177: Charging What You’re Worth with Jim Landers - #GrowYourLife

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski and if you haven't listened to this podcast before, I help coaches, trainers, authors and mentors scale their businesses, find their niche, and know exactly what they need to do to get more clients fast. If you want to make six figures, seven figures, or even go to eight figures, I'd love to help you do so. We actually have events that we're running every other week that you can check out over on my social media to help you for free, get the step by step of what it takes to start to get more clients in your business. Now I have the honor of having a mentor here. His name is Jim Landers and he helps low volume photographers. Meaning they're, they're not like doing a ton of photography. They do more high end, high priced photo shoots. Low volume photographers get clients as well as get better at their craft. And so Jim, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Thank you, Jeremiah. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on.

I'm excited when you, when you said yes to being on here, I know we had a great conversation a few months back and I was like, you know, I think you have some value that you could bring to the, to the listeners on here to be a great conversation. So tell me a little bit about what got you into coaching. A lot of the people who listen to this podcast, they're like, man, I want to, I want to get into coaching or training, but how do I find my niche? How do I find my, my lane of like what I'm good at? And so what got you into it?

Well, I suppose that's a long story, but I'm not going to tell you the long version. But I've been interested in photography since I was a kid. I was, I was six years old and of course then it was just a thought, it was just an idea. But in high school I took classes and then in college I actually went and got a degree in photography. I have a four year degree in photography that I got many years ago. I'm not to say exactly when, but at that point I really, you know, felt like I, that I knew what I was doing, that I had a great four year education, that I had wonderful teachers, because I did. But then reality hits and you struggle at the beginning trying to get your business, your photography business to work and you start noticing those around you. The 33 students that I graduated with, I'm one of 33, started disappearing, falling out, not doing photography anymore. And within five years, I couldn't find a single one left doing it. I think I was the only one within five years of the program ending. And so I got to that, that point where I'm thinking, you know, it took me, I'm a slow learner, Jeremiah. It took me a while to get to this point, but a lot of.

People are, if they're being honest with themselves. As we learn, we learn. It takes us way longer than we want to.

Yes. Man, you'd think I would have figured this out pretty quickly, but I still didn't. My eyes still weren't open to what's going on here. But now looking back at it with, you know, with a different point of view, you know, hindsight is 20 20. We all have heard that one. I look back at my, my education, my formal education as being very good, but I realize now not one of my teachers and I actually knew it then, but it didn't, I guess it never crossed my mind I was being trained by someone who had never done what I was, what they were training me to do.

Wow.

Not one of my teachers. I had seven photography teachers in college. Not one of them had benefit a photographer, not as an income source. Now all of them, you know, could press the easy button and create beautiful photographs, but that's a totally different thing than making an income to pay for your mortgage and put food on the table. It's a totally different thing. And so again, it took me a while, but at some point I started realizing this is, this is an area I can help. You know, your mom probably told you this or somebody that if you're, if in your mind you're thinking somebody needs to do this, that's your flag that's going up saying it's you who needs to do this. And so at some point I started realizing, oh, yeah, okay, it's, it's me. I'm, I'm the one who's supposed to stand up and help other, other photographers make this work. And so about 2009, I started writing on the business side. Now it took a while before I started presenting what I wrote because, you know, I, it wasn't, I didn't think it was very good. It probably was pretty good, but I don't know, I just didn't feel like it. And so I had those classes available and I taught them, you know, as a one on one, just private coaching and. But I started expanding that probably about 2015. So it took me about five years to where I really got serious about that business side. And Started really expanding it beyond just a one on one and started doing group coaching with it and have been doing that in one form or another since then.

I want to point out a few of the things that you said here and pause here and kind of expand upon them. I think you just tapped into two really key parts that'll help people that want to get into coaching. Is a one is take a look at things that you've learned that quote unquote came easy to you, that you enjoy, that other people who learn the same stuff didn't quite get it at the same level. And those things could be good for you to at least start with making a niche in. You know, I have a number of people. One of my clients, Rick Pino, he does worship songwriting and publishing classes, but he has a number of students that are like, hey, I want to teach this as well. And they actually can teach the, the recording side of things better than other people. They can teach the nuanced sides of it. And so some of you take a look at what you have learned yourself that maybe other people have struggled with, that came a little bit easier to you, or that you said, hey, I need to learn more. And you really had a passion for learning more of. That's a good hint of what you can coach in. And the other one is like you just said, Jim, if, if nobody else is doing it and you're saying, you know, I wish there was somebody that's doing that. That might be a good indicator of a niche that you could go into. That's called a blue ocean strategy, where it's like blue ocean instead of red ocean. Everybody's doing this versus you could actually become the category king, one of the only people that's doing it. And you don't have to work as hard when you do that. So that's awesome. Tell me a little bit about when you're coaching photographers on how to get clients, what's the number one thing that you notice your students struggle with, that you help them with? What's one of the biggest kind of problems? And I always talk about this in your marketing, you want to lead with problem and then solution. What would say be one of those problems that like your students struggle with and how do you help them work through those?

