PODCAST

Make Fast Cash as a Photographer with These 6 Easy Strategies

Shownotes

In episode 482 of the Business of Photography Podcast, you’ll learn how to start creating a strong financial strategy. With the right strategies in place, you can ensure that your business is well-positioned to succeed and thrive even during these trying times.

You’ll learn:

  • Why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow is vital for photographers
  • The hidden value of existing clients vs. new clients
  • 5 golden rules for captivating clients with promotional messages
  • 6 rapid revenue generation strategies for immediate cash flow

Links and resources:

This podcast is sponsored by Sprout Studio, the first all-in-one business software made by photographers for photographers. Sprout Studio combines studio management software with online galleries, wall portrait sales tools, design proofing, bookkeeping and more!

Start your free 14-day trial of Sprout Studio today and simplify your photography business, get more done, faster, and give your clients a great experience!

Join the Sprout Studio community on Facebook to continue the discussions between episodes.

Make Fast Cash as a Photographer with These 6 Easy Strategies

Named best of iTunes, The Business of Photography is a weekly podcast where we interview industry experts and business specialists who share high-value, no-fluff, concrete business ideas for professional photographers.

Share this podcast

Transcription

Welcome to the Business of Photography podcast powered by Sprout Studio, a studio management suite built for photographers by photographers. Here’s your host, Brian Caper. Hi, and welcome to episode 482 of the Business of Photography podcast. Times are tough and you are faced with challenges today that you’ve likely found to have strained your business, maybe even in ways that uh you couldn’t have imagined after this chaos that we’ve all just walked through for the past couple of years we’re faced with where we are today. And amidst that uncertainty, there lies what we believe is an opportunity to adapt and to evolve and to continue to um trek through this and come out on the other side stronger.

Maybe you’re thinking a couple of things. Um Right now, maybe there’s some things that are keeping you up at night. Maybe one you’re thinking, hey, I used to have a steady stream of clients, but lately my bookings seem to have dried up or maybe you’re a photographer and you’re worrying about the stability of your business and whether or not you’ll be able to sustain yourself in the long run. I’m here to tell you, it’s ok. You’re not alone. You’re not the only one that’s feeling these things.

This is a common thing that is keeping so many photographers up at night and it’s something that is really running rampant and really controlling the thoughts of so many photographers. And that’s why we want to be able to help because we believe in you and we believe in your craft and, and we believe here at Sprout that you deserve to be able to make a living doing this thing that you love and we’re invested in helping you continue to weather this storm. So today we’re gonna really dive into this and try and unpack some of these challenges and we’ve got four specific things we’re gonna cover in this episode. Number one, we’re gonna talk about why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow uh is really important for you as a photographer. It’s sort of a different way of thinking as a photographer because it’s typically not how we exist, but it is something that is going to be important and you’re gonna notice it now. But once you unlock this in your business, you’re going to make this a part of your annual plan. And number two, we’re gonna talk about the hidden value of existing clients as compared to new clients.

Number three, we’re gonna talk about the five golden rules for captivating clients with promotional messages. And then number four, I’m gonna share six rapid fire revenue generation strategies to help you build immediate cash flow in your business. So let’s get into it. Why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow is vital for you.

As a photographer, I’ve got five reasons why it is important for you to look at building consistency into your cash flow as opposed to the up and down nature that maybe you’re used to having in your business. If you’re a wedding photographer, you have deposits coming in, you have um you know, different payments coming in in before the wedding day after the wedding day. If you’re a portrait photographer, it’s very seasonal. So you’ve got these things built into your business where it comes spring time, maybe you’re busier come fall time, you’re busier, you’ve got print sales coming in, maybe in the summer time, maybe around the holidays, but it’s very up and down. It’s very much an ebb and flow, the typical cash flow structure for photographers. And so let’s talk about the five reasons why building a more steady stream of cash flow is so important for you and your business reason.

Number one is just pure financial stability. So by you building this steady consistent stream of cash flow into your business and into your year, it builds that financial stability. It allows you to cover your expenses to stretch these things out over the year. To invest in equipment with money that you actually have today is just looking at a cash flow. Um sort of like um up month, if you have it up month and all of a sudden you take that money and invest it and then realize the next month you don’t have any money left to continue to invest. Um But by having that um steady cash flow, you can support your livelihood without any uncertainty, you can pay yourself as a, as a salary as a, as an income without any uncertainty with the ebb and flow of the seasonality that you otherwise may have as cash flow in your business reason?

