The Sales Strategy That Doubled This Magician's Income

If you're just starting out as a magician or looking to grow your magician's business and start to make money as a magician, then this episode of Fix Your Business is definitely for you. Welcome back everybody. It's the next episode of Fix Your Business and I've got an amazing guest on, magician Kerry Scorer, who is going to be talking to us today about how to make money with magic or More to the point, I'm hopefully going to be helping Kerry to make more money with magic. If you do hang on to the end of this video, Kerry has promised us a trick, so I can guarantee it's worthwhile hanging on to the end. We're gonna do about half an hour of the interview and then we'll hopefully see some magic at the end of it, Kerry. So welcome to the show, Kerry.

Hi, thank you for having me.

I have to say, we need to give out awards because your background is the best background I think we've had on the show so far. Let's kick things off with— just give us a very quick introduction about how you got into magic and how you kind of started your business.

Okay, so I mean, I grew up watching magic. I watched Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, which I guess is probably giving my age away a little bit, and I always wanted to be Debbie— the dresses, the glamour, the glitter— but decided to go down the other route instead and become a magician. I kind of got into it by accident. I met people who did magic as a hobby, and I joined my local magic club, which was when I was living in Hull, and then it just went from there. I heard about this You know, elusive magic circle and things, and I'm proud to say I'm a member now and have been for many years. And yeah, it's just basically just come about really just by chance, I guess. I think I've just been very, very fortunate.

Awesome. So you've come on to the show because you want to know about sort of, well, a couple of things, potentially how you can charge a little bit more for the magic which you're doing. You obviously do a lot of sort of private events, weddings, and things like that at the moment. And also how to grow your audience. So we're gonna dig into that. Now, we talked about some of your goals off-air, which was one of them was to kind of hit regular sort of monthly revenue somewhere around about the £4K to £5K mark. So talk to us very sort of briefly about how you currently charge for the magic which you do.

Okay, so I charge— I mean, it all depends on where I'm going, how long they want me for, what the event is and things. For weddings, I have a A definite amount because, well, if it's a local area, obviously I'm in the Gloucestershire area, so if it's local to me, then I just have a flat fee for around 2 hours at a wedding. And I think that's kind of, you know, that works for me. Which is how much? That's £350. And I say 2 hours, but I'm kind of, you know, it's for the time slot. So I'm not rushing and I'm not, you know, I'm not rushing to them, I'm not rushing off. For them or anything. I arrive in plenty of time. I get ready when it feels, you know, when it feels right, when the people are around, and then I finish when the time slot finishes. So normally I do between the wedding ceremony and the wedding breakfast. So once everybody's gone through and then I've had sort of 10 minutes with the bride and groom to show them some things, then that's when it finishes. If it's 2 hours, it's 2 hours. If it's more, it's more. You know, I'm kind of quite flexible on that. I'd rather do the period of time rather than, well, it's, you know, 2 hours, I'm going now sort of thing. And I kind of keep that as a general price, and that seems to work very well for me.

Just out of curiosity, what would you say your conversion rate is at the moment?

Quite high, actually, I would say. I mean, I do a lot of wedding fairs, and obviously, you know, I mean, I do— sometimes when you're at wedding fairs, people come up and they go, oh, a magician, you know, they don't even think, you know, and I'd show them some stuff and It's really nice actually when they're the ones that will then ring up and go, actually, you know, we want to book you, we didn't even know that was a thing. So there are people that don't realize, you know, so I might see people at wedding fairs and they didn't realize a magician was a thing and it's not on their list. But people who do come up and say, oh, we've been looking for a magician, then I'm happy to say that my conversion rate, I would say, is quite high.

Okay, put a percentage on it for me.

I would say 70 to 80% of inquiries for weddings.

Okay, why do you think that it's as high as it is?

Probably because although I think I get a lot of weddings, I probably don't get masses of them. So I've probably been recommended, or they've seen me at a wedding fair, or, you know, there's something in there. They've looked at my social media, that my Instagram page gets quite a lot of attention for weddings and things on there. And so I think it's probably that. Also, I think as well, just because I'm a girl. You know, it's just that little bit different. You know, most people when they say, oh, you know, magicians— I mean, I still get it now if I go to an event and I say, oh, hi, I'm the magician, and they go, oh, you're a girl! You know, so it still sort of surprises people. So I think some people quite like that as well, just to have that little bit of different, I guess. So yeah, and also I like to think I'm good.

