How to build a photography business team
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” -Abraham Lincoln
I want to start with a story. This story involves Warren Buffett and a guy named Mike Flint. Warren Buffett asked Mike Flint to write down his top 25 career goals. So he took some time and wrote them down.
Then Buffett told Mike to review his list and circle his top five goals. He took some time and did that as well. At this point, Mike had to list he had five items in he that that he had circled, and he wrote “List A” above it. He then had 20 items that were not circled, listed “B”.
Flint told Warren Buffett, “The top five are my primary focus, and the other 20 comes in a close second are still important to me. I’ll work on those intermittently, as I see fit. They’re not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”
To which Warren Buffett replied, “No, you’ve got it all wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your avoid at all costs list, no matter what these things get no attention from you until you’ve exceeded with your top five.”
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2. WHAT DOES NOT BRING YOU JOY / WHAT DO YOU SUCK AT?
This is where I want to project this conversation in this answer on when do you know you’re ready to hire a team, one of the things that I would say is you’re going to get super clear on your goals, what your goals are, and how you’re going to achieve them. Now I’m going to share my personal story with you here in just a moment on how I personally started building my own team. But some of the questions that I would want to ask you that I really want you to start thinking about is one, I say this as lovingly as I can:
- What do you suck at?
- What do you not like doing?
I have been a photography business coach now for going on two years. I’ve been doing it before that but professionally doing it for two years. And one of the clients that I have, every time I would talk to her, she was so distraught because she had her attention was being pulled in so many different areas. And she would say she’s actually a venue owner here in Colorado wedding venue owner. And she would say, “Well, I have to get up at midnight and clean, clean the venue until 4am. So that my guests can come in and our next couple can get married. And I’m having to do my social media and my email list and my contracts and my web design.”
I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, why are you doing all this? What are your favorite things about business?”
She replied, “Well, I love meeting my clients. I love booking clients, I love meeting with them. I love hearing their story. And I love sending them gifts and being a part of the wedding day.”
I said, “Good. That’s all you should do, then only do those things, everything else hire out.”
Now it’s way easier said than done. And it’s taken her a couple years to actually do the thing. But when you start thinking about what am I not good at? Or what do I not like doing, you’re going to get very clear on the areas of your business that you need to start hiring out. Now, let me be clear, you do not have to be at a financial point to hire out business. You can be just starting out and hire out tasks that you don’t want to do. Because you know what it’s going to free up time for you to dedicate to the things that you do love and that you are very good at one of the very first things that I looked at whenever I was starting to build a team, what am I not good at? And where do I want to place my efforts.
2. HIRE OFF OF INTEGRITY OVER EXPERTISE
The second piece of advice and this I actually got from one of my favorite books, but it’s also kind of ingrained in me is when you’re hiring, you should hire based on integrity over expertise. Depending on what you want to hire so like if you’re looking for a Pinterest expert, you should at least find somebody who niches in Pinterest or if you’re looking for somebody who writes copy you should you should hire somebody who focuses on copy and not just everything, but you should absolutely 100% hire somebody based on their integrity. and their honesty and how much you trust them over their expertise. And I’ll get a little more into that here in just a few moments when I tell or when I share my story with you.
So those are the two things that I want you to to think about what am I not good at? And who can I hire based on their integrity? Now, I want to share an analogy with you and I share this with the students that I coach in my group coaching program:
think about a doctor’s office, you go into a doctor’s office, and who do you meet? You meet somebody at the front desk, who is doing the bookkeeping, who is doing the scheduling, who is doing the billing, you meet somebody who is working on admin, admin department. Then once you get into your room, who do you meet with? Probably a nurse, you meet with a nurse, they take all your vitals, they ask the questions, and then they give that to the doctor. Now, it’s not until the maybe fourth person that you have contact with that you’re meeting with the doctor. Now let’s pretend that this doctor didn’t have a nurse. There was no admin, there was no billing, there was no janitorial service, this doctor was trying to run an entire office by themselves, what would happen, people would literally die. And that’s not an exaggeration.
Now, as photographers, there are very few of us who are in roles where people’s lives are at stake. But when you think of it like that, you think, of course a doctor has support. Of course, there’s a team built around this office, one person can’t do everything. Now think about that: one person can’t do everything. Why should you be wearing 17 hats? Why should you be doing everything? And who are you to think that you are an expert at everything. And if you are not doing everything that your business is going to fall apart?
These are really hard questions that are not easy to ask yourself and get really sincere with yourself about.
Now, I want to share my experience with hiring my team. And I’m still building it. I started my photography business in 2012. Officially, our first big year was 2014. And by big I mean, I ran a social media campaign for $100…and we ended up booking 28 weddings in one month. Needless to say, my head was spinning in 2014. It was also the year that Mike and I were getting married, we just had a lot happening. In the fall, I had about 13 Weddings stacked up. And at this point in my career, it was taking me a full 40-hour workweek to edit a wedding. So I had 13 Weddings backed up and 40 hours a week that I had to dedicate to each one of these weddings = 520 hours = I have no life forever and ever.
