reach out and say hello. And of course, while you’re looking at the show notes too, well, let me just make it simple. Check out all that we do with Work Smart Hypnosis. Come on in for the. Hands on training event, you’re about to listen to the results of someone who’s actually gone through this content, and more importantly, has put it in motion, has actually done the efforts put in the work, and has really broadened her own mindset to really make it her own.

So Work Smart Hypnosis Live is the live hands on training event where even for those of you that have some experience already in Hyn, Look at it this way. You probably know a lot of great techniques, but the challenge is how the hell do you put it all together? That’s what this training is really all about.

Building systems for change to better serve your clients. If you can’t quite make the travel, well check out hypnotic workers. Dot com. This is the All Access pass to my Hypnosis training library. It’s all the video content, so you do kind of miss out on the hands on content. And just to say it’s simply many people who go through the online training eventually, then join me for the live event.

So either live and in person at work smart hypnosis live.com or check out the digital Access all Access Pass, lifetime access hypnotic workers.com. And if you would also like to make it rain as Karen is, Making it rain. There’s no need to have to reinvent the wheel. That’s what hypnotic business systems is all about.

This is the all access pass to my Hypnosis business training library. We’re gonna see my frameworks, you’re gonna see the systems I’ve set in place, even down to the stuff you wouldn’t think about, whether it’s. The stuff you’d say if you’re giving a presentation to a local group, how to design your own seminars, email marketing campaigns that are already done for you, and you have the license rights to reproduce.

So whether it’s one or two or all three, which by the way, if you’re considering all three, Send me an email directly to [email protected] cuz I’m the payment plan guy. We spread it out. We make it really easy for you. So a lot of content, all based on here’s what’s working now, and folks like Karen, where it’s a thriving community where I’m learning from her, here’s how she’s taken some of the stuff that I’ve done and she’s doing it better.

So with that in mind, congratulations on this. Outstanding success. Here we go. Happy holidays, episode number 248. Karen. On consistent hypnotic growth. Hey, Karen. Hey, Jason. How’s it? It’s going really well. How are you? I know, right? We were talking about this before we jumped in and this episode’s been a while coming, that we, we’ve been chatting that you were on the program a number of years ago and telling that story of how you first got into hypnosis and then eventually how you opened up your practice and a whole lot of things that you did, including like Chamber of Commerce type things, email list serves to really get things up in motion and specifically to call it out ahead of time.

The reason having you back on was that, hey, this stuff is working for. And going quite well. And for, for those that don’t yet know you, could you briefly introduce yourself? Absolutely. I am Karen Gray and I own Green Mountain Hypnosis, located in Lebanon, New Hampshire. And by background, I’m a registered nurse who stepped outta my nursing career to, well, to become aist, though in all fairness, that wasn’t my intention when I took your class.

Yeah. What, what was that intention, origin? I was really intrigued. I have no background in hypnosis at all. Yeah. And so, and I can talk about that a little bit more later on because it actually plays a really interesting role in how successful I’ve been. But as I took the class, it was out of an interest and an excitement because.

The science behind hypnosis and the ways that your abil, you’re able to use this modality to do really incredible things. Well, that’s just awesome. So I’ve started taking the class with the intention of bringing these tools and techniques back to my nursing career, and very quickly realized that. A much better idea would be to open my own practice, So I did.

Yeah. Yeah. Which let’s fast forward the story and people can go back. Of course, we’ll link to it in the show notes that work smart hypnosis.com or fun fact, for the listeners out there, if you’re on the Work Smart Hypnosis website, In the top left, there’s a search function, and that’s where you can easily track down past episodes or themes of sessions.

And you can just type in Karen Gray, k a r e n g r a y, and that’ll find those episodes. But again, we’ll link to it in the show notes, but give us the, the Cliff notes version. Where have things gone since the last time we, we recorded together? How are things going? Things are going great. The business has great episode.

All right, so once again everybody, thanks for listening and, uh, leave reviews on. Two minutes and 30. Okay, we’ll keep going. Yeah, so catch . So let see. In July, we moved out of our tiny office that shared a wall with a machine shop. Mm-hmm. to a second floor. Two office suite with much more room and much less noise.

Yes, we were able to do that because the, we have gotten busier and busier and busier exponentially. It’s grown. So I believe I have tripled the number of clients in the last two months over the last, Yeah. And if you had to, if you had to kind of reverse engineer that, what’s been. What’s been bringing those people in?

So I’ll start with the framework. Yes. And here’s my nod to Jason that that your training course and the Work Smart Hypnosis provides this incredible framework. That gives you all the basics of how to move forward in running a hypnosis business, how to, what are great marketing strategies and all of these building blocks like Legos that you can build up with.

So that’s how it began. And from there I was able to take those tools and fit them really easily into our demographic, which in northern New England is a little bit different than the rest of the world in. And from the, Well, briefly, how, how would you say they’re different? There’s, without sounding too political, Yes.

There’s , there’s a lot of living income imbalance here. Mm-hmm. , that’s. Can be catastrophic to a certain amount of the population and shows up in all kinds of ways through the demographic. And for as open-minded in a wonderful and willing to try new things as this area of the country is, hypnosis is a foreign entity.

