Lessons From a Day Job, Part 2: Planning Your Marketing | Rob Greene

Have you ever gotten to a prime season for your business (like fall mini sessions) and thought "if only I had better planned for this!" Moreover, have you ever wondered why some photographers seem to effortlessly glide past the competition? The secret might just be in their advanced marketing game—and that's exactly what we're unpacking today. As I reflect on the days of balancing a day job with my photography hustle, I've garnered some game-changing insights on time management and strategic preparation that I can't wait to share with you. Join me for a candid look back at a defining moment from my church staff days, where I discovered just how powerful observation and forward-thinking can be for marketing efforts. I want to help you get ready for a DOMINANT 2024 with marketing plans that set you apart from the rest.

If you're all about maximizing your photography gig to its full potential, this episode is the boost you need. I'm giving you the lowdown on my personal calendar system (hey, there's a special rate for you too), and I'll be teasing some budget management wisdom that's on the horizon. And for those of you looking to diversify your income, get ready to dive into the world of college and sorority photography with a free guide I've put together. So come on, let's chart those multiple revenue channels and kick your entrepreneurial spirit into high gear!

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!)

17 Ways to Make Money: https://www.square8studio.com/17ways

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, wow your clients and make photo magic? Here's your host, rob Green.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Aw, coming at you from DFW, texas. You are listening to the Bop. Hope everyone had an amazing Christmas. I am currently wrapping up some time with family down in Cocoa Beach, florida, and I am just always amazed at how much warmer it is down here than most places I have been and spent Christmas, but I guess that's why my parents and the rest of the world likes to retire and move to Florida. Like I said, hope you guys had an amazing Christmas celebrating with friends and family.

Speaker 2: 1:16

Today, as we are now marching really fast towards the start of 2024, I wanted to jump back in with part two of Lessons from a Day Job. If you haven't listened to part one, we released it a few days ago, back before Christmas, and now we're coming back with part two. This is basically taking my usual Bop episode that runs more like 45 minutes to an hour, 10 hour 15, and breaking it down into three smaller, little bite-sized nuggets, a little more like our Bop bites that we do to give you guys something a little more bite-sized and actionable that you can work off of as you're working through. What I know for many photographers is a slower season in our businesses and people are going what do I do Like things are slowing down. Nobody's booking sessions right now. How do I survive this time? And so what happened for me was I started thinking back through when I was in the early phases of my business, before I even had a full-time job doing photography, certainly long before I had gotten into education, but when I was working a nine to five. What did it feel like for me this time of year and what was going through my mind, and what were some of the lessons that I learned in this season of work where I was working a nine to five but had the dream of doing something else full-time. How did I put that season to use? Because what I have found in retrospect is that there are tons of lessons that each of us can take away from our current circumstances that are going to come in so handy when you are running your business full-time down the road. And so these are just a few of the lessons that I have taken away from my nine to five job, my day job that I believe are universally transferable across everyone's business, and so I wanted to share them with you during this season so that you could start putting them into action for your business as well.

Speaker 2: 3:12

So in the first part of this series, we talked about planning out your calendar. You can go back and check that out. One of the big reasons I'm a big proponent of planning out your calendar every December is because planning out your calendar allows you to do what we're going to talk about in a day's episode, which is to plan your marketing. And so the big idea of today's episode, the bop bite for today's episode, is that you can do more than you think, and you can do it more easily than you think. You just have to do it earlier than you think. I'll say that again you can do more than you think and you can do it more easily than you think. You just have to start earlier than you think. See a lot of times. Maybe you don't do this.

Speaker 2: 3:57

I know for me, when I was getting started, I would look at these people running these wildly successful businesses and going. It seems like they have unlimited time. I'm looking at my life and I don't feel like I have unlimited time like they do. They somehow have time to do all their social media. They make all this money. They're still having time to have picnics with their kids in the backyard. How, how, how do they do it? I don't understand. What I've come to realize is that everybody has the same 168 hours in a seven-day week. It's all a matter of how you use it. If you will start planning your marketing and planning the things that you want to do throughout the year further in advance, you can accomplish so much more and it's going to be so much less stressful.

