Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Tried and True with a Dash of Woo, where we blend rock-solid tips with a little bit of magic. I'm Renee Bowen, your host, life and business coach and professional photographer at your service. We are all about getting creative, diving into your business and playing with manifestation over here. So are you ready to get inspired and have some fun? Let's dive in. Hey, hey, welcome back to Tried and True with a dash of woo. I'm your host, renee bowen, and today we are talking about pricing and sales and money.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Because let me tell you something if you're a photographer and you're doing this like, not as a hobby, you are doing it because you love it and you're like oh my god, I could totally earn a living, I could help support my family with this. If you're doing it so that you are doing it for an exchange of money, you're in sales, and a lot of you guys don't like hearing that. A lot of you guys that triggers all kinds of stuff like I don't want to be a salesperson, I don't want to be slimy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, like, there's so much programming that we have around sales and most of it is not even ours, most of it came from our parents or our grandparents, the way we were raised. Somebody said something about how sales is slimy. Here's the truth. You are being sold to pretty much 24 seven. You're being sold to all the time, even on TikTok, even on Instagram time, even on TikTok, even on Instagram, even when you think you're not being sold to even like as simple as talking about what you want for dinner, right? People in your life probably have used persuasion techniques on you to get you to do something you maybe didn't want to do or what they wanted you to do. All right, so it could be as simple as like your kid talking you into buying something at the store. The fact of the matter is that we're being sold to all the time. So the more you are aware of it and the more intentional you are with your language and the way that you are selling, and that you know you're making sure it comes from a place of authenticity and service and your soul, your heart, then it's not going to be slimy because you're not slimy. That is just the fact of the matter. You can have your sales process look any way you want it to.

Speaker 1: 2:21

I want you to hear that there is nothing wrong with you charging an appropriate amount for your services, for what you do. Okay, if you're a photographer and you're just giving away all the digitals you're including all the images for like two 300 bucks, not only are you leaving so much money on the table, you're not serving your clients to the best of your ability. You're not serving your clients to the best of your ability. You really aren't.

Speaker 1: 2:46

And, yes, your talent and how good you are at what you do is a part of this. Like you can't just kind of right out of the gate, with no experience and a basic kit lens, start charging thousands and thousands of dollars. I mean, there's probably people who are doing it who have a lot of confidence, but what I'm trying to impart here is that there's a lot of you guys who are super talented. I see you, I see your work. I talk to a lot of you guys inside my groups and inside of coaching and even just like people who reach out for coaching. I see your work and most of the time, you are far too good for what you're charging truly. And the reason that you're not charging more is usually because one reason is that you don't know what you don't know right. Like it seems incredibly overwhelming to try and figure all of that out, and you don't know what you quote unquote should be charging. And then the other reason is that you don't feel like you're worthy enough. So I want to try and address those two things today on this podcast and hopefully get you in a better place so that you can start making money. Because, yes, if you are only charging a small amount of money for all of the images, you're giving them all the high res images you're just leaving so so much on the table.

Speaker 1: 4:05

And listen, even with our really advanced editing tools and how fast we can be at editing, most of you aren't, let's just be honest, and most of you are spending way too much time editing. And it's not just the editing, it is all of the processes and all of the hours of care that go into it. Because what happens is you want to be that photographer that is high touch. You want to give your clients an amazing experience, so you provide a lot of details beforehand. You hold their hand, you make sure they have all of their prep documents and they know how to show up for your session, and you want to help them with wardrobe and you want to make sure that you're being really communicative with them, and so that means emails and texting and all of those things add up. Your time is money and most of you guys have families. Most of you guys have a life, I hope, outside of your business. But at this time of year it's pretty common for most of us to, like you know, go into our cave and our family's not to really see us. That's the running joke, but it's not really funny because the people who are suffering are the people close to you and that's not how it should be.

