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 and welcome back to another episode of the Posers Podcast. You would laugh so hysterically if you saw the way that I was recording this podcast right now, because I am sitting on the floor in my son's closet, one for good acoustics. Two, because I recorded this episode [00:01:00] earlier a few days ago, and.
As I was recording, some of my neighbors in the studio came in and they were super loud, so it messed up the audio. And then I said to myself, okay, it's fine. I'll rerecord this tomorrow, and then tomorrow happened and it was a day that I had 10:00 AM golf, 2:00 PM volleyball, 6:00 PM baseball. And by the time I got home, I was absolutely exhausted.
So then I told myself again, okay, I will, uh, record this in the morning. And then the morning happened and my son needed a jersey delivered to his dad's house. And now it's 11:00 AM golf and it just, it never stops. It never stops. And that's the thing that happens with our businesses is that we have to, especially as moms, especially as women, we have to make our businesses fit inside of the lives [00:02:00] that we're already living and not only fit, we have to make them.
Move forward. We have to use brute force in order to make sure that we are getting the things done that we need to have done in order to build the businesses that we want. So here I am on a Sunday, sitting on the floor on a pile of towels inside of my middle son's closet, making sure that this episode happens because I would be in my own closet.
Standing up. 'cause I have nice, beautiful shelves in there that I could use. But my husband is showering and he tends to sing. And you know what? Here we are. We are making it happen. So I started off this episode a few days ago when it was the day after the first day of the new mastermind. And I started off there because what we talked about during that first [00:03:00] day really lit some fires and it was one of those days where I clicked out of the Zoom I really thought and I felt like, holy shit, this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. Because what I presented in our first call was brand new content. Like truly brand new. I have never taught it before. I didn't teach it in the beta round of the Mastermind last year. I've never talked about it here on the podcast.
I've never taught it anywhere publicly at all. And when that call ended. I started reaching out to the girls over dms, just checking in because it was our first time meeting up and I was like, Hey, how are you? How are you feeling? After day one? I just wanna personally say Hi. I wanna personally welcome you.
I wanna personally ask like, how did that hit for you? And what happened next was my dms absolutely exploded with fire emojis and voice notes and screenshots and messages that [00:04:00] basically all said the same thing in different ways, and they all. We're saying, I've never thought about marketing like this, and they're all saying, my brain is on fire.
And my, they're all saying like, how did I never see it this way? And I wanna talk about why this hit them so hard without obviously breaking any kind of like a paywall. The fourth, I, I would, I would prefer to call it the fourth wall, just like they do in reality tv. Obviously there is no fourth wall.
We are not running a reality TV show. Would I love it if we were sure. Absolutely. And if I was on a reality TV show, I would be breaking the fourth wall all the time. I would be like the office meets reality TV because the way that I would pan a side eye over to the camera, it would be like no other. But obviously there is information that stays behind the paywall of the Mastermind.
But I'm also an educator and like. I want to be able to share and I want to [00:05:00] be able to give nuggets, and I want to be able to at least dissect the why here for you. Uh, I wanna be able to give you a few things to think about so that this can hit a little bit differently for you too, even though you're not inside of the Mastermind this round.
So, let's rewind a little bit because the reason that this blew their minds actually has nothing to do with like. Tactics. It has everything to do with how I've always shown up inside of my business, even when I didn't even realize what I was doing at the time, and it's taken. Me creating the Mastermind in order for me to dive back into those early years and really dissect it even for myself and understand why my business blew up the way that it did.
So whenever I first started my business, it was 2000 and. Eight. And that part really matters because in 2008, there was no social media. I mean, there was [00:06:00] Facebook, that's it. But Facebook doesn't run the way that like Instagram does. Instagram didn't exist in 2008. There was no social media the way that we actually know it now, Instagram started in 2010, but let's be honest, it wasn't like people were out there building full blown brands on Instagram in 2010.
It was literally. You posted a photo, you posted one photo, you posted one caption, and that was it. There were no stories. There was no reels. There was no carousels. There was no strategy. There was no content calendar. There was no hook. There was no call to action. There was nothing before Instagram came on the scene.