Speaker 2: 4:45

I know for me, one of the ways I learned this in my day job came when I took a job in a youth ministry out in Texas. When I arrived, it was two weeks before the start of the school year and this particular church kicked off their year with what they had told me during the interview process was this massive event that the whole community came out for, that there would be thousands of students showing up. I think the largest number somebody told me was between 5,000 and 10,000 students coming to this thing. I'm like, wow, this is a really big deal. You guys are really putting a lot into this. When I came on staff two weeks before this event, my boss came to me and said hey, so what would you like your role in the event to be? And a moment of rare courage for me in that season of life said, I think I would like my role to just be to watch and observe what's going on. Just, you guys have already done all the planning for this. I just want to watch and observe. And in the meantime, what I would like to focus the majority of my time on is I would like to start mapping out a plan for the upcoming year.

Speaker 2: 5:57

I had already had a number of conversations with my boss leading up to my start date. I knew the direction they were looking to go with things and I knew how. From the calendaring work that I had done with my previous job, I knew how to make a schedule come together really easy. Because here's part one of the story. So at my Atlanta job the one I told you about last episode one year, one of our interns came in. His name was Eugene. He came in and he said guys, I got it and he whips out on Atlanta Braves baseball calendar. Now, if you haven't seen these, they fold up, they fit in your pocket. All the home games are colored one way, all the road games are colored another way. It's an easy way for any baseball fan to have a really clear picture of the whole season right out of the gate and it fits in your pocket. It folds up like and fits in your wallet, even just like a credit card.

Speaker 2: 6:49

And, based off our interns idea, what we did was we created a calendar for the entire student ministry year. It started in August of every year, it ran through May of every year and we put all of our events on this calendar that we passed out to families right out of the gate. So what did I do? I started building a calendar of events. I started thinking about okay, we know we meet on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, let's start there with the big blocks. And then what are some of the special events, seasonal things that we might do around Christmas time or Valentine's Day or Easter? When are students going to be gone for things like spring break or Christmas break? I put all of this, I took two weeks and put all of this into a calendar and then I started mapping out.

Speaker 2: 7:37

Once I had this calendar, I started mapping out teaching ideas. What are some of the topics we could teach on that would be appropriate for that time of year to teach on. From there I took another step and I said, okay, if we're gonna do an event like we had an event we called it Muckfest. It was a big food fight. We had a blast with it. Another year we did a thing called Color Wars full of colored powder and kids just had a good time getting really messy and having a blast with their friends.

Speaker 2: 8:04

So I put all of this on a calendar and then I started asking the question if I already know when all these things are gonna take place, when would we need to start marketing these things? So I spent two solid weeks at the end of August one year my first two weeks on staff creating this calendar. So for the rest of my team, by the time they got finished putting on this major event, I had already put together the entire plan of action for the upcoming school year, which meant all they had to do then was look over it and give me feedback and let me know which parts they thought would work great for their context and which parts they thought we ought to continue tweaking and revising. But we had a whole plan in place so that when we called a parent meeting a few weeks later, we were able to roll out for them an action plan for the entire year. And y'all families loved it because they knew how to plan, as a family, around the events that we had going on, that their kids wanted to be a part of, which made it easier for them to say yes to being apart. And wouldn't you know it, by the end of the year, attendance had skyrocketed. I think we had gone up to four or five times the attendance just in the first year. Because families knew how to plan around the things we had going on. Why? Because we communicated them in advance.

