Ready to level up your studio’s success? Pat Miller sits down with award-winning photographer Amy Pezzicara for an inside look at the business strategies that separate good studios from great ones.

Episode Highlights 🎤💡:

(09:42) — Diversifying genres to survive economic downturns

(29:00) — Redefining success beyond income

(30:28) — Why investing early matters more than buying gear

Connect with Pat Miller ⬇

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Connect with Amy Pezzicara ⬇

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I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. What does it take to run a great photography studio? Not a good one, not a studio that makes a little bit of money. I'm talking about a great studio, a high-performing studio, one of the studios that's the best of the best. Well, we get a chance to learn from a high performer today. Amy Pezzicara is in the benchmark survey as a high performer, and today we'll talk about what she has learned over the years as an entrepreneur. How has technology changed? How have the clients changed? What is she doing differently? How did she raise her rates over all of those years? How does she feel about selling? What about employing people? You know, questions we would have if we also wanted to have a studio and a high-performing studio open for a real long time. Amy, she's gonna spill all the beans with us next. Amy, welcome to the show. How are you today?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm great. I'm excited to have this conversation in the High Performer series. And if you have not met Amy yet, big deal. So if someone hasn't met you yet, tell them who you are and what you do.

I'm Amy Pezzichera. I own a studio called Pezz Photo, and I'm located in South Tampa in Florida. And then— and we shoot in St. Pete, Sarasota, Tampa, and anywhere else, usually mostly in Florida these days.

Sounds good right about now because we're recording this episode in the depth of winter and it's 11 billion degrees below zero here in Wisconsin. So I might have to come down for a headshot or like, you know, come do this interview in person or something if that's okay with you.

It's actually a little chilly here, but you would find it quite warm.

Yes, I'm sure I'd be out playing golf in whatever you consider chilly. So today's episode, we get to talk to a PPA Benchmark Survey High Performer. And before we get to learn all of this stuff, what is it like to be recognized as a high performer? How does it make you feel to know that you're running a studio that's in the upper echelons of everyone that was surveyed?

I was surprised. It feels good. I have participated in the PPA's Benchmark Survey a couple of times now, so I knew I was running my studio within the benchmarks and just kind of going along doing fine. I didn't realize that would qualify me as one of the top performers. So that's nice to hear I'm doing something right.

Absolutely you are. And we're gonna learn all of the right things that you're doing. And we're gonna start by going all the way back to the beginning. All the way back to the beginning of starting your photography business, what was that like for you when you first got things kicked off?

Well, the biggest thing was being a creative person with lots of interests was putting all those other interests aside and focusing only on photography to make sure that I could really make it a business and not a hobby. So that was an interesting transition. But it was a lot of long hours and a lot of work. I probably spent the first 15 years working 60 to 80 hours a week to make it work. So it was challenging but fun. It's not one of the easiest jobs that's out there, but probably one of the more rewarding ones.

One of the things that comes up when you're just getting started is, okay, there's money coming in and there's not enough of it. I wish I had more. But how did you handle the money? Did you start pouring it all right back into the business? Did you take profits? Did you invest some of it? How did you set up the money coming in?

I put all of it right back into the business and just took enough for me to live on. My husband is really good at budgeting, so he tries to make it so that we have a strict household budget and keep to that. So I knew where I needed to be, but I had been coming from— I had been in a teaching job and working for a nonprofit, so I was already used to having a really small budget to work with. So I lived extremely frugally and made those numbers work. I knew right from the beginning that I needed to turn a profit and watch my overhead. And so I chose not to buy equipment unless it made me money, not to make any investments unless they were going to make me money. Back in the day when I started, we had forums for photography. We didn't have like Facebook and stuff, or YouTube to learn things. So in the forums, we had a lot of discussions and answered a lot of questions for each other, and had a really good community of people helping figure out what was smart to spend your money on and what not to.

Early on, how early were you to become a PPA member? And what did that get you when you joined?

I joined pretty quickly. And I don't know, it might say that I've been a member since 2012. I was in there recently. So I've been a member for a really long time. I wanted to make sure I joined both because of the work they do for copyright and advocating for photographers, and also because it came with some insurance that I thought was nice to have. I always maintained separate insurance, and it just felt good to have that. And there were some benefits, like if a card was to fail, you could get a discount on card recovery software if you needed it, that sort of thing. I just felt like, it was just a little extra peace of mind to be a member of PPA.

So you're off and running, now you're an entrepreneur, and I have a camera. And the artist side seems to come kind of naturally to people, like, hey, I'm going to take pictures and I'm going to go out and make them look beautiful. But then there's the business side of it. So when you got into business, can you describe yourself as a business person? Did this come naturally to you?

