[00:00:00] No one's coming. No one's coming to help. Your creative business clients aren't lining up to work with you. You're the only person responsible for your success. There's this outdated idea that you need to get really good at your craft post about it online, and people will begin coming to you. The reality is that no one's gonna come.
So how do you succeed in creative business? By the way, if you're new here, my name's Chris Pieta. I teach creative business and improv photography online. So how do you succeed in your photo or videography business? It's simple. You take control. You take responsibility for everything. No one owes you anything.
Photographers and videographers, they spend years getting good. We post our stuff online and we wonder why we can't get clients, why aren't they coming? We spin our wheels thinking of all the ways to improve our websites, take better photos, and grow our Instagram pages. And yes, these things are really important.
The big thing that no one mentions though, is when you're starting out is that you need to do outreach. There are tens of thousands of photographers at [00:01:00] your skill level, so why would a brand reach out to you over them? You need to take control. Real quick, if you're getting any value outta this podcast, if this is your first episode or 30th episode, if you could do me a favor and please, please drop a rating on the show.
It really helps spread the message to more and more people, and that's my only ask of you. You know, I don't run ads or anything on the show, so thank you. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures. Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here.
I fell into this trap hard back in 2019. I knew that I wanted out of my nine to five. It's not that I was miserable. I just wanted freedom, and freedom to me was waking up and going to bed, and in between doing exactly what I want to do. I got that definition from Casey Neistat. Huge inspiration, by the way, when I made that decision that I wanted to quit my job, photography seemed like the answer for me.
I was really good at it. I've been doing it for a while. And at that point I [00:02:00] had a few thousand Instagram followers that really loved my cityscape and street photography work. I thought my stuff was pretty good. Random strangers were telling me my photos were really good. Then I would see other photographers on the platform, landing brand deals, monster energy product placements, Nike sponsored posts.
When were these brands gonna start reaching out to me? Well, I guess I just had to get better. I need to take better photos. I need to create a better looking website. I just needed a few more thousand followers, and Nike would be sliding into my dms. Looking back now, it's hilarious how these things sound around this time.
I also pivoted from cityscape and street photography to product photography. I go over that story on a different podcast episode, but the main point is that it's easier to make a living from product photography than cityscape. I spent months building out a product photography portfolio. I would shoot random stuff around my house.
I would buy a brand's product and make creative setups and take those photos, and then I would try and learn new lighting techniques and all these other things. The longer [00:03:00] I did this, the better I got. Once I got enough photos to create a website, I uploaded them to a Squarespace template. And I spent a while arranging those photos, making them look pretty.
Billy out wrote some nice web pages to go along with them, building out contact page, all these different subpages on my website and different ways to style my portfolio. And now I just had to await, it was only a matter of time until Red Bull saw my work and was gonna ask me to take photos for them. So I waited and I waited, and when the brands didn't come, I assumed my work wasn't good enough.
I started questioning whether I'd even be able to make it in photography. Would I ever make money from this? What was I missing? I would see other people working with brands and brands and so many different brands. What did I need to do? I, well, no need to reinvent the wheel here. I made a list of all the photographers I looked up to and all the photographers I saw who were working with the brands I wanted to work with.
And I messaged them, I DM them, I told them my dreams, and I asked them how they got to where they are, how were [00:04:00] they able to work with brands. And each time I got very similar answer. They were the ones doing the outreach, they were pitching themselves, they were getting rejected time and time again, but they were also getting a small slice of yeses too.
This was around the time I also bought an online course that taught me all about the creative sales process. It wasn't about waiting for brands to come to you. It was about you reaching out to brands, getting rejected, learning from those rejections, and trying again without giving up. As soon as I learned this, something clicked to my head.
My photography business was no longer going to be in the hands of someone else. It came down to me doing the work instead of waiting for people to come to me, I would reach out to them and at that point it would become a numbers game. If I reached out to a hundred people, 20 might respond, 10 might agree to talk to me on the phone, and a couple might agree to work with me out of that, it became crystal clear in my head, and success seemed inevitable.
I just had to put in the work. At this point in my journey, it was summer 2020 and the pandemic was here to [00:05:00] stay. It was in full swing, and I'm still trying to get my first paying clients during this time. The difference now was I was actually putting in the work, I was doing outreach all summer long and it took me about six months of learning the correct way to reach out to clients.
