Ready to unlock a high-conversion system that delivers unforgettable customer experiences and record-breaking sales—all in a single day? Pat Miller welcomes studio sales expert Adam Mueller, who reveals his streamlined “same day” sales formula that’s transforming how photographers work and sell.

Episode Highlights 🎤💡:

(04:18) – Same-day portrait session + ordering explained

(07:19) – Emotion and clarity create better decisions

(12:50) – The Dream Walk: guiding wall art choices

Connect with Pat Miller ⬇

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Connect with Adam Mueller ⬇

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I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. It's another High Performer Series interview here at Imaging USA 2026 inside the Sony Cinema Line studios using their Monitor & Control app, they've made us look great this entire conference. A big thanks to Sony for pulling out all the stops. Now we're talking to a high performer, Adam Miller, and we're talking today about how to do in-person sales right. What he's doing is unbelievable. He will have a family session and then do the in person sales all on the same day. In the matter of four hours. He will take the family out, take the pictures, take them back to the studios and have a customer-centric experience so they can make great decisions for the images that they will love all in one day. It's unbelievable. He's thought through all the ways to do it, all of the customer conveniences, and you may think this will be a story about the systems and the pipes and the email communication, but it's really not that. He's very clear about how do you make a great experience for the people that you have in front of your lens. It's a different way to do things. It's doing great for him. It's part of the High Performer Series, and we'll talk to Adam next. Adam, welcome to the show. How are you? Good.

Thank you for having me.

Imaging USA 2026 in Nashville. It's been busy for you.

It has. We're back home doing some wedding shows and some other things. So we slid into the conference yesterday and trying to get as much that we can with education and expo and meeting our vendors so.

And it's nice that you're giving us some education today too.

Happy to. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, absolutely. It's the High Performer Series, and we're talking to you about Retail Studio and this really unique way that you go about selling after the shoot. And I want to dig into all of that. But if someone hasn't met you yet, tell them who you are and what you do.

Yeah. So my name is Adam Miller. I have a studio in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I've been in the photography business for quite a while. So I started it when I was in college and been doing it for over two decades and photographed hundreds and hundreds of weddings and thousands of families, high school seniors, engagements, personal branding, so kind of all of that. But we have our studio right in downtown La Crosse, and that's what I get to do and I love to do it every day.

I love how you think almost systems-wise, like the process that you use in your studio. Let's set the stage for velocity. Are you doing like one shoot a month? A thousand shoots a month? Because I think it's impressive when people understand how much you're doing and how purposeful you are about how you do it. So set the stage for us. How big is the studio?

Yeah. So our weekend schedule is wedding based. So I'd fit 25 weddings on weekends that way, which means the vast majority or all of our portrait clients are on weekdays. So I'm typically doing Monday through Thursday portrait sessions and then Fridays and weekends weddings. I do two sessions a day on those Monday through Thursday. So I can fit eight sessions a week unless I'm, you know, again, staying late one night or trying to squeeze somebody in somewhere. But generally eight sessions a week, Monday through Thursday, and then weddings on the weekends.

With that kind of framework, that kind of availability offered to clients, do you find that clients, because they want your work, they're fine saying I want a Tuesday or I want a Thursday, because you only do two a day with this unique sales system that you do?

Yes. I mean, we set up our calendar around what works for both, usually our clients and us. When we kind of describe the amount of time that we're going to be with them that day. But in all reality, if we ever have to make an exception, we make an exception. You know, if we have an extended family, and they're all getting together on one specific day to celebrate mom's birthday. And we'll always make exceptions. But in general, our clients appreciate with our same-day presentations that we'll be talking about, they only have to come in one time, and that both on their end and my end, we block off that one time. So, yes, when they call us and want to schedule an appointment, you just have to lead them to here's how we do things and then listen in case we need to accommodate them in a different way.

The same-day presentation, so I want to start with what it is. Literally tell us what it is. We do the shoot, and then what happens? Because I have a thousand questions about how you got there, how the customers react, how it drive sales, but just describe the overall product because it's really unique.

Well, we took a step back and we just said, how can we serve our clients better and how can we design an experience that they will love from start to finish? And that they don't have, you know, that hassle factor of having to come back a second time three weeks later or two months later to finally view and order their portraits. So a lot that goes into it. But for our same-day presentations, it means our clients arrived at our studio, we usually had outdoors, create their family portraits, high school senior portraits, engagement portraits, but we create their portraits, and then directly after the session they come back to our studio and we do that same-day presentation. So they get to sit down, we've got a private presentation room with an 85-inch TV, all the products on display, but they get to sit down and view and order their portraits directly after their session.

