421: Phillip Blume – The step by step process for profitable mini sessions

421: Phillip Blume - The step by step process for profitable mini sessions

Andrew Hellmich: Today's interview is part one of a two part series on mini sessions and features photographer and educator Phillip Blume of The Blumes. I recently posted in the PhotoBizX members group asking if you'd like to hear from someone who teaches a strategy or a photographer actually utilizing the strategy. Now the response was mixed, but almost everyone agreed both would be the best way to go. And there were comments like this from Nicole Abbott. She says, "I'd love to hear from The Blumes. Mini sessions are so frowned upon by pro photographers, yet I love them, but and yet to successfully make money from them, I'd love to hear their methods." And this one from Mike Glatzer, he says, "I've taken The Blumes minis course, and it's excellent. Definitely something worth checking out, because they actually make a significant portion of the income via mini sessions, which is pretty counterintuitive, plus, they're both wonderful people and just awesome to talk to." So in response to that thread, I reached out to Phillip Blume for an interview. Phillip and his wife, Eileen, are a husband and wife wedding photographer team from Atlanta in the USA. I've read that they stumbled on this unique way of doing mini sessions that consistently generates $10,000 in a single weekend without watering down their brand. But I've also read they use mini sessions as a lost leader to drive business and gain clients. Now, I can't wait to learn more, and I'm rapt to have Phillip with us now. Phillip, welcome to the podcast.

Phillip Blume: Hey, Andrew. I'm so happy to be here. Man, it's great to hear your voice. Thank you.

Andrew Hellmich: I've heard so many good things about you and your lovely wife, so I'm excited to chat to you. These mini sessions sound amazing. I think the first thing I need to ask is, are they an income generator or a loss leader?

Phillip Blume: That is an important question, because for most people, I mean, the general common knowledge about mini sessions in the photography industry is they're just a loss, they're frowned upon by most, and actually, rightfully so. I think most of the time, photographers are starting up a business, and mini sessions are kind of that desperate attempt to appeal to the low income bargain seeking part of the market. And so as a result, if you get any leads at all. If you get new clients through that method, you indeed end up with bargain seeking clients who become, you know, not only a very profitable kind of source of income, but also just usually high demand, a lot of problem clients, extra difficulties, certainly not worth your while, even if they happen to be paying you, which are they're not. So that's that kind of loss leader is not what we want to see. In our case, the mini sessions, we kind of flip the whole strategy and the whole business structure behind mini sessions on its head, just to do things differently for us that came out of just a crazy story of how that happened, I'm sure we'll go into but as a result, we went from becoming purely wedding photographers. 100% of our work at the time was wedding photography. That's what we were known for, shooting weddings around the world, but then also stepping into a phase of life where our family was growing and we wanted solutions to keep our business afloat without having to be gone from home constantly. So what we came up with was this experiment that ended up going very, very right. And mini sessions have actually become our engine of our business. So it's really the number one generator of our income. It profits our business more than six figures a year, and better than our luxury wedding photography, which we still do, but we just limit, because we're able to do just a few weddings when we want to with the clients we want to, and the rest of our work is generally shot out in our backyard before dinner. So it's kind of been a nice transition that I would, it just does my heart good seeing anybody being able to transition their business and step into that kind of consistency and just peace of mind for photographers. Really nice.

Andrew Hellmich: Wow. Okay, so did I hear that right, that you're generating over six figures from the mini sessions, or the mini sessions lead to full sessions?

Phillip Blume: No. So we're actually, we have a six figure business of just mini sessions. The mini sessions do lead to a lot of full length sessions, but really, you know, to me, the definition of a business, a good, healthy business with a purpose, is an institution that is serving people's needs. So oftentimes you need a full length session that you know the client has special needs. They want to, they want a session that's done in a special location that's nostalgic or important to them. They're having a whole family reunion, and they want all these different family groupings, or they want to do an outfit change. Sometimes the client has needs that a full length session is necessary to fulfill. But really in general, most of the time, all of those things aren't so important. Most of the time, families, senior, high school senior portraits, or for a lot of our students, we don't have a boudoir studio, but a lot of our students are using it for pet photography and boudoir. A lot of times, people just want the portraits. They just want an update. They're happy with the outfits they chose. It took them enough work just to pick out that one outfit. They don't need a change. And so a mini session is really the thing that serves their needs better. And in fact, it appeals to maybe the kids attention spans, or dad's attention span, and it's just a much easier step into a new client experiencing you for perhaps the first time. So for us, the mini sessions are, we would happily just shoot mini sessions exclusively around the clock, but certainly when a client comes back to us because they love the experience and they have special needs they want us to fulfill them. We love doing that as well. We have a lot of return clients.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. So these definitely aren't a lost leader. These are a serious income generator for you guys

