Intro: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Posers podcast, the place where we skip the fluff. Say the quiet parts out loud and dig into what really matters. This is where photography, psychology, and business collide. I'm Jody, your host, and I'm bringing you my raw takes, hard wins, and a whole lot of unfiltered honesty about what it takes to build a photography business that actually connects and makes money.
So ladies, grab your headphones and get your tits up and your ears open because we are going to build something really incredible together.
Well, hello, hello, hello, my beautiful posers. I am so excited to be back here on an episode of this podcast with you. We are coming off of Posers After Dark, which just happened last night, and here I am today pre-recording the episode for next week. So when I tell you that I am coming off of a high, I am [00:01:00] literally, If any of you guys watch the Valley, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm coming off of a high because he just went to rehab. Okay. Rehab is not something to joke about. Jody, get it together. Alright, so. Posers After dark happened last night, I was able to see most of Griffin's orchestra concert.
If you saw the emails that were coming out, you know, there was a debacle, Griffin's orchestra, orchestra concert was double booked on the same day due to, uh, nobody's fault but my own. And the time kept on changing with when we were gonna be starting poses after dark. Okay. But, so we did get it started.
I had to leave the orchestra concert. Early, and the concert was going so long and it's. It's middle school orchestra, so it is nothing but violence squeaking from one side of the gym to the other, and it is torture. But all of the [00:02:00] younger class griffin's in eighth grade, so he's like last ones to perform, right?
So everything was taking so long and I had to actually get up and leave before I ever even saw or heard, I guess any of Griffin's songs being performed. So I got up and I left hoping that he didn't notice what time I left, and I sprinted over to the studio and we got started with posers after dark and it was obviously phenomenal, but in my head I was also thinking, dear Lord, I am going to get it whenever I get home because Griffin is a miniature me. He will slice you. He will dice you. He will one line you. He has got the sharpest, funniest, most. Ridiculous tongue that I have ever heard, and he cracks me up on the daily.
But he is also my middle child. He literally lives his life knowing that he is stuck right in the middle of [00:03:00] his two brothers and he demands that life be fair for him. So whenever I pulled into the garage after I'm getting home from posers after dark, I. I thought that maybe he'd just be in his room. I thought that maybe he'd be chill about it.
No, he comes out into the garage, doesn't even let me get out of my car before. He's like, when did you leave the concert? And I was like, oh, I had to leave a little bit early. I didn't hear all of your songs. And I just wanted to leave it like really brief like that. I didn't wanna have to lie. Too much to my child.
But he's like, well, how many songs did you hear? And I was like, I got through about two of them and I had to sprint. And he's like, oh, really? Because I saw where you were sitting in the back of the room and then I looked up and you weren't there. And I was like, yeah, I listened to a couple of the songs and then I had to leave.
And he [00:04:00] literally, the way this child reads me to filth, he was like, oh yeah. So you had to leave my concert for your Alzheimer Association for Boomers meeting. And I was like, first of all, hold on. There's a lot for me to process there. We're talking Alzheimer's, we're talking boomers, we're talking meeting, we're talking.
I left your concert. How dare you. But also, yes, I did. So I was thinking in my head, I was like, are we all a bunch of women pushing geriatrics? Yes, absolutely. Was it hard for us to stay up that late? It sure was. Did I forget what I was saying? At least 14 times also. Yes. But was it incredible and filled with raw moments and hard hitting truths?
And was it a handful of women who are literally kicking ass in their businesses also? Yes. So. I turned to Griffin and I was like, Hey, you know what? I did miss some of your concert and [00:05:00] I'm sorry about that, but I think it's really important that you have a mom who shows up for you in the best way that she can.
But you also have a mom who you are watching build a business, and that right there is probably teaching you far more than anything else could teach you in life. And he just looked at me and was like. Your lecture means nothing to me, and he walked inside.
