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Episode 97: How Film Supply Club Began
200 Plays4 years ago
Today's guest is serial entrepreneur, Braedon Flynn. Braedon has not only built successful photography businesses, but he's also the founder of Film Supply Club, a membership site for film shooters that provides deals on all sorts of photography resources from film to cameras and accessories.
During today's episode we explore how Braedon got started as an entrepreneur, things that made both his photography businesses and Film Supply Club successful, and a few of the differences in marketing two very different types of businesses. We covered quite a few things as well, from book recommendations to how he books high end clients.
For the show notes, go to https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-braedon-flynn-episode-97/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Braden Flynn and the Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
I think when people were seeing what I was putting out there, where it was like really cool people getting married with really stylish, non-typical wedding outfits and non-typical wedding venues at the time, this was like before ranch weddings were really popular, then that's the sort of people that were attracted to my work, right? Like attracts like to a big degree.
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones. Today's guest is serial entrepreneur, Braden Flynn. Braden has not only built successful photography businesses, but is also the founder of Film Supply Club, a membership site for film shooters that provides deals on all sorts of photography resources from film to cameras and accessories.
00:01:02
Speaker
During today's episode, we explore how Braden got started as an entrepreneur, things that had made both his photography businesses and film supply club successful, and a few of the differences in marketing to very different types of businesses. We cover quite a few things as well, from book recommendations to how he books high end clients.
00:01:21
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at DavianChrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode. And I want to hear from you. Let me know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Branchette Book Podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, head on over to the Davian Christa Facebook page and send us a message. You can also DM us on Instagram at DavianChrista.
Braden's Journey: From Real Estate to Photography
00:01:38
Speaker
Now onto the episode.
00:01:44
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the Brands That Book podcast. I'm here with photographer Braden Flynn, founder of Braden Photography and more recently Film Supply Club. And I was fortunate enough to be on Braden's podcast recently, The Photo Report. So definitely something that you should check out, but welcome Braden. Thanks so much, stoked to be here.
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to continue the conversation. Really enjoyed chatting with you a little bit about, I feel like everything from website design to marketing. So I am very interested in hearing about how you built your business because you built this outstanding wedding photography and photography business. But then you also have the film supply club, which I wish I knew about back when we were shooting. So excited to dive into both those business endeavors.
00:02:32
Speaker
and just talk about things that you've learned throughout the last couple of years from both businesses, especially since one is a service-based business and the other one is mostly round a product. So, excited to dive into that with you. Absolutely, yeah. I love talking all things business.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's why I enjoyed our conversation so much is obviously have a business mind on you. But for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, could you just tell us where you got started? I'm assuming that Braden Flynn or I'm sorry, Braden photography was the the first business. Correct. Yeah. So I was actually I went to school for business out in California, USC, and studied entrepreneurship there actually was in commercial real estate right out of school. And
00:03:18
Speaker
left that to be a youth pastor, which was a very lucrative choice at a small little church. But with the idea that I could always get back into this other thing if I wanted to, but it's like you're only young once and you can relate to kids more, like high school kids when you're closer to that age. And I just sort of took that as, I just felt called to be going there. So I did that. And while I was doing that, I was also shooting photos. I grew up around a lot of music. My dad was a
00:03:44
Speaker
drummer and just brought me up around tons of good music and going to concerts. And so I had friends and bands and I started shooting photos of friends and bands and everything that I was doing, I was just taking pictures of, I was really active snow. I was a big snowboarder, surfer, skater, all of those things and injured myself a lot. Like put myself in a coma, injured myself in fractured places of my body that shouldn't be fractured. And the, so I ended up having to slow down and not do that. So instead of.
00:04:14
Speaker
participating in a lot of these things, I started taking pictures of a lot of those things. And that's, that's sort of where the, the love of photography came around. But while I was doing the youth pastor thing, the head, like, I don't know, executive pastor was suggesting to do more of a bivocational thing to, because at a small one service little church, like, how are you going to be able to live and have a family and, and stay doing this versus have to transition. So I was doing that. And I think,
Mastering Photography: Education and Experience
00:04:44
Speaker
Going into my business mind is I am I have really high capacity of I've learned that I am not normal in a lot of ways and with that I am I say yes to just about everything right I used to and is like I also have the mentality hey if you want to do something just you need to tell everyone about it so it's like if anyone asked me to do anything yeah sure.
