Turning Art into Profit with Gary Hughes

Pat Miller: 00:00

I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. The cycles of business can be brutal. One month, you're on top of the world. And then, you find yourself in the pit of despair with no clients, no money, money, and feeling like you'll never recover. When you're down there, a lot of wild stuff can run through your mind. Should I offer a quick discount to my list in order to get some clients? Or maybe I should raise my rates or maybe I should slash my expenses or maybe it's finally time to look for a job. On those dark days, I've done that too. During those low times, I find it helpful to turn to a friend that knows. Someone that's been there before and can help us understand that this too shall pass. And that's what we're going to do today. We're gonna talk with headshot photographer and all around good guy, Gary Hughes, about what to do when you need to get back on track. How do you get up, dust yourself off, and get back to a full schedule in sales? If you're in need of a recharge and you need to get back on track, this episode is for you. We'll be back with Gary Hughes. Gary, welcome to The Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?

Gary Hughes: 01:34

I'm pretty good. I'm always excited when I do a Zoom call or an interview, and I end up being glasses twinsies with the other person. Like, that's awesome. How cool is that? Yeah.

Pat Miller: 01:45

It takes a certain level of man to wear the clear glasses. Not everybody can pull it off.

Gary Hughes: 01:50

I think you could if you it's just, you know, you just gotta believe in yourself. You know? I think that's that's part of it. These were actually my backup pair, and I was on a job, and I lost this pair that I had this really beautiful pair of glasses from this company called Helium out of Paris. And I was so proud of these glasses and I got all the way home. The job was an hour away. And I realized that I'd left my glasses somewhere. And I was just and you know what? I was like, that's too far. I'm not going back. Like, I'm just not doing it. So, my backup pair has now been my only pair for, like, 2 solid years. And so, I'm so I bought them on like a lark, you know because I'm in there. I get my glasses at Costco, you know, like an adult. And so, and I got this pair of glasses, and I was like, you know what? My backup pair, maybe they'll just be a little weird and funky. Those are okay. And so, I got these, and they ended up being the only pair. And so, I do miss my other pair though, but these are the official, like, middle midlife crisis YouTuber glasses. And I real I'll yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That's why I got them because I'm a YouTuber having a midlife crisis, and that's why I have these glasses.

Pat Miller: 02:52

And they've seen some stuff. I mean, these glasses, they're not like everything is rosy. They've been through the battles. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about business cycles. Because when you look around the Internet and you see other photographers, it seems as though they're all nice smelling and perfect, and they've never had a down week, let alone a down month. But the business cycles come for everyone. A lot of folks look up to you. You've done so much teaching and educating over the years. Even someone like you, I wanna hear about a time when a down cycle hit the business because it comes for everybody. When does it happen to you?

Gary Hughes: 03:28

Well, gosh, Pat. First of all, that was a great transition because these glasses have seen a lot of things. And second, nothing bad ever happens to me. No, I'm kidding. Well, the thing is that I think you gotta look at your business almost like you look at investments, you know like if you're a long-term investor, typically, you know, if you're the type of person that freaks out when you see a downturn, you're not gonna be a good investor. And if the, if you freak out when there's a downturn, just go get a job, just go get a real job and do that because business always ebbs and flows. And there are lots and lots of things that you can do to sort of shore up against that. The ugliest thing is actually looking at your numbers and analyzing them, which is so, so sexy, which we'll talk about. I'm sure. But I think that probably, the hardest thing that we ever did in our business was actually going from, Hey, somebody's paying us to take pictures to really printing out like all of our numbers and looking at it and realizing that we weren't really making much money compared to how much we were working. And my wife who's actually on the other side of the room can tell you that we started doing this annual business meeting where we would look at our numbers. We'd rent a little condo or something down by the theme parks and we'd sit for 2, 3 days and go over all the numbers and then project the numbers for the following year. And the first time that we did this, this was probably after 7 or 8 years in business. I literally like raged and cried. Cause when you look at it in black and white, like how good you're not doing, not doing bad. But that process was transformative. Now, if you're looking for a specific thing, I think probably the easiest one that we can all relate to is as a photographer, I've been through 2 major global financial crises, and I was prepared for it funny enough, both times because my parents have, had a photography studio. They're not dead. They're retired. Yeah. And they always, I watched them do this. My whole life growing up was every 7 to 10 years, some major event would happen that would just come along and knock all the pieces off the table. And they were able to survive that. And you start to see that in business in the world, in the global state of things, at least once a decade, you can plan on a total reset through things that are completely out of your control. So, in my lifetime, we started our business in 2008, right in the middle of the global financial meltdown or what we call in the United States, the housing collapse or the real estate collapse implosion. And the entire world just basically went out of business. So, for Warren Buffet, he made money, but which he sometimes always somehow always manages to do. And then the second was the global pandemic. And I think that if you've lived through those things, you know, that there's a very real possibility that market forces are gonna come and be things that are out of your control. And we almost didn't get our business off the ground because we started in 2008 struggling through that. Luckily it was just my wife and I having to take care of ourselves, and we were willing to eat ramen noodles and live in our car if we had to. But then again, you come through it about, you know, in the next big collapse, we almost lost our business almost like everybody. And we had to change some things very seriously change the entire, like focus of our areas of practice and the things that we were marketing for and how we were going to our event-based group-based service shooting, headshots for sometimes 100 of people in a day in an economy where you can't be in a room with more than 1 person at a time. And so, we had to, we had to navigate that, and we had to beg, borrow and steal every nickel we ate through every dollar we had, we had to get loans and grants and get on food stamps. I mean, we, I collected unemployment. We did everything to survive. We probably lost about 3 years of like our financial trajectory in those 4 months where everything was locked down and then the year that followed and because we were familiar with adversity because we knew that something big happens, you know, like I remember when 9/11 happened, 2000, September 11, 2001, that killed the US economy, especially for like luxuries. People didn't wanna go to the movies. People didn't wanna go out to dinner people and and my parents, you know, a luxury photography business was devastated. And so luckily, they had an insurance policy that covers like, you know, acts of God and stuff like for their business. And they got this cash injection from this obscure insurance policy that they had fixed. They helped their business survive. And so there are the things like that you can do. But I think that those are extreme examples. Don't you like, and, you know, so basically the economy is always on its way up or on its way down. And so you have to, you know, be prepared as a business owner, to deal with those things. And, if you happen to join into this lovely profession of ours in a time when, man, it's just banging right now. Like, right now, the headshot business, for example, in the first quarter of 2024, we set a record every single month for the 1st 4 months of the year. Like, we've never seen before, which means what, Pat? Which means what? Which means we're at the top of the roller coaster. And how long you're gonna stay up there? Very likely, we're at we I mean, who knows? It could go for another year or 2 and keep showing up, but there's always a down coming. There's always a down that's just over the horizon, and so you have to hedge your bets for that. And so I guess we could talk strategies how to do that, but really operating from a position, not a fear is probably the best thing that I can tell you to do. What you gotta know that it's coming and you have to prepare for it in every way that's under your control. And then you have to sort of not panic. Although to be fair, when things are bad, it's hard not to panic. We're creative entrepreneurs and, and we just, we just tend to panic, you know, especially since our livelihood is all tied up in our art and, that makes things quite a bit more personal. And so, I think that knowing these things are coming and preparing for them, sometimes people get early success when they start out right. So maybe they're really good. They're really good at marketing on social media or something. And then they just get really, really good locally. And then all of a sudden it stops and that has happened to everybody. And if it hasn't, it will, and you will have to survive it.