It was blogging, and blogging was major. Blogging was king, and even whenever I was blogging, I looked back onto those days and realized I was showing up differently there too because. Whenever I wrote my first blog post. I wrote exactly how I speak. I wrote exactly the way that I am. I didn't write soft. I didn't write flowery.[00:07:00]
I didn't write the classic wedding photographer script where everything is perfectly polished and every sentence sounds like it came from some sort of a bridger tin novel. I never wrote like, oh, what an honor it was to photograph this couple on such a gorgeous day and then just like move on from there.
No, I wrote like a human, and if something ever went wrong on a shoot, I talked about it. If something felt chaotic, I talked about it. If I was obsessed with something, I talked about it and I didn't dilute myself in any kind of way and. Honestly, I don't even know why I didn't. It's just who I've always been.
It's who I am. I'm an open book. I say it like it is. My mom would literally warn people whenever I was a little girl, like, just so you know, she's gonna tell you exactly what she thinks with no apology and. I never took a minute to sit down and say, I'm going to build [00:08:00] a personal brand. I'm going to build an audience.
I'm going to build a following. Back then, I wasn't being strategic. I was just being me, and then Instagram stories came on the scene, and even then I didn't jump on stories right away either. I don't even remember. Like what year they launched, but I know they were already a thing. Whenever I finally started using them consistently.
It was around 2016, 2017 whenever I really leaned in. That timing is important because that's also when my divorce really started, and I know this sounds a little bit backwards, but instead of becoming private, instead of disappearing, instead of retreating inwards like most people do when their life is crumbling around them.
I did the opposite and I talked about it not. In a messy way where I'm airing out private details or crying on the [00:09:00] internet every day. I never did that, but I talked about becoming a single mom. talked about having almost 90% custody of my three boys. I talked about fear. I talked about rebuilding. I was literally in the process of dismantling the home that I was married inside of.
And I documented packing it up. And it's wild because people had watched me buy that house, gut it, remodel it, and make it this big, beautiful dream house. And then we only lived in it for two years. Before everything shattered. Let me sort of back up. So I would, document the process of us redoing the house over a blog and over Instagram on actual Instagram captions.
And then whenever stories became a thing, I would show the remodeling of the house, but I wasn't using it for any sort of business. So. People got to watch that process of me gutting that [00:10:00] house, remodeling it, and it was stunning. I'm talking about The kitchen had brick floors it was my dream home then.
So then we only lived in it for two years before everything shattered with the divorce. So the packing up wasn't just packing, it was like. It was grief, right? It was a before and after that was happening in real time, and I let the audience that I had then watch me rebuild it, which if I had to put a number to that audience, I would say it was probably.
Around 5,000 to 6,000 people. Okay? And nothing was curated, nothing was filtered, reels didn't exist. There wasn't even the concept of content, the way that we talk about content now, it was my actual life, and honestly, it became therapy for me because what it created was a community. And women would start to DM me this.
[00:11:00] Still happens to this day, that people will reach out and say, I'm about to go through a divorce. What do I need to know? And we have these really deep, vulnerable, intimate conversations in my dms. In fact, a lot of these women become clients of mine because it connects them to me even more. And while all of this was happening, I was also building the business.
Because I had to, I had almost full custody of three little boys and my business at the time, like it was making $40,000 a year, $40,000, and the options were very clear. Either I make this business work or I go back to being a school psychologist and making. $48,000 a year, and honestly, that second option would've had a lot of perks.
It would've been a steady income. Health insurance, summers off a pension. I would've had all of that, but I hated it. I didn't want to work for anybody. I [00:12:00] wanted to build my business. I did not want to go back to being a school psychologist. I kept building and I kept documenting not just my life this time, not just the divorce, not just the rebuild, but I really started to commit to showing the building of my business too.
I was a wedding photographer then, and I documented everything about wedding days, like getting dressed, packing gear, talking through what I was wearing, and. My God. I actually made a whole entire story series about the jumpsuits that I would wear to these weddings. I became addicted to buying black jumpsuits because it's Las Vegas, and I would be sweating like a pig at weddings, and I, my dad would say I was sweating like a horror in church right there.
But. was sweating at weddings and I was not about to be walking around with like pit stains and like running some kind of marathons [00:13:00] across these wedding venues looking like an absolute mess. So it had to be black and it had to have pockets because we carry batteries and SD cards and all other random forms of chaos all day long as wedding photographers.
So. On my stories, I would pull the audience and I would say like this jumpsuit or this jumpsuit, and people cared. People genuinely cared. They would always vote, which one is the better look for the day? Was it a windy day? Was it this way? Did my hair have to be up? Did my hair not have to be up like so much so that.