Which, you know, I don't doubt you are. Most of the business owners we come across, they're brilliant at what they do. Would it surprise you if I said that you're vastly undercharged for your time at the moment?

Yeah.

Because I think you could probably keep a relatively high conversion rate and double, if not maybe even close to treble, your pricing without kind of, you know, losing too much work.

Okay.

So do you want to know how?

Yeah.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna share my screen very quickly, and then we can actually kind of dig into the numbers, because this is really, really, really important. Hopefully you can see this okay. So some of the people who've watched this before will probably be familiar with this diagram which I'm about to do, 'Cause it is like a basic, very basic sales funnel, and the numbers will start to become a bit more sort of, they'll make more sense for you. So obviously one of the things we're gonna be talking about is how to build your audience a bit later on. So we start that off by obviously producing content to kind of warm people up, start to build up that know, like, and trust journey for prospective clients. You're kind of doing that by getting out and doing events, like when you actually go and do a wedding, You're kind of— that is a piece of content effectively which you're then putting out to other people who haven't yet booked you. So you're creating that kind of word-of-mouth referral anyway, which is good. And obviously I saw a couple of videos where people had kind of shared like the reaction videos and things like that, which somebody else had obviously taken, not necessarily you. Again, that's some nice content which is getting out there. But the next thing that then starts is something called conversations. which will hopefully lead to a sales consultation, and then you'll convert and you'll get a booking off the back of it. But the numbers are the thing which I want you to pay attention to. So for every 70 conversations you start, you should be booking 10 consultations off the back of it, which will lead to 2 clients booking. Okay? Now, that relationship between those 2 numbers is quite important, so a good conversion rate for a service-based business is actually somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3. Now, I didn't make any of these numbers up. This actually came from a white paper which Google produced called Zero Moments of Truth. So they studied a gazillion bits of data, smashed it all together, and worked out that actually, it comes from the age-old days of like cold calling. So 70 calls, 10 appointments, 2 sales, and they actually worked out that the numbers correlated for businesses just like yours, that 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 conversion rate is about right. Now, you actually said you're converting somewhere between 70% and 80%. So when I challenge people on that and say, well, actually, your conversion rate's way too high, which means you're far too cheap at the moment, like you want a bit of tension in the marketplace, you want more people saying no than they're saying yes, because then that means you've reached that point of equilibrium. So if I said to you, Kerry, why don't you go out and You know, why don't you go and double your prices tomorrow? What would be the first thing that you would think?

My initial reaction would probably be that people wouldn't pay that.

Yeah, so international sign of distress. Nobody would ever pay that. People think I'm stupid. Taking the piss out of weddings, blah, blah, blah. Everybody's, you know, capitalizing on weddings. The truth is you don't actually know, do you?

No.

No, because there's a story which you kind of told yourself, which is, oh, people won't pay it. Now, I'm not going to go into necessarily the value system on why that story is happening for you, but what we don't know is whether that story is true or not. So how we actually go about sort of validating that story is to go out and pitch it, pitch your product to 10 or 20, you know, the next couples that you're gonna go and do a wedding for, but at £700 as opposed to £350. Might seem like a bit of a scary prospect, and probably you might need a bit of, you know, help with your sales training. If you make your product better, bigger, and/or more expensive, Generally speaking, you've got to get a little bit more scaled around the sales side of things. But I think because you're only pricing yourself at sort of that £350 mark, I know for a fact that there are, you know, you think about people spending tens of thousands of pounds potentially on weddings. Actually, £350 is just a drop in the ocean for like the average wedding. I think if you looked at the average amount somebody spends on a wedding, it's something like £12,500 now. So there's bandwidth there for somebody to spend £700 on a magician. And don't forget as well, if somebody's spending a bit more money with you, you can actually kind of start to add in more value if needs be. So you're saying you're already staying there. Well, you can stay there and do even more stuff if necessary, if the money's there, and there's no friction.

Sure.

