28: Making Montana Diaries: My photo/video business story!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN…
1. Why video is KING online, AKA why YOU should incorporate video into your business strategy
2. The leg up that hybrid shooters have in the photo + video industries and why it IS possible to learn with your existing equipment
3. Action steps you can take RIGHT NOW toward incorporating video content!
Making Montana Diaires: My photo/video business story!
psssttt…
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COLLEGE YOUTUBE CHANNEL LOL
When I was in college, I had a hobby YouTube channel where my roommates and I would make just about the dumbest videos you can imagine — I really didn’t know what I was doing or know the concept of personal branding or niching or funneling to a paid offer. It was just dumb fun.
During the years I had this personal YouTube channel, though, travel diaries were blowing upppp on YouTube and I was obsessed. My husband, welp boyfriend at the time, Brandon and I are from NW Montana and we spent our summers there hiking and fishing in the most picturesque place you can imagine. Think Glacier National Park if it wasn’t infested with people — that’s where we grew up. So I started a mini-series on my channel called Montana Diaries — play on travel diaries, super original, I know — but I would just vlog our adventures. I even bought a drone for that sick ass dope ass drone footage, I was one of those. Think any basic blonde influencer from the 2010s and that’s who I loved, but nobody more than Hailey Devine — I was obsesseddd with Hailey Devine and I still freaking check up on this woman every once and a while — she had a legit chokehold on me. But she was a videographer who actually got paid to do this fun thing that I just did for fun — companies and brands and tourism boards would pay her to take videos and photos in the most beautiful places I could only dream of visiting. She wasn’t an ~influencer~ in the traditional sense — she was a master of her craft, a real talented filmmaker and business woman but she was cool and chill and funny. She turned more to family and lifestyle content later, which I’m not really into, but mannnn — all of this is just to say that the YouTube thing was just a silly goofy thing that I did until it wasn’t. I finally had something modeling a career that I actually kind of wanted — the Devines even started posting weddings that they filmed, and my wheels were really turning toward the end of my college career. I don’t think I thought that this would be my career, but the idea of having such a fun side job was starting to seem really cool.
WHAT THE BEGINNING OF MY BUSINESS WAS LIKE
Soooo that brings us to the beginning of the business, I guess. I know educators in the photography and videography space are always preaching “you’ll shoot what you share” and it’s kinda annoying, and I’m so sorry, but it’s true. I had no business sense or any idea what I was doing, but I started getting inquiries from real clients just from the YouTube stuff I was sharing. Some students from my college had me take their graduation photos, the owner of the volleyball club that I coached for hired me for her WEDDING which I’m so grateful for but I really had no business shooting, and then by the time I graduated college in 2017 I really started to think about what a real business could be. Bran and I were engaged by this point — we went to colleges four hours apart and he had a year left when I graduated, so I moved to his college town. I remember we were dreaming up this side business — we thought we’d work for tourism boards mostly and make content for the parks, which is funny because we ended up becoming friends with a dude that literally has the job we ideated back then and thought was so impossible — I’ll have to get him on the pod to get his perspective on what it’s like, but he was a TUMBLR boi back then and I literally followed him. It’s just so funny to think about now.
That summer of 2017 we did five free weddings, mostly for friends, and we took on a ton of outdoor branding work — it was very Montana, think lodges and fly fishing outfitters. So it was a lot of portfolio building mixed with paid work — I think we made something like $25,000 that first summer and I didn’t save a freaking penny, it was all going to equipment and traveling costs and I paid our rent that year because Bran had to finish up school and then student teach. But that $25,000 blew our mindssss — we couldn’t believe we could get paid to do what we were doing, it was just so fun. Our work was atrocious, but that’s just retrospect. I think people literally hired us because we owned a drone — I don’t want to be dramatic either but I think we might have been one of like three videographers in the state. It’s so funny to look back on — I was never not working, I was a waitress and I freelanced for an online certification company that taught HVACR education so I was freaking making slideshows about commercial boiler systems and I took on every singleeeee photography project that came up. Brandon’s college was in a small town and there was this weird boudoir boom in that town — I swear I did like 45 boudoir shoots in the spring of 2018 for like $50 each, and it wasn’t like the creative weirdo artsy tasteful female gaze boudoir that I do now, it was like — porn poses and white women holding guns with fish lips. I’m not kidding.
