Recorded: Welcome to The Rework with Alison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Alison 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. When you really break down marketing, when you really break down selling, at its very basic form, all we’re doing is helping our clients to make decisions. And for some reason, that can be difficult. Many of the most difficult situations that we find ourselves in is in the sales room with a client, and we can’t seem to finalize the decision. We can’t seem to close it up. Either they want to go home and measure, they want to think about it, or they want to talk to their husband or whatever, and it’s just we have these sales that just hang out there and never quite seem to finalize, and it’s so frustrating. So this is something that I’ve battled with in my business, that I’ve worked very long and hard to negotiate and try to figure out the best ways to help our clients reach a decision, because then they can get what they want. We can get to the point where our beautiful work of their beautiful family is hanging on their beautiful walls and everybody wins, but getting there sometimes is difficult.
Allison Tyler Jones: So today’s guest is Ms. Kathryn Langsford from Photos by Kathryn in Vancouver, Canada, and we are going to talk through how we help our clients finalize their decisions. I can’t wait for you to hear it. Let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it’s been a hot minute since we’ve had PBK in the podcast studio, and I’m happy to see your cute face.
Kathryn Langsford: Always happy to see yours.
Allison Tyler Jones: So happy that you’re here. So I wanted to talk today about the concept of less clients, but more money, making more money with less clients. And that’s something that we have intentionally, both of us have intentionally done with our businesses as we purposely charted out on a course across the fraught ocean of clients hell and purposefully structured our business so that we could not have as many clients and spend more time with less clients.
Kathryn Langsford: Correct.
Allison Tyler Jones: So what do you have to say about that?
Kathryn Langsford: Well, we’ve talked about this for years, and it was one of the first things that we connected on when we first started talking all those years ago. And I think in the beginning, it sounds like this sort of ultimate dream goal that of course everybody wants that, but how on earth do you have that? It sounds like too good to be true.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Kathryn Langsford: Working less and making more money.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yes.
Kathryn Langsford: But I think the two of us have been really focused on doing that with our business and have learned a few things along the way as to what that looks like and what it feels like. It doesn’t always feel as good as you think it’s going to.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s not for the faint of heart. When you start down the road, it can feel really scary. So what would you say for somebody that was listening to this who has just maybe come through the busy season that have just felt like, “I am just overworked, I’m broken, and something’s got to give. I got to change the way that I’m doing it”? What are some of the first steps that you felt like we took collectively together that you took in your own business to make that change?
Kathryn Langsford: I think one of the first steps that we did do this together was to look at… That book, The Pumpkin Plan. Who wrote that book?
Allison Tyler Jones: Mike Michalowicz.
Kathryn Langsford: Okay. So I’m sure you will
Allison Tyler Jones: Link to that in the show notes.
Kathryn Langsford: So we looked at his worksheet and segmented our clients and listed out all our clients, and saw who really were the top people that we were working with. And that was enlightening. It wasn’t always who we thought it was. It wasn’t necessarily the people who come every year. It wasn’t even necessarily the people who spend the most. So learning who the best clients that we had was the first step for me, and then thinking about, okay, are there people on this list that maybe I need to cut loose? Not because I don’t want more work, but because they’re taking up my time and my brain space, and I can’t properly serve these top 5% who could become my whole business if I am dealing with someone who wants to nickel and dime me about unframed five by sevens. So there was that step.
Allison Tyler Jones: One thing I loved about that spreadsheet that he has on his website, which we’ll link to, and he talks about it exhaustively in his book, but he uses as his metrics for measuring the clients, it’s not just top line revenue that they’re bringing in. It’s a lot of, how easy are they to deal with?
Kathryn Langsford: Yep, how well do they communicate?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, how well do they communicate? If you make a mistake, do they let you fix it, or do they punish you for it? Are they putting a Yelp review and telling everybody that you suck, or whatever? There’s just a lot of metrics that go into that to give that final grade that allow you to sort that in Excel so that you can really see that, wow, this person maybe doesn’t spend the top line, but they’re a referral machine. And they love you, and they talk about you, and they’re so easy, and they’re so fun, and they’re so great. So there’s a lot of things that go into that that make a great client that sometimes we are looking only at one metric and we need to be looking at more.