So, we did not get through the night. Being, unscathed and being not attacked by Griffin, but I survived. So anyway, quick change of direction. , Yesterday before posers, after dark. Okay. I was sprinting from the orchestra Over to the studio, I decided that I was gonna do it at the studio.
'cause I was like, you know what? I don't know about my dogs barking. I don't know if my kids are gonna be demanding things to me. I don't know what's gonna happen if I actually try to do it at [00:06:00] home. So I run over to the studio and decide that I'm going to do it there. And while I was sitting. In my car it was, it's like 7 27 at this point pm and this thing starts at seven 30 and I'm still sitting in my car.
That's how much I was rushing, but. I was on Instagram for a split second and I was responding to some dms about posters after dark, making sure that everybody who wanted to have the link had it. And I start to close out of Instagram and I see this post by bitches. I don't know if you follow bitches.
It's just kind of a funny online quippy sort of account, but it is 9.1 million. Followers deep, so I'm willing to bet it's like 9.1 million women deep. Right? And they had this post up. Granted, the mindset that I'm in is like I'm about to go into posers after dark, where I'm talking to brilliant [00:07:00] women who are kicking ass in their businesses, and there's this post from bitches talking to 9.1 million women, probably of a younger generation than I am.
And it said something along the lines of like, all that girls want are forehead kisses and goodnight texts and a hug and to be told that they're beautiful all day. Something like that. That's not exact, but it was basically like a list of.
What girls who literally play with my little ponies probably still want out of their future. And it was so immature and so off base and kind of degrading to the idea of what women actually want. And it triggered me, guys, I am not an online troll, okay? I never am a keyboard warrior even whenever things make me annoyed.
[00:08:00] On the internet, I am usually great at being like, you know what? That doesn't involve me. That's none of my business. Like I don't have to respond to this. But for some reason, the mother. Inside of me, it like rose up and I felt as though I needed to protect 9.1 million women of this younger generation from reading this because it was garbage.
I pulled up the, I took a screenshot of it because I. I was that heated. I was that attacked by this post. And the Post actually said, all girls want is flowers, forehead kisses, cute jewelry, playlists, dinner dates, car rides, hair strokes, and good morning and goodnight texts.
And my response like the mother that I am, I was like, literally. No, we don't. We want to run businesses, make money, do bad bitch things, and [00:09:00] some of us wanna raise legends. And for those of us who don't wanna raise legends, they're icons too. Now, does my comment matter? No, it absolutely does not. Nobody cares, but Well, except for the three people who like debt, and to those three people, I say, thank you for standing in solidarity with me.
But something about that post it just, I. It hit me like a ton of bricks. It slapped me across the face. It was the attack I wasn't expecting, and I just felt as though it was my, , duty as a community mom to, , protect and serve. Okay. So if you are still with me here by episode 13, then I know three things about you.
, One, I know that you're becoming a little bit too addicted to me, so you need to chill out. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. , I know that you've learned more about Bravo in the last 13 weeks than you thought you ever would, and you [00:10:00] also know that we do not fuck around and that we are about to drop a really sick.
Podcast episode right now, so let's get after it. I've been reading a book called Ready, fire, aim by Michael Masterson, and if you haven't picked this one up yet, let me just say don't, that's not what you thought I was gonna say. Honestly, it is boring as hell. It is not a cute little like business book that's lining the end capsid target, but.
The first bit of it has blown the roof off of my brain a little bit, and I wish that I had read this book sometime within the first few years of my business rather than now, because I would have gone about things so much differently and I would've had a profitable business way faster. So I thought, what better to do than to share it with you guys who are maybe in that stage that I wish that I had read this in.
Okay. I'm [00:11:00] about to say something that might slap you in the face a little bit, or at least it's been very humbling for me to grapple with this for the last few years. Uh, having a profitable business does not mean that your business is making enough to pay your bills. Okay. That might seem like common sense to you guys, but it took me a little bit to learn this so.
