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Adding a photobooth to your business and making a whole lot more money - Brandon Wong
129 Plays4 years ago
Calling all wedding photographers that want to make more money.
Brandon Wong started his wedding photography business with his now wife Katrina when they were in college. They were already leaders in the industry at age 18 and I reached out to them to help me with my reception lighting. This was ten years ago.
They wanted to scale so they created a photobooth company called Photobooth Supply Co. and now have 20 employees. His hunger for knowledge has led him to great success.
He's proud to say that they didn't lay off anyone during the pandemic. Their team is everything!
A photobooth is the perfect synergy to your wedding photography business.
Things that made me say "WOW" in this episode.
- He teaches us how to collect 200 emails at every wedding. How do we get the guests to know our name after the wedding?
- Photographers need an exit plan out of our businesses.
- We need a marketing plan in our businesses.
https://photoboothsupplyco.com/ are proud sponsors of this podcast
Get yours today
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Transcript
Beginnings and Business Expansion
00:00:00
Speaker
Today in this episode, I chat with Brandon Wong. I've known him for over a decade. Brandon started his career as a wedding photographer with his now-wife Katrina at the age of only 19. By 22, they saw a need to scale their business in a profitable manner, so they implemented a photo booth. Now they co-own Photo Boost Supply Co., which provides hundreds of photographers a turnkey photo booth so they can work less while making more money. This is one of my favorite episodes. Enjoy!
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome to Get a Heck Yes with Carissa Wu. I'm your host, Carissa, and I've been a Los Angeles wedding photographer for over a decade. I've traveled the world, built my team, and seen it all. I now coach wedding photographers hit 10K a month and build a thriving business. In this podcast, we are going to deep dive into how top wedding creatives get that heck yes from their dream clients. We are not holding back on the struggles of the business and how to push through the noise. Some healthy hustle, mindset shifts, up-leveling your money story,
00:00:59
Speaker
Time hacks because I'm a mom of two, a little bit of woo-woo, and most importantly, self-love and confidence are just a few of the many things we'll talk about. I want to give you a genuine thank you for following along my journey. I hope to inspire you every Woo Wednesday so that you say heck yes to listening to this podcast. See you guys soon!
Meeting and Mentorship
00:01:22
Speaker
Hey guys, we are here with my old friend Brandon Wong from Brandon Wong Photography. I met him years ago when I started my wedding photography business over a decade ago and I actually reached out to him and his now wife Katrina about how to help me with lighting. So I actually sat down with them doing a one-on-one course.
00:01:40
Speaker
And they helped me so much with my lighting techniques. And now a little bit years later, he started a photo booth company and he's been doing that for a long time and he's going to share all about it. But this is like state of the art photo booth. I have one and it's called a Sasa booth and people have seen it and they rave about it. Super easy to use. But yeah, what's up, Brandon? How are you doing? Hey, Chris. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
00:02:06
Speaker
What have you been up
Balancing Life and Business
00:02:07
Speaker
to? What's going on in your life? Yeah, so trying to survive COVID has been the biggest thing. And obviously, depending on what time you're listening to this, Delta variant is raging. So we're trying to handle that and trying to balance that with work, also have a baby on the way too. So lots of things kind of in the balance here. But it's been fun, a lot of fun.
00:02:31
Speaker
Okay, I'm just going to back it up because you just said, baby, tell me a little bit about how you met your wife, Katrina, because you have been running this amazing photography business, not photobooth business for since you guys were in college, like kids, and you guys been through it all. So how did you guys meet? And what is it like have running a business with your now wife for so long?
Business Challenges and Innovations
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, so we actually met when we were 18 years old in college. And for some reason, we decided, hey, let's start a wedding photography business. And that was blossoming and did really well. And within just a few years, we were shooting international weddings all across the world, which is super fun, especially as a young couple, a really romantic lifestyle and career. But at a certain point, we kind of matured. I think we were early 20s at this point and decided, hey, we need to grow our business.
00:03:21
Speaker
And we tried actually hiring associate photographers. Well, this was really difficult. And Carissa, as you know, there's so many things that can go wrong at a wedding. What if the photographer loses the wedding rings? What if they don't show up on time they're hungover? What if they miss the first kiss? What if they lose the memory cards and
00:03:40
Speaker
If any of those things happen, your pristine five star wards on wedding wire and you go down the drain, your business could be in jeopardy. A couple could sue you. It just wasn't worth the liability to have an associate photographer make you what? An extra thousand dollars, fifteen hundred dollars. So I started thinking, how do we still make the same amount of money? But without the liability, without the work, without the training, without needing someone with ten thousand dollars with the camera gear and relying on that one individual.
00:04:10
Speaker
Well, we started seeing photobooths kind of popping up in demand everywhere.
Designing the Ideal Product
00:04:15
Speaker
All of our clients started asking us for it. So we bought a photobooth, but it was this giant clunky machine. And we said, you know, there has to be a better way. There has to be a way you can make this more compact and sleek and beautiful and take awesome pictures.
00:04:32
Speaker
And then we did that, we made our own photo booth, and then we formed Photo Booth Supply Co. So yeah, we don't rent photo booths anymore, but we actually sell them to photographers like yourself, and you actually own one of our assaults of photo booths. And we help photographers, especially make more money, hopefully work less, so they can focus on what matters most, like your family, or for me, and since my upcoming daughter, that's gonna be coming in November.
00:04:56
Speaker
That's what we're passionate about, Karissa. Yeah, we make photo booths. We really want to empower people in the event industry, take more control of their lives, scale their business easier, and really work less and make more. Okay. This is not even a question about your photo booth, but I'm actually genuinely curious. How did you even start wedding photography with Katrina? Did you always know how to do photography? And then she happened to know how, and then you just kind of collabed and then fell in love?
