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, mini-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. Today’s guest is Richard Marchisotto of Sherwood Photography in Long Island, New York, and I love a New Yorker, and I think you’re going to love Richard. Richard has been making huge shifts in his business the last couple of years where, he has been shifting from a volume wedding studio to a luxury portrait studio. And I know many of you who’ve been shooting weddings and are thinking of shifting over to portraits, and so I think his information is going to be very pertinent for you.
Allison Tyler Jones: Richard is one of our valued Mindshift members. He’s also a former student of The Art of Selling Art, and he’s going to share how he has applied those principles that he’s learned to make this shift from employing a bunch of photographers, running around like a chicken with his head cut off to shifting into a luxury portrait studio. Let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, we have an extra special guest today in the podcast studio Mr. Richard Marchisotto, and he is from Long Island, New York. Welcome, Richard. I’m so glad to have you here today.
Richard Marchisotto: Oh, thanks for asking me. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. So Richard, you have been one of our Artists Selling Art students, and you’re also a valued member of our Mindshift community, and I wanted to just have you come today and just chat about some of the concepts that we learned together and the changes that you’re making in your business. But before we do that, why don’t you tell our listeners who you are, tell about your business, where you’re at, give us the rundown.
Richard Marchisotto: Okay. Sure. So I’m a second-generation photographer. My dad was a photographer and he started this business in 1948. So 2023 is actually our 75th anniversary. And we’ve gone through a lot of changes and all that times, especially the past few years since COVID, which we’ve transitioned from a high volume wedding photography studio to more of a boutique style, portrait studio. And that’s where I’ve learned so much from working with you, Alison, on how to price, how to present ourselves to people and how to sell, which had been very helpful. So that’s really good. So our studio, we used to photograph up to 200 weddings in a year, which is a lot.
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh my gosh.
Richard Marchisotto: We used to have 11 full-time employees, which was a lot. And today’s broadcast, we talked about having people work for you, it becomes a huge babysitting job. So we decided, we moved to this new location in 2019 and started rebuilding the entire studio that you see here now. And then COVID came, so everything kind of stopped. So we then were forced to say, “You know what? Let’s really look at our business and how are we going to move forward and what do we want to do? How do we want to define who we are and what we do?” And that’s when I decided that enough of chasing weddings, that volume, enough of having a lot of people work for us because your investment is so great when you do weddings, especially a volume of wedding photography that the return on your investment is really not there anymore. So we still do weddings. Last year we did about a little over 20 weddings, but we raised our price-
Allison Tyler Jones: Just still a lot.
Richard Marchisotto: … It is. But we doubled our prices. So basically, we priced ourselves out of the general market, and now it’s more in that, I guess, more boutique style where people who come to us are looking for really creative wedding photography, and that means having amazing portraits in their weddings and creating beautiful books. All of our books are handmade in Italy, everything’s made at Graphistudio. We offer a lot of different variations of books, which is something that I was going to talk to you about it, how we should narrow that down. The Graphi offers a high degree of customization on the album. It makes everything seem more valuable, customized.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and your work is beautiful. The wedding work I’m looking at, our listeners can’t see this, but just these scenic cinematic looking portraits. Just beautiful.
Richard Marchisotto: Thank you. Thank you. So now we’re trying to add that into our portrait photography. So I’ve always done portrait photography, and that’s what I was trained on with my dad, so I love what you do, and that’s kind of what we felt, I love the energy in your photographs and your portrait photography. That’s kind of where we’re going. More studio portrait photography, high energy with certain younger families or studies in black and white. We do the whole thing. So we’re just really now getting our feet wet of how to finally define that. We’re doing a new wall day decor in the studio, and we’re doing a new website. Hopefully by April we’ll have that done, which will show our products.
Richard Marchisotto: Right now, our website is lacking in showing products. One of the things we learned from you is how the website really should be a reflection of who we are, and that includes showing the products, which we don’t do right now. And that’s our big focus for this year. We don’t show wall art on displays. And last year, we did a lot of wall art. We did a lot of wall collections.
Allison Tyler Jones: Good.
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, I can tell why, because I’m looking at your walls and you’ve got that large scale art hanging on the walls. Get it on your website, of course, but when your clients are coming into that space, it’s very obvious to me that you have really good taste because your studio is very tastefully appointed. It’s very curated. You don’t have a lot of junk out there. It looks like an art gallery. It’s really beautiful. Very well done.