And when you think about what that is, we shoot it, then we sell it all on the same day, I could see how someone could look at that as a workflow thing. This would be really efficient and like all of those things. But you shared it's for the customer experience, they don't have to come back. So how do you like, did it come to you naturally, to engineer the efficiency, but also keep that eye on the customer experience and the convenience of it all?

Well, we had to engineer the efficiency, but I would assume most photographers would look at it and say that seems like a lot of work to try to pull that off in the same day. Right? But for us, that client experience is really the foundation of why we did it. We photographers have all of these hurdles, right? Clients calling to reschedule their presentation or their ordering appointments or not showing, or only one of them could come back, their spouse couldn't make it. So now they're left trying to make decisions on their own, and they struggle with that. Right? So we kind of took all of this and said, is there a way that we can do it better? Even if it means we have to think a little outside the box, or it's a little bit harder on our end to pull that off. Right? But our clients love the fact that they show up. They arrive at our studio, we do a little meet and greet, we talk about the location that we're going to head out to. I get to go create all their portraits. It's a really fun experience. I'm fast paced with the photography. We're creating lots of high energy images, and then they take just a short break. It might be 15, 20 minutes or so. They can come right back to our studio. We have a beverage center so they can have coffee, water, other drinks, and just sit down and hang out for 15 minutes. Otherwise, they'll grab coffee and then swing back to our studio. But then we're already ready for them. So there's a lot of backend work that goes in during that quick 15, 20 minutes. But then I'm ready. Then we invite them. We walk them into our private presentation room. They get to sit on a comfy couch, see all their portraits, they get to see all the beautiful products they get to choose from. And within a few hours after arriving to our studio, they're already done. And then, a few weeks later, they have their printed wall portraits and their albums in their home.

Amazing. That must be an emotional journey for them because they're showing up, oftentimes kind of nervous about getting their picture taken. Some people, or at least they want and make sure the kids look good or they look good, and they go through that, then they come back to the studio and then they see the images. That has to be a real juicy emotional moment when they go from, I'm going to get this done to look how amazing you captured us.

For sure. I think clients make the best decisions when emotion and clarity come together at the same time. And that's what we're designing. We're designing an experience where the emotion is at their highest point. We just created these images. It might take us maybe an hour or so for a session to create the images. And then they're on that emotional high of I'm really excited to see what was just created. And then we're showcasing it on our 85-inch TV and they're there with their family, themselves, their spouse, the kids are probably still there. We have a little kids area with, you know, streaming services. They can watch shows and kind of hang out while the parents are looking at their portraits. But we just designed it around all the key decision makers are still there. We just did the session, and now they get to get invited into a comfortable environment, see all their portraits, and they're prepped ahead of time. I mean, this can't be pulled off unless you're telling them from the moment they book. Here's how we do it. And for me, that means we do weekday sessions. It's first thing in the morning, or it's more in the lunchtime area. We're designing four to four and a half hours for our session times. We tell them right away, don't worry, your whole family doesn't need to smile for four hours. They can be as grumpy as they want after the first hour, but that first hour is for the imagery might take us less or more. And then they come back, and they get to view and order all their portraits. And then we add in just a little bit of buffer time in case we need extra time during the session, and then our next client arrives. So for me, as a photographer now speaking to photographers, it's really nice that you get to do just two sessions a day. Prior to doing this system, I was doing five to six sessions every hour and a half. But then on other days, I would do my presentations. So that's when clients would come back to order. And those take about two hours for my clients. So I would do four of those back to back. But I would be sitting in a chair in a darker office setting at the time we were projecting. Now we're using our TV system. So I would sit for eight hours straight.

Yeah.

And, on the other days, I'd be hustling outside with five clients every hour and a half coming in. So now I just work with. I'm fresh because I work with one session, one client all morning, and then another client in the afternoon. And my clients love the fact they don't have to try to schedule another time to come back. Four weeks, two weeks, eight weeks later, have to reschedule because other things pop up. Spouses can't come. You know, there's a lot of hassle factor on their end. And on our end, when we're doing separate appointment times.

That has to make you a better salesperson as well, because you can recall off the top of your head the conversations while you're capturing the image. The father and son who were bonded by baseball. And you get them into the sales room. And remember, you said baseball was important. So I captured this in this way. Like I would imagine you're just ready to move images and products because it's all so fresh because it's literally that day.

