Ever wondered what it takes not just to survive, but thrive for 50 years in the photography industry? Pat Miller sits down with volume photography authority David Grupa to reveal the game-changing shifts and timeless fundamentals that keep a business relevant, no matter the decade.

Episode Highlights 🎤💡:

(07:40) - Transition from Paper to Online Sales

(14:03) - Don’t Compete on Price in Volume Photography

(29:49) - Consistent Marketing Wins Long-term Clients

Connect with Pat Miller ⬇

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Connect with David Grupa ⬇

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I'm Pat Miller, and this is the Professional Photographer Podcast. How long have you owned and operated your photography studio? Five years? That's a heck of a long time. Ten years? Whoa, you're killing it. What about 50? Today's episode is with David Grupa. He's been finding business for 50 years and a PPA member the whole time. I'm going to ask him, what has it been like? What are the changes that you've observed? Is selling still just the same as it's always been? What about closing clients? What about their expectations? What about finding new business? How do you do all of that stuff? He's been doing it for decades, and he's ready to tell all. If your studio is open and you want to last 50 years, pull up a chair and let's learn from David next. David, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Hey, Pat, how are you? We are shoveling out after a weekend of blizzard here in Minnesota, but we're good.

Nothing like a blizzard to make you wish of real spring, right? When does real spring arrive for you there in Minnesota?

It was 60 last week. And they just kind of hammered us over the weekend here. It will be 50 again by the weekend.

If someone hasn't met you yet, they got to get to know you besides where you live. Tell them who you are and what you do.

I'm David Grupa. I am a certified professional photographer. I have been involved with PPA for 50— that's 5-0— years. And it's— I tease it's the best investment I've ever made in my photographic business better than any lens, camera, anything. And I have kind of run the gamut over the years of photography. Started with weddings into portraiture, high school seniors, kids. I started doing some sports teams, and then about 15 years ago, my wife and I decided this is where we needed to be. And here we are. So sports teams, leagues, schools, banners, that stuff.

Fifty years. Congratulations, first of all, on 50 years. Think back to the beginning. What was life like when you started way back then?

We didn't know what we didn't know at that point. We were— I started this business with a friend from high school. We had been partners on the yearbook staff doing yearbook and newspaper photography the entire time. And a friend asked us if we would take photographs at her wedding because otherwise it was just going to be her uncle who had a nice camera but didn't know anything about photography, apparently, just had a nice camera. And I did wedding photographs as her wedding gift. I said, okay, I'll take wedding photographs. I will give you these. That's that, you know, no more expectations. A friend of hers after the wedding said, I liked it. I looked at Rhonda's wedding photographs, and I thought they were great. What do you charge to photograph weddings? And I looked at this guy who was my partner in crime in high school, and I said, do we charge to photograph weddings? And it put us through college. I went to school for broadcast journalism, which is clearly what I'm involved in for 50 years here. I started a business and at one point, I kind of looked at it and went, this is where I need to be. And we have gone from kind of with my family as well; had kids, so I started doing kids' photos. I was doing weddings all those years, but guess what? Those people had kids, too, so they needed kids' photos. Well, then the kids grew up and became high school seniors, so hey, we better look into doing high school senior photographs. And so I've just kind of been the whole route with things. And the great part about my membership at PPA is it's always connected me with the right people when I needed them at that moment, because here I am again in volume now. And whether it's schools or sports, and I tease, I am now at the point in my career where I do know what I don't know, and I'm smart enough to ask somebody else.

We themed this episode 50 Years of Finding Business. So, I want to learn some of the things that you've learned along the way. What about sales? Has the sales process changed much from when you started, or is selling, selling?