00:05:06
Speaker
and I would then figure it out on the way. My very first photo class, I mean, I was already shooting for magazines and I was self-taught up to a certain point, but after I got done with my main college, I actually went back through a photo school and took all of, I wanted to print in a dark room. I wanted to really understand the idea behind making a photo versus just taking a photo. It's really easy to take a lot of pictures and come away with a good one.
00:05:32
Speaker
but it's really a whole different ballgame when you approach something and you actually create or curate or you are coming up with the idea of what you're wanting to capture, you're manipulating the lighting, you are manipulating the subject, so you get what you want. And those are the things I wanted to shoot commercially and really understand all, like I had guessed around lighting, I mostly shot natural light, but I wanted to understand how to light, how to shoot everything that I would need to shoot. And yeah, so I don't know,
00:06:02
Speaker
Basically, that was a long way to say. While I was taking my very first class, shooting 4x5, which I'd never shot, printing, I got asked to shoot a high-rise building, and I charged them $2,500. I'd never shot something like that before. It took me probably shooting that building 15 different times at different times of the day, printing through
00:06:26
Speaker
Hundreds of sheets of paper, but you know it's like that's more of the way to say like I would just say yes And then I'll figure it out along the way
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, is that, I guess that focus on the approach and is that what drew you to film in particular? I always thought when we transitioned from digital to film, I thought I was a very mediocre digital photographer and a pretty good film photographer. And I think what film taught me was that you have to slow down with each frame. And there's not just this, you know, tendency, at least for me, it was, you know, hold the button and hope for one of them to turn out right. And you can't do that with film. So do you think that's a little bit of what attracted you to film?
00:07:03
Speaker
film initially oh my favorite favorite photographer was old school and you leave it's not I mean I still love her current work but like when she used to be on tour with the Rolling Stones and that sort of like Bob Gruen and all of these older rock photographers because that's something I was passionate about shooting myself and just the grain the grittiness the stuff that look like it was shot in you know the sixties like old photos of Bob Dylan
00:07:29
Speaker
Those are the things that really captivated me and that's what I was drawn to. So even today when people ask me, like, why do you shoot film or, you know, you got all this other, like there's amazing digital equipment today that you can manipulate to look like it's, you know, I've done tests where it's like, can you tell if this is film? I generally can, but then there's some times where it's like, that's
00:07:50
Speaker
pretty dang close. But there's other reasons behind why I still would prefer not to manipulate images because I hate sitting in front of the computer. But I think back to it is I was into film aesthetically because I really loved it. And when I first started shooting, that's all that there was. As digital came out and really as I got into weddings, which we can get into as well, then I had the first 10D, the Canon 10D, and was playing around with that. And it was pretty incredible what it could do.
00:08:20
Speaker
So then it become this, this nuance of a new thing that was like not as many people had.
Entrepreneurial Ventures: Film Supply Club
00:08:25
Speaker
And to be able to do this and work with lower light. I mean, I remember shooting 1600 ISO. It, you know, it was like the photo was bad, you know, where today you can shoot at like a thousand IS or a hundred thousand ISO. And it's incredible. Some of these cameras, that's a long answer to say, I started out as film film is why I'm back at film and why I originally shot film was because of the aesthetic.
00:08:49
Speaker
I want to jump into how you built your wedding business here in a second. You serve a very high-end, luxury, so to speak, clientele. I definitely want to dive into that. But when did Film Supply Club come along? Again, for people who aren't familiar, can you just give us an idea of what Film Supply Club is? The easiest way to explain it is it's how Costco works. You pay a small membership fee.
00:09:17
Speaker
that I made it like as small as I could where like if what I found over the years, no offense, all you photographers out there, because I'm one as well, is that photographers are not very good at math. And so that's, that's been the biggest hard part is be like, Oh, I'm paying money upfront to save like to not then realize how much money they're actually saving down the road. But I made what I did was I made it a small membership fee, and then pass on the savings. So as a member, then you get wholesale pricing on film. So I'm making the tiniest tiniest margin on the film outside of like, I'm having to purchase it
00:09:47
Speaker
warehouse it, fulfill it, I mean, you know, by the boxes, by the brand, all of that stuff is a cost. But I'm making like the tiniest margin on the film and then charging just a small membership fees ultimately to save a ton of money for when I first launched for my friends and for, you know, all of that. But yeah, it's been fun. We have something around 1000 members in the community. And, you know, I've got a YouTube channel that has a bigger subscription base. And yeah, just trying to serve the community and all that.
