Lessons

Lesson Info

Mentorship: Business and Marketing

So let's talk about month one, right? And for the rest of sort of this little period, I'm gonna talk you through each of the three months and tell you what they're going to entail and what I'm sort of going to expect of you. Right? Um, it's not a lot of teaching you how to do it if you want to be taught how to do it. First of all, start with 30 days. Second of all, read the book because you're gonna be doing a lot of reading of that textbook and 1/3 of all. I'm not gonna teach you the answers to these because that's kind of what the courses for again, this is like going to college and getting your course syllabus on the very first day. You don't get taught the entire syllabus, but you know what is going to be expected of you? So we're gonna start off with the super basics we're gonna start off with naming your business And for some of you I know out there in the internet, you've already like Oh my God, we'll start with naming your business like this Totally isn't for me. I named my bus...

iness 15 years ago. Well, so did I. But I got married last year. Last year, Time sort of telescopes on itself. When you're here in the studio, I feel like I never actually left. I got married last year and I actually thought like I changed my name personally. Like my My personal last name is not stripling anymore. It's mountain. Er, um, do I change the name of my business? I mean, now my business has my ex husband's name on it in my cool with that, but like I started, my business is Susan Stripling. Can I really change it? And then if I change it, God, then people will be really confused because my husband and I aren't in business together. But then there will be two like mountain type photography is out there. And do I do that at some point in time? In your business, you might think, huh? Do I want to rebrand? Do I want to make a change? So there's literally a whole section in this book about naming your business. It's kind of an important thing, and that if you've named your business and you hate the name of your business. There's something wrong with turning around and renaming your business. That's you can rebrand. It's your business. You knew it, everyone. Where you running your business again? We're gonna figure this out. And some of you might be saying, Well, I mean, I live in Brooklyn. I'm gonna run my business in Brooklyn. Is that what you want? Do you? Maybe you should run in Manhattan instead. Do you want to reach out to the Hamptons like saying I'm just gonna run it in my own backyard? Maybe do a little research before making that decision? There might be a better option nearby, and then we'll get into running your business at home versus a studio versus an office versus an office share. Those were sort of yes, their business. 101 things that you'll need to know. But also you will reach a point in your business where you need something more, and maybe that something Maura's. You leave your studio when you go back home. Or maybe that something more cause that's what it was for me. When I moved to New York, I got rid of the idea of having a studio. I don't Children's portrait's altogether on. I went to doing weddings out of the spare bedroom of my house, and it's only been in the last six months, really that there was sort of a shift in my head back around again of God. I'm getting no work done at home. All I'm doing is watching the walking dead and doing laundry, and my bed is right there and it is so comfortable. And I've been wearing the same yoga pants for like, eight days in a row. And I haven't seen an adult since Sunday, Right? I started to get a little lonely and a little depressed and stir crazy s o humorously enough. My office is now literally a storage unit in a building. It's the smallest ever. We painted it almost black, and it is a cave, and it is the greatest thing ever. But sometimes you'll need to change, So you might want to go back and revisit where you're gonna run your actual business. I'm gonna make sure that you are set up legally. Sound as perfectly as possible. Now, is this re treading something that I talked about in 30 days? It is. But if you have a question about it now I can help you collecting sales tax. It's a US thing. You're in equipment, so we're gonna talk about it. Not just what do you need to shoot a wedding? But what do you need, Teoh get insured for your gear and equipment because it's kind of important. You actually have insurance. In the last six months, I left the insurance company that I had been using. I was with Marsh, and they are not really sure what in the world happened there, But it was Martian. And all of a sudden I'm getting renewal notices from Mercer having trouble kind of getting people on the phone. And I was like, you know, let me just get some more quotes. You know, I've been with them blindly for a few years now. Let me see if maybe there's a better option out there. So I went to Hill and Usher and I'm with Hillen Usher now, and they had me do this list which you see in front of you list your serial numbers, determine your replacement costs and I realized, Oh my God. The list of gear that I actually have insured is like 18 months old. I don't even own some of this stuff anymore. And I bought a bunch of new stuff that I just kind of been wandering around like my d for us that I have been carrying for a couple of months has not been insured because I forgot this in in my serial numbers. So we're gonna loop around on your insurance. We're gonna make sure that you have a concrete knowledge of what you have. Make sure it's all insured for you plan for the future. And this is where I start