To actually getting them to say yes to me. I'll talk about how I learned from this in just a little bit hit so you can shortcut the whole process. Once you've come to the realization that the success of your business is your responsibility, well, you're on the way to success. Being accountable for your success and your failure is what sets apart.
People who make it and people that don't. I know a lot of photographers who are really talented, they've perfected their craft over the years, and they're quite frankly, better than me, but I'm the one with the clients and not them. So why is this the case? Simple. They're waiting around for clients to come to them while I learn the business side of things and create an outreach method.
They'll allow me to acquire client after client, and I realize that's my responsibility to do this. They're not coming.
There's one big thing I wanna note here. This [00:06:00] will be hard work and it's not gonna be fun for a lot of people out there. Some people just care about the art and the photography and the videography or the design work, and they don't want to learn the business side of things. They don't want to go down the path of entrepreneurship, and this is perfectly fine.
The path of entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. Just because you wanna be a pro photographer doesn't mean entrepreneurship is the right way to get there. If you fall into this boat, then my advice is just to get a job as a photographer working for someone else. If all you truly care about is the photography, then you'll be miserable doing the business side of things, because for me, photography only makes up about 25% of my time.
And honestly, if you just wanna take and edit photos, go get a job for an agency, a magazine, or maybe come work for my agency in a little bit. But don't force yourself into the path of entrepreneurship if you're not ready to fail hard and fail often. Now, if you're still listening to this and you want the freedom for working for yourself, Building your own company and getting into the business side of things.
While you're in the right place to learn, you're willing to [00:07:00] accept that it's up to you whether you succeed or fail. And with some hard work, smart work and a bit of luck, you'll get there. But how?
Here's how to actually get clients. Now we're not gonna dive in super deep here. I have a whole crib business. Course that goes really in depth into this, just go create a biz launch.com link in the show notes. I talk about these things throughout the podcast as well, so you can either learn through this podcast or work with me directly up to you there to get clients.
First, you need a website, but before you start making any money from this, you have to have that website where you can actually direct your prospects to a prospect is just another word for a potential client. When you direct a prospect to your website, they should immediately know what you're all about.
I recommend some sort of tagline on the top that shows how you can solve a problem they may have. If you're a photographer, you can say something like, I help your Amazon listings, convert more customers through compelling photography. Next, you need a portfolio. Back up your claim up top. Post your best photos in your portfolio, but don't post all of them.
[00:08:00] You need to make sure that they're all in the same niche if you're trying to go after these Amazon sellers. Don't post wildlife shots, portraits, or product photos. Just post the relevant product photos so that you're perceived as the expert. Once you have the website, it's time to drive traffic to it.
Gather a list of companies you wanna work with. Find their emails and send and send them cold emails. Your email needs to be very specific. Cold email has so many moving parts to it, and it can be confusing at times. But real basic here, your email should have some sort of creative opening line about how you discovered them, a credibility statement, backing up how you're legit, and then ask where you have a quick phone call with them to share ideas.
Always ask for a quick phone call. At the end of these emails, and then make sure you have all the technical stuff set up like your D Chem, your dmar, your sending domain, so that your emails actually land in the inbox and not spam. This technical stuff is actually something I talk about a lot in Creative Biz Launch.
If you wanna learn how to send emails the right way, please enroll in the program Link is in the description of the show. Then once you [00:09:00] get that phone call, hop on the phone, share ideas with them, and at this point you'll probably get one in 10 companies that actually respond to your email. But on that phone call, you have to listen to them, listen to what their marketing needs are, what problems do they have, and then show them how you can help.
And then you present your offer. After all that, send a proposal, they'll sign it. And you've got your first client. Now I went through that really fast, but that's really just the basics of it. Um, again, I cover all that in depth and create a biz launch. Feel free to try this stuff out on your own, but if you need more help, Feel free to work with me, but remember, no one's coming and some of you will get discouraged by this and quit now.
But if you're willing to put in the work, and you put in the work every single day consistently, you will reap the rewards for some real world perspective. I've worked with over 50 clients within two years, and only two or three of them came to me. If I didn't do any outreach, my business would've failed and those 50 brands would never have worked with me.
So imagine that if I didn't do any outreach, I would not be here today and I would not be [00:10:00] teaching you. But because I took on the responsibility, I'm able to thrive and spread everything I know on you. Thanks for listening. That's all I got. I'll talk to you next time.