Richard Marchisotto: Thank you. That was our intention. The studio we had before this was in a shopping center. We’re in a little village called Huntington Long Island, it’s a very progressive kind of a village where it goes to art. There’s a lot of art galleries. There’s about over 40 restaurants in town. So that’s the reason we wanted to come here. And I live close by here, so we decided to pick the studio that has… We have a little over 5,000 square feet here, which is a lot. So we do all of our production here. Any large-scale wall art that you see behind me now, we print them here in the studio.
Richard Marchisotto: And then again, I’d say almost a third or more of our wall art is made by Graphi Studio We do a lot of collections with them. That’s who we deal with a lot. They do our albums. So what we’re showing here now is we are actually creating new designs for our walls. We have a screening room that’s behind me where we have a screen and a projector comes down where we do ourselves. So that’ll be having just wall collections, either framed or floating as what Graphi does is the canvas prose or metal prose or something like that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. I love that. Well, okay, so you went from this high volume wedding, you were still doing portraits. Were you doing portraits mostly on location, mostly on studio? What’s the split of that?
Richard Marchisotto: It was a mixture, a lot of studio portrait, but it was nowhere near the average dollar that we’re doing now, and it was nowhere near doing the wall collections that we’re doing now. So our main focus in the past couple of years, has been doing wall art for people’s homes. And that’s-
Allison Tyler Jones: So what were you doing? What were you selling at the portrait stuff before? Before you were selling-
Richard Marchisotto: … Because our wedding business was so busy, someone come in for a portrait session, “Oh, you want an 8 by 10? That’s fine. Oh, you want a 16 by 20 family portrait?” Like most photographers do. And then once you start realizing we’re taking a lot of the money out from the wedding stuff, we start cutting that down, you got to start creating revenue. But since we moved here and showed people this wall art, people just really love putting collections on their wall. So we do a lot of younger families with one, two, three or four children, and then we do a collection.
Richard Marchisotto: So our typical wall collection, whether it’s framed or floating, would be a family portrait and each of the children separately gathered around it, either symmetrically designed or asymmetrically designed according to the client’s general taste. And we design all that in Fundy. So we design a wall collections like the canvas prose in Fundy because There’s no framing or anything, or use pro select to show framed pieces.
Allison Tyler Jones: Got it. Yeah. I love to see evolution. I love change personally, even though it’s usually painful, and I love our listeners to hear that it doesn’t have to be… Maybe somebody’s listened to this. That’s a second generation. It’s been in business for 40 years and it’s just lik, “I’m on my way out. I don’t even know if I’m relevant anymore.” You can always change. You can always adapt. You can always do new things. And especially as creatives, you have to because we need that charge of new ideas and new energy. Do you feel like that you’ve been given that? Like this has given you new energy?
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah, it has. The first evolution was when we went from film to digital. We jumped right on board with that, and I started learning digitally. We’re early adapters of digital photography. Matter of fact, the first wedding I photographed digitally was Kevin, who’s now my partner, 20 some odd years ago, 21 years ago, and Apple Computer followed us around to show how we photograph a wedding digitally, how we download, how we organize it and show clients. So that was an exciting thing for us to get involved with.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s awesome.
Richard Marchisotto: And then because we’ve always done all of our own printing and finishing in our studio, we added a full digital lab, and that’s why. Then it started getting more and more people you’re having to hire to keep the files going, to keep your archiving going, to keep the retouching going, and keep the machine working. So now the new place we’re at is like, well, we cut our employees down, outsourcing some retouching. We have a full-time graphic designer who also does retouching and lays out our books for us and very good doing promotional things and that sort of thing.
Richard Marchisotto: My partner, Kevin, does a lot of the sales and follows up on clients, and I do most of the photography in the studio and the weddings we’re doing now because it’s a high dollar volume, I go on every single wedding with another photographer and two other assistants. So it’s exciting. And some clients are asking us to bring film back now, so I unpack my…
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re like, “Oh, wait, I know how to do that.”
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is. So one of the things we sell our clients on is that we want our photographs to look more film-like, because our DNA is film, and I’ve always photographed using film. So even when we process our photographs, we want them to look like film and our black and whites look more like film, not this desaturated color. And we go over all this with our clients and educate them entirely.