Mm-hmm. . So I had to start from scratch in terms of educating people. And not only am I here, but here’s what I do and here’s why you want. So there was that piece. Yeah. So that task of let’s say, being that advocate first and having to, Now I describe it as, and I’ll give a metaphor for this, which now this is kind of the norm, but if we look at even, you know, the, the online program that I have, hypnotic business systems, which had a different name when it first came out, but I was at a convention selling a thing that you could not physically touch while everyone else had stacks of dvd.

And there’s something to be said, and I learned something from this. There’s something to be said about when you have to sell the platform first before you can even sell the product. So in the shape of hypnosis, you know, the, the thing we’re, the product we’re actually selling is not the hypnosis we’re selling.

The change and the outcome and the process we’re gonna do together. The platform of how we actually do that. The actual hypnosis, and until we have that barrier taken care of, we can’t really address the second one, right? Yeah. Right. So the first year, year and a half was all about focusing on education. I put out a weekly article, That talks about, you know, different timely issues that people may be encountering and ties it in all very nicely about here are some tools that you can use to manage whatever it is that’s going on, and here’s why hypnosis is so awesome.

Mm-hmm. , So there’s that piece. Yeah. In terms of the, the, It’s been consistency. Yeah. And. Being consistent. And we talked about this on a previous podcast, how there was this one year that I went to hypno Thoughts and I didn’t write an article for two weeks and I came home and I didn’t have any clients for two months.

Yeah. This year I planned better . We came home from the convention and I’ve had a solid book schedule ever since. Nice. So that consistency to maintain the things that. and this is how we’re programmed. The tricky part comes in where it’s time to growth. Mm-hmm. , time to develop that growth and when it’s good to make those changes and take risks and yeah.

So what are, what are some of those risks that you took? I revamped the articles. Yeah. Which was a big deal. They were starting to sound. Somewhere between cheese and click bait , and that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in at all I wanted to be. I wanted it to be my voice telling you things that I think are really cool, which is a great move because there’s four things I hate about click bait and you won’t believe number three.

Exactly, Yes. . And they don’t even publish that story. And that drives me nuts. Right. ? So one of the things was revamping how I did the articles. I haven’t been too concerned about making sure that it’s out on this day a week. It’s typically either Monday or Tuesday. And the other, the change that we made was to back off in other areas that weren’t perform.

Hmm. Yeah. And that at the time, I’ll be honest, felt like a huge risk. Well let, let’s pause that for a second cuz I wanna go back to something that you mentioned which that ability to recognize that we don’t always have to be consistent based on a specific schedule. I think that’s a huge point. To really highlight, and as I’m saying this out loud, I am now realizing I’m guilty of my own greatest criticism that I used to be the guy at the convention saying, with a playful smile, You know, you’re all, and I pre reframed it.

You’re all fantastic people with wonderful skills, and you deeply care about what you do, and nobody wants your damn newsletter. So at, in the, in the real mindset behind that statement was, I’m gonna send you something that’s specific about your public speaking anxiety. Here’s this video that I found online that shows some really cool tips.

And as a side note, this is what we help to strengthen inside of the hypnotic process. So if this VI video resonates with you, please gimme a call right away so we can schedule a time to get started. And that’s very laser focused as opposed to the standard newsletter format. Hey, it’s Tuesday. Let me send you something, which the disclaimer always was.

Yes, Sean Michael Andrews does a fantastic newsletter, which I believe does come out on Tuesdays, and you should really subscribe to that one. As I’m now realizing here you are, like episode number 250 something, and this has always come out on Thursdays because it’s Thursday. Right? Right. A podcasting . So know, know your platform and recognize too that you are the one who sets the deadline.

Therefore you’re the one who gets to change. Exactly. And, and to that you’re not just putting out a newsletter mm-hmm. , and you know, you’re putting out something with quality content that people know that there’s a 94% chance that they’re really gonna wanna hear what this podcast is about. And, and this is a different entity that, I’d say the local business to some degree, because this is more that built in audience.

This is, you know, micro niche in terms of. This is hypnotist already doing hypnosis. That’s the audience for this and that’s where it’s different. So by giving yourself permission to only put the content out when you knew it was a, was valuable to those people, what was different with that? Oh, well, way less stress on my part.

Yeah. Now I don’t have to write something for the sake of writing it. Mm-hmm. , the quality of the articles went up. I used to be really stringent. I gotta be consistent, so it’s gotta be this long. It has to contain these sections. It’s gotta have four tips. It’s, I went a little nuts and now it’s. I start the beginning of the month and I write out four or five ideas, however many weeks there are to cover, and there are things I’m actually genuinely interested in.

Mm-hmm. , so I’m not stressed about what it is. If I end up with three paragraphs that are really awesome, I’m not gonna put in five more to fill space. Yeah. So the con, the quality of the content that I’m putting out has definitely increased and it’s made my job a lot easier. Right running business because content first rather than schedule.

Right. You know that, that feeling of, I gotta do this, I gotta have the deadlines coming, I gotta get this done. That feeling, I think is the reason why a lot of people go into business for themselves, so they don’t ever have to feel that again. So it seemed very silly that I was making. Be that employee in my own business.

Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So that editorial calendar based more on, you know, the value to the person reading it as opposed to, again, just because it’s Thursday. Right. Which by the way, happy Thursday, . Thank you. . So there, there’s some of that content side. Was this, was this all writing? Was this, uh, video? What was the. I’m still writing.

