Lessons

Lesson Info

Decide What Tasks You Can Delegate

So, there was a time where, I'm just going to be honest. Do I have permission to be transparent today? (audience murmuring) Okay, so I'm going to tell you the truth. So, I actually, sometimes will get a charge back from a client because I didn't deliver what I was going to do. Like, I love selling products. Like, that's my jam. I don't necessarily all the time like to order the products. Does that make sense? (laughing) Oh, I'm not the only one, okay. So I will, I love ordering, I mean I love like placing the orders, I mean like woo getting the sales, like yes we're in this thing, right. But then I like wait a long time to like place the order. Because it's like something about placing the order I just didn't like, right. So if I would see a client in the grocery store, I would be like, right. (audience laughing) Because the first thing they're going to say is what, where's my album, right. Where's my prints, where's my such and such, and so I'm like, I'm sorry. So, there are times whe...

re clients will, you know file a dispute. And that's just the truth, you know take too long, it happens. Again, things people don't tell you that really happen in real life. So of course, I would not dispute it, I would just say okay here's your money back and I would still order the product. But, if I hated doing, I hated the ordering process that meant that there was a place in my business that had room to grow. That meant that I was losing money instead of actually making money. And I was losing money because what, I was not placing the orders. So for you all, I know you're thinking you're like whoa, well maybe not this audience because I just saw that some of you don't like to place orders either. But sometimes it's like I don't want to do that because I don't want to lose like, we're type A, and we don't want to delegate. We don't want to ask for help. We think that the emails have to come from us. We have to do the sales appointment, we have to go to the photo shoot. We have to respond to the inquiry. Like, you think that you have to do all of these things in your business, and that's not the case. Because the most important thing is that the inquiry gets responded to. It doesn't matter who's responding to the inquiry. It doesn't matter who's posting on your social media. The most important part is what, that it gets done. So, had I hired someone to do the graphic design for my cards or do the album design for me, my client really doesn't care who designed the card. The only thing that matters to them is if little Johnny's invitations gets to their house. That's it. She could care less if I designed it, my daughter designed it, maybe not my little son. But, that's the only thing that matters. And so sometimes we're holding ourselves back because we're holding on to so many pieces of our business. Does that make sense to you all? So sometimes in order for us to move forward, you have to subtract. You have to subtract some of the things that you are actually doing in your business. So, what task can you delegate? Anything that doesn't make you happy. You're like what? (audience laughing) Yeah, seriously. If it doesn't make you happy, don't do it anymore. Because I can't tell you, I don't like to edit. I don't edit my photos. Instead of spending three or four hours sitting there scrolling through Lightroom, I'm coloring, I'm doing all of this, I send that stuff out to the image salon. Here you go. While you're doing that, I'm going to the park with my kids. I'm going to do something else. Like I'm not going to be sitting there like, I'm sitting there editing photos, that's just not my thing. That's also not my strength. I know that. But it's okay if I let someone else do it that does a better job than me. I'm like man, you're doing some really good editing. I didn't even know those were my photos. (audience laughing) Right? But we're so afraid to say okay, I'm not going to let my client know that maybe I'm not 100% in this area. You could be a great photographer, maybe you don't do so well on responding to emails. So let somebody else do that for you. They're coming to you because they trust you, they want you, they want your work. So, they expect if they go to another corporation that the CEO has an administrative assistant. They know that already. So what's wrong with you having a studio manager, or someone who helps you respond to your emails. Someone that helps you actually edit your photos. Someone that posts on social media for you. Because they'll email and be like, well you didn't post a sneak peek. I kind of wanted to eat today. You know? So, sorry. But had I had someone in place I could have uploaded those pictures to Google Drive, and said will you post these on our schedule. So when they say, well you didn't post my pictures on social media. You just say, oh, we have it scheduled and it's coming. Versus go away, I'm hungry, I don't like you right now. (audience laughing) Right? So we don't want to do that. So here's what you have to do. You have to do a SWOT analysis. What are your strengths? What are the things that you are good at. That's what you should be doing in your business. I have done enough sentence diagrams in my entire life in undergrad where I am not doing another sentence tree in my life. I'm just not going to do that. So what do I have? I have Autumn. Autumn does the copyrighting for me. She does the website copy. She makes sure that all of the grammar people that are, that all the commas are in the right place. All the spelling is done for me. I don't have to worry about that. Now, if you go on my Facebook page that's a completely different story because I give everybody the notice Autumn is not writing my Facebook posts. Okay? But if you see something that professionally comes out for me, that means that someone has done that for me. Do you care if I wrote it? No. The most important thing is that you get the information. Same thing with the newsletters that I send out. So I wanted to send out client newsletters. Listen, it would be like three weeks in between. And I was like I'm going to send out a newsletter every single week. I had to hire somebody to send those newsletters every single week because