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.
Hello, my beautiful posers, and welcome back to another episode of The Posers Podcast. If you note just a little bit of sharpness in my tone right now, you are not wrong. One of my boys pissed me right the fuck off earlier today, and I haven't been able to shake the mood yet. So this is me [00:01:00] being a human, being a mom running a really, really messy life, and it's a messy life that I absolutely love.
I've got three stinky teenage boys who are all deciding that they can step to their mother, and we all know that is not something that I take too easily. So it's a very messy life, and I like to show that messy side of me. I like to show every side of me. I like to make sure that you are seeing every side of my business.
So instead of hold off on recording this podcast until I was in a better head space to do it, I thought, "No. You know what? Let's use this energy and just point it in the right direction," because if I'm gonna be mad at my kid, then I am full [00:02:00] of, overflowing with even, this mothering kind of energy. It is surging through me.
So- I am going to take this energy and get up on my soapbox and give you some life lessons that will change your business if you get your tits up and your ears open, and you really listen to this episode. I am about to destroy your ... That's a, that's a word. That is a aggressive word, but you know what? I'm in a mood, so here we go.
I'm gonna stand by it. I'm going to destroy your six biggest excuses in just the next few minutes, so I hope that you're up for it because none of these excuses are really about photography. They're not about your camera, obviously. They're not about editing style. They're not about niche. You know me better than this by this point.
You know that these are not going to be the things that I'm talking about. They are about the six lies that you tell [00:03:00] yourself instead of doing the thing that you already know that you need to be doing. you know what? I'm also gonna give you a minute, because it might be the situation that I'm catching you on a day that you're in a mood, and you know that you can't handle a feather-ruffling kind of day, or you're just not really up for a little dose of tough love.
So I'm gonna give you a beat to swipe into whatever true crime episode you have up in your queue next, but if you're still with me, don't say that I didn't warn you, okay? Let's get into it, 'cause I am ready to go. All right. Here we go. Excuse number one. I don't have time. If that's what you're telling yourself, if you're saying, "I don't have time," to do whatever it is that you've got going on in your business, whatever the constraint is, whatever the bottleneck is, whatever the thing is that you know is halting your business from [00:04:00] being as incredible as it absolutely could be, and you're saying the words, "I don't have time," to do those things that you know you need to be doing.
If that is actually the case, then I expect that you have not scrolled your phone today. I expect that you haven't wandered the aisles of Target this week. I expect that you haven't sat on the couch and watched a TV show, that you haven't read a book. And you know that by book I don't mean a business book, I mean smut, okay?
I mean guilty pleasures. I mean that you're not watching a show, you're not binging Love Island right now. You're not reading any sort of, I don't know, beach reads. That you haven't sat in your car playing Words With Friends for 30 minutes in your garage. But let's be honest, you have the time, I have the time.
We all have the same amount of time. You just simply have to [00:05:00] ruthlessly prioritize it if you're going to say that you want extraordinary things in your life. If you say you want extraordinary things, then you have to behave in an extraordinary way. If you're spending Three hours perfecting skin tones on a gallery that is already client-ready because your client will not notice those little tweaks, then you have to know that you're doing it because editing feels safe, and putting yourself out there with a marketing plan makes you feel unsafe.
And I just need you to know that is not a time problem at all. You have the time. You're just choosing to hide during that time instead of using it the way that you could, instead of ruthlessly prioritizing it. So here's the thing, if marketing isn't on your calendar with the same kind of non-negotiable status as a [00:06:00] photo shoot, then it will not exist in your business.
If it's not on your calendar, you won't do it because everything else always comes up. It is not that you're too busy to do your marketing. It's that you've never made marketing as important as the thing that you already know how to do, the thing that you have already mastered, which is obviously being a photographer.
Being a photographer has always been the thing that you make the most important in your business instead of understanding the business, being a CEO, and running your marketing. Marketing should take up 80% of your day, and the running of your business should take up 20% of your day. But I also understand that's a stat that kind of lives inside of a dream world, and I do understand that because that stat is based on having a team of people that you can ask to take other tasks off of your plate so that you can stay in the [00:07:00] CEO role.
But even if you're not able to do that yet, I'm not even able to do that yet, but what I do is I make sure that I work towards that stat, and I want you to make sure that you work towards that statistic also. 80% of your day should be running the marketing. 20% should be running the admin and everything else on the technical side of your business.
If you drive hard towards that stat, then guess what? It means that you're driving towards your marketing, and bookings go up, and sales go up. So that means that money goes up so that you then have the money in order to outsource so that you can get yourself to a place where you can then spend 80% of your day running the marketing of your business because you have the ability to outsource.
