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, hello, all of my beautiful posers. Welcome back to the Posers Podcast, where today especially, we do not do cheap. We do not do basic, and we most definitely do not do affordable. Even if I was in the business of selling feet picks, y'all better believe. [00:01:00] That I would have my tootsies up there for top dollar.
Okay. Bunions be damned. I'm actually getting, I do not have bunions, but if I did, I'd charge extra because that's simply more to love. In my opinion. My bunion would be an upcharge. Okay. It's an add-on that is extra gravy and we don't do extra for free around here. It is the one time. That I am not locked in with Chick-fil-A because I am not asking you how much extra sauce you want.
Okay? Today's episode is called Stop Being Affordable, and I need you to lock it in with me today, ladies, because I have been on the phone with so. Many of you talking through so many blocks and getting you through money issues. I've been on several one-on-ones, getting my dream team put together for [00:02:00] the Mastermind that is starting in January.
And my God, the amount of people pleasing that I hear from you guys on these zooms is overflowing. In your businesses today, we are unpacking the exact reason that your prices keep attracting browsers and budgeters instead of the whales that I want you to be nailing. Okay? I think that not even, I think I know that the reason why this.
Has baffled me is because I was born without the people pleasing gene. This is a complete shock and surprise because I was born and raised within the Mormon religion. So being sweet, being kind, being gentle and caring for everyone around you is basically injected into your [00:03:00] veins. If you were a little girl growing up in the church, I remember my grandma, who was a very, very devout Mormon on my mom's side, not my dad's side.
Do not get this confused with my G Gruner, my g Gruner, who I idolize and adore, but on my mom's side. My grandma used to tell me all the time, pretty is as pretty as does. And this was before the days of Forrest Gump. This is Pre Gump. Okay. I was also a kid. I had no idea what pretty is, as pretty does even mint.
I would be like running outside in some sort of like. Frilly church dress that my mom would make me wear. I'd kick a football, I'd spit on my brother, I'd run off to chase my cousin down the road. And then whenever I'd get back, my grandma would pull me to the side and she would scold me for not like acting Right.
Quote unquote, acting right. [00:04:00] Right. And she would tell me, pretty is is pretty does Jodi. And I had no idea what she meant, but I also knew it wasn't good. And I also got a really like. Intense feeling or knowing that she didn't like me, and you know what? It didn't bother me one bit. I had no desire to make her happy or do what she told me to do.
Now I am not going to claim that this lack of people pleasing has always served me well
because it has gotten me into quite a bit of trouble throughout my life, to be honest, from being like. I don't know the girl who would get red carded during like big rival volleyball matches to getting fired from a job in college because I blew the whistle on this dirt bag of an old manager who was trying to kiss me [00:05:00] in the break room whenever I was a hot little 18-year-old thing.
Okay. This also has kept me from having a huge amount. Of girlfriends because I was always a little bit too honest, and in my younger years it really kicked my ass sometimes, but. Uh, the place that this has always, always, always served me is inside of my business. I move with a huge amount of understanding that the amount of confidence that I have in my business, even if I'm faking it.
The amount of confidence that I have or that I show up with will determine what kind of audience and what kind of client I attract. Today's episode is called Stop Being Affordable, and I know that title can make even some of you flinch, just even hearing it out loud because [00:06:00] you've been conditioned.
Especially as a woman, especially as a mom, and especially as a woman in business, to believe that being affordable makes you, I don't know, sweet, right? It's wrapped around the idea that you care about people's budgets and that you're going to worry about their bank accounts for them. That being affordable to others makes you kind, that it makes you good.
But let's be honest, being affordable is just simply the worst form of people pleasing that you can do inside of your business. Glennon Doyle talks in Untamed about how women are trained out of their knowing that the deep like internal voice that says, this feels right for me, that is wiped out. Right, and instead we are taught to prioritize what feels right for everyone else.
[00:07:00] If there was ever a queen that I would bow to or a Bible that I would worship, it is her book, Glennon Doyle's book, untamed. I devoured it. I read it back to front. I read it front to back. I read it. So many times that the pages started to fall off of the spine. Okay? From childhood. Girls are rewarded for obedience and politeness and helpfulness and selflessness while boys are rewarded for assertiveness.