Yeah. And you'll see we designed this around; it's not based around the sales process. Right? It's all about the client experience. But the way we're guiding our clients, both with the poses and the photography, but also the decision-making process afterwards, it becomes fairly effortless on their part to know what feels right for them. And you'll see with how we guide our clients in the actual sales presentation that how we walk them through our studio, we do kind of a dream walk, and how we have them make bite-size chunks of decisions so that they're not making all the decisions at one point. And we walk them through just small decision making processes throughout.

All right, let's dig into that because now we've gotten them through break, they're on the couch, big old TV, they're excited to see their images. And you talk about making sure. They're making digestible decisions. They're not solving the world's problems all at once. And the dream walk, we got to get into that. So how do you specifically break down those digestible decisions? So they're making easy decisions that end up in things that hang on their wall forever.

The first decision they need to make is, what beverage can we get you? And setting the tone that way, getting them in, again, a comfortable room and a comfortable couch and just an environment where they feel like it's their home, too. And serving them beverages and having a welcoming staff. Right? But then we are showing them a slideshow of their images so they can get an initial impression of their images. And then after that, we're going to go through the process of, and we can again dig down into the background of how we actually get there, how I get the images from the camera into the computer, select images, get it into our software that we're using. But at that point, clients are then just doing like an A/B test. Do you like this image or this one better? Right? And so we're going through that comparison maybe two or three images at a time. But if there's any small difference where they like both of them, we keep both because both then will make their finished album. But we go through that process. We go down from maybe, some sessions might be 80 or 100 images, and some might be 150 or more images, depending like an extended family session. But we get down to that favorite set of images. When they get down to that set, let's call it 50 images for now, we then go back through them one more time and we keep them all. But we then say, let's get down, let's just identify your top few that would actually make your wall as your featured wall portraits or the ones you're going to be giving away to grandparents or people like that. So when we get down to those favorite 5 or 10, we call it the top 10 list. It could be bigger or smaller, but when they get down to that list, we're now ready to move into the next part. And it's a nice time to be able to stretch our legs. And that's when we're going to take that tour of the studio and do that dream walk.

Yeah. The dream walk itself is also no surprise to anyone that's watched this far. Incredibly purposeful, because you're showing them things that you want to sell. So tell us about the dream walk.

Yeah. So now they've gotten down to their set of 50 images, let's say, they've also identified their top five or 10. So then at that point, we'll take a little tour of our studio. So we go out and at this point, we let them know we're just looking at finishes. It's the different ways we can actually print their wall portraits. So this dream walk is all about wall portraits. So we'll show them our finishes, such as acrylic, metal, canvas, framed prints, and flip frames. And we show them those different finishes. And then we go to one wall that has each of those finishes with the same image on it so that they can easily see the color differences and the other differences with the finishes. And that's the only question we tell them, don't worry about sizing which ones you're actually printing, where they're going. It's just what finish might you like best? Yeah. And they might like two best. But we're really just trying to have them identify, like, well, in a perfect world, I think we like that finish best.

Yeah.

At that point, we can go back in, into my office where I have every size that we print from a 40 by 60 down to a 12 by 18. So we then, and we have this in kind of a counterclockwise fashion in a room so that we can go from the 40 x 60 to 30 x 45, 24 x 36, all the way down. And then we're right in that room where they see on that 85-inch TV the eight images they picked out as potential wall portraits in the groupings that I'm already suggesting. These three together. This one by itself in the living room, and this one may be in their bedroom so they can see those groupings together. They've already identified their finish, and now they're just looking at sizes. So at this point, we then focus on that individual kind of hero image in their home, the main family portrait. Right? And then we say what size might fit you best for that one? And so they look again at those sizes. We talk about the room it's going to be displayed in. We might look at that grouping of three of the three kids, individual portraits. And again, we're talking about where it might go in their home. And I'm suggesting one or two different sizes that might fit best. And they're saying, I think we like that one better than that one, or we might want a size bigger or smaller than what you showed us. Right? But that's what we're doing. Little, little chunks of decisions. Right? What finish do you like? What size might fit you best for this image or that grouping of three. Because at that point then we're going to move into pricing everything out for them.

And you're divorcing all of these decisions from the actual bottom line. If they're only choosing this size or this size, they're not having to consume all of these other decisions all at once, which probably helps you make better decisions and more focused decisions for the people that are doing it well for them.

