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, and welcome back my beautiful posers. I don't really have much fun quippy anecdotes To start off this podcast, I am. Caught up on traitors. I'm doing a good job with my word of the year. I am, uh, being more mindful about the amount of time that I am spending, watching all [00:01:00] of my trashy reality TV shows.
And I'm trying really to limit it to mostly traders for one hour per week. Not that I've stuck to that, but I'm doing my best. I wanna dive in quickly today because I actually have a lot to talk about, but before we go in much further, I want to say this, uh, with this next sentence, I'm not necessarily like throwing a, a lob or a pitch for the Mastermind because at the time that this.
Episode comes out, the mastermind will be starting in two days. So, uh, this next sentence seems as though it's leading into that kind of a pitch. And not that I would be ashamed if it was, but it's just not. So I want you to stick with me. I have spent an uncomfortable amount of money on education, like truly uncomfortable dropping.
15, [00:02:00] 20, 20 $5,000 to learn from people who are miles ahead of me, not just like in my same industry, not relatable, not in the trenches with me, but like super far ahead and only once really has this education. That I invested in, been inside of the photography industry. But the thing is, is that no matter how much I do it every single time, it's terrifying.
Not because I don't believe in myself, I do obviously, but. Because investing at that level forces you to confront a very specific set of fears, and those fears ruminate around in your head by saying things to yourself like. What if I'm not ready for this room yet? What if I'm not smart enough to be in this room yet?
What if I don't measure up? What [00:03:00] if I waste all of this money? Or even worse? What if I'm not worth this? For me, it's never something that gets easier. It simply feels like new level, new devil in its truest form. So January is always the best time for me to jump into education while we're all in our slower season.
So this month has involved me getting really uncomfortable in order to make what I teach later on, which is now just a couple of days away. It's gonna make what I teach inside of the Mastermind even better, and. A little sidebar here. I just wanna say this too, because I'm in this space of like coming out of this education where I felt really uncomfortable.
It has my wheels spinning about everything that we're building here with posers. And I just wanna say out loud that I love what we're building [00:04:00] and I am being extremely intentional about how it's being built. Even though posers is very quickly becoming a community, I've never wanted it to be a, a leader and a follower community.
I don't wanna be the leader of posers in the way that most people would think about leadership inside of a community or like with a podcast or something like that. Sure. I'm the voice of it. Sure. I set the tone. I protect the standard. Of course, it's my brainchild, obviously, but. The dream for posers is that I want an incredible group of women standing next to me, standing beside me, all of us standing together.
Nobody's standing beneath me. Which I have a reason for all of this because the education that I got into this last week was just so [00:05:00] insanely uncomfortable, and I'm gonna get to that here in a little bit, but was also. So incredibly amazing to see what an actual business, and, I mean, theirs is a business, but it, it runs like a community.
It runs like a team. It runs so well-oiled, like it was incredible. So I want women who are going to stand beside me that we're gonna stand. By each other. I've never, ever wanted to build posers to be something that it's like I'm the leader and it's a hierarchy. I want people learning from me. I wanna be learning from them.
I want them to learn from each other. I want learning from books. I want workshops. I want different industries. I want different rooms. And if that's what I'm building, then I have to model it, right? I don't get to sit [00:06:00] comfortably in the same rooms, listening to the same people, reinforcing the same ideas while parts of my business are not working.
And yes, right now, currently there are parts of my business that are not working for me. Growth and education means success. And if I'm not. Leaving the photography space to learn. Then for me personally, I feel like I'm at risk for becoming wildly stagnant. And honestly, the entire industry would simply keep regurgitating and digesting the same content, and there wouldn't be someone bringing something new to the table.
If people in our industry don't step out and go and learn new things and bring them back. There wouldn't be differing viewpoints, there wouldn't be like tearing down systems and tearing down structures and rebuilding them [00:07:00] into something better. And because I wanna be in different rooms learning from different people, I would never expect that you would want to do anything except that.
