Business Secrets of a High Performing Photography Studio - Links to a Benchmark with Lindsay Betz

Pat Miller: 00:00

I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. Today's show is going to put the word professional into The Professional Photographer Podcast because this conversation is going to make you money and make you profit, and it will challenge you to think about, what do I sell? And who do I sell to? And how do I find them? And what do I do with the money when I'm done? All of that on today's show with Lindsay Betz. Lindsay and John Betz, their studio has been open for decades, and they are one of the top performing studios in the country. And on this episode, we go deep, and we learn a ton. If you're sitting there thinking, "I wish someone could show me a better way to build my studio. I wish I could learn something that will help me be more profitable." You found it. We'll be back with Lindsay Betz after this. Lindsay Betz, welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?

Lindsay Betz: 01:04

Thanks for having me. I'm doing great. Yeah. Doing well.

Pat Miller: 01:07

I'm glad you're here. We've so much to learn from you. Like, my notebook is out. My pencil is sharpened. We are set to learn from a high performer. But if someone hasn't heard about you and John yet, we need to know more about what you do and how you look at things. So if we met you for the first time, how would you describe the studio?

Lindsay Betz: 01:26

Sure. So, we are portrait artists. We love to find ways that connect to the fact that, yes, we are a portrait-driven studio. We're here in Colorado Springs, and we're all print-based for the portrait side of what we do. So, when we have our individual families or high school seniors, a family with a new baby, everything is gonna be a print-based experience. We're saying these days, you know, welcome to a different experience because at this point, while the way that we do business is how professional photography worked for literally over a hundred years, it has become more rare to take a client all the way from start to finish to tangible pieces. So, if you met me as a client, a potential client, I'd be talking a lot of those languages to other photographers, you know, nuts and bolts. My husband's been a full-time professional photographer since 2002. We launched our own business together in 2006 and had moved from St. Louis to Colorado Springs. Primarily, our yearly volume of portraits is gonna be high school seniors, first and foremost, followed decently close by family sessions. Then we mix in some commercial sessions. We mix in some babies. We mix in some engagements. We mix in a couple of weddings, and that becomes the bigger picture of what we do. And, yeah, we love it. This is like the coolest profession really ever. Right?

Pat Miller: 02:58

It's a great profession, but it's one that we have to earn our opportunity to be in every day by being a good business owner. For someone that's been doing it as long as you have, there have probably been thousands of photographers that have tried and failed in that amount of time. Is it weird that there aren't a lot of examples of fully functioning profitable studios for others to point at? Do you think that's kind of getting in the way of photographers being introduced to the business?

Lindsay Betz: 03:26

I do think we're in such an interesting place. I've had a chance now, really, especially since 2018 to do a lot of education within Professional Photographers of America and speaking at Imaging USA, doing a pre-con class behind the Business Intensive Foundations for Portrait Photographers. But as I've kind of, you know, gotten in and looking around and starting to educate, it really just hit me that we've become an industry that almost requires you to be an entrepreneur. And the reality is that that's actually a very slim set of people that are truly geared and wired to be an entrepreneur. And so when we're an industry that's requiring people at this point to do their own business because there aren't the big studios that have a staff of photographers that you can be a staff photographer for, that really changes the scope of what it means to really enter this industry and not just be a glorified hobbyist or a I'm kind of doing this thing, but I'm actually, you know, only gonna serve my clients in this little box because there's this huge piece over here that I don't even understand. And I do see so many evidences of what is so rare now and how my husband, Jonathan, got his start into professional photography. I mean, he is so blessed to have first discovered photography actually out in Yellowstone National Park. He was working out there for a summer and got mentored by a professional photographer who was there. But to have had the opportunity to first learn photography by somebody who took the time to teach his eye to see light and then how to tell this tool of the camera how to see. That set his foundation. He learned on film. That also has become so rare, and yet learning on film is the entire reason why he gets things right in the camera, why he doesn't spend hours and hours behind a computer screen trying to fix what wasn't done well that could have been done well. You know, so many people are sitting in front of their computer for far too long instead of getting to be out there working with clients and doing their sessions. And that's really what you wanna do. That's really what you're passionate about. So he got a chance to have the foundation. But then his first full-time job was a staff photographer working for a decently high volume, multi-location studio in St. Louis. And so he got to see, hey, here's the receptionist who are filling the phone calls and doing scheduling. Here's the client showing up for the session, and I've taken care of this piece. But then they have a sales appointment. And then I see the order fulfillment and the people who are in the backroom who are doing the framing, who are doing the packaging of the orders. He had that chance to work for a handful of years in the beginning, being not only mentored on elevating his craft with professional posing and lighting, learning, and master photographers, but also to have that picture of a fully functioning studio, which then we knew when we came out to Colorado Springs. And now I was invited to run all of the not behind the camera pieces of the business. I like to tell our clients, I'm your before and after, and John is your photographer. I'll do the prep work and the scheduling on the front end, and I'm gonna be with you for the sales appointment and order fulfillment and all of that. But we knew the components. And the hardest thing, I think, for newer photographers right now is that you don't have the opportunity to necessarily have seen that in action. And so it feels as though it's fine just to take some pretty pictures and to deliver some files. And in reality, I truly do not know if you are really trying to make this a bread and butter career. I don't think you can manage to do it by simply doing a low-cost session and giving those files to your client and leaving them with the rest of the whole experience that could be what you can take care of and get paid very well to do when you're really the expert from start to finish.