Phillip Blume: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, there's a loss leader component to the marketing, but the mini sessions themselves are our business. It's a business model that we basically have wrapped, packaged up, and have had the great fortune and opportunity to, thanks to PPA, Professional Photographers of America. They have sent us around to a lot of the affiliates. They have different organizations in every state here in the US, and also Imaging USA, their big conference, national conference, and just, I think they saw how this unusual strategy was just lifting the industry and some places where it was hard for people to get a foothold, and it was helping them succeed. So we've, over some years now, have really enjoyed kind of touring around, until this last year, when in person was limited, touring around and meeting people and teaching this and just seeing it help lift studios in all kinds of markets all over the place.

Andrew Hellmich: Unreal. When I go to your website, theblumes.co is that your only website? Because on that website, it shows you guys purely as wedding photographers. There's nothing about mini sessions.

Phillip Blume: Yeah

Andrew Hellmich: There's no portrait. So what's the story there?

Phillip Blume: That's right, yeah, that is our only, well, I'll give a caveat. We do have various websites we use very strategically. So for example, Eileen does have a newborns business. It's blumebabies.com so when she's photographing newborns in the studio, that's a very kind of high level genre of photography that takes a lot of time, a lot of patience and also serving mom and dad in the studio. So it's not sort of the one genre that in headshots, which we also do in the studio, are really the genres that can't be fit nicely into a mini sessions mold. But then all the other genres fit very nicely into that kind of strategy. So our main website, theblumes.co, you're right. It's just, we've maintained this kind of that brand since the beginning, as luxury wedding photographers. A lot of people talk about how, as a photographer, you have to be sure you don't want to be a generalist, right? I'm sure you've heard this before. Andrew.

Andrew Hellmich: Absolutely

Phillip Blume: You don't want to be a generalist, right? You want to be a specialist. And that's partly true. Heard it from a thousand educators a thousand times. It's just not the full story. I think what people mean when they say that is, you need to be a specialist in your marketing, and that's very important to realize the difference between being a specialist in your marketing versus actually being a generalist in your behind the scenes work. If a couple reaches out to us, they get our website. We only want them to see wedding work. We don't want them to think we dabble in everything. You know, Eileen and I no longer have that business card that we printed out when we first started our business that said, you know, pet photography, commercial photography, wedding photography, family photography, head shots. It said we do everything on the business card. And of course, we would leave piles of business cards on every coffee shop counter that we could find when the barista wasn't looking our way. You know, you just drop them and you're hoping for people to discover your business. So that's kind of desperate marketing, right? And we all do that at some point in the beginning, but then we learned, you know, if we're going to market properly, it's going to be very strategic, very specialized. And so for our mini sessions, our portraits that actually bring in most of our income, we literally do not have a web page for that other than actually specialized behind the scenes landing pages. So we'll actually create basically private web pages that you would never find in a search. It's just a one page how to book simple form, and we will mark it strategically with a link going directly to that page. And so when we, we can talk about some of those exciting marketing strategies that work so brilliantly on the local level. But whenever we market, it just takes them straight to that hidden web page that you would otherwise never find with a web search.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. So are you using something like Leadpages, or you have a separate website, or is it just hidden on theblumes.co website? Where are these landing pages?

Phillip Blume: Yeah, there's so many ways to do it, which is the great thing, Leadpages is very popular one for building simple landing pages. We're actually using for our portrait clients and for mini sessions currently is Sticky. So Sticky started out as a company that is called Sticky Albums, and then they branched out into different marketing tools and just became the Sticky brand. So we're using that. It's kind of specially designed for photographers, which is the great thing. But there are other, like you said, LeadPages, ClickFunnels, and other software you can use to create those.

Andrew Hellmich: Right. And I mean, potentially the listener, they could even use their own website, their current website, and just have a hidden page with no navigation as well. They don't need to have a third party app, do they, to do this?