Richard Marchisotto: One of the big things we did that I learned from you is creating a price. When someone calls us now, and we started doing this maybe within the past eight months, where someone comes in, we say, “Our sitting fee is $1,200,” and they have a print credit. And that has taken a lot of the stragglers out of the loop, really. People who just don’t get what we do.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s like a good qualifier,
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah, so qualifies our clients a lot better. So that was one of the biggest things we learned to do. Like, “Wow, why didn’t we ever think of that before?” Because we want to have at least a $2,500 order. When someone comes in, they’re paying a $500 session fee, and there used to be, “Come for your session, it’s $500.” And then we’ll, “Well, this is this much. This is that much.” Now we kind of sit with the clients and in our consultation, we’ll say, “Our session fee is $1,200 based on the type of session you have, you have a print credit,” but our average client spends X amount and based on what they are, and that really has worked a lot for us to let people know when they sit down with us that they’re going to probably spend at least $3,000 to $4,000. But because I knew I was going to be meeting with you, we did some calculations.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love it.
Richard Marchisotto: Our average sale last year, portrait sale, which would mean wall collections that are floating from, like I say, from Graphi, and wall collections that we do where it’s framed art, where we do the custom framing on it, and then some people get booked. So the average altogether was about a $6,600 average, which was great for us because-
Allison Tyler Jones: Awesome.
Richard Marchisotto: … Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: What was it before? Did that change?
Richard Marchisotto: Well, the thing that changed is that we pushed a lot the wall art now. So going back to COVID year, there’s nothing really. 2021, we started doing this and I think the average has gone up. It probably went up 30% from the year before. So we love selling the wall art that we don’t have to frame. Like the canvas book because I send it to Graphi, it comes back and we…
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and they do such a beautiful job too, really.
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah, the stuff is amazing. It really is. I’ve been dealing with them since 2019 and I’ve never really had to have to go back for anything. So it’s good. But the wall collections, we design it in Fundy. Our process is once the session is done and they come to do the sale, we have them come back to approve a proof. So I print out in the studio a proof of what the wall collection will look like. So they approve the retouching and the finished way it looks, and then we order it from Graphi, it comes in, and we then install it for them.
Richard Marchisotto: So we do the full service, we install everything we make, by the way, all the frames and so on. But the framed collections are about 30 to 40% higher in average than the non-framed because we do matting and framing and last, all that becomes very expensive.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, it’s no joke.
Richard Marchisotto: And we use the AR glass only in archival matting.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: If you’re a portrait photographer, you know the next few months are going to be crazy. This is our busy season and how to make the most of that busy season is to make sure that our client communication is in order, that we are not having clients showing up with the wrong clothing, that we are not having clients shocked in our sales appointments by our pricing and needing to go home and measure or going home and asking their husband, and then sales burning down and our client’s not getting what they need and we not being able to build a sustainable business.
Allison Tyler Jones: So how are we going to make sure that this season is the most successful that it possibly can be? Well, it starts by getting on the same page with your clients so that nothing is left to chance. And how I’ve done this is that I’ve spent the last 13 years revising my own internal consultation form, which by the way, you can download the consultation form that I use in my business absolutely free. But I realized after tweaking that form for about 13 years, that I needed something more. And it wasn’t just a pretty brochure and it wasn’t a price list with no context, because we all know you can send a price list to somebody, and they’re still shocked by the price because they never looked at it or they have no idea what those prices even mean. It’s happened to all of us.
Allison Tyler Jones: What I realized is I needed a single printed piece for my client to take away with them that would leave nothing to chance, and that it would allow me to educate my clients about the price range of my products, it would help them to understand what we would and wouldn’t be shooting for during their purchase session, like actually creating a game plan for what is it that we’re actually going to be shooting for, and let’s prioritize that. And then also something that would allow the clients to feel confident about selecting the clothing for their session and a printed piece that would allow them to share with their spouse and be able to put together the game plan for their session.
Allison Tyler Jones: So I needed it to be part brochure, part getting ready guide, part last minute checklist and part consultation form, because my consultation form was internal. I was keeping that form, but I wanted this printed piece to go with my clients, and I wanted it to be sexy and good-looking, and that they felt completely and totally cared for. So I wanted all of this in a single booklet that the client would take with them at the end of their consultation. Now, I’ve been using this. I created about five years ago. It’s called the ATJ Game Plan Booklet, and I started off by using it in my studio, and I’ve been revising it for the last five years, and now for the first time ever, I’m offering it to the ReWork community to use in your portrait studio.
