What happens to your photo booth business the day you decide you're done running it?

Not the day you sell it. The day you actually try to walk away, even for a few weeks. For most owners, the honest answer is: nothing good.

This week I sat down with my cousin Adrian Salomunovic, mid-rainstorm, on a sidewalk in Ottawa, because that's apparently how we do interviews now. Adrian built an eight figure business completely from scratch, no outside investment, no funding rounds, and sold it for eight figures. Since then he's mentored and coached over 400 founders, many of whom went on to exit their own businesses successfully.

Most of us started this business messy. Maybe it was a side hustle to pay off some bills, and you built it as you went, figuring it out one event at a time. That's exactly what real entrepreneurs do. But somewhere along the way, the goal has to shift from "keep the business running" to "build something someone else could actually run, or buy." Adrian came on to break down exactly what separates the two, and why most photo booth businesses, even six and seven figure ones, would fail the test if you tried to sell them tomorrow. 

In this episode, we covered:

What You'll Learn: 

Mentioned Resources:

Your Next Steps:

Work with Me: https://bit.ly/POD-Site2

Join Photo Booth Mastery Hub: https://bit.ly/POD-Hub

Connect on Social: https://www.instagram.com/photoboothmastery

It's 2 a.m. and a stranger is backing a car into my driveway.

He just dropped off a photo booth, fresh from a wedding. The next morning, I grabbed it from the garage in my pajamas and loaded the galleries. My neighbors probably thought we were running something out of that house. And honestly? We kind of were. 

For a long time, that was just our life. Booths in the garage, the basement, the living room. Two full-time jobs between me and my husband, and a photo booth business crammed into every crack of time we had left over. We built the first $100K–$150K on our own, no staff, no team, no help.

And it worked, right up until it didn't.

In this episode, I'm breaking down the two hires that finally got us out of that chaos, who you should hire first (not who you think), and what the order actually looks like when you're the bottleneck and there aren't enough hours in the day. Your first hire and your second hire are doing different jobs. Mix up the order and you'll be frustrated when the first one doesn't fix the problem you thought it would.

What you'll learn: 

Resources Mentioned: 

Your Next Steps:

You've seen the thread. Someone posts in a local wedding Facebook group asking for a "reasonably priced" photo booth. Within an hour, 30 booths are in the comments. Links, DMs, pick-me energy everywhere.

I want to talk about what's actually happening in that thread.

Because if you're trying to charge more and build a business that actually pays you, that thread is one of the worst places on the internet to be standing in.

This episode is about why local Facebook bargain groups are keeping good founders stuck, and what you actually do about it when Facebook is where most of your leads come from right now.

I start with who's in those groups, because this is the part everyone skips. When someone types "reasonably priced photo booth," they're telling you everything. They're not asking about your prints, your experience, or how you run an event start to finish. The filter they're leading with is price. And the booth that wins in that room is whoever answers that question best. Which means whoever goes lowest.

Then I walk through what happens next, because it gets brutal fast. The client calls booth one, gets a number, calls booth two and mentions the lower quote, booth two matches it, and on it goes until the person who wins the bid war is the one who agreed to do it for the least. That's not a win. It's a race to the bottom with a trophy made of exhaustion.

And the part that really gets me? A lot of the prices I see flying around in those threads don't even cover the real cost of the event. Gas, gear wear and tear, consumables, staff time, setup, teardown, admin. When you add it all up, some of those booths aren't making a small amount. They're paying to be there.

This episode is not about making you feel bad for starting there. A lot of us got our first bookings right there in those threads. This is about what comes next.

What you'll learn in this episode:

Mentioned resources:

Your Next Steps:

She came in as a photographer, almost sold her business in 2020, and is now on track to hit $400K, all while packing up and moving to a brand new state with her team still running things back home.

Stephanie of Juju Booth in South Florida is the kind of operator that makes you want to audit your own business. She's been in the photo and events industry since 2007, built a loyal team with insane retention, cracked the corporate market, and figured out how to make keychains worth over $30K in a single year. And she did a lot of this in her first year inside Photo Booth Mastery.

This is a candid, community-style conversation we had inside Thrive, and I knew more people needed to hear it. Whether you're trying to crack corporate, build a team you can actually trust, or stop doing everything yourself, Stephanie has been through it. She doesn't sugarcoat it either.

We talked about the moment she finally split her brands (after fighting it for years), how she turned content and training days into a $2,500 investment that pays off for an entire quarter, and what actually helped her go from $280K to a projected $400K in one year. Spoiler: it wasn't just the gear.