Number two, why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow is vital for you as a photographer is just business growth, but you having a consistent and predictable and repeatable cash flow engine, it enables you to reinvest in your business. Now, whether that is to reinvest in marketing, to reinvest in professional development, uh or just to expand what it is that you offer as a photographer by having a consistent level of revenue, it allows you to fuel your growth and it enhances and allows for long term stability in your photography. Business. Number three, and this is one that you’re probably feeling really um right now is it allows you to weather the challenges of the industry. So as we have these challenges that we’re walking through now, as we saw challenges in 2020 the fluctuations, the ups and downs the trends, um the things that can really take control of our industry in an unpredictable way and then drive us into a bad place by having a, a predictable and a consistent and a sort of flat cash flow structure. It allows you to weather that because you have consistency consist consistency, I can say that properly, consistency built into your cash flow. So it helps you sort of stay afloat potentially even during those challenging times.

One of the things that we did a lot of during COVID times is we launched this whole series called Photographer First Aid, where we just went in depth on all of these tactics, all of these strategies on how photographers can continue to build revenue, continue to build cash flow even when they’re not allowed to be behind their cameras. Even when you couldn’t be physically with clients, there was a lot of strategies that you could be deploying in your business to help you build cash flow still. And we saw photographers that took advantage of those tactics that were still generating significant cash flow even when they couldn’t be physically together with their clients. And so by you building these strategies into your business, it allows you to weather those challenges. It allows you to weather those unpredictable times and build more predictability and consistency in your cash flow reason. Number four, why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow is vital for you as a photographer, it allows you to invest in creativity by you having this um stability on the financial end of your business. It allows you to actually spend time as a creative, which is really what you love to do at the end of the day.

Anyways, that’s why you got into photography because you fell in love with the creative side. So by you not having the stressor of finances, but you not having the stressor of needing to book clients, of needing to make money of looking for that next booking because you’re needing that cash flow. It allows you to be able to do more of the thing that you love to do, which is photography. It allows you to unlock that artistic end of what you love in photography. And it allows you to push those boundaries and push those limits as a creative. So it allows you truly to do more of the thing that you love to do by building that consistency on the business side of what you’re doing. And number five, this one is probably obvious.

The fifth reason why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow is so vital for you as a photographer. And that is because it builds peace of mind. When, when you have this reliable cash flow, you can concentrate on just doing the thing that you love photography. It allows you to focus on spending your time and your energy and your resources on existing clients. It allows you to serve them to build these great experiences to do the best work that you can be doing to be the best creative that you can be instead of constantly worrying about making ends meet. So that peace of mind allows you to deliver great work, give a great client experience. And then ultimately, what all that means that you’re going to fuel your business even further, you’re gonna build more success into your business. So it builds this repeatable cycle. So those are the five reasons why unlocking a steady stream of cash flow is so important for you as a photographer.

Now, let’s get into the conversation around why existing clients are arguably more valuable than new clients. Now, I just want to caveat this by saying that doesn’t mean that you don’t consistently try to build new business. It doesn’t mean that you don’t consistently try to market and try to bring in new leads. That’s obviously a big part of growing a business of creating a sustainable business. But one of the things that I see time and time again is that photographers put so much energy into that marketing, they put so much energy into social, into going to bridal shows or home shows or into Facebook ads, whatever it is that they’re doing, they focus so much on getting new clients that they almost forget the client list that they already have. And so I wanted to take a moment and talk about that because there really is a hidden value that so many photographers don’t consider when they’re looking at where they can generate revenue, especially when they can generate revenue on a short term basis. So let’s talk a little bit about this.

The probability of being able to generate revenue from an existing customer is substantially higher than the probability of generating revenue from a new prospect. In fact, there was um a study done by marketing metrics and they said that the likelihood of successfully selling to an existing client falls within the range of 60 to 70%. While the probability of selling to a new prospect ranges between five and 20%. So what they’re basically saying is that it’s almost 15 times easier to generate revenue from an existing client than it is to acquire and convert a new 1, 15 times easier to generate revenue from an existing client versus a new one. You have to work 15 times harder to get the same amount of money out of a new client than from an existing client. So that’s motivation right there.

