How to Add A Little Volume For Big Bucks with Brent Watkins
Ever wondered why some portrait photographers seem to struggle with income consistently? In a world where artistry often clashes with commerce, Pat dives deep with Brent Watkins, a seasoned pro who’s redefining what it means to thrive in the photography business.
Episode Highlights 🎤💡:
(07:32) - Sports & School
(16:45) - Sales Speech
(28:22) - Business Questions
Connect with Pat Miller ⬇
Connect with Brent Watkins ⬇
Transcript
I'm Pat Miller, and this is the Professional Photographer Podcast. Okay. You're a portrait photographer, and you think to yourself, boy, I wish I had more money. And the answer is, guess what? Let's do some volume photography. Now, there are some portrait photographers who hear the v word and think no, that's not for me. But what if I told you could work it into your portrait business and start making consistent revenue and not go all in on volume photography? Instead, you could roll in some SmallVol. It's a cool little term coined by Brent Watkins. He's our guest on the show today, and his concept is start small, get consistent, and you'll be shocked where volume photography can take you. On today's show, we're gonna talk about what it means to be a volume photographer, how to get the gigs, and what it will do for your portrait session when you embrace it. Sound good? I mean, you do like money. I mean– I'm like Mr. Krabs. Money, money, money, money. I love money. So if you're like me and you wanna make more of it, let's welcome today's guest, Brent Watkins. Welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?
Brent Watkins:I'm doing great, Pat. Thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate your time.
Pat Miller:Now someone hasn't met you yet. Tell them who you are and what you do.
Brent Watkins:Hi. I'm Brent. I am a professional photographer, as most people on this podcast I'm sure are. What's different about us is that I'm actually a third generation photographer. Our studio has been in business a little over 80 years. I've been doing this for 30 years, and I've been a member of PPA coming up on '25. So actually, almost half my life now, a PPA member. This is all I'm qualified to do guys. It's the only thing I can talk about.
Pat Miller:Congratulations on all that success. I'm curious just because I have to ask the question. Some people may look at that tenure, like three generations, and think, they must have it in the bag. It's easy. But I bet you feel I don't wanna project it, but do you feel an extra burden because you are the third generation and you don't wanna mess it up?
Brent Watkins:Oh, absolutely. I have–it's just me, but I feel that there is a legacy that it is my duty to protect and an industry that it's my duty to give back to because it's given so much to me and my family.
Pat Miller:And that's why you serve as a councilor.
Brent Watkins:That's why I'm on the council, and I should have said that. I'm on council at PPA. I've served on my state board as president a couple of times. I still help them with their events. Guys, come to Ohio. It's a lot of fun here. But, been involved in the industry. I have a group on Facebook. If anybody would like to join me, it's Mentor.photo. We did a big video thing a few years back during the pandemic; a lot of you might have seen, but I try to be as plugged in as I can, but at the same time, I have a studio to run. So while I create a little bit of content, I am not a content creator. I'm a studio owner and a photographer who tries to get back where I can.
Pat Miller:Today, we get to dig into your expertise. We're gonna talk about volume. But we're not gonna go there straight away. I wanna dig into one of the struggles that everyone faces. And you probably, as we just discussed, you've lived this for a long time, the struggle just to make money in the industry. Why is that so hard? Why is it difficult for photographers to ask for money?
Brent Watkins:Wow. Let's start off with the easy one.
Pat Miller:Just go right to it.
Brent Watkins:For the most part, and I do a lot of business consultation and things, and I teach business. But I find most photographers are artists or many photographers are artists, and most artists are terrible business owners because they identify themselves as artists and not business owners, which is something a couple of moments ago, I said I'm a studio owner and a photographer because I'm a studio owner first. My kids only eat if I sell photographs. So I have to ask people for money for what I do. And if I don't get money for what I do, my kids don't eat, I lose my house. That legacy I'm trying to protect, poof, gone vanished.
Pat Miller:At its heart, does that mean this is just the classic tale of art versus commerce?
