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.
Okay. Hello. Hello, all of my beautiful posers. Alright, so welcome back to another episode of the Posers podcast. I don't think that I'm alone in this by any means, but the majority of communication that goes back and forth with my husband each day, you. I mean, being that we're long distance, you would expect that [00:01:00] it's like, I don't know, lovey-dovey voice notes and text messages and whatever.
But no. It is expressed through funny memes and reels that are sent back and forth in our dms, except his are usually not funny, even though he thinks that they are hysterical. And I don't understand this because this is a man who. I truly, genuinely love so much in real life, and I find him funny in real life, but there's some sort of disconnect about what his algorithm is like feeding him because the memes in reals that he sends to me usually get like an eye roll or some sort of response telling him like he is.
Gotta stop wasting my time or just leave me alone so that I can work. He's, I guess I swear to God I love him so much. He is a golden retriever and I am a black cat, and I'm [00:02:00] convinced that our marriage, our relationship wouldn't work any other way. He chases after me and I cuddle up and pur into him maybe.
One time per day when we're in the same city. And honestly, you know what that's called marriage. Okay. But the other day he sent me this quote from Jay Shetty because even if we are like laughing and sending jokes back and forth, or if we're in like a lovey-dovey mood, or if we're even in an argument, the way that we do a lot of our communication is sending things back and forth on the internet because sometimes.
That communicates the way that you're feeling far better than you being able to say it in real life. Okay, so the other day he sent me this quote from Jay Shetty and he was saying like something nice to me in this quote that he was sending me. And I died laughing because I had actually already seen that post and I [00:03:00] had already screenshot it and I had texted it to myself because I wanted to quote it to you.
On this podcast as like my own little love note to you, so. Clearly my husband reads like something romantic or soft or loving, and he thinks about me and I can read the same exact quote and I think about you and I think about this podcast so clearly. We're dating. Okay. What that quote was is Jay, Jay Shetty said in a post it said something along the lines of like, a good relationship is just two people saying like, Hey, life is hard, but.
I still wanna do this with you and the like. That's it. It's not that Life is not this highlight reel. It's not always romantic dinners or grand gestures. Sometimes it's folding laundry together and sending each other memes whenever words feel like too much, right, which clearly very much certifies my marriage.[00:04:00]
I want you to just replace like romantic dinners with us talking about business wins and replace doing the laundry with like breaking down where our mistakes happen. And that's how I feel about us and what we're doing here each week. Okay? Because this podcast, this business, the photo shoots the client work the chaos, like failed pricing attempts, like all of it.
Is hard sometimes, but every time that I sit down to hit record, it feels like I am looking at you, looking at my people and saying, look, business is hard, but I don't wanna do it with anybody else except for you. Okay. Which brings me straight into today's episode because I made a really big mistake recently, like a $3,000 plus.
Endless amounts of my time. Kind of mistake. [00:05:00] And is it good for my business as an educator to sit here and tell you like, oh, look at me. I made this big, huge mistake this week. No, probably not. But I promised you the real and the raw, and the honest and the ugly, and I promised you that we're building. This business together.
So here I am talking about a huge mistake that I made in my business so that you can make sure that you're not gonna make it in yours. Okay? And this mistake, it came from something that I thought I had figured out, which is outsourcing. I am an outsourcing queen, okay? I love nothing more than hiring out work that I despise doing, or even like, I love nothing more than hiring out work that I know I'm not an expert at and that I should.
Not be doing at all. I would literally, I would, you guys, I would've outsourced childbirth if I could have. Okay. And actually, well hold on actually. I kind of [00:06:00] did, I did the next best thing. At least I scheduled three C-sections because I simply couldn't be bothered to push my own children out. Okay. So I was like, what do you mean?
They'll just take this baby out for me? Uh, absolutely. Sign me up. I mean, I probably bent over faster for that spinal block than you ever saw me bending over to make those babies. Okay.
Okay. So this outsourcing, the stake it was an epic fail. It lost me $3,000 and my assistant. A doozy. It's a big one. All right, so I'm talking about blurred boundaries. I'm talking about I failed at delegation. Uh, there was emotional fallout, and I'm talking about what happens whenever you choose comfort over clarity in your business.
