Hey, friends, welcome back to the Business Journey podcast, I'm your host, Rebecca, and today we're talking all about what to do after your mini sessions. We're giving workflow tips for after the shoot. Before we go too far, I wanted to let you know about an opportunity that I have for you, and this is a free mini sessions class. This class dives all into what many sessions are and how to structure them right so that you can maximize your profit. And then we talk a ton about marketing. So if you're wanting to dive into marketing for mini sessions, this class is for you. You can check it out at Rebeccaricephoto.com/minis-class. We'll link it below so that you can access it super easily. But you know, just wanted to let you know about this opportunity. It's completely free. And I'm telling you you're going to walk away with pages and pages of notes. So let's dive in to our topic today. Now we are in the thick of mini sessions season, and if you guys have followed me for any period of time, you know that mini sessions are my thing. I love many sessions because in my opinion, they are the best way to maximize your time while maximizing your profit. So many sessions are amazing, but they can become a little bit of a logistic. I don't want to say nightmare because it's no nightmare, but it has some interesting logistics for after the session. If you don't have a plan and you are really sure like, what do I do with all these families? Like, I just shot 12 families in one day. Now what do I do? So today we're going to be giving you tips of what to do with your workflow, what to do after the session to make things super, super easy for you to be able to process everybody and give everybody an awesome client experience. So I've been doing mini sessions for years, and these tips are kind of a culmination of the things that I've learned along the way. Just from trial and error, I have done things well. I've done things not well. And so hopefully you can take these tips and avoid doing things not well so that your post-processing for mini sessions is easy and, you know, not overwhelming or scary. So the first thing that I suggest is after you shoot your mini sessions, let's say you shoot them on a Sunday evening. I always suggest waiting a day before starting your post-processing wait one day just to give yourself rest, right? Because it's pretty overwhelming in the moment. There's lots of adrenaline shooting that many families at one time, and so you want to give yourself a day to just chill and let off the emotions of the day. Whether you're a mini went super well, whether you know, there were some challenging minis in there, I don't know about you, but sometimes I have some challenging mini is that make me not so excited to edit them or I don't edit my own minis, I actually passed them off to my editor, but it makes me not so excited to cull through them and all of that by giving yourself a day. It allows for those emotions to subside and gets you in the right headspace to be able to serve these clients well and process these images efficiently. Because you don't want to waste a whole bunch of time, you know, being emotionally your images and things like that, it's best if you just give yourself a day and then jump in. So the next piece that I highly suggest is organizing your files well, so the way that my team organizes our files is and this is a little more difficult to explain on a podcast, but stick with me here. So in Finder or whatever, whatever you're using, we put all of our images on an external hard drive. And for mini sessions, we have one master folder for that set of mini sessions. So let's say it's, you know, 10/25 Adriatic mini sessions. So we always put the location, we put the date. Obviously, we organize our files way date. So we put the date and then the location of those mini sessions. And if it's an associate shooting, it will put whoever shot it in parentheses. It's only you shooting it, then you know you shot it. You don't have to put anybody in parentheses. And so inside that master folder, we have three folders. We have a capture folder, which we label 10/25 Adriatic Images capture. That's where all of our raw photos are going to be dumped. And I'll tell you how in just a second. So we have our capture folder. We have our Selects folder, which these are the images. Once we call, we're going to put them into the Selects folder so that we can pull them easily. And then we have an output folder, which is all of the photos that are final edited images. Don't ask me why I call my files these names. It was when I first started. I like looked up how somebody organizes their files, and this is what they do. So I have like did it from my very first photo session and then stuck with it for years. So we have our capture, our selects and our output now within each of those folders. This is where we organized by family. So let's go into our capture folder, OK, in our capture folder. Again, this is where we're dumping all of our raw images. We order our photos by family, so every family has their own folder and we do it by number and the mom's name, so I'll do 1-Mom's first and last name because typically it's the mom who's booking with us. So mom's name is on their contract and their invoice and in their project and mom's name is just everywhere. You know our communication in our emails. So we'll do 1-Mom's first last name 2- Mom's First and last name and we label them all the way. However, many were doing so. If we did 12 sessions, we label them 1 through 12 all the way down. I do it this way because it helps us, you know, keep all the photos in order. If you just did mom's first and last name. You don't know what order they were in and that gets really confusing. So it's really easy to just keep them in order. The order that we shot them, not the order that you book to them, because occasionally, you know, you may have to people switch