making you fill out spreadsheets. I don't know what happened to me. Like I went into photography with the FAA and theater thinking I just wanted to shoot pretty pictures. And now I am, like, literally at my happiest when I'm filling out monetary spreadsheets. It's just something dark happened to my soul somewhere. But I've made you a bunch of spreadsheets, right? Like it's one thing to just make this list of your gear in equipment on a loosely piece of paper, and then you lose it. But now I have a master spreadsheet. It is tacked to my board. So every single time I buy something new. I remember. Okay, add this to the list of stuff I own, Get it reinsured. And also, sometimes you look at that list and you're like, All right, this is getting super excessive. Like I sold off a couple of my camera bodies. I was literally carrying six camera bodies every wedding because I'm a digital hoarder. I just couldn't get rid of anything. And I looked at it on like, this is ridiculous. Like, this is I do not need four backups to the system that I'm using, like it's time to sell some of these. And then I bought your stuff neither here nor there. I sold it all. And then I bought another D for s. And then I was like, Who the D 8 10? I don't know. I can kind of can't stop. So then we're going to get into which has kind of become one of my personal favorite parts, your personal and your business financials. And that's where the fact that this is a closed group starts to get really important because nobody wants to talk about money with a bunch of strangers, and nobody wants to own up having a ton of debt to a bunch of strangers. Now you will be turning in your homework assignments, and you will have an email address that you will turn these homework assignments into. If there is ever an assignment that you want to turn in, that you don't want your name on, just indicated in that email. Like if you're writing out your list of debts and you're embarrassed by it. First of all, don't be seriously. Second of all, if you don't want me to put your name on it, just write anonymous. And when I put your information up there, no one will know what's yours, because it is to me. It could be very personally devastating to talk about money. And there's a great feeling of shame around, having made bad financial decisions on. I don't want any of you to feel that at all. There is a period of time in my life when my business was new and I had credit card debt and I was terrified. I'm not there anymore, but it took me a long time to get to a different place from there, and if you're there, if there's anything I could do to help you out of there. I will help you. But if you don't want me to use your name, I will not use your name. I am. I'm down with that. But we're gonna get deeply into your personal and business financials because there's no way that you're going to be a successful business If your personal financials are a disaster and there's no way that you're going to ever get anywhere with your business if you have no idea how to run your money, I literally sit like a little hamster and just hoard. Oh my God, have any answers? Joke? I did. It took me 29 minutes. Listen, if you have not Googled tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos, just do it right now. It is the greatest thing you'll ever see in your entire day. I can't believe I made a joke on it that early, but I do. I sit there like and I hoard the money for the winter, and my winter is my retirement and my kids going to school. And I have become this insane person about money and I can tell you to the penny what isn't all of my accounts and what it cost me to make things and how much my phone bill is because knowledge is power, right? I was gonna make a G I, Joe, like knowing is half the battle thing there. I joked that to my husband. He said something that today he's like, Well, now, you know. And I was like, and knowing is half the battle. And he's like, what I was like, Oh, my God. Like it was would have been funny if you've ever watched that. All right, so I'm gonna give you eight million spreadsheets which will probably, like, make you cry But they make me cry every time I do them And I do them all the time Like these are my spreadsheet that I actually use at home. These are in the business and marketing workbook, if you want it there. There. If you want help, I'm here. We're going first. Determine your personal expenses. Like what is it just cost to be you, right? And I talked in 30 days about the importance of knowing this, but now we're actually going to do it, and we're going to get together on. And if you want to see mine. I will show you mine all day long, but you have to show me yours too. So there you go. Were to determine your personal expenses just what it costs to run your life every month. And don't lie to me, right? Like if you're embarrassed because your cell phone bill is ridiculously high, don't make it another number than what it is or else I can't help you write like we need to determine the areas in which you're spending stupid amounts of money. Now, if you tell me that like you want to get a coffee at Starbucks every single morning, I'm not the financial person that's gonna tell you. Well, if you just made that coffee at home, you would save yourself $300 a year because forget it. I'd rather get someone else to make me a cup of coffee. My job is to make you so financially good that you can afford that cup of coffee every morning without thinking about it, right? Like I'm not saying we're all gonna be out like buying our yachts and like having parties on them because, let's face it, we're running Photographer is none of us are gonna