Phillip Blume: Absolutely. Yeah. So if you know, if you're designing your own web page, whether that's on WordPress or a platform like Show It that we use for theblumes.co you can even build and the great thing is, you know, if you understand the strategy, then what's important is to sort of understanding marketing psychology, what your client is thinking and how it's easiest to simplify the experience and kind of guide them by the hand, because there's something in marketing known as consumer retreat. And unfortunately, we as photographers and really any business people, have this tendency to think that the best way to market is by providing more options, right? And the more options you provide to someone, the more chance you're going to have of saying the right thing or offering the right thing for all those people who are on your website, and so there's something for everyone, and then they're going to book you. But in reality, what we know just from deeper research and psychology is that that actually leads to consumer retreat, where people have so many options they don't feel confident in themselves to understand the choices, to make the right choice. There's kind of a fear of making the wrong choice, and so people click away. They retreat. And so what a landing page does? If you write the right kind of copy, put in the right elements, put the calls to action, you know, the buttons where people can click and book you, put them in the right places, then you have a really good chance of converting people who land on that page into clients. So you can design that on your own website, whether it's WordPress or Show It or whatever. But the nice thing about some of these other software that kind of pre-design it for you is, well, first, they're saving you time, but also they have a lot of the strategy built in to some of these templates and tools, and you can kind of drag and drop your pictures and just adjust the verbiage on those pages, and just get moving and be a photographer again instead of being a web designer.

Andrew Hellmich: For sure, for sure. So you've talked about the or you've mentioned the strategy. Can you give us an overview of the strategy? What is it? How does it work?

Phillip Blume: Yeah, absolutely, so mini sessions for the most part, and this is where, if we had a classroom and we're together with everyone who's listening right now, it would be fun to kind of take a survey or a show of hands and ask folks, what do you generally think of when you think of a mini session? How much does a mini session cost? What is the standard mini session? What's included? What is the product? And for most photographers around the world, and you know, I'm not sure what the conversion currently, you know today, of the US dollar to the Australian dollar is, but generally, in the US, you ask this question, and it's going to be a mini session, is 150 to $200, somewhere in that range. 150 to $200 lasts about 30 minutes, and it includes about five to 10 digital images. That's the finished product. So you take the images for 30 minutes, you get what you can and then you show those images to a client, probably on an online gallery. And then those clients pick their favorites. They have to narrow it down, and then they have to, kind of, you know, just forget about the others. Even if they like them, they kind of just limit it to those five or 10 choices. And then you pass the digitals on, probably a digital download or a USB drive, and you're done. It's this kind of low service, low value process. And then I think for most photographers, is because of the ease they know they can do that simple process and just get out of it, and they don't have to hear the feedback from the clients. They don't have to continue serving them. It's a lot of times, it's our fears, right? And our lack of confidence as photographers that drives us to, to do that. We think it's just the easiest route, but ultimately, you have done all the work and spent all the time that you need to put in to create beautiful images. You created a product, but then you're really not selling the product. And so that's that. What that comes down to is a recipe for failure, because you're trading your time for money. You're trading your most valuable commodity that you have in your life, your persona time, and you're creating a product, but then all you're really selling is your time. So what we realized, you know, in our personal story, Eileen and I had just gotten married, this is going back about 13 and a half years now. So we had just gotten married. Eileen is working as a barista at Starbucks. At the time, I'm working as a high school teacher, and then in the summers, I'm working for my family's pool and spa business installing swimming pools. And we decided to start trying our hand at photography as a money making thing, because, you know, a friend just asked me to shoot their wedding because they knew that I love photography, and they were trying to get a wedding photographer on the cheap. So we do, we shot that wedding and just showed some of the images online, and surprisingly, we started getting phone calls. Andrew, you're old enough to remember, this is back a few years, so it's like a lot of photography businesses were just in the phone book.

Andrew Hellmich: I do remember those days.

