Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
A
Last week on the podcast, I interviewed Ali Lee about how she built her associate team. And that conversation got me thinking about the other conversation that I have had on this show about building an associate team, which was a while ago. It was back in 2023. I looked it up, it was episode 239 and my guest was Jill Smith. After Jill and I stopped recording, I remember that we stayed on the line, as I often do with my guests, and we were chatting for a few minutes while we were waiting for the files to upload and all that sort of thing. But I remember this particular conversation pretty clearly because I had been genuinely inspired by the conversation that we had just had. And as I was saying that, I remember her saying something along the lines of, well, you would be the perfect person to build an associate team. You've got the experience, you've got the systems, the SEO. You would make a killing doing this. And man, that comment nearly changed the course of my career. Because for the next several months, maybe it was closer to a year, I really considered creating an associate team in my family photography business. I knew that Jill was right about my business being in a good place for it, right? My SEO was strong, I had a solid email list, I had systems that were well honed and working for me, I had a long list of clients, and I was also an experienced educator. So I knew that was going to be helpful when it came to getting my team up to speed and trained. But month after month, I procrastinated. Creating an associate team, or at least looking into creating an associate team stayed on my to do list. But it was one of those things that I just kept pushing to maybe next week, maybe next week. And finally I realized it wasn't going to happen. Not because the math didn't work, not because I wasn't capable, not because I was afraid of growing, but because when I got really honest with myself, I realized that growing the photography business wasn't where my heart was anymore. Since 2020, I had been singularly focused on growing something else right? This show, the education side of my business. And although I was still running my photography business, building an associate team seemed like a bigger, longer term commitment that I wasn't ready to make. And all of that procrastinating was my subconscious's way of telling me that I'm sharing this story today because I want this episode to be kind of the counterweight to everything else that we have covered this month. We've talked about getting organized, we've talked about bringing in help, we've talked about building associate teams. All of that in service of getting out of your own way. And that is real. It's valuable. I stand behind every bit of what we have shared in this theme, but none of that means anything if you are trying to grow in a direction that doesn't actually serve the life and the business that you want. I've always believed that it's better to go 20 steps in one direction than one step in 20 directions. So today I want to share my thoughts about how to figure out what that direction is for you and then how to make the math work as you head in that direction.
- [03:20]
B
Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Ana 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.
- [03:44]
A
You can do it, and I can show you how. There is enormous pressure from the online business world, from social media, from the photography community itself to grow, right? More clients, more revenue, more scale, more teams. And that pressure is so pervasive that a lot of photographers never stop to ask themselves the really simple question of more for what? Because growth all by itself isn't a goal, right? Growth is a strategy. And like any strategy, it only makes sense if it's happening in service of something that you actually want. I built this show around a tagline that I take very seriously, right? I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. It's not just, you know, profitable. It's not just sustainable. It's all three. Profitability, sustainability, and something that you love. And that love part is the one that gets dropped most often when photographers start thinking about growing beyond themselves or really growth of any kind, right? So before we get into any math, and I do want to do a little bit of math today, because I actually think that this is a genuinely useful piece of the puzzle when you are looking at growing beyond your own bottleneck. I want to start with a different kind of question, and that is, what does your ideal business actually look like? Obviously, we all have the version of our business that we like to trot out at dinner parties, but that's not the one I'm talking about, right? This is not what you think you should build. It's not what other people are impressed by. This is the version of your ideal business that fits your life, it fits your energy, it serves your creativity, and probably kind of Goes hand in hand with the reason that you picked up a camera in the first place. And I want you to think about three things specifically. First, I want you to map out your ideal week. How many sessions are you shooting? How many hours are you spending on the business side? What are you doing? What are you not doing? Right? If you could design your working life from scratch, what would that look like? The second thing I want you to consider is your ceiling. Is the ceiling of your business a problem for you right now? Right? Are you turning away