Allison Tyler Jones: So what’s included in that? In this course, it’s a little mini course, not a big long course, there’s a video lesson with me on how to use the game plan booklet in your consultation. You will also have a video recording of an actual client consultation with me and a client using the booklet in real time. And then you will have layered PSD files of the game plan booklet that we use in our studio every day, as well as a PDF version of the latest and greatest ATJ consultation form. So all of that is included for just a one-time payment of $2.95, just $2.95 to completely change the way that you interact with your clients, the information that they have, how taken care of they feel by making things transparent to them, putting together the game plan for the session so that everybody’s on the same page, we all know what we’re shooting for, we know how much it’s going to cost. They know what to wear. Everybody’s on the same page.
Allison Tyler Jones: This is the document. This is the booklet that has changed my business, and I want you to have it too if it works for you. So go to dothereework.com/gameplan. That’s dotherework.com/gameplan, and download that booklet and start using it in your business this busy season. I know that the Game Plan Booklet will be a game changer for your business.
Allison Tyler Jones: I have a quick question. Can I take you back a couple of sentences? On that proofing, so I come in and I ordered a wall collection. What you’re saying is that you’re printing out a proof of that, and then I come back into the studio to approve the retouching on that and sign off on that?
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah. I have them sign off on it. And I do it for two reasons, because I want them to approve the tonality of it. We don’t really say retouching, but the editing. I want to approve the way it’s going to look, and then we get final payment at that point. That’s when we get it, so we get a final payment that pays for the whole job, and then about three weeks later, it comes in from Graphi and it gets hung.
Allison Tyler Jones: What size are you printing that proof at?
Richard Marchisotto: So I do it to scale. So let’s just say if they did a collection where there’s a 24 by 36 and a bunch of 12 by 18, I lay it out. I use a RIP software and I just lay all the sizes out to scale. I can show you what it looks like. You want to see one?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, but I mean is it-
Richard Marchisotto: So it’s a 16 by 20.
Allison Tyler Jones: … Oh, it’s a 16 by 20? Okay. That’s what I wanted to know.
Richard Marchisotto: 16 by 20 with all the images on a 16 by 20. Or 16 by-
Allison Tyler Jones: In relation in scale to each other? Got it.
Richard Marchisotto: … right. Right. So I use 24 inch paper, so I print on a 24 inch. It’s typically 16 by 24.
Allison Tyler Jones: And then this is just me being selfish because I want to know what are you printing as far as your printers? Are you Epson or are you Canon?
Richard Marchisotto: I’m Epson.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, interesting. Okay. Awesome.
Richard Marchisotto: I’m using Hot Press. Hot Press-
Allison Tyler Jones: Bright.
Richard Marchisotto: … Bright. Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I love that.
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah, all the stuff behind me is Hot Press Bright, and it looks amazing.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s so beautiful. Yeah, it looks so good, Richard. I love it. I love it. Okay, so you guys have made a ton of changes in actually a very short period of time.
Richard Marchisotto: Well, two and a half years. Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. That’s short. I mean, for the kind of changes that you guys have made, you’re not letting any grass grow under your feet. You’re also not 20, you know what I mean? Neither am I. So I love that. I love that you’re not just resting on your laurels. Like, “I won a print competition back in the ’80s, and I’m still doing the same thing I’ve always done.” You are moving forward, moving with the times. And so to what do you attribute that? Your success and that?
Richard Marchisotto: I’ve always had this desire to learn and to see. So I always feel like when I go to conferences, I go to workshops, I go to seminars, and I don’t ever feel that I know too much. I know how to take a photograph, obviously.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, you do.
Richard Marchisotto: If I can’t take-
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, you do!
Richard Marchisotto: … if I can’t take a good portrait now, then I’m in trouble. But my big thing now is learning about new ways of selling in business, and that’s what I’m learning from you. I did go to a workshop in Italy with Graphi, had a seminar with Steve Soparito, a whole bunch of people. We learned about-
Allison Tyler Jones: I love Steve. He’s so awesome.
Richard Marchisotto: … we learned about selling there. Always now, I’m looking for a more sales thing. I did a KT Merry workshops with her online. She does amazing stuff, amazing marketing. But what I’m learning with you guys is really how to work in a physical studio, how to sell, how approach people differently and how just to always be on. We’ve always had that in our DNA of the studio, is that we’ve always given so much back to the client. That’s always been our thing. We get totally involved with them. I hate to say this, but in 1976, I photographed a wedding and my father photographed their parents’ wedding. I photographed her two daughter’s weddings. Now I’m photographing the children. And I’m not that old but in doing so-
Allison Tyler Jones: No, but you started really young. But don’t you love that?