The distribution or like the payroll that you take out of your business is considered an expense to the business. So using my business as an example. I take a $6,000 distribution every month, right? I pay $1,500 in rent. I pay my team 27 50. I pay my payroll taxes that are 1450, and then add in like overhead, , cost of doing business, other software expenses, things like that.
I'm just putting in 1500. I know it's higher than this whenever I'm talking about, , the cost of goods sold and things like that. [00:12:00] But. Just with this example alone, my business has to make $13,200 to break even every single month, and anything that I make on top of that is considered profit.
So that means that I've only been running a profitable business for about five years. Does that blow your mind a little bit? Maybe I am a little bit business dense, but I actually always thought that what I take as a distribution was considered profit. So I was like walking around like a peacock with my feathers all big and bright, shaking my ass everywhere, and I wasn't even profitable.
So. Knowing that now and reading this book now, I kept this in mind while I was thinking about and reading about the idea of building a , profitable business, which granted, of course my business is profitable now, but it still makes me think of [00:13:00] like the whole bigger picture of my business. So much more so.
In this book, ready, fire, aim, the author is comparing business to like a forest, and that every new tree inside of the forest is really fighting for survival, trying to grow fast enough in order to at least keep up with or outpace the competition and. That metaphor definitely works, but like I said, the book is a little bit boring, so I wanna make it a little bit more like fun for us to dissect.
So let's act like. You are a first year housewife, or let's act like your business, not you. Your business is like a first year housewife. So notoriously first year housewives are kind of hard to watch. They flounder and they flop, and they rarely get asked back for a second season. So if there's like this little sapling in the forest and he needs.
Uh, light and [00:14:00] water and air in order to grow and survive and compete. Then a new housewife needs a storyline, relationships with the other women and witty one-liners, right? Andy doesn't keep you around just because you are pretty. He only keeps you around if you pull ratings because ratings mean money.
The Housewives are called a franchise for a reason, because it's a goddamn business people, and our business is, why do I get so passionate about the Housewives? They are my friends, they are my family. I am here to protect them just as I was the 9.1 million from the Bets account. Okay, but they're called a franchise for a reason because they are a business and our businesses are no different.
So you might think that you're building something beautiful, and maybe you are, but if it's not turning a profit, it doesn't matter because just like Bravo doesn't bring back like this newborn little fledgling housewife, if she's not [00:15:00] delivering, your market will swallow your business. Is not profitable.
There's no renewal without revenue, and there is no sustainability in your business if you don't focus on sales first. Sales. Are your light, your water, and your air sales are your storyline, your relationships with the other women and your witty one-liners. That's what your business has to have in order to grow.
Now, a lot of photographers, especially in the early stages, confuse branding with marketing. We think that we need the styled shoot images, the gorgeous website, the perfect grid, and then the clients will come. But Bravo doesn't care if its new Housewife looks good in the cast photo. They care if people watch.
So it's the same here in that your business doesn't survive because there's an aesthetic. [00:16:00] It survives because it's profitable. Now, whenever I started my photography business, I had about $10,000 to get it going. Now to a teenager, that sounds like a lot of money, but anyone who has ever purchased, , camera bodies, lenses, Photoshop, Lightroom contracts, a website, branding, logo insurance, like all of that, knows that 10 K disappears faster than a bottle of Whispering Angel on a Real Housewives brunch.
Okay. How many references to Bravo can I put in one episode? Okay. So naturally with not a single shoot on the books. I start allocating where I'm going to spend this money to get this business set up. And I created this website. You guys, , Oh, she was a stunner. She was an icon. She was before her time.
Really. The header of this website [00:17:00] had like Polaroid type photos , that were animated as if somebody was standing above like. I don't know, a counter or a poster board or something that they were like dropping these Polaroids onto the header of this website and I thought that my shit was so good.