work that you want to take? Are you so maxed out that you're burning out? Or maybe you're not quite there yet. Maybe you're still building toward the capacity that you are aiming for. Because the answer to should I grow beyond myself? Is very different depending on where you are on that journey. And third, I want you to consider what it is that you love about this business. What made you want to start it, certainly, but also what makes you want to keep going. Because here's the thing. The parts that you love, those are the parts worth protecting and doubling down on. And sometimes growth, when you're not growing with intention, is exactly what kind of erodes those parts of the business that you love. So, as I said, I spent a year sitting with those questions. Sometimes I was being more intentional about it, sometimes they were just kind of percolating in the background. But I sat with them for that solid year before I ended up making a decision about my photography business. Was I going to grow? Was I going to take on associates? Was I going to sort of take megapixie to the next level? But what I kept coming back to was that the thing I loved most at that phase in my business, which I want to take a moment to say, is different than what I loved most five years before that. At that time, at that phase, what I was loving the most was teaching, was talking to photographers, was building this. This can't be that hard community. And that's already where all of my energy was going. So splitting myself up to grow both would've meant doing neither as well as either of those goals deserved. Right? And it wasn't what I wanted to do. That wouldn't have been a growth strategy. That just would have made me busier. So whatever direction it is that you're considering, whether you're considering starting an associate program, whether you are considering outsourcing something, whether you are trying to dial in your systems or maybe actually looking at stepping back in some way, I want you to run your goals through those questions. First, because again, when it comes to running the numbers and thinking about what you could make or whether this is going to be sustainable or not, none of that really helps if you're not solving for the right problem. But I do want to talk about the numbers. I do want to talk about the math, because that's also an important factor to consider when you are thinking about growth. One of the most useful concepts that I've encountered around this topic is what author Dan Martel calls your buyback rate. He wrote a book called Buy Back youk Time, and it's all about this. It's really a great book about outsourcing and automating and getting yourself to where you are working fewer hours with the same results. His idea is pretty simple, right? First, you need to figure out what your time is actually worth per hour. And then you use that number to make decisions about what you can and cannot hand off. So here's the basics of how to calculate it. Number one, you want to take your total revenue from the last year and divide it by the number of hours that you worked. So I recognize that those are. The revenue piece is a little bit easier to distill. But if you're honest about the number of hours that you're working, then you can calculate your effective hourly rate with a simple little bit of division, right? What's worth noting, and I feel like I should warn you about, is that number is often lower than you expect, and that in and of itself is useful information. But what I want you to then do is once you've calculated that number, I want you to use that number to help you make logical decisions when it comes to handing things off, whether that's to an editor or a VA or, you know, an associate. Whether you're shopping for AI tools, all of these different things I want you to ask yourself, can I get this done for less than my hourly rate by handing it off? And if the answer is yes, then handing it off makes immediate, obvious financial sense. If the answer is no, then you need to consider whether it's worth delegating it and whether opening up your time will allow you to raise that effective hourly rate. So let me run through a couple of scenarios with real numbers so this isn't quite so abstract because I'm not sure I made that super clear. So outsourcing, editing, one of my favorite things for people to outsource, because most of the time you can make the numbers work so that you are buying back your time, right? If you are a portrait photographer, let's Say you charge a thousand dollars per session and you spend around 10 hours between, you know, client communication and the session and editing and driving and all that. In that scenario, your effective hourly rate is a hundred dollars an hour, right? And if the editing part takes, let's say, half of those 10 hours, that means your editing time alone is worth $500. So if you hire an editing service that charges less than $500, then that math works. Given that most editing services charge somewhere between like 50 cents and a dollar per image, and that there are even cheaper options if you want to go the AI route. The math on that is rarely even close. It's almost always going to make sense to outsource some amount of your editing. Slightly more complicated would be if you were looking to hire a VA for admin work, right? To help you with things like emails and inquiries and all that sort of stuff. So let's assume that you spend like 10 to 15 hours a month on those kind of VA type tasks. Email scheduling, client communication. If