00:10:16
Speaker
That was what it is. Yeah. You've been churning out a ton of YouTube content. I was just telling you how I admire you for that because there's so much that goes into producing video and producing video well. And you had kind of alluded to the fact that you're able to take on all of these things, right? And I can tell that just we were talking setups before this and your setup sounds much more complex than my setup. Granted, your audio sounds great too.
00:10:41
Speaker
But as far as film supply club goes, what made you think even to start it? How did you get the idea and what made you think that it would be as successful as it is today? I didn't know it was going to be successful as it is today, but I would say that I'm a serial entrepreneur in the sense that I have a lot of ideas.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I remember I have, I don't know if anyone knows Wiley Valentine, they do stationary, really high-end stuff. They work a lot with like Lisa Borson, but they're friends of mine and neighbors and I would be stopped. And I also, it's where I get a lot of my printing and all the boxes printed. But when I would go, every time I'd stop by their office, I'd be like, so I've got another idea. What do you think of this? And they would just roll their eyes at me because I would just have all these ideas, but I wouldn't really start them. Right. Or, I mean, I had,
00:11:31
Speaker
Before the photo report, I had the artist report, and that was instead of a podcast, it was video interviews, which was a really silly thing to start doing it for my first time because I'd never worked with video. And then you've got, you know, instead of us right now, we're doing this via Skype, screen to screen from across the country. I would have to go and physically be with the person that I'm interviewing. It was a mess. But so that was one thing that I finally decided I need to just start.
00:11:58
Speaker
And so that's the background is I'm always coming up with ideas and partly this can we will probably get into this within the wedding world. But you know I would say for weddings at a certain point you're trading time for dollars and it's a gig and you are outside of having an associate studio or education type business or you're doing workshops which I also would say is a gig.
00:12:24
Speaker
then you are sort of capped at how much time you're willing to, like when you're single, that's great. When you're married, like me, with four kids, it's really, really difficult to be gone every weekend. So there's that balance of like, okay, if I wanted to grow, if I'm wanting to make more money, if in making more money in order to pay for just having four kids in Southern California, at a certain point, like, what do I do? And how do I, so I think there was almost if I
00:12:53
Speaker
If you're visual, which I'm guessing you are, if you're a photographer, you can picture a balloon being squished with all your might. And then it just sort of like, if you put it between your two hands and push it really fast, it's going to like squirt out in different directions. And I sort of feel like that was me for a long time is feeling this pressure of like, I need to figure something else out so that I can, I really enjoy doing what I do on the wedding side, but I need to have these other streams of revenue coming in.
00:13:23
Speaker
And trying to constantly figure out so it's I have described it as like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks and so. Always have these ideas but the idea for film supply club. That I was listening I I listen to tons and tons of podcasts and audio books I read I. For example I just had on a mutual friend Jamie Finley who her and also Katy Mary had recommended the book the science of getting rich.
00:13:50
Speaker
And so I've legitimately listened to this book in the last four days, seven times. So, so I listened to a lot of content and I tried to take it to heart. So I was listening to a book called The Automatic Customer. And in that book, it was talking, like he wrote another book before that I can't remember the name of, but he was talking about how to take a company that you can then position to sell.
00:14:17
Speaker
In the automatic customer, he goes, the one thing that I left out was that the biggest value you can add to a company is this idea of recurring revenue. To have something like how Netflix does, any sort of SaaS, software as a system, they are recurring revenue. It's like if you pay for Adobe, that is recurring revenue. Anything where you have this membership base, and so now you're just feeding and building this community and trying. There's a lot of things that come with retention and turnover, and they'll call that churn.
00:14:48
Speaker
and all those sort of things, but I heard that, and all of a sudden I had this light bulb go off my head because I've spoken at conferences like WPPI, I know, and I've shot film over the years, and I know the reps at these companies enough where I have their cell phone number, and so I called up one of these reps, and I said, I have this idea. And the idea, which I didn't necessarily communicate to him, when I called him, I was asking, hey, what do you think of this?
