Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, many workshops and behind the scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She will challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business. Let’s do The ReWork.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hi friends and welcome back to The ReWork. I’m thrilled with our guest today because he is my favorite person in the whole world, and that is my husband, Mr. Ivan Jones. Now, you might remember the show called Everybody Loves Raymond, but really everybody loves Ivan. To know him is to love him. Everybody that has ever met him loves him. He’s the nicest guy I know, the kindest man, but he’s also really, really smart. He quit his job and came into the portrait studio with me almost 10 years ago. In August of this year, it will be 10 years. And so we wanted to do an episode about working with your spouse, how we set the intention to work together, what was hard about that coming to passand, how we made it better, and what he does in the business now, and how that has worked and how we’ve been able to fight to our strengths and be better together as a whole.
Allison Tyler Jones: So I think you’re going to find a lot of good information here, especially listen closely about when he’s talking about his manufacturing background and his degree and how he has used that to help us and our business to streamline things, make our processes better. I think you’re going to find a lot of useful information. But even if you don’t find it useful, you’re going to love them as much as I do. Let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay. So today’s guest on The ReWork is the most special guest we’ve ever had on the show. Mr. Ivan Jones is my husband.
Ivan Jones: Hello.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’m glad that you’re here.
Ivan Jones: Good to be here. Thank you.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know that you would rather be shot than have to do this, but thank you for doing it. So, Ivan, tell our listeners just a little bit about what you did before you came and worked in the business.
Ivan Jones: Well, after graduating college, I went to work in manufacturing and for a few different manufacturing firms, some steel fabrication, screen printing, electronic and semiconductor industries, and then into the offset printing world. So had an experience mostly in those areas and just was able to use my expertise that I had gotten from my degree in college and had a lot of fun doing it. That was exciting worlds and really fun.
Ivan Jones: And then as the business was started and grown by Allison, we had talked about the possibility of working together at some point. And so we made the plan to do that, and it was over a period of years that we made that transition so that we could do it. And now here we are.
Allison Tyler Jones: So we’ve been married for almost 22 years. This October will be 22 years, and we are blended family. So most of that college and career was before we met. And then when we met, you were working in the offset printing world and doing that. So when we got married, we had the goal that we wanted you to be able to quit that and come and work in the business so that we could… What was our goal? I mean, we wanted more time freedom. We wanted to be able to… If we wanted to travel, we wanted be able to travel and also have all of our efforts and work going into something that was ours and not somebody else.
Ivan Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I remember how difficult it was to ever mesh together when it came to going on a vacation or scheduling time off anywhere around the holidays. And mostly because the businesses that we were working in there, the industries had different ebbs and flows of timing. So the timing of us getting away was almost impossible sometimes because when she could take off, I couldn’t and vice versa.
Allison Tyler Jones: And with the kids, we had so many kids and two special needs kids, it was just hard for you to get time off. So it made it difficult. So when we first got married, I had my scrapbooking store, you were working in offset printing, and then in 2005, six-ish that’s when I started the portrait studio. I think we were thinking it’d be nice if in about eight years we could get this to where we could go into business together. And that we really did almost exactly that because it was 2013 when you… It’s almost 10 years.
Ivan Jones: I know. It’s crazy.
Allison Tyler Jones: August 10 years.
Ivan Jones: We said at the beginning, if we were still married after three months, then it might be the right thing.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Ivan Jones: Here we are.
Allison Tyler Jones: The first three months of when you came into the business, we did honeymoon, but then it kind of got hard. So let’s go back to that time 2013. What was hard for you when you first came into the business? What was difficult that you could share with listeners and so that if they were going to bring their spouse into the business, maybe we could have done differently or better?
Ivan Jones: Well, I think having that vision of what the job responsibilities are going to be and how you’re going to break those things out, obviously you want each person to contribute with their strengths to the business and not have a redundancy. So at first, when I came, Allison and I were paired up, not in the same office, but we were just around the wall or around the corner from each other with a partition wall between.
Allison Tyler Jones: I could hear you.
Ivan Jones: Yeah. She could hear me when I was speaking on the phone. At that time, I was taking calls from clients and helping to schedule, and we found out that that was not a great plan because I didn’t usually say it the way that Allison would say it, and I needed to take all these courses. That’s probably why.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, it sounded something like he would say, “Hi, this is Ivan with Alison Tyler Jones Photography. Your order is ready to pick up.” And I would run around the corner and making the slitting-your-throat sign, “Put them on hold, put them on hold, put them on hold.” And he’d be like, “What?” I’m like, “You don’t say your order is ready to pick up. You got to say, ‘We don’t even want to let these go, they’re so cute. This is so amazing. It’s so great. I’m sitting here looking at these and your little girl is so amazing.'”