My audience would go to other weddings and see other photographers and DM me from that wedding saying things about that photographer being like, oh my God, she doesn't even have pockets. She's not wearing black. She's not even in a jumpsuit. She can't bend down without like her lower back showing she looks uncomfortable.
And I need you to understand how insane that is. This audience that I had [00:14:00] created, this community that I had created, they were thinking about me while watching someone else do the job that I do. And that's what happens when people feel like they know you. When people feel like you bring them in to everything that you are building.
I would do this with the timeline I would talk about while I was getting ready, I'd be studying the timeline. I'd be going over it on my stories. I would talk about the stress of a tight timeline. I would talk about the sprint between locations. I would talk about the nervous system, like of a wedding day.
know you guys are maybe like listening to this and being like, okay, Jody, how does this relate We are not wedding photographers. I promise you. I will land this plane. I will bring it full circle. Okay. I would be like talking through the idea of like, we've got portraits at this time, then we're sprinting over to the church, then we've got 10 minutes.
We've gotta nail family photos. We've gotta be doing this, we've gotta be doing [00:15:00] that. And then. I would talk about memorizing the wedding party names. Okay? I memorized everybody, the wedding party, the parents, the siblings, every single person. And I would practice the names on my stories, and I'd talk about why that mattered, because yes, it made my job more efficient, but also names matter.
People feel seen whenever you know them as a human. Okay. So people felt like they were getting ready for the wedding with me, but also I was talking about why I was an authority. I was talking about why I was doing it the way that I was doing it. I was talking about my ex. Experience I was talking about, like, Hey, this timeline is crazy, but I always show up.
I always knock it out. I always know what I'm doing. I always kill it because I've done this before at this wedding and I know that this can happen. So I documented behind the scenes in real time with no editing, no clipping, no [00:16:00] perfect angles, just the reality of what would happen. And sometimes they would be ridiculous and they would just be funny and it would be vendor chaos, and it would be me laughing with videographers and me taking some sort of a stupid video where I laid my head inside of a bed of florals where the shoes were supposed to lay.
But I loved it so much that I geeked out and was like, hand my phone over to my second shooter and be like, make this video for me. Okay, now. An entire city watched me build this business and this compounded in a way that people don't even realize is possible. I think because brides would DM me and say like, okay, I'm, I'm changing my timeline because of what you said, or I'm picking this because you talked about it.
Or not even brides of mine, brides of other photographers saying like, I want this kind of a moment. That you showed and people who weren't even engaged yet would DM me and be like, oh my God, I'm living through your stories and past brides who were [00:17:00] in that like post wedding depression would live inside of my stories because it gave them life again.
And like feeling about like what they did with their wedding. And it was all this big conglomerate of emotional connection that I built. And You know what? Whenever my husband left in 2017, I was making, like I said, $41,000. And I remember doing my taxes that very next year and texting my ex-husband, because he used to call my business a joke.
Whenever, like especially at the end of our marriage, like I would be leaving on the weekends to go shoot a wedding and he would say like, okay, me and the boys will just be here. And you're choosing this joke of a business over being with your family. It was a lot of stuff like that.
So I remember texting him and saying, why did you make fun of my business all of those years because I just did my taxes and. I crossed [00:18:00] six figures and his response was honestly like a little bit of disbelief because you see my ex-husband is a CPA, so he always did my taxes. I never paid attention to it.
I never knew how much money I was actually making or what I was doing, or whether I was profitable. Like I didn't pay attention to any of that 'cause he handled it for me. So then at the time, whenever I texted him, I actually didn't even know that I had made $41,000 the year before. I just knew that I had to build.
So I went back whenever he was in disbelief about the text message that I sent. I went back and looked at the previous year, and that was the catalyst for me to even understand what was happening. So. From that point on, whenever I went from $41,000 that year in 2017 to crossing six figures in 2018, everything just exploded because what I built wasn't just a [00:19:00] photography business, it was an ecosystem.
It was a community, it was loyalty, and people booked me not just for the photos, but for the experience. For the behind the scenes because by that time I had hit 10,000 followers and that was a big freaking deal back then at 10,000 followers. Back then on Instagram, you had to have the swipey uppy tool where you actually could link things to your Instagram, and that was a game changer for me.
