Speaker 0:06

Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Often Ambitious podcast. I am always excited to record an episode whenever I have the time and the brain space. It's always Monday, I feel like Monday is always coming. I can't explain the feeling, but it's here. And normally I look forward to Mondays, but when winter lasts so long here, it's hard to get that ambition to get up in the morning. Not to mention daylight savings almost took me home. I think they took two and a half hours from me because the way that I had to coach myself outta bed for a week and a half needs to be studied. Honestly. I have nothing else to say about that. I don't even wanna talk about it. I need it to be a past memory because of how tired I was. Now I'm getting my life together and that's what I wanna talk about. I am learning in this season of life, in this season of motherhood. My daughter is nine, my son is five. I'm getting out of the weeds of the early baby, toddler childhood. I am realizing that in the midst of the tornado that has been my life is I actually need to get it together. And a lot of people say, you're really hard on yourself. You already have it together. And I think that might just be the visuals, honey. Like I can put an outfit together, that doesn't mean my life is together. And so I was thinking about it. On Saturday man, I really wanna organize my pantry. I really wanna like, spring cleaning has hit me basically. And if you feel like, okay, at least for us, the six months of winter has taken me out. I have to redecorate for spring. I need to make sure that fully stocked. But there is a system. I'm a systems girl for my business, but I'm not a systems girl for my household. But I was scrolling on TikTok and I came across this post saying, if you don't have a house manager, this is something you can do. And I was like a house manager. I know somebody who is a house manager, and she explained to me her job description and I'm like, these are all the things that I don't wanna do that I have to do. And so she went through all the things that you need to make sure that your household has and does repeatedly to create a system and to avoid motherhood burnout. And what I'm realizing is the motherhood burnout cycle seems to stem from doing a bunch of things that I don't wanna do, but don't know when to do them, how often to do them, and what's coming next. Yeah it isn't my calendar. It isn't the schedule of the kids. It isn't really taking them to school, it isn't helping'em with homework, like it's the management of the household and how that all comes together. And so after watching that video, I was like, all right, that's it. Like I am deep diving into this home CEO system. And so of course I had to get an aesthetic binder and all of the worksheets that I'm actually gonna print up and mark these things off. So one of the examples I wanna share with you, just in case you don't have a house manager or you have no house management experience, is having a set weekly dinner schedule. But splitting them into categories. So I have tried doing the same meal like every two weeks and being like, oh, we gotta cook pop pie again. We gotta cook salmon again. We gotta, and like for some reason, it just takes the fun out of cooking. It feels like a chore. It feels too predictable. And I like a little fun and variety in my life. So having categories like, okay, these are all of the family's favorite. One pop meals. These are all the favorite fish meals. These are all the favorite beef meals. Maybe these are all of our best chicken meals. And then even being like, these are the best Crock pot meals, like having categories for the meals, whether it's like in notion, whether it is in a binder, Excel sheet, however you like to organize your life, but just being able to like either link that recipe or kind of just paste or just paste the title of the meal if you have it memorized. That alone just freed up so much of my brain space. And so they were saying that women experience a lot of burnout because of the amount of decisions we have to make a day. And they always say men are waffles, women are spaghetti. Like men have things that go a certain way and I don't know, do a certain thing, but women, we have to be very flexible. You need to do this, we're like spaghetti. We're all over the place and we somehow make it happen. But like we don't really have a choice because we have so many decisions to make a day. And so being able to free up some of those decisions by having a kind of loose plan that you can just refer to when you don't have the mental capacity to be like, okay, I don't really wanna figure out dinner this week. Let's say I wanna have beef this week. Okay, cool. Like we can make chalupas, we can make enchiladas, versus me having to go in the back of my brain in the depths of nowhere and being like, what was that thing that I had that was really good that one time. And then I'm spending an hour trying to find this recipe in my brain and then I end up going on YouTube and looking for some quick, short recipes that I could just apply, but that takes way too much time. I should be able to have some kind of blueprint of my best recipes or new things that I wanna try that I can just be like, all right, lemme look up a recipe for this. And that's done, and I can pick four of those for the week and then also put into count leftovers. House management has been one of the ways that I am alleviating a lot of the stress in my life. So I can be a good mom and a good CEO at the same time without realizing that the house was actually the center core of the issue. I am learning to take care of myself in ways of creating systems to alleviate my brain space and to avoid, mental burnout within the home. It's hard to explain, but if you're a mom, you get it because of the decisions we have to make. And then the next part is, now I have a membership subscription to a spa that forces me to take care of myself because I apparently have a really hard type taking care of myself. And I went to my first. Spa day. Like I