Allison Tyler Jones: He was used to being in offset printing where it was like, “Come pick up your freaking business cards and call it a day.” He didn’t know about the fluffy and having to add in the extra layers of love on there. Although you are very fluffy as far as caring and loving.
Ivan Jones: Oh, thank you.
Allison Tyler Jones: You do have that layer, but you never had to use it in the business world.
Ivan Jones: Well, and I had worked in sales for some time, but it was a different world. The client was usually businesses rather than individuals, and so there was a lot of corporate speak that doesn’t necessarily translate to the same with the portrait industry. So it was a learning experience for both of us and trying to make sure we could each find our place and find the way to mesh things out in the right way.
Ivan Jones: So not too long after we started, I decided that I did not want to have the client scheduling appointment scheduling opportunity. So we found a way to change that up and it worked out better. But where I did find a lot of joy and where I am now is in the production side of things. My job every day is so different. I’m doing constantly different things between printing fine art prints and canvases to shipping and receiving.
Ivan Jones: And we, in theory, don’t ship really that much, but we do from time to time for clients who have kids out of state or whatever. So there’s a lot of varied things that I do. And then working on the accounting side, helping pay bills and collect monies from clients or whatever. So it’s a great thing for me because I love having different things going on and not just the same day in and day out.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. That is true. The thing that I had to learn… So when you came to the business, I knew… I had all the business in my head, so it was okay, what, probably for three years before you came into the business, it was like, “Well, what are you going to do when you come in?” And you were saying, “Well, would you want me to shoot? Would you want me to learn how to shoot or whatever?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t really see that happening.” But you could do the bookkeeping or whatever.
Allison Tyler Jones: So we had to figure out what your role was going to be, and now there’s no way I could do it without you because of all the things that you do. And I also had to learn to value your skillset was so different than mine, and the way that you approach things is so different. You’re definitely much more of a detail guy and also you like to do one thing, do it well, and then move on. You don’t like to multitask and do lots of different things at the same time. You like to do different things-
Ivan Jones: Right. Very much so
Allison Tyler Jones: … sequentially. Yes. So the first thing was realizing that we don’t work the same and you always valued me what I did, but I didn’t always value you because I just thought, “You need to be faster or you need to think like me.” I had to realize, “No, actually you don’t need another me, you need somebody that’s better at you than all that detail making sure that all the I’s are dotted and all the T’s are crossed.”
Ivan Jones: Well, and I think that comes into play and I think you realize that more and more as you’re looking for things that hopefully are filed in the places that they need to be or whatever. So that’s where I feel like my contribution has helped the detail part of it. But you need both. You need that broad stroke person and that visionary person that can go in and really see where the business needs to go and see what needs to happen to make it get there. But you also obviously have the other aspects too where if you have those detailed people working along side by side, then you’re able to find things that you need to find and gather information or have data that is going to help you make those business decisions.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so anything that involves a spreadsheet, you’re an Excel guru, you’re so good at that. So that has been so valuable to be able to look at the data, not just raw data, but be able to interpret that into things that have meaning for us. So anywhere from session sales averages to going through and looking at clients and seeing who are our best clients and how can we make things even better for them, so that has been really valuable.
Allison Tyler Jones: The other thing that has been really valuable for me once I allowed myself to see it was I’d been doing a lot of things because I was the solopreneur or maybe had one helper. You don’t see your flaws. And so you helped me see that in a kind way. One of the things I really was really bad at was I wanted to completely change everything, every single year. I would go to imaging, I would listen to somebody talk, and I would be like, “Okay. We’re changing CRM software. We’re going to just change everything. This year we’re going to change this, this, this. There’d be a list of 10 or 20 things I wanted to change.”
Allison Tyler Jones: And you would say, “Okay. This is awesome. This and this is already working, so how about we keep that and let’s not keep pulling up the plants to see if the roots are growing.”