Speaker 1: 5:19

I'm really, really adamant about helping photographers design their business around their lives, because you don't need to be working 24 seven to make a hundred thousand plus a year. You don't. I'm sorry, but if you think that or you believe that that is a choice, there are many of us making well over $200,000 a year photographing a limited number of clients per year, holding our boundaries in place, not taking on too many sessions, and we have systems and processes in place and maybe one or two people on our quote unquote team right, like maybe a VA and maybe an editor, and that's it right. You can design your business to stay like that and still bring in profit. That is really, really good. Like I'm talking, you know well, over $200,000 a year. It is a hundred percent possible to do that.

Speaker 1: 6:14

As a portrait photographer, I know that because I have for years. That's, that is what I have done for years and that is what I teach people how to do. Now, that doesn't mean I teach you how to do it exactly like that doesn't mean I teach you how to do it exactly like how I do it. I share my processes. I share the psychology of why I price things the way that I do. My pricing is really simple and that's my biggest tip for you guys today is keep things simple. Okay, don't get over inundated with, like all of these collections, and I mean if your price list is, like you know, 12 pages long, no, your, your clients are probably super, super confused. So there is not one size fits all. There's many different ways to do this, but the idea is that you have to find a way that is going to work for you and your profit margin, what you want and you need to make and I do know that the psychology behind pricing is pretty much the key right you have to understand how to sell to people, and I've done other episodes on. You know sales, language and things like that, and those of you who coach with me know that I'm really really big on that. So I'll see if I can link some of those episodes for you here.

Speaker 1: 7:25

But specifically today I want to kind of focus on the pitfalls that I see you guys falling into and how you can fix that from those two things that I talked about in the beginning the fact that you don't think you're worthy, and also the overwhelm of just not knowing how to do what you don't know how to do. So that first one. So I totally understand both of these points. Let me just kind of give you a little bit of you know a backstory, because I didn't just like know how to do this out of the gate. I don't have an MBA. I never considered myself a business person. I don't have a degree in business. I have a degree in psychology. I'm a people person. But the good news is that that's kind of what sales is. It's psychology, it's understanding people, knowing how to read them, and not so that you can be manipulative, right, I'm not trying to teach you how to be nefarious. I'm just saying, when you have an understanding of how people work, what makes them tick, and you understand how to activate someone to purchase.

Speaker 1: 8:34

That's really the heavy lifting, okay, and it also has a lot to do with the way that you structure your pricing. A lot of you guys have your pricing. Like I said, you know pages and pages of this pricing document and you kind of just throw it together based on what maybe PPA said you know you should be charging or based on what you heard you should be charging, but you've never run your numbers. So the first thing I want to encourage you to do if you, especially are new to photography or you just haven't done it yet, because a lot of you guys are, have been in business for a while and you've never even run your numbers and done a you know profit loss statement or any of that you need to do that. You need to look at your overhead and get very hardcore about it, and I'm talking about including your time as well, because time is our most valuable commodity. I don't know about you, but like my time is so, so precious, I have not that much of it and I want to have time for me and my family, so it needs to make sense right, all of the time that you spend with that client before, during and after the session all come into play here.

Speaker 1: 9:45

So I want you to do an audit of that. Sit down and really really write out how many hours you're spending, include every email, how long it'll take you to do that, do you have automations for that? Do you have a client management system? Is some of that automated so that you're not manually having to do it? Or are you copying and pasting a template each time, like, if your clients are waiting to the side note, if your clients are waiting hours to hear back from you from an inquiry? You need to get a, you need to get a better system for that. You need to have some automations. So a lot of this can be helped by putting those things in place. But the first part is that you need to look at it with really honest eyes. You need to look at it and really understand how much time you're spending with each client.

Speaker 1: 10:30

Okay, and then I want you to take what your profit was from that session with the client and average it out, like what are you making per hour? A lot of you guys are gonna be coming in at, like you know, $2 an hour or less, and I'm sorry, but that is no way to live. You could go get a job at Target or McDonald's making more money than that and you would have more time with your family. So why are you killing yourself for this? Why are you like raking yourself over the coals, like working yourself to death for pennies? Truly, and most of the time, we're doing this unconsciously, and that was definitely my thing, right? So I did not know any of this.