Also because. Growth doesn't come from loyalty to a method or a group or a community, or the same way of thinking. It comes from being willing to get uncomfortable. Willing to get uncomfortable. Whenever something that someone says makes you feel prickly, and then doing the work to figure out what insecurity that hit.
And willing to get uncomfortable when we're walking into rooms where we feel like we don't even speak the language yet. And this takes. A level of trusting yourself enough that when you're in those spaces, you are going to pull what resonates for [00:08:00] you and discard what doesn't, or put it in your back pocket until you can revisit it somewhere down the line when it does make sense.
But it takes this trusting of yourself to integrate what actually works for you, for your life, for your business. So. This past week I did exactly that. I went to what I am referring to as some big boy meetings, and I mean that quite literally. It was a high level workshop for million dollar business owners, ran by a man who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, ran by a man whose viewpoints make me.
Uncomfortable and I'm not aligned with him at all. And honestly, it was a room full of these men actually. It was also a room full of very attractive men, physically attractive men, but. They were also [00:09:00] the types of men that I kind of, frankly, decenter from most areas of my life. Or to put it even more plainly, uh, they're the type of men that I divorce.
Okay. So I was uncomfortable almost immediately. And you know what I, I wanna say something that might feel a little bit uncomfortable. On this podcast too, and because it's honestly like pretty opposite of what women are usually taught in this industry, we're told that before we invest in a mentor or a coach or a course or an education space or anything like that, that, that our views have to align with the person that we have to like feel good in our gut, that we need to like them, we need to agree with them, we need to share the values.
There's like this. This idea that we all have to feel really emotionally safe with each other. And most of the time it [00:10:00] actually means that we're also getting into groups where the people look like us and they talk like us, and they think like us because our brains are actually hardwired to read sameness as safety.
And then we're also told. In this industry that if we don't align with them, if our gut doesn't feel like spot on, that this is the right move that we should be making. If the vibes aren't there, then it's simply just not the right investment for you. But hold on, let me like, let me clear up too, what I'm not talking about.
I'm not talking about people who are unethical or dishonest or have long, consistent trails of red flags behind them, which I think is kind of funny that I just said that. 'cause who knows whether or not the men in that room have, I'm pretty sure they probably do have consistent trails of red flags behind them.
But if someone has a reputation for being diabolical or distrustful, or [00:11:00] there are hundreds of people on a mile long Reddit thread saying the same thing about their behavior, that's very different than what I'm saying because most of the time it's just that the people we avoid aren't saying things to.
Purposely make us feel uncomfortable. It's just that they hit an insecurity with something that they have said, and it's an insecurity that we maybe haven't addressed inside of ourselves yet. And there's people who challenge how we think and they don't speak. The industry's like same language. They say things in ways that don't feel comforting or validating when really.
All we've ever heard inside of this industry is the stuff that feels good. And that was so incredibly apparent this last week whenever I was at this workshop because these guys, they just, they, they [00:12:00] talk about business so detached, right? It doesn't have anything to do. With self-worth, or it doesn't have anything to do with feelings at all.
It simply has to do with structure, and it has to do with equations, and it has to do with math, and it has to do with business. And we're kind of taught the exact opposite, that everything kind of like has to sound nice, but really. If you're serious about building a business, not just like maintaining one that pays you your definition of whatever you think is enough, if you're actually serious about building a business, then it's in your best interest to really become a free thinker in this space.
So. Obviously if you love the business that you have built, if you are sitting pretty and feel on the gravy train and you [00:13:00] just are in a really, really great place with your business, then awesome. Amazing. I am. I'm so happy for you. But what I'm talking about is if you're serious about building a business or wanting to scale, or wanting to optimize, or wanting to change systems inside of your business that aren't working like I am, then.
You've gotta become a free thinker and you've got to put the needs of your business ahead of your need to feel like you have to emotionally agree with the room. Okay. Basically plainly put, you don't have to like someone to learn from them. And to be honest, you will often learn far more when you go the path that makes you uncomfortable.