Ivan Jones: Yeah, for sure. Well, that was one thing too when I first came on board that was a daunting task in my mind was just trying to come up with something where we could manage the business data better and make things more efficient, but also be able to really gather the information that we needed without doing this hodgepodge of six different programs, which I guess to some degree we still are doing a little bit, but we have narrowed the field and get more and more information out of a few tools instead of this myriad of tools.
Ivan Jones: When I got there, my past experience with other manufacturing companies was to help integrate those systems, software systems and inventory systems and a lot of things pertaining to those manufacturing worlds. But they definitely are similar in our world too, because we have to keep track of all this stuff that we are going to store or make and we have to know what our costs are just like any other manufacturer does.
Ivan Jones: So even though we look at ourselves as a fine art portraiture and it seems to have more of an artsy feel, the whole back end of this system is manufacturing without a doubt. So we got into our software that we were using and tried that for a while. We went through an iteration of what, maybe three different software groups and finally came up with the one that we liked. And then just really-
Allison Tyler Jones: The one that you liked?
Ivan Jones: Yeah. Allison wasn’t real gung-ho about it, but as we’ve gone on further, we’ve realized that it’s something that has helped us to refine our methods and give us a lot of more data and freedom to manipulate and look at the numbers in the ways that are going to help us, I guess is the best way to say it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And I think that if you’re deciding between CRM software and you are in a partnership or you’re in with your spouse, I finally realized whoever is going to be using that the most is the one that needs to finally make the call because I’m not in there using it as much as you are. That’s your life. You’re in it all the time. So it needed to be something that you felt like you liked and understood, and it was powerful enough to do all the things that you were doing. So it’s Stratus StudioPlus is what we’re using.
Ivan Jones: Correct. I guess a big draw to them in the beginning, and I’m not paid by Stratus or StudioPlus, whatever.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, certainly not.
Ivan Jones: But the big draw was that they have more of an open system that we could literally export anything pretty much of our data out to Excel or other programs and be able to put it in a way that is a way that we could read easier or do with. They don’t have all these great reports every kind that we wanted. So we do have times when we’ll export some things to get into Pumpkin Plan or other things that we use to try to make sure we’re analyzing our data in the correct way.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. So in Pumpkin Plan, what he’s referring to is from Mike Michalowicz, his book, The Pumpkin Plan, and he has an Excel spreadsheet that you can go on to his website and download that for free. It’s just a way to rate your clients based on not just revenue, but also how much they refer. There are a lot of different metrics and you can give them a grade, and that way you can figure out who are your top 10 or 20% of your clientele, and really that’s who you should be building your business around.
Ivan Jones: Right.
Allison Tyler Jones: So Stratus has allowed us to be able to get that information out so that we can get in and massage it. But I don’t think it’s pretty, and I don’t love it because of that. So it doesn’t have to be pretty because you love it.
Ivan Jones: Right. And it looks and feels so much like a spreadsheet world, which I’m extremely comfortable with. Other people who aren’t, it’s going to be much more… They’re not going to like it as much. But along the lines of Pumpkin Plan, it was great because we started finding a lot of things about our clients that we hadn’t paid attention to. Alison always had a good handle on who our big clients were and who’s spending the money, who’s referring people.
Ivan Jones: But when we really started to dig into those numbers with real data, it opened her eyes too a lot to where she’s like, “Oh my gosh, this person doesn’t spend much at all.” And I kept thinking, they’re not as high in the tree as they should be, but they were referring a ton of clients who were spending lots of money. I know she’s talked about that in other webinars, but that was a huge eye-opener. And then the other thing too is being able to do scheduling.
Ivan Jones: StudioPlus has a great feature where I can export information into a spreadsheet, and I’ve come up with a scheduling spreadsheet where we can see the detailed orders each item, and it’s, again, very cumbersome. It’s not something she likes looking at, but it’s something that has helped us so that we don’t have things fall through the cracks and we can keep on top of things that are supposed to be done.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. So from a production angle, he basically has a spreadsheet that just tracks everything in every order, has a line at him, and then it’s backwards scheduled so that he can keep track of all of that, which makes his heart happy.
Ivan Jones: And it’s color coded, so it’s a quick glance. You can see if things are… It’ll tell you if something’s running behind or whatever because it’ll color code it in a shade of pink or something that you can say, “Oh, okay, I got some things running behind.” So it’s a real nice tool for me, and I’ve been trying to fine tune it. But when we have production meetings or anything, a lot of times we’ll go through that just to make sure again that we don’t have something slipped through that. And it has caught a lot of things before they slip through the cracks, which is a blessing for us and for our clients.
