89: Pricing Audits To Boundaries: 2026 Prep Tips

Helpful Links: Design Your Year Jan 12th

We map a simple plan to prepare your photography business for 2026 by fixing pricing, cleaning systems, and protecting your time and energy. From a dual-card backup workflow to email list pruning and boundary resets, we focus on practical changes that reduce overwhelm and raise profit.

• auditing cost of doing business and raising prices to match increases
• calculating profit per hour by session type and finalizing 2026 rates
• updating all client-facing materials for clarity and consistency
• digital declutter, gallery retention policies, and backup strategy
• email and CRM cleanup, segmentation, and re-engagement
• client experience review and realistic delivery timelines
• systems and automation for booking, contracts, and reminders
• offer alignment based on energy, demand, and seasonality
• financial housekeeping, subscription cuts, and profit-first
• boundary and expectation reset to reduce revisions and scope creep

Please come to the design your year on January 12th! It’s $35, or free for members. 

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Transcript

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Framing 2026 Beyond Marketing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everybody. Okay, this episode is going to be about preparing for 2026 by changing up a few things beyond marketing. So last week's episode was all about how to clean up your marketing for 2026 in terms of showcasing which images you want to shoot more of and all of that stuff. So these things are going to be outside of marketing, but still really important because they will often free up time to do said marketing. Because when I talk to people, the main issue they have, the main pushback is overwhelm because they don't know where to start. And a lot of that is because they feel like there's too much

Live Training And Membership Update

SPEAKER_00 0:38

on their plate. So quick update the um design your year training on January 12th is live, and I will put the link to join right in the show notes. It's $35, which is the exact same price as one month of the membership. Members get to be in that for free. So if you want to be in the member, if you want to join the membership, you also get to come to design your year. So it can be a good way to see what the membership's all about and that kind of thing. And if you don't, you can just come to the training. But I'll put the link to you'll have the link to both in the show

Pricing And Cost Of Doing Business Audit

SPEAKER_00 1:09

notes. Okay, so we touched on this a little bit in last week's episode, but I think it's really important. It's a little more in-depth in terms of reviewing your pricing strategy and doing a little bit of an audit. So the first thing that you need to do is review your 2025 cost of doing business. So have your and this will be true, you may not be tracking the increases here. Have I know Adobe went up, um, I know that my insurance went up for sure. I'm pretty sure Flowdesk and Pick Time had price increases. So it's really important to add up what that looks like on a monthly basis because if you don't raise your prices to match or you don't handle the resentment, then you will if you do nothing, you will have reduced overall income after you have to pay said expenses. So you need to understand exactly how much it's costing you to do your business every single month. In my online banking, I pre-categorize all my expenses and it gives me a chart. So it's a little bit of work up front, but those reoccurring expenses, once I categorize them, they're all in the chart, and I can be like, okay, this is exactly how much I spent on Adobe, this is exactly how much I spent on um, I'm trying to think what are my other expenses, pick time, acuity, all of those things. And almost all of those, flow desk, almost all had price increases. So if you don't know that, then you don't know how much you need to raise your prices as well to accommodate. And I know it can be really frustrating because you may want to be like, well, I just want to stay at the same price and I don't, I want people to still hire me. Yes, I get that sentiment, but you also have to protect your own financial well-being. Okay, so then we talked a lot about this, but I'm gonna say it again.

Profitability By Session Type

SPEAKER_00 2:51

You need to go back at 2025 and audit what was profitable so you can lean more into that. Um many family photographers don't actually have a concept of which of their shoot types was most profitable, meaning per hour. So if you have a shoot that's in the mountains and it's a $1,500 shoot, but it takes seven hours of your day and a hundred dollars in gas, you need to see if that's actually more profitable or a local session at a lower price point. You need to figure out which one has the right time to output to money ratio that makes sense for you. And this is the time to commit to your new rates, um, mostly just for ease of marketing. If you're doing price changes in the middle of the year and you have written down prices anywhere on your marketing, you're just gonna go have go back and have to update those. So this

Finalize Rates And Update Materials

SPEAKER_00 3:43

would be like my little nudge to just after you do this work, analyzing your profitability and analyzing your cost of doing business, finalize your 2026 price list so you can remove that element from your overwhelm. So a lot of people will do this. They'll be like, Well, I can't start marketing my 2026 sessions because I don't know what my prices are gonna be. And you can live there until March and then be like, Oh, I gotta keep and you don't want to do that. Take away any bit of unnecessary overwhelm. And then once you have that finalized, you can go through and update all client-facing documents. So if you have your prices on your website or you have a welcome packet, or you have them highlighted on your Instagram stories or whatever, you just need to make sure that all client-facing and potential client-facing documents have updated prices.

