A (0:00)

If you've been keeping up with our systems theme this month, you have now built or audited three major systems in your business. Your marketing system to consistently attract new leads. Your sales system to convert those leads into clients, and your fulfillment system, which delivers that exceptional experience each and every time. And if you have those three systems dialed in and working well, congratulations. You could probably run your entire business on on those systems without ever needing to add anything else. Not only will your marketing system bring you new clients, but a great experience will bring referrals and repeat clients organically. And for a long time in my business, that's exactly what I did. But one thing that always kind of plagued me was the income roller coaster, right? Where one month I would make a thousand dollars and another month I would make $10,000. Not as often as I would like to, but especially after I got divorced and I was managing my household on just my income. Those huge ups and downs, not to mention the uncertainty of where my next booking might come from, became the source of a lot of stress and made it really difficult for me to plan and budget and all the things that you have to do when you are an adult operating in the world, right? So I started asking myself, how can I make this whole process less of a guessing game? What's the easiest way to get more clients right? Which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. Building a system to encourage referrals and repeat business. If you've been running your business for a while, you probably already get some repeat and referral clients, right? Even without a system in place. And that's the beauty of doing great work. Happy clients tell their friends, and they often come back themselves. But without a system, that kind of growth is unpredictable. And when you're trying to build a business that's sustainable, stable, and enjoyable, unpredictable is difficult. So today we're going to talk about building a system that helps turn those occasional bonus clients right into a reliable, recurring source of income. Because once your marketing, sales and fulfillment systems are working well, this fourth system can really take pressure off everything else, creating a business that grows more easily over time with less effort. So today we are going to cover, number one, how to increase your referrals in a way that feels natural and aligned with your brand. Number two, how to make it easy for clients to come back again and again. And number three, we'll talk about why putting the system in place is one of the best ways to create more joy and ease in your business. So let's dive in. Welcome to this Can't Be that hard. My name is Annemie 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. Depending on your niche, repeat clients might not be a huge part of your business, especially if you're a wedding photographer, for example, right? But referrals are relevant for everyone. Past clients, fellow vendors, even friends and family can become powerful referral sources when they are properly supported. So just like in your other systems, I want you to start by working backward. What makes someone want to refer you? What do they need to know or have in hand in order to do so, and what might be holding them back? Then what we're going to do is look for ways to reduce friction and make referring you easy, appealing and top of mind. So you might be thinking, you know, great, what kind of incentive can I give people if they refer me? Can I get them a free session? Can I give them a framed print? But I want you to proceed with caution here because in my experience, and I really have heard the same from basically everyone I've talked to over the years about this subject, the most successful referral networks are less about kind of bribing people and more about reminding them. So the first step of this system is that you should be asking for referrals all the time and everywhere. That means including a referral request in your email, email signature, mentioning referrals in your check in emails and post session thank you notes, and building strong vendor relationships by being easy to work with and sending referrals to them whenever you can. And I think when we talk about vendors, everybody thinks about weddings, but there are vendors in all niches, right? If you are serving any client, they have other people who they need services from as well. So whether it's photography related or not, you can actually vendor network in any niche and I encourage you to do so. So if you're a newborn photographer, that's doulas and ob offices and midwives, but also things like lactation consultants and newborn clothing stores or places where people are going to learn how to breastfeed, you know, all those kinds of things, that is your network and those are your vendors. And it's depending on what your niche is, that could be all kinds of different things. So thinking about those referrals and asking for referrals all the time, Might sound obvious, but you know, are you already doing all of those things? Are you doing it consistently? Most people aren't. And then beyond those ongoing casual reminders, you can also periodically make specific time limited requests that are tied to something useful or urgent. So I find that this works a lot better. You can't overuse it, you can't do it all the time. But what you want to do is give somebody a now reason to share your name. So you might, you know, send in an email to your email list and say, I just launched a newborn session guide. So if you're not expecting a baby right now, if you're expecting a baby, great, you're going to really love this. If you're not, please share it with any friends who might be expecting. Or if you, you know, say, I only have three holiday sessions left and I would love to fill one of those with a friend of your. You are a friend of yours. You know, something like that. When there is scarcity and urgency in any kind of offer, whether it's an offer or an ask, that can lead someone to actually take action. And when you're saying to someone you know, please