So I spent thousands of dollars on this website. Didn't have a single shoot on the books. Let me remind you. I spent $1,100 on custom business stationary. I'm talking business cards. Thank you. Notes, envelopes, the works. 300 copies. Who did I think I was? 300 copies, 300 thank you notes, and I had not a single client and I wasn't doing any work to get a single client either.
In fact, [00:18:00] there was once a time when one of my husband's really nice, well-meaning friends, spoke to the catering director at a luxury. Country club members only weddings galore. He was talking to the catering director and he told the catering director about me, a brand new fledgling wedding photographer, told him that I was the best wedding photographer that he would ever seen.
He would think that I would be jumping for joy for that kind of marketing to be happening in my business, but. I was mad. I was embarrassed because I thought, I felt like selling was like slimy. For the longest time. I thought that marketing myself felt so gross and I didn't wanna be that girl who was like pushing her services.
I told myself that I was a boutique business and I [00:19:00] thought that. My work should just, I guess, I don't know, speak for itself. I thought that if I was going to book weddings, then it was only going to be because the wedding vendors in town, like the wedding planners or a florist or somebody else had seen my work and that they wanted to reach out and that they wanted to work with me.
What was I actually thinking? But so. I was upset at my husband's friend. I was thinking in head, I was like, how dare he tell people that I need clients? Like I am not some starving artist. I do not need to sing for my supper. In my head, I was like, I'm sought after. And that's what Morgan Freeman literally should have been doing.
A voiceover in my life that was like, she was not in fact sought after because I wasn't, I. I was an actual nobody in my market at that time, and I wasn't even C clueing into the fact that [00:20:00] I was spending $10,000 to get this business off of the ground, and I wasn't for one second thinking about how I was going to get clients.
So. In this book that I'm reading, Masterson says that 80% of your time, creativity, and resources should go towards selling, not branding, not your fifth styled shoot for the year, not a website redesign. Just because someone in yet another mastermind said that you need to like. I dunno, package your work better or something.
But most photographers that I know, especially the ones stuck in neutral, spend 80% of their energy on things that feel productive, but don't bring in a single dollar. In fact, the biggest mistake that most photographers make is that they spend most of their time, attention, energy, and money on paying thousands of dollars for styled shoots or rebranding websites on a whim or tinkering with [00:21:00] editing and re-editing photos.
Thinking that some minor tweak that you make to your white balance or saturation of oranges is going to be so noticeable to the client that they will gasp and they will see your work and they will come running to you with their credit card. We have this impression. That we're doing things in a logical order, getting everything right before we actually start running the marketing side of our business.
We think that doing a photo shoot and making a reel of some of the photos will stop people in their tracks and have them grabbing for their wallet faster than I grab for the TV remote at 9:00 PM every night. The activities that relate to making the business look and feel like a real business are considerations that should be given little.
No attention, and I can already hear you saying, but Jodi, we're photographers. What do you mean we shouldn't be making things look pretty? And I'm not saying that. I'm saying that you shouldn't perseverate on these things and let them consume you so much that you spend all of your [00:22:00] time spinning your wheels on things that don't actually bring in clients.
Do you need to spend. 24 combined hours of your time editing a wedding. No, you do not. You could raise your prices by $200 and cover the fee of outsourcing the edit so that it frees you up to be sitting your butt in your desk chair creating a download that will drive. Your newsletter list, you should be sitting there writing a nurture sequence that will warm your clients as they come in contact with your brand.
You should be producing content for social media. You should be going to networking lunches with an amazing group of other women in business and investing your money in online education that is actually going to teach you how to move the needle forward, not rebranding. A website for the third time that costs you $5,000 when you're not even bringing in $5,000 of work each month.
Now, I can already hear you also saying, Jody, didn't you teach us about [00:23:00] perceived value? Didn't you teach us that everything has to look a certain way in order for you to be bringing in the clients that you want to be attracting? Yes, I absolutely did say that, but what I'm telling you is that. It doesn't have to be perfect.