Yes and no. Selling is always going to be selling. Digital has obviously changed how we do things. And rather than just handing folks a book of photographs and saying, here, there's an order form next to each photo in the book, write down the number of prints that you want, prices on the front page, to looking at it and going, I need to make this much money from my sessions in order for these to make it worthwhile for me. At which point we started looking at, okay, I need samples of this product, this product, this product. So when they're in the studio, I can put it in their hands or walk them over to it, let them touch it, feel it, hold it. With senior portraits, there was a lot of suggestive selling. It was working them through a list of people who would have wanted photographs of the graduating senior, you know, and go down that list and what else do you want? Here's some products we offer. Sports volume stuff tends to be a little more hands-off, but on photo day, if you can have a set of samples or even a banner with samples on it that folks can look at and say, ooh, what's this? And if we have samples with us, we'll pull them out, put them on the table. A lot of our leagues now, we're photographing on days where the parents are filling out a form at the table or filling out an ID card, but then back in the actual area we're doing the photography, they're not there, just coaches and players to keep things less chaotic. So, and we've moved most of our sales to online, because on photo day, they'll only buy as much as they have cash with them, or they don't want to put everything on a card that day. But later, they'll sit there and look at it and go, oh, we want one of these, we want one of these. So it's the same, only different.

Well, think about that transition, that transition, order forms stuffed into, you know, magazines and such all the way now to online digital ordering. Did that kind of transformation come to you naturally? Did you get help to do that? How did that go?

You know, when we we started doing this, we were printing a lot of paper and we were getting order forms to leagues and then we were using the online forms or the online platforms as a backup. So that was more, if you didn't order on photo day, don't worry, you can still place your order, go online, find your kid's photograph. And then we realized how much paper we were producing, how much paper we were throwing away or recycling, how many of the order forms that we gave them— leagues, coaches, schools— in advance, never got handed out before photo day. And so we went, let's go with something really simple, like a little card with a QR code on it, scan that and put your email address in. So we have banners, we have signs, we have, like I said, just a little trading card size code with a QR code on the one side. The flip side just has our contact information and then the actual link that people can use to find the photographs. They'll go online later, place their order, and everybody's used to ordering stuff online now too. So I think it kind of came as people became more comfortable with ordering things online, putting credit card info in online, that whereas there was a point when people went, I'm not putting my information online, and now it's just an everyday thing.

Isn't that kind of crazy to think about? The time when people were afraid to put their credit cards into Yahoo or Netscape at the time because we all thought it was going to be financial doom. And now we, like, my AI agents have my credit card, and they're running around with my credit card doing a bunch of different stuff. It's just, that's a really good example of how people's mindsets must have shifted during your time.

Well, and we kind of tease about it. I like the fact that you brought up the fact that you'd open a magazine and all these little renewal cards would fall out of it or things like that. And we started initially when we had paper, that was kind of a philosophy that we used when we were handing out these forms to people. And I would have extra little sheets inside the paper order form that when they pulled the paper order form out, extra things would fall out, and they'd look at that and go, oh look, if we order this much, we get this bonus item for free. And there was, you know, all of that in there. But again, you had a lot of money that you spent on printing, and then somebody had to stuff all these things and assemble them. So we're paying people to put order forms in envelopes and stuff all these extra pieces in with it. And then we had to count them out and deliver them to schools. And it just was an expense that we felt we can be more profitable and still give people the opportunity to order all of these products. And we just kind of looked at how other places were doing it and went, we can do it like this. And it was scary at first. You know, it was a little intimidating the first time we said, nope, we're 100% online. We had one league that really balked at that because they showed up on photo day with actual cash. And I teased, it was the only league we brought a change fund to because we knew which league would put it on debit card and we knew which league would write us a check. And this one showed up with cash. So we had to be able to make change and everything else. And it was pretty crazy, but we pretty much moved everybody online, and we haven't taken physical orders on photo day now for a couple of years.

Wow. Things are obviously changing during your 50 years of finding business, and marketing methodologies completely changed during that time. But are there any principles or beliefs that you have that have just held true across all 50 years that when we tell our story in this way, regardless of the way the story is told, when we talk about these things, people want to do business with us. Does anything come to mind?