did the facial, I did the massage of the whole thing and my massage therapist, without realizing how apparently tense my body is, ended up doing deep tissue against her will. And I apologize to her. Katie, I'm so sorry. But she's my permanent massage therapist now and I have been feeling so good ever since. Anyways having a monthly membership and sometimes you just have to do the thing. So I am now put prioritizing myself, my health. I am gonna start building a new capsule wardrobe and trying to just get like little basics, but a mix of statement pieces so that it's easier for me. To create an outfit. Also, this is going back to the decision fatigue. I feel like I'm at the point in my business where I am expanding my team. I am building new offers and I'm needing to free up more of my time. And so I'm realizing now that I'm saying this out loud, that I need to cut corners in some areas that I'm spending too much time to give me more time, do other things while I'm trying to expand the business expand my beautiful, gorgeous membership that I am thoroughly obsessed with while making changes to wedding atelier so it's even more efficient than ever. Whether that means adding new trainings and like right now we're doing a luxury wedding series with our luxury wedding co-coach, when she worked with me initially, she was charging six K and now she's booking like 17, 30, 40 K weddings. Yes, you heard me correctly. 30 40 k. Weddings. And so now she's teaching her custom proposal process and like her way of doing things, which I think just adds a beautiful blend to our ecosystem. And so we're gonna be adding more sprints, a lot more advanced trainings. And I don't know, it's just been such a good year. One of my mentors told me that my offer suite is the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. And when I tell you that is the highest compliment you could ever give me. Thank you. Thank you. I have three really good, solid programs. I feel great about them. Lab 35 is where you start if you wanna shift your portfolio for luxury weddings. And then if you want more inquiries, in demand is your Instagram marketing membership. You get weekly prompts, you get monthly content calls, you get your posts roasted by me and my bots, and you have the community. you have quarterly sprints to just get it done and show up every single day on Instagram. This was, it's so funny to me that this membership was just a challenge that I did every January in wedding and now it's its own membership. But If just one challenge can get people five to 10 to 15 more inquiries that month, and then we never do it again. I'm like, no, we're making this recurring. You're getting monthly inquiries now. Gone are the days where you can just set up a beautiful profile and people just come to you. There's too many decisions to make. There's too many photographers, nobody's standing out. So we're gonna help you stand out, but we're also gonna help you show up and you'll never have caption, burnout or decision fatigue ever again. So if that sounds like the community you wanna be in, join the wait list because the in demand wait list, launch only is next month, and you will have the opportunity to come inside. Doors will open at a early bird price before it goes up again to its final membership price. Okay? So if you are like, I don't wanna miss this, I need to lock in, like lock in babe. Let's get these inquiries, let's get the consistency. No more excuses, more accountability, and we're gonna be adding more and more things to this membership because I'll be asking you questions, being like, what do you want? What do you wanna learn? What do you want support in? We're gonna make it happen. This is your membership until we lock in on the system and structure, and that is what it is. So if you're like, oh yeah, I want a membership tailored to me and I wanna double my inquiries, join the wait list. Babe, what are you doing? I'd love to have you. Love to see you and love to roast you. And so then with Wedding atelier, that's my bread and butter. That's our luxury positioning, pricing, and sales group program. We also have, of course, the rebrand studio in there. If you want to use our proven process to get a rebrand in 30 days with all of the work that you did, all you have to do is submit it to our graphic designer in house bring your website template. She completely adjusts it to your artist story and your rebrand is done and you know it's gonna be aligned and I will be in there. You can't get rid of me. I'll be on strategy calls. I'll be reviewing it. I'll be making sure. The messaging and the positioning and the branding is aligned with what you told me, with what your inspiration is the amount of support you get from a rebrand studio for the price. I don't even know why. It's as cheap as it is, and I'm not even gonna say, because you'll have to be in wedding Atelier to find out. So if that's something you're looking forward to joining, apply and we can chat in the dms about whether this is a good fit or not. If you're ready to charge 10 K and above, or at least go from 5K to seven K to eight K, I know it's a big jump. Once you get to 5K and beyond, it's like, ah, where am I? You're in the mid luxury market, but we wanna get you to the luxury market and we will support you in doing that. Lots of things coming up there. There'll be a really huge change happening to Wedding Atelier, but I'll probably announce that in like about a month or so. So keep your eyes peeled. The doors for wedding until, if you're like, oh yeah, I wanna get in on this launch, they open in May, but if you wanna join in the backend, we can have a conversation and you're like, I wanna get it done. I wanna get in, I wanna get this artist story. I need to rebrand. Whatever it is that you want. You're like, I wanna be charging eight to 10 K next year. Hop in right now, do the work. Get the feedback, and you should be ready by the time you start accepting 2027 bookings. And a lot of times people would join and be like, oh my gosh. I don't wanna join.'cause I only have one