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. I want to slow down with you for a minute because the last handful of episodes, we have been moving fast. We have had a lot of quick lessons, getting straight into the tactics. We've been like bing, bang, boom, onto the next one. And I really do think that there's a place for that, and it honestly has to happen sometimes.
But [00:01:00] it's not how I actually prefer it to be. It's just not really what I imagined for this podcast, and it's not really what I want for the entire Posers brand. I don't ever want you to feel like you're being taught at. I want you to feel like you are sitting across the room from me and that we're just talking because if I'm really transparent and truthful and honest here, , the part of this whole podcast that I love the most isn't actually teaching.
It's hearing from you. It's having relationships with you. It's you telling me exactly where you're stuck and exactly what's scaring you, where some mental blocks are happening and honestly, like, how I can help. Because having been at this for almost 20 years now, there's a really high probability that I'm years ahead of you, and you don't have to figure things out on your own because I've already walked the path and [00:02:00] figured it out for you.
So basically, I have walked so that you can run, and that is forever how I want this podcast to feel. And that's also how this episode really came to be. So a few weeks ago, I was driving into the studio, and I was thinking about - podcast topics because that's really where the best episode topics always hit me, is, like, while I'm driving.
And I'm constantly thinking about what could possibly be swimming around in your head. And it got me thinking about some phrases that I hear over and over and over again that honestly just aren't completely true. And it really hit me that I need to debunk some myths that are out there. And they aren't just some little, like, fables or some tiny white lies that aren't really, like, affecting much for you.
They are actually myths that are costing you from making a shit ton more money. So you know that this episode is [00:03:00] literally right up my alley. - It's what happened next after my drive into the studio that day that felt so serendipitous and so kismet that I couldn't actually believe that it happened so perfectly.
Because within the same 12-hour window of me starting to formulate this podcast episode, I got a voice note in my DMs, but I actually hadn't been chatting with this photographer. We didn't have, like, some long-standing chat history or relationship. It was, in fact, the opposite. We had literally never talked at all.
So time-stamping this, September 7th, she opted into one of my funnels. September 8th, she opted into another one. And then September 10th, I actually sent her a message because my mini chat glitched, and it gave her the wrong link. So I slid into her DMs and gave her the right link, and she responded by saying that she was going to be booking a call with me.
And of course, I sent something cheeky back [00:04:00] telling her to not, like, tempt me with a good time, and that I would obviously be there with bells on. But she told me that she's obsessed with this podcast, and I asked her if there was anything that she wanted to hear me cover in an episode. And she ended up just sending me a voice note that lined up so perfectly with exactly what I was formulating for this episode, so I knew that this episode had to kind of, like, make it out of the chat.
It had to make it out of my head. I want you to hear exactly what she said because a little bit later in this episode, after you hear the whole entire voice note, I promise you that some part of it is going to feel like it was you talking. But here's what she had to say first.
Voice Note: when my son had his one-year milestone photos, I booked with a photographer who, at the time, I didn't even really know what IPS was, and she was not communicating anything with me [00:05:00] upfront.
I paid the session fee, and then she invited me to this thing called a gallery reveal at her house, at which point in time she explained that to get any photos, I was gonna have to spend thousands of dollars, which I was not prepared for, , at all mentally. And because it was a milestone, there was a lot of emotions there too.
So, you know, of course, that was, looking back, very... just the wrong way for that photographer to handle that. But, , what ended up happening is I spent thousands of dollars on an album with her at, like, very frustratedly , if that's a word, and I left super pissed. , Got the album. Absolutely in love with it.
The quality was amazing. Ended up buying another album, very frustratedly, because I wanted to get... That would be the only way to get the photos to my parents. , And so, [00:06:00] you know, the whole experience left me just pissed and kind of tainted my view on products.
So let's sit with that for a second. Imagine that's you for this photo shoot that you had booked. You don't even know what a gallery reveal is. You thought that you had paid for the whole session plus the digitals.