Well, there's certainly a lot of them, but probably the number one is getting new clients or getting clients that are willing to pay what they're charging. So. So getting the ideal client is probably the number concern or problem that they're experiencing.

Yeah. And so what, what Stops people from getting people to pay them what they're charging. What do you find is like that biggest thing? And I know you mentioned a lot of stuff even, even mentally, if we look at photography, it's an art form. And so art coaching is a unique niche that even not a lot of people are in. A lot of people are like either in personal development, business coaching, health coaching, finances, things like that. But art coaching is unique because we almost think of art and sales as almost like they're like water and oil.

Oh, that's so true.

And yet how do you navigate that and help people? Because if instead of being a starving artist, a starving photographer, it's possible to be a thriving photographer and make a full time living. And so what are some of those areas that you help them work through? And I think some of those areas we have, we actually have a lot of creatives who listen to this podcast and are doing creative art coaching. And I think they could learn from that from you.

Oh man. It's in some circles considered a virtue to not make money with your art. It's insane. And there's a school that's not far from where you are. It's not in, not in your city, but it's not far from there where there are some fantastic teachers on the photography side, but they are anti business. And if you even talk about doing it for profit outside of galleries, they're good with galleries, but galleries are often not very profitable. But they will, they'll give you a hard time in class. They'll tell you that you're a sellout. They'll make it, it's, they'll make it very difficult for you to actually make a living. It's like they're training you to be a starving artist. And if you're not a starving artist, you're selling out. You're not being, you're not doing, being true to your heart. It's you, you, you are less than. And this is how they're teaching it. And I am amazed that they get away with this partially because I think it should be illegal to do that because when a parent pays for, for their kids education to go through their education, they're expecting that student to be independent at some point after they finish that program. They're expecting them to be able to create an income source for themselves as a result. And those students get out of that program not only with not an income source, but with an anti feeling against making money with their art.

And we see that a lot in, in culture that almost like you Know, making money is bad. Rich people are evil. If they're making money, they must be doing something evil. You're. You're, you're less than. And art is. You're right. It's one of the number one areas. As if your art is less than because it's making money and in demand. That's a whole other.

Like, that's crazy stuff. It's. Now those who come to me or don't have that. That feeling, but they may have had it at one point in their lives and it definitely could have influenced them.

But I've had people who have it.

Yeah. Oh yes, they absolutely are. So it is influencing them. Even if they, they feel like it's not correct, they're still being influenced by. You're right. I've had a handful of interns from those from that school, and that's the only reason I know about their, their program. Doing that is because I've had, I believe, a total of five that I've talked to. And three of them have been interns. But each one of them have shared the same story without me asking about it. Do you have teachers that do this? I don't ask the questions like that because I actually want to get an honest answer. And even though they were from different years, two of them were from the same year. They were contemporary, but the rest of them were not. They wouldn't have known each other. They all told me the same story. So therefore that's just their culture. That's just what they believe in. And my school wasn't like that. They were not anti making money, but they also didn't teach the business side at all. In fact, I remember twice the subject came up. I didn't ask it because I was oblivious. Go figure. I guess I was into. Well, it doesn't matter what I was into. I remember two times someone asking about business and. And I don't remember exactly what their questions were, but I remember the answers from these two different teachers. One said, I won't be on the test. Don't worry about it. What a weird answer. And the other one said, you don't actually need that until after you graduate.

Okay. Wow.

Are you not the person who's supposed to prepare me for what happens after I graduate?

Yeah, you're. You're passionate about this. I can tell. And just helping people get clients, it's so important to do that. I want to just. It's funny, my background, I was super into photography when I was.

Oh, really?

12 years old.

Cool.