I want you to understand that whenever you drive [00:08:00] hard at marketing, those sales are gonna go up, your bookings are gonna go up. But guess what happens if you drive hard towards admin and editing? Absolutely fucking nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. You stay exactly where you are if you wanna focus on tasks like tweaking your website, editing photos until you feel like they're absolutely perfect, and not outsourcing all of the other things that you're spending so much of your time on.
So please block out marketing time on your calendar for the same time every day, or block out a whole day or two days every single week that you're only going to work on marketing. And please treat it and prioritize it just exactly the same as a photo shoot, a photo shoot that you absolutely cannot cancel.
That is exactly how your marketing should be looked at every single week. [00:09:00] Woo, I did not lie to you. I told you, I warned you that today I was gonna be spicy. Here we go. Excuse number two is, "I'm just not good at the business side." Okay? I wanna take a quick little poll here because I am going to debunk this so freaking fast.
I wanna know how many of your clients- Have ever asked to see your photography degree? Not a single one, right? And also, what photography degree? You think that you need some sort of, I don't know, marketing class or a marketing certification before you're allowed to think about or work on your pricing strategy.
You think that you need an MBA before you can jump into IPS or understand sales. Meanwhile, you're out here nailing exposure, nailing composition, nailing everything that has to do with photography because you loved it so [00:10:00] freaking much that you sat up and you watched YouTube videos until 1:00 AM, and you taught it to yourself.
But somehow, that skill doesn't count. It's like it doesn't count as proof that you can learn anything else that you set your mind to. There are billionaires out there who have reading disabilities, and they have not let that stop them from running incredible businesses. There are people out there who are actually hard of hearing, and they're out there in these streets composing symphonies, okay?
So I myself never went to school for photography. I myself never went to school for business. I myself never went to school for anything regarding marketing. Google and blogs and YouTube has built every single inch of my business. You do not need permission to be the CEO of your business. You hired yourself the day [00:11:00] that you went full time.
You know what? Even, not even if you went full time. Even if you're still part time, you hired yourself the day that you went part time. You hired yourself the day that you decided that you wanted to have a business. You hired yourself the day that you picked up the freaking camera. So the problem is not qualification.
It's that you've decided that being just a photographer is your whole entire identity, and claiming that you're only good at that side. So stepping into being the chief marketing officer, into a salesperson, or into the CEO, or into the business owner, it feels uncomfortable for you. It feels like cosplay.
Instead of just understanding that doing both sides is the assignment. Doing both sides is the job. That is what it is to be a photographer, to be an entrepreneur, to be in the creative space. You are [00:12:00] already running your business. Please start acting like you're the person in charge of it. Please stop giving the excuse that you're just not good at the business side.
Okay? Excuse number three, I don't know where to start with sales, or showing up, or outsourcing, or marketing, or any of those things. The excuse being, I don't know where to start. I just want to tell you there is no shortcut. There is no magic answer. You just fucking start. Okay? Most photographers think that they need the perfect funnel, the perfect content strategy, the perfect reel strategy, the perfect editor to outsource to before they'll ever take a single step towards the thing that is bottlenecking their business.
Most people think that they have to figure it out before they start, but the crazy back-asswards thing is that you [00:13:00] can only figure it out after you've started. You don't know if in-person sales will work for your business. You won't know not from a podcast, not from a digital course, not from me. You won't know if it'll work for your business until you do it.
You don't know if you can let someone else come in to edit for you so that you can actually free up all of that income generating time that you ke- keep complaining that you don't have. You won't know until you hand off your first gallery and you feel the panic of letting go of control, and then realize that you survived that panic.
And then guess what? After that, you have to do it again and again. So please, today, pick the smallest possible version of the next step. And do that today. You do not have to do the whole entire thing. You do not have to do the whole entire system. You do not have to bite the whole entire head [00:14:00] off of the horse.
Okay? Just make one move towards fixing the biggest problem that you have in your business. Make one move towards doing it today. Just start today. All right? Excuse number four. I am on fire today, God. All right, excuse number four, now isn't the right time. Spoiler alert, the right time doesn't fucking exist.
There's just time and your decision to make it the right time. Okay? I hear this all the time with people saying that you're really busy right now. Maybe you're a wedding photographer too, and it's wedding season, so you'll start to learn the portrait side in the fall. You'll start to learn IPS later whenever it's slow season.
Or, oh, the s- it's slow season right now, so, like, money is not coming in, so I'm gonna wait to invest in [00:15:00] myself, or I'm gonna wait to learn that skill, or I'm gonna wait to do this thing until bookings pick back up. I'm here to tell you There is always a reason for you to convince yourself that now isn't the right time.
