The Easiest Way to Transition from Weddings to Business Clients As A Videographer

One of the biggest questions we get, and I get personally, is, Eric, how do I transition from wedding clients to business clients? And why would I want to transition from weddings to businesses and retainers and people who pay me consistently every single month? So in today's video, I'm going to be breaking down exactly how you can do that, how We've helped over 700 video agencies scale using retainers and the exact process I take our private clients through to help them go from doing only weddings to doing specifically business retainers. And I'll tell you this right off the bat, it is not as hard as you think. Couple questions. I get a lot. Number one, if you're going from weddings to business clients, I don't have a lot of business clients or I don't have any business clients right now. I'm concerned because I don't have anything right now. Number two, how do I make this transition? And number three, how can I make that transition? What do I need to be doing? So let's dive in. One of our clients, Max, engage Max, specifically. Max had done a lot of weddings and things like that. And so we were working on making the transition here for Max into more of medical, and he had done a lot of weddings, a lot of things in that realm, but not a ton of things when it comes to weddings. So I'm going to kind of use this as an example, break down why they made the switch. So, number one, one of the main reasons people switch from weddings to retainers is, number one, they don't have to deal with bridezillas, right? So people who are crazy on their wedding day, and if you miss the shot, you are absolutely screwed. It's just a lot of pressure, right? So a lot of people don't want that pressure when they're shooting weddings, which is why they transition over to retainers. With retainers, you only really need to shoot one shoot per month or per quarter. With weddings, you have to work every single weekend. But again, with retainers, you're typically shooting one shoot day per quarter or per month, and you're not having to do a ton of weekends. And typically they're just during the week. And it's one shoot day per month or per quarter. I know multiple of our clients, Maxengage included, they work specifically with medical practices now and med spas, people who have cosmetic dentists, people who have a lot of money. And so because of that, they're only having to go out once per quarter. Quarter, typically where they shoot all the content for three months, they go out One time it's an eight to ten hour day, they shoot all that stuff and then they're done. And a lot of times they even have people in different states that they just hire to shoot for them, which we'll get into in a second. So now one of the other main benefits with retainers is you have the same clients for a long period of time, which means you can build amazing relationships with them. When it comes to weddings, you have to start over with every single client that you have. And so you don't really get the chance to really build a relationship with these people because you're just onto the next couple, onto the next couple, onto the next couple. Right. Whereas with retainer clients, you have some clients that are with you for 2, 3, 4, 5 years, paying you 5 to 10k a month for the same kind of content and strategy and things that you're going to be doing. So you become more of a partner with them as opposed to just somebody who's, you know, getting in, getting out. And a vendor, you become more of like a marketing advisor or like a content advisor, someone who's going to strategically advise them on the types of content to create. And you just have a better kind of sense of authority with these people. It just feels a lot more like you just have a lot more rapport with them. It's nice to work with the same people. You get into kind of a flow and you don't have to keep like starting over with somebody new every single time. Right. The other obvious benefit to it is you have people paying you 5 to upwards of 20k per month per client. And so these are people who are paying you every single month where you're maybe going out once a month or once a quarter to shoot the content and you have that consistent revenue where one client could be worth 100k a year to you. Right. We have some clients that are worth 140k per year to our clients. So they are not having to do too much for those people, but they're paying them, you know, over six figures per year with one client. Whereas with weddings, if you were even just charging 10k for a wedding, which is not that normal and not a lot of people do that, then you would need at least 14 clients to pay for the 140. Whereas a lot of our clients have one client and that pays them 140k per year per client. So it's a lot less work for more money. And with weddings you have lots of work, but you don't make a ton of money. You know, they try to get you, you're dealing with consumers here, people who are getting married, not businesses where businesses. You're in a make money outcome. When you're doing retainers, when you're doing weddings, you're just in a relationship outcome. You can't charge as much for something that is a not make money outcome. Whereas with weddings, like I said, it's more relationship based. You're dealing with consumers, they're constantly trying to get the cheapest. You try to deal with people who are cheap, they don't want to pay a lot of money for these weddings. And so you're kind of in that cycle there where you have to do a ton of work for not a lot of money. Whereas the businesses, like, if you can get them a result, they don't care how many days you come out to shoot for them or how many pieces of content they get, as long as they get the result and they're willing to pay for that. So that means you can do less work for more money. And it's also easier to hire people to do the work for you because we can build systems around what it is that we're doing for our clients, for