But then I shifted so I did a bunch of stop motion photography and then I realized, oh, there's these cameras that I don't have to click it. They're called video cameras. So I got into, I got into video was kind of my thing and storytelling and, and to this day I utilize storytelling and video in all of my marketing. I'm the reason I kind of make so much video content is because I have been using a camera and being in front of it and talking in front of one since I was a teenager. But what I found was, is that it wasn't. I ended up doing video for a Sales Training Company. DannyJohnson.com was the name of it. And they're, they're actually located up in Kerrville, Texas. So there. And I actually moved to tech. That's how I moved to Texas. The first time is I was working for them out in California. They moved to Kerrville and I was making their videos together. But what I realized was, okay, video isn't going to make me rich working for somebody else. I need to learn sales and I need to learn how to get clients and I need to learn how to take what I have a passion for, which really is. I found a new passion for helping people that have a lot of impact, like coaches, trainers, mentors. The person I was working for, Dani Johnson, she was a coach and a trainer. And so my first job was working on videos. I ended up in that company helping them with a lot of their sales messaging and a lot of their marketing as well. And that's how I ended up transitioning into what I do today is through that. Because I realized, okay, you need to understand sales to actually fund your vision. I still have a dream to this day to develop video games and movies and more from like a executive producer standpoint. You know, find people with great ideas and help fund their ideas. That's going to take a lot of money for me to do that. And so sales is the number one way for me to, to get to that level. How do you handle. I'm saying this for a reason. When somebody is, is a, is a photographer and they've had all this training and they're indoctrinated with all this information, or maybe they're just around it and, and they come to you. How do you help them break through what they're being told and the messaging that they're being told all the time to understand what they need to do to start to get clients and what is the shift that happens in a lot of them?

That's a good question. If they're coming to me, it's because they are. They're struggling or they, so in those that are in that category would have already had in their mind, they want to do portrait photography. And so they would be coming, even though they had that, that philosophy, they'd be coming to me. It reminds me of a, a guy that reached out to me probably at the beginning of this year, and he said, I don't even know why I'm calling you. I know why I'm calling you, but I don't like you. I don't like anything about you. I am offended by every single post you make, but I am. I'm going to set that aside for just a moment because I've been struggling for years and I think I can learn something from you.

Wow.

And I said, I said, let's get our calendar out. I want to take you to lunch.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I took him to lunch and we talked. And by the end of that lunch, he said, I don't know why I don't like you. I don't know why I didn't like you. I, it's, it doesn't make any sense to me. I, I had this preconceived. I now, I'm, I'm now putting my own words because I, this isn't exactly how he said it, but this was the gist. I, I, he effectively said I had a preconceived idea. I thoroughly believed it to the point where I wouldn't have any reason to, to research it. And I moved on with life with that preconceived idea, even though it was wrong. And, and now he's a coaching client. So it totally turned around from someone who is bothered and totally bothered and offended by my posts to someone who is taking my advice.

What were some of the things that he was, like, offended by and that he kind of came around to? I think, like, so, like, specifics.

Well, he said everything, so I didn't, he didn't bring up anything in specifically, but he literally said everything. In fact, that, that part he, he wrote. Because he started off his, the, the reaching out that he did to me was. And, and I, I, I think I implied that it was a phone call. It was a Messenger, Facebook messenger message, and he, he wrote that. But that's when I responded by saying, let's, let's, let's go have lunch. And I do that. I take a photographer to lunch every once a week. That particular week, it was two, because I had already taken someone to lunch that week. But, yeah, it's pretty. Pretty amazing how things change. And now I am seeing a lot of positive action in his, you know, from coming from him. Whereas before, it seemed like he was just upset about things and everything seemed to upset him and make him cranky and angry. And there's. There's no positive when you're pouring negative into your tank. So he's.

He.

He was pouring negative into his tank thinking that that was. That was right, and it was. It was correct for him. And I'm not saying he doesn't do it at all anymore. I'm just saying there's a lot more positive coming from him.

Right. Totally. That's amazing. And I'll ask you this.

I.

Some of your messaging. So, like, for instance, a lot of my coaches and trainers and mentors, they are like, you know.

They.

They naturally have a bent towards people pleasing.

Yeah.

And a bent towards. They don't want to upset anybody. They don't want to offend anybody. But what's amazing is just from your story that you just shared there, this person who was offended by what you said and didn't like you actually came around, became a client, and became one of your biggest fans. And so, like, how does that work? And how does somebody get to that place? How did you get to that place where, like, a. You weren't reactive or judgmental of him saying that? I think that that's a. That's a powerful testament to what kind of man, coach and mentor you are that you weren't immediately like, well, screw you then, dude. And I've. I've struggled with that attitude when people, like, come to me and say that. I've gotten a lot better at it. But, like, I'm like, okay, the reason they're saying this has to do with them, not me. And so that is tough.

