Original subtitles

Welcome to another new studio.

This is our home for the foreseeable future

until I get a little bit bored and

just decide to move things around again.

It's time to talk a little bit about

the really fun stuff of being a self

-employed photographer.

Business tools and anything to do with admin

and my favorite subject, automation.

I can hear your whoops and cheers from

here.

Now it would be super easy for you

to just skim over this section and jump

straight into the editing and workflow part of

the course and who could blame you, right?

We're creatives, right?

We make art and we're free spirits.

We don't want to learn about business systems

but here's the thing, right?

I'm not here just for a laugh.

I'm here to make money and with any

service-based business, which we sort of are,

you make money when people find your work,

connect with you and you sell your services

to them and that doesn't just come on

a shiny new plate.

You don't get to charge £2,000 a

wedding or £5,000 overnight just like that.

You have to do the hard yards, the

late nights, the saying yes to every job

that lands.

You have to play the long game and

that takes time.

So let's start with time.

Business tasks, whatever that be, emails, booking clients

in, sending invoices, marketing, whatever it might be,

they all take up my time and time

is money, right?

So the more efficient I can be with

that time, the tasks that go into that

business, the more money I can make, sort

of.

But on a deeper level, the more efficient

I am, the better I can run my

business.

The better I run my business, the more

I can grow and in turn, hopefully the

more profitable I can become.

An example or sign that your business is

inefficient is this.

You get to the start of the wedding

season and then disappear from Instagram or social

media and you don't post regularly and in

turn your marketing suffers.

When your marketing suffers, you can't strive to

charge more.

You see, your business only grows with marketing.

So if your business grows, you get this.

Time is money but eventually money helps buy

back time.

To best illustrate this point, I want to

show you how my business numbers have evolved

over the past decade.

So in 2013, my first full-time year

of weddings, I shot 53 weddings.

The same in 2014.

In both years, I was turning over around

about £80,000 which in the UK is

just under the VAT tax threshold.

But then in 2015 when Buddy arrived, that

started to change.

I started moving towards a business that would

charge more so I could shoot less.

And by 2020, I had 22 weddings booked

in and that was for the same level

of turnover as 2013 and 14, the years

where I shot 50 plus weddings.

And in order to shoot that volume and

to be able to market yourself and grow,

you have to be efficient.

You have to have systems in place that

allow for growth.

And that growth has allowed me to save

31 weddings in a calendar year.

31.

Just think about that for a second.

31 weddings saved.

That's 31 less weddings to shoot, to call,

to edit, to deliver.

That's 62 less invoices to send, 62 less

journeys in the car, 62 less client calls.

That's more time to spend with these guys.

So before we get into the business systems

that I use in order to operate efficiently,

I want to take you back to 2006

first and the business I set up before

becoming a photographer.

Prince's Vintage.

I know, shit name.

But we sold vintage clothes on eBay at

fairs all over the UK and eventually on

our own website.

But this business set me up in so

many ways to succeed as a photographer.

It not only introduced me into the world

of photography but as importantly, business.

And the importance of being efficient because we

sold one-off items.

We had to process and list hundreds of

unique items every single week.

And the more we processed, the more we

listed.

And the more we listed, the more we

sold.

You can see where this is going, right?

The more we sold, the more revenue we

made.

A little side lesson for you all though

here.

This business failed because we failed to adapt.

We continued to try and rely on single

items and some golden eBay years rather than

recognising the landscape had changed.

Multi-product lines and multi-platform sales.

Our greatest strength, which was selling unique items,

was our biggest weakness because it was so

time consuming.

But it taught me to be efficient.

So here we are.

Let's get into what systems and tools I

use and how I use them.