Lessons

Lesson Info

Long-Term Growth Strategies

So let's talk about your dream because so far we've talked a lot about processes and we'll continue to talk about processes but let's talk about the dream what is your dream? Are you you know like we've seen that picture of richard branson when he's in a necker island in the british virgin island on the hammock with the laptop and you know it's like well, this is how I work is that your dream it's your dream to be in at home it just in time for when your kids come home from school after you've done two sessions in the morning now you you know in time now you switch over to mom and you do that is it the four hour work week zambia tough one possible but uh tough one is your dream small, medium large what's the dream good my dream is that I'm not the doo r anymore like physically they're my reality is that I physically can't doing everything and so my dream is to hold the vision to be able to operate in an environment where uncomfortable and be able to have much of an impact in the world ...

and, you know, be able to to have ah standard of living that allows me to be comfortable and the freedom to travel and just and not and not have it be that my experience is that I'm physically playing catch up all the time okay, so in the b otto world with numbers, how many days would you like to go on vacation? How many trips that were taken with? I'd like with my photography to be able to do it frequently. I wanted t be able to go on trips, at least I would say six times a year, and they haven't be that what I produce are beautiful pictures of nature in the process and also to be able to run, you run my business at home and I would say twelve hours a week, but that would be me having a boy, he's, working with me, you know, remotely part time. Okay, okay, very good. And I want to make sure that you guys understand the difference between frequent in six times a year frequent could be anything six times a year, six times a year, six times a year, six times a year. So I'd prefer if in your visualisation off your dream that you fill in the blanks as much as possible. And I talked about this a lot in my book on how to create a wanted all list or the list where you actually start to think about how specific you want to be about what you want, is it with the relationship, is it by yourself? What? You know, what do you want to set your priorities on it's entirely up to? Because it is your dream? We're not building anybody else's dream we're building your and your own dream alone so you know, we all clear about the dreams are dreams starting to form and we have clarification on the ambivalent and some dream shared, so the jackie says they they're ambivalent because this is challenging paradigms, and now they know something that's easier or different than what they could think of on their own. And paul cabron photography says well, maybe scared is a better word than ambivalent on dh miss engstrom dream is to take the pressure off my husband as the breadwinner and still be a stay at home mom, so maybe perhaps a building a home based business? I mean, there was a time when people were laughing when they said you can't make any money just sitting at home and being on a computer. Now a lot of people are just sitting at home and making money on their computers, so it is totally possible again, you know, hold their dream and create that for you because for anybody who tells you that it can't be done, then there's me and I can tell you that it can be done so it's entirely up to your dream is definitely within your grasp. Just run the numbers and see that if what you're doing brings you closer and in my book I talk about this setting a main focus and when you have a main focus than every choice and every decision you make it's based on driven by one and one thing only is it helping or is it hurting your main focus and then decision making and priority setting becomes so much easier because you have either an action that supports it or either an action that counteracted so if there's two things you know if am I going to do it or not now becomes much easier because it's in relationship to something good just uh on the dream tip of things I think um for me yes, the kids air important on some level I think I would, uh like to get to a point where I'm paying people to be home for when the kids arrive at three and then I'm abc them at five or six or um but, uh I think the important part for me is is living a creative life and making a profit doing it um I grew up in a family where like my father was very creative he was a musician and uh he was absolutely discouraged in following his creative pursuits by, you know, his parent's generation and he passed a little bit down to me on that tip of yeah no no yeah it's great that you're creative and hey do this music and do this art and photography but go over here and do something else for the real work and so what I'm excited about is is seeing these numbers that you were working out with um with all of us and seeing that it can really it can really come through how what a powerful statement it's when people say why artists artist said generally don't make money most of the time artist don't make any money because then understand the business thought is that I know that I understand the business they are making money because people you know, people are supported by their artistic abilities everybody told me okay, I'm going to tell you another story so no essays they come to me when I was sixteen and I went to school we had this career aptitude test and this woman comes in and it's like a government thing and cheese giving us these you know these tests and and I said she says what what you're interested in I said, well, I would like to be a jewelry designer and she says mm it's a lot of applicants for these kinds of jobs very few jobs available, what else is it I would like to be a textile designer? You know, somebody's got to really create these great patterns on fabrics and she's like ah it's a lot of applicants only a few jobs what else would you like to dio I said I want to be a photographer and uses ah uh too many applicants too few jobs and then I said well what do you suggest said would you like to be a trade secretary and then the second part of this test was we we got like this whole thing that we had to fill out and it says are you afraid of heights you know to like being outside yes are you you know do you mind doing physical work no you know and so it goes through all of these things and I'm filling all of this out guess what I should have been a current to mr roper in my life I knew