Pat Miller: 09:41

Let's combine 2 parts of your answer to follow up then because you've been through down cycles. You're at a high right now, and you shared your experience of when we first looked at the numbers, they weren't what we hoped they were. So knowing that you've been through down cycles, knowing what not minding the store looks like from your financials, how would you, with your experience now, get ready for that next downturn? Are you signing long-term contracts? Are you stowing away cash? How are you and your wife preparing for what you rightly point out is something that will be coming eventually?

Gary Hughes: 10:16

Right. Yeah. You know, there's a friend of mine who says data is beautiful. And you really have to get into that mindset that data is a beautiful thing. Knowing is better than not knowing. Look. I'm a guy who I never balanced my checkbook in my whole life. I never, I don't even like to log in and look at my checking account. I wait for the email to come from the bank that says my checking account balance is low and that before I do anything. So, I'm not a numbers person or a conscientious person. And luckily my partner, my wife is that person for us. You know, I can always tell when things are tight because she starts to sort of hint at it that maybe we shouldn't do things or, you know, or ask kind of leading questions. I'm like, okay, we need to, we need to get out there and market. Okay. So here are a couple of things. You have to adjust your mindset for your business, to think of everything in your business that you sell as an area of practice, as a product offering, and you have to divide those product offerings on your spreadsheets into those as a different stream of income in your business. So here's a good example. You can't just be like photography income. 1 income could be, high school senior portraits, and one income could be professional headshots and branding photography. 1 income, one stream of income is event photography. And these are all line items. And you can't just look at the overall amount of money coming in because it can deceive you. You could be crushing it with your gross, but you could be putting a lot of energy into an area of practice in your business that is eating a lot of your time and not bringing in a lot of revenue when you separate those things. And then you look at how much time you spend doing each one of them. What you find is this magic number called, you know, called the ROI, which of these areas of practice has the best return on investment. And in some cases, there are photographers out there trying to run basically 3 or 4 businesses at the same time, and not all of them are a good ROI. And that's where we got with our business. We got to the point where we were doing weddings and portraits and high school seniors and in everything we could. And when we looked at the numbers, we looked at, like, weddings we're bringing in. I'm gonna make up some numbers that are gonna be close to it. To say weddings were bringing in like $40,000 of our gross and headshots were bringing in like $150,000 of our gross. And we weren't marketing for headshots at all beyond just being good search engine results. And so, but we looked at the amount of time that we spent marketing weddings and going to bridal shows and going to these networking meetings and creating collateral and working with vendors. And we're like, what are we even doing? It was like, by the tie and all the time you spend actually shooting and delivering those products. And we were doing it really, really badly. And we were holding on to that relatively small amount of money in comparison. Like that was our business. And you might, it might just turn out when you really look at the numbers that your side hustle or your little extra area of income is actually the best thing in your business. And refocusing on the things that are the most profitable and being more economical with your time as a as an entrepreneur, not as a photographer. And you go, well, I really like doing ballet photography. I'm spending 3 quarters of my time doing it, and it's bringing in 20% of the income in the studio. That's a bad ROI. So you are you either have to change what you're doing in that area of practice or shift your focus over to an area of practice that is more profitable and looking at your business as like, as a CFO would look at a business. You gotta look at that. Look like you're in charge of the money, but as actually, as Travis did said, you put on that CFO hat and you gotta do that person's job and make those decisions with data because data is beautiful. And so that's like step 1 is analyzing your business by the numbers and seeing what areas of practice that you're working and what product offerings do you have are the most profitable ones. That’s really stage 1.