Kathryn Langsford: That’s right. And just a little further on that is the assumption that I was making that my big spenders were the ones who needed all my attention, that even if they were a lot of work and a pain in the butt, I needed to really give them all they need. But you know what? When I really looked at, as you said, the metrics in that spreadsheet, there were some people who were, yes, big spenders, tens of thousands, but the time that I spent worrying, redoing things, chasing them around, trying to come up with solutions to all the complaints they had, it wasn’t worth it. It was keeping me from being able to give the attention to new great clients who could be a part of this new model. So that was a learning curve for sure, and I needed to be able to see that, be open to seeing that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And also, I think looking at your client base, at your database with a fresh eye and maybe some metrics that you hadn’t considered before, and then also really looking at yourself and thinking, how much do I want to work? How much do I really need to work? And being okay with not being, this is a big one for us, not just running around a chicken with your head cut off all the time.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. Yeah. Adjusting to… Making more money and working less means working less. It means the phone will ring less. There will be less client activity, less client traffic, less blocks on the calendar. And really, it took me years, I would say. Still sometimes now, I have trouble with being okay with that, letting there just be space on the calendar if there’s going to be space, being cool with, maybe I’m only getting one great lead a month, just less traffic. But if they’re quality people that are well qualified and a good fit for this new business model, then it all works really well. But we do really have to shift that mindset that busy means successful.
Allison Tyler Jones: Exactly. So we look at the clients, kind of get your head around working less actually means working less. How do you make that transition? Because I think everybody would like to have more really amazing, great, well-qualified clients. I don’t think you and I have ever been in a situation where we’re like, “Listen, I just got to start telling people I can’t work for them anymore.”
Kathryn Langsford: I think it was a two part transition for me. Part one was being clear about clients that I needed to let go.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, so talk about that.
Kathryn Langsford: They fill a lot of your brain. They fill up a lot of time and a lot of headspace. So it’s not just simple. It was implementing that all important pre-session consultation, which it all comes back to.
Allison Tyler Jones: Every time.
Kathryn Langsford: But once I was able to implement the pre-session consultation, I was able to see, really early on, people who wanted a couple of five by sevens to go on mantles. What they really wanted was holiday cards and a print to mail to the grandmother.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Kathryn Langsford: People don’t necessarily know that’s all they want, and when they call, they might think they want a whole lot more than that. But when it really gets down to the consultation and a real education about the service, that kind of thing can come out. And those are not necessarily people that are worth my time if I want to make more and work less.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay. And so let me just clarify something here too, because I can hear our listeners out there thinking that, okay, so you’re defining clients that you want to let go, so then you just call people up and tell them, “Hey, I’m not working with you anymore.” No.
Kathryn Langsford: No, of course not.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s not that. Yeah.
Kathryn Langsford: And we’ve had this conversation.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yes. It’s not that. It’s what you’re doing. You’re not saying anything to anybody. You’re saying to yourself, you’re saying Kathryn, I’m saying Allison, this is how I want to work. What I really want to do, the highest and best use of my talent, my abilities, why I was put on this earth, in my mind, other than metaphysical things, but in my career in this business, my highest misuse of my talent and abilities is to make art for my client’s homes that go on the wall and custom designed albums, but it is a finished product that they can look at and enjoy for generations that creates the art in their home. And that’s how I want to do it. And so I’m not willing to do it any other way. I don’t want to just have the work be on a holiday card.
Allison Tyler Jones: I don’t want it to just be something ephemeral that’s just going to go on a social media post, or like you said, in a bunch of little frames on a consult table. That’s overkill for what we’re doing. So I don’t have to say to anybody… Say I’ve been doing those little things up until now. I’ve allowed that to happen. I can just stop allowing that and say, okay. Like you’ve said, like we’ve said many times and we’ve sat together and said, “Okay, how are we going to roll this out?” Well, we can say, “I realize I wasn’t serving my clients to the best of my ability, and the best of my ability is creating art for your walls and custom designed albums, and so that’s what I’m doing. And so let’s talk and see about what we can do for you and how we can work together.”