There will always be a reason. Baby girl, you will be, I promise you this, you will be at this exact crossroad in 12 months with a brand-new excuse saying why that time isn't the right time. Okay? No one who ever made it ever waited for the right fucking time. Okay? It wasn't the right time for me to quit weddings and walk away from a six-figure income stream.
It wasn't the right time for me to drain my entire bank account and build the studio. Are you kidding me? I was a single mom. I had three boys to feed during that time. Okay? It wasn't the right fucking time for me to do all of that. [00:16:00] So I need you to stop auditing your calendar for the next, like, right time window.
The only thing that you actually need is permission from yourself. Today is the right time. Right now is the right time. Seriously, if you have a thought in your head that you're wanting to build on and you're wanting to move on right this very second, please hit pause on me. Hit pause right now and go and do it.
I promise you, I will still be here the next time that you hop on the treadmill or that you get in your car. Anywhere that you normally hit play on me, I will still be here, right here in the middle of this episode, 'cause that's the best thing about that pause button. Pause and go do the thing. The only thing that will make you successful in your life, not even just in business, but in life in general, is the idea that you need to bite off more than you can chew, and then you need to figure out how to chew it.
That's it. That's literally the secret to [00:17:00] finding success. All right? Excuse number five this one's gonna get you. This one's going to slap you in the face a little bit, okay? Excuse number five: I'll invest in myself next year after I can save some more money. But guess what? Next year you'll tell yourself the same exact thing.
And I am not even, I am not talking about my mastermind, I am not talking about the posing method, I am not pitching you on this at all. This is for anyone's education system. Because here's the thing about this excuse. This excuse is one that really fucks with you because it doesn't even really sound like an excuse.
It sounds like you're being responsible. It sounds especially like you're being financially responsible. You're telling yourself that you need to save up first before you make that big expense, which it makes sense, right? But let's seriously talk about what's actually [00:18:00] happening while you sit around and wait to be able to afford it, okay?
What happens is that you're collecting free PDFs. You are watching free webinars. You are doing all of the free five-day challenges. You are doing all of the, "Hey, grab these free Instagram carousels that are destined to go viral." Okay, you're doing all of this from 12 different educators who all run very different education programs based on very different strategies that you could use in your business.
And all of those coaches, while they're fantastic and they've built really great businesses, they will derail you and say "Oh, don't do it that way, do it this way." Not because they're wrong, not because they're trying to steer you in some other different direction, but because they are going to coach you on the way that they found success by doing it, right?
Which they think that they're helping, and they would be helping if you were [00:19:00] in their program and if you were going through and building your business exactly the same way that they did. But what's gonna happen is whenever you're getting it from 12 different educators all from all different places, you're gonna go 100 miles an hour in one direction, only to get distracted by somebody else saying the exact opposite thing.
And then you're gonna change, and you're going to course-correct, and then you're going to change this system and that system and move this one and pivot here. And then, oh, damn, here comes Jody saying, "Okay, ditch this pricing, and never say the words book now ever again." So now I better run off, and I better change that button on my website and this button in my funnel, and then this and this.
And it feels like so much effort. You feel like you are working so hard. You are working so hard. But it fucks you over with a really hard business whiplash, okay? That's because [00:20:00] free information isn't actually free. It's the most expensive thing that you'll buy because it costs you time instead of money.
Time spiraling, time going in circles, spending all of your attention over here being like, "Oh, Jody says I have to build this thing," and then somebody else says, "Oh, no, that's not gonna work. I need to build it this way." A year from now, whenever you've jumped into all the freebies and you've taken all the free PDFs from all the 12 different educators who are so incredibly good and so incredibly right in their own capacities.
But a year from now, you won't be sitting on a pile of saved cash ready to invest. You'll be sitting on 12 months of contradictory advice, half-implemented funnels, and a content calendar that you've abandoned three times. You will have bought this preset and that preset and this digital course and that digital course and this band-aid and that [00:21:00] band-aid, and you'll be pulled in so many directions by so many free resources that you never actually build anything.
Because none of it was designed to work together. It was never a strategy. It was noise that felt like hard work. It felt like progress. Meanwhile, the photographer who bit the bullet and paid for the right education six months ago isn't ahead of you because they had more money. They're ahead of you because they stopped paying with their time, and they started paying with their wallet.
And whenever they pay with their wallet, they get a straight line instead of a crazy scavenger hunt. They get to go from point A to point B with one exact strategy. The more money that you are saving up by not investing in the one program that will get you from A to [00:22:00] B, get you from where you want to be right now to the goal that you've been thinking about, by not investing in that program, it is costing you a year of compounding.