Allison Tyler Jones: So that attention to detail, that ability to see that you’re willing to get into the weeds and go and have… You have the patience to figure something out so that you’re tracking it all. And I simply don’t have that. That’s not in my DNA. So that is a huge benefit. The other benefit is that you have a good head for seeing a big picture as well though because, for example, we were doing a promotion not long after you came into the business, and I said, “Okay, well, I just want to put this up on Facebook and do this mini-session thing that I was doing at the time.”
Allison Tyler Jones: I think it was a holiday card day. And so I said, “Okay. We need to get this out there. We want to get a bunch of people in.” And I said, “But I don’t want to attract a bunch of people that just only want the cards. I want to get good people in.” And you said, “Well, why don’t you just call and try to fill it with all of your best people first. Give them the first dibs on it. And then once you’ve got it filled with those people, then open it up for anybody else that might want it. And then maybe you’d get somebody new out of that.”
Allison Tyler Jones: That sounds so simple, and anybody that’s heard me talk knows that I’m constantly beating that drum, but that really came from you because… I just hadn’t considered, I just was still in the mode of marketing… Everybody else markets, which is the one to many, and let’s just send out emails. Let’s just send out the big blast on Facebook or whatever. And you help me see that, “No, why don’t you just call who…” People that already love you, people that have already invested with you and give them that chance to do something. And then once you’ve filled it with them, you might not even need anybody else. And so that was really good.
Ivan Jones: And they feel good about it because you’re giving them first chance, first dibs on those slots and so it works for everyone. But they come away feeling like, “Wow, that was really thoughtful that she would even think of me to call me first before she lets this out to anybody else.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. And you are just a thoughtful person. The other thing that’s great about you is that you really care about how other people feel, and you’re very attuned to like, “How is this going to make somebody else feel?” So when I was running in and making you put people on hold and drawing my finger across my neck, once you got trained to, “Okay, this is how we talk to our clients, we’re not a business to business business,” except for maybe some commercial work that we’re doing, but typically we’re dealing with the end user and it needs to be a little bit more caring and loving and personal. I realized 99.9% of the time you were fine and everybody loved you, and I didn’t need to manage that. So that’s where we decided that separate offices were better.
Ivan Jones: Right.
Allison Tyler Jones: Where I couldn’t hear you and you couldn’t hear me.
Ivan Jones: Yeah. The ladies got suspicious if I said, “Hey, girl, you’re looking skinny today. How’s it going?”
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, yes.
Ivan Jones: But it’s true. We’ve learned that with other employees of ours too. You always say, “Oh, I wish I could just duplicate myself.” But in reality, you don’t want to do that because each person does have their own personality and their own nuances of how they approach things and how they talk to people. So you just want to bring out those strengths that they have to do it in a way that’s going to give the client that feel that you want to give them.
Allison Tyler Jones: And a well-rounded team means that the client gets served in the best possible way in all areas. So I never want to do what you’re doing and you never want to do what I’m doing. I love that. A lot of these things that we’re talking about can apply if you’re looking to hire somebody, not just if your spouse is coming into your business, but looking at if this is somebody that’s a good fit.
Allison Tyler Jones: So one of the downsides of working together, it’s not really a downside, but one of the things that to consider is that even though we don’t have the same office, but we do spend a lot of time together. So we live together and we work together. And so that could be a lot of time together. So I found that it’s helpful to drive separately to work. ‘Cause we used to drive to work together too. ‘Cause I want to listen to my podcast and you want to listen to your French podcast. And then that way we can leave. We can go when we want, we can come back when we want. So that gives us a little bit of separation.
Ivan Jones: Right.
Allison Tyler Jones: Is there anything else you can think of?
Ivan Jones: Even just riding together, it was nice too because we are doing different things at different times of the day it made it easy to. If she needed to leave at a certain time, there was not this coordinating or pulling me away when I couldn’t leave at a time that was…
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re just so dedicated and you don’t-
Ivan Jones: Because I’m usually done night and day. Yeah, I’m listening.
Allison Tyler Jones: You don’t ever want to leave, have to pull you out with your fingernails, climb the concrete on the way out?
