TRANSCRIPTION:

Transcription was done by Temi.com which means it’s an AI generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Intro: [00:00] Welcome to from nothing to profit, a photographer’s podcast with Matt and Kia, where each week they talk to photographers about what is working in their business now so you can swipe those ideas and grow your business faster. Okay. Welcome back everyone.

Kia: [00:17] Two from nothing to profit. This is Kia Bondurant and I’m going to be interviewing my cohost, Matt Hoaglin today. Hi Matt. How are you? Very good. So I, uh, we already recorded my interview and I didn’t know if I would like this as much, but I think I like being the boss better. I’m like, Ooh, now I’m in charge, so I get to talk about you.

Matt: [00:42] That’s, that’s perfect. You can be in charge of whatever you want, like we talked about in your interview. I can outsource everything to you.

Kia: [00:51] That’s funny. No. So I’m Matt, you and your wife Allison Ragsdale, photography and drink. Oh, Colorado. And that supports both of you and allison. Uh, even though she’s not on this, we’ll talk about her. She’s fantastic. She never wanted to do anything besides be a photographer. So she started out being a photographer from the very beginning. Is that right?

Matt: [01:13] Right from the very beginning she went to college and got her degree in photography and we started the business like the week she got out of college

Kia: [01:19] and so you’re more like me. You actually, we both have education degrees, although yours is a high school math and you managed a camera store and now you run the marketing and the operations of your photography studio.

Matt: [01:33] Yeah, exactly. So Alice and I actually met at that camera store, her part time job when she was so cool. Was that the camera store? So we met there and started dating and then eventually moved to Durango and got married and built. Built a business and stuff together. But yeah, so I taught high school math for awhile, which was really awesome. But I’m really glad I stopped doing that at the same time. Yeah. Now I just run like, like you said, operations and marketing for our business. So make sure that the phone rings in the calendar, gets booked so that she can go out and photograph.

Kia: [02:01] Yeah. And you’re able to build your life around what you love to do.

Matt: [02:05] So one of my passions, just total side note, one of my passions is fly fishing and so what I love about the business that we’ve built as I’m a I, I fly fish at least one day a week if not more. That’s awesome because I can do it on a random Wednesday when there’s nobody else on the river and I love the business that we built and the lifestyle that it’s given us for sure.

Kia: [02:24] Yeah. And I think that that’s really good to bring that up because as photographers and as small business owners and entrepreneurs with this podcast, our goal is to teach people to go from nothing to profit, but part of that is making a business that works around who you are and who you want to be.

Matt: [02:42] That’s definitely not good going from like entrepreneur to like business slave, you know, like that’s not the goal. It’s definitely, you know, to build a business that allow, that provides your lifestyle that you want, whatever that is. The lifestyle that and I wanted to build is we wanted to work together and be able to take vacations and stuff together. And if we’re working at two different, that would’ve never happened. And so it was really important for us to be on those exact same schedule. And that’s what we built.

Kia: [03:06] Yeah. And one that you can take off whenever it’s convenient for you and you don’t have to worry about spring breaks or summer vacations or things like that.

Matt: [03:14] Yeah. And we were just now after like 11 years of business trying to figure out how to like vacation and do things separately because we do so much stuff together. We traveled together a lot. Um, and this December I’m actually, uh, I have a week long fly fishing trip in Mexico for salt water fishing and she’s not going so it’ll be really interesting to see what it’s like to have a whole seven days with just my buddies and not have her there because like I said, the business and life we built was to spend a lot of time together. So it’s, it’s exciting to see what this, what this will bring.

Kia: [03:46] It’d be fun to see what she does in her seven days without you too.

Matt: [03:49] I know and she’s such a, she’s such a foodie person that I’m a, I think that she’s going to end up going somewhere where there’s like crazy good food for a week with her friends and you know, she’ll probably in the wine bill will probably be huge, but that’s okay. Don’t show love every minute of it.