Another point here that’s interesting is that existing clients have already experienced what you offer. They’ve already experienced your photography, they’ve already experienced the experience that you create for them. They have trust with you. They have familiarity with your brand, with you as a photographer, with your company. If you have other photographers, um they’re more receptive therefore to future offers to future promotions, to repeat business because they already have that lived experience with you.

There was a study um by company that revealed that customer retention rates, uh you can increase customer retention rates, sorry by just 5%. And it can boost your profits by 25 to 95% as compared to focusing solely on acquiring new customers. So you can boost profits by up to 95% by just increasing customer retention rates by 5%. So if you can get 5% of your customers to continue to buy from you, that’s going to potentially increase your profits by up to 95%. Again, these are all big studies in a lot of big businesses across multiple categories. But the point still stands to say that by focusing on existing clients and by creating offers and opportunities for existing clients, there is a really big profitability opportunity there for you and then also for them because they get to have the same kind of experience that they already know love and trust serving existing clients um is arguably more cost effective than acquiring new ones.

That’s sort of another um point that we can look at here when it comes from a customer acquisition cost. The Harvard Business Review states that acquiring a new customer can be 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. So by leveraging those relationships that you already have with your existing clients, you can actually save on top of funnel expenses you don’t have to market as hard, you don’t have to sell as hard. It, it’s gonna be a higher conversion rate um from sort of presenting an offer to then actually them taking advantage of the offer. So you save money, it’s more cost effective for you to serve existing clients than it is for you to try to generate new clients and bring them through the entire experience. And at the end of the day, your existing clients are brand advocates. Like these are people who have already done business with, you know, your work, know the experience that you create, know who you are, they have this trust, they have this loyalty to you. And so therefore the more that you can get existing clients to have repeat business with you, the more likely they are to continue to spread positive word of mouth and to refer their friends to you. So when you look at all of these benefits, when it comes to existing clients versus new clients, again, I’m not saying don’t focus on bringing in new clients, you definitely should be having a top of funnel approach to bringing in new clients.

You need to be bringing in new leads to keep that going. But don’t ignore the clients that you already have. Too many photographers will bring in these new clients. They’ll do all this work to acquire a new lead, they’ll do all this work to convert them to book them, to run them through the process and then they just kind of move on and forget about them and move on to the next lead. But there’s a lot of opportunity there that we can serve greater.

We can optimize that we can generate more referrals out of that, we can generate repeat business. There’s a lot of opportunity that you already have from your existing clients. So those are the hidden value or the hidden values of existing clients as opposed to new clients. There’s a place in your business for both. But let’s not ignore the fact that there’s a lot of value in serving existing clients. Now, when it comes to generating cash flow in your business, that’s kind of what we’re talking about here in this whole episode. And we’re gonna get into some tactics in just a little bit and we’ve actually written in our seeds to success email newsletter, um scripts that you can use, that you can copy and paste into your email or if you’re using Sprout studio, you can use these because we’ve already got them into spout template library that you can send out to your clients to existing clients to generate massive revenue immediately built into those email templates are a lot of strategies around how to best word promotional offers. How do you actually send out an email to a client that doesn’t feel slimy or gross or icky? It doesn’t feel sales but still gets the point across and entices them to want to make a purchase. So I’ve broken down all of that into five golden rules for captivating your clients with promotional messages. And the five rules are this, we’re gonna go, I’m gonna sort of skim through them and then we’re gonna go through them in more in depth.

Number one, keep it simple. Number two, focus on benefits. Number three, give a answer to the question. Why now number four, personalize the message. And number five make the next steps crystal clear. Let’s go into the top number one in the five golden rules for creating captivating for captivating clients with promotional messages. Number one, keep it simple.

A lot of photographers will get in a lot of sales. People will get into these complicated offers that are like you do this and do that. And then if you do this, you do this and send this and, and they make this complicated decision tree that it’s just too complex for a client to follow. So your offer needs to be simple. Whatever it is that you’re offering as a promotion, as a discount, as a reason to buy. It needs to be simple. So you need to distill the whole promotion down to its simplest terms.