So you're not going to get frustrated that kind of, well, they've only paid for 2 hours, now I'm going into 3 hours and it's kind of my hourly rate's getting depleted. You're kind of like, well, actually I'm getting paid my worth, so I'll stay for a bit longer, add loads more value. So more money equals more time to deliver a better quality product. And so round the circle goes. What we've got to do is you've got to— I think it's one of those things you might have to make the decision, right? I'm just going to go and test out what Robin's saying. For the next 10 people I pitch at £750 or £700, see how many I get. Now, I can guarantee to you that you will get probably at least one in 1 in 5 to 1 in 3, so 25 to 33% conversion rates. You'll still get people saying yes. It might be fewer than 70 to 80%, but it won't be half, I don't think for sure. And but what I can guarantee though is clients are like buses. So if you pitch to 10, the first— it will be the first 8 that say no, it will be the last 2 which say yes.

Yeah.

So you've got to hold your nerve, and this is where actually a lot of small business owners fall down is because they don't have the bottle and the patience to wait for the right opportunities to come along. Yeah, it's what I call they're too busy stepping over the pounds to get to the pennies because they've got to pay for their mortgage today, they've got to put food on the table today, they need money. So does any of that kind of resonate so far?

Yes.

So, and now think about it this way. When you're at a gig or consultation, or, you know, who is the most important person in that transaction, you or the client?

The client.

Client. And it should be the client, 100%. But if you're approaching sales from a business— not suggesting you are, this is the royal you, this is what I see with a lot of business owners doing— but what I see is a lot of the time when people are making sales, it's all about them for the reasons I've just said. They need the money, they need to pay their mortgage, they need— and it's like, actually, when it's all about me, going into a sales situation, it means the client's best interests aren't being looked after, and you can see the focus has shifted slightly. Again, whereas actually if we're just a bit more patient and we know that when we get the opportunities, we're going to get well compensated for it, the neediness starts to kind of drift away. Make sense?

Yeah.

Let's go back to the diagram. We'll just finish it off. So we've got the 70-10-2, the final— this is called my 5 C's model, just so people know, you end up with those loyal clients, and it's those people who kind of refer people to you. And the more gigs you're doing at a higher price, which generates more loyalty amongst the clients because they've invested more, so that, you know, you can see how it's all kind of stacking up. The more referrals you're likely to get in as well.

Yeah.

Because they're coming in pre-warmed, you've got a greater opportunity, a greater chance of converting them.

Yes, yes.

I don't know about you, but probably there are, you know, if somebody's going to spend £350, they'll spend £700 because they're not paying for 2 hours of your time, they're paying for the experience, which is completely different.

Yes.

They're paying for like the outcome and the results, and that is often worth a lot more than like what I call the features that go into a product. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and I suppose for me I'd be thinking, well, they're paying £350 for a magician and there's quite a few magicians around that would obviously do it for that price, but then it's, are they paying for a magician or are they paying for me?

Yeah.

And that's how—

So you've got to find a way of kind of, it's what I call articulating your value, and you've got to be able to articulate your value better than anybody else. So how we do that is actually more about education than anything else, and I'll tell you a little story actually. In fact, I'll reflect back something which you said. So you said, I'll do 2 hours, it's £350, and I might, you know, it happens between here and here, this is kind of what they're gonna get, and you'll list off a bit of like close-ups bit of card magic, a bit of, you know, what I call the features. So imagine this scenario, Kerry, and I think you might have heard me tell this story before, but it's useful for this. The AA story, you know, the guy in the AA van, right? So you've gone and done a show, you live in Gloucestershire, you've gone and done a show up in Hull. It's late on a Saturday night because it was a wedding and it dragged on a bit, and it's like, it's now like 1 AM, right? Middle of winter, 2 degrees, pissing down with rain. And you're shooting down the M5 to get back to Newington, whichever the motorway— the M50, I think it is— to get across the countryside to get there. And tire blows out. OK? So you phone up the AA guy. Eventually, he shows up an hour and a half later. So it's now past 2. You've been waiting on the side of the road, just soaked through, freezing cold, right? And he goes, Kerry, just before I fix your car, they've just given me a new AA van. Let me show you the AA van. It's got these brand-spanking-new shiny alloy wheels on it. It's got this amazing Snap-on toolkit in the back of it with this whole tool set that kind of You know, imperial and metric. It's got this air compressor that will get your tire off in a jiffy. I could say, yeah, I've got to fix your tire. Then all he's doing is talking about all these features, right? And how amazing his van is. What are you thinking whilst he's telling you that?

