#016 Break free from Having a Reactionary Business!

Shifting from Reactive to Proactive: Building a Creative Business That Thrives

In this podcast episode, Keith and Melissa, seasoned photography business owners, discuss the pitfalls of running a reactionary business and emphasize the importance of being proactive, with systems in place, to prevent burnout and achieve success.

They explain how not having a structured system can lead to unnecessary repetition, inefficiency, and exhaustion. The episode encourages creative business owners to develop operational roadmaps, streamline workflows, and understand the real time investment in business tasks. They highlight the significance of understanding the actual hours contributed versus the time billed, and the value of hiring help when needed.

Towards the end, listeners are invited to self-reflect on areas of their business that are handled on the fly and consider creating solutions to streamline operations. The hosts conclude with a reminder that transforming from a reactionary to a proactive approach can effectively enhance both business and personal well-being, reducing frustration and boosting success.

Journal Exercise: Write down something that you are avoiding in your business. And write down something in your business that is more reactionary - or something you can create to make your business more proactive.

00:00 The Pitfalls of a Reactionary Business

00:16 Introduction to Keith and Melissa

00:35 The Dangers of Running a Reactionary Business

01:28 Personal Experiences and Early Struggles

02:45 The Importance of Systems and Organization

05:21 Balancing Creativity and Business

08:06 The Value of Time and Proper Pricing

12:55 The Benefits of Proactive Business Management

14:54 Overcoming the Starving Artist Mentality

20:28 Final Thoughts and Homework

21:37 Closing Remarks

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Transcript

Overwhelm sets in and you know what eventually happens, you actually get tired of your business. The dream that you had to have this creative business, it's counterintuitive, but because your business is run in such a reactionary fashion, it's not organized and proactive, it actually becomes a labor. 

Welcome. We're Keith and Melissa, photography business owners for more than 25 years. And our mission is to help you find the success you want. And we know firsthand the role that mindset plays in figuring it all out. Now, today's episode. 

So welcome to today's podcast. Hello. 

Today's podcast episode is definitely something that I think I learned the hard way, at least in the earlier days, and that is to not run a reactionary business. What do I mean by that?

Don't be just making shit up on the fly when it comes to your business. I think a lot of us are guilty.

For example, you practically start from scratch each time your phone rings, your DM pings, or your email lights up every time someone asks you for your pricelist, or you need to get packed up and ready for a job or an in person client interview, it's like starting over. 

How much should I charge for this? As if you don't even have a price list to refer back to.

Things like that. Basically you're being reactive rather than proactive. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, a little bit. I think there were times that may have been us. Guilty as charged. No plan, very few systems in place, starting from scratch, every time a client contacts you or something needs to be done.

If you're like me, I learned the hard way. I was constantly reminding myself that my life might be easier if I had a priceless PDF to send off to clients, or a product guide, , or a what to expect guide, or a series of emails prepared that cover every step of the client journey.

A bookkeeping system, a post working with you pdf, and so on and so on. I mean, I get it. In the beginning, you're setting things up, right? I mean, I remember when I met you. Oh yeah, that that was rough. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, it was rough. Thank you. That was rough that I met you,

The meeting part was cool. The position that my. My fledgling business was in was, uh, it was pretty rough. You're so cute. You had like a white trash bag filled with receipts. It was awful. Very few systems in place, but you had your beeper that worked, that you would respond to. So at least that system was working for you.

You responded to clients when they inquired. That's, that's a good step. Number one, it was all the other things, the bookkeeping and. And all the, the follow ups and stuff like that. I had the Palm pilot too, my little PDA. I'm sure a bunch of people are going to have to, or if you're interested, look those two things up and see what ancient technology that was.

But you didn't even know what you didn't know, you're starting out, you don't, you honestly don't know what you don't know.

So how can we be proactive? Or how can you be proactive, right? That's a good question. I mean, really, when you're starting out, you really, really don't know the basics. If you even know the basics, you're lucky. But some people don't even know that much. They start their creative business. You started a photography business.

Yeah. With a zero idea of what business actually was. I knew what photography was. So I can like, how hard could it be? How naive. And I have it. It was my, uh, my foreshadowing. Of course, there was basic things.

I'm sure you knew that you needed, 

I'm constantly shocked when I talk to fellow creatives and they tell me that what they don't have in place, some things to me seem basic, like not mixing your business funds with your personal funds. Not having insurance. Like that's always a shocker.

Well, I don't even have contracts. Like as, as, as, uh, naive as I was, I, I went for contracts pretty early on and insurance. Yeah. But these are things you really need to have in place for a solid foundation for your business, a creative business, or literally any business. You have to have the basics. Don't you think? Totally. But on top of the basic business things that you need to have in place, you also need to have your own roadmap.

It's your operational roadmap for your business. Like what do you need to do on a regular basis? It's like your operation manual for yourself, for your business and what you need to do within your business.