If you, I haven’t read the book um building a story brand by Donald Miller. That’s one of the things that he advocates for and that he teaches really well and provides a framework for clarifying your message and keeping things simple and getting things down to the this sort of smallest nugget that you can then um communicate to your clients and how to communicate that in a really clear way. So you want to keep your promo simple, you want to keep your messaging, you want to keep your language, you want to keep the opportunity as simple as you possibly can. Number two, in the five golden rules for captivating clients with promotional messages is to focus on benefits. So much of the time we as entrepreneurs focus on ourselves and we look at ourselves as being the center of the story and so we will speak in terms of us. Whereas instead, what I want to encourage you to think about is to flip that and focus on what your client gets out of it. What are they going to benefit from in taking advantage of this opportunity? What’s the benefit? Why would they want to do this? What’s the value in it for them? And if you can really get into that and communicate the benefit? And again, Donald Miller’s building a story brand has a great framework for how you can actually create this. But at the end of the day, what you want to try and do is put yourself in your client’s shoes and try and look at it from their perspective. Why would they care about this? What’s the benefit to them? And if you can’t answer that question, then you don’t have a clear and engaging and interesting promotion to offer them. So focus on the benefit.

Number three in the five golden rules for captivating clients with promotional messages is why now, now this is something that I remember reading from in a book by Robert Chani called Either Influence or The Laws of persuasion. He has two books and we’ll link both the books in the show notes for this episode. But he talks about this idea that people naturally don’t want to make a decision.

We are actually decision um averse like we don’t like the idea of, especially when it comes to purchasing decisions. We don’t gravitate to wanting to make a purchasing decision. And so we, we hum and haw and we think about it and we just sort of like procrastinate and I’m sure you’ve been there, you’ve probably been there where you’re kind of looking at, maybe you’re looking at buying a camera, you’re looking at buying a computer, you’re looking at buying whatever it is and you kind of just like you sit on it and you kind of just wait and you don’t really like make that decision, you’re not decisive in that decision. And that’s human nature. That’s how we make decisions.

We naturally don’t, especially when it comes to partying with our money. We don’t want to part with our money. We don’t want to make that decision. So we have to, when you’re putting these offers out there we have to give our clients a reason to make the decision. Now, otherwise we’re just leaving them to sort of their own thoughts and their own decision making process and, and we can’t really understand or predict when that decision will be made. So you need to give them something and now that could look like I’m sure you’ve seen it because now that I mention it, you’re probably going to see it all over the place, but limited availability or creating scarcity or a limited time offer or X number of things available or whatever it is, you need to give a reason for them to make the decision. Now as opposed to waiting until the decision just feels right for them, which like by the way is never going to happen. So you have to give them a reason why now why is now the time for them to make this decision? And that’s why in the email that we have in the success and then some of the reasons that we’re going to walk through in just a moment, there’s reasons why you are going to be um creating these opportunities for your clients and in some of the language in these email templates that we’ve written for you in Sprout or that you have in seasons of success, we, you can see that there’s like a specific reason why now is the time for you to do this and there’s an opportunity that they must sort of, you know, get in touch with to take advantage of. So why now number four in the five golden rules for captivating clients with promotional messages is to personalize the message as much as you can.

You want to tailor your communication to your client specifically to them. You want to try and use things like their name. Uh This is a rule in Dale Carnegie that says that a person’s name is the sweetest sound in any language. So people love to hear their own name, they love to read their own name. They want to feel like they’re not being mass marketed to. So the more that you can make the conversation to your clients personal, the better now for for photographers that use Sprout studio, you know that we have things like variables and email templates or you can do email marketing campaigns that have variables or you can have filters based on what kind of photography this client has booked you for. So you can send a certain message out to all of your wedding clients, a certain message out to all of your family, portrait clients, a certain message out to all of your newborn portrait clients.

You can use variables and include their name or you can include what date you had your shoot with them or you can include whatever you need to include in there to make it as personal as you can. And if you’re not using Spro well you should be using Spro. But if you’re not using sprout and you have another CRM, then uh perhaps that CRM has that opportunity and if not, then just switch it to Spro and we’ll get you over there and we can get you a better tool. But at the end of the day, what you want to do, the, the idea here is that you want to personalize the message, you want to tailor the communication that you’re sending when it comes to this language, this email marketing or however you’re communicating to your clients, make it as personal as it can. So it doesn’t feel like you’re just mass marketing to them.

