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. Today’s guest is none other than Jed Taufer, former podcaster, portrait studio owner/White House custom color magician. I love Jed because he’s always up for a philosophical conversation, and today’s conversation is focused on are we making our experience, our product, our business, as special as we can for our clients? Jed has a wealth of experience, not only running his own portrait studio with his wife, Vicki, for many years, but also speaking to so many photographers on his podcast, This Conversation, and then also working on the vendor side, creating the actual products that photographers sell. I think you’re going to find real value in this conversation as we explore the client experience from many different angles. Let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: It has been way too long since you and I have been on the either side of a microphone, Jed Taufer. I’ve missed you.
Jed Taufer: I have missed you as well.
Allison Tyler Jones: Not really, but it’s okay. Thanks for saying that.
Jed Taufer: No, it’s not just reciprocal. I really mean it.
Allison Tyler Jones: You have been busy at White House doing all the things. What have you been doing?
Jed Taufer: Well, I got called up to White House in August of ’21 for three weeks to help with some operations type stuff, and I was there for 17 months because there was a lot to do more than what I think anybody anticipated, and I became… Oh, I became more involved in the operations piece, got more involved in the HR piece, hiring, firing, managing people, helping others manage people. It was very fruitful. Things are in a really good spot right now, operations wise and personnel wise, and they’re running really smoothly. So now it’s a matter of keeping the cogs greased and just maintaining things and expanding into other projects and ventures. My title right now is special projects, so I just-
Allison Tyler Jones: You are so special.
Jed Taufer: No, I don’t mean special. Sorry. It’s not special projects, it’s strategic projects.
Allison Tyler Jones: Strategic. I like special better. I’m just going to say special.
Jed Taufer: My goodness. I said that wrong. It’s an ambiguous title on purpose because I-
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, strategic sounds much more manly, but I prefer special. You are special.
Jed Taufer: I’ll take either one of them.
Allison Tyler Jones: Don’t let anybody tell you different. Okay. Well, I would love to talk today about one of our favorite topics, which is the idea of valuing yourself. You and I are constantly fighting that tide, so obviously you work for a lab that creates finished product. I own a portrait studio that specializes in that, as do you and Vicky, and so just before we jumped on the recording, we were talking about that. Why do you think… Is it a hard sell to get photographers who have been shoot and burn to convert to product, and if so, why? What are your thoughts?
Jed Taufer: Well, in general, it certainly can be a hard sell. I would say in general, it is usually a hard sell to get people to convert from just shoot and burn to actually selling products because it is scary. You have the perception at least of putting yourself out there.
Allison Tyler Jones: But shooting portraits isn’t putting yourself out there?
Jed Taufer: Not in the same way you’re giving yourself another opportunity to be rejected. I think that’s the core of it. It’s one thing to offer the service and the experience, and everybody goes through the experience and they have the session, and then you give them a bunch of images, whether it’s via a gallery or just emailing them to them or however people do it these days, but to then say, “Now I’m going to sell you these images and give you the opportunity to buy products and actually purchase the images and give me more money,” could be a scary piece because once you’re putting yourself out there even more or further.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, you have to have another opinion about it. You have to have a, “This is the one I think you should do. This is the one I think should go on your wall.”
Jed Taufer: Well, and I don’t think a lot of people understand how valued their opinion is. It’s certainly not how valuable it should be, and there’s security issues and all kinds of things there. Well, my work isn’t as good as so-and-so’s, or I’ve only been doing this for X amount of time, or who am I to think that I should charge $80 for a five by seven? And my response is the, “Who are you not to?” It’s the Marian Williamson, “We’re more scared of the light within us than we are of the darkness.” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that quote. She’s got a great quote-
Allison Tyler Jones: Don’t play small.
Jed Taufer: Right. And I think that’s a big piece of it. There’s all this insecurity that’s built, and I think people mistake it for humility. They think they have to be that way. It’s a virtue to be timid. No, it’s a virtue to be humble. It’s not a virtue to be timid. You can think less of yourself or you can think of yourself less. Those are two very different-
Allison Tyler Jones: I like that.
Jed Taufer: Well, that’s a CS Lewis thing. Those are two very different mindsets, and I think people a lot of times want to think of themselves less, but then they struggle with thinking of less of themselves. And when it comes to putting yourself into a position where you’ve done all this work and you have these images and now it’s time to sell them, I think that security is a big piece of that. And you need a confidence. You need to have a level of confidence. You probably know this almost better than anybody. You walk into a room and you have somebody on the other side of that table that’s a client and potentially a very good client financially. You got to bring your A game man, and you got to walk in there with a level of confidence because that’s a big piece of the process. If you walk in there and you’re all timid, who’s going to want to give you any money for your stuff?