So if you've ever hired out of convenience and regretted it, [00:07:00] or even if you are terrified to hire because you're afraid of wasting money that you don't think that you have. This episode is for you. Okay. We are going to talk about trial and error because somehow we always mention trial and error, like it's this wonderful thing that we're doing in our business by testing something out, by like trial running this and experimenting with that.
But. What about the flip side of that coin? We tend to forget that error is part of the deal. We romanticize the trial part, like, oh, I'm experimenting, I'm expanding, I'm being brave. But when the error hits, whenever that brave experiment turns into a $3,000 mistake and a whole lot of awkward conversations, suddenly we think we've failed.
Instead of realizing, oh, right. Error is the other side of that, right? [00:08:00] So. About a year and a half ago, I took a leap in my business and I finally hired a virtual assistant. I had had a studio assistant before here in the studio, physically. And then I had, actually, I had tried, this was a even bigger mistake that we can talk about on a different day, but I had tried to also.
Source overseas to a virtual assistant, like one of those companies, I think it was called Doers or something like that, that ended up to be like a $7,000 mistake, which we can talk about at different time. But after I made that doozy of an error I hired a virtual assistant who lives in Washington and she was seriously phenomenal.
Okay. She is seriously phenomenal for. Like a year and a half, we moved and grooved inside of my business. We created some really incredible systems inside of the studio. And to the point that she was basically running the studio, all I was doing was doing the photo shoots and holding the sales or the [00:09:00] proofing meeting, whatever you call it.
I call it a proofing meeting. She basically did everything else and we talked often about her growing with my business. So recently when my plate got. Too insanely full with the education side of my business. Plus I was still shooting. I decided to hire her to take over social media for me. Now, this was not a crazy idea.
I was not just hiring somebody who I thought I could train or not, just like handing over a job to my cousin who dabbles in it a little bit. No. This wasn't a crazy idea. She also works for a social media firm and she runs social media for a few others because she was not full-time with me.
She's my va, right? So she had other clients. So this was a quick and easy decision for me to make, to bring her on further. It felt really safe. It felt really easy. It felt like, why not just give someone [00:10:00] I already trust a little bit? More responsibility, except I gave blind trust to a role that I hadn't fully defined yet, and I assumed that she understood my business and my voice and my standards and my pace just because she had worked in it.
And I'm not gonna take that away from her. I do feel as though she understood those things. But here's the thing. Working inside your business and being able to market your business are not the same skill. And we ended up spending weeks, literally weeks, trying to force fit my brand into a system that she had built for other businesses while she was still juggling her tasks as my assistant.
So. There were no clear lanes defined between the roles that she was like technically my assistant, but then I was also technically her [00:11:00] client, and that made things messy. There were no boundaries between the roles. There were no success metrics defined prior to us starting the social media relationship.
It was. Just one big mess. It, it kind of looked like pig pen's, hair, just like one big overlapping and moving mess on top of my business because I was her boss in this one sense, and I was telling her the things that were needed inside of the studio, but then. I wasn't acting as the boss of what I needed from my social media because I would then have to take off that boss hat kind of.
And then she was the one who was running the show and she was the one who was doing everything for the social media side, if that makes sense. Okay. To be fair, that's on me. I thought that I was just. Being [00:12:00] efficient, but I was actually being kind of lazy and I was choosing comfort over clarity. I was like, okay, hey, this is your lane.
This is what you do. I'm gonna give it to you and you are gonna run with it. But I didn't take it upon myself to make sure that I was still leading and that I was still giving the direction of where I wanted the social media to go. And this caused a lot. Of problems because she was creating social media for my business the way that she was doing it for these other companies and these other brands.
But that's not how I wanted to have it done. So then it created this really hard dynamic in between the two of us about kind of like who was leading the ship, right? So eventually. I had to pull the plug on her doing the social media, which wasn't just disappointing at that point. It then became kind of emotionally complicated because removing the [00:13:00] social media tasks from her plate made her feel undervalued, and that tension spilled over into.
Everything else because she felt undervalued and then was also losing out on the money that she had come to expect monthly, she decided that it was in her best interest to move on with some other social media clients that would replace that income. So now unexpectedly I don't have a social media system running like the way that I needed to, and now I don't have my assistant and.