Pat Miller: 13:51

Well, that's the danger of the down cycle, especially for an artist like a photographer. I love taking ballet pictures, but headshots are bringing in all the money. As you talk with other photographers, if they're in that situation where I love to do x, but y is my meal ticket, how would you coach or, walk someone through that process if it's clear their path to profit is doing something that really isn't the one thing they love to do.

Gary Hughes: 14:17

Well, I gotta ask you. Do you wanna be a professional photographer, or do you just wanna take pictures of dancers? You know? Like, you could go and get a great job with benefits and 6 weeks paid vacation using whatever it is you went to college for before you went nuts and decided to become a photographer. And then you could have a nicer camera and photograph ballerinas as much as you want, you know, like, in your free time with no stress and nobody counting on you to deliver anything. I mean, that's a really potentially great way to live your life. But if you want to make money, you have to build, and if you want your art to survive, you have to build a business. Think of your business like it's a castle wall and inside the castle that's surrounded by the moat that has a dragon living in it inside that castle wall. That's where your art lives. And there are barbarians trying to just knock the walls down, trying to get to your joy, get to your life and kill it and take it away from you. And that business, that castle wall, that's the rampart against which the world is going to break, and your art gets to live inside of it. If you don't build that wall, the barbarians are just gonna run over your art. The world is gonna take it away from you. If you don't build a strong business, you're gonna end up hating it. Not only are you gonna be unsuccessful at it, are you gonna be stressed out, but you're gonna put that camera down one day and be like, I'm just gonna go work at Starbucks. This is terrible. Yeah. And that's the mindset you have to have your business as much as you feel like it's icky as a photographer. Your business is gonna let your art thrive. And the better business you build, the more time you will have to do the stuff that you wanna do to take on those personal projects, to look at photography from the creative side and to shoot the things that make you happy. In a perfect world, there's a Venn diagram of the things that make money and the things that make you happy. But not in every market and, not with every specialty, and not like nobody's gonna pay you to photograph birds. Like, I'm sorry. They're not like, with the exception of the very few people who are like out there working for it, Nat Geo or something, nobody's going to pay you for bird photography. They're just not. But they might pay you for school portraits, school pictures, or team sports. And you could have the, the only photographers I know who retire with like a boat in their fifties are people who did volume school and sports. Yeah. They're those guys make money. Do you think that they're like super geeked out about the art of photographing first graders? No, but they built a business. They hired people who are doing 90% of the work and those businesses live on while they get onto their catamaran and head towards the Caribbean. So, you know, you gotta think of it in terms of the business. If you're gonna go into business for yourself, you have to demand, from yourself a business that protects the art. You got into it for the art, and then you discovered that there's all this other crap that you have to do now. It's out. It's not just as easy as I like taking pictures. I'm good at it. Someone's going to pay me for it. The systems and practices, the good financial decision-making are the things that enable you to do the thing that you love for a living. But if you neglect the business, the barbarians are just gonna kill your art, man. They're gonna cut its head off. They're gonna put it on a stick, and you're just gonna never wanna take pictures again for the rest of your life.

Pat Miller: 17:15

Well, first of all, there's a visual. Secondly, this is the professional photographer podcast, so I might have to lose this, cover of the magazine and put up in big bold letters. The closest I can get to your quote of the business will let the art thrive, and that's really the point of what I wanna talk about on this show. And it's the thing that so many photographers need to hear because they love what they do, but they have to have a business that puts food on the table so they can continue to love what they do.

Gary Hughes: 17:42

And let me add onto that and not just put food on the table. Like putting food on the table is the bare minimum. You could get a job as an assistant manager at a Wawa and put food on the table. There's nothing wrong with it. Wawa is great. I won't hear any word against it. I don't know. Is that specific to areas of the country? Sheetz, people have a Sheetz. They like that one too. They're Buc-ee's, people like Buc-ee's. Alright. So, I digress. Let's move on. But, like, putting the that the other problem is that putting food on the table is like the goal for a photographer. Like, hi, I'm paying my bills. Isn't that great? No. It's not enough. Like surviving, treading water is great but you have to, like, think bigger and dream bigger and expect more from yourself and more importantly, believe that it's possible to pay yourself out of debt, to put money away for retirement, to fund your kids' college funds, to do to go on incredible trips and have adventures to live a life that you want to live. Otherwise, choosing to go into photography as a profession, the amount of money, energy, and expertise you have to spend learning to be good at this thing if you put that much energy into learning how to invest instead or to opening up a Firehouse Subs franchise and just letting somebody run it for you. Like, there are so many better financial decisions that you could make that you wouldn't work as hard as you're working at photography right now. So demanding a little better than survival is important and to start thinking that way as soon as you possibly can.

Pat Miller: 19:10

I wanna talk about digging out when you're at the bottom of the business cycle in a moment.

Gary Hughes: 19:13

Yeah.

Pat Miller: 19:14

I wanna address one of the scary, awful things that I see with small business owners’ way too often.

Gary Hughes: 19:20

Yeah.

