[00:00:00] The number one thing that holds photographers back from building their business and working with their dream clients is this, too many photographers rely solely on referrals to get. Do you want a secret? I didn't have any referrals until after I've already worked with 30 plus brands going into photography.
I had no connections, no family, friends that needed photos, no social media for my company, and yet I was able to build a six figure photography business. This was no accent either. I did this by having a systemized approach that I'm going to share with you. After you're done with this podcast episode, I'm going to drill into your head that you don't need referrals.
And in fact, if you try and only rely on referrals, they will hold you back and they will actually hurt you as a creative business owner. At the end of the show, I'm going to give you tangible advice on how to actually build a creative business that will generate clients. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to [00:01:00] six figures.
Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. Referrals are dangerous. Referrals are not how you build a photography business. When creatives rely solely on referrals, they will struggle to get their company off the. They'll live paycheck to paycheck, and they'll have this feeling of constant stress from not knowing where the next client is coming from.
If you feel like this, I feel like this is you. Well listen up here.
Before I break down all the dangers of referrals, I do want you to note that there is a time and place for referrals. I'll get into that later on in the episode. So why are referrals dangerous in the first place? Well, I think the most dangerous reason is something that people don't immediately think of when they hear referrals.
Referrals instill a feeling of entitlement. Let me say that again. Referrals instill a feeling of entitlement. When you're relying on referrals, you're saying that clients should come to you. You're so good that clients should be lining up to work with you. Entitlement will bury you as a business owner.
If you go into [00:02:00] business thinking that you are owed anything, you will fail. Let me tell you right now, you are not owed clients. You are not owed any business success. It's up to you and only you to go out there, prove yourself as a business owner and actually get clients. When you go into business with the mindset of, I'm great at what I do, people should work with me, then you won't get very far.
You have to go into this with the assumption that no one knows about. No one cares about you, and it's your responsibility to go out there and make something for yourself. So many photographers fall into this trap of creating an incredible portfolio, designing a beautiful website, and yes, that portfolio and website are important, and they may be truly impressive, but no one's coming to look at that website.
No one's Googling your name. No one knows you exist. It's on you to make yourself known to the. And just having a pretty website isn't enough. It's barely scratching the surface. And when you go into this photography business thinking that you can rely solely on referrals, then you're in for a rude awakening.
As photographers, and more [00:03:00] importantly, as creative business owners, we need to focus on what's in our control. Well, does this mean exactly? Well, we need to focus on ? Well, when you're focused on activities that move the yield forward, and our business, I'll get into this more later, but for now, know, When we focus on things outside of our control, like the number of clients we get, we're bound for.
On the other hand, when we focus on things that we can control, like the volume of client outreach we do, the number of cold emails we send, the number of Instagram dms we send, well then we succeed. Keep this in mind throughout the whole video. Focus on the things that are within our control. Now, maybe you've got some referrals.
Maybe your friend saw that you bought a fancy camera, they saw your Instagram post, and their uncle has a coffee shop and they. , great. This is a fantastic foot in the door opportunity. You wanna do your best work for this client, provide a really, really incredible customer experience. And when you do all of this, you'll probably get a great case study and that case study you can use down the road to get more and more clients, [00:04:00] but you'll also get something else from this experience.
A false sense of confidence and a false sense of security. Yes, it's amazing that you're able to work with a client doing what you love, but the reality is that a. Isn't a reliable source of new clients. Not yet. At least. It's great to have this as an addition to your website and for your client acquisition pipeline that I'll talk about later, but just getting a referral could instill this false sense of security that you don't actually have.
As long as you have this in the back of your head that there isn't an actual client acquisition system to referrals, then you'll be fine. But if you think that referrals are coming one after another, then you're in for a rude awaken. You might get this referral and then expect them to refer you to their friends, but this is rarely the case.
There's no predictable revenue here. You just sit at home and you have your fingers crossed and you wait for the next referral. And if you remember what I said earlier, you're not entitled to any clients. This world does not owe you anything, and it's on you to get that next [00:05:00] client. Now, if you get this referral and have the mindset that you need to be the one that's consistently finding leads and selling them on your service, then that's great.
But a lot of the time referrals will just provide this false sense of confidence. Let's walk through this situation here. What if you have four clients that you consistently work with and they were all from referrals? Well, that's great. That can be a decent living right there. But what happens if you lose a client?
How will you get another? What if you lose all four? How will you support yourself? How will you support your family? Are you going to tell your family that you're waiting for a. No, of course not. You have to do something to actually get clients, but what are you gonna do? Well, right now everyone's talking about recession, and if you know the right way to get clients, you're going to thrive, and if you don't, then you'll suffer.