Allison Tyler Jones: But I think how you get there, there’s different paths to that confidence. I think there are some people that are born with it. As a parent, you see within your own children, there are kids that are just more naturally, they just flew into this world more confident and others that second guess themselves more. But one way to… I found for me as an oldest child, I tend to second guess myself. I definitely struggle with imposter syndrome. I found one way to be more confident was to think about myself less in this way, that it’s not really about me, it’s about them and their experience and their family and how they’re feeling and what they’re seeing in those images, and really listening to them and portraying that for them and realizing I am giving… At any time in my career, I really do feel like I give the best that I’m able.
Allison Tyler Jones: Now I can look back and see that stuff that I shot in 2009, and I can’t believe somebody paid me for that because my skills have increased and I’ve learned more about lighting and I’ve learned better vendors and better substrates to print it on or whatever. But I can look back at that and know that was the best I could do at the time. I never gave less than my best. So there’s confidence in that. I mean, we could always be better. Our critical eye will always outstrip our ability. There’s no question on that, but are you giving the best that you can? And there’s a confidence in that you don’t need to flagellate yourself with this false, like you said, thinking less of yourself.
Jed Taufer: Well, I like the perspective that you’re adopting when you’re basically saying you’re doing this for them. I think one of the biggest lessons that we ever learned regarding sales is that it’s a disservice not to offer your clients products via sales, finished portraits and albums and things that are done that are tangible that they can set on a coffee table or put on a shelf or hang on their wall. And then they see and experience and enjoy for the rest of their lives really. And to not offer that, and I didn’t think about it at the time, this is 20 years ago when somebody’s like, “You’re doing a disservice to them.” You have all kinds of reasons not to do it, but that’s a hard one to argue when someone brings that one up.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s true. The other thing I think too that I think many shoot and burn photographers may not have experienced is that first time that you order a very large print of a favorite image. Something that you shot that you love, that you’re really proud of, just order a 40 by 60 of that sucker, and then you open that up and I don’t know what it is, but just the size alone takes it to another level. It elevates it in a way that’s really inexplicable. I don’t know. I’m sure there are words to explain it, but unless you have experienced that, you’re never going to grasp it, how special that is.
Jed Taufer: I think it is a good idea for people to… Just, I think it’s a good idea for photographers to be photographed and experience what it’s like to be on… and I know that I get that reaction.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hate. Hate. Hate. Loath entirely.
Jed Taufer: I get it. And that’s probably the reason why I think it’s that much more important to experience what it’s like on the other side. I think it’s important for photographers to have the experience of purchasing and having and owning something that’s what it is that we sell ourselves, whether it’s a landscape image or even you go and you buy something from Peter Lick that’s big and beautiful, and whether it’s-
Allison Tyler Jones: A million dollars.
Jed Taufer: You could spend less probably or your own portrait of your family. I remember we decided when we moved to Minnesota 10 years ago, and we had our daughter at the time, and we decided to take her in for portraits, and the guy knew who we were and introduced himself in the sales appointment, and in my mind, I’m like, “Let’s see if we can get out of here with $500 or less or whatever.” And he started talking to us and he went through the presentation and to see her up there, I remember just I wanted everything. I said, “How do I get all the digitals of this stuff?” And he goes, “Well, you spend a certain amount and you do this, that, and the other.” And I was like, “Okay, tell me what I need to do because I want all the digital files and I’m going to get a big, huge 30, 30 acrylic.” We got whatever it was, it was three or four grand that I walk out of there spending. And I was shocked.
Jed Taufer: I was shocked at myself. I was shocked that I did it. I was shocked that it occurred the way that it did, and I was shocked at how excited I was to have that. And here, this is what we’ve been doing for, at the time, it was 15 years we’d been doing this and talking to people about this, but to experience it that way myself was extremely eyeopening for me.
Allison Tyler Jones: So what was eyeopening about it? What did you take away from that?
Jed Taufer: I guess, I took away from it how special it really was, how much it really meant to me, which sounds ridiculous because I don’t think I would’ve said it before that. I don’t think I would’ve said, “Oh, I don’t think this is-”
Allison Tyler Jones: Because you can do it. You guys can do it. You can take pictures of her any day of the week, day or night.