I'm out $3,000 in onboarding. That kind of like never really took off, but let me say this, I don't regret trying it because the error taught me something crystal clear, and it's that my business deserves specialists. Just because someone is great at one thing doesn't mean that they should be doing all of the things, and just [00:14:00] because they are great for someone else and another brand doesn't mean that they're gonna be the right fit for.
You and for your brand. And so today we're diving into the things that photographers really shouldn't be doing themselves, from editing to bookkeeping, to album design, to social media, because whenever you wear every hat. In your business, you start to lose your mind, and whenever you start to lose your mind, you actually start to lose your margins also.
Okay, so let's talk about what we can and what we should outsource. These are the five things that I think that you have no business doing inside of your business. Okay. So now that I have publicly admitted to Flushing $3,000 down the drain, trying to shortcut my way into a better social media strategy.
[00:15:00] Let's talk about like other places in your business that are just begging. For you to let go because the truth is, if you're trying to do everything, you are probably doing everything halfway. So number one on the list, obviously I'm going to say this photo editing. Even if editing is your literal brand signature, it can be taught to someone else.
There is no way that you should. Be editing every single gallery. Editing is obviously top of the list for this because. It's the main thing that is the biggest time suck for any photographer, and also it's something that you're probably wildly attached to emotionally. It's at least three to six hours per client.
That you could be spending building your business, and I don't care if you're using AI to edit or not, and that it's faster than [00:16:00] that three to six hours, it is still not fast enough and it doesn't remove the emotional weight that it puts onto your shoulders. I was talking to my team, the other. About how I had just hired a stylist to outsource the wardrobe styling for my fall family clients.
And of course my ass was like, uh, yeah. And then she's going to like, take the wardrobes. We're gonna create a like to no account. We'll do all this underneath my brand, and we will run social media and Pinterest to the mood boards also. And we'll make money per click from like the styling work that we're already doing.
Because if we're already doing the work, why not get paid for it? And because I always have to make things bigger and more difficult. And Aaron, my business manager, explained to me the emotional weight that things carry in your business can be just as cumbersome as the physical weight. So. It wasn't like just because I had outsourced, this [00:17:00] doesn't mean that me as the CEO, that I don't feel the weight of yet.
Another thing needing to run underneath my umbrella. Okay? So even if you are using ai. You still have, we all still have busy season looming that's coming up in the fall, in the next few months. Okay. You still will have unedited galleries that are stacking up on your shoulders, and you will still feel the emotional weight of getting that task out, and you'll start to cut corners to simply get it done.
And those corners that are cut are usually tied to your profit line. By outsourcing, you can still keep your presets, you can still keep your profiles, you can still keep creative control. You call the gallery, edit three anchor images, and then let. Someone else batch the rest of it. I don't care if it's a private editor, I don't care if it's photographer's edit.
So long as they are a [00:18:00] professional and they know what they are doing because we just learned the lesson, not to just hand it off to someone who claims that they can do it. Someone that you think you can like train them or teach them or do anything, do not take that easy route. Get it off of your plate to a professional because you are not the color balance department inside of your studio.
You are the CEO. Okay. We are also editing, or we are also editing. Clearly my head is in the editing section. We are also outsourcing bookkeeping and taxes Now. Seriously, stop playing with TurboTax. Okay. One missed write off. One miscalculated quarter, one forgotten 10 99, and suddenly you're explaining your calling software to like an IRS auditor.
Hire a bookkeeper, get a CPA who understands your creative businesses. Let them tell you what's deductible, what's risky, and what you're missing. You should know [00:19:00] your numbers. You should not be drowning. Your numbers. I am not spending a ton of time discussing this because if you are doing your taxes and your bookkeeping, you are nuts.
Okay? I am more terrified of the IRS than I am of letting my foul mouth father come onto this podcast. Okay? And that father of mine, he would ruin my entire business. Yet I am still more scared of the IRS. Okay? So please, if you need to like. Increase your pricing a little bit in order to afford bookkeeping and A CPA.