It doesn't have to consume you. You shouldn't perseverate on these tasks so much that you're also not running your business For most entrepreneurial businesses. It is enough to have the product and the customer service to just be okay, especially in the beginning. Yes, even in photography, protecting your images will be something that happens over time.
Spending thousands of dollars on styled shoes before you're able to bring in clients of your own is backwards thinking and frankly, a waste of your money. I know that I am going to get a lot of heat for saying this stuff because you all might [00:24:00] argue that spending time on your portfolio is part of selling, but it's not.
Your photos are not so good that they are getting clients to bang down your door. Neither are mine. Your images are probably great. Mine are probably great, but they are only part of the equation. And honestly, a really small part. You can be the best photographer in the world and it wouldn't matter because you aren't prioritizing getting and staying booked.
I would rather be a shitty photographer running a business with clients who are like. A revolving door who are willing to pay my prices because I've done the work in marketing and sales, rather than being a phenomenal photographer that's sitting in the corner of my apartment that I'm about to get evicted from because I only focused on making a pretty website that nobody visits.
Okay, now. would never in a million years give you this sort of [00:25:00] like a soapbox preaching TED talk if I wasn't also going to tell you the opposite side of what you should be focusing on and what you should be doing. Okay? Here's what you actually need in order to run a successful business. You need a basic booking software.
I use session. It costs me $168 a year. Somebody do the math because I am not a mathematician. Uh, that is not very much money per month. It is simple and it is user friendly. I absolutely love it For free, you need an Instagram, a TikTok, a Pinterest account, whatever sort of social media you are going to be running things on.
You need a decent camera set up. It doesn't need to be the Canon R five with three L series lenses. Okay, A decent camera set up. You need a presence where your people are not just online, but in your community. You need relationships that come from networking. You need local partnerships. [00:26:00] You need to donate to silent auctions.
You need to part with other businesses. You need to show up inside of your community. You need an email list that is your audience, that is your megaphone. While you are out in your community, you should probably just have a QR code that leads people straight to your calendar, straight to your booking software.
You do not need $1,100 spent on business cards that will sit in your desk drawer collecting dust. I do not think that any of you guys are doing that because what are business cards anymore? I, I don't know her. I'm talking to Jody of 2010. Jody, you did not need $1,100 worth of business cards that I literally still have stacks of.
As a bonus, it would be really great if you have some type of platform where you can create long form content outside of your newsletter, such as a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, anything like that. That's a bonus. That's it. You guys, the work is [00:27:00] in the marketing and the sales. Everything else is just for decoration that you can add as you scale and grow and move into higher price points.
Okay? This is not me talking about how to be a luxury photographer. This is me talking to you If you are in Gear one through six, okay? This is not how you get. Five figure sales. This is not how you move into having gorgeous websites, amazing work. This, that bells and whistles. This is me saying that you can stop spinning, stop perseverating, stop staying stuck because you're just tinkering with all of the stuff that makes your business look pretty.
Okay. Let's wrap this up. Being obsessed with perfection before you have momentum is like rearranging your lipstick drawer while your kitchen is on [00:28:00] fire. Sales first, pretty later, because you can be the most talented, the most artistic, the most aesthetically inspiring photographer out there, and still get beat by a pet photographer in New Jersey doing color selection edits, all because they show up.
They market themselves and they focus on sales. So during this week, I want you to ask yourself, am I building a profitable business or am I just building a pretty one? That's all I've got in me today. Until next week, bye for now. Friends.
Outro: Okay, so that is a wrap on this episode of the Posers Podcast. If you loved it, please subscribe, rate, and review because honestly, algorithms are needier than all of our ex-boyfriends combined. And ladies, I need all the help I can get. If you've got thoughts, questions, love letters, even hate mail, please send them my way.
I actually read every single one of them. So until next time, stapled, stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open [00:29:00] and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
