Session #342: Brian Eslick on Cracking the Hypnotic Marketing Code

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 342. Brian ick on cracking the Hypnotic marketing code. 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. What you’re about to listen to is perhaps one of my favorite conversations we’ve ever captured.

In this Work Smart Hypnosis podcast series, mostly because I’ve actually known my guest this week, Brian Ick, I’d say, going on at least 12, 13 years. And part of our backstory was that when I was first getting into hypnosis, I was seeing him actively out there doing programs. And I was reaching out to Brian and I was asking him questions about what I can do to make my program better, and then as I opened up Virginia Hypnosis and started working more with clients and was becoming more visible thanks to this program and other trainings that I offered, then Brian was messaging me and asking questions about working with clients, and finally just made the decision.

To travel down from New Jersey to where I was in Virginia at the time, and actually attend the Work Smart Hypnosis Live certification event. Now, over the years, we’ve had moments where we were, you know, talking on a regular basis, then getting caught up with everything else. So I will tell you, it probably had been about a year before I got an email from Brian, which you will hear me read in this convers.

That basically was the gist of how five years of failure turned me into a success. And let me kind of unpack a lot of where what you’re about to hear in this conversation. The mistake a lot of people make in terms of their business is to try to dive into everything and they try to do everything and they try to do it all and they end up doing a lot of things rather poorly.

And you’re gonna hear us stress this in this conversation that it’s very rarely the platform. It’s almost always. The strategy. This is why whenever I talk about people’s hypnotic businesses, I always talk in terms of systems, which is why we run the program in the community, hypnotic business systems.

And what I say to people in that community is that there’s more than 200 hours of content and more than two dozen strategies, business action plans you could implement right away. And we did rebuild that a number of years ago to make it so every module stands on, its. . So specifically if you’re looking at organic traffic to be found on Google without having to pay for advertising, go directly to the search engine optimization section.

Do that really well and then branch out and then do something else. If you’re realizing you need to have more videos on your website, hey, go directly to the online videos module where you’re gonna see the step by step tutorials in terms of how I script my messaging, and even talk about the strategy of how to put the videos and where to host and all that good stuff that’s necessary.

It’s not just about telling you to do videos, it’s about giving you the proven methods that actually make the videos sell for you. So you’re gonna hear. Inside of Brian’s story, of this kind of turning point of shutting off the noise, making it a point to turn off the things that was just kind of dipping the toes into and bring it down to a few simple step by step strategies to then create these outstanding months of success.

And I want you to listen through all the way to the end of this conversation for the rarely discussed moment of making the conscious decision. To turn down the marketing efforts because he’s just too damn busy and can’t take the extra clients. Which, that’s the kind of problem we all should be having, mind you.

And when you’ve got the right strategies at the right points, that’s how you make that happen. So you’re gonna hear a conversation from moving from stage hypnosis to opening up shop and working with clients. The importance of winning your local market first before branching out to something national.

And then even better some of the step by step systems about how we can outsource what we do in such a way. That it optimizes our efforts, builds the appropriate and ethical prestige authority inside of what you do and helps to position you as the clear choice that’s gonna help your client. So be sure to check out the show notes and work smart hypnosis.com to see exactly how to get in contact with Brian, and some of you will be delighted to find out the avenues, the channels that Brian does not engage in.

For his business, not because they work or don’t work, but simply because he just doesn’t want to. And we always have the right to make that decision, which look at this conversation you’re about to hear because that then opens up an opportunity to do a few things exceptionally well rather than a bunch of things.

Badly. Uh, while you’re there to check out the website for hypnotic business systems.com, that is the all access pass to my Hypnosis business training library. As we like to now say, guessing sucks. So use what’s working now and the lineage of this program is that it used to be, tell you what to. As I listened to the members over the years, it became show you how to do it.

So we have several step by step tutorials that talk through a lot of what you’re gonna hear me and Brian talk about in this chat, and then to get you up and running even faster. . It also includes some done for you marketing materials. This is where the people who join this program, which is you look at that page and look at the webinar that’s promoted on that hypnotic business systems.com page as well.

There’s an opportunity to learn more about the program even before you join, but where most people earn back their investment, or even for the folks who have, are doing the extended payment plan for lifetime access. The assets that I share with you, and I just give you permission to duplicate. As your own.

That’s what helps to create that instant gratification, quick win that teaches you how to better market your services, how to become that clear choice and how to really provide that value where as we provide more value to our clients, we can receive even more value back. Which is a very noble way of saying Earn more money.

And yes, indeed, make it rain. Check that out hypnotic business systems.com and look at the footer on that page. That’s where you can join a free on demand webinar to learn six exact strategies you can implement immediately to better grow your business. Check that out. Hypnotic business systems.com. The the first draft of this conversation was again, how five years of failure turned me into a success.

We went for a more positive turn here, so here we go. This is episode number 342. Brian ick on cracking the hypnotic marketing code. He was watching a hypnosis show and realizing, Wow, this. Really cool. I was, I was a magician at the time and, um, I was like, they’re not using any tricks and, you know, how does this work?

