Prep for off season with this simple hack

Summary

In this conversation, Christa discusses the importance of budgeting for photographers, especially during the off-season. She emphasizes the need for photographers to understand their financial numbers, plan for seasonal fluctuations, and implement strategies to generate income during slower months. Christa shares practical tips on tracking income, setting up business savings accounts, and exploring additional revenue streams such as upselling to past clients and offering educational services.

Takeaways

• You need to know your numbers.
• Understanding your financials provides reassurance for future planning.
• Track every dollar that comes into your business.
• Set aside 20% of your income for savings.
• Pay yourself a consistent salary to manage personal expenses.
• Explore upselling opportunities with past clients.
• Consider alternative photography services during off-season.
• Engage with local businesses for branding and headshot opportunities.
• Teaching photography can be a lucrative side income.
• Plan ahead to avoid financial stress during slow months.

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Transcript

Christa (00:01.322)
Okay, we're gonna be talking all about how do you budget for off season as a photographer, right? Our work is so seasonal. There are months that when I was at my max, I maybe did like 40 grand in sales. And in that same year, months, I did so little. I might've even been in the negative when all my costs came out. And the very first thing you need to do before getting into it is you need to know your numbers. And I don't mean to speak at you, but now coaching for over two years, coaching photographers,

all different levels. coached someone who added $100,000 to their income. I've coached others who just want less sessions, more alignment with their family. It comes down to the numbers and knowing where you're at. Okay, let me share why, because you might be like me and you get overwhelmed with the numbers and they kind of feel ick to you. Like, do I actually need to know them? You do. We need to start taking this seriously. I will never forget when the OG of photography, Caitlin James said to me at a workshop years ago,

If you cannot take yourself seriously, no one else will. So it's time to put on your big girl photographer pants and start acting like a high level photographer. I love the book Atomic Habits. And one of the things that he talks about is when you're trying to hit a new goal or reach a new level, if you ask yourself regularly, what would that type of person do, you'll eventually get there. Okay, hear me out.

He gave the example, if you're trying to lose weight, you would order at a restaurant and say, what would a healthy person order? And when you do that enough times, you're gonna eventually be there. So we're gonna do the same thing. Even if you're at like three to $500 sessions and you wanna be at 1000 to $4,000 portrait sessions, which if you do want that and you want a step-by-step roadmap to get there, templates, scripts, something that's worked not just for me, but for plenty of photographers that I've coached, me, just DM me the word coach at KristaCH.

R-I-S-T-A underscore Renee R-E-N-E, and we can totally chat about it, okay? But I want you to start thinking of yourself ahead of where you are now and start asking yourself, what would this high-level photographer be doing? What would this $1,000 average photographer be doing? He's having 10K months and 100,000 or $200,000 years. What would they be doing? I assure you, they'd be knowing their numbers, okay?

Christa (02:20.684)
So I want you to start there even if you're like, I didn't even do much this year, Krista, that's okay. I promise it will help and I'm going to share why. Okay, so the first reason why it's super helpful to know your numbers like for the year that we're on is it does provide some reassurance for the following year when you might say, I'm not booking at all. The immediate thing I ask my students is what did last year at this time look like for you? And sometimes it's, hey, this month is normally pretty quiet for me, next month, oof, I need to be gearing up because I...

I booked all of these, whatever, these senior sessions or these family sessions. So I need a market now intentionally to bring those in, even if right now bookings are a bit slower and not a lot of money is coming in, right? But if we don't know our numbers, it's gonna be really hard for us to like get a gauge and track what's actually going on in our businesses. So I coach on my upper level group, there are students in there that I've coached now for over two years. And one of the reasons that I love that is we're able to like,

really get clear on like where they've been and where they're headed and not compare in a negative sense to the previous year, but obviously to celebrate their wins of their growth, but also just to get clear on like for their clientele and their area, like what are the trends when it comes to bookings and what is working for them? Never to make excuses of why I didn't book this amount last year, but just to really get clear on when their big booking wants are so we can prepare for it. Okay. So I wrote down in my notes here for you,

of the mindset of a higher level photographer, not panic, but plan. We want to know what's ahead and plan for it. So step one, before we're even talking about how do we plan for ops season, look at your numbers for this past year, what happened when you were booking and what came in. My upper level students, we actually have a sales tracking sheet where we track this every single month. You have to know your numbers. The emotion, the reason numbers are cool, y'all, is like the emotion is completely taken out of it.

Okay, so I had a coach who I would push back on this and be really late filling out my numbers. And she was like, Krista, you have to do this because there were times, y'all, when I felt in a dark hole and was like, I just am not feeling good about things. We'd pull up the numbers. I was actually doing fine. Things are great. And there were times when I felt on top of the world, but the numbers weren't making sense. What I was doing wasn't really working or at least not for that month.