We also got into the messy, real stuff. Her CRM situation she's been stuck in since 2012, why commission-only salespeople can backfire, and what she'd do differently if she were starting over.

What you'll learn in this episode:

Why you can't market to a bride and a corporate client from the same brand, and what Stephanie did to tackle this

How she runs quarterly content and training days for under $2,500 and walks away with 400 video clips

The three revenue pillars that added tens of thousands to her business: keychains, trading cards, and the look book

What changed in her business when she stopped being the only one who could do things (and hired her sister as a VA)

How she went from $280K to a projected $400K, and what systems made that possible

Why her leads come from Google and venue relationships first, not Instagram, and how that shapes where she focuses

Her honest take on Booth.Events, Breeze, CRMs, and the softwares she uses to run the show

What she's thinking about for salespeople, commission structures, and team building as she grows

The one piece of advice she'd give to anyone who's a year behind where she is now

And why education got a "38 out of 10" from her on the importance scale

Resources mentioned:

Juju Booth: https://www.jujubooth.com

Photo Booth Supply Co: https://www.photoboothsupply.co

Snappic: https://www.snappic.io

Booth.Events: https://www.booth.events

Simple Booklet: https://www.simplebooklet.com

ADP Payroll: https://www.adp.com

ConnectTeam: https://connecteam.com

Kolbe Index: https://www.kolbe.com

LinkedIn for corporate outreach

Chamber of Commerce / WIPA networking

Your Next Steps:

Work with Me: https://bit.ly/POD-Site2

Join Photo Booth Mastery Hub: https://bit.ly/POD-Hub

Connect on Social: https://www.instagram.com/photoboothmastery

New apps are popping up in the photo booth space faster than I can keep up with.

And the pitch is almost always the same: I couldn't find a solution that worked for me, so I built one. And now you can have it too.

Sometimes that's exactly what it is. A founder who solved their own problem and wants to share it. That part is genuinely cool, and I'm not here to knock it. But there's a whole other side to this that nobody in our industry is actually talking about. The side that could put your business and your clients at risk before you ever see it coming.

This episode isn't about how to use AI in your business. That's a different conversation for a different day. This one is about the software AI is helping people build, the stuff landing in your inbox and getting passed around in the groups, and the questions you need to be asking before you hand over your data.

Because here's the thing. The moment you start loading client information into a tool, names, emails, phone numbers, photos, videos, you've taken on a level of responsibility that most people never stop to think about. And if the app running your business has no privacy policy, no terms and conditions, and no real infrastructure underneath it? That responsibility lands on you when something goes wrong.

And something always goes wrong eventually. That's just software.

What you'll learn in this episode:

What "vibe coding" actually is and why it's showing up everywhere in our space right now

What a full stack app means in plain English and what's usually missing from the tools being sold to us

The four things real software has that vibe-coded apps almost never do: error reporting, security, data backups, and staged updates

What "spaghetti code" is and why it matters when something breaks on a Saturday night

The exact questions to ask any software vendor before you hand over your client list

What a good answer sounds like versus a bad one, and how to tell the difference without being a tech person

Why the software you choose becomes a sales decision, not just an operational one, when you're going after corporate clients

The difference between building tools for yourself and selling them to others, and why that line changes everything

Why your photo booth business insurance does not cover you the moment you start selling an app you built

Which companies in our space are building it the right way and what actually makes them different

Resources Mentioned:

Your Next Steps:

You're exhausted. And it's not even peak season yet.

Your calendar is packed, your weekdays are spent prepping for the weekends, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, you're supposed to still have a life. Missing dinners. Pushing vacations. Your body hurts. Your phone never stops. And underneath all of it? This quiet panic that something has to give, but you can't figure out what.

The thing that's crushing you isn't the volume of events. It's the structure underneath the business you built.

Because somewhere along the way, without meaning to, you stopped building a business and started building a really expensive, really demanding job. One you can't quit. One with no weekends. And one with no boss to complain to, because that boss? Is you.

I've been there. My first year, I crossed six figures in just over twelve months while working a full-time corporate job. My husband and I were doing every event, every load-in, every 2 AM drive home. I was scheduling emails at midnight, answering inquiries on my lunch break, and running on adrenaline. The business was growing. The money was real. And I felt completely and totally trapped.

That moment of sitting at my computer at 2 AM, thinking this cannot be the dream I signed up for, that was the moment everything shifted. I stopped asking "how do I book more?" and started asking "what am I actually building here?"

In this episode, I'm breaking down the difference between building a job and building a business, why your exhaustion isn't a badge of honor, and what you actually need to build this busy season so that next year looks completely different.