Pat Miller: 07:31

But that's about modeling to show someone that there is another way. Because if you don't know any better, I got $300 for my digital images. And if you're just starting out, you might feel like I got $300 and it costs me nothing. And someone like you that does portrait work and wall art might go, "No. You're doing it all wrong." So it kinda comes back to that modelling and demonstrating what an alternate path might look like. And you told his story about taking the time to be really great with the camera, understanding light, doing it right the first time, and not being chained behind a computer so you can go to where your clients are. Both of those things kinda lead to the same place. We're here to serve and transform our customer, not necessarily capture an image. Is that the big misconception that you see when you go out and train?

Lindsay Betz: 08:19

I think I would say one of the really important things that photographers need to hear is that in this day and age, taking pretty pictures is not where you're going to find yourself valued as an expert in the marketplace. There is a flood of people taking pretty pictures. And so if you're just one in a sea of people, there's nothing making you distinct. And if you're really going to be seen as a valuable expert, you have to come alongside your clients with a far bigger picture of what this looks like. And that has to start with the very first phone call where you can position yourself as, "Hey, we're gonna take good care of you. We're gonna make sure that you're prepared from start to finish, and it's gonna end with something beautiful and tangible that you're gonna treasure for all the years to come and pass down to the next generation." But until you're using language that causes you to be very different from all the other people that they might be talking to, a client isn't ready then to see you as worth investing in in a different way than they're hearing so many other people "value what they do." You know, when you're not gonna be a $300 price point, every single thing you do from your web presence and how your website begins that conversation, to how you communicate on an initial phone call, to bringing them in, I strongly recommend when you're in the print-based portrait world, you've gotta be sitting down before they book with you and doing that preparatory and pre-booking consultation. And ideally, that's gotta be in person because I'm sitting in that client space. When clients come in and start seeing what I'm surrounded with, already we're starting to give them a different picture of, like, "Oh, this isn't to live on my computer and for me to just, like, flip through on my phone. Oh, this is art in my home. I'm adding the people I love most into those personal spaces." And that's an entire flip of a script that the digital world has brought that we have to run a chunk or two if we really want to serve well and provide amazing value through that service that then gets rewarded in the profit that we get, which I love–can't remember whose quote it is–but one of my favorite quotes is that profit is the applause your clients give you.

Pat Miller: 10:39

Oh, we need a T-shirt with that. Do you have t-shirts with that on it? We need a T-shirt with that.

Lindsay Betz: 10:44

I don't. But I would wear that T-shirt.

Pat Miller: 10:47

Yeah. We need to get that printed so next time you speak at Imaging, we can throw it out in the crowd. That's really great. I wanna talk more about pricing, but I wanna set that to the side because there's a danger when you interview an expert. And the danger is the expert throws out stuff so fast that it kinda gets glossed over.

Lindsay Betz: 11:04

I agree [inaudible 11:05]

Pat Miller: 11:05

No. It's great. You're doing great. I wanna back up the truck, though. The sale begins on the first call. The positioning begins on the first call. How are you establishing the outcome and setting the stage on the first call? Because that's something that if someone isn't doing intentionally, they're just trying to get the appointment and they move on, they may be missing a great opportunity to set up the entire engagement. So, can you share a little more about that first phone call and how you go about it?