I would say it wasn't totally naturally, although my parents always owned their own business. So I knew what things looked like from that side. But I went and first worked for another photographer. And then I mentored with some photographers. So I made sure that in the beginning, it wasn't just me. I was learning from people that were both amazing artists at what they did, but they were also really good business people and really kind people. So I would work in their office. I worked for both a food photographer and a wedding photographer. But in the very beginning, when I started doing weddings, I called up a photographer whose work I really loved and just basically said, can I carry your bags at weddings and learn from you. And he was so kind about that, and we shot together for quite a while. And then I moved to another photographer, and for that one, I shared a studio with him for several years. So I learned from the best so that I could become better. And then I went to several PPA Imaging conferences and went to all the business classes. So it was just class after class after class learning the business. And that would help maybe what I've heard in the background from my parents, how you would then translate it into a photography business to make it work for me.

Let's talk about what you shoot. A lot of folks just niche down to one area, but you didn't. Why didn't you?

I think that I love trying all different sorts of photography. So in the beginning, the very first photographer I worked with was a studio food photographer, and it would take all day to shoot one picture for Publix. And then I jumped into weddings where we shoot a million different things all throughout the day. And I kind of found that to be a little more exciting in the beginning. And then the clients that I had for weddings hired me to shoot their baby pictures, or maybe they had a business and they were like, well, can you come do headshots for us? Or can you shoot the business for us? I also met event planners that asked me to do detail shots of the events that they were creating. So I started doing all different genres pretty quickly, and I liked them all, so I didn't really feel the need to niche down to just one. But what I found over the years as we weathered, like, the crash in 2008 and COVID, when you hit these big bumps in the road, I felt like having a few different genres of photography kept me afloat because one might drop precipitously and another might keep going. And so I had constant streams of income, whereas some people that only did weddings lost all their work and didn't have something to go back on. So I feel like, in the long run, It helps both keep me interested in what I'm doing and helps me weather those economic downturns.

We talked about you as a business person, and we talked about your vertical and what you decided to shoot. Can you also say a word to someone that's walking around right now without a CRM, people that don't have a central point for all of their information? When did you start using one, and why do people need one?

I think I started working with my first CRM based on a meeting at Imaging USA at the expo. I found something that I thought was really useful. As far as I can remember, I have just always been on one, and it keeps me organized. It lets me see a history of my clients. And whereas I didn't even know there would be a history when I first started, but over the years it's become really nice to be able to look back and say, oh, your last 4 photo shoots, your, your 4 family portrait sessions over the last 4 years were at these different locations. Let's try a different one the 5th time, or if I want to see maybe this particular client has been super faithful over the years and has spent a lot of money for me, you know, I need to make sure I send them a little note or send them a little present and thank them for sticking around so long. So, a CRM really helps with that. Plus, I am constantly looking back at past shoots and looking for the dates of a photo shoot, maybe what products were ordered. If someone needs to make a new book and they want it to match the books they've made for their other kids, or if we need to do some commercial shoots, and I need to make sure that I reference my past shoots to look at the style and make sure the style continues for their website. So, it's a history that I really really rely on, and that's what made me nervous about switching to a new CRM, which I'm doing now. But I needed to have a little more functionality, and I needed to fully utilize what a CRM can do, which is saving— it's supposed to save me time. It's nice when you can send a quote and an invoice and a contract all at once and have the client pay all in one place. So there's all those little points where I would get bogged down in my workflow that a CRM saves me from those little pain points. So this new one I think is going to really help that flow once I get everything all set up to where I can concentrate a little more on communicating with my client and not worrying about the little things, those little bits of friction. We need to make those go away.

When you look back over the years, are the clients essentially the same, or have they changed over the time that you've been running the studio?

I have a lot of clients that have been with me since the beginning, and we kind of changed together. I have slowly moved from doing mostly weddings and babies to now doing more commercial work. So the type of client that I have changes, but they tend to stick around for a while, which is really nice. So I get to know them for a really long time. So they all feel like I've known them forever. But in the fall, I have family portraits for the holidays, usually to do holiday cards for people. And then the rest of the year I'm doing commercial work, which would be headshots or shooting a cookbook or doing food and interiors for restaurants or personal branding for small business owners. So there's a lot of variety and there's a lot of different clients. But I like the fact that a lot of people keep coming back as different parts of their lives change, and they kind of go through the flow of how their family is moving or their business is moving and they utilize me along the way.

And what a great endorsement. You did a great job with our office headshots. Hey, can you do my kid's senior picture? Or whatever it might be. That's just— they think of you when it's time to get pictures taken. And with your wide stance of what you do, you get to soak up all that business, which is fantastic.

Yeah, it's nice. I like it, and it gives me different things to do instead of the same thing every day.

Okay, so you like that part. Let's talk about something that maybe some people don't like. If you go into business, you got to be able to sell. How do you feel about selling? Do you love it?