Ivan Jones: No, but it’s true. You got to have a little bit of space, especially with spouses working together, I think. And that dynamic is different for each couple. There is some would require even more space, others maybe a little less. But we’ve found a good mix where it works for us and it has worked really well. One of the things I didn’t mention before that I think is helpful is to make sure that you’re cross-training employees on many tasks. Because if I were the only one that knew StudioPlus Stratus, and we didn’t have other employees that knew how to do things in there even basic-
Allison Tyler Jones: If it was up to me is what you’re saying?
Ivan Jones: You’ve got to have people-
Allison Tyler Jones: It would be over?
Ivan Jones: … who can help cover things when you’re gone, on vacation. You can keep the billing going or whatever. And so it’s great. I feel like that has added a lot of strength to our team because multiple people can step in and do a lot of similar things.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s true. The other thing that was really helpful when you came in from your manufacturing background, there were two other things that were really helpful. And this was actually before you came into the business. I don’t know if you remember this conversation, but it was like… Of course, it was November because I was crying because I usually always cry at least once in November. And I was just saying, “There’s just so much work. I don’t know how I’m going to get all of this done.” And you said, “Well, have you looked at how long each job takes you? Have you looked at…” And you called it the critical path. “Have you looked at like this has to be done and then this has to be done, and then this has to be done? How long is one job, one session taking you?”
Allison Tyler Jones: I said, “oh, I think it’s about three hours or whatever.” And you said, “Well, no, you need to really look at that.” So you got into Excel and you did a flow chart thing and you said, “Tell me how many minutes and what else, and what else, and what else.” And before we really looked at it was actually nine hours by the time we did a consultation, a session, the reminder calls, the production. All of the things, it was nine hours. So that was eye-opening for me to realize, wow.
Allison Tyler Jones: And then the other thing that you taught me that was really good too is you said, “When you earn manufacturing, you have different machines. So say if it’s even a machine and you’re looking at this machine, that machine cannot run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year because at some point there has to be downtime to maintain the machine, to service it, to whatever required, fix it.” He says, you’re trying to run yourself a machine and you’re a human. You actually have more needs than a machine would, but you’re trying to run yourself like a machine. I didn’t actually want to hear that. I’m talking about it now like it was a good thing. Back then, I think I resisted and didn’t like that you said that to me. But now, I look back and I realize, no, that was actually foundational, because you’re not an inexhaustible resource.
Allison Tyler Jones: At some point, you have to have downtime. You have to sleep. You have to make dinner. You have to spend time with your family. And so you’ve always been more on the side of like, “Let’s have balance in life. Let’s enjoy the kids. Let’s go on vacations. Let’s live a more balanced life.” And I’ve been like, “More work, do better. How can we do better next year?”
Ivan Jones: Do we have a few minutes where I could just… Or even a couple minutes where I can say something from the manufacturing world? So one thing that I saw over and over and over in manufacturing was when people do scheduling, typically they would do backwards scheduling. They’d say, “Here’s my due date, and I got to figure out when all this stuff has to happen in order to meet that date.” So client comes in, wants a bunch of portraits, and you say, “Oh yeah, I’ll have a to you in three weeks or two weeks, whatever you want.”
Ivan Jones: And then you have your whole team pulling their hair out, trying to figure out how they’re going to retouch, how they’re going to get everything prepared to even get into printing or whatever. And you’re in trouble right from the get-go. And so a lot of these companies that I saw were basing all their scheduling on what we call in manufacturing, infinite loading, meaning our machines can handle as much as you can throw at them, and they’re operating 24/7. Well, it’s not that way in our business or everybody else’s business.
Allison Tyler Jones: Any business.
Ivan Jones: Any business. Right? So you start realizing these are finite resources, whether it’s people, machines, whatever. And then you’ve got delays in shipping times if you’re ordering stuff from a lab or whatever. And so the timing of all that makes it a lot more complicated to schedule things. So we started realizing, “Okay. We need to be promising things a lot further out than we are.” And underpromise, overdeliver is what you have to do. So I think we’ve really fine-tuned that into a way that now it’s working really well and clients are pleasantly surprised.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. You have to factor in not just the lead times, but you have to factor in the human error time that there’s something going to come in from the lab. It’s going to have some weird fleck in it. It’s going to have to be reprinted. I mean, if anything COVID has taught us, there’s just lots of things that can possibly go wrong. The other-
Ivan Jones: Especially around the holidays. Around the holidays, there’s a lot of part-time helpers that are working at the labs, and you’ll all of a sudden realize, see a lot of problems that you never have seen throughout the year. So that throws wrenches in everything.