You show up, and you find out that the only way that you're gonna get your son's one-year photos, the ones that you've been wanting forever, this huge milestone, is to hand over thousands of dollars that you were not prepared to hand over. You weren't prepared financially nor emotionally, and you leave that meeting just angry.
Like, really angry. And honestly, this photographer had every right to be angry because that's not in-person sales working the way that it's supposed to. That's in-person sales done really, really badly. So here's what I actually want you to [00:07:00] take from that voice note, though. There are huge myths about IPS that are out there that are keeping you from making this leap in your business, and I'm willing to bet that you either used to believe or still believe at least one of these huge myths.
The first one being that you have to dramatically raise your prices in order to do IPS. The second one, you have to sell all of these albums and frames so then you have to take on this huge burden of learning a whole new system when you're already stretched thin with your time and your energy.
And the third one being that all of your current clients will hate you, and you'll deal with a lot of angry people, and you'll lose all of your clients. So those are three huge myths. And let me tell you, you do not have to raise your prices at all, actually. You don't have to sell any products, and your clients will not leave you.
But let's break down each one of these a little bit [00:08:00] further so that you can probably stop rolling your eyes at me and actually start believing me. Because- This idea that you have to, like, inflate your prices, you have to, like, raise your prices so high and then just kinda, like, hope for the best, it doesn't really work like that.
Yes, you could raise your prices if you wanted to, but you don't have to. Whatever you're charging right now with, like, your session fee or your all-inclusive package or whatever number your clients already know and expect, that number doesn't have to move if you don't want it to. You can start as small as you want in order to simply remove the part of your pricing that is capping your revenue.
You can take that exact number that your clients are used to spending, and you can build your whole entire pricing structure around that. So your clients can spend exactly what they're already spending with you and walk away with everything that they came for, and nothing [00:09:00] changes for them except for the process.
But if they want to spend more, now they actually can, and that's the whole mindset shift In my pricing system, you get to choose where you start. There are five tiers of pricing that my posers choose from, and you don't move out of one of those tiers until you're comfortable and ready to move up. So you can take a year and not make any more money than you want to if you wanted to move your client base over really, really carefully.
You just need to make sure that you're giving people who do want to spend more money with you the opportunity to do so. You can seriously talk to all 40 of the women who have gone through my program this last year. They will all tell you that they were surprised whenever they had their first sale that blew their old pricing out of the water.
It has happened with every single one of them. Everyone thinks [00:10:00] their clients would never do that, and yet every single one of them has had that moment where they're like, "Holy shit, that actually worked." So myth number two, you have to start selling albums and frames and canvases, and now you've got this whole new not only skill set to learn, but all these vendors to collect, that you need to, , do design work on top of everything that you are already drowning in.
This might be the thing that's keeping you stuck, but it might not. But I'm gonna say it here in case if you need to hear it. The very first thing that you sell as an in-person sales photographer, the most important thing isn't a physical product. It's your digital product, your photos first. We hear it all over our industry that IPS photographers resent the digital-only client.
But that's only the case if your structure isn't built to welcome the digital-only sale. My structure is [00:11:00] built for both, and I profit heavily off of both. If you never want to design an album or hang a frame a single day in your life, you don't have to. You can run this whole entire model selling nothing but digitals as their own product at their own price point.
And the second that you do that, that's when your revenue uncaps because your client is the one who is deciding what is worth it to her instead of you deciding it for her back whenever you set some flat number at the beginning. You don't have to think about albums. You don't have to think about frames, not today, not this year, not until you actually want to.
I actually have a student who was so terrified of moving over her pricing. She had actually gotten into my mastermind, but she was there for my launch system, not for the pricing. But I you know that I convinced her, and she [00:12:00] decided to take the leap, and she wanted to sell just the digitals. She literally has yet to even try to sell an album, and you can probably guess what happened.
