[00:00:00] Hey, thank you for listening to the creative as launch podcast. It's Chris here. If you have an extra 10 seconds today, please leave a review on whatever platform you listen to. It'll help the show reach more creative entrepreneurs out there, and you might just change someone's life. Thank you. This episode is all about scaling a creative business.
I really love this topic and I'm excited to get into it. Now I'm going to be breaking down the exact. Steps I went to go from making 50, 000 a year as a photographer to making 50, 000 a quarter, 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.
Now I know me saying this kind of number may create skepticism in a lot of people, but this episode isn't for those people. If you're skeptical about this, then this isn't your episode. There's a select group of creative entrepreneurs out there that hear this kind of number. And they don't feel skeptical.
They feel inspired. This episode is for those who have huge ambitions and want to push [00:01:00] themselves far. If that's you, then keep listening because the reality is you can get to this level in just a few years. Now, there are two ways to make a lot of money from photography or videography or any creative endeavor.
You get really, really good at this. You build up your network over the course of a decade and you work with the top brands. And this is a very safe approach and people take this all the time. But this approach takes a very long time. The other way is to learn the business side of photography, learn how to scale and use leverage and get to that multi six figure a year mark in just two to three years.
And that's what I did. I went full time with photography in July of 2020 and in Q1 of 2022, I made my first 50, 000 quarter. Now that only took me 1. 5 years to get to that level. And the reason for that growth was I invested a lot of money
both into my business and even more money into myself through coaching and online programs. I knew that [00:02:00] if I paid someone a few thousand bucks, I would be able to get a 10 X return on that really quickly. And it was a no brainer for me.
There were a lot of people in the space that are promising to teach this stuff through online programs and they had great testimonials and their students were succeeding. So I went with them and I learned their skills and it's been the best investment I've made. So what I actually do to rapidly increase that amount I was making inside my photography business.
Well, it all started with the concept of leverage. Now I'm going to be using the word leverage a lot here, so get familiar with it. What is leverage? Well, typically when you put one thing in, you'll get one thing out. But with leverage, like a lever, when you put one thing in, you might get 10 or a hundred out.
Leverage allows you to use your resources efficiently. And a big unlock for me came when I read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. In this book, he talks about spending money to make money. And there are a lot of ways that you can do this inside of your business. And pretty much everything I talk about here requires you to spend money so that you can make more money.[00:03:00]
If you're a complete beginner and you don't have any budget, well, this is not an episode for you. Because we're going to be talking about how you can spend your money to actually multiply it down the road. So let's use an easy example here. Hiring someone. This is one of the best ways of using leverage inside of your business.
So let's say you make a hundred dollars an hour. If you can hire someone for $10 an hour to do the same task, you can now pocket the extra $90. This is a form of leverage. You're using your money to hire someone to to do the job for you for cheaper. Now, you might think this is an impossible trait to make, but this happens all the time as business owners.
We take on all the risks starting the business, finding the clients and the people that we hired don't want to take on that risk. So they don't get paid the same amount that we do. Now they could start their own business and earn the 100 an hour, but they don't want to. So we hire them for a lower rate.
And it's a fair trade for both of us because they don't want to take on the risk and we want to pay someone less than what we earn. So this works [00:04:00] out. Now you may think it's impossible to actually find this person, but let's, let me show you what I do inside my business. Now that 100 an hour. And the, uh, 10 an hour thing is just an example here.
These aren't the, these aren't, uh, real numbers that I'm talking about here. These are just, it's just an example of leverage here. Okay. So as a photographer, videographer, we wear a lot of hats. We take the photos, we edit them. We communicate with clients. We hop on sales calls to actually get the clients.
And the list goes on and on here. If we can identify a task that we can hire someone for, we can utilize leverage. We can hire someone for an easy repeatable task that we do so that we can focus more on the high value tasks that make us a lot of money. Now, how do photographers make more money? They take more photos for clients.
How do we take more photos for clients? Well, we need more clients to take photos for. So if we can spend more time getting clients, we're going to be making a lot more money in our business. Getting clients is a high value activity for us. [00:05:00] So how do we actually get more clients? Well, that's simple. We just spend more time on sales and marketing, but it's not that easy because we have.
Other things in the business that still need to happen. And that's when hiring comes into play, when we can hire someone to take over those low level roles, we'll be able to focus more on the high value tasks like sales, right? So if we can hire someone. Um, like an editor by hiring an editor, we free up so much more time that we can then focus on getting more sales and taking more photos and increasing our revenue because editing doesn't directly make us money, but sales and actually taking the photos does
what we're doing here is we are hiring someone to do a test that doesn't make us much money and then we're spending our time on tasks that do make us a lot of money. Very simple concept here. But applying it is a bit tricky. Now, understanding the power of investing in people is the first unlock into getting.
Uh, into rapidly increasing your creative business revenue by delegating these tasks with your team, [00:06:00] you can assign tasks that consume your time and that they can be done by others here. This frees you up to focus on the other core business tasks that move the Neil forward. Even more earlier, I was talking about how I've invested in myself and in my business and investing in people.
Is a big reason why I was able to get a big revenue shift as soon as I started making money. So that was July of 2020. Um, a few months later, I started hiring people. So in early 2021, I hired a video editor for my YouTube. I hired a photo editor and I hired a virtual assistant. So that was three hires I made.