00:15:17
Speaker
But my idea was like, oh, what if I could get film as a store and I could then pass on all like, cause typically as a store, you're in, I didn't know what the margins were with film, which are really tiny, but typically like, let's say it's clothing. Cause I come out of the, I live in the area where all the surf industry, surf companies are based. And so I have a lot of friends in that industry and I just know it. And they used to work in retail. So the like for a shirt.
00:15:47
Speaker
A retail store might get the shirt for 10 bucks, just as a number, and then they're going to sell it for 20 to 25 bucks. There's that, you know, typically it's like a 50% markup. So what I was thinking was like, Oh, I'll be able to get film as a store. And then what if I charge a small membership fee to all my friends and then they are going to save a ton of money. If I can pass that, basically that savings onto them.
00:16:12
Speaker
I was not going to make any margin on the film. I was just going to sell it for exactly what I bought it for. And then an older gentleman that has mentored me over the years, he was like, ah, hold on. I don't think you understand the amount of work that is going to go into and then also the other expenses that are going to go into like, cause none of these film companies drop ship, meaning they, I can't get an order from you, Davey, and then call up Kodak and be like, Hey, got an order from Davey. Can you go ship it to him? It's like, no, no, no.
00:16:40
Speaker
we will only ship to the store so I have to purchase the inventory which was the most stressful thing as I would launch and was growing really fast because I had to guess how much I couldn't afford. On my credit card you know you have a month to pay something off so if I was buying something this month I had to sell it so I could pay off the credit card to then buy the next batch of film and not go into credit card debt because even if I was to have taken a loan.
00:17:10
Speaker
at the time at a like five percent interest rate i would have been losing money because my margin was less than the loan on the film if that makes sense so the amount of stress that came from buying just the right amount of inventory guessing how much people are gonna buy having no idea. What that was going to be and so i would purchase films are this is a long long sorry but i would purchase the film.
00:17:33
Speaker
And it's back in Illinois so it would take sometimes about you know five to seven days to get after I'd make the order I'd get the film so I'd purchase it by the time I would get the delivery it was already sold out and so it was this constant like juggling of you know I was packing and shipping boxes of film on an ironing board then it moved to a tool bench and you know those all of those sort of things so I don't even remember what the original question was but that's that's sort of like how it started why it started and
00:18:01
Speaker
And you can ask more questions into that. Yeah, no, that was fascinating to listen to. How did you start getting customers for, I mean, to a certain extent too, to make this business model work, right? And because you don't charge a massive membership fee, you have to scale it up for it to be ultimately worth your time, right? So how did you start marketing this business?
Branding and Community Building
00:18:24
Speaker
Was it just a matter of, you know, you had put it out there to your friends and then word of mouth, but what did that look like?
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah something if you listen to anyone talking or if you read any books in regards to the startup space they will say like as a company or as a founder what is your unfair advantage. And the unfair advantage that I had it's not even that it's unfair it's just that.
00:18:49
Speaker
if some other person who was not a wedding photographer and who was not a photographer just had this idea, what if I started this company that sold film to photographers and they didn't have any friends that were photographers, like the ability for success in that outside of like having just ridiculously low prices, which is impossible to do with the margins that we get filmed for. I do not get that 50% markup that it is tiny. It's really slim.
00:19:17
Speaker
So my unfair advantage for, was that I, I'm not like, I wouldn't consider myself an influencer, but I'm in the upper echelon of the wedding world where I'm friends with all of the, like, I would say most all of the top, top names in the wedding industry. They're my friends, like Jose Villa, K.T. Merritt, you know, it's like Tech Potosha, Eric Kelly, they're my good friends.
00:19:42
Speaker
Well i don't know about good but i really like them and i think they like me and we're you know i can't i'm not level like we're friendly. And so when i had this idea i was able to go to them bag hey i would you know obviously i'm setting you up for free and i just i did that with like everybody that i knew. The other way that was really successful launch was that i sped up the process i knew wppi was coming in this was still when people are going to wppi. And i
00:20:13
Speaker
launched, like the site went live just before I drove out to Vegas. And while I was there, I stationed up at the Richard Photo Lab booth and I filmed, they were doing interviews at their booth and I filmed all of the interviews that were happening for at the time, yeah, for the photo report. Those are all up on the site.