Are these people all staged? And so that led me on a quest to discover hypnosis. Yeah. And you were coming from a background, working in magic, and here was that opportunity to first see a stage show. Uh, what was kind of the thought process that was going on as you were seeing that? Just, uh, trying to understand the process, you know, how this is working and, and how to, how to do it, how to, how to structure a show, how to hypnotize people.

Um, and so it was just a, a quest to find information and there, there’s so much out there. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not real, and a lot of it is crap. So then along that journey, what was that point? Whether it was a specific training or a specific experience? At what point, Cuz correct me on this, you then added on the hypnosis show as another booking option in addition to the magic that you were doing.

Correct. Oh, absolutely. You know, the first thing was to learn how to do it. So once I initially, I, I did a home study course, honestly, for stage hypnosis. Yeah. And one of the first shows I did was, was out at a comedy club in Philadelphia. And halfway through my induction, I, I turned around with, with. One eye open and low and behold, it, it looked like they were hypnotized.

I mean, I mean, I mean, I didn’t, I didn’t know how to tell other than they were laying down. I’m like, Well, let me have them say something, you know, Let me have them do something. And I was like, I’m like, Damn, how does this work? So I was doing shows before I even took a, uh, hypnosis course. I think you and I have had this chat before that, That was part of my first experience too, of I was doing a program.

And at one point I turned around and looked at the audience and then girlfriend, now wife, uh, she goes, That was great, but you should work on the moment where you have that expression on your face that telegraphs, Oh my God, it’s actually working. . Exactly. So you mentioned that that first one was at, at a comedy club.

Like what were some of the venues? What were some of the audiences you were seeking out with this program? Initially I was. Trying to gain enough confidence to actually charge money to do this . Mm-hmm. . Cause I could, cuz as a magician, you know, I’ve charged a two 50, $500 to do a magic show. But doing all my research, I’m like, No, you can’t charge that little, you have to charge more.

But I didn’t have the confidence, you know, I felt like I was a fraud. So I, I went out to, uh, bars and doing shows for five people, one people, 10 people. And I really sucked . I used to go out to service clubs, you know, the American Legion and VFWs and travel all over to do shows and it was 50 50, you know, half the shows.

It was like, yeah, I think I got a couple people out. Mm-hmm. and then there was a couple of shows like, okay, let’s restart the induction. Who wants to go next? Well then I’m curious to ask then, because clearly, you know, part of this story is now going back about, correct me on this, about 10 years. If not more.

Yeah. What was it like 2005, 2006? Yeah. Yeah. So, so clearly, Yeah. Got better at it. Uh, . Well, I was gonna ask like, what was the moment where things kind of clicked in terms of doing that program and having more confidence and let’s say reliably producing the results. You know, thanks to that too, it was learning hypnosis, um mm-hmm.

and I. You had just become a trainer, you know, you might have been doing it a couple years. I’m like, you know, let me, let me drive down and, and do a certification course and and get trained in what I’m trying to do. Mm-hmm. and, and I think it was that detail of a certification course or just learning the dynamics, the breakdown of how inductions work.

Cause I only knew one induction. And with with you learning. The different inductions in the course and then how to tell if people are hypnotized. And then that led me to, to other trainers to learn different types of inductions and, and then it became of, Okay, I can do this, I can do this and I can do this, and if that doesn’t work, I can do this.

And so it was just a progressive learning situation and. You know, learning how to do shows as well. That’s a whole different dynamic. Yeah. Which, which part of what I’m curious to chat about here to kind of highlight for people, cuz part of this audience are people who are brand new to all of this, and this is one of their first encounters.

There’s working professionals who regularly listen as well as the general public. What I’m curious to ask is that sort of catalyst of advancing the story. So there you are. You’re doing shows and you’re getting better results doing those programs. At what point in that journey was that decision to kind of, I don’t wanna say take a step back, but let’s say take a step to the side and learn more about the Hypnosis for Change side of things.

Doing shows. I, I started to, um, record my own products for basically back of the room sales. Mm-hmm. For stop smoking, weight loss and whatnot. And my interest in that is simply recording a product so I could sell it after a show. And then people would come up to me and say, Wow, that’s great. Do you do anything in person?

And I’m like, No, not really. And then finally it was like, Okay, let me call Jason. How do I do that? What do I do? ? And then that started the path towards, uh, Working one on one with people and, and izing and, and helping them. And then it, you know, Go to my house. Go to your house, go to my house. I’m like, You know what?

This isn’t really working. So then I looked it more seriously in opening my own practice. I think I remember some of the details cuz you and I go back a bunch of years here that that first office that you found, I remember it was like a really good deal in terms of what you track down, right? It is, yeah.