Please do so immediately before you get into another tax year. Okay? We're outsourcing album design. Look, I love albums. I actually love. Designing albums. I love the tactile beauty of like legacy work and heirloom work and all of that, but designing them is [00:20:00] not where my time is best spent. And honestly, this was something that my assistant used to do for me because I had trained her to do it exactly the way that I wanted it done, and I approve every single one of her designs.
So. Now that she's not with me anymore, the very first thing that I stepped in and made a decision about was that I could outsource this to my new stylist who is now running inside of my business. So because obviously with her being the stylist, she understands the aesthetic I want, she understands design.
She is a professional stylist. Her moving into the spot of also doing my albums for me. Is very seamless. Okay? But also there are platforms, there are humans that can do this beautifully and quickly, and whenever you outsource it, you finally stop feeling like you're behind. Not only on editing those [00:21:00] galleries, but then getting them designed into albums and getting those shipped out to your clients.
Okay. Let's talk about something you might not have even considered. Being outsourceable or even something that you hadn't considered or even that you knew that somebody would handle for you, and that. Print sales. Now, if you aren't running IPS I secretly wanna shake you by the shoulders and show you the way to make massive amounts of money inside of your business.
But if you're not running IPS, this system will be a game changer for you if you are running IP. This system will make you money that could have been left on the table during your proofing meeting because it's obviously just kind of impossible to capture every single print order that the client will make over the lifetime of their gallery in that one single meeting.
Okay, so if you're not offering a client gallery where people can order prints and wall art or even holiday [00:22:00] cards, yes. Even after you've had your ordering session with them, then you are still leaving money. On the table, and I'm not talking about like maybe one day someday someone will buy a frame kind of money.
I'm talking about how you can never really know when a client is ready to design a gallery wall and your system sends out a 15% promotion for Mother's Day, and it's the only. Thing that they needed in order to pull the trigger. Like you can never really know when your client is thinking that they want to do something either inside of their home or in an album or print something for grandma's birthday coming up.
You can never know that until your system is automated and they're sending out these promotions for you and that sets them over the edge. Your clients, it sets them over the edge. It pulls the trigger so that. You'll get, [00:23:00] say a $5,000 sale without you having to lift a finger. All because your print sales company runs all of this for you.
Alright? I use pass for this and I believe that they are the only gallery sharing software that also has this really huge team behind it. They run your promotions, they run your print shop, they even do album design for you. I have monthly sales income come in from pass. That adds into the thousands of basically just bonus money because I'm doing absolutely nothing for this money.
I'm talking about sales. That's. Stack up over time without you ever doing a single thing, if your system is set up correctly. Okay? So once your gallery is live, then they handle the entire backend for you with printing, , packaging, shipping, customer service, like. [00:24:00] The whole nine yards. You don't touch a single thing.
And also past doesn't just like wait around for your client to remember to order something. They're sending automated emails before holidays, on anniversaries, during promotions like Mother's Day, which resulted in that $5,000 sale that I mentioned before. That is what happened when I set up past platinum.
That very same month was leading into Mother's Day. An email got sent out. It clued and triggered one of my clients who was wanting to do the gallery wall while she was in the ordering session with me, but I just couldn't get the deal closed that email for the 15% off. That's all she needed to say yes to the deal, and I hadn't known that.
I would've never known that. But past sent that out and within that first month of me signing up with them, I made $5,000. [00:25:00] So they're also sending out emails if somebody abandons their cart. If you have no idea how you even wanna set up your print store, they do it for you. They do it for free, they do it while they're on the phone with you during like a free audit call.
And you can even just. Tell them that if you don't know how you want your print store to be set up. Just tell them you want them set up exactly like mine and they'll do that for you and then you're done. There's no overthinking, there's no tech overwhelm. It's just more money, more automation, and more time for you to do your business.
Now is pass a show sponsor? Yes, absolutely. Do I get a kickback if you're signing up with them? Also, yes, but I wouldn't tell you about anything that isn't doing work inside of my business. And I'll also tell you that at every single proofing meeting that I have with my clients, once we are finished, [00:26:00] I then go over the past software with my client.
My assistant sends out an email well. Well back whenever I had an assistant, my new assistant that I'm going to hire she'll be sending out an email letting them know after their proofing meeting that I don't want them having their photos printed anywhere else except for pass because of the product standard that they hold.