You're right, because we all have feelings, and we are absolutely influenced and affected by those feelings. So no matter how positive a person we are or we think we are, we're affected by those. Those negative feelings. And they. Initially, I think that it's out of our control. I think that it just, boom, we have a reaction. But our subsequent actions are completely and totally our own. I mean, if I was. If I was angry with someone and, you know, there was maybe a situation between me and another person, we were working together, or maybe it's a spouse, maybe it's a friend, whatever. But you have words. If. If that person reacts to you, then with anger in return. Makes sense why someone would do that. But if someone. If Someone were angry with me and share me their story. If I, I want to think about it in a slightly different way. If they were speaking to me in a different language, a language I don't know, I don't have any relationship to whatsoever, they are getting angry with me in that language. I don't know what it is they're saying. I might even think it sounds funny and laugh about it. So therefore it isn't their words. It isn't, it isn't them that's causing me a problem. It's internal. It's me. It's the words. It's. It's me using those words inside of me and getting, get, getting upset about it. Because if they, if they did, if that same individual getting upset with me in a different language, I would not have had that reaction.

Wow.

It was because of how I received it that I had that reaction.

That's powerful.

So I, I don't know if that doesn't, I mean that's, oh, that's, that's one way to look at it. But reality is we have our initial reactions and we get angry and it makes us, it clouds our judgment at that point.

What I've learned just in my own journey as somebody, I've been somebody who over the years and there's people that have known me for years, they followed me, they remember when I was this way, They've seen it where somebody could say something to me in just the right way and I would verbally react and kind of go crazy and almost lose self control in that. And I actually vulnerably and confidently share that about how I used to be. Because I've had to learn exactly what you said. It wasn't what they said, it was what was inside of me, the meaning that I applied to it. And, and usually that meaning for me came up based off of some situation, whether it be my childhood, teenage years, past interactions with, with, with people like those people, you know, men that remind me of guys at church when I was growing up that were, looking back it a very healthy situation. Just things like that, like whatever it is, people, they were in school and they were bullied. And so like our reaction reminds us of these, of these situations and we apply meaning that isn't even there to somebody else who they're, they're applying meaning themselves to it. And so when we can, when we can learn that internal game, I think that's really important. And to learn, to learn self control. One of my favorite things as well is I love reading at least once a Month listening through, usually on YouTube, like a summary of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

No.

Have you ever. Have you ever gone through those?

No.

Really? Cool.

I'm curious.

Yeah, there's like 30 minute videos on YouTube about it. And you know who Marcus Aurelius was, though?

Yeah, yeah.

So he was the Roman Emperor.

Roman went to Egypt and was with Cleopatra and he.

He wrote down his journal and they're called the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. And it's been translated over the years around Stoic philosophy. And the. One of the biggest things is about not letting other people's opinions knock us off track while still being humble and being able to operate. How does a Roman emperor operate in that way? You have thousands of people in your empire that hate you. And so he literally talks about that. And it's so weird. It's from 2,000 years ago, and yet it feels like you're reading a personal development book written last year about what we're going through as business owners from this guy. And so it's some of the greatest writings on this topic. It kind of, when I read it, it snaps me, like right into order as far as, like, not really worrying as much about what people think. I had somebody about a year ago, I was telling them about the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and they immediately reacted and said, that's some of the worst teaching out there and it will ruin you and ruin all your relationships. And it's funny, I. I took to heart what he said and I erased a lot of that from my mind. And as soon as I picked it back up about three months ago, I was like, no, this is. I let that other person's opinion actually dictate that to me and literally shape my brain for like two years off of what one person said that wasn't even true based off of what they thought. So it's amazing how we try to be liked by other people and we change the way that we think and we do certain things and that comes right into our businesses to where, if you're a coach, if you're a trainer, if you're a photographer, if you're an artist, you don't put yourself out there, you don't get clients because we're afraid of how people will react to us, the fear of the unknown. Do you. Do you find that a lot of photographers and artists are afraid of. They're not sure if people are going to pay them, so they're afraid to actually ask to be paid.

