Focus and Measure

Today, let’s talk about focus and measuring.

Focus

If you’re anything like me, as an entrepreneur, or Lauren, it is so easy to get monkey brain, right? Or squirrel brain, right? Kind of what that means is you may be like us, like you may be excited about business, be excited about growing, you’re always looking for opportunities, you’re always looking for the next thing. And while that’s a blessing, and I think for some of you, I think that’s just an innate drive that you have, you’re always seeking to grow, you’re okay with being uncomfortable, you’re okay with uncertainty. I think that’s a huge blessing but sometimes what it will do is, it could really hinder your ability to grow and to grow consistently because it’s sort of like the spinning plate analogy. If you have one plate you’re spinning on one hand, that’s all you have to focus on, you could put all your attention there. But then what happens when you start adding a second plate to spin and a third plate, and a fourth plate? Before long, your first two plates are going to stop spinning, they’re going to fall over and crash and now you’re just trying to manage all these different spinning plates. Not all the time, but a lot of time.

That’s what we found for our business. A lot of the time where that comes from — the ability or the desire to want more spinning plates, is from comparing ourselves to others. You may be able to relate to this, like in your marketplace, maybe just on social media, maybe you’re part of like masterminds and networking groups, or Facebook groups for photography, and you start to see other’s successes and other people’s wins. That stuff is definitely good. I know, I’ve leveraged other people’s successes and wins as motivation for me. But a lot of times, that can be a really big distraction for a few reasons. Number one, they’re in a completely different part of their journey a lot of times than you are. And so looking at it, they’re on step 10 and you’re on step 3, that’s not going to help you to get to step 4, right? More often than not, you’re gonna compare that gap, the distance between you and them and it could be pretty discouraging. Or, like in the previous blogs, in my opinion, sometimes God has planned for you isn’t step 10. at all, it’s maybe sometimes to be at step four that you’re at, or step one.

I should say this: God has different plans, everybody. I think that’s pretty obvious, that’s easy to comprehend but sometimes the hard part is accepting that on our end because the hard part will be you look at somebody, and you may think to yourself, “Man, if they could do it, I can do it.” I’m sure you’ve had that mentality before where you start seeing people’s wins in their posts, how much business they just did, or how many mini sessions they’ve been able to stack up and you’re like, “Wow, if they can do it, I can do that.” That could be the case, that could be true and it probably is true. But what if it’s not in the cards for you? What if there’s something completely different? If I were you, I would go back to one of our previous blogs where we talk about getting your direction. And again, I believe the Bible is absolutely amazing. It’s not theory, it’s not just this book of things not to do. I truly believe that the Bible is ‘truth’. It’ll direct you, it’ll guide you including your business. It’s not just good for eternity, but the Bible is absolutely for your time here on Earth. So anywho, some encouragement there.

So going back to focus, that’s something Lauren and I have been focusing on. In this season of life, we found that the more things that we can cut away, the more peace we have, and the more consistent growth we found in our business. What does that look like for us? Well, we can look at it a few different ways. One of the things Lauren and I decided, or really Lauren she’s doing the photography side of the business, was at first she was working with families, right? So some of you may be family photographers, she was doing some engagement sessions, she was doing newborn photography. She’s doing pretty much whatever she could do so we can generate a profit. A lot of you may be in that situation now where you’re like, “I just need to generate a profit, man, I can’t start whittling stuff away.” And I totally get that. That may be the season you’re in. That may be the right season for you — just to do everything, to get experienced, to get wins under your belt, to get some profit coming into your business. Maybe you’re a one man show and you’re just trying to figure things out. You may need to do that.

We were there for a while. But it was only until we decided to weed away everything that we didn’t feel we were called to and stick to the one thing we were called to, which we felt was brand photography. Essentially, that’s just working with other entrepreneurs, other business owners, other like minded people to help them brand themselves. Whether it’s a personal brand, or more of a corporate style brand. We just felt that that was our calling. Essentially, what we ended up doing was weeding out everything that wasn’t that. So when inquiries came into the website, when they were for family sessions, we didn’t take them. We would either refer them out to people we knew, or if those folks were busy, we would just let them know, “Hey, I’m sorry, we don’t actually work in that space anymore.”

