88: If Your Brand Needs a 2026 Reset

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I lay out a four-step reset for family photographers who want to pivot their brand toward sessions that feel true: ruthlessly cull, define the niche, curate the homepage, and announce the change with confident, specific offers. The goal is trust and consistency so the work you show matches the work you want to book.

• Ruthless cull across all platforms to remove off-brand images
• Keep, archive, delete or repurpose workflow to decide what stays
• Prioritize emotive, on-brand work over technical perfection
• Define a single profitable session type and name its traits
• Build a private ideal gallery to spot patterns and language
• Curate the homepage with 20–30 images per session type
• Write clear, specific descriptors your ideal client understands
• Announce the shift and invite aligned clients first
• Create a named offer with limited slots for focus and clarity
• Avoid pitfalls: sentiment, proving range, perfectionism, quantity
• Market the audit consistently to create visibility and trust

Join the membership: we’re shifting to specified booking paths with monthly money calls to tie creative focus to financial goals. We’ll also host a vision and dream board clinic in January. Come post yours and build momentum for 2026.

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Transcript

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Why Change Now

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everybody. So this episode is going to be about what to do if you need to make a pretty big change or you didn't like how last year went or you feel like you are not booking the type of sessions that you want to book. So that's what it's going to be about. I know it's kind of a weird time of year to do it, but I want to do it now instead of waiting to the new year because what might happen if you wait is that you will look ahead at your calendar, freak out about the lack of bookings, and fall into the same trap. So I just want you to think about a different way to consider the past year instead of just doing what you've always done.

Step One: The Ruthless Cull

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Okay, so the first step is going to be called the ruthless cull. So it's going to be the hardest part of all of this, which is going to mean going through your portfolio everywhere you have work online: Instagram, Facebook, your website, Pinterest, and culling everything out that doesn't meet the following rules. Okay, the first rule is is it on brand for an ideal session? So I'm not talking about ideal clients. I'm talking about all the aspects of the session that made it ideal for you as a photographer, style, mood, quality, all of that stuff. You know what I mean when I say that. It's not, yes, every once in a while you get a family that everyone looks like supermodels and they're dressed to the nines, and that's fun for that reason. But but that's not really a replicatable business model. What I'm talking about is how the session felt, how it flowed. The client grew to trust you really quickly. The booking process was really easy. They listened to your styling recommendations, your location recommendations. They took your expertise to heart. They followed it. The session went off really well. You really enjoyed it. You liked the location, you liked the light, you liked everything. They were play playful, adventurous, all those descriptor words that are really important or whatever, emotive, um, somber, whatever it is that you like. Everything that doesn't fit that has to go. And I would rather you have a handful of super on-brand ideal sessions than just content for content's sake. So you can create three folders on your computer as you're doing this, keep archive, delete slash repurpose, and then drag the stuff that you want to keep or not into those folders. If you have it somewhere where you want, where you don't want to, you you're not ready to throw it in the trash completely, just keep it in those folders for now. The ones that are keep that are keep the keep folder ones, those are going to be your portfolio, your the those are gonna be your portfolio images, the ones that you lean on the most. Archive are ones that in case you need more like seasonal content or something that's just in the back end, you can have those there. And then the delete or repurpose, keep those in a folder for a few months until you realize you truly don't really want to market with them. That way you're not doing that way. The call isn't as ruthless as just throwing everything in the trash. So give yourself a little runway there to make the decision. Okay. And don't leave any in limbo, like they're either what you want to show, background stuff if you need it, or it's going away. So that's really important. Technical flaws are not as important as how the overall feeling of the session went. So if you're like, oh, I really loved this, but like the white balance is one tick off, don't throw that one away if it represents everything else on your on your list. Because I think the issue can be like translating this to mean that only technically perfect work can make it through a ruthless coal. I would rather have emotive, like on-brand work

