- Yo, what is up.
- Chris Ramsay here. Welcome back.
Today, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to look at
five tips and tricks that you can do as a magician
to book more gigs.
I know a lot of you out there right now
are getting ready to book your first gig
or are having trouble finding work.
I hope this video serves you well.
These are tips that I've used in the past to get gigs
at restaurants, with planning companies like event planners
and businesses and corporate events and that type of thing,
so may these tricks serve you well.
Let's get right into it. Number one (bell dings once).
So the first trick I have, and this is something
I've been using for a long time is
find a restaurant that you really want to work at.
Make sure it's a fancy restaurant.
You don't want to go doing this at McDonalds
or something like that.
Find a restaurant, find literally thee restaurant
you want to go to.
Now make sure it's a restaurant that is suitable
for a magician.
The environment lends itself to possibly having a magician.
Now, ideally, you go there.
If you're old enough, if you're of age, you sit at the bar.
If you're not of age, you can sit in a booth
at the restaurant, order something small,
play with your cards.
Start playing with your cards.
Shooting them up in the air.
This is actually Guy Hollingworth I think used to do this.
Throw the cards up in the air and intentionally
have them fall on a neighboring table.
He would go over there and explain to them,
I'm sorry, I'm a magician and I'm practicing,
and he would start to break out some moves
and end up just really blowing their minds away,
and then the owner would see it and he would get a gig.
If that's something that you're not inclined to do,
just try to impress the waitress, try to impress the waiter.
But before you do, before you do any of this at all,
find out the owner's or the manager's names.
So the manager on staff, the one whose working right now.
Find out his name and find out all the information
you can about him.
Find out perhaps birthday or these type of things.
You can find them on Facebook once you have their names,
so be a little sneaky like that.
Get some insider information that you should not have prior.
Now once this is done, what you want to do
is you want to reveal this information in a really cool way.
So, first, you have to get his attention.
Start performing for the waiters.
Start performing for the people around you,
at the bar perhaps.
The owner or the manager comes in,
say can I try something with you.
You do this trick, and you reveal the information
in any way you see fit.
So if it's his name, spread some ashes on your arm
and then, I obviously can't do it because these tattoos,
he wouldn't even see his own name, but you get the point.
Have it with a flash paper (mimics fire starting)
burnt into a piece of paper or something like that.
Find a clever way to reveal that person's information.
Maybe do a mind reading trick
where you reveal his birth date or his star sign.
Just really quick you look at him,
you're a Sagittarius, aren't you?
Yeah, you look like you might have been born in June.
He's like oh my God, how'd you know?
- Oh my God.
- And then say, I might get this wrong,
but I'm thinking the 21st or the 22nd of June.
Was it 22nd?
And then he goes yeah, how'd you do that?
And you say well this is what I do.
I'm a magician.
That's a really cool way of getting their attention
and impressing the people you need to impress.
So finding out secretive information about the place
that you're going to want to work in.
Tip number two (bell dings once).
This is a really good one.
What you want to do is you want to send a small box
to the business or the company that you would like
to be hired at for entertainment, right?
The box should look something like this.
Hold on. Sorry.
Something like this.
Now, you can get these actually probably even smaller,
but if you can find this size, you find these at Staples
for about $12, and they come with a little key.
So you got that little key, which you can lock.
Obviously mine is not locked.
What's kind of cool is that you can actually fit your cards
in here, your decks fit.
It's actually a nice little storage tool,
if you want to fit your decks in there.
I got my Red Pill gimmicks all set up.
I'll leave a link below where you can check this out,
so just for a storage box it's kind of cool,
but actually for a prediction it's even better.
So this might cost you, this might be a little bit costly,
but it should be worth it.
So you don't do this every second business
around the corner; you do this like this company here
has an amazing like business set up and they always hire
entertainment, and they're the ones I want to impress.
What you want to do is you want to get an invisible deck,
and what an invisible deck is, if you guys do not know,
it's basically they name any card,
any freely-named card whatsoever.
You spread through the deck. No funny moves.
One card is turned over, and it is their card.
That's a very very strong thing.
A lot of magicians use that starting out.
So when you were like 12 or 13, this would be the trick
that you were doing, and you would impress
the hell out of people, for good reason,
because this is an impressive trick.
So you want to do is, you want to get
one of these invisible decks,
and you want to place it inside this box.
You want to wrap this box up neatly
and attach a little card to it,
saying in this box is a deck of playing cards.
