234. A New Chapter is coming...

🪩 Made six-figures as a Wedding Photographer? Ready to scale to multiple six-figures without adding more weekends? 

Or 

Are you an artist or creative entrepreneur ready to launch your first product or service?

📝  Apply for the Mastermind here - 3 slots left!

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🏛️ Apply for The Wedding Atelier, my high-touch business program for photographers ready to double their prices, book less, and get their weekends back

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the podcast. I have no idea what to say because. The podcast is gonna have no name for a little bit. if you've been on my Instagram stories, you'll see I am in a crisis of deciding what to name this podcast and I just wanted to do a really quick life and business update on what's going on with me. I love sharing behind the scenes and I feel like I have not been doing that. So I do apologize. I have ghosted the internet. Very consistently this year, and I normally never ghost to my podcast, but I think it's just because I've been in a little bit of a creative funk and I just wanted to rest. And so after rest always comes clarity for me. And so I highly recommend it. If you feel like. You're spiraling outta control or you feel like you're just doing very rash decisions, or you feel like very sporadic, or that you're trying to make things work that maybe aren't working. It could just be the signal to rest. So after rest always comes creativity for me And I have just been thinking about my business, where it's headed, the things I wanna introduce and the people I wanna serve. And while I love Wedding Atelier, and I love the name of this podcast, it is gonna change because I am not solely gonna be talking about wedding industry stuff on this podcast. I know. Big shocker. I am the queen of pivoting. I will change in a heartbeat. I will change my podcast name. I'll change the strategy. But, for a while I was like, let's just make this work. Let's just, record the podcast, keep it strictly business, maybe five seconds of personal life. And it honestly felt misaligned. And if you have been here for a while, you'll know that. Podcast title number three was aligned with aor, and that's not aligned with me. So I need to make sure that I'm doing things from a place of alignment and from a place of just groundedness within myself. And I've been feeling this push of I want to be able to help all creatives and business owners, not just photographers and. I have on the side been helping friends, family members launch businesses with simple marketing and sales strategies. And, I'll listen to their issue. I'll tell them what to do, and they go make money. And I started thinking to myself like, huh, I know it sounds obvious if you're listening to this now, but me being like, wow, okay. These strategies that I have taught wedding photographers for over a decade, mind you, since 2016 is applicable to any business, and that's when I decided it was time to create the Mastermind. Now, I have wanted to create this Mastermind for a very long time, probably. A couple months after I launched wedding, CEO, which is now Wedding Atelier, which by the way, nobody can pronounce. And I had one of my friends being like, can you change the name? And I said, no, it's trademarked. She's oh my God, I can't even say this name. It's not at Lear, it's not Atill. It's. Atelier. Sorry. Pause. I didn't think about it. Okay. I didn't realize there's a lot of people who don't know how to say atelier, which is another reason why we're changing the podcast name. 'cause when people introduce me, they're waiting for me to introduce the podcast name. Okay. I get it. It's a hard word. It's Parisian. Maybe it's a little too fancy for all of us. Regular people. Okay. That being said, I wanted to launch this mastermind, and in this mastermind I want six figure photographers or any business owner that's ready to take their expertise and bring on additional streams of income. I have been a multiple six figure business owner for the past 15 years, and it's okay, we can, I can actually teach the fun strategies of running a business. If you wanna create an offer and you wanna sell it, and you wanna make a plan within the next year to launch something, play around with something, an additional service, a digital product. An in-person mentorship, whatever that is, we can map that out together, come up with a runway and you sell. It's that simple. And I've done it time and time again since 2020 when I launched my first course. Actually no, because I launched mobile presets, I think in 20 18, 20 19, and that was when I made my first couple thousand dollars. From one email. to this day, I'm like, who makes thousands of dollars on A $30 pack of mobile presets? I did. I still have people that are asking like, are you gonna bring those back? And no, because I don't wanna do customer service for 'em. But knowing that you can make so much money, Tens of thousands of dollars on a offer and sell it time and time again without having to sacrifice weekends, you can create the offer, test it, make it better time and time again. It's proven, it's working, it's getting results, and you just keep selling it. It feels complicated in your mind, but it's actually quite simple when you integrate it. And so helping people do that on the side, multiple different businesses, they're just solopreneurs, entrepreneurs. I had a friend who, she was in this bread making business, and I said why don't you create a menu and then you launch something new every month and then promote your menu every single week. and then you have a goal of selling a certain amount