How to Grow a Brand Photography Business

Welcome everybody. This is the first episode of Fix Your Business with me, Robin Waite, founder of Fearless Business. So this is essentially a coaching program. I'm thinking that maybe even it's the first of its kind, CJ. So we're kind of breaking new ground here, which is quite exciting.

Definitely.

So hello, welcome. Let's just kick things off. So I've put a little bit about your biography in the video notes. So I want to just dive straight in and focus on the business side of things. So can you give everybody just a quick 60-second précis of what it is that you do?

Yep. So I have 2 creative businesses. I have a photography studio in the Southwest and I have a clothing brand that works with creatives which focuses on putting your personal brand on your clothing in order to maximize impact. When you're out working. So that started mainly through the photography. So I have a large amount of UK photographers, and I also have a big following of international photographers now. Some really big international photographers that I'm lucky enough to be able to call my friends as well. They choose to wear the brand when they go live and on all their social medias, which is brilliant. And I'm just in the process now of trying to pull the two together, working more with brands and businesses in the photography side, launching personal branding photography. I was lucky enough to work with a photographer last year who's fantastic up in Leeds. She did some great product shots and photography shots for Fotis, which was brilliant. And quite nerve-wracking as a photographer being on the other side of the camera, and I think for her photographing another photographer. But we had a fantastic day, and I think that really kind of pulled together and cemented to me the importance of umbrellaring these 2 businesses now. So bringing the photography together, the branding, some training ideas, and, you know, really pulling on my background, which is I used to work in London and Bristol as a graphic designer. I've been in teaching. So bringing it all together under one umbrella and just building a complete brand service that people can come to me from consultation to final delivery.

We're gonna— let's say for example you sort all of my branding out, right? Ballpark, make it— make a number up, be brave. How much is that gonna cost me?

I don't know.

Make it up, just throw a number at me.

If I was working on a personalised photography shoot, if I was looking at your social medias, if I was guiding you with how your branding could look, then I'm guessing we would probably, based on what my photography prices would be in a normal shoot, around £2,000, £2,500.

Okay, so second observation. Okay, and this might be a little bit of a— I'm hoping this will be a bit of a moment of realization for you. So let's say, for example, if it was 2.5K. In fact, I'm just going to try and share my screen a second. Hopefully this will work, and then, right.

I mean, in terms of—

Can you see this okay?

Yep.

Right, that's, that's my notes basically as I've been, as we've been going through and you've been describing your product. So we've got an idea over here about what turnover you're currently getting, what turnover you would like. And as we kind of, I mean, these, these are rough notes by the way. It's not, it's not an exact science, but you'll get a picture of where I'm going with this. If you've got a product at $2.5K, that means you only need to be working with 2 clients a month. One business, one product, 2 clients a month. Okay? Now, one of the things you said to me is, well, actually, at the moment, I'm currently kind of pushing 8 to 10 clients. I know that includes all the different areas of your business, but 8 to 10 clients per month. So one of the things which I talk a lot about is 3 ways to grow your business. So the first one is, could we do Um, double our turnover but with the same number of clients? Could we do the same turnover but with half the number of clients? Or best case scenario, could we double our turnover and half the number of clients we're working with? Now in this instance, if you're talking about just 2 clients per month, which gives you your $5K per month turnover, or goal, the goal which you want in terms of your turnover, that's actually a fifth Of the number of clients you're currently working with. Makes sense?

Yeah, so you're my 8 to 10, excuse me, my 8 to 10 there was working on photography.

Yeah.

So I think the businesses, how they differ is I can have less photography clients with most of them averaging between a £550 and a £750 spend.

Yep.

But then obviously the clothing side of it, it's more on volume.

But less money.

Yeah, which I totally get. Now I'm thinking with this branding product, so I always recommend to people you can have between 3 and 5 core products.

Okay?