I was so run down and burned out by the time Bran graduated — I was so grateful to get the hellll out of there, for the fresh start. But I was also a little lost — I was still in the mindset that videography and photography was a side business for me, I still didn’t know that it could be a full time career for me or that full time was something I even wanted. On top of that, we moved to a realllyyyyy small town for his first teaching job and it honestly just felt really lonely trying to integrate into yet another close knit Montana community.
I think what’s always a little weird timeline-wise in my business story is trying to explain why and how the traveling got so crazy every summer — buttt it makes more sense if you think about the wedding market: weddings book out about a year in advance, so my 2018 couples had booked when people mostly knew me in central Montana in 2017 and then my 2019 couples were a mix of central Montana and Southwest Montana…soooo while I had moved to different regions of Montana every single year of my business, I ended up traveling hoursss to my weddings every week because my clientele were so spread out and I said yes to EVERYTHING. There was no rhyme or reason, it was crazy — and Montana is huge, if you didn’t know that. At the end of the 2019 wedding season I knew a few things: I knew I wanted to niche (mostly) to adventurous couples and let go of a lot of the branding and family work. I knew I wanted to be more high end, so I needed to raise the quality of my portfolio to the price point I needed to reach. I knew as the years passed without me getting a real adult corporate job I was getting more and more unemployable…so I needed to start acting more like an entrepreneur and less like a hobbyist.
Aannnddd then I found out I was pregnant at the end of 2019, so it was time to get realllyyyy focused. Oh, and I was due in August of 2020 soooo… yes, right in the middle of wedding season. We quit booking weddings right when we found out we were pregnant, so we were at about half capacity for the next season which…hurt, I guess, the realization that I couldn’t make the amount of money I wanted to make. That I wasn’t contributing toward our financial goals. I remember New Year’s Eve, I told Brandon “2020…will not be my year, but ya know what? 2021 will be.” That was our joke, that I would make 2020 about setting us up for success in 2021.
Ohhhhh my gosh, what an omen. Did I cause COVID? Am I the drama?
Obviously, it turned out to be a blessinnngggg that we had prepared for a slow year in 2020. In March, I made the quick decision to make everything as easy as possible for our clients — to reach out and offer help and let anyone reschedule that wanted to and to put up zeroooo fuss for cancellations, and just going into the pandemic with that mindset helped a lot. I used face to camera video, talking heads, to talk people through getting married in the pandemic the best that I could and this weirdly established me more as something who did talking head videos to educate, which is kinda funny. I worked so hard, SO hard. I was scared…I don’t know how to even put words to this time. We were pre-vaccine, I had to honor my contracts and work weddings but I was also very aware that if I tested positive before labor then I would be giving birth alone, without Brandon, and they warned me that they would take my baby from me and dispose of my breast milk immediately after birth. I’ve never talked about this — I just honestly didn’t know how to handle it, I didn’t know how to live the two lives we were living where I was pretty much in constant isolation in our remote town and taking walks alone every day but then once a week I was traveling and covering the weddings that didn’t cancel. And the political climate wasn’t great — the protests and the fighting and the businesses getting called out. So I was taking notes on how I wanted to show my ideals in the business better in the future but also kinda shoving those feelings under the rug to deal with at a later time. SO I basically felt like a hypocrite in every aspect of my life, and I felt extra sensitive to any judgement because obviously I was judging myself too. Ya know, cute 2020 things. I should say that I never did get COVID when I was pregnant, and Bran was able to be there during the birth, thank goodness.