Phillip Blume: There wasn't a lot of, not everyone even had a web page yet. So that helped. Eileen is an overachiever, so she kind of figured out how to hack together our first website. And we were ahead of the curve online. So people started to see our pictures, call our phone, and suddenly, you know, we just came up with some numbers and charged, I forget what it was, maybe $800 I think, for our base wedding package, and we started booking up so busy that we had engagement sessions to do, weddings on the calendar. We couldn't continue in our other jobs. So in a way, it seemed like we were living the dream. We became full time in less than a year. But that wasn't because we were running a smart business model. We were, we basically lost our other jobs. We gave them away. Thought we were going to go live the dream as photographers, doing what we love for living, and it was too late, once we had jumped into it and given up our other jobs. Only then a year later, do we find out that we're spending more money to keep our business going. We're spending money to go shoot all these photos for everyone and stay up all night, editing the images and all the figuring out the business, and we're spending money to do that to the point that we can't pay our mortgage one day. In fact, we're cutting costs everywhere we can. We can't even pay for trash pickup, so we're collecting our trash in the carport throughout the week, and then I would throw it all in the back of our Volkswagen Jetta, then we can drive it to the dump myself, so our car smells like trash. And so that's, that's where we found ourselves kind of desperate and painted into a corner. And we thought, you know what? What we have to do is stop trying to be amazing artists and run a business as artists. And we need to run a business as business people instead, you know, work smarter. And we were really stupid up to that point, because Eileen actually has a business degree. And we just had never really thought, oh, we should implement some of that stuff that all those old people in the textbooks wrote about. But we decided, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna trust the process. We're gonna trust the process. We're going to go to what the experts have researched over centuries. We can't test it on weddings like this new business model that you learned in business school, seems like it's going to work. We're going to have to really commit ourselves to selling prints and products, at least offer them, you know, because maybe someone wants them, and they were just shy about asking for it. They knew we didn't offer it because we're working out of the trunk of our car. So maybe people want that, if we at least offer it, but we can't, like test it on our wedding because our weddings are booked out a year. We already have the contracts. We already gave them the pricing, and we're going to be out of business in two months. So let's do a big test case. Let's actually do like, a scientific experiment here, and we will schedule in three weeks from now, we'll have a weekend of mini sessions. And mini sessions are something that we had tried once, and like everyone tries them, they just completely failed. We just burnt ourselves out. And worked so hard to photograph all of these tons of families. We tried to bring through as many as we could. We shot for cheap, and we worked for days on end just to deliver everything, and still had complaints because it was impossible to do it fast enough. So we thought, if we can make this work with mini sessions, then we know that this pricing structure and this type of offering will work anywhere. And so that's what we did. We scheduled our first mini sessions. Was about three weeks out, and come three weeks later, we had, you know, not a ton of bookings. We had about 12 bookings, so six on a six shoots that we did on a Friday, and then six more shoots we did the next day, on Saturday, and we shot those sessions, we offered the products in this way that we thought kind of fit the marketing mold we had read about. And as a result, we made over $8,000 that weekend as like early startup photographers who were failing at business.

Andrew Hellmich: Wow

Phillip Blume: We made $8,000 in a weekend, and we just slapped our foreheads and just realized, you know, why weren't we doing this from the beginning, this is, this is the answer. And so we applied that to our wedding business. Our studio became an official Bulldog 100 fastest growing business here in the US. And then we, of course, just continued to do mini sessions strategically and allowed that to become, you know, we were making more for mini sessions because we weren't booking $8,000 weddings yet. But even when we were, you do six months to a year of preparation, vendor coordination, appeasing the mother of the bride, all kinds of work that goes into photographing a wedding. And mini sessions just didn't require that. It required a few weeks of marketing, and then you shoot and turn it around the prints that week. And so that became much more our speed. And so that's kind of, that's one element of the, I hope I didn't, you know, I kind of over answered that by going into our story a little bit our background, but that's sort of one element of the process itself, and ultimately it led to clients who, they're paying us all this money, and they were thanking us for the experience like it was amazing. We had never seen people so happy to pay us money, and it was because they were walking away with something physical in their hands. You know, prints, a canvas, a simple little, we don't design whole albums for mini sessions, because there's just not that many pictures from a 20 minute session. But they've ordered these simple little gift albums, and they'll come back every year because they have to. It becomes a tradition. They always want to get their gift album that year to add to their library of their growing family portraits, or bring their next child who's now their next child is a senior. And so it's been just awesome to actually see families grow this way, and rewarding to have clients who because you're offering a product and a service that it's not just once in a lifetime, like a wedding. It's a service that people come back for again and again. And any business will tell you that a repeat client, a loyal customer, is the number one valuable asset that any business can have. So I think that's what it created for us, and that's how it changed everything.