Allison Tyler Jones: And then if at the end of that time that you’re chatting and having that consultation and they make it very, very clear that really all they want is a couple of five by sevens and some holiday cards, then that’s just overkill because they can’t really get that. And here’s the kicker is the rules, the things that you have to put into place to say, “Okay, can clients get five by sevens from you? Can they get them from me?” Yes, they can.
Kathryn Langsford: Absolutely as add-on to finished fine art. So as a copy of a finished fine art piece. So if they want a print in a five by seven, that needs to be a copy of that print that’s on the wall as a framed piece. So yeah, we don’t say, “No, I don’t do that.” We just say,-
Allison Tyler Jones: Yes. Absolutely.
Kathryn Langsford: … “Totally we do that stuff as copies of wall work.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. For mine, it doesn’t have to be a copy, but they have to have put something on the wall or we’ve created an album. In which case, if it was an album, obviously it would be a copy because it’s already in the album. So that is the next part, is that you’re looking at that client list and you’re saying, oh man, these top five people, what did they buy? Why are they the top five? Because in our conversations, they put something on the wall, they did a cool gallery up their huge Vancouver staircase that has all this natural light and gorgeous, or mine did a huge 60 inch portrait of their family over their sectional or whatever. So those best clients love their family, want to see them on their walls.
Kathryn Langsford: Love what we do.
Allison Tyler Jones: Get what we do and love what we do.
Kathryn Langsford: They’re not asking us to do something different. They love what we do exactly the way we do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And usually, those are the people that we’ve actually told what we do in a clear fashion, and then they’ve decided to do it.
Kathryn Langsford: And some of those people were working with me when I wasn’t doing that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Exactly. Okay, so talk about that. Because the other fear is that when we have students that come through the art of selling our course or whatever, and they’ll be like, “Well, so I just have to go get all new clients. I have to get rid of all these people.” No.
Kathryn Langsford: I’ve had that conversation many, many times because I’ve been in business 25 years. So the major changes I made in my business were probably seven-ish years ago. So people from before that time, I tell them, “We haven’t worked together in a long time. I need to tell you about how I do… There’s a few things I do differently, a few changes I’ve made for the better, in the interest of better serving my clients and being as efficient as I can with your time.” And then I talk to them about starting with the end in mind and how we start with the art idea. And if they don’t have that idea, that’s something that I can help them develop. And then from there, we decide what we’re shooting based on what they want on the wall or what they want in an album at that time.
Kathryn Langsford: If they’re like, “Oh, last time we did 25 four by sixes, we just do that?” then I have that conversation, like, “Here’s how you can purchase unframed prints.” I try to not say, “No, I don’t do that.” I just tell them how they can get what they want. But if the way to get what they want doesn’t suit them, then usually it ends. We never have a… I haven’t experienced people saying, “Can’t you just do this for me?” which is what I’m worried about, right?
Allison Tyler Jones: Of course.
Kathryn Langsford: But I don’t really experience that. I experience them sort of saying like, “Okay, let me think about it,” or, “Okay, let me ask my husband,” and then they don’t call back. And that’s fine. That’s how they get filtered out. I gave them all the information. I told them how I’m working now. And sometimes I can tell that it’s not working for them and that they’re not going to be coming back, and I have a little thing in me that feels like, oh no. Yeah, maybe I should make an exception.
Allison Tyler Jones: Who do I think I am to be placing these rules and restrictions on people?
