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- [00:00]
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There's this old story about a fisherman who goes out every single day, and over time, he starts to come home with less and less in his boat. And his neighbors and the townspeople are all kind of watching this happen week after week, judging from the shore, as everybody always does. But finally, one of them pulls him aside and says, look, buddy, your net has big holes in it. I can see them from here. You need to take a day and repair the net so. So that you can catch twice as many fish, right? But the fisherman says, thanks. I know the problem is I can't afford to take a day off from fishing. And I love this story because it is so relatable, right? Obviously, from the outside, the answer is clear. Of course he should stop and fix the net. Of course, one day of repair is worth it. But when you are on the inside of that boat, of that exhaustion, of that pressure to, you know, need today's catch, it makes total sense. You can't stop to fix the net because you are too busy fishing. I have been that fisherman, right? Many, many, many times. And if you're running a photography business, I'm willing to bet that you have been that fisherman, too. This month is all about getting out of your own way in your business. And today I want to talk about how we're going to tackle this problem from a handful of angles over the course of the next month.
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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.
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At some point, as we build our photography businesses, most of us hit a ceiling. And the tricky thing about that ceiling is that it doesn't announce itself right. It doesn't show up one day and say, hey, here I am. The ceiling. You've maxed out. It's time to rethink things. Instead, the ceiling shows up as exhaustion, as the sense that you are working harder than ever, but you're not getting further ahead, as that nagging feeling that success is always around the next bend. Just one more booking, one more season, one more year, but somehow you never quite arrive. And it's hard, right? The reason most of us stay stuck at that ceiling isn't laziness. It's not lack of talent. It's that we are wired as artists and business owners, to keep fishing, to focus on, you know, what's right in front of us, the catch the fish, the next meal that we're trying to chase so that we can put out the fire that's burning today with this idea that we'll deal with the holes in the net later. But later has a cost, which is something that I know very well from personal experience. So let me tell you about a few of the holes that I have had in my own fishing net over the years. The first one that comes to mind really is editing. When I first started, it was 2010, there weren't all that many tools out there. And so I took a class on how to edit photos in Photoshop and I got pretty good at it. Then Lightroom started to grow in popularity. It was already around when I started, but, you know, Photoshop was kind of the big name. And then Adobe launched Lightroom and people started talking about like, oh, Lightroom's so much better. It's so much faster. You can batch edit photos and whatever. Anyway, I was totally a late adopter on that one. I was like, I'm fine. I'm pretty fast with Photoshop. No big deal. I like my. I don't even remember what presets are called in Photoshop, but, like, I like all my actions. That's what it was that I have set up, and I'm good. So for years, I did not download a copy of Lightroom. I didn't bother learning how to use it. And then at some point, I took a class that showed me how to use it, and it was like, I think I had to scrape my chin off the floor. Like, it sped up my workflow by leaps and bounds. I was mortified thinking about the weeks or like, years of my life that I had wasted editing photos individually in Photoshop one by one, exporting, importing all this stuff, it was just atrocious. Anyway, that switch really taught me to at least keep an open mind to the fact that a faster workflow doesn't necessarily reduce the quality of your output. You may just be getting in your own way. The next lesson that I learned the hard way, the big hole in my Net was just had to do with like, organizing my time and my workflow, which I had always done the way that a lot of people do in my head and on my Google Calendar and in a spreadsheet with all my client information and all that sort of stuff. Everything was like, I could find whatever I needed to find because it was all in my emails and I had notes about things scattered around, and I have a pretty good brain. I'm a pretty organized person. I lived by my calendar, whatever. But one time, one day, it finally came to pass, as it inevitably was going to, that I had forgotten to mark a client session on my calendar. Or maybe I had put it on there, but I had put it on there wrong. Anyway, I got a phone call one morning from a good client of mine, one of my favorites. She was lived 40 minutes away, but I had worked with her family multiple times over the years. And she calls me and was like, hey, we're here. And I was like, what? Where? Where are you? And sure enough, she was there with her family. Everybody was dressed and ready for this photo shoot, and I was, you know, sitting at home in my PJs, not even, like, thinking, batteries, not charged, camera, whatever. It was a disaster. And I had to, like, there was no way for me to get over there in any kind of time. I just had to fess up to the fact that I had totally botched her session. And it was that day that I started researching tools that would help me get more organized about this stuff. And I ended up signing up for my first session CRM at some point that week and setting it up, which revolutionized my business completely. Like, having a tool that held all of those dates and times and meetings and notes and contracts and invoices and all the things all in one place, all easy to sort of sort through and find, completely changed the level of organization that I brought to my business. And again, I was like, wow, I wish I had signed up for this years ago. I wish I had learned about this years ago. Those are kind of the manageable stories, right? Those are the ones that I can tell with a bit of humor and hindsight. Then there are the harder stories that many of, you know, when I went through my divorce and had to kind of restructure the way that my business was run because I had been ignoring a lot of holes in the net, and the need for more income forced the issue and made me kind of reevaluate everything. Not in a