So it could be that actually, so first of all, you could have an audit here, which, or consultation as you called it, could be free. So it's like a try before you buy. And I'm going to go through some slightly different numbers in a minute about how much business you need to be pushing through in order to kind of make you know, achieve your goals basically. So it could be free. You could also charge for it. So it could be that actually you have an audit process that is maybe £500. Okay, so that's just for me to review everything you've got currently and to give you a one-page summary of where we think that we can make some progress for your brand. Now I want you to, if you've got a notepad handy, I want you to write something down. You need to become a master at working out The return on investment, the ROI. So you need to become a master or mistress at working out the return on investment that your clients are gonna get through working with you. Okay? Now imagine if you go through and rebrand me or help me to, like, you go through your audit process, we get some amazing brand photography done, our social media is totally consistent, online, offline, visually I look awesome. And my program costs $3K, right? So if you— if through doing that, somebody comes up and says, look, your branding is brilliant, I'd love to look like you, can I work with you? I've just got an ROI on a $2.5K product. Okay? So that's almost like a no-brainer for somebody to drop $2.5K on the full suite. And it might be that, for example— shut up, Siri, stop talking to me. It might be, for example, that actually if you then do— we've got the audit consultation process. Next thing, if they've already got branding in place and they just need a social media audit to make sure everything's consistent, well, could that be, I don't know, let's— I'm putting some random numbers here. Pricing, there's no real science to it. We don't look at the competition. Let's say that package is £800. If we then add brand photography on top of it, how much if somebody was to do a photo shoot, did you say?

If all my clients are working with me currently, Without them buying any products, for the digitals it'd be £550 to £600.

No, I know.

Yep, so it might be for social media pack plus brand photography, could that be more like, I don't know, £1,500? So we've got what we're building up is like gold, silver, bronze, or packages A, B, and C, or whatever you want to call it. So I mean, the difference there is only £700. That's probably not enough actually. I'd maybe even bump that up to £1,800. And then one of the things you could do is then, okay, so social media is kind of your online stuff, so that might actually be included there anyway, but then we start to move into the offline stuff, which is where you then start to talk about t-shirts, bottles, physical stuff. If you've got clients who go to exhibitions, how can we make your exhibition reflect your brand well? All of that side of it. And then, I mean, that could be for the full package, actually more like 3K, 4K, 5K, doesn't matter. Yeah? So what we're doing is we're starting to build up tiers of products that— it says recorded, you don't need to take screenshots. I'm joking.

My notes now look like this already.

Amazing. So we're making some progress here, I hope. Is this the sort of thing that hopefully you were expecting? Is this useful?

Yeah, definitely. Great.

I know what I want in my head, but you know, this is a little bit of a crazy place.

Yeah.

So being able to just break it down, and I suppose in a way trying to justify, like, I know that my shoot pricing and the structure for that is where it is. I also know that whilst having put it up, my clientele went down, but that is okay because my focus is to push products because I want my clients to have artwork on the walls. You know, these things with the t-shirt and the branding, it's just having, like I said to you, like these 8 plates spinning. And I know that it can pull together, but I also know that I'm overcomplicating it an awful lot. And I just, yeah, I need you and that structure to be able to say, this is, you know, this is what you need to do.

Yeah.

So this is great.

Excellent. So you can see here what we're starting to do is build up a suite of products. Now, I always recommend 3 to 5 core products. It might be that You don't want to go through and like create a massive long list of features for each one of these. It's just got to be the headline stuff like I've just done there, basically. So you have your basic package, like your starter kit. You have your one where you also then start to work on their photos, and then your, you know, all of the printed stuff offline. That links nicely, dovetails into Fotis in terms of that side of your business. The next step in terms of one of the things you asked about at the start was recurring. How could you create some more sustainable revenue? Well, it could be that once you've taken people through having one of these products, you almost loop back on that audit product and you have what we call a done-for-you monthly audit.

Mm-hmm.

So what we'll actually do is as you're putting out content online, doing videos, if you're blogging, if we see you at an event, if we see you in a magazine or things like that, We'll just produce a report for you once a month which will go through and look at your brand and give you half a dozen to a dozen pointers on areas maybe where it could either be better or you've got the branding wrong or it's not consistent. And could that be, I don't know, let's say for example it's £250 a month per client. Okay, now all of a sudden One of the beautiful things about when you package stuff up, you don't need to put any of these prices on your website or in brochures or anything like that. When somebody comes through your initial sort of— I don't want to talk too much about the marketing side of things necessarily, but when they come through, maybe they see you at a show or want to book in that initial conversation with you, you know, the conversation up here, and by the time you've done your fact-find You then— this is another thing which I want to write down, I want you to write down, which is quite important. The best way to sell anything is using this statement which I'm about to give you. So based on what you put into our assessment and what we've just discussed during your consultation, the package that I would recommend for you is package B. Give you a chance to write that down.

Say again.