No. So, it's funny because you don't naturally know how to sell, or at least I didn't naturally know how to sell. Before I was a photographer, and maybe even in the beginning when I started, I worked a second job at Pottery Barn. And Pottery Barn taught me two things. One is how to talk to people and not be shy, because you have to say hello within 60 seconds of a customer walking in the door. And they put me up front, and I was like, oh God, I have to talk to people. And it ended up being the most fun part of the job was seeing if I could get a person to smile when they walked in the door. And then they always wanted you to sell things and add-on items and stuff like that. And I found it easier to just be like, well, I bought this for my house and this and this and this. I have all the furniture. So, you know, you can trust that it's good because I like it. I think it kind of transfers over into photography where I made sure that products that I carry are really well made, really high end. I would check them out at Imaging USA in the expo, make sure they were really good quality. And before I would offer it to a client, is this something I would buy? If it's the quality that I think is appropriate, then I'm happy to offer it to my clients. So that made it easier in that I'm not selling a million different kinds of products. I'm doing a pretty curated group of items that I think are really nice to have after a wedding or after a portrait session. I love making books, so I try to make really high-quality books. And that doesn't feel like sales to me at all. It's, I just show them all the beautiful things I can make. I don't do as many in-person sales sessions as we're told to do, because most of my clients have been with me so long they know what I offer or they know what they want. we just kind of take care of it over the phone and get it done that way. And it's a lot of books. They're just really beautiful to have. So I don't do as much of like creating galleries of framed prints and that sort of stuff anymore. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, for sure. If you love the stuff you have to sell, it really doesn't feel like selling because look at this other beautiful thing that I have. And you believe in the products as well. You know that they're quality. You're not convincing someone of something. You're hooking up a trusted friend with a high-quality product, which makes things a whole lot easier.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

So you've been open for a while. How have you kept your rates in step with inflation and how things have changed? Are you good about raising rates?

I would say no, I'm not great about raising rates. I used to be the one that would convince other photographers to raise their rates because when I was doing weddings a lot and going to networking meetings, I felt like I really had a good finger on the pulse of what everybody was charging. But then as I transferred a little more over to commercial work, there were a lot less resources, a lot fewer resources for how to price your work. And as I moved away from the weddings, I didn't have as many interactions with other photographers to kind of hear what people were doing or to hear who I was being compared against, which is often how you heard what other people's prices were. And so I was just kind of creeping up prices, maybe $50 a year would be an increase. And I think once we had COVID, I did not increase prices at all because I felt bad for people. And, after COVID, a lot of new photographers came into the market, and they came in charging what was appropriate at that time to make a good living, which was way higher than what I was charging. But I didn't even realize it until recently when both my assistant and another photographer on two separate occasions were like, you need to raise your rates, raise rates in years. And I was like, I didn't even realize how many years had passed by, like 10 years, and I haven't raised them very much, like just crept them up a tiny bit. But there's a fine line when you've got clients that have been with you since the beginning, and you don't want to be charging one price for family portraits one year and then double it for the next year. So that one's a hard one. It's a hard thing to figure out. Everyone says to do your COGS, you know, what's the cost of your overhead, what are the goods you're offering, all that sort of stuff. but once you've been cruising along for a while and you're becoming more and more efficient at what you do, your overhead's going down. You're not buying as many new things, new programs, things like that. It's not as obvious. And so, yes, I need to raise my rates, and I'm working on it.

How about getting it all done? What's work-life balance like? You've got employees, contractors. How do you get all the work done?

I usually am doing it all myself, which I try not to do, but it kind of changes through the years. I've had assistants. And then they get married and move away, or they have a baby and they move away. so then I went 3 years without an assistant, and I was swamped. My desk was a mess. I felt like I was barely keeping up and probably not giving all of the care I wanted to give to my clients because it was all I could do just to get their session edited and out to them as fast as I could. And then I would get around to invoicing and stuff like that. So, there has not been a lot of work-life balance as a whole over the whole course of things. When I do have an assistant, life is a lot better. So I have one right now. So she's helping me with the conversion to the new CRM and getting things neat and organizing and reminding me when I need to be places and things like that. And I always say that my main goal for an assistant is to make it so that I can work out. So it's like, your goal in life— to make sure I eat. Husband helps with too. Yeah, she's constantly reminding me. She'll be like, 2 o'clock, have you eaten lunch? No. But my husband also helps with that too. And then getting me to work out every day, that's extremely important for my health and to be able to maintain this job, like to be able to go for hours and hours on end carrying two cameras, you need to stay fit. And there have been times throughout the years where I have not had time to work out at all, and I'm finding that I have to be the priority and then work can come second.

Just out of curiosity, when you're moving, what do you like to do? What's fun for you when it's time to go work out?