Pat Miller: 19:20

People get at the bottom of their cycle, and they lose their confidence. They feel like they can't. They and as an artist, that would seep into your work when you're not shooting what you see. You're trying to make a buck. In your experience, when you went through COVID or you went through the economic downturn or you just lost your creative confidence mojo, how would you coach someone through that? So if they feel like they're at the bottom and they'll never get out, how would you coach them to find their confidence again?

Gary Hughes: 19:49

Okay. So let's get a little, you know, light and airy here. I think the, you know, first in the process is, is grieving. You have to be okay with failure. You have to realize that every single one of us, myself included is gonna hit these points. And so, you have to not take it on yourself all the time. And even if it is your fault, you have to realize that it's not show friends, it's show business that you have decisions to make. So, grieve, go into a dark corner, cry, hugging your knees for a while. But just also realize that you have to decide there's a time to stop. Everybody processes these kinds of feelings differently. And when the thing that you created that you love seems to be failing, it can be incredibly, incredibly devastating, to the levels of like PTSD. Like, especially if you were really successful and then now you're not so grieve process, put a time limit on it, and then get to work because you got decisions to make. And the decisions that you have to make is, again, going back to that same data. Okay? And you have to look at where the dead weight is, and you also have to be willing to pivot what you're doing. So let me give you a good example. One of the pivoting means dropping areas of practice, moving resources. It means adding new products and areas of practice, you know, being open to changing the business in certain ways, marketing differently. You know, I've coached photographers and other business owners where they're like, yeah, it's easy to get the mentality that everything around them is going wrong. Like the world, people don't like this anymore, or nobody in my market wants this. Or, the problem is the hardest thing to do is to look at yourself and go the thing that I if you have numbers, you will probably see that the thing that you've been doing for a long time, that's been working has actually been going downhill in how well it's working for a long time. Because what you have to realize too, is that your consumer base, if you stay in the same area of practice, you're gonna get every 12 years, or so, you're gonna get an entire new generation with different sensibilities, different spending habits, different ways of connecting, different ways of communicating and being marketed to. And you will have been doing the thing that worked for the gen Xers when the when when the millennials come along. And guess what, folks? Millennials are now like forties 40-something in middle management. So now we're on to the Zoomers, baby. And after the Zoomers are coming, the alphas and I can't even speak alpha, man. I don't speak alpha at all, but I'm gonna have to figure out how. So the thing that you were doing that's working probably stopped working as well a long time before you noticed it. But the data will show you the returns on your investments, the returns on your time, and your marketing. If you're keeping track of this stuff and if you have the courage to look at it. And so a lot of times it's just a paradigm shift in how you communicate. And I find a lot of photographers, a lot of creatives, a lot of small business owners are like, oh, yeah. Well, I'm just not gonna do that. Or I just yeah. I don't really do social media or I don't really like that or I don't really do that. Or and and they just keep, like, sending out mailers to people, like, in the actual US postal service or something. And you're like, okay. Well, maybe one day that'll be retro, like a disposable film camera at a wedding. Those seem to be coming back now. But, like, you have to figure out what's working and how the new generation of people that you're beginning to serve is communicating. Probably the people who stay on the edge of this the most are gonna be wedding photographers and senior portrait photographers because you have to.

Pat Miller: 23:13

Yeah.

Gary Hughes: 23:13

Because, you know, your business will grow with you as I'm, and by that, I mean your age. So, like when I was 25, 24, I was shooting weddings for people that were around my age and now I'm 42 and I'm photographing mostly like middle-aged people in business, you know? And, it gives me a lot of credibility, the gray hair in my beard, you know, they're like, okay. This guy's been around a while, but 24-year-old me wasn't as attractive as a prospect to a 55-year-old investment banker. You know? Yeah. And 55-year-old me isn't gonna be as attractive to a 26-year-old getting married in a glowy hipster barn. You know, they're not gonna really believe they want somebody young with suspenders to shoot their wedding and probably, clear glasses.

Pat Miller: 23:54

So, Glasses. Yeah.

Gary Hughes: 23:55

I would say that don't blame everyone else. Don't blame your market. Don't default to blaming, you know, that the service isn't in demand. Don't default to blaming external circumstances. Be brave enough to look first, to see if you are doing something wrong, and to be objective about the things that you're doing, because the marketing that you're doing, efforts usually have about a 4 or 5-year life cycle before you have to completely be doing something new. And if he here's a great example. Instagram is broken for still photography. It sucks. I used to get a few 100 hearts and likes and comments on posts for within my client, my client facing 1. And now I post a like a banger of a picture, at least to be, but as good as anything I've ever done. And it's like 12 hearts on it. Now I do a stupid video, like, how to open an umbrella and 30,000 people watch it. You know? So, like, the and plenty and lots of photographers are going, like, I just don't do video. And I'm just I just don't like being on camera. I'm just not gonna do that. And that's fine. But, like, you gotta find a way to communicate with the people you're trying to serve. Because much like Matthew McConaughey said, you know, you get older and they keep staying the same age. You know, like, your clients, if you're serving a particular market, your client's age is gonna stay the same, but a whole new generation is going to replace them. And so you have to do the work to learn how to talk to those people, or you can change your area of practice to something that's, like, more age-appropriate to how you wanna communicate with people dialing their number on a big rotary phone. I don't know how you like to communicate with people, but don't blame outside forces before you have a really good, honest, sincere look at yourself and what you're doing. And if you're honest with yourself, you'll see that the decline of the effectiveness of your methods has probably been decreasing for quite sometime long before you actually felt the pain of it.