So based on what you put in your assessment form and what we've just discussed during your consultation, the package I would recommend for you would be Package B, and these are the reasons why. Now obviously, if C is the right package, you recommend that one. They might be going, oh, I just want the cheap and dirty one. No, no, you've told me that you want to attract clients into your business. You've told me that you want your turnover to increase next year by £50,000. pounds because of X, Y, and Z. You can't get that through just making your social media look nice. Everything needs to look nice. If one piece of your branding breaks, it breaks the sales cycle for your client. You'll lose the client. That's why I'm recommending Package B. The beautiful thing about this is that you could be doing a consultation now and pitch it at £1,800. If you're feeling confident and buoyant, you could Do another one tomorrow and pitch it at $2.5K. So you can actually validate at different price points. Make sense?

Yeah.

A lot of people when they get— when it comes down to pricing just get super stuck on, I can only put my prices up once a year. No, no. We keep on testing and validating our prices until we hit a point which A, makes our business stand up economically, And B, there is a market, there's demand out there for it. The Guinness World Record, believe it or not, Guinness World Record, the most amount somebody has ever paid for a haircut, £8,000. What an idiot. But there is somebody out there who paid £8,000. So somebody was— I was in a hair salon. Somebody was talking about the fact that the hairdresser's prices were too cheap. It was like 25 quid for a haircut and color and all sorts of stuff. way too cheap. I don't know much about women's hair, but too cheap. And even somebody in the room said, well, I'd pay £100 for that. Why is it just £25? Oh, well, that's what I would pay. So a lot of people price stuff based on what they would pay, not what the market would demand. And when I said to her, well, look, I quickly Googled, you know, most expensive haircut. It came up Google, you know, Guinness World Record. She didn't believe me. I was like, it's in a book. It's in writing. That somebody paid £8,000. It's like there's a bandwidth here between £25 and £8,000.

Yeah.

She just could not get it. And actually, you know, she's the sort of person who will struggle with business, will never quite, you know, she'll never go out there and even test it. She won't open up a hair salon next week and charge £35 instead of £25. And I remember going to another client who sold sheds, and I mystery shopped their business on behalf of their clients. So what I did is I actually pretended to be a salesperson for a morning on their forecourt because they were really struggling in their business and couldn't work out how to make more money. Somebody walked up onto their forecourt and said, well, actually, we came here because we want a new home office, but actually these are sheds. We're not really sure whether they're right or not. And I was like, If there was a cedar-clad studio with bifold doors, is that the sort of thing you're after? They're like, yeah, of course, that's what we want. So I sold, took a deposit for them there and then, went running into Dan and said, Dan, Dan, Dan, you need to knock down 3 sheds and build this cedar-clad studio so people can actually see this thing, because you're losing business.

Yeah.

And actually, they very quickly shifted. They took a couple of deposits on top of mine as well. Sorry, I was just about to wake that up. They took a couple of deposits on top of mine within the first 2 months of actually starting to build this garden studio. So people have got to see the value.

Yeah.

So great. So now we've got— and we'll go back to your goal again. So we were talking about hitting— so what was it, about £4,500 a month revenue? Let's call it— let's round it up to £5K. So now all of a sudden, if you— let's say for example, if you had, I don't know, 10 clients Who are on your monthly audit package.

Mm-hmm.

And you've got to get those first, obviously. That's, that's probably something for another day. But then you sold one of your platinum products for $3K a month. You're actually at $5,500 a month. That's irrespective of your family Photography, irrespective of how much merchandise you sell. Okay? So it's one business, one market, 3 simple products. Well, 4 if you include the follow-on product. So that's what this is, follow-on product. And you've got your revenue there. How does that feel?

Sounds easy.

Do you want to know where people make the biggest mistake?

Yeah, they don't do it.

No, it's not that they don't do it. They do a whole load of stuff that they think is heading in the right direction. But the biggest mistake that they focus on is sales. Now, I know you're thinking, that's just dumb, Rob. Every business needs to have sales in order for it to survive. Yes, absolutely, you need to make money. But the issue with just focusing on sales is that we end up focusing on the wrong target.

Okay?