Feeling Over Flaw: What Stays

SPEAKER_00 4:09

make it through, even if focus was missed a little bit. Okay, so I don't want you to look at it through through that way. So the way that to think about this is like we don't want anyone to see something that doesn't make them feel the way that you would want them a client to feel when they receive their gallery. So if it's just a family of everyone looking at the camera and it's very static, and you keep relying on those images, but what you really want to shoot is lifestyle playful, you're being really confusing. And it's not the client's fault that things are mismatched. So you need to be ruthless and get all of the images that don't represent the feeling of what you want your clients to feel when they get their gallery out of your brand completely. Okay, step two, you need to define what it is. Where are you going? Just for the starters, just pick one type of session that you would love to fill your calendar with. And you might have other sessions in there, but choose one that ideally is pretty profitable. In the membership, we just did the our first money call, which was really fun. We went through like reviewing 2025, we talked about the profit first system, which I want them all to start implementing for 2026, and we talked about identifying your most profitable session type so that you can lean into that. So if you had a session type that was profitable and you could get the type of emotive ideal session that you love, that's going to be a very good marrying of the business-minded professional and the creative-minded professional, which is often a struggle for us. For me, that's my midway adventure sessions. It's my I'm known for my adventure locations. So it's that, it's adventure locations and pretty light with styling on point with adventurous, playful families. So the clients will pay for it because it's what they are expecting from my brand, but it's not all the way up in the mountains, so I don't have such high costs. So that adds more into the profitability category. Okay, so look at the images that you kept after you've done this, after you've gone through with your ruthless cull. See if there's a trend, because that can help you define your niche. So if every image that you took and put in the keep pile, the one that you're, the ones that you're excited, if you could, because oftentimes we feel constrained by constraints that aren't real. Like you don't have to have 10,000 galleries in order to be a successful marketer. You need to have images that showcase trust and consistency. So what do they all have in common? And that will give you your niche and how you can talk about it. So you can talk about the action of it. So for me, it's playful adventurous families. That's a very specific type of family. That's not a stand-in perfectly posed family. It's adventurous locations, it's not your local park. It's sunset light, it's not happening at noon. So we can start to describe and the niche will appear out of the smoke if you can have all of these images in one place. And if you have trouble looking at them all in once, create a gallery like I use Pick Time. So you could create a gallery that's just ideal work and you could upload everything in there, and then you could scroll through your own gallery of ideal sessions, and then you could start to see how what they all have in common. Step three, you need to curate everything that you have online. It just is important, especially if you're leaning towards online booking. You need to have a home page that has your absolute definitive best images that represents your desired ideal session type on your homepage, not the technical best photo. So often, so often, I talk to a photographer who feels this. They're not shooting the way they want to shoot, and I go to their homepage, and ever and the banner image is a family posed, uh, like statically, everyone looking at the camera and smiling. Instead of a slightly out of focus, playful image where mom is smiling and kiddos are running and you can feel the movement and love. Like you have to be that specific about it because it creates so much confusion if in your heart you're trying to silently sell something, but in the real world you're selling something completely separate. So your homepage has to give the impression. Your homepage should look like that gallery that you created of your best images, it

Step Two: Define The Niche

SPEAKER_00 8:33

should just be a scrollable experience of that gallery. That's what you would want to think about. So you don't need quantity necessarily here. You need enough so it feels like you you showcase that you can provide a consistent result, but you don't need 50 galleries of images to show. You need 20 to 30 third-y, that's that's a word, third-y, you need thirtery images per session type, 20 to 30. Oh no. So that's what you need. That's easy. You could you should be able to at this point in your career create a gallery of 20 of your favorite golden hour sunset session images, if that was your niche that you want to lean into. And this activity of creating a gallery of each of your session types is so important because as you scroll through, you will begin to feel the things you want your clients to feel. And that will help you as a marketer to define that for them and help you see what they might need help with to achieve it and what took this family from being someone who is maybe feeling stiff and posed to having the freedom to play an adventure, or a family that's always just met you at the local park dressed in their holiday gear to a family who's now running around in the wildflowers during spring. So you need to immerse yourself in your own ideal work so that those sort of epiphanies have a chance to occur. Because if you don't have that, if when you look at your own work, you want to vom, that's not gonna help you. And you can't be a good marketer if the product that you're marketing feels off-center to your creative heart. So I would rather you have 20 extremely on-brand ideal session images that even if you're consistently showing those and talking about them, I would rather have you do that than have a portfolio that's padded with fluff that doesn't matter and doesn't actually excite you as an artist or excite your potential ideal session participant. I don't want to say client. I hate saying ideal client, so I always try to figure out how to not say it. The person who is drawn to the playfulness, the light, the styling, the location. That's who you're trying to educate and excite. And if you can get educated and if you can pinpoint the points of education by looking through your own work through the eye of that person, you're going to become such a clear marketer. You're gonna become even more of the expert of your own brand. Okay, step four is with this ruthless cull, what might come next is telling people that you've made a change. So if you've really been a meet at the park, everyone's in sort of just plain clothes and looking at the camera, and those are the images that the clients say, like this would be a good indicator for me. Like if the client was saying, can you do a head swap? If those sort of things were happening, we need a better smile from Johnny. If those sort of things were happening all the time and you were just done with it and you just wanted to literally capture the hour as it went down with your creative direction, then you need to market in a way that you have a new focus. One, it's gonna force you to get clear on what it is, but it's also going to help clients understand that they may no longer be the best person for you, and that is okay. So we talk a lot on here about how much your own excitement leads to other people and potential clients getting excited about your brand. So you could announce this shift. Exciting news: my new 2026 focus is X. Position it as a benefit to them. Like if you like X, I'm now offering X. New niche, focusing on this. We're finding new locations, we're doing pose studio work