That’s an interesting piece. It is in the back of my mind on a weekly basis about transitioning into doing videos. It’s been the comfort of being able to spend money on the things that are going to make the quality videos. And then an interesting thing happen as well, and, and this is all excuses as to why I’m not making videos yet, but my schedule.

Yeah. And well, that really cuts down on your production time.

in a wonderful way. But now, now I’m, I’m playing those, that game of how do I keep the client schedule filled, do the things that I need to do, and. Create content and courses and videos and launch new formats and mm-hmm. , all that stuff. But right now the articles are doing well. Yeah. I mean, this is where you get to choose the platform that you use.

Yeah. So it’s where, you know, the platform of this podcast series does. Bring in clients even to the local business, not just Zoom sessions with folks around the world, but the locals find it. They see it as further evidence of what I do. And that’s one specific mechanism that I do when I got my start. If you look at some of the older links on Virginia Hypnosis, I was writing a column for a local newspaper.

And it really doesn’t matter. Some of those things are nearly nine or 10 years old now. There’s still resources and assets that we can use, but clearly put, that’s not something that I’m doing now because I don’t need to. Right. So it’s that discovery that what we do to get started is not necessarily what we have to keep doing, and we may even just outgrow a strategy and then eventually decide.

Let me move on to something else. So it’s okay to pick. The platform that you want to use and just focus and do that one extremely well, rather than what so many people do, which is they try to do everything and they do it all badly. Yeah. And that beautifully ties up that loop of letting go of the stuff that doesn’t seem to be working.

Mm-hmm. of, you know, there were places that I was advertising because that’s where I started and realized at some point last year that I don’t need to be spending that money. And I’m not getting anything back from it. So we can quit doing that, but at the same time, because we’re so programmed to maintain consistency, right?

That’s what hypnosis is all about, is overriding that, that homeostasis, that balance. Yeah. So we’re so programmed to maintain this consistency that the idea of changing anything once you put it into motion can be a little, I. So well, let’s, let’s talk for a moment cuz we were kind of hinting at this before we started recording that there’s often some growing pains that come from that moment where suddenly, hey, it’s working and the schedule is filled.

What are, what are some of those new barriers that you’ve realized as, as the business owner you’ve had to address now that we’re growing? There’s more that I want to do. Yeah. Nice. And I have, I started a series of classes with the Chamber of Commerce, and to anybody listening, if your Chamber of Commerce is offering classes to corporations in your area, this isn’t a bad idea at all.

So my local Chamber of commerce has an arrangement with five huge businesses in the area, and their arrangement is that they will provide quality content and classes as part of their HR programs. So all I have to do is set up a class and provide a space and the chamber collects the money and recruits the participants and sends me a check, and I get to stand in front of a room with people and be awesome.

So these have been great. So it’s an hour long workshop, and this is one of the things I’ve taken on and the crunch I’ve found is that now I’m working more hours around, more hours on weekends to get the classes and the workshops built. Mm-hmm. , because the client schedule is full though, Let me, let me pose a scenario here, which is not.

For the meant of, not for the goal of coaching, but just to kind of call out the next phase of list. Let’s fast forward the story. It’s three months from now and these workshops are now assets. That you know how to turn on these workshops, you know how to then take that, Let’s use my real terminology that I use in my head.

Let’s take that, that song and dance routine. And you could do that somewhere else now. Oh, exactly. Everything. We’re very much in a content creation mode where there’s more of a challenge. I, I think of, of all things. The friend of mine that’s a third grade teacher, Who had been a first grade teacher for 10 years, then became a third grade teacher, and the first year was the worst year of her life because she hadn’t taught that before and there wasn’t a curriculum just handed to her the second year.

She goes, Oh, I get it now. . Exactly. So, and definitely in that framework and that that comes from workers and, and all of this great education piece is that anytime you’re gonna sit down to make something, make it artfully vague enough. Mm-hmm. making universal enough so that you can use it until it’s irrelevant.

Yeah. Elaborate on that. For those that don’t quite get the full point of what you’re saying, because I think that’s a major, major thing to really address here. So, The first Dere workshop that I did for the Chamber was one that I had written up a really short PowerPoint for a meetup event that we held within the first three months of launching the business.

And because in order to make something universal, you have to keep it. Pretty plain, Pretty simple, pretty nonspecific. And to do that, create your workshop so that we’re gonna cover stress. I’m not specifically in this framework, creating a workshop for stress for middle-aged women with four dogs, Right?

I’m creating a workshop for stress that I, Hang on a second. I need to buy a website. . No, go ahead. Like create the. Within that foundation so that then when you have a group of middle aged women with four dogs who wanna stress workshop, you can it in very small, very worth of time. To then customize it for them.

I forget this is an obscure reference, but there was a magician that I knew and he had this signature act, which could kind of appeal to all ages. And it was amazing to find out that this guy would do the performance for rather, you know, sort of elite corporate groups, but also he would change his costume and he would also do the exact same show for children’s birthday parties.

And his description was, yeah, I just use different music. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. So the, just to highlight this, coming up with some sort of, and I’ll, I’ll tell you some examples of this, and this is quite honestly something I’m working on right now, which is part of why we’re batch producing most of the episodes for the next two months, which, which would be that if you can identify one specific need that people have, if you can do that.