Digital Declutter And Archiving Rules

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Okay, this next bit is digital declutter. So, like what is going on with your images? How are you archiving things? Do you need new rules or systems? So if you don't already have a firm policy on how long you are keeping things available to clients. Um, my policy is basically my pick time until I run out of storage. I just keep those galleries up there, um, mostly because that's uh where I actually get a lot of my marketing images from because they're organized really well online. So if I'm working on putting together an Instagram post, it's really easy for me because I don't have the active files usually on my desktop because they take up too much room. I I pull from my own galleries the website's version, and that's usually every image that you see that I've used for marketing has been pulled from a pick time gallery, especially because they're already pre-organized by year. So I'm not even by year, by season. So if I'm like, I need a spring image, then I just go back to May, March through May of all the past years, and I can easily find all my spring sessions. There are, of course, better ways to organize it, but not without having like an in external hard drive that you plug in. And you could obviously have your images saved through like the cloud, but I found there's there's always some element there of it's just not as easy visually for me as pulling from my own galleries. So I have that thing where I would rather, for my own ease of use, just have the gallery stay up for myself. But if you do not have that, then you don't need to be prioritizing keeping sessions from seven years ago available for people unless that's something that you promise. So you need to examine the liability and the storage cost of saying that you'll keep everything forever. And is that even a necessary thing?

Backup Workflow And Card Strategy

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Now is a perfect time to do a backup strategy check. So, like, what are you doing to make sure you're not losing anybody's images before they're edited? And I've shared this before, but this is what I do. So I have SD cards and then a CF card. My camera takes both, and they you can set them to which position you want. So I set it to write the image on the SD card and also a backup on the SF card, which is a lot bigger. So I use 64 gig for the SD and I shoot the session and I take that card out and I do everything I need to do with the images, upload, backload, or upload, backup, whatever I need. And I do not touch that SD card again until that session is delivered. So I have a ton of 60, it's 64, not 68, sorry, it's 128 or 64. So I have a bunch of 64 cards and they just live in their little container and I have them organized by when I last shot on them. And so usually during busy season is the only time where I get close to being like, oh, I'm getting down to my wire here because I do not I will not put two sessions on one SD card. Multiple sessions can be on the CF card because that's my backup. And then I have an alternate CF card that I pop in when that one's full. So that's how my system works. And only having one shoot per SD card and that shoot automatically over written over to a CF card is a pretty foolproof way while you're shooting the session to make sure that nothing happens to those images and not shooting that card until those images are safely uploaded to PickTime. I'm I haven't had any issue with deliver deliverability or losing images with this system. It's a higher price in the beginning because you have to buy a lot of SD cards, and I like to buy ones that write really fast because I shoot a lot. So those are the sort of things to take into account. But the amount of times, especially during busy season, that I see that someone has been shooting multiple shoots on the same SD card and then using it again a couple days later and then realizing they forgot to back some images up and write, it just there's no need for that. And I do feel like it's part of our promise as photography professionals to make sure that you're handling everybody's images very carefully. So now is the perfect time to just examine that. And if you have an action item attached, like, okay, I really want to implement a system like that, you need to get those cards, you need to get that card holder so that you have the actual physical elements to make sure that you can do it. Clean out your hard drives, go through if you have images that you don't need, don't let them take up space and slow things down. It's really important at this time of year to strategically look back at what you're actually doing instead of just doing things you've always done for no reason.

Email, CRM, And List Health

SPEAKER_00 9:08

The next thing is just an email or a CRM cleanup. So I don't have a CRM, but you may, and it may be old client records um leads, anything that you don't need, get it out of there if it's causing any sort of visual disruptance to disrupt disrupting to your how you see things. So if you're like, oh that that's there, I don't need it, that's there, I don't need it, and you find yourself saying that, saying that, saying that, now is the time to actually visually clean out anywhere where you are trying to see the overall picture. If there's anything within the overall picture that you don't need, make sure you actually clean it up to free your mind of feeling that stress. Um, and then of course you want to update all your visuals, but if you're looking for a whole episode about that, that was the last episode. So I'm not gonna go too much into that because we already talked about it. Email list health is a really, really good time to look through your email and see who's unengaged. You may not need to keep people on there who haven't opened your emails in two years. You can just remove them from the list. Um, figure out what segment of people are engaged and put them in their own list. So you can be like, these are the super engaged people. They're my reliables, and then everyone else can kind of be in a different category if you have a way to segment people out. And then that allows you to do some sort of like re-engagement campaign, if that's part of your 2026 marketing strategy, where you can say to the people who are kind of just sleepy on there and you're not sure if they're engaged, you can send them an email that's like, hey, I'm working on my email list and I want to make sure it's really helpful. I've missed seeing you open the emails. Are you still interested? And give them a chance to say stay subscribed. And then if they're unobsc unif they're not interested or whatever, just get them out of there. I know it feels weird, but it will increase your open rates and save you time and money on your email, not really time, but money on your email provider if you're not paying for subscribers who aren't doing anything. So that's another really important thing that you want to keep in mind. I know not everybody uses email, but I think going into 2026, it's going to be a big recommendation for me that most people do do that. So this next part isn't necessarily marketing marketing