Christa (04:43.522)
So numbers don't lie, it's important to know them. So now that you're going to be moving forward, tracking your sales for each month, here's something you can go ahead and start doing. You can go to your bank and definitely have a separate business account. If you don't have that, go do that today. You can even open a DBA, Doing Business As account, and you won't even need your tax EIN or anything for it if you don't have that yet, okay? But.

Ideally, like you have a whole separate business account and all of your business transactions are coming in and out of that account. Only your bookkeeper will thank you. You will thank yourself as well as you're tracking this. And what you're going to do is I would pull up my HoneyBook report or whatever CRM you're using, DubSado, whatever it is, and you look at all of the money that actually came in to your bank account.

So not sales. So for instance, if I book a $6,000 wedding, but they paid me a thousand dollars, I am only tracking that thousand dollars, not that 6,000, because that money has not hit my bank account throughout a payment plan. So I'm tracking every single dollar that has come in. And I actually have my students categorize like what category it came from so that I can easily see even down to the category what income is coming in. Now, again, we're going back to the numbers more than I anticipated, but my coach one time said to me like,

Krista, your average in XYZ area is super high. What are you doing there? And I wouldn't have known that had I not gotten really clear on this. Okay, so now that we're doing that, we have a spreadsheet that we have exactly the dollar amount that came in. Go to your bank and open a business savings account, still under your business account, but just a separate account. And what you can do is take 20 % of everything that came in and hit your account and just move it over to a business savings that you don't look at, you don't.

bank on, you're not there to spend it like, yay, can buy my new camera now that I don't need right now. No, that is there for your rainy day. That is there when you have those really off months. It's also there if something happens and you can't shoot for a month, right? You want something built up. I don't want y'all skipping paychecks. We're past that. We work too hard to not have a consistent income. Speaking of that, you also need to pay yourself as if you're a regular employee anywhere else. What do I mean by that? Okay.

Christa (06:57.216)
especially when I was in the wedding world, you might have some really high paying months, right? So like for instance, I had months where I would have like five weddings. So I'm getting all those final payments in that month before and it's a super high paying month. And you see that bank account build up and it's really easy to be like, great, I'm gonna transfer that, you five, 10 grand over because it's sitting there and I want to go out and buy XYZ or go on XYZ trip or buy that bag or something like that or buy that car.

Right? It can be really easy to do that. And I'm not against giving yourself more than like an average paycheck amount. For us, we just call it a bonus. So we still pay taxes on that for paying ourselves. Right? That's fine. But we also need to remember, okay, the reason I have all this money sitting here is because these are the final payments for brides. Meaning next month, I'm not gonna be getting all of these final payments, which can be hard if you're shooting all the weddings the next month, not having money come in. What I encourage doing,

is giving yourself a regular, every other week paycheck of the same amount. So you have budgeted that this is what you are paying yourself. Now, there's a couple things that go into this. One is the mindset of I'm paying myself. Like I gotta make this work, but I'm paying myself first and I gotta kick it into gear if I have other expenses coming out too, which you do. Running a photo business is actually very expensive, okay? So that's part of the mindset. The second one is to keep yourself on track so that when you do see all that money sitting there, you're not like, ooh.

Maybe I should pay myself like triple that amount this month, but you stick to that set amount. The other side of it is it allows you personally to budget better, right? So like definitely have a personal budget of what those expenses are. Those living expenses outside of your business, like your home, your mortgage, anything else like my daughter's daycare bill. What are our expenses? Can you tell my husband handles the budget? I'm over here like, what do we pay for? We pay for health insurance out of my business account, like homeowners and homeowners owners insurance and things like that.

There's a lot of things that come out personally that I need to account for and I can budget if I know consistently like what I'm making instead of like, hey, babe, I didn't budget well. You know how I paid myself five grand the other month? Well, now this month I can only pay myself $1,000 and that actually doesn't cover our expenses. Okay. So you can set that up with your accountant where that just happens automatically. I get a paycheck for my business as if I worked at Target. Like it just hits my account. That's it.

Christa (09:18.186)
Every now and then I might transfer something else over if I want to plan for it, but I don't make that the norm. Okay. So let's talk about that business savings account. I want that out of sight and out of mind. Yes, I can still see it in everything. It's not like it's at a different bank that I don't have access to, but that is really there, y'all, for like, first of all, that peace of mind, just knowing it's there keeps me from stressing. Maybe for you, gives you the permission. Like you really, really, really want to take a certain amount of time off.

And you just want to know that you have those months expenses set aside, right? Just like that peace of mind where you're not going to be like frantic and running from a place of stress or of scarcity later on. It just helps you plan really well for that. It also is really great if you have any like last minute things come up that are out of the ordinary, maybe like emergency expenses in your business, okay?