You have to calculate what one more year at your current rates actually costs you. That's the real price of waiting. That's the real price of the excuse of saying, "Oh, let me do this next year after I can save up for it." All right? Final excuse. Last one, excuse number six, is likely the deadliest.
Okay? It's the excuse of I've already tried that before, and it didn't work. So this is whenever you jump into something, and you try it out, but you really only give it a lukewarm attempt. Right now in my business, I'm sitting [00:23:00] $10,000 deep in trying... Probably more, actually. I'm sitting $10,000 deep in trying to figure out ads so that I can scale my studio with associates.
And I know that I am months away, and a lot more money away, if I'm being honest, from figuring it out and getting a system dialed in. But- Imagine if I stopped in month one whenever I turned on the ads and I got ghosted on about, I don't know, 12 discovery calls or something in one month. What if I quit right there and said, "Oh, well I tried it and now it's not gonna work"?
But instead of just jumping back in with the ads firm that I'm working with and saying, "Hey, this isn't working. What's happening here?" And figuring out that the thing that's broken is the automated text messages that are supposed to be going out. Those weren't running, so nobody was getting a reminder two days and one day before that they had booked a [00:24:00] call with me several weeks before, so then nobody was showing up.
Imagine if I just quit, right? I could have screwed myself out of not only making my $10,000 back, but making hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years if I stuck with it and got this system figured out to where I could run associates through my studio. So the question here is why do you think that you're any different?
you post consistently for nine days or so, and no inquiries come in. So what? So you give up? So you throw in the towel? So what if you ran one in-person sales session and you got nervous and you tanked the sale, so then all of a sudden you throw up your arms and you decide IPS isn't for you?
So what if you hired one editor and then didn't give clear direction and then got images back that weren't your style and decided, "Oh, no, nobody's ever gonna figure out my editing style. I have to be the one to do it. That just doesn't work [00:25:00] for my business." That's, it's just not accurate. It's just not factual.
MrBeast uploaded 455 videos before one of them ever went viral, 400 and... I have showed up on social media almost every single day of my life for the last decade building my personal brand. You have got to go so fucking hard if you say that you want this multi-six-figure business or six-figure business. If you don't want that, it's okay to go soft.
It's okay to dabble on the side. It's okay to keep it as this hobby that pulls in a little bit of money. But if you say you want six figures, if you say you want multi-six figures, then you've gotta go so fucking hard. You've gotta show up. You've gotta stay consistent. You've gotta repeat yourself and your offers and your values over and over again.
If you say you want it, you've gotta [00:26:00] grab your business by the fucking horns and go and take it. You've gotta be the photographer that doesn't give up after one attempt. You've gotta be the woman who actually commits. Because those attempts, even if it's a little bit more than one, it's not anything except for a data point, and you cannot make decisions based on one or two or a few data points.
You have got to get out and get more data. All right? You are not stuck because you don't have the time or qualifications or a starting point or the right season to be starting in, or because next week or next year isn't coming, okay? You're not stuck because of these excuses. You're stuck because every single one of those excuses is way, way easier to say than I'm scared Or I'd rather [00:27:00] stay comfortable than risk failure.
Clearly, this is a no bullshit zone for a reason. Because anybody who is stepping into my world, anybody who is stepping into Posers, I want you to know how much passion and drive I have behind what we're creating here in Posers. And I want every single woman who gets even a dose of me to understand how incredibly powerful and dynamic she is, and that she deserves every single ounce of success that she's ever dreamed of.
So if you're new around here, not every episode is this... Do you know what? That's probably a lie. Most episodes are this much. But it comes from a really, really good place and a really deep place of, of me being in a place that I didn't [00:28:00] have financial freedom whenever my divorce first happened and whenever my world crumbled around me.
I was in a situation where I had to depend on child support. I had to depend on this man to still be contributing to the finances of the house that I was building. That meant that I could still be under his thumb. That meant that I could still be under his control. So this all comes from a place that is so deep inside of my gut that I cannot help but to show up here with passion and drive, and grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you a little bit and telling you that you are so fucking talented, and you are so fucking powerful, and you are so good at what you do, that all of the excuses on this list need to go away.
They need to get kicked to the fucking [00:29:00] curb so that you can show up and you can actually gift this world with the talents that you have. And then get paid very well for the way that you are showing up, for the way that you are serving inside of your communities, inside of your businesses, inside of your worlds, inside of your families, inside of everywhere that you step into because you're that bitch.
So clearly this is a no bullshit zone. If you're new around here, welcome to the Posers fucking podcast.
Bye for now, Posers
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, [00:30:00] stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, friends.