get there. Um, right now, I depressed you guys already at 9 30 in the morning. But if you are making, like, egregiously kind of dumb financial decisions, we're gonna sort of help reverse them. And some of these will become apparent to you when you're determining your personal expenses every single month. If you're like, whoa, I'm spending way too much money on a B C D e. You'll know yourself. Okay, maybe maybe six Starbucks a day is maybe not a good idea. I should just buy a curing instead and make some myself Sorry, this water cup disturbance, like little drops of water like a hamster. I'm over here with the bead in the little thing, and I'm trying to drink it, so yeah, we're gonna figure out what your personal expenses are, And it's really important to know that because we need to know how much money you need to make every single year. So really determine your personal expenses, and then we're gonna determine your personal assets. And for some people, the personal assets spreadsheet is gonna be a zero. Because you've got nothing in your savings account. You haven't even started thinking about retirement. But for some people, you've already got a nest egg. Maybe you've got a day job that's been contributing to your 401 K like we need to know what you're spending and then what you already have. Those are kind of important things to know. These are all spread. She we're gonna determine your current personal income. And yes, that is, if you're married and your spouse makes money, that's kind of important, right? Like if you've got a safety net there, if you've got someone who's paying the rent or the mortgage or the whatever, that's important, because as a household you need to know what your contribution needs to be. That involves knowing what the other person is bringing in. If you've already got a day job or you have a part time job, how much income are we looking to replace with wedding photography so you can dump that other job? And then when we're done, you know, filling out spreadsheets, ad nauseum and you're all done weeping and like drinking wine late at night because you're sad, cause this is depressing for every it's depressing for me like I don't like doing these things were gonna determine your necessary desired income. Because for me, I have this shiny number at the top of every single year that it's like one of those old fundraiser like thermometers where you watch it go up as people donate. That's what I'm looking at my income to go up until I hit that big number at the top. And I re evaluate that big number. No. So we're gonna crunch a lot of numbers. Then we're gonna talk about buying more gear, right? Like, let's say you have gear, but you really need to upgrade your camera and you'd like a few new lenses. We're gonna figure out how you can fund that in a way that is not well. I mean, I just use my credit card, right? No, please don't issues your credit card. Let's try to find a way other than using your credit card. And if you have to use your credit card because you desperately need something before you hand over that plastic, you need a plan to pay it down. We'll talk about banking. We're gonna talk about paying yourself. This is going to be lots of little work. But don't worry. The month after that, you'll get to shoot. And then one of my personal favorites, we're gonna talk about pricing and profitability, right? That's what a lot of people have questions about. What are in my packages. What do I charge for my packages? Well, I live in an area that is really poor, and I can't charge $10,000 for photography. We're gonna talk about the relationship between what you need to live and what you need to make, right. Like somebody who lives in Tallahassee, Florida is not gonna have monthly rent that is the same as mine in Brooklyn. God bless him. So you're not gonna need to make a much as I am because less than that will run your life to sign. So this is where everyone who's been like But what about my area? We'll get we'll get help. So we're gonna talk about whether you want to make packages or whether you want to have an ala carte list. And this is where the Facebook group is gonna be super helpful because I've noticed that packages versus all a cart is a very regional thing. Like when I was in Florida. The Ala cart list worked great for me, like eight years ago. But now that I'm in New York, people people want packages, right? Like so you might find a good community of people started in your area who are like, Yeah, I've been doing all a cart and it isn't working, and oh, well, I have been trying packages, and it's not working, So this is where you'll be able to actually, you're gonna get feedback from me. But the feedback from each other in this Facebook group is also, I think, very powerful. And sometimes you have a question that you don't want to ask me. You just want to be like, Hey, guys, what do you think? Like I made my new priceless. Do you like it? And then bring it to me, right? It would be like I k to keep making college references. That kind of is, it's like having a study group. Before you go back to class, you're gonna find your vendors. We're gonna figure out everybody that you're using to produce your wedding packages and what every single bit of it costs every that you talk about whether you have an employee that helps you out full or part time or whether you just have an assistant who helps you out on the wedding day and what that costs. I started paying my assistant one thing, and now that we're about celebrate our six year anniversary, um, I pay her much more now because she's proven herself to be invaluable. So I had kind of a plan for giving her raises. And