So maybe you drop your camera a week before a wedding and you need to get another one ordered squat, but it's like $2,500. But you have that money set aside where you don't have to feel that dent as much. Make sense? Okay, so let's keep going here. Let's also talk, now that we talked about budgeting and planning for off season, let's plan on, you can still make money as a photographer during off season, 110%.

let's talk about weddings because this is the industry I hear the most about and this is where I had felt the most stress for because it is so seasonal, right? It's not like I can like go be like, I should probably book a wedding for next month. That's not really how it works. So what you can do is you can totally run sales and promotions for those past brides. Maybe you go ahead and take care of their wedding album for them or a wall portrait for them. I had a student who did this. She just reached out to past brides.

and did like several thousand dollars in sales just saying, hey, can I take care of your wedding album for you? I'm running a sale, right? So think of ways that current clients can spend more with you in the wedding space. Okay, step one, if you want help with that, a program y'all sharing how DME coach and we can totally see if it's a good fit for you. Okay, shameless plug over here because I love, I'm so passionate about helping photographers like move past what is so possible for them and hit that next level. And chances are there's a lot of money already sitting on the table for you.

Christa (11:28.502)
Okay, so then the next step, let's talk about, Krista, I don't do weddings, no problem. Okay, let's talk about portrait sessions for a bit. So a couple of things you could do that I've had clients do. I have a student by client, my photographer students. I have a student that lives in the North in a place where you just really can't shoot outside in like January, February, like no one does, it's freezing, it's ugly. And so one thing that she did that was really cool, that worked well for her is she ran personality portraits, which is like a cool spin on heirloom portraits. Like I love the vignette around the child's head.

Hers is like very modern, black and white, the kids emotion. And she went ahead and launched that and aligned really well with her offerings. She still had it where clients could upgrade. And she just rented a studio space for that and was able to book those out. Another thing that you could look at is branding and headshots inside a studio or inside their place of business. Why? Okay, well they might need that. Hey, let's do a.

beginning of your refresh for your brand. Let's make sure that clients coming know what you look like, but in a modern way. And you can go out and like actually sell that to businesses. So I don't want you sitting there saying, but Krista, I'm not getting any branding or headshot inquiries or I'm not getting any personality portrait or heirloom portrait inquiries. No problem. You got to get out there and get them. So some ideas would be just to like really connect with people who would be attached to your ideal client.

So getting in their circles, you're connecting with more people who are a good fit. This is why I don't just walk down the street knocking on every door because some of them, their clients and them, aren't good fits. And I wanna save my energy for those who are, but I really wanna exhaust that and connect with anyone and everyone possible. I recently was talking to a photographer and one thing that was really cool that this individual did in their city, and I wanna keep their details private, but they found a way.

to have something special that they made and they would go to the office of places that would be connected with their specific client and actually gave them like a gift that they had handcrafted and made along with information about what they did and then a gift card that got the client in and covered a little bit for them and then the client could upgrade. When you're full service, you're able to do things like that. It doesn't have to be the farm or an all or nothing thing. You can include a little bit, over serve.

Christa (13:46.132)
over deliver and the client wants to purchase more. So they were able to do that and get into these other circles and get these clients in the door. And that was awesome. You can also use social media just to reach out and connect and share what you can do and what you want to offer. What we don't want to do is send a three paragraph DM on what we can do and make it all about us. No one's going to read that, but instead share how you can help the client. Find a way that you can get in front of them face to face, meet at their store.

or take them to coffee or lunch. Like make it easy for them, make it about them and how you can help, okay? The other thing is if you just, again, you're connecting with their clients, but then if you know someone, again, who's just a good fit. So I know we were talking about branding and headshots here and I got on a tangent. We're like, that's great ways to get in other people's circles. But just ask that business owner if you can take some headshots or branding photos, have a special for them for a limited time to be able to get them in during off season. Share what you can do for them. Ask if they have friends. So find those things that don't have to be season specific, right? Because I understand like,

A big family session might want to be outside in the sun or the fall leaves, but branding and headshots often aren't outside or don't have to be. Another thing you can lean into if you're interested in families is newborns. Babies are always being born no matter the time of year. Mamas are pregnant no matter the time of year. So if that's a niche that you've been interested in tapping into, maybe that's a great time. And a great way to attract them is have a model call and ask if anyone knows of a mama at this stage in her pregnancy or.

a baby a certain amount of age and again, bring them in with a gift card. So you can tap into those other things. One more option would be just finding a completely separate revenue source. For instance, offering education and you could teach other photographers what you know. And it might seem so basic to you, but it can be earth shattering to someone else. You could really, really help someone else and be compensated for that. And I loved that. So one of the first few years I launched into education, my photo seals,

were lower the first part of the year, but education was great. And so I didn't really see like much of an income dip. I just saw growth being able to do that. If you're interested in that, we do have a container that we're going to be kicking off towards the beginning of the new year on how you can create an amazing offer and make thousands more each month by teaching what you already know. Again, shoot me a DM on Instagram and I can point you in that direction. I'd love to chat. So guys, going through this, few takeaways. Get clear on your numbers.

Christa (16:08.578)
put 20 % aside of everything coming and hitting your bank account so that you have it for a rainy day, and then tap into other ways and other ways that you can upsell clients already on the queue, clients that you've served recently, brides with wedding albums, as well as is there another genre that you can tap into that works really well during off season?