What you'll learn in this episode:

The real difference between a job-shaped business and an actual business, and which one you're accidentally running

Why crossing six figures doesn't automatically mean you've built something scalable

How the gap between demand and structure always gets paid for by someone, and right now, that someone is you

What a business with a real sales process, operational systems, and a team actually looks like (even when you're just getting started)

Why freedom doesn't come from more revenue, it comes from better structure

The three questions that will show you the gap between the life you're living and the life you actually want

How to identify your one structural move to make before the end of busy season

Why it's not about building a seven-figure business, it's about building the right structure at every level

Resources Mentioned:

Photo Booth Mastery: https://photoboothmastery.catalinabloch.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/photoboothmastery 

Your Next Steps:

Work with Me: https://bit.ly/POD-Site2

Join Photo Booth Mastery Hub - https://bit.ly/POD-Hub

Connect on Social: https://www.instagram.com/photoboothmastery

 I just got back from two weeks in Japan and I am still not over it.

Honestly, Asia was never really on my radar. Not because I didn't want to go, but because the flight is like 20-something hours and it just never felt urgent. But my friend Mir, who owns South Beach Photo Booth Company, got married in Kyoto and invited us. And I am not someone who turns down a wedding in Japan, so off I went.

I brought a journal. No real plans. No expectations. Just an intention to let myself be inspired. And wow, did that deliver.

Because somewhere between the Seven-Eleven egg sandwiches, the photo booths I dragged everyone to try, and a receipt handed to me with two hands and a bow for a four dollar purchase, something clicked.

Luxury is not what's in your package. It's how you make people feel. And Japan showed me that better than anything I've experienced in over a decade of running events.

This episode is me unpacking what I saw, what it made me realize about our industry, and the specific zero-cost things I'm bringing back into my own business starting at the very next event we do.

In this episode you'll learn:

Why the "what do I put in a luxury package" question is the wrong question entirely

What high-end wedding clients with $150,000 to $200,000 budgets actually expect from their vendors

The two-hands print handoff I'm testing at our next event and why I think it matters more than it sounds

How to train your booth attendants to be the best part of the guest experience, not just the person running the machine

Why early setup, response time, and how your team is dressed are non-negotiables at the premium level

What a cashier at an H&M in Tokyo taught me about scripted, trainable service

Why consistency across every single touchpoint is the thing that actually builds a premium brand

Resources Mentioned:

Your Next Steps:

The future of the photo booth industry isn't in your next gear purchase. It's you.

I bought my first photo booth over 11 years ago from Photo Booth Supply Co. Charged $9,000 USD to my parents' emergency American Express card without telling them. I had a vision. Got back to Ottawa and realized everyone had the same booth in a different shell.

That was the moment I understood that the gear was never going to be the differentiator. And figuring out what actually was took us to six figures in year one and kept us scaling from there.

This episode is a live keynote I delivered at a major industry conference. I'm talking trends, technology, emotion, nostalgia, and the one thing nobody on the trade show floor is selling: your perspective.

Here's what we get into:

Resources Mentioned:

Your Next Steps:

In 2022, we ran over 500 events, crossed seven figures in revenue, and I sat in my kitchen at the end of that year looking at the numbers, looking at the calendar, and wondering how my body got this tired.

I had built something I was proud of. And the cost of running it that hard was catching up with all of us.

That year changed how I think about growth. Because somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that a packed calendar was proof the business was working. It took almost breaking my team to realize it wasn't.

This episode is about the math, the mindset shift, and the actual moves I made after that. In 2025, we ran 100 fewer events than we did in 2023, and made 25% more revenue. That's not a lucky season. That's a decision. And in this episode, I walk through exactly how it works and what it takes to get there.

If your calendar is full but something still feels off, this one's for you.

What you'll learn in this episode:

Resources mentioned:

Your Next Steps:

Do you know what your clients are going to be asking for six months from now?

I do. And it started with me sending my friend Zach to run around Coachella with one job: grab samples from every photo and video activation he could find.

Here's why this matters. Whatever big brands are spending their experiential marketing budgets on at festivals like Coachella is exactly what's going to show up in your clients' requests next year. Every time. And this year had some genuinely impressive stuff, some head-scratchers, and one activation that is already generating phone calls to my business right now.

In this episode I'm walking through every activation Zach captured, breaking down what worked, what missed, and what you need to start paying attention to. From overhead look-down booths to lenticular prints to branded key chain stations, this is your trend report for the year ahead.

What you'll learn in this episode:

Resources Mentioned:

Your Next Steps: