[00:00:00] If you're working a nine to five and trying to get your first paying client, this episode's for you. I haven't shared this story on this podcast yet, but this episode will teach you how I got my first client, and it'll teach you how to avoid the painful mistakes I made along the way while trying to get that client while working my corporate job.
We're diving into my story. I'm teaching you the principles I learned throughout this process so that you can shortcut this journey. Let's get into it. How did I get my first paying client? It actually took me 10 months from the day I decided to start my business to the day that I actually got that first client.
That's a very long time, but lucky for you. I already made all the mistakes so you don't have to.
Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures. Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. I should clarify here that 10 month process. I did work with a few clients, but they weren't the clients that I wanted to work with.
They weren't the clients in my [00:01:00] niche. One was a little portrait project, another one was some headshots, and then there was this coffee shop that I worked with, but I developed the system. That I thought would be able to get me clients on repeat, and it took me 10 months to actually get the system working.
Now the system has generated me over 50 clients and I teach this inside of Creative Biz Launch Wait list for that is down below. Okay, so this episode's gonna be all about how I got my first client while working at nine to five. We're talking about how I was able to work on my photography business while at a full-time job and how I knew it was the right time to go all in on my passion.
Let's rewind the clock all the way back to 2019. In early 2019, I was fed up with working for someone else. I've had the idea of starting my own business for a few years now, and the timing felt right. I was happy in all areas of my life except for my job, so I knew it was time for a change. I'm the kind of person that recognizes if something is going out in my life and I don't like, I go out [00:02:00] and fix that.
This is true for every single aspect of my life. At this point. It was time for me to fix the job I hated. I should clarify here. It's not like I really hated this job. It paid me well. The work was easy, and my coworkers were great. I just felt like I was wasting my potential here. I want to be free to do whatever I wanted.
I didn't want to answer to someone else. I wanted to be my own boss. And yeah, I know I'm not unique here. There are millions of people that have the same dream. Well, I was ready to do something about this. I grew up being taught that I should get good grades, go to a good college and get a good job. After that, I did all of this and I wasn't happy.
So what was wrong? Everyone around me followed the same path, so I didn't know there was any other option until I really started reading books on entrepreneurship, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube videos of people running their own businesses. The more and more of this info I consumed, the more I knew this was the right path.
All my friends had stay jobs. All of my family had typical jobs, [00:03:00] and I was a black sheep in the situation trying to start my own business. It was hard not having anyone around me that was in the same boat. So naturally, I turned towards the internet. I consumed everything on this topic for months and months and months until finally in October, 2019, I made the decision I was going to make this work.
I decided that this was going to work. At that point, I've been doing photography for about three years, and I was pretty good at it. I knew that there was some money in the side hustle, but I just didn't quite know where to find it. My work at the time was primarily cityscapes landscapes and portrait work.
Pretty soon I learned that in order to make a living in this niche, you had to be the best of the best. I was a good photographer, but I was nowhere near being the best. But then I discovered product photography. I learned that companies would pay lots of money for great photos of their products. This seemed like the logical answer.
I watched a YouTube video after a YouTube video to learn how people take product photos. I experimented every single day with new setups, new [00:04:00] studio lighting, new props, new products, until things began to click for me. At this point, I wasn't even worried about getting clients. I was just learning how to take product photos.
I was building up my portfolio, and once I had that portfolio, then that's when the hard part would actually begin. I thought the hard part was going to be getting good product photography. Little did I know that the hard part for me would be getting these clients. The photography I had down, but the business eye of things, I had no idea where to start.
At this point, it was January, 2020, and I ended up buying an expensive online course from my now friend Zach. Zach used to teach the creative business to Beginer entrepreneurs, but now he shut that down. He spends all his time building up his own drone company. But from that course, I learned a lot about business.
I learned marketing and sales, and how to pitch yourself to clients. I took everything he taught me. Applied my own spin to it, applied some systems to it, and then I started pitching to clients, and this is where the real work began. Keep in [00:05:00] mind that I had a typical nine to five throughout this entire process.
Each day I would wake up around five 30, work for an hour or two before I had to commute to my real job. I'd bring my laptop to work, and at lunch I'd squeeze another 30 to 60 minutes on my work break. Then after work, I would spend a few hours on my business. Then I'd wake up and do it all over again the next day.
During this time, I was figuring out how to acquire clients. I was sending emails. I was switching up the cold email copy. I was trying to update my website. I was trying to get something that would actually get responses from the people I was emailing. I was trying to figure out what industries to target, who would even wanna work with a beginner photographer like me.
Should I get better? All these questions were bopping around in my head and I didn't know the answers to them, so I just did what I always do. I put in the work and learned from my actions. At this point, it's March, 2020, and as we all know, COVID hit. I was in talks with a few restaurants through their photography, but.
As you know, all the restaurants shut down there, [00:06:00] so any potential clients I had lined up vanished. This sucked for me, and it was pretty disheartening. After putting in all this work, I let myself feel sorry for a week or two, and then I got right back into it. I started offering free photo shoots to restaurants in my neighborhood so that I could actually build up my client portfolio, and it worked.
I was able to work with a few really cool coffee shops and even a brewery to help them get some content for their online menus. They were doing takeout only, so it was easy for me to pitch myself. I told them that I do this for free and it would help their online sales, and it worked. It felt awesome to finally get these clients, even though they were free, they weren't gonna pay me, so I knew I couldn't just quit my job here to take on free clients.
I still had a lot of work to do with this new portfolio and proof of concept that I've had clients on my website. It was time to double down on the work. Now that I've worked with brands, it should be easier for more and more brands to trust me. Next up was creating a system. [00:07:00] I had a systematic approach to how I was going to get these clients.