And this is exactly how I want to keep building posters because I love [00:14:00] nothing more than women who can listen. Without having to agree. They can listen with thinking through something and feeling like it's okay if they disagree or agree. It's okay if they discard and don't take what the person is saying completely to heart because they know that it's not gonna work for them.
I love women who. Don't outsource their thinking to anyone else or to a group, or to a community or anything. Women who are willing to learn from anywhere, whether that be books or rooms or conversations or industries like people. I want, I wanna learn from people who challenge me to think differently, and I find that to be the type of women that I want to be around too.
I think that I've made my point pretty clear, but I wanna say it plainly too. I'm not sitting [00:15:00] behind this microphone to kumbaya in any kind of way. I'm not here to talk like softly, nicely, kindly sweetly about business. I wanna talk nicely, kindly, sweetly about people and about my friends, and about my family, and about my boys, and like.
The the people who I care about, but I really like to separate business from all of that, and I'm for sure not here to repeat the same conversations in prettier packaging. I'm not interested in having these echo chambers of conversations that just say the same thing back and forth to each other and they feel good, but they don't change anything.
I am here because I wanna build unshakeable businesses with you. And this just like [00:16:00] really hit home last week whenever I was in this workshop of exactly what I wanna build and how I wanna build it. So if this resonates with you, please keep sticking around because you're exactly where you are supposed to be.
Now, let me get back to what I was saying. That took me off on that little side poser, uh, journey because all of that that I just described is exactly what I felt walking into that room of men. I felt fundamentally opposed. I. Don't like the style of teaching, I don't like the toxic bro mentality. I don't know the personal life of the like head guy, but I'm pretty sure by what I gathered from their conversations that I heard around the room of like, oh bro, these are their words, [00:17:00] not mine, but like, oh, don't be a little bitch.
Like, or, uh, one guy said on a stage that they pride themselves in saying that they are not a woke company. So. Do I align with anything in that sense? No, absolutely not. I am adamantly opposed on a personal level, but what I saw was an opportunity to learn a completely different version of business, and my desire to learn how it's done at that level outweighed my need to sit in a room and feel good.
It's an arena where I can say I better sit down and listen because even though I don't love the energy, and even though I'm not like here for the environment, these guys know way more than me. And it's also my job as an [00:18:00] educator to keep learning outside of this industry so that I can have conversations like this.
So. I also felt uncomfortable, not just because I was one of very few women in the room, but because I knew that my business wasn't anywhere close to being on the same playing field as the other businesses, and that insecurity. Runs deep in me, that feeling of not being enough and not being worthy of something, that, that's probably my biggest insecurity that I fight against.
It's something that was planted inside of me during a very, very, very long, very unhealthy marriage. And it's my number one like trigger point. So when we walked into the room, there were workbooks on our chairs. They were [00:19:00] thick workbooks, like spiral bound hundreds of pages, and the very first page was this table that was full of equations and acronyms and terms that I genuinely had no idea.
What they were and even less knowledge about what they meant. And in that moment I felt, I know this is like a pretty harsh word because I know I'm not stupid, but I felt really stupid. And that is literally like my. My biggest insecurities forming a ball like between the worthiness and like feeling like I don't belong in a room, feeling like I'm too stupid for a room, like there was a tornado brewing.
Okay? That insecurity immediately crept into my head and my brain was flashing red light. And it, it was telling me like, just leave. It was telling me [00:20:00] there's different ways to run a business. Like who do they think that they are wanting to like break down my business like this. I was thinking like, why do I have to think any differently than, than these guys, right?
Like, I've made over half a million dollars last year. Like, that's enough. And people can be successful at different levels and their way isn't the right way. And all of these thoughts were coming up as if they were attacking me. As a person, but nobody had even said anything to me yet. Right. They had all been like really nice.
Like when I talk about it was a well-oiled machine, I'm talking like when I walked into the parking lot, they had studied me. They knew who I was, they knew what I looked like. They knew the name of my company. They like. At each point somebody knew was ushering you into the room and telling you where you were going next.