Now, number five, and this is probably the most important one of the five golden rules for captivating clients with promotional messages. And that is to make the next steps crystal clear too often. We send these things out to our clients and we’ve done the first four, right? You know, we’ve kept it simple, we’ve focused on the benefits, we’ve explained why. Now we’ve made it personal, but then we kind of just leave the email, sort of trailing off at the end and hope that our clients know what to do to actually take advantage of the offer to actually take you up on what the email is giving them as an opportunity. And that’s a big mistake.

You need to make the next steps crystal clear. This is something that we talk about when it comes to email marketing, it’s something that we talk about when it comes to sales. It’s something that we talk about when it comes to your website. Even simple things like the flow that your customer walks through on your website. Having your call to action clear, having the button clear, having what’s next clear. You always want to make sure that it’s understood at any point in time. What’s next? Where do I go from here? How do I buy? How do I get more information? What specifically do I do? Do you want them to fill out a form? Do you want them to email? Do you want them to click a button? Do you want them just to pay? Like what is next?

Don’t think that pointing that out is too simple because it’s not because you need to be as clear and as simple and as direct as possible by making the next steps crystal clear. OK, let’s move on now to the next part, which is some sort of rapid fire um revenue generation strategies to get you some cash flow flowing really quickly. So there’s a whole bunch of things here um in the seeds to success email that we have. Um we have the link to that on our show notes. We’d love to have you join that.

I actually wrote out three specific email templates that you can copy and paste into, you know gmail or whatever you’re using or if you’re using Spirit Studio, we have them in template libraries so you can just click with a with a button and copy them into your account, send them to your clients. But these are three emails you can send to immediately generate cash flow with specific promos to existing clients. I’m not going to go into those because you can get all those details in season of success and you can get those templates in sprout. But I have six other rapid revenue generation strategies for immediate cash flow.

Now, for each I and we have an article that accompanies this podcast as well. So I’m gonna encourage you to go and read the article because it kind of gets meaty here. I’m gonna sort of fly through these really quickly. Um But for each of these six strategies I’m gonna talk about or I’ve written about what the strategy is, why it’s important. What are your immediate next steps to implement these strategies and then what are the long term benefits? Because we’re talking today in terms of short term benefits, there’s sort of like an S OS there’s an emergency.

You want to get some immediate cash flow happening in your business. But all of these strategies do have long term benefits and I outline those in the article. So I do encourage you to hop on over to gets spread studio dot com and read the article that accompanies this podcast because I go in more depth for all of these strategies. So let’s run through these six strategies really quickly.

Number one, sell unused equipment. Now, this might seem obvious but any equipment that you have that you’re no longer using, it’s just costing you money to sit into your shell in your shelf. So by you selling that, uh a it’s going to enable another photographer to get something at a bit of a discount. So you’re helping them out, but also it’s gonna generate some immediate cash for you. And at the same time declutter your workspace. So figure out what equipment you have that you no longer need, list that equipment.

I don’t need to tell you where to list it, you know, to go to Facebook marketplace or Gigi or Craigslist or ebay or wherever it is that you’re selling stuff and then sell it and that’s it. And by, by building this into your like regular rhythm, that’s something I actually encourage you to do quarterly might be too much, but at least annually just like review the equipment that you have and stuff that you may not be using, even if it’s simple things like, oh yeah, I have that like soft box or I have these reflectors that I’m not using. It’s not gonna hurt to just clean that stuff up and to, and to offload it to make some more cash flow for you to spend in other areas. So number one, selling these equipment, number two, run a mini session campaign.

Now we’ve had a lot of articles and, and episodes here on the podcast, talking about mini session campaigns, how to do them, how to structure them, how to best offer them. So I’m not going to go into all the nuance of that, but now might be a good time for you to create one of these themed or seasonal or VIP or limited edition sessions where you book multiple clients in a short period of time and generate some quick revenue from that opportunity. It’s a great way for you to optimize your time. It’s a great opportunity for your clients to have a session perhaps at a lesser fee. Um And it’s really a win-win at the end of the day. So running a mini session campaign is a great quick way to generate some revenue. The third way to generate some quick revenue.

