Hey, friends, welcome to another episode of the Business Journey podcast, I'm Rebecca, and today we're talking about three workflows every family photographer should be using. Now, before we get too far. I wanted to invite you to join us for a free class that we have running right now for marketing mini sessions as we head into the season of Fall and Christmas Minis. Now is a great time to make sure that your marketing is where it should be so that your minis fully booked. So if you want to level up your mini sessions game, definitely go check that out. You can watch the free class joined today by Rebeccaricephoto.com/minis-class. You can pick a time that works for you. Tune in and you'll just get so much information. It is super packed with practical things that you can apply to your business. Today, I have students that take this class and they walk away with pages of notes and they're so thankful and it's completely free to you so you can go out today. Rebeccaricephoto.com/minis-class. Now let's jump into three workflows every family photographer should be using. First, I want to, like, define a workflow. When I say workflow, what I mean is basically a list of steps could be a checklist. It could be just something that you do. It's a consistent I don't know how else to put a flow, a consistent list of things that you do every single time. OK, and so there are three workflows that I believe every family photographer should be utilizing. And you probably have some variation of this workflow already that you do, whether it's on paper or not. I highly suggest putting it on papers that you never miss a step our team likes to use. Trello is a planning app. It's completely free and it is really great for checklists. And, you know, we separate each client by each client has their own card and every card has a checklist. So we know that every client is experiencing the exact same thing. So the first workflow that I believe you should have is your client experience workflow. What are the steps that your clients go through from the time they first inquire with you all the way until you've delivered their gallery and you request a testimonial? What pieces of information or whatever are they receiving? You know, for us, part of our client experience is every client gets a questionnaire, every client gets a client experience guide from us, which is our version of a style guide. Every client gets a final info email. You know, these are just a few of the steps that go into our client experience. And so I would encourage you, No. One, write out your client experience as it is right now. What does every client or you know, what ideally does every client experience with you? What emails do they get? What touch points are they receiving? What forms of contact communication, what links are they getting? All the things write it out so that you can visually see what pieces you have. And then I would go in and tweak it and add in, you know, oh, I really wish my clients got a blog post about such and such before our session so you can add in a place for that to happen. Ideally, most of this workflow would be automated. So I use a system called Dubsado to automate a lot of our client experience, our emails and things like that. Our booking is all automated. If you do it manually, that's fine. Whatever works for you, but write it out. And the goal here is that every client experience the exact same client experience. Right. We want to serve every client super well. So if one client gets a questionnaire, we want all the clients to get a questionnaire. So whatever the pieces that you have, I would write those out and literally put it in a checklist that for every single client you serve, you mark off the pieces as they happen so that you know that every client is getting served super, super well. So that's the first one client experience workflow. The second workflow that I feel like every family photographer should have is a post processing workflow. Now, post-processing workflow is basically everything that happens technically after you shoot the session. So think things like culling or backing up your photos, you know, sending them off to your editor if you have an editor or actually sitting down to edit, if you're the one editing, you know, delivering galleries, blogging, sneak peeks, posting on social media, all the things that happen after that session. So this post processing workflow for us again, is on a Trello card. So in Trello, we have a post processing check. List that we follow for every single client. So, you know, if they need to go on the blog, we get them on the blog, we when we post the blog, then we share it to our stories and we put up an Instagram post about it and all the things. So this post processing workflow, really the purpose of it is to make sure that you don't miss vital steps in the process because, yes, you served them well beforehand, but you want to make sure you serve them super well afterwards and that clients don't fall through the cracks. I know before I put a solid post-processing workflow into place, I would honestly forget about clients. And that sounds so terrible. But it was in my first year and all of a sudden I have a client saying, hey, where are my photo? I'm like, oh my gosh, it has been two weeks and I totally forgot about their session and I haven't even touched them. And you're like, Rebecca, how can you forget about a session? Well, when you're shooting in high volume, it's really easy to miss people if you don't have a solid, like workflow for it. So because I was shooting so many sessions, somebody would fall through the cracks and I would literally just forget. And it was the worst feeling ever. And so pretty early