Everybody had been incredibly nice and they hadn't said a word [00:21:00] about my business, and they for sure weren't coming for my business or saying anything directly to me. But I took it that way because my knee jerk reaction was to protect my method, protect my structure, push back and say that like, oh, this isn't in alignment with who I wanna learn from.
Right, and I felt anger swell up that I had wasted so much money on this and my chest tightened and my brain was like hissing at me that we didn't belong there. granted, all of this also probably happened in like 30 seconds inside of my brain. But then. As we were like all sitting in rows, and there was this adorable young guy who was in the row ahead of me, and he turned around in his seat and he asked me where I was from, because these people are flying from like all over the world, all over the country to be in [00:22:00] this room, and it just happens to be in my city.
So that was actually really great, but he asked me where it was from and so I started just chatting, you know, just kind of small talk with him. And it turns out he's only 23 years old. 23. My oldest is 18, so this, this guy could have been my son. Okay. His name was Danny, and I actually learned that he dropped out of college to build a business.
He was a division one athlete and he gave it all up because he felt like he was wasting his time sitting in classrooms. He is. Very sharp, very hungry, very determined. Yeah. He's also a full blown like wake up at 4:00 AM cold plunge, like 15 step matcha making bro. But still. He's a kid. He's a baby. He is a 23-year-old college dropout affording this same workshop that I'm sitting in with a room [00:23:00] full of middle-aged men who've already built million dollar companies, most of them having built and sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.
And I kind of quietly said to Danny, thinking that we might like relate that. I felt like I was completely out of my league, and it took me by surprise because you know what he. He didn't even lean closer to me. He didn't whisper back. He said back to me in his normal, loud, like almost borderline obnoxious voice with people sitting in my row and his row all turned around.
We're all listening to each other, and he said, with his whole entire chest, he said, I want to always be the dumbest person in the room. I actually go out of my way to make sure I'm in rooms that do not make me feel smart. And I was like, [00:24:00] God damn, this 23-year-old kid teaching me lessons. But I loved that and it reset me because suddenly my discomfort wasn't a problem anymore.
It was a privilege. Now. This room cost me thousands of dollars to be in, and I was terrified that I was going to waste it. I was convinced that I wasn't ready enough to be in the room. And honestly, I might go back next year 'cause I think I would get a lot more out of it next year after implementing everything this year.
But who knows? We'll see. I was terrified that it was far too advanced and terrified too, that it was far too investor focused and too removed from how photographers actually run businesses. Because this entire workshop was about building a business as if you were preparing to sell it. And obviously I have zero desire to [00:25:00] sell my business, but I have thought.
What if like about the what ifs? What if I get sick? What if I get in a car accident? What if I die? What happens to my business? And the question looming in my head, and I've actually had this conversation with the boys, would my team that I've put in place be able to get some kind of investor to buy my business for a cash payout for my family?
Or for my boys, or in the least, would they be able to still run my business for a few years and continue generating revenue so that like with my life insurance and with everything else that my boys would get like inside of my trust, that they would also get, you know, profits coming from the business.
And that's the goal, is to build something so good. That even if you're not [00:26:00] dying or getting sick or getting in a car accident or anything like that, even when you're just ready to put it in cruise control and chill out a little bit more, then you can, or that you've at least built an asset, not a liability.
So. I sat my cute little bubble butt in that chair until it hurt and ate nine hours later, and I wrote notes until my hand wanted to fall off. Notes that I've tried to go through and I don't understand what I was writing. I cried to my husband each day on the drive home and. I'm okay with that. 'cause you don't grow by only sitting in rooms that echo back what you already believe.
You grow by sitting in rooms that make you question your structure, that make you look at data not vibes. And then you're able to make decisions to fix [00:27:00] where you spot the leaks. And here's the nuance that I think that sometimes our industry misses. There are right and wrong ways to run a business. There are patterns that sabotage growth, and there are systems that work better than others.
There's kind of this mentality in our industry that it's like, oh, like. Everything can work for everyone and everything's okay so long as you know it's generating enough or like things like that. But I wanna challenge you on that. There are right and wrong ways to run and build and scale a business. So your definition of success.
