Mapping Out Your Best Year Yet

Photography Goal Session and Income Tracker:

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Summary

In this conversation, Christa discusses the importance of planning for the upcoming year in the photography business. She emphasizes the need for both personal and professional goal setting, the significance of understanding revenue goals, and the necessity of investing in education to facilitate growth. The conversation also touches on the challenges of fluctuating incomes in the photography industry and the importance of having a structured marketing strategy.

Takeaways

• It's easy to feel aimless without a plan for the year.
• Goal planning is essential regardless of income aspirations.
• Mapping out personal goals is the first step in planning.
• Revenue goals should be realistic and based on past performance.
• Marketing strategies should be planned ahead of time.
• Investing in education can fast track your success.
• Understanding your busy seasons helps in revenue planning.
• Personal and business goals are intertwined and should be aligned.
• Tracking income month to month helps in setting realistic goals.
• Taking yourself seriously means investing in your growth.

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Transcript

Christa (00:00.94)
I don't know about you guys, but we have been fighting sickness like crazy over here. And I feel like everyone I know is sick or has sick kids, that's anyone else. And right when you get better from something, you get hit with something else. So we've all been on the struggle bus. So if I step away and have to cough a little bit, just know that that is why. But we're on the mend over here, just taking it little by little. But I'm really excited because I wanted to just talk to you guys about how can we plan out.

our best year yet in the photo space. How can we really hit the ground running? And so what can happen is, if we don't really plan out our year, it's easy to kind of start and then we hit, right? Like y'all were in like February, I can't really know what I'm doing. It's easy to feel a little bit bummed. I've had that happen. And I think it's because we come off, like our work is so different quarter to quarter that we come off such a busy quarter for.

And then if we start January without a plan, it can make us feel kind of aimless, even maybe like borderline depressed where you're like, I just feel really, really off. Okay. So we want to have a plan when we start the year and we want to do that sooner than later. Now you can always revise your plan or dig deeper later on, but I would say the sooner the better, because if you don't know what you're aiming at, you don't know what to hit. Now the other conundrum that I want to clear up is, you know, goal planning and mapping out. It's not all about just like majorly scaling and growing and booking more and making more like

still have a goal for yourself, even if you're in a space where you're like, hey, I just want to make like 30 grand with my photo business. And I know like what that's going to take. And I'm great with that, right? You're not over there like, need to make 300,000. So just note that like no matter where you're at, it's still really important to have a plan. And so I coached some photographers. I just was talking to one today who's an intensive student who is going for another 150K year. And so her plan looks different versus my photography student who wants a 40K year doing two shoots a month.

Okay, it's different goals, but we still have to goal plan and goal set in order to get there. And I wanna give you just some really practical steps today on how to do that. And I'm even going to link a free resource for you and share how you can get it in my DMs. So let's talk about how to plan your best year yet. I'm gonna give you a little spoiler. In two weeks, we're dropping an episode with Michelle Taylor. Actually, I think it's next week. With Michelle Taylor, who is a marketing and brand consultant and has a seven figure marketing business. And we're gonna talk about

Christa (02:20.578)
how to give yourself the energy to accomplish your goals and daily tasks. It's not all about time blocking to get to your goal and scaling. Like you want to do it from a place where you feel good and not burnt out. And we might have all the hours and the data, like quote unquote, complete the tasks. And we're not seeing the needle move forward because we're just strained. And so that's coming up and we're going to actually break down like the energetics of how to get our goals actually done then. So think of this as like a precursor to that. And I'm really excited for that coming next week. Okay.

So the first thing that we wanna do, and again, Michelle's gonna share even more about this with us then, but we wanna go ahead and get clear on what we want our personal lives to look like. So map out like personal goals first. I would actually write down what would be like an ideal day for you and an ideal week for you. Maybe it's even months of like when you want to shoot. Maybe you only wanna shoot two days a month. Maybe you're fine shooting four sessions a week, but we want them to be at certain times.

And maybe we want to take Tuesdays and Thursdays off with our kids or like Friday mornings off, right? Like map out what that ideal week looks like. And I would encourage you to like take away all of the mindset stuff. Like don't even have it nearby you. So whenever that little voice like pops in your head, that's like, you can't do that. Like just alleviate it and just write down what do you want your ideal week, month, day to look like? If something didn't go well last year, what was it?

Okay, what tripped you up? What was in your way? And so goal setting really shouldn't start with the numbers. And it doesn't even make sense to really separate the personal from business. Michelle's gonna talk to us about that more because it's not separate, right? It's all intertwined. There's really not such a thing as balance, especially for us as entrepreneurs, okay? So we're gonna start there looking at our personal lives and what we want it to look like. And then we can go ahead and shift, okay.

Now that I have that mapped out, right? What do I want my revenue goals to look like? What do I want my session averages to look like? And I actually have a free planning sheet for you. It's linked in the show notes or if you DM me 2025, just the numbers without any other emojis, and you DM it to me at Krista with a C-H underscore Renee, R-E-N-E. I'll send you this free guide, this free sheet. It's on Excel. It's really cool. It has some formulas so that you could type in like how much you want to make this year.