Brent Watkins:Yes, to a large degree. And it is also so many artists want to derive validation from their artwork. And, ooh, I think you should love this portrait. I love this. And let me back up about our studio. We are a classic portrait studio. We have done a lot of high school senior portraits, weddings, and events. Volume is something that we also do, but if people ask me what kind of photographer I am? My response is I'm a portrait photographer. Now what that means is in a sales room, a lot of photographers want to, but they picked the wrong image. Let me give you this one, too. As a business owner, I don't get that luxury. I get to sell things to my clients to improve their lives. I don't get to give things to my clients to improve their lives because I also have to improve the lives of my children, my employees, and everyone else at the studio.
Pat Miller:Yeah. Is that the difference?
Brent Watkins:Being a business owner, which is not the sexy part of being a photographer. Everybody's like I'm a photographer. You get to spend your life living behind a camera. If we're behind a camera 30% of our day, that's a busy day behind a camera for most photographers.
Pat Miller:Is that the difference between selling like an artist and selling like a business owner that you're not because you said something I think really connects. Well, they picked the wrong one. This one is better. They have to have this one. Is that what selling like an artist is like?
Brent Watkins:That's exactly what selling like an artist is. Because, again, you're trying to derive validation for your art from what your client chooses to love. And having done this for a long time, I'm gonna let everybody in on a secret. Clients make the wrong choice every single day. Clients don't understand composition. Clients don't understand art. They don't understand lighting. They have no idea how to buy art or an artistic experience. All they know is I like that for some reason, and here's some of my dollars so I can have it. So every choice they make, while we say it's the wrong one, it's the right choice because it's the one they wanna put money behind.
Pat Miller:So model it for us then. You're the artist that takes the pictures, but you're the business owner that sells them. When they make the wrong choice, how do you swallow hard and just move on to the next slide?
Brent Watkins:Asking them what size they'd like that to be in if it needs to be framed. "Would you like fries with that?" is the correct response because it's not my job to judge my client's taste. I'm the one who presented them the image. If I showed them an image, it should be saleable. Okay? Now, it might not be my favorite, but maybe it's my favorite because I had to lay upside down, and we used nine lights, and we had six gels and a smoke machine. Okay, that's my favorite. And grandma likes the traditional yearbook style portrait because that's what grandma was trained to like as a portrait her entire life. And if she loves it, who am I to tell her different? I'm just gonna write it down on the list and see what they wanna buy next.
Pat Miller:I'm glad we got to the selling part upfront because this episode is about selling not a little, but big, vast tracts of land. We're gonna sell some real volume on this episode. And as I've done a bunch of these interviews, and being the husband to a studio owner– she's amazing–some portrait photographers seem to be allergic to the word volume. Why is that?
Brent Watkins:I think there's a lot of reasons for that. Let me back up and say I'm not sponsored by anybody. I'm just gonna give you my opinions here. But the truth of the matter is, the portrait world, and to some degree, the teaching world, tends to treat volume like they stepped in something.
Pat Miller 7:14
And I'm sorry. That was funny. Go ahead. Keep going.
Brent Watkins 7:16
I appreciate that. I try to be funny. It's the only skill I have. But what happens with volume is people say, "Oh, I can't be artistic. Oh, I can't really do this. Oh, I'm not just selling cheap portraits to people." Volume photography is the most of what most families buy. They buy Johnny and T ball. They buy Johnny in wrestling. They buy Susie playing lacrosse. And then you get into high school, and they do the high school pictures, and we do all of those services for our clients. Of course, you can come to the studio and spend $3,500 on a portrait package. But for the sports stuff, and this is where portrait photographers disengage–it's not creative enough for them, or that's what they say. But what it does is it's lucrative. It will keep your studio open. You can be as creative as you want at a portrait shoot that you can price however you like, if all your bills are paid by volume. It doesn't matter what your prices are for portraits. You can be $12,000 for a portrait session, or you could be $12. You could be a charity photographer as long as all your bills are paid because your first job is to be a business owner.
Pat Miller:It seems to me that people have an easier time saying, "Oh, I do head shots and senior photos, and I'll do a wedding every now and then." They're cool having those different kinds of specializations. But when it comes to portrait or volume, that just seems to be a wall between those two.
Brent Watkins:This is something that I am working very hard to try and break down, that you can be a portrait photographer and be a volume photographer. And I'll be honest, all the teachers that most people actually admire up on stages do volume work. They just don't talk about it. Because the money's too good and the hours are too good. Imagine you could make enough money to run your business and pay your employees during business hours, and you don't have to work weekends and evenings. That's what volume is.