That's a good a Very good question. They, they, okay, we humans come with preconceived ideas. We just do. And one of those is on that sales side that they don't feel like they have a negative interpretation of what salesperson is. They're saying, they're saying the slick. They're thinking the slick salesperson, the person who has the quick one liners, who's trying to persuade you to buy something that you don't need, you don't want, and you can't afford. And so they've got that preconceived idea in their head. Sales is bad, which is insane because sales is the ultimate in helping another person. It's helping someone else get what it is that they want or need. That's what sales is. But man, we artists, I don't know, I'm sure it's just a human thing, but I, we creatives, which is how I generally refer to us. Yeah, we created. Had this negative connotation of sales. And so when we do it, we start, I don't know, we judge ourselves and, and we are concerned about how other people think and we want people to be able to, to. We, we feel like we're supposed to help people afford it. But in my opinion, getting into their finances, unless that's your job, is rude. Yeah, it's not up to me to decide what they value. I. My job is to make sure I value me and what I care about enough to charge an amount that causes me to be able to reach my goals and causes my family to be able to reach whatever it is that we want to reach. And whatever that cost is, that's what I have to charge my clients in order to reach that goal. Now what someone else values is theirs. It is totally theirs. It's mean of me. It's rude of me to jump in and say I need to make it more affordable for you because you can't afford it. How rude.

Ooh, you. You just hit something that I never heard somebody articulated that way before. And that's honestly some of the best sales content in like a minute. I'm gonna, I might have to clip that. And I'll send you the recording of this podcast too. You can clip it for some of your content for your people. Honestly, that was like the one of the best one liners about sales I've ever heard. Because it's true. Like, who is, who are we to say, oh, they can't afford it? Yeah, who are we to say that they can't? And I think offering like certain financing and stuff there's different things that we can do that for sure to help people, but not devaluing ourselves. As long as we're not doing it to devalue ourselves. That's so important. My mind is just actually kind of blown by, by what you said is I've always heard like we, if we know we can help somebody, we have a moral obligation to, to offer them that help. But we, but we need to charge for it instead of saying I'm going to do it for free and sometimes somebody needs to pay for it to actually get it. I do a lot of like free events and podcasts and stuff. And, and I was wanting in the beginning of this business. So I had built a couple of eight figure coaching businesses before, but then I was like, when I went off on my own, I was like, you know what, I want to help as many people and I'm going to just give everything away for free. And I found that, that 95 of people that were listening to my free content weren't doing anything with it and only. And the ones that were actually making money working with me were paying me a lot of money to work with me. And so I realized I'm actually doing a disservice to the people that I'm coaching by doing that, by giving away so much for free. I was doing like hour long phone calls. I did them with 450 people in a year. Now what's cool is I got a lot of data about my target customer. I've used that and that's helped me pivot my business into the right niche, which is awesome. But you can do that a lot faster. Like I'm running a five day event right now to help people build their own six figure coaching business. When somebody joins that event, the first question that's asked is actually, let me see what the, what the, what the question is. What is your number one problem that keeps you up at night from building a coaching business? And what would you love to learn in these five days? And so I actually have, I'm on my computer right here, over 19 pages of 200 people's responses to those two questions that I've gathered in the last 48 hours.

Nice.

Now here's what's crazy about that. The answers to those questions identified a lane of content that I haven't been addressing in over four years. This podcast right here now is addressing that lane of content. And so I immediately have pivoted and adjusted all of my content to what people actually want. I didn't have to hop on 450 calls with people to do that. It took 48 hours of just getting people into a Facebook group for an event to do that. And so I use that as a way to build trust with people and to do market research. And then we adjust our messaging based off of that so that we're finally finding the lane of people and the exact words. What I'll use is I'll use a tool like Jasper AI. I love Jasper AI. I talk about it, I'll take the answers from these people and I'll filter it through Jasper and then Jasper will actually generate the offer copy for my offers and generate titles for my content and my podcast episodes.

That's fantastic.

All using AI in less than like it takes. And that maybe takes me like a half hour to do. And so a lot of people, I think coaches, trainers, mentors, you don't have to work as hard to make money. I think a lot of times we think that we need to work more hours to make money, that we need to make more hours. Do you find that's the case with the people that you work with, that they think to make more money means more hours of work? And is that true? Maybe in the beginning, but not long term?

Yeah, it's, it's interesting because with, I'm definitely have all types who, who I, who I get to, I, I get the privilege of working with and some of them are very much on the. I, I only want to do this a certain number of hours per week. Maybe, maybe it's. Moms do it while their kids are in school and so they have between 9:30 and 3:00 clock to be able to do their business and, and, but that's not the norm. There's a handful of those and I find them fascinating. I just think they're. How, how do you, how do you make that work? And it's fantastic that you, that you are making that work and it's, it's fun helping them, but that's, that's a smaller percentage. So the majority, even though they, they may have kids in school, are, are working it like a regular job, but they're doing it in the evenings sometimes after the kids have gone to bed when they're doing their, I call artwork, retouching and organizing of their images. And it's amazing for a photographer the amount of time that's invested that is unseen. It's usually about a 10 to a 20 to 1 ratio. And so if you see your photographer for an hour, I guarantee you they're putting in 10 hours worth of work in order to make that one hour look good in order to make it happen. Because there's just a massive amount of stuff that goes into it. And photography is one of those interesting things that you could learn that you'll never learn all there is to know. It's not possible. If you, if, if someone has an interest and they stopped doing everything and made photography education just learning photography their only thing they did, they could study for the rest of their life.