Speaker 1: 11:14

I fell into it, like a lot of you. I was a mom with three little kids. My husband's an actor. I can't really, you know, count on having consistent income. I mean, yes, he's working actor, but it wasn't like you know, he has a nine to five job and we know exactly how much money was coming in.

Speaker 1: 11:34

And I have always worked since I was 15 years old. Like as soon as I could work, I was out there working. Actually, before that, I was babysitting at like 12 and 13. No business babysitting then, but I was, and I've made money my whole life, right. So I sort of like just fell into photography because I was good at it, I loved it, and people started asking me to do it for them and I did not know what to charge. I had no idea what I was doing. I back then it was even before like YouTube, so it wasn't like I could sit and watch all this free education like you guys can now.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Right, you can like find so much information online In fact, probably too much and then you get overwhelmed and you don't understand who to listen to. So that's the other side of it. You have to understand that not everybody is going to tell you good information. Unfortunately. There are a lot of educators out there who maybe have not even been in business that long. So be super careful with who you listen to. Make sure you vet them. Just be smart about it. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be coaching. I just feel like if they took a class a year ago on how to raise their prices and now they're teaching one that doesn't really fly, that's not putting in the time and work.

Speaker 1: 12:55

My methodology that I teach for pricing I came up with on my own years and years ago. So that's not to say it's probably not unlike someone else's, it's just that be really careful on the people that you're listening to, and especially in a lot of these free Facebook groups, because I run a couple of free Facebook groups and one of them has a lot, a lot of members and a lot of you guys come in there asking for all kinds of stuff, not realizing that most of those photographers probably aren't doing the kind of business that you want to do, right? You don't know how much money they're really making, you don't know what's really going on under that hood and unless you're really working closely with a coach or a mentor, you're not going to really have that information. So make sure you do your research. So I ended up finally getting some mentoring right and that's the first time it really opened up my eyes to not only just how much money I could make, but I really needed to do some work on the worthiness part. So that's.

Speaker 1: 13:59

The other little piece of it here is that I really really had some money issues and I didn't know that. I didn't have any idea that I was just living in scarcity, no clue, and I really had to take a hard look at everything that I was doing and the reasoning behind it. Most of the reasoning behind it was scarcity related. I wasn't really living in an abundant mindset. I really believed that there wasn't enough for anybody and I had to scrape and I had to fight my way to the top and you know all of that stuff I really kind of bought all of that. It was sold to me, I bought it and I believed it. So I had to undo a lot of that and I also had some personal reasons for thinking that I was unworthy. So that's the other side of it, and those of you who are in my group coaching you know I'm really transparent about all of those stories because I feel like they're really big, important piece of why I do what I do now, because I don't want you guys to have to go through it. I want to try and save you a little bit from that.

Speaker 1: 15:07

A big part of it was that I had to go back and realize where those thoughts of unworthiness started and do that shadow work and really look with honesty at where it came from, why, so that I could undo it, and I did, but it did take me a while and it was a process and I had help. So the other reason that I love doing this with you guys is because I love being that person to help walk you through it. Honestly, nothing lights me up more than that, not even photography. I'm going to be really honest with you. I absolutely love being a photographer, especially for seniors Like I. That's where my heart is. That's the bulk of my business, and has been since 2007. Most of the money that I make comes from working with high school seniors, but it's because I love it so much.

Speaker 1: 16:03

But I love coaching you guys through all of these blocks way more, and that was something that was a surprise for me. To be honest with you, I didn't mean to start coaching. Like it just kind of happened. People just started asking me how do you do this, how do you do that, how did you figure this out? And once I started working with you guys, I started to realize not only how much fun this was, like it gets my brain working in a whole different way, because I love finding solutions Like I don't know what it is, but I love helping you guys figure stuff out. And more than that, though, it was when I started seeing light bulbs going off for y'all, and especially when it comes to anything related to your worthiness, because I really believe we're all worthy. I just believe that we've been, you know, programmed, and that, of course, led me down the road of becoming a certified coach, because that's the other thing.