Pat Miller:Yes, please. That sounds great. I'd like that.
Brent Watkins:I would like to go into a school building at 7AM and be done at 1 o'clock and have photographed 1,200 kids and know I'm going to run an average of about $50 a piece. So if you wanna do the math on that– that's $65,000 a day.
Pat Miller:Oh, yeah. That's that's $55,000 a day. That's a lot of money.
Brent Watkins:That's well, it's not a small amount of money. That's for sure. And maybe that's three or four high-end portrait sessions, but I can still go do three or four high end portrait sessions.
Pat Miller:Sure.
Brent Watkins:My Saturday is clear because I made more time in my week for higher value activities. And it's not people like to talk about, "Oh, this is my senior average." But photograph 300 kids and get a hundred dollars out of each of them. And, oh my gosh. That's a lot of actual money.
Pat Miller:That could be a month of senior photos depending on your volume. And I like the way that you talk about volume. You've come up with a term called SmallVol, and it seems very approachable. So what does SmallVol mean, and how does it work?
Brent Watkins:Okay. So SmallVol to me, and this, yeah, it's a word that I came up with. But if you're a sports fan, you might have heard of the term small ball in baseball or basketball. And what small ball is base hits. It's just getting on base. The more times you get on base, the more runs you will score. SmallVol is the same thing. I am going to look for small groups. When people think of volume, one of the things that scares them is they think of the giant portrait day. I'll say the name, the Lifetouch Style Portrait Day. Nine photographers come in who are of different skill levels, and they're delivering a lowest common denominator product. It's not what we do. We are a portrait studio. I can't deliver a bad product. I just couldn't live with it in my soul. These are beautifully lit portraits, and I get thirty seconds to make somebody feel super special standing in front of my lens, and then I say, next. And I do it again and again. But the SmallVol for me is I don't want giant jobs that take nine photographers. My wife and I are both photographers. We own our studio. If I need more than two backgrounds, I don't wanna shoot it. I don't wanna necessarily be hiring a lot of staff to come into these gigs because, again, I don't get to interact with them as much. And most of the school work that we do is in communities where we do all the league sports, all the, you know, YMCA sports, baseball, T-ball, soccer, and the high school sports, too. These communities buy from us on average 6 to 12 times a year, these families. It's the same families over and over again, and they trust us, they know us, and they are happy to pay us, and they're not shopping us against other people at this point. So that's the small town, small volume. I don't need a school that has more than 2,000 kids in it. Honestly, 1,200, if there's a hundred kids in a class, that's, like, perfect. It's your small rural communities, the ones the big companies can't service as well as we can, and we offer them everything. And they love us for it.
Pat Miller:So is the innovation or the insight here that volume is good, and everyone recognizes that if you can do volume, you'll make big piles of money. But the innovation is you don't have to go for the corporate office with 10,000 employees. You can go for these interest pods around a sport or a smaller school that might be a hundred kids or 500 kids and really supplement the business. That's what you're talking about.
Brent Watkins:Absolutely what I'm talking about. And the areas that if you are, let's talk about how it mixes together with a portrait studio, if I may. I build–let's use a corporate term–synergy.
Pat Miller:Look at that.
Brent Watkins:Because my high school students or all of my sports kids, we're photographing them from the time they're T-ball age. So let's say kindergarten, five years old to the time they're 18, and we photograph their graduation at their high school. Now the ones that are in sports that we enjoy are in dance. They're in gymnastics. Those girls, a lot of time, get approached by us to say, "Hey, you should be on our senior model team at our studio for our portrait sessions." They have friends that are very much like them, and they're all involved in different things. So if they bring me one of their friends who happens to dance at a different dance school, and then that school goes, "Wow, your pictures are better than our pictures." That person now has brought me another dance school and more potential senior clients. So I'm opening up the pool of the type of client I want to work with, and I'm getting their low-margin work and their high-margin work just by servicing them well.
Pat Miller:I want to redefine volume photography too because you don't just think about sports teams and schools. You get pretty creative about what volume looks like. Can you give us some out of the box examples of literal volume photography, but civilians like me wouldn't think of it that way?