And you know, I still hear . I’m in a, I’m in a Victorian about, Two miles from my house. And you know, I always said, you know, if I’m gonna open up my own business, I’m like, Oh, am I gonna commute ? So I have a beautiful space, um, on a second floor, two offices. Um, and I, I just can’t tell you how much I pay, but it’s like half of one smoking session.

nice. Yeah. For the month. Yeah. That, that is one of those things to kinda highlight here, that even. Even coming from someone who recently moved and I made the decision to then migrate everything that I do online. I was in a private, you know, business consulting call with another hypnotist and he had just moved as well, and he’s going, Well, I don’t want to do the office because I don’t want to have that expense.

And I said, Well, hang on a second. And we looked online together and come to find out he now has. Single room suite that’s like 600 square feet, so pretty good size, bigger than the room that I’m in now and got it for about, I think two 40 a month. Yeah, there’s, Which he goes even, he goes, even if it’s just a place that I go film videos, even if it’s just a place that that’s where I just quote, go to work or have the option to meet with someone in person and not have it be my home.

I was saying this seven, eight years ago, it’s even more true now that there’s an overabundance of spaces available. Uh, we, we kind of bounce around in this conversation though, and I’m, I’m curious to ask, from doing the programs to then learning the hypnosis for change side of things, what, what did that do to the actual program that you do for a stage hypnosis, if anything?

It, it. Strengthened, you know, my credibility and it really hasn’t changed. I still booking stage shows and, and, and I sort of found the seasonal patterns for what I wanna get into. You know, I I, I tried the corporate and the college and, and there, there are different routes and for what I do, I, I’m able to just run my practice book shows and most of those shows are in the evenings or weekends.

I can do both and, and increase my income. Yeah. What about in terms of the actual hypnotic skills you get? You get to that, that skill set where you know when they’re hypnotized, you know, when they’re not, and that’s really transformed my stage show. I, I go into stage, so a a lot more relaxed. Which increases the, the success.

You know, I used to watch, I used to, I used to watch, um, you know, Jeff Ronning and when he was doing stage shows on some of his old videos, he, he’d just walk up and like, Hey, sleep or Justin do that. And, and was like, Bam. And I’m like, Wow, they’re, so how do they do that? And now I’m able to, to, to actually do that in my shows because of the amount of.

Work that I do in my practice. Yeah. Yeah. I’d mirror the same statement that, you know, one of the first programs that I did, it was more of a hobby at the time, and I had like three volunteers. All three were just these rockstar responders to everything that I was doing. And there’s a moment where I turned and faced the audience.

And, uh, she was then my girlfriend, now she’s my wife. But Michelle goes, That was great, except for the moment where you looked at the audience with the expression of, Oh my God, it’s actually working. uh, and, and correct me on this, eventually branching out to work with clients wasn’t the original goal here.

The original goal was just another offering of a show. Right, Exactly. Yeah. I didn’t wanna open up an office, I just wanted to do shows. But then, I need to fill the gaps and generate revenue, and I enjoy helping people as well. Yeah. Well, like you mentioned, this was my experience too, that people were reaching out to you for help and you saw that, Oh, I can do this too, Which I, I then have to go back to the email that you sent me a couple of days ago, um, which may have resulted in the fastest.

You’re already laughing. The fastest invite to go. We need to record this and just have the conversation live. Um, Hey Jason, how, how goes. Hope Life in Florida is awesome. It is. Um, I’ve been really jamming in stop smoking clients. Uh, things are firing on all cylinders. I cracked the nut and discovered the real secret.

We should do a podcast. And I said yes. Uh, zero to hero. How five years of failure made me successful. . Oh, let’s go there my friend. Uh, so rewind us back. You’re doing shows. You then came down from Jersey to Virginia and did the training with me, and you were out there and you were seeing some clients to a degree that you were able to kind of blend that into everything else that you were doing.

I’m curious to ask. Walk us through that turning point where things kind of clicked and I’ve got a feeling this episode will be a little similar to the one we did a while ago. I forget the name of it. Uh, there’s another Howard Cooper episode, by the way, coming soon. But there’s one that I did with him called Howard’s Marketing Epiphany.

where suddenly all the knowledge just clicked and went, Oh, that’s how I do. And then business took off from there. But let, let’s go to your story here. What was kind of that turning point for you? Exactly. So I had the skills, um, I knew what to do. I had an office and it was, you know, fairly successful and, I’m a marketing guru.

I’ve studied mm-hmm Magic Marketing from like everybody. I’ve studied almost every hypnosis marketing angle. So I basically hit the run, you know, shotgun approach. You know, I built my website, I put, you know, white pages, free audio, special reports, contact, all that good stuff. I went to libraries. I. Talks.

You know, one of the things that I got from you and the work Smart Hypnosis, was the Google Maps. Mm-hmm. and the Bing pages and the Yelp pages, and that was a real turning point as well. So I did all of those. I did npi, meeting planners, International BNI Business National Network. So you know, Those groups where you go in, you meet once a week there, there’s a realtor, there’s the, the, uh, the chiropractor and, and lo behold there’s the hypnotist and

So some of those are free business networks. Um, Some of those are real expensive. What I wanted to charge me like a thousand dollars to join and yeah, you had to go every week and if you didn’t go, they’d kick you out and put your name on, on a big nasty list in the world. So I, I went to a doctor’s office.