Right.

Still not learn all there is to know. There's just too much to know.

With sales and marketing too.

Yeah, yeah, it's that way with always.

More any, any industry, any niche. I, I've been exploring storytelling, how to write novels and doing that. I've, I've been reading through like 20 different novels just to get the art form of how to tell us a story, like a fiction story. And I'm like a barely scratching the surface of like, okay, how does, how does fiction actually work? That's so true. You can always learn that. But when it comes to implementing, when it comes to taking action to get more clients, to get more people to pay you money and to increase your income, does that always take more hours or what does that take?

No, you're right about it. In the beginning. It, you do need to, to think this through and do not do this alone. It's a waste of time to do this alone. Get a coach, get visit with someone who's doing this before and, and I don't know about other industries, but in, in photography, 90% of all photographers have a price that's so low they don't even give themselves potential to have an income. And about 60% of them don't even know it. They're totally oblivious to it. They're thinking, I, I just, I charged $200 for, and I, I don't charge this, I'm, I'm saying someone else. Yeah, $200 for a session. I, I can pretty much do that. I, I, it depends. There are exceptions, but for the most part I can mathematically prove you're one of the ones going out of business. 200 is not going to cause you to make it happen. It's just not. Yeah, so what do they need to.

Charge to actually be in business?

Like, no, everyone's, everyone of course is different because they, they do different, require different amounts of time. But you know, I mean, we could just pull out a calculator and figure it out. You know, if someone wants this as their full time job versus someone who just wants it as a part time.

Or inflation now everything's costing it is.

Yeah, no kidding, throw that stuff in. But if someone wants to do it as a, as a full time job, I start off with the end result by, by asking what do they want out of this life? What, what kind of variables are important to them? And I have a, I've got something that, and I guess I have it handy enough where I could just show you, I've got this life goals chart and they just write down what it is that's important to them. So These are the 11 categories that I find important. And if they do too, they put something in there, whatever's important to them and then put an amount to it and in, and then timeline it. I want them to, to define for themselves when they want these things so that they know how much money they're going to need in order to make it happen and when they're going to need that money. Because that's the only way your pricing should be done. You shouldn't base your pricing on what other photographers are charging. It's irrelevant what others are charging because if you're charging what they charge, but it doesn't cause you to reach your goal, then what, what good is it? It's ridiculous. So you have to do the things that cause you to reach your goals. You cannot do this on your own. You can't. Yeah, you can, but it'll take you a decade to two decades in order to get to that point. And do you really have that kind of time? You don't. You don't.

Yeah, you don't.

You need to work with somebody, you need a coach, you, you need some. And I mentioned earlier, about 90% of photographers have a price that's so low that you're not going, that they don't make a profit. So how do you know that you're going to the right person for advice? 90% of the 90% chance you go into the wrong person for advice. And so if you go to other photographers websites and check out what they're doing, which you should, I mean that's a curiosity thing. You're curious as to what they do. But just like their words shouldn't influence you, neither should their price list. If they have a marketing system that's working, success leaves clues. I think you told me that success leaves clues. So they're therefore, yeah, learned from it. But don't be influenced by their pricing because their pricing is theirs. And if they've done it right, it's based off of their wants, their Dreams, their goals and their loved ones and yours should be also, it should have nothing to do with theirs. So we define, you know, what is it that I need to, to make in the long run. And then break that down into how much do I need? All the way down to how much do I need to make this year or how much do I need to make next year and how do I, how do I form a path to get there?

I want to say what you just shared here, that right there, I'm probably going to even borrow a little bit of that with some of my group coaching and even in my building, a six figure coaching thing is I, I tell people to imagine like making a certain income level, but I think they also need to get real with their goals. Do you find a lot of people actually have never thought about their goals before?

Oh, everybody says that, yeah.

Really?

It's rare, it's rare that I come across someone who has done anything even slightly in that direction.