that these after two tests and all of this this was not meant for me when I was standing on a glacier in switzerland at my first job as a photography assistant because of course I did go to photography school I did become a photographer and I'm producing for this photographer this shoot and we're flying on a helicopter an audi a car for a big price for this huge catalogue manufacturer in this helicopter comes up over the mountain and it's like taken you know it's taken this car and it's dropping in the middle of the glacier and we're there and photographing and I'm going to myself outside check doesn't mind physical work check rufer I don't think so so sometimes we don't really know how these dreams kind of connect but sometimes they really connecting the perfect way roof right okay so let's talk a little bit about operation did you like that that funny yeah row for my favorite um wei needs some new shingles yeah the germans you knows you follows the system and send the system spits it out for you so when we talk about operations my recommendation is to get involved in systems that are one size too big one size too big for the reason is you want to grow into something and not start with something that you would grow and then you have to get the next size anyway and growing into a bigger system has thie advantage that in order for you to feel like you're utilizing everything that's available to you it's almost a little bit of pressure right so always aim for one up automation have you heard about the term automating yet that's that say something to you so automating basically means if it is a repeatable task a clearly defined repeatable task you want to automate it so if you do estimates on an ongoing basis you wantto automate the process to some extent if you produce nondisclosure agreements if you produce any kind of agreements everything should be automated if you stay in touch with your clients which you should that also should be automated because when you are out producing or out working or out managing clients or coaching or consulting or doing post production or creating, you're not going to have time with the one on one client contact to turn customers into repeat customers because what we didn't talk about earlier is when we were looking at three hundred or hundred eight clients as connie outlined so perfectly for jin is of course we don't want her to do one hundred eight new clients every year we won't repeat it business there's an eighty twenty rule that says that eighty percent of your income is derived from twenty percent off your list so we want to learn on how to maximize the list and how to maximize the value that comes out and bob when he comes on he will help us to shed a little bit on off lied on that as well. You set up your automation the way it works for you remember and keep saying this because there's nobody out there that says you have to do things in a particular way you do it the way it works for you so if you feel like your clients should be contacted once a week you do that if you want to talk to them daily do that if you want to do it once a month do that if you can only do it once every three months then that's okay too but important is that you have to start or you want to start somewhere and then you do that on a regular basis if you cannot commit and I talk about commitment remember asked you to commit to this so you also want to commit to your client's thie customer acquisition cost which is thea amount of money it cost you in your own time and actually expenses to get a new customer is you know you wanted to be a slow is possible so a customer acquisition cost if you ever already an existing client and you're up selling this client there is no customer acquisition costs which is why our existing clients are so incredibly interesting to keep right and why referrals are so interesting to keep so even if I give my referral ah coupon it may be lower than my customer acquisition cost that's why so many people do you know referrals and asked for referrals because it's much easier that way than it is if you constantly have to look for new clients advertising can get expensive and um we talked about having an organizational chart because again it all works together so in your in your operation you just want to have a gn idea off where everything is and who is doing what and how that sort of all it kind of works to get let's talk about customer relationship management this here actually is a part off and, um, apologize. You can't see it all that well, but we will talk about this in the mind mapping in a little bit you'll see here on the lower right corner, off this slight, you see an actual screen shot off, one off my campaign sequences, and I told I told you about the what next? So what next means is when somebody comes in through, you know, the br tisha let dot com forward slash creative life, what are they going to do? They're going to select one, two or three how they're going to select their going to selected by radio button? Can they select more than one know they can only select one? Then what? Then we give them a free gift? How are they going to get the free gift? They have to put in their name? Do we want their first name? And the last name do? We only want one name? Do we need the email address? Do we ask them for the primary email address? And so we put that in, then they go into the system that go into the back end, what happens once they're in there, so we promised them we're going to deliver them something, so we're going to first say thank yu, how is that thank you, delivery coming then we're going to deliver this to them where is it going to be? How big is the document that we're going to deliver? You know how big is this? The exit off the book that were way giving everybody's like one point for mega but can I attach one point for me goodbye to an e mail? Probably not so I have to put it on a cloud server and said a link so people can go and pick it up themselves have to test it they have to be people to test it so you get this part so automation really means that you're not flying by the seat of your pants but that you actually think about this coming in here we're going in here doing this if they do it yes, they do this if they do know that this is what's gonna happen if they something goes wrong this is the process once I have them in here and once I know once I know that someone who's come in and has selected their interest in the photography business do you think I should contact them about more of my photography offerings? Of course I should, but so now they need to contact with, uh with attack that says, you