Update: How Revenue Grew By 30% In 2021
This is a follow up story for Ah Real Magic LLC. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Gary Ferrar and I am a (virtual!) magician and mentalist. It’s still a struggle to write that sentence. Should I remove the parentheses and commit 100%? In this ever-changing market, I’m still not sure. Let me tell you when you’ve spent 10 years as an in-person magician (was there even another kind!?) change is hard. Especially in December, the month in which I’m writing this, where success has always been measured by consecutive nights out in the boozy holiday bustle of New York City.
But it’s only an emotional resistance to change. From a system’s POV, I’m fully committed to high-end, high-quality virtual experiences for the past year and a half and the payoff has been tremendous. In this new world, I’ve accepted only as much in-person work as I needed to keep some material fresh. For December I have turned down almost every in-person request that came in for the holiday season, banking on the demand for virtual corporate entertainment. It was the right decision, allowing for maximum income and efficiency, and bringing in over $100k for the one-month holiday frenzy. And yet, out of uncertainty for the future, and nostalgia, I still can’t fully pull my last toe from the pool I swam in for the past 10 years. This is why I remain a (virtual) magician and not a virtual magician.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
I log into Zoom, every day, and guess what people are thinking all over the world. What they had for breakfast. What is their favorite movie is? We laugh, we talk about things other than work, and people love it. This is why income is up about 30% for 2021. For reference, 2020 was up about 30% from 2019. These are encouraging numbers.
So now I spend my time figuring out if virtual entertainment is a permanent option. It will certainly never go away completely, but is it sustainable as a single income stream in a post-global pandemic world? That’s what I try to gauge every day.
To be fair, there is almost no point. I’ve spent the past year working on ranking high for virtual with SEO, at the expense of 10 years of work optimizing for in-person. For years I was the number one result for searches like “NYC magician”. I’m now on page three.
Was it worth the sacrifice? At the moment, yes. Being one of THE go-to options for virtual entertainment has led to incredible vertical mobility. Early in 2020, I performed for a small team at PepsiCo. Six PepsiCo events later, I was performing for the CEO and was hired to host several of their internal awards ceremonies. This pattern has repeated itself with many clients, and they all now have enough trust in me that I’m confident I can pivot to a non-virtual relationship with them, if necessary. You can see this month has brought more returning visitors, indicating a little more stability than the chaos of 2020.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
For most of 2020, I underquoted my service. It was a critical error and I lost thousands of potential dollars. Why did it happen? I made the mistake of only looking at it from my perspective. How could I justify charging the same as an in-person appearance if I didn’t need to pay for gas, tolls, or invest significant travel time? But the fact that it was easier for me to do a virtual event should have had no bearing on what I was quoting.
I didn’t realize how much demand there was, and how few options there were for quality virtual entertainment. I did a whopping 1,040 virtual performances in 2020, thanks to incredible word of mouth and SEO efforts. For 2021, I’m on track to do a much more manageable 530 virtual shows, and yet even working 50% less, revenue has grown 30% thanks to my price corrections.
Always go where the growth is, even if it’s not where you expected.
Another major factor that allowed me to increase my rates after 2020 was the realization that for in-person events, a company is balancing its budget between catering/venue/entertainment/etc. At a virtual event, I am the party. The experience I am providing is the entire event and it should be priced as such.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
The plan for the next few years is that there is no plan. There really can’t be, when working in a market so impacted by the pandemic. I had hoped by now I would be able to test out this new business model in a post-pandemic world. But alas, we’re all still here, living on Zoom as omicron spreads around the world.
I’m encouraged by the fact that many of my clients for this holiday season are global teams that would likely be meeting online, regardless of COVID. And thanks to two years' worth of significant growth, business would have to slow quite a bit before I would need to pivot to a majority of in-person events.
If it’s not already apparent, I now have a very love/hate relationship with in-person magic. It’s an inefficient, logistical nightmare overflowing with excitement and nostalgia. Eventually, I’ll be settling into a happy balance of both styles within the next 5 years.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Growing a business is hard. What is often harder is moving away from that. It was clear in March of 2020 that my very successful in-person business model was not going to work for the foreseeable future. Many magicians that I know were too afraid of disrupting their SEO and missed out on virtual options. If the virtual market starts to wither, I may regret that decision. But I don’t think I will. Even if I need to do a horizontal shift back to the in-person market, I’ll be entering with better contacts and higher profile clients than if I had stayed there all along. Always go where the growth is, even if it’s not where you expected.
Where can we go to learn more?
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