Our biggest, I guess our biggest push always is we're going to give you great service. So there's that institutional form of advertising that's not, hey, here's a specific product, here's a specific item that we're trying to get you to do. And now when we're looking at leagues, what they want to hear is, this is going to be easy for me. Every school kind of rolls their eyes and takes a deep breath when it comes to photo day. Every coach that you talk to is like, oh, I hate photo day because it's in a lot of cases been for them a disorganized process. It wastes a whole day of practice time. And yet, we walk in and we kind of sell, this is not a disorganized process. We have this down. This is how it's going to happen. This is how much time I'm going to need per team. I don't need all day. I need this much per team, but I need undivided attention from that team for this period of time. And we move them through and we get them photographed and get them back on the practice field or back into the locker room or wherever they need to be. And that has, you know, it's really the biggest thing is selling that service, selling that organization to them. After that, you know, you can go on price, but it's easy to be the lowest price guy in town. And I always kind of laugh. I have never been a big proponent of winning the race to the bottom. So I'm not looking at selling them on cheap prices. We do say we're an extremely good value, but there's a difference.

What about some of the additive things about doing your business? So this is how we take the photos, but we make sure that you get things delivered to you quickly and maybe even deliver them directly. Do you do either of those things, and how important is that?

When we started with volume, what we knew at that point was you delivered everything back to the school or back to the league. Or to the coach, and they handed things out. What changed that for us was actually COVID when we started getting calls from a league that we had photographed that winter saying, hey, I haven't got my kids' photos yet and it's April. Come to find out they're riding around in the back of coach's car because they've canceled practices and everything. And he's got this box of photos. And if the kids weren't there the first night, he handed out photographs. They're now sitting in the back of his car, and he didn't get them to them. And we then thought, oh, for Pete's sake, how are we going to make this happen? And I actually met a few coaches who had undelivered photographs. I got them all back, and we kind of bit the bullet on our end and mailed them all out. After COVID, we looked at it, went that was the best thing we ever did was ship all this stuff directly to clients. And we adjusted our pricing schedule because after COVID, everything was a little bit adjusted anyway. So we adjusted pricing to accommodate for postage and shipping costs, and now everything is delivered directly to the client. They get things either First Class mail if they're doing onesie-twosie small prints to getting a photo mailer that will have, you know, 8x10s and 5x7s and magnets, buttons, whatever is in there to having a box with products in it if it's banners and thicker products that you can't put into a cardboard mailer. But we ship everything. Tracking numbers, the whole bit, people love that. And it's easy.

Yeah. I know you haven't been doing volume exclusively the whole time, but how has volume or the other products changed over the years? What people are actually buying from you? Are there products people used to buy and they fell out of favor or things even during your time doing volume that were really hot a while ago, but now they're not hot anymore?

Initially, volume was 8x10 team photograph, 5x7 individual photograph in a cardboard slide, or a 5x7 team photograph and a 3x5 team photograph and a cardboard slide that you put in the mount and you assembled all of it, or you put the prints in a baggie and put the slide or the mount inside. Digital has moved us into a point where we're now producing school or league graphics and colors on everything, and we're printing all of this as one photo as opposed to now making two separate photos. It's allowed us to do cooler products that we just couldn't do before digital printing. I have something on the floor here, and just got these back today. These are printed on PVC. They're large PVC prints that I need to drill in the corners because the school displays these on the wall right outside the athletic department, and these are all the captains for the upcoming year's sports or the upcoming season's sports. So we photographed these guys a couple of weeks ago, and we print this. We'll take them out to the workroom, and I have a drill press and we drill the corners out so that they have post mounts that fit on the wall and they change them out every season. And being able to offer schools products such as this or vinyl banners is so huge. Vinyl banners are so huge. And that's probably what hooked me into the volume initially was seeing— I went to a seminar with Jeff Gump in Kansas City, and one of the things he talked about was how we're doing vinyl banners for our senior athletes or for certain teams. And I went, that would be so cool. But convincing the schools at this early stage of the game— this is probably 15 years ago— convincing some of the schools to spend that money wasn't as easy as I thought. And I was part of a business marketing group at that point. And I walked in one week and that was my, you know, ask for that particular week is I'm looking for people who want to get their names out there in front of people at high schools. And for this much money, if you help me pay for the banners for the school, we'll put your name as a sponsor on the bottom of the banner. And so we did that, and we didn't— you know, I limited the spaces so that it didn't clutter up the banner with business logos and things like that. But we designed the banner then in such a way that there was a little frame at the bottom that said, banner printing sponsored by Apex Construction and State Farm Insurance. And of course, my logo goes on everything.

Absolutely.