on, I set up a post processing workflow so that I knew every single person would get served well and that all of the vital pieces like backing up their photos and getting them sent out to the editor and delivering those galleries and blogging them and posting about them on social media, all of those pieces would happen and they would happen in a timely manner. I really like Trello because you can set due dates and that helps me, you know, get a reminder when something's supposed to happen. And so that is something it's really helpful for us to be able to have those things in place. Now, the third workflow that I think every family photographer should have is one that is often overlooked and that you may not think about, but it really, really needs to happen. And this is a maintenance workflow.These are things that you may not do every single day or every week, but they should be done at least once a quarter. So, you know, whether you need to set down schedule a day to be your, like, duty day or your maintenance day, whatever you want to call it, where you do these things, it's just really important to put this checklist together so that you have a place that you can look at it and do it once a quarter. So some of the things that go on are maintenance. Workflow are things like backing up photos where ideally you'd be backing up photos as you take them. But if that doesn't happen, for whatever reason, this gives you a schedule time to make sure all of your photos are backed up. Another thing that you can do for maintenance is refreshing your website portfolio. So as you're serving more clients, you can go in and update your portfolio so that it's reflective of your current work, whether your style has changed or maybe you've gotten better or you've served, you know, more diverse clients that you want to highlight on your website, whatever that may be. Updating your portfolio quarterly, even if it's just swapping a photo or two, just helps you to stay, I guess, like top of mind and the most updated that you can be. Another thing that you should be updating on your website, at least quarterly, is your testimonials. So as your serving clients and they are giving you testimonials about how awesome you are, hopefully then you can update those testimonials on your website. So go in and put those up, you know, grab them from Google, grab them from emails wherever you need, and put those two testimonials up there because that is gold for photographers. Another thing that you can do in your maintenance workflow is update your client experience. Take a look and say what pieces could I add? What pieces should I take away? You know, really nail down and see, like, how are these pieces working and could I be better? So this is a really good time to step back, get like a different view and really see. How are you serving your clients? Are there pieces that are unnecessary? Could you serve them better? Those are all things to look at. Another thing that you could do is you could look at your you know, your other workflows and say, am I being the most efficient that I could be? Right. Am I using my time efficiently for all of my clients receiving the same experience? Is there something I need to tweak in my automations or anything like that? So those are really easy maintenance things that you can do that don't require like an all the time kind of thing, but are really good for at least once a quarter. I would highly suggest those are the three workflows, your client experience workflow, your post processing workflow and your maintenance workflow. Find some kind of system that's free, you know, like Trello, Azana. I think Monday is one whatever system you want to use Maybe you're a planner kind of girl and you want to have like a physical planner with a checklist, wherever you put it, put these workflows somewhere so that you know that you are following all the things. Even if you're not a checklist person, I have a girl on my team that's not a checklist person and that's OK. She knows the importance of keeping a checklist because that way you're able to, like, see visually see what is happening. And so, although naturally she wouldn't create a checklist on her own, she is, you know, adapting well to having a checklist to follow because it helps her make sure all the steps get done. So whether you're naturally a checklist person or not, workflows are some of those things that really should be checklists that way, you know, for a fact that all of the pieces are happening as they should. So if you have any questions about workflows, especially these three, let me know. DM me on Instagram and I'd love to help you. I'm considering putting my post-processing workflow, our photography client workflow up in my shop. So let me know if that's something that you'd be interested in, like DM me on Instagram, like. Yes, Rebecca, I totally want that. Or like now I can make my own, like, let me know. It is a Trello board, so I would like to teach you how to use it. But if that's something that you would be interested in, like, let me know and maybe we'll put it in the shop. But I hope this is helpful for you. Short and sweet episode. Just, you know, really hitting. You guys know, I'm a no fluff teacher, so I just really wanted to hear some very practical things that you can apply to your business today. And I hope that you do. I hope that you take these things and take it seriously, grab, you know, put pen to paper, grab a checklist, whatever in Trello, make it happen so that you're serving your clients the best that you can. So with that, we'll go ahead and close out. Hope you have an awesome, awesome week and we will see you this time next week. Bye, guys.
Episode Transcript
