In this episode, we are going to focus on why tuning up your business is more valuable than tearing it down.
For years, I followed advice without understanding the 'why' behind it, constantly rebuilding my business according to generic templates. Eventually, I began examining these tactics from a psychological perspective, seeking to understand why certain strategies worked for some but not others. I explored outside the photography realm for business inspiration, recognizing a lack of comprehensive business education within the photography industry.
Realizing I didn't need a complete overhaul, I learned the power of subtle tweaks and optimizations. I discovered that in this phase of business growth, small golden nuggets of insight, like adjusting your tone or setting sales limits, have a substantial impact. For those making around $2,000 to $3,000 per client, feeling the need for more growth, the frustration lies in discovering those crucial, tiny tweaks that make all the difference. It's these small adjustments that significantly propel businesses forward.
It's time to transform your business with strategic, small but mighty adjustments.
Connect with Karinda!
Thanks for listening!
In this episode, we are going to focus on why tuning up your business is more valuable than tearing it down.
For years, I followed advice without understanding the 'why' behind it, constantly rebuilding my business according to generic templates. Eventually, I began examining these tactics from a psychological perspective, seeking to understand why certain strategies worked for some but not others. I explored outside the photography realm for business inspiration, recognizing a lack of comprehensive business education within the photography industry.
Realizing I didn't need a complete overhaul, I learned the power of subtle tweaks and optimizations. I discovered that in this phase of business growth, small golden nuggets of insight, like adjusting your tone or setting sales limits, have a substantial impact. For those making around $2,000 to $3,000 per client, feeling the need for more growth, the frustration lies in discovering those crucial, tiny tweaks that make all the difference. It's these small adjustments that significantly propel businesses forward.
It's time to transform your business with strategic, small but mighty adjustments.
Connect with Karinda!
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to Mindset and Money Mastery for Photographers the podcast. We help overwhelmed photographers make more money while simplifying their business by mastering their you guessed it mindset and money. Tune in each week for practical and actionable tips to take your photography business up a notch. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2:I wanted to share with you the story of why my coaching public Facebook group is called Photography Business Tune Up, and that is because I have this huge belief that we should be tuning up our businesses and not tearing them down. I spent nearly five years going to every conference, every workshop, every online class, hiring mentor after mentor to work with, and what would happen is that I would listen to an educator preach on this is what I do, so you should do it too. And they wouldn't really explain the why, because obviously the why takes a lot, so why takes a long time to explain. And I understand why they weren't explaining the why. It wasn't because they didn't want to, it's just because they didn't have the ability or the time to. And you see, I would leave, I would tear down my whole business and I would copy and paste what they were doing and what they told me I should be doing. The thing is is that I wasn't considering who I was, I wasn't considering if the advice they gave would actually work for me and I wasn't considering what was actually important to me. First and foremost. They would say things like here's my script, here's my priceless, here's my product menu, here's my workflow. Here's this PDF guide. Oh, do you want to buy this template? Cool, I'll sell it to you. But they didn't explain the script, they didn't explain the priceless, they didn't explain the product menu, they didn't explain the workflow, nor did they explain how to make that work for me, and really a lot of frustration came of that. They took me five years of doing this and five years of constantly tearing down and rebuilding my business to start back and say this isn't the right way.
Speaker 2:I think there was one year where I legit tested 10 different pricing methods in my wedding photography business. I tried them all. I was on a mission to figure out the best pricing and I would go to this workshop or learn this from Creative Live and I would test it out and put it into play. And then it didn't work for me. But along the way I did learn a lot from my mistakes and from falling flat on my face and seeing what didn't work. But it took a lot of time and there was a lot of time wasted and just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping and praying that some of it stuck.
Speaker 2:What happened was I started to take what I was learning and look at it from a different perspective. I started to say how can I take the business I have and tune it up? How can I take the business I have and make it better? How can I take the pricing I have and make it better instead of just replacing it all? I started to take a look at psychology the reason why people were telling me to do these things. Because of the way your clients responded, because of the way people made buying decisions, because of the way people thought, the way people led with their emotions. I started to look at all of these things and once I started to look at the psychology of why our clients are buying and what they're buying and why they're choosing to work with us, and I started to learn business basics like financials, marketing, everything started to change. I started to ask questions and look at the reason behind all of these different recommendations and all of the things I saw these other photographers doing in their businesses. I wondered why some things worked so great for some people but worked so terribly for others, and I started to take pieces of what others were doing and learn how to use them in a way that worked for me and piece together a system that worked for me, instead of just doing what everyone told me I should be doing.