Just fix my car.

Fix my car. Yeah. And like now, because I want to get home. I want to see my family. I'm fed up. I'm cold. Right? So what happens is the most— and again, this might be something which you've experienced. So When a client says, how much? That dreaded question. What are you like? Yeah, it's £350, and you say it like really confidently, and like— or do you kind of like, you know, shrink down a little bit like Gollum and his ring and just come in and say, £350?

I don't know, actually. I would like to say that I feel confident each time, but yeah, probably now and again, I don't know, maybe not. No.

And okay, so there's a little bit of a— like, it sounds like on a scale of 1 to 10, you're like a 6 or a 7 on the confidence scale there. So you're kind of up there, but not up there.

Yeah, I think it depends maybe on how the conversation has gone beforehand of, you know, so if they say, you know, we got your number from so-and-so because we saw you at their wedding, then I'm like, I'm more confident because they know exactly what I'm going to be doing. So I can then just go in and charge that, and that's how much I am.

Yeah, so the confidence thing is quite important because again, it means that there's this— if you're not feeling confident, there's an emotional attachment to the sale.

Yeah.

Okay, and that actually impacts your ability to sell. So it should be, no, it's £700, and we say it confidently and, you know, like it's just normal and it's part of the process. And actually, when we say it, we don't care whether they say yes or no because actually if they say no, Whether they say yes or no, it's going to be the best result for them. So if they say, yes, this is great, go ahead, great, we're tickety-boo. If they say no, they'll probably have genuine reasons for that. Now, for example, if they come back and say, oh gosh, that's expensive, and you've probably had people even say that at £350, how does that make you feel?

Yeah, I guess if I was charged— if I'm charging £350, I don't go down. But if I was charging £700, yeah, I would be very tempted to Discount my price straight away. And I wouldn't do that at £350, so why should I do it at £700?

Great. I'm glad you've made that. That's a great piece of self-awareness, actually. I like that. But one of the things which I've noticed a lot is when people are challenged on price, especially because it's being expensive, all of a sudden we go, oh, but I've got my shiny tools, they're amazing, and my air compressor is the best that it can be. So we start having to justify ourselves by talking about features. And actually a better way to— when we get challenged on price, generally speaking, the objection is never about price. The objection is actually around their confidence in your ability to deliver and the fact that they're gonna get good value for money.

Yeah.

Okay, which is slightly different. So what I mean by that is, or one of the best ways to come back to when somebody says, oh, it's expensive, first question you should always ask is, well, why do you say that? Because you've got to understand like what it is that, you know, they might say, well, we've spoken to 3 other magicians and they're all 300 quid. So we're like, We don't understand why you're double. And you can just say, well, I'm better than them.

Okay.

And you can also say, well, one of the things which they won't offer is a money-back guarantee. So if I come in, I am better than them, I'm more expensive than them, and I know that. But if I come in and you feel you don't get value for money on the day, I'll just hit the refund key because it is not worth my reputation, like, you know, not delivering remarkable value and giving your guests the best experience they're ever going to get. So can you see the difference in how you articulate that value compared to taking justification and taking people to the back of the AA van? Sounds a bit dodgy, but versus having confidence in your ability to deliver, which is backed up by a cast-iron money-back guarantee. If you don't feel that you get value for money on the day or there is a problem, I just hit the refund key and I've got no problem with doing that. I've never had to do it yet. I don't think I'll have to do it with you either.

Yeah.

You can see the difference in the sales pitch all of a sudden.

Yeah.

So that's why I think that you can easily, if you just learn to sell using a couple of kind of simple techniques based around confidence, and don't forget magic is all about confidence. Yeah. You know, take some element of that in terms of what you're doing with the magic in your sales process. And I bet you could probably, I bet you could close. I don't say this about many people, but I bet you could close as many people at $700 as you're currently closing at $350. Okay, so if we got you the same number of bookings in 2021 that you got in 2019, you're gonna double your turnover easily.

Yeah.

