This Can't Be That Hard

When I asked my friend Rebecca Hunnicutt to contribute to our Stories and Shorties series, I didn't give her any specific direction - she's an educator and long-time family, maternity, newborn, and school photographer in Portland, Oregon, so I knew she'd share something good.  

What I didn't anticipate was that she'd send me FOUR somethings - four separate ideas, each of which could have been its own full episode - and fit them all into under five minutes.

So I'm doing this episode a little differently! You'll hear Rebecca's four tips first, and then I'm chiming in at the end to unpack each one so none of them get lost!

Here's what she's sharing:

• Modifying your questionnaire to improve your clients' experience  
• Auditing your workflow with an eye on automation  
• Auditing your marketing to ensure you're speaking to the right audience  
• Adding customer support that delivers faster answers (and saves you time)

None of these are complicated, but they can be powerful. Try (at least) one this week!

LINKS:

• See more of Rebecca's work in her website.

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

Every photographer I know would love more referrals, but they're all looking for them in the same place: their past clients. Of course, past clients can be a wonderful source of referrals, but the timing isn't always right, and we don't want to ask too often (or too forcefully) and risk making our clients uncomfortable.

 That's why I wanted to bring Emily Kim Huynh back on the show. Emily's background is in tech and business, and her outside-the-photography-box thinking has led her to a strategy that brings in bookings from a different kind of referral entirely: other business owners who serve a similar market.

 In this episode, Emily breaks down how to identify good referral partners and how to reach out without feeling like you're pitching. It's a completely different way to think about growing your business, and it takes so much of the marketing pressure off.

 LINKS:

• Download Emily's Local Networking guide
• Visit Emily's website
• Follow her on Instagram 

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

90% of client confusion and problems - including low sales averages - can be traced back to things that happened (or perhaps didn't happen) much earlier in the process.

That's exactly what my guest this week unpacks. Ina Jalil is a pet photographer based in Canberra, Australia, and she coaches pet photographers globally on booking more premium clients consistently.

Even though Ina's strategy comes from in-person sales for pet photography, this works no matter your niche or business model, because it's really about working backward from an outcome you want to change.

In this episode, Ina shares:

•   Why ordering appointment surprises almost always trace back to the very start of the client relationship
•   The exact two questions she asks every client at the consultation, before she ever picks up her camera
•   A real example of how one client's answer completely changed how she planned and shot a session
•   Why these questions help her identify the right-fit clients before she's invested a single hour of shooting

If you keep getting caught off guard by client issues, this episode will help you see how to reverse-engineer those issues to help prevent them in the first place.

Links:

• Find out which gap is costing you bookings in Ina's free Consistent Booking Audit quiz (https://www.inajphotography.com/consistent-booking-audit)
• Connect with Ina on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/inajphotography/)

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

When Lydia Fine suggested client privacy as a topic for her Stories & Shorties episode, I almost said no... it honestly felt too big and important for such a short episode.

Privacy is one of those issues that's expanding fast, in the world generally and in our industry specifically, and it deserves way more than a quick conversation. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized Lydia had something genuinely useful to hand you right now, even if the bigger conversation is still ahead of us.

In this episode, Lydia walks through:

•   Why a "share unless you say otherwise" policy is probably costing you bookings
•   Why privacy needs to be a spectrum of options instead of a binary yes or no
•   The exact language and timing she uses to ask clients about sharing preferences at booking
•   A simple habit at the end of every session that builds trust, and sometimes even gets clients to loosen their own restrictions

If you've ever had a lead go quiet on you for no clear reason, this one might explain more than you think.

Connect with Lydia on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/lydiafine_forphotographers

Check out Lydia's website:
https://www.apolloandivy.com/for-photographers

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

Being your own boss comes with a lot of big benefits, but there are challenges, too... and one of the surprising ones is how hard it is to get things done when you're the only one managing your time.

On this week's Stories & Shorties episode, Maddie Peschong is sharing her secret weapon: Marketing Mondays: a block of time every single week that's just for marketing, no matter what else is going on.

In this episode, she's sharing: 

•   Why Marketing Monday works even though it looks a little different every week
•   How she protects that time, even when life gets in the way
•   How she uses that time, including her strategies for client research
•   Why visibility and marketing are skills you build, not talents you're born with

If you've ever felt the challenges of time management as a business owner - especially when it comes to marketing - this is a must-listen.

Links:
Connect with Maddie on Instagram

Check out Maddie's Rebrand coaching program

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

This week, we're shifting gears. The busy season is upon us, and from now straight through the holidays, we're all going to be chasing our tails in one way or another - with marketing, with sessions, or even just with general pre- and mid-holiday chaos. So instead of hitting you each week with a longer, meatier episode, I've put together a series we're calling "Stories & Shorties." These are bite-sized tips and stories from some of my favorite photographers and educators, intended to give you those little boosts of business-focused inspiration you need each week.  

