PODCAST TRANSCRIPT - EPISODE 055

[MM] HOW TO KNOW WHEN IT'S TIME TO BUMP YOUR PRICES WITH ANGIE WYNNE

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Annemie Tonken  00:00

Welcome to mini mentoring. A weekly bonus episode of This can't be that hard. Every Friday, I share a conversation that I've had with one of you my amazing listeners about a problem or issue that's got you stuck in your photography business. We set the timer for 15 minutes and see how much progress we can make. And sometimes 15 minutes is all you need to find clarity or achieve your next breakthrough. If you've got an issue that you'd like to have featured on the show, stick around at the end to find out how to reach out. But for now, let's dive in. Angie,

Intro:

Welcome to this give me that heart. I'm so excited to have you on the show today. How are you?

00:35

I'm good. Thank you for having me.

Annemie Tonken  00:37

No, my pleasure. I love when you wrote in about your mini mentoring topic that you were like, I'm sure you get this a lot. And the truth of the matter is I do get this a fair amount. But I feel like everybody's pricing struggle is a little bit different. So I'm really excited to talk through yours today. And I guess before we get into that, I should go ahead and get my timer out. Which I didn't do before, which always slows me down. All right. So you know the deal. I am just going to set this for 15 minutes and and then you tell me what's going on and we will talk it through sound good. Perfect. All right, ready and go.

01:19

Okay, so I am a lifestyle family photographer I've been in I'm in my third year business. I started off like everybody did. Most people, I think all inclusive like $150, I quickly realized that wasn't going to work and kept just raising my prices. So for about a year and a half. Now I've been at the five $600 range, doing really well sold my 2020 By July. This is the first year I do feel like I'm starting to get like my ideal client, starting to sort of create work that I love consistently. But I'm overwhelmed. I'm doing like 150 sessions this year, I have three little kids at home. It's a pandemic, I'm just exhausted, I keep up my marriage, everything is just too much. I can't keep doing this. It's not sustainable. But I'm just really crippled by fear of losing all my clients that I'm starting to love rebuilding my business, moving to a collections package feels like nobody will want to do that. But I've been with I'm worried about being like highest priced photographer in my area and not having that experience to back it up. Since I've only been in business for three years. It's just all of it. I just can beat myself down over it. Yep. And I'm not moving forward. I'm just I feel like if I want to jump up to 750 That just seems crazy far inclusive. And we're where does it stop it just I keep raising my prices hoping that hoping people won't book but that will force me to slow down and it's just not happening that way. So yeah, I needed to change.

Annemie Tonken  02:58

Good. So I think what I'm hearing from you is not I mean yes, it is that you need a change, but it's also that you need permission. Your situation is classic for it is time to raise your prices and probably significantly but we'll get to that in a minute. And the reason that where you are is classic, it's time to raise your prices is that you are overwhelmed with work you sold out in July in a pandemic year. That's that's bananas like that should say to you, I am severely underpriced because the demand far exceeds the supply. Right. So we'll take it back to econ 101. Your you have limited time and your time has already been spoken for halfway through the year for the entire year. And I'm guessing at 150 sessions, based on the five second perusal that I did have your website that you're probably falling into, did you listen to my series on the alignment business alignment? Okay, so this is classic corny ass situation where you are giving like unicorn service and unicorn photos at sort of like Donkey quantity. And that's not again, I you know, I feel like it's confusing for people when I talk about unicorn and donkey. Unicorn doesn't necessarily mean more talented or more like great photos. It's just a matter of the whole experience and the way that those things are packaged up and delivered and yes, all inclusive can be a good foundation for a donkey model business. But but it seems to me that's not the kind of service that you want to get because at 150 sessions feeling that burnout that probably indicates that you're giving more than just the sort of baseline donkey model. So I would say like right off the bat, you don't it's time to raise your prices and you don't need to compare yourself in terms of the time that you've been in business. This is as art, this is not plumbing. You're not a plumber, you're a photographer. And so if the work that you're producing, creates that kind of demand that speaks for itself, if you're sitting here coming to me and saying I need to raise my prices, because I can't find anybody to hire me, that's a different conversation. And it may or may not be like the wrong thing to raise prices. But in your situation, it just seems really cut and dried. Your two options are either to dramatically reduce what you're delivering to people or dramatically increase your pricing. So the next thing I want to say is that I think that your fear of losing people is super common, but also unfounded, you don't, you won't lose everyone, I can tell you from not just my own personal experience, but from the experience of watching a lot of other photographers up their prices significantly, you will keep probably the people that you're describing as your bluebird clients, most of them will be the ones that stay with you and the ones that you lose, you may not miss at all. And the fact of the matter is, if you went from 150 clients to 100 clients or to 75 clients, but you are making twice as much money per client, you'd be making literally the same amount of money with half of the work that you were doing. The other thing that I don't necessarily talk about all the time, but three years in business is kind of that like messy middle time where you've gotten through a lot of the the hard steep climb of just starting out, but you don't yet feel like you've been in business for a long time. And so there is a lot of that self doubt and that questioning in that period of time, but it's it. It's just one of those things where I feel like we put that on ourselves a lot more than anybody else pays any attention to it, I would be shocked, truly shocked if someone if you changed your prices. And we're doing this for a year or whatever. And then you call me back and said 50% of the time when I get on the phone with a potential client, they question my prices, specifically because I haven't been in business long enough. Like it's just not going to come up. I would guess that no one will say that. And if anybody says that, it'll be like one in a million. They might say that's really expensive. Or they might say I can't afford that. But for them to question it because you don't have enough experience is wrong. If you were brand new, like you just opened your business, maybe but even then people don't necessarily know how long you've been in business, unless that's something that you splash everywhere. I'm sorry, I'm super monologuing. Right now, are you with me thus far? Yes. Okay, so the next thing that I want to say is, is has to do with the five Ps in your business alignment. So when I teach pricing in the simple sales blueprint, I come at that from a perspective of everyone runs a different kind of business, and you may only want 60 clients a year, but somebody else might be super happy with 150 clients a year or 200 clients here because they run a different style of business. So all of that has to do with your preferences. And and that's really the first thing that you have to audit, you have to think about what does work for me? What works for my kids? What works for my marriage? Do I photograph take? Do I take clients on weekends? Do I? You know, am I willing to do photo sessions in the evenings when I would rather be eating dinner with my family? Those are all questions that don't have right or wrong answers in the world, they just have right or wrong answers for you. So I think, you know, you're in an enviable position really, because you get to sit down and look at your, all of these preferences, all of these parameters, you know, the demand is there. And then all you have to do is the math. And then that math will spit out a number. And you look at that number and you say this is what I have to charge. And if I am not charging this amount of money, it's not worth it. Like it's not worth it in my life. Because again, like running a photography business needs to be profitable. It needs to be sustainable, because it's not, there's no point in doing it for a year. It's way too much work to just do it for a year. And then it needs to be something that you love, because otherwise the profitability and sustainability don't they don't end up panning out. So I feel like all the markers are there. Like you have the green light, you have my permission. But you have, you know, you should just give yourself that pat on the back. It's like it's time and the nice thing is you're booked through the end of the year. I don't know if you started taking 2021 bookings yet, but I would stop if I were you. I would put people on a waitlist and then I would figure out what your move is before you take any more clients because I think you need to get to that place sooner rather than late. After

