Lessons From a Day Job, Part 1: Planning Your Calendar | Rob Greene

Do you feel "stuck" at a Day Job, when you'd rather be running your own business? Fear not, friend! I was in your shoes for years, and looking back, I'm amazed at how much those jobs prepared me for the things I'm doing now!

In this first of a 3-part series called "Lessons from a Day Job," I'll be sharing the power of planning your calendar each December, and the transformative power of meticulous planning and goal setting. I'll take you behind the scenes of how calendar mastery and deliberate goal crafting can not only reshape your business but also revolutionize your personal freedom. This episode is a treasure trove of actionable strategies, walking you through my own method for setting "big win" goals and aligning your time management to support your entrepreneurial journey—whether you're just starting or refining your process.

Embark on a detailed exploration of how advanced planning and market timing can uncover the ebb and flow of your business's busy spells and quieter moments. With my story as a backdrop and practical advice as the cornerstone, I'll guide you through my method for planning a year of goal setting each December!

Ready for me? Don't miss these upcoming episodes in the days ahead:

Lessons from a Day Job, Part 2: Planning Your Marketing
Lessons from a Day Job, Part 3: Planning Your Budget


QUICK LINKS:

Square 8 Studio Annual and Quarterly Calendars: https://www.square8studio.com/calendar
(Use promo code BOP for 90% off our Annual Calendar through Jan. 15!)

College Photo 101: https://www.square8studio.com/college101

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

You're listening to the Bop the business of photography podcast with Rob Green, a photographer to contagiously positive clients and fierce believer in building people-focused businesses that leave a lasting impact. If you're an entrepreneur with dreams in your head, ideas in your heart and passions burning deep down in your soul, this is the perfect place to be, because this is where dreams come to thrive. So are you ready to build your business while your clients and make photo magic? Here's your host, rob Green.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Coming at you from DFW Texas. You are listening to the Bop. So glad to have you with us. Friends. I believe this episode or, as you'll soon find out, series of episodes is going to be a really fun change of pace for us.

Speaker 2: 0:58

This holiday season I started thinking about what I wanted to do for these Christmas episodes of the Bop and how I wanted to go about these, and it got me thinking about what was going through my heart and mind this time of year when I was just starting my business full-time, or when I was just about to go full-time, or when I just had this dream of going full-time but it felt forever far away because I was stuck at my day job. Now, I say stuck, I loved my day job. For those of you that don't know, I spent a number of years working in churches as a creative director, working in youth ministry had a blast doing it. But all that time my heart was really set on this long-term dream of wanting to just volunteer at a church for free and run a creative business that paid the bills. That's where I wanted to be drawing revenue from was from running my own creative business. Now, at the time when I first was coming out of college, I thought this was going to be all about logos, branding, graphic design, album artwork for musicians, had no idea photography was going to be a part of the equation. But I still had this dream of taking a creative business full-time. And so, for the person who's listening today and you're sitting at your desk in a day job or you're home with your family but thinking about going back to that day job after the holidays and you're just going gosh, it would be so nice to be able to make my own schedule, run my own business, do this thing full-time.

Speaker 2: 2:35

This episode, or these episodes, are going to be for you, because here's what we're going to do, especially on the BOP. We run these episodes about 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes depending on how the interviews go with our guests. But what I'm going to do is this episode is actually going to be broken up into three parts. Now, if you've been listening to the show for any length of time, you know we love to kick off every show with a BOP bite, and BOP bites are these little bite-sized nuggets of goodness that, if all you've got is a few minutes in your car on your way to work or school, you can listen in the car and get something that is actionable to apply to your business right then and there on the spot. Well, what we're going to do is I'm going to take this one episode and break it up into three BOP bites, and each of these BOP bites are going to be focused on lessons from my day job, lessons that I learned while going to my nine to five job, longing to one day have a business, wondering what, what I could possibly glean from my current line of work that would apply to my business. But in retrospect, as I look back, there was so much about those jobs that I was working in my nine to five that are massively Influential in terms of how I run my business today. Now, some of those are things that are very unique and specific to me, but so many of them are things that can apply and be utilized by every single person Listening to this episode and the two that will follow. And so here's how this is gonna work.

