Scaling Out Loud

 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

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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:

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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:

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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:

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Your Next Steps:

You've been thinking about free events all wrong.

What if I told you that one single free event,  one where you spent maybe $500-$1500 on setup and staff, could bring you millions of dollars in revenue over the next decade? Because that's exactly what happened to me.

If you're stuck on marketing, struggling to find consistent leads, trying to raise your prices, or desperately wanting to break into corporate but have no idea where to start, this episode is going to flip the script on everything you think you know about "working for free."

This episode is a recording of a live keynote talk I gave at at PBX (Photo Booth Expo), where I walked attendees through my entire Photo Booth Lead Generation Blueprint framework, the same strategy my team has used for 10 years across both of my brands, MDRN Activations and MDRN Photobooth Co.

Spoiler: it's not about giving your services away. It's about paying your best marketer, yourself, to get in front of exactly the right people, at exactly the right events.

The first event I ever did using this method was a local networking lunch called Ladies Who Lunch. One booth. One afternoon. And from that single event, we landed two of our biggest corporate clients. Clients who have collectively brought us millions of dollars in revenue over 10 years. And we still work with them today.

That's the power of this system when you do it right.

What you'll learn in this episode:

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Your Next Steps:

I'm going to tell you something I've never said quite this directly before.

I didn't think a photo booth business could make a million dollars.

Not mine. Not anyone's. I thought there was a ceiling on this industry, that you could do well, make decent money, have a good little business. But seven figures? From photo booths? That felt like it was reserved for other kinds of businesses. More "legitimate" ones.

That belief was quietly running everything. My pricing. My vision. The size of the goals I let myself set. Because why build something big if you don't actually believe big is on the table? And then I found today's guest.

I was pacing back and forth in my backyard, earbuds in, listening to her audiobook, and something cracked open in me that I didn't know was closed. I made a decision right there on that grass: this business could be a million dollar business. I was going to move into my dream house. I was going to stop letting a belief I'd never even examined out loud put a cap on what I was building.

I'm recording this from that dream house. I've since built multiple 7-figure brands in this industry.

The one I once thought had a ceiling.

That's why this episode is personal. Today I'm sitting down with Denise Duffield-Thomas, Hay House author, money mindset coach, and the woman behind two books that are now permanently on my recommendation list: Get Rich, Lucky Bitch and Chill and Prosper. She's helped over 10,000 entrepreneurs through her Money Bootcamp, and she has a way of holding up a mirror that makes you go... oh. That's what I've been believing.

We get into the money blocks that are specific to service businesses like ours. The ones that don't look like money blocks. The ones that feel like logic, like humility, like just being realistic. We talk about pricing paralysis, the myth of the critic-proof price, the "keyless life" framework for building a business that stops draining you, and the real reason so many photo booth founders stay stuck, even when their business is technically working.

And the part where Denise talks about the value of what you're actually creating for your clients? I wasn't expecting it to land the way it did.

What you'll learn in this episode:

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Your Next Steps:

There is a clip that lives in Catalina's head. She has never been able to shake it.

It's the music video for Humble by Kendrick Lamar. That moment where the camera doesn't just move, it dances. Every cut on the lyric. Every angle shift perfectly timed. It made something shift in her brain. And it planted an idea: what if a photo booth experience could feel like that?

That's what this episode is really about. Because that idea didn't come from studying the photo booth industry. It didn't come from a vendor catalog or a trade show floor. It came from watching art.

And that's the conversation we're having today.

Where does your creativity actually come from? Not the version you perform for clients. The real raw material. The fuel. The stuff that makes you look at a blank canvas and see something instead of nothing.

I've been thinking about this a lot. And the more I think about it, the more I believe creativity is one of the most underrated and misunderstood assets in this industry. We talk systems, pricing, team building, corporate clients. All of it matters. But none of it is what makes your work unforgettable. What makes your work unforgettable is you. Your particular lens. Your specific obsessions. That weird, unrepeatable combination of things only you love.

And here's the thing: it doesn't come from inside the photo booth world. It never did.

There's a book I keep returning to called The Art of You. The premise is simple but it will stop you in your tracks. Your creative identity, the thing that makes your work distinctly yours, is built from your experiences. Everything you've ever seen, heard, felt, explored. The places you've been. The films that kept you up thinking. The art that made you feel something you couldn't name. All of it goes in. All of it comes out in your work.

And that means the question isn't just what do you do. It's who are you? What have you lived? What are you made of?

You are losing clients before they ever contact you.

And most of you have no idea it's happening.

There is one word spreading through this industry like wildfire, on websites, in proposals, on Instagram captions, and it is being used completely wrong. Every single time I see it, I cringe. Because I know exactly what it's costing the person using it.

The word is activation.

And today we need to talk about it. Because the language you use in your business is not just marketing copy. It is a signal. It tells every person who lands on your page exactly who you are, who you work with, and whether or not you actually know what you are doing. And right now, a lot of us are sending the wrong signal.

Let's get real: language either attracts your ideal client or repels them, before you ever get on a call. In this episode, I am breaking down what a brand activation actually is, why using it incorrectly is quietly killing your credibility with the exact clients you are trying to attract, and what words you should be using instead depending on who you are actually selling to.

This is a loving call-out. But it is still a call-out.

You're working. You're learning. You're in the groups, you're researching, you're asking questions, you're staying current.

So why hasn't the revenue moved in two years?

That's the question nobody wants to sit with. And it's exactly what this episode is about.

Let's get real: there's a version of shiny object syndrome that doesn't look anything like impulse buying. It doesn't look like chaos. It looks like hustle. It looks like a founder who genuinely cares, genuinely works hard, and is genuinely getting nowhere.

In this episode, I'm going deep on the most expensive version of shiny object syndrome in this industry. Not the one where you buy a booth you didn't plan to. The one where you're in constant motion but the business looks the same six months from now as it does today. That's avoidance dressed up as productivity. And it's costing you more than you know.

I also get into why your brain is literally working against you here, why Facebook groups can become a trap if you're not careful, and the one question you need to ask to figure out exactly where your focus should go for the next ninety days.

There's a version of success that looks great on paper and feels like a trap in real life. Aldo from I Touch XP has been in this industry for 16 years, worked the Super Bowl five times, activated for Beyonce's tour across 22 cities, landed Disney as a client after Coachella, and crossed seven figures in revenue. And then he scaled back. On purpose.

This episode is for the founder who thinks scaling always means going bigger. Because Aldo is proof that sometimes the most powerful move is getting really, really clear about what you actually want and building toward that instead.

I sat down with Aldo at PBX and we got into all of it. His journey from wedding videographer to seven-figure corporate experiential operator. The moment he realized he had to choose between weddings and corporate (and why he chose corporate, hard). The philosophy behind why he calls his setup "controlled chaos." The hiring struggles he still hasn't fully solved. And why he hit a million dollars and then... didn't love it.

This is one of those conversations where every answer gives you something to think about. Aldo doesn't run his business the way you'd expect. He doesn't have a fancy website driving his leads. He doesn't automate much because every single project he does is custom-built from scratch. He travels 80% of the time. He flies first class because a one-day project is actually a three-day project when you account for travel, and he prices accordingly. He is, by every measure, doing this his own way.

And it's working.