the VAs that you're looking at charge between 25 and $50 an hour, which is not atypical, that ends up being 250 to $500 a month to buy back those 10 hours, right? And that feels like a lot of money on a monthly basis to be committed to. However, if those 10 hours are able to go toward anything that generates more than $500 in revenue, whether that's another session, you know, more sales, conversations, a marketing strategy, push, whatever, then that investment can very much pay for itself. And honestly, as long as your overall revenue supports it. Sometimes the mental load reduction all by itself can be worth the money that you spend on something like a va, right? Again, it all comes down to making the math align with your goals and needs. Finally, I want to talk about this associate team idea, because it's probably the most complex of all three scenarios. Because the math depends heavily on your pricing structure and your market, what you need to pay your associates. But the basic question is, can you charge enough for an associate session and pay your associate fairly while keeping enough money to make it worth the overhead of running a team? Last week, Allie Lee talked about how that works for her. But obviously your situation may be different and probably is. So it's important to run your own numbers at the end of the day. If the hourly rate to bring on an associate is lower than what it would cost you to do all the work yourself, then that is the math giving you a green light. But again, I want to reiterate, the math can math. The math can work out perfectly, but the decision is still up to you, and there's no formula for figuring that out. The question really isn't whether to grow. We are all growing in some way or another. Rather, it's what to grow, where you are going to put your focus, and whether the version of growth that you're considering actually moves you toward the business and life that you want. For some of you, everything that I've covered this month is exactly what you needed, right? You are ready to get organized, you are ready to start handing things off. Maybe you're ready to build a team. You've done the reflection, you know what your ideal week looks like, and growing your photography business is genuinely the direction that you want to go. The math works and the vision is clear. So go do it. For others, this month might have surfaced something different, right? Maybe you realize that what's actually keeping you from the business you want isn't capacity so much as it is direction. Maybe, like me, your energy is already going somewhere else and splitting it would undermine both things that you're trying to accomplish. Maybe the goal isn't more photography, maybe it's better photography, or more profitable photography, or just photography that fits inside a life that has other things in it too. None of those are wrong answers, they're just different. So as we wrap up our beyond the Bottleneck series this week, I want you to think about what your definition of growth is. Picture your best possible, most successful self a year from now. And then I want you to consider how your current actions are moving you toward that reality, or potentially away from it. If you're moving in the right direction, fantastic. Keep going. If you're not, that is worth considering, right? How can your actions better align with your goals? How can you stop chasing all of the success that someone else is feeding you and start moving more intentionally toward the success that you actually want? And if you're unclear on what you want, or if you know what you want but don't feel clear on how to get there, I would invite you to check out the photographer's business plan. Glow up. The Glow up is a short self led challenge of sorts that I have run for a couple of years. It's been hugely popular and it is the only opportunity in my course library where you get one on one dedicated contact with me at a super bargain basement price. It's a five part self paced workshop and in about six to eight hours, spread out over 10 days, I walk you through exactly how to audit what's working in your business, identify the problems and the friction points, and create a concrete plan for exactly how to get from where you are to where you want to be. It's not really a course. It really it started as a challenge that I used to run live and then I turned it into a thing that you can do on your own time. But it really is a process. And it's the same process that I use myself for getting clarity on where I am, where I want to go, and what needs to change in order to get there. So if that sounds like something you need, you can find out more@thiscantbethard.com glow and speaking of what comes next, in August, we're going to be kicking off a brand new back to school marketing challenge. Over the course of four weeks on the podcast, we're going to simplify the whole how do I fill my fall calendar? Question by focusing on the three audiences you already have your hottest leads, your warm leads, and your cold leads. So each week you're going to walk away with one clear, targeted thing to do so that by the time September rolls around, you're not scrambling, but are feeling booked and confident about the season ahead. That challenge starts next week and you are not going to want to miss it. I'll see you then. Well, that's it for this week's episode
- [18:16]
B
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
- [18:33]
A
to hit the subscribe button.
- [18:34]
B
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.