Now, this is something that we talk about in uh the email. So I’m not gonna go too in depth on this one because I actually have the email script of exactly how to do this in seeds to success, but it is to run a sale to galleries that have expired. So take a look at all of the expired galleries that you already have all of the clients that you’ve already had sessions with and offer a print sale to all of those clients reopen all those galleries and email them out. Offer a coupon offer a discount offer, a savings. Um, again, give them a Why now and open that up maybe seven days and allow them to make purchases for prints. Uh We make this really easy and to do, by the way, if you’re doing email marketing, you can turn it on for certain galleries that have had certain kinds of shoots.

You can even extend the expiration date for a certain period of time. You can apply a new special promo price list for those galleries. So a lot of the gallery uh print sale opportunities are like more or less like one click to be able to do that in your business. And we’ve seen photographers that have done this over COVID that really quickly with one promotion was generating, you know, five figures of sales from just opening these galleries up and sending the emails that we gave them uh to their clients. So this is a great untapped opportunity if you haven’t done something like that already uh for your existing clients.

Another reason I think I’m on number five now is to reach out to couples or to families who maybe never purchased an album or a book with an offer to purchase an album or a book. A lot of the times when we’re doing weddings or when we’re doing family portraits, our clients are maybe bombarded with decision making and we talked earlier about sort of the whole why now thing um sometimes our clients will just make decisions to do nothing as opposed to doing something. And so I bet if you think back at your past clients, if you look back at your past sessions or your past weddings you might be able to identify. Oh, yeah. There’s like, you know, 30 or 40% of my clients that have never actually bought an album. They’ve never actually bought a book.

They don’t really have anything other than maybe digital files or maybe a handful of prints from their sessions from their wedding. So this might be a great opportunity for you to reach out to those clients and offer them a promotion on either an album or a book or maybe you do the prints or you do some other product that you want to offer. But you can just reengage those clients that you already have images for. Maybe you can even pre design a book or pre design an album and offer it to them and say, hey, um this web designed for you, what do you think? I’d love to offer you this at X price. Now, if you’re using something like Sprout, then you can use design proofs in Sprout, which are a really great way for you to upload the finished spreads after you design your album and you upload it into a design proof in Sprout and you can send that to your clients and they can actually sort of flip through it almost like it’s a book and they can give you immediate feedback. So we’re kind of using that as a tool to help you save some time. So that when they look at it, they’re not like, oh, page number four. Can you get rid of the picture of, of Uncle Bob? And you’re like, well, is it page four or is it spread for? Is it left or right side? Who’s Uncle Bob? I don’t know who that is.

That process wastes a lot of time back and forth. So the design proofs and sprout if you’re using an opportunity like this, if you’re doing albums and books and designs, it lets you present these things to your clients and then all they have to do is click anywhere on the page and say, hey, like this picture, don’t love it, swap it with this other picture and it makes that communication between you and your clients a lot more seamless. It saves them time, it saves you time and it makes it. So you’re on the same page literally pun intended. So that’s another opportunity is to reach out to families, reach out to couples who maybe never purchased a certain product.

Maybe it’s an album, it’s a book. It’s a whatever a a folio and offer that to them. Uh I’ve got two more here. So two more is uh the second last one here is to launch a gift certificate campaign and pre sell gift certificates with some sort of reason. Now, in again, the seeds of success email that we have, um I go into this in more depth and I actually have an email script that you can use in there to actually launch these things to your clients to send an email to your clients and say, hey, here’s a specific um promotion that we have. And I think I’ve got four or five specific promotions that you could offer as they relate to gift certificates. So one’s called like the double dollar gift certificates.

That’s where, hey, if you purchase $100 if you give us $100 we’re gonna give you a $200 gift certificate. And there’s other um promotional ideas that I have in there like that double dollar one and I have email templates for to use to just copy and paste that and send it to your clients. So again, that’s another great way to quickly generate some revenue in your business because it, it immediately creates that income. And at the same time, it secures future work for you. Um So that’s a great way to generate some quick revenue immediately. And the last one is the family portrait plan.

