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. I had to resist the urge of saying, "Ciao, ciao, ciao, my beautiful posers," because whenever you hear this episode, I will be soaking in the Italian sun. I will be a ridiculous tourist. I will be wearing the cutest new [00:01:00] floppy hat that I purchased that has, like, this adorable little bow in the back.
I'm gonna be hopping into gondolas in Venice. I'm gonna be eating my way through literally every gelato stop that we can find, and I will be frolicking through the endless small towns of the Puglia region. But I batched some content before I left so that you don't have to miss this soothing voice of mine that you've gotten used to hearing every single Tuesday of your week.
So, you're welcome for that, obviously. also, it strikes me with just a little bit of irony that I'm recording this specific episode while I'm on this beautiful vacation with my family. Did I plan it to happen this way? No, I sure did not. But does it work in my favor to act like I did? Sure as shit does, so we're rolling with it.
Okay, so I wanna start today by talking about something [00:02:00] that I hear on repeat. Honestly, I hear it constantly, mostly in my DMs, sometimes on discovery calls with other photographers, but honestly, I also see it a lot in other educators' content too, and it seems to be plaguing our industry, so the likelihood of it impacting you might be pretty high.
So, I wanna talk about the photographers who are stuck because they have priced themselves right in the middle of the pack, thinking that it's a safe place to be right there in the middle because they aren't the cheapest, but you know, they aren't crazy expensive either. So they think that they'll win over the clients who are middle class and want, a decently priced photographer, but nothing too outrageous.
Not the whole, like, arm and a leg photographer, okay? the good photos at the [00:03:00] good price. That's the crowd that you're going after. So, we're talking about the 500 to $900 range of photographers, okay? That's who we're talking about today, because also, those photographers are the ones who have probably tried to raise their prices, and their bookings have gone like And immediately dried up.
So they panic, and they drop them back down again, but then had to drop them even lower to compete more since they panicked even further, worrying that they had done a ton of damage to their reputation by trying to go too high. So now they're kind of sitting there terrified to ever touch their pricing again, and doing the math in their head at 1:00 in the morning trying to figure out how they're going to make it through this year, how they will ever book enough to make ends meet, and how they are possibly [00:04:00] going to get through all of it without also burning out because of the volume that you have to run when you are at that price range.
So if you just said, " Holy shit, that's me. why is she coming for me? Why did she wake up and choose violence today? She's supposed to be all giddy and happy and vacation Jody while she's in Italy." Okay? If you just said, "Holy shit, she's speaking right to me," keep listening. Okay? Because I personally hear some version of this conversation multiple times a week.
And what I usually wanna keep on saying back to these photographers who are having this conversation with me, the ones who are terrified of raising their prices, is that you are actually terrified of the wrong thing Not being able to pay your bills, that is way scarier than raising your prices. Not being able [00:05:00] to take some stress off of your partner's plate and then adding stress to your marriage, that's freaking terrifying.
Because if this economy keeps tightening the way that it's tightening and you don't reposition, you are not actually playing it safe. You are pricing yourself right out of business completely. And that, my friends, that, my love, that, my Bella, that's the real nightmare. Okay? So let's lay this out. There are two types of buyers in our economy right now.
There might be a little bit of gray area in between, but not a ton, because what's happening is the gap between the two buying groups is getting wider and wider and wider as the economy keeps getting worse and worse. So buyer number one is [00:06:00] kind of the old middle class that is now plummeting, right?
They're cutting back. They're tightening on their budget. They're canceling subscriptions. They're canceling the delivery services. They are really having to cut anything extra out of their lives right now. They are downsizing with a real impact on their day-to-day life. Their anxiety is high, and that is a lot of America.
So I completely understand the thought process of thinking that your pricing needs to follow that same backwards trajectory if you're going to keep on getting clients. That thought, that feeling, that anxiety, those are real, and I am not here to minimize them at all. But- We also have buyer number two who is still spending, still doing renovations, still putting in a pool, still going on trips, still buying brand new bags and [00:07:00] brand new cars completely unbothered.
They know the economy exists. They know it's tightening for other people, but they aren't directly affected by it. And if anything, they're making more money than they have before. Their businesses are growing. Their paychecks are great. And that gap between the two groups is what this whole entire episode is about.
Because here's what nobody in the photography industry wants to say. There is a tier of client who is almost completely insulated from what everyone else is feeling right now. And if you are not positioned to serve that tier, I promise you that you are in trouble. Not because your work isn't good, obviously.
Not because you're not talented, obviously. But because of where you have planted your flag, because of your positioning. Okay? Now, the thing that actually sent me down this rabbit [00:08:00] hole was a conversation that I had a few weeks ago with a photographer who came to me completely stuck. Incredibly talented, genuinely.
