My Story – Going Pro in Kids Entertainment Part 1

Steve Wickenton Going pro as a kids entertainer

Going Pro as a Kids Entertainer

Over the coming months I am going to share with you how I took my Children’s Magic Entertainment Business from a small part time affair to a full time career. Well, you get to experience it with me …

The exciting thing is that as I write this, I am still a Part Time Children’s Magician, but all going to plan, I will finish writing these posts as a full time Magician.

When I first made the decision to go pro, I was doing between 3-5 magic shows a month. I don’t know when, but at some point I realised that I could actually make some good money out of magic and so I set a goal to be a full time Magician by Dec 2015.

I had read and heard so many times before that goals can always be broken down into smaller goals, but I had never really understood what that meant. Sure I had tried it a few times for different things over the years, but somehow it all just seemed unrealistic and unachievable, so this time I approached it all a little differently, this time I planned my plan.

I started with my goal of being full time by Dec 2015 and calculated how many shows I needed to do a week in order to equal the income my family had become accustomed to.  I then set interim goals, but unlike in the past where I had broken my goals down into “where I wanted to be at certain times”, I worked out “where I needed to be at certain times” in order to reach my goal and its deadline.

Next steps

Next I planned how I would actually get these extra shows. With a very quick look across my current business, I realised that 95% of my work came via my website. Therefore if I wanted to increase my number of bookings, I needed to increase the number of potential clients visiting my website. So my first smaller goal was to start an AdWords Campaign and also continue good SEO practices to help improve my Google rankings. That seemed simple enough, but in order to do that I needed to learn how to run and maintain a successful AdWords Campaign and that became a goal in itself. I also decided to improve my show to a higher standard so that my clients truly felt they were getting value for money, and this created even more, smaller goals.

As I worked my way backwards from my main goal to each smaller goal, I realised that I was in fact breaking my goals down into achievable goals with easy deadlines to work towards. All these small steps have now been broken down even further into daily and weekly routines that include AdWords maintenance, client relationship building, monitoring SEO rankings, adding ideas and improving my show, planning and writing new shows, networking, and educating myself with new ideas and software that help  me reach my goals easier.

After just a few months of working at these broken down goals I have progressed so quickly, that my main goal of going full time is actually well within reach and I am now aiming to be full time by July 2015.

Of course planning this plan is really only one slice of what I have done to grow my business so fast and in my next post I am will be sharing with you a hard lesson I learnt on how saving money can sometimes be a very expensive exercise.