A (0:00)

Good intentions are kind of like laundry. When you're on top of it, the laundry gets done and folded and put away. But when life gets crazy, you start throwing your clothes on that chair in the corner of your room until the pile gets so big that you forget what the chair underneath even looks like. Then, at some point, things start to calm down and one morning you wake up ready to tackle the laundry and get everything back in good order. When it comes to our intentions, that's what January is all about. Many of us have finally gotten off the busy season treadmill. We've had a chance to catch our breath, and now we're staring down this big pile of good intentions that have gotten off track and need to be addressed for the year ahead. Is it a big job? Probably. Will it eradicate the pile forever? Doubtful. But taking the time to clean out the clutter will give us the fresh start we're all craving right about now and and set us on the right path for the year ahead. As I shared last month, my word for the year for my business in 2025 is sustainability, and I am here to advocate that you set it as your word too. If you missed the sustainability series that I dropped last month, I highly recommend that you binge it. It's four episodes, none of them are super long, but I walk you through how and why I think sustainability should be the primary driver of your business decisions this year. I'm not saying you shouldn't set revenue goals. I'm not saying you can't give yourself a target for the number of clients you want to book. Obviously those are important and fun kinds of goals to set as well. But when you achieve those things at any cost, whether you're ignoring your need for sleep or your mental health or your friends and family, then you're building a house of cards that's going to fall apart sooner or later. So so today I want to share seven of the biggest problem areas that most photographers really need to address to create a rock solid business that will serve them not just this year, but for all the years to come.

B (2:02)

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.

A (2:31)