Tease, you know, it's one of those things that, that really— do your jeans have a logo on them? Does your car have a logo on it? Yeah. So we're going there. Yeah.

I know some school and team photographers are leaning into technology, digital post-production, and video. What's the demand been like for you?

Schools want cool stuff now. They want to be as close to college as college wants to be close to pros. And so they do production with their games, with their home sports, and they want to have a lot of that as part of what they're doing as well. So there are days that we go in and photograph. Now, parents, they, you know, we lean into cool for the school, but the parents say, I just want a nice photo of my kid holding the basketball and looking at the camera and smiling. Whereas schools, they want some smoke and mirrors and things like that. Photographing with the technology that we have now to be able to extract the student from the background. A, we can replace the background, so I can drop them into the school gym. I can take the same image and drop it onto a background with smoke and mirrors and lights and things like that. And it's also allowed us to not— I don't want to say not care where we photograph, but about 90% of the photographs that we will do in the next couple of weeks, as like I said, we got hit with snow here, so all the track photos next week, guess what? There's still going to be snow on the track next week. They don't want that in their photographs. We photograph them in the gym, in the cafeteria, in whatever space is available to set up a background. And knowing that we work with these schools for these sports through the year, we stop and photograph the track, the football field, the baseball field at different stages. And then we have to kind of watch it because a school last year changed scoreboard on me. So I had to go back and rephotograph that field so I had their updated scoreboard. And so, but that's allowed us to do a lot of products like that. They want stuff for social media, schools. So it's kind of finding the sweet spot into what will we share at no cost, or if you want a lot of this from us, here's what we charge to provide you with these digitals. Because one way or another, we need to get paid, and the schools and leagues don't pay us to come in and, and photograph. We make money when the parents are buying photographs. And in many cases, we're giving some money back to the school or the league to support their programs, to kind of endear them to us as well, or us to them. And, so we've sponsored giveaways, we've bought ads in their programs, we write them a check. And there's a lot of times that we do that. Sometimes, we had a league this last year that they had a wall in the arena. It's a hockey league. They had a wall in the arena where they had those plastic— think of the sign holder at Target, the little plastic frames that they slip a sign in and out of. And they had this on the wall at this arena, like 25 of them, all stuck up there with double-sided tape, and then their logo above that in dry transfer lettering or whatever they had— the press-on lettering. And they were slipping photos in, and she walked me over and she said, I need 25 8x10s of the teams to put in these frames once we get that. And I looked at her, and I said, how married are you to these frames on this wall? She said, I hate them. They're hard to get photos in and out of because they're mounted to the wall. I looked at her and said, we can fix this, and it'll be the easiest fix you've ever had. We printed it, we measured the space, we printed all of these teams on a banner, on a vinyl banner. They rolled it out, tacked it to the wall with Command Strips or whatever they're using to do that. At the end of the season, they can take it down, roll it up. I got one school that does that and they auction it off at the end of the year. I've got one school or one league that keeps them and lines them up along their fence every year to go back to day one when we started with this league. Last year I walked in and looked at it, went, oh, these two need to be replaced. So we just reordered them and put them back up. So it didn't make us look bad either, but they'd not held up well after 15 years of wind, rain, and sunshine. So, but there's a lot of things that the technology has moved into what they want to do as well, and we have to find ways to share it, but still get paid for what we do. Because I always used to tease, I said, I don't make any money taking photographs, I make money selling photographs.

And that's the headline of the episode. You want to be open for 50 years, make money selling your photographs. And to that end, over all this time, what have you learned about getting leads? Any advice or guidance on what helps you get a lead that you can go take pictures of?

I tease. I used to carry— let me move one more thing here and pull out the pile. We have cards that we print that extol our virtues, put little infographics on the front that say, here's what we want. I started doing a series of cards in black and white with a sports quote on it from somebody. This one is Herb Brooks. It says, "Great moments are born from great opportunities." And the backside of the card says, "Don't miss this great opportunity to have your league's photos done with David Grupa Sports." And we do it for the leagues that we're trying to find. I started carrying a plastic file box in the car that had packets of these and some of our basic info in it. You know, something we sent out in the winter, it says, you're planning for opening day even though we realize it's cold and frozen outside, things like that. But we ran into a lot of these leagues at the grocery store because they have that table in the front of the grocery store and all their little kids stationed at every checkout to bag your groceries. So I walk over to the table afterwards and make sure they watch me put some money in their jar, and then I hand them a card and say, who's in charge of your league's photos? And this has opened doors for us. I don't want anyone out there to think that getting a league is a 2-phone call process, or here's a phone call, here's an email. You bet we're signing up with you this year. I have one league that we've been with now for a solid 7 or 8 years, but it took me 6 to land them.