And it is a matter of just having the confidence to— it's a 3-step process actually, so I'm gonna share my screen again just so I can explain it. So it's a 3-step process. It's called MVT, which stands for mindset, Validation and time. So the idea being that we've just sown the seed of an idea with you that you could charge more.

Okay.

So we're gonna charge more and we're gonna charge minimum £700. Now as you get more confident— so what I tend to see is I go through this process with people and they get more confidence and we get— I get them to a point whereby like they'll charge, you know, tomorrow you're charging £700. That's it. We're done. In a month's time, you'll come back to me and go, Robin, you know, actually, I was with a couple. I wasn't sure about them, but I felt confident. So actually, I pitched it at £900, and you'll never guess what? They said yes. So clients actually, once they get this methodology, they start taking it upon themselves and they start increasing the prices themselves. I had somebody, she was a dog trainer or dog behaviorist who was charging £50 for a consultation, which is way too cheap. The initial MVT part took a while, but we got it to £150. She came back to me 6 months later, recently, and said, I've just charged somebody £850 for a consultation. So for one client, she used to have to deliver— one consultation, she used to have to deliver like close to 20 consultations before.

Yeah.

So you can see like the compression of time. So we're gonna accept £700. Yep, I'm down with that. Kerry's in. Thumbs up. Kerry's in. £700. Great. So the next thing, we've got to go out and validate. So the validation process typically takes About 4 to 6 weeks, which is where the time element comes into it. I'll come back to that in a second, but we're gonna pitch this to 10 to 20 prospective clients.

Okay?

Remember, good conversion rate is 1 in 5 to 1 in 3, so that's the benchmark that we're gonna be testing against, validating against. So if you come back to me and tell me that you closed somewhere between 2 and 6— 2 and 6. of those prospects, we've just validated, we know that there is a market out there that's willing to spend £700 to have the amazing Kerry come down and deliver some magic at their event. And we've got that nice fine balance between Kerry getting well compensated for the work she's doing, we've got demand, there'll be good cash flow coming into the business because now we're making double per client that we're doing, so we can actually have not even, it's not even half the clients, you could actually have probably a third of the clients and still make as much profit as you're currently making. Okay? So you can have dramatically fewer clients but make a lot more money. It's nothing to say that over time we don't actually scratch £700 altogether and actually put together a package for you which is maybe £1,500 or maybe £2,500. It's like the all-you-can-eat, like most amazing wedding magic show on this planet. Okay? There is a market out there for business like that. So now all of a sudden you've got like for a quarter of the clients, 4 times the revenue, you know, you're laughing. One of the things which I found actually, which is quite interesting, is like people in service businesses struggle to package up what they're doing. So you think about it this way, if you've got your £350 product, I don't know if you have more expensive packages which you sell at the moment?

No, not really. I mean, it depends on travel basically. So if you wanted me further afield, then obviously I charge more, but that's because of of travel, really. So yeah, but my price pretty much stays the same. But, you know, obviously if he wanted me in London, I'd be charging more than £350 because it's a, you know, it's like a 12-hour round trip, you know.