She just spent all of July and August making more money than she ever thought possible. And she has sent me so many messages, literally in tears, happy tears. She finally sees a way out of her day job. She sees a future that she never thought was meant for her. She made $22,150 in August alone. So let me say this again.
You do not have to sell products to run an IPS pricing structure And myth number three, your current clients are going to hate you for this, and they are all going to leave you. scared that you're literally about to become that photographer, the one from the voice note, and end up in a room [00:13:00] full of angry, blindsided people.
And I need you to just really, like, hear me on this one, because I don't have some sort of, like, incredible transformation story to tell you here. So I just need you to trust me, because this is just, it's just not what happens. Every client who sits down with me for their reveal loves that process. They love going through the images together.
They love reliving the whole shoot again. They love seeing the images that we, like, actually made together, and they cry, and they gush, and they get so excited that they can barely wait to get those photos on their phone so that they can, like, text them to all of their amazing people. And then they thank me over, and over, and over for doing it for them.
And the ones who do want an album or who do want something to hang on their wall, they are relieved that somebody [00:14:00] else is handling it. They don't have time to design a 50-page album. So they are thrilled that somebody is making sure that a keepsake is getting made every single year for them, and that that's being made by somebody else except for them.
And they thank me for it profusely every single time. And it is not just me saying that either. Other photographers that you know that they're running IPS, ask them. Ask them if their clients hate it. And if they did, do you think that people would keep on coming back year after year after year? Now, here's the part that actually gets me, even after everything that I just told you.
Remember the voice note from the photographer that we started off the podcast with? There's another part to it. The reason that she was actually, like, booking a call with me was because of this realization that she had based on her own lived experience. So this is coming from her, straight from her [00:15:00] mouth, not as a photographer, but as a mom and as a client to that other photographer that she was so mad about.
So this is basically like friendly fire . It's like the call is coming from inside the building. This is coming from one photographer to another about how the products feel on the other side of the fence.
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Voice Note: That being said, this super expensive album that I have lives in my nightstand drawer, and it is the one freaking thing that my kids go and pull open the drawer, and they flip through the album, and they look at it.
It doesn't, doesn't even matter how many pictures we have, like, on our bookshelf or, , on the wall. That frigging album, for some reason, m- maybe it's the location, I don't know, but there's something there that just really resonates, and I love that for them. And so anyways, that's my story, and that's why now I have that kind of feeling behind [00:16:00] products and why I'm willing to go the route of IPS, but- , , for photographers that don't have that experience necessarily, and they're looking at products as this huge additional workflow or like barrier, , like a mountain they have to climb, , or even also, like I said, it's like a ticket to losing all their existing clients.
That album lives in her nightstand drawer, not on a wall, not on a shelf, in a drawer that her kids dig through on their own because they want to. So even after the anger over how that photographer handled the reveal process, which by the way, was not the right way, and IPS has a whole entire system behind it that needs to be understood, which is also why going through a full program to learn it is so important.
But no matter how angry she was or how much [00:17:00] money she spent, the product itself still won. It's still the thing her son reaches for over everything else. It's this experience with her son that solidified the fact that she needed to start offering products and going down this route in her own business because of the impact that it actually has.
And she told me that she has a lot of hesitations around doing this. She's scared that it means piling on an entirely new workflow of vendors, , learning design, adding on shipping costs on top of, , this schedule that is already burning her out. And underneath that, she's scared that raising her prices even a little bit is going to make every single one of the clients that she has walk right out the door.
So those fears make complete sense. They really do. But they are also [00:18:00] based on myths. You do not have to sell $3,000 albums to run IPS or to run it well, and your prices do not have to skyrocket overnight and scare off everyone that you've ever worked with. IPS does not have to feel like a cliff that you're jumping off.
It can feel like a slide. You can ease into a new structure, one that lets you grow with clients who are ready for more, while you still also welcome the ones who aren't ready for more and aren't ready to spend more I know that what's actually sitting underneath the fear for you right now, it's not really just the products, or not really even just the pricing.