Allison Tyler Jones: That is true. The other thing too that came from your manufacturing background was that idea of in pricing, we were figuring out pricing. I thought that I had the pricing pretty well figured out. I knew that time needed to be in there. I knew that materials needed to be in there. But you did that concept of the bill of materials of, “Okay, every single solitary inch of ribbon, every piece of tissue, and then every of the amount of time that it takes to tie that ribbon and to fluff that tissue.” So you really helped us tighten that up with that concept. That was really great.
Ivan Jones: And that was a huge undertaking where Alison and I spent weeks and months even fine-tuning it. But it was just sitting down and going through every one of those processes. We were doing this when I was still kind of new coming in to the portrait business. So I didn’t know a lot of this stuff. So we both had to sit there and really hammer out, “Okay, how long does it really take to do this?”
Allison Tyler Jones: The biggest problem, which you don’t even know this because you didn’t go to imaging this year, but if I had a huge slide with your picture on it, when I said…
Ivan Jones: Oh, boy.
Allison Tyler Jones: When I said how to not price your services was don’t ask your family how much you think it should be. Because if you remember when we sat down and looked at the pricing, you were like, “Hun, there is no way we can charge this. This is ridiculous.”
Ivan Jones: See, that’s where the selective memory comes in and I just don’t think that that’s right.
Allison Tyler Jones: No. That’s exactly what’s you said and I said, “You shut your mouth.” I said, “You wait till December 31st and then tell me what you think about these prices.” And sure enough, you were like, “We are not charging enough because this takes so much time to get this stuff right and get it done.”
Ivan Jones: Very true. It’s easy to undervalue yourself for sure and we did that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Was there anything that you learned from me now that I’ve just told all the good things about you?
Ivan Jones: Well, I’ve learned that I have an amazing wife, which I already knew that before ATJ photo ever came about. But the other thing too is I see an Allison just that she has that ability to basically push aside a lot of the smaller things, to look at the big picture and really see a lot of more clarity, I guess, of where the business is going, where the industry’s going. She’s really had a desire to help educate others in whatever she finds that’s good.
Ivan Jones: So for a long time, she has said, “I really want to share what I’ve learned because I’ve tried to really dig in and work hard to learn all this stuff, but I want to share that with others.” I feel like that’s always been a desire of hers. And so it’s really exciting to me to see her going forward with that, with The ReWork. And in the business too, when she’s at trade shows or things and people are always asking questions. As I went to the trade show with her, I always tease her, which she hates, but I told her, she’s like Elvis walking into-
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, brother.
Ivan Jones: … the trade show. I know she’s shaking her head, rolling her eyes, but that’s good. But the neat thing is that she can hopefully help someone. And usually it’s a lot of people I know that can improve things in their business. Also, she’ll get a lot of ideas from others too that have helped us improve. So that constant sharing is a huge strength of hers. She’s a hard worker. When we first married, I used to be amazed at how many books she could read simultaneously, meaning we would have this big wide headboard, and she’d have, I don’t know, 10 or 20 books stacked up on that thing.
Ivan Jones: And I’m like, “Are you reading all those?” She’s like, “Yeah.” A lot of them were business books just like how to do lighting or whatever. But people, I can’t help but laugh because a lot of times people say, “Well, what is the quick takeaway? What can you tell me that would help me not have to read all these things?” And she’s like, well, it’s pretty tough that she can share some things with you, but the fact is she’s been willing to read about everything on the shelf about each of those subjects that she’s talking about.
Ivan Jones: I saw those hours and hours of work or her laying up, being up during the night, reading them on her phone, on the phone version of a book. So you can’t get away from that. There’s a ton of hard work. And she’s been had that work ethic from the get-go, and her dad had it, her parents. So she’s done the same and emulated those same work ethics that they’ve had, and it’s paid off. But I think the other thing too is that her ability to work with clients and to have that trust, obtain that trust of theirs, and they know that she truly cares about them and their family. When their kids come in, she knows them personally. She knows what’s going on most of the time even with things in their life from social media or whatever.
Ivan Jones: So it’s just amazing to me to watch how she has been able to do that in a very real way because it’s just part of her core. It’s part of her personality. So I know a lot of times you hear people on podcasts or whatever and you think, “Yeah, but is that really what they’re like?” Or with movie stars, you always think, “Oh, well, that’s the role they play.” But how are they in real life? This is how she is. What you see is what you get. And she is every bit to the core of what she’s talking about in each of the podcasts.