So it could be, you know, it might be that, you know, you have the basic package, which is now £700. You maybe, maybe then you have like a gold standard package, which it's not just Kerry, maybe it's Kerry and Richard. come as a package that you can both be moving around, and that's £1,500. But then you have your platinum all-you-can-eat, which is like some fantastic stage show produced, like, you know, I don't know, just something. There could be something in that. But at the moment, because you've only got one offer, like, and you're not putting out those other offers, we don't know if there's a market for it. We don't know if you're missing opportunities as a result of it. So one of the reasons service business owners struggle is because they're just not putting offers out there. They're not testing stuff. So you use a similar— when you come up with a new product, and that's something you and I could probably talk about maybe offline, when you start to come up with a new product, you know, you go through a similar sort of process of validation. It's just that what we do is we kind of throw out the seed of an idea that we've got this new product coming up. Would anybody be interested? And then you get to a point where— so there's a book behind me by an author called Daniel Priestley. He's got another book called Oversubscribed. You get to a point whereby if there's enough demand, well, let's build this thing and launch it. Yeah. So that's also validation. But what we want is we want you to come back with 2 to 6 people who said yes at a higher price point. Gives you the confidence in the process that this is working. Now, the bit which everybody finds hard is this final part here where we've got to essentially wait 4 to 6 weeks for the right opportunities to come along. for us to put the offers out and for those offers to be accepted and for the money to hit our bank account. And I'll be honest, most entrepreneurs, because we're excitable human beings, these amazing ideas, we just want to get on and do it right now. We don't have the patience to wait for those opportunities to come along. We don't have the patience to wait for the money to drop into our account. We're like— and so what we end up doing is kind of rushing the sales process. Okay, so if I go back to this, you notice there is a process here. Take people through from your content you're putting out to your conversations, to your consultation, and getting them into as a client. Okay? This process takes 4 to 6 weeks per client. It's just that what's happening is because you've now got a long-established business, like people are already partway through that funnel. It's just you're not measuring exactly where they are through that funnel, and you've got this constant flow of opportunities. But now we're just going to start to improve each of the stages. And actually, most people focus on the sales, getting the money in now. I don't know if you have a way, but you need to start measuring the number of consultations you're doing each month with prospects. You need to start finding a way to measure the engagement you're getting on your posts as you put them out and things like that. I'm gonna talk very briefly about engagement and audience building in a second. But yeah, it just takes a bit of time in order to kind of go through that process. And like I said, it will always be the last 2 out of the first 10 that say yes. So you kind of got to go through and get those nos in order to start getting the yeses and build your confidence. Okay, now I did also mention I was going to talk about audience building. Is that— has that all made sense? Have you got any questions?

Yeah, no, definitely. No, no, it's great.

So I was doing a little bit of research before we came on just now, and I was looking at kind of your online presence and how we can actually start to boost the— I guess your audience, because at the moment, like, we are in the midst of it, you know, the biggest sort of global crisis I think we've been in in our generation, potentially since You know, the Second World War. For some business owners, we were talking about like life has got a bit easier business-wise. For some people, it's got a bit harder. But one of the things I've been consistently telling people throughout this crisis is you need to double down on building your audiences. And I think there's a couple of things which you could be doing which you're not currently doing, which could start to kind of grow your Instagram following, potentially YouTube channel, get your Facebook fans like up. Very, very quickly— not very quickly, but so that you can start to build some assets. So one of the things which I've noticed— and Kerry, can I be honest with you?

Of course.

One of the things which I've noticed is that your content is kind of a lot— it's very personal. It's a lot of stuff that you're kind of interested in. It's a little bit too much about Kerry.

Right.

And it's a bit like, look at what I'm doing. It's like— it's like there's nothing wrong with it, but it's like it's very newsworthy. It's like, look at what I've done, not what I can— not at what I can do. And the thing which people will be most interested in with you is your ability to do magic. It's what you can do and what you could do at their potential event. So what I was looking at was a lot of like your competition. I know this guy's like, you know, he's obviously doubled down on— I don't know if you know Chris Ramsay.

Yep.

So he's doubled down on his YouTube channel. He's got like 3.96 million subscribers. And there's a few techniques which he's done, you know, in order to start to build that, build that audience up. And he's done the same for Facebook and things like that. But I found that Instagram is actually like one of the things right now which is giving us the, as a kind of like a coach, the biggest clues as to what an expert is doing or not doing in their business. So I looked at yours, for example, and And you've got some nice videos here, but I think actually you need to be using IGTV more so to actually say, here's a trick, watch this.

Yes.