The only real customization comes in the marketing and then in the final delivery. So I’d highlight, and I’d highly endorse this guy’s materials. Chandler Bolt is the one behind self dash publishing school.com. These got some books on Amazon. I went through the entire expensive course to put out my book and really.

What he did was quite genius because he solved the problem of how do you self-publish a book and get it to number one on Amazon, yet in, so the, the course delivers that one specific need yet inside of it, the marketing. I saw him at a marketing convention talking about how do you increase your visibility online?

The same week he was speaking to a group of chiropractors about how to position yourself as the clear choice in your community. So the marketing message. is what changes the actual conversation, but at the end of the day, here’s this core delivery of stress relief. Fear release, weight loss, public speaking, whatever it might be.

So to have that core signature delivery thing and then customize it based on the folks in front of you is a great, great model to strive towards. Otherwise, here’s my, um, and what I’m talking about is gonna hear exactly the reference. Here’s my course for the parents of teenage drummers. That’s specific , which once you’re up and running and then you’ve got a thriving business, you can quote, Play with the house is money to then target something that extremely specific and it’s not a make or break moment.

So just list a few of these programs that you’ve been building. So I built a core stress management and from that came a stress management for executives and a stress management for parents and a stress management for teachers. And then those, because those were the three interest groups that came to me.

Mm-hmm. , and each of those is specific, yet general enough so that they can be branched into a more specialized. And an anti-anxiety workshop that we’re gonna be, and we’re gonna be shifting it a little bit because we live in Northern New England and so we’re going to do an anxiety free driving workshop.

Oh, nice. Is huge. Yeah. The little stretch of highway on my, on the way to my office gets. Minimum of four accidents a week. Mm-hmm. . So , this is gonna be great. Um, weight loss is a fun one to play with because, The system. So the basic formula for weight loss is move more, eat less, and there’s so many nuances that you can pull from that.

And so many ways that you can target that to specific people from people who are emotional eaters, to people who eat all the right things and do all the right things except for that bag of Skittles and, and all of those pieces. So I built, Right now I have three core workshops. Stress, anxiety and weight loss.

And from those, I’ve just been, I don’t know, it’ll be maybe a week before the workshop and I’ll go in and I’ll change a couple words. Mm-hmm. and it’ll be exactly what I need, like magic. Yeah. I also imagine too, there’s some sort of group interaction at that experience and even that’s informing you how to make a few little tweaks and customizations even while delivering.

The flexibility is, is necessary and brilliant. Yeah, and I think that’s coming back to, I don’t have a background in hypnosis, so I am naturally not constrained by any preconceived notions or rules or anybody’s idea of how anything has to be. . I wasn’t around in the first days of hypno thoughts. I don’t have any knowledge about how anybody dictated anything should happen.

Yeah. So what did I do this morning? I used the, the bilateral hemispheric collapse for, uh, nicotine craving. Yeah. And because it seemed to. Right, And it worked with Magic. I used, there’s a, um, I’m not gonna remember her first name, but her last name is Austin, and she put out this quit smoking script program.

You could buy the book and read it and quit smoking over a period of time and it had backup CDs and the whole deal. And I really like her script because it has. As a framework because it has a version options and kinda that come to reality part, and then a very soft, gentle self. So when you’re starting out, it gives you options to fit almost anybody.

Yeah. You know, you bring up something beautiful there, which this is probably my. Catch phrase for 2020, and I’ve been hinting at it already, but frameworks equal freedom. Yeah. That when we have a specific framework, like for example, you’ve, you’ve already seen some of the material leading up to this.

Coming up in January, I’m doing the, um, product creation workshop for the people inside of hypnotic business systems. And basically it’s step one, let’s break away from just producing the single audio as the product. And instead, here’s a system and just to call out ahead of time. System with a quick start video, this series of audios, and here are your instructions over the course of the next whatever period of time.

And here’s a teaching video. And suddenly we’ve taken it out of just being the single use audio, which maybe people sell online for like between, you know, 10 to maybe even as high as 80 or $90. But now that it’s a system. One, it’s gonna provide a better experience for the user. And two, it’s got more value to it.

And since it’s the same threshold to sell one thing as it is something else, well sell the more valuable one, but even two, you know, in the community. The other day someone asked about webinars. Do you use a video? Do you not use a video to promote the webinar? And I just put up the template to say, Here’s everyone that I do.

You know, if you’re on my email list, I send the same formatted email every single time I open up the last one. And we just change the content. Here’s a brief call to action, something to grab your attention. Here’s a link to click, and then here’s more information. Below the fold. And, and by having a framework, this gives us the greatest flexibility because now we can choose, you know what, this is exactly what’s right for this specific audience doing that, that workshop for the chamber.

Mm-hmm. , or here’s, you know, people, women with four dogs, and you’ve gotta completely, you know, cut out the last half and change the. But now you’ve got that flexibility, right? So the script I had come in and said, I just sugar, I like

aversion, not not eating sugar. Wait a minute. She hasn’t had any in two weeks. Wait, wait. Hang on, hang on. Are you telling me that you took a, let’s use the S word, you took a script and you didn’t just read it, you modified it for the person in front of you and trusted it as, Ooh, back to the other word framework and then used that at least as a foundation, another F word, uh, to, to better address that person specifically.