Mm-hmm. Now, if say, for example, your goal for your business was actually to get 2 clients a month, right? And we get to the end of the month, So that says conversions, by the way. So we get to the end of the month, right? And you've only sold one client. There's actually nothing you can do at that point to influence that number up or down. It's called a lag indicator because time has lagged. All the activity before it has lagged. We're stuck with one client. Lest we monumentally make a complete F-up, you know, we can't lose that client. We're stuck with one client, we can't make any more. But actually, imagine if we get, I don't know, halfway through the month, and we've been measuring our lead indicators. And I start this off with something called conversations. A bit like you joining a Facebook group, for example, and us just jumping into Messenger and saying, I'm doing this crazy thing, do you want to jump on? And, you know, whatever. That's the start of a conversation, albeit not necessarily as a direct client potential for my business. But it's the start of a conversation. From those 70 conversations, you then want to funnel them down into consultations. So this is the actual sales part of what you're doing. And actually, sales is that line there. Yeah? It's one small part of it. But imagine if we get halfway through the month, and actually I've only started 20 Messenger conversations with people. I've only booked 3 people onto consultations. I know that my lead indicator is starting to tell me that I'm falling short of hitting my lag indicator, my goal, my target. So we've got 2 choices at this point. One is to admit defeat and go, oh well, not going to make it. I'll just be happy with 1 client this month if, if I'm lucky. Or we double down on our activity focus on our target market, our audience that we've niched on, and getting people booked into those consultations. We need 7 more before the end of the month. Can we do that in 2 weeks? Probably. We just work bloody like Billy O to do it. If we're distracted by loads of other stuff going on because we're not terribly organised in our business, we're going to struggle to do that. So I think it's really important. This is why I'm telling you, like, giving you a few clues here about what you need to focus on. Most people focus on the sales because obviously we need money. But it actually gives us false information. And we— it's very binary. We either hit the goal or we don't. We either get the sales or we don't. And when we don't get them, we tend to beat ourselves up. And emotionally, it's a bit of a drain. Whereas actually, if I'm chipping away at the conversations, and if I get to the end of the month and I know that I've done my 70 and my 10 properly, but maybe I still only ended up with 1 sale, it doesn't mean I'm a bad salesperson. It just means that like clients are like buses. Sometimes 2 will come along at once. Sometimes none will come along, you know, when you want it to, when you're expecting it. But I'm content if I know that I've done consultations and conversations at the top end of it. I've done the work. Didn't work this month. Cool. Let's reset, start again next month, and off we go again. Makes sense?

Yeah.

I'm probably gonna bring it to a close there, 'cause we've gone way over time. We're up to 40 minutes on the live already, and Probably both of us want to go and enjoy some sunshine. How do you feel about things now?

Yeah, it's just— to be fair, it's just nice to talk to another creative, just to have an outside view of what's going on, because I think it's quite easy that you get so caught up in it, and people around you might just be going, you're doing too much, or you're spreading too wide, and you're like, no, no, I'm not, this is what I'm doing. But then, you know, once you're not with those people, you're like, how am I gonna do it?

Yeah.

How am I gonna break it down? Like, I've got all these pieces of paper everywhere, what's gonna happen first? Like, and there's no real plan. You think there's a plan, but the plan doesn't seem to progress to the next stage because you're very aware that you're not really there yet. So I think just being able to break it down into sections instead of trying to look at it, again, looking at it as a whole.

Yeah.

It's just breaking it down into different elements and, you know, like you say, it is hard to balance the two. So it's just trying to, like, I love my family and children side of the photography, but I know that I have another business that I can grow and expand so much more. My newborn photography, I have all my clients that are existing, I have new ones coming in. There are hard months when, you know, you're not bringing in and you are doing the marketing and all the things that you should be doing. Like you said, you're doing all that stuff, you're content that you've done it, but you don't have the shoots at the end.

Yeah.

It's enjoyable and I love it, but I see the branding and the personal branding side of this all pulling all my skills together, keeping it very varied for me. So, you know, you're not tiring of one aspect of what you enjoy doing.