of slots. And then when they're all booked up, you can release the next menu of the month. And then I have another friend, who has a car detailing service. And I was like here's your marketing plan, and then you just market it until you sell every spot, and then you can start reusing them. Come up with some B-roll, reuse them. He's been selling out of his spots for the past six months. So it's really so simple in my mind. But then people are like, oh wait, that makes sense. Why didn't I think of that? And so I wanna do that for more people. I just broke down a little bit of what that looks like now. So my alumni automatically get invited to this when they make their first six figures inside of my program, because then you're ready to add additional streams of income so you can become a multiple six figure business owner by sprinkling in offers all over the place without having to sacrifice more weekends. But if you haven't worked with me before, maybe you know me and you've been in this space and you're like, okay, yeah, like wedding atill was not for me. I'm already charging high ticket prices. I'm already making six figures. Then this will be the perfect time to apply and see if it's a good fit. And all you do is fill out the application and then I'll reach out. Over Instagram dms or you can book a call and we can map out what this would look like. And if you love it, great, let's work together. If not, totally fine. Risk free. And by the end of the call I'll give you my honest feedback on what I think you probably should be working on at this point in your business. Yeah, lots of cool things coming, and all that being said is I wanna be able to talk about more things. I want to be able to hop on here and talk about business and motherhood and managing it all. I wanna talk about my schedule. I wanna talk about planning yearly. I love being a CEO that is rooted in everything that I do, everything that I am. I love to make plans and rest later. Okay? I am a projector. I'm a four six, all I know is that with my energy, I will do things in a sprint and I'll batch it out My work is done for the next 30 days. Batch my newsletter, batch my podcasts, batch all the content that I need to get out and then go live my life. The main focus this year for me was my rebrand and my rebrand took everything out of me. I actually was planning my rebrand December of last year. The idea came to me December 30th, 31st, one of those second to last week before the new year, and from December all the way until April was the rebrand and I needed like a month or two to recover after that. All the planning and it was it was such a fun experience, but it was very time consuming. I loved working with a stylist. What a dream to work with the best of the best. Sophia Bailey. She was incredible. And to be able to like. Virtually go shopping in my closet and be like, what do you think? And try things on. I felt like I was in a rom-com movie. It felt great. And working with Maddie, she took my brand. She took the illustrations and she just made me, and it felt so fun and it really helped me shape how I wanted my personal brand images to be. The fact that I was able to buy these Dry Ramen noodles. By the way, if you see me in the photo, like you notice there's no broth in there because we had to literally carry like a bag of dry ramen noodles around Detroit. Love that. And I was like, Hey, I know we're taking photos in this beautiful cent bowl to put these dry Ramen noodles in for the photo. That was fun. You can even ask Paloma every time we took a photo with those noodles. I was like, because it was just dry sticky noodles with no flavor. But that was all fun and it was a great time. But I think, next year I'm going to be, I want to be able to serve photographers and keep helping them. Of course, forever and always. I wanna help everyone raise their prices, work less, more impact, make more. That will always be like the core motivation of my business, of what I do and how I help people. I've found out that like one of my secret sauces is I am somebody who reads between the lines. If people just tell me what's wrong, what they've tried, and what they want to do. And for some reason, my brain can calculate a strategy just from those three pillars, which is why I love intensives every time I launch them. And they sell out. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is great. Somebody's life is about to change and they have no idea. Like I'll just come on and be like, tell me about your business. Tell me what you want. Tell me what's not working, what you've tried. Let's do it. And it just comes so easy to me. So I really wanna lean into that. Wearing my mentor hat, but also being able to be a better coach. I've never really warned the coach title, because I felt like coaches. We're always like, how do you feel? Is this a mindset issue? And I am all about mindset. You can't do anything without mindset. But I also believe that your mindset isn't gonna get the work done. It's the strategy, it's the implementation. But I wanna be able to also know not to push someone if they're not in a mental space, to be pushed and also be a little bit more intuitive. And my friend Alexa calls it wearing the coach hat and wearing the mentor hat and knowing the difference between the two. And I really like that. So I'll be doing a lot of self discovery next year and just figuring out my style of teaching, of helping, of guiding others to their results and I'm really excited about that. All that being said is, I wanna be able to share a myriad of things and I want to expand my community, and I really want a huge emphasis on community next year. I feel like