Annemi Tonkin (0:00)

Last week, I kicked off a series of episodes that I am sharing on the topic of sustainability in your business. So if you missed that first episode, you might want to pause this one and go back. It's short, but today I'm picking up where I left off with a concept that's known as Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law originally stated that work expands to fill the time available for its completion, but this concept is so relatable that it's been used to describe all kinds of behaviors. Like no matter how much space you have, you will accumulate possessions and furniture to fill that space. Or this is my favorite, as your money grows, so will your expenses, right? They grow to keep up with your money. But although we can all laugh and agree with the sort of inherent truth of these statements, we're not powerless to push back against Parkinson's Law when it suits us. In fact, recognizing this tendency is really the first step toward taking control. Today I want to talk about how this principle shows up in our businesses, and more importantly, how to design systems that help you work smarter, not harder, while building a business that's sustainable in the long run.

Annemi Tonkin (1:13)

Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Annemi 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.

Annemi Tonkin (1:42)

Unless you're part of a very small minority of people at some point or another, you've probably looked at your bank account and wondered, where did all the money go? Budgeting is a skill that most of us struggle with, even though we all know that saving money requires savings setting and sticking to a budget that's lower than our income. But the reason that sticking to a budget is hard is that somewhere in the back of our minds, we know that we could spend more money, right? Whether it's because we have that credit card that allows us to outspend our savings, or just because if we're putting money away, it's like, well, I could just dip into that savings account. So you know, when you see that pretty sweater at the store or you get invited out to the fancy restaurant, there's that little part of you that thinks, well, maybe I could do it. When I started my business in 2010, I was hyper focused on the money part of the business. My goal at that time was to Quit my nursing job. And the only way I was going to be able to do that was to replace not only my salary, but my benefits package with my income as a photographer. Now, even though I didn't want to think about money, I didn't want to look at money. That was sort of a super stressful thing for me, I also knew that, that the only way that I was going to be able to make this happen. So I dove head first into running my numbers and pricing myself profitably. And I've talked about this before, you know, it's like I looked at the numbers and I was like, there's no possible way, but I'm just going to try it anyway because otherwise I'm never going to be able to, to do this thing that I want to do. And sure enough, after two years, I got to a point where I had enough business to go full time with photography and cut ties to my nursing career altogether. But the scarcity mentality that was happening during that time was real. Like it was not joking around. Money felt extremely limited, like an extremely limited resource. So I did what I figured I needed to do and I worked harder. I ramped up my work hours, I added all kinds of bells and whistles to what I was offering so that I could feel good about charging more, because I was charging more. And then I took basically any and every job that came my way. So in addition to families, I was shooting weddings events, I did some boudoir work, I did some seniors. You name it, I was photographing it. Now, I will say this, I have a pretty high tolerance, sort of naturally, for work. People have always described me as high energy, you know, and hard worker, whatever, which we won't even delve into the psychology of that. But it's, it's an apt description. Like, I do tend to have a larger capacity for work than a lot of people. I'm not. It's not better, it's not worse, it just is. So from the time that I quit my nursing job, I think that it is not an exaggeration to say that for those five years between quitting my nursing job and then when my divorce happened in 2017, for those five years, I was pulling 50 to 60 hour work weeks on average, on top of, you know, trying to be a good mom, a good wife, a good friend. And obviously I just said something about my divorce. And most of you listening to this podcast know that I got divorced in 2017. And so, you know, at least one of those areas was probably not getting the energy that it deserved, because all of that came to a screeching halt when I got divorced. I'm not saying that I got divorced because I was working too much. That's a whole different subject for a whole different kind of podcast. But when that happened, it really was like somebody pulled the emergency brake on everything in my life, right? And as I started to try to get the engine back up and running again, because I needed to, I really was forced to pick and choose what came with me. I mentioned the phrase life quake in the last episode. It. It was this lifequake, and everything got sort of called into question. I have shared before on this podcast how I had this moment of clarity during a conversation with my lawyer. Basically, I realized that I needed to make more money now that I was going to be on my own. That was obvious. And as we were looking through the numbers with my income and my expenses, it was clear that even though my clients