Step Three: Curate Your Homepage

SPEAKER_00 12:28

in Pose Maternity is my new focus in the studio. I'm switching from pose newborns to lifestyle newborns. Here's what that looks like. So you can give your past clients a chance to be the first participants in this new change that you're doing if you let them know. A lot of you guys are not communicating at all with past clients. So this is a perfect opportunity to jumpstart that communication and then keep it consistent. And guess what? Some people they don't want to come along on the ride, and that's okay. Would you rather have someone along the ride who's not getting the work that they used to get from you and being disappointed every time, or marketing to find clients that align? That's the mindset shift. Update your bio and your messaging everywhere. Let people know what it is that's changed and what your focus is. Find those descriptor words. Is it snuggly in-home lifestyle newborn photographer? Be very descriptive so that the a client who's looking for that particular work can tune in immediately to that copy. Like let's say you live in a you live in a town that's near the beach and you have been doing lots of sessions, but what you really want to do is sunset work on the beach with families that are playful. So you could change, you could have be like, I'm I'm introducing a new product, even though a new offer, even though it doesn't have to necessarily be new, you're just redefining it. The Adventure Coastal Family Sunset Collection. There's 50 spots available for 2026. This is what it looks like. Here's how I defined it. Here's what it here's how it feels. And you have those 20 images that you actually have taken that represent this particular package, and that's all you're talking about. You're just consistently talking about this one thing, and you become the expert of that offering because you are the one that is making it happen. Okay, step five. That's not the step we're on. Yes, it is. This isn't really a step, but this is the way that this audit, this ruthless cull, this reimagining of what your brand could be, could go wrong. Okay, so the first one is the sentimental cull. So let's say that you went and you moved to a new town and you went to a preschool and you met Jenny and you just love her. She's so sweet, and you photographed her family at the park, and it was pretty stiff, and they didn't really listen to your styling recommendations, and they didn't want little so-and-so to be up past his nap, so you ended up shooting him in day, and you don't like the light because it's not on brand, but you really like Jenny. Jenny has to go. That's a sentimental problem. That's not gonna help you. It doesn't matter what Jenny thinks at the end of the day, because Jenny isn't putting the food on your table and helping you achieve your financial goals. So, Jenny, she's out. Okay. Mistake number two. I want to prove that I can shoot everything. No, people want a specialist. I actually hate this about my own brand, which I know you guys know. I wish that I had one thing I could specialize in, or could. I mean, I could, that's a silly thing to say. I definitely could. I just don't, and the amount of marketing work on my back is like a 10,000-pound gorilla. If you had one or two session offerings and that's all you were marketing, it would be so much easier. So you don't need to prove to potential clients that you can shoot everything. You need to prove to potential clients that you can consistently deliver a result that they trust. That's your whole job. Mistake number three is hyper-focusing on technical consistency. So throwing images out because there's a little bit of a soft focus or something isn't technically right. I will say this is more of a problem for men, I feel like. Um, male photographers are seem to harshly, harshly hyperfocus and judge images on their technical consistency. Does technical consistency matter? Yes, but there's we know in this day and age, there's photographers. Like, I just saw an image that stopped me in my tracks. It was like a snow image. It was like a uh you guys may have seen this one because I think it went a little bit crazy, but it was like a family in the golden hour snow, and there was a dog, and there was a forefront blurring, and there was all sorts of things going on in the image that may not be technically perfect, but it was a showstopper. And if every image in the gallery had a technical imperfection, but it felt like me as a photographer and it felt like what I wanted as a potential client, that doesn't matter. So don't hyper focus on that. You don't, I'm not saying every single image should be blurry and crap. No, I'm saying don't I remember one of one of my life-changing images that changed the trajectory of my business from more posed, which is where I started, to lifestyle was I had the parents standing in this field and I had the girls starting behind me, the two daughters, and I had them run around uh run around me. And so they're running towards the parents, and the only thing that was in focus, like the girls running and her hand was behind her as she was running. The only thing that was in focus was her hand, and then everything else was blurred out in motion and movement. And it was like I was like, oh my like two years ago, Fiona would have tossed that image, but it became like a defining pillar of where I wanted to go because I stopped judging myself so harshly on the technical consistency that I had been learning on all of these photography forums. So you want to have a defined process and you want to have a defined outcome. It doesn't have to equal technically perfect every time. Mistake number four, prioritizing quantity over quality. If you say, like, oh, but I need to have 10 images, so I'll keep this one. No, be ruthless. Be ruthless. It's okay. I'd so much rather see super consistent, ideal work that you love on your website and your social media, and your marketing is running ads to that page or creating a series or creating something to turn to gain visibility around that particular very curated portfolio