Does not have to match the person who's teaching you, but you are allowed to learn their frameworks and implement what you decide is best for your business. But it should be based on data, not [00:28:00] what like your bestie group chat tells you to do. So. Let's get out of the mindset a little bit, and let's get into the actionable steps of something that I took away from this workshop we're going to talk about.
Maybe you know about it already, and you're gonna be like, Jody, how did you not know about that already? And I'm gonna be like, Hey, didn't I just tell you a minute ago that not feeling smart enough is my biggest trigger? If you've heard about this, great. If you know about this, awesome. I think you're crazy smart.
Send me a DM 'cause I wanna talk about it. We're gonna talk about something called LTV to cac and yes, the 13-year-old, uh, boy inside of me had a very hard time sitting around talking about CAC and I couldn't even make any jokes and. But this stands for the lifetime value of a client versus [00:29:00] your client.
Acquisition costs. LTV to cac. CAC. Okay. In simple terms, it is how much a client is worth to you over the entire relationship of them being in your business compared to how much it costs you to get them in the door, and you want that ratio to be as high as it possibly can be. Now, for photographers acquisition costs would be.
Ads, it would be styled shoots, paid collaborations with other businesses, trade shows, marketing in, you know, magazines like buying the ad in Vogue so that you can have that pinned image at the top of your Instagram with those coveted letters across the top. This is. Any money, CAC is any money that you spend to create content, send newsletters like your monthly subscription to flow desks that is part of your [00:30:00] CAC because you use it in order to acquire new clients that like digital course that you bought on how to market your business.
CAC is all of the money spent drumming up demand. And here's where I see a clear way of implementing the understanding of LTV to CAC into our photography businesses. A lot of the time, whenever we see our calendar is empty in the coming months, the immediate thought is. Hit the panic button. I need bookings.
Oh my God. I have to pound the pavement and I have to get people in the door. So more ads, more outreach, more noise, more blogging, more whatever. More posting. So then we're paying content creators, like more everything, more Hail Mary newsletters of some kind of mini shoot that you're gonna throw together.
Don't act like you haven't done it. We've all thrown together a mini shoot in order to get a quick like cash grab. Okay. [00:31:00] But. here's where the data comes in to help us out. If we're running numbers to track our LTV to CAC during all parts of the year, then we can use that data to understand, because when LTV to CAC is high.
Then your business has leverage, like your LTV is high and your CAC is low, so the ratio is really high. Then your business has leverage. It's bringing in way more money per customer than it's costing to get a new customer. So it's like you're rolling in gravy, you're happy, you're great. Everything is cruising.
But when LTV is low and CAC is high. Then your business is fragile even if it looks busy. This is why photographers can be fully booked and still stressed, and still broke and still exhausted. [00:32:00] When LTV is low and CAC is high, it threatens your cash flow. It threatens your ability to sustain the business, and it threatens your ability to say no because.
When acquisition costs rise and they always do a low lifetime value of your client, it makes a business collapse underneath that pressure. So in photography terms, like a low LTV to CAC ratio means that you can't afford ads, you can't afford mistakes, you can't afford slow seasons, you can't afford a to fix a broken camera, and.
Also, most importantly, you can't afford to rest because you are forced to hustle. You're forced to bring in volume, and you're gonna start discounting just to survive. Now, here's the part where that panic button sends us in the wrong direction [00:33:00] When we're just running our business based on like vibes and gut checks, the, the fight or flight that you're feeling.
Will tell you that the fix is to get more people in the door, but usually if you're running out of that kind of urgency, then. Those leads that are gonna come in the door, they're gonna be cheaper leads, which means like you're throwing up some stories to book, some cheap sessions that attract kind of the low hanging fruit.
You're gonna run a promo that goes against your brand statement of luxury. You're gonna reduce your prices, you're gonna switch back to shoot and burn because that's what worked in the past. And it's a quick like cash grab again, but. The fix is almost always the opposite. It's always increase the lifetime value of your client first.