Are you actually saying, I absolutely am. What the heck? I do it every day. , , which right there, I mean the catchphrase of let’s go find another dead horse and beat it. This whole dialogue around scripts, I think we all kind of agree. I, I think we can move on from this dialogue that though I’d say, even if just simply reading it, Is getting the result.

Thumbs up to you. Keep it up. You know, listen to your client and modify where appropriate. It’s like, was it Richard non guard story of going, I don’t usually do a lot of aversion, but when it was my lawyer’s mother saying, If you could make me hate cigarettes, I’d quit. Well, have I got a deal for you ? It is.

And I like scripts. Wow. I said that out loud. I like scripts. There you go. . Because they’re a framework and. And just like all of these pieces. So I just came outta, uh, David Snyder’s workshop with all of these great ideas and, and ways to implement language patterns and all of this stuff. So now I can take these scripts and I can add in better words Yeah.

And I can make them more effective. And then when I’m done with some other brilliant person’s piece of pattern that I can throw in my own and, and those framework, Let you make the thing your own. Exactly. And that’s what makes us awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s, let’s come back to, so that’s great in terms of building some of the systems of how we reach a bigger audience.

And actually, you know, briefly, let’s branch off that for a little bit longer here. That you’ve now got those people in front of you. Is that the end goal, to have that workshop audience or there’s people there that are then, In my world, we don’t call it an upsell. We call it upgrading the experience that are then upgrading their experience to then come in and work for one-to-one services.

Sometimes that’s a goal, and if I’m being honest, sometimes it’s not. Yeah. We do the Great American Smoke out every year. Yes. And I don’t spend a ton of money on it, and I don’t promote it heavily, but. We have typically over the last three years had an average of 12 people come. Nice. And it’s absolutely free.

We give out little goody bags with FRI and lollipops and cough drops and all these great things and I don’t expect anything from that. Yeah, that’s my give. Mm-hmm. the workshops, well, I set a budget that I have this much money to play with, and if it’s more than this, then I need to try and sell the client at least to pay for.

And if it’s less than that threshold, then it’s an experience. I wanna branch off of this for a second. How, how do you go about figuring out that financial threshold? Cause I, I mean, I’ve got a formula for it, which I’ll share in a bit here too, but I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on that being that I am very much Karen.

I don’t have a scientific formula for it. Awesome. , I, I break mine all the time cuz I remember frameworks are freedom, but Yes. It’s, where are we at in, in. The monthly bill cycle. What else? Have I already spent money on this month? Do I have the money? If I lose, if I get nothing outta this hundred $50 that it’s gonna cost me to do this thing, do I care?

That’s my formula. Mm-hmm. . And if the answer is no, not really, then I’ll probably do it. And if it’s, this needs to become something more to justify doing. Then I’m gonna put more. The only thing that really changes is the amount of effort that I put into getting the upsell afterwards. Yeah. I’m already getting paid for the workshops through the chamber.

I set the price point at a point that made it worth the two hours of my time to do so. Anything above that is cake. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. The formula that I tend to live by is to kind of base it off of potential income of just one person. So let. Play some rough numbers for a moment, even if we’re using an older pricing model, cuz it’s easier to do the math.

A new client coming in was basically paying a thousand dollars and they were coming in for a series of about three appointments and run the math. I’m in the office and these days it’s about. 15 people a week that I max it out at. Just cuz hypnosis clients is not the only hypnosis thing that I do, which is not a sentence, at least in good grammatical form, uh,

But to look at how, okay, so of those 15, roughly, I’m bringing in about 15 to 20 brand new clients every single month. So if I’m willing to invest back into the business, the income of basically forfeiting one. That becomes a good marker. The same as here’s an event, here’s a big training event that’s coming up, or even my own classes, and to at times forfeit the income of one student of the event to bring in a total of 15 total, which even if we play the dollar cost average in game, it still works out.

I mean, this is where we can start to make some bigger. Discussions, which I’ll give some specifics. This is what helped me years ago to make the decision to, at one point, triple my rent and move into a bigger space, and then drop a big down payment and basically purchase the new office. Because I could look at the state of the business and go, Oh yeah, it’s, it’s basically taking care of that this is affordable.

Mm-hmm. , you mentioned David Snyder. We had about 60 people at that event, and the decision to move it from the one room we always use at that hotel to the ballroom, by the way, David Snyder dc.com, joining us in November, 2020 . But the task of moving it to the ballroom, you know, the rental rate of that was the difference of about $1,800 for the one room.

Versus the ballroom for five days. We’re talking about $8,000 for that. But we can look at the scope of that and go, Yeah, we’re gonna take care of that pretty easily, and we’ve got a full year to lead up to this event. So, you know, yes, there’s this line between, as well, Farrell would say, strategic to put some method behind how we pick what we do.

But also there at least is an element of, Hey, watch this. Have you had any of those? Hey, watch this moments of just simply throwing something out there in the last year or so, which really paid off big for you. As a matter of fact, ? Yes. Yeah. I Big It’s paying off yet. Yeah. I went to a fair, mm-hmm. And I spent two on.