know this person's interest in the photography business so what other things in my system do I have where I can send them you know, to the next one in the next one, in the next one, and then how many emails that were going to send them over? How much time? So some of my sequences, I'm going to just share this with you and don't be afraid, you know, I do pretty advanced things, but I want you to just understand the bigger picture and then we'll we'll we'll make it small a few. So the bigger picture is that my boot camp and I talk to you about this my boot camp to photo biz intensive to you know, the second cell that comes afterward has a combined I think we have about four hundred different actions that run in that sequence from hey it's coming. Hey, you already took it. Do you want to take it again? Hey, you already referred some of your friends earlier. Tow us. Do you want to refer more friends to us? How you send us a testimonial? Do you want to? You know you want to redo this again? Or you send us that you took the boot camp, but you didn't take the photo biz intensive. Are you ready to take the photo biz intensive, too that you took the photo biz intensive, do you want to take it again? Because they can retake it once for free um you took the photo biz intensive and do you want to maybe take the advanced course this time so that we really maximize out of the capture? The opt inform remember we talked about the often forms of the common on the opt in form and now they're in there and now once we have them, what are we going to be doing with them? So there's a couple off customer relationship management systems out there that I recommend and I ask you to please follow those links, and I asked to follow these links for one and one reason only I am big a numbers, so that way I can actually know what you're doing because to me it helps me to get better at what I do when I know what you're interested in. So please do follow those links the ceiling for infusion soft, which is what we're using in my company and brought a lot of the big internet market is he using it is like entre port, both of those are relative comparable. There are definitely a very pretty steep learning curve for that, but the automation is absolutely phenomenal a weber is something that baby probably a lot of you may be familiar with they actually able but has up informs it's a mailing list management it comes with a shopping cart shopping cart component. It probably will be for a lot of you, a very good solution that helps you to get a lot of this automation together for a relatively low price. But I want you to check them all out. If you are interested in automating your system with shoe should just to get an idea off what's out there, and then find that one thing that is appropriate to mailing list management is huge. And here are some ofthe theme mailing list management software. Isthe one is like male chimps. As I contact my m a constant contact there's a couple off them out there. I personally, I'm not the biggest fan off just having a mailing list system. I like I like a system that does a lot more from me just because I told you I wanted to be at that next level so I can kind of grow into that platform building. So what is a platform? Does anybody know what what we mean by the term platform building means, uh, I wanna shout this out to our audience life out there. Um, take tell me if you do know what platt from building is and maybe like a quick note on what what you're understanding of this is that would be quite helpful to know, and I'm going to dive right in this just very quickly move on someone just asking what you think about hub spot you mentioned there, dearie thoughts on them? Yes, perhaps, but there's, a lot of service is out there that are pretty comparable in very good. I purposely mentioned only the ones I have personal experience with. That doesn't mean that the ones that you have are not good. I know there's a hub spot puts out a lot of white papers. They're pretty active, get responses. Another one colin gee is asking of you heard of them, which is called get response I have I have not seen a lot. I usually go by when when I get emails from other people, I I always check sort of what people using in a lot in the this would be a great question to ask if you are in the photography business forum and linked in or in any one of these other groups ask, you know, the people that you want to do business with what they like and what what they prefer and find something you know, especially in europe. There's got to be other places, but the ones that I mentioned are just the ones that I have experience with and that I like, so that doesn't mean that yours is bad, so platform building and you know, if something comes in, do I've asked I haven't gotten any answers here, okay? They might be noodling on it right now all right? Probably doing a quick google search eso platform building basically means is the platform on which my social media social networking operates on like yes platform when I go as an author to a book publisher the first question they asked me how big is your platform? And then I say I have three twitter accounts that have anywhere between twenty five to forty, five hundred followers each I have a linked in group with twenty three thousand another one that I'm building up. I have three facebook pages I have you know, I have ah blogged that reaches about forty thousand people have a news, you know, tip sheet that goes out to three thousand people and then we'll all calculate that together, and we arrive in a number off that say, it's forty thousand fifty thousand people so I come with a platform off reaching anywhere between forty and fifty thousand people a month that's pretty good. So instagram followers um, I found that instagram is incredible tool for especially especially millennials because they're so comfortable with it um I was really upset that my daughter started her instagram account way after I did mine and she has way more followers than me I am afraid of this because she's really cute and maybe I am not so much so, so, you know, she always liked goes and she's, like, hey, mom, could enough six followers how me and you got o s o. So use the tools that are available to you that are relevant for your particular type of business or your particular type of platform. So, ah, platform building includes direct mail, networking, social networks and professional networks. It doesn't matter how you reach him, as long as you reach him somewhere and you cannot. You cannot do everything equally good. So you're gonna have to focus on some of those things.