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah, it was a lot of fake it till you make it. Okay. So I dabbled in photography. I had a point and shoot camera in high school and I wanted to learn and I was thirsty for knowledge. So I was really, I had an affinity for the footer journalistic side of my photography. So in college, I joined the college newspaper.
00:05:45
Speaker
I became a staff photographer. I slowly became the photo editor there.
Building a Portfolio from Scratch
00:05:49
Speaker
I reached out to as many photographers as I knew and begged them to allow them to second shoot, second shot. I called all of my friends that were couples or my good looking friends like, hey, can I take pictures of you guys? Can you guys pretend to be a couple? And then from there, I kind of made a fake portfolio.
00:06:09
Speaker
Back then i forgot what the website was called and i started putting that on craigslist and it's free post it's like hey i'll shoot your wedding for a thousand dollars right or five hundred bucks or whatever and kid you not we started getting bookings and back then it wasn't too difficult because there's a lot of photographers out there that would just got really cheesy pictures.
00:06:30
Speaker
It was terrible, like the coffee out there, like the glow, the whitewash background, the really like fake posing. And then when you inject photojournalism into it and have like just couples doing real stuff and being honest with each other and having, you know, natural poses, it just stood out. Obviously, that's a lot more saturated now in the market. But back then, it was pretty easy to
00:06:56
Speaker
really stand out between the crowds. So that's kind of how we got started back then. And then we got really lucky. They had some clients that were really big budget and they ended up booking us and kind of from there, we kind of stayed in that higher
Strategies for Standing Out
00:07:11
Speaker
end range of clients being like the $5,000 to $10,000 range from there.
00:07:16
Speaker
So there's a lot, I mean, you know, then they could take go make it is pretty controversial and really polarizing topic. But if you really put your heart and soul into it, I was learning every single day taking workshops, learning from other photographers,
00:07:32
Speaker
And it paid off in the end. So yeah, that's how we got started. That's crazy. I actually have a very similar story. I started from Craigslist and just asking my good looking friends to shoot. They're probably not together anymore. But yeah, that's so weird. And then I was just talking to my little cousin and I was telling her it is a lot of liability with my associates.
00:07:56
Speaker
you know, she runs a volleyball clinic and she has her coaches go out and she has 20 coaches under her. But for me, it's like, if I'm on the beach and then my, you know, associate photographer is late, then who gets in trouble? I do, you know, and I don't pick up my phone or I don't have my phone on me. I'm playing with my kids. So, yeah, that's kind of why I'm going into the coaching business because less liability because it is the biggest day of someone's life.
00:08:24
Speaker
Exactly. But with that said, I wanted to ask you my favorite question of this episode of my podcast is, what is your woo factor? Like, what is your photo booth supply salsa factor? Like, why does your photo booth stand out?
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think when you originally asked this in your questionnaire, I was like, what's your woo factor? What makes you stand out individually? And it took a good time to reflect on that question because it is a great one. And it kind of goes back to my earlier answer to how we got started wedding photography was this insatiable hunger for knowledge and how I was just so fascinated when we bought that original photo booth that was so ugly and clunky and took bad pictures.
00:09:11
Speaker
I really want to understand, OK, how do I make this on my own? I started looking into engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial design as a photographer to your making your website. So you have to kind of understand graphic design to an HTML. And then when we started growing Photo Boost Supply Co and we started joining going into software, we had to learn how to OK, what's agile methodology? What is the difference between like HTML5 and React and Swift C plus C sharp and blah, blah, blah, blah. So
00:09:41
Speaker
If it wasn't for me being curious and really wanting to know how everything works, I wouldn't have been as successful of an entrepreneur that I am today because that curiosity just drives so much more opportunity for personal growth, which ultimately will lead into business growth as well. So that's, I guess, my woo factor there, my Wong factor.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, you want to move on production. How did you become so curious? Were you always a curious child? Is it Katrina? That's the curious one. Like, are you guys just the curious couple that's always so driven that has this big picture? Like, how does your teamwork as a husband and wife like tell me everything?
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, that question is such a great one. How do you instill curiosity? Because as me and Katrina are about to have our first child, we're asking ourselves the same question. We want to provide our kid with a better life. I come from parents that are immigrants that have the same mentality.
00:10:44
Speaker
That's second in importance to me. The first thing for me is I want to how do I create curiosity and how to instill an environment that really nurtures that. And I don't know the answer. I really don't. I'm just fascinated by everything. And I was telling Katrina the other day, if I was like, if someone were to look at my YouTube search list,
00:11:08
Speaker
They'd be like, what the heck has this got into? I have, okay, number one, I have Eternals Marvel trailer living in Oahu,
Fostering Curiosity and Learning
00:11:18
Speaker
vintage Broncos, a Sonos arc installation. It's like a Kenji cooking show. It's just like everything that I...
00:11:30
Speaker
everything I find I want to like learn the inner workings of it. And I think maybe it's because I'm not that smart. And I like people people explain to me things the first time. What I don't understand about and I need to understand I need to dive into Wikipedia, I need to YouTube it I need to read a book upon it. But yeah, how do you instill curiosity? I don't know. But
00:11:52
Speaker
if there's any sort of advice I can give somebody is if you're going to dive into something, research and learn as much as possible within the best way that you can learn. I'm a visual learner, so YouTube is great for me. But just dive into it. I know so many people say, I want to get into photography. And I'm like, Oh, well, what have you done so far?