the businesses, because it's very simple, dare I say boring type content that pays you lots and lots of money every single month. And I don't know about you, but I, I'm fine doing less work for more money when the client's getting an amazing result. And even if it's kind of simple or boring content, I can go, you know, fund passion projects or, or shoot a, you know, a passion, a passion film or something like that that I want to do with that money or I can just chill with my family and take a vacation or whatever it may be. I'm not having to always trade that time for money. I'm trading that time for results or I'm trading that money for results. So clients are paying you for results when it comes to content and retainers. Whereas the brides and the grooms and the weddings, they're paying you every single time you're there. And if you're not there, you're not getting paid. Right. Whereas like with retainers, we can start to build some compounding effect where, you know, we have five clients paying us every single month, our monthly income is going to go up and to the right as opposed to, and we could only have five clients here. Right. Whereas with weddings you have to always get the same clients or new, you have to always get new clients. You can't ever have the same clients because they're only getting married once. Now let's kind of dive in step by step, the process of how we do this. So number one, what we do is if you've only shot weddings and have never done business clients before, right? Totally fine. We have a lot of clients in that position. Number one, we're going to help you get case studies with ideal, with your ideal niche. So like number one, we're going to figure out and give you a list of niches that you should go into. Because we have over 700 clients, we have a lot of different niches and, and data on different niches that we can then give you. And then we'll say, hey, this is based, based on what we see, you should go into working with medical companies, right? That's what we might say, right? So you should go into medical companies. Then we're going to help you get case studies with those people using our beta client strategy. And so if you haven't had any clients in that industry before, but you've done work, video work in general, we have a specific strategy that we run our clients through called our beta client strategy. And so this is typically doing work at a discounted rate to where you're still getting a retainer for this work, but you're doing it for like a beta testing group of clients to where you can get them amazing results with the content and then get case studies with those people and then make it look like you've always worked with those types of people. So if I got two to three of these beta clients, right, I knock it out of the park. Now I have two to three case studies that I can then use to then go market myself to other medical companies, right? So let's just say in the example we're using medical companies, I get two to three case studies using the beta client strategy, and then I get those case studies and then it looks like I've always worked with medical companies. No one has to know I did that at a discounted rate. Right? Step two is then, like I said, leveraging those case studies to get full paying retainers. Anywhere between 4, 5 and 20k per month is typically what we see. Right? So we then leverage those and then step three, we then scale and then hire a team to do a lot of that work for you to where you can focus on working on the business, scaling it, getting as many clients as you want, and then it just becomes a math equation to say, okay, you want to hit 100k a month. Well, we need 10 clients paying us 10k a month. Not that crazy. Right? And so then we map out a strategy for you to get there. As far as how many calls do you need to take with potential clients to get 10 clients, and then 10 clients paying you 10k a month equals 100k a month. Now, it's very difficult to do by yourself at least 100k a month doing weddings. I'm not saying it cannot be done. It can, but it requires a lot more work. I'd rather only have, like, for me personally and for our clients, I would rather have less clients paying me more than more clients paying me less. Right. I don't want to have to hustle and grind and take on hundreds of wedding clients a year just to hit seven figures. Whereas I would rather just have 10 clients every single month that pay me every single month, that pay me 10k a month to get 100k a month, which is 1.2 million a year. Right? So the reason a lot of people are moving to this model is because it just makes more sense. And they can hire people because they have stability and they know, hey, if I made, you know, 20k in retainers this month, I know I'm going to make another 20k next month in retainers again and again and again and again. And there's that consistency there. Whereas with weddings, unfortunately, you are left kind of riding that roller coaster where you're like, okay, I booked 10 weddings this month. I don't know how many I'm going to book next month. I can't plan my expenses. I can't plan, you know, things I have to pay for for my family because I don't really know how much money I'm going to be making next month, which is a huge problem. So this is just a short, kind of brief overview, answering some of the questions we have around going from weddings to business clients. Most of our clients, once they go from weddings to business clients, they are so happy they did and they never look back. Right. Because it's so much easier. And you're probably grinding doing weddings. And it's way easier to create these retainers with businesses who require much less work but pay you a lot more. So hopefully this is helpful if you guys want to learn more about how we could help you make this transition. If you are doing weddings, click the link below. Schedule a demo with our team. Otherwise, keep enjoying the free content. Hopefully this is helpful for you and we'll see you in the next one.