Speaker 1: 16:55

There's a lot of people out there calling themselves coaches, but they're not really coaches, they're mentors. And there's a difference. There's certifications you can get for coaching and, while it is not regulated fun fact, it's not. So, also, you have to be really careful on who who you're working with as far as that goes, because there's a there's just a lot of unregulation in that world, in the world of coaching. So there's a lot of people out there saying that they want to help you, that they're a coach, but it's really important for you to understand how they work and whether that's going to feel aligned for you as well. And when it comes to pricing, like I said, the main thing that I want you to hear do an audit, not just of your time, like I said, but do an audit of your worthiness.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Okay, ask yourself some questions. You know how does it feel when you ask the client for a sale, even if it's just as simple as sending an invoice. Do you get anxious? Do you have any feelings of anxiety in your body? Do you feel good about it? Does it excite you? Do you feel like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited to follow through with my client in this way and to make money. Does making money make you happy? What kind of feelings come up for you when I say those words? Right, if I told you you should be making at least a hundred thousand dollars a year on your portrait photography business, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Just write it down, journal about it, think about it and hey, if you want to chat about it with me, book a call. I'm happy to chat with you about that. But I want you to really think about it, because a lot of y'all are not thinking about this. You just throw it together, your pricing, or you're throwing it all together, like I said, in one small lump sum and you're not charging enough and you're killing yourself and you're running yourself into the ground and your family is going to suffer. That's not a way to live.

Speaker 1: 18:55

I have my calculator in front of me, so let's do just some quick, simple math. Okay, let's say that you charge $300 per session, total, okay. And then let's say you're photographing on average. So you're going to have busier seasons, right, but let's average it out and just let's say, maybe five clients a month, just, okay, that's $1,500 a month for those five clients times 12. Okay, that's $18,000 a year. I don't know about you, but I can't live on that. Okay, so let's go up to. Let's do it more. Okay, so, $300 times. Let's say you shoot 10 clients a month. $3,000 a month times 12 months, that's $36,000 a year. That's a lot better. Still not livable, by the way.

Speaker 1: 19:49

Look it up. Look at what you need to be making in your state, and I know a lot of you guys have husbands. If you're moms, you have husbands who you know provide and they're the main breadwinner. But why not you? Why not you is what I want to ask you. If you've been doing this for a minute and you're good at what you do, you have every possibility to make a lot of money at this. Okay, it's just that you're holding yourself back. You don't think that. You don't believe it and I want you to believe it. So let's just go back to these numbers.

Speaker 1: 20:25

Okay, so let's say, with those five clients, a month, five clients, but your average per client goes up from 300 to 1500. Let's say you start doing a hybrid, which a lot of my coaching clients do, a hybrid of selling some products and some digitals. You don't have to go right into products. We can figure this out for you. But let's say five times 1500. Okay, that's $7,500 a month. Now you're going to have some costs in there, okay, but we'll get to that in a second. But let's just multiply that by 12. That's 90,000.

Speaker 1: 20:59

Yes, you have your cost, but it's probably not going to be that much, to be honest with you, because if you're selling your average sales only 1500, your, your cost per goods are not going to be that high. You're probably doing a hybrid, like I said, of some digitals and some product. So let's say maybe $200 product costs. It's not that much. $90,000. Okay, that's a big, big jump, you guys.

Speaker 1: 21:24

Now, if you even go even further than that and you know my average tends to be about 4,000, but let's do $3,000 times five clients, okay. But let's do $3,000 times five clients, okay. So that's $15,000 profit a month. Again, I'm going to have higher costs because I'm so that's all product and there is more. You know, usually I'm looking at anywhere between for, like a $3,000 sale, it's probably going to be somewhere around $600 in product costs, five or 600, depending on what it is. But let's say $15,000 a month times 12, that's $180,000 a year before costs and taxes and et cetera, all of that stuff.