Pat Miller: 25:55

I like to focus on data trends, knowing what's working, what's not working. And before I move on to the next question, I just want you to know that I'm gonna have you back on the show, but you can only do the stick in the mud, won't change photographer's voice because that is choice. Can we do that? Because that would be.

Gary Hughes: 26:09

I know your video. I don't wanna do the YouTube and the real I'm not channeling anyone in particular. It's just I do, well, I do coaching with photographers. I have about 3 or 4, time slots a month. I'm not a life coach, but photographers usually will bring me specific problems. And I find the number one thing is getting them to get over that how they used to do things or what they're used to, how they're used to communicating and getting people to sort of like, look at what they're doing wrong. I cannot tell you how many dozens of times I've been on a call with a new coaching client and somebody has been like, well, it doesn't work in my market. I'm like, give me 2 seconds. I'm gonna jump over on Google, and I'm gonna find you a photographer who works in your specialty who's killing it right now, and I'm gonna tell you why. You know? Because their website doesn't use Adobe Flash player first, You know? Stuff like that. You know? There and there you know. But it I have to go through these things too. I'm not picking on anybody. I am the I am I've been I've been 90 years old since I was 20, you know, inside. I'm a grumpy old, get-off-my-lawn guy. I hate fun. I hate anything new. I don't like to play games. I like to sit on an ancient barstool and drink a very simple beer. That's like the greatest joy of my life. So what I'm saying there's about this fictitious photographer I just made up. Sure. I'm saying it about myself. Yeah. But, yeah, it's never your market. I promise. It's not your market. Sometimes it's what have you chosen to do in that market? That is the problem. So if you're in a town with, you know, 50,000 people, which is a small town or, you know, a large small town, you and you wanna be just a headshot photographer, for example, you might have a hard time because there are no big corporations headquartered where you live, and there are not big corporate events coming to your town. You know? And so you have chosen a service that's not good for your market. I know photographers who became successful when they realized this is what I wanna shoot and they actually moved to a market that wanted what they did. You gotta think about it that way. There's nothing wrong with the market. You're just offering something that it doesn't want and or need. And that's still extreme cases because you can make almost anything work almost anywhere because, in the grand scheme of things, photographers don't need that much money. You know? You got, you could put together a boutique, you know, glamour and personal branding business, and, you know, you need a gross $150,000. Okay. That's 30 clients at 5 grand each. That's 50 clients at 3 grand each. That's 50 clients. That is literally 50 shooting days a year. You could take the rest of the year off. Like, all you gotta do is find 50 people out of 50,000 that wanna spend $3 on a really killer experience. So it's adjusting your business model. It's adjusting to serve your market and it's stopped blaming all those external forces and start looking at what decisions you need to make to be successful.

Pat Miller: 29:04

It's a great piece of awareness because when we're in a down cycle, we sometimes can think, well, I'm not taking great images anymore or I'm not good at what I do. But if you're not keeping up with the right ways to communicate, if you're not targeting the right audience, it's not that you're not talented. You're not telling the world in the most effective way that you have right now that might maximize your opportunity. When you're in that down cycle, this is something I see all the time, and I think you're gonna crush this. So I'm just gonna softball. Here comes a softball. Softball. Here it comes.

Gary Hughes: 29:35

Is that sports? I just wanna know, is that a sports reference? Because that is a sports reference.

Pat Miller: 29:37

Okay. I'm sorry. Here comes an ice-cold beer for you to chug. Okay. How about that? That, I know you relate with. Here it comes when we're at the bottom and things are terrible. The natural instinct is, I know, I'll run a sale. I'll discount, please. Here's your cold beer. Here's your softball. Crush that instinct that we have that discounting is the way out.