Table rental and supplies and all the stuff that one brings to a health fair. And I had my table and I got a client out of it, so it was paid for. And my office is situated next to one of the largest teaching hospitals in New England, which means that anything health related gets very quickly absorbed in the sea of this hospital.

And I looked around and I had a really, really great. We need, you know what we need? We need a health fair that focuses on these integrative, holistic, alternative complimentary modalities that just focuses on us so we don’t get lost in this sea of hospital business. Mm-hmm. so. I launched it. I hosted a health and wellness.

I had no, I, no idea what I was doing. Thankfully, everybody really did built of a presence in wasn’t a stranger. People knew who I was. And we are gonna be holding the second annual one. in April. Mm-hmm. second or third weekend in April and it, it’s not cheap and it almost paid for itself. And it was just one of those non hypnosis related, How can I, This is a really good idea and nobody else is gonna do it.

So here we go. Hold your breath, , , see what happens. Yeah. Beyond that, the other thing, The really big, let’s see what happens was moving into the new office, hypnosis wise, I was doing really well, but my office was dumpy and it wasn’t, It wasn’t expressing the level of professionalism that I wanted to be showing people.

You don’t go to the lawyer who operates out of the mobile home. Yeah. You go to the one with the marble pillars and ferns in the lobby. Yeah. If you watch South Park, it’s all about the fountain. That’s right. Yeah. So I, the upgrade to the office doubled rent and. There’s other various unsorted fees that go with it, and it was a lot of sitting down and figuring out how many clients do I need to make this work?

And the extra space allows me to have, well, a, a closet, which is exceptionally important. Oh, yeah. So important. And, and this space that’s dedicated to content creation. Oh, yes. So I’m not pulling the microphone out of the box underneath my desk every time I wanna record something . Mm-hmm. . I actually have a space that’s set up.

It’s usable that’s right there. So even if I’ve got, like we were talking earlier, that client at the last minute who says they can’t come in, I can pop next door. And rattle off another audio program. Yeah, Which, let, let’s highlight that for a second. Which this may not be something that everybody can go off and do right away, but at least there’s some steps you can set in motion to make it easy
.
Cuz I’m, We’ll talk about, you know, we don’t have to get into specific numbers here, but we’ll talk about some of the bigger benchmarks that you’ve been able to pass. But I’d kind of call out part of what I’ve done this year, which is. The reason I moved the office was we had groundwater coming up from the floor.

I had, um, censoring myself in terms of what I say about the previous leaseholder. We’ll just leave that behind where we recorded that episode. , that was a problem for you. Oh, that was the main issue. Yeah. There was groundwater coming up and the way the contracts were written, the amount of effort it would’ve taken to try to break it.

The time was coming up anyway. I made a, you know, pay full offer and I broke the lease early and just moved on. It just wasn’t worth the effort. But in the midst of basically losing my office for the most part, for a couple of months, in the midst of doing the hunt for a new office and moving and supporting family members with some major medical things, I’m up 28%.

I actually got software that tells me this. I’m up 28% as of at this point now versus last year. And I’d say a big part of that is this ability that just to walk into a space which is dedicated to content. And just turn the cameras on. Turn on the microphone and it’s done. Which there’s a small personal aspect of this, which is that I used to at home and some of you’ve seen the older videos set up the folding screen, set up my laptop on the coffee table and put the lighting on a laundry basket because that was the right height for the microphone, and that was my in-home studio.

When now the new office is like five minutes down the road and this has become the game of, like tonight there’s virtual chapter thing with Michael Watson and Karen Hand. And even though I’m only on for like 20 minutes, it turns into Yeah, but it’s so much faster just to go to the office because its setup’s already done.

Right. So as phrase, I’d say is as soon as you can again, and, and the, the 21st century, you are a media company first. That happens to provide products and services and whether it’s the articles that you’ve been doing, and let’s, let’s even put into the workshops as a media opportunity as well, that by having that thing where the, the burden of the setup and the take down’s, the reason why today I’m recording five podcast episodes, uh, yeah.

That would’ve been impossible in, in the previous, with just the one space. Mm-hmm. , because I literally have to clear the desk. Yeah. And it, it’s just, no. So that’s been, that’s been a huge leap in being able to provide more quality content, to take a lot of pressure off and be a better hypnotist and just keep that momentum of that consistency and within.

Experimenting within that framework and the consistency to what you can change, what’s a good idea, what you’re willing to throw at the wall and see if it sticks. And that those changes lead to more opportunities that lead to more changes. And that’s what this last year has been. Which not to rip off Howard Cooper with the Rapid Change Works podcast, but let’s go for a completely unplanned, unrehearsed rapid round here of some questions here.

What are your thoughts in terms of raising your rates over the years as things grew? At first, I was terrified of raising my rates. Mm-hmm. . and now I just read somebody about the the 80 20 idea. Yeah. That if 80% of people are booking and percent of people aren’t, then you’re good. If more than 80% are, then you could probably raise your rates.

I explained to somebody the other day how I set my rates that I did a, a, I created a spreadsheet of a 50 mile radius of everybody that provided anything that remotely looked like hypnosis and figured out what they were charging. And I picked a spot in the. And I kept raising it until I was consistently filling up the schedule the way I wanted it to.

