The Powerful Business Plan For Hypnotherapists.
Here's a video to complement the content in this blog post. It covers the five main elements: Time, Money, Niche, Content and Outreach.
Have you got a business plan? If not, why not? It doesn't have to be complicated. Some business plans can be hundreds of pages long. But you can write one on the back of an envelope. Today, I want to talk about five important yet simple points a hypnotherapist needs to have in their business. And I guarantee you at least two of these, you'd haven't thought about before.
Key Takeaways
Consider how much time you really have to work on your business.
Think about how much money you want your hypnotherapy business to generate.
You absolutely MUST pick a niche to work in.
Create entertaining, informative and compelling content.
I know it sounds scary but you should start reaching out to potential clients.
Time
If you don't have a full time job, if you live by yourself, you have all the time in the world to work on your hypnotherapy business. But if you're working full time, if you're working part time, if you have kids, if you have a significant other, if you have a dog, got a house, all of those different elements take time to deal with to live with to have fun with so you really need to sit down and be totally and completely and brutally honest with yourself. How much time do you have each week to work on your hypnotherapy business?
Now, I had a client a few weeks back and she was telling me well, I've got 35 to 40 hours a week Paul. And I thought actually that doesn't really sound right. I know you've got a part time job. And I know you've got a family, a couple of kids and you've got a dog. So I let her carry on for a little while. But look, you need to stop right now. And be honest with yourself, it doesn't matter what you say to me. But it matters what you tell yourself.
You're saying you've got about 35 hours a week to work on your hypnotherapy business now take into account all of the factors we've just been talking about how many hours do you really have to work on your business, she took a moment made a couple of notes into that check got about 15 to 20 hours, and that's fine.
Now she knows exactly how many hours she can dedicate to her hypnotherapy business, then here's the important part. Once you've figured that out, those hours now need to become sacrosanct, they become sacred, they need to be used for one thing and one thing only that is working on your hypnotherapy business and nothing else. Now if you really want to push things forward, you're going to have to make some sacrifices, some things may have to be put to one side. So you can start to grow your business.
For example, you might want to say to yourself, well, but I got 10 hours during the week. But at weekends, I could get up a bit early and go from seven till 12 o'clock on a Sunday morning, which is an extra five hours to work on my business, my significant other the dog and the kids in the house are all going to have to wait so that I can focus during this particular period of time on my business. Get this sorted because everything else will not fall into place if you keep kidding yourself and said you've got more time than you really have to work with your hypnotherapy business.
Money
The second point I want to talk about today is money, not how much money you've got, how much money do you want to make how much money you want to make as a hypnotherapist Have you actually sat down and taken the time to work this out.
Because here's a little thought experiment for you. Let's say for argument's sake, and for the simplicity sake, that you want to make an extra 10,000 pounds a year, just 10 grand now to make 10 grand a year, you are going to have to sell 1000 items, if you're selling them for 10 pounds. So say you're selling CDs or T shirts or whatever it is, you're going to need to sell 1000 of them for 10 pounds.
Now let's say that you are looking at what to charge for your sessions. If you're still selling sessions.
Don't do that. By the way. If you sell a session at 100 pounds per session, you aren't going to need 100 sessions are sold to make your 10,000 pounds a year. Let me say that again. If you're selling your sessions at 100 pounds a go, you're gonna need 100 of those every single year to make your 10k. Now think about this for a second. If you've only got 10 hours a week to work on your business, how many hours does that give you to do all the other stuff you need to do and sit with a client in a particular session.
Now if you're selling your services for 1000 pounds, you only need 10 sales in a year to achieve your 10,000 pounds. Now if you're in the coaching or high end therapy business, you only need one sale 10,000 pounds to achieve your goal.
A lot of people, a lot of gurus, a lot of internet marketers will say to you, it's just as easy to sell something for 10 pounds as it is for 10,000 pounds, complete and utter garbage. For 10 quid, most people aren't going to think about it, though, you know, they'll spend more than that when it goes to the pub for lunch on a Friday afternoon, or if they go out with a family on the weekend.
But 10,000 pounds is can significantly more as a big chunk of change for anyone. And that's going to take more thought more time to think about to consider whether they actually want that thing, whether they need that service. So don't let anybody tell you that selling something for 10 pounds is the same as selling something for 10,000 pounds. It's a complete and utter piece of fake news, fake information.
So decide how much money you want to make, and then break that down into what you sell your services for. And that will give you a good idea how many clients you need to attract every single month.
Niche
The next thing the third thing I want to talk about is your niche. Now I know you said Paul, I don't have a niche, I help everybody.
But I hate to say this, that's not true. Because if you try and help everybody, guess what, you're probably gonna help nobody. How can you become a specialist in specific area?
If you don't have a niche? How can you be known as the expert on a particular subject? If you don't have a niche? How can you use content to talk about how you help people, if you don't have a niche, you must have a niche.