Gary Hughes: 30:00

No. No. And it's such a natural thing. It's the most natural thing in the world to be like, I'm too expensive. Let's lower by prices. And even let's say that we do have some kind of a, you know, a recession or economic downturn, the you know, don't freak out. The economy does that.It goes in waves. It always has. It always will. You know, it’s bubbles. It that's literally it's recedes and it expands, you know, this is a problem. And I had this great conversation with a really incredible photographer who survived 40 years in the business as a luxury, as a luxury portrait photographer. And so he and I were one time sitting at an airport in, Hart, Jack, Atlanta, Hartfield Jackson International Airport, Atlanta at the international international house of pancakes express there because, you know, pancakes, why not? And so we were right in the middle of this. This was probably 2010, maybe 2011. And we were sitting there having pancakes and he was telling me about his business and he'll go, this is a person who regularly makes 5 to 10 and larger $1,000 portrait sales. And all of a sudden people don't wanna spend money anymore, at least the people in the middle. So if he starts making his prices cheaper, you can't ever come back from making your prices cheaper. You can raise your prices over time, but if you drop your prices and then you build a client base of those lower prices, it's so much harder to go back the other way. So, you're really you're already in a hole. So lowering your prices is digging you further into that hole. If you cut your prices by 30%, that means you have to produce 30% more work for the same amount of money. And so why? Okay. So, here's here's a great example. In this conversation with this photographer, I asked him, what did you do? And he goes, well, we have clients that are very, very wealthy, and we have that would that who have hedged their bets against this economic thing. These are good with money people who this is nothing to them. They're gonna survive this just fine. They're they, you know, they're they don't even have to get downgrade to the medium-sized jacuzzi. They're still in the extra-large jacuzzi. He said, but then I have clients that are like middle class and upper middle class that are more affected by this, who don't have as much resources, and they're the ones who can't afford me right now. But my very wealthy clients can. If I lower my prices, I have to I'm lowering them for them to get those middle-class people back in. But now all of those very wealthy people who can still afford me, I'm losing all that money too. So, the alternative was this. When this photographer created a separate product, a completely separate deliverable, like a different finished product, a different style of work inside portraiture, something simple, like an in studio, small frame, black and white portrait session that is like called the masterpiece collection or something. And those were at a different price point than the flagship services and products that he typically offers. It was very obvious that it's not the same thing. It's done a completely different way, and it's also in his studio space. So, it takes less time to produce. And so, this he created a product line that would get the middle-class people through this time. And he still was able to generate income off those people. And the very wealthy people were looking at that product line going. That's just not what we're used to getting. We'll just stick with what we got last time. And so instead of lowering his prices, he created a separate product line. And guess what? Companies can add and take away products all the time. We're offering this at the moment. We're not next year. We're not gonna offer this. So when things get better, you can track that product line or raise the prices on that product line. But if you just blanket drop your prices to try and respond to a market, that is a position of fear. A downturn is a really good time to advance. Everyone runs away when there's a downturn. It's time for you to open new product lines, to expand into new areas of business, to go boldly where all the other people are running away from, and to really analyze what things that you can do to generate new streams of income. If there's a slowdown in your boudoir business during a bad time, then don't just go like sale, sale, sale, cut my prices and buy a 3rd. Cut my prices in half because that's gonna be like, boy, does that degrade your brand. Boy, does that degrade your clientele, and what you do is you let that be slow. It's okay. And you shift focus to something else. And then when you go back to it, it'll pick up again. And then those great prices that you had set, those sustainable prices are still there. And so that's like one fantastic way of doing it.

Gary Hughes: 34:29

I think that, never ever lower your prices. You can offer events for, like, a limited time, like a mini session is a really great way to offer a discount as long as the product or service that you offer isn't your flagship product. You can never discount your flagship product, and what I mean by that is every business needs to have those flagship products. This is the best thing we got and this never changes. And you can always come back and get this. And then you can experiment with product lines. Like I said, at the very beginning, you have to look at your business into these areas of practice and product lines that you offer. And sometimes product lines come, and they go for a while. It was really, it was a big deal when we were photographic a lot of actor headshots for actors to get a slate, which is basically like a 5 to 10-second video clip that was like, hello. I'm John Digory. And that it's just like, that goes up on their acting website profile so that people could just hear their voice and see them. It's called a slate. It's literally 10 seconds. And so we started doing that when they were really popular. We offered that as an add on and we made some good money doing that. And now we don't do it anymore because nobody does it because it's dumb. And now it just turned out it was dumb, like NFTs, just really stupid. You know, and there are all kinds of things that we do like that during the pandemic when everything was locked down, we started offering virtual headshot sessions. That was one of the things that got us through. We would literally guide people through the process on a Zoom call of taking a really good selfie with their camera phone and then we would take that file and then we would gussy it up in Photoshop and make a professional headshot out of it, put a proper background in it and the whole 9 yards and make sure they look great. We even like changed their perspective from the wide-angle lens and for the time, it worked. And we made $20,000 extra one year just in virtual headshots because I thought about it, and we did it. And I made some pages on the website, optimized it for SEO started marketing. Is it the thing that I love to do the most in the world? Does it fulfill my soul? No. But putting that check in the bank fulfills my soul a little bit because that means I could fund my kid's college, and that means I could take my kids on a trip. That means I can afford to buy the good hot sauce. So next time I go to the grocery store instead of the the Kirkland brand hot sauce, I can get the Cholula if I want the Cholula. So you gotta think about it again in terms of product lines and in terms of, you know, that those things can be temporary and you can do things on the side to bring in other streams of income. Don't degrade your flagship product just because you're scared that things aren't going well.

Pat Miller: 36:56

I hope you heard that. Don't ever discount the flagship product. Write that down. That's a good piece of information. When we're at the bottom, we think, well, we need more sessions, and we default to, oh, that means I need new clients. But sometimes we can generate revenue quicker by working with the people that we already and they already know, like, and trust us.

Gary Hughes: 37:18

Oh, yes.

Pat Miller: 37:19

Experience and your studio experience and coaching photographers, give us a tip or a trick to reengage people that we've worked with before to get them to come back.

Gary Hughes: 37:27

I was doing this today and I'll give you several tips. The first is, again, your mentality. When you're in, when you're new in the business, it's all about, acquisition, getting new clients. If I had kept if I had been smart enough to keep every good client I ever had, or most of, or even half of them, I would be in a totally different financial position than I am today. I wouldn't be wasting my time on this podcast with you, Pat. I would be on the beach in Saint Tropez with some kind of cocktail that I can't pronounce in my hand, surrounded by beautiful women, and they're all my wife and daughters. They would all be.

Pat Miller: 38:01

That was right. Good save.