Yeah, it’s nice. It’s a much more comfortable thing to do now. In fact, I was just thinking about doing it again today. Yeah. Which, I mean, my math on when to raise the rates is when my schedule was completely packed and I had to do something to re reduce the. Right. But then again from there, the jump from about 9 75 to a one point 1500, recognizing that at that point it was also the presentation of the number, not just the number itself, and even as of this week, shooting some videos to play with the model even further.

What is a bit more of a rapid fire question here? What is your favorite new problem with having a thriving business that you didn’t have before? Oh, I have to set my alarm much earlier.

That is my favorite new problem. Mm-hmm. , I just, I, I have more of a schedule now than I did when I started the business. Yeah. Almost more of a schedule than I did when I had a job. Mm-hmm. , But I love it. Yeah. It’s the old, I hate this line, but I still love it though, that self-employed, we’d rather work 80 hours for ourself to not work, 40 hours for someone.

Oh my gosh, yes. Yeah, absolutely. So Michelle and I chat the other day that, you know, we’ve kind of fall into a nice routine. I’m the morning person, She can be the night owl, and here’s where my routine is. I’m up, uh, because I like lifting weights in the morning. I’m up at around 4 45 and I take about maybe a half an hour or so, have a cup of coffee, something to eat, and that’s where there’s, that’s my email catch up time, you know, So I’m doing something to kind of catch up on the business during that timeframe while the body’s waking.

Then I’m off to the gym and getting home around 6 45. Everyone’s awake by seven or so. But yeah, we, we find that rhythm where , this is where some of the scalability comes into play, where, where we start to realize I need more hours. That’s where that 80 20 principle comes into play to go, Okay, what can I now scale back?

What do I not necessarily have to do anymore? What, uh, here’s another one. What things did you have to learn about? That you didn’t expect by becoming the business owner. And I, as a hint, we chatted about this before we hit recording as a possible answer. Oh my goodness. Well, my brain just exploded with the everything.

Oh, yeah. List a couple of them. We’ll branch off of them. I I can build a hell of a website. Nice

And oh my gosh, you’ve absolutely stung to me, Jason. Yeah. Well we were talking about some things around, uh, taxes. that, you know, these are things that . There’s a meme. There’s a meme that’s online. Which is, and I’ll see if we can find it and put it in the show notes, but it’s that, Hey school, could you teach me about what a credit score actually is?

followed by, here’s a music class, which again, I support the arts. Yeah, but what about like taxes and balancing a checkbook? No, here’s a recorder. But what about financial independence and investing hot cross funds, , Right? Where these are things that unfortunately we don’t know. I’m so. In love with my new accountant, whose name also happens to be Jason because he wouldn’t work with me unless we scheduled a couple of sessions via Zoom for me to, for him to educate me on what I should know about my tax filings.

Oh, I love that. Yeah. I, I can comfortably say I have never in my life balanced a checkbook. Mm-hmm. or attempted to. I mean, the closest nowadays I’d say would be, you know, someone’s using QuickBooks, reconciling the data, which. I can pretend to know what that is, but it’s basically balancing out the income and the, the liabilities and everything to look at the end of the year and show that as a, as an S corp, which is basically what I am, I have to file not only my taxes, but also a balance sheet, which I look forward to asking him and showing me exactly what that is.

And this is why I’ve fired my previous bookkeeper, accountant. Um, , you mentioned something before we jumped in though, which is the ultimate version of secondary. Which the new hypnotist is terrified of, but as the seasoned working your ass off hypnotist, at times the dialogue changes. Do you wanna come back to that chat?

I think I do. Ugh. Which I’ll, I’ll, I’ll set it up. That we really set it up. The, the, the preframe to this is we genuinely care about our clients achieving their outcome. We genuinely care about helping people, but there sometimes is that moment where they cancel at the last minute. Oh, and you know, we both really needed that time, right?

Oh my gosh. So it happened to me today, like so it’s Monday or Tuesday, it’s a day, and I’m supposed to write an article December, and I get an email this morning and. This, Oh, I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta attend this financial meeting with the people in the office. Can I reschedule? And in the past it would’ve been, Oh, now I’m worried, and now I’m stressed.

And now, okay. Because if we don’t work, we don’t make money. Right. And this morning I’m like, Oh, thank God. Now I can get stuff done. The one I was actually thinking of was when I shared with you that all of a sudden I have to write these great big checks for taxes. Yeah. And I can. And so I think that’s my moniker of success in this moment.

That not only do I make enough money that I have to pay taxes, , but I can afford to pay them. And by the way, you probably see it, I post it every single year online. Technically speaking, every time you pay your taxes, you can commit at least one minor misdemeanor offense. Don’t me up have plans. Don’t look me up on that.

But it sounds true. And we’re gonna go with. I have my all planned walk with delight, . No, no, no. It’s a Okay. Officer. I paid my taxes. No. Yeah, but these are those, again, the problems. We didn’t expect ourselves to have the conversations where years ago I thought I just needed to hire an accountant. But then eventually reaching a point of threshold in the business and realizing, yeah, okay, I’m paying for QuickBooks, which makes things easier.

And yes, it does automatically sync up with my accounts and my credit cards and everything and you know, but still I needed someone else to even run that, you know? Right. And you need to know enough. To know when that person’s screwing up. Right. And also, which was a big issue for us this year, is there was a minor, a major discrepancy, which turned into a $12,000 tax bill, which I absolutely owed.