Speaker 2: 4:14

In today's episode, I'm gonna be sharing with you about how I plan my calendar. This is a rhythm for me that has been a long running Part of my business that goes all the way back to my days working in youth ministry and I'll tell you about how that happened. And then, in our next episode, I'll talk about planning your marketing. Once you have your calendar set, planning your marketing takes on a whole different feel, and it's amazing and powerful what you can do with your marketing Once you have a calendar planned out in advance. And then, finally, in the third part of this three-part series, I'm gonna talk to you about how I plan my budget each year so that, hopefully for you, you walk away with a clear picture as you are going through these holiday seasons, going through what for many photographers is a slow season in their business. I'm gonna give you three actionable tools, actionable steps you can take in your business to lay the foundation for an incredible 2024. So are you ready? Let's dive in.

Speaker 2: 5:15

Today's bop bite has to do with planning your calendar, and the bop bite is this Tell your time where to go now or wonder where it went later, and Unfortunately, I learned this lesson all too well while sitting at my day job. Here's how it happened. So we had a really incredible youth ministry that I was working in in Atlanta, georgia. We had anywhere from 800 to a thousand students coming on a weekly basis. The production value of a Wednesday night program for these students was through the roof. They had a great time and I was the guy responsible for overseeing all of these things. Now that may not sound like it has much Connection to photography, but here's how I learned today's lesson this particular youth ministry.

Speaker 2: 6:00

We always took a break for summer. We would go on a couple trips, but by and large, we use the summer for planning the year ahead, and what that meant was we had an incredible Launch every fall to our work and we had a incredible finale to our work every spring, where we'd have one last big event, and that was how we encapsulated our year. And so, of course, for me being the creative director, I was responsible for creating a year-end video that had highlights from all the things that we did throughout the year to show at the end of the night. Well, me being the procrastinator that I was, I wound up waiting till the last minute to put this video together, like I always did, and I found myself up at the church at like two or three in the morning the night before this big yearly finale for our youth ministry, and I'm just I'm bleary-eyed, I'm my eyes are crossed from staring at screens for so long and I'm like Gosh, there has got to be a better way. I cannot keep doing this every year. It's not like I don't know. These dates are coming. It's not like I don't know. This finale is coming each year. I wonder what it would be like if, next year, I Started building the video as we went, so there wasn't as much to do at the end and y'all it worked.

Speaker 2: 7:22

It worked so well, in fact, that I went from being the guy that everyone on my team was waiting for to get things done To being the guy that was driving the ship and making sure we were staying ahead of the game, working on things in advance, and what our team found was the caliber and quality of our work increased Dramatically when we had time to plan ahead and really build out our ideas. Also, the amount and volume of work we were able to do while actually working less and with less stress went up Tremendously. Why? Because we had a plan. We weren't working in the final hours, everything wasn't moment-to-moment, it was all worked out with plenty of time to spare, living in margin. What was happening was, when we didn't plan our time, we wound up wasting lots of time, and so then the time that we were working was actually spent grinding and stressing our way through these projects, because everything was so last minute. But when you tell your time where to go, you don't have to wonder where it went.

Speaker 2: 8:23

And, friends, I don't want you to have to learn this lesson the hard way, like I did. I want you to be able to thrive. So what I want to do in our remaining time together here on this episode is walk you through how I plan my calendar each year. I just finished doing this exercise recently for 2024, and I'm so excited about the things that we have planned. But here's the process that I use annually.

Speaker 2: 8:45

I have two calendars that I run off of. One is an annual calendar, one is a quarterly calendar, and, by the way, both of the calendars that I personally use in my business are on my online shop. And for those of you listening, I have an incredible deal for you. Between now and January 15th, you can visit square eight, studio comm slash calendar and, using the code BOP, you can download my annual calendar. That's normally ten dollars. You can get it for just ninety nine cents again. That's square eight, studio comm slash calendar, and use promo code BOP to get my annual calendar for ninety nine cents. That way, you can plan using the same tools that I'm using when I do this each year. So let's just take this from the top.

Speaker 2: 9:30

With my annual calendar, the very first thing that I do is I mark my out-of-office dates. I'm starting with things like Christmas vacation, thanksgiving vacation, birthday vacation any time that I plan to be out of office, if I'm speaking at a conference, whatever it may be, if I'm gonna be out of town Shooting a wedding, I mark all of my out-of-office dates first. The main reason I do this is because I want to make sure I'm protecting my rest and guarding my rest and creating rhythms of rest in my business, and so if that's something that, for you, you're like gosh, I need more rhythms of rest in my business. I don't ever take time off. I want to encourage you to go back and check out.