I also talk about this in the seeds to success email. So in case you haven’t learned, you definitely want to get in on that seeds to success email because you have all of the scripts, all of the how to the specific actionable outlined, right? In front of you in that email. So hop on over to the show notes for this episode and you can sign up for that. But by offering a family portrait plan, you basically pre sell a group or a bulk of family sessions to a client to like sort of a preferred client um up front. So it might be something like offering 10 sessions to be used in the next 10 years. And normally you might, you know, spend 10 times $250 for that. So that’s $3500. But if you buy it now up front, it’s only 12 50 you get a complimentary eight by 10 print from each session, like you make it really enticing for your clients so that you can, there’s a lot of benefits and we’ve actually talked about family portrait plan on the podcast a lot before. But uh and again, we have an email template for you to use specifically to offer this to your client. So the next steps are very clear on that one, but it’s a great opportunity for you to generate some quick cash flow.

We’ve seen photographers that deploy this kind of strategy in their business just immediately generate $10,000 in their business. I mean, what, what would that mean for you right now? If you could generate that as an immediate opportunity to you have some cash flow flowing in your business. So by doing something like that not only does it generate that immediate cash flow, but it also secures that long term work.

This now means you’re going to have potentially 10, 15, 20 clients that are kind of like lifelong clients. They’re gonna now walk with you for the next 10 years as clients and you can continue to create experiences for them. And not only will you now have consistent business there, but every one of those clients will now consistently be referring you, those clients will be consistently be sharing their work that you’ve done for them. They’re going to come back to you for the types of sessions that they may otherwise not pay full price for. But also for every time that you photograph them, there’s an opportunity for you to do print sales, for you to do book sales, for you to do album sales, for you to do other product sales. So there’s a lot of benefits to doing a family portrait plan and now might be a perfect time for you to offer that to your clients. So today was kind of like um a lot of ideas thrown your way. And again, we have an article that we’ve written that accompanies this podcast.

I definitely encourage you to go and read because it kind of has a lot of these things written out. You can take your time, you can go through them, you can read them, you can highlight them. Um If you’re on sees to success, the email series that we have, it’s totally free. Um Then we have scripts that you can use to deploy these things in your business right away. But by following all of these tips, by sort of following along all these things we talked about today, it’s going to allow you to create a more consistent cash flow while also retaining existing clients and optimizing those existing clients as you sort of look at these challenging economic times that we’re sitting in. So um I hope that that was helpful for you.

I hope that you are looking at all of these opportunities as things that you can implement in your business today. And you can see how they can have a short term benefit to you in your business. You can see the immediate cash flow impact they can have. But really, I, I think that if you look at all of these strategies we talked about today, you can really look at them and say, well, I could actually implement these every year. I could just make this a habit, a routine, come February or come October or whatever, choose whatever you want and, and deploy these things and actually plan these things. And if you’re not taking the time to plan an annual calendar in your business, you’re missing out on a big opportunity because otherwise you find yourself perhaps in the situation that you’re in now where you’re having to react.

Whereas if you can look at your calendar. If you can learn from this, if you can then look at your calendar and plan out the kinds of things that you want to do to create a more consistent cash flow in your business on a proactive basis. It allows you to plan for success. It allows you to build that consistency of cash flow in your business so that you can actually create a business that stands the test of time. So thank you so much for listening to this episode.

We’ll have all the links and everything um in the show notes for this episode. So you can go and read the article and get on to the seeds of success, email and get those email scripts and so on and so forth. Otherwise we will see you in the next day. Thanks for listening to the Business of Photography podcast powered by Sprout Studio, a studio management suite built for photographers by photographers. You can do it all in one place with Sprout studio. Stay organized, give your clients a seamless experience and get more done faster. Visit, gets sprouts studio dot com to learn more about Sprout studio.

Sprout Studio Logo

Start your free
14-day trial

No credit card required. Cancel anytime.

Sprout Studio Logo

Save 20% with your friend's coupon!

Sign-up now and receive 20% off all annual and monthly plans in Sprout Studio – a studio management suite built for photographers by photographers.

No credit card required. Cancel anytime.

See how Sprout looks and feels

Book a complimentary 1-on-1 demo call with our team or watch a pre-recorded demo now!

Select “Sprout Studio Demo Call” to start.

Prefer not to wait?

Step 1 of 8