Kathryn Langsford: But then I need to remember I’m doing this to grow my business and make it better. And if it’s not a good fit for them, that’s okay. There’s another business that’s a perfect fit for them, and there’s another client who’s a perfect fit for me. So I have those conversations a lot.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, okay. And so what I’ve experienced is exactly that, that really, people don’t go away mad. They’re just like, “Oh, that’s really cool. That’s really interesting. I think when our oldest is about ready to graduate, we’re going to schedule that, and let’s do that then. But right now at this time, I really just need a few four by sixes, so I’m going to go do something else.” Right? Or what’s more common in my experience is the reason why they bought all those four by sixes the last time we worked together is because I wasn’t acting like an expert. I wasn’t helping them. I was showing them too many images, and I was letting them do actually what I consider wrong. I was letting them not decide by just buying a lot of little. Rather than saying, “Okay, no, look, look, look, look, look, look. Really, let’s look at this.” What’s the most important thing? We already talked about this. It’s the family or it’s the picture of the kids or whatever. And let’s pick the best one.
Allison Tyler Jones: And you know this, the very first time you print your work, print a piece big and have it framed what that does for that image and how it elevates it, and how you feel about it when you walk by it, even in your studio, or whether it’s in your home of your family or in a studio of your client’s family, and how that… It changes the whole thing. And that’s, in my opinion, how I want to do business, that’s how it should be done. And so I really am just not willing to do it another way. I really want the clients to have that feeling. As they walk in their home, that they have an elevated modern family portrait that really shows the personalities and their relationships in their family in a way that can hang next to fine art that they’re buying at a gallery or whatever. That’s what I want for them. And if they don’t want that, if they don’t want that, then they don’t really want me, and that that’s okay.
Allison Tyler Jones: But what I find is that they actually do want it. They just might not want it right this minute because this time in their life is not that important. So they’re going to save me for when it’s important. They’re going to go use another photographer to get a lot a little, and that’s okay.
Kathryn Langsford: Totally.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so what’s the self-talk to make that okay? How do we-
Kathryn Langsford: I think the self-talk is I’m not the person I was 12, 15, 17 years ago. I’m not running the business I was running that long ago. My business has grown and changed, and I want to be able to do what I’m doing for anyone who wants it. But if this person doesn’t want it, then it’s the right thing to be transparent about what it is and let them walk away if it doesn’t fit for them.
Allison Tyler Jones: So the scary part of this is that when you start to make some of these changes and put some of these rules in place and say, “Okay, this is what I’m doing,” there might be… There’s a lot more people that want a bunch of digital files than there are who want to spend multiple thousands of dollars on a single piece of framed art for their wall. There just are. But you could make the same amount of money, just dollars to dollars, with one person that’s doing that second thing than a lot of people that are doing the first thing that we just described. So what’s happening then is your phone is going to ring less. If you’re really putting the message out there on your social media, whatever, that like, okay, look, we’re hanging this, we’re installing this, you do a lot of where you’re signing the prints before they go to the framer, that sort of thing. It’s very clear what it is that you’re doing. So there are going to be some calls that we don’t even get. There’s somebody that’s going to be like, “Oh, I haven’t seen Kathryn Langsford in a while. I wonder what she’s doing on social media. Let me check her feed.” And then she looks and sees, it’s all fine art, it’s all albums, it’s all she’s signing things. Man, it doesn’t look like she’s doing just digital files anymore, so they might not even call. So the phone is going to ring less.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah, they’re not calling.
Allison Tyler Jones: They’re not calling, which is scary.
Kathryn Langsford: That can be scary. And also, I get more leads that don’t convert. So if they haven’t looked at me and made the decision on Instagram, maybe they are calling me and reaching out, but after we have a conversation, they realize, oh, okay, that’s more than what we want to do, and it’s a bigger deal than I’m planning on. And so those can be hard. Those can be demoralizing and make you feel like, okay, what am I doing wrong that none of these people are booking? But what I need to do, what helps me is to look at the data, look at the numbers, look at the year over year sales, look at the average. I don’t trust my own memory for how many shoots I’ve done this year. I need to count them, take the revenue, divide it, do the math.
Allison Tyler Jones: Fourth grade math.
Kathryn Langsford: Yes.