I was going to send emails, book discovery calls, hop on those calls, send proposals, and finally close deals. This was the plan. I knew that I could, if I could get one client using the system, I should be able to get 100 more right? It's just a repeatable system. And if it works for one, it should work for many.
The last thing I wanted to do here was have referrals. If a close friend or family member referred me as someone and they became my client, that'd be cool, but that didn't prove that I could actually do this myself. It wouldn't prove that I could quit my job and get client after client. I would feel good for getting a referral client, but it wouldn't really matter in the long run.
The referral clients wouldn't be clients I required. They were clients that someone else got for me, and that didn't seem like it would be sustainable in the long run. So it didn't give me the confidence to quit my job. Instead, I relied on my system. I sent email after email, after email, and I got some nasty replies, but I also got a lot of positive [00:08:00] replies on the phone.
I had discovery calls and on these discovery calls, a lot of them received proposals, but none seemed to actually wanna commit and work with me. I wasn't sure what was wrong. That was until one day in July of 2020 where I finally closed a deal with a paying client. It worked. My system worked. What I was doing was working.
I know one client doesn't seem like much, but that one client proved that I had a system in place that worked. It took me 10 months from when I said I want to start my business to actually landing. That client with the system, I was patient and I was persistent, and it finally worked. And after that one client I knew I just had to repeat my system over and over again.
I quit my job right then and there, and no, this was not a big client either. This client paid me 500 bucks for this project, but I had the confidence that I could get client after client. Now the story is fun and all, but let's break down the key principles that actually allowed me. To gain this client while working a nine to five, because I know a lot of you are in the similar [00:09:00] position moving the needle forward each day.
This is probably the most important thing. We want to move the needle forward each day. When you're building a business, there are a lot of things you can be doing, whether that's trying to improve your photography, but let your portfolio reach out to clients, redo your website post on social media. There are a lot of things we can't be doing, but the number one thing that you can and should do is reach out to potential clients.
Each and every day, this is your number one priority, and this was really hard for me. I wasn't used to cold emailing or cold messages, but I knew this is what I actually had to do to live my dream, so I did it. This is what actually would get me clients and make me money. There were a lot of days where I wouldn't do this, though.
I would just try and improve my photography or my website, thinking that was a missing piece of the puzzle. And the truth is my stuff was already decent enough to land clients. I was just procrastinating because I. I was scared to reach out every day. It's also not that fun. It's boring sending the same emails over and over.
It's soul crushing when you send [00:10:00] all these responses, all these emails, and then you get zero responses. But that's the thing. They'll move the needle forward, and that's important to recognize. Being aware enough to know what actually matters and what doesn't matter is probably the most important thing in your business journey.
And 99% of the time, the thing you should be doing early on is reaching out to these potential clients. Okay. The second principle here is using systems. I had a systematic approach to my client acquisition. I didn't rely on referrals because referrals can't be replicated. Asking for our favor from our friend is great, but that's not gonna help you in the long run.
It won't be a predictable way to build up your client base systems, on the other hand, are totally predictable. If you follow systematic approach to get clients, you can repeat that time and time again. When you go all in on this business, you'll be able to trust your system because you've proved that it works.
You'll know you have a reproducible process because this has generated you money in the past, and it's gonna generate you money in the future. Now the systemized process that I used had [00:11:00] a lot of steps, but to sum it up, we find brands. We reach out to brands, we hop on sales calls, we sign proposals, and then we close deals.
If you want to know more about the system, uh, join Credit Biz Launch wait list down below. But for me, my, my first few, uh, months of using the system were. Very tough because I didn't know the right copy. I didn't know what to say on these sales calls. Right. Um, luckily right now I teach all this stuff. I provide the exact scripts, everything to.
Maximize your chances of signing on clients again, create a bis, launch down below, it'll change your business. Uh, but for me, when I was going through this stuff, I was sending a lot of these cold emails. For example, I would find 100 brands, a hundred brands, then I would send a hundred emails, and then if someone didn't respond to me, I would follow up with them a few times.
And then from there, we booked discovery calls, and occasionally we got signature. Now, With the system. I was also working that nine to five. So in order to actually make this work, [00:12:00] I had to put in time before work, at lunch, and in the evening to really grow my business. But luckily for me, this system gave me structure.
It gave me structure to my day-to-day process. So I was able to do the same work every single day. I didn't have to think about why I was gonna do that day. I just knew I had to follow this system. I followed it and had some hard work and persistence along the way, and it paid off. Now, the third principle here is hard work and persistence.
It's hard to wake up early. It's hard to work on your business when you're tired from working on your nine to five all day long. Maybe you dealt with a lot of issues during your work day. You're tired. You just want beer. You just wanna go on the couch and relax. You wanna watch some tv? You don't feel like working.
Well, that's too bad because your competition is putting in the hours. Someone out there is working hard and they're going to succeed. And if you're not working hard and you're not persistent, then you're not gonna make it. I'm sorry. Now, yes, hustle culture can be unhealthy, but I believe that's what it takes at the start.[00:13:00]
There's no magic formula that will get rid of this hard work. I mean, I talk about creative biz launch all the time, but even with my program, if you don't have hard work to accompany it, You're not gonna get very far. By having systems in place and moving the needle forward each day do make it a lot easier, but you still need to work.
And three months down the road after you feel like nothing you've done is working, you need to stay persistent. You need to stay the course. And even when you haven't had any wins yet, you need to keep that persistence sea up, and that is what will set you apart. A lot of people will give up at this point, but you're so, so close and you need to trust the process here.
That's really all I got today. Hope you found some value from this episode. If you did, please give the show a rating. I would really appreciate that and I will see you next time.