We're kicking things off with a fantastic, outside-the-box strategy from Lyndsay McNiff, who realized the hardest part of her busy season sessions wasn't the time she spent shooting... it was everything around it: wrangling kids off the bus, prepping dinner, handing things off to her husband, and loading the car. Thanks to the strategy she's sharing today, Lyndsay is able to manage four to six sessions a week while keeping up with soccer games and family dinners.  

This is one of those creative business solutions that's almost too simple to believe, and will leave you wondering why you didn't think of it first!

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

Here's something  see all the time (and have fully been guilty of myself): you run a marketing campaign, it does what it does, and by the time it's over, you don't want to think about it any more... you're just onto the next thing. You skip the debrief. You promise yourself you'll remember what worked. But then six months later you're reinventing a wheel you've already built two or three times.

To close out our back-to-school marketing challenge, I brought on my friend Tiffany Crenshaw from Animal House Photography and Tiffany Crenshaw Education. Tiffany - a business owner and homeschooling mom of three - coaches photographers on building a business that fits their life instead of swallowing it whole.

In this conversation, we get into:

•   Why starting a campaign with the end goal in mind, before you touch a single email, changes everything downstream
•   How to block off your personal calendar before you set a booking goal, so the plan actually fits your life  
•   The "hand raiser" email and multiple-choice poll that gets real answers out of leads who didn't book
•   Why Tiffany schedules a quarterly planning day and an end-of-year "SHE-EO weekend" to turn this season's data into next season's roadmap 

Tiffany is one of our speakers at the Consistency Club's live marketing summit on September 1st, and she's sharing a free quarterly mini planner to help you map out your own goals and action steps.

LINKS:

• Connect with Tiffany — see the storytelling, authentic-moments style she talks about in this episode
• Follow Tiffany on Instagram 

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

You know that feeling when you get a client email, a phone call, or even just an inquiry and your heart starts racing... Maybe it's excitement, maybe it's fear, or maybe it's a combination of the two, but according to our nervous system, it's all the same.

We talk a lot on this podcast about what to say to fill your calendar. What we don't talk about enough is how what's happening in your body when you respond tends to show up in your words whether you mean it to or not.

That's exactly why I wanted to bring Melody MacDonald back on the show. Before becoming a full-time photographer, she spent 21 years in 911 dispatch, and now she's built an entire teaching practice around the thing dispatchers know better than almost anyone: how to stay regulated when everything in your body wants to go into panic mode.

In this conversation, Melody and I get into:

•   Why automation should remove repetition from your business, never the humanity, and how to keep it that way
•   The "pause" practice she uses to keep cortisol spikes from writing her emails for her
•   Why every no, yes, and silence is just information, and how to use it instead of spiraling from it
•   A simple way to respond to a no that keeps the door open, sometimes for years   

Melody is one of our two guest speakers at the Consistency Club's live marketing summit on September 1st, and she's also sharing a free five-minute reset for photographers, worth grabbing before your next hard conversation.

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

Most restaurant menus have a handful of apps, a handful of entrees, and a handful of desserts: enough to give people choices and accommodate dietary restrictions, but not so many that people get overwhelmed.

So why do most of us limit our photography "menu" to one or two items? When your business only has one package, one price, the offer is take it or leave it: you're handing hesitant clients an easy way to say no by saying nothing at all.

In this episode, I'm breaking down:

•   Why a single, rigid offer might be costing you bookings
•   How to navigate your public-facing pricing so it signals flexibility (without being overwhelming)
•   How to develop an off-menu "special" that you can bring out in special cases, and
•   Why figuring out what's actually causing someone to hesitate matters more than guessing and discounting

This is part two of our back-to-school marketing series. And if you haven't grabbed your ticket for the September 1st marketing summit yet, a Consistency Club membership gets you in.

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!

It's August, which means it's probably feels way too early to think about Black Friday, holiday cards, or filling your calendar for Q4... but that's exactly why now is the time to do it!

Every year I watch the same thing happen: photographers coast through summer, and then the second Starbucks rolls out everyone's favorite seasonal latte, panic sets in: empty calendar, no plan, reactive scramble. This month on the podcast, we're running something we're calling the Back to School Marketing Challenge, and this episode is step one: getting organized.

My marketing director Dayna and I get into:

•   Why proactive marketing beats reactive marketing, every single time
•   The hot, warm, and cold lead system, and why sorting your contacts into these three buckets changes how marketing feels
•   How to go on a "lead scavenger hunt" through your DMs, comments, and email to find people you forgot were even interested
•   Why and how this up-front organization step will increase the effectiveness of these conversations   

If you're in the Consistency Club, this sets you up for our marketing summit on September 1st, where we turn all of this into an actual plan. If you're not, you're still going to walk away from this one with a spreadsheet and a plan for filling it.

LINKS: 

• Learn more about Consistency Club 

Resources:

• New to the podcast? Go to thiscantbethathard.com/welcome to get access to 3 of Annemie's best free resources.
• Join our community! We'd love to welcome you into our supportive, business-focused private Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/thiscantbethathard to request access.
• Long-time listener? Leave a review!