or two weddings booked for next year. That's great. Let's make the changes now so that when you charge higher prices, you're not booking 10 weddings at your old rate that you're like, why in the world was I charging this? I know I should be charging more. I know I should be working less. That's wedding atelier. So that is your girl's new office suite. If you have any questions, send me a dm. I will probably send you a voice message'cause that's the kind of person I am. It's just faster, especially'cause I'm always on the go. So a voice message is pretty convenient for me. But anyway, those are the ways that I am taking care of myself so that I can manage my time better as a mom and a CEO. And if you are in the thick of it right now, if you're in the thick of business. Wedding season, motherhood, thinking about motherhood, and you're like, Ooh, I need to get my systems together. Let this be a sign that you need to prioritize yourself. So that you can be a really good and present mom and CEO, and they can coexist in harmony. Self-care isn't selfish. You need to prioritize yourself so that you have a creative brain. You don't have decision fatigue and you don't have business burnout. And when you take care of yourself, all of these things fall into place. So far I'm feeling pretty good. And now that I realize that half of my problem was household fatigue. And I'm gonna be the CEO of my home. I'm really excited. I'm excited to have a binder that sits downstairs that I can just flip through, know what needs to be clean and when, these are the quarterly things we need to do. These are the monthly things we have to do. I'm not necessarily a locked in. Every day has to be the same kind of schedule, but I like some kind of blueprint that I can reference to. Let me know if you're the same. These are the ways that I'm taking care of myself. This is the way that I'm optimizing before I scale my business. Further, I'm realizing now that we've launched this new membership, my time is going to be even more precious and I need to be a better. Management of my time. It came to my mind about a month ago. It was like, El Laura, you're gonna have a lot of things to do and the way you're managing your time now, it will be impossible to do it unless you do better. So I have been reading the book 4,000 Weeks and when you realize that you only have 4,000 weeks of life, man. Like even if you think about how much time that we spend. Scrolling on the internet because everything is short form. Everything is like YouTube shorts. We got TikTok, we got Instagram reels. And yes, I understand there's a time and a place to rot in bed. Life is Lifeing. You need to reset. But I think I'm gonna start resetting with a book, which I read books all the time, but I switched to audio books so that I could listen to books on the go. Yeah, and I think I just need to literally read a book physically in my hand and slow down. So if you have any time management books that you love and you wanna share with me, send me a link. Please. I am down the time management. Rabbit hole. And honestly, I love it for me because I know there's this thing on where you're creating a curriculum for yourself. I'm thinking that I probably should make a time management curriculum for myself and walk myself through the big picture goal and figuring out how I'm gonna get there as efficiently as possible, because that's time management. And yeah, I just, I know this is like not a typical podcast episode that I would record, but I kind of wanna start sharing behind the business of what my life looks like, what I'm working on, and how I'm getting there. And I love a, behind the CEO series, I love hearing what lights people up, what they're working on, what they're into. And for me right now, journaling hasn't gone anywhere. I am still doing my morning pages. And I try to do one page a day at least, if not every other day. And then of course, give myself a break on weekends. But for some reason, the stream of consciousness journaling leads to my greatest ideas of all time. So if you're not journaling and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know what to say, write what you're thinking about or what you're looking at, and then the rest of it will just come out. But getting all of those thoughts that are buzzing in your head on loop out on paper opens up this like creative door that is unmatched that nobody else could give you, that nobody else could do, but you and you find out that it was in you all the time. Like ultimately at our, at our core, I think we're all creative artists and that's why I have so many references to artists in Wedding Atelier, like the artisan CEO is like the way to think like an artist and a CEO the artist's story, because I feel like ultimately we are all different. We are all artists. We have something to share and there are just some things that only we can do them and do them well. And I think you need to give yourself more credit as you go along in life and business and realize that you are special and you have something to give the world. And you just need to stand by it, but you also need to uncover it. So if you don't know what it is, journal. If you do know what it is, then you need to lock in on mindset. Maybe you need to make a mindset curriculum for yourself and be like, okay, how can I stand behind myself? How can I get over this imposter syndrome that has me stuck on a loop? What are the stories that I need to let go and what are the things that I need to tell myself so that I feel like the best version of myself? And these are all the ways that I kind of check in and make sure I'm on the right path. Like for example, whatever your problem is, the solution is actually hidden within the problem. For example, burnout means that you're stretching yourself too thin and you probably have bad time management, which me I get burnt out in many different areas and I have to constantly check in where it's coming from because I know it's not from the business. So it's coming from something else.'cause my business is streamlined, ready