Yeah, same for Facebook, same for YouTube. It's like, you know, get a camera set up over the shoulder or in front or wherever, you know, maybe 2 or 3 cameras and actually just like go through your repertoire of tricks. You could even show people some basic like techniques around things like coin magic, how to make— simple ways to make coins disappear, because people love the tricks, but they're also intrigued as to how they work. And so long as you're not obviously giving away tricks of the trade, pick some things which are really common, like the coin trick up the sleeve. Like, we all know that one. I wow my daughters with that one, right? But actually showing people how to kind of like master some really basic magic will generate a great fan base for you. And then they'll book you to come and do their sort of amazing event. So you could use Instagram, you could do one video which goes on to IGTV, goes onto your Facebook page and a group if you've got one, it goes onto YouTube, can go onto Twitter, it can go to loads of different places. The reason why I've picked on IGTV is because it is a growing media, and also I don't know if you knew, but there's a— I'm not gonna be able to find it now because there's so much stuff on Facebook, but let me just go back to my— So you see down here you've got these options in this left-hand menu for things like live videos, and actually if you go into the app there's a video little button in the app which you click and then you get a stream of like all of the people's pages you like who are doing videos. And I follow some magicians on there and they get like tens if not hundreds of thousands of views on their videos if you get into Facebook's video feed. Okay, so we want to get into the video feed. We want to get into the IGTV feed. And you've got, I mean, you've got, so you've got 200 plays. I think you could get thousands of plays if you play, if you do this correctly. And then obviously repurpose it into some YouTube stuff. Now obviously, like, another thing as well, which Chris is doing quite a lot of, is there's the magic trick side of it, but also puzzles. Like that whole thing about like magic tricks and puzzle solving, there's something quite like— there's a link between the two of them. So again, like, if there's other stuff— like, Chris obviously loves puzzles, but if there's other stuff magic-based which you can start to bring in as a theme into your content, I think it would be massively engaging for your fans too. And it's like, it takes time to do videos. Like, set yourself a realistic goal. Do one a week or one a month to start off with.

Yeah.

Set up a workflow or a process and start rolling them out. There's a yoga instructor there who— she also does something called a carousel. Post whereby she'll take her IGTV 10-minute video, chunk it down into 10 1-minute videos. Because most people use Instagram, they'll just like put one photo up there with a bit of text. But actually you can put 10 photos or videos up in a carousel post. So take a 10-minute video, slice it up, and then put little snippets in. Like especially if you're doing explainer videos on little magic tricks that you want to teach people to do from home. And again, I bet you'd get a ton of engagement if you did some— explored some different Things like that. But you need to be doing more video.

Yeah.

You know, flood your Facebook page with video, with reactions, with— and like get you in. I noticed your reaction ones, for example, you don't do the build-up with the trick, you just do the reaction. I actually think you need to have an element of like the trick and then you could do like, you know, because you'll have done the trick like so many times and probably have tons of different reaction videos, cut in like 5 different reactions to the same trick.

Yeah.

You know, so it just, it takes time. And so you may need to get somebody to kind of help you with sort of building out a workflow, help you with taking the videos. Like, and especially if you're getting paid £700, £1,500 a gig, pay a student to come down with like a Sony mirrorless DSLR and like take some video of you, like high-res video which you can start to use. And even if you're just collecting all of the footage, It's there then. You know, you can get it edited further down the line. It doesn't have to cost the earth. You've got the asset. And it's assets. I think you get the picture. It's assets which are the main thing. At the moment, you're— and I think this bit will probably hit home for you— at the moment, your marketing is what I call cranking the handle. It's like, I have to be posting on social media all the time, and it's very outbound. And if I stop posting, I tend not to get the the interaction and then I don't get the bookings. Whereas actually, if you build marketing assets, things that you invest in and build once really well, like a YouTube channel, like an IGTV channel, like the magic videos in the newsfeed on Facebook, you invest in the asset once and then it's just there, just working for you the whole time. I have YouTube videos and it's a bit of a— well, it's a not-so-humble brag, I have terrible YouTube. I'm so embarrassed by the first 40 YouTube videos I did because of what I was wearing and the state, how we staged the setup and stuff like that. But the key thing is the content was good. I still get comments from people and even clients from people who saw videos which I produced 4 years ago that I think are rubbish. So I'm sweating those assets like all the time. Like my books, for example. I went through the pain of like writing a couple of books once or twice, get them out there onto Amazon. And I kid you not, I send out 100 books, I get a client. It's like clockwork. So I'm not having to crank that handle all the time, you know, because I've got all these assets out there. And I think you need to get to that place. So obviously more than we can cover necessarily on one episode of Fix Your Business.

Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, the video thing, definitely. And I kind of— I think I've always known that. I used to predominantly do quite a lot of corporate stuff, and I can't take video at corporate events, but obviously weddings and things, you know, I can. And people are also taking videos and things and stuff. So I do have a lot of footage.

Can I challenge you on that? I can't take footage at—

At the corporates.

Yeah, why not?

I'm not allowed. It's in my contract. It's in it.

With every single corporate you go and work with?

Pretty much, because usually they're through agencies. So yeah.

