The holidays are a wonderful time to take a few minutes and think about the year which has passed. What have you done? What has worked? What has not worked so well?
The entire idea of New Year's Resolutions has a rather bad track record. All those promises to hit the gym more often, eat less junk food, leave toxic relationships behind – tend to evaporate by February if not before. There is a reason for that: too many people think of resolutions as objective commitments to do or not do a specific thing. They can certainly be that, but a really good resolution is an intention rather than a hard and fast commitment. A good New Year's resolution sets a direction for the New Year.
So which directions would you like to go? Where do you want your escorting business to be in 2016?
Setting a direction, or directions, is all about learning from your escorting experience. But it is also about paying attention to your own aspirations. Rather than focusing on who you are and what your business is, look at who you would like to be and how you want your business to evolve.
It is all too easy to find a comfortable rut and stay in it. Whether you are a high volume service provider or a low volume courtesan experience girl, you have the opportunity to fine tune your business to bring it into alignment with your needs and expectations. Changes don't happen all at once, but, unless you decide to make changes your business will stay the same. Or will it?
A Competitive Marketplace
It would be nice to believe that a girl with a steady flow of customers and some decent regulars will be able to keep her escorting business going without having to make many changes. But while your business may look pretty solid without any changes, there are girls all around you who want your clients and your regulars. It's not personal, it's just the nature of competition.
Unfortunately many escorts don't really see their escorting business as a business in a marketplace. They don't spend much time thinking about escorting as a service business like any other. Which is a mistake because escorting is the classic service business. What are known as "barriers to entry" – things like specialized knowledge, the cost of setting up, and the cost of sales – are all very low so, in principle, a girl's potential competition is every other girl whether an escort or not.
When you think about escorting, your escorting, that way you can begin to think seriously about why a guy is willing to pay for your services. After all, it is not impossible for most men to find a girl who will have sex with them for "free". Why would a guy pay you? And why would he pay you rather than one of the other girls?
Answering those questions is the beginning of the entire process of business planning and the resolutions which will let you set your direction for 2016.
Thinking like a Client
An escorting client is faced with a wealth of choice. There are street girls who will do a car date for $20, there are porn stars and models who will ask for and get $10,000 an hour. And there are clients for every one of these girls.
Every client is thinking about a number of things as he scans down the advertising pages: how much money does he have? Is he in the mood for a quick date or a long, intimate encounter? How much time does he have? Will the date be safe? Does this picture or that picture appeal to him?
No escort will appeal to every potential client who is looking at the posts. Girls who understand this will design their advertising, website, social media and the rest of their marketing efforts to target the sorts of clients who are most likely to want their services.
Every client will have a different set of preferences: for some money is not an issue but safety is, for others the promise of a girlfriend experience with a blonde overrides all other considerations, others will have specific desires, role play fantasies and fetishes. Men, being men, tend to focus on their own particular interests when they are looking for an escort and if a potential client is looking for a busty brunette, he will simply pass over a pretty, flat chested, blonde.
You are not going to change potential clients' preferences so it would be a good idea to cater to those which fit your own escorting style.
Not Just Any Girl
Unfortunately, many girls who escort see the business as the simple – and usually illegal – exchange of sex for money. That is the baseline. And it is a horrible mistake. While there is usually activity between consenting adults it can and should be surrounded by layers of presentation.
That presentation, that style, is what allows a girl to charge more and find better clients.
Once you decide to lift yourself off the baseline the entire range of escorting styles, services and alternatives opens up. Setting your direction towards a particular escorting style is the first step to making more money and spending less time working.
An escort's style begins with her personal safety. Baseline girls essentially "take their chances" which is extremely dangerous. Simply deciding that you will not engage in consenting adult activities without a condom is a huge step in the right direction. But it is only a first step. The second step is the decision to screen.
Screening is a bit of a pain and it will lose a girl certain sorts of clients. The resolution to screen every client sets a direction which, if a girl sticks to it, will increase her personal safety immediately and, over time, will improve the quality of her clients. Simple screening – the requirement for a real name with a real number which can be checked – takes only a few minutes. More elaborate screening where you actually confirm identity with a third party takes a bit longer but will eliminate virtually all potential problems.