Allison Tyler Jones: Not even high school, fourth grade math.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. So I need to do that so that I can see, okay, my sales average is pretty good. And okay, my annual revenue is pretty close, or even past what it was last year. So I can’t just trust how I feel about how successful my business is. I have to look at the numbers. And many times, I’ve been surprised, many, many times. Your head can really do a number on you. And the other piece is, as we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, the glorification of busy, right? We have in our minds, as business people, if we’re not hopping with the phone ringing and a full calendar and people wanting us at every turn, then something’s wrong.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Kathryn Langsford: And this model, you sort of have to get used to that not happening. I’ve had a couple of years now with this model really almost exclusively where I have fewer clients, bigger sales, less work, but my revenue is good. And I’ve really had to get used to things being quiet and realizing that it’s okay. And this is what I wanted. This is what I asked for. Maybe I’ve got nothing going on this week at all because I just wrapped up a really big job and I don’t have another shoot for another two weeks. And the revenue is not suffering, but I’ve got nothing happening this week. So maybe I’m going to not go in. That’s kind of an extreme, but it has happened.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, or you’re planning your life around… You’re saying, you know what? We’re going to book… Maybe you’re planning a big trip coming up here that you’re going to be gone for a few weeks, and you can do that. You can plot that because you’re not just booking every minute to be busy. The other thing too, I think that’s important to say is that the time that you are spending on those clients, each one of those sessions, the time you’re spending is very different than how you were spending it when you were just busy. When you’re doing a lot of volume and a lot of little client… No client’s little. Every client is big. We love all of our clients, but you know what I mean, a lot of little orders or a lot of smaller things, rather than like, okay, we’re doing this very conceptualized piece. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be whatever. How you’re preparing to sell that, how you’re preparing to show that to them even before the shoot.
Kathryn Langsford: The level of service.
Allison Tyler Jones: The level of service, the amount of time you’re taking doing the consultation, and then dreaming up what you’re shooting for them, and then how that is going to manifest in their home, what they’re doing with that, that takes more time to come up with that.
Kathryn Langsford: 100%. And that’s something that while I was transitioning into this model, I fell short a couple of times, and I realized, okay, I got to get on the ball with this. Because the people that are the really big clients cannot be lost in a sea of smaller clients who have way more needs because they’ve ordered quadruple the number of things, but they’re so much smaller. I guess what I’m saying is we learned to be really wary of booking a big client near Christmas or during any other big busy time because I don’t want them to get lost in a sea of busy. Now, it’s a little more, I don’t get as crazy busy as I did when I had more clients, so it’s a little bit-
Allison Tyler Jones: During the season. It’s more spread out through the year. Yeah.
Kathryn Langsford: But I have learned that I want to provide the best service to these people, and that means thinking about them every step of the way, thinking about them before they come in for the consultation. Do I have the wall photos from them? If I don’t, it’s not going to be a very productive meeting. Do I have the right drinks and snacks? And is the studio all clean? And do I have fresh flowers? And I’m not too busy to pay attention to these things. So every time a client walks in my studio, I want them to look like they’re the only person that’s ever been there. It’s all clean and perfect and refreshed, and nothing looks like it’s been worn down. And then all the way through, so the consultation, we do wardrobe pickup. I want to help consult with them on their wardrobe to make sure they’ve thought of everything.
Kathryn Langsford: And if they haven’t, can I help them? And then we go and pick it up from their house so that it’s all pressed and ready and at the studio a couple of days before, and I can go through it and see if anything’s missing. If we aren’t on top of that step, it sometimes doesn’t happen. So staying on track with that. And then of course, the session. We need to have had a very clear understanding of what we’re shooting. Have I sent them the quote? Has the quote been approved? If it hasn’t been approved, then we might need to adjust what we’re shooting that day because I have people approve the art sale before I shoot for the art. And if that hasn’t happened, that can screw things up, man. If people haven’t gotten back to me and I’m too busy to notice they didn’t get back to me, and then they show up with their family and they want 500 different iterations of everything just in case they might want to buy it and we haven’t really nailed down what they’re buying, that’s just a bad situation. That can tank the whole sale.