Gary Hughes: 38:03

And so, I you have to realize that retention is the most important thing in your business. Once you get a client, keep that client. And so here's how we do that. 1, we do a quarterly call. We have a master list of our clients and they every single client gets a contact from us every quarter if we haven't heard from them especially. And we also go through our Google Calendar with all of our stuff on it. I just did this with my studio manager Al, today. We were looking at June, July, August, and September. And so, we today, we looked at July, August, September. We made a list of every job that we shot for our clients in July, August, and September, and made a note to contact all of them because those events are repeating. Those clients often need stuff yearly. So, we are actively reaching out to our clients on a regular basis just to check in and see how they're doing. So you don't email them or call them up and go, hey. You need any pictures? No. You call them up. Hey. How are you doing? It's just been a while since I talked to you. Hey. So, you know, I got I took down your gallery the other day, and I just wanted to double-check and make sure that you had all those files because we're just backing up our servers. We're archiving some stuff. And you have everything locally to you? Okay. Good. You do. No problem. What about all those file sizes? Everybody good? Any complaints from anybody about not being able to upload it to LinkedIn? Okay. Cool. Awesome. Awesome. Oh, while you've got me on the phone, you've got 20 new attorneys. You've been meaning to call me, but you just got distracted. And now you're like, that happens all the time. That is all you have to do. Like, you gotta realize a lot of times you're not the most important person in your client's life. I know that's shocking to hear, but, like, it's very easy to kick the can down the road for people when life gets in the way. So that proactive customer service check-ins are brilliant way to do retention and you have to have that sort of set up in your CRM. You gotta have that marked on your calendar, to make sure that you are touching with those clients. You know, the other thing that you can do is turn your social media rather than into trying to get as many eyeballs all around the world on your stuff. Turn it into a place where you engage organically with your actual clients. So, like, I make a habit now of every person who comes into the studio. I, you know, I do mostly professional headshots. I come in and then I have their information on the calendar. I look them up on LinkedIn. I have their page pulled up. And after we photograph and have a good time, say, hey, do you mind if I send you a LinkedIn connection request? And they'll go, oh, yeah. Great. And next time they post something or when they turn my headshot into their profile picture or I make a post about them with the behind-the-scenes shot of their session and the photo that they chose, it's all retouched and beautiful. I'm engaging with them. I'm creating it on all my social media platforms. The numbers may not be impressive, but the quality of those numbers is impressive. And so, when a local business who we worked with and photographed their corporate event or did their commercial photography or did the headshots for their board of directors when they post that they just got a project financed by another local company who's my client and that they're expanding and building a new facility. I know them. I've met them all, and I can be like, hey. This is great. You're bringing so many awesome jobs to our community. Thank you so much. Love working with you guys. Like, that is an organic social interaction. So building social media rather than, like, trying to get out there and get all these eyeballs of people you don't know on it, it's a great retention tool for people to remember you and to work with you. And that's what I've realized over the years is to stop worrying about somebody in Sri Lanka or you, or the Ukraine or Scotland. That's who cares if they're looking at my stuff, I want my clients to see what I'm posting and I want to see what they're posting and I want to engage with it so that it just keeps everything top of mind. And it's fun that way. Cause you actually know these people and like these people and care about what happens to them. And so creating that schedule, and turning your social media into kind of an organic engagement, those are just a couple of ways that you could concentrate on retaining your business. And when you retain your clients, every client you keep is another one you don't have to get. I literally looked at it today. I was like, Hey, we don't work for them anymore. What did we replace them with? And like, where do we take that volume, that work that we just got off of them? Like, that's a hole now because they didn't rehire us. So who's there? And we were having that conversation. Well, let's reach out to them, but you haven't heard from them. So let's see where they're at. And maybe somebody a new company contact is in that position. And we have these conversations about keeping and keeping and keeping those clients. And eventually, your mar your job marketing becomes very, very easy because you only have so much bandwidth that you fill with clients. You can only take so much work. And if you the more you keep, the sooner you get to that bandwidth, then you're like, wow, I've got a nice amount of work. I got all these clients that I like, and I'm not stressed out about trying to go to a chamber of commerce meeting like that desperate kinda like realtor look at my eye that's like, please hire me. Like, you could just go as a successful business person and peer and member of the community and be like, yeah. I've actually been really happy in this community and built up a really nice life here. You know, that's the goal is to keep those clients. It's so much more important than acquisition over time.

Pat Miller: 42:52

Keeping those clients as opposed to acquiring new ones is a great reminder. But what happens when someone says to you, yeah, Gary. That makes sense, but I don't do a really good job of outreach because I don't like to sell.