The first issue I want to talk about is one that may not apply to everyone listening, but it probably applies to, I'm going to say, 80% of photographers in business today. And that is the issue of underpricing your services and undervaluing your time. Photographers need to price for profit just like any other business person out there in the world, right? We are not setting our prices just to get hired. So what does that mean? That means that you need to actually look at your numbers, actually think about how much money you need to make, not just to cover the expenses in your business, but to pay yourself a living wage. There is no reason that any of us should be working for free in this industry. And if you are struggling to find clients who are willing to pay profitable prices, that's a whole different issue. At the very baseline, you have to know your numbers. You have to understand both what your needs look like, what your expenses look like, and then what your goals look like. And then the math is actually pretty straightforward. Obviously, I offer lots of ways to support you in looking at and evaluating your numbers, as do many other educators out there, but a lot of people just ignore this altogether. They sort of look at their bank account every month and judge whether things are good or not good. And that is not the way to run a business. So if you are in this situation where your pricing is sort of built on what you believe the market will bear, or if you're looking at another photographer and copying their prices, I want you to set a goal in January this month, and if you're listening to this later, you know, this month, whatever that is, to actually sit down, look hard at your numbers and figure out what your pricing structure needs to be in order to make your business profit profitable. It's really a non negotiable item on your to do list. I know it's scary. I know it can be sort of deflating at the beginning if you look at a number and say there's just no way. But I promise you there is a way to get there. The first thing is you have to establish what there is. The second issue that I want to talk about is this tendency that a lot of photographers have to take every inquiry personally. And this goes in conjunction with item number one on our list, right? Whether or not your prices are profitable. You are going to hear people tell you that you are charging too much. And the fact of the matter is they have no idea what too much is for you. They know what too much is for them. And a lot of times, and I've said this before, people will say the prices are too high. As kind of a knee jerk response when the answer is no, it's an easy way to say it's not you, it's me. You know, I'm just going to. It's, it's too expensive. It's more than we had budgeted. So sometimes it means that that's actually more than they have the budget for. Sometimes it means I've made a different decision or I've decided not to hire a photographer at all. And we can't take that personally. That's on them, not on us. Now, if you are getting lots of rejections based on, you know, price or really any other reason, that's not to say that you can't evaluate how your website is speaking to people, how your marketing messaging is speaking to people. Who are you attracting? Where are you finding people? One of the common, you know, marketing channels that I have heard people really struggle with is Yelp. Yelp does a really good job of reaching out and getting people to sign contracts where they are paying to have their business listed high up on Yelp. And Yelp is historically. And please reach out to me if you have had great results on Yelp. But I have talked to lots of photographers who have said Yelp was a terrible investment of money for them because when people go to Yelp, they are absolutely in many cases looking for cheap options. So it's, you know, photography is kind of a special category in that it requires trust. You know, art is priced all over the place. It's not an apples to apples thing. We are not comparing who has the best pizza and all the pizzas cost $20. So if you are marketing on a channel like Yelp or if people are finding you that way, then you may end up, you know, attracting people who are going to routinely tell you no. The fact of the matter is when you build a business that works in sort of theory on paper and, you know, set your prices and all this other stuff, then you've got to work on the peripherals, how you're talking to people, how you are presenting your brand. All of those things can be addressed. But each individual inquiry is just a data point. It's not a personal, you know, referendum or judgment on you or your business. And if you can mentally separate those two things, if you cannot take it personally when someone tells you no, you are going to be in a better position to make logic driven decisions about what you're doing and where you're finding people versus these sort of emotional decisions which tend not to serve you. The third issue that I want to talk about is overbooking yourself and burning out. Now, this can be a completely separate issue from your pricing. It can also be a matter of not being priced in a sustainable way. And you know, people see, wow, this is a really great deal, we're all going to book. And you start to take on more and more work because you figure, if I'm not making very much money, I'll just book a lot of work. And ultimately, if you haven't set up your business to support that, you can very quickly get yourself into a situation where you burn out. And that doesn't serve anyone. It doesn't serve your clients, it doesn't serve you. It doesn't serve the people who love you or rely on you. So that is something that we want to be really intentional about avoiding. So when you say yes in every scenario, when you know you're at your total capacity, but then somebody reaches out and they seem really nice and they seem lovely and like a perfect client. So you know what, I will take that extra session, we'll just add one this coming weekend or something like that. It ends up creating chaos. It creates chaos in your life, it creates chaos in your mind. I don't think that it serves your art. And ultimately it also doesn't do a great job protecting your brand. Saying no can actually be a really good thing for the way that your brand is perceived by the person that you're saying no to. You're not saying no in like a, no, I'm not going to work with you. You're saying, I'm so sorry. I am completely at capacity in my own business. I have been for the last year or so. I have been extremely picky about the clients that I take. So for the most part, I am just serving my existing clients, my member clients, and then people that I've worked with in. And every once in a while I will take a new client if I have the space, if I have the capacity. But for the most part, when people are reaching out and it's a new inquiry, I am sending them to other local photographers and I'm saying, I'm so sorry, I am booked. What was interesting is that I actually put a pop up on my website saying that. And I felt like all of a sudden I started getting these inquiries that were like, I'll fit myself into any corner of your schedule. And they weren't saying that before. It was almost like me saying no ahead of time made them want it more. So I'm not saying be false. I'm not saying Say no for the sake of saying no. You know, you don't want to create false scarcity. But I do think that setting boundaries can be good not only for sort of your mental well being and the, the, the clients who have hired you and so sort of gotten in while you did have available space, but it's also good for your brand name. So if you are finding yourself inundated with inquiries and you know, people are booking you, it can be time to raise your prices. It can be time to start saying no to people who are not your ideal client. You know, if you don't photograph, if you don't like photographing big family, you know, extended family sessions, say no. You know, pass those on to other photographers who do want that work. The other thing that can sort of tie into this is are sticking to your other policies. So, you know, rush fees, weekend surcharges, any sort of policy that you have in place or that maybe for this year it's time to put into place that protect your