as I'm giving her raises, that means it costs more to put my packages together. So I have to adjust my packages accordingly. And then the major thing that we're looking to do there is to figure out how much it's going to cost to produce each package that you want to sell like you're hard core bottom number. You know, it will cost me $1000 to put this package together, so I'm going to sell it for, and that's what will help you figure out. We do a lot of math. I hope you like math. Math is awesome. Mathematics. I try to tell my my 13 year old daughter that math is awesome. She doesn't believe you. So where we're gonna do some math is we're gonna figure out your income needed. So we've done all those spreadsheets. We figure out that shiny number at the top that you need to make every single year. Then we're gonna divide that by your package prices. Right? So if you say I need to make $100,000 a year and it's gonna cost, you know I'm gonna sell these weddings for $2500. Well, then, that's, you know, divide one by the other. That's the number of weddings you need to shoot per year, right? And once you know those of you who are with in the class when you're going through the business and marketing workbook, that is sort of your Bible for the first month it will walk you through every single step of this, which will be, I hope, very helpful for you. So what happens if you look at your desire number? And you're like, Oh, my God! After I pay my taxes and I do my math, I have to shoot 73 weddings at $ a year to run my life. And the average photographer here makes two grand a wedding. What in the world. Am I going to Dio? We're gonna talk about that. What? You don't want to do that? I'm not gonna lie. I don't want to shoot 46 weddings a year for the rest of my life. I miss my husband's like it would be super nice to see him every once in a while. Be nice to occasionally spend a Saturday with my kids or to just see what normal people do what you do on a Saturday. I'm just talking to one of the creative life of other the makeup artist here at Creative Life, and she's talking about having a Saturday off. And she's like, I mean, I worked in my yard and I'm like, That's it People do on a Saturday, and sometimes my sister and I will be like driving home from a reception with driving through the city, and we'll see people outside of bars, and I'm like, That's what everyone else does with a Saturday. It would be cool. I haven't. It's been 13 years since I have known what to do on a Saturday, so maybe it would be nice to occasionally revisit that, and we're gonna talk about what happens when the world isn't perfect. When you come up with that number and you can't make it or you don't want to make it, it's not an ideal situation out there. What do we do when they're huge roadblocks in your way? And I talked about this during 30 days, kind of at length. I talked about what I do, but I would really like the opportunity to help you figure out what you can dio. I want to know where you live. I want to know what your personal limitations are. And if there's anything that I can do to help you get around them or get past them, or spark an idea for you in your unique community to make money in the off season to make money when times are hard to get past your own personal roadblocks, that's something that you can't do when you just buy a class and you watch it and you kind of go OK, but now you've had this 30 days and you've watched it, and even if you've never heard of 30 days or never watched 30 days, you're not going to be at a disadvantage here. I'm I really, really, really want to help you like legit were you talk about window, raise your rates. We're gonna develop kind of a strategy for each of you as to when you're going to raise your package rates and when you're gonna realize, Oh, God ever is him too high, too fast and had after back as I mentioned, we're going talk about making money in the off season. We're gonna create your contract. The business and marketing workbook actually has a huge section from the law talk Rachel Bronchi. She's been here on creative life teaching before. She wrote a huge passage in there for me on what your wedding contract needs toe have in it. And we're gonna make sure that yours is absolutely bulletproof for you. We're gonna write template emails and worksheets. Those of you who are with us who get the book for free, you're going to get access to every single type of email that I sent to my clients and the entire wedding day worksheet that I give clients to fill out before the wedding day. It's all right out there in the book I thought about, you know, kind of offering the template separately or what not? And I said, why don't I just write a book that has them in there? So if you ever want to know how I respond to an inquiry in the book, enjoy. But we're gonna write that for you so that you will have bulletproof responses to enquiries to every stage of your workflow to how to obtain the information that you need from your clients before the wedding day. We're gonna talk about studio management software whether you need it and whether you don't and what it may or may not do for you in your business. We're gonna talk about what geographic area you're going to serve. And some of you are like, Well, I live in Brooklyn. I'm gonna work in Brooklyn and serve Brooklyn. Yeah, but I also sort of Philadelphia, all of New Jersey, the Hamptons, Connecticut, sometimes out to D. C. We're gonna figure out where you want your marketing scope to go. We're gonna size of your competition, even have spreadsheets for this. And we're going to size up your competition, not by creating a fake email address