Jed Taufer: And we had a million of them. But to actually go through that process and experience it, to be in someone else’s hands, I guess you could say, I’m in your hands type of thing. You do your thing and then let’s see what happens. And to go through that and then to see the results of that, and then to feel the desire to just, “I want all of that.” We kept going through, “I want that one, I want that one, I want that one. I want that one.” At the end. It’s like, “Well, I want all of them.” I’ve heard people do that. I’ve seen people have that experience with us, and so it’s easy for, “Oh, you do this and you say this and you set this up like this, and you can go teach a million people how to do all that,” and it’s not nearly the same as it is to be on the other side of that table or the other side of that couch or whatever it is, and actually go through the process and experience it yourself.
Allison Tyler Jones: After my mom passed away in 2013 Oric, an Irish photographer at the time had come to do a workshop at our studio, and I asked him if he would photograph me and my siblings together and that one image… and it was one image. It’s so beautiful, and you can see in all of us how much we were finally orphans. We’d lost our dad in 2005. We lost our mom in 2013. We were all that we have left, and you see that in that image, and I gave that, ordered them full retail, the whole thing, had them shipped over from Ireland, and that image is a treasure on my wall. That’s going to be one of those you grab if there’s a fire on the way out the door, and I could have done that. I could have set that up and had my assistant shoot it or whatever, but just having Oric do it was so special.
Jed Taufer: And it’s one thing for you to say that from the stage or say that on your podcast or say that in any of your materials. It’s another thing when you’re teaching somebody or talking to people about it. It’s another thing to experience it yourself and to go through that process and to have those thoughts and those memories and those things that you can actually draw on moving forward in your own business.
Allison Tyler Jones: Because when it was being photographed, if I had been in charge of photographing that I would’ve been like, “Okay, is my assistant… does she have the light right?” She and I would’ve been directing it and back and forth, but I could literally just be the subject. And you can see in that image that many of us have a little… we’re tearing up a little bit because you’ve got us all kind of hanging onto each other a little bit. And so it’s just to be in that moment, I think we really undervalue what that experience, and we talk about that a lot client experience, and I think sometimes people think, “It’s the candy, it’s the water bottles, it’s the…” No, it’s that, sure. But it’s also them being next to people that they love and watching people they love. Being in that room and just having a time set aside. You’re not at a wedding, you’re not at an event. The only event that’s happening is family portraits, and you really get that aerial view of like, “I really do love these kids. I really do love my husband. I really am glad that I actually had kids.” Sort of, kind of.
Jed Taufer: There’s truth to that. There’s a gratitude perspective I think that maybe pops up. We can get so lost in things on a general basis that we miss that part of how much we actually have to be thankful for.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and how much… and we also don’t… We forget how much the client has invested to get there. So they’ve shopped for weeks, they’ve got their kids dressed, they’ve threatened their life, they’ve driven to get there, this level of investment to get there, and we’re like, “It’s another day at the office for us.” And so if we treated it as special… I think that’s the theme of this podcast actually. If we treated this as special as it really was, we would do so much better. Going for printed product is making that image more special, allowing yourself to really watch those people walk up and go, “Okay, I can see what they put into this. Let’s make this special for them.” Just taking a minute rather than like, “Okay, there’s more donuts to be made. Okay, next. Next. Okay, we got to edit all those pictures. Okay, we got to get them out and get them on the gallery so they can download them. Next.” It’s like, “Are you using your abilities and talents to the highest and best ability, and are you printing or exhibiting that work in the highest and best way?”
Jed Taufer: The anecdotal experience is invaluable to actually go through it yourself on the other side I think is a big deal.
Allison Tyler Jones: I could not agree more. How can we slow down and make it more special and really see what’s special about our client and what’s special about what we do and how those things marry together and are we doing the best we can for the client? Are we serving them to the best of our ability?
Jed Taufer: Man, how can we slow down? Is that the question?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m just saying, I just think we get into this mode. How many talks are there going to be at imaging about workflow and processes? Which we all need to be more efficient. That’s good, but can we… Great, we’ve got all that workflow, we’ve got the process down, but there’s some things that should not be automated. Love is one of those things, and loving on your client and making the experience special and really pondering what’s going to be the best for their house. What’s the best for this image? That can’t be automated, that’s not AI, that’s your creative talent and ability.