00:20:34
Speaker
But that's sort of, I, one, I was getting content for that, but two, it sort of just got me like, this is where all the film shooters are. And this is where I was going to run into the people that I knew and tell them about it. And that was really how I initially spread the word. I would say the other thing that happened was I was really, I think branding is a really big deal. I think you and Christo would argue that that is the case as well. But for this, so I.
00:21:00
Speaker
had a logo and I designed basically I've got I got boxes printed with the logo on it I had tape designed with the logo on it and I had wrapping paper designed with the logo on it and as the first year probably I was legitimately hand wrapping every film order that went out like a present like I was wrapping it with wrapping paper I was writing a handwritten note to every single order that was going out and really like outside of like
00:21:28
Speaker
how you were saying when we opened up that this is a product business where the wedding photography is a service business, I have completely approached this as a service business where for me, even like within my wedding work, this company is about the community. This is about like all I've, if people ask me, what do I do now? I basically say I am supporting freelance entrepreneurs to do their thing well. And so that is,
00:21:55
Speaker
Film Supply Club is a tool in that. The Photo Report is a tool in that. Anything, I don't know, the YouTube channel is definitely a tool in that. So it's all these different components where I'm trying to serve this community of people in a way where they feel really taken care of and really, like, yeah, cared for. And I think in the Instagram photography world, when people were getting boxes of film, almost every day there was photos of people on Instagram stories of getting their packages. And basically the unboxing of this, like,
00:22:24
Speaker
handwritten note like they were getting these little presents in the mail and it was filmed as exciting and so that really helps spread the word as well.
00:22:31
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I can see that being the case. I mean, even just getting film in the ugly cardboard box, it's satisfying, right? Taking it out and getting it organized, right? So if it's now Instagramable, I got to imagine that people are sharing it left and right. This might be a more difficult question to answer, but having experience in at least two different businesses here, and it sounds like maybe you've had other projects as well, being a serial entrepreneur,
00:22:55
Speaker
If you had to reduce your success as a wedding photographer and founder of film supply club to one or two things, what would you say those are? Yeah, I mean, it is definitely sort of difficult to deduce that, but I would say with a fair amount of confidence that a lot of it has come down to serving people.
00:23:18
Speaker
And the way that I am in my photography business is the same way that I'm treating my customers within the members with films. I really care for them and I care for serve them and serve their community or serve them as a community and as people. Yeah. And I actually like think that people feel taken care of, members feel
00:23:44
Speaker
taken care of and known and it's not just like yeah it's not just like coming to get us shot like buying a thing they're actually like a part of something.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah. And there is, I think even for a product based business and buying film, there is like a trust factor too. You know, you want to make sure you're getting your film from a reputable place. It's nice to know that there is a someone behind the business, right? And so I have to imagine that helps. Film also is a, is, I don't know if it's fair to say that it's more technical than digital, but I would say that there's probably not as much education out there. That's as easily as accessible as there is for digital photography.
00:24:23
Speaker
So I think not only are you fulfilling a need in actually supplying people with film, but at the same time, you're doing things like putting content out on your YouTube channel as well. And so have you seen YouTube be an effective marketing tool for Film Supply Club? I really have. It has been, so I just launched the YouTube channel less than a year ago. And I would say the growth of that channel has
00:24:52
Speaker
we happen fairly quickly and I've been really it's been interesting trying to figure out what do we do on the YouTube channel and trying to create content coming out with a video every single week we launched by going out to New York and filming with a bunch of different photographers where I was
00:25:11
Speaker
One, I'm trying to take myself out of the equation as much as possible, but I'm the lowest hanging fruit, so I end up staying in the face of things. But I don't want this brand to be about me. I want it to be about the community and other people within the community. So a lot of the first handful of videos was featuring other photographers. Sometimes I would be in the video.
00:25:34
Speaker
But it was really highlighting these other people and how they do what they do and how they shoot what they shoot. Most everything on the channel is not wedding related and that's sort of intentional because I feel like a lot of people in the wedding space who shoot film know about Film Supply Club. So a lot of the intention behind the YouTube channel has been reaching more of the non-wedding market. I'll call them the cool kids who shoot film.