And I think I'm talking to young entrepreneurs. And when I say young, I don't mean age young, I mean, young, newer entrepreneurs, and even some seasoned entrepreneurs that definitely haven't embraced some of this.

So I'm speaking to everyone who runs a reactionary versus a proactive business. You need to figure out what your workflows are, what systems you need, and all the pieces that fit together.

I struggle with this early on, but once I realized that I was investing more of my precious time and not getting paid more, like that's a tough realization, right? I think it's tough when you realize like how much extra time you're investing in your business that if you had. The basic systems in place, you would have more time back, right? You would, because you're, uh, you're spending so much time not knowing what you're doing, that you just keep, uh, keep reinventing the wheel and you're just, your time just flies away.

It starts to become frustrating. And especially when you're a solo printer, your time is so valuable that every precious minute matters. It's hard when you keep doing repetitive tasks that you could just do once and then rinse and repeat. For our business, we definitely needed to figure out systems that worked and we needed to understand how our time broke down for each and every task.

And guys, this is an extension of your customer journey in some ways, But it is also your journey, your business journey. I'm a unique personality because there's parts of me that love systems I love order. And then there's another part of me that absolutely detests it. And I like to wake up every day thinking almost like I have free reign over my day when I don't at all.

It's not the truth. It's delusional, I am a conflict because I like my systems. I like to be organized. But on the other hand, I love being an entrepreneur because I really appreciate the freedom that that provides. Now, how do you see yourself?

The same, but, uh, in different proportions, uh, the, the freedom is my thing. And I hate, I, I, I love systems for what they bring. I hate creating systems and it's really the, uh, I'm, uh, the creative mindset where I detest the whole business aspect of, uh, of a creative business, but it's, it's completely necessary.

And so I've got to do it anyway, so I might as well do it well. Well, and it serves you right when you have a, I want to say a strict schedule, but when you're a little bit regimented, I think in the end and you just plow through things a little bit faster than I feel like, what should I do today or what email should I send when someone sends me an email or it took me a little longer to embrace this than, than it took you.

But I eventually came along and, uh, and we're doing well for it. Yeah. And here we are. Obviously there are things that need to be done in any business every single day. And when it took me a long time to realize once I had a routine every single day for my business, that our business started to have a life of its own, it really started to thrive.

You and I came together and created roles for each other. And I think, I really do think that that propelled our business, that organizational structure. Yeah, yeah, because without it, you just kind of just running around. Exactly.

No, no purpose.

When you take the time to create a system and an action plan for many of the flows that your business regularly has, say an email sequence or a workday flow for a certain type of job you do regularly. a post flow for after the job is completed or delivered. If you make them up on the fly, every time you need to repeat, repeat, repeat, you're losing time.

I think it's a form of buffering. 

It's work that I think a lot of people don't really want to do when it comes to their business. , they didn't get in the business of being a creative because they wanted to run a business. Do you agree? They became creative business owners because they love what they create. And I know that most people may not want to spend precious hours creating these workflows, but once you do it, You have it.

You literally have it. And you can use it over and over and over again. Once created, it's there. Exactly. And you can refine it over time as you refine things you didn't think about. Then they're just incremental changes and you just move on. When you start from scratch each time, not only do you lack consistency, but you lose time and your clients pay a price and you definitely pay a price, both financially and personally the time for money trade, which also brings me to the point that I think a lot of entrepreneurs.

They don't value their time enough. They don't count the hours that actually go into a lot of what they do. we're photographers, so we'll go with photography as an example. Let's say a photographer is shooting an eight hour wedding.

It's a lot more than eight hours that you're on site. It's hours and hours of emails, in person meetings, timelines reviewed, questions answered, possibly an engagement shoot, or most likely an engagement shoot, scouting the venue, answering more questions, reviewing timelines again as the day gets closer, Planning, packing, driving, photographing the wedding, backing up everything the night after the wedding, because God knows, I think, well, I mean, I'm a lunatic about doing that, and I know you're, you're pretty serious about that.

I just get paranoid of just the idea that what if, when, something happens, so if something happens and I, one more backup, so I, I don't go to bed until it's in three spots. And that's the system, like that's one of those systems that is just automatic. Right, it's just one of the things that I've done for years.

Exactly. And it's paid off because you get to sleep well and wake up knowing that that wedding is saved in three different places. Yeah, even if it pushes the time I go to sleep back. Exactly. After a long day. At least I'll sleep well. And again, I'm saying photography, but I'll keep going with, so after, so we back up after the wedding.

Cataloging, color correcting, editing, organizing, storing. Presenting the images, creating a slideshow, a gallery, creating social posts, more phone calls, emails, or in person presentations after the wedding. For us as wedding photographers, for sure, the wedding day, that eight hour day, is literally just the beginning.

