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- [00:00]
A
This morning, I got a call from my son that he had broken one of his braces and needed to go have it fixed. So I called the orthodontist. They were able to fit him in. And I went and picked him up from school and took him over to have this little, you know, tweak made. They told me that the appointment was going to take, like, 30 to 40 minutes. And, you know, I hadn't planned on this 30 to 40 minutes. And all of a sudden, I found myself in a situation where I was right around the corner from the grocery store. I knew that I needed to go to the grocery store, and I was like, great, two for one. I'm going to, you know, get him to his appointment, and I am going to run to the store and make the most of this little unscheduled, you know, chunk of time that I have. But of course, I hadn't planned on going to the grocery store, so I didn't have a list. I didn't have a meal plan worked out yet. I tend to try to go to the grocery store as infrequently as possible. I'm sure I'm not alone on that. And so I didn't have this list. I didn't have a plan. But I was like, that's fine. I do most of the shopping and cooking in our house anyway, so I can just come up with this as I'm walking around the grocery store. So I, you know, had my phone out. I had my New York Times recipe cooking app open, and I'm sort of trying to, as I'm walking around the grocery store, shuffle through different recipes that we might want to use for the week, plus thinking about what we need for Judah's lunches at school and what I need for, like, my oat milk for my coffee and all the different things. And, of course, I'm also trying to mentally inventory what we have at home, because I hadn't done that before I left, so I was kind of assuming some things. And I only had about 30 minutes by the end. As I was checking out, I spent, you know, $180. It was definitely a big grocery shop, did a fair amount of damage in that short period of time. And I thought as I was leaving that I had a week's worth of groceries all ready to go. I went and got Judah. I went home. I'm unloading the grocery bags, and as I'm sitting there looking at it, I'm trying to remember even what recipes, what meals I was planning in my mind at the Grocery store, because none of it is really coming together the way that it clearly had at some point in my mind, just 30 or 45 minutes before. And I'm putting stuff away, and I realize I've purchased some things that we already have, and I'm missing some key ingredients for a couple of the things that I was, you know, I finally realized, oh, I was trying to make this, and I got everything but, you know, the main piece of protein or whatever. Anyway, all that to say at the end of unloading all these groceries, I realized that I was gonna have to go right back to the grocery store sooner ra than later, probably even before this evening's dinner. And it got me thinking about how going to the grocery store with no list is not all that different from trying to manage your schedule and your business kind of by the seat of your pants, right? Sometimes making a grocery list, going and looking through the pantry, looking through the refrigerator, looking at your cookbooks and your apps and things, and making a meal plan seems like an extra step that you don't have time for. Just the same way that writing out your systems, documenting your processes seems like an extra step that you might not have time for. It feels faster. It feels easier to just kind of go and get it done. And then, you know, oh, later I'll. I'll write down these systems. Later I'll document my processes. But I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about how when we do that, either at the grocery store or in our businesses, we end up spending more time, spending more money making mistakes and errors and not sticking to the goals that we are truly motivated to try to stick to in our lives and in our diets.
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Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Anna Mi Tonkin, and I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it, and I can show you how.
- [04:45]
A
When I first started my business, I definitely ran my business out of my brain. And at the time, that seemed not only perfectly doable, but it seemed more responsible. It seemed like I was giving my clients more attention because I was spending more time thinking about each and every one of them, right? I would sit down in the morning and I would think, okay, who are the clients that are currently, you know, in the process of being of working with me? Somewhere in the process, okay, where are they what needs to happen next? What can I do today? What emails do I need to send? What reminders do I need to send? What photos do I need to edit? Do I need to deliver anything? All of those different things. And I would sit down and sort of figure that out and then make my list for the day and go about checking off those items on my list. And especially when you are in a season of having fewer clients or, you know, fewer tasks on your, on your list, it's certainly possible to do that where we are capable of managing our businesses, because our businesses, even when they are busy, aren't super complicated. However, it becomes very easy to miss things, right? And then you start spending extra time checking to make sure you didn't miss anything. You spend time straight stressing that maybe you're, you're missing something. I mean, there's, there's a lot of like, thought time and worry time that goes into holding everything in your brain so you become less efficient, right? And when you're less efficient, then you're spending all this processing time worrying or thinking that you could be spending coming up with a marketing process or, you know, surprising and delighting your existing clients in a way that isn't on your list, right? You're also much more susceptible to losing track of sort of the overall goals. It's like the, you can't see the forest for the trees because you're so busy trying to manage the trees that are right in front of you. These tasks that need doing that take up so much more of your time and energy just end up sort of crowding out the bigger picture items on your list. So I'm going to take this back to the meal planning and grocery shopping example. So if you want to become more efficient at the grocery store, the first thing you do is you make a list before you go to the store, right? Even if you're not looking in your refrigerator, even if you're not sitting down and trying to plan meals for the week, if you make a list and sit down and actually think it out and write those things down, you'll end up spending less money because you're not making impulse buys. And you will have a more sort of cohesive, strategic plan that will get you in and out of the store faster and make sure that you get the groceries that you need. The next step, as you're sort of becoming a better, more efficient grocery shopper, is that before you make your list, you make that meal plan so you're actually thinking about like, how can I repurpose if I have to buy something and you could maybe put it into two meals, then a meal plan will allow you to make better