In this deck of playing cards is one card reversed.
The card that is reversed is the exact card
that you are thinking of.
If you would like to see the contents of this box,
please call me to set up a meeting.
You sign your name, you leave your phone number,
and you send it to the CEO of the company,
because usually these guys don't answer their phones, right?
And them bam, you get a phone call.
Now all you have to do is show up, open the box,
do the invisible deck thing, and impress them,
and you might have just booked the biggest gig of your life.
So using small tricks like this in sort of a sneaky way
to get a gig is very very valuable,
and something that anybody can do
as long as you want to take that risk
and you want to take that investment to get that gig.
Now if you do that, you're stepping three steps
ahead of the competition, right?
So remember that.
You might not get the gig,
but you're literally trying harder
than anybody else out there,
and you will be more impressive.
Number three (bell dings).
Number three is a sneaky one indeed.
Number three involves YouTube, so this thing.
YouTube has a very interesting feature
where you can unlist videos or make them private,
and by doing so, it's a timestamp, right?
So if I unlist a video from today,
and I make it public a year from now,
the upload date will be today.
So the idea here is to make a prediction,
an impossible prediction.
Again, finding out the owner's name
or the business owner's name or anything like that
is something very important in this instance
because what you can do is say
go up to the restaurant, go up to the owner and say
I want you to name any card at all.
Any card whatsoever, a freely-named card.
Now this doesn't have to be a card.
You can do the same thing with words
or different types of information.
I'm just using cards as an example.
So say they name three of hearts.
You say that's incredible that you named three of hearts.
And they say why.
You pull up your phone, you go to your dashboard
on your own YouTube, you make the three of hearts video
public, and then you send him a link.
You say can I have your phone number?
I'm going to send you a link right now,
which you're not going to believe me.
Boom, you send him that link.
Then they watch the video, and you ask them
to look at the date that you uploaded it.
The video says, oh hi Mark. - Oh hi Mark.
- Thank you for allowing me to possibly perform
at your restaurant. I would love to do that.
In fact, today is a month in the past, and I have predicted
something that you would say to me in this meeting.
If I get it right, I'm pretty sure
that you're going to hire me.
Your card was the three of hearts.
Boom, are you kidding me, oh my God.
That's like get out of my head.
That's a really, really cool thing to do.
It will take some time
because you have to upload like 52 separate videos,
but you can make them all unlisted or private
and just boom, publicize the first one,
the one that you need.
Guaranteed that will impress them.
Plus, you're like tech-savvy at that point.
You're like, oh yeah, I got a YouTube Channel, check it out.
Or you have his phone number now,
which is pretty cool as well, or his email or whatever.
So that's a very very clever thing to do,
and again, all these tips are like a step beyond
what the competition would do, so you're literally placing
yourself in a whole new category where no other entertainer
or /magician would be willing to go,
so it should give you an edge.
Number four (bell dings) is something I've used in the past.
This is really interesting.
You guys might get a kick out of it.
So, basically, I would go to the owner of the restaurant
and say to them I'm a magician, do some card tricks.
He's like, oh that's fantastic.
We might want a magician or whatever.
I say, you know what?
Let me go and perform right now.
I don't have anything on me, but let me go perform
right now for a couple tables, and see what type
of reaction they get, and if it's positive,
then we'll move on and possibly book me,
and then you'll see right here.
So you don't have to pay for this.
This will be completely free of charge,
and I'm happy to do it.
Of course they're going to say yes.
They're going to say oh hell yeah.
You go and you do a couple tricks at the table.
You say, hi, my name is Chris, I'm a magician.
I was hired tonight to entertain you,
please pick a card, whatever you want to say.
Now, before you get into the trick,
you tell them secretly without the manager
or the owner present, you say I just bet with the owner,
and I need your help.
So basically I bet him that if you guys
were really impressed, he would hire me
as a resident magician.
It would really mean a lot to me
if after I did this trick you guys exaggerated
and like oh my God, what was that, or even just go tell him
how amazing the magic was.
I know this sounds really bad,
but I'd really appreciate it,
and it would really help me work here.
But only if you're really impressed though.
If this is not impressive, you can stay seated.
Is that cool? Does that sound cool?
They're going to be like, yeah yeah, we'd love to.
They're in on it, they're like oh yeah cool.
So you do the trick. You get a crazy reaction.
They go to talk to the owner afterwards,
and they're like, that magician was amazing.