Client Experience And Delivery Promises

SPEAKER_00 11:24

related. We talked a little bit about it in the last episode, but it's the client experience cleanup. So you need to audit your inquiry to delivery timeline and see if you are actually under or over promising there. So some people can say if I go on their website, it's like I deliver images in two weeks. And then I see on their stories that they're like, I'm so sorry, life came up, we're now at four weeks. You need to be really careful about that because um that was still a promise that you made. And I understand that life comes up, but I do think it's really important to try to stay fairly close or over or like overpromise, deliver before, um, just in terms of the client experience. There's you don't want clients to have to feel like they have to reach out to you and ask where their images are. That still happens to me, and I'm not, I try during like October when I have 30 shoots in a month. There are times where I go slightly over, but I try to stay on it and let people know that it's important for me to get back on. But sometimes I just see it as like, so sorry, your life came up and now you're at four weeks. Well, that's not what was promised to the client. So I think if you review that and actually get the data, see how long it actually took you to deliver galleries. That would be actually a really worthwhile use of your time. And that will help you identify where your time is going. So that would mean that you, if you don't, if you don't have timeline promises on your website, uh, that's fine. You're you're maybe off the hook, but are they in your contract? And if they are, and if they are on your site, are you actually sticking to them? So remove anything that's outdated. So if you no longer truly can deliver a gallery in two weeks, go through and move it to three. Like actually go with what you can do instead of promising and then not being able to deliver on those promises month after month. So the other thing you want to you want to look through your client experience through the lens of simplification. So simplify things, make things clear. These are really important steps to take. Where do clients feel like you are giving them the utmost care? And where does the whole experience feel rushed for you or like maybe you just had to sweep their question under the rug and keep going because of whatever? Those sort of client experience reviews are so important. If you're wondering where, if you have like a trusted client who's hired you for a while, you can always be like, hey, I'm working on my client experience. Is there anywhere within my process that you get confused or you wish you had more support or whatever? All of these little audits are gonna help you in 2026 mostly just free up more time. And if that time is used for being with family or hobbies or friends or whatever, um, if you're in growth mode, it's honestly gonna free up time that you should be using for marketing as well.

Systems, Automation, And Online Booking

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Okay, the next one is a system and automation reset. So, what things are you still doing manually that maybe they could be template template bit templated? Templated. Now I just think of Templeton. Who is he? Oh my god, where's my brain? Is he a mouse? Where am I going with this? Okay, you so back to back to the back to the episode. I'll be thinking about who Templeton is in the outer parts of my brain. I'm sure some of you are screaming it in my in your car as you're listening. Okay, so what are you doing manually that you don't need to be doing? A big one of this is going to be something like online booking. For me, the client uh finds my, you know, I've talked about this 17 million bajillion times. They find my site, they learn about my sessions, they go on my online booker, they see, they choose their session type, they choose their date, they fill out their contract, they pay their deposit, everything is done, they start getting reminder emails without me ever even knowing that that's happening until I get the email that they are now on my calendar. When I was doing that manually, it was taking up a ton of time. You may still feel like you have to do that manually, but it's something that you need to examine. Also, do you have old workflows that are just done out of habit but not necessarily out of good flow? Like, how are you storing? You may have this thought where when you're in the middle of busy season, you might be like, Oh, I just wish I had a better management system for how I'm keeping my files or a better way to keep track of whose images are due when and how am I having that as a visual. So people who have a CRM, they can often be like, okay, this session is due this date, and they can see that. But if you don't have a CRM, what are you going off of? I'll tell you how my brain works, not necessarily that you should copy this because I'm weird. But if I look at my calendar, because I'm a procrastination editor because I edit really fast. So I don't necessarily need hours and hours and hours of time to edit, um, mainly because I have my systems down. So this is how it looks for me. I'll go in and I'll look at my calendar and I'll see who did I shoot two weeks ago. And then that's what I'm editing and delivering that day often. That's how my brain works, but it's still work I'm doing every day because I'm a high volume photographer. So it's not like I'm just not editing the other days, but I work well on a tight deadline. If your brain does not work well on a tight deadline, you need to figure out if you have systems that you could be automating that work for how your brain wants to work. So booking, booking, online booking, contracts, questionnaires, gallery deliveries, just take a look at all of these and see if you're actually doing it the way that you want. And right now, before we go into a new year, is the time to change things over. Often because, and I talked about this in the last episode, there's that resistance to change once we switch over into the new year, where you just want to be doing the same thing from the