Richard Marchisotto: … Yeah, I do love it. Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: That is what I adore about this industry and about portrait photography in particular and what makes me insane when people are like, “Well, I just need to go get more new, more new, more new.” Of course, we need new clients. But I just love that legacy, those people that just… Once they find Richard in Long Island, why are you going to anybody else when you can walk in there and deal with you and you dealt with your dad? That is legacy. You just can’t pay for that kind of marketing. It’s not even purchasable, that loyalty.
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah, I agree with you. And that is the joy of it. I love what I do still. I come to work and I’m usually the first one here and the last one gone at night. I live 15 minutes away, so I stop in on Sunday and do stuff. And so my partner thinks I’m crazy, but that’s what I do. I come in here on my day off just to do a couple things. I’ll get on the computer for a little bit. But it’s part of, you’re born into this industry basically. And I have four brothers and a sister. None of them were involved in this business. So I just felt from the time I was like 13 years old or even younger, my dad would go photograph weddings with a 4 by 5 speed graphic. I used to load his film holders.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love it,
Richard Marchisotto: And I learned to practice photographs. And I learned how he used to mix his own chemicals to do black and white processing, to do special formulas to get certain tones in his photographs. So I learned all that at a young age. And so that’s just kind of what we always did. I don’t enter a lot of exhibitions and competitions now, but I did a lot. And I got my masters when I was 21 years old. So it was a young age to get the masters in crafts when I was 23. So I went through all that, and I understand the value of that and going to seminars and workshops and conferences. So I think it’s really important. Even though I don’t enter exhibition now, I still watch what’s going on.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, you are. I think you’re exhibitioning, in my mind, the most important way possible. I’m looking at what’s behind you. It’s hanging in your studio. It’s actual client work that’s competition worthy. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Is your dad still here? Is he still with us?
Richard Marchisotto: No. No, he passed away about 15 years ago.
Allison Tyler Jones: Did he? Okay. Well, Richard, I can just tell you, I’m just going to give you a message from your dad that I know he would be so proud of you because what a beautiful studio, what beautiful work, and you’re a joy to work with. I love having you on our community because you’re just positive and you still just got the fire and still going, and that inspires me so much.
Richard Marchisotto: Thank you. Yeah. Well, that’s what I get from you. I think you’re still into what you do so much. And that’s why Kevin and I and my business partners think that the way you run your studio and the energy you have in your studio and the energy you have with your clients and in your work is really just something we aspire to as well. It’s really beautiful to look and the sales volume and how you work and your whole aesthetic is really kind of what we can relate to pretty much here.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it is fun. Because you don’t vibe with everybody. There’s your mentors and people, some people that are older than you, some people that are younger than you, you just find your people as you go along in your career. And I think that’s true of our community, and I feel like we have so many great people in our community that are committed to excellence and not just excellence in the product, but also in excellence in how we treat the clients. And you are definitely an amazing example of that. So I thank you so much for being here and sharing your journey and some of the things that you’ve done with us, and as you’ve made the changes, because I think it’s going to be so inspiring for so many. Is there anything else that you would like to leave our listeners with before we head off?
Richard Marchisotto: I really think that, and what we’ve spoken about is really being excited about what you do. Genuinely excited. If you’re not genuinely excited about it and you genuinely don’t really love what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing this because it takes an awful lot to get to a certain level and plateau where you’re making the kind of money you should be making, but you don’t make it unless your heart’s in it. So to me, I think your heart has to be in this, in what you’re doing and as you said, treating your clients well and just always staying on top of learning new things. I do a lot of personal landscape photography and all that. I do everything. So I’m always thinking photography.
Allison Tyler Jones: I can see that in your work. That makes sense that you love the landscape because you do have that cinematic quality, that wide shot, kind of Francis Ford Coppola.
Richard Marchisotto: Thank you. That would be nice. Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. I love that.
Richard Marchisotto: One thing I wanted to ask you is, and in my last studio I did have a whole gallery of fine art photography of landscapes and things, do you think that’s a good thing to have in a portrait studio? I didn’t put it here. I haven’t displayed anything here yet. I’m trying to decide if I should or not, or you just think it confuses people?
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it might. I think with 5,000 square feet, you’ve got a lot of real estate. So you probably have a place, whether it’s a hallway down to a bathroom. I wouldn’t give it prime real estate, not in a salesroom, not in a entry. But if there’s a place where you could show something like that, I do think it’s compelling to see an artist, what you do on your day off. I think that’s interesting. “Oh, the guy that photographs my family, the reason why my kids’ wedding pictures in this meadow with this whole background looking so cool or this big, huge barn is because on the weekends, he’s out there shooting landscapes.” So I think that’s an interesting… it’s just a layer for you. So I think if you have a space to do it.