I mean, those were great and I, and I did that initially at first, but you know, you get cold pancakes every week and . Yeah. You know, you may get somebody’s aunt’s uncle. Depending on where you’re located. Well, I gotta tell the story here briefly of the BNI chapter that I was a member of that that was around the time that I dropped like 60 pounds, and that was around the time I had moved to Virginia.

And there was another person in the group who she saw, and she actually became a weight loss client too. Mind you, we were known for the fact that at this point the BNI meeting was held at an Embassy Suites hotel and. Embassy Suites, this one had phenomenal catering. Um, not what they gave us though. So we were known for the fact that we paid for the lunch meeting, but we’d show up early, hit the restaurant, get the salad with the salmon on it, and walk our plate over to the meeting and then sit down

And every week it was the, Oh, where’d you get that? Exactly. I’m like, I’m here to grow my business. I’m not here to eat this, um, lukewarm, uh, burger bar , right? Yeah. Yeah. So then you’re doing those meetings. What, what was that doing for you? You know, it was, it was, he was locking up my time. You know, I was meeting some people, some resource for people that I wanted to get to and, and, you know, yes, I would get a referral here and there, not enough to, to, to run my business.

And then I was reaching out to dentists office, chiropractor’s office and bringing my car, take out brochures and business car. I put my business card to grocery store. I mean, Jason, I tried every single thing in the book and there’s a couple of those services. People say, Go to Yelp. Go to Yelp, . I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna dog any services, but you have to be careful in getting into an advertising situation with them.

It was my experience. I, I did, I, I’m like, I went into an advertising situation where I would pay them roughly, you know, like $400 a month, and for 25 days I would get $3 a day on my budget spent. There was two days left, and then it was like they would suddenly expose me and I, and then they would use my budget and I would reach out to ’em like, Hey, could you spread out my budget a little bit more?

Mm-hmm. , Yeah, they would do that again, and then the last day it would be like, I was like, I need to get out of that situation. Well, I will say this and anybody go back and find the episode, we’ll put this in the show [email protected]. Go back and listen to the episode I did with Dan Perez that there is a way to make Yelp Google extremely profitable in terms of a review strategy.

I will say this, knowing that I’m being recorded and broadcasting to an international audience, I’ve yet to meet someone who was happy with their paid service. Right now, I, I did for years. I turned this off when we moved, though. I did for years. Give them 75 bucks a month. Just to make it so your ads wouldn’t show on my page, you know, and exactly based on the fact that if I got one client a year uhhuh, uh, that paid for it and a whole lot more, so I can get behind that one.

But again, I’ve been very cautious. So that’s kind of that route of platform to platform. Where did things begin to take off for you? When I began analyzing where my money was going, how people were contacting me, So I narrowed it down to three main things. You know, where do I put my mouse trap? You know, how much bait do I use?

Mm-hmm. and how not to let them get away. Yeah. That’s the key to this. That’s, I was, I was gonna say, it’s like I wanna be cautious with some of what you just brought up, because there’s many times I’ve brought up this theme here of it’s very rarely the platform. It’s almost always the strategy. And even before you get into the details of what you’re about to share, would you say if you had applied this strategy back to those platforms, you would’ve seen a different response?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So listen carefully to what we’re about to get into, because the mistake would be to go, Oh, these guys just said that B and I and Yelp and all of that are not working. No. It’s the strategy that you put into it. So let, let’s hear what you kind of cracked into. Exactly. So I spent a lot of time on all those different platforms and things, and I’m, I’m here to tell you that they can be successful, but I focused in on more what was driving traffic to me before I get into what I did with them.

Once I got it, I’ll tell you, it all narrows down to Google Maps and, and it was Google AdWords. For me, the Google Maps page is imperative. Because when people do a local search, your business will come in. So that’s important to have the pictures of your business, who you are, your contact information, your website, because that’s free advertising.

And I get a, a report that says 22,000 people saw my Google Ads map page. I’m like, Wow. It’s like, you know, 50 of them clicked and called. Like, Wow. I didn’t have to pay for that. So that was really good. I narrowed it down. I had more success with Google AdWords than I did bang. Mm-hmm. . I have both running, but I’m lucky if I use a dollar 50 a day on bang.

Now, this is where a lot of the audience goes, Oh, does Bing still exist? And that might be part of the answer. They, they do, they do have a great network. They really do to different sites that Google doesn’t. So it’s a matter of, you know, being available there but not yet focusing all your marketing budget on it.

Yeah. I’m having to pull up, uh, a chat that I had a couple of weeks ago and there’s nothing. Private here, mind you. Uh, but all of a sudden I was getting a message from Kaz Riley asking about advertising on Tumblr, to which I’m now having to play stupid and go, Wait, what? What are you seeing? And it’s because we do a lot of Facebook promotion, right?

And Facebook has a network, you know, connection with things like everything from Huffington Post to Fox News to Tumblr to. I believe at one point someone did send me a screenshot of an ad for one of my classes on J date. Wow. Which that is, that is the moment where, you know, you’ve arrived, by the way.