Okay. But that celebrity edit of being part of my world and for other brides to be booking me because I was the coveted best photographer in my area that. Changed things for me. I became synonymous with being the best wedding photographer. Not just because I said it out loud, but because people watched it happen.
That allowed me to raise my prices. That [00:20:00] allowed me to be in demand, that allowed me to stop competing with anybody else and then. It just started compounding even more and even more on top of that because the, the people in the bridal parties who were getting engaged, they would book me. But what happened after that was the couples that I was shooting at their weddings.
They would become parents, and in the following year, another set would become parents. And so then I started photographing their families a lot. And then even at those weddings, the mothers of the bride, they loved me, they would tell their friends, the mothers of the groom, same thing. And eventually I had two full fledged businesses within the wedding space and the portrait space that were.
Fully built and the trust was already built in. The notoriety was already built in, so. Whenever I made the switch over into the portrait space, I already had [00:21:00] that foundation in 2022, whenever I decided that I wasn't gonna shoot weddings anymore, I had already built this whole entire mechanism and it allowed me to move into the portrait space and to very quickly charge what I'm charging for that portrait side of the business.
now this is the key thing. This is me like landing the plane for you, because now as I move into the education space, I'm building it the same exact way. So every email, every newsletter, every funnel, every launch, every piece of content, it all runs through one voice. This podcast. It all runs through the voice of Jodi, the photographer, not me as an individual in my private life, because those two people are not the same.
I, myself, as an individual, I am not my brand. Posers [00:22:00] is my brand, and the voice inside of posers is the voice that you're listening to right here, and that voice is consistent. It's the same language. It's the same convictions, it's the same boldness, it's the same truth. And that consistency is what people attach to, especially whenever I'm using the same language, especially whenever I have the same convictions, especially whenever I have the things that I stand for and I stand against.
And building an audience is the same thing as building a client list, and there is a formula to that. And that's what I taught in the first day of the Mastermind. And it cracked people's brains open because they've been taught tactics in regards to post a reel, post a carousel, use trending audio, like show your album, show the frames, show the pretty work, but.
Nobody has taught how to build the kind of [00:23:00] community where it doesn't matter what you offer. The people who are in that audience already want you. They already want it. It is the same as building this cult like audience that transitions into. What is your client list? And here's the part that is important to know too.
Even though the landscape of social media has changed, the psychology of marketing, never will. Platforms will change, features will change, algorithms will change. For sure. We have gone from blogging to Instagram to stories, to reels, to whatever the next thing is. But humans, humans don't change. People will always want to belong.
They will always follow clarity. They will always be drawn to conviction. People will always buy from the people that they trust. People will always choose the brand that makes them [00:24:00] feel something. So the point isn't to do stories or to do reels, or to do carousels or post three times a week or four times a week or whatever.
That's not the point. The point is understanding what makes people attach, what makes people stay, what makes people become loyal, and what makes them think about you whenever you are not even in the room. That's marketing. That's branding too. the way that you make people feel. That's branding, but the way that you make them engage and want to buy from you, that's marketing.
And that's how they tie together. That's the foundation of everything. And that's exactly the reason why I start the Mastermind there because as much as I wanna jump in and I wanna teach launches and sales and pricing and IPS and all of the flashy things that everybody's wanting to get into, mastermind for Marketing is the foundation.
If you don't have that foundation, everything else feels like you're pushing a boulder up a [00:25:00] hill. So. Yeah, I have 26 women in the room for the Mastermind, 26 incredible women who are running legitimate businesses already, and as I sat there with them for an hour and a half, all 26 of those women are walking out saying like, oh my God, , now I see it.
Now I know what I'm paying attention to. I have clarity. I have a roadmap. And that's why their brains were on fire. And this is so massive because it touches everything. So much so that, I was DMing yesterday with one of the alumni girls from last year and she was having a little bit of a Mindy beef. She was, spiraling a tiny bit about her business because another photographer had moved into her area and They were selling the same frames, selling the same albums, had the similar look, had a similar style, and she was panicking like, oh my God, what do I do? How do I pivot? How [00:26:00] do I do this? How do I do that? This is literally my immediate competition, basically moving in next door to me. And I was like, say that again.
And she was like, this is my immediate competition. And I said, that's it. That's the block. That's the spot that you're thinking about. This completely the wrong way because whenever you build your business, the way that I teach you to build debt, competition doesn't exist in the same way. Like you are not McDonald's at Burger King.