time. That is going to help your work life balance, whatever that is, but it's also going to protect your business with this. I want to raise something that I have myself been extremely guilty of and not like way in the distant past, but I still kind of have this. And I think it's one of those deep rooted issues that many of us probably carry. And this is the concept of using time as a badge of honor. The amount of time that you work or the time, the hours that you log when you're working on something somehow is tied to success or your, you know, value as a business owner. The fact of the matter is there are plenty of extremely successful people out there who part of their success, in fact perhaps the key to their success is the fact that they have gotten smarter with their workflows, they've gotten better with their time management. They have, you know, outsourced things, automated things. And I have done that pretty successfully in my photography business. I'm still working on it in this business. I am someone who, you know, if I have a few minutes on my hand, I tend to lean into work and it creates messiness. It, you know, again, going back to burnout and all this other stuff, it can, it can really sort of snowball into a bigger problem. I think much of that for me comes from this like deep rooted belief that, you know, being busy and being working hard somehow make me a better person. And that, you know, is a conversation perhaps for another time. But if you relate to that, if you tend to feel like in Order to justify your prices, you have to put in those extra hours. I want you to really reevaluate that, because objectively, that's not true. And so how can we shift the way that we think about this in our businesses in order to create space and allow ourselves to kind of breathe? The truth is that as creatives, we have to create space to allow that creativity to flourish within our work and then outside of our work as well. So it is something worth paying attention to. And then item number five on my list kind of ties into that as well. And that is, you know, it's like there's the, I have to work hard. More work equals more money, equals more success, equals more validation, whatever. And the flip side of that is that, you know, one of the major solutions for hard work or lots of work working, you know, lots of different checkboxes is automation. Automation is a very, very inexpensive way and very accessible way these days to reduce the amount of, like, the number of boxes that you have to check on a daily basis. You can automate all kinds of things. Different admin tasks, different, you know, editing can be automated. Lots of different things can be automated and outsourced. But I want to focus on automation. And so many photographers, so many creatives, so many small business owners fear automation. They feel hesitant to automate things because they feel like maybe something will go wrong. Maybe one of my clients will see, you know, an email that they're not supposed to get and they'll know that it was automated or, you know, I would hate for something to make my clients feel like I'm not paying 100% attention all the time. I'm going to bring this back to sort of that mental, psychological, you know, weird thing where as soon as I said I'm not available to be hired, everybody all of a sudden wanted to hire me. It's kind of like that with automation. I have leane leaned in to. In my automated emails, I'll put like a little thing in there. Being like, this is a, you know, automated reminder. If this seems wrong, just reach out to me. I think that clients respect the fact that we are running businesses. We are busy people. They are busy people as well. And we have set up systems that are both professional and they're able to, you know, make sure that all of those boxes get checked. As a client, as someone on, you know, the receiving end of any kind of service, I want to know that the person, person providing that service is taking really good care. And part of that is running a professional business. So it really is a win win. There are so many amazing tools out there for automating and you can set those automations up in a way that feels very true to you and to your brand. The sixth point that I want to raise is systems. And no one should be surprised that I want to talk about systems. But the fact of the matter is that systems kind of like intentions at the beginning that I was talking about. It's like they're great when we first set them up and then after a while things get messy. You know, it's like when you first organize the catch all drawer in your kitchen where you've got scissors and you've got, you know, extra phone chargers and you, you've got some markers and whatever and then that becomes the junk drawer. And so over the course of a few months or a year, that drawer becomes super disorganized and all over the place and you have to sit down and clean that drawer out and sort of restore it to its original purpose. The same is true for any system in your business. This is a great time of year for you to sit down and look at your processes from start to finish. If you have access to the business plan, glow up. I walk you through a whole process where you are sort of taking your business apart, down to its component parts, looking at all of them. And then I call it, you know, we're going to Marie Kondo your business. That's what you need to do with each of your systems at least once a once a year in order to avoid steps that you're doing that you don't need to do things that are getting clunky. I think that maintaining that sort of lean business will always serve you and it ends up serving your clients as well. And the last issue that I want to raise is probably the most important and this is that mental trap that so many photographers and artists and creatives fall into, which is the idea, the mindset that creativity and business are mutually exclusive. I hear so many photographers say, oh, you know, I'm an artist, I'm not really a business person. And they, you know, whatever version of that they say, and they say this not only to themselves, but to other people and even to their clients. And it is such a dangerous mindset. The fact of the matter is you should be creative in your business. Your business should be run creatively because that's on brand for any of us. But when you speak aloud, the idea that you are not a business person, that you are not running a real business, you are sort of creating cracks in the foundation of your long term success. And that's the opposite of what we want. I need you to do your business and yourself and your clients the favor of believing that you are a business person, that you are a good hearted business person, that you are a smart business person, a creative business person. I you can frame it in all kinds of different ways. This does not mean that you need to like put on a power suit and show up in a boardroom. What you are doing is giving your business the respect that it's owed and that is necessary for anyone else to give your business any respect. So of the seven issues that I have raised here, they're all important. And I know you know, sometimes it's like pick one or two and jump in. These all work together. They're all super important to the long term health of your business. Not to mention your mental and emotional well being. But if you do need a place to start, I want you to start here at the end. I want you to begin with that mindset. Give yourself a mantra like make a little sticky note and hang it on your mirror. Whatever works for you. I want you to remember you are running a business. You are committed to making good art and in return, making good money. In order to make good on those commitments, you have to charge profitable rates. You have to embrace systems and automation. You have to do things that might sometimes make you feel uncomfortable, like saying no to an inquiry or even firing a client. If you need support, if you need encouragement, you know that I am here for you. If you're not yet part of our free Facebook community, you can join us there. And if you need help with your systems, this Can't Be that Hard has been here for you for five years. We will continue to be here for you and I look forward to watching your businesses thrive. Happy New Year, guys.