And I was pretty much breaking even at that point, because I knew if I invest into these people, then my business would grow rapidly and my bet paid off. And that's how we grow businesses this fast. Sure. There's risk to this, but that's the whole point here. If we don't take any risks, we're going to grow slowly.
If you take some risks, we'll grow faster. And these are calculated risks that will pay off. We're not being reckless here. We're taking risks [00:07:00] that are in our favor here. Right?
Another thing that happened once I hired an editor. Was, um, increased productivity. The crazy thing was that after I hired that editor, my final photos for clients actually improved, I was able to focus on the client's needs and I was loving my time behind the camera. And my editor was actually better than me.
So that unlocked even better results for clients, which in turn allowed me to charge more money. But this episode isn't about that. A great team can help improve your overall productivity. And really enhance the efficiency of your business. Now, having this type of diverse skill set is a huge unlock.
Now I've been talking about this editor for a while here, but there are a lot of different tasks that you can offload if you're, if you need a virtual assistant to take over any tedious tasks that you do, things that you do pretty often, like maybe looking for leads. or answering emails. That's something that they can do.
There's more than I want to talk about in this video. So in this episode, so I don't have time for that today. If you want my [00:08:00] full blueprint on how I trained my team and how you can train yours to actually work with students inside of creative biz launch on that enroll in the program. If that's something that you're interested in.
Okay. So hiring talent is one way of getting leverage. What else can we do to get leverage? We can get leveraged by using code or software. We can find softwares that make us more efficient and automate parts of our business. Picture this for a second. A client signs your proposal to work together. They get a welcome email from you with an onboarding form.
They get an invoice from you for a 50 percent deposit. A new project gets created in your project management software. And. And this all happens without you having to do anything. This is a normal sequence that happens after we sign on a client in my business. And usually it will, it used to take us time to do something like this.
But the good news is all of these steps are automated now. As soon as the client signs that proposal, an automation triggers. Those steps happen automatically without you having to do anything. The signature on the proposal [00:09:00] triggers the next step, which is that welcome email. That invoice gets created and sent in QuickBooks, and finally that project gets created in Notion, and all this happens without me having to do anything.
Now normally this might take 10 to 30 minutes, and that's not much time, but what if you were in the middle of a shoot and you had to pause to do this? So it takes you a while to get back into the zone. By getting rid of these manual actions and automating them, We gain leverage. This is just one example of how we can use automation software to help our workflow.
And there are dozens of other things that happen every single day that can be fully automated using software. Imagine how much time you can get back with this stuff. Now, obviously the software won't be free, but it's going to be way, way cheaper than having to hire someone to do this. Software can work 24 seven automations are actually better than people.
A lot of the time. Automation don't make mistakes like people do. They reduce the risk of human error and your automation will never invoice a client for the wrong amount. Sure. There are going to be other issues that may come up, but human error won't happen here. [00:10:00] Softwares also never sleep. So you can have these automations working for you 24 seven, like I mentioned, and this is a really powerful unlock for your business.
Now you're probably thinking that you need to learn how to code to do this, but I've got some great news for you. You don't even need to know anything about coding to automate your business. There are softwares out there that make these kinds of automation so easy to set up. And this is exactly what I teach all of my students inside of creative is launch.
Now, what's the one thing that we can start doing today so that rather than having, having to go get clients ourselves, they actually come to us. Now, this may sound too good to be true, but it is possible. Now this requires a lot of hard work and it takes a very long time and there's no shortcuts to this process.
I'm talking about building brand. Let me make one thing clear here. Your brand isn't your logo or the colors on your website. Sure. These are part of it, but they're a tiny fraction of what a brand actually is. Your brand is your reputation. It's your values. It's what [00:11:00] clients expect when they work with you.
When I say Apple, you automatically think high end electronics. When I say Amazon. You think unlimited options and fast delivery. These companies have spent decades building up their reputation and we're going to start doing the same thing by building brand. We create an environment where our clients start approaching us rather than the other way around.
When I think of the type of company I want to become, especially as a service based business, this comes to mind. I want to be considered premium. I want to get results for my clients. And I want the clients to have a great time working with me. This means I need to charge a lot, be really good at what I do and provide a great customer experience from here.
We can build out our brand on these three foundations. These three things follow every action that we do. Now, once you actually do what you say you do, you need to create content around your brand so that you build up your reputation, post on LinkedIn. Post on Instagram and post to YouTube. Start showing the world and ideally your target customer [00:12:00] who you are.
Do this on a consistent basis for multiple years and you'll have built a small brand. But this is extremely hard to do and very few people do it.
Would you post for two years in a row every other day or every single day? Knowing that no customers would come your way for the whole two years, but then after two years, you would start getting client after client, would you still make that trade? Well, that's what building a brand is. You're spending a very long time upfront for results that come later on.
Now, during that time, when you're building your brand, you're going to be doing sales work and outreach work to actually land clients. So from the brand building, you're not making any money, but in two years, the amount of money that you're making from the brand that you built will be worth it because you'll be able to recoup the losses you made during those first two years by building that brand.
Now, again, those first two years we're doing sales work. We're doing outreach and systemized way to actually land clients and be making a lot of money.
Now, building brand is hard. Hiring is hard. [00:13:00] Sales is hard, everything. about business is difficult and it takes a long time to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Now, sure, go ahead, try everything yourself and you're going to build a successful business eventually. But if you want to shortcut the process, I already told you what I did.
I invested in my education. You can do the same with create biz launch. That'll be in the show notes. That's all I got today. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you in the next one.