Christa (04:48.11)
and then how much you wanna shoot and it'll show you like what you need to get your average to. And again, I want you to have fun with it and play around with it. Take the mindset game out of it, right? When that voice creeps in, that's like, you can't go from a 300 to a $1,500 average. You definitely can. I felt many photographers do that. You might need a plan and we're gonna talk about that at the end, but just play around with it on what you would want this to look like, keeping in mind what you want your personal life to look like. And you can reverse engineer that. So when I'm doing revenue planning with my upper level students,

Yes, we want to take the mindset piece out, but I am taking into account what happened with them last year. So I do have them write down, like, what was your session average for like all the different types of sessions you shoot? What was the average you did and how many shoots did you do? you know, I'm coaching a photographer and maybe they did 80 seniors last year and they're like, I'm so burnt out. And then put on their goals. They want to do a hundred seniors, right? We're going to have to like pause and be like, Hey, does this, like, does this make sense? Okay. So like take that into account. Or if you did 10 shoots last year and you're like, I want to do 50 this year.

great, go for it, but we need a hefty marketing plan. So I'm also looking at it based on that of like, where do I need to see that growth to get to my next goal? Okay, let's keep going here. So again, DME 2025 and I'll send you that sheet. So then as we're goal planning, photographers, we have some of the most like fluctuating incomes, I think out of like a lot of service industries where it's really common for us to have really busy times, really slow times, it even differs. I coach a student in Florida right now and she's like, I'm like, Krista, I'm like opposite of everyone. Everyone's kind of.

chilling saying we're not booking much when quote unquote people's off season is when I'm like thriving. Okay, so like it can differ, but just know it's okay for your income to shift month to month. So what we don't wanna do is plan a revenue goal and then like be frustrated if we're not a 12th of the way there at the end of January when January is historically your lowest month. There's always ways you can have cash injections and get clients in. That's a topic for another time. But we also wanna keep in mind what does your projections look like? When are you busiest? When is your clientele?

booking you the most. Again, this can change. have students in destination towns where people are visiting at certain times. I have students in the senior space where there's certain just times of the year that seniors are really, really pushing to get their photos done. So this can differ, but also make sure you take that into account when you're mapping out your revenue to hold yourself to a realistic standard. And then as you track it month to month, so I have my upper level students actually track their income in each category every single month, we can look back and be like, okay,

Christa (07:10.85)
Well, last January was slow too, but you know, February, March picked up a ton in this area. So that can even help us with our marketing plan and how we're gonna get there. Okay. So then the next thing we wanna do is then look at and make sure we're marking down when we're gonna be marketing different things that we're doing. If we have different offerings, if you are doing weddings and portraits, when are you marketing the weddings versus the portraits? Are you doing them both together? When I was doing them both, there were times.

that there were higher bookings in one space over the other. So I capitalized on that. If I'm coming up on my beach destination season, I'm going to start marketing for that intentionally before when people start looking for photographers for their time visiting. So then go ahead and map out when you want to start marketing things. We don't want to start piecing things together or duct tape things together to hit our goal or decide a week before many is like, I should probably start marketing them. Like we want that to be like really set ahead of time. OK. And then lastly, now that we've looked at, OK,

Where do I want to be this year? What do I my personal life to look like? What do I want my average to look like? What do I want my business to look like? Look at the gaps that you need and the areas that you want to stretch, to stretch yourself in and look for education to invest in to get you to that level. So a few reasons that I like to invest in education is A, I always like to fast track my success. So if someone out there is ahead of me doing it, I don't want to wait and DIY something five different times if someone already has it figured out.

The other thing is I don't know everything. And again, I don't want to take the time to try to learn everything. So if there's a gap in my business that I can fill, and if I can go ahead and make a lot more, if that gap is filled, if that learning curve is filled, if I have someone else's eyes on what I'm doing, depending on the type of education I invest in, like I am all over it, right? The other thing is it holds myself to a certain standard where it shows I am taking things really, really seriously. That's why I invested a lot of my income into education.

early on when if you saw what was in my bank account you probably would have been like, Krista I don't know about that and I'm not saying stretch yourself thin but I took myself seriously and I was all in wherever I was at and that's one of the reasons a hundred percent like sometimes you know if people say something like well Krista you're just really good at business it's like I'm I'm actually not I just have learned a lot about business because I was always investing

Christa (09:27.734)
and my educational growth. So if you are still feeling stuck on like shooting and editing or posing and you're like, that's really tripping me up. I don't really want to scale until I've mastered that. Find a way to master that. Find an amazing course or coach to help you. Right. If you're wanting to scale in the luxury wedding space and you did a lot of four grand weddings last year, but this year, you know, you don't want to double your wedding bookings. Talk about burnout, but you want to grow maybe to the six to 10 K weddings. my gosh. Okay. So we need to find a coach to help you scale your wedding bookings, right? Or you want to hire a team like

Or for what I do, you want to scale in the portrait space and you see, yeah, I would love to double or triple my portrait session average so I can book less sessions and actually make more and serve clients better. Great. I can teach you how to do that. I do that all day long and I'm obsessed with it. And I created Uncapped because I was looking for that answer one year of like, this is not working. It was January. I had just paid taxes and I realized something's got to give. Like the goals I want to hit, like,

the scalability that I know I'm capable of, I have to find a different way to fast track it. And what I'm doing now isn't working. So invest in yourself to fast track your growth, take yourself seriously, and rise to that next level. And again, I'm excited next week for Michelle's episode to come out. But until then, start making your plan for the year. And again, you can find this link in the show notes or DM me 2025 for my goal planning sheet when it comes to numbers and session averages.