Speaker 1: 22:04

So I just wanted to paint that picture for you, because a lot of you guys are not even just doing these numbers. You're not even like thinking about the possibility that is there for you, because you have put yourself in a box and you've decided that this is all you can make or that you're worthy of making, and because you have a safety net of a partner making most of the money, you have kind of decided that this is good enough for you. But what if you decided to switch things up? What if you decided to go all in on this business? What if you decided to really step into the biggest and highest and most amazing version of yourself? Because that version of you does exist already. You just got to tap in and all you have to do is have a strategy that is based on real things like numbers and proven techniques, as well as the right mindset to back it up, because once you rewire that programming that has taught you that this is good enough, you shouldn't reach for more or whatever it is, you literally can do anything.

Speaker 1: 23:13

Now, the other thing here is that you can still sell digitals, just price them higher. That's the other strategy. I have some clients who do buy just digital packages. I sell them, but they're not cheap and it still comes in. Honestly, they're more expensive than even some of the product and there's no cost on that. So I'm fine when clients want to come in and purchase high-res digitals, because I packaged them appropriately and I'm still meeting my average sale or higher. I love when they buy products because I want my clients to have something physical, but I'm not going to force them Right. I definitely have options for them for digitals, but again, it's going to make sense for me and my numbers too.

Speaker 1: 23:59

So you need to do your numbers, you need to do an audit of that and an audit of your time, and I want you to really really do an audit of your programming as well. Okay, I know that it's not fun programming as well. Okay, I know that it's not fun, but if you want more out of life, you have to let go of what you got you here to this place. Okay, what got you here got you here and that's awesome and you can be grateful for all of that, but it's not going to get you to where you want to go. It's just not.

Speaker 1: 24:30

There's going to be some different beliefs that need to be installed. If you need help with any of this, that's what I specialize in and right now I am interviewing for 2025 coaching students. I'm not taking on that many. There's going to be two ways to work with me in 2025. You can either go one-on-one, which is going to be more limited spots, and then I'm going to have two groups one for brand new senior photographers, like people who are just starting in photography, or just starting in senior photography, and then I'm also going to have another group for more established photographers. If either of those speak to you, there is a link in the show notes to an application.

Speaker 1: 25:10

It's not long. It won't take you very long to fill it out, but that's the first step letting me know that you are interested and committed in some way to your growth in 2025, because it is going to be here before you know it. I know it's just the end of October, but it is coming. It's coming quick and a lot of you guys don't have anything lined up in January and February because you've been crazy busy trying to get in as many shoots as you possibly can, because you're not charging enough, and I want to help you change that for next year. So now's the time.

Speaker 1: 25:45

Go ahead and fill out the application and then the next step is that I will reach out. If it does feel aligned as well for me, let you know and then we'll set up a time to chat over. Zoom really easy. I'll let you know all the ins and outs of each option, and there are payment plans available as well. So the good thing is that you get another write-off before the end of this year, because your education is the most important thing that you can invest in, by the way, but it's also a write-off for your business and because the coaching will start in January, you're going to feel super prepped, and I've got some stuff to even get you more prepped. So, even though we won't be like technically working together until January, you can start paying on it now and you can also start laying the groundwork. I will send you lots of information on how to do that, depending on what you're signing up for.

Speaker 1: 26:34

Obviously, if you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram at Renee Bowen. Happy to chat with you guys in the DMS there. I just email me, renee, at Renee Bowencom, and I really hope that this episode just at least sparked some questions for you, like I said, about what are my numbers, what do I need and want to make, how much time am I spending with each client, what is that time worth to me and my family, and where do my beliefs about money come from and how do I really feel about money? I'd love to hear your takeaways. Let me know what this brought up for you, and the link to the application to work with me is in the show notes. Have a great rest of the week, you guys. I'll talk soon. Love you, bye.