Kia: [04:05] That’s funny. You know, in my interview we didn’t really talk about this, but you know, my studio is built so that I go to work three days a week and then I can leave whenever I need to and I have four kids and that’s kind of how my life has been built around making it work for them. So I started out as a photographer just right out of college and then had kids and I was a full time photographer all the way through, but I’ve always worked my business around my family and what I wanted to do with them and so that I can be at everything that they do. So that’s awesome. Well that’s fun. So it’s kind of fun with these interviews to see where things go. That was a bit of a rabbit trail, but I think it’s really valuable to know how we structure our lives to make it so that works for us. Okay. So, uh, Matt, here’s my next question for you and I’d love for you to share some of your expertise. What is the area of expertise that you are known for both maybe Allison Ragsdale and just Hugh Hoaglin as well?

Matt: [05:06] Yes, I’ll start with the studio. So we’re mostly a senior portrait studio. We’ve, we do a lot of family pictures and headshots now, but that grew out of our senior business where, you know, where you were like, Oh, here we have 100 seniors this year, we’re photographing, how can we get them back so we don’t have to market to them again because they’re already clients. And so we’re like, well, we’re going to photograph their family pictures and so that Kinda grew into this big family business. And then of course that has its own referrals. And then we did, uh, we, we kind of fell into headshots, professional headshots a lot because a lot of our parents of our kids were business owners or you know, doing the weather. They had a side hustle or they own their own business. We said, hey, can you do some head shots for me?

Matt: [05:48] And were like, course we, that kind of grew as well. And then we do a few weddings a year and most of that’s our high school seniors eventually grow up, go to college, get. And so they have us photograph their weddings as well. So we don’t do a lot of weddings. I mean like a busy year of weddings is 10, but we do a few and so we kind of have, we kind of have a business that does a little bit of everything, but it all stems from our senior portrait business where that’s most of our energy and our focus and our marketing all goes into that. Yeah. Separate than that, I’m, I’m kind of known. I’m in the speaking world for marketing. I have spoken a number of conferences. That’s where you and I first met and I spent a lot of my day here at Allison ragsdale photography, like trying to figure out how to make the phone ring and how to book up the calendar so that we can have the lifestyle we want and everybody stays busy and the bills get paid and through that I’ve come up with some really cool marketing ideas that I’ve been able to share with the photography community and I think that’s what people know me most for some people do know me for like business operations as well because I have some advice there, but I would definitely say my passion is teaching photographers how to market so that they can make

Kia: [06:55] more money. Well, and when I think of how you’ve helped me in my business, just from when we first met, sat down and talked and I feel like it’s the marketing side, but from a, like a systematic approach. So it’s kind of business operations and marketing put together so that it all works, you know, in a, in a system and it’s, it’s easily duplicatable.

Matt: [07:20] Yeah. And so the way I. There’s two things that are really important to me and marketing of which tie right into that. One of them is consistency. I want systems in place so that marketing consistently happens, so it doesn’t just. It’s not like a rollercoaster where you know your market and you get some clients and then you work with all those clients and then when they’re all done and they’ve ordered, you have no clients again because you didn’t have any time to market. So I want consistency in marketing so that it just flows. People keep falling in no matter how busy we are. And then the other thing is I view marketing as a really simple idea. It’s basically moving one person from one conversation to the next conversation, so maybe they just have some general questions and then I want to answer those questions and move them onto the next question or the next conversation. That’s important. And so, you know, they may show up in their conversation, they’re ready to have is, you know, where are we going to go take pictures. But by the time they come to order, I want them to be thinking about what they want to order as well. So you know, there’s definitely, there’s systems there as well to move people along so that they’re always knowing what’s going on and they’re always educated and we’re always, you know, always on the same page. So it does feel very systematic because I view marketing as very systematic.

Kia: [08:31] Yeah. It’s kind of like the order of operations. There’s some song or what’s, what’s the order of operations? So

Matt: [08:39] yeah. Well we just, when I taught at, we just called it Pem dos.

Kia: [08:42] Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I have a great video to send you a one of the kids I know who did a. made up a song to Das. Yes. Fantastic.

Matt: [08:54] Yeah, exactly. I never did songs

Kia: [08:56] in my classroom because I never went there, but we could do a order, a order of marketing operations song.

Matt: [09:04] Yeah. Well if we, if we find a really good one, maybe we’ll link it in the show notes, but we’ll spare all these photographers, although

Kia: [09:13] that would be fantastic.