Richard Marchisotto: Yeah, it’s funny because when I used to do my sales for weddings a lot, I used to talk about how we incorporate our landscape photography, incorporate client, you, into the landscape but make use of that, like in that picture in the mountains, how they stand out. So there’s the lighting or positioning a placement or something. So they’re not like Waldo. They’re not this little tiny thing in this big, epic scene. We want them to be the focus. And that’s kind of what we do in all these landscape pictures.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Well, and another thing, this is just a thought, and this is just my opinion, so I don’t know how much weight it really carries, but I think if you put those up somewhere, I would put a price on them. And so you have the little plaque that says what it was printed on, and then it’s by Richard Marchisotto and it’s moonrise over Taos, and this is $15,000. And so I think that’s only going to make everything else appear great too.
Richard Marchisotto: That’s good. That’s a great point. Yeah. I think I’ll do that. So just right now, we’re designing all of our walls for the new space, some of our new work and some of the things we’ve been doing, and I don’t know if I should be highlighting weddings so much as we have here. Main thing we’re doing is portrait photography, but it’s a work in progress.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. It’s just like anything else. You’ll see a situation that it will have an effect that you don’t want it to have, and then you’re going to change it. Or it’ll be like, “Oh, that made them want this. They wanted to do the family picture out in the mountains, and we had a great sale from that.” I have no worries about you. You have immaculate taste. You have a great eye. You’re going to do fine.
Richard Marchisotto: I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you do for us on the mindsets. It’s really, I think, amazing stuff. And it’s great to watch everybody and see everyone’s journey and see how everyone is growing.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. It’s so fun. My favorite thing is seeing people realize, “Oh, this is valuable.” Going from the, “Please like me. Please buy something,” to, “no, this is really valuable,” because I just love our group.
Richard Marchisotto: And I just have so many photographer friends who I’m trying to convince, stop selling digital files when you could sell wall art, and really good photographers who are just working like crazy, doing dozens and dozens of sessions through the holiday season, and they’re giving away files for almost nothing. It’s hard to convince them.
Allison Tyler Jones: It is.
Richard Marchisotto: It’s really hard.
Allison Tyler Jones: It is hard. It’s like you can’t see it until you can see it. Honestly, I feel like it’s like once that big print comes off of a printer or you see something framed like what you’ve got like that black and white that’s kind of behind your shoulder there, it’s like, “Oh, no, this is what I need to do.” It’s the highest and best use. Right? It’s the way to go.
Richard Marchisotto: Thank you. I appreciate everything you do, and I’m looking forward to this 2024.
Allison Tyler Jones: Me too. Tell our listeners where they can find you, Richard.
Richard Marchisotto: sherwoodphotographers.com and also sherwoodphotographers on Instagram. That’s where I am. And also the thing we started last year was a pet photography thing and portrait studio. So what we do there is, it’s called My Best Pal Pet Portraits by Sherwood.
Allison Tyler Jones: My Best Pal. M-Y-B-E-S-T-P-A-L. Okay?
Richard Marchisotto: My Best Pal. Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Dot com.
Richard Marchisotto: And we do a lot of these collections. Like this dachshunds here, when I sold them a $4,000 collection, I said, “Wow, you’re buying $4,000 worth of photographs of your dogs?” And then we went to hang it. We did that wedding photograph years ago. When Kevin went to go hang it and install it, they have a set of twins that were six years old that have never been photographed.
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh my gosh. Priorities, people. Priorities.
Richard Marchisotto: I know. So we sent them a gift certificate based on that sale to have a session done. So I think they’ll be coming in for that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, that’s such a great idea.
Richard Marchisotto: Isn’t that crazy?, it’s really crazy.
Allison Tyler Jones: That is crazy. But people do love their dogs. I don’t know.
Richard Marchisotto: They do. I can’t even ever have imagined that they would spend that kind of money on dog portraits. But if you get them in, they’re fun to photograph. It’s another revenue stream.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. I love it. Well, I can hear your enthusiasm in your voice, and it really is inspiring me so thank you so much for spending the time with me today. I know you’re busy. Thank you for taking the time.
Richard Marchisotto: Thank you. Thanks. Have a great day and have a great night.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com and on Instagram at do.the.rework.