Exactly. Uh, but you’re right that, you know, to diversify of having this out there, but that, that Google Map listing, or I think it’s now called Google My Business, right? I believe you’re correct. Yeah. They, they, they rebranded every couple of years. This is absolutely free. It’s something you can get up and running today, and the beauty of it is that’s now another platform where people can leave reviews.

It is. And the organic, the organic stuff that you can pull off on that. And by organic, I’m saying without having to pay for it is phenomenal. We, we picked the company, we’re in, we’re under a lot of sunshine right now, so we’re getting solar panels put on our rooftop. Oh, nice. And to see that, you know, the company we found is the one that said, Look us up.

We’ve got a hundred plus reviews on Google. No one else does. Yeah. That, that’s, that’s another key thing at the end here. I was gonna go over as Google reviews, but these different marketing platforms, and I understand Facebook ads is very, can be very successful in targeting what you want. I’m not on social media.

I’m mm-hmm. , I’m in the dark if I’m off the grid, so to speak, . And, and there’s a reason for that. . Yeah. That’s another podcast. So I, I’m not saying those are not successful, it’s just I have not tried them. That calls out a reality that you don’t have to do every single thing that’s out there and Absolutely.

Kind of what I’m hearing from this is refining your efforts to do a couple of things exceptionally well rather than the whole jack of all trades, master of none type situation. Exactly that. What has led me into. Specializing in one service, but yet I still get people for stress and weight loss That drive me nuts.

You know, I’m trying to narrow it in. So I’ve narrowed my marketing in everything that I do, so I have a lot more time on my hands. I’m able to focus into that. And so one of the things I found challenging starting out was how much do I spend. On AdWords, if you looked into it, there’s daily budgets, there’s click budgets, and a primary rule that I learned back from my magic marketing days was okay.

The cost of one performance, there you go, should be your monthly budget type of thing. So I typically ran with that when I marketed my magic business, and then I trans transcend that to hypnosis. So if I’m gonna charge $500 for a stop smoking session, That’s gonna be my monthly budget. So if I do that, if I break that down into 30 days, so my daily budget would be like 16 bucks.

So that’s what I did for a couple years. I ran a daily budget of about $16, $17 a day. The key thing with the ads, Don’t market to the United States. Yeah, thank you. Mark it to the whole state. It all depends where you’re at. I’m fairly dense here. I closed up my circle radius because you can take a zip code and say, Okay, only display my ads between five miles, 10 miles, 25 miles.

And I’m telling you, if you’re spending money on somebody 75 miles away, most of them will click on your. But never go see you. Well, let, let’s, let’s modify this slightly, and this is a conversation that I got into recently with someone and they didn’t quite, quite take the advice and continue to flush money down the toilet.

Let, let’s, let’s kick off with the metaphor. Of the original cast of Saturday Night Live and the joke was they were referred to as the not yet ready for primetime players, cuz the show was going on at like 11, 11 30 at night. Mm-hmm. before you try to go global, before you try to go national, it’s easier to win local.

Even if you’re a business that is doing everything online and not having a physical location, you’re still gonna win local a whole lot faster than you’ll win national. And that’s kind of the equivalent of like back, back to your story, Brian, of getting up at the comedy club, getting up and just doing something in a venue where it was okay to do it while learning , but confirm you can make it work in a smaller pond.

Before you try to start to fish in the big one? Yeah. For me it was, I don’t have a lot of money for marketing, so I have to really. Optimize my marketing and, and look at the analytics, look at the numbers to see what’s going on. And I, and I had a wide net and, and I closed my circle down about a year ago to about 15 miles from my house.

Now granted, you know, different. Geographical areas have different density, and that may not be possible for you, but think about that. How many other hypnotists are in your market that are within 15 to 20 miles? For me? And how many of those are marketing? Yeah. Two. . Who else is market? quit.com. Yeah. Um, national advertising campaigns, you do not wanna compete with quit.com, stop smoking, you know, dot net, all these different places, so you have to adjust it.

So what I discovered was $16 a day was generating maybe $3,500 a month. Nice. Okay. Pause there for a second, Brian, and we’ll come to that point. Cause I wanna go back to something that you brought up, which this is, this is what I’ve been saying for years too. It’s that willingness to reinvest and, and the key phrase here is reinvest that I, you know, I don’t want people going into debt for what they’re doing or going broke at it.

Um, but just to run the math for this, We have the next work Smart Hypnosis live and online class coming up in October. I’m sure we’ll mention it in the intro to this episode cuz hey, you’ve been through that class and, and the nature of that event, just to give some rough numbers and let me just, uh, round this off to make it easy.

It’s not $2,000 for a person to sign up. Most people get in early enough that they don’t pay the full rate. But even if it was. It’s a split event. I’m gonna multiply 2000 times 36 attendees, which is what we max it out at. That way people still get the hands on attention. There’s monitored practice, and at the top of that, on paper, Key phrase on paper, that’s a $72,000 event.

