← Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Ready For Slow Season? What to Focus on in Your Photography Business
00:15:43
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There is not one person walking this earth, including myself, that does not need a coach or does not need to follow a program that another coach built. There's nobody. Why? Because we need someone else to hold us accountable.
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Welcome to the Book More Clients Photography Podcast. You can stop spending hours on Google and YouTube because you just found your number one resource for growing a profitable and sustainable photography business. Hi, I'm Brooke Jefferson. I'm a believer wife, mama to two and Oklahoma family photographer. I left the classroom in 2018 to pursue my photography career full time. Now I'm here to help you do the same. In this podcast we're covering the most asked about topics including pricing, marketing, client experience, and all things systems and workflows. You won't find any fluff or BS here. Just tried and True Strategy Are you ready? Grab your kids some snacks and charge those camera batteries. It's time to jump in.
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Winter months are typically known for photographers over here in the United States as being slow season. It's a time when bookings naturally slow down, whether it's because of the holidays, the frigid weather or the new year. Let's chat about what to focus on during your slower season that will set you up for a successful year ahead and start getting you bookings right now. Hey friend, did you miss the most profitable year yet Workshop? You can catch the replay right now. This was a two hour workshop that I hosted where I helped photographers reflect on the past year, analyze their data, plan for 2025 and create strategy to hit their goals. You'll receive a data review worksheet that you can use again and again, a workbook to guide you through the workshop and the replay. Head to brookejefferson.com 2025 to watch. I didn't always utilize slow season to set me up for success. I just assumed that this was the way it was supposed to be. December through February. I would overwork myself in October and November so I could make up for that money that I knew wasn't coming in slow season. And then a couple years ago I decided to get more strategic with what I worked on during the slow season and see if I could book sessions during the winter. And to my surprise, it worked. So let's get into some points here about how to really utilize your slow season so that you can one Prep your business for a really profitable year. And two I want you to really focus on ways that are going to help you book more clients, even right now. So the first point that I really want to talk about is this. I think it is crucial for you to utilize your slow season to take a break. Okay, wait, what? Brooke, you just said that you were going to tell me how to set myself up for success. Yes. And this is one of those ways. I want you to pick one month out of the year where you are going to intentionally slow down. Your mental health needs it. Your creativity needs this. If we are on all the time 12 months out of the year and then all of a sudden we press the restart button and we do it again, and we do it again and we do it again. You get the drift? You are going to burn out. And so it's very important that you intentionally choose one month out of the year and you, yes, you could break this up. But just for simplicity, I used to take December's off and that was my. That was like my major slow month. And this year, in 2025, I'm actually going to utilize January for that slower season. December just happened to be a month. Like I've never seen it before. I have more bookings than I know what to do with in December and so my slower season will be intentionally in January. But I want you to pick one of these months so that you can actually focus on some of the things that we are going to talk about. Other things that I want you to utilize is just take a break. Just take a break. I want you to unplug. Just unplug. Take a social media detox or take a whole week to just binge your favorite shows and not think about business. If you can do this, you will come back so much more creative and you will be so shocked at how your brain is just rolling with all of these ideas and how you just show up better to your business. Especially in the the area of content creation. This is something that as soon as I start feeling the weight, I pick a week and I take an immediate break because I want to make sure that I am, you know, really prioritizing my mental health and of course the creativity. Something else that I love to do during slow season. Like right now when I'm recording this, we are at the tail end of November and I am craving like three days where I can do absolutely nothing but declutter my house. It has been a whirlwind since I've gone back to a full time job. I just feel like I have not had the time to really go through and like highly organize my house again. So we have those little piles going on. My house is, you know, it's picked up, it's put together, but I really want to dig into those cabinets and the kids rooms and the toys and all the things. So this is another great thing that you can utilize is pick, you know, house projects or other things that you can spend your time with. I think it's really going to be helpful for you. So please, please, please, during your slow season, please take a break for a minimum of one to two weeks. You promise? Okay, next point is during slow season. This is the biggest part of slow season right here that is really going to set you up for success. And that is this is the time to refresh the back end of your business. This is everything that is not really forward facing. So you're not worried about showing up to sessions, you're not worried about talking to clients. This is everything that is like the backbone of your business. So this is where you are updating your workflows, you are remapping your client journey, you're refreshing your website, you're reworking that pricing, creating new guides, updating them. All the things. The reason that it's so crucial to do this is because first and foremost you need to stay relevant. If you keep the same old same old for three, four years in a row, including your pricing, including your website, you are losing clients. You are losing clients. You have to stay relevant. This also gives you an opportunity to show off fresh work. Every year you get better. Every couple months you get better. You know that feeling when I post in our student community and I tell you guys to show us your glow up and you go back and you choose like, hey, here's what my work looked like even just a year ago compared to today and there's like such a drastic difference. So you were growing all of the time. You, your best work needs to be facing forward, right? Like