 That's a lot that goes into a wedding using the photographer example, and every creative has their own example of that. And I remember the exercise of one of our business coaches had us do almost like a timeline looked like a timeline and from the beginning to end from really the beginning of the relationship, your first email with a client all the way through till Basically the post wedding, the after, or maybe it's a, if you're a graphic designer, whatever the scope of your project is.

It's everything that goes into creating the arc of what your session includes, or your job includes, and then putting a dollar value for that. We'll figure out first how many hours it takes. We're obviously photographers. So I gave that example, but let's take a makeup artist. They have the back and forth emails, DMs, messages prior to the job. They're probably looking at a bunch of Pinterest pictures that the, the, their client has provided.

They're probably doing a test run with the client. Then they have the day of the job. They have to prep their gear, pack it up, drive to their job, set up, work the designated amount of hours, clean everything, pack it back up, drive home.

That's a lot of work for say the three hour job they're getting paid for. And I'm going to go into this further in another episode. So when you think of how many hours it takes to do something, maybe an eight hour wedding day takes 40 hours or 60 hours, whatever amount of time. And of course, not every task that you do is valued at the same as your, for us are when we're out photographing.

So answering emails wouldn't be valued at the same as shooting or in the case of the makeup artists 

when they are out creating, , when they're in front of their clients, when they're creating their time should be valued higher than when they're doing their office tasks, just like us, but you have to figure out really how many hours you're investing in a shoot, in a job, and then how much time it takes you to do the job and figure out.

really how much you're making. And the reason I bring this up, because all these other things that you don't have systems for, whether it be you backing up the night of the wedding, that that's a system that probably saves you time versus like, where did I put those? Yeah. Not even so much saves me time is in this specific instance, it just saves me anguish.

I think they're just there in the stress of what if something happens? This is, that's, that's more of that. Of course it does get, uh, The files in place to be worked on when they're ready. So it does speed that part up mainly just so that I can sleep. So when I say it saves time, because you're methodical about how you back up your jobs and stuff like that, in the end, it saves you time, but that could be Having emails that are already created that could be, you know, your contracts ready to go, your price list is always up to date, those systems, PDFs, handouts, correspondence, all of that sales, your sales routine, all of that is just dialed in.

So then when it comes time to actually use it, you're ready and you do it. Succinctly and efficiently. And if you do it the same way every time, this way, you know exactly how long it's going to take and you're not fumbling for things and it just, it makes it more efficient. Exactly. And I didn't mean to go into pricing because I think that's one of the most important things you have to nail down in order to have a prosperous business for the longterm.

 So let's go back into reactive versus proactive business. And as it keeps going like this, if you don't have a workflow for each session or each part of your business or each operation within your business and understanding exactly how much time you invest in each job and how much you make per hour, then this is a disservice to you and to your business.

And it also includes your friends and family, whoever you're not spending time with, because you are working on these jobs. I think we all know what it's like to feel overwhelmed in our business. And when you're reinventing the wheel for each client, it makes no sense for anyone.

Totally. Yeah. You just, the things, the people you don't see in the things you don't do because you're sitting there doing the finding 

 the same way to do the exact same thing versus just knowing it's going to be just a system. And you can just being on autopilot, constantly trying to figure out the, uh, how to do this.

And then you find out, Oh, it's exactly the same. But it takes you time to realize that. Just get it done. Exactly. This approach to running your business, even in the early stages, really prevents you from growing, especially if you're a solopreneur. You are doing it all and still trying to maintain a life of your own.

It's hard. Even if we work together and we each have our designated roles, but it's hard spending a lot of time away from family. I mean, I think maybe that's the catalyst for me pushing to get our systems in place because we had small children at the time we had to do work long hours, building our business and being mainly wedding photographers.

That's a lot of time spent away from home. So to make sure when we were home, we could be as present as possible with our kids. I think it mattered to both of us. So. To have these systems in place as fast as possible just gave us more time with our, with our kids and our, and our family. And that's not easy.

I mean, it comes with such a cost.

So we totally understand how hard it is to be a solopreneur. But why when you can really, honestly, you can make small changes in your business and make it easier for you.

Another thing I think is that many creative business owners really don't like to do this side of the business. I don't. Is that true? Yeah. They tell themselves they aren't good at it, that they're not good at the business side, that it's just something they don't want to even have to deal with.

That I'm a starving artist type mentality does that ring a bell with you? I don't know. Oh, yeah, I get just it's cover That's what you expect. Oh, yeah, you go into the whole thing thinking. Well, I might not make you go in thinking You're gonna make a bazillion dollars then you quickly realize you hate the business part of it.

Then you know Well, this is starving artist thing. I'm going to always make my art And you hope somehow you're going to keep it in business, but you've just given yourself a reason to fail. I never thought of it like that, like a being covered. Someone's giving yourself permission. Yeah. So when you do fail that, because you didn't do anything other than create, then that was the inevitable outcome.