Brent Watkins:Sure. Business head shots, volume photography, right out of the gate. That's really no different than school picture day. But there's something that a lot of photographers do called mini sessions, and all a mini session is volume. In fact, all volume photography is you build a background and you see how many people you can put in front of it to take their picture. There's volume photography. That's all it is. So mini sessions, you're going to do your pumpkin patch sessions. You're gonna do your Christmas farm sessions. Guys, that's volume. It's all that is. It's a limited number of images in a limited set for a limited time. That was fabulous. You guys were great. Next. They step in. That was fabulous. Saying next means it's volume photography.
Pat Miller:I like that. It's a really good rule of thumb. I know that big piles of money is one of the advantages, but there are other advantages to putting volume into your studio. So what else besides the big piles of cash, which we like, what other kinds of advantages come with embracing volume?
Brent Watkins:Well, so first, cash. We joke about big piles of cash, but cash flow is a lot of times more important than workflow because my rent is due every month. If I'm working with volume clients who are repeatable, we finished them this spring, and they're like, this was fabulous. The day ran great. Can we book next year right now? They are repeatable businesses. They are bankable. They're less fickle than portrait clients. Again, if you do a lot of portrait work, and I live in a senior portrait world, so I'll talk about that. What's more fickle than a 17-year-old girl who is our target market for senior portraits? And then suddenly, one of your prospects and all of her friends go to the person who got a new iPhone down the street, and they walk around the woods for a few hours. No. Those are my portraits now. No sports league is gonna do that. No sports league is bringing that work in-house. They don't have the time. They don't have the talent. They don't have the capability. So it is more difficult for a sports or volume client. Again, business head shots. Once you've established a look for a brand, they're not going somewhere else. They're gonna call you twice a year to come into their office, photograph 40 people, and deliver two days later exactly what they know you're gonna deliver. They're there to buy consistency. They're not there to buy art. And that's true for schools. That's true for if you do a yearbook, one of several of our schools require yearbooks. We provide yearbooks to them. Schools are not gonna go out and get that done by themselves. We have great partners. If you were at the expo at Imaging USA, there were a lot of yearbook companies there to talk to. And while I might recommend one over the other because I have some relationships, the truth of the matter is any of them are gonna serve you well, and you can provide that product too. And the more times a client buys things from you, the less reason there is for them to shop somewhere else. So it provides lock-in.
Pat Miller:I've heard you say something counter-intuitive about volume photography and I wanna see if I express it correctly. So correct me if I'm wrong. If someone's watching this, they're a portrait photographer, and the way they make their sales is that the work is phenomenal. But their sales skills aren't what they need to be. Just the work is really, really good. So the thought of having to go sell 300 or 400 images to different families might be super overwhelming. But the counter-intuitive part, you've said that that kind of selling is actually easier and this might be the place to go if you're no good at selling. Did I get that right?
Brent Watkins:You got that exactly right. When I consult with portrait professionals, the first employee most portrait photographers should hire is a salesperson because most of them are terrible salespeople. It's true.
Pat Miller:Ooh. I believe you.
Brent Watkins:It's just most artists are bad salespeople, but they have met a parent who maybe sells Mary Kay, maybe sells real estate, somebody who can sell things to people and loves their work. Why aren't you hiring this person to do your sales for you? Because they can speak with passion and as a customer to another customer. So there's a tip for the portrait crowd. Go hire yourself a salesperson. But when you're shooting volume, I cannot sit down and have in person sales sessions with 80 clients from a dance school. This is a web sale. This goes online, and you will find yourself a service. I use GotPhoto, but there's PhotoDay. There's several other ones out there, Candid Color. Find a service that matches your style, that matches your workflow, and work with them. Send a link to people, and they go, "Oh, my gosh. There's so many here. I love everything. I just really feel like I need to click the buy all button." And then your average goes from $40 a student to a $100 a student.
Pat Miller:That's nice.
Brent Watkins:For no back end work or limited back end work. You ship that work off to a lab. They print it. It comes back or it ships directly to your client, however you choose to set that up and frees you up to go serve as your next client.
Pat Miller:Okay, yeah. Pat and Brent, you got me sold. I want a SmallVol in my life. What are the first few steps to go down this road?