It's the change. It's the unknown to that change. It's that you're already exhausted, too. Already shooting three or four or five $400 sessions a [00:19:00] week, and editing until midnight, running your own website, running your own Instagram, trying to blog, trying to send newsletters, hearing educators say, "Add another meeting, add products, add design, add video."
And you just probably wanna, like, lie down on the floor and hide from all of it. And it feels so much easier to ignore the noise and just keep doing the same thing. And I hear you, I really, really do. But please listen to me whenever I say this, because it's the whole entire reason that I made this episode.
In-person sales is not one more thing on your pile. It's actually the thing that removes the pile. Remember that other photographer that I told you about, that reluctantly shifted her pricing inside my mastermind, and now she made over $20,000 in August? She told me that she had made more money on one mini session than she [00:20:00] would have made on seven sessions with her other pricing.
Seven. So do you get that? IPS is the solution to your overwhelm, because it's the only model that guarantees that you shoot less and you earn more. And it guarantees that you do that. Because the entire mechanism of it is that you stop needing those five $300 sessions per week in order to hit your number, and you start only needing two clients instead.
So you're not adding volume to your life, you're actually removing it. The fear tells you that this is going to burn you out even further, but the truth is, the volume game has already burned you out, and this is the way out of it
I told you at the start of this that I walked so that you could run, and I wanna prove that to you. And now [00:21:00] after I say these numbers, I'm ... Like, it's going to be very clear that I probably actually crawled so that you could sprint marathons. So listen to this. I ran my business on an all-inclusive model for 15 years.
15. I was charging about $1,500 a session, and I was one of the most expensive photographers in my city, and I genuinely thought that I was rolling in it. I thought that if I ever asked my clients to do it any other way, that they'd move on to another photographer. So I didn't for 15 years. The year that I finally made the switch, I did the exact same number of photo shoots that fall as I always would have.
I had the same clients, the same calendar, the same amount of work. But instead of the roughly, like, $30,000 in portrait sales I was used to, like, seeing during my fall season, [00:22:00] I made 90,000 with the same number of sessions with triple the revenue. And the following year, I went all in, the, the entire year, start to finish, and that year I made $330,000.
So 15 years
Of ignoring people who tried to teach me this and, like, not switching over. 15 years, that's well over a million dollars that I left on the table, all because I was scared to learn this new method, to learn a new way. I was literally... I was a fool. But you don't have to be. Here's the only thing that I actually want you to walk away with today.
Every one of those three myths that you've believed for so long, none of them are real. None of them are true. [00:23:00] They never were. I'm doing something that I've actually never done this year. I'm adding a guarantee onto the mastermind. The mastermind costs $10,000. You know that. There's no surprise there.
But you also know that my students are turning out revenue numbers that feel completely unreal. They are investing $10,000 with me, and they're turning it into $100,000. But there's never been a guarantee on that return, and that's left you still being able to say, like, "Okay, but what if it doesn't work for me?
I can't risk that $10,000." But now I'm backing the mastermind with a guarantee that if I don't at least make you your money back by the end of the mastermind, then you will not leave my program until you do. You will stay however long you need and have as much support from me and my team until we build you a business that is moving across that threshold.
So [00:24:00] you will build out with me the pricing structure, the launch system, the marketing, the IPS process, all of it. The exact same system that took my business to over $400,000, that's the work that we do inside of the mastermind. And I feel really glad that we got to reconnect today and go a little bit deeper than we have been.
This is the part of doing this podcast that I love the most, sitting here with you like this and actually changing the way that we think and changing the way that we move. So the link to book a call with me is in the show notes and in your inbox, and I know that I'm not supposed to officially open the doors for enrollment for another week, but we also know that I'm not very good at following rules, am I?
So if you book the call, I will tell you truthfully if I can or cannot change your business. So that's all for today. Bye for now, [00:25:00] 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, friends.