Her work is beautiful. She had, you know, been at this for about five years, and she was really building something incredible. But recently, the, like, inquiries had slowed down. They had thinned out. And she was doing or thinking that she needed to do what most photographers do in that situation, and she was thinking about dropping her prices And she said to me, "I, you know, I, I just need to pull back.
I need to drop my prices. I need to be more accessible. I need to be more affordable. If I'm more affordable, then more people will book." And to be honest, I understand the logic. The logic makes sense on the surface. Things feel uncertain, you lower the barrier, then more [00:09:00] people can say yes, right? Except that's not what happened.
What happened was s- a few people booked, sure, but now she's working way more and making way less. And the clients at that lower price point, let's just call a spade a spade. there's a different energy there. The energy is far more transactional. It's far less invested in the experience.
it's the kind of sessions where you work really, really, really hard, and then it kinda just makes you feel a little bit, like, deflated, right? A little bit empty afterward because the kind of clients that are in that tier say things like, "Well, we just need one good photo, and then we can be done after that."
Right? But here's the part that really got me, is that she told me also that some of her best clients, the ones who always come back, who always referred [00:10:00] people, the ones that she genuinely loved, they had stopped booking too. Not because they couldn't afford her anymore. She told me that they definitely had the money.
So she didn't understand what was happening. And that's the trap. And I want to spend this episode unpacking it. So I wanna talk about that photographer who's charging, say, $800 and wants to raise her prices. So maybe that's you. Maybe you've been at 800 for a while, or, you know, somewhere close to that range, and you know that you need to raise that price.
You know it in your gut. You are working constantly, but you're not scaling, and you can feel it. But every time that you try, every time that you bump into that $950 range or that $1,200 range, then the bookings slow to a trickle, and then that fear kicks in, and you drop back down [00:11:00] And you do that loop over and over and over again until the economy tightens and suddenly even the $800 clients start disappearing, right?
Here's what I want you to understand, and I say this, you know me, I say this with so much bluntness, but I also say this with so much love. You have unknowingly painted yourself into a corner, not because you did anything wrong, but because the path that you've been on has been narrowing, and there's about to be no more room left for you on that path.
Now let me explain what I mean I want you to imagine a barbell, like obviously the one that you see in a gym, right? Imagine Popeye in an old cartoon holding a barbell. All right? Uh, with that barbell, with the shape of it, there's heavy weights on both ends and almost nothing in [00:12:00] the middle. That's essentially what the market looks like right now.
On one end, you've got the super cheap, the photographers who are charging $200, $300 for a whole entire session. On the other end, you've got the luxury buyer. You've got the photographer who's making 4,000, 8,000, $12,000 and up for their full experience. And in the middle, everyone else, the, the 500, the $700 photographer, the $900 photographer, the one who's affordable, here's what happens whenever the economy starts to pinch, just like it's doing right now.
The people who used to be happily spending that 700, 800, $900, even $1,000 on a family session, the solid, normal middle-class family who planned for it, who saved a little bit for it, who felt good about it, those people are scared right now. Things feel uncertain for them. [00:13:00] They're watching their grocery bill go up.
They're watching their mortgage go up. That $1,000 photo shoot, they're seeing that it starts to feel like something they should probably skip this year, or wait on, or find a less expensive option for, right? So they trade down. They don't stop caring about the photos. They just move down a rung on the ladder.
They find the photographer who is at $350, and they say, "You know what? This will do for now." And then that photographer gets really busy. That end of the market actually gets more active, not less, because everyone's shuffling down. Meanwhile, at the top of the market, almost nothing changes. The family who spends $6,000 on photos, who has been with the same photographer for eight years, who has their whole entire home filled with [00:14:00] portraits from this one person, they don't trade down The amount of money that we're talking about doesn't register as something that they have to cut in their financial life.
It's just what they do. It's how they live, and that doesn't change. So what happens in the middle? The middle gets crushed from both sides. The $800 photographer can't compete with the cheap end because she's not cheap enough. There's a real price difference that matters to a family in budget mode down there, right?
And then she can't compete with the luxury end because she hasn't built that world yet. The brand, and the relationships, and the reputation, and the referral network, and the experience, all of that, that's not built yet. So she just sits there in the middle where the clients are disappearing in both directions.
That's no man's land, and that is a genuinely terrifying place to be right now [00:15:00] Now, here's where I wanna go deeper because I think that the thing that photographers don't fully kind of like, I don't know, like reckon with, is why they can't just raise their prices and move up. Like to just say like, "Oh, I'll just go luxury," right?
"I'll raise my prices. I'll rebrand. I'll spend money that I shouldn't spend on styled shoots, and I'll beef up my portfolio with such beautiful images that I'll fit into the luxury market, and then I'll be golden. And then I can just, you know, go after a higher end client." And I want to very firmly say it does not work like that.