slow, methodical, thoughtful way, but in kind of a Hail Mary pass kind of a way. The other was the ankle surgery that I had in 2019 that took me out of work not for the two weeks that I was anticipating, but for four months where I didn't have any income. And I had not planned for not having any income for four months. Thankfully, in both of those cases, it worked out well. I developed the simple sales system when I got divorced. And that totally brought in more money in less time, again changing my entire business. And then after my ankle surgery, I started my portrait membership, which then helped me maintain steady income through the rest of my business, including Covid, when everything shut down. So there are silver linings to these stories, and I imagine that this fisherman might have his own silver lining. But I really would love this podcast to be a way to help you make some of these moves with more intention and more of a Runway rather than in a crisis situation. Right here is what I have come to understand after, you know, running a business, a photography business for 16 years, and after working with and talking to hundreds or thousands of photographers via this can't be that hard. We are all, to some degree, the bottlenecks in our own businesses. Not because we're doing anything wrong, but because when you are the one who creates everything from scratch, you do all of the things, you know, all of the things you are the photographer and the editor and the scheduler and the bookkeeper and the marketer and the customer service department and on and on and on. And even once you start handing some of those things off, you're still holding a lot of them. And that works until it doesn't, right? We hit these ceilings at different times in our businesses, telling us not that something is broken, but that something worked. You built something and you got to a point where it's big enough that you can't manage it all on your own. And now it needs to grow beyond you. The problem is when you're smashed up against that ceiling, it's hard to kind of see the forest for the trees, right? You get into this, like, how, how could I possibly pull all this stuff that's in my head out and hand it off to someone else? And especially if you find yourself in that position during a busy season or during a personal crisis, it can really cause things to unravel. The answer to how you can manage all of this ahead of time or even in a crisis situation, I guess, falls into three buckets. The first one is systems, right? Getting the knowledge, the processes, the workflows, all of those things out of your head and into some sort of form that doesn't require you to personally execute every single step. This is stuff like setting up your CRM and building out your automations. And, you know, if that sounds techy and boring and unglamorous, that's because it is. But you know what isn't boring is getting your life back, right? Not having to hold everything in your head all the time, not having to second guess, like, what do I have going on this week? What do I have to do today? You save so much time just not managing the admin in your mind, and that alone is kind of worth it. So the return on your investment of time and effort and all of that when it comes to setting up these systems is real, and it compounds over time. The second bucket is outsourcing, right? Handing actual tasks that you normally manage off to actual people or nowadays off to a trained AI tool so that your time is freed up for the work that only you can do. You can do this. This could be a va, it could be an editor, it could be somebody who handles your social media. The blocker for most photographers isn't necessarily finding the help. It's getting organized enough to hand something off cleanly, which again, goes back to having good systems in place. So these things do build on one another, and the first step is building the systems. Once you've got the systems, then you can start to outsource and. Or you can add capacity. So by adding capacity, I mean bringing in other photographers who can actually extend the work that's done under your brand, as in an associate model, so that your business can book more and serve more clients, even when you're not always the one behind the camera. This month on the podcast, we are going to be digging into all three of those buckets, if you will. Right. And although I can totally understand where this would sound like the sort of thing that is for the photographer who is super busy and, you know, needs help with this, I want to be clear that obviously it's important for those people, but it's also super important for the photographer who's not as busy as they want to be. Yet, if I could go back to the beginning of my business and start again, the number one thing that I would change is trying to set aside time to work on my business before these crisis situations hit. I had a tendency that was pretty clear to wait for that disaster to happen before I kind of got myself going. And it doesn't have to be that way, right? If you are earlier in your business or still growing your business, this is the perfect time to work on that framework, right? So that when the busy does come, and it will, you're not the fisherman with the holes in his net, scrambling to fix things in the middle of the catch, right? The best time to repair the net is before you actually need it. But that really does take discipline. So here's what I want you to do. This week. As we get ready to dive into all of these things, I want you to think through all the different activities in your business and write down one place where you are the major bottleneck right now. One thing that can only happen if you personally do it. One process that lives entirely in your head. Something that you've been doing, you know, manually that you know somewhere in the back of your mind could be done differently. And hold onto that. You don't have to fix it today. You just have to kind of know what it is so that as you are listening over the next few weeks, you start to understand the next steps on how to address that. Because you can't fix the net if you don't look at the holes. All right, that's enough for this metaphor. And. And for this week, next week, I've got Colley James back on the show. If you know Coley, she's been on the show several times and you know that every time she's on the show, it's a good one. And in the meantime, I hope you have a fantastic 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
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to hit the subscribe button.
- [15:56]
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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.