00:12:11
Speaker
I was like, hmm, you know, I just like, you know, I've taken pictures on my iPhone. I'm like, you have the world available to you, man. Like, yeah, on YouTube, go to creative live, go to Skillshare, like buy a class, you know, talk to Carissa, sign up for her course. Like there's so many resources available. And I guarantee you, if you if you don't find that spark initially,
00:12:35
Speaker
Change the way you learn. Maybe it's not YouTube. Maybe it's a podcast, right? Maybe it's not a podcast. Maybe it's a book. Maybe it's not a book. Maybe it's literally a one-on-one mentor. You need that attention. I have ADD. I cannot sit down and read a book all day. It's really hard for me. I can do it and I still enjoy reading, but it's not the easiest way for me to digest information. So try to find the best way to digest information. And then from there, just again, go all in.
00:13:03
Speaker
Wow. That was a great answer. Great way to get your natural woo factor in you. Totally. That was a really good answer and a little glimpse of Brandon's world, like your mind is crazy. It's interesting, like when I used to talk to wedding photographers in the industry, when I first started, they're just like, oh, this Brandon Wong guy, he's so young. And he's like 19 years old. And he's just like this wealth of knowledge. And they really
00:13:29
Speaker
looked up to you, and now you're not 19 years old, and you're going to have a baby, you're married, and look how far you've come because your curiosity has taken you to so many different places. But I wanted to ask you, what is your biggest accomplishment in business? I would have to say, and this might be due to recency bias, is not laying off a single employee during COVID.
00:13:53
Speaker
Wow. We have over, oh, geez, I don't remember. We had over 20 team members at the time when COVID hit. And I remember the day where everything went to crap. And I was like, we can only control what we can control. We can't control external things, right? All this stuff happening in the world right now, locking down, shutting down events, weddings being rescheduled. And we are a company that is contingent
00:14:22
Speaker
Our success is relying on events happening, right? Just like wedding photography as well. We're a little luckier as in we, we don't just have one location because we have photo booths all around the world, but still it heavily affected us. We have a lot of people on payroll. Um, but I knew at that point, it's like the people.
00:14:42
Speaker
are what matters, that people make this business, right? And if it wasn't for my awesome team, we would not be where we are today. And we would not even get where we want to go in the future. So I made a huge point like even if we lose money, we're going to try as much as possible to keep and retain our awesome team. And we did just that.
00:15:03
Speaker
Wow. We kept all of our amazing team members throughout COVID and it's paying off well. 2021 was an awesome year for us. Lots of bonuses all around to the team. Wow. Lots of huge growth. Grew our team member base by 50% this year. Wow.
00:15:21
Speaker
And it's been great, but it wouldn't have happened if I let go of my best team members or any team members. They're all great last year during COVID. So that's something that I'm really proud of. Like, as I kind of grow as a creative and an entrepreneur, and as your business flourishes, we know whether you're Chris or people listening to this, you're going to start to realize that you need an awesome team and they are everything, right? The company is that's it. It's just your team.
00:15:50
Speaker
right? And you need to do everything possible to keep that. And it's kind of like right now, you're going out to eat at your restaurants that you wanted to and your favorite restaurants out there. You can see the ones that are kind of trying to survive and like barely keeping staff. You know, they're like, Oh, we can only see half the tables here because like half our team. Yeah, these are the restaurants that the first sign of COVID have, they laid everybody off in the tree.
00:16:14
Speaker
The restaurants that are flourishing right now have a lot of people coming back, have happy team members. Those are the restaurants that decide to keep everybody during the pandemic and treat them well. Wow, that gave me two. I love that. You can see it in your daily life. Companies that treat their team well and companies that retain them throughout the pandemic and obviously companies that didn't. They didn't treat their team members well.
00:16:40
Speaker
You can see in the restaurant you go to, you can see it in the venues you go to today, you can see it in the event industry all around. So team is everything. Yay, I want to give you a round of applause. That was amazing. So the team members are full-time?
Effective Advertising Techniques
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, cool. So what have you done in the past to advertise? I know me and you connected at Evolve workshops in Palm Springs. So what is your biggest form of advertisement or is it all just word of mouth?
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, we spend a lot on Facebook ads. Oh, nice. Yes. So Facebook and Google are kind of the biggest things out there for us. We can do that because we're an international audience and we're trying to scale as in like grow our business very quickly. And a really easy way to do that is Facebook ads. You make an ad and then you just say, hey, Facebook, I want to spend $100 a month.
00:17:34
Speaker
a month, $10,000 a month, $100,000 a month, easy way to scale there. But if you're listening to this and you're starting off as a wedding photographer, I definitely never did Facebook apps when I was a wedding photographer. Not back in the day. However, we were pulling in like 100
00:17:52
Speaker
$150,000, $130,000 a year just by word of mouth and Yelp. The best thing I could have done back then, and I don't know if this is the strategy now, was just I asked every single client to leave me a five-star review or a good review of those five stars.
00:18:09
Speaker
Back then, everyone was searching for vendors on Yelp and that was our main marketing strategy. I probably could have implemented Facebook ads back in the day. It probably would have been really cheap because it's a lot more expensive now. But I wouldn't just go and drop money on Facebook ads if I were starting wedding photography business from scratch.
00:18:29
Speaker
Um, at the level that we're at, like we spend, if I told you how much we spend, you guys, you guys employ your minds, but we don't recommend how much we spend right now on Facebook. Well, as long as you're making a lot more. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Cool. So what are we going to talk about today? What is our hot topic?
00:18:47
Speaker
Oh, well, the big thing for me is I'm really passionate about helping photographers grow their businesses. Yes. It's my community. It's where I cut my teeth in. This is my industry. And of course, I think the best way to do it is really look at your business and see how you can scale, right? We talked about the Facebook ads and how you can just like hit a number and just like and start growing immediately with just like adding more and more zeros to it.