10:02

you've said everything I was thinking, and it's I knew. So I just

Annemie Tonken  10:05

sometimes you just need somebody to validate that. And I totally agree and I, but you're, like I said, before we hit the record button, you're not the only person out there who's struggling with this. And so I really even if it was, you know, us specifically that needed that permission, I think there are probably a lot of people out there who need that permission and need to understand that this is not, we're not doing anyone of our clients any favors by slowly, what's the word I'm looking for, like drudgery, this work becomes, you know, because the thing that we start out with all this passion, it dissipates really quickly, when we're way overworked, and not getting compensated enough for the amount of work that we're doing. So yeah, I hope that you said you are booked, you are nodding when I was saying that you are booked into next year.

10:57

I've taken I mean, not a lot, but a few. And I've been thinking I was under the mentality that I just need to book them while they're trying to do it. But yeah, that might not be a good idea. Because then I have some resentment or whatever for oh, yeah, for sure. lower price for them. But

Annemie Tonken  11:19

the, I would just cut it off now. And I would say, yeah, we've got big fun things coming in 2021, I'm going to start booking, I, you know, is it okay, if I put your name on this list, I would build an email list for all these people who are contacting you. And as soon as you've got your plan set, for next year, I would send them all an email and say I am, you know, bookings are now open for 2021. Contact me, you know, it's first come first serve, whatever, and then be ready with your plan. And as you know, I'm all about I think you'd be surprised at how well or how relatively easy it is to transition people from all inclusive over to a session fee plus, plus collections model, there is just a lot of you end up getting people to spend more because they're not spending it all up front and they get to see their photos before they're being asked to make a financial commitment. And I see it time and time again, where that people sort of resist mentally, and they're like, I don't think they're gonna like this. They just want the digital files. But when you go through and help them understand, do you sell any product right now?

12:25

I mean, I started a pic time store and I have been having clients recently, like start, it's been like a month start buying products. So I was like, okay, there is an interest there are people actually buying it. So that does make me feel better. And I bought the blueprint. So like, yeah, by the time and this overwhelmed. Well,

Annemie Tonken  12:45

and you gonna say the timepiece is what you need to give yourself and the fall is a hard time to like the worst time to time. But like December, January, you know, maybe after the holidays, I feel like the new year is a good time to kind of get that stuff squared away. And I remind me where you are. St. Louis. So yeah, so you probably don't get a ton of people booking outdoor family sessions for January. Or maybe you do I don't know. But you know, sitting down at that point, and then at the end of January, just when like people are starting to look forward to spring and stuff like that launching then is probably a really good strategic time to do it. So give yourself permission to just like, you know, get through the next few months, get through the holidays, get to that place, and then take that rest period to really go through the whole thing. But cool, we did it with it less than a minute to spare. Wonderful. Well, thank you again for coming on. And yeah, I'm excited to see you feeling a little more like you've got your faculties. This time next year. It'll be a whole different thing. Yeah.

13:57

Thank you so much.

Annemie Tonken  13:58

It was lovely chatting with you. All right. I'll talk to you soon. Okay, thank you. All right. Bye. That's it for this week's mini mentoring session. If you've got a problem or issue in your photography business that you'd like to have featured on the show, go to this can't be that hard.com/mentoring and use the form to submit your information. I can't wait to hear from you.