I Pivoted My Magic Business From Virtual to In-Person and Still Make $20K/Month
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.
Hello (again!). My name is Gary Ferrar. Those of you who have been here for a while may remember me as the $25K/Month virtual magician and mentalist. I’m a solo entrepreneur figuring out how to entertain high-profile clients and corporations in this ever changing world.
Though I’m now primarily back to 3D IRL experiences, I’m still regularly performing on Zoom, and using lessons from the pandemic to tweak my business model.
Trimming the business, deciding what it is, and more importantly what it isn’t, is still forward progress. Even if you emerge a little leaner.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business changed?
Well, since we last touched base, my business has gone from $25K a month to….. $20K a month (womp womp). What went wrong? Nothing! Other than that the pandemic ended.
As I said in my first interview: “Virtual magic has taken away some major growth hurdles. Since I am the product, I would always have to personally show up at your event to make money in a pre-COVID world. This put a limit on scalability, which is why I charged a premium. Now, I can perform every hour, on the hour, in any country in the world.”
While this is all still the case for virtual events, my virtual events for 2023 dropped 86% from what they were in 2021. Since I now need to travel from gig to gig for in-person events, making up the difference is not as efficient.
Virtual still accounted for 19% of my income for 2023 (as opposed to 87% in 2021), and though it’s slimmed down, I’m still super thankful for that secondary revenue stream. I even started doing some targeted Google ads (exclusively for virtual). In my first post, I was very proud of the fact that I never needed to pay for advertising. But with the incredibly small overhead that virtual performances have, I feel it’s worth exploring paid advertising. I only started these ads last month, so it’s too early to gauge their impact.
Even if they do start to convert, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that in-person shows are back. And given that my schedule is pretty maxed out (I worked 44 events in December), my only option for growth is to charge more per gig.
To accomplish this, I’ve done my best to infuse my in-person experience with some of the things that helped make my virtual show so successful. People were always blown away by the production value of my virtual show. So I added some tweaks regarding lighting, backdrops, and projection screens to my in-person show rider, and the difference has been significant! Many of my pre-pandemic performances looked like this:
The lighting is average, the backdrop nondescript, and it could be a photo of anyone. Thanks to changes in my rider and more active discussions with clients, many more of my post-pandemic performances have looked more like this:
Even more intimate events can look like this:
While this has a noticeable positive impact on how each audience feels about both the show and me, the larger benefit of these more theatrical events is that they are more likely to perpetuate themselves. How?
- Larger events often have a bigger tech/planning team, which leads to more industry contacts being made from each event (I’ve unfortunately become one of those people who connects with everyone after the gig on LinkedIn).
- These kinds of events produce beautiful images that look great in promo materials like my stage show reel. I have learned that you will always get booked for the types of events that you present as your specialty.
This may sound obvious, yet I have a magician friend who often complains to me that he only gets booked for kids' shows, while his website only shows him working kids' shows.
It’s been great to charge more, to travel more, to have nicer green rooms, and to read minds in front of larger audiences. And while my bottom line may not have increased, I still feel like my business is “growing”.
Like the quote that is often attributed to many famous artists, to sculpt an elephant, you get “a large piece of stone and take away everything that is not the elephant.” Trimming the business, deciding what it is, and more importantly what it isn’t, is still forward progress. Even if you emerge a little leaner.
Knowing that I was able to make the vast majority of my previous income while having suffered from SERP drops and shifting back to less efficient performance styles, was very comforting. I feel like if I can survive that, I can weather most obstacles.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
SEO!!! In my first post, I explained how quickly I pivoted SEO to highlight my virtual services. This meant burning some of my main SEO work to the ground. Were there ways around that? Maybe. But would I do it again? Yes!
Virtual shows have brought in over a million dollars, which is a huge deal for a one-man company. However, I was barely hanging onto the reins as that rocket went to the moon. I had to create and redesign content and pages quickly, and then reshift back to a more hybrid model. Overall, I did a pretty good job of it. Except for: THE SPACE.
As I edit my site, I always double check that I didn’t break anything. But somewhere along the way, I had an invisible space of text that hyperlinked to a non-existent demo page. I wasn’t using any reports like AHREFS at the time, so I had no idea. And worst of all, IT WAS ON MY DAMN FOOTER. Which meant that every single page on my website had a broken internal link. I have no idea when this happened, but when my organic SERP traffic started declining, I assumed it was just because virtual events were cooling.
I didn’t start working on improving SEO until Sept 1st of 2023. Within two days, my website health went from 46 to 100. Below is my isolated organic search traffic for 2023.
While my SERP rankings are nowhere near where they were pre-pandemic, I can see that it’s working, and will hopefully continue trending upward as I tweak things and pay better attention to SEO.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
My first lesson learned last year was to be more diligent with SEO. You might be wondering why I wasn’t, considering it’s always been an essential part of my success.
Mainly, I had put so much work into SEO early on that my best strategy to stay on the top was to never change anything. And that worked shockingly well for over 7 years! I never changed anything. But in the whirlwind of shifting to a virtual model and then to a hybrid model, I broke my own rule, and I changed a lot.
Which would have been fine, except I was out of the habit of doing SEO due diligence. Now I get weekly and monthly website health reports in my inbox. Even if I never change anything and get the same weekly results for years in a row, I will NEVER be unsubscribing from those reports again.
My second lesson was a bit of a confidence boost. Knowing that I was able to make the vast majority of my previous income (while having suffered from SERP drops and shifting back to less efficient performance styles) was very comforting. I would have assumed those two things would have had disastrous results for my bottom line. I feel like if I can survive that, I can weather most obstacles.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
I used to always be addicted to beating last year's numbers. The end of the pandemic made that an impossible goal, which freed me from a specific revenue target. This ended up being a great thing. Since each gig sold pulls me away from quality time with my family, my more important goal is to do the gigs that excite me. This past year, I could have accepted lower paying gigs and easily have made 50k more. But I would have been significantly less happy and more stressed, so I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Instead of focusing on numbers, I’m planning a more lofty goal: to start back up a public ticketed show. I had a successful one, “Nothing Here is Real”, pre-pandemic, but the venue closed due to Covid. The idea of rebuilding that momentum has felt daunting ever since. But enough time has passed that I now feel ready to start that process over.
This leads nicely into my 5 year goal, which would be to merge a more theatrical show with my current “gig repertoire” and create something that’s artistically fulfilling, a commercial success, and tourable. It wouldn’t get much better than that.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
The best book I read was The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. As someone who attends countless events, I thought I knew what this book would cover. But this book zooms out further than I expected, with perspectives such as “why are we gathering in the first place” and “who are you deciding NOT to invite”.
Even if you don’t work in the entertainment industry, the activity of gathering with people is relevant to any entrepreneur. And given how insanely expensive it is to throw an event, this book is worth a read to make sure you don’t squander that investment.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
In case you missed it above, watch out for costly website errors! I can’t stress this enough. Details matter, and not just for SEO. I constantly come across websites (often with big budgets) that are broken/glitchy. I’ve often bailed on purchases due to difficult friction points in a check-out process. Test, re-test, and test some more.
Second, never ease up. For many years, I dominated the Google reviews for my market. I had over 150 reviews and my next closest competitor had 40. I ended up focusing on other efforts for a while, and now some newcomers have surpassed me. If I had kept the pressure on, I would have stayed untouchable. I’m working on getting back on top, but it would have been much easier to just stay there.
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.