Kathryn Langsford: My really great big client, because of my disorganization and not getting that fine art order organized before the session, that could mean that when they show up for the view and order, they’re overwhelmed. There’s too much good stuff. They can’t decide what to buy, so they don’t buy anything, or they go away to think about it, or they put it all in an album instead of doing the three great big art prints, which-
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. It just screws up the decision making because it gives them so many things to consider. And then they’re overwhelmed and upset with us because-
Kathryn Langsford: Absolutely. Of course.
Allison Tyler Jones: … it’s not ever going to be their fault.
Kathryn Langsford: It colors their experience. It colors their experience. They’re not thinking through, oh, it’s because I didn’t answer her email. They’re not thinking that.
Allison Tyler Jones: No.
Kathryn Langsford: They’re thinking, that was overwhelming and stressful, and I don’t want to do that again.
Allison Tyler Jones: Or, well, it’s going to cost this much, and I just want my pictures. And then we’re holding them hostage and it’s bad. Yeah.
Kathryn Langsford: So all the steps to the process are much easier to execute if I’ve got time to think about it. If I have time to think about that client… What I really love doing is the clients that are coming up for me in the next two months. I have my own office, and then there’s a production office that handles all the post-production and everything. So when I’m in my office, I like a stack of client files sitting on my desk. That’s all my current, my clients that are coming up soon, so that I can regularly look through those files and think about them for a second. Do I need anything from them? Is everything on track for them? And very often, it’s not. And there’s a ball that’s been dropped, and I need to stay on top of it. So those people need to stay at the top of my mind or they’re not going to get the best of me. And I’m talking about… There may be certain months when I only have four clients or five clients, but they’re big orders and big jobs.
Kathryn Langsford: And if I’m bogged down with 12 more other people that want a whole bunch of little stuff, I mean, those people are just going to get lost.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And I think I may have talked about this before in the podcast, but this was really clear, brought home to me one Christmas season when my very best client, who is just lovely and so easy and never… She’s just happy with… She loves what we do. She approves quickly. She pays quickly. She’s just easy. And all of a sudden, I realized I was doing the 12th revision on a holiday card for a client that had only bought holiday cards. It was on the 12th revision. This woman was making me insane. And I realized, oh my gosh, I totally forgot that client, and we had all of this stuff that she needed for holiday gifts, all this framed art that she needed.
Allison Tyler Jones: I had completely let the whole thing slide, and we had to rush. We got it done, but I mean, the day before she left town, I was taking it personally over to her house. And as far as she was concerned, we got it done. But as far as I was concerned, I had almost really messed up of somebody that spent multiple tens of thousand dollars of dollars with me every year for somebody that was only buying holiday cards. And so that doesn’t mean that the person only buying holiday cards isn’t worth anything. They have their place and all of that, but it’s just for the health of your business, you have to look at those things and realize that… And we all have been in those situations, right?
Kathryn Langsford: Oh yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: We’ve all been the good client, the loyal gym goer who pays your dues every month. Anytime they come up with a new class, you buy it. Anytime they come up with merch, I’m the first one with a T-shirt, but yet that gym is doing Groupon after Groupon or Living Single or whatever, these promos, and they’re screwing up your classes, bringing in all these people that only want to come in for the cheap deal, and they’re not taking care of the loyal people that have been there all the way through. So it’s epidemic in every type of business. It’s just not realizing, okay, what is it that really makes my heart sing? What is it, brings me joy, brings my very best clients the most joy? What do my very best clients need? And that’s the point of The Pumpkin Plan book, is that building your business around the big pumpkins, and then cutting some of those smaller vines off so that you can let those pumpkins be bigger.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. And I just want to stress it doesn’t necessarily mean cutting them off, like saying, “I am no longer your photographer.” It’s more that your priority is to work in that way with the top clients, and the people who don’t want it won’t want it.