Yeah, there has to be a repetitive sort of process as well which you've got to go through because that consistency is ultimately what gets clients. Otherwise, So there's a couple of little tips which I'm going to give you which I think will be helpful. So this is kind of like your homework. So if this was— if that branding side of things is an area where you want to focus on, and let's say for example the next 3 to 6 months, and hopefully we'll come through the crisis and things will start to— the market expands again, one of the things I'd recommend you do is put those 10 consultations I talked about that's going to get you those 2 clients Map it. So that's like 2 to 3 a week. Map in 2 empty consultation slots into your weekly diary. So I don't know if you use Google Calendar, Google Apps, or Office 365, but actually put in empty consultation slots. It just tells the mind, I've got empty consultation slots that I need to fill. It gamifies it. And then you'll be more incentivized to do it. What a lot of people, the biggest mistake people make in the sales cycle is they do all of the other stuff first, content creation, client work, delivery, and everything else. Then they slot in consultation slots around the rest of it. And it feels like we're busy fools rushing here, there, and everywhere. I have get shit done like periods in my diary where I will block book 4 or 5 consultations back to back. Bang, bang, bang. Done. Of that, it's predictable then. I know that out of some of that, I'm going to win some business. And at the end of every one of my get shit done sessions, I can come out of it going, yeah, I've got a new client or 2. It's predictable. But at the very beginning, you just want to put in 2 or 3 empty ones that you've then got to go out and fill. Next challenge is, how do you then go and find the clients then to book into those? Now, if you've already got a network, which it sounds like you have, that's relatively deep, you can start telling people stories about these fantastic new branding products which you've got and the sorts of return on investment that people can expect to get from them. So as a coach, coaches who typically go through my branding, my Platinum Branding products, will on average get an extra client a month. To the average coach, that is worth about £3,000 extra revenue a month. If that's something which you would be interested in, reach out. I've got some consultations available. So we tell a very different story. It's about getting the— you're into branding. It's about getting your messaging right, telling it up with your audience. Tell them what they want to hear. And from there, you'll then start to book in those consultations. And then we go into all the nuances around sales, like what happens on that consultation, how do you close a $3K product. That $3K product could easily be a $10K product in 12 months' time. Seriously. We test and we validate at a price point you feel comfortable. If $3K feels comfortable, start there. In 12 months' time, trust me, we work together, this is a potential opportunity, I'm not, this isn't a sales pitch. But, you know, or any other coach. There are other coaches out there, not Fearless Business. But we're good at what we do. But in 12 months' time, that could be a $10K product. Now you need one client, half the clients, and you're making double that $5K. And maybe your follow-on product is actually $500 a month, not $250 a month. There's tons of opportunity. It's just being open to that idea now.

Awesome. Amazing.

Cool. I'm gonna throw it back over to you. What are your last thoughts about the experience you've just had? Albeit it's much longer than I planned.

Yeah, sorry.

It's my fault, it's my fault.

It's really good. It's nice to have someone from the outside looking in. I also may or may have missed bits and bobs because this is the first live that I've done as well, so that's another challenge, and goal kind of ticked off for me. But it shows that it's feasible. It shows that you aren't— you haven't got your head in the clouds when you're trying to think, but sometimes you just need more clarity, and you need a better process with better time management, which I think just looking at how you can pad it out, knowing that you don't know the businesses, is quite reassuring that— it's comforting for me to know that I do have something that I can work with.

Yeah.

And I think it's a really good time in the year, not for the world, but for where my business is at the moment. I haven't started this yet. It's something that I've done 10% in maybe everything, and my goal is to bring it all together. So I think talking to you now is a massive help for how I try and look at it moving forward instead of maybe just using the next few weeks or God knows how long we're in a pandemic for mumbling along and not knowing if it's the right direction. So I think this is a massive help and the perfect time for us to have had this chat.

Great.

It's been really good.

Thank you. It's a really awesome piece of self-awareness which you just kind of which you just talked about there. I think that's quite hopefully a big moment of realisation for you. And I think in terms of my summary, I think if you can focus on one thing and do it really well and be patient with the other areas of your business, they're still there, they're still going to happen, you're still going to attract family photography in there, you're still going to be selling merchandise, the t-shirt side of things will still happen, but you need to focus just on one area. The other stuff will just it'll happen. And you just need to be patient in terms of building this up. And then when it gets you to a point whereby you have that lifestyle element of the business running and working really well for you, maybe you can pull in other experts to deliver on that. You can turn your attention back to the real passion projects, the, the stuff you're deeply passionate about, the family portraiture, the photography work which you do, and things like that. You know, that's not going away. We're not saying we just focus on this and don't do anything else. It's just about applying your energy in one area primarily and let the other stuff happen more naturally, and you'll be absolutely fine.

Which I think it generally has the last few months where my mindset's been clearer and more this way. So I think, yeah, I need to keep steering the way that my heart's going to as well.

Brilliant. CJ, it sounds like that's been helpful. Has it been helpful? Definitely.

Thank you so much. It's been brilliant.