It's the agency issue then rather than the corporate issue.

Yeah, but actually, do you know what? I've never That's made me think now because I've never— I've just assumed that that's come from the client, you see. So yeah, now I'm not sure.

Get the guests to film it. Just say, hey, hey, I'm gonna do some tricks. Yeah, yeah, get your phone out. Hey, why don't you hop onto livestream and just film this and then tag me in afterwards? Here's my card. Like, there's simple ways that you can kind of get around this stuff, but don't ever be fooled by the I can't word. That's fixed mindset. We've got to get you to a point whereby you're like, How can I? Because, like, life is too short. You've got to— when it comes to, like, marketing, you've got to aggressively grow your profile. It can't be done passively. So find ways around it. That's a nice message to kind of finish up with. Right, we've run over time, Kerry, so it's entirely up to you. You can say, no, I don't want to do this, but I did ask you at the start if we could have a trick. Here we go. Oh, pot noodle! Lunchtime!

I know!

Lovely.

And I just want to point out as well to anybody watching this, when I am at your wedding or corporate event or anything like this, my hair will be better than this.

Mine too.

I have lockdown hair, but I'm in at 9 AM on Saturday to have it done, so next week I'll be back to being blonde, hopefully. Anyway, so I just wanted to put that out there in case they're going, she's charging £700 and have you seen her two-tone hair? Alright, so I have got my pot noodle pots in, but inside I've got the pack of cards. Hopefully you can see that they're all mixed up.

Yep.

Excellent. Alright, so I'm just gonna split these roughly— let's go roughly about— let's go about halfway, shall we? Hang on, let me just give them a shuffle. All right, so I'll just give them a cut to about halfway, and I'm gonna pop them back in my pot. It's because I'm doing it sat down and I'm normally stood up. I'm not used to doing my tricks sat down. It's really weird how things can throw you out. I'm just gonna pop the lid on and I'm gonna give them a shake up. What's gonna happen now is all of the face-up cards are gonna mingle in with the face-down cards, and the face-down cards are gonna mingle in with the face-up cards. Hopefully We should have a little bit of a mess. So we've now got face up, face down, face up, face down cards. Hopefully you can see that in there. I'll just go right through just to show you that it goes right through to the end as well. Hopefully you can see that in there.

Yep.

Alright, so I'm going to pop these back in, pop the lid back on. Now I'm going to give them a shake up. Robin, I want you to choose whether you want a black card or a red card.

I'm gonna go for a black card.

You're gonna go for a black card?

Yep.

Would you like a spade or a club?

Spade, please.

And which spade would you like?

Number 4.

Number 4?

Yeah.

The 4 of spades.

4 of spades.

Hopefully now what's happening is all of the cards are now turning round and facing the same way, all except for one. And if I have a little look now inside, we should find that they are now all back facing the same way, all except for this one here.

No, don't tell me that's the 4 of Spades! No way! That's amazing! Oh, that's awesome! Thank you, Ceri! Oh, you've made my day! I'm going to be worried now, thinking about like all day long, how did Kerry do that? That's amazing. Oh, that's great. Oh, thanks so much for that, Kerry. Listen, I also want to say thank you for being a guest on Fix Your Business as well, because it can be quite a scary prospect for some people. And you said, please don't make me cry at the start. I didn't think we managed to avoid that. Listen, if you are watching this and you want to be a guest on Fix Your Business and have a bit of live coaching. One, you've got to be able to do a magic trick from now on. I'm not gonna let anybody else on unless they can do a magic trick. 2, just drop me a quick email, robin@fearless.biz, with a bit of a background about your business, and we'll see if you're a good fit for the, for the channel. And please do make sure that you, if you enjoyed this episode, we're gonna be trying to do one sort of weekly, so do hit the subscribe button and the little bell notification below this video so that you can see some future Fix Your Business episodes. Kerry, it's been an absolute pleasure. I hope you got some value out of that. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I did, and thank you. And if anybody is watching this and they're thinking, oh, I don't know whether I should go on— do it! Robin has been amazing. He's asked me loads of questions. He's really opened my eyes. And because now you have to learn a magic trick, then let me know. I can teach you some.

Ah, yes! There we go. Love it. Sales pitch.

Awesome.

I'm down with that. I agree with that.