Jed Taufer: I step back further and I start with… Oh, boy. All the consultations and discussions and workshops and all this stuff, it always came down to… not always, but if a person talks long enough and you’re back and forth, it always, for me, every time, if you did it long enough, it came down to the one question, what do you want? You have to know what you want. I think it really behooves you to know what you want. Well, I want to make a lot of money. Okay, well, that’s going to look a certain way, and if that’s your priority, then you’re going to want to think about this, this, and this.
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re going to want to be a hedge fund manager.
Jed Taufer: Sometimes I got to the point where some people are like, “Well, if you want to make a million dollars, this could be really hard to do that in this industry. There’s not a lot of people that do that or can do that,” and I’m not the guy that’s going to tell you, “Everybody can do this.” I don’t say that. I’ve talked people out of going into photography. I’ve talked people out of having a studio. I’ve talked people out of investing more in their business, in hiring more people. I asked a lady one time, “What do you want?” And she said, “I want a big, beautiful studio just like this.” And I said, “Are you a mom?” And she said, “Yeah, I have three kids.” I said, “Well, now you’re going to have six.” There’s some banter going back and forth. And this conversation actually took place over a much longer period of time than when I just mapped it out.
Jed Taufer: But it was like she had this realization, “Maybe I don’t want a big studio because that’s going to require a lot of my time, and I have three little babies at home that I really enjoyed.” So we got to the point in the conversation that what she really wanted was to be a mom. And I said, “So be a mom first, and you don’t need a big studio. You don’t want 4,000 square feet in the middle of downtown that you’re going to have to manage.”
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s going to cost you 10,000 a month.
Jed Taufer: It’s going to cost you all that money and all the time that you’re going to have to be away from your children. You really want to be a mom. So let’s talk about that first and then talk about how integrating you as a business woman is going to look like being that your priority right now to be a mom, and that’ll change in five years or 10 years or whatever. Your kids are teenagers and you don’t see them hardly any more anyway. Well, now you have all this time on your hands. Well, and put more of that time into your business then, but you’re not going to get the next 10 years with your kids back ever.
Allison Tyler Jones: And I think that absolutely is the case.
Jed Taufer: That’s where I start anyway. After you get some information, you go back and forth. That’s where I almost always start, “Okay, what do you want?”, all this stuff. We laid all these things out. I’m relatively familiar with your circumstances. What do you want?
Allison Tyler Jones: But usually the first thing you say is-
Jed Taufer: And some people can’t answer that very well.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, I know. I was just going to say, usually the first thing you say is not the thing that you really want. Because I mean, how many-
Jed Taufer: No, rarely that.
Allison Tyler Jones: I just need more clients. It’s like, “Well, do you really, or do you need just different clients or do you need to change the way you’re working or whatever?”
Jed Taufer: I need more hours in the day. Well, don’t we all? I want to make more money. Yes, we do. Well, I never see my family. Well, do you want to see your family more? Yes. Well, then you have to make some adjustments. I’m up till three in the morning editing every night. Well, have you thought about outsourcing that? After you find out what they want… I don’t want to be working 78 hours a week. I don’t want to do that. Okay, well then let’s talk about how you can focus on efficiencies and workflow and outsourcing and maybe not shooting 7,000 images for a senior session because that requires more effort and work, whether you’re doing it or somebody else. And if it’s somebody else, then it’s costing you more. There’s all kinds of directions that you go into with the question, what do you want?
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and I think you and Vicky have are really prime examples of that. I remember a couple of years you telling me, these are my dad years. It took a lot to get the kids that you have. You didn’t go a typical route. So you have, I think, a deeper appreciation than many people that I know for the children that you do have in realizing we’re committed to this for this period of time. Because then you know that at some point they’re going to launch and then you’re going to have time to do other things. But right now, you’ve intentionally committed to this. I love that. I love the idea of really thinking about what it is that you want and digging down to that. And I find for myself, it’s not always self-evident, it’s not always the first thing we think of.
Jed Taufer: No, it usually isn’t because sometimes we think we know what we want, and a lot of times that’s based on what other people want or what we perceive other people wanting or doing with their lives.
Allison Tyler Jones: Or what we should want.
Jed Taufer: What we should want. And you look at someone’s Instagram feed and you’re like, “Well, they’re obviously getting everything that they want. I want that too.” A, it’s not true, most of the time by looking at somebody else’s feed.