Interesting. I've been, I've been in this space. My mind is actually, I'm learning something right now. I've, I've been so indoctrinated with goals, goals, goals my whole life that I just assumed everybody else was. And so I, right there, I, I'm gonna start talking more about goals in the beginning with people when they find their niche, what their pricing is and all that is really what are your goals? And what I love to do is, is I love to help people build a six figure income, seven figure coaching income, even an eight figure income. And I've seen this, my, my mom is a great example of this because this is what I grew up around, eight figure coaching business, working five hours a week because that's the life that she's wanted and doing so without a bunch of employees either. And so how do you got to price stuff to do that? How do you got to structure things to be able to do that? And so that's a lot of the model that, that I help people with is, you know, if you want to, if you want to work only 5 to 10 hours a week now in the beginning, you're going to have to grind it out. You might have to work some late nights and do that. But once the system starts kicking in, I usually tell people in the coaching business, once you're making over about 30,000 consistently a month, you can automate most of the stuff. And it's very easy to get to that level once you figure out your messaging. And so that's powerful though, about the goals. I think Those that are listening to this right now, go back and maybe even can you show that screen where what those goals are? I'd love even people to pause the podcast episode if they're watching the video version of this, just to pause it on this and, and kind of list those. If you're listening, it says what are your health goals? What are your travel goals? What about contribution and charity, Hobbies, play and rest, social goals, friends, relationships, family, career, financial, home car stuff. What's the, does that say? Oh, mental, emotional and spiritual goals. And so think about those. You can, you can put that back down now. Think about those in your own life is and get real with those. You have to create the life and the person that you want to be first and start with the end in mind. I think that's so important. A lot of my early podcast episodes talked about that more than anything. If people go back through some of the early podcasts, I talked about your purpose and finding a business that fits your purpose and I really broke a lot of that down. I haven't touched on that in a long time though because I focused more on the marketing side of things. But I think that's important to not skip over. So just thank you for bringing that here, Jim. And anybody who's listening to this podcast is going to get a lot of value out of that. Any, any other closing thoughts that you want to share just for people that are. They, they, they want to coach, they want to serve people, they want to have an impact and ultimately make a full time income doing so. Any other advice that you give them before we close here?

Yeah, and I'm going to, to read this because I don't want to skip anything. Yeah, but let's see, there's. There's three things actually I add more to it, but there's, let's do four. There's four steps to reaching your goals in, in my opinion. One is determine your destination. That's the, the life goals that I'm talking about. The second is to plan your path. The third, get on that path with passion, dedication and an appropriate amount of stubbornness. And number four, adjust as needed because it's not set in stone and things change.

That's good. I think a lot of people are afraid to adjust as needed too because they're like, does that make me a failure? Does that make me a failure that I adjusted as needed? That makes you intelligent ask people that question. My, my mom is a great example of this and, and Rick Pino, 2, 2 great examples of this. Adjust as needed in their coaching businesses. So my mom was teaching social media and Facebook ads and a lot of that. And she, she pivoted into teaching the stock market and increased her income by 500%. So she adjusted to a different niche that she actually just learned two years ago. But she's gotten really good at because she literally became obsessed with and learned everything and dedicated every hour of her day to and, and her coaching income 5x and she's then pouring that into the stock market and growing that with like that. It's amazing if anybody wants to trade stocks. Like she's, she's probably one of the, one of the maverick like most easy to understand people because she's super technical. She's just like anybody else and she breaks it down in a very easy way. Now Rick Pino, his was interesting. He started as his coaching was mostly just spirituality coaching, Christian Bible teaching around worship. And so it had nothing to do with like music industry. And he actually said, I don't want to do anything with music industry. I just want to help people with the Bible aspect of it. And he, but, but everybody was asking him like, hey, like I want to learn how to write songs. And as soon as he pivoted and finally was like, you know what? Like, okay, I've done this for four years. And this is what he said. He said there's like six or seven other people now that are teaching worship, Bible teaching and they're teaching it as good as I am. So I feel good about now pivoting into helping people write songs because I helped start people teaching this stuff and influenced a lot of people to teach it themselves. That's one thing as a coach is that you'll find my mom found the same thing. She was one of the first teaching social media. Now everybody is teaching social media. So she's like, what more can I teach? Let me find something else. She's found that there's a lot of misinformation in the stock market and teaching. And so she's changing that, that industry as well. And so that's what happened with Rick. When he pivoted instantly eight figures. It went right up to the eight figure level by giving people what they wanted. Even though it went against what he wanted to give people. It was listening to people. And he still includes a ton of the spirituality training that he wants to into that because he feels it's foundational. But people are more willing to pay more money because it's more, it's more business related versus just let's, let's Study the Bible together type of a thing. At that level, he was given stuff away for like a dollar. You know, here's it's a dollar, it's 27 bucks for like the whole thing. And now it's like to even work with him on the songwriting levels, $12,500 minimum. And that was what was able to take him to that eight figure level is by figuring that out and working on the messaging. And so a, don't be afraid to charge what you're worth. Don't be afraid to pivot and adjust your niche as you learn new information and say, hey, maybe, okay, this group of people is going to make me more money. I did this in this business, my own business. I4X'd our income in my coaching business since January. That's pivoting only to helping coaches, mentors, trainers and authors.