Offer Alignment And Letting Things Go

SPEAKER_00 17:01

beginning. In the membership, we talked about how this would be a really good idea to switch to a profit-first system for handling your finances before 2026 starts, so that you have it all in one year and you're not trying to switch in the middle of the year, which can cause your brain to be like, oh, we just have to wait till 2027. Okay, we again this one we kind of covered, but basically the offer alignment check. Which of your sessions drained you? Like how, like, check in on the resentment. See if your calendar reflects what you want to be doing with your time. Like if you missed every single one of your kids' sporting events and you know you made good money, but you're super sad, that's not necessarily a sign of a healthy business because it's not serving you in your professional life. Seasonal offers that don't that don't make sense or never get booked, just give them up for 2026. If you've been trying and trying and trying and nobody wants your whatever it is, trendy sort of session that one photographer did and it went viral because all these repost accounts reposted it and you're like, I'm gonna do that. And then the public was like, we don't actually wanna pay for that. And then you've been trying year after year, you just give up on it. It's okay. It's okay to be like this no longer makes sense for where I want to be.

Energy And Capacity Audit Across Seasons

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Okay, so this one is important too: an energy and capacity audit. So the question is, where do you do your best in creative strategic work? What time of year do you feel most most stressed, stretched, and stressed? Trashed can be one word that encompasses both of those feelings. How many sessions or projects can you do before the quality starts to drop off? Like you you may have felt that in fall, where like in the summer and the spring, those sessions honestly get a little bit more of my editing time. They get a little bit more of my creative juices at the session itself because I'm not on this holiday deadline and rescheduling for rain and all the things are going on. So it's important for me to know that and know that not only do I want to stretch more sessions into summer and spring for my financial well-being, but also for my creative protection so that my energy can be spread more evenly throughout the year. So reframe how you want your year to go by taking an honest, reflective look at what your energy and your capacity actually is. So when I was doing the one-on-one marketing, this concept came up a lot because there was family photographers who started when their kids were babies. And what happens in that realm is that your babies go to sleep at like five or six, and you can work in the evenings, and it's as long as you have someone there, it's doesn't feel like time away. And then suddenly you get into middle school and even late elementary school, and everyone has activities, and suddenly your job is happening at the exact time that you need to be driving everyone everywhere. So these are sort of energy and capacity audits that if you don't do, you will just burn the frick. Right out because you will be so overwhelmed with how your job is keeping you from your passion of being the person who drives their kids to all of their things, or or having dinner with your family every single night, or whatever it is. So you need to be able to look at those things because now is the time that if you need to implement new offers that serve your energy and capacity better, you need that runway to actually start marketing and booking them. So that's why it's important not to put them

Financial Housekeeping And Leaks

SPEAKER_00 20:28

off. Okay, financial housekeeping and beyond, like I said, I think it's really important to look at how your money was coming in, how you were accounting for it, how you were saving for taxes, how if you understood your profitability, like if you are your in are your expenses too high, um, where could they where could you reduce them? What subscriptions do you have that maybe you forgot that you were paying for? Do you have a software overlap? A lot of people have software overlaps they don't necessarily need. Um, maybe you're like, every once in a while I use this software, so I want to keep it. Be kind of ruthless about it. Like if you don't use it every time, if it's not part of your, if you're part of your like structured flow, there's no reason to keep it. What education purchases do you have that never got implemented? Go ahead and cancel them. Cash flow patterns across the year, like where do you have huge outputs? Where do you have huge inputs? How can you structure that money to help you? If you have a big cash input, maybe in the fall, what are what systems do you have in place to help that money stretch through your slower seasons? A lot of times it's just, oh, I worked a ton and I spent a ton. Um, and then I was back in fight or flight for January, February, and March. Um, where are is your money leaking out that has no positive impact back onto your business? So I have money that goes out to my business, but it all it has a high rate of return. My studio is one of those. So my studio is not cheap, but it's really helpful in two ways. One, just as a write-off, because I can write off this expense every single month, which is helpful for my family's overall financial health. And then also I get to use the space and not have to pay studio fees, and I I pay for it through my session. So, but if I was having an expense that I didn't use, I'm gonna say one of the big ones that I see is the client closet. Um, you need to make sure that you see where your money is leaking out, and if it's making zero impact on your business, you need to fill the leak, right?