You are not fighting for drive-by traffic. You are building loyalty. You are building a community. You are building authority. You're building a brand that people are emotionally invested in and a brand that people trust. And the only time that competition can hurt you is when you're swimming in a sea of sameness with the same language, the same convictions, the same.
Soft music, the same captions, the same everything. [00:27:00] Then you are left to only compete on price, which is a race to the bottom that will crush you, but the minute that you step into conviction. The minute that you decide to stand for something, and also the minute that you decide to stand against something, the minute that you let people in, in a way that feels aligned and safe and intentional, your business becomes a fortress.
Nobody can crumble it. Nobody can undercut it. Nobody can copy it because your audience doesn't want just a photographer. They want you, and that's the kind of business that becomes unshakeable. Now, I want you to also understand that just because I did this with parts of my life that are very private does not mean that I was out there sharing my private life.
Do you understand that? So like I was saying things about being a single mom, I was saying things about going back into the dating world. I was making stories that were [00:28:00] funny about dating. I was doing things that let people into the surface level of who I am as a human. I was not airing dirty laundry. I was not talking about religion.
I was not talking about politics. I was not talking about social like injustices. I not saying you can't, because that stuff is so powerful and it is so polarizing. But for everybody who's saying like, okay, well, like then what do I do? What do I show? What do I say if I don't wanna share my private life and.
That's, that's the strategy of it all. It's a perspective shift. It's a system. So you still showing the build of your business, you're still showing what your thoughts are. As you walk up to a shoot, you're still showing yourself, talking through the like roadblocks that are happening. You're about to go to a photo shoot.
You're packing up to go, the weather is a little bit crazy. [00:29:00] How are you gonna manage this? How are you gonna do this? And then showing that. The photos are still coming out absolutely stunning and gorgeous. You can still show who you are, what your convictions are, what you stand for in the photography industry, what you stand against in the photography industry without ever showing a single ounce of your personal life and.
it's the exact thing that you have to have if you want a business that can charge what you want to charge without feeling like you're constantly being hunted by the next photographer in your city. So I wanted to air this out because I know you might've. Seen a couple days ago now on my stories, the dms and the fire emojis and the hype, because I was posting on my stories about what was happening in my dms and talking about how mind blown the people were who were in the Mastermind.
And I [00:30:00] understand that there's a wall between the podcast and what happens in the Mastermind, but if I can pull anything out of. That room and still give it to you in a way that helps you. I want to, am I going to be able to give you the actual roadmap that I gave them? No. Am I going to be able to hand you the formula and the materials and the whole method and everything that I built for them?
No. Obviously that's inside the Mastermind, but I do think that what I've shared today, you can start asking yourself really different questions like. Who am I and how much of that can I show? What do I stand for and how can I show that on my socials or in my newsletters or in my email funnels or in my guides?
What do I stand against? What does my brand stand against inside of the photography industry? What do I believe that other photographers are too scared to say out loud? Like, how do I want people to feel? Whenever they interact with not just me on a photo shoot, but also [00:31:00] the photographer version of me that is out on the internet.
And whenever you start thinking about it from that lens, it changes everything, not just social media. Again, emails, launches, websites, guides, the way that you speak on a shoot, even the way that you lead, the way that you position yourself, everything becomes more of you. As an actual brand, and whenever everything becomes more of your brand, then you stop being interchangeable.
Okay. Now I don't know exactly when the next round of the Mastermind will open. It might be April. April is being thrown around a lot, but that's a big might. I'm not sure if you missed out on this round and you're kicking yourself a little bit. Now, just get on the wait list. There's obviously no commitment to the wait list at all.
You're just giving me your email. You're just gonna put your name in there so that you are the first to know if and when I open it [00:32:00] again. check the show notes because the link to the wait list will be in the show notes. And honestly, until next week, this is kind of all that I have for you today, but if you've enjoyed this podcast over the last 50 something episodes, I would love it more than anything if you'd hop over to Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen and rate it.
Leave a comment, tell me what you've taken from this. Tell me what's clicked for you. Tell me if you just find me really funny and cute, entertaining. I would love to hear that too. I mean, I'm a girl. At the end of the day. but because that's what drives this podcast, that's what pushes it out to more people and, that really matters to me.
Okay. Alright. That's it, that's all we've got for you today. 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 [00:33:00] 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.