Andrew Hellmich: That's so good. So just let me ask you a couple of things about what you've just shared there, Phillip, so I think you said it was 12 clients over a two day period, and you made $8,000, was that the numbers?

Phillip Blume: Yeah, that was that first, that first year for us, right?

Andrew Hellmich: So that's an average of almost $700, so with the clients booking in for a $700 session, or were they booking in for, you know, $100 session, and then being up sold products at the back end?

Phillip Blume: Great, great question. Okay, so what we see now, you know, so this is almost 13 years ago, we tried this for the first time, and what we see now, 13 years later, where we have thousands of photographers doing this exact program throughout the US and abroad, that I would say the average client spends about $800 on a mini session for a photographer who's getting this program started. So it averages out to about 800 and this is where that question of the loss leader comes in, Andrew, shooting mini sessions itself is not a loss leader to lead to bigger sessions or to lead to weddings. The mini sessions themselves are profitable, like we talked about, but part of the marketing strategy here is going to be that we don't market the mini session as a $150 or $200 investment, and we don't even sell $800 mini sessions. I've seen people do that. My wife and I have actually hired a photographer who we really liked before, and they offered $800 mini sessions. They were very in demand, had a great brand, and so we knew them, we trusted them, and so we hired them for an $800 mini session. But to be honest, we actually didn't have that creative experience. I think it was just an off day. The pictures weren't all in focus, and I think that's why most people are afraid to spend a high dollar amount right off the bat, because we haven't shown them a product. If we ask people to pay us a high dollar amount, whether it's 200 or 800 it's almost in my mind, because Eileen and I filter everything in our business, all of our business choices, through our values to decide if it's something we want to do. Does it support our value system? And to me, it's just not the most honest way to run any business. You know, a McDonald's may ask you to pay for your food ahead of time, and you know exactly what you're going to get. You're going to get, like, some fake meat between some cardboard buns, right? So it's a known commodity. That's a very low dollar amount. You pay it ahead of time. But you go to a five star restaurant and they're not asking you to shell out the money before they bring you your meal. They're going to show you the product. They're going to allow you to experience it first. This is what luxury businesses do. They're going to prove themselves to you. You're going to sit down there and that waiter is going to treat you like royalty. And if you have no complaints, and if you had the experience of your life, then you're very happily going to pay that bill at the end of the meal. Right? So why do we, as photographers, who we don't run commodity style businesses. That's not the structure of the businesses we're in. We have to understand that as artists, we are a luxury business, and we have to operate under that framework if it's going to work for us. So what we'll do is we'll actually have a booking fee that holds their spot. This is the loss leader. Yeah, it'll be, it varies depending on market, but here where we are, we charge a $49 booking fee, and that includes nothing except for holding their spot, right? So they'll pay that. And it's a very easy point as sort of a low barrier to entry. So people can get on board with that. And then we have a whole menu of the prints, the products, artwork that we can sell, whether we want to sell that in studio, which, when I say in studio, we work from our home. So if we want to have them in and do it in person sales in our home, or if we want to do those sales online, which is what we do primarily, and certainly, over this past year, did almost exclusively, then those print and artwork sales, that becomes a real business that's scalable, because if you just had four killer portraits that you created during that time, that's enough to create a beautiful, you know, wall collage, a collection of beautiful artwork that's going to hang in someone's home, as well as some Christmas cards or some sort of thing that they might want to order to use seasonally. And so all of a sudden, you become a business instead of just a laborer. And I think that's what makes the difference.

Andrew Hellmich: Absolutely, and that makes total sense. But there must be some kind of qualifying process, because if I register for a $49 mini session, which, you know, we can call it a loss leader or a small investment or a booking fee, at what point do you tell me that I might potentially spend $800 because if that's something I'm totally not interested in, I'm not coming in for that session.

