By definition a professional magician is someone makes their living performing magic. However, there’s more to it than that, a magician must also act professional, and be perceived as professional.
If you have tooth-ache you want to see a professional dentist; someone who has training, experience, the right tools for the job, and a clean and hygienic room to operate in. You wouldn’t trust a dentist that doesn’t fulfil all these criteria.
Say you drive a nice car and the clutch goes on it, you could spend a weekend with a friend who has some tools attempting to jack up the car on your driveway; but it’s more likely you’ll take it to a qualified mechanic who can lift it up, take off the gearbox, replace the clutch, re-fit the gearbox and give the car a service whilst there, all within a couple of hours.
The lesson: people are willing to pay for a professional service.
From the first instant the potential client comes into contact with you, either via an advert, website, or seeing you at an event directly you must have an air of professionalism about you that gives people the confidence to book you; and more importantly, the confidence to give you financial remuneration for it.
The professionalism comes across as the tricks you perform, the props you use, the patter you have, the website that is clean and easy to navigate, the pictures, videos and testimonial you have, the clothes you wear, the business cards you give to people, the emails you send and the way you answer your phone.
This course aims to cover all of this, and more.
But being a full-time professional magician gives you tremendous freedom too. You are your own boss, and you control your destiny.
I often joke that the working week of a professional magician is Saturday and Sunday, with Monday to Friday being my weekend. It’s not strictly true, bookings do crop up during the week, often during school holidays for children’s entertainers, and corporate events can occur on any day of the week
However, Monday to Friday is not spent commuting to work in rush hour, or 8 hours in an office. A professional magician with a mobile phone and laptop can operate wherever he likes. I have successfully operated the “business end” of my business whilst on a cruise-ship for ten days, only using the 3G on my mobile for brief internet access when in port.
It does take hard work to set some of these systems up and create a professional act, but once done you are only limited to the times and places you book into your diary.
If you want to book a holiday you can. If you want to spend an afternoon at the golf course you can. If your diary is looking a little too empty one month and you now want to spend the day in the office sending out emails and reaching out to your clients – you can!
You have direct control of your income too. Once you get established and your marketing is bringing in a constant flow of enquiries you can book as many, or as few as you wish.
You can set your price. You may want to be doing more bookings (but at a slightly lower price) to get a grip on the market, which will generate more repeat bookings and referrals in the future; or you may wish to increase your price but do less work for the same income.
Essentially being a professional magician is a lifestyle career. Granted, you have to turn up and provide the shows to get paid; but you decide which ones you take, how much you charge, where they are and when you do them.
Does this sound better than spending 40 hours a week in an office, directly trading your time for money, and ultimately using your skills, talents and resources (time is a resource, and you only have so much of it) to make money for someone else?
If you are going to make some changes to your life, or embark on a big project – and becoming a professional magician is a big one – then you are going to be going outside your comfort zone. It won’t be easy.
No matter what you wish to achieve in life, if you have a good idea (which preferably has been researched to back it up), you have enthusiasm to see it through, a good financial potential and your intuition tells to to do it, then do it! Whether it’s in your comfort zone or not should have nothing to do with it.
So now you know the advantages to being a professional magician, and why you need to act like a professional magician.
Let’s start looking at how you can make this a reality. What styles of magic are there, and how do they fit into the marketplace, and how you can use this knowledge to start generating an income.