Speaker 2:The other thing I did around the same time was I started to look for other industries for inspiration outside of just the photographer space. I started to realize that a lot of what photographers were teaching was just regurgitation of what they learned from somebody else and their fumbling through it that got them to where they were. I started to learn that there was a lack of real business education happening in the photography business space, and that's why I didn't understand business. That's why I was struggling. I started to realize that I didn't need to continue to tear my business down, that I needed to instead learn to take my business and to tune it up, to make those subtle tweaks, to make things better.
Speaker 2:I started to learn that I needed to comb through my business with a fine tooth comb and look for those little pieces that were broken, the little pieces that could be optimized, and I needed to start searching for the golden nuggets and education that could make my business better, instead of expecting a complete and total system that was going to change my life, because oftentimes it's the little bitty golden nuggets that propel us forward, the little bitty golden nuggets of saying something the wrong way or asking the question with the wrong tone of voice, or maybe putting a limit on our sales Little tiny golden nuggets that make your business go a long way. I didn't need to go to some class or some workshop and learn something that was earth shattering anymore. I realized that I was beyond that and you might be there too, and, honestly, I'll tell you that this is a frustrating phase of business to be in. You start to realize that you have to work really hard to find those golden nuggets. You have to work really diligently to comb through your business and figure out what you need to tune up, what needs to be optimized. I would say that those of you who are in this phase that are probably feeling this frustration, you're probably making like two to $3,000 per client. You're doing an okay job, you're doing a great job actually, but you feel like there's more, and to get to that more feels so frustrating because you feel like what do I need to do? How do I need to get there? I feel like all the things I'm hearing are the same. I don't know where to go. I don't know where to turn for this, and the reason that it's frustrating is because it's those little bitty tweaks right now that will make all the difference.
Speaker 2:I also started to realize that maybe part of the reason why I was so easily persuaded to burn down my business and build it up again was because I didn't have a compass or something to guide me in what I was doing At that time. I didn't have a good grasp of my why. And because I didn't have a good grasp of my why, I was not making decisions from a place of. This is what's important to me. This is what I value. Instead, I was just making decisions because other people told me to make those decisions. I was no longer running a business that felt good to me or a business that truly worked for me. I started to realize if I truly understood things, the logic, the reason, the psychology behind the advice, and I took my why into consideration, what I valued, what my moral compass was for my business. Then I could take that piece of advice and I could look at that and decide is this good for me or is this bad for me, or is there a little piece of this that I can take and tune up what I'm already doing? And when I started to look at things that way, a lot of things began to change. I stopped making big shifts and doing things for months on end that didn't work and then looking back and being like, well, that didn't work, that sucked. I will never forget.
Speaker 2:There was a point in time when I changed my pricing structure to follow a mentor that I looked up to and respected. They said it was amazing. They said it was going to be great. I saw other people making tons of money and my sales plummeted. I was actually making like half of what I was making before, and the goal was obviously to make more money, but instead it run my business for a while until I was like whoa, why am I doing something that doesn't work? That doesn't feel good, that doesn't fit for me. I should go back to what I was working on already. Maybe there's a piece of this that would help what I was doing.
Speaker 2:And the moment that I started to really make decisions from a good place and started to tune things up instead of tearing them down, things started to fall into place. My sales truly skyrocketed. I felt good about my process and my systems and I let go of all the things that everyone was telling me I needed to be doing, because if it didn't feel good I wasn't going to do it, and if I didn't feel like it was a good fit for me, I sure as heck wasn't going to do it. I simplified, I focused on being a person with my clients. I focused on creating the magic and serving my clients the way they needed to be served.