Suddenly your Van Gogh.

So basically you're giving yourself permission not to be good at business or telling yourself I'll never be good at my business. I guess if you tell yourself that long enough, you start to believe it. It becomes like you just described. Exactly. And I don't think the most talented creatives are generally the most successful creatives, or at least we find that in photography.

You find that in painting. You find that in music. You find that across the board. It's just a thing. Exactly. I guess that's a topic for another day as well. So back to the self, fulfilling prophecy. If this is the truth and you really aren't good at something, then doesn't it make a lot of sense to hire someone who compliments you?

I mean, I guess we're lucky we work together and I know that we're not solopreneurs, we're not technically, but, uh, but we wear different hats, we wear different hats, we do different things. So they're complimentary, but there's still things that there's still things we need help with. So it just makes it easier to get help.

 Just as the advice that we're giving to you is that you should do things, That make you more productive and the less productive things, the busy work, give that to somebody else.

Absolutely.

And I know what's coming next. I know you're thinking I can't afford that.

Well, maybe you're listening to this episode because you want to know how to attract more clients. Maybe you want to work with clients that you love. And of course you want your bottom line to be better than it is right now.

You want to make more money. So therefore a lot of you may be thinking, well, if I add one more expense, that's impossible because I'm already not making enough money. And I know I hear that old adage that you have to spend money to make money, but there is some truth to that. And I think that when you're not good at something or you don't want to do something, if you bring someone on for a couple of hours a week or a couple hours a month, it can help you with something that you're ignoring.

Or something you're avoiding in your business, but that is something that could propel you forward if you were working on it. That could cause you to make more money in your business.

Then it's very short sighted not to open up to the possibility of finding that extra 100 a month or whatever amount of help that you need, because I really think that sometimes you do have to spend money to make money, and you may not see the return immediately. But it's something that, especially if there's a side of your business that you're consistently ignoring, then that's definitely something that I think you could be very helpful.

I think could be very helpful if you bring someone on to help with that. And sometimes you just need that extra structure. You just need that organization that someone else can give you.

You're the creative and you like to do these things. And someone over here can do these several things that you don't want to do. And the two of you together make a whole and you can create a more successful, prosperous, profitable business

You can work together being a proactive business owner. Being a reactive business owner is exhausting, it drains creativity, it takes you away from doing what you love to do, and then I'm assuming most of you love being a creative, and it makes you feel like you're always working.

Overwhelm sets in and you know what eventually happens, you actually get tired of your business. The dream that you had to have this creative business, it's counterintuitive, but because your business is run in such a reactionary fashion, it's not organized and proactive, it actually becomes a labor.

It's not enjoyable and you get frustrated and that,

That energy that you give off is also what you give back with who you book and the type of clients that you get.

And you can't understand why things aren't working out the way you wanted them to, when you dreamed of having this business. And you're not alone. Everyone else does not have it figured out, but really there are some key reasons why creative businesses don't do well and they can't all be blamed on a handful of things.

Yeah, there's so many different things, so many different excuses you can make as to why you're not, uh, you're not being successful at this. And the last one you usually want to blame is that you're just not, putting enough attention on the systems in place. Exactly. And the business, that fundamental, that foundation that keeps your business solid.

Right. And you're, you're equating with the, uh, like you said before, you're just equating all this busy, stressful work with. just business in general and that you're just, you're not good at it. If you just spend some time refining it, you'll be surprised at how good you can be. Embracing it and enjoying it, right?

. Being great at what you do is wonderful, but I can't tell you how much our business grew once we were running like a well oiled machine. It's indisputable. It's absolutely indisputable that the two went hand in hand. Is being organized and proactive, creative and enjoyable.

It may not have been fun to deal with the quote, boring side of the business, but it is also so rewarding. You get your time back and you make more money. A win win in my book.

Here's a little homework for you. I'd love for you to take a look at the areas in your business where you may be leaning towards reactionary and less towards proactive. So grab your journal and write down what you're missing.

Where do you make things up on the fly?

What PDF or organizational structure could make your life easier? What would help you sell more because you can inform your client more easily? What is one thing you avoid doing because you hate doing it?

Take a few minutes and answer these for yourself because I'm sure you've sat at your computer and you've said, I hate doing that. And I bet it's rarely the creative part of your business. I bet you're very happy when you get to go out and do the thing you love to do.

That's probably where you find your most joy. So when you sit there thinking about what you dislike about your business, that might be the area that you need to work on first in order to elevate your business to the point where you're being proactive and not reactionary.

A few minutes ago, I saw a post on Instagram that I think sums this up perfectly, and it said, the magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding. 

Anyway, I know you've got this, and I can guarantee that if you start being less reactionary, your business will soar.

 I'll see you in a few days. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

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