Increasing the lifetime value of the clients [00:34:00] that you already have is the solution. Remember the last two weeks whenever I told you how each one of those pricing structures isn't luxury based and that discounting your, digitals is. A fragile way to run your pricing. This is why there has to be a focus on making sure that the lifetime value of your clients stays as high as you can take it.
And when you remove the discounting feature, it allows you to value stack instead of punishing your revenue. So using any kind of pricing structure that introduces discounting models like nominal upgrade fees or not running a sales system to increase your lifetime value, puts your business in a weaker position should your acquisition costs increase.
And acquisition costs are not in our control. They're controlled by like [00:35:00] the stock market inflation politics. Et cetera. So if we're keeping our data updated and understanding the trends of our business, then we know not to hit that panic button because the real opportunity to increase LTV is sitting quietly in your past client list.
So clients whose. Cac, I still can't get through that without chuckling clients who you've already paid those costs of acquiring those clients that's already been spent. So they're clients that you've already trained, clients who already trust you, clients who already desire to work with you.
So instead of asking. How do I find more people? You ask, how do I deepen the value with the people I already serve? If you look back at your 2025 clients, then [00:36:00] you're looking to see who didn't order an album, who skipped on framing, who only bought a handful of digitals, who loves to book shoots, and maybe they wanna refresh of their kids who books consistently year after year.
And those clients. That book consistently year after year, that could you look at what they've spent over the last few years and offer them to move to a subscription based service to create consistent, comfortable monthly revenue that will ease the feast and famine of our busy seasons. You ask yourself, not from pressure, but from service of like what would help them see the value?
Now how can I serve them more now? How do I go deeper with my same client base? Or even what's a new product that I could offer from their last session? [00:37:00] And maybe even like. Can I offer a birthday promo each month for like, you know, September birthdays, October birthdays for those loyal clients that they're allowed to bring in their kids for just a quick five minute personality print, in essence.
You get what I'm saying? How can you go deeper, not wider, because whenever you increase the lifetime value, you stop needing volume to survive. You don't have to spend more money to make more money. You simply have to recognize that there's a full arc of your client relationship so that you're not chasing, so that you're not panic marketing, so that you're not feeling as though you're in constant acquisition phase, but you're in a place of sustainability.
You're in a place of depth. So here's where I wanna land this. If there's one through line in everything that I just shared from the money invested to sit in [00:38:00] bigger rooms or to learning new ways of doing business to the way that I also refuse to not question other methods and structures, it's this growth requires discomfort on purpose.
Intentional discomfort. The kind where you look at your business, honestly, where you stop making decisions based on vibes and whatever the photo bestie group chat decides is best for the masses. And I know this might leave you feeling as though you have that same familiar tightness in your chest just like I did last week.
And it might even be that. You know, something isn't even broken in your business, but it's not optimized and you know that you're capable of more, or that you simply want more, but your systems aren't catching up yet. You know [00:39:00] that like. You don't for sure wanna keep having to rebuild your business every single time that there's a slow season.
And that's exactly why posers exists, not as a kumbaya space, not as an echo chamber, not as a place where we talk about the same ideas in slightly different ways, but. As a room where women are willing to look at their businesses like assets, where we replace that panic with structure, where we increase the lifetime value instead of chasing volume.
And where we stop outsourcing our thinking and start making decisions outside of the group. The doors to the Mastermind actually close, probably tomorrow. And I just wanna say that the rooms. That you get yourself into really matter. The container really matters, and the work only works when the [00:40:00] women inside are all ready to get uncomfortable on purpose. So if any of this made you feel seen, challenged, or called out, this is me saying really gently, but clearly.
Pay attention to that. Pay attention to that uncomfortableness. Pay attention to the how that feels, because staying comfortable has a cost too for you who are listening that are in the Mastermind. The 20 plus of you, I can't remember what the final number is now. I am so freaking ready to do this with you.
You are. 100% my people, my like-minded baddies. Uh, me and my team are really ready to crush this with you, and it seems crazy to say, but I will see you on [00:41:00] Thursday if I don't like explode from excitement before then. So, all right, signing off until Thursday. 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.