Seal the deal, you leave your card,
smoke bomb, and just disappear.
Peace. Next.
Number five (bell dings once).
This is one of my favorite things.
Do I have one here?
So number five involves making your own business cards.
I get a lot of these questions from magicians
about business cards and stuff.
First of all, I do not want to see your face
on a business card.
This is just my personal opinion,
but I think putting your face on a business card
is a bad idea, because if you remind them
of someone they hate, there's nothing you can do about that.
You're fucked. You're done.
If their neighbor looks like you,
and he hates their neighbor, they're going to be like
oh, this guy, you know what I mean?
So don't put your face on there.
Keep it simple, unconvoluted, very minimalistic,
with straightforward information there.
I usually just go with black and white.
Now here's the thing.
I go to Staples, and again, I'll leave the link below
for this because this is really cool.
At Staples, you have these little packs of business cards
that you can make with your own printer.
You might say to yourself, well that sounds sketchy,
you probably have to cut them out.
No, you actually, so this is mine that I made, right?
They come in sheets and you just bend them
until they snap off.
There's no, these are clean edges.
There's no ripples, there's no little ridges or anything.
Super clean, so they look like professional business cards.
They have a thick stock and the black ink there
that I've printed on them.
Here's what's really interesting about this.
I think it's like 20 bucks,
and you get like 200 business cards,
so a stack of business cards for 20 bucks
that you can print yourself.
But the interesting thing about printing business cards
yourself is you can print them individually.
I can print an index of business cards.
So, I can have, let's say in a pack of 200,
I can have four of each card almost, of 52 cards.
So I can go to a gig, make myself an index in my wallet,
have them choose any card or name any card
or think of any card.
When they reveal it, you, boom, you take your business card,
you leave it on the table, you say have a good night,
and you leave, and it has their prediction
on the business card.
Or, here's a really really, I don't even want
to be giving this away, because this is just like
a really strong piece of magic.
Just print, to the guy who picked the same card twice.
Your name, your phone number, that's it,
that's all you need to do.
All you want to do is have them pick any card at all.
Any any card in the deck.
Boom, you do a trick, boom.
You say oh let's do another trick.
You have them select another card.
At this point, you've classic forced this card.
Boom, he takes it again, he goes ha ha ha, he reacts,
and you react.
You say did you grab the same one?
And everybody's like oh you probably ...
You're like no, I had no idea, that is completely,
I mean that happens, I'll take credit for it if you want,
100, yeah, I meant to give you that card again.
All right, let's take another one.
Let's take a different one.
And now they actually take a different card.
So now they believe you that it was an accident.
Before you leave, after you've done all the tricks,
you just give him that card.
They read it and it says, to the guy who picked
the same card twice, and they're like, oh, oh.
Because now you've taken them here,
brought them back, and then boom.
It's a small piece of information
that they're going to remember.
It's memorable. And that's number five.
So in all, just to recap, I want to tell you
the one thing that you want to do is be memorable.
The one thing that you want to do
is be something that they remember, all right?
Whether it's, and a lot of the times,
the personalized item, leaving them with something,
but also leaving them with a memory,
whether it's a video, a message,
a note on a card, anything like this.
Leaving them with something impossible like that
creates this long-lasting memory,
and you will be in your minds, and they will think of you
when they're booking their next event.
If they have your contact information,
there are more chances they will reach out to you.
Now after this is done, once you start working
at these restaurants, these bars, or these corporate events,
you're going to start talking to people,
and you're going to start bookings gigs at these events,
which is pretty cool, so then word of mouth
just sort of propels your own career, which is the idea.
So guys, I hope you enjoyed that video.
I didn't mean to make it so long,
but I think these five tips are really valuable.
Play around them, don't necessarily take them
for what I've given them to you for.
Dissect them, maybe turn them into your own thing,
or jump or springboard onto a different idea.
The point is get creative. You're a magician, right?
You should be able to use magic in every aspect
of your life to make it more interesting for everybody else.
All you have to do is a little bit of research
and maybe probably a little bit extra work.
I hope this inspires a lot of you
to get out there and do that.
Let me know in the comments below
which one of these five tips that you
would actually perform or if you have already,
and subscribe if you're not subscribed already,
so we'll see you on the next video guys.
Thanks so much for watching.
Tomorrow, we got a tutorial. Tomorrow is Tutorial Monday.
It's gonna be a doozy. We'll see ya then.
Peace out. (whimsical keyboard music)