I was such a mess I'd be like I know it's been six weeks. Because you have to sit down and make the time. If it's a busy week, if I'm traveling, if I'm doing a lot of things, I don't have time to do that. If I want to make sure that the information goes out, I delegate that task to someone else who does a better job at it than I do. Okay? Your weaknesses. Do we all have some? Yep. So if it's not making you happy, if it's not your happy place, if you automatically need to eat chocolate when you think of doing that task then, well I like eating chocolate and cake anyway. But. I will eat a lot of cake if I'm doing something and I'm not operating in the gift that I have. Like have you heard of the saying stay in your lane? I just like to take pictures. I don't need to be over here doing copyrighting, and editing and all these other tasks. That's just not something that I have to do. Opportunity. So what would you do if instead of sitting at the computer for three hours editing you went to a networking event. That would give you the time to grow your business, and the things are still going just the way that you want them to. Right? And then threats. So you just don't really want too many chargebacks, just FYI, okay? (audience laughing) You just don't want that in your life. So, let's find some ways to help. So what part of your business are failing or not living up to their highest potential. Editing. Now, we live in a day and age where people think that they're supposed to get things like right away. Like I want my pictures right now. Right now I want my pictures. If it's taking you longer than a week or two to get those images back. If you're not exercising, you're not in your happy place, it's taking way to much time, then that's something that you could be doing, okay. You could be doing something else. For your IPS sessions, for me personally, I will just do a light batch, and then I will go to the IPS session, but we'll talk about that later on this afternoon. But, I'll do that and then they'll just see a rough draft of this is what it's going to look like. And then when you purchase it, then that's when I send it to the editor. Okay. Client communication. This is a big one. How long does it take you to respond to an inquiry? You can be honest. Does it take about a week? Three days? A month? Like, 24 hours? About. Oh you all are pretty good. Who really takes a week. Okay, see this is the honest group. Okay, so in that week of time how many things have the client probably, if they're on Instagram, they've probably gone to like five different other photographers at this moment. While you're in the process of trying to make time to respond to their inquiry. At that point, you've lost business. We don't want to do that. You need to have a system in place in order to respond to a client inquiry in a very short amount of time. For me, I service high school seniors. They think things are supposed to happen within like 30 seconds. That's what they think, like. Ding! Well you didn't respond. Sweetheart, that was 30 minutes ago. Okay, give me a little bit of time. So depending on who you're servicing you have to have something set up, like a buffer in place to say this is how long it's going to take in order for me to respond. But still respond in a timely matter. I think that most adults that are doing real life understand if it takes you about 24 hours. You may miss a few, you know, if they've sent like 25 inquiries out, but it's okay. Social media management. Okay. So, if you're ever waiting for me to post on Instagram, it's never going to happen. Instagram is not my happy place, it's just not. I will go to Instagram and then by the time I get there I swipe a few times, I forget what I was supposed to be posting in the first place. And then by this time, I've missed the peak time, I've done everything else. So, I hired a social media manager last year. She was like 21, she like loved Instagram. Like that was her jam. That's not my jam. Jam, my jam is chocolate and cake, okay. So, she was on there, and she would actually be like talking to my friends in the comments, and my friends would text me and they thought I was the one like doing the commenting. And I felt so bad, I didn't want to say that it wasn't me that was like giving the hearts and showing them all types of love, it wasn't me. It was really the social media manager. But, did it matter? No. The only thing that mattered was that they were getting love and hearts and comments and likes on their pictures. So sometimes we have to do things that is going to help our business grow. Using relevant hashtag, that one's pretty simple because I can now, if I really really really felt like it, I can copy and paste the hashtags and move forward. But that blogging thing, listen. No, I don't have time for that, okay. So I have someone that does the blogging, too. It's like Tomayia what do you do in your business? Not much, okay. (audience laughing) Yeah, I'm just the face of my business. I just have to have this thing like rolling because my kids like throw these like these dodge balls at me sometimes. It's like, did you think of this in advance or now all the sudden you want to dress up like for Halloween or something like. Did you not think of this before October 31st? So, like they throw things at me. So I have to be like prepared, like blogging, like oh my God did you blog my session. I saw you blog such and such's but you didn't blog mine. Well, my kid decided they wanted to go to a birthday party, that's why I didn't blog your session. Or, that's not my happy place. Okay, so get someone to blog for you. And then assistants. So I have been trying off camera flash like the last two weeks. I'm going to have to work out a little bit more. Because trying to carry the lights and set everything up, I was like oh no, uh huh. This is getting too hard. So I'm dragging equipment trying to go and then by the time I get there the light has changed. So now I have to redo these things like all over again. So I was thinking like, how awesome would it be if I had like an intern or someone helping me carry these lights around. Like, why didn't I think of this beforehand. Like why am I out of shape so much, from the chocolate and the cupcakes.