that needs to be on your social media, it needs to be on your website, on your Google business profile, all of these places that you are marketing. So make sure that you are updating this at least once a year. I really recommend twice a year, but this is something that I really want you to make sure that you are focusing on. And again, working your backend systems, you are making your business better. You always want to get better. So what does this look like when you are updating these backend systems? This is you updating those emails, like I said, reworking your client journey. So do you love everything you have or do you want to update the steps that they go through? Do you want to add a step, take away a step? This is something that you need to reevaluate and then of course, the biggest project is that refreshing your website. And I'm so excited to tell you guys that if you stick around this month, you're going to see an episode that airs that is all about specifically how to refresh your website, what to swap out, what to focus on, all the things. So stay tuned because that is coming. The third part of where I want you to focus during your slow season is I want you to invest in education. Specifically invest in education. Here's why. This is how you stay on top of your competition, right? And when I say competition, I just mean this is how you're going to stand out. This is not, we're not trying to be caddy. We're not trying to compete with everybody. I do truly believe in community over competition and I do believe that there's more than enough to go around. But for you specifically, you're almost competing with yourself, right? And then of course you're competing with some of your local photographers as well. But it's like, how can you stay top of mind? How can you continue to be the best and be and do the best of your ability, right? And so this is where investing is going to get you to that next level. There is not one person walking this earth, including myself, that does not need a coach or does not need to follow a program that another coach built. There's nobody. Why? Because we need someone else to hold us accountable, to present another way to help our brains start thinking about things differently. So I really would recommend that this is the time. This is the time when it's slower. You have the time to focus on education in your business. You have the time to implement what a coach is going to tell you to do. And so I want you to either invest in a coach or a mentor. This could be business wise, this could be editing wise, whatever you think you need. And number two would be a course or a program that you have wanted to join for a while now. I'm not just saying these things because I want you to come to me and buy my stuff. I am saying like for real. This is what I do every slow season. I am investing in something, whether it is a course or it is a one on one coach or it is a mastermind, whatever it looks like. I am always investing myself because this is the time of the year when it's so crucial, it's so crucial to do this because it will set you up for a super profitable year. So find someone that is going to help you get to the next level or purchase that Program that you've kind of been eyeing all year. Yes, obviously I offer both of these things. So if you want to talk to me about that, I'm more than happy to discuss that with you. But I just mean in general, this is where I, I would focus, I would highly focus in during slow season. Okay, so those are the three main areas. One is during slow season you have to take a break because when you put yourself first and you unplug and you go and you get creative, right, that is going to help you show up to your business better. It's going to help you really get ready to do the second point, which is refresh your back end systems. This is something that is probably going to take you a couple of weeks to do, if not over the span of two or three months. And so really get organized. Really look at what you're wanting to refresh. This part right here, ultimately is what sets you up to be able to attract those clients. The third point again is investing in education. That's a huge piece of this because it is going to push you outside of your comfort zone. It's going to encourage you to do things differently. They're going to help you get to the next level of where you currently are. So if you want to be making more money and what you're doing right now is not getting you the bookings you desire, then you need something, you need another strategy, you need a coach, you need something that is going to help you roadmap it and get to the place that you want to be. So those are the main three things. Now there is one other area that I will touch on and that is really making sure that you are setting up a marketing and sales strategy for yourself. So where are you marketing? You need to spend some time on this and you need to come up with a content plan, right? Like some kind of a content plan. So you know what you're talking about, what you're promoting at that time and obviously going back and following the goals. Now, if you missed the most profitable year yet workshop, I talked about it at the beginning, then this is where you are going to. You're going to come in, you're going to go grab that replay. This is what's going to help you know where to focus. And then you'll know kind of what order you need to work on some of these things. The other thing is if you go back and you listen to episode 326, I talk about five strategies to boost your bookings for 2025. Go pair those up. Go listen to what I said. See if you can take one of those and do that during slow season. Or do that, you know, once you get to January, February, and implement one of those strategies and start getting the bookings, once you have taken that break, you're like, I'm chomping at the bit to get back. Amazing. And you've refreshed your back end of your business. Then you have fresh everything. You're ready to book that client, you're ready for them to go through your client journey again, and you're ready to go do, like, the best work you've ever done, then that is how these strategies are going to really help you get those bookings. So I hope this helped you be able to see exactly like the areas that you need to focus on for your slower season. I hope it got your brain thinking. I hope you're kind of actually excited and looking forward to a slower season. And the last thing that I just want to say is this slow season does not have to mean a dead season. A slower season is a gift to most of us because it allows us to slow down, but it doesn't mean that you have to bring in $0. And so I believe that this episode and the previous episode is really going to help you go ahead and continue to get those bookings while still having a slower season. All right, good luck. Have so much fun. Enjoy your little break. I will be back here next Thursday for a new episode.