00:19:15
Speaker
Kind of the same with wearing photography, like I tried a lot of different ways to try to scale. One of the first things I did was do album sales. So I had clients come over to our house, or if you have a studio, that's fine too, but we were bootstrapping it back in the day, like come over to our house, our house, like this nice studio. We had like frames on the wall and stuff like that and example albums. So we had them come over and we did a little album pitch and then we sold an album.
00:19:44
Speaker
That was great. And we increased our average order value by like 30 to 40%. People were buying like $5,000 albums from us. Wow. That'll be kind of the first step I recommend is like try to incorporate upsells to increase the average order value per client. That doesn't scale too much though. That's just increasing how much money you get paid per wedding. The next step though is how do you shoot more weddings?
00:20:11
Speaker
Well, you can't duplicate yourself, so you have to hire someone. And it kind of goes back to what I was talking about before, affiliate photographers, associate photographers, excuse me.
00:20:20
Speaker
are a pain in the butt to manage. You have to make sure that their style matches yours. You can lose any number of things, wedding rings, they can lose their shoes and they'll be the terrible day, right? You can lose a memory card, miss the first kiss, show up drunk, have an excuse that they can't show up that day for whatever reason, because of the white box tournament, whatever, you know.
00:20:41
Speaker
There's so many things that can go wrong. And then how much can you realistically get paid at the end of the day when you're paying the associate photographer quite a bit of money? Customer pays you $4,000 for the photography. You pay the associate photographer $2,000. You pay the editor, what, $500? You're making $1,500 at the end of the day? Yeah. Is it worth your time? Yeah. I can sell an album for five grand.
00:21:05
Speaker
doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So from there, that's when Photo Boost came to the picture. And I hate to sound like this is just a pitch for Photo Boost, but you can make your own Photo Boost. You could look up other Photo Boosts out there. I just personally think that this is the best way to scale because you could have five Photo Boosts
00:21:24
Speaker
in your arsenal. And you can go to five different events in a weekend. And due to current technology, at least our app does this, you can control all five of your photo booths from your phone. Wow. So if there ever is an emergency, client calls like, Hey, this photo booth is not working, you can just go on your phone and be like, Oh,
00:21:43
Speaker
Your wedding is purple. Let me change the color to red. Let me change the template name because I misspelled your name wrong. Everything can be done remotely. And you don't have to hire skilled labor with $10,000 with the camera equipment. You can hire high school students, which is what I hired. High school students, photography interns, random college students, they show up, they put this thing together, and they press a button.
00:22:08
Speaker
all night long and with a smile on their face. They don't need to know how to pose people. They don't need to know how to have good composition. They don't understand what ISO is. And you pay them like, I was paying them well, like $100 a night. But I was charging for a photo booth event, like $1,000. So I'm netting like $900, to set up something that I was already there for. And then again, as you grow and you have more photo booths, you can have multiple of them out in the wild.
00:22:37
Speaker
So just to paint the picture here, a lot of people think, oh, a photo of a business, they don't make that much money. A lot of our clients make over six figures and some of them make over seven figures. Wow. Yes. And I guarantee you they work a lot less than a wedding photographer because again, we don't have to edit photos. Everything is shot.
00:22:59
Speaker
They have edited automatically from the photo booth. So no editing whatsoever. You know, the deal with the client, there's no meetings. They just go on the website, they book the photo booth and you're good to go. I've rarely had someone say like, I want to see the photo booth in person.
00:23:14
Speaker
If you didn't want to see it in person, you're meeting with a client anyway, just set it up in your studio or set it up at your house, have them take a picture at the end of the day. And I guarantee you, if you set it up there, they're going to want to book the photo booth. So it's just such an easy add on. No, it looks so sleek. I feel like your photo booth just looks so
00:23:33
Speaker
you know, it's compact, but it looks like state of the art. And it's easy to set up. So you make it easy for photographers to just, you know, not have a van or a truck. And you just make it all compact and perfectly fit into like this nice little suitcase, kind of like, you know, how Apple
00:23:51
Speaker
Engineers all their packaging how did you figure that out? I mean I know it's your curious mind But did you talk to like designers or engineers or did you design it yourself? Or was that a huge investment for you? And how do you keep evolving your your booth because now? It looks even more amazing
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for that. We've been always trying to make things look better. And going back to your original question of how do we design the booth in general? Well, I wish I could say that I'm classically trained as a mechanical engineer and industrial designer and electrical engineer. I knew all that stuff, but I frankly don't. And you have to consider, well,
00:24:33
Speaker
If you want to start your own business and be on Shark Tank, whatever you could, yeah, you can go out there and get a mechanical engineering degree. You can go out there and get an industrial design degree. You can go out there and get an electrical engineering degree, right? But how much time would that take you? You'd be in school for a decade plus and also be extremely burdened with debt, lots of debt. So what do you do instead? What I like to tell people is like, learn just the amount so that you can communicate
00:25:03
Speaker
well with the people that are experts, right? So if I was designing a photo booth, right, I would learn the amount of industrial design just necessary to convey my user stories or my requirements to the engineer. If I were to understand mechanical engineering, OK, I needed to tilt about 13 degrees down because we need to capture kids and we need to like 15 degrees out because we can capture people that are as tall as Shaquille and Neil. And just learning how to talk.