where one person was a little late, one person was a little early, so we swapped them. So I want to you want to remember that and I order the folders in order that we shot them so that when we go and pull our raw photos, it's super easy to throw them in the correct folder. And I just go down the list in order of each family and I throw them in these folders. From there we cull and we batch everything. So the next tip for you is to batch your work, cull all of your photos at the same time, edit them all at the same time, or send them off to your editor and then deliver all of the images at the same time. I have some people ask me, Well, is it better to do one family at a time? Cull, edit and then deliver that family and then go to the next one cull, edit, deliver? It's not the best way to maximize your time is to batch your work and do like tasks together. And the reason for that is you're a lot more productive because for me, for example, I cull in a program called Photo Mechanic, which if you've never used auto mechanic and you're calling in Lightroom, stop culling in Lightroom immediately and switched to photo mechanic. It's a one time purchase. I want to say it's like $49 or something, and it's so, so worth it because you're able to call super fast and you think it's fast and Lightroom until you got a photo mechanic and then you're like, Oh, why did I ever cull in Lightroom? So I cull all of my photos and photo mechanic. And then from there, I import into Lightroom to process my editing or handoff off to my editor in Lightroom. And then I deliver my galleries through shoot proof. And so it would be a lot more time consuming if I'm jumping between all these programs constantly. Whereas if I sit down and just do everything I need to in photo mechanic at one time and then everything I need to in Lightroom at one time and then everything, I need to shoot proof at one time, I'm spending a lot less time bouncing around between my programs. I'm using my time efficiently. Batch your work, and it really, really helps. The next piece that I would say to help your workflow is to get organized. So have a workflow so that every client gets the same experience. I talked about this a little bit in the last episode that we did. Our team uses Trello to organize our workflow, and we have a little checklist of everything that needs to happen for every single client. And so within this workflow, we're able to know that every client is served the same. We're also able to see where every client is in the process, whose photos have been culled, whose photos are now in Lightroom or sent off to our editor whose photos are being delivered. I want to know so that if something were to happen to me, what if I was to end up in the hospital sick randomly? I want to be able to reach out to a friend or a person on my team and say, Hey, here's my workflow. Can you make sure this stuff happens in these clients get served? You're not able to do that if it's only in your head. So it's really important to get it written down somewhere so that somebody else could step in if they absolutely need to. And if not, at least you have, you know, your steps organized. So that, like we talked about last week, if you know you're super overwhelmed, you can just lean back on those processes and remember what needs to get done. We actually do have this photography workflow masterclass where I walk through what our photography workflow looks like from start to finish of our booking in our post-processing and everything in between. This is in behind the lens. So if you're behind the lens, remember you can watch that. And if you are not behind the lens, no, this masterclass is in our masterclass vault. So our vault is kind of like Disney opens and closes and it's actually closed right now. But I did link a special link here below if you want to check it out and you are able to purchase that now. This link is not live anywhere else. It's literally just here because our vault, like I said, it opens and closes and it's closed right now. So if you want to grab this photography workflow masterclass, you can do so with this special link because I wanted you to be able to have something in your hands to be able to actually use. And what this is, it's our Trello board in the masterclass walk you through what the process is, and I also include the Trello board template. For you to use in your own business, so I highly suggest checking that out. So those are just a few quick tips of what to do after your mini sessions to make sure that workflow goes smoothly and it's not overwhelming as you start booking more, especially in a higher volume. That's really when these workflows become so vital because it's impossible to continue scaling. If you don't have these workflows in place, you are going to become the bottleneck in your business, and you're not going to be able to take on anymore clients because you're still trying to get your workflows right. And so by implementing this stuff early, maybe even before you're shooting high volume, if you are shooting high volume right now, do this like yesterday. If you say, you know, Rebecca, I'm not even that booked yet. I can kind of handle things where I'm at now is the perfect time to implement this stuff so that whenever you do start booking in higher volumes, that you'll be able to keep up with that demand. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions about, you know, workflows or how to keep your minis organized or anything like that. I love talking all about mini sessions, of course. So feel free to reach out to me on Instagram at Rebecca Rice Photography, and I would love to just chat with you in DMs and see how I can serve you. So hopefully this is helpful and can't wait to see you implement this in your own mini sessions in your own business. So that's all we have for today. We will see you back next week for some more awesome stuff. See then.