share it with any friends who are expecting, if someone reads that sentence, they almost can't help but think of who they know who's expecting. So they're much more likely to be like, oh great, I'll send it to Sarah. Instead of saying, you know, feel free to download the guide or share it, you're giving them directions. And people are just more likely to take action when they have something specific that's asked of them. So those kinds of specific requests just light up a different part of the brain than, you know, I love referrals. Instead, they're really forcing somebody to think about who they know who's expecting, which families have complimented the photos that this photographer took for me. And then, you know, they actually potentially are more likely to do the thing you're asking them to do. Finally, if you do want to offer some kind of compensation or bonus or whatever for referrals, I want you to think about being generous. And I'm sure that you are generous, I have no question of that. But I think that if you're going to offer an incentive, number one, you have to make sure that you have the margin built into your pricing to do that without, you know, killing your profitability. Then assuming that you do have margin, I want you to be as generous as you can be. Depending on the size of the referral. I think a non photography related thank you gift, something like maybe a gift certificate for a dinner out, or, you know, if you're a wedding photographer and it's a big client, you just booked, you know, a $9,000 job or something like that, maybe you send somebody a gift certificate for a local boutique hotel overnight. You know, something that feels really generous and is sort of aligned with the thing that you're that. That they have referred you for. You can potentially, you know, if there's a hotel that hosts weddings or something, you know, maybe you can work out some kind of discount. But when you're not giving them something that you sell, it feels more generous. Right. And it feels more kind of motivating than just a discount or a session credit. So I understand that obviously a session credit is we want people to come back and work with us, but we also want to give people something that feels special in a way that will encourage them to come back and work with you again. Anyway, at the end of the day, I want to bring us back to the fact that, you know, we've talked about in every episode of this system series that people are busy. And when it comes to referrals, most people are going to be happy to support you, but they're much more likely to actually do it if you give them a reason and the tools to make it easy. So rather than building some sort of elaborate or expensive incentive program, focus on making a plan and then building a system that allows you to regularly, intentionally ask for referrals. So now let's shift to repeat clients. Depending on your niche, repeat business might be the easiest, most reliable source of income that you aren't yet taking full advantage of. If you work with families or kids or pets or couples or any other kind of portrait client, or if you do brand or commercial work, you should be aiming to fill at least half of your calendar every year with repeat clients, which not only takes a ton of pressure off of your marketing, right, because then you only have to find 50% of the clients each year, but it makes the work that you're doing faster and easier. Right? Repeat clients know your process. They know your personality, they know your pricing, the big three Ps, I guess, and they trust you implicitly, which means that they are typically more comfortable and excited during the session. And you know, you're not having to do the whole song and dance about your pricing, right? They're not hemming and hawing. They already know that working with you is worth it. But like referrals, repeat business is more consistent and effective when you approach it systematically. Instead of Just hoping that, you know, your people remember and take action on calling you up and booking a session. So once more, let's work backward. What needs to happen for a client to come back to you again? Number one, I want you to think about what the ideal session cadence is for your clients. For families, that might be once a year. For brands, maybe it's twice a year or four times a year. You know, each kind of session has its natural repeat timeline. And I want you to think about what that is for your clients because once you define it, then you can build a plan and an offer around that. The biggest barriers to repeat business are rarely about the experience or the value. Right? They already know that those are great. Instead, they are usually, you know, forgetting that it's time to book again. The years fly by. As we all know. Budgeting concerns or financial timing can be part of the hesitation and there can be just decision fatigue, scheduling stress, you know, the normal things that kind of, they think about it, but then like, it's not super easy to do, so it slows them down and sometimes debris to the process all the way. So the best repeat client systems are built to solve these problems. And there are a bunch of ways you can do that, right? You can use your CRM to set reminders that are tied to their last session date. If it's every year, then you can just say a year after their session, we're auto sending this reminder. You could also do that around something like a child's birthday or a wedding anniversary or anything like that. You can send a friendly check in email with a helpful nudge like, oh, can you believe it's been a year since our last session? Let's get something on the calendar. Or if you want to take that a step further, you can incentivize them to stick to this cadence that you've determined is ideal by saying something like, you know, if you book your session within the next week or the next month or something, I'll waive the session fee. But if you're listening to this and you're like, repeat clients are my jam. I love working with them and I want to make it a total no brainer for my people to come back again and again, then, my friend, you need a