Boundaries, Expectations, And Trust

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Okay, boundary and expectation reset. So this would include office hours, return response times. Are you working on the weekends? Are you working in the mornings? What do you want to do and what do you no longer want to do? What will you no longer explain away or justify away just because you think you have to do it? So update your FAQs or your procedures or your policy to reduce your overall emotional labor. If you find yourself going back and forth with clients constantly about edits and revisions, it's probably a communication problem because I don't have that in my business. Um, but I'll tell you when I did, when I was wanting to shoot lifestyle imagery and but then showcasing a lot of posed, I had a ton of questions that look like do you have any that look like um uh this smile from Johnny on this photo or could you do this face swap? Or I don't get that anymore because I've aligned my my output, like what I'm actually wanting to shoot, with who is actually finding and booking me. Boundaries in we've said this another gazillion million times, boundaries improve client trust. It's true with anything. If I hire a photographer, I want to know that our visions match. And if you're not talking about what your vision is and you don't have boundaries, you're leaving it up for client interpretation, which then leaves your email open for them to say, okay, well, I thought it was going to be this, but the resulting gallery is actually this. And can you spend the next seven hours editing out X, Y, and Z? So if you want to avoid that for 2026, it's going to come from a boundary and expectation audit. Where are you using energy that you don't want to use? And we talked too much about this in the last episode, but just if you need, if you feel the need for a vision and identity shift, then uh tune into last week's episode and figure out what you want 2026 to feel like. Let go of outdated identities, let go of comparison traps, choose simplicity, whatever it is that you need, now is the time to implement. So here's a good question to ask yourself. If someone described your business at the end of 2026, what would you want them to say? Streamlined, powerful systems, working well, very on-time delivery, wonderful client experience. What is it that you want would want someone to describe your business like? And you can then work backwards from those words and turn it into that. So I hope that gives you a few listical items to go through and fix before we move into the new year. Because while the new year is like a wonderful reset, it can also be this thing where if you don't make any changes and suddenly you find yourself in February, your brain might say, Oh, well, we'll just wait till 2027. And then you have 10 months of misaligned creative goals and misaligned clients and time and money leaking out every possible hole when you could have much more streamlined, structured systems. Okay, um, a few things again.

Design Your Year And Marketing Reset

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Please come to the design your year on January 12th. It's gonna be a live training, but it's also like a little mini course. So the live training is taking place in the little mini course where I can have some helpful PDFs and that sort of thing. Um, I'm really excited about that. I think it'll be super helpful. We're gonna go through each season and kind of how to market it and how to think about it. And I hope everyone can leave that with an overall outline of 2026, um, with the goal, of course, to be building marketing systems around those particular goals instead of just saying, okay, for 2026, I'm just gonna keep posting randomly. And if you saw on my Instagram, I'm doing a personal trust reset for myself because I kind of fell off on my own marketing in 2025 at the end there, and so I told myself I was gonna post every single day on Instagram in December, and it's not for anything else other than saying what I said I was gonna do, which is so important for me to be the person who's doing the marketing, to have high trust in my own self. And so um, it's actually been great. Like I the rules around this trust exercise have been I can only show and talk about things that I want to book. So I can't I'm not just showcasing fall images, um, which would be the easy thing because I'm no longer booking fall. So it has to be helpful and pertinent to what I'm actually trying to book. And I've had a 99% increase in um

Closing Encouragement

SPEAKER_00 27:01

in engagement on in from month from this month to last month. So uh not to say that I want er that everyone has to go out and post every single day, uh, but it has been started a lot of DM conversations. I've booked two sessions from it. Um, so it's been helpful. And it's like, okay, yes, I remember now that I have that I can trust myself to strategically market for my own damn self because I'm all the people in this business, and we're all all the people in this business. So I know it's a lot to think about, but there's a lot of potential within all of us. Um, and I hope that this helps you to set 2026 up to be a more profitable year. All right. Have a good week.