00:25:31
Speaker
to the developers and the designers. Because ultimately, if you're a business owner, you're the CEO, etc, you're the person conducting, you're in front of the orchestra, waving your wand, telling everybody the direction to go, but you don't need to know how to play the violin. You don't need to know how to play the trombone. You don't need to know how to play the saxophone. But you need to understand the high level fundamentals of how each of those instruments play
00:25:58
Speaker
in accordance with each other and how each of those have their strengths and weaknesses. So that's what I recommend. Just understand at just the high level what you want and then from there I would hire like an agency and this is what we did. We hired agencies or engineering firms to carry out that vision for me.
00:26:19
Speaker
If you don't have that vision, you don't have that wand conducting the orchestra, how is anyone going to know what to do? You can't just say, hey, build me an awesome photo booth, right? Because that's not going to end up well. You need to have that vision. Yes. I just listened to like a podcast. I forget the girl's name, but she designed like the beauty blender, like the sponge brush for makeup. And she just realized like engineers or all the blenders for girls, like they were all made by or engineered and designed by men.
00:26:48
Speaker
So she had to come up with this vision. Now she's some bazillionaire. But also, I always tell my students, you have to understand how to edit, how to do your album's design, how to make it real before you start outsourcing because you don't know how to communicate what you want. And if you don't like it, you don't even know what you don't like about it. You just don't like it.
00:27:11
Speaker
So it's very important to understand all the elements of your business. And yeah, you are the conductor. You're that Wizard of Oz. You're the CEO of your business. So you need to really understand the mixing crannies of that big vision so you could tell the engineers and designers what exactly you want. So that's awesome. So I guess that was our first point.
00:27:33
Speaker
how photographers could add this more money to their photography business. So what is the point number two?
00:27:43
Speaker
Shout out to our sponsors. Photo Booth Supply Co. helps entrepreneurs start and scale their businesses by creating meaningful experiences with a photo booth. Living in a digital age, anywhere people gather is an opportunity for an experience. And what better way to capture those memories than with a photo booth? There has never been an easier way for photographers to scale their businesses, increase their marketing efforts, and maintain cash flow during off season than with a photo booth like the Salsa booth.
00:28:11
Speaker
Increase revenue 600 to 800 dollars per event by adding a photo booth to your services so you can make more and work less. If you don't provide a photo booth, someone else will. So stop leaving money on the table and get yourself a salsa booth today. The other thing too is I feel like photographers don't have a marketing plan.
Marketing Potential of Photo Booths
00:28:31
Speaker
And I've seen that a lot. So and I'll say back when I was doing photography too,
00:28:37
Speaker
I felt like I was this awesome artist. And I was like, if I do good work out there, the clients will come. I don't need to market myself because I'm this amazing artist. And that was a flawed philosophy. Ultimately, we have to understand that when we're going into a wedding photography business, it's just that we need to run a business. You need to have a business plan. You need to know how to do your craft, but you also need to understand how to get more clients.
00:29:07
Speaker
Yes. I did not know how to do that. And thankfully, we were making pretty good money not having a marketing plan. But I can't imagine how much more we would have made had we even gone to a wedding and just had everyone know who the heck I was. How many weddings do you guys go to?
00:29:27
Speaker
And you walk out at the end of the day, you go back home and nobody even knows what your name is, right? Everybody knows the DJ's name. Everyone knows the photo booth name. Everyone knows the K Cup because they can put their business cards out there or just right next to it, right? DJ has his name on the stanchion or her name on the stanchion.
00:29:47
Speaker
Photographers were too busy running around and getting dirty, rolling, climbing up trees, taking pictures, you know, here and there. Totally in the bushes. Nobody knows. And then you're thinking like, well, you know, the bride and groom are absolutely going to share the photos afterwards and say taken by Carissa Wu, taken by Brandon Wong, and they're going to spread the word out. And what happens? They post the stuff on Instagram. They put an ugly filter on it and they don't even photo cred you. That's the worst. Right. That happens all the time. So there's no marketing plan.
00:30:16
Speaker
And it can kind of going back to photo booths here, which is why it's so awesome. When people take a picture in the photo booth, they need to get that image, right? So in our photo booths at least, you can go to the photo booth and then you can enter in your email. And that's how they get their image. It goes to you, or you can enter in your phone number and then it gets to you, right?
00:30:35
Speaker
Yes. Imagine if you're going to a wedding, there's 200 people there, and at the end of the night, you collect 200 emails and 200 phone numbers, right? Wow. And then let's just say you're shooting 20 weddings a year. You can do that math, right? That's 4,000 emails and phone numbers you're getting every single year. Holy cow. You still have 20, right? So 20 times 200 is 4,000. Let's just say you booked only 1% of those clients, right? 1%. That's it.
00:31:04
Speaker
That's 40 new clients a year. Wow. So are you saying that you put them on your email list? Like you would put them on your Brandon Wong photography list or just the Sasa list or just both in general? Yeah. So I'm talking as a wedding photographer, right? You're going out to 20 weddings.
00:31:21
Speaker
200 people per wedding, right? And I know a lot of people listening do a lot more than 20 weddings a year, right? So this is pretty conservative. But you say if you have 4,000 people in your contact list, you enroll them into MailChimp, or you enter them into a texting app, and then you send them,
00:31:37
Speaker
So great seeing you at that wedding. Here's a link to all the images from the photo booth. Here's a link to all the images from the wedding or here's a sneak peek from the wedding. By the way, I shoot weddings, but I also shoot family portraits. I also shoot bar. I also shoot pet photography. So all 4,000 people.