Brent Watkins:First steps. Well, okay. There are several different ways you can do this. I will tell you the first steps that several of my friends have taken when they got thrust into this world, and I actually have a friend who got thrust into this world, and his first step was he called me And I said, "Man, let me help you. I got a spring shoot coming up. Come, just look and see what this is," because most portrait photographers don't have an entry point. Now that has actually gotten much easier in the last few years. There are several conferences. Imaging USA just happened, and there's a sports and volume track there where we will sit down with anyone and tell them how to do this. Find a lab. If you probably have a relationship with a photo lab, several of them offer classes where you can go to their jumpstart class. I'll be honest. I'm plugged for, my lab is H&H. They have a great jumpstart class. You can go take their class, whether you're working with them or not and get a feel for what this looks like. They will tell you cameras. They will tell you settings. They will tell you setups. This is something that don't try to invent because this wheel already exists. There are several outlets that are happy to spend three days with you and teach you how this all works, but don't try to do it at the last second because volume is about systems. When I switched over to a lot of volume and online sales, it was during the pandemic, actually. We picked up our first two school districts because of the pandemic. So it's only been five years that I've been preaching the volume work really hard. And when there was no one air traveling, I flew to my lab and I took their class. And it laid my foundation for the first year, and then I knew what I didn't know, and that's really important. Then I could start tweaking that system, trying to understand it better. Is there a better sales system? Is there a better this? Is there a better that? And we then moved to the GotPhoto system because it has such a beautiful online shopping cart, and it's such a nice experience. But I was shopping for my fall sports in January when I went to SPAC to go find a product. Don't try to jump into it at the last minute because that's a recipe for disaster. You have to do–all the work that you're saving your customers is something you get to do on the back end in volume. There is work there. Picture day is the last part of the sales cycle for volume, not the first part of the sales cycle for volume.
Pat Miller:That's a good piece of insight, and planning and systems are definitely a part of the success. I wanna stay true to the SmallVol concept. If I'm a portrait photographer, and I'm not doing, you know, big boy or big girl volume yet, but we try and get into it, what does success look like? One volume shoot a week, a month, a quarter, like, how would you know that someone's getting traction?
Brent Watkins:That's a great question Pat. I would say the first thing is how's your bottom line looking? That's how you know if you're getting traction in volume. Are you willing to just look at certain portrait shoots now and say, I don't like doing that. That's okay. You don't have to photograph everything. You know what I don't personally enjoy photographing? Babies. I don't. My wife is fabulous at it. I don't like it. You know what I never need to photograph again in life? Babies. So when someone calls my studio for that work, I make enough money. I can say no to clients now. So that's the ultimate form of traction is that we don't do that. I'm sorry. I have drastically reduced wedding clients. I'll only take weddings from clients who have been clients somewhere else in my life now, and then I know if I like them or if I want to work with them. I haven't done a bridal show in ten years, and I couldn't be happier about that.
Pat Miller:Oh, man. You ain't kidding on that.
Brent Watkins:Right. Because it's a huge amount of work in a wedding. But if you can photograph a wedding, let me tell you guys, you can photograph volume because the group photos, that's volume work. You set up the lights, you have a background, you push people in and out, and then you move on to the next thing. That portion of the wedding day, total volume work.
Pat Miller:We talked about the revenue. We talked about empowering ourselves to be able to say no because we're doing well enough. But once we bring SmallVol into our life, there are other impacts moving forward. So what other impacts will we feel once this is a part of our everyday deal?