Phillip Blume: Right, right. And this is something that, you know, when we're walking through this with a student, a photographer who has never kind of experienced any kind of sales offering products in their business yet, it's almost always the same inhibition that they have at first night. And I relate to it. You know, I completely resonate with it, because it's how I felt for the early years of our business. I was scared to death to offer artwork and product, because ultimately, showing those prices right, like, if I show these clients what things are going to cost beforehand, the fear in my mind is, well, then they're just, they're going to ghost on me, they're going to disappear, they're going to maybe even, you know, criticize me for being too confident in my work. And how could I charge that for, so it was really for me, when I was at that point in our business, it was a real kind of a low self-esteem and fear that my work wasn't good enough. So I had to find a way to get past that and understand that when someone doesn't book me, you know, you get an inquiry, and then you give that inquiry the information, and they don't book you. That's not a failure. That's actually a success. Seth Godin, so Seth Godin, who has written a ton of fantastic marketing books. He's known as the godfather of modern marketing. He says the purpose of excellent marketing is not only to convert new clients, it's actually to chase unqualified clients away. So the purpose of marketing isn't just to attract clients. We're not supposed to just tell people what they want to hear and scratch their itchy ears, because then we end up booking people who really are misinformed about what the process is going to be and are going to end up being dissatisfied because their expectations aren't met. But actually, if our marketing chases people away, and we count that as a success, then that allows us the freedom to keep moving forward and scale what we're doing. So yes, absolutely. The finest point I can put on this is that as soon as someone inquires, we send pricing out immediately. There's no bait and switch. There's never any hiddenness or that we want to get the inquiry so that we can start a conversation and express what the value is to what we do, how we're full service studio, what we do is different than someone who's just, you know, has a camera and is shooting out of the trunk of their car. We have this experience to offer, and we give all of that pricing and an email to them after their inquiry. And as a result, this is what people always say often. Then, doesn't that chase a lot of people away? And yes, because that's the purpose of the process.

Andrew Hellmich: Yes.

Phillip Blume: So I would say that our marketing draws in a ton of inquiries. Most of those inquiries disappear because we have made plainly clear what the prices and the experience are going to be out about. And then a select group of clients, after they get that information, they see the price, it doesn't faze them, and they see what the experience is going to be about, and that's exactly what they want. They are a NEO which we can talk about what that is in a minute, but they're a NEO person in the market, and they want that experience, and as a result, they book and the process moves on smoothly. All of our clients are completely qualified. They're the right kind of clients who respect what we do, who appreciate the value of artwork, and we're not responsible for educating them or slapping them on the wrist when they misbehave or disrespect our art or something like that, because they're the right kind of qualified clients. And so that's how that process kind of prevents bottom of the barrel bargain hunters from making that mistake.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. So Phillip does the client when they respond to your marketing, and I'm assuming that's some kind of an ad, which we can talk about, is that when, let's say they go, "Yes, I'm interested", they raise their hand by giving you their email address or whatever it may be on your landing page. Is that when they get the pricing, or do they pay the $49 you know, holding deposit first and then see the pricing?

Phillip Blume: No, yeah, they'll absolutely see the pricing all of that first before they even book that. And so there are a couple steps, and I'll just sort of say what they are exactly as a point of strategy, this is really helpful. So they'll inquire. They'll receive an email that, of course, not only provides the pricing in a really beautifully well formatted, professional menu, but it will also describe what the experience is about, and it focuses on what that experience is about, and it doesn't say, and these are our prices, and we apologize for that, but we promise it'll be worth it. We just, we always speak from a place of the assumed sale. You know, we're not shy about our prices, and so you shouldn't be. So we'll say, you know, "Most clients choose one of our packages. Here are our packages this." And we won't say, you know, it just it includes a canvas that is printed on with the finest archival inks. And you don't want to talk about just material things, what we know is that people buy emotionally. There's actually the limbic part of our brains. When that is activated, that's the emotional part of our brain. That's actually the part of our brain that we use to make purchasing decisions. So if you talk a lot about facts and details and materials, then you've lost someone, it actually closes down the limbic part of the brain. And people don't need material things. We don't need to encourage people to be materialistic. The things that are important in our lives are our relationships. It's the people we love, is the moments we can't get back. And so if we talk to somebody about how "Our packages include artwork, big, beautiful displays that will brighten your home with the pictures of the ones you love. Your kids will grow up looking up on the walls and seeing your family at the center, at the heart of your home, and they'll know that your relationships take the priority over everything else in your life, because that is at the center of your home." That's the kind of thing we're talking about in this email and in all of our marketing. And we can talk about how the experience of the shoot, it won't be like here. We'll teach you how to pose and all these practical things. We're going to talk to the limbic brain. We'll have scenarios that we're going to walk them through that are going to allow their family to connect in a way that, you know, get away from devices, get away from the routine, and connect in a way that they haven't for a long time, emotionally, or to give that senior confidence in their high school portraits. And so the experience is there with all the pricing married together, and when that passes in front of the right kind of client's eyes, then they are given a 24 hour period to book, and so there's still urgency. They know that they have a button, a link in that email, that if, now that they've seen everything, they'd like to confirm their booking, we already know what time they like. We've already confirmed that it's available. If they'd like to confirm and keep their time, then they can press that button, pay their $49 and confirm it. Otherwise, it'll go out to the public automatically if we haven't heard from them. And so it gives them the freedom to make that choice without us having to kind of go back and forth anymore.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. Okay. So this all happens on sticky pages. You have your landing page with all this information. They've got the countdown timer. They can schedule a time on, I'm guessing, via Acuity or Calendly or something like that, and then pay via Stripe or PayPal. So this is all happening without you actually having to get involved.