00:31:56
Speaker
maybe only 40 of them are engaged at 1%, but maybe 20% of those have family to shoot. Or maybe 10% of those people have an upcoming corporate party that needs photographs. Or maybe 30% of them need a photo booth for the next birthday party, right? So we're just talking about how you can leverage 4,000 people
00:32:19
Speaker
who have been exposed to your work, right? They've seen your photography. They've seen you firsthand. They have that firsthand experience that firsthand testimonial with you. These aren't cold leads. These are warm people. Yeah. Right. Yes. They were with you already. Exactly. They seem to experience. So again, let's just do that four thousand number again. Let's just say 10 percent of people booked you. That's 400 people. And to be super conservative, let's do five hundred dollars per shoot. Right. That's an extra two hundred thousand dollars a year.
00:32:47
Speaker
Holy cow. Exactly. So people aren't doing this. They're not collecting emails. They're not collecting phone numbers. They're not doing frankly anything at a wedding to try to market those services. And bringing a photo booth in, and ours costs only $3,000, to make $200,000? I mean, that's 66 extra revenue right there. That's not even from photo booth rental. That's just literally from the little contact list you got and the bookies you get from the contact list.
00:33:15
Speaker
So that's why I'm so adamant about a photo booth. I think it's just like the perfect synergy for any sort of event professional, not just photographers, but it's just a no brainer to add on to a arsenal.
Planning for Business Exit
00:33:27
Speaker
Yes. And I think when I first started out, I was like,
00:33:29
Speaker
Is photo booth ever going away? Is there something new coming out? And then year after year after year, and then all of a sudden 10 years, I'm like, photo booth is not going out of style. Everyone just loves it. They act silly. They want to be with their friends. They want to be goofy. They want to wear the silly hat and the glasses. And everyone's just having a good time. So it literally is never going out of style. I think I've seen some other things like Flipbook and 360s.
00:33:58
Speaker
And those are great, but I feel like majority of people just want the classic photo booth. So crazy. And yeah, I love that tip about the email addresses because email marketing is totally up my alley. And I think you have like one last tip and then we'll go into like rapid fire question.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the last thing here is really that we're not really building, uh, exit strategy. And on this, a lot of people like what's an exit strategy, right? Well, again, you're, you're, you're a photographer, but you're really a business owner.
00:34:33
Speaker
And almost all businesses get into it because they want to sell at one point. They want to exit the business because we want to what? Retire. Our bodies are not made to do wedding photography until we're 65, let alone 40. You know, my back hurts all the time and I don't even shoot anymore.
00:34:55
Speaker
Grandpa Brandon. Yeah, maybe because I started shooting weddings when I was 19, who knows. But this is bad, right? So really, and no one's going to ever buy your business too, unfortunately, right? Let's face the hard truth. No one's ever going to buy a Carissa Wu photography because guess what? If I buy a Carissa Wu photography, she's going to retire and then there's no more Carissa Wu.
00:35:17
Speaker
Yes, exactly. They want me. Well, they buy my company. I'm going to retire and they're not going to have a brand new one. Doesn't make any sense. So how do you like my my question I want to ask everybody listening here is how do you start to build like enterprise value? How do you build value for your company? So hopefully you can sell your business for a hundred thousand dollars, maybe even a million dollars or more later down the line. You can't do it if you're in the business. You can't do it if you're a main focus of the business.
00:35:47
Speaker
It's not an easy thing to do. It takes a long time to build an empire with tons of associate photographers. And we talked about how hard that was. But you can do it through photo booths. And you can build an empire through photo booths pretty easily. You don't have to be the one going to the event. It's not like it's a Brandon Wong photo booth or a Carissa Wu photo booth. You just want to book your photo booth.
00:36:08
Speaker
And that's a company that you can easily sell. We've seen companies sell for over six figures within our community to other photo booth owners just by absorption. Like, hey, we want to buy your list of clientele and we'll buy your photo booths too and sell your business that way. So this is something I just want people to think about because honestly, like you want to be able to, as your kids grow up and you have kids, or you just want to focus on your hobbies more, you want to have that time to do that.
00:36:34
Speaker
You want to have the body to do that. You can't just shoot weddings all day. So I really want everyone listening to really think about what the next 15, 20 years are going to look like and how can you start building the enterprise value now. So hopefully one day you can't just like not just quit the business, but quit it with a fat stash.
00:36:52
Speaker
quit it while selling the business. All the Harvard you put into, you know, most other people out there like restaurant tours or like even food truck people, even DJs, right? Because they can scale up pretty easily. A lot of those guys end up selling.
00:37:09
Speaker
And they have that opportunity. Photographers, on the other hand, a lot of us are so focused on trying to be that artist. A lot of us are so focused on having our name attached to everything. And we forget the importance of that. You know, we're ultimately business owners at the end of the day. And we need to focus on building that value. So Photo Boost is one way to do it. You can do it a million other ways as well. You know, there's educators out there that built
00:37:31
Speaker
huge educational courses, like Susan Stripling just built their educational course and sold it on Facebook, which is awesome. But man, Diamond doesn't there, right? Very hard to do. Wow. So yeah, think about that. I feel like you should write your own book or have your own YouTube channel. But what is your favorite or top two or three favorite books that you could recommend to the listeners?
00:37:54
Speaker
Oh, man. I always recommend the first book is How to Build a Story Brand by
Recommended Business Reads
00:38:01
Speaker
Donald Miller. Yes. It's so popular now. How can I read a lot of people do what that was? But I feel like that is really the best sales and marketing book ever created.
00:38:12
Speaker
It just breaks things down simply and gives you a framework to really understand how to present yourself in person and also online and in any other travel literature out there. The second book I recommend is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah. Again, such a basic book. Everybody recommends it, but it really is a Bible for especially as a wedding photographer.
00:38:40
Speaker
When a lot of your business is communicating with people, talking with people, and you are that salesperson yourself, and you also are kind of selling yourself as well. Yes, you're selling your images, but you're also selling your presence at a wedding, how awesome you are, how fun you are, how well you can pose people. How to influence people is a great way to learn how to communicate well with everybody, how to make everyone feel comfortable around you. And to the influence part, get people to do crazy-ass poses for you.