And it is not that simple, not because you're not good enough, because I promise you that you are, but because of how the luxury market actually works. The clients at the top, the ones spending real money on photography, they already [00:16:00] have their photographer. They've probably had the same photographer for years, and that photographer is not just a vendor to them.
They are woven into the fabric of how their family documents their life. That person knows their kids' names, knows that, you know, mom hates being photographed from a certain angle. They know which spot they always go back to and why, and what places mean to the family. They know to always capture that one thing with like one of the kids or, or that one thing that the mom wants.
I have this one client who they have me take a photo of mom holding the firstborn every single year at the end of our photo shoot, and her firstborn is now like 12 years old or something, and almost bigger than she is, right? But it's ongoing. I know that we're gonna do it at the end of every single photo shoot.
I have another client who takes this one random photo [00:17:00] where I don't know where this started, I don't know where it came from, but They asked me to do it the very first time that we were on the photo shoot, m- like our first photo shoot together, and I can't remember the story behind it for me to tell it to you here to save my life.
But they all get into this, like, lunge kind of pose. Almost like a lunge, but with, like, a superhero, like, punch up to the sky, right? And every single member of the family is doing this weird pose. And they crack up at it every single year, but we have to take it. There's nuance, and there's layers to the relationships that I have with each of my clients that have been built over years, and years, and years.
So you cannot just walk into the high-end market and think that you'll just book work there. You cannot put up a new website and suddenly become that person for this new clientele. That client is not looking for a new photographer. They're not even [00:18:00] thinking about a new photographer, because they already have theirs.
It is impossible to move into that market in that way, okay? Is it impossible to move into that market? No, absolutely not, obviously, because it's constantly happening. But what I'm saying is, is that it's not instantaneous. It's not based on a website rebrand or a few new images in your portfolio. Your marketing has to change, and you have to pivot your messaging and your positioning, and you have to climb the rungs of that ladder.
You have to understand and change your pricing structure. You have to change your approach. You have to uncap your revenue. And the really critical thing, the thing that sometimes really gets underestimated, is that for a family at that level, choosing a photographer isn't just a practical decision. It's a status decision.
It's identity, okay? [00:19:00] Whenever they're out at a dinner party and they say, "We use JANN Photography," that's a sentence that means something in that world. It signals taste. It signals access. It signals belonging. it signals refinement. You can't buy your way into that with some kind of ad spend. You can't rush it.
you have to earn it over time through relationships and referrals, and through becoming someone that people in those circles know by name. So whenever I hear photographers say, " I just need to raise my prices," my answer is that that's not a pivot. That's a years-long, like, repositioning, and you cannot start it the same week that the economy starts to tighten a little bit, and then you're scared, and you need bookings right now.
You can't just pivot and switch. This is why the corner that you've painted [00:20:00] yourself into is so hard to get out of Here's the thing that I really want you to understand about, like, a true luxury market and why it's structured the way that it is. People with money, people who don't have to think about the cost of photography the way that most people do, they are not primarily just buying images.
They are buying certainty. They're buying the knowledge that this whole entire experience will be handled for them, and not only just handled, but it will be beautiful. It will exceed what they imagined, and they will not have to manage any of it because everything will be taken care of for them. But they're also buying something else, and this is the part that almost nobody talks about.
They are buying the bragging rights of the photographer. And I don't mean that in, like, a douchebag kind of way. I mean it in, like, a [00:21:00] real, human, deeply psychological way. The choice of who you hire is a reflection of you. And in circles where status matters, having the right photographer is part of how they present their family.
It says something about them. And wealthy clients are not going to risk that on somebody unknown. They're not going to bring in a new person for the photo that's going to hang above their fireplace or hang somewhere in their home for the next 20 years just because that person's Instagram looked good this month, right?
They want the name. They want the established. They want the history and the reputation behind the photographer because that is part of what they're paying for. Which means that the way you build towards that market is not by changing your prices tomorrow. It's by building the story and the relationships and the [00:22:00] reputation and the proof over time until you become someone that people in those circles know and talk about and recommend.
That doesn't happen in Q1. Doesn't happen in a quarter. It happens over years of intentional positioning. I actually had a client come in for, uh, her reveal a few weeks ago, and we sat down, and we chit-chatted for a while. And she'd been in the middle of this whole, like, interior design project in her house, so we caught up on that.
and then we finally, like, got into her reveal, and I walked her through the whole entire experience, and I showed her the photos. And she loved them, of course. She really, really, really loved them. She ended up buying the entire set, plus an album, plus a frame for her mom, and she spent over $10,000 without a blink of an eye, okay?