Step Four: Announce The Shift

SPEAKER_00 18:44

that is consistent. That is going to be a more trustworthy brand than having a hundred images that are just there for the sake of living there. Okay, mistake number five: doing the audit, but not marketing the audit. So you'll spend hours cleaning up your gallery, tell changing all kinds of things, making everything look perfect, and then your new changed persona just sits in the corner in the dark. Again, like we always say, you need visibility, you need to turn heads, you need to use this ruthless cull as a way to communicate and educate clients on why this matters to your artistry and ultimately to them. So let's do a little a little uh quick recap. First, cull, get rid of any confusion. Second, define what is it, create that gallery that's just for you of all your favorite images and scroll through it and write down how you feel. You can give them someone else, you can name someone else that you love working with, scroll through and ask them how it makes them feel. Curate everything so nothing gets to show up uh tied to your name unless it's something that you would like to shoot again. Fourth is market, you have to then market and let people know about. The change and bring them in. So those are basically the steps that you would need to do. It's going to start with a ruthless moment. There may be some sadness there. You may be like, oh my gosh, I you may have that thing where you had clients who had the potential to be the type of session experience that you wanted, but you weren't clear enough with your artistic direction. You weren't clear enough about what you wanted them to do to join the partnership of you as the artist, them as a client creating this type of work. Try to forgive yourself for all of that and just move forward from this day forward. From this day forward, this is who you are. This is what you're marketing. Ideally, pick one or two focuses that you're talking about consistently. Okay, so I hope that kind of helps give you some hope if you haven't had a year or the past couple years that you've wanted and you haven't felt like your output as a family photographer is matching your taste as a family photographer, which it's a hard place to be in. There's that Ezra Klein quote about taste. That's really good. If you need something, you can read that quote. Um, and the reason you judge your work harshly is because you have a clear artistic vision in your head. You're just struggling to execute it and you're creating confusion because you're confused on what actually creates trust. So these are the steps that will help you pull yourself out of that, redefine your creative vision and bring people into the fold. So I hope this was helpful in the membership. Um, we are going to be focusing, we're switching the focus from just general marketing, which is pretty much how it was in 2025, to specified booking paths where I'm gonna have every photographer choose to. Um, and so the goal is to combine the ideal sessions into booking paths that will lead to visibility and then tying it all together with a money call every single month so that everyone could be reaching their financial goals. So if you want to join, I would love to have you in there. Um, it's gonna be really fun in January. I have lots planned to help us all. We're also gonna be doing a vision slash dream board clinic where everyone's gonna be posting their vision and dream boards in the chat so people can see what people are working towards. So I'm really excited for that community. I can't wait to see where we go in 2026. I can't believe it's not even a year old because it feels like my favorite thing I've ever done. So hope you guys have a good week and I'll see you next week.