Wow.

And it was just a matter of kind of being persistent. And every year they got, you know, a couple of times a year they'd get these cards from us. We have one that's a report card that basically says, hey, how'd your other photographer do? Here's what we do. If your photographer can check these boxes, great, you're good where you are. If they can't check all these boxes, you might want to give us a call. After COVID, we did one here that just basically says emergency contact, and the backside of the card said, hey, if your photographer isn't a photographer anymore, because there were a lot of people that during COVID just threw in the towel because this was hard. And I tease, they– a lot of folks looked at me and said, how can you afford to be marketing right now? And I said, how can I afford to not be marketing right now? You know, this is exactly when I need to do this. We came out of COVID, and there were leagues that called us because we had contacted them during COVID, and what had ever happened with their, you know, previous provider, be it a solo proprietor or a big box company, they were now looking for someone new to service them. And guess what? We're here, and we've been, and we just told them, this is what we do. This is how we do it. I'm not– this isn't my weekend gig. This is all I know how to do. And after all these years, we're very good at what we do. But we always are trying to move in new directions and stay current and relevant, I guess, is the big thing.

What about schools and leagues that already have a photographer? You get an outreach to them, and, oh yeah, we've got somebody. Do you just not call them back? Do you, do you chase after them? How do you handle that?

I have a similar card like this. That— and actually the back of this one says, you're happy with your current photographer until you're not. And, you know, so it's one of those things that says, hey, if something's happened and now you guys are looking at it going, well, we don't even know who to call right now— we had another card similar to that that says, I want to be your second first choice. So when your current first choice that you're working with isn't working any longer, I want you to call us and let's talk. And maybe we're a good fit and maybe we're not a good fit, but let's find that out in advance before you say, let's sign up for this and then realize that we're not what you want or they're not what we want. We had one last year. I literally got off the phone with this gal this morning, and she wanted to make sure we were on the calendar for a couple of weeks from now because their travel soccer teams are starting and they want to get the photos done before their travel schedule starts. Last year they decided— and this is in a city about an hour away from me— Last year they decided that we are going to go with a local photographer because we want to keep all the business local, small town, that kind of thing. I get it. I get it. And I am all for that. And yet, people walked up to me this last summer as we were photographing other teams and leagues in that town and said, I think the soccer league might call you back this next year because it didn't go well this year. And so, it's really not a push it hard, but it's just keep reminding them we're out there. And my wife read a book a couple of years ago, and the interesting title of the book was called Go for No. And I know people get frustrated as they start picking up the phone or emailing leagues or things like that. And they start getting, "No, we're good. No, we're with somebody. No, we're good." So you send them a nice email back, and it says, "Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply to my email. Thanks for answering the phone, blah, blah, blah." Go through all this, thank them for their time. Keep us in mind should the need ever arise. But the premise of the book is set your goal to hear X number of nos per phone call cycle. And when you've hit 5 nos today, stop calling. Now you're done. Now, wait till next week to make your 5 calls and keep calling until you get your 5 nos. And somewhere in between, someone's going to say, "Hey, yeah, let's talk about that." And it just— there's a lot to be said for the follow-up as well. A bunch of years ago, one of the schools that we do ITs, it's I passed that school, on the way to the high school that I graduated from. And I would always get frustrated because the high school that I graduated from at that point was using a big box provider. And the guy who was the athletic director wouldn't talk to me. And he had no emotional connection to this big box provider other than it's what I know. And if it's not broke, I'm not going to try and fix it. Because I don't want to have to learn anything new. And so he went with it for the longest time. But I was driving by this other school, and I had sent out postcards the week beforehand to all the athletic directors. And as I'm driving by this other school, I stopped, pulled over right in front of the school, called the athletic director from the car. And said, hey Joe, David Grupa, we sent out some cards last week, just kind of talking about what we do, and expecting to get one of my nos from this guy. And he said, yeah, matter of fact, your card's right on my desk here. He said, I kept it because of that quote on the front. That was kind of fun. And I'm a big baseball fan. He said, I kept it because of that. How's next Tuesday look? I'd love to talk with you. Yes, that. "Sure. Next Tuesday. Next Tuesday is great, Joe. What time?" And I'm writing all this stuff down on the back of a McDonald's napkin in my car, and came back to the studio hoping that there was nothing on the calendar for next Tuesday, but fully prepared to move whatever appointment was next Tuesday if it was going to mean meeting with this guy. And it all worked out, and we looked at each other and that was, that was also one of the schools that looked at us and said, we don't do paper, and kind of pushed us in the online ordering direction as well.