I’m gonna divide that in half because I share that one coming up next with Richard non guard. So really on paper, there’s a theoretical, $36,000 can comes from running this event that happens over the course of nine or 10 weeks. So look at that though. And here’s the question to ask. Would you be willing to spend.

Two to $4,000 to earn back 36,000, and the answer ought to be yes. This is the same math that I would do with my client sessions. I would run a budget of about a thousand dollars a. because typically that’s about what I was earning from a new client that would come in and to divide that out. That would work out to be around 30 or so dollars a day, and now Google was one part of the strategy.

I think there is a lot of validity. You don’t have to be on social, but your business can, because the strength of Google is, it’s bringing traffic. I see better conversion with Facebook. For those you, you’re inside of hypnotic business systems. There’s a whole section on retargeting, which is about showing ads to people who have been to your page That’s so powerful, but have not yet become your client.

Yeah, that’s so powerful. I dropped the Google budget because the, the metaphor became, let’s not keep throwing more darts at the dart board. Let’s make the dart board stickier, which. Not how dark boards work. I know, but the metaphor still holds . Exactly. But, but take a look at what you would typically earn.

And I will say this, knowing part of this audience, uh, I was at an event in like 2011 and um, two people came up to me and said, Oh, we see your ads online. We don’t advertise in the next week. Their ads were running right under mine, . Uh, it’s not advertising, it’s educat. And informing. That’s the frame on this, but it is, What was that?

What was that next step for you then that, It’s funny that you mentioned that figure, because my point is, what if I double my budget? Would I increase my income? So it came to a point where, okay, let me save some money and I’m gonna just invest, throw the money away for two months and test this. I increased my budget to a thousand dollars a month.

I did the numbers and as you mentioned, 30 to $33 a day. I ran with that. That generated an additional. You know, 3000, $3,500. So now I’m up to over 6,000, but that piggyback and started going up to over 10 off of a thousand dollars budget. Nice. Yeah. And so are you willing to spend a thousand to get 10?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I have all this traffic coming in and there was a point where I’m spending this money. But how come I’m not getting the amount of people and I come from. An analytical background. I was in the Air Force, I was in recruiting service. I worked in operations. We tracked numbers, numbers, numbers.

We track how many calls you would make, how many contacts of that, how many would you make appointments. So my thought process is, let me look at the analytics, Let me look at my phone records now. Phone, that’s a whole other. Thing. Um, if you’re not using a professional phone service and there’s so many out, theres, there’s move, There’s a viop, there’s, there’s one service that I use.

You call in from my one 800 number for my shows. You call in from my practice number and it’ll automatically call my office landline. It’ll call my cell phone without giving out your cell phone. And then I built a phone tree. I actually had a voice, a voice artist, do my phone tree. I can pick up a phone on my cell phone in my car at the grocery store, and they’re calling my business line

So the, the bottom line is I’m able to track what’s coming in. Yeah. I discovered there were 25 calls of people that would call hang up and never call me back. So I have a pretty good sales success rate. Yeah. 90%, 85% of the people I talk to for stop smoking. We’ll schedule an appointment, so if I was able to recover half of those 25 lost phone calls, 12 of them at $500, I was losing $6,000 a month.

Not keeping the clients that I was paying to bring to me. Yeah. So really what we’re now talking about is empowering that follow up. So what were you doing then with the people who would call and not even make it onto the call? They were just disappearing. Mm-hmm. , the people that would call and hang up would just disappear.

Um, and I. I can’t be available 24 7 for clients. I’m doing sessions, I’m eating dinner, I’m doing shows. Um, my wife had mentioned, I can answer phones for you. It’s like, no, I don’t wanna hire a salesperson. I don’t want you to. What if we’re eating dinner at the same time? Who’s gonna do that call? So let me tell you what I did.

This may not be the solution for you, but. My phone service offered a, a trial for a live answering service. Um, I, I, I tried that and I discovered a few things. Um, number one, I loved it. number two. It was expensive as hell. Yeah. And that led me into doing a lot of research in, in live, answering services, you know, how they work, who are these people?

And I found this one company, actually the Nun, Virginia. Jason. Mm-hmm. , this small service that have a network of, you know, home based people around the country. Just a handful. And their pricing was so good. I. It was double the amount of minutes for what I was paying at half the cost. And I’ll tell you, it was around $159 a month for over 200 minutes, and I didn’t, And so using the math of 25 missed calls, I’m thinking, Let me run with this for a month or two at 150 bucks or so a month and see.

If it’s gonna eat me up or if it’s gonna work. So I, I had that, uh, mentality. I didn’t have to sign up for long term contract and the, they went from 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM They didn’t answer weekends or nights. That was initially a turnoff for me, but it actually turned out to be better cuz it works. So you call my number.

It works on a, a forwarding basis so I can turn it on and off from my control panel for my, my phone service. So whenever, so there’s times in the office where I have a few hours, I can take live phone calls, I would turn off the thing. So if. People would call me, I could pick up the phone and go, Hello. And when I have a client, I switch it over to answering service.