Take your time over this, don't just say well, I'm gonna go for this niche or that niche or the other? You need to do some research to figure out which niche is gonna fit you which one is oversaturated?
Which one are you interested in? Which kind of person do you want to work with? These are all things you need to consider when you start to pick your niche. So take the time to think about the niche you want to seen as the expert in.
Content
Now leading on from that I want to talk about content, you must produce good, useful, valuable content that entertains people. Shock horror, people do not go onto Facebook and to TikTok and to LinkedIn and other platforms to be educated.
They want to be entertained. And so your job as a therapist, is to add a little bit of flair, add a little bit of what they used to call edutainment, provide education provide the value by entertaining people through the medium of entertainment. How do I do that? By posting stuff that's interesting, that's valuable and is not boring.
This is why you need the niche.
Because when you have a niche, when you become an expert in that niche, you know what to talk about, you know what's going on in that particular niche, you know, what people are interested in, you know, what pain points people have, you know what switches people on and turns people off.
This is why you need the niche, because then that the content flows from the niche, but you have to be entertaining, you have to really put some time and effort into creating good quality content. Now a little warning here, if you are using a AI to create your content, stop it, I mean that, if you're just putting in simple prompts, like write me five posts about anxiety, it will do that for you.
But that's not in your voice, that's not in your style, it's gonna have the same kind of material, that every other person that's using AI to produce content in the anxiety niche is going to be putting it out there. And I'm seeing this already: therapists using AI, and it's starting to sound and look the same as everybody else's.
Now AI is brilliant is great for coming up with ideas. It's great for actually writing content, if you give it detailed, informative, useful prompts for its workflow. That's a complete whole other subject, but you must produce content - it's really critical. Because how else can people get to know you? How else can people get to find you? How else can people get to like you, know you and trust you?
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Outreach
The last thing in my plan is outreach, you must start reaching out to people to figure out if you can help them and if they want your help.
Okay, Paul, how do I do that? Well, we talked about content, if you are writing engaging, value driven, entertaining content. People will start interacting with your content, they'll start commenting, they'll start liking them even start showing your stuff. This is then a great way to introduce yourself to people on a one to one basis.
You can kind of get involved in the comments, you can start talking to them via DMS. You can do a whole range of different things in must stop reaching out to people, you know, build it and they will come doesn't work anymore. It's never worked.
You have to have this bank of content, which you're adding to on a regular basis. This makes people find you, it helps them to see who you are. And from there, you can reach out to people, you can go to various place on the internet and draw people from wherever they are into your world. And the more you do this, the more people start to find you, the more you start to interact with people and guess what, the more potential clients you'll start to reach.
Three behaviours you need to adopt
Now at the start of this video, I mentioned a couple of things that I wanted to share with you. The first three, consistency, frequency and persistency. I didn't come up with this, but it's really, really important, you must be consistent. If you've got 10 hours a week to work on your business every single week, you must use those 10 hours on your business. If you're posting three times a day, you must post three times a day consistently.
If you're only posting once a week, forget it, you're gonna get missed you're not gonna get seen. You've taken your phone, and you've scrolled through. How many posts you actually pay attention to when you scroll through?
Now, just imagine for a second, you've only posted once in a week, what chance has anyone got to have seen your posts if you want to post once a week? So you have to post consistently: three times a day minimum, day after day, after day, after day. You must post frequently, like I just mentioned, if you're posting once a week, or once a fortnight, or once a month, you have no chance, you've got to be posting frequently on a level that you can manage.
Using your 10 hours a week, you can create content in bulk and have it ready to go if you stick it all on your phone. And when you've got a minute you can click send and away it goes. Persistency: do not give up! Do not give up! If you are serious about making your therapy, business work and grow and provide you with an income. You have to be persistent. But also, I don't know why I have to say this, but I do it means you have to do the work.
There is no point playing at this. If you've got 10 hours to work on your business and you spend 10 hours watching videos: that is not working. I'm sorry, that's learning and learning or working in two completely separate things. Ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing now gonna make me money?
If you're watching a video, now if it's directly related to doing something like improving your content, or how to do outreach better, then yeah, okay, I can accept that. But if you're just watching videos to learn how to get better at a certain thing, you've not had any clients yet? Are you doing the right thing? Is that gonna make you money? The answer is probably no.
And the next thing I want to talk about the final thing we talked about consistency, frequency and consistency. You have to be honest with what you have to commit. I can't do it for you. The biggest guru names in the world can't do it for you.
We can help, we can guide, we can assist but we can't do the work for you. Look in a mirror. That's the person who's gonna do the work for you. Nobody else to get serious. Get down, get up, get doing it and have some fun. If you've got any questions about what we've covered in this video or any of my other videos, or you've got a general hypnotherapy business question, please drop a comment below or DM me.