Lindsay Betz: 11:32

Well, I think, you know, back up one step, though, because the phone call isn't gonna happen until they've found you. Right? And so, typically, the very first impression is either gonna be that they literally just clicked from our Google Business listing that popped up with a simple search, or they're gonna have gone to our website. Those two places need to be interesting enough to cause somebody to lean in and either fill out that contact form or pick up the phone to call us. I would say most people are gonna send a contact form, and then our next response is a phone call because I know that we are a highly relational business with an amount of touchpoints that in today's day and age means if you can't fulfill a phone call with me, you're not gonna be a good fit for a multi-appointment process that takes you from start to finish. And so, one point that I'll stop to make that doesn't speak to your original question, but just, you know, we're learning right now that people do business with people they like and with people that they trust–hold that–we also know that people are looking for a lot of frictionless engagement, but I will say that you do as a business owner and when you're coming up with how your communication flow happens with a client from start to finish, you do need to use some friction very intentionally to your benefit because it is one of those barriers to entry different from a price point. We also have price points that are barriers to entry, but some of the friction that we will put can be really intentional. And so, to me, I need somebody to be able to pick up the phone and have a conversation with me over the phone from an initial experience that they probably had just with a Google search that maybe brought them to our website as well. But you've gotta entice and give people reasons and, obviously, that can come from the quality of your imagery. I know that's the number one reason people do fill out an inquiry is they really see high-quality imagery on our websites. We break all the rules on how many poses you're supposed to show. We have loaded down portfolios. But we love what we do. We have a lot of great clients, so we show a lot. But in that first phone call, my goal is to make sure that I clearly communicate to them, first and foremost, we care about you. So every client that's a prospective client who's shopping for a photographer, all they know to ask is the price. But my job is to first build an initial start to a relationship by asking questions. Thank you for calling. You know, what kind of a session are you calling about? Oh, it's a high school senior. Tell me about your senior. What high school are they gonna graduate from? You know? And I'm asking some questions. If it's a family session, oh, do you guys have kids? Tell me about your family. I'm not spending a long time, but I want it to start with a relationship. Then I'm gonna ask, you know, I'm gonna speak to whatever questions they have, but I want to tell them a few things about who we are and how things work, so that they either will feel a disconnect or something that they didn't expect to hear and they ask more questions, or I'm literally telling them what should resonate for them to move forward. So I start in that very first phone call saying, you know, we have a lot of session options. We offer both indoor studio. We offer outdoor sessions. We're gonna take care of helping to guide you to the best session structure and the best session location when you come in for your pre-session planning consultation. I always want families to know right from the start that we're a print-based studio. So, every family's experience with us is going to end with tangible pieces of art that you have for your home. That is a different conversation probably than what they've heard from potentially other people that they've talked to. And so, it causes my families who truly just want to check a box, they want a file space photographer, they wanna do things themselves, that causes them to ask some questions so that I can clarify, and we can figure out in that first phone call if we aren't the right fit already. But otherwise, if they have enough interest, even if it's different, I might say, well, why don't you at least come in and see who we are and what we do more in full and decide from there? We have a no obligation, completely complimentary time to come in. We'll go through all the details. If we aren't the right fit, that's great. We want you to find who is. But if we are the right fit, now we're gonna know that it's gonna be a great experience, and then we're gonna book as long as they want to book that piece.

Pat Miller: 16:07

This is the voice of experience speaking. Because when you just start out, it seems as though it's real easy to say, "Whatever you like. Oh, we can do that. Oh, five extra poses or three locations. Yeah, whatever." But you're injecting friction in the process and sharing with them the way you work as a qualifier of who's right for you. And I think that's a power mindset shift that younger or newer photographers maybe won't feel as confident to stand up on. Is that something you learned through the years?

Lindsay Betz: 16:39

Definitely through the years. You know, business ownership, intentionality, and consistency are probably two key ingredients. If you're not intentional, you don't even know what's going well and where you have a problem so that you can fix it. We are very good at being intentional. We have dedicated time. Really, the seasonality of portrait photography is a gift if you can learn how to navigate, planning for the seasonality in ways that give you all the benefits of that. We could not work as hard as we do during the busy season 12 months out of the year. We would never have vacation. We would hardly ever see each other. But I am happy to work crazy hard for 70% of our income that comes in the latter six months of the year knowing that the first six months of the year, we have time to refine our business, to evaluate what went well, what do we want to change, and do we have any problems we need to solve? You gotta work on your business, but the only way you know what to do is if you're intentional. And the intentionality refines your business constantly so that you're always getting better. The consistency piece takes a lot of building. I mean, it's almost like when you go from not working out to working out. You know, your muscles are not ready to lift the weight you will two years from now if you're consistent. But that consistency has to be first probably scripted. I mean, that's where in the beginning, you're not gonna be ready for every conversation. But when you learn from every single conversation, you keep getting better. Your language gets better. When you had a conversation where you know you wish that you hadn't just, like, tripped over every other word or you had a question and you're like, "Oh, my gosh. The answer I gave in an unprepared moment was not the answer I ever wanna give again." Well, that is your ping to say, how am I gonna answer it better next time? What verbiage do I need to write down first and keep close? That then years from now, I have 10 different ways I could say the same thing, and they're all equally great? And I can pick and choose, and I'm not gonna ever sound like a robot, and it's gonna become second nature how I educate my clients well with language that constantly builds the value I need them to have when we're doing something that is going to be an exchange of some of their hard-earned dollars for something that we know is ultimately valuable and precious to them.