So it means that my clients will go straight to their gallery. When it's time to order something and I just love that pass does all of the heavy lifting for me. I'm pretty sure that you get a pretty huge chunk of money off too if you're using the link that's in my show notes. And in fact, the coolest thing about the link that's in my show notes is if you scroll down on that page you can calculate your print store potential and you can see how much money passed.
Can make you, and this is getting kind of salesy. I [00:27:00] don't, I didn't actually intend for this to be salesy. I intended to tell you about something that works so hard within my business, but I'm pretty sure also don't quote me on this.
God passes gonna get mad at me if I don't get this number right. But I think it's something along the lines. If they don't make you like a thousand dollars for the year or $2,000 the year, then you get your money back or something like that. But again, don't quote me, they literally might jump me in a dark alley.
Okay?
Either way. Check that link in the show notes. If this isn't something that you already have running in your business, and if you're not running it with pass, because I just don't know that any other company in our industry is giving that kind of backend support. Okay. Okay. All right, so let's talk about the last outsourcing that we're gonna hit on, which is obviously social media management, the Beast.
Okay. The one that it pretends to be free marketing, but actually requires [00:28:00] a full-time degree in psychology and design and trend forecasting and writing and performance and monetization strategies. All of that. Let me say this as clearly as I can. I know that hiring a team to manage your social media is expensive.
I know that it is a leap, and I know. That it is scary, but if you wanna grow and actually build authority and demand and sales from your content, you need help. You need strategic help. You need, I was gonna say professional help, like in the sense that you need help from a professional, but that just sounds like I'm saying you need professional help.
Like you're crazy, which honestly like. Maybe we all kind of are. Okay. But it brings me back [00:29:00] to where we started that I tried the shortcut route, I gave my assistant extra responsibility, and it backfired, and I lost time. I lost money. And you know what? Maybe I did lose my mind a little bit. So maybe I do need that professional help.
But I do know that going forward I am going to hire a social media marketing team. I'm going to hire a professional. Firm that does this for me and if it is something that you feel like you can jump into right now in your business, I truly believe that it is the one thing that you could outsource that will give you so much ROI in your business.
Alright, so I wanna wrap this up and I wanna say this, most photographers are not. Sitting around feeling like they are too [00:30:00] successful to outsource. They're not sipping matcha in their like all white, beautiful studios thinking like, oh, I just can't be bothered to edit this gallery. No. Right. They're sitting in their car between sessions, answering dms at red light.
They're editing at midnight. They're doing their own taxes on TurboTax, not because they love it, because they feel like they can't afford to pay someone else to do it. And I get it. Paying someone to do something that you technically could do yourself feels scary. It feels like you're giving up profit.
It feels like taking a risk that you're not quite ready for, and it feels like you're spending money that could have gone towards groceries. Or the gear that you need. Or maybe just for putting it into your savings account so that you can catch your breath for a second. But here's the [00:31:00] question that could change everything.
What if doing it all yourself is the thing that's keeping you from making more profit? What if holding on so tight is actually costing you the growth that you say that you want? So that $3,000 mistake that I made with my assistant, yeah. It hurt, but it also forced me to ask better questions about my leadership.
It helped me see where I was choosing familiarity over function, where I was trying to save money, and it ended up wasting time and wasting energy, and it ruined relationship. Instead. So outsourcing isn't just a business decision, it's a self-trust decision. It's choosing to believe that your time is worth more than your pride, and that betting on that future return is better than clinging to the [00:32:00] fear that you're all holding onto in the present.
So if you're listening to this and you're feeling torn, you're saying all the But Jodi's. In your head, like, I get it, I see you, but I'm telling you right now, you don't scale a business by saving your way to success. You scale it by making decisions that free you to do more of what actually grows the business.
So let this be a little bit of a nudge for you not to throw money at every single task, not to outsource, just to say that you're outsourcing it. But to intentionally hand off what's keeping you small so that you can finally go after what's calling you forward. Okay. I adore you. I love you. I don't care that that makes things weird.
I keep on. Signing off on our episodes like this. You know what, on the next one, I'm just gonna own it. I'm just gonna be like, I love you. Okay, [00:33:00] bye. No, for reals, I'm wrapping up this episode. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the POS podcast. And until next time, 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 and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