00:25:59
Speaker
And I've had to have this conversation to explain why I'm spending so much time on YouTube with my wife, with my father-in-law, because essentially you're spending a ton of time, and I'm paying money for you, because sometimes I'm paying a videographer, sometimes I'm paying an editor, sometimes I'm paying to go to New York for a week, buying flights for myself, buying flights for a videographer, buying flights for my producer. I've spent a lot of money on YouTube, and you go, okay, well,
00:26:29
Speaker
What's the ROI on that? You know, your return on investment. And the thing that I keep coming back to is I am using YouTube as a way to build brand authority, to build awareness. And there was a third one that I can't think of off the top of my head, but it's really this and community was the other one. And a lot of that too, because so by bringing other people on the show that are way, way, way, way more followed than me will have, you know, like,
00:26:57
Speaker
close to a million subscribers on either YouTube or Instagram, and being able to have them on the channel and as a peer, like we're friends, and also to have them on there, it's like, oh, wow, for that sort of an audience, of their audience, that one, it brings awareness to Film Supply Club, and then also brings that authority, like, oh, we're on the same page. Or at least like this person thinks Film Supply Club is cool, so maybe I should too, on that level.
00:27:25
Speaker
And then on the other side is education. One of the things that I've been pleasantly surprised, I don't know if it's surprised, but it's been affirming is the better word, is that I've been getting comments on there is that there's a lot of YouTube channels out there that are like film has become popular, especially in the cool kids world. And there's like the street photography in that sense. But I mean, even in the wedding world, it's like there's a lot more photographers shooting film than there used to be. Well,
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, after digital came around. Yeah, I know what you're saying. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are doing ultimately, like they have channels that talk about shooting film. But some of the comments have been getting is that there's a lot of people doing that, but not a lot of people that have as much not to say like I have this abundance of knowledge, but like, I sort of know what I'm doing. And you know, I've gone to school for it. I've been shooting film for probably 15 years. And I and I would say that I do know
00:28:22
Speaker
a few things and so I'm doing a little bit more education around that which that's the part that I've been surprised by and that's again like affirmed by is that people are asking for more I a be more technical I teach us ultimately.
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure. This is different though, I assume, than how you built your photography business. So I'd like to jump back there a little bit. I'm assuming that YouTube wasn't part of the marketing strategy or the brand awareness strategy for the photography business.
High-End Wedding Photography
00:28:52
Speaker
But you've built a lot of brand authority over for your photography business. You shoot very high-end weddings. You have an editorial side of your business. What did it look like to build that side of the business? And how did you get into
00:29:06
Speaker
that higher end market. Yeah, it a lot of it happened over time. It doesn't happen overnight. And I think that was ultimately my goal. And I wasn't even really trying to like this starting from the beginning, I wasn't trying to be a wedding photographer. Yeah, it sounded like you were. Yeah, and you were more into, you know, documenting bands and the snowboarding scene and stuff like that. So what did that transition even look like?
00:29:32
Speaker
Correct, yeah, so coming out of that world, and I would say 13-ish years ago, if you were in the commercial space and you said you were shooting weddings, they looked at you like, oh, that's cute. Or they say those that can't do, teach, and things like that. But it was sort of, it still sort of has a frowned upon look, but now I would say the caliber of talent in the wedding world is huge. So I was shooting that sort of stuff, and the first couple weddings that I photographed,
00:30:01
Speaker
were people coming out of, I was shooting editorial or I was shooting for clothing companies, friends that started working in that world. And they were getting married and they wanted something shot like how I was shooting this other stuff. They didn't want it quite as traditional. I knew before I started shooting weddings that I would really like shooting weddings. I just was avoiding them. And so when I photographed the first, I think the second wedding that I ever photographed got featured and
00:30:27
Speaker
almost every blog that was in existence at the time, as well as like it was either Vogue or Elle magazine featured it so online. And at that stage, then I started getting a lot of inquiries, but what was really, so this is back to establishing brand is because I wasn't desperate and because I wasn't really trying to do this, I was able to be really picky and I only was taking on jobs that I wanted to take on. And it was,
00:30:57
Speaker
wasn't as much like I was saying, I would, I would meet with people and be like, ah, sorry, you don't make the cut. Nope. But it was, I was like thinking through all of that stuff of partly like it's exciting to build a business and when you get inquiries, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll take them. I'll take them. But then at the same time, thinking about it in the way where like, what is it that I want to be doing? What are the things that are life giving? What are the things that are life sucking? So because the first few weddings that I shot, because I had this editorial site that had
00:31:27
Speaker
fashion that had music and bands. I think when people were seeing what I was putting out there, where it was like really cool people getting married with really stylish, non-typical wedding outfits and non-typical wedding venues at the time, this was like before ranch weddings were really popular, then that's the sort of people that were attracted to my work, right? Like, like attracts like to, to a big degree.