But here's the part that really landed for me As she was handing me her American Express, she [00:23:00] said that she was so happy that she could not only pay me what I'm worth, but that she was even happier that I'm out here teaching other women how to say numbers like that out loud, how to actually demand that kind of money in their businesses.
She's a personal injury attorney, right? She owns her own firm. She makes great money. And she told me straight up that she loves knowing that her money is going to another female-owned business, and that I'm turning around and I'm teaching other women to build businesses that can receive that kind of money too.
And I sat with that for a second after she left, because it really felt like every piece that I've been trying to explain in this episode just, like, clicked into place in that one conversation. Because it proves that this is all about mindset. It's about money mindset. And most [00:24:00] photographers are terrified to charge premium prices because deep down they assume that everyone thinks about money the way that they do.
And the way that they think about money is usually coming from a place of scarcity. So it becomes this vicious cycle. They won't charge more because they're scared to, which keeps them stuck in that scarcity mindset. Which then makes them assume that nobody else would spend that kind of money either, because if they wouldn't spend four figures or five figures on family photos, why would anyone else?
But that attorney in my studio doesn't think about money that way. She thinks about money the way that people with money think about money. And she was thrilled, genuinely thrilled, to spend it on something that mattered to her with someone who made her feel like her money was well spent and well used.
That's the client [00:25:00] that you're not currently positioned to serve if you're staying in the middle ranks, if you're staying as the $800 photographer. And this is the client that you're not currently, like, positioned to serve, not because she doesn't exist. She absolutely exists, and there are more of her than you think there are.
But because you keep pricing your work off of your own bank account instead of theirs, you're going to stay stuck So what do you actually do if you're the $800 photographer that is standing in that corner right now? First, I want you to stop thinking about this as an actual pricing problem. It's a positioning problem.
The price that you've set your- for yourself is the outcome of how you've positioned yourself, [00:26:00] which is also an outcome of your money mindset. So the real question is, who do you want to be known as, and are you showing up as her? And then second, and I know that this is not a quick answer, you have to start building relationships at the level that you want to work at.
Relationships. One person who moves in those circles, who gets to see your work and your experience firsthand, will do more for your positioning than any other form of marketing. Okay? And then third, you've got to stop being affordable. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I literally want you to think that the word affordable is like a four-letter word.
And I know that that doesn't mean much coming from me on the Posers podcast, because I drop a four-letter word as if it's, I don't know, [00:27:00] raindrops coming from the sky. Okay. So I know that sounds counterintuitive when bookings feel slow, but scarcity is not something that you stumble into. It's actually something that you create.
The photographer who is affordable, who responds instantly, who has open slots every weekend, who barters with discounted prices just to get the booking, that person does not read as exclusive. They come across as desperate. All right? Here's where I wanna land this plane. We are in an economic moment where everyone is scared, or most are scared, okay?
And scared people shrink. They make themselves smaller. They make themselves more affordable. They make themselves more accessible and palatable to whoever [00:28:00] might say yes. And I really do understand the impulse, okay? When it feels uncertain, the instinct is to make sure that you're not too much, that you're not too expensive, you're not too premium, you're not too hard to book.
You'll do anything to get the money just deposited into your bank account. But The cheap end is getting busier because people trade down whenever they're scared. And then the luxury end is barely being affected because the clients at that level don't experience the economy the way that everybody else does.
And the middle is getting squeezed from both directions, just like that barbell, with nowhere to go. You are stuck in no man's land. That is the most dangerous place that you can be right now, is stuck in the middle, trying to be affordable enough to attract the nervous middle class while also trying to be impressive enough to attract the wealthy.
[00:29:00] Because you will end up with neither. The nervous middle class will find someone cheaper, and then the wealthy client will stay with the photographer that they already have. You've got to pick a direction. Not for this month, not as a reaction to Q1, Q2, Q3, whatever. But you've got to pick a direction as a long-term commitment to who you are building toward.
Even if that means you wanna build towards the lower end, you wanna build towards that cheaper audience, that's great. That's amazing. There's money there, too. You just have to know that the money is gonna come from high volume, right? There's money there. Walmart exists on that exact principle.
So if you want to grab a ton of cheap associate photographers and build a machine for $300 photoshoots and pay them $50 each, go in that direction if that's appealing for you. But you've got to pick a direction, [00:30:00] okay? Now, the only direction that I'm going to pick right now is whether I am going to be eating pasta or pizza for probably my fifth meal of the day, and whether or not I'm going to go with hazelnut or pistachio gelato.
I can promise you it is probably pistachio. All right. Okay. That's all I've got for you today. Until next week, ciao 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, stay messy and don't let the bullshit win. Tits up. Ears open and go build something. Incredible. Bye for now, [00:31:00] friends.