Pat Miller: 19:04

Okay, Lindsay. Don't listen to this part. Now if you're watching this interview and you're saying, "Woah. She's doing stuff differently, and I would love to run a studio like that. I can see why she's making a bunch of money. I hope this interview never ends because I'm getting a bunch of great stuff." You haven't seen anything yet. Okay? You're gonna have your mind blown. Okay? Now, Lindsay, back to you. What's your social media strategy?

Lindsay Betz: 19:24

To not really be there.

Pat Miller: 19:26

Oh, alright. I can't wait to talk about this. Okay. Minds are blown right now. Okay, what do you mean you're not using Instagram?

Lindsay Betz: 19:34

Here's a little bit of where we've been, where we are today. Web presence, I will say, is essential. I think you have to be with a web presence. So we have a great website that we love. We have consistently blogged for more than a decade. And I think while you would blog, initially thinking that people are going to read it, I feel like our blogging is just for the Google bots to see fresh content and to constantly see a lot of relevant details that have helped us to organically appear in the top first page of searches for our community when they search for us. We're very findable on Google. That definitely is time in business merged with fresh content and a very functional great website. When it comes to social media, I think what I want photographers to hear is everything about your business to me is going to flow the most freely, is going to be the thing that you're gonna love to wake up and do every day, if it is a true reflection of you and your old loves and values. And we, ourselves, as people, really don't share more than two hoots about social media. And so we're not gonna do it well when we don't love it ourselves. We've dabbled in it certainly in the past, but we found that our best clients, if we're asking them to invest in an experience that is print-based, a digital presence of advertising has never yielded our best people. And so what we should sound is that it's been far better. You know, if you go and if you search on Facebook, Jonathan Metz Photography, there is a page. You can tell it is very inactive, and pinged to the top is literally a message that's like, hey, thanks for finding us here, but we're actually not here. We're a relational business, so pick up the phone and call us. We just have found that it's not where our business came from. It's not what we love, but that does mean that there is a completely different way that we had to work very hard, and that took some years to build enough people in the pipeline of client families. And so I want people to hear that your very best marketing is to first and foremost serve the very best you can with the client in front of you. If you can do that well, one great experience turns into two, turns into 10. And no matter where you're finding those clients, a lot of times it's gonna be better to be visible in your community and to make connections and to start having people know where you are. And then those people start talking, and you start having more and more that's out there that then builds referrals, that then builds yes, pay attention to being found in Google searches that people are doing. That's certainly important. I'm not saying it's not important, but I do want you to feel a bit more freedom than sometimes culture makes it sound. You can have a viable business and not spend hours and hours feeling like you have to constantly be on social media.

Pat Miller: 22:54

And that is so liberating to hear because that's a big should, "Capital S". You should be on all of these different platforms, and here's a model, a different way to do it. You are investing directly in the schools where you get seniors from. Like, that is a go-to market strategy that has nothing to do with Instagram. What is your strategy there, and how does that work?

Lindsay Betz: 23:17

We are, in Colorado Springs, different from a number of markets where this may not be possible because it's contract-based, and the schools are making contracts with photographers. Our market is an open market, and so we actually have a handful of schools where the yearbook advisor, so if you're listening and you're like, hey, let me at least see if this is an opportunity. You'd be reaching out to the high schools in your area, calling those schools and asking for how to reach their yearbook advisor because, essentially, the way the programs work for the schools doing them here is these yearbook advisors have a program where a photography studio is buying in. In our market, it's typically a couple hundred dollars, okay, is all it is. You have the buy-in. They're gonna put you on a preferred photographer's list for senior portraits for their school families, and then you deliver your printed material, whatever it is you want to print and have, go out, and they send these packets home at the end of junior year so that the rising senior class has a packet of those preferred photographers. It's been great. The schools who do that, it's awesome because it is the most targeted advertising possible because it's literally going into the hands of the rising senior class. So if you have that in your market, we love that. I will say Google searches are still for us, the number one place that people find us, but those packets are awesome. And if you can reach a yearbook adviser and say, "Hey, I wanna support your program, and I want to pay you. And in exchange, is there a way that I can reach your incoming senior class for senior portraits and see what they say?" Because, obviously, these yearbook advisors see value because it supports their program.