They get to decide in, again, it's kind of a dream walk. Well, it's kind of a dream scenario of what they would want displayed in their home. Right? And they're not making actual decisions at this point. They're just giving preferences. In a perfect world, I would love this in my living room. I'd like this in my family room or down the hallway, wherever it's being displayed in these finishes, in these sizes. And then we go through all the pricing for everything that they've laid out. And at that point, we can make adjustments, we can take something off or downsize something, but by that point, we know everything that they want. So when we get into pricing, we'll price out everything they love, and they're either going to stay at that point or we're going to give them easy ways to change finishes, reduce sizes, take something off to get them to a point where they're like, I feel good about that. Right? And then they can give that final confirmation.

Wow, how long did all of this get to like, how long did it come to be? Was this a one-year process? A one month process? Have you been working on it the whole time and refining it? How did you get to such a smooth process?

We've always done in-person sales. We've always done in-person presentations, 23 years. It's all I've ever done way back in the day. And not to sound too dated, but probably plasma TV, a 42-inch plasma TV. And that thing was probably $1500 for that, which today would probably be on sale for less than 100. Right? But so, I think it's been a process. I always knew how to do both. Create the imagery with my clients and be able to do that in person presentation. There's been times I probably had to do it on the same day, but I just came down to, I don't know, hitting this moment, which just like I can do better for my clients, or I'm getting frustrated that they have to keep rescheduling. They're getting frustrated that my next available isn't for four weeks now, now that they need to reschedule to come back for their presentation. Right? So I think I just hit that point where I'm like, I know I can do better for my clients and I want to create this experience, from start to finish, like high school senior coming in. You've got a high school senior daughter. She gets multiple outfit changes, multiple locations, and within minutes, she's coming back to see her portraits. And she's loving what she's seen. Right? And we can even create same-day Instagram Reels for her to be able to post something.

Wow. That's cool.

When you want to talk about a client experience, just say, what would be that perfect world scenario? And then, what can I accomplish with myself either being a solo photographer or having a team, but how could we pull that off so that the client walks away saying, "That was the best photography experience we've ever had?" And then we want to build that relationship with them because we're family with our clients. Right? So when they have the next important thing coming up in their life, like all photographers would say, we want them to call us. Well, we're creating an experience that's different than most photographers that they're going to go approach.

An outsider may wonder, do the clients feel pressured that they're going from getting their pictures taken to buying something all in one go, or are they really valuing the customer experience of the convenience of all of this?

What they love is that convenience. All the decision makers are there, so they don't have to worry about coming back, maybe solo, without their spouse to try to make those decisions then. So when they come, when they're in there, we've already prepped everyone. Planned on being here for those four hours, obviously, if kids need to go somewhere, they can, or they're welcome to stay, but we definitely need the main decision-makers there. So a lot of it is our education to them about what the experience entails. But when they're there, it's comfortable. The sessions don't take us that long. I create a lot of images in short order. So that goes pretty quick on their end. And they have a lot of images to choose from. But then we have that process set up within that two hours. They can quickly get through from not even seeing their images yet all the way to they have envisioned every size and location of their main wall portraits, and they know every image that's going in their album, and they walk out. They're just excited about what was just created. So although it is a bit of time on their end, right? I mean, we can't. It's hard to get around the fact that we're asking them to set aside four hours of time for both of them to take off work or school or whatever the case is, but they don't have to come back a second time. And that's the benefit too.

Huge convenience. I would be doing podcasting malpractice if I didn't at least ask the question, how are you pulling this off technically? Like, do you have the pony express to take the images and load the thing and edit it up? Can you talk about the technical side of making this happen and making it so the customer thinks it's effortless, even though you and your team are doing the stuff behind the scenes?

Yeah, I mean, just basics for any photographer. Downloading images quickly to your computer doesn't take very long. Right? We'll sort those into the RAW files and the JPEGs pretty quick. We're not doing any editing. And that'll be something that some people will say, well, I always edit all my images before I show them. If that's the case, you can always edit one image and let a client know. I'm a client too, I've got a family. If I was walking in and the photographer said, this is how we fully finished the image, this image, and then they can see the difference. But say, everything I'm showing you today because I'm doing same-day presentations, they're not edited, but this is how it will be edited. That's enough for them. They would rather have the experience on the same day than rather waiting a month for you to edit every image you're going to show them. Right? But getting the images on the computer, I use Lightroom, so I'm going to quickly go through and select the images that I'm going to show them. Exporting those, that's obviously the bulk of the work. But maybe it takes 10 minutes for me to go through 3, 4, 500 images, quickly select those images, export them, and then just takes another minute or two to import those into Pro select. And then I'm already ready. And then that computer's hooked up to that TV and the sound system and everything else. And so it probably takes me a dozen minutes on average for most sessions to get that done.