and shopping all of your competitors. If you do that Come on, y'all. Seriously, my friends joke that I can find anything on the Internet, which is absolutely true. Um, you can find out what your competitors cost without being a devious little secret shopper. You know what I mean? Like, and I will teach you exactly how to figure out who your competition is. We're going to determine their strengths and weaknesses, and we're gonna figure out how to annihilate them. Except for those of you who are in the Philadelphia and New York area, you can annihilate everyone but me. Please. I realize there are people here like you are in my own market. And I'm, like, just just leave a few weddings for me at the end. When we're done, we're gonna write your mission statement, and this is getting in depth in a way that I was not even even with 30 days. I couldn't get in depth on this one. And your mission statement just to give you a brief overview, you're gonna figure out what do you do? How do you do it? Better than your competition, right. Who were your clients? What are your business values and how are you providing value to your clients were going, Teoh. Answer every single one of those things and create a mission statement for you in the textbook. I'll give you my mission statement. You'll see how I went through putting it together, and then you're actually gonna put it together yourself. And the mission statement is sort of the defining statement that you run your whole business by. It's like the core worth of your business. It's it's the moral star that you make your decisions under. We're gonna determine your target clients because somewhere in the last six months I realized, you know, there actually is a lot of value to knowing your target client on while I've said before, and I'll say again, my target client is someone who values good photography and is willing to pay for it. I can now break that umbrella down into a few little segments underneath it. I have to do it yourself clients who save a lot of money by doing it themselves and hiring me. I have wealthy clients. Where I'm hiring me is nothing to them. I have a few different segments of target clients, and now I'm realizing how to get it. Each of them individually. And we're gonna figure that out for you, too. I'm gonna write your brand and your marketing message. So if you think that Month one is going to be a lot of writing and soul searching and feeling all the feelings, it is story. In the second month, you get to shoot at school, we're gonna talk about free marketing strategies, things that you will do that don't cost you a dime. We're gonna talk about things that you can do that cost you money that are not worth it versus the things that are worth it. Where you talk about what I think is the myth of high end marketing, we're gonna market with social media. And if you come back for the next section after this one, you'll get 90 minutes of free info on how I do social media. And some of it is super interesting. Okay, I like to think that all of it is super interesting, but some of it is is extra interesting. We're gonna talk about presenting your pricing. When a client emails, You're when someone contact you for the first time. How are you responding back to them? You're going to see my email templates. We're going talk about creating Ah, priceless. That is visually beautiful And how you're going to deliver it to people. We're gonna understand your enquiries, which is very important. And I have a spreadsheet for that, which is awesome. You're gonna track your enquiries over this entire three month period. Where they coming from? Whose referring them to you? How far out from their wedding are they? If they're not booking, you acquire it, They booking you. We're going to start figuring out your data points of your inquiry so you can kind of start understanding. Wow, I've been interesting forever. And no one's finding the office interested or none of my prior clients are referring me Anybody. What's up with that? We're gonna figure out your personal trends. We're gonna talk about negotiating your rates. Will you do it? Won't you do it? What will you negotiate? And this is where I feel like the feedback loop is very important. You'll come to me and say, Hey, listen like, you know, I'm just not comfortable negotiating or I don't want a negotiator. When do you negotiate? Or maybe it's a Friday in January should I negotiate for that? And what should I negotiate? We'll figure out your own personal feelings on it and what you'll bend on and what you won't bend on. So that's what we're gonna dio that's all. Just month one. I feel like that could be three months entirely. Some of you just looked at me like Oh, my God, Oh, my God. Like looking for the door like trying to sneak out. Now the doors are closed. I will see you if you leave. But when I when I said it's gonna be a lot of work, I wasn't joking. But if you sit down and you do this work, you know, if your brand new in business it's going to jump you over your first couple of years of stumbling around out there going, I have no clue what I'm doing. And I do have known this for 13 years, and I do every single one of these things every single year, several times a year so that I am always trying to stay on top. If you people in Philly and New York could just do it like once every five years, that's probably good for you guys like to actually don't do it at all. I'm just getting so that's month one, right? Any questions at all about month one Internet While I drink my little we have a ton of questions, a lot of the stuff you've been covering and a lot of the stuff we will come under. One of the one of the