00:31:55
Speaker
And that was really establishing, you know, I'm sure you say this to people when you're talking about branding. It's like, be really, really conscious about the type of work that you put up on any platform because that is the type of work that you're going to attract back.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's like the common thread that I hear from people who break into higher end markets is, you know, even if they're not picky about who they work with, especially in the beginning, even if there's a lot of hustle there, they're very, very careful about curating their work and what they share, you know, so they're not sharing necessarily everything that they shoot. Or, you know, hearing from a few people like you who were able to be picky
00:32:34
Speaker
just in terms of what they shot to begin with, there's still an element of being very intentional with the work that you actually share, hoping that it leads to more of that work or to a specific place. I'm sort of laughing at myself because I'm thinking, I was picky, but at the same time, I went from that first year I shot, I think maybe like six weddings to the next year, I shot 65 weddings.
00:33:04
Speaker
That's amazing. That's unreal. I mean, I think Kristen and I are peak was somewhere in the ballpark of 45 weddings. And after that year, we were like, never, never can we do that again. So that's amazing being able to shoot. I mean, obviously, that includes double header weekends, of course. So
00:33:25
Speaker
Yeah, I had one, four wedding weekend that was Labor Day where, and I had flights in between two of them. So this is actually a little lesson learned during that year. So I had one weekend that had three weddings in it, you know, shooting one wedding is pretty exhausting. Shooting double headers, really exhausting. Triple headers, triply exhausting. And with that on the third day, I should have been worked, but I was more energized on the third day.
00:33:55
Speaker
than I was on the either two, on either of the other two. And that was such a big tell for me because it showed me what gives me energy and what gets me excited and what brings me life is the people, the venue, the type of venue, the type of crowd, the style, those things matter a lot to me. And because that third wedding was, the groom was a hairdresser from Paris, the bride was in the fashion industry in LA, all of their friends were stylish, it was at this venue that was so cool, I think it was
00:34:25
Speaker
Twin Peaks it was it's no longer a venue because I had noise ordinances but it was all of all of the things hit it off, you know, hit it off the tee and that was just something that I really like notice that and I really applied that to a lot of the rest of my work because I realized okay, if I'm going to continue to do this for a long time, I need to do the things that bring me life versus suck the life out of me.
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's a good segue to start talking about. I'd just love to hear your perspective on running two businesses. And for people out there who are listening, who are also serial entrepreneurs in the sense that they have a lot of different ideas or they want to start a lot of different projects, do you have any tips or lessons learned from building two businesses?
Managing Multiple Businesses and Closing Remarks
00:35:11
Speaker
I know personally running two businesses, just the amount of intentionality that you have to have in your day in order to create content and just
00:35:20
Speaker
I mean, well, run the business, right? It can be a lot. Do you have any advice for people like that? Yeah, absolutely. I have learned a lot. I have nose divin, dovin. I've had a nose dive a lot of times. So when I was doing photography at a pretty high volume, and we had our first kid back then, and I have four now, but that was a lot of things to be, a lot of events to be shooting and managing. And then on top of that, I was doing other things.
00:35:49
Speaker
And so I brought on an office manager and then had that same office manager for probably five to six years that we had to learn how to delegate was the, was the big thing. And then even more so, so, and then even more so when she left, because she started having babies and I had to hire somebody else, I had to really break down like, what are all of the things that I do and everything that I do. And what are the things sort of like back on that triple header weekend?