Nice.

Which is interesting. Everybody that I've helped over the last 19 years, the ones that I've actually gotten results for were in that lane. But I was like, I want to help everybody make money on the Internet. And so I had a lot of confused and unfortunately a few disappointed people who came to me for E commerce and affiliate marketing and network marketing and, and I'm not an expert in those fields, but the ones who came to me for the coaching niche, they started to grow and get the positive results. I said, okay, I need to just focus on this niche of people and I'm even finding more and more where I need to niche down even more. I'm still testing a few things out. And that's how you do it. You look at the data and you do pattern recognition. Okay, what is the pattern across the people who are coming to me? What is the specific pattern of the ones that are most successful and the ones that have paid me the most money? And when there's a specific pattern where those two things are in mind. Now the only way you're going to find that data is by actually putting your stuff out there. If you've never put anything out there, you have no way of identifying that data. You can observe other people's businesses, but you don't have it for your own data. Once you've done that for your own business, you can really identify what is it going to take to easily create a six figure income on autopilot. I just launched my group coaching program and it's already a six figure recurring income source for me over over $8333 a month coming in in the first two weeks of launching it because I identified exactly what the niche was, exactly what people want. And now I want to grow it. I'm going to 10x that to where it's a seven figure recurring income source in the next six to 12 months. And that's what I think any coach or trainer can do. But it takes being willing to adjust, being willing to pivot, being willing to be a little bit uncomfortable, maybe have uncomfortable conversations with people, being willing to have haters instead of trying to make everybody happy. And I think that's what's going to help take people to the level that they need to be financially. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Makes total sense.

That's awesome.

I couldn't say it any better.

So you're awesome. Jim, I appreciate you being here. I think, I think we might have to have you back too, in a couple months. You just, you have so many, like, pearls of wisdom to share with people that like. And that's what I love when somebody's like, man, like, how long have you been doing this for?

I, I've been teaching since 97, but the business side, since 2009.

Yeah, that's a long time in this industry. That's a long time. It really is. And, and you've learned a lot of stuff that like, I'm telling you, you know, you know, stuff that as like the top 1% know about what it takes. And, and so I appreciate the value that you're bringing here. This is incredible. Thank you so much for just your time today. And I think this is really going to bless the podcast listeners.

Well, I appreciate you saying that, Jeremiah, and I, I feel honored to have been asked to, to be on your show and to spend time with you and hear your words of wisdom because you, you have a lot to share. And I've, I've learned a lot from, from you and you know, watching the things that you're doing and being part of, of what you do. And so I, I am blessed to, to know you and, and I value that relationship.

Well, thank you for that. Where can people find you online?

Landers photo school dot com.

Okay. Landers photo school dot com. And then what's the one that's like you have portrait profits. What's that?

Yes, portrait profits. And you can go to portraitprofits.com too. But I have a weekly show that I do for photographers and it's on the business side. It's also a little on the philosophy side because one of our most recent ones was called People Pleasers that was probably about two, three weeks ago. It was Pretty recent.

I think a lot of the listeners of this podcast, even if you're not a photographer, but you're in the art space specifically, could really benefit from even just plugging in. And maybe you could learn photography from Jim and find a new love and a new art that you never knew that you had had inside of you. I. I'd encourage anybody to do that.

So that. That's at facebook.com forward/portraitprofits.

Awesome. That's great. Well, thank you for being here. And listen, those of you that are listening to this podcast, if this has helped you in any way, make sure that you share it. Don't keep this information to yourself. That's the biggest thing that I'd ask you. This podcast is free and we're giving you, like, high level training in this. Like you, you what you just got out of this one episode. People pay a lot of money for. And because it's free, not a lot of people apply it because they're like, oh, it was free. But like, those that do apply it, if you take even just one nugget away from this, your business could explode in the next month. And so share this with others and think about jumping into one of the live events that I'm doing. If you're a coach, if you're a trainer, and you want to know, how do I grow my business to six or seven figures, as well as the client growth accelerator where I get to work with you in a group coaching setting to help you grow your business and to get more clients. All right, everybody, grow your life and we'll talk soon. Have a good one.