Speaker 2: 9:24

That is the power of planning your marketing. You can do more than you think. Whatever you think your current capacity is for doing things in your business, it's way greater than you realize, and you can do it easier than you think. All the stresses that you're facing right now guess what? A lot of that stress comes from working at the 11th hour on everything you do. But if you start planning it out in advance, it's so much easier. So the only thing you have to know is that you just have to start planning it earlier than you think. How do you do that? Well, let's think back to last week. I was telling you, when I plan out my annual calendar, what I do is I set a big win for each month and three to four sub goals under each month with that big win.

Speaker 2: 10:08

Once you've established those big wins and set those three to four goals under each win, ask yourself this question in a perfect world where I had unlimited time, when would be the ideal time for my audience to hear about blank, for my audience to hear about the wedding special that I'm running, for my audience to hear that we're doing red truck minis or fall family minis or spring mommy and me minis for Mother's Day, whatever it is that you're putting on? In a perfect world where you had unlimited time, when would be the ideal time for your audience to hear about it? Ask yourself, how far in advance would you connect with them? Cause gosh y'all. How often do we think of this great idea and we're like, oh man, I wish I had thought of that sooner. There's no time to do that this year.

Speaker 2: 10:56

How far in advance would you connect with your audience around this perfect, ideal event? How often would you want to connect with them and through what mediums would you want to connect with them? Would you do this through Facebook? Would you do this through Instagram? Would you do this through TikTok or email? What would be your method of communication for this. Go ahead and plan out the ideal scenario and then, when you're in this December January window, where things are running a little slower, go ahead and create it all. Create if you're doing Instagram, create the square content for your feed and the vertical content for your story. If you're doing it on Facebook, create things that are going to fit that audience. If you're doing it via email, create your email drafts and start getting things scheduled in your email hosting platform. You can do all of this during your slower seasons and in your first year.

Speaker 2: 11:49

Y'all because some of you are going. That sounds great, but I've got stuff coming up already that I've got to be working on. Here's what I want to encourage you to do is do exactly what I did when I started at that job. I want you to start with your big win months from now. So let's just say, since we're in December, january, let's just say June and July is when you want to focus on start there. Give yourself the margin to start planning in advance. You already know you can do what you're doing right now and kind of get by at the last minute on things. So let that keep rolling. It's gotten you this far. Let that keep rolling for January through May, start with the summer and ask yourself in June and July, what do I want to do? And if I had unlimited time now to do it, what are the things that I would want to create? You may find this sparks all kind of creative ideas for you. You may go into a studio or plan out a style shoot that illustrates for your sessions, your mini sessions, that you're doing, what kind of results people can expect from working with you. But start in June or July with your planning and work out from there why? Because these dates are already too close. You're going to be stressed, you're going to wind up stuck in the same old rat race If you keep doing things the same way you've always done them.

Speaker 2: 12:56

When I walked into that job, I could have easily jumped in on the planning for this major event. It was a huge event. It had a big budget behind it, which I'm going to tell you about in the third part of this series Some crazy findings that we discovered as we went through the budget. It would have been easy and obvious for me to focus all of my energy on that event, but instead I looked to the future and I said let's not get caught in the rat race, let's focus on an ideal plan for an ideal outcome. And wouldn't you know it, I had more time than I thought and it was easier than I thought. All I had to do was start earlier than I thought, and the same can be true for you and your business. So that's it for today's episode.

Speaker 2: 13:43

I hope this has been encouraging for you. I hope this gives you some easy, actionable next steps. If you're looking to use the calendar system that I use for all of my planning, I've got it available on my website, square8studiocom slash calendar, and all you have to do when you go to checkout is use promo code BOP and I'll give you 90% off the price. Normally, I charge 10 bucks for this thing. I'll give it to you for 99 cents at square8studiocom slash calendar using promo code BOP. That's good through January 15th.

Speaker 2: 14:12

Take me up on it and set yourself up for success in the year ahead. We'll be back in a few days with the final installment of this three part series on lessons from a day job. I cannot wait to share with you how I plan my budget. 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 square8studiocom. Slash 17ways today.