Phillip Blume: Yeah, that's the nice thing is, we do have a you know, a lot of people aren't using all those software. Like you mentioned, Calendly is one that for a long time we worked with different students trying to set it up, and it just didn't have the features over the years to qualify the lead really well. You know, it was kind of like half-automated, and you still had to go in there and make manual adjustments and replies to people. So we personally use 17hats, which is a small business CRM, it was designed originally for four photographers, so it kind of manages our whole studio. And we actually worked with, we consulted for 17hats as they developed their own automatic calendar, like Calendly, their own automatic software. Not everybody has those pieces of software necessarily pieced together. So we have, when we work with students, we have sort of a whole system tells you step by step, by step. You can copy and paste this email. You can do the whole thing manually, just using your Gmail if you want to. But we also have this whole automated system that you literally plug into a program, like 17hats, and you're right. It's beautiful. It's complex. You want to understand a system like that, because if something breaks in the software, you don't want to be left out in the rain and clients like getting emails at the wrong time and confusion, but when you set it up the right way, it is beautiful. You can literally launch your email sequence, your marketing that goes out to your email list, and then watch your calendar just fill up. And literally, it's a conversation going on back and forth between your computer and your potential client, and we can take the kids out for a bike ride, and we're doing that while the bookings are being handled by our virtual studio manager, and come home and see that weekend calendar filled up. So it is really exciting and worthwhile to do the work at the front end and get that set up.

Andrew Hellmich: That is so good. So let's say I've gone through the booking process. I've seen the price list, I've selected my date for the session, and I paid my booking fee. Do I just turn up then on the day? Do I get directions to your home? Or do you or Eileen jump on the phone and give me a call and talk about what to expect?

 
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Andrew Hellmich: So everything you've shared today and what you're referring to now that's all inside the Maximizing Mini Sessions eCourse.

Phillip Blume: Oh yeah, yeah. So I haven't actually mentioned, I haven't mentioned much about the course, because I'm hoping that anyone who listens to this is going to just take a lot of these ideas. I mean, for us, all of this just started as ideas, right? No one gave us a course. So it took us, you know, 10 or 11 years to kind of to fill in the gaps. But the ideas, to me, are the things I've learned from others and try to pass on are priceless. The course itself is kind of what a lot of photographers call The Blumes Studio in a box. It's basically our whole studio structure that you can plug in and replicate. So it's hours of videos of not just the teaching, the classroom style teaching, but actually showing our mini sessions in action behind the scenes, showing our in person sales and action behind the scenes, our virtual sales behind the scenes, it's all of our emails. It's all of the order that you should send them in, all of our marketing pieces, all of our verbiage we use, as well as if someone does want to, currently because of the COVID thing, we've had all of these awesome companies who have seen what Maximizing Minis has done in the industry, who have supported us. So that's, you know, 17hats and Sticky. They actually include an extended free use of their software because it's worked so great for the landing pages, the marketing, the software that actually does that for you, plus the whole 17hats, has the auto booking that just does that whole process for you. So and the course is like our actual software plugins, where you can drop those into the software and it builds all of our automations. And of course, you have to go in there and replace our names. I think we already took our names out. You would replace where it says, 'Enter photographer's name here', and you put in your own information, your own logos. But then you have basically our structure, our automation that every time we do a mini session, we just start that system over again and press play and kind of let it run.