Allison Tyler Jones: Wow. That was so nice. I actually asked that as kind of a joke, but thank you. That was so nice of you to say that. I don’t know that it’s really that true.
Ivan Jones: It is.
Allison Tyler Jones: I think we make a good team, and I am so grateful that you were able to quit that job and that you were able to come into the business because it’s been amazing for, I think for all of us. We’ve figured out our groove. We know we need to be in separate offices. We know that we shouldn’t ride to work very often together and that we need to stay in our lane, and I need to listen to you when you are calling out detailed things. And you need to listen to me when I’m… Because you’ll tend to put on the brakes on some things like if I’m seeing we need to run fast and run grab an opportunity. You’re more risk averse and you’re more careful. So sometimes it’s good. It’s a good check. It does make me pause and think, but then sometimes I have to override that because you’ll want to like, “Okay, let’s just hold on off on that.”
Ivan Jones: And it’s not all roses, which you have…
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, it totally is. It’s totally roses every second.
Ivan Jones: Right. It is funny and it’s brings a chuckle because every time, what we call our busy season, which all of you have the same, which is that September through December in particular in October through December, even more so, I always used to think if we can just stay married until the end of the year and start the new year married, we’ll be doing well. And then January would come and you kind of breathe a huge sigh of relief that at least some of that blur is gone, and you can get back into a more normal business setting.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, I think the thing that’s good about our skillsets though, in that busy season is that it’s very front loaded for me because I’m shooting and consulting. So I’m way busy before you’re busy because you’re on the back end. So you’ll be like, “Oh, I’m going to go fishing with the boys, or I’m going to go… Hey, we need to start that new series on Netflix or whatever.” And I’m like, “I’m going down for the camp. I’m going to end my life, and you’re talking about the Netflix series.” And then I’ll say, “Well, if this is all coming for you, so you better hold on.”
Allison Tyler Jones: And then as it starts to, I’ve sold it, we’ve gotten through, and then it goes into production, we hit November, and I’m sailing off into the Christmas sunset trying to get Christmas figured out for the family and you’re like, “Life is so hard.” And I’m like, “Hey, we got a new show on Netflix.” And you’re like, “I’ve got to go to bed. I can’t handle it. I’m so busy.” So it’s good that we’re not to the wall at the same time.
Ivan Jones: Right. For sure.
Allison Tyler Jones: One of us can support the other while…
Ivan Jones: Yeah. What was this about you doing Christmas? I usually do all that.
Allison Tyler Jones: You are so full of crap. You never do anything for Christmas. Lest anyone listening to this think you’re perfect, you’re just as shocked at what the kids got for Christmas as the kids are, because you have no clue.
Ivan Jones: No, that’s why I asked you before they open it, what did we get then?
Allison Tyler Jones: What did we get them? However you do laundry, dishes. You are a very evolved man.
Ivan Jones: Oh, well, thank you.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’ll definitely give you that. You’re the best. Anyway anything else you want to share before we sail off into this perfect sunset that we’ve created for ourselves?
Ivan Jones: No, I think we’ve shared quite a bit. It’s good.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, I appreciate you. I love you. You’re the best, hun.
Ivan Jones: Me too.
Allison Tyler Jones: Even though you didn’t want to do this, even though you were totally bitter driving home.
Ivan Jones: I wanted to be the silent partner in this relationship.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Even though you didn’t want to do it, you did such a good job. So that’s also for those of you who are out there who don’t want to try new things, let this be a lesson to you that you should try new things. So thank you. Love you.
Ivan Jones: Thank you. Love you too.
Allison Tyler Jones: The entire reason I started this podcast is because I am convinced I have the best job in the world. Being a portrait photographer fulfills so many needs. It’s just meaningful. I get to be with amazing clients and they’re darling kids, and it’s just so rewarding in so many ways. I know that there are so many talented, amazing photographers out there that could be making a living, a better living for their family if they just tweaked a few things in their business. So if you know somebody who’s struggling or that you know this podcast could help, please share it with them. Wherever you listen to your podcast, hit that little share link and send it to them because we want everybody to do better.
Allison Tyler Jones: And if you have a minute and you can give us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening to your podcast, it makes a huge difference in getting us exposure so that more and more photographers can learn how to have better businesses. So share and review if you have a minute, I’d so appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com and on Instagram at do.the.rework.