Critically, deciding to screen your escorting clients says something important about you: you value yourself enough not to take just any client. Having that sense of personal value and sticking with it will quickly improve the quality of your escort business.
Escort Style
Once you get off the baseline you have a huge range of options for your escorting life. Chances are you already have the beginnings of an escort style: just look at your posts. "Girl Next Door", "Exotic", "Pampering", "Lingerie Queen", "Alt Girl 2.0", "Sweet College Student", "Luxury" – any one of these and dozens more tell potential clients who your escort persona is and hint at what she offers.
When you think about the year ahead take a sharp eyed look at whether your style is working for you. First off, there is little point in playing the girl next door if you have a sleeve of tattoos. Nor is it much use pretending to be a dominant if you look barely old enough to drive. But, more importantly, take a look back at your year and think about how well what you are presenting as an escort is working for your business.
Remember that resolutions are about setting a direction. So, which way would you like your style to migrate? There is an old saying in sports, "Never change a winning game, always change a losing one." Are you winning or losing. Are you hitting your own expectations? If you are then, for the moment, you have a winning escort game and can simply keep doing what you are doing. But if you are not meeting your expectations, if your phone isn't ringing or if most of your dates are one offs, it may be time for some changes to your style.
An escorting style is how you project yourself into your market as well as how you present to your clients. Even if you have a winning game and are hitting your expectations, it is never a bad idea to review what you are doing with advertising, your photographs and your website. If you are not meeting your expectations think about trying other approaches.
First off, where are you advertising? If you are looking for higher end clients it may make a lot of sense to pay a little bit each month to one of the better escorting websites (for example skipthegames.com) to get featured presentation. It may also make sense to drop advertising on websites which do not fit your escorting style.
Second, what do your posts say? Are you promising a straight escorting date or are you trying to add value? If you are adding value, what is it? Remember that escort advertising is as much about trying to avoid time wasters and cheapskates as it is about filling up your date book.
Which brings up the real issue in escorting style: are you creating a style which will attract the sorts of clients you want? Here's the thing, to create that style you have to have some idea of what your own, ideal, client looks like.
An Escort's Mr. Right
It would, of course, be lovely to have a client list of five or six billionaires who competed with each other to pay you the most money for your kind attentions. The problem is that even in New York or London or LA, billionaires are thin on the ground.
In actual fact there are many more well-heeled clients several rungs down the ladder from the billionaire class: brute statistics, The Independent reports that there are 537 billionaires in the United States, however, households earning $100,000 per year represent 20% of all US households and households earning $176,000 or more represent 10% of all US households.
Escort encounters, particularly at the more lucrative end of the market are "luxury purchases". Essentially, any escort date is going to consume a client's discretionary income but the more income a client has, the more discretionary income he'll have. A man making $60,000 a year has very little money left after taxes, the mortgage, health insurance, car payments and so on. Plus, his wife or girlfriend will be keeping an eye on his spending and there is really nowhere to hide. Triple that take home and a man has a good deal more flexibility.
However, while a well-heeled man has more to spend he also has more to lose. So, what is going to entice a wealthy man to call you rather than another girl? Tailoring your posts to target those well off gentlemen is more than claiming to offer a "classy" or "elegant" experience; it is about reassurance.
A man comfortable spending $500-$5000 for an escort encounter is looking for rather more than a service provider experience. Yes, he is certainly interested in the consenting adult element of the experience but he is also interested in safety, discretion, location and environment. He'll skip right past the booty posts and the badly lighted selfies shot in a messy bathroom. Too risky, unappealing, far too close to the street girls he avoids like the plague.
So if these 10%ers are your target market it is time to go back and revisit your escorting style and reel them in.
Sending the Right Signals
Affluent clients may not know it but they are usually looking for simple clues which let them feel secure booking an escort.
Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs and C suite executives spend their lives reading. They are good at it. They spot things like spelling mistakes, typos, grammar errors and, mentally, move on. No matter what your advertising or website says make sure you say it correctly. Getting this right makes it easy for your target client to take the next step.