And independence and their ability to problem solve, their ability to make money, their ability to make businesses like in their older years. So we grow up as girls thinking that in order to be loved. We have to be agreeable. We have to stay small, we have to be flexible, we have to be easy to handle.
We have to give freely of our [00:08:00] gifts to others. And Glennon, dear Glennon, queen Glennon, who I bow to, says that it's, this is the very. Thing that breaks women, because being good requires us to betray ourselves a thousand times a day, we say yes when our body screams. No, we smile when we want to scream. We lower our prices because we're afraid that someone might call us aggressive, and we serve everyone else's comfort at the expense of our own peace.
She writes in Untamed that when a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself. And that line hits so hard because the thing about [00:09:00] this inside of our businesses is that. You are never going to please everyone, no matter if you price yourself even lower.
No matter if you work harder, no matter if you book more or kill yourself more for others, it is never going to be enough. So then if it will never be enough, you have two choices, either don't do it at all in order to stay completely safe. Or do it the way you fucking wanna do it instead and piss people off anyways.
Because you're always going to piss people off. Glennon uses this metaphor throughout untamed that women are like caged cheetahs, that we've been domesticated to perform, to look graceful, to stay within the fence of acceptable when deep inside [00:10:00] there's a wildness there. There's a knowing that whispers.
This isn't what we're made for. That wildness, that knowing, that feeling that you have inside of your gut, inside of your chest, as you listen to this right now, that's your truth. It's the part of you that knows when your prices are too low, when your time is being wasted, and when your worth is being compromised.
Just. To keep other people's bank accounts into consideration. When we start listening to that voice, even when it makes other people uncomfortable, that's when we become free. That's when we become untamed. That's when we become alive. Affordable prices attract people who are always looking for a deal.
They shop around, they wait for sales. They care more about the price than they do about you. I promise you that they care [00:11:00] more about the price than they do about the experience, and the truth is it's not just that they don't value you, it's that you don't yet value you. Enough to stop being affordable for that approval.
We have been taught our whole lives to make ourselves easier to love, easier to hire, easier to handle, but in business, being easier comes at the cost of being disrespected. So when you set low prices, you are subconsciously saying. I'll make myself smaller so that you'll say yes to me. That's your nervous system, the nervous system of a woman who has been praised for being accommodating her entire life.
But what you need to hear is this. You are not more [00:12:00] worthy. When you're more affordable. You are not more lovable when you overdeliver. You are not more professional because you say yes. To every single request, you are actually devaluing your business. You are digging a hole that your business will never be able to climb out of, and you'll run yourself into burnout and resentment.
Let's talk about logistics for just one second, because you know that my brain does not love math, but I do love logic. Okay? If you're charging. $200. That means that you need 50 clients per month to hit a $10,000 month. That's 50 onboardings, that's 50 style boards, that's 50 timelines, 50 editing cues, 50 late [00:13:00] night emails that are like, can't you just Photoshop that out for me?
50 of those per month. When there's only 30 days, I can't even imagine, I can't even wrap my brain around needing to do this kind of work. So you basically have to shoot almost two shoots every single day of the month with no days off. That's not including a weekend. Are you kidding me? No. With no days off just to bring home about $60,000 per year you've built a treadmill, not a business. Okay? Even if you're charging $500 a session, you have to shoot almost every single day. And that's not even getting you close to having a six figure business. Now, reframe it a minute. Five clients at $2,000 each. That's the same $10,000. Five people [00:14:00] who value what you do.
Five women who show up ready. Five clients who you can actually serve with depth instead of exhaustion. High pricing creates capacity. It gives you the breathing room to actually deliver an experience, not just survive the day. Here's the emotional side that nobody wants to talk about either. Cheap pricing keeps you stuck in a cycle of validation.
Addiction, every new booking gives you a hit of dopamine. It's proof that someone else chose you, so it tricks you into thinking. Oh, you're so good. You're so loved. You're so adored. You're so talented that everyone wants you, but maybe that's not it. I promise you that is not it. They just want your cheap prices.
So then you take all [00:15:00] of this on and the stress hits and the resentment creeps in because you realize that you've built a business that feeds everyone else. Before it ever even starts to feed you because it's, I'm sorry, but it is barely feeding you. Barely feeding your family. It is barely putting food on the table.