Now, I might sound grim here, and it might sound like I'm discouraging you, but I'm not trying to discourage you here. I'm trying to provide you what reality actually looks like for photographers, for videographers, and for creative business owners. My [00:06:00] hope here is to give you the tools that you need to succeed.
That's my whole mission, is to provide education and resources to help people live their dreams. I love getting messages saying that you were able to quit your job from the resources I provided. That's the whole mission behind what I do, and that's why I created my program. Creative Biz Launch Referrals can also make you feel stuck in business.
Let's say you still have those four clients from before, and you've actually been working with them for six months now, but you're only making. Three grand a month total from all of them. Now, three grand a month is not nothing, but it's not quite enough to quit your nine to five to pursue your passion full-time.
So what happens? You keep working with them, but you feel stuck. You keep asking them for referrals, but nothing shows up. You're trying to grow your business, but since referrals are outside of your control, there's not much you can do here. You can't control how many new referrals will come your. So you feel stuck and you feel like you'll never be able to quit your job to do photography full-time.
Eventually you burn out and you give up [00:07:00] on your dreams. Now no one wants to go through a situation, so I wanna give you the tools to. Actually break free from this. My goal here is to drill this in your head. You have to break free from this. You can't control referrals, but you can control a different thing.
Cold outreach. You can control sales calls, you can control how many emails you send. So let's start talking about what we can do instead of relying on referrals. Now at this point you probably recognize the danger of referrals. So what's the solution? Our solution here is actually what most businesses do to acquire customers.
This isn't unique to the creative business industry. It's what all businesses do to get customers. We're going to go through a sales pipeline. We're going to generate leads. We're going to figure out 100 different businesses that we want to work with. We're gonna contact all of them, and then maybe a few of those will agree to work with us, and then we'll repeat this process indefinitely.
See why I did there? We're in control of finding those hundred businesses. [00:08:00] We're in control of emailing them. We're not in control of whether they're gonna work with us. But what we can do is have such a high volume that the numbers are in our favor, and that's how we win at business. This is what I do.
This is what my students do inside of Creative Biz Launch, and this is what you should do as well. Let me walk you through the components that you need for a successful client acquisition strategy. Now, this process is really simple, but it's not easy. So the first thing that we need is a clear niche, not just proc photography.
We dig deeper, something like proc photography for cosmetic brands. From there, we create our portfolio. Then we make an irresistible offer, and then once we have an offer, so good that leads can't say no. . We begin our cold outreach campaigns. Now we're sending dozens of emails, hundreds of emails to all these companies.
A few get back to us. We hop on sales calls, we send proposals, and then we close deals. Now, everything I just outlined is 100% in your control here. That's what I've been trying to get across this whole podcast episode. When we focus on what we can control, we can move the yield forward, and then we see a [00:09:00] massive success in our own businesses.
I actually want to walk you through the right way to do referrals here. Now, referrals can be good, but only if. I'll get into that one
in just a second here. But real quick, I actually teach all of this client acquisition stuff inside my program. Creative Biz Launch. There's 80 plus video lessons in there packed with value. One of our members actually just closed a $3,000 deal within a month of joining the program, so I was so excited to hear that enrollment is currently closed, but you can join the wait list down below, so don't miss out next time we open link below for that.
Let's talk about effective referrals. How do we actually use referrals in a way to help us rather than hurt us? Well, first we need a client base. Once we've used the client acquisition system that I talked about above to get 10 or 20 clients. We could then begin incentivizing referrals. You know those emails that you get from companies that say, we'll pay you five bucks for completing the survey.
Or things like Our affiliate program pays you 20 bucks every time one of your friends signs up using your code. Well, we're gonna do the same exact thing [00:10:00] here. After we finish a project with a client, then we offer them a referral bonus. This can be something super simple like, Hey, I love to work on the project together.
I wanna talk about our referral system. If you refer someone to us and they begun working with us, we'll send you 200 bucks. So here we're actually gonna pay our old client 200 bucks to get a client to work with us. So that $200 investment will hopefully turn to thousands down the road. You can calculate your.
Cost of acquisition and make that number make sense for you. Or you can also incentivize them with free content. So instead of paying them 200 bucks, you can say, Hey, we'll shoot five free photos for you. So something super valuable that they will actually refer friends to you because you're paying them or providing them a service.
That's all I got for you today. My name is Chris Pieta. This is a Creative Biz Launch podcast. If you have an extra 10 seconds, please, please rate this show. I'm trying to get this out to as many creative business owners as possible to help them win in the game of business. That's all I got. I will [00:11:00] see you in the next one.
