← This Can't Be That Hard
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- [00:00]
Unknown Speaker
Hey guys, welcome to this third episode in my end of year series on building sustainability into your business. If you haven't caught the rest of those, I mean, you can listen to this episode first, but honestly, if you missed the first two, I'd probably pause this one and go back because these episodes are kind of building on each other. So at the end of the last episode, I asked you to think about the things in your business that were taking up valuable real estate in your time and your energy. And if you took me up on that even for a couple of seconds, I imagine that, you know, some pretty obvious answers probably came to mind, right? Meetings, emails, admin in general, if we're talking about the photography side of things, maybe it's editing, but I bet that almost every single one of us probably included marketing on that list, right? Marketing is the thing that we do, the activity that we do to find new clients for our business. And it can be really time consuming. Both the activity itself, right? Going out and running mini sessions or writing emails or any of those kinds of things, but also the mental real estate that marketing takes up. It's like all the thinking and worrying that we do about finding that next job and marketing is also a chore that's never really done until we're ready to close up shop for good. Right? Which brings me to another story that you're probably familiar with if you heard the first episode of this series. I talked about the parable of the Taoist farmer. This one, the one that I want to bring up today, is Aesop's fable about the golden goose. So as a refresher, because I'm sure you've heard this somewhere along the line, but maybe not recently, the story of the golden goose is that there's this farmer and his wife. It's always a farmer, but there's this farmer and his wife. And they had a goose that laid a golden egg every day. And while this first started happening, they were very excited. After a while they started to take that for granted and they got impatient and know. They were like, well, if let's just kill the goose and we'll open up the goose and get all the gold out. So they did that. Stories from the olden days are dark, folks. But they did that. They killed the golden goose and then they opened it up only to find that there was nothing inside at all. The moral of the story was that their greed cost them this steady, reliable source of wealth. So let's think about golden eggs as booked sessions, right? That is the payday in Our business and most photographers are running around looking for sessions like it's some big golden Easter egg hunt, which is exhausting. It's also frustrating when you look around and you see other photographers with their, you know, basket full of eggs and you think, ah, you know, that one should have been mine. And it's stressful because every egg that someone else finds feels. Feels like one less egg available to you. Right. Which is why we need to reduce the amount of time that we spend hunting for eggs and start hunting for golden geese in our business.
- [03:25]
Anna Mi Tonkin
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. 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.
- [03:55]
Unknown Speaker
Before we dive into this golden goose idea, let's recap what we have covered so far in this series. In the first episode, I talked about the importance of building a resilient business, one that has a margin of error. When most people talk about giving yourself margins, they're talking about money. And that's definitely a part of a resilient business. Right? You can't sustain a business that's constantly one dropped lens away from closing its doors. But in the second episode, we covered how time is another, arguably more important margin to pay attention to. If you have extra time, you can use that time to make more money, but no amount of extra money will ever buy you more hours in the day. Creating the simple sales system allowed me to ensure that every golden egg that I found was big enough to fill my basket. But when I had ankle surgery and couldn't work for four months, it became apparent to me that the sustainability of my business had another weak spot. And that was my constant need to be hunting for eggs. Which led me to this whole golden goose idea. Right? And my golden goose is is my portrait membership. Initially, it felt like inviting my past clients into the membership was a bit of a trade off. The eggs that I was typically hunting for my regular sessions were worth around $2,000, whereas my members, when I invited them in, were paying more like $1,800. And that was divided into these monthly payments of $150 each month. Now, those are my numbers. They don't necessarily need to be your numbers, just run with this metaphor with. For me now, the membership concept was easy to sell to My clients, not just because the cost, the overall cost was lower, but because it made it really easy, right? The payments were smaller. My clients no longer had to go to the trouble of remembering to book, and I built in a bunch of other little perks. But it was also an incredible boost to the sustainability of my business. Whereas before my membership, I was hunting around for eggs all the time, now I had a predictable revenue stream, like a goose that every day lays a golden egg. And every egg that that goose laid was one less egg I needed to find to fill my basket right at the end of the year, I only had to find a handful of clients to take care of all of my needs for my business versus having to go out and start from zero every year. Memberships are a fantastic golden goose if you run a portrait business, especially if you work with families or kids. Pet photographers, brand photographers, all of those niches are great for memberships. I love the model. I teach it. If you have never looked into my course, it's called Revenue on repeat, and I think it can be great. But memberships aren't the only golden goose out there. If you are a wedding photographer, you know, you could be partnered with a popular venue or a wedding planner, and that could be your golden goose. That could be your source of referrals that come in regularly if you have a good funnel set up. School portraits are another really great golden goose opportunity, especially for family photographers. Right? And of course, you can have more than one golden goose if you're a family photographer. You can do school portraits, book family clients from those school portraits, and then invite those families into a portrait membership. Anything that you do that decreases the time and effort that you have to put toward marketing and increases the amount of predictability in your revenue will make your business more resilient and more sustainable in the long term. So I know this episode is short. We're kind of at the end of the year, at the, you know, mid holiday season. But what I really wanted to do this month was make sure that if you've been listening through these episodes, that you are convinced that your business's word for the new year should be sustainability. I don't care if you're brand new or if you've been in business for 15 years like I have. Sustainability is something that we have to constantly be looking for in our businesses and working toward. Because I seriously believe that when you build sustainability into your business, everything else falls into place. But as I sat down to record today, I was thinking about, you know, the first two episodes and then this episode and I realized that what I haven't really put into these episodes was a ton of detail about exactly how to create sustainability in your business. I mean, to be fair, I'm recording these for December when I know most people are multitasking at best. And really, if you're listening to business podcasts at all, you are looking for inspiration, something on the lighter side. But maybe by the time you actually get around to finish listening to these episodes, you will be ready for something a little more specific, a little more tangible in terms of recommendations for how to add this sustainability, like what actions to take. So next week, in the final episode of the series and the final episode of the year, I have something really special cooked up for you that I'm excited to share. I will see you then. And in the meantime, if you happen to be listening to this in realish time, Happy Holidays.
- [09:24]
Anna Mi Tonkin
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.