Now, here’s a beautiful picture for you. I’m in a Starbucks, and I’m sobbing, I’m just sobbing over my computer. I don’t know what to do. And I, I just said to myself, “This is not what I signed up for. And I will not be in business next year if this is what it feels like.”
One of my girlfriends had mentioned to me previously about the possibility of hiring an editor. And I was like, “I don’t know, that looks like I don’t have the time and I don’t want to relinquish that control.”
Now I want to point out that I said “I don’t want to relinquish that control.” Because this was an issue that I had to overcome. And an issue that a lot of entrepreneurs have to overcome, especially creatives, we don’t want to relinquish that control. And that’s not a good enough reason to not build a team. But alas, I’m crying in a Starbucks by myself. And I call an editor. And God bless the woman who answered the phone on the other line because I was just through tears saying, “I need help. I can’t do this. How many weddings is too many for me to send you?” And she replied, “Send all of them! We will figure this out. We will be here to support you.”
Since 2015 I have been working with Photographers Edit (https://www.photographersedit.com/) and they are incredible (CLICK HERE FOR A REFERRAL CODE). That was my first step into building a team.
The second person that I hired was Brianna. Briana is one of my favorite human beings in the world. We actually met in college. And I was at a point in my business where I just started thinking and you’ll feel this to you, you’ll start thinking, “Maybe I could bring somebody on and get some help.” You just start getting that gut feeling a lot of things in business are a gut feeling. And so I started getting that gut feeling that I needed to have some help. I was exhausted by social media and trying to keep up with it. And I also had this fear that if something tragic happened in my life, whether it was an illness or a car accident, I didn’t have anybody in my business to support me and respond to emails or manage my business if I needed to take some time off. So I had nobody. And that really scared me because I was eight years into business and realized, “I don’t have somebody to take over, if I can’t do it for a certain amount of time.”
So I actually put out a just a Instagram post, saying that I was looking for a VA or a virtual assistant. And I interviewed 12 people. And Brianna was the first person that I felt comfortable with, she was so competent. And mind you, I was talking with VAs who had been doing this for years, but Brianna made me feel so heard and seen. And I knew that her integrity would outweigh her experience. And it has 10 fold. Now she has oodles of clients. She’s doing this full time she’s building her business. But I was at a point where I needed somebody I trusted more than somebody who had been doing this for 10 years.
After hiring Briana and hiring an editor, guess what happened? This freed up space for me to do what I love doing, like mountain biking and being with my two toddlers. And it allowed me to pursue new passions, such as photography business coaching, I was really interested in coaching, but I knew that I could not handle the workload of launching a new business such as coaching, while I was shooting 40 weddings a year. Thankfully, my editors were doing the editing, Brianna was going to take some of the workload off of my shoulders, and helping me with social media and scheduling and posting.
One point that I want to bring to your attention is that when you hire a virtual assistant, or anybody really, whenever you start hiring a team, it’s a very easy trap to fall into that you free up time, and then you fill it with stuff that doesn’t matter. Don’t fill your time. I made it a rule that I would send a wedding off to my editor, and I would go about mountain biking every Tuesday morning: send a wedding…go mountain biking. And that just became my ritual because I did not want to fill my time with stuff that didn’t matter.
Speaking of having freed up time, I wanted to start the Fearless Fempire podcast. I have been so excited to start this podcast for five years. But my husband begged me, “Honey, you should do it. But you have to hire somebody to produce it and edit it.”
And I said, “Alright, challenge accepted.” And I found Susan. Once again, she was honest with me. She said, “Hey, I’ve never managed or produced a podcast.”
To which I replied, “Well, I’ve never hosted a podcast. So perfect. I trust you. You have integrity. I know that you’re going to work hard to make this happen. And I trust that I can hand over this project and you’ll figure it out.” And she did. But I hired her because of the trust that I felt with her after our first phone call, and because we had mutual friends, not because she had been doing podcasts for 120 years.
At this point in my business, I am actually hiring an apprentice. I just hired an apprentice. We just signed the contract this week. I’m so excited. She’s going to be coming to weddings with me this summer to help you know manage people, wrangle people have set up shots be there for creative inspiration. This was this was something that I really wanted to do after reading the book Get Rich Lucky Bitch. I realized after reading that book that I needed, and quite frankly, I deserved a support team at weddings. I had a support team outside of weddings and with my other passions. My husband, Mike and I shoot together. But we didn’t have a support at the weddings. He was my support, I was his support, but we didn’t have somebody a third party there to support us for what we needed help with. This year I’m also hiring a copywriter. I’ve hired business coaches. And I’m going to be hiring a Pinterest specialist.
I want to reiterate; you don’t have to be in business for a long time. You don’t have to be at a certain price point. You just do it when it feels right.
I have two more books that I want to recommend to you, and they are actually written by the same author: Essentialism is one of the books, and Effortless is the second book. They are both written by Greg McEwan and they have absolutely transformed how I view my business how I view my own strengths, where I should be putting my time where I should not be putting my time.
Going back to that, quote, “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” create your team, build your team, add a support crew to be there to lift you up and take on things that they love doing and their zone of genius. And take that off your plate. Thanks so much for being here!