Pickleball, horseback riding, swimming, kayaking. I'm learning how to sail. I'm going all in, like, every day of the week. So I have pickleball like once or twice a week, I have horseback riding once a week, sailing on Thursdays, weather permitting, and then kayaking usually on the weekends when I can. So I'm always off doing something, and then in between I'm doing yoga and lifting weights.

Awesome. Beast mode. That's great. So you've been open for a while, you're doing great, you have assistance sometimes and sometimes you don't, but you've been open long enough that you've been able to enjoy all of the advantages that technology has offered us over the years. So what role did technology play in you getting better and faster at what you do?

The biggest thing is when Adobe came out with Lightroom, that was huge. I had a client that worked for Adobe at the time, and I sent him a message and said, please thank the entire Lightroom team for me because I just got my life back. Because editing a wedding before Lightroom was so hard. It probably took 20 hours off my editing time and made it so that we could batch edit images, like apply one color correction. And I mean, photographers now don't know what life is like without Lightroom. We have to use it. It's fabulous. So that's been great. And then, we came out with some album design software And again, that was another huge jumping point where I was designing albums by hand. That could take 6 to 8 hours to build it in Photoshop. And if somebody made a change, oh my gosh, it would take hours to fix again. Or if we were trying to design cards for the holidays. So the biggest thing was when each of these two softwares came out That saved me a ton of time. And then I was cruising along for a few more years, just Lightroom kept getting better and the design software for albums kept getting better, so that helped. And then we came out with these AI programs for culling and editing, and they're not AI like people are hearing in the news. They're more, machine learning, where it learns from you, from me. So I am teaching, this editing software that I use, which is Aftershoot. I trained it on images to show the program what my style is, and then we're constantly tweaking. And so I have like a setting for events and portraits, and I have another, I guess we call it a profile for food. So it edits those differently and applies the colors differently and brightens it up differently. And it can get me to a spot in Lightroom where it gets me there faster than when I did the editing myself or when I sent it off to an editor. That would take like 2 weeks to get through something, and now it's 2 minutes and 50 seconds.

Wow.

So that's a big change in terms of turnaround time for my clients and being able to take on more jobs and make more money.

Oh, for sure. Well, you're doing the money-making part great. You're one of the most successful studios in the entire survey, which is fantastic. And I appreciate you sharing some of your insights that you've learned over the years. And I'm curious, you know, you've learned how to run a better studio, you've gotten better at a photographer and being a business owner, but what about the definition of success? What is the finish line for you? What do you consider being successful, and has that changed from the moment that you started until now?

I ask myself that question a lot if I start looking at other people and comparing, which I try not to do. My definition has not really changed. I just want to do a good job, like do good work, make people happy, and be able to make a living doing it, have fun while I'm doing it, have like, have a great time. I could make a lot more. I could have made a lot more money coming out of the gate, taking some kind of a business job where you sit in front of a computer and, you know, make six figures out of the gate. But I think I would have pulled my hair out as a creative person. So I was thinking the other day when I saw another photographer online say that they are not encouraging their children to become a photographer. And if you just want to take pictures and make beautiful creative work, sure, you can have a regular job and not do it for a living. But I wanted to be able to use my creativity every day, and I really enjoy getting to know people. So while society sometimes defines all of your success as being based on money, for me, it's whether or not I'm proud of my work and whether or not people respect what I do. And if I can make people feel beautiful, that's really fun. And if I can give them like little microbursts of happiness, like just beautiful pictures of their kids, if I can make them happy, it makes me happy. And I don't know, to know you have a good reputation, I think that's success right there.

For sure. I want you to think back to everything that we've covered or anything we haven't covered. If someone's just starting out, What would you like to share with them that you would have liked to have known when you started? Does anything come to mind?

I think it's really important to make sure you start investing right away. That isn't discussed a lot in the photography world. People are always trying to buy the next best thing. And I took a workshop with Zach Arias way back in the beginning, and he was like, do not buy all the things. Like, don't buy all the equipment, just get what you need and do your job. But I do think it's really important that people start with the business courses that they can learn in PPA so they can become a really good business person and work on efficiencies, getting rid of friction, and being as efficient as possible while also becoming a good photographer. And then taking care of themselves both financially in terms of investing and making sure you take advantage of a SEP as a business owner, and also staying in shape making sure you keep working out and being healthy, and try to maintain some kind of work-life balance if you can.

Great pieces of feedback. Congratulations on all your success, and thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Okay, thank you. It's nice speaking with you.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. Hope we can see you right here next time. But wait, before Before you go, can you do me a favor? Hit like. But wait, can you do one more favor? Hit subscribe. Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, can you do one more favor? Can you leave us a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this show? We want to know what Amy said that resonated with you, and your feedback helps us ensure that we make a good-sounding podcast from here and into the future. And another thing, if you're not yet a member of Professional Photographer Photographers of America, you're missing out. 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. Discover more about at membership ppa.com. That's ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community and your host to the show. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.