Men at this level are also surrounded by well dressed women. They themselves may or may not know much about women's clothes but they certainly notice when a girl falls outside the norms their wives, business associates and daughters routinely meet. So, when they look at a picture on your post or on your website, while they may want a bit of titillation, they are picking up clues about what sort of girl you are. Again, they may not be able to articulate those clues but they know them when they see them.
Flesh on display is a signal. Nudity is a signal. Garish colours are signals. Stripper heels – three inch lucite platforms with six inch heels – are a signal. Manmade fibers are signals. All those signals are giant red lights. They signal that the girl in the picture is but a corridor and closed door away from the street, possibly desperate, and therefore high risk.
The opposite of those signals, sexy, not explicit, muted colours, pretty heels, no platforms, natural fibers, all serve to suggest that you are a girl who poses no threat, who offers no drama, who is not going to get them into trouble and is, in fact, going to be the discreet companion worth far more than her rates suggest.
Pivoting your advertising away from the standard escort chat about bra cup size and assorted acronyms toward a much less explicit set of suggestive phrases will tend to lose you the clients looking for a "blow and go" date and gain you the clients for whom an escort encounter is a pleasure to be savoured and repeated.
Add to that a few reassuring words, "safe", "discreet", "luxurious", "delicate", "pleasure", "conversation" and you begin to set your direction towards the more lucrative end of the market and your business towards more money for less work.
Experiment and Small Changes
A New Year's Resolution to run three miles every day when you have been a couch potato for the last year is delusional. And, because it is delusional, it will not be kept and, come next year, you'll be sitting on the couch a few pounds heavier and even less likely to get fit.
A Resolution to "get more exercise" combined with modest beginning goals – a walk around the block on New Years Day, around two blocks a couple of days later, ten blocks a day by the end of January – has a much better chance of being real.
Radically transforming your escorting business if it is not meeting your expectations, or tweaking it a little to improve its performance if it is, comes down to making manageable changes and measuring the results. A simple thing like changing the wording of your escort post may not make a huge difference overnight but look at the effect over a month.
To give another example: having a stable of regulars makes a lot of sense at every level of the escorting business. A good regular is a steady source of revenue while, at the same time, less work because there is no screening required and you know what he wants. Dates with regulars are easier and less fraught than dates with new clients. So think of what you can do to convert the men you would like to see again into regulars.
One simple way is to provide select clients with your – discreet – card and tell them that if they quote the code on the card they will have priority booking and 10% off their next and subsequent sessions. Now, to measure the effectiveness of this experiment, keep track of how many times clients book using their promo code. Easy and what you are giving up on the discount you make back on the return business.
If you want more calls from better clients, try running a post with a very different picture, different persona/name and a very different, more implicit set of features. Where your current post may emphasize your 36D statistic and a willingness to provide both GFE and PSE, invent a new girl who "has a wonderful, lush body" and a "vivid imagination". Your new persona only wants to hear from "discerning gentlemen" and if she discloses her rates at all, quotes double your normal fees. Worse case, you don't have a single response. The experiment fails and you are out the cost of a post and a few pictures. Best case, without changing anything but your advertising and presentation, you begin to attract a completely different, better off, clientele.
The Best New Year
There is nothing more positive than jumping into the New Year with a sense you are in control of your own life and your own escorting business. It's all up to you.
Most importantly, taking care of yourself in 2016 needs to be the one, non-negotiable, resolution you make. Escorts suffer burnout. Escorts can easily fall into toxic lifestyle patterns. Escorting can become sedentary work and escorts can go one day to the next without setting foot out their doors.
Taking care of yourself as an escort means making time for a walk every day. It means saying "no" to escorting clients who don't "check out" and to clients who want things from you which make you uncomfortable. It is all too easy to become addicted the buzz that cash in your purse will give you. Nothing wrong with the cash but, set your direction in 2016, to take breaks. A long weekend here, a week there and plan an actual vacation. It might only be turning off your phone for a few days but it is critical.
By shifting your client base towards better off men and raising your rates either a little or a lot, you'll have more cash and, most importantly, more time. Escorting is a wonderful way of giving yourself the gifts of time and independence: use them!