Speaker 2: 10:11

I did an entire episode on rhythms of rest last Christmas where I deep dive the topic of how I build my rhythms of rest into my calendar. But that's the first thing that I mark off with my calendar or my out-of-office dates. The next thing that I mark off are any additional essential dates for me and my family, things like birthdays or Holidays. Like this year, I set aside time to go and visit my parents on Mother's Day and Father's Day. They couldn't believe it, but it's because I scheduled that in advance. For me also, essential dates means things like back to school now for y'all that if you've got kids, that may be like your personal family's back to school window for me. I don't have kids, so for me, back to school is all about winter TCU students coming back, because that's gonna impact my work and my rhythms of how I'm working and what I'm planning for for you. It may also be things like tryouts or game days for teams that your kids are on. That's the second piece for me. I start with the rhythms of rest, then I block off the essential dates for me and my family From there.

Speaker 2: 11:11

It's all about labeling big wins. I wanna know each month, what am I trying to accomplish? If I got nothing else accomplished in that month, what is the big win gonna be for me? Like for me right now, as I'm looking at January, I'm planning a college photo 101 free five-day mini course to be able to help photographers jump in and learn more about how I have built a six-figure photography business that the primary driver of my photo revenue is coming from college and sorority photography. That's gonna be the big win for me is getting people into that course in big numbers in January. That's where all my energy is gonna be focused. But what is it for you? Maybe for you it's gonna be all about booking a certain number of weddings, because there's a lot of people getting engaged around the holidays. Maybe for you it's gonna be that you wanna start getting all of your mini session ideas together. We'll talk more about that in part two of this series, where we'll get into planning your marketing.

Speaker 2: 12:11

But for each month I figure out what is that one big win? Then, what I do and this gets me over into my quarterly calendar, because with a quarterly calendar this is where you can start to get more detailed, more granular, and on my quarterly calendar I set three to four sub-goals under my main goal. So for me that looks like in January. That looks like setting a certain number of students that I wanna see enrolled in College Photo 101. From there I wanna set a goal for a certain number of students that wind up purchasing. I have a full seven-hour college and sorority course that I'm gonna be telling people about during College Photo 101. That if you're seeing the potential for college and sorority photography in your business and you want the full A to Z system, I've got the course on that'll take you there. So that's another goal that I set within my main goal.

Speaker 2: 12:59

The third goal, kind of keeping with that college and sorority theme, is the number of college graduates that book a session with us during January. Each year we book about 10% of the senior girls at TCU and I wanna make sure because I know a lot of them start booking those when they're coming back to school from their holiday break in January. That's one of the first things they're thinking about is getting their grad photos on the calendar. So I wanna make sure that I've got a goal in mind of how many people I wanna book, because that's gonna be a big driver of revenue for me during the month of January. And then, finally, my fourth goal keeping with that college and sorority theme is the number of sororities booking events and recruitment videos with us, because this is one of the things that you'll hear me talk about if you do wind up enrolling in that college photo 101 course. Is that, if you limit, if you only think about college photography being like high school senior photography and you only think about college seniors, you're missing the bulk of the market.

Speaker 2: 13:56

Sororities have tons of needs for photography and videography throughout the year and for a lot of schools, their exec teams roll over around the first of the year, meaning they're setting new budgets and getting excited about planning a new set of sorority events that they're gonna need captured by photographers. So what do I do? I set a goal around the number of sororities that book events with us during the month of January. Now, once I've labeled all these big wins, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go mark off dates on my calendar that support those big wins. So right now, if you were to look at my calendar in the month of January, I've already marked off five days for that five day mini course. I've also marked off days on my calendar where I'm expecting that sororities, based on when they booked with us last year, are likely to be booking their events and exec team shoots with us this coming year. I'm also going in and marking off dates of spring grad sessions that have already been booked, because we roll out our spring calendars every November. So I've already had dozens of dates come off my spring calendar that I wanna make sure I've accounted for when I'm looking at my spring of 2024. All of this works together to start to give me a big picture idea of how things are shaping up for the year ahead. And it's amazing what happens, because when you see all these dates in advance on your calendar, you start to see where the busy seasons are going to be, where the slower seasons are going to be, and it's going to start to give you ideas of how to utilize those slower seasons to really leverage them for success in your business.

Speaker 2: 15:30

That's what next week's episode is all about is planning your marketing, because y'all, if you'll tell your time where to go now, you won't have to wonder where it went later. That's it for today's episode. Y'all, we'll see you in a few days with part two of lessons from a day job. Until next time, friends, keep learning, keep loving and keep chasing those dreams you were made for. You know what no photographer ever asks how can I make less money? As small business owners, we're always looking to make just a little bit more, and most of us just need someone to show us how. What if I told you college and sorority photography could give you not one, not two, but 17 different ways to make more money in the months ahead. To download my free guide, visit squar8studiocom. Slash 17ways today.