00:36:16
Speaker
What are the things that bring me life or what is more so as a business perspective? What are the things that I am good at and should be doing? And what are the things, even if I can do them, what are the things that I'm not as strong at? They don't energize me that I need to hand off, that are not essential to the business. Part of the, you know, and I had to break down everything and look at what am I good at and figure out ultimately what are my strengths? And a lot of that has to do with connecting. A lot of that has to do with
00:36:46
Speaker
client meetings, meeting with people, meeting with customers, obviously shooting the photos, but almost everything else, I had to learn how to delegate. And that's the only, only way to ever be able to scale and not completely implode or crash and burn. Cause I had, I got to that point of just doing, I said it earlier, I have really, really high capacity, but do that for a long enough time running in sixth gear, you know, the engine's going to burn out.
00:37:16
Speaker
and I was starting to redline for a while. But those are the biggest lesson that I would say is the only way to grow is to figure out how you can multiply yourself. And the only way to multiply yourself is to figure out what are the few things that you need to be spending your time doing, and then how do you delegate the rest. There's people that edit photos. That's how much time do you spend in front of the computer that you could hand off and be editing photos.
00:37:41
Speaker
There's people that design albums. You can hand that off. And if you're not selling albums, that's such an easy thing to make so much money is how to build an album portion of your business. You don't have to know how to do the albums. There's companies that do the design for you and sell them for you. There's so many easy things that you can be delegating. And I think there's an element of pride to a degree when you're not
00:38:07
Speaker
able to delegate because you feel as a perfectionist, as a creative artist, it was really, really difficult for me to let someone else even write emails for me. It's so hard. But that is the biggest lesson that I learned is out of necessity, having to do it.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I think that's really solid advice. And I mean, about the album design and the photo editing, we've had people on the podcast. So if you're listening, you can check out some of those episodes, Align Album Design's been on. So check that out. But I mean, as far as delegating goes, I mean, again, solid advice. I would say that for the Davey and Krista side of the business, it took me way longer than it should to learn how to give up control of certain things.
00:38:55
Speaker
And then, you know, taking kind of what I learned from there and realizing after having done it, like, oh, wow, this is incredible. And I'm able to get now so much more meaningful stuff done because I've done that. And we've been able to apply that to the newer business, Till Agency, and it's just grown so much more quickly because we've gone in with that mindset. Instead of, you know, for Dave and Chris, it took us 70 years to learn how to delegate. So it really is such a, I think, powerful skill to learn.
00:39:24
Speaker
There's the other part of it too is you have to think about it though I think the hardest. Barrier to that is thinking about paying somebody so now you're it's like. That means I'm making less money early I've got to pay somebody to do this but the. The trade off for the opportunity cost or whatever you want to look at it is that it then frees you up to be able to do X. It frees you up to hopefully know the flip side is you need to be intentional with your time and not just like pay somebody else to do it then go kick back and watch Netflix. The
00:39:54
Speaker
reason you're doing it is so that you can grow in other ways. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Braden, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Can you tell people where they can find more information about film supply club and your other resources from the photo report to your photography website? Yeah, absolutely. It was a pleasure being on here. Love what you do and how you're doing it. So keep it up. But for
00:40:20
Speaker
The photo report is the podcast. You can go to the photo report.com or look it up on any podcast platform out there. And yeah, I've been putting out a lot of content specifically around this COVID time that is just encouraging. I'm trying to, the thing that I've been talking about the most is finding the silver linings and that describing this time is like we've been given the gift of time. And so how do you use that time well?
00:40:47
Speaker
And that is what I've been talking about a ton on the podcast. So go there. Then there's Film Supply Club, which is the website is filmsupply.club. But on YouTube, you can just find it searching Film Supply Club. Would love for you to check that out if you check out anything just because I've been putting so much time and energy into that. And let's say I'm pretty proud of it. I like how this stuff's coming out.
00:41:13
Speaker
And yeah, on Instagram, it's either at the photo report or at Film Supply Club. And then my photography stuff, you can go to Braden Photography or Braden Flynn at Braden Flynn on the gram.
00:41:27
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I said this earlier, but Braden puts out a lot of really great content. So be sure to check that out, especially the YouTube channel and what he's been doing over there. And the podcast as well has had some really, really great people on it. So be sure to give that a listen too. So thanks again, Braden. Thank you.
00:41:51
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.