The Evolution of a Photography Business

Today, what we’re going to talk about is kind of where we’re at in our business, because something we’ve learned from a mentor of ours is to document and not create meaning when either when you’re creating podcasts, when you’re creating content for social media, whatever the case is, a lot of times, it’s easier just to document what you’re actually doing versus trying to think about what to create. And so, anyway, that’s kind of what we’re doing here, just trying to document what we’re doing our business. Hopefully it helps you and blesses you along the way. I think in the previous blogs, I spoke about how we’ve been thinking about making the decision on making some hires in regard to photographers and and trying to grow that way. That’s the direction we’re headed.

How Does A Photography Business Evolve?

Now, some of the stuff we’ve learned recently is:

What is the evolution of a photography business?

How do you go from you being wearing all the hats to maybe only wearing a couple hats?

How do you actually progress there?

One of the things we’ve learned recently, for most businesses, there’s kind of a track to follow on which is nice. You don’t have to try to recreate the wheel. One of the things we learned, which we’ve been doing for a while now is you first have to become a marketer.

First, Become A Marketer

What’s the purpose behind that? Well, if your business has a great product or service or offer whatever the case is, but nobody hears about you, it’s going to be tough to do business, right? The foundation for any business out there is marketing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do it, but it certainly means that you need to have that as your foundation. So whether you work with an agency or you have a family member that’s good at marketing and they they help you get set up or if you learn, I would suggest that you definitely at least learn the fundamentals so that when you go to hire somebody, you kind of have an idea if they’re going to be performing well for you or not. I would at least understand the basic concepts of marketing. That’s kind of step one. That’s what we’ve been working on for the past, I guess seven months now. Hard to say at this point, kind of all the months blend together.

How Did That Look Like For Us?

Well, it looks like purchasing a bunch of different courses. We’re really big fans of online courses, I am personally. Some people aren’t, some people want to just go and say, “Hey, all of the information’s free. You can just go on YouTube and Google and find it that way.” And I think in one sense, that’s true. But in another sense, having tons of free information but not having a track to follow on is sometimes what they say is death by information. You’re kind of oversaturated with information. Anyway, learning marketing for us meant paying quite a bit of money. I think our first course was maybe 1200 dollars that we learned how to do marketing. And then we bought another course, to learn how to create systems which was 7500 bucks, 7500 bucks. I think for this year, we spent maybe just a little over 10 grand, which I look at now I’m like, I want to spend way more than out on courses just because I know all of those courses have at least 10x themselves in regards to return on investment. I look at it as a massive help for our business.

I would encourage you as well. As a business owner, if you’re not investing in yourself, definitely do that. Because a lot of times I’ve seen people post on Facebook groups, and they’ll say, “Hey, I have 1000 bucks and I’m looking to build my business. Where should I spend that?” From what I’ve seen of other mentors that we’ve paid for in their courses, a lot of the consensus is to invest that in yourself, meaning don’t go buy a pair of Gucci shoes or something like that, go invest in a course. Go buy some books, just start learning, start paying mentors that have gone before you and are currently in a place that you want to be or they far surpass, or at least where you want to be in your business. So that’s step one — learn marketing, pay for some courses. It’s super worth it.

Now that you’ve got that, that’s where we’ve been at, for the past seven months. We’ve been generating leads like crazy people especially really the past quarter. We’ve really started to fill our calendar up like crazy people, even during the pandemic coronavirus, that’s actually kind of when we started doubling down on marketing. And so kind of like I was saying before, although it’s quote unquote busy season, we’ve been busy before ‘busy season’. The reason is because of marketing. That would be step one of your evolution of really building your photography business into a business.

Second, Be A Salesperson

Now, step two. This is the part that we’re at now. Now that your calendar is starting to get packed, you have to transition yourself into becoming a salesperson. Because there’s a term that folks will use, identifying what’s called revenue generating activities. It’s just a fancy term for the things that you do in your business that actually brings money and puts it into your bank account. Because there’s a whole lot of stuff that you could do in your business that has nothing to do with getting money into your bank account, right? If we’re being honest, the whole point of being in business, obviously, is to provide a good service to the marketplace, but it’s to generate income, right? If it wasn’t about generating income, you might be doing a nonprofit or something like that, which is totally cool. But when we’re talking about the photography business, we’re trying to generate revenue. So as a business owner, you should be focused on the things that generate revenue. Editing photos, and working on a logo, and tweaking your website, those are all things that are good, but they don’t bring you any revenue, right?

So after you figured out the marketing piece, the next piece is to do revenue generating activities. And essentially that means getting on the phone with the people that book a call with you. That’s how we have our business set up. We have ads that are running, we’re also doing the organic outreach method which we have our free course on that you could just check out the show notes where we send a lot of DMs, send cold emails, things of that nature and we get folks to book times on our calendar. Essentially what that looks like is let’s say Sally Joe books a call for Tuesday at 12, Lauren will hop on a phone call with them and figure out what Sally wants, then Lauren will book them and take a deposit. That is the most important thing in your business — is talking to people that want to book with you. At this point in our business, that’s the seat that we’re in right now — the salesperson seat. Specifically Lauren has been, in the past few days, just inundated with phone calls. I think on Monday she had or Tuesday she had like 10 or 12 phone calls and the next day another 10. It’s quite a bit of phone calls. If you added up at the end of the week, Monday through Saturday, it could be 30 to 50 phone calls. You’re talking to a lot of people which is good. That’s the next step — get yourself as a salesperson.