Pat Miller: 25:03

Alright. We need to get comfortable because I still have a thousand questions on pricing and profit, and debt, but we're gonna get to all that. There's one more thing we have to talk to about when it comes to getting new clients. You shared with me that the hustle factor still matters. What does that mean, and what are we not doing as an industry?

Lindsay Betz: 25:21

Well, I feel like, you know, the first thing a newer photographer needs to hear is you're gonna have slow growth. There is an element of just time doing the thing you're doing and making that known that everybody has to put in that time. You can't wake up one day, launch a website, and the phone starts ringing, and here you have clients. And so you're looking at slow growth, but you've gotta, again, take excellent care of the client who's in front of you. You wanna have strategies for how do you stay on top of mind with families that have used you in the past so that they continue to have you come to mind in the future. And if you've done an excellent job, you should have earned the ability to have their loyalty in the future. That can look as simple as, you know, a follow-up phone call after they've had their order for a period of time. You're just making sure that you're pleased with everything. We do a handwritten thank you note to close their experience with us. Our main yearly annual piece that we definitely do is to send out a printed thank you card that thanks everybody from that current year. Plus, I go and send it to anyone that we've done business in the past with that I still have a working address for that we would love to see again. We have a unique thing in the Colorado Springs market with a very high military presence. Our population is about a third military, and so we do have a lot of churn. I fully believe that we have a ton of families who we would have earned their loyalty to work with another time, but because the military moves them, we only see a number of our families once. But being memorable, sending out that yearly card, and then, we started now making sure that we do a more in-person phone call when the guaranteed time for a family's portraits are ending and they're no longer gonna be guaranteed. That's one of the things I'm really trying to grow into a new layer of intentionality is to have a phone call. You know, thank you again for doing business with us in 2023. Let me know your guaranteed time for your portraits is ending. Is there anything else we can do to serve you? Is there a portrait session coming up that we can get scheduled for you? So touch points like that, I think, are really good. And, honestly, here's one of the pieces that I have really felt like is really a key as well to being memorable because you wanna be memorable and sticky in their minds. Right? And so, to a number of the photographers who feel good with their file-based delivery, I just wanna push back in a very, like, love you, but I want you really, really think about this. When you're print-based and there's not an option for a portrait client to leave the experience with you and have nothing tangible that is now gonna be on their wall or on a tabletop in their home, you are trading 365 days a year of multiple impressions a day of something that is memorable and loved in their environment. I mean, we have clients who call us now that we've been in business for long enough to have decades of clients. We have examples now of people who we did a session for them ten years ago. They're calling for a new session. They've not worked with other photographers. It's just ten years felt like, okay, now we need another one, and we're still memorable. And what they say is, I can't tell you how much I still love our wall portrait. That's memorable. You can't buy better marketing than that, than having a piece of art that you had a hand in creating for them. You're automatically attached to that piece of art. I'll also give everybody a little, like, tip on our favorite. So the other thing we make sure to do is, every year, there's like a top tier of clients who have spent, we'll set a bar and basically say, okay, everybody who spends more than x amount of dollars is gonna get a special surprise gift from us at Christmas. We have run the gamut of, like, a crystal base to, like, Omaha Steaks shipments to, you know, things like this. But our favorite idea that I don't think we will ever deviate from is we make a portrait blanket.

Pat Miller: 29:53

Oh, wow.

Lindsay Betz: 29:54

And our name is nowhere on this. You guys, the most powerful things for a thank you gift keep you kind of out of it, but gives them something that you're tied to without actually throwing all over the place your studio branding. So there has nothing with our brand on it, but it is we already know their favorite portraits, and we deliver this blanket, and we have never had the response to anything else like we have every year when we deliver these blankets. People are over the road.

Pat Miller: 30:22

That's a good one. We're writing that down. Did you write that down? You gotta write that down. Okay. Let's switch gears. Masterclass on marketing. Thank you for that. And customer acquisition. That's awesome. Let's talk about pricing. What is your studio's approach to pricing?

Lindsay Betz: 30:34

Well, profitability first. Let's all be profitable. We are trying to make money if we need to support our family. And I always remind people, if you're running a business but there's no profits, you actually have a hobby, okay, or a ministry. And hobbies and ministries are awesome in and of themselves. But if you're trying to put food on the table or put your kids through college or pay off a house that you're in a mortgage for, well, by golly, you got it charged enough to have money to do those things. So, you know, profitability first. That's first and foremost. But another piece to that is you can have the profitability in everything you sell, but there also has to be a level of volume, meaning the amount of times you sell that thing. Or it doesn't matter that there was profit left over. There's still not enough to actually support yourselves. I mean, we are solely supported. This is the only thing we do. I will say the cool advantage to that is if you don't have a plan B, and this is gonna be the thing that puts food on your table, there's a different fire in your belly to do the thing and to work hard at it and to know that there's a level of efforts and a level of excellence that's gonna be required. But you do it because you're like, okay. I love this, and there's a fire because if I don't work, I don't eat. So that's an important thing that you wanna keep in mind. A client can buy anything that we offer, and we have a very healthy profit margin in that. But we also know that we're aiming to be the most expensive in our area or aiming to only work with a client who spends, let's say, $2,000 or more, that it becomes such a small piece of your overall market that it's very hard then to have a healthy volume of activity in your business. We want a healthy activity of volume. And so, a part of that profitability actually being done and replicated enough times is we wanted to very intentionally broaden the scope of what people can choose to do. And so we have the high level of albums that we would love for every family to order. But we also know that if we have some other album options, we open up the opportunity to work with a broader scope of families because we're not telling them, well, if you work with us, you have to spend at this high level up here. These sales are fantastic. We love that they happen a lot, too, but we also have roughly 15% to 20% of our yearly revenue that comes from families who aren't way up here. And we would love to know that if a family values the work that John does and a print-based experience, that we can work with families even if they're only gonna spend $500 or less, and that's okay because now we're still able to show them what we do. We're able to give them what we consider to be a full-service, fully professional photography experience to where now they're gonna know the difference if they do something different in the past. We've at least given them, here's how this can look. And we're now the studio, that would be their answer to somebody saying, hey, do you know a photographer? Or who have you worked with? To have broadened the scope has been very valuable to us because now there's both profitability and there's a replication of profits that build to the point that we get to not only subsist off of photography, but we get to have the lifestyle of really cool vacations and trips and travels. And we get to be positioning ourselves to pay cash for our daughter's college that comes crazy enough very soon from now. This studio that we're getting to operate out of now,e saved 10 years out of the profits and retained earnings so that when we found the right property, we have the cash to do this. So there has to be a level of replication. And I'll share a really cool–I was listening to an excellent podcast. And the person that was being interviewed is a guy named Sahil Bloom. So this is his quote. One of his grandparents said this to him, and it's awesome. And it was, "You will go much further in life by being consistently reliable than being occasionally extraordinary." And I love that on so many levels. It connects to many aspects of life and just showing up and doing the thing consistently, reliably. But it reminds me too of a connection to what your sales strategy is going to be and how you're gonna position yourself. If you want to only do 10 sessions a year, great. Have a ridiculous, like, required sales amount. Go for it. But we're doing this full-time, and 10 sessions a year, like, would be kind of silly. Like, that's less than one session a month or something. And, you know, even two sessions a month or, you know, a hundred sessions a year, like, do the math. That ends up not being that much. You have a lot more capacity as part of what I think isn't talked about a lot within the world of professional photography. I think we've got a lot of people, and if that's the business you wanna run that is, like, super, super small and wanna work very little in my business for very high dollars, we have found that it has been highly beneficial to have a much broader scope and to say, "Hey, if you want what we do, we're gonna have payment plans. We're gonna have different levels of entry for what you buy. We're gonna have no minimum order requirements so that we can simply guide you to what's right for you and help you to feel great in the end." And that's a little bit of a a a less heard voice, I guess, in the world of professional photographers.

Pat Miller: 36:40

Yeah. It seems like all we hear about is that the cool kids charge a fortune. Is there just too much talk about this big ticket sales and that's it? Because I asked you about pricing, and you went to profit straight away. That tells me this person knows how to run a business and keep the doors open. So, are we talking about that overall top line figure too often when it comes to pricing?

Lindsay Betz: 37:00

I think there's just a sense of overemphasizing a dollar amount and forgetting that unless you're talking to somebody and then asking, well, how many times do you do that a year? We can get starry eyed about something that doesn't necessarily also indicate a true reality. And so every business has to look at profitable in what I'm pricing myself and my products that I'm selling at, but then also realizing how often and how much do I need to do this thing. And if I'm priced way up here, I'm trying to cast a really small net that has to catch just the perfect fish instead of here's a really broad net, and any fish that wants to end up in my net could find a place. I just think there's two different sides, and we don't often merge a really cool sale that we hear over here with whether or not that's getting replicated. And we would love to worry less about what somebody's gonna spend knowing that in the end, because John's doing impeccably beautiful work that's going to be highly desirable, we have highly desirable, high-quality prints and products that are attractive to people, that it's going to be hard for somebody or a lot of somebodies to do very little. And most of the time, they're gonna end up in the place where we'd love for lots of people to land. Sometimes we're gonna get giddy because they did even more than that. And that's been a progression. Nobody wakes up doing all of their pricing and their product offerings perfect. So, this has obviously been refined literally every single year. And in the beginning, we had a lot of, like, packages that we offered. Because you know what? In the beginning, that is a great place to start if you're trying to cut your teeth, getting confident in the sales rep. Giving yourself some very set things to sell builds a lot more confidence. But then you start to realize, oh, well, my top package is basically my big stop sign, and nobody's ever gonna spend more than that because there's a big glaring stop sign to the client. This is the best I can do is whatever that top package is. You've gotten more confident. You start to know more and more what you'd love to sell, what you don't even like to sell, and you should just stop selling because you're never gonna sell it because you hate it, too. So why would anybody else love it? And then you start this process of how do I remove every single stop sign so that the sky is the limit and I can guide anybody towards something wonderful. You know, I think, Pat, a quick example too that is just helpful for some people to maybe understand a little bit of, like, the psychology of who we want to be, for the market of people looking for a professional photographer in our area is, like, think of a fine dining restaurant, and that fine dining restaurant is going to have all different people come in. And they ultimately are going to provide the same ambiance, the same flatware, China, whatever, all of their kind of pieces of, like, what you get to sit on, the tablecloth, what does that room feel like, here's this beautiful menu of amazing things, and they're gonna obviously be most excited for somebody who comes in and orders the very premium entrees and maybe does all four courses that could be done, has a bottle or two of really premium wine. And then you're gonna have the other people who come in. They're gonna stay with the ice water. They're gonna do the side salad and the more reasonable entrees. And what was most important, that you had somebody always come in and do, like, the four-course meal, or we're here to serve really well with our best and let the client in front of us determine whether they want the ice water and the side salad or whether they want the four-course meal. And either way, we're gonna treat them well. We're gonna give our best, and they should leave with an excellent experience. And we wanna be here for both sides of that equation.

Pat Miller: 41:00

Before we get out of here, we do have to talk about money because we talked about how you get your clients. We talked about what you sell them, how you think about that, customer service. All of this has been great. But when you get clients and you sell them things, it ends up in money. And you shared with me that you don't use debt. How did you make that decision, and what does that look like in practice?

Lindsay Betz: 41:20

How we made the decision, I will say, John and I are both probably savers, in general, and we're both very, I'll say frugal on one end. But we really, more than anything, we want to be educated consumers. And so we always want to slow down enough to know that we're getting the right deal, that we're buying the right thing. John's my huge researcher. What's fascinating in our journey is, before we moved to St. Louis, we were both working. I was a music therapist, so not even in this industry. He was doing his studio job. We were kind of in that, like, early married place where we didn't even know the resources that we had. We didn't know it was weird that, like, we put, you know, like, thousands of dollars into savings every year. Like, we just didn't realize that was not normal. If there had been a time ever that we would have debt-funded life, it would have been when we moved to Colorado Springs, more than doubled our rent, took a, my gosh, I think our yearly income went down about 60% from what we made in St. Louis to having little side jobs that were gonna help us, you know, just subsist while we got this business off the ground. You know, pro tip, you can't open your doors and then all of a sudden, like, there's a paycheck coming in the photography world. Like, you gotta give your business time to get healthy itself before you can start paying yourself. But we were given that summer before we moved, Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover book. And what was awesome in that book for us is it cemented in our mind a commitment that we were not going to go into debt. So that has carried on the entire time. I will say, when we first read his book, there were probably two pieces that were revolutionary. One was that you can buy cars with cash, and the second was literally you don't need credit at all. And so the car thing was like, okay, wow. That's a little mind blowing, but I get it. Sounds cool. Great. We haven't had a car payment since 2006. The credit cards took me a minute, but I will say when we left that industry, back in 2007, and haven't looked back. And I know that that is, like, completely counter cultural in our world, but when you think about it, it's just an industry that has probably had one of the most successful marketing strategies in all of time possibly, because the credit card industry has convinced everybody we are your safety net. You need us to do life. If you don't have this, you can't do life. You have to have points. Like, you should feel really great. You guys, those are some of the most profitable industries. If you don't realize that you are lining their pockets, those points are not making them nonprofitable. They are not suffering an inch by those points. But those points are kind of getting you to dabble in an industry that at worst is predatory and at best keeps you constantly living in the past because you're buying things that you still owe money for. And so now instead of forward fueling and self-securing, how you're gonna do your life, you're constantly paying off things that already happened. And so, it actually is like you're trying to drive forward, but looking in the rear view mirror. And I think that mindset is one of the most powerful pieces of not using debt and credit. I think we remove a level of creativity and problem solving that we can have really strong muscles in if we take off the table that we just are gonna buy this on credit. So we've grown at the speed of cash, and what it does beyond just using the huge front mirror, and being forward focused in what you're doing, you eliminate risk out of your financial picture, both for your business and for your household. And I think what people don't understand about risk is that there is a level of burden that you may not even know you carry when you owe debt because everything is fine and dandy with monthly payments that you owe to all these things until anything shifts. And then all of a sudden, now you're on the hook for these things, and your picture has changed, and that's a lot of pressure. The top reason why businesses fail is problems with cash management and cash flow and debt. And so if you can eliminate those two things, you automatically are putting yourself on the best side of the small odds to where you're gonna land there. And, like, let's just look back at 2020 and what happened there. I mean, the building that we have right now, again, I told you we saved for ten years so that we could cash flow a dedicated studio building, which is on our property. So we walk about 30 steps of a commute, back and forth to and from work. We opened the doors in late January of 2020, and roughly eight weeks later, the government told us that we were a non-essential business and that we couldn't do business. Had we taken out a 6-figure loan, that would have felt quite crippling, and yet we didn't do it that way. We had it paid for in full. We have an emergency fund in our business. We have an emergency fund for us personally. So instead, COVID happened, and we looked at each other and said, "Huh, this is not something that we thought would ever happen that we would have the government tell us we couldn't work. But, okay. We're good. You wanna tackle some home projects?"

Pat Miller: 47:02

Yeah. Gotta do something.

Lindsay Betz: 47:03

Yeah. I mean, it turns when you don't use debt, it turns things from crises to inconveniences. And it gives you a freedom of deciding how you wanna work, when you wanna work. You get a chance to dream and then have funds funding up to those dreams. And then when you get a chance to, like, do the cool trip, you come back, and you don't owe it to anybody. You get to come back and just start talking about the next one and save enough for the next one. It's just been such a freedom-filled, peace-filled, forward-focused way to do business in life.

Pat Miller: 47:39

You're the first in our high-performing studio series. Let's give you the last word. Is there something else that you haven't shared today that you wish people do so they could also become a high-performing studio?

Lindsay Betz: 47:49

I would just encourage you to start with that belief and confidence in your heart that the work that you create in photography has value and it's lasting. And you wanna value your time and value your craft, and that translates to, I'm gonna charge what I'm worth. And not everybody's gonna be your client, and so you want to have that patience to work with the right people because you're gonna be happier anyway. You know? If you get to work with only the right people, well, that's a way more fun thing than either overworking yourself and burning out because you didn't charge enough. So you had a ton of clients, but they didn't really appreciate what you did, and you weren't really making enough to, like, have a life outside of your business. That's not fun. So if you charge what you're worth, work with the people who get on board with that and say, yep. I see that, and I'm gonna reward you with my hard earned dollars for something that I value. You're gonna love what you get to do. And this truly is the coolest industry. I think anybody can do it, but it will take time and it will take a ton of hard work, and you've gotta be intentional and you've gotta be consistent.

Pat Miller: 48:57

This easily could have been a four-hour show, but we did do a four hour show today, but congratulations to you and John and your success. And thanks for joining me on The Professional Photographer Podcast. I appreciate it.

Lindsay Betz: 49:08

Thanks for having me.

Pat Miller: 49:09

Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. Was I wrong? We could have kept going. This could have been–we could have filled up YouTube. Like, YouTube would have been full if we would have kept talking because they are, man, that was awesome. Lindsay, thanks again. We really appreciate it. Before you go, will you do me a favor? Can you like and subscribe to the show? And most of all, leave us a comment. If you leave us a comment about what Lindsay said that made you think differently or maybe what you wanna hear more of on the show, we're paying attention to that because we're trying to build this program to make sure that we are helping you make more money and become more profitable. So like, subscribe, comment. The gift is in the mail. Not really, but just pretend I'm sending you a lavish gift for doing all those things. One other thing, if you're not yet a member of Professional Photographers of America, you're missing it. PPA offers incredible resources like equipment insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's a perfect place for photographers who are serious about growing their business in a sustainable and profitable way. At PPA, you belong here. Discover more about membership at ppa.com. That's ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, Founder of the Small Business Owners Community. Thank you for joining the show today and being a part of what we're building. We'll be right here next time. See you then.