Brent Watkins:Oh, wow. Okay. So a few things that I think people will tend to notice is, one, you're not as tired as you used to be because you get to work slightly better hours. You will be interested in investing in different kinds of equipment too, because people, for volume, depending on how you do it, but for most of us, you could there's two ways to do volume. There's live background, and there's extraction. And I have to say, if you want to sell more to your clients, extraction is the way to go because now I can offer you this image cropped three different ways on nine different backgrounds, and mom wants to buy all of them. And as a portrait photographer, you think, oh, I have to do this. I need 19 different poses. As a volume photographer, you need three poses, and you can crop them each two ways, and everyone's a head shot, and everyone's a mid length, and everyone's a three-quarter shot. And you would think people would notice that, but they don't. Civilians can't see that. So, you are offering them what they feel is an amazing amount of variety for what cost you a minute and a half worth of time, and you then deliver the product online. So they can click the buy all button. They can buy all the digital. If they want prints, I love it when they order prints. Our lab makes fabulous prints for them, but they are in control of what they choose to order. What you start thinking about is how do I get more clients like this, like that. If you're using a system, and this is something that has become very obvious to me in the last year or so having been in the GotPhoto system for a few years now. When a client logs in with their email, it will show them all the other shoots that we've done for that client that that their email address is associated to. So now we are coming into spring, and we have people that are going online to, well, they're looking at their dance school pictures right now in gymnastics. We just did a gymnastics school last weekend. And we're seeing orders come from fall sports, and we're seeing orders come from fall picture day at their school because that name popped up in the list. So we're getting a second sale opportunity simply because we photographed their other work. And it's one of those compound interest type of transactions where we're not doing any more work, but we're making more money. And guys, that's the goal. Your job as a business owner is to provide for your family, make enough money that you can retire, and perform well for your employees so that they can do well. And if you can make that job easier on yourself, why wouldn't you?
Pat Miller:One more question on the life cycle. So you showed now using GotPhoto at least how they can see previous sessions and the compound interest effect happens by buying old pictures. But you touched on you may start a relationship in a little kid dance or T-ball and shoot them all the way through their wedding. How do you continue to upsell them, remind them, stay in their life so they're inside your ecosystem to get them to book again independent of the volume stuff that you're doing?
Brent Watkins:And that is partially because you have their email address. So now you can market to them. If you're doing email marketing newsletters, which is something that's much less common with portrait clients because you just don't quite have enough of them a lot of times to justify a mailing. And it's not something I'm great at. I'm gonna be honest. I should be better at sending out newsletters three times a year to clients. I'm not. I should be. But there are, again, tools that make this a lot easier now in whatever system you purchase or you choose to partner with. Let me say that. There are tools in there for that. But the way we really stay relevant to our clients is we see them, again, five to seven times a year easily. We see them at spring sports. We see them at fall sports. They didn't play sports in the winter, but we photographed their drama club or the school play that they were at. So we were standing there, and they said, "Oh, you know what? I meant to get this. Can I still log in?" Well, of course, you can. And that's it. And then they are at a point where they're like, "Oh, we need a photographer." Well, my studio, Silva Studios, is now synonymous with the word photographer in their mind.
Pat Miller:Yeah.
Brent Watkins:Well, let's call Brent. Let's call Terry Ann. Let's see how much it would cost to go to them. And yeah, we're more expensive for that stuff. And when they sometimes ask the question, "Ooh, wow. This isn't the same as, you know, school picture day." And I say, no, it's not. Because you can buy a cheeseburger at McDonald's and you can buy a cheeseburger at Ruth's Chris, but those are not the same product. And that's not the same thing here either. Our signature portrait line is a $100, 8 x 10. Sports pictures is a $20, 8 x 10. They're not the same product. One's boarded, one's mounted, one's professionally retouched. A lot more happens for my portrait portrait than in my volume portrait. That said, that volume portrait? I've sold them 30 of them by that point. If they're in two sports a year for ten years, they've given me a whole lot of money, and then they get to do it again. And they're happy to do it because they feel a relationship, which is something I don't think you can foster as well when you're doing really large volume. The other thing is, like I said, I don't wanna do events that take more than two backgrounds because that means me and my wife are the photographers at those events. And we are the ones interacting with our clients, and we're the ones talking to mom at all of the events. And we, "Oh, this was great." And we have a little more control and a little more time because we don't have to push as many bodies through. And I'll have mom say, "Mom, come look at the back of the camera on this," and she'll be blown away. Is that not gonna translate to money later? Of course, it is. If you make it easy and frictionless for them to give you their money.
Pat Miller:Let's give you the last word. First of all, thank you for introducing us to the concept of SmallVol and kind of pep talk. Like, come on, friends. Let's get into this. So if someone's looking at this, they're a portrait photographer, give them that last piece of advice, what they should do next, and why they need to embrace this concept.
Brent Watkins:There are two reasons I would say to embrace this concept. One, it will make your studio stronger. It will make you higher profit margins, and it will make you more nimble to be able to attract the kind of clients you choose to work with in the future. And to some degree, it lets you target the type of portrait clients you want to work with. Because if you don't like baseball, don't shoot baseball. Focus on dance schools. You recently interviewed Sheryl Bayshore. It's all she does is dance school. Sheryl's a good friend of mine. I love her to pieces. You know what she doesn't do? Baseball. She doesn't like it. I don't blame her. But cheer gyms and gymnastic gyms turn into great portrait clients. They really do. The second thing is it lets you be more stable as a business and as a person. You don't have to miss every Saturday with your kids. You don't have to be out of the house all the time. You will get to have days where, yes, you do have to sit and process images. And, yes, there is money, and, yes, there is cost in that. But the fact of the matter is you get to do more work during business hours, and you get to be more of a business owner. Now whether you want to be a business owner or not is a different question. But I will say there are several conferences out in the world. One of them for volume photographers is called SPAC that tends to happen in–it's near imaging. It's usually within a week of Imaging. It's in Vegas. And I go to both. I go to Imaging every year. I tend to go to SPAC every second or third year. Let me tell you the difference I find in the crowds between these two things. Everybody at Imaging is a photographer and wants to talk about craft and f-stops and shutter speeds. When I go to the volume conference at SPAC, I don't see anyone carrying a camera. They're business owners. They are looking for, how do I put more people through my system? How do I increase my revenue? They are asking legitimate business questions. And not photographer questions because they know they're business owners. Now that sounds less fun, and some days it is. Being a business owner some days is the worst. Being a business owner some days is the absolute best. And when you have something that is profitable that you could, like I said, we're a third generation studio. If one of my children would like to take over this business, we have built a business that has contracts, that has value that they could continue forward in if they chose. And if they don't, I can sell it to someone else. So I'm creating profitability and protecting the legacy of our studio by still being a photographer. And I don't, again, want to make it sound like less than because there's no way volume work is less than portrait work. Volume work is frequently documentation. Yes, Johnny played baseball. Yes, Sally played lacrosse. Yes, this is their graduation portrait. But mom and dad need those things every bit as much as they need beautiful portraits to hang on the walls.
Pat Miller:Being a business owner is pretty great, I find, about every other Friday. Wouldn't you agree? Every other Friday?
Brent Watkins:Every other Friday. I'm thinking it's a pretty interesting interval. I understand completely what you're saying there. But it also lets me do things like this. My kids have an event or something. I get to control my own schedule because I own my own business. Yes, I can get to this event. Yes, I can get to that event. Friday nights are a little harder if we have other things. We are still event driven. But any Tuesday afternoon, I can sit down with a good friend and have coffee and explain this kind of process to them. So let me say, community is probably the best investment that any photographer can make. Be part of your local guild. Be part of PPA. Be part of any guild where several photographers get together because, guys, there's no secrets in this business. We all want everyone to do well, and I'm happy to tell people how to do that. I teach my business class in my own studio to the photographers that are in the area because the best thing in the world that can happen to me is they start charging real prices and then we're competing on talent.
Pat Miller:You know, it's interesting. You're right. There aren't any secrets, but there's a whole bunch of stubborn. There's a whole bunch of, "Oh, I don't do that. I don't do this. I would never do that." Then don't. But what we talked about today is something that if you choose to do, there's a big opportunity for you in the studio. Brent Watkins, thanks for coming on The Professional Photographer Podcast. I appreciate it.
Brent Watkins:Pat, Thank You for having me. I appreciate you.
Pat Miller:Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. That conversation with Brent absolutely made you some money. We appreciate you checking it out. Now before you go, you know what you need to do. Hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. And for the triple crown bonus points, leave us a comment to tell us what Brent said that resonated with you. When you do all three things, luck will be on your side. I wish I had something I could send you if you would do all three. Let's just say luck is on your side right now, and we'll see about sending you something. We read all the comments, and it helps us guide the show to make sure that we're doing a good job at helping you grow your photography business. The other way you can grow is to become a member of Professional Photographers of America. If you're not yet, you're missing out on their incredible resources like equipment insurance, top notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's perfect 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 us on the show today. I appreciate you doing so. I'm gonna go find something I can send you. Between now and then, we'll keep on making more shows, and we'll see you right here next time. Take care.