Speaker 2:Around that time I also started to realize that I was spending most of my time sitting up late at night at all these conferences and workshops I was going to and having conversations with other photographers about their businesses. They were asking me questions about business and I was giving them advice and they were picking my brain and I was telling them how to make more money. And I would also sit there learning and think like, oh man, I could be doing this, I could be teaching this, I could be teaching this better. I would sit in the back corner of the room wanting to jump in when questions were answered because I just couldn't hardly keep my mouth shut. I just wanted to help and I wanted to help other photographers. After quite a few requests and people prodding me, I finally decided that I would start helping photographers with their businesses and I actually started teaching a webinar. Essentially it was what should you be charging? What should your session fee be? And I started teaching this webinar for free every year as a way to give back to the photography community. That quickly turned into my very first coaching program, which was called Photography Business Tune Up, and I also called that program 6-up to 6-figures. So that's where this came from. I wanted to help photographers tune up their businesses and that's where the Facebook group was born from, from that term Tune up your business, don't tear it down. So if you've ever wondered why the Facebook group is called Photography Business Tune Up, that's exactly why it's called that.
Speaker 2:I knew I wanted to help photographers and I wanted to help photographers realize that they could tune up what they were already doing to make their engine run like they wanted it to, to make their engine feel good for themselves. I wanted to show photographers that they didn't need to throw out their entire engine, that they could learn to be their own mechanic and fix their engine themselves. Oftentimes when I was learning, I felt like I was taking my engine to a mechanic and be like here, fix my engine, what's broken with it. When I would hire a mentor or go to a class, and you see what happened. Would I go work with that mechanic? They'd fix my engine, it'd be working fine, and then I'd bring my car home and the engine will break again. And what would happen? I would run to the next mechanic in town to help me fix my car. And that was the cycle that I was on. It was happening over and over and over again and, as a coach, that is not what I want to create and that is exactly why I'm here on this podcast and that is why I'm here sharing these things so freely with y'all.
Speaker 2:I want to create a community of photographers that know how to fix their own engine. They don't have to go running to the next mechanic shop every time their business breaks, because your business will break from time to time. You'll get a leak somewhere and you will need to fix it. But I want y'all to be able to be confident in yourselves and your own decisions, to make those decisions and make those pivots on your own. I want you to have a community of people who also believe the same things around you that are going to be there to help support you if you need help looking for the leak. That's why this is important for me. I want y'all to be independent business owners. I want y'all to be able to make your own decisions.
Speaker 2:I want you to be confident in what you're doing and, honestly, if I had to say like one word that I hear my coaching clients say time and time again, is that they feel confident after going through my coaching program. And it's really crazy, because I don't teach people confidence Nowhere in my coaching program. I'm like let me show you how to be confident. That's just not something I actually teach. But the confidence comes from knowing and understanding your business on a deeper level. Knowing and understanding how to pivot, how to change, how to adjust, knowing how to go forth as a business owner, like a CEO. The confidence is born when you truly understand your business and the confidence is born when you are surrounded by people who are encouraging you to make the decision that's good for you.
Speaker 2:You are very rarely gonna find me just answering a question. You're gonna find me answering a question by helping my coaching clients think through the process and the problem, by helping my coaching clients realize that they know the answer inside of themselves if they think about it the right way. That's what I'm about. I don't wanna create a bunch of codependent photographers that need me forever. Yes, I love y'all. You know I have separation problems and when you leave me I get really sad, but it's okay, it's part of the process and it's a bittersweet moment to know, like you are doing the thing. You don't need me anymore. That's the goal. I don't want you to have to keep training wheels on your bike for the rest of your life. That's no way to be. That's how I was for a lot of years in my business. I had training wheels on and I thought I needed those training wheels. But you don't. You can do it. I really, truly love helping y'all.
Speaker 2:This is why the podcast is here. Like I said, I really want to see all be successful. I want each and every one of you to build a multi-six figure business that you love and you're passionate about. I want each and every one of you to be making so much money that you can give back to charity. I want each and every one of you to be making so much money you can do awesome things for your family, like you can go buy yourself a new car or you can buy your house that you've been dreaming of, whatever it might be. Buy yourself the dang horse. Now you kind of have an idea of where my Facebook group name came from and why my Facebook group is photography business tuneup, and I hope that this helped. You see that During my very first iteration of my business tuneup coaching program many, many years ago, I created a process to comb through business from A to Z, to look at business from the perspective of going through each and every inch of your business and helping my coaching clients have a systematic approach to look through their business as they grew, as things changed, as things might have been broken by themselves, and that is how my coaching business to this day is run. My coaching business still uses those same steps. It's actually six steps. My coaching business uses those same six steps to this day to teach photographers. They've evolved over the years and they've become much more robust, but the basis has always been the same.