00:39:11
Speaker
It's just all around, you know, it's called how to win friends and influence people, but it's really should be called like how to act as a wedding photographer on a wedding day. Like it is it is an awesome book. You can also rename is how to close a wedding album sales as a wedding photographer. Same thing like this book really teaches you just how to how to present yourself.
00:39:31
Speaker
in every scenario as a business owner, and especially in the event industry, because you are so in front of, you're not a software designer, you're not a software developer making a software company, right? You are in front of people all day long, and shoots, you need to read this book. Have you read
Empathy in Sales
00:39:46
Speaker
it? Read it again. Those are, yeah, my two favorite books too. I know you have a great personality and you are very charismatic, but what is your biggest selling technique, tip or hack that you could share with photographers that are listening?
00:40:00
Speaker
or wedding pros that are listening? You have to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. I started going from selling $1,000 weddings to $10,000 weddings, going from selling no albums to $5,000 albums, and now selling $10,000 photo booths, $3,000 photo booths, and talking about even bigger deals than that.
00:40:25
Speaker
And time and time again, whenever things get complicated, I always just think to myself, what would I do if I was the buyer? What would I do if I was that couple sitting across from me in that room? What would I want to hear? What would be the benefits?
00:40:44
Speaker
How would this help my life if I had a wedding album? How would this help my life if I booked Carissa Wu? How would this benefit my life if I signed up for Carissa Wu's course or bought this photo booth? So try to think of everything in the perspective of that person. Kind of like what I was doing today.
00:41:07
Speaker
Photographers out there, what do they need? They need an exit strategy. Photographers need a marketing plan. Photographers want to grow their business to work less, right? I didn't say anything about the photo booth, about what it does, but I talked about what the pain points of the photographer and how they can fix it.
00:41:26
Speaker
So, same thing is really empathize with the customer. And at that point, you're not selling. You're really a problem solver. And if you come into the perspective, I'm not selling you anything, but I'm actually helping you solve your problems and help achieve your goals, you can be much more charismatic and passionate about what you're doing because ultimately in the end, you're doing a good thing.
00:41:51
Speaker
Obviously, you just shouldn't be selling snake oil, and your product needs to be awesome. Don't sell a $10,000 wedding photography if you're a shit wedding photographer. You got to be confident in yourself. You have good shit. But ultimately, the end of the day, once you establish your product, change that framework. You're helping the individual. And think, how does that person need help? That's it? Yeah. I mean, I'm the same way.
00:42:18
Speaker
new coaching business has is pretty fairly new. Like I just started the curriculum during pandemic. But you know, I bombed a couple sales calls and I just felt like I talked too much about my myself and my accolades and my features and you get this kajabi course and all my resources of a decade. And you know, I got ghosted.
00:42:40
Speaker
And then I really had to look inside and now my sales calls, I really, really dig deep into what are their pain points? What are they struggling with? How can I make them unstuck? And my last call yesterday, she was in tears and she just opened up to me about everything she's going.
00:42:57
Speaker
through right now in her photography business. And I think she wouldn't have opened up to me unless I asked her those very powerful, deep questions and got in her head what she really is going through. So I love that you said that. So as a wedding photography coach, I have to ask, you're growing exponentially all the time. So if you had a magic wand, where would you see your business in three months?
00:43:20
Speaker
Oh, just three months. Yeah. I like three months because I feel like I listened to this meditation podcast vision, Luka lini or something. And he always said like, we overestimate what we could do in six months, but underestimate what we could do in three months.
00:43:35
Speaker
So go for it. Got it. Well, if it's that short of a time frame, I have very specific goals. So I have this little sheet that have all these metrics that I want to hit. I don't want to bore you guys to death of like, you know, exactly what is it? But, you know, it's X amount of subscriptions, X amount of boots sold X amount of team members that we have on. So stuff like that. So yeah. Short term answer. Unfortunately, it's a little boring, but yeah.
00:44:03
Speaker
If there's anything to help the visitors here, it's really, if you don't measure it, it doesn't get improved. What's not measured does not get improved. So what I like to tell my team is
00:44:19
Speaker
if I was on a stranded island, random one was on a stranded island, and I got a little little bottle floating to my island every single day. And in that bottle was a piece of paper and it said just 10 numbers that that that in the in the business, a 10 business metrics, right? It might be like number of weddings booked, it might be number of leads gotten that day, it might be, I don't know, number of images edited that day, whatever. But
00:44:45
Speaker
Just based on those 10 numbers, I should be able to tell how healthy the business is currently, if the business is growing healthily, if it's declining, and pretty much, I would have a very clear picture of how the business is doing.
00:45:00
Speaker
What I would help you do if you're looking at short-term goals like that, write down what is the most, even five most important things that your business needs. And not the obvious stuff. Not how many bookings you have, right? But how do you get more bookings? Well, you ask for more reviews. How do you get more reviews? You email clients. So maybe that's one of them. How many clients have I emailed this week?
00:45:22
Speaker
We get five star views. Another thing might be, you know, like you're talking about how do I, you want to get more coaching clients, right? Podcasts might be a good avenue, right? So I want to get more coaching clients. How do I get more coaching clients? And you start my podcast. How do I make sure my podcast is successful? I get more guests on the podcast. How do I make sure I get more guests? I email three guests a day. Yeah. So that might be another thing you write down too. How many people that I emailed to be on a podcast guest this week?
00:45:51
Speaker
So don't think about the, I call it the lag measures, which is like how well my business is to how much money I'm making. I like to think about the lead measures. What are the actions that you need to take that will eventually get to where you need to be? So going back to my answer already.
