My Story – Going Pro in Kids Entertainment Part 2

Going Pro as a Kids Entertainer part 2 with Steve Wickenton

Going Broke Trying To Save Money? A Cautionary Tale For New Kids Entertainers

In my last post I shared with you how I planned the plan for reaching my goal of becoming a full time Magician. Most of those plans were very much based around my website. I understood it was so important. I want to share with you as well something I didn’t understand …

My website is my booking machine, I have literally spent hundreds and hundreds of hours tweaking and reshaping it to optimise it for the best possible results. It is an ongoing affair, my secret passion; I wake up in the middle of the night with brain storms of what to do next. I am proud of what I have created and how well it is working for my business.

So the day that it disappeared from the internet was a gut wrenching blow, not only to my business but personally too. It was like a part of my life had been removed and there was a void of emptiness.

To explain what happened I need to back story about 24 months when I was first putting my website together. Back then it was a fun little hobby that I was playing with. It was a case of it might make me some money and if it doesn’t, at least it’s fun and creative.

Because it was a hobby and not a business, I took a cheap hosting option from a fairly well known hosting company. At the time any money I saved could be used to purchase new tricks and routines, and every dollar in my pocket counted

Now that hobby has grown into nice little business that is expanding rapidly. I now have insurance, expensive sound equipment and props, a growing income and a lot of invested time and money. It is a high quality service provider of children’s entertainment, and I have worked hard to make sure everything looks and feels professional for my clients.

But the one thing I never changed or upgraded was my website hosting service.

To be honest, I had never even thought about it. It was cheap and in the scheme of things it was a small outgoing that barely made a scratch on my budget. That is until the day that the hosting company made a human error and removed my DNS address.

Going Pro Kids Entertainer Hub Steve Wickenton Website

To make matters worse it then took 3 days to fix and get me back online. Three days with no website and no way new clients could even find my existence.

It is fair to estimate that in those 3 days II lost over $1000, which easily makes it the most expensive web hosting plan I have ever seen.

As a result of this harsh learning curve, I am now in the process of creating another website with a more professional hosting service that costs more than my last one did, but far less than it ended up costing me.

It has opened my eyes to looking at other areas of my business that may one day fail and cost me money. As Kids Entertainers and Magicians, we frown at cheap props, but perhaps we should also consider other areas of our business where we try to save money by going cheap and evaluate its true potential risk.

In my next post I will be discussing some things you can do to help push on and stay positive when you’re tired, things are going wrong and you hit the wall.