folks, as a lot of it is about the logistics of how the stuff is gonna work. So and we'll be reiterating that throughout the day. But you definitely need to purchase in order to get any any future involvement in this workshop. A lot of the times as far as the Facebook book. As far as the Facebook page is concerned, folks, you will. You'll be getting emails from creativelive directly to you. And also you guys will be able Teoh, interact with us, be email as well. But we will get into that a quick point about that. You're having any trouble with it. For those of you who are in. If you a question about how the Facebook group works or you're not be able to see the videos or anything technical on that side, don't email me email creativelive about these things because they're the ones running the behind the scenes. And if you email me, I'm just gonna end up forwarding your email to them. Soas faras the logistics like I can't see the video. I can't get into the group. They need to find you guys because I don't have make work right. And he says a lot of those are actually asking about They've purchased 30 days. Yes. How much redundancy will be? Well, they are a complementary. And that's what that's kind of. What we were going for here is that it is complimentary. Your I'm not going to sit here in Respun feed you 30 days if you've seen it already. You sort of know what I'm talking about. But you're out there trying to implement these things yourself and what this is going to make you do. First of all, it's gonna be a call to action to actually make you do it, because it's really easy to say I'm totally going to do those spreadsheets. I'll do it next month when I'm not busy or I'll do it this winter when I'm not busy and then you're gonna realize three years have gone by and you haven't done anything. So this is gonna make you sit down and do the work number one second of all, you might have watched 30 days and been like, Oh, my God, I have so much to do. I don't even know where to get started or how to start doing it. Or I have to build these spreadsheets and I don't want to spread cheese. And I don't really understand how to do the numbers. It's almost like walking back through 30 days with me, giving you assignment on each portion and then helping you, right? So, yeah, you're you've gotten a lot out of 30 days and I would never come back here and try to do something that would be redundant. But why don't we kind of walked that path again? And let's do it together with ongoing feedback every single week. And I can help you with everything that you're trying Teoh do. And if you've watched 30 days, you know what I'm talking about. Let me give you more information on all of those things. Like it will be. I mean, we're here for 90 days, right? so you'll get more information. You'll get personal help. And for everything that I said on 30 days that you're like, Yeah, I want to do that. But let me help get rid of the but entirely and just help you make the 30 days actually be transformative to your business in practical ways. Great. I got a couple comments. 30 days is one way, right? That and this is a two way. That's what that is to me. The most magical thing about this is that it's your you know, Susan's gonna be critiquing your work, critiquing your workbook, your your worksheets or financials. So that is a really special thing and watching days. But being the only person in the chat room, Yes, right, Like and being able to say, OK, hold on a second stop here. What about me? Help me personally. Okay, let's do it. And I just want to clarify to You definitely do not need to have seen 30 days at all, either, because people are asking that as well know. If you've never seen 30 days, I mean, would it be helpful? Sure, but it would be helpful, just like having any prior knowledge of any subject that you go to study, right? Like if you come here and you take a baby photography class, you're gonna be a little better off if you've done it before, right? But if you've never done this at all, I created this from the ground up to be informational for those who have never even seen the 30 days before. So you're not gonna feel like you're there some club that you have not been a part of and it's still out there, right? Like 30 days is still out there. So if you wanted to be into the mentor ship and you also have never seen 30 days, you can go get it right. Like and you can watch it alongside with this to just continue helping to reinforce. And we're always over here trying to figure out ways to enhance that 30 day experience so that you're continuing to get more out of it, right? And I'm just going to a couple of housekeeping things, So I just want to let you guys know. First of all, the workbook that we've been talking about Susan's brand new book that's a $69 value will be uploaded to the course page as soon as we possibly can. I'm sure will be done in the next few days, but well, if not today, but we will definitely keep you posted on that as well as when you do purchase the course you will get, of course, those invites to the to the Facebook page as well as our private broadcast that we will be doing in the future. And the way that will work is you will be emailed a password. So you'll come on the day of the broadcast. You'll get a password, and that's how we will make sure. And when we do the live broadcast, the only people in the chat the live broadcast for you guys, the only people in the chat room we're gonna be you guys. So it's not just gonna be Oh, God, I'm trying to get my comment hurt or my question asked, amongst everybody else who's watching it live, It's not live. It's only live for you. Come on, do this