Andrew Hellmich: Unreal. I love it. I love it. So you're going to set up a special landing page and share a link with me to give to listeners so they can go and look into this in more detail. For you, the listener, let's use the link now the URL photobizx.com/minis. That's photobizx.com forward slash minis. M-I-N-I-S, and that'll lead you to the landing page that Phillip's going to set up. So you can check out this incredible course, which does sound amazing. So I know you can't guarantee Phillip what people will make or generate with the course, but by the sound of things, if we follow along, should we be able to average, you know, six, $800 sales?

Phillip Blume: Oh yeah. I mean, what you find is when you have a system, and it's something that I have had to drill into my own head, because I always step back from things that are taught to me with hesitation, that person then this quote that Jeff Woods taught me, of trust the process comes back and back to me over and over again. So when you trust the process and you allow it to actually qualify your leads, and you don't decide to break a rule or change something in order to give in to that, that person who inquired and said, well, "Won't you just, you know, won't you just give me a break or I have this situation, and won't you feel bad for me and do things differently for me?" It's so tempting to drop that confidence and change something, and then you end up with clients who aren't qualified. And this is what I have to say to that, because most of the time when we as photographers, I mean, I know there's people who are listening right now and who are thinking, "Yeah, but I actually want to do that, because I'm just an empathetic person. I love people. I want to give and be generous" And so it comes from a really great place, like photographers are artists. Photographers are generally, every photographer you know, I've met or had in a workshop, are just awesome, giving people. But what I always want to remind everyone listening right now, like any photographer who's trying to run a business, if your business fails, what impact can you have on the world? A starving artist cannot feed the hungry. So we have to decide what we want our legacy to be. Do we want the greatest thing that we ever left to the world to be that we gave a discount to somebody who didn't really value our photography that much? Was that the greatest generosity we gave the world? Or can our businesses succeed to a ridiculous level, making our clients happier than they've ever been before, and allowing us to succeed financially in a way we've never thought possible? If we do that, then heck, you know what? Take your extra time and money and just do free sessions for needy people who wouldn't have it at all, or give to people who need food and shelter, change their lives. The generosity that you'll be able to give to the world when your business succeeds. Business owners, artists have like again, have those superpowers that can change the world that almost no one else has. So my encouragement would just be, avoid the temptation, avoid the temptation to give in and change the system. Know that the experience and the product you offer, your artwork is meaningful, and if you don't believe that, no one else will. If you believe it, you're going to find the clients who believe it too. They're out there. You may just not have walked in those social circles before. I had not before, but they're out there, and you'll meet them, and it'll, it'll just change your life experience dramatically.

Andrew Hellmich: So let me bring you back. So if we follow what you're teaching and we stick to the rules that you've outlined in the course, should we be able to generate six and $800 sales?

Phillip Blume: Yes, I would expect seven to $800 US is the average that our students..

Andrew Hellmich: Wow

Phillip Blume: See come out from a mini session when they start running those at the beginning. Now, there's a couple pro tips that we go into later that I would say, like, start out simple, don't try to do everything at once. Just do the basic mini sessions that we guide you through the structure of. And then we give a few pro tips on sort of some advanced products that you can offer, some advanced kind of customer loyalty options that you can give people who want to come back every year. And what Eileen and I have seen is that our averages stay constantly above 1500 per client now. Our last mini session that we did last Thursday was a $2,000 sale. And that was, I say the Thursday because this is something I won't go into deeply now, it's all in the course, but our mini sessions, we only actually run them publicly twice a year, sometimes just once, but usually spring and fall. Spring and Fall, we actually publicly advertise our mini sessions. If you more often than that, then it doesn't seem special, and people don't feel like it's urgent to book. However, we have mini sessions booked secretly who just show up at our house. You know, if you don't have a backyard, then you could run these at the nearest park that's convenient to you. But it's those partnerships with our local businesses who are constantly giving away our sessions to people, and then it's just a steady flow of people who will just show up, maybe one a day, maybe two a day. We'll have maybe three in a week, and they just come one at a time for 20 minutes in our backyard, and I'm able to photograph them, go in for dinner afterwards. And those are the sessions that are filling in those gaps and just creating a constant revenue stream.

Andrew Hellmich: So good. I love it. Phillip, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I'm so glad we had a chance to connect, and I'm really excited to record the second part of this interview with someone who's actually doing what you teach.

Phillip Blume: Awesome.

Andrew Hellmich: So that's going to be next week. And again, massive thanks for coming on, sharing what you did. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Phillip.

Phillip Blume: Thanks, Andrew, pleasure. Have a great one.