Allison Tyler Jones: I always think I want other than $8 million and a fast metabolism. If I can’t have those two things, then I really want time and autonomy, freedom. Time, love and freedom, time to spend it with people that I love. Those are big focus for me. So efficiencies in my business so that I don’t have to work every hour, but the hours that I am working, I really want to be able to spend loving on my clients and really having meaningful connection with them, not just photographing them, but also talking with them when we’re brainstorming what we are going to shoot, and then envisioning where those images are going to go in their home and really connecting. And as an older mom, I’ve had… and I know you guys have had this experience too, you end up in those sales appointments and you’re on the inside track of people’s lives and helping them raise their kids. And I love that. That’s one of my favorite things about what we do, and that’s all part of it.
Allison Tyler Jones: I would never give that up. I don’t want to give up that part, but I don’t really care about retouching. I don’t care about… So the parts that I don’t care about, I need somebody who does really care about that to be… Stacey cares about retouching. She’s amazing at it. She needs to be doing that. I need to never touch a stylist at a Wacom tablet ever again in my life.
Jed Taufer: I think, I don’t know how many times I’ve had the conversation where you say, “Okay, what are you doing?” “Well, I do this and I do that, spending all my time doing all these things.” And I say, “How many of those things do you enjoy? How many of those things do you want to do?” And there’s like three out of 14, and I’m like, “Well, you’re doing those 11 things. Do you have to be doing those 11 things?” “Well, three of them, yes. Eight of them, no.” “Well, then have somebody else do them.”
Allison Tyler Jones: But it’s just the inertia. It’s because you’ve always done it, so you just get stuck in this pattern, or how many times people are like, “Well, it’s going to cost me so much to pay somebody else to do it.” It’s like, “But then you free up that bandwidth. Even if you don’t-”
Jed Taufer: How much is your time worth?
Allison Tyler Jones: Even if you don’t go book another session, maybe you go play with your grand kid or you play with your kid, or you are able to go to a game or something like that. Like you said, you’re not going to get the time back.
Jed Taufer: And it’s easier said than done. I get it. I don’t mean to oversimplify any of this, even though-
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh yes, you do.
Jed Taufer: Well, I don’t mean to.
Allison Tyler Jones: You love to oversimplify it.
Jed Taufer: I am doing it. I don’t know if I want to be doing it.
Allison Tyler Jones: I don’t want to be seen as oversimplifying it.
Jed Taufer: And yet that’s what I’m doing, and I know that. But at the same time, I do think it’s something that, it’s a great goal to have to figure out what it is that you want to do, what it is that you don’t want to do, and work towards doing the things you want to do and not doing the things you don’t want to do. There’s that oversimplification, but it’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. But if you have those goals laid out before you, based on the self-awareness of what you want and what you don’t want, you can work towards that over time. And I think that’s what we should be doing. You’re working towards carving out more time in your life to do other stuff with family and friends. Right?
Allison Tyler Jones: And then also to just… I want to thoroughly enjoy and have my clients enjoy the time that I’m spending with them so that I don’t feel like I’m resentful. I’m charging enough that I don’t feel like I am resentful when somebody comes in and it says, “I want to hire you to photograph my family.” I’m not like, “Ah, another one. I can’t do one more dang session because I’m excited.”
Jed Taufer: If someone’s in a situation where that’s what they’re saying, then I think they need to stop on a dime and analyze why it is that’s where they’re at. Don’t just keep going. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You have to keep going to a degree. You have to keep moving.
Allison Tyler Jones: You’re not always in the mood, for sure.
Jed Taufer: But figure out why is it like that. Have a conversation with somebody that you trust and is not afraid to lay it out for you. Don’t talk to a yes man. Don’t talk to a yes woman. Talk to a person that’s going to help you analyze why it is that’s where you’re at, and then figure it out, because it’s going to be stuff you don’t want to hear, more than likely.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. But those are the best friends and the best mentors. Right? They’re people that’ll tell you the truth.
Jed Taufer: The people that you get angry at once you ask them for their opinion.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s true. Well, I love it. You’re always good for a good philosophical discussion. Of course you are. You’re one of my favorites to talk to. But I think we can take away from all of this as we were early in the year to be more intentional, make something more special, and realize building that confidence is a layer at a time and realizing truly what we bring. And then if we feel like we’re not bringing it, let somebody else do it and figure out what we want to do.
Jed Taufer: Well said.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, you said it. So good job. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you.
Jed Taufer: Great to see you.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com and on Instagram @do.the.rework.