Matt: [09:16] Yeah. Maybe next time, next time we speak together, maybe we can do that

Kia: [09:19] song and dance. All right matt. So my next question for you is tell us a story of what is working now in your business.

Matt: [09:27] So what’s working right now is that we spent a lot of time, a little over the last couple of years building lead generation tools and our business and that and I just talked about that a little bit about how we want a system where we’re leads and people are coming into our business even when we’re busy and we don’t have time to market, you know, for say market. We’ve built a lot of lead generation tools like what to wear guides and location guides that people can download and basically they just, they trade their information with us to be able to download that information to answer they’re pressing questions and that’s been working really well because then then our customer service can just kick in and we can just call them and just say, Hey, saw you downloaded our guide. You know, how can we help? And then get them in for a consultation and the whole thing happens.

Matt: [10:09] So that’s one part of it is that we have these tools that help customers raise their hand and let us let us know that they’re interested in photography, which makes our marketing a lot easier. And then the other part then the other part that’s working really well is that we’re running facebook and instagram ads to that and recently snapchat ads as well to those downloads and tools. That’s been super powerful because the amount of people you can reach with with a facebook or instagram ad and the power of targeting is really, really awesome. So those two things are really working really great in our business right now and I probably wouldn’t trade them for anything

Kia: [10:45] for sure. Yeah. I’m actually truly jealous of your lead generation process and I know you’ve told me how to do it and I’ve sat down and worked on it, but it’s something that, uh, is, takes time to put together and put in place. But I know that it’s working well for you and it will work well for anyone in the photography industry. And I’ll, and I’ll share it

Matt: [11:05] lincoln, the show notes where people can go watch a free video, you know, and kind of see what we’re doing and then I have a full class on it, but they’re all linked, allegra free video in the show notes so that people, if they’re interested in and building lead generation tools and how we do it, they can, they can see exactly.

Kia: [11:20] That would be great because I think that a lot of people, once they hear what it is and understand what it is, they can see how it’s worked on them and then they can see how that can work for their, um, to bring clients into their business. So here’s my next question for you then. What is the one thing that you are most fired up about in our industry today? Like what gets you excited when it comes to our industry?

Matt: [11:42] So right now I think there’s two things that are happening that are, I’m really excited about and I think a lot of photographers are actually really struggling with it. But one of the things that’s happening in our businesses consolidation, and since you and I have been in the industry for so long, we saw the 2000, eight, nine, 10 bubble of photographers. That was like, it was amazing. I mean so many people lost their jobs and had to go get side hustles or they decided they didn’t want to work in corporate America anymore. And so they became photographers and we just saw how many people flooded the industry. Well, I think that’s starting to change. I think Alicia, with unemployment being so low, there’s a lot of people going back to work and some of the people that just haven’t been making great money doing photography, look at it and say, well, you know, I’m staying up till midnight editing, you know, I might as well just go get a job where I can just come home at five and hang out with my family.

Matt: [12:28] And they’re just choosing that lifestyle. So I think that I’m really excited about the hard part. I think a lot of photographers are struggling with this. That means there’s a lot of photographers in your market that are actually the marketing dollars or actually leaving your market and I think that when there’s, when there’s competition in your market, we all benefit from that because somebody may be running facebook ads and they think, oh, I need to do photography, but then they know you better. They have a relationship better. So then they call you and you don’t necessarily know why they call you because.

Kia: [13:00] Oh yeah, that makes sense. So when, if when your competition markets you get, you get business from it?

Matt: [13:07] Yeah, because everybody’s thinking about photography because we’re not competing really against each other. We’re more competing against, you know, like do they come do photography with us or do they take a trip to Disney or do they buy a new boat, you know, what are, what are they going to do with their extra money and we’re one of those options. And so when everybody’s marketing, our industry is top of mind, but when, when people are, when the industry is consolidated and people are going back to work and leaving the industry, I think there’s just less ad dollars out there right now kind of keeping us top of mind. So I think there’s photographer struggling, they can’t quite figure out why they’re down and it may be they may be down 10 percent because they lost three of their competitors that we’re advertising heavily. And so some of those add some of those dollars that consumers are spending aren’t necessarily come into our industry.

Kia: [13:48] Wait, wait, wait. But why are you excited about that? You’re saying that that’s something that you’re excited about, but that sounds like a negative to...