Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the Wedding CEO podcast, where we discuss all things marketing, sales and scaling so you can become the CEO of your life and business. I'm Elora Rochelle and I've been a wedding photographer for over a decade and now I'm sharing all of my secrets so you can stop sacrificing your time and make more money like a CEO. Hello, ceos, and welcome back to another episode. I personally think this is a little bit of a non-negotiable hot take, but I feel like everybody knows this by now. But if not, I won't go ahead and expand on it. I think that 100K needs to be the bare minimum for wedding photographers. 100k is really 70K when you do the math like I show you in my free training. You can check the link in the show notes. We walk you through exactly how much money you do need to make to be profitable and then how to make more than 100K maybe multiple six figures to be able to actually achieve your dream income goal and how easy it is. But link in show notes if you want to check that out. We have a goal now of making 150K so you can actually profit 100K as your income strategy salary. Say that five times fast. The expenses will supersede the income and the profit will be less than 50K once you subtract taxes, business expenses and then, of course, business savings. So 100K is actually really 50K once you subtract all of those things. And if you are having a lot of business expenses, like you decide to, for example, switch to Sony or add a new lens we know lenses are thousands of dollars maybe you decide to jump in with film and spend all that money, then it's even less. Most photographers don't budget for business expenses and future investments, therefore taking a huge pay cut, and then the business is benefiting more than your actual profit is, which this is why it's so important to have a plan when you're going about your business whether you're brand new or been in the industry for a while and wondering why your income isn't growing or it's staying the same. Filling your money is a CEO skill being in charge of where it goes and when, planning to outsource, calculating that into your expenses, maybe even limiting your expenses. Maybe this is a season of figuring it out yourself until you have the influx of clients to be able to hand it off. Or maybe this is a season where you figure out what it looks like for you right now, instead of being stingy planning to spend and making it back, because we believe in abundance so much inside the wedding CEO, we believe in letting it be spent and then making it back or making sure it's accounted for. All of this can be achieved when you make a CEO plan for the quarter or the year.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Now I was asked a question earlier about how can you make sure that you actually plan to make 100K. So I have a piece of paper laid out in front of me because I am a pen to paper gal and let's just go ahead and do some wedding math. So how many weddings do you want to book, at what price? Let's say your minimum is 3000 and disclaimer I hope you raise your prices, but if not, you can join my program and we can teach you how to raise those prices, because you're going to be booking a lot of weddings at this price. Let's say you want to book 20 weddings at 3,000. So that is going to be $60,000, which means 60,000, subtract 100,000 is 40,000. So you have 40,000 left to make. What are you going to do to supplement that income? Are you going to maybe launch a workshop, or maybe you want to start doing in-person mentorships, or maybe you want to offer brand sessions to other photographers. Now, these are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's other better things and maybe higher paying ticket things. Ok, so let's do launch a workshop. Let's say the workshop is 2,500 a ticket to go wherever it is you want to go, and you want 10 people to go, that already is 25,000. So we're going to subtract 25,000 from 40,000.

Speaker 1: 4:51

Y'all don't make fun of me, I'm about to. Math was not my strongest, I flew by the seat of my pants. Ok, so you have $15,000 left to make. So out of that $15,000, how many mentorships do you want to do? Let's say your in-person mentorships are, let's say, 750. Maybe you want to do for the year? Well, maybe let's see how much you want to do a month. So 750, maybe do one a month. So we'll do 750 times 12. That's $9,000. We're getting there, guys, we're almost there. So we're going to subtract 9,000 from 15. So you have $6,000 left to make to hit $100,000. Now, if you actually raised your prices you probably, at $5,000, could have just booked 20 weddings and that would have been a wrap. But we're going to keep going.

Speaker 1: 5:49

Ok, so you have $6,000 to make. So let's say, for brand sessions, you charge 9.50 divided by $6,000. So thank goodness for calculators. You know, growing up our math teachers were like you're not going to be calculators when you grow up in the real world. Who's laughing now?

Speaker 1: 6:09

Ok, so 9.50, that would be six brand sessions. Ok, let me just make sure, because that's a weird fraction. So let's do 9.50 times 6. It's 5,700. So let's just do 7. I mean, that's not a lot. 9.50 times 7 is 6,650. So I mean we made a little bit over than $100,000 just by breaking down the math of how it is you're going to make it. This is what we do inside of our plan your year master class we do either at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, depending on how the two days go. So that way you can just be like OK, this is how much I need to make of whatever it is I want to do, which leaves you in charge of your life and your life calendar, your business calendar, I guess. And we did that in like a couple of minutes. So there you go.

Speaker 1: 7:01

I do think. Personally, I would like you to book 20 weddings at $5,000, and that's $100,000, and everything else is colored bubbles. So something to think about. If you loved today's episode and think you're ready to become the CEO of your business and make sure you're in control of everything, like your business finances, like I just showed you, I invite you to apply for the wedding CEO. The link is in the show notes and if you're accepted, you're going to get access to our how to Scale to 100K Advanced Training Masterclass.

Speaker 1: 7:35

We'll walk you through this math exactly on the breakdowns from weekly, monthly and, of course, the 250K mark. It's not as unattainable as you think. We just did the math here on this episode. If you're driving, I want you to listen to this again and do the math with me and break it down with me. I do think that when you're doing laundry or multitasking like you don't really get the full scope of the episode. You have to like physically do it or physically write it down, and if you write it down, there's an 80% chance that you might achieve it. So let's do that, ok? It is getting close to the end of the year. It's not too late to book a couple of weddings, a couple of sessions for the next year at your hopefully new prices, and I will see you in the next episode.