At first, it was kind of like,

“Oh, is this good to do? I mean, we’re turning down revenue, we’re turning down money.”

But what we found out was by staying focused, by not getting distracted, yes, other people are doing 20 minute family mini sessions, a day or a week, whatever the case is, and that’s good and fine but that’s not what we were interested in doing. So I would encourage you, if you’re in that space right now, if you’re comparing, if you’re thinking, I want to do everything, all these different photography courses are coming out (Obviously, we have one so I’m not trying to be hypocritical) I’m just saying, we’re still in that boat too where we see all these different options of courses to buy and people’s ideologies when it comes to photography business and all these different things you can get involved with; I would encourage you just to sit down, I would encourage you to pray but but just sit down with a notepad and start thinking about, what direction or what your calling is in photography. Is it with families? Do you love kids? Do you just want to spend all of your time around kids and you’d love the art of being able to get them together to pose them in the right way? And knowing that they’re going to use your photos to cover their house with beautiful portraits that you took excites you? If that’s your desire, focus on that. If anything comes in, whether it’s weddings, or a branding inquiry or engagement, I would encourage you to stay focused on what you’re doing. Stay focused and either refer that stuff out to maybe friends of yours that do those sessions, or just turn it down. Just stay focused. That’d be my encouragement to you.

Again, I’m just explaining what we’re learning in our business, the focus piece that’s been such a blessing for us. Once you find the lane that you’re supposed to be in and you stop comparing and you just stay in your own lane, that’s when you start to find “success” or “consistency”. Because then, you can start to double down and really start taking care of your clients and getting to know your clients better, really understanding their thought processes and what type of product they want from you. Instead of being scattered across all different niches and trying to figure out each niche, you could just stay focused on one whether it’s families, you can start to figure out:

“What do they really desire?”

Can you offer other packages along with just the digital photos?

Can you provide them prints at a great price?

Are there other offers and packages and services you can provide them?

Can you show up with gift cards to a dinner that the husband and wife can take each other out because they know how stressful photoshoots are?

Even though it takes some of your profit, maybe you can charge a little bit more because you’re offering more right? Gift cards for their kids, it could be a $5 gift card for them to go get a little ice cream or something after the session. And by focusing on one niche again, you can start to double down and think about how can I provide so much value to this type of client because this is the only lane that I’m in? I don’t need to focus on anything else so I can really triple down, quadruple down on this niche. That’s what will help you win long term, in my opinion.

If you’re in that thought process of comparing, wanting to do everything, my encouragement to you, you can listen to it, you don’t have to listen to it, I’m just telling you what’s working for us — just stay focused. I’m not saying to go delete yourself from Facebook groups and being friends with people on Instagram that are also in photography. I’m not saying to do that, I’m just saying, try to train yourself to think stay focused, stay focused. Look at other people’s success as motivation. But also understand that that may not be the direction that you’re supposed to be going in. Okay, so that’s number one — the focus piece.

Measurement

Now, the second piece after you focused, is the measurement process. We’ve talked about this in previous blogs but I think it really only applies until after you found your focus. The measuring process of business, in my opinion, and I’m not really a big numbers guy so I think others that are more entrepreneurial and less accounting financial number based, I think you’ll still enjoy the measuring part.

So what do I mean by that? Essentially for us, the measuring part is how you grow your business. There is a business management guru, Peter Drucker, who used to say something along the lines of, I’m paraphrasing: What you can measure can be managed, and what you can manage you can grow. If you have something in your business that you can’t measure, you can’t quantify, it’s gonna really be hard to grow your business if you can’t really measure stuff. But the beauty of businesses, there’s 100,000 things you can measure, obviously, only a few things really matter but if you can measure the few things that matter, that’s really what’s gonna help you drive and grow the business.