Oh, over the years, I'm sure you've had to adjust your pricing. So how have you kept up with the going rates and when do you reconsider your pricing to increase them to keep up with inflation?

We looked at— the last time I looked at things, our providers all have increases over time. We've been very fortunate, and the increases that they've had have been minimal, so that we haven't had to do any major adjustments. The biggest adjustments that we're running into right now is postage because we're shipping things, and I was teasing the other night as I was on the phone with a buddy. I said what used to cost me to mail an 8x10 or a 9x12 mailer with an 8x10 print inside used to cost me about $3.75 and it costs over $5 now just to mail it. Plus, the price of the mailer has gone up just a little bit too. And so we look at that, we try and hold the line. I really don't like to keep inching things up, but we did a couple of years ago, inch things up a little bit because the local groups in town, the municipalities, decided to start instituting local sales taxes. And if you're just charging a flat fee for your photos and then backing the tax out of that number at the books instead of calculating tax point of sale, we thought we have to come up a little bit just to match that. And that's where going with the online stuff, for ordering and fulfillment has helped a lot, too, because the companies that we work with collect the sales tax based on the zip code of the person placing the order. So if you live in, you know, the city next door that has an extra half percent sales tax, you pay that. If you're ordering and you live in Wisconsin, which is 20 minutes from where we are here in Minnesota in the Twin Cities, they have an entirely different rate of sales tax. And the company that we work with pays all the sales taxes because they are the online merchant now. And then they just pay us afterwards after they take their fees out. And that's made life a ton simpler in terms of that. And one of our providers told us that they're expecting a 5% price increase sometime in the next couple of months, probably by June. And we always have to swallow because, you know, we've already got things set up for the summer. However, the other thing with being online, and that is I can move faster to adjust pricing because before you'd look at it and say, there is no way I am recycling 5,000 pieces of paper that we just paid to have printed. And even during that point when we were doing paper, we printed all the paper, all the order materials with no prices on it, and then the envelope was the actual order form, and that had the prices on it. So I just had to reprint one piece, not all the pieces.

Very smart.

We've done that.

We could keep going learning from you from 50 years of running a studio, but we're out of time, or almost out of time. So I want to ask you two more quick questions. One thing that you shared with me is that you find it really important to control the space for the shoots that you're doing, especially for volume photography. Can you share that strategy and how you learned it?

We learned it because we didn't at first, and the worst thing is to have a parent who thinks they can get their kid to smile better than anybody else standing over your shoulder trying to do that. And when you've got a team with 12 little kids on it and then 12 sets of parents plus grandparents who sometimes come to photo day as well, all thinking they can do this, it just doesn't work and it makes things take longer and it's just less efficient. So we went to the hardware store. They sell these step-in stakes. They're probably about 42 inches tall. They're fiberglass. They have about a 10-inch metal spike on the bottom. They're about $2 apiece, and you can step them into the ground. And then we go on Amazon and buy the pennant flags and just rope off our area. We have signs that say things like parents and coach or players and coaches only beyond this point. We have signs that say parent waiting area. We stick it out in the ground over in an area in the shade under the trees or wherever, that kind of thing. We've made some signs that say quiet please, photos in progress. We need players' eyes on our camera. And if you've got a mom standing next to the fence calling out to their kid, he's going like this. We photograph in tents. We pop up like the 10x10 commercial canopies that you would see, say, at an open-air market or things like that. We pop those up. We put sides on them. We either drop a gray drop inside for the most part. We used to use printed backdrops, pretty much now we're photographing on gray and doing the extractions. But we pop that up inside, we put our lights inside, we have a board on the ground with feet on it that the kids have to stand on. And depending on if you're a lefty or a righty or what pose you're doing, stand on the red feet, stand on the blue feet, stand on the green feet, look here, boom, boom. And then we move them out, line them up somewhere else, do the team photograph, and we're good to go. So it's signage, to let parents know, because most parents will respect that. There's always a couple that, you know, well, that's for somebody else, not for me. I mean, that's my kid there, I have to be in there. But most of them are really good about it, and the ones that have worked with us, once they've done it once or twice, they to understand how fast the process is, and the coaches are right back there with us, and it goes fast.