Speaker 2:My goal for you is to have the knowledge to confidently fix your own engine. Also, I want you to be able to listen to your engine and know when it starts to sound funny. For those of you women listening to this, you probably know what I'm talking about. Your car starts sounding weird and you tell your husband like hey, my car is making this weird knocking noise. And your husband's like I don't hear anything, it's just fine. And then you take it to the mechanic and the mechanic's like nah, it sounds fine, there's nothing wrong with it. And you're like no, I know my car, I know something is not right in my car, I know something needs to be fixed, but nobody listens to you and nobody believes you. Yeah, you've been there. Right, your business is the same way. You need to be able to recognize those funny sounds, the wobble in your wheels, and when that happens, you need to have the system to go back through and fix it.
Speaker 2:Now, as an educator, I'm going to tell you that there might come a time when you outgrow photography business education and I'm telling you this as a person who wants to see you be successful. Maybe there comes a time when you need advanced mindset training or sales training. Maybe you need help being a better and more powerful writer so that way you can write more powerful and impactful copy. There might be a time when you step outside of the photography industry when it comes to your education, and that is okay. I'm going to give you full permission and tell you that that is something that is going to be necessary in your growth. Down the road, you will step outside of the photography industry for education, and you should, because a lot of the things that I do and a lot of the things that made a big difference in my business came from stepping outside of the photography world.
Speaker 2:It might be subtle, little nuances that might not be super huge, but I started to look at what other people were doing, whether it was the way restaurants priced their food, the way menus were laid out, little things like that that you might not ever think like I could learn from. Yeah, you could learn from. You could learn from how a restaurant prices their food. You could learn from the way a menu is laid out 100% Honestly, I'm going to go ahead and say you could learn from a network marketing training on sales. That might sound crazy, but honestly, I'll throw it out there and I'll say that my sister is in a network marketing company and I was also in it for a little bit and she would drag me to all these trainings with her and I learned some really important, valuable things from those meetings. To be honest with you, those women are great at building networks. That is their whole job. You might not love it, you might not love the way it feels and you might not love being on the receiving end of it, but they're really good at what they do and there might be something you could learn there.
Speaker 2:As crazy as that sounds, don't be afraid to go outside of your industry, even if you're like that makes no sense. How could I ever learn anything from them? Because you will actually learn some little golden nuggets that could change everything for you. I want you to start to learn more and I want you to see you grow. I want you to think of going outside of the photography industry to learn, like adding performance things to your car, maybe like a fancy exhaust or performance tune. You might stop going to the normal mechanic and you might shift to a high performance expert that specializes in making cars super fast or super loud or whatever it is that you want your car or your business to be. Once I learned to tweak and tune my engine, I started to focus more on growing as a person as well. Now, looking back, I probably should have focused on my personal growth a little bit sooner In my coaching business.
Speaker 2:This is something we do. We talk about mindset and growth as a person first, before we talk about the business stuff, because growth as a person is extremely important. I'm going to tell you and encourage you that focusing on growing as a person is equally as important as growing as a business owner. The time that you're spending learning business things should also be equally spent on learning and growing as a person, taking care of yourself first. Your business can only function as good as your functioning, so in order to function well and to be optimized, you're going to have to function well. That is also really important. Be better as a person. Grow as a person. Learn outside of the photography world. Learn from marketing experts, copy experts, learn from Facebook ads experts. I spent an entire year learning everything under the sun about Facebook ads. I spent boo-koo's money. I learned how to run the ads myself. I ran Optimize Ads myself. I outsourced to a few different companies. I spent tens of thousands of dollars a one year on Facebook ads.
Speaker 2:Ask me if I still use Facebook ads. No, I don't, and I know a lot about them, but I don't really use them. I don't actually enjoy them or love them. So now use them, but I have the knowledge in my toolbox if I need it. If I need to pull it out to run an ad for something, I can. It's no big deal.