membership. My portrait membership was a total game changer in my business. And I do not say that lightly. I understand that everybody says game changer, but this really was a game changer. You may have heard me tell the story before. In 2018, I had ankle surgery that totally sidelined me for Close to four months, I wasn't able to work. And that four months of no income almost put me out of business. Right during that time was when I dreamed up this idea for creating a simple portrait membership for my clients. I figured, you know, everybody who calls me, all of these repeat clients who would call me would say, oh, you know, we meant to book last year, but X, Y, Z. The fall was busy, we had to buy a new car, whatever the case was. So I knew that they wanted regular sessions and of course I need regular income. So I figured, why not create a solution for both. I launched my membership in August of 2019. And the way that I set it up was that it was, the cycle was 12 months, right? They joined for a year at a time. And during their year cycle, they got one full session. They got digital files, they got some print credit, and then they got some member only bonuses. I created three tiers, so there were different options to choose from. And I came up with a way to streamline everything. The scheduling, you know, some other stuff that made them feel like they had priority over my regular clients. And then the cherry on top was that I divided the payments for that year over the 12 months. So instead of a big budget hit that my clients were used to, they had to, you know, fork over a couple of thousand dollars each time they wanted to hire me. Instead, it was chopped up. So it really didn't feel like a budget hit at all. It was more like, you know, an extra trip to the grocery store each month instead of, oh, look at this big, you know, line item in this one month of the year. That launch in August of 2019 was a major success, right? So I started right off the bat with about 30 members that year. And although that wasn't all the money that I needed to make, it took so much weight off of my shoulders. I knew that I had income every month and that income was enough to actually cover the costs in my business. So it was like everything else was going to be profit. And although it wasn't a hundred percent, smooth sailing while I was working the kinks out, overall it went really, really well. And like I said, it just became this kind of instant game changer in my business. It solved my clients problems because it spread the cost out, it made the scheduling easy, and it guaranteed that they would get like a great spot on my calendar. But it also solved mine. It reduced that marketing burden. It meant that I got to work with my favorite clients every year and it smoothed out my income, which happened if you were thinking about the date there, just in the nick of time, right? Because when everybody else went to like zero income Covid, I was getting paid month after month no matter what. So building a system for repeat clients does not have to include a membership. But if that sounds like something that would help your business, I really encourage you to check out the course that I teach on memberships, which is called Revenue on Repeat. It's a step by step guide to building your own client membership program, whether that means recurring family sessions or seasonal brand shoots or any other offer that you want to make consistent and easy. Again, you don't need to create a membership to encourage repeat clients, but if you're ready to make that more reliable and more predictable in your business, it's a great way to go. It doesn't take very long to put a membership together once you know what you're doing and you, you know, kind of figure out the pricing and all that sort of stuff. The course gives you just a really clear checklist and walks you through each step so that you can start building that repeat revenue into your business right away. So that is it, my friends, for our systems module. Thank you so much for following along with our first theme. I hope it's helped you gain kind of a fresh perspective on your business runs and shown you that thoughtful systems don't box you in. Right? They don't limit you. They actually give you breathing room and the ability to run your business instead of feeling like it is always running you. Whether you are working on marketing, sales, fulfillment, or building repeat and referral momentum, I want you to remember that your systems don't need to be fancy, they just need to work. And the more consistently they work, the more of that freedom you're going to feel. So, as you can tell, I'm a big fan of systems. I honestly think they're kind of my superpower, which is why they're basically the crux of everything that I teach. Right? The Consistency Club gives you all the pieces of a thriving marketing system. The simple sales blueprint is my step by step course on sales and fulfillment systems. And then Revenue on Repeat walks you through setting up and marketing a membership offer. So if any of those feel like the right next step for you, I would love to have you join me inside. You can find information about that and all of my courses@thiscampythathard.com under the Learn tab in the menu. But again, whether or not you're using those resources, I want you to walk away from this theme and this episode feeling empowered to take the reins and build something that fuels your profitability, supports your life and gives you some much deserved peace of mind. So don't forget to check in with us on the Dark Room. Let us know what you thought about this theme and check out what we'll be diving into next. I create this podcast for you so you know that I want to hear from you. And as always, I am cheering you on. See you next week, friends. 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. If you like the show, be sure to check out thiscan'tbethard.com to explore all the resources we have for photographers. And of course, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a review of the show on itunes or Spotify. As always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.