At the beginning of the episode, you said that you've been a PPA member for a long, long time. Let's close the episode this way. This is PPA's podcast. What has PPA meant to you and your business over the years?

Oh, man, okay, I joined PPA back when you had to tear a page out of the magazine. PPA. True story. And, I always tease people. I say this is the absolute best investment I have ever made in my business. No amount of software or lenses or hardware, has made as big a difference in my success as my involvement with PPA. And if it's just walking into the imaging and finding someone else in the same program that you're in and handing them your business card and saying, hey, I'd love to talk with you more afterwards, or let's go grab— some of the best learning doesn't happen in the classrooms. Some of the best learning happens in the hallways or in the trade show, or maybe over a beer in the lounge afterwards. And it's that theory that somebody is going to be sitting there and we'll be talking about something. And I tease, I don't have any hair because for all of these years I've gone, oh, my goodness, what a brilliant idea. And I've rubbed it all off, and it won't, you know, and because other people sitting in the room will come and ask me about something. And then I will say, "Well, this is what we do in our studio." And the guy went, "Huh, we do this, and we've done this for all these years." And I go, "Huh, that is a great fix if we can blend this or if we can tweak this, or maybe I just throw away what I'm doing and try that and see if it works better." I always tease I learned more when I started speaking to PPA groups because again, it put me out in the middle of a conference with a whole bunch of other photographers who were also doing it and having a beer afterwards or standing around in the room afterwards. They would give me ideas that they do. I had a video Zoom meeting this morning with a bunch of volume photographers, and we're talking about products and what works in your studio and how are you marketing them and things like that. So it's, it's connected me with so many people I would have never, ever have met. All of the social media groups, those are all great. But I tease right now, I could get in the car and start driving, and no matter where I stop, I'm probably within 30 minutes of a photographer who I know well enough to give them a buzz and say, hey, let's go have a beer, let's go have dinner. And there's even a few I could probably crash at their house.

Wow.

You know, so it's the best ever. And it's not— Hanson Fong, who years ago gave a seminar, and in this room with 600 people in there, pointed right at me during the seminar and said, "It's not expensive if you use it. Close your eyes and write the check." And I was talking with him at Imaging this year, and I teased, I said, "You did this years ago before we knew each other personally," I said, "and I have taken that to heart and used that to run my business for so many times." PPA membership is an investment in your business. People look at it and say, oh, what am I going to do with that? It's $30 a month. What do you waste $30 a month on? You know, fast food, lottery tickets for some people. You know, how much are you spending on coffees? You know, things like that. And seriously, I could go on and on.

Well, we appreciate it, David. Congratulations on all your success, and thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here and that you guys still find value in old guys like me.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. Here's how we can find each other easier next time. Click the subscribe button. When you do, boink, I'm going to pop up right inside your feed. Also, if you hit like and leave us a comment, first, it'll please the algorithm gods, but secondly, your comments will let us know what are we doing well and who else you would like to see on the show. So like, comment, subscribe, all of those good things. And you heard what David said about PPA. You're a PPA member, right? If you're not, you are missing it. PPA offers incredible resources like equipment insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's perfect for photographers who are serious about growing their business in a sustainable and profitable way. At PPA, you belong here. Find out more about membership at ppa.com. That's ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community and the host of the show. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.