It’s, it’s real simple. I can do it for my mobile phone now, I, I don’t answer live calls anymore. . Yeah, because it add, it’s funny, it adds a, uh, um, a credibility, um, another part of scarcity, you know, that, that law where if, if you have so many appointments, You know, people don’t think that you’re busy or good if you tighten that down where people can’t get a hold of you or you don’t have that many appointments.

Now people are jumping through hoops to try to contact you and people call, they. A live person picks it up. And I’ll tell you, there’s two things that I did. One of the things I did initially was, I want you to book appointments for me online, which they offer this service. And I have a system set up where they can book phone consults, they can book smoking sessions, they can book Zoom, consult.

And initially I was like, Yes, I’m getting all these people in. And then I would look like this person wants information about a product. So I’m gonna talk to them in two days. I’m gonna talk to this one next week. I’m gonna talk to this one tomorrow. I’m like, Wait a minute. I wanna talk to them now when I’m available.

When I’m done with my client, I don’t wanna wait. So I actually talked with them again and said, Look, I don’t want you to book appointments for me. I want you to just take a message. Get that message to me ASAP and I’ll take it from there. So less empowering. Your messaging service empowered me more to, to communicate with them.

That’s a really cool strategy and I, I, you know, I teach a digital version of that called Velvet Rope inside of the Hypnotic Business Program, but to make use of the same concept where there’s a sense of delayed gratification, there’s this elevation of knowledge where now you’ve got someone who’s answering the call.

I’m assuming, answering some basic questions, but then basically queuing you up as now the expert, and then when they get to you, you have an appropriate level of prestige because someone else is doing that initial entry point for you. But now comes the task of they’re then handed off to you for the booking, correct.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and then I can go through that and I have the capability on my website. This is another strategy that I struggled with initially, is people automatically booking your service on your website and, and I’ve gone through different scenarios on that by, you know what, I don’t want people going in seeing my price booking me and then being turned off without going through my sales funnel.

So I. Took away a lot of that. I just had phone consult, Zoom and I, you know, I just edited that again. So now , you basically have to talk to me before I book you into my automated system. Yeah, except for stop smoking, because that’s my higher end, um, service that. I want to happen automatically, but I put the link all the way down after my sales page and I integrated, um, webinars from our friend, Yeah, from our friend.

Personally, I, I’m not into webinars, but I discovered a way to automate that whole process. So yeah, I do au webinars all the time, but I’m not there. So I put that link at the bottom of it. And I remember when you, you used to say the automation that you do and you’d make money, go into sleep, booking your seminars and stuff.

And I’m like, I wanna do that. I want people to just book me. And it took a while of tweaking the product information, the scarcity of that. And so the last six to seven months, I got people booking appointments and paying me up front, and I’m like, Wow, . Yeah. And it’s just a matter of narrowing things down and servicing your clients.

So everybody I talked to and I tell you, it, it made a difference for me. Uh, yesterday, for example, I had somebody call me at eight 40 in the morning wanting information about stop smoking. I wasn’t available to talk till after 3:00 PM but the mere fact that they talked to somebody and they said, Hey, we’ll have Brian call you.

I called them back at three o’clock. And they waited for me because they knew they had made contact with me, so they didn’t reach out to another hypnotist. And so that client’s coming in at one o’clock today. Nice. And he gave me a credit card over the phone, which really, I mean, let’s break down everything here.

That, first of all, there was that willingness to test. There was that willingness to play with the systems, continue tweaking and reinvest some of what Yes. Was coming into the business. In such a way that now you can start to see what’s working. And the key here, and this is the whole systematic mindset, when you crack into something and see the way that it actually works, that’s where you can then go and even better and optimize it.

So then you can reproduce it. So if you had to kind of break this all down into, um, steps moving forward, what is it that you’re looking at in terms of, you know, the core elements that really made the shift? Analyzing where my leads were coming from, from all the sources and things that I do, how they’re contacting me.

And, and you have to make adjustments because now people on your website, there’s people are gonna call you, There’s people that are gonna email you, there’s people gonna fill out your web form. So you have to have all those avenues available. But the primary thing for me was people calling me because they want instant gratification.

When people wanna stop smoking, for example, they’re not gonna wait to to listen from you at the library. Mm-hmm. or, or wait for a realtor to pass you a business card, or they’re not gonna look for display advertising in the supermarket. They’re gonna go on the internet and say, I wanna stop smoking near me.

And then bam, there you are. And then when that client comes in, they wanna be able to connect with. . And when you think about it, how many times when you call a service and you get the phone tree, that’s a nightmare. You can’t your life and it’s automated customer service, please. You know, I wanna talk to somebody, and you get angry.

But when you call somebody and they pick up and they’re like, Hi, how are you? You’re like, Wow, they care. It may not be the solution for you, but. That was a major turning point. Well, I think the big things here are again, that willingness to test the systems, the opportunities to see what’s working and the willingness to kind of tweak it on the fly, which you can take all of this and apply it to whatever avenues you want to do.