At this point, you may be saying, “Man, I just want to take photos man. I’m not interested in really talking to that many people per day and kind of transitioning myself to a salesperson.” That’s cool. I think that’s actually a good thing, because at least you figured out that maybe you don’t want to run your business like business to that degree. Maybe you just want to do one off sessions, because I don’t think that running your photography business like a business, is for everybody. I think that there’s certain people that would much prefer just to work off for referrals and maybe a few inquiries on their website here and there and just do that, and that’s fine. But again, we’re just speaking from what we’re enjoying, what we want to do with our business. And if that resonates with you, I think that’s great. So that’s step two.

First step is to figure out the marketing piece, get leads coming into your business day and night, when you’re awake when you’re sleeping, let your calendar be booked all the time for phone calls. And then the second step is you need to fulfill those phone calls, so become a salesperson.

The Big Question

Now, here’s the thing you may be asking: how can I do photo sessions when I have 12 phone calls a day? That’s the question that needs to be answered. So for us, that becomes the next hire. So at the marketing step, it may just be you running Facebook ads, plus virtual assistants, right? Maybe they’re doing organic outreach for you, the virtual assistants are getting people to book on your calendar through social media. Maybe that’s your first hire and that’s good. So once you get to the point of now you’re on the phone calls, you’re the salesperson, you’re closing people every day on those calls, someone needs to do the fulfillment, right? That’s the term folks will use for service based businesses, as who’s providing the service. In the case of photography, there’s a photographer, right? They’re the ones that are fulfilling the service. So if you’re the salesperson, essentially, that’s the hat that you’re now wearing. You went from marketer to the sales guy, the sales lady, you need someone to do your fulfillment for you. That’s the next step. This is the spot where we’re at in our business right now. Again, we’re just documenting where we’re at in business. So at this point, now we’re needing to figure out, now that Lauren is filling her calendar with phone calls and most of her day literally from 10 o’clock to 5 o’clock. If she’s doing the photo sessions, she can’t make the phone calls, right? Hopefully you’re starting to figure out, “Ah, see how this works.” You can’t do both. So at this point right now, we’re going to be on the hunts. We’re actually going to be, if we’re talking tactically, making a little sales funnel page or I guess I can call it like an application page, where we’re gonna have photographers in our marketplace fill out an application to work with us as an employee. We’re going to be trying to figure out if we want to have them as an employee, or as a contractor. You may have heard the term like a W-2, or a 1099. We’re trying to figure it out. Again, we’re learning this stuff on the fly. As you guys are kind of hearing us talk about this, we’re figuring it out on the fly. So hopefully, by Episode 100, we’ll have this stuff kind of squared out more.

That’s something I encourage you to do, too. We’re big on taking action and figuring out as we go. Now, you don’t want to be reckless and make poor decisions but certainly you don’t want to overanalyze stuff. That’s what we’re big on.

You may be in your business right now, just trying to figure out how you make your business cards and how you tweak your website. And we’ve spoken about this before, just get started. So anyway, that’s where we’re at right now. We’ve now taken over the salesperson seat and we’re trying to figure out how to actually hire out the fulfillment. As we start to bring on people, start to do interviews, we’ll keep you posted on how that works for us, what we learned along the way, what we figured out works and what doesn’t work and keep you posted there. So that’s where we’re at.

If you’re reading this, and you’re just getting started, figure out the marketing first — market market market. Figure that out, get leads coming into your business. Put on your salesperson hat. Maybe it’s not 12 phone calls a day but maybe as you’re getting started, it’s two or three a day. Then you start to ramp up and now maybe you start to do Facebook ads on top of maybe your organic methods. Now you’re up to five calls a day, and you’re like, “Whoo, okay, I’m getting busier.” You’re booking more sessions, now you’re starting to make good revenue. Maybe then, you start putting more money towards Facebook ads, or Google ads or YouTube ads or Pinterest ads or whatever as you like and now you’re up to 10 calls a day. And that’s the point where you start to say, “Okay, now I need to kind of take myself out of the actual fulfillment, and trust the process.”

The Doubts

Another thing a lot of people think is, when they’re at this point in business and starting to think about making hires, they get nervous. I spoke about this on the previous episode like, “Man, no one’s going to be able to do it as good as me.” Or like something that we’ve battled with recently, we’re kind of past it now is like, “Well, my clients are so used to seeing me, how are they going to be able to work with somebody else?” And it’s like any business. If you go to your favorite restaurant in the world, when they first open, you may have seen the owner of that restaurant, everywhere, right? You just saw them everywhere. They were running around the kitchen, and you became really familiar with the people that own that restaurant. But over time, you started to see them less and less and less as they became more established but it didn’t mean you stop going to eat there. You still enjoyed eating there, right? So kind of the same idea that you need to get past as a business owner. Yes, your clients know you because you’ve been wearing every hat, but ultimately, when you run your business like a business, they just enjoy doing business with your business that happens to be run by you. And it doesn’t mean you disappear off the face of the earth, you could still continue to post content, continue to show your face but the actual fulfillment is now done by one of your photographers, which if you hire correctly, and you train correctly, they should love your photographers just like they love you.

So any who, that’s where we’re at. We’re just gonna keep you posted. We haven’t figured everything out. We’re learning, right? A lot of stuff we’re teaching you is from learning from mentors and implementing seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And like I said, hopefully it blesses you along the way.

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