Allison Tyler Jones: So they’re like, “Look, all I need is some holiday cards. What are we doing a consultation for? I don’t need to come in for some consultation. All I got to do is holiday cards.” Okay, well, then right there, we’ve got… There’s some education that needs to take place. And oh, certainly. We can absolutely do cards for you as an add-on, but what we specialize in is finish product for your wall, so we need to get together and plot that, figure out, like you say, set the creative agenda for the session. And then they’re like, “Well, I live in the igloo with no interior walls. I’m never going to put anything on the wall, and I don’t believe in albums. It’s against my religion.”
Kathryn Langsford: “My house is all done.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Then it’s like, okay, well then don’t actually… For me, for just only a holiday card, it is just overkill. You don’t want to spend that kind of money for that. So what I find is that once I have a conversation with somebody about what we really do, they hear how excited I am about it and how passionate I am about what we really do, I really don’t have anybody that goes away mad anymore, ever. What they always do is say, “Thank you so much for taking the time to tell me about this. It’s so cool what you’re describing. I hadn’t even considered doing that.” Does that sound familiar? “Hadn’t even considered doing that. But now that I know that you exist, I think maybe I do want to do that. So let me talk to my husband. I’ll get back to you.” And then sometimes they never will, or sometimes they really do, they wait until it’s a more special time or something.
Kathryn Langsford: Oh, absolutely. And something I also hear is people love the way that the new method is more focused on the end in mind. People who remember sitting with me and agonizing over 40 paper proofs and aborting the whole situation because they couldn’t decide, those people are really happy with how things are now. If the rest of it fits for them, they’re thrilled with how easy this new method is. Because really, by the time… We don’t have to go into what that new method is, but by the time they get to their view in order, there’s just a wall with four prints on it, and it’s done. They don’t have to start from narrowing down. The other thing I was going to mention was I could maybe hear people asking, “How do you get those big clients? If you’re only going to have four clients a month or 20 clients a year, or whatever your number is, how do you attract people that want to spend that much money?” I’m sure you get that a lot. I think one important thing is put it up.
Kathryn Langsford: I do a lot of my promotion with the goal of showing people what I’m doing. Obviously, there might be a promotion there too, but a lot of times I want to show people, this is what’s happening in my studio. This is an idea of what it costs. And I’m not giving them a price list, but I might throw out, “We’re discounting this. Now it’s only $6,500,” or whatever, just so people sort of get an idea of, we’re doing these big pieces, we’re hanging them on the wall, here’s the general price point, just to put that out there. But I think that’s useful, even if it’s not a promotion. As you mentioned before, Instagram showing installations, Instagram showing big wall art pieces, albums, obviously website headed in that direction as opposed to just being an online portfolio. It’s really all about-
Allison Tyler Jones: Showing the installation, showing what the finished product looks like, what it could look like in their home, what it would mean for them.
Kathryn Langsford: They don’t know that these kind of services are available.
Allison Tyler Jones: No.
Kathryn Langsford: We’re not the average photographer. We’ve said it many times. We’re not going to just meet them in a park and shoot 1200 images and hand over some kind of USB stick.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. Exactly. Well, and the other thing too, to answer that question, “Where do you find these clients that are willing to spend this kind of money?” many of them started off as my clients that didn’t spend a lot of money. Many of them started off in my basement when I saw digital files or started off shooting in my basement or in a park somewhere, when I was selling a lot of little eight by tens and five by sevens, and they’ve just come along because they love what I do. They love the experience. They love how I make their kids feel. They love the expressions that I’m able to capture. All of these are, things apply to so many people listening to this podcast. But I changed how I wanted to work, in part because I wanted to have a sustainable, long-term business, but also because I really truly believe in that end product.