And here’s the kicker here. You don’t do social. You know, Okay. I know you’ve put your efforts on the things that you want to focus on and none of us have to do all of this. We have some activity that goes out on Twitter, but that serves a bit of a funny purpose as to, I do a lot of guest podcasting and my other podcast host who would possibly have me on wanna see that we’re active and that’s really, All that’s serving the benefit of, uh, so I’m curious to ask, what’s the next step of this for you?

In addition to continued awesomeness, it’s doing more clients, narrowing my services down, specializing. And I’ve always heard that, you know, I think you have something out there on that niche to get rich or something . Um, and you’re like, Wow, that’s cool. That’s all I’m gonna do. And, uh, I never really thought about it.

Well, I, I tried to get there, but how do you get there? And you get there by being too busy. You know, I’m. I think it has to do with confidence level. Mm-hmm. and success in what you’re doing. So I’ve slowly weeded out weight loss in my, in, in my case. Um, a lot of people are very successful doing that. It’s a great service.

That’s not for me. Um, just there’s so many variables involved with that. We don’t even have to get into that, but I’m trying to narrow it down more to, to one service. And I actually had to turn off my marketing. I turned off my marketing for the last three and a half a weeks. I, I, I was getting too many leads.

Yeah. and that, that, that creates, I love that you brought that up. That creates a beautiful scenario where to say it simply, you figured out the systematic nature of your business well enough that when you want it to go up, you now know what to do when you want it to slow down. Which is a real concern sometimes you know what to do and that’s, that’s a beautiful place to be operating from.

It is. I can turn it off, turn it off, turn it on, and I still get these emails from Google saying There were 2000 people that were on your website this last week. I’m like, And they, and they still call me . So I mean, you wanna be from that referral place. Before you, before you can get there, you have to have a system in place to generate business and, and that’s where I’m at.

I’m transitioning from marketing to referral only, but I’m not there yet. So this is what has worked for me to turn. On turn off and how to capture those leads in a successful professional way without breaking that bank. And you just pulled away what my intro was gonna be, ? No, which calls out the fact that these are some of those things that we do a little heavier.

To get that sustainability of the business where now, you know, and it’s not just because I’m now in another location, but the nature of my client acquisition, uh, systems for my business, there’s no paid budget anymore because there’s enough footprint of it, there’s enough traffic coming to it. There’s enough of the systematic nature of those inside of hypnotic business, what I call the v i P page strategy session, which is my automated funnel sequence that I, that I run to bring people in.

Which is now making it so that’s just sustaining on its own. Mm-hmm. . So the opportunity comes that once we have that, there’s a place where we can kind of relax down some of the systems. Because the business is just running though. I’d encourage look at some of that retargeting stuff that’s available.

Because that’s the easiest thing that that’s one of those money left on the table. The same as you found people who would call and would not be answered. There’s people who are visiting your site and not going any further. There’s a means to stay in contact with those people, and that’s some of the best business you can do online.

Uh, Brian, this has been fantastic and what I love about it is the, um, transparency of here’s where it wasn’t working. , I, I, I sucked and I spent a lot of money. Now that you said it, here’s why I sucked at the other things and here’s why I found the things that I’m passionate about and made the work, and you just pulled back the curtain.

And gave it away, which is awesome. How can people track you down online? What’s the best way to get in contact with you? Yeah, I’m off the grid. Don’t call me. Okay. Yes, ? No. Actually, my website, I’ve, I’ve changed it. It’s New Jersey family hypnosis.com. That’s my main website and. You know, there’s so much going on that site.

You know, we could do a whole other podcast on, on marketing and, and whatnot. But New Jersey family hypnosis.com is a, is a great way to reach out to me. And if you wanna email me, um, New Jersey family hypnosis gmail.com. Excellent. Easy to track down. Uh, before we wrap this up, any final thoughts for the listeners out.

Track what’s working, what’s not working, and, and you know, just really look at your analytics, you know, look at your phone records, look of how people are contacting you. And, and one other thing I wanna circle back, if we could real quick, that I didn’t think was important. Was Google reviews, as you mentioned, for years and years.

I would not ask people to do Google reviews and I was like, Big deal. You know, I got two reviews, five reviews, whatever. I circled around and really worked to get reviews and so I’m up to what, 50 reviews plus on my Google Maps, but people who were calling me and saying, Ooh, I researched you. You have good Google Review.

I actually put a lot of those Google reviews on my website, which increases my credibility because if you have a review on your website that says, Brian’s the most amazing hypnotist in the world, Susan Smith . But if you say from Google reviews, people are like, Oh, that’s, He didn’t have his uncle do that review.

This is coming from the internet. It must be true . So I think that’s a key element to Google Maps is Google reviews. Take time, Reach out to your people, get those reviews, watch your wallet. Don’t spend more than you can afford, but do testing. Jason went out here once again, and as always, thank you so much for leaving your reviews for this program online, joining us as you dive deeper into programs, whether it.

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