to go. But that's when I realized, oh, my house management skills. Could use a lot of work. And I've never actually known how to manage a household. I've just winged it. But guess what? To go where I wanna go. I can't keep winging it anymore. So now I'm gonna be focusing on that. When it comes to photography, are you burnt out because you're shooting weddings that don't light you up? Then maybe you need to dive into Lab 35 and shift your portfolio to attract the weddings that do light you up. Learn a new skill, learn off camera flash, learn composition and framing. Learn how to direct your couples. Learn how to tell a story the only reason why you don't love your work is because maybe you're copy and pasting what somebody else gave you instead of creating your own unique portfolio style. That clients are like, oh no, we want you because of X. That's what you want. or maybe you're burnt out because you know you're undercharging and overbooking. You know you need to raise your prices past three to 5K. You know it. Your editing queue should not be a whole Google Doc page long. It shouldn't. And do you have systems in place for that? is your inquiry workflow and your post wedding workflow, are they optimized? Are they updated? Is there a workflow like you have to check. We are coming up on the end of March, so Q2 is here. It is upon us. So I think this actually is the best episode to kick off April, but end March with a little bit of reflection for these past three months. What have I done? What's lighting me up? What's not lighting me up? Why? At my core, what is it that I really want to do? Big picture, where do I see myself at the end of this year? How am I gonna get there? Why do I want it so bad? Okay, these are actually perfect journal prompt reflections, so take these. You're welcome and please DM me. Please DM me if you come up with anything. I love a journal breakthrough. Everyone in my personal life is sick of me. Sick of me talking about journaling, but guess what? They'll be like, oh my gosh, Laura, I journaled and I feel so much better. Yes, I know. That's why I told you. Okay. All these amazing ideas are in the back of your mind, behind all the junk that you're thinking 24 7. So how was your Q1? Let's reflect. Where do you wanna go? Do you like what you did so far? What are you gonna change so that April, may, and June is way better? How busy is your wedding season? Do you like how busy it is? Do you want it busier? Do you want it less busy? Are you about to throw in the towel? Let's figure out what the problem is. Because sometimes if you're getting emotional, if you're getting dramatic, something's wrong. We gotta figure out what's wrong. So if you wanna work with me, I laid out my three offers if you wanna update your luxury portfolio, I have a self-study course lab 35, dive in, three modules, 12 lessons. I promise you, you will have results by your next session. That is literally my wedding photography style. In one course, you get 12 years of experience and 12 lesson videos. I like how that worked out and if you wanna get more inquiries, get on that wait list for in demand because we are about to kick off a sprint in April. After we launch to the wait list only, then we're immediately kicking off our 30 day Instagram sprint. It's gonna be so fun, and I know you're gonna double your inquiries.'cause every time we do this sprint, they double their inquiries. If you want five to 10 to 15 more, let's go join the wait list. It's my monthly Instagram membership. And we are adding new things to it every single week. Join in while the hype is high, and I promise this is gonna be the membership that you're never gonna wanna cancel. Why? Because the ROI for booking one wedding from this membership is it a hundred? fif 50 x whatever you're charging for weddings, okay. And then wedding atelier, we are launching it in May, but you can always come on the back door if you apply now and we can have a conversation, but we are launching in May because it's not too late to start elevating your business in the next few months to start attracting those luxury 2027 clients. We have. An SEO coach and she does SEO audits every other month, done for you. Okay? You submit your website, you submit the answers to her questions, and she will literally show you your website, tell you where you need to improve. Done. Okay. Submit your website page. Good to go. Se audit. Done. Okay. We have a luxury wedding coach and she will walk you through on how to get 10 K, 20 K, 30 K, wedding bookings. How to network with planners, what they're looking for, positioning, rebranding, messaging for luxury only. We just finished the workbook for our luxury wedding series. We already did the mindset last week, and by April 15th we'll be doing luxury messaging. So if you really wanna join on the backend. Send an application and hop in on this live luxury wedding series because she's gonna be ripping apart everything we're gonna be doing. Website audits, Instagram audits, messaging audits, and then curating your portfolio to only speak to luxury. And then at the very end, we say the best for last. Your pricing and value, the way that you deliver custom proposals to luxury clients. Only you're gonna create your own luxury client inquiry to sales process. She's gonna walk you through her process, and then she's gonna be like, okay, now we're going to create our own custom luxury proposal process together and make changes as time goes on. And I am exci excited. Can you tell I love my offers. I, they're changing lives. Like these are not offers that are fluffy. You're gonna leave with the result. You're gonna leave with the strategy and your business will never be the same. That's my goal. All right, so if you loved this episode, the links are in the show notes to all of the things. I can't wait to see you. And the next one, we have some amazing guests coming up. This quarter, and I can't wait for you guys to meet them all and of course, get massive results this year. I will see you in the next often ambitious podcast episode. Bye.