Three Money AHA's to help my photography business and my life
Image by:@jaywennington
For those of you following my daily lives in the Facebook Group, this content may seem familiar as I spoke about it just today. Some topics are worth putting down in another format, and money is one of those topics!
Photographers are well known to have mindset blocks around money. We feel greedy, we don’t feel like our work is worth the price or we can’t afford our own services and feel awkward about selling something we couldn’t or wouldn’t buy.
These blocks are personal. Our clients may not share our opinion. But we tend to bring our money blocks into the relationship with our clients and it leads to self-sabotage in the form of discounts, low prices, or making exceptions for clients. Because if our client doesn’t share our blocks, none of it would have been necessary, and our behaviour around taking their money can also create a negative experience! For example, you might beat around the bush instead of presenting a price clearly when asked. If the client just wants to know the price and have it communicated simply, then our humming and hawing can be a turnoff!
I have a Mindset breakfast every day. Meaning, I consume some sort of inspirational and educations content daily. It could be around any topic: Confidence, abundance, business, marketing, money, relationships.
Here are three key concepts that I have found valuable and am working them into my outlook:
Income Strategy
I have business and marketing strategies in place so that I can find clients who will invest their time and money with me over another photographer. I have also run my cost of doing business (or, as I’d like to call it, my Dream Allocation) so that I know at what price I must sell things. But my internal money conversation is always a little bit outside of those systems. If I shift slightly into thinking about my money framed with an income strategy, it creates a certainty and a path, in the same way I structure my other strategies.
For example, I use the strategy of email marketing to stay in touch with previous clients, in order to invite them to book again. Once I decided on the strategy, I created a template for the email and created an email list in Mailchimp. Once a month, I create the content and send it out. This strategy yields me a few extra bookings or referrals in the course of each year. I know that I will follow this strategy on a monthly basis and I know it yields results. In that same way, thinking about and implementing an income strategy can also yield some results.
My income doesn’t only come from wedding and family photography. I offer a lead generation/ community program for social media imagery, I sell some landscape prints and calendars through my art site on Pic-Time, I sell prints and other products through my galleries, and I contribute in a small way to micro-stock sites. It comes from ShineSparkL products and services. I also offer contract services to the non-profit I used to lead. When I realize all of this, I see how an income strategy overlaid on top is beneficial. It helps me to see which avenues I might prioritize at certain times of year, such as calendar and landscape print sales during Holiday season, or that I might mine my portfolio for good stock imagery in January when I’m not shooting very much. It gets me money-minded as well as business and marketing minded. And what you mind, grows and flourishes.
Daily Tracking
I heard a speaker recently who said that most of us with jobs get a paycheque every 2 weeks or so, but ironically, we typically spend money daily. And wouldn’t it be nicer to have money in daily too? That got me thinking. While I can’t fully guarantee a daily income, if I set a goal for daily income, then my actions and intentions may subtly change towards achieving that goal. Because again, what we mind, or pay attention to, grows. So one thing I do now is that I repeat my goal to myself all the time to have daily income. And that leads me to identifying my income streams from my Income Strategy, and working those strategies (as I described above) to get on track for near daily or daily sales. As an example, if I know I’m aiming for daily sales, I can check in daily on my income streams and see if there is something I can do to ramp one up, if the others are slower. A wedding needs a little time and consultation from first inquiry to booking, but one post on media could sell a landscape print.
The other part is I no longer run from my finances. When I was younger and in a lot of debt, I would avoid my bank account. I knew the issues were there, but distancing myself somehow protected me. But you know, it didn’t protect me at all, because the bills are still there even if I tried to ignore them! There was a point in my life a few years ago, that I decided that I wouldn’t avoid my financial issues, but face them head on. It changed everything! Since then I’ve had a monthly or weekly financial checkin, but now I am committing to doing it daily. If I want daily income and pay attention to my income strategies daily, then I must also track my progress to goal daily. It doesn’t have to eat a big chunk of my day, but just like the financial sector watches the markets daily for trends and fluctuations, I want to be on top of my financial health.
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Starting a love affair
We nurture things we love and value, and we move away from things we don’t love and value. When we love and value a person, it looks like listening, care, doing loving things for them. We go our of our way to help them, put their needs ahead of our own, stay close and in contact. When we don’t love and value a person, then we cut ties and we create boundaries and say no. We keep them at a distance and we may even harbour anger and resentments.
Do you love money? If you don’t because you have feelings it is evil, or that it does harm in the world, then you are cutting ties and creating boundaries and saying no. Keeping it at a distance and even harbouring anger and resentments. That is a formula to keep money away. If you started a love affair instead with money, you might listen and care, that may show up as daily tracking, or affirmations around how money allows great things in your life such as caring for those you love. While money is inanimate, there is always a source of the money and that’s where the love is felt. I love my clients and show them my love in how I care for their photography experience. They are the source of money and they love me back with payment. If I didn’t love money I might ask for less than what I need, and then because I don’t have what I need, I get angry and resentful and then that may extend to the client who got so much from me and I got so little in return, even if it was my fault that I discounted. What a negative spiral!
Care for your money. It is the medium that you exchange your services for and when you value the money people give you, you are by extension demonstrating value for the source of the money - the clients. You must also care for it because you want it to be spent on highly valuable things such as your shelter, food and enrichment of your family. You want it to grow to support you when you are retired. Like a good friend, you invest in a relationship with attention, care and positive action.
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