I've been more of like an intimate community person. Once you're in my world, you are taken care of. You are seen, you are heard. You're getting on demand feedback, unlimited reviews, like I take care of my people, and they know that. That's why I have an 85% renewal rate because people know like, all Laura's gonna help me and she's gonna work with me until we get to this goal. And I think the thing that I have been unlearning in the coaching industry is that there is a million ways to make money. There's a million ways to start a business, to grow your business, to create a community, to create your positioning, your brand, all of it. There's a million ways to do it. There is not one size fits all, and I think that's why the Mastermind feels so special to me, because I want to hear your ideas and then help you execute a plan to implement it and not say, don't do that, don't do this. Now, if it's something that hasn't been proven, it doesn't make sense okay, we will fill in the gaps where needed. But I really want people to do things in their expertise, in their own way that serves them best. And I feel like we live in this world where we're always being told what to do and how to do it. This is the best way to do this, five steps to do this, three steps to do that. And I have of course put out that kind of content. But also you can take that advice, but you also don't have to. The reason I started a business in the first place is because I hated working for people. I always thought to myself like I could be doing their job better. Why am I an admin assistant right now? This is like meaningless work, and now I'm doing the most meaningful, impactful work ever. Our students hit 3 million this year, $3 million in collective revenue. I just got off a call with one of my students who booked a 30 k wedding in France, and all I did was listen to what she was telling me and we cleaned up her messaging, her positioning, her website, her portfolio was all outdated and she kept saying I just, I don't even like my work. I said we gotta change it. What are we doing? You say you wanna try new things, let's try new things. And your secret sauce. She's been in the industry for well over a decade, but was stuck at this six K pricing, and I was like, six K is really low. If you're shooting fine art film and you're all over the world and your clients are just, you're getting featured in publications every single week. Why are you charging so low? And so she submitted her pricing to me. I ripped it up, and we created this elevated destination package. and she was able to book a 20 K and a 30 K wedding, like this work. I've learned that positioning is Everything. Because when you're able to position yourself as the go-to, as the expert, iconic brand or insert dream client couple here, Then people are gonna pay, they're gonna pay top dollar for it. And so the possibilities are endless. And I just, I'm so excited to be able to see what Wedding Atill has in store next year. I always want my alumni to make a million every year collectively, bare minimum. And I will be launching some courses, some digital offers, and I just want. People to have quick wins and I want people to work with me in any capacity. So that kind of gives you a glimpse of what's going on behind the scenes. What's a Laura working on? Where has she been? I have been filling out my planner with ideas of how I'm gonna position my offer suite. And if you don't know anything about a offer suite, it's basically all the different offers you have, how they feed into each other, the pricing, who it's for, who it's not for. All that great stuff, and I think I'm gonna explode my next year in the best way possible. But I just wanna help more people. And what I do works I can definitely brag because the, when speak for themselves, the testimonials, the videos, the podcasts interviews with my students, it's just, it's life changing to know that. You don't have to make 50 K or less a year. You can establish yourself as a luxury. Insert artist story here, photographer and you can start a business and you can keep scaling it as far as you want. There is no limit. As an entrepreneur, the sky is the limit. And it doesn't end for us. If you wanna try something new, we can. If you wanna introduce a new offer, let me show you how. Let's figure out how we're gonna bundle it together, and sell it and package it up, and make it the best of the best, and fill in all the gaps so that you're serving people to the highest degree, which all goes back to positioning. Go figure. So anyway, get ready. I will be publishing more episodes. My takeaways, my behind the business, any mindset shifts, motherhood, everything. It won't just be about weddings and photography, but yeah, I'm still deciding on the name, so if you come across my Instagram story and you wanna vote, send me a dm. Okay. Help, please. I am between like four different names and it's not helpful. So anyway, I will see you guys in the next episode and keep listening and follow if you haven't already. And please post a five star review if you are a listener. I love, love, love to get the notification in my email inbox it makes me smile every single time I get one every single time. You guys are the best, and thank you for supporting me for, it'll be six years. This podcast has been going on. Six years is insane. What? Six years yapping about what you guys, I don't even know, but I hope it's been helpful and you've been learning things and you love my no fluff, spicy, self, because that's how I'm gonna continue to give it to you with a little bit of fun. Of course. But yeah, good things to come. I will see you guys in the next episode. Bye