use of that so you have less waste at the end of the week, right? The next step beyond just making a list and making a meal plan is actually sitting down and making sort of an overarching plan for what your food goals and priorities are. You know, maybe you want to reduce your meat consumption so you start looking into recipes that allow you to create vegetarian meals multiple times a week or something like that. If you are trying to manage that on the fly, chances are you're not going to do as good of a job as if you sit down and say, it's important to me to eat less meat. So I am going to, when I sit down to meal plan, when I sit down to make my grocery list, I'm going to look at that and make sure I'm not buying more than a couple of days worth of meat based protein. So when you put that effort in beforehand, not only does it become more efficient with your time, it becomes more efficient with your money, but it also helps you stick to your goals better. So let's take this back to using a business example, especially this time of year, right? It's like the busy season and whatever. Let's say that you have a client who ends up booking you for something that's a little off of what you normally offer. So you have a standard invoice that you send to people for your regular session, but this person booked a half session with you or you know, in the process of talking to them about what they wanted, they said, oh, can we add on a business headshot to our family session? Whatever the case may be, it's not part of your standard offering. So you don't have that line item that you can just sort of like add into your invoice. So what you do because you're busy is you just create an invoice on the fly, right? You just make a one off, you type it up and you send it to that person. Because that's the path of least resistance. You just need to make it for this one person. But I would encourage you to consider taking that a step further, right? Don't just create that invoice. Take the few minutes that's required to actually create a product in your CRM or your billing invoicing software. Create a product that is specific to what this new thing is that you're offering to your client, right? Maybe you won't use it again, or maybe you won't use it again regularly, but if you ever have to use it again, then it's there. You don't have to make it again. Right. So you've done future you the favor of having that documented. You also have it associated with a price. It's all sort of listed out there for you so that you can reference that and find it easily in the future. A step beyond that would be not just creating the invoice and creating the product for the invoice, but actually sitting down and making a checklist of all the steps that it's going to take for you to fulfill that invoice, to sort of deliver the product that you're invoicing them for. Right. Again, you can probably hold that in your head. Let's say that it is something as simple as adding a headshot on to a family session and you tell them, okay, that's going to be an extra $250 and you're going to get three, your choice of, you know, three of the poses that we do. So you create that line item product that you put into the invoice and then you sit down and you tell, you think through what do I need to do to make sure that I get all of that right when I'm sending it to that person? So that in three weeks when you are sending that family their gallery, you can very easily reference, okay, this is what I need to do. This is what I promised them, this is what they paid for it. You can adjust your email templates, all that sort of stuff. Yes. It's probably going to take you 20 or so minutes of work to sit down and sort of get that all taken care of. But if you wait for three weeks until you've moved on and your brain is not thinking about that anymore, it's probably going to take you an hour. And you run the risk of forgetting that you even had that conversation and not setting it up for that. And then you've got a client being like, hey, where are my images that we were going to do? Or I thought I got three and you only sent me one. Whatever the story, the specifics are, it's much easier to kind of take care of it right there in the moment and have that all mapped out. Now, whether you're using a CRM and you can add this in as a workflow, like an add on workflow, maybe you use a spreadsheet that acts as a checklist for your time, putting those steps in there right away will help you stay organized and make sure that you Deliver exactly what your clients are expecting. And then the third step, sort of taking this even to the next level, would be to take the time to consider how this offer that you're, you know, making or the product that you're selling, how that fits into your overall business. Because the real gold in this is to say, you know what, it's not infrequent that families that I work with have parents that might need a business headshot. How about I actually add this as a line item, like an optional line item on all of my family sessions going forward, and mention it as an afterthought, like, hey, by the way, I frequently have clients who need updated LinkedIn, you know, profile photos. If you'd like to add that to your family session, it takes an extra 15 minutes. This is how much it costs. This is, you know, how the process works. And then start thinking about, like, how does that fit into your bigger picture business plan? Is that something that next year, maybe you set a goal to add $20,000 in revenue from doing that? How do you want to market that? How do you add that onto your website or into your social media? Maybe you write a blog post about it. I mean, there are so many different things that that could potentially lead to, and it might not lead to any of it. But I think that when we are just kind of playing whack a mole in our business, when we are just, you know, hitting the balls as they come at us, we don't give ourselves the benefit of taking advantage of some of these opportunities, making it easier for ourselves. This is how you begin to train your brain to think in a systematic way. Reducing errors, reducing inefficiencies, reducing the time that you spend, and ultimately increasing the amount of money that you can make. So above all, especially this time of year, these are all good things. But I just want to remind you that the tiny effort that it requires to sort of think at that systemic, systematic level when you are going about the tasks of your day will pay huge dividends in the long run. Not only in your time and your money and your business, but also in your headspace. And that's really what I want for you. I want you to keep your headspace free for the bigger, more important things that I know you want to be dedicating that headspace to. Anyway, I hope you're all doing well, and I will be right back here next week.
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Well, that's it for this week's episode of this Can't Be that Hard. I'll be back same time, same place. Next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads@thiscantbethard.com learn. If you like the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review in itunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.