And it showed up at the worst possible time. And we got through it by just doing another event to cover the expense of it. And now that’s why we rehash the team. But again, looking at these places where you’re at a point of threshold where now, Here’s the guy who cleans the new office, and he comes every week, and we have this kind of floating agreement that if it’s a class, he’ll come twice that week and there’s no extra charge for that.

Just, you know, based a number of times a year and just to give the real numbers. That’s about the best. $300 a month I spend. Because the end of the day, I’m not the one mopping the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, and that’s an expense that’s worth it because that’s now time I get to go home to the family.

I get to be writing something new. I get to be turning on the camera. You get to be there writing those articles. I get to be having wonderful conversations with folks like you, Karen. Aw, thank. So let’s say the coulda, woulda, shoulda, or at least the informed adult informed child game, if we want to go hypnotic language on this, what would you do?

What advice would you give to yourself differently if you had to rewind things back and take some of the knowledge that you have now back to yourself when you first got started? I think I would’ve focused a little bit more on automation. And I say that with some hesitation because a lot of the stuff I didn’t know I needed to automate or didn’t know how one would do that.

Um, just within the framework of, of my business specifically, and. So, but I think I would’ve focused more on getting stuff to run all by themselves. Your whole set it and forget it. It’s an easy thing, I think for new hypnotists to miss because you don’t need it automated. You have all the time in the world right now.

But automation goes beyond just software. And I’ll give a specific example that A, as much as there may be a big entry point to working with me as a client, I have another category. We’re talking like hypnotic pain relief, where I’m gonna say we’re gonna kick off with the plan of just two appointments, you know, cuz that’s gonna see how we can best work together and get the leverage.

And basically we kind of go more ala carte on this as opposed to something more ongoing like, you know, the public speaking confidence that I do. And as much as I’m the Senate and forget it guy, I do not have an automated sequence for that set of office forms, that payment link and those scheduling buttons.

But instead, I just remember in my little head that David, who I saw last month basically came on the same deal, and today Scott called and we confirmed with Scott and all I had to do was find the email from a month ago in Gmail and Outlook. Whatever platform you use, even on your phone, there’s a function to resend an.

And as soon as you click that button, it doesn’t send it right away. It opens it up. And that allows you to just simply have a new draft of the email, change the email address, change the name and the subject line. And it’s still technically automated. I’m just basically repurposing an old message and you know, is it the dropdown menu, which I’ve bragged about, which used to run Work Smart Hypnosis and Virginia Hypnosis from Infusionsoft?

No, it’s not. Cause I haven’t, we haven’t built that. But just to simply find that email and just resend it and change the email address, that’s enough for right now because that’s kind of a entry point that I’ve been testing the last couple of months that I’m kind of happy with, and eventually I’ll just hire someone to, to really fully automate that and put that into that magic dropdown menu.

Right, And I think that’s what I meant, that you have to know what your system is before you can automate it. Yeah. And in those cases, but there’s some there. Over the last few years there’s been a lot of playing catch of that, Oh crap, now I’m busy and I need this to run itself. So if I could have done anything differently, there’s certainly some pieces.

There’s an email confirmation set that goes out with every. And I have, I built that kind of on the fly, whereas before I was writing them out individually because again, I have all the time in the world. Yeah. Now I don’t. And so those things I would’ve put into place easy earlier. And it’s easy to go in and as you said, tweak an email, change a line, change the template.

Whatever it is. But I think if I had to go back, it would’ve been, that would’ve been a good piece to have in place. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Mm-hmm. . Got it. So this has been great to have you back on and catch up and hear how well things have been going. Thank you so much, Jason. It’s been a pleasure. Yeah. So where can people check you out online?

How can they learn more and get in contact? So you can find [email protected], all spelled out, and you’ll put the link in the notes of course, and and a Facebook page of the same name. Outstanding. And before we wrap it up, any final thoughts for listeners out there? Use those frameworks. I think if I had anything to share with anybody, starting out in hypnosis is treat everything that you learn as a framework.

If somebody else built something like, I don’t know, let’s say Work Smart Hypnosis, and it’s a fantastic system and it works really well, use it as a framework to then. Add on everything new that you’re learning to start tweaking things and that’s how you make your own really awesome thing. And that’s been the structure of my success over the last three years.

Jason Lenette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for your. Feedback on these episodes for leaving reviews, for using this as an ongoing resource in our community. Once again, head over the show [email protected]. You can link off of there to leave reviews online or reach out to Karen.

Let her know what you liked about the episode, or just reach out and say hello, and for everything else, join me at Work Smart Hypnosis. Dot com. You can check out the online hypnosis [email protected] or get the all access passed to the business training library so you can level things up.

And yes, indeed, you two can make it rain hypnotic business systems.com. Either way, enjoy the new year. We’ll see you back next year or some amazing episodes coming your way. We’ve got Dan Candel coming up in the New Year’s episode. Uh, a couple of new folks coming on as well. Amy Charlow is coming on, and then the.

God of all things social media these days in our profession, Zach Peus is gonna come on. That episode’s coming out to you at the end of January. How to get a hundred million views online in one month? Let’s use the terminology. Damn, we got some good stuff coming your way. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you all soon.

Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.