Benny Balloon joins us this week for a BMTV customer chat.

Benny is a children’s entertainer, magician and balloon modeler that got started in the industry by performing for his daughter’s nursery. He got some bookings from parents off the back of that and has gone on from there. Benny says that that is a good idea to get the experience if you are a complete beginner and want to get into the industry. After a while though you do need to start charging and Benny was saying that he has seen some people charge £20 for an hour of balloon decorating. This has the effect of bringing the prices down for everyone as people then have a lower expectation of how much balloon modelling is worth.

To work out how much you should be charging, you need to know how many bookings you can do in a week, Benny say you can realistically get 2 and a half bookings per week. Work out how much you need to live off per week and divide that by 2.5 to get how much you should be charging for each party. Remember you are the brand and you can effectively charge whatever you want if you find the right audience. Benny was talking about an entertainer he saw in London who is charging £1000 per party but wasn’t doing much more than people that are charging £40! This entertainer just had the confidence in his brand to charge that much and found the customers that are willing to pay it.

Benny is well-known for his large balloon sculptures but he started with small sculptures like this mini Spider-man. He thought he could do better so he learnt how to make bigger sculptures like this large Spider-man for the birthday child. He wasn’t satisfied there though and pushed himself further to create this life-sized Spider-man! The life-sized and the medium Spider-man balloons are actually made in a very similar way and the larger one even has less balloons, they’re just bigger! The time it takes to make both balloons is also fairly similar but the bigger one just creates so much more impact. If you are a balloon twister, then a little tip for you would be to super-size your models by substituting 26Qs with 350Qs and see what reaction you get. Benny says that the bigger balloons sell his business to people and he has actually got bookings purely from people seeing a picture of his creations with no questions asked!

One final tip from Benny would be to throw something into your routine for the adults at the party. They are ultimately the ones paying for it and if you can entertain them as well as the kids then they are going to think that you are worth the money, no matter what you charge! Benny has some special routines in mind for the parents but we don’t have time to show you this week, he is going to come back at a later date and show us what they are so you can add them to your routine.

That’s it for this week, if you want to find out more about Benny Balloon then you can check out his Facebook page or Website. See you next time!

Rob

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