Allison Tyler Jones: I truly believe in it. It’s not just a money grab for like, well, the only way you’re going to make money in this business is if you sell finished product. No, I really believe in it. I really believe… I have a gallery hanging in my own home of work that my mother had photographed of me, that her mother had photographed of her. I have multi-generations of portraits on my wall. It’s something that has shaped me as a person growing up, and I believe in it. So it’s to the core. So when I was new and started, was kind of following what other photographers were doing. It just never felt truly satisfying to me. And I could see, like you said, that my clients would sit there and I’m… Okay, so let’s look at your pictures. Let’s play the slideshow of 150 images. Now, we’re going to go through and go, “Yes, no, maybe.” And then they’re like, “Give me the razor blades right now and let me kill myself.” Whereas now, it’s like, okay, play the slideshow of way less images. I still love a slideshow.
Kathryn Langsford: “And here’s the three that are going on the wall.”
Allison Tyler Jones: “And here’s the wall, and here’s the album. What do you think?” So it’s just much shorter, much easier, and they don’t second guess you because they are just like, “Yeah, sure.” Sometimes if you even ask them a question, they’re like, “Wait, hold on a minute. That’s your job. Don’t ask me that question. You tell me what it’s supposed to be framed in, or you tell me where it’s supposed to go.” So it really has changed so much over the years.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah, agree. I love it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay. Well, I think those are some good takeaways. So look at your data, look at your clients, see who really is the very best. For most businesses, it’s not top 100 people. It’s usually top five, 10, maybe 20 if you’ve been in business for a long time.
Kathryn Langsford: I’d say it’s less than 10 for me, my really top people that I would just drop everything. And again, it’s a combination of bottom line sales, communication, people that they refer, how easy they are, how much they love what we do and just let us do our thing, and they.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yep, trust.
Kathryn Langsford: Let us manage anything. Trust, exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: They trust us. Yeah.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. Those are the people I’m talking about. And it was surprising how some of the big spenders did not make the cut.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Yeah, the biggest. Yeah. Okay, so data. Then we’re, again, always going back to that consultation, really communicating before we ever shoot anything, what is it that we’re doing and how we’re doing it, communicating that in every social media post, communicating that on our website, because I don’t like telling people no. I don’t say no, but I don’t even… When I feel like I’ve weeded someone out, even still, even when I know it’s a good thing, it still makes me feel bad. So I’d rather just not get the call. I would rather all of that communication is going out on social media and my website makes them go, “Okay, I’m not ready to do that, so I’m not going to call her until I’m ready to do that.” That that’s success to me. And then preparing ourselves for that when we’re not just running around after a lot of little, and that the phone isn’t ringing as much as we would like, that we need to, again, go back to that data and see how are the sales averages looking?
Allison Tyler Jones: What’s the year over year revenue? How’s that looking? And fact checking ourselves before we start freaking out and thinking, oh my gosh, I’m never going to work again. I’m going to be living in a van down by the river. And then taking those time, that time that we’ve now carved out to really spend on the clients that we do have, dreaming up all kinds of new things for them, new concepts, new reasons for, things that we could do for them that we wouldn’t have the bandwidth or even think of, have the creativity for if we’d been stretched so thin just doing the same thing for multiple people.
Kathryn Langsford: Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: And that’s how you get less clients, but more money.
Kathryn Langsford: Yeah. That’s it. That’s how you do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: In a nutshell. It’s so easy. It’s only a 75 step process followed by being shrunk by your shrink to not feel like you’re going to be living in a van-
Kathryn Langsford: Comes together magically.
Allison Tyler Jones: … down by the river. I know it also really helps to have a good friend in the business in another city or country to help bounce these ideas and shore each other up. Because there’ve been plenty of times where you’ve been slow and I’ve given you the pep talk, I’ve been slow and you’ve given me the pep talk. And so we keep each other like hold firm.
Kathryn Langsford: Yes, totally.
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re doing it. So I appreciate that about you, and I appreciate you taking the time and sharing your wisdom with our listeners today.
Kathryn Langsford: And I appreciate everything about you, ATJ.
Allison Tyler Jones: You are the best.
Kathryn Langsford: Bye.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com and on Instagram @do.the.rework.