00:46:07
Speaker
Going back to Mike, would you ask me, what are your short term goals? Well, yeah, it's kind of boring because I just have these lead measures, the message in the bottle. Thank you for explaining that. The message in the bottle that I get, those 10 metrics, and I just hope those 10 metrics moves or I want them to move.
00:46:23
Speaker
That's it. Wow. That is so crazy. I never heard it like that. Okay. So we're going to do the last five minutes of rapid fire questions. So just fun questions. You are crazy traveler. I see on your Instagram and Facebook super travel MB, but what was your favorite trip and why? Oh my God. Such a loaded question. Um, but I will just say,
00:46:46
Speaker
Yosemite last year. I think that was my favorite trip because we went with my in-laws and they are not athletic whatsoever. And we were able to do what this hike was called the Mist Trail, which is like a seven or 11 mile hike. And it was insane. And to see Katrina's parents do that hike and finish it was just the greatest joy to me.
00:47:11
Speaker
There's a ton of other places that ate great food, travel, wine, whatever. But it's something really awesome seeing your parents succeed and do really well and something that they didn't think they were capable of. And they lost like 15 pounds at the end of the trip. Super cool. Yeah. That was my favorite trip. That's awesome. What kind of dad do you think you're going to be? I'll be the dad version of my current self.
00:47:39
Speaker
Oh no, that is a great question and one that I've been pondering about so much. But ultimately, I see a lot of parents out there trying to be someone that they are not, to try to be this awesome ideal parent for their kid. When in reality, they need to really just fix who they are.
00:48:04
Speaker
Wow. I see a lot of parents like, oh, I can't cuss in front of my kids. But then behind closed doors, they're cursing all the time. I have parents that are like, you know, being really hypocritical. Oh, don't do this. Don't do that. But then they turn around, they do the same thing, you know? Yeah. Organic food, eat this good stuff. Don't drink soda. But they turn around, they drink soda. They eat garbage, you know? And I'm like, well, your kid sees this and they're going to think you're a big hypocrite and you're a big liar, right?
00:48:32
Speaker
Be the parent you want to be 100% of the time, right? Build that discipline in you. And for me, I don't know if I'm tooting my own horn here, but I've tried to be that person I want to be and embody that 100%. My favorite Peloton instructor, Cody Rigsby, he says something that it's like my life mantra right now is how you do anything is how you do everything. Wow. How do you work out? Are you that person that puts 100% of their work out?
00:49:01
Speaker
or you're 90%. If you put 90% in your workout, I bet you put 90% in your business. I bet you put 90% into your parenting skills too. So I just try to... There's kind of my answer. I want to be who I am today because I feel like I'm really comfortable with who I am.
00:49:17
Speaker
And I would love for my current self to be that dad. It's gonna reflect through how you are as a father, definitely. I love that. Exactly. Don't try to be someone you're not. Yes, yes. And I want to just tell you, we haven't talked for a long time, but I have two little girls, four and two. And it's been amazing. And yeah, that's what I decided to become a coach. So I'll have those weekends free.
00:49:47
Speaker
So yeah, I wish we had this conversation about 10 years ago. I probably would have took the leap a long time ago and not been so hustle for so long. But yeah, I truly love this conversation and I've learned so much. But I'm going to ask where we could find you and work with you. And I'm going to ask you one last question. So where can we find you?
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to follow the business, you can do at photobooth supply Co, spelled normally on Instagram, etc. And you also if you're interested in learning more about a photo booth, we have so many free guides, you can sign up for a photo booth Academy, which has 100 plus free videos as well. Pretty much anything and everything you want to learn about photo booth, we give you for free. So it's all at photoboothsupplyco.com.
00:50:39
Speaker
It falls on Instagram. We just have a ton of awesome stuff out there. No cost to you. And again, if you're interested in learning more, we also have a demo so you can actually sit down with one of our photo booth strategists that are really smart and they help photographers all the time, implement a photo booth into their business and create a business plan. And that's all again, all available for free at photoboothsupplyco.com. Just hop on there.
00:51:00
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, it's called the Salsa Booth. And if you just look at the website, you'll just be blown away. And you are a sponsor for my podcast. And it just started, but I don't think you even listen to my podcast. But there is a commercial on every episode about the Salsa Booth and a link in the profile and the show notes and the podcast description. So it's pretty easy to find through my little link.
00:51:25
Speaker
And yeah, just the last words of Brandon Wong from Photo Boost Apply, like just any advice for up and coming wedding pros. You gave so much already, but just anything else that you want to say? Oh, man. What else can I say? I know you said so much already. Sign up for Carissa Wu's course. Sign up for her mentorship. She's great. But honestly, you know,
00:51:55
Speaker
When we first met Chris, she did sign up for a lighting workshop. And that just shows, you know, we talked about my my WU factor and her WU factor, too. We share this thing common. She does have that drive and that craving for curiosity and a willingness to learn as well. And she has I know that she's definitely going to be a fantastic tool to help you grow your business as well. And I just hope you guys had learned something from this podcast and got inspired a little bit.
00:52:23
Speaker
whether it be parenting or photo booth or photography or creative whatsoever. But of course, thanks just so much for having me on here at Michigan Center for a course. Yes. And congratulations. I am so excited for you. Thanks. I appreciate it. Bye.
00:52:42
Speaker
Thanks for joining me this week on Get a Heck Yes with Carissa Wu. Make sure to follow, subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend about the show. Take a screenshot and post to IG. Tag me. Also, don't forget to download my free guide on how to become a lead generating machine. See you next time, wedding pros.