Speaker 2:From time to time I am still working on my photography skills. It's not like I'm sitting here saying I never work on my photography, I don't ever learn from photographers anymore. That's not the case at all. I still am listening. I'm still learning. From time to time. If I'm on a virtual summit teaching, I am on there listening to the other speakers. I'm looking for a goal to nugget. What is something they said that could encourage me, or maybe a different perspective of business that I might have never considered. I'm still always kind of tuning in and checking in on things, but when I do that, I am not doing it from the perspective of taking all the things in. I'm just looking for little subtle nuances of things.
Speaker 2:I am constantly looking through my own business. I'm constantly analyzing my own business and looking for things that need to be changed, adjusted, tweaked, tuned up, ways to get my sales higher or ways to simplify my workflow so that it requires less work for me. Nothing earth-shattering is changing. To be quite honest with you, my system, my pricing. My process has been the same for relatively probably the last four years. Things have been mostly the same. My pricing does shift from go up from time to time because of inflation and some other things. I do sometimes test some random subtle nuances in pricing and sales processes, mainly for my coaching clients.
Speaker 2:Now, if my coaching clients share something with me that they're trying that they think works well, I'll test it out and see if I think it works better than what I'm doing. I don't want to give them the wrong advice and if they think that they have something that's better than what I'm doing, I'm going to try it. I'm going to test it out. So I am always testing things. If I'm going to have a system where I know I'll test something once or twice, I'll be able to quickly identify is this a tree worth barking up or do I need to run on down the road and go back to what I was doing? There are little subtle things I'm doing. I'm testing and tweaking as I go. Nothing is really earth-shattering, nothing is changing substantially. I might listen to a sales expert in here. I tip on closing the sale and test that on on a call with a client, but I'm able to really see what works and I'm able to make those subtle tweaks, to make a decision on my own and look at things on my own to diagnose if this is helping or not. I'm still checking for leaks and I'm still tuning it up.
Speaker 2:Wherever you are today, I want to encourage you to stop tearing your business down and to truly start tuning it up. Make your engine run better. Don't replace your whole engine. Guys, start to understand the background, the reason, the logic, the why on something before you decide if you want to implement it, but also check in with your why and make sure it feels good for you. I hope you all have found this helpful and I hope you really take this to heart and honestly, I'm going to encourage you anytime you're going to a conference or workshop, whatever it may be, come back and listen to this episode and give yourself that quick reminder, the kick in the butt, that you don't need to tear down your business. You're doing okay to look for the golden nuggets and look for ways you can optimize your engine that you already have running.
Speaker 2:I also find that it's very fitting that I'm sharing this on the podcast right now, as we are ramping up to dive into our equine photographer virtual summit at the end of November. So if you're listening to this and you want to jump on and join us on the equine photographer virtual summit, make sure you check out the link in the show notes and you grab your seat there. It's going to be amazing. You're going to learn so much. I'm bringing together the people that I consider the best in the equine photography world to learn from. We're going to be talking about lots of different things, from mindset to marketing to horse shows to portraits all the things in between. We're going to be covering a lot of different topics and a huge variety from a lot of different perspectives. So make sure you join us there.
Speaker 2:Make sure you come into the equine photography virtual summit looking for those golden nuggets, looking for those little places you can tune up your business and I can guarantee you that ticket is going to pay for itself like that, if you come into with that perspective. All admission to join us live is a $10 ticket, which is donated to charity. You can also join us with an all access pass, the VIP pass, which is going to get you lifetime access to the replays as well as some amazing bonuses from our speakers. So make sure you grab that, and I can guarantee you you do not want to miss out on my bonus. It's going to be real good guys. So make sure you head on over and grab your ticket there. I cannot wait to see y'all. I hope y'all have an amazing week and I hope that y'all can go through this week and think about tuning up your business instead of tearing it down.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support the podcast, please make sure you share it on social media or leave a rating and review. As always, you can check out the links and resources in the show notes over at masteryourmindmoneycom. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on Instagram at masteryourmindmoney and don't forget to join our free Facebook group photography business. Tune up with Corinne Decay. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.