Gary Hughes: 43:03

It's not selling though, is it? I mean, ultimately it is, but you're not calling up and going, hey, let's get you in for some more pictures or whatever. You're calling like, especially if you're a boutique business like me, if I have to come up with some crap to talk to them about. You know? Like, I have to have some kind of pretense because it's their they answered their work phone and they're like, you know, Sterling Cooper Draper Price. You know? Oh, hey. You know? Like, you get to interact with them as a boutique photographer on a personal level. You've probably seen them mostly naked if you're a wedding or a boudoir photographer. You know what I mean? Like, you just you were you met their mother. Like, you know all of this stuff about them. You spent time together. You went into this emotional sail with them. You can absolutely just call to say hi. You know what I mean? Like, hey. How's it going? Oh, man. You know what? I was just going through some old some, pictures today. We're just getting some new samples for the studio. And I thought, man, I'm just gonna give her a call and see how she's doing. And so, you know what? Well, how's everything going? You know? Like, you know them. They know you. You don't have to have a sale. You if you call and say hi, the work will book itself. If you call to sell them something, they'll be like, really busy. Like that's relationship marketing. I know a photographer who gets who has their studio manager gets on the phone every single day, and there's like 5 clients on the list, and they just call to check in. Even if they leave a message, even if they get them on the phone. Oh, hey. Because then, you know, you photograph their baby. How old is is little Macklemore now? Oh, man. 2. I cannot believe it. That's amazing. Oh, hey. Well, hey. No big deal. Just calling to say hello. And that, you know, I was just looking at our Instagram feed and I saw a little Macklemore on there, and I thought, gosh, his birthday must be coming up soon. You know, like, there there's nothing wrong with that's amazing. And you didn't ask them for anything. You didn't try to sell them anything. You were just a good human. You know? I got a I bought a; I went to this boutique clothing store in Saint Louis that I really like when I was there. And I go to Saint Louis every year and I shop at this store every year. And I got back, and they know. They pull it up and they see everything I've ever bought from them. By the time I got back to Florida, in my mailbox was a postcard handwritten by the guy who sold me the pants that I bought. It was like, hey, Gary. It's great to see you again. I hope you enjoy what you got, and it was great to meet your kids. And it's I bought pants from a guy. And I was like, oh, man. You know what that did for me? It was like, boy, man. I would follow that brand into hell. I will never not love that brand. You know? And, and that's what you're trying to do, isn't it? You're trying to create shut up and take my money, loyal clients. And there's plenty of ways to do it, but you don't have to always be selling that hustle culture, that, you know, hard selling thing. It's and most people don't react very well to it. And the ones that do will very often end up regretting that expenditure and not being very good clients. You wanted people to find the right people for your brand that you will enthusiastically collaborate on the work together and whether that's professional headshots or whether that is boudoir photography or wedding photography or pet photography, whatever it is that you do, your idea is to basically take all of the contacts out there in the world, and you're just shaking it down to get like the right people through with that, that funnel marketing. The right people will find you if you're making good business decisions, and then you will much more enjoy your life as an entrepreneur, but that business part has to come first.

Pat Miller: 46:17

We're up against time, but right now someone's listening to this or watching this because their business isn't where they want it to be. They're trying to get back on track. Any final words of wisdom or recommendations for that person as they're trying to turn it around and make sure that they're back where they wanna be as quickly as they can get there?

Gary Hughes: 46:34

Yeah. I will tell you this. If you're struggling, if you are looking at things have were good and have gotten bad again, you can survive this. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. You have decisions to make, but there isn't a single success photographer that you see on YouTube that and I know most of them. That you see on YouTube, that you see on Facebook, you see on Instagram, you see a TikTok. There's not a single one of them. It hasn't been like crying in the dark because things were so bad for their business. It we all have these moments and it is completely and totally survivable. In fact, I believe that if you make good decisions, you're gonna look back on this moment and you're gonna wonder what the heck you were so worried about. The best things that are gonna happen in your business have very likely not happened yet. And if you quit, they'll never happen. And so you can do it. Look at the numbers, make those decisions. If you're new and you're having trouble getting your business off the ground, the best advice I can give you is this. Photography is a small business with a slow growth curve. It is a boutique business. You will not even start to hit your stride until somewhere’s bet likely between years 5 and 7 of doing it full time. And that's if you're making good decisions. It takes time to build an audience. It takes time to grow a loyal following. It takes time to build out your style and grow that product line. So if you're at like year 3 and you're you don't have that cyber truck yet, like hang in there because it took it takes years and patience And the ones that wash out, don't worry. And they will. They won't be your competition soon because if you stick with it and you make good decisions, you build that castle around your creativity. You're gonna find that in, in the blink of an eye, what feels like a blink of an eye by the time you get there, what seems like forever now, you're gonna be living a life that you want to live. You're gonna be working in a business that you're proud to be an employee at, and you're going to wonder what it is you were ever worrying about because it's just hard in the beginning for most of us. Not everybody is a beautiful starlet that gets picked out by a director at a cafe and made the star of a movie. So most of us are slogging it in the dirt for years. Remember, the Counting Crows were a band 10 years before August and everything after came out. And for those of you that are under the age of 40, that's a band from the nineties, and that's a perfect album start to finish 10 years before that album came out. So, you've got time. Nobody has fired a starting pistol, and everyone else has taken off a run. You stop looking over the fence so much, concentrate on your business, and you'll be fine.

Pat Miller: 49:03

Gary Hughes, thanks for joining us on The Professional Photographer Podcast. I appreciate it.

Gary Hughes: 49:07

Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.

Pat Miller: 49:19

A big thanks to Gary for coming on this episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. I'm Pat Miller, the host of the show, and I'm glad you found us. And hopefully, you're gonna stay with us and be a part of this conversation to help more photographers make it in business. To stay connected with us, follow, like, and subscribe depending on the platform that you're on, but click the button that helps us reach more people and helps us show up in your feed regularly. For some reason, that makes a big difference. We'd also love it if you would share this show with another photographer friend, or leave us a comment, or a question, or a sarcastic remark. Whatever suits you, we'd love to hear from you, and we're really glad that you tuned in. I look forward to talking with you again on the next episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. See you next time.