How Can a Hypnotherapist Have a Successful Business?

Question
How can a hypnotherapist have a successful business?

Answer
I have heard that there is an incredibly high attrition rate with people in our profession. Personally, I feel that one can be the greatest hypnotist in the world, and the greatest therapist, but, for most, if you don't tend to the job of managing your business and marketing it, you will eventually dry up. From the very beginning of my business, before my first client, I operated out of the image that my office was open from 9 to 6 daily (I had decided to become fulltime right away), and that ANY time I wasn't with a client, I would be MARKETING! I wasn't a "born" marketer--I decided it was necessary to become one, through testing and trying and evaluating. I see hypnotherapists come and go, and most of them go because of business reasons. I believe that the high attrition rate among therapists is due to these, primarily, usually in combination, more than to their therapy skills: 1) They thought it would be easy, and didn't bother to WORK at it. (You have to be a self-starter in any self-owned business). Some even thought it would be an easy way to make money due to the hourly "value," forgetting that the $$ they receive has to spread over the entire day of their work, which includes the times they don't have clients at all. 2) They thought their clients would just come to them from the yellow page one-liner advertisement, or that the clients they got would just love to tell everyone else about them without further effort. (How many of you have experienced that a good many of your clients don't want to tell others they used hypnosis for some issue--unless its to stop smoking!?) 3) They thought they wouldn't need to spend money to get money. In other words, they forgot, or didn't realize, that most every other entrepreneur in the world has to borrow money or have it already in the bank in order to draw upon it to build their practice and tide them over until their clientele becomes adequate for self-support. 4) They got discouraged because of their own lack of confidence in what they had learned, and allowed what they may have perceived as failure with a client or two, to influence them into believing they couldn't be good therapists. The way you become good at your job is to just do it over and over again until you become the "expert" you hope to be. 5) And, perhaps this is the most important of all, they couldn't "hang in there" long enough to see it all through. Most every business I know of takes anywhere from 3-5 years to get "in the black." I think this also holds true with therapists, on the whole, although a few may be lucky enough to hit the right time, place, potential, etc. Personally, I wish more hypnotherapy schools would take business practices and marketing as seriously as they do the methods of hypnosis, so that students got more than a brief overview before launching out on their own.