And being the same day and being the artist, when you come back, I'm sure you're knowing, oh, I bet this is going to have a really good result because you just got done taking the session, which ones you know to go to that might be the winners.

Yeah, it does make. It's fresh on your mind, right? Yeah. So it goes pretty quick. I think if someone starts trying to do it and say, how can I actually pull that off? Just keep testing it out. You can be pretty quick in Lightroom. If you're quick in Lightroom, it doesn't take more than a couple minutes to throw it in whatever program that you're going to actually show the clients.

Great photos and a great customer experience usually drives to great sales. Is this performing well when you make this customer experience great?

Yeah, I mean, we specialize in wall portraits and albums, and every time we talk with our clients, we're reinforcing that, especially with new clients. And obviously, our returning clients already know that. But at our studio, we're fortunate enough to have a fairly large studio that we can showcase. We have 80 wall portraits on display. We have different albums on display. So we can showcase all those different finishes and all of these different sizes and different combinations. So our clients have the ability to easily picture what, kind of that vision of what can go in their home. Right? But even in a smaller space, just having several wall portraits up in different finishes and different sizes. Right? But yeah, so it lends itself well to have that space to be able to do that. But it's worked out really well. Our clients love what they receive. They also, again, get usually quite a few wall portraits. That's what they want to display in their home, and then they want their favorites in an album. So as for sales, sure, it has worked out well for us that we can serve our clients with beautiful wall portraits and albums. But in all reality, to me, it has far less to do with numbers at the end of the day. And although our sales have been increased every year that we've done this, it is really much more that experience. I want that client to go home and when their friend asks, like, who do you use for photography? I want them to be able to say, like, here's who we use. They're amazing. They do this same-day presentation. They're great with kids. They're great with our high school senior. But it's about that experience because I think too many photographers focus on just imagery or just one of these pieces. And we want to focus on the end product in their home. But the experience to get there is just as important.

What has your curiosity right now? How are you going to take it to the next level? What's the next big thing in the process?

I think we've been incorporating video a lot. We've been incorporating video into our weddings and doing both our horizontal format highlight reels, but we're also doing our Instagram same day vertical content reels for weddings. I think incorporating that more into our families and our high school seniors is something that will also start folding in.

So this really is a story about in person sales. It's a unique way to do it, and the customer experience around doing the in-person sales. Let's end the interview with this. If someone is trying to do a better job of in-person sales, does anything come to mind as a power tip or something that you've learned over the years that maybe a customer is hemming and hawing and you're not exactly sure how to get them exactly what they want? Maybe a power tip for in-person sales so someone can make some more money?

I think you just need to go back to what would serve the clients best and say how would they feel with this type of experience? Right? And then, what's the pain points for them? So a pain point might be if you didn't educate them well enough that all the key decision-makers should be there for four hours. There's going to be a friction point when they arrive for the session and they say, oh yeah, my spouse needs to leave as soon as the session's over. You're going to all of a sudden have that, right? So all of your emails, your text messages, they all need to say plan on a certain number of hours. All decision-makers need to be here. Every phone call that you have, you remind them. And then, when they arrive, you also give them again that vision of where we're headed. Great, we're going to head up for your session. We're really excited. Here's where we're going to go. Remember afterwards we're going to come back right away. So I think my power tip would be you just need to fully flesh out how to do all the back-end stuff, what it looks like to the client and making sure you have your bases covered in case those circumstances come up so that you can kind of get ahead of the curve on it because you're designing an experience that will look great in the client's eyes as long as it doesn't look like you're fumbling through it. Right? So just takes a lot of preparation and planning, but once you start doing it, becomes second nature.

Awesome conversation. Congratulations on your success. And Adam, thanks for coming on, man.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. Live from Imaging USA inside the Sony Cinema Line Studios, a big thanks to Sony for doing all the hard work to make us look good. Now, if you're still watching the episode, that means you enjoyed the show, which means you should be a subscriber of the show. So click subscribe on whatever platform you're on. Also, leave us a like and a comment so we know what the guest said that really resonated with you. The other thing is, if you're not yet a member of Professional Photographers of America, what's going on here? Because PPA offers terrific benefits like incredible equipment insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. Join now at ppa.com. That's ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, host to the show and the founder of the Small Business Owners Community. I appreciate you tuning in. We'll see you right here next time. Take care.