Okay? And then whenever you burn out, guess what? The same people who you bent over backwards for who you bent over to accommodate who you said, oh sure, I can slide you in somewhere. They will go and they will find someone cheaper next season. People pleasing doesn't create loyalty. It creates dependency.
Now let's flip this whole entire conversation and look at it from the other side. Premium pricing doesn't just attract different clients. It also attracts a different version of [00:16:00] you. the woman who charges more has boundaries. She doesn't chase clients. She leads them into her business with authority.
She doesn't apologize for not being able to get someone in. She demands that they respect her calendar. She commands presence, and she's not waiting for permission to take up space in her own. Business. Okay, here's the real truth. Being affordable might make you liked, but being valuable makes you respected.
And respect is what sustains your business. So if your business keeps you anxious and underpaid and exhausted, it's not your marketing that's broken, it's your conditioning. You were taught to equate service with [00:17:00] self-sacrifice to be accessible, to make sure everyone else is comfortable before you are.
Now, I can already hear you saying, okay, but Jodi, you just told us that you weren't born with that people pleaser gene. And also somehow within my religious upbringing, I skipped. The conditioning of all of that too, and I hear you saying, okay. But I have that people pleaser Gene. Okay. But I was conditioned to be this way whenever I was the little girl.
And I can hear you saying like, you want to raise your prices and you want to move with this kind of authority, but you don't even know how, you don't even know where to start. Right? And that is the entire point of this podcast, not this podcast episode right here, right here today, but this podcast right here, right now in like.
In existence. The whole entire point [00:18:00] of the Posers podcast is to not just talk about the fluff, but to actually build. So let's dive into this even further. These are five ways that you are people pleasing inside of your business, and it is keeping you stuck at being affordable and it is making you feel or be.
Trapped inside of the cage of the business that you've created. Okay. Number one, you confuse kindness with compliance. You think being quote unquote nice means saying yes to everything, every request, every favor, every reschedule, right? I actually had this happen with my assistant just the other day with one of my shoots that had booked for the fall.
The client reached out to her, my assistant, to let her know that she was going through a divorce and that she needed to cancel her shoot. Now, in all fairness, this is exactly what I said to my assistant too, [00:19:00] is that she is still very relatively new to working with me. We had never handled this before.
She didn't know how I wanted this situation handled. We had never discussed it. This had never came up. So I do not think like, oh my God, she handled it incorrectly. She just handled it in the way that she would've handled it. Okay. And it wasn't a conversation that we had, and what happened is, is that her conditioning kicked in and she sent an email back to the client saying that we absolutely understood and that we would be more than happy to rebook her at a later date.
Right? But that's not what her contract said. This was very kind of course, and I would never not be kind in our responses, but it wasn't business oriented. Okay. It did not honor the contract that the client had signed with us, and simply because her husband wasn't part of the dynamic anymore, didn't mean that the shoot needed to be canceled, [00:20:00] being compliant and doing what the client wanted doesn't honor my business at all in this situation, and it trained that client to know that they are in control instead of me.
But kindness without boundaries isn't kindness. It's fear. You're avoiding the discomfort of saying no. You're scared of a possible conflict, scared of standing up for the contract and the business. True kindness is saying, I care about your experience and I care about my bottom line at the same time. I would have much rather my assistant say that we are so incredibly understanding of her situation, especially given the fact that I have lived through a nasty divorce myself, but also.
Reframe this opportunity to capture her and her daughter at the start of this new journey that they're about to start together. I would have offered [00:21:00] for her mom to join them or for their dog to join them, the new version of their family, for that to be captured during their family photo session because also.
Family photo season is never simply for it's in my business, especially family photo season is never simply for the families who have the mom and the dad. Okay? Number two, you discount out of guilt. And not out of strategy. You tell yourself something like, oh, well they're such a sweet family. Or like, oh, they really deserve these photos, or, yeah, she's really been through a lot, so, you know, I wanna gift her with this.
I get that. I really do. Just this morning I had a widower in for her proofing session. She had lost her husband and she's raising their two kids. On her own, one of which has differing abilities and the desire to discount. Just because she deserves it, it feels noble, [00:22:00] right? But I also have to consider where does that line blur for my business?