So for us, one of our biggest drivers of the business is paid advertising. We use Google ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, all the different ads. We do organic stuff as well, we spoke about this before but let’s just take Facebook ads, for instance. The beauty of Facebook ads is we’re able to measure how much money it costs to get somebody on a phone call with us which is really beautiful. We’ve been able to measure that. What does it cost us to get somebody to schedule a call on our calendar to talk about branding sessions or whatever offer we’re promoting at the time? We figured that out, then we could figure out, “Okay, how many phone calls does it take in order to get somebody signed in as a client and get a deposit taken?” That’s cool. We figured, for every 10 phone calls, it takes X amount of phone calls to get somebody to sign with us. Great. Then we get to know, there’s a term you may have heard, it’s called CPA — your cost per acquisition. What is your cost to acquire a client? Maybe in your business, it costs you $50 to acquire a client for a branding session or for a family session. So this becomes the gold. If you haven’t thought this way before, this is one of the most profound things you can think about in business. Once you figure out what it costs you to actually acquire a client, then it’s just a matter of how many clients you want to service in your business.

Now, you may think, “Okay, if it cost me 50 bucks in my sessions, or $500, that’s a 10 x return, I’m just going to ramp this thing up. I’m going to start spending crazy money.” I get that thought process. Now keep in mind, obviously, you need to be able to service your clients well. So just cranking up your ad spend, and saying, “I’m just going to throw 500 bucks a day at Facebook ads and I’m going to start getting 10 clients booked a day. I’m going to have a couple hundred people at the end of the month.” That can be a little bit hectic and crazy. Long term, yeah. Give yourself a few years, you might be able to get up to that point if you have some photographers working for you. But that’s not the point of what I’m telling you, the point of what I’m telling you is when you’re getting started in photography, what we’ve seen other photographers, what we’ve seen family members, what we’ve seen, other people mentioned is like: “Can you really make a living with photography?” It’s one of those things that people look at and I think that’s a kind of a cool side hustle to make a little bit of money on the side. There’s busy seasons and there are slow seasons.” That’s the thought process a lot of people have and you may have had is like, “Could you actually run this thing like a business?” That’s where your CPA comes into play. The minute you can figure out what it costs you to acquire a customer, now you’re in business.

That’s kind of what has really, really helped project us forward and be able to consistently book sessions and now get to the point where we can confidently take a photographer on and know that we’ll be able to provide her with X amount of sessions per month because we know our cost per acquisition, we know how much money we’re spending per day, we know how many phone calls are coming in every day, we know the general average closing rate of those phone calls, etc. That becomes the fun part in business.

Start Now

So I’d encourage you again, if you’re just getting started, if you feel cold to run it like a business, my kind of foundation behind this as well as, although this is a blog about the business of photography, some of you may read this, and I’m not the only one you should listen to but some of you may read this and be like,

“Man, I don’t really want to run it like that. That’s too much for me, I’m not interested in doing that. I like photography, I just want to get a couple clients. I’m not really wanting to run it like a business.”

That’s totally fine. If that’s you, then that may just be your calling. But if you feel you’re called to the business side of it and you feel like you want to grow it and you feel like at some point maybe you want to have photographers that you can mentor, you can teach and they can do a lot of the photo sessions for you, then being able to measure stuff is really important. I would start right now. You may think to yourself, “Well, I’ll start to measure and start tracking once I get to a certain level or once I can start spending enough money on ads.” I would encourage you to start now because it’s the little things that matter. If you’re faithful with the little things, if you’re diligent and you’re a good steward with the little things, as things start to grow and expand, it’s going to be way easier to manage that stuff.

As always, we hope this blesses you in a thousand more ways than it blessed us.

If you want to listen to us talking about all these in detail, please do listen to our podcast. Click below.