were paying me a lot of money to take their photos, the way that my business had been set up for those seven years, I didn't have enough time to take on any more clients. So the option was to either figure out how to make more money in less time, which is like, you know, the unicorn that everybody's chasing, or I needed to go back to my nursing career or consider getting a different kind of a job. Like, something was going to have to change. And just a few weeks after that come to Jesus meeting, I basically started using the Simple Sales System. I launched this brand new system in my business, even though at that time it wasn't called the Simple Sales System, and nobody was telling me it was going to work. I basically took a hard look at every single step in my entire workflow, and I asked, number one, was that step necessary? Did it need to happen in order for, you know, my clients to get what they were promised? And number two, if it was necessary, if that step was necessary, did I need to be the one to execute that step? Was it something that I could automate? Was it something that I could have somebody else do? Like, how could I separate my time from this process as much as possible? And going through that process of examining my workflow was actually a lot like culling a set of photos that you love, which I know is something that all of us can relate to. As I went through this, there were some things, of course, that were easy to eliminate. You know, the blinks or the blurry photos, but there were also a whole, whole bunch of steps in the process that I felt really attached to. For instance, I used to have a pre session meeting with all of my clients. And for years I talked on my blog and, you know, when I had a new client inquiry, even to my friends, I would talk about how important that meeting was, how it helped me to get to know my clients, how it helped me understand what they were looking for. And I also talked about how it helped them get comfortable with me. You know, I had a whole explanation for why this meeting was so important, and I believed it. But as I was looking at it and as I was being really like cutthroat about every single minute of my day, every single minute of my workflow, I realized that that meeting was adding a minimum of an hour to the time that I spent with each client, right? I had to schedule the meeting. I had to drive to meet them. I had to have the meeting. Sometimes people were chatty, plus, you know, sometimes I met people for coffee or a beer or whatever. And, you know, of course I'm whipping out my business card to pay for that. So that meeting was not only costing me time, but in some cases it was costing me money. And as hard as it was in the moment when I was examining my workflow, for me to say, you know what? That meeting doesn't have to happen. Ultimately, I knew that I had to. So that meeting got replaced by what is now a 15 minute phone call and a questionnaire. The big aha there was that. You know, here I'd been thinking that money was the limited resource, but really, time was the hard stop. That was the. That was the truly limited resource. When I was giving my business whatever amount of time that I felt like it needed, when I would just say, I'll just do as much as it needs, all in the name of trying to make my business work, right? Trying to be successful, I ended up spending every minute available and then some. When I first launched Simple Sales, it wasn't unlike setting a really strict budget that curtailed all the money that I was spending before, right? It felt like I was giving something major up. So I assumed that that was going to be painful, not just for me, but also for my clients. But when I put that rigid container around the time that I was spending and I got super clear on what activities actually provided the value that I was offering, I realized that I was able to make significantly more money in a fraction of the time. And you've heard me say it before, and I'll say it again, I honestly believe that my clients like this process more because the truth is their time is limited too. And they know that I'm there for them if they need me. But there isn't any sort of unnecessary back and forth. At the end of the day, they're still ending up with the photos that they love hanging on the walls, filling the albums on their shelves, all the things. But they're not being forced to kind of do this song and dance that I see now was sort of allowing me to justify the prices that I was charging. Now, if I've been talking about simple sales and you're like, what is simple sales? If you don't know how that works, you can learn all about it@thiscantbethard.com SimpleSales I've been teaching this system since 2020 and and I have seen it transform the businesses and the lives of photographers all around the world. I truly wish that I could go back and, you know, reassure my panicked 2017 self that what felt like the end of my business would actually turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to it. But because I can't, I just want to invite you to remember that sometimes hardship makes us stronger and that creativity, whether it's artistic or otherwise, really does thrive within constraints. So next week I'm going to be back. We're still going to be talking about sustainability, but I want you to do some thinking about the constraints in your own business and where there are things that are taking up more space than they need to. I think it's a really good exercise at any time, but especially as the year winds down and you're looking over, you know what has come before and what you hope to have come in the near future.