Because with that kind of outlook, one could argue who doesn't deserve it. Life is hard. Do we discount for everyone who is having a hard time? This isn't to say that we don't give back or that we don't utilize a promo here or there, but we do it with planning. Just this year, I announced for my 40 over 40 series that I would be gifting one session to a woman, so incredibly deserving of the experience, but would never be able to do it on her own.
And that's giving back with intention, with planning and with boundaries, because also the truth is. You are deserving. You are deserving to make enough money too. You shouldn't have to give to everyone who is like deserving or going through a hard time or that they're such a sweet family. Only to put [00:23:00] yourself in a position of panic every time that your mortgages due.
Discounting for everyone isn't. Compassion. It isn't noble. It's self abandonment. You can love your clients deeply and still charge them fairly. In fact, that's how they'll actually respect you. Number three, you let indecision lead your pricing. You post something like DM me for pricing. Because you don't wanna scare anybody away by putting your pricing out onto the internet, okay?
You keep three versions of your price list because you're constantly adjusting it based on what you think people can afford, but. Confused buyers don't buy and inconsistent pricing screams insecurity, especially when one client tells a referral [00:24:00] that they got you at $250 with all of the digitals while you're trying to book that referral at $500.
And seeing whether or not you can tinker with the idea of, you know, playing with a little bit of IPS. If you're always tweaking your prices, then you're teaching your audience that your value is negotiable. Okay? Name your price. Stand behind it. Let the people who can't afford you go to someone else. I promise you that there will be more inquiries. Well, I promise you that there will be more inquiries if you're marketing yourself correctly and showing up with authority.
Consistency, but that's a whole different podcast. Okay number four, you over deliver to earn validation. You give triple the time, double the edits, endless communication, and you wanna call that like good service, [00:25:00] good customer service, or you claim that you just can't reduce the number of images because you love them all.
And your clients know that you'll give them all to them. So they're expecting it. And if you stop doing that now, then they'll leave you. My God. Let them leave. Okay? You're running a sweatshop disguised as loyalty. You're doing extra work, not because it's necessary, but because you're terrified of not being liked.
You think if you give them everything, then they'll love you forever, but what actually happens is they'll expect it forever. You train them that your boundaries are optional. Number five, you mistake accessibility for service. You believe that making yourself constantly available is what makes your business great. You text back at 11:00 [00:26:00] PM you deliver galleries early. You take last minute bookings even when you are drowning, like, oh yeah, of course, of course I can squeeze you in honey.
That is not good customer service. That is not a good client experience. That is your own scarcity. You're afraid that if you don't answer fast enough that someone else will take the job. But luxury businesses aren't built on speed. They are built on structure. Boundaries are the hallmark of high value.
Okay? This is a truth that will sting a little bit. People pleasing feels safe because it keeps everyone happy in the short term, but it's killing you in the long term. It is keeping you stuck in that nervous system loop of, if they like me, I'm safe. If they like me, [00:27:00] my business is good. If they like me, my business stays safe.
But the women who build wealth and legacy and demand, they've learned that being respected is actually safer than being liked. Every time you raise your prices, you are not just changing your income. You are retraining your nervous system. You are teaching your body that it is okay to be seen.
It is okay to be chosen, but it's okay to be chosen so long as you are getting paid what you are. You're teaching your daughters, you're teaching your nieces, you're teaching your clients' daughters that women who know their worth don't have to be affordable in order to be adored, and that's changing the conditioning.
If this episode hit a nerve, welcome [00:28:00] to the Posers podcast. That's what we do here. Okay. It is time to unlearn that conditioning. One price point, one boundary, one unapologetic. No at a time. And if you're ready to stop being the bargain bin version of yourself and start becoming that woman whose prices make people pause, then it is time to join me inside of the posers.
Mastermind, hit me up in the show notes for a free one-on-one for me to look at your business and to see if you are one of my last few who are being chosen to join us in January for the Posers Mastermind. If you learned anything today, let it be this posers. Do not flinch. You don't have to please the world anymore.
So get your tits up, get your prices up, and go build something unaffordable. Buy for now [00:29:00] 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.