But I was thinking a lot about BUSINESS. I was consuming a crazy amount of business content — I learned about SEO, branding, educational content, passive income, client experience, systems, money, I was consuming, consuming, consuming business content like crazy. It’s hard to condense all of this into a quick, easy story but the month or two before Lucy was born was…insane, I guess. I got burned realllyyyyy badly with a collaborative project and it left a really bad taste in my mouth, and I was really hurt and hysterical about it. This experience changed the business in ways I’ve never come out and said — I became hyper focused on what having a personal brand actually meant, I knew I would neverrrr speak negatively about this experience online even though this person deserved it, and I became obsessed with contracts and having clearly defined communication boundaries. I’ve never given my phone number out again and I’m better for it. I also jumped on everyyyy opportunity to shoot in NW Montana because we were pivoting our marketing to that area — we were finallyyyyy laying the groundwork to live and grow where we’ve always wanted to be. And Brandon’s family lives right outside of Glacier National Park, so that also kinda solved my “where do I put the baby while I’m shooting” dilemma.
The new niche of adventurous couples and the focus on branding made one thing that we suspected suppperrrr clear: the most attractive thing about us, besides being connected to the mountains and Montana lifestyle and laid back weddings, is that we could offer both video AND photo with one team. What also became clear, is that other photographers were starting to want to do the same thing.
WHEN I STARTED TO GET QUESTIONS FROM PHOTOGS…
It might be obvious by this point — with all of the business education and planning I was doing during my pregnancy and crazy pivoting in 2020, that I was becoming interested in selling a digital product — what not a lot of people know is that at the time, I thoughtttt I wanted to make a HUGE high ticket course teaching wedding videography business. My “thing” has always been that I over-deliver video and that I’m faster than the market average at editing and I deliver way more than others are delivering— I would deliver the full ceremony, speeches, reception cut, AND highlight film at a high ticket price without charging hourly packages. I was a full service videographer booking out every year WITHOUT a big social media following. I didn’t follow industry standards with how I ran by business and I was doing well with that — all of that is still true, but nobody really cares about any of that — and that’s an important thing to know before creating a product.
In September of 2020, I took Digital Course Academy taught by one of my favorite female entrepreneurs Amy Porterfield and thank goodness; that course requires a tonnnnn of market research and messaging work. I’m so grateful every day that I was throwing up polls on my Instagram stories, teasing that I was creating something cool, and getting creatives on calls. My ideas were a wedding videography business course, a creative business systems course, a marketing course for creatives with low social media numbers like me. None of these are BAD ideas, but they weren’t things my peers wanted from me.
Instead, I started getting DMs from photographers asking questions about video. Like, a lot of DMs. My sweet friend Laurin Kluver even DMed me saying “pleasseee tell me you’re doing videography education!” I think it was that DM where I was like “...yes, yes I am.”
So, I wasn’t giving up on my other course and education and digital product dreams — I started this Podcast as a general creative business podcast, after all. Butttt it became so clear to me that something I thought was easy and took for granted, which was my ability to do videography and photography in the same session using one camera setup, was something photographers REALLY wanted to learn how to do but felt overwhelmed by, scared to do, they thought it would cost a ton of money in new equipment, and they thought the learning curve for editing was too much.
I hired my friend Maddie, an incredible branding photographer, to come crash on my couch for a week in October of 2020 and we curated shoots in almost every niche of photography so I could showcase how I captured photos AND videos within those same shoots. And that was going to be it…butttt, well, let me tell ya about Clubhouse.
CLUBHOUSE IS WHEN I REALIZED HOW MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS WANTED TO LEARN VIDEO BUT HAD BLOCKS
I know Clubhouse was a bit of a fever dream, but it’s where I finalllyyyyy realized two things: the importance of meeting people where they’re at and serving them from that place, and the power of networking and finding community.
I met my dear friend Chris Mai being know-it-alls together in photography rooms, and it’s where I started talking to people like Jaci, Dawn Jarvis, and Dawn Charles. These are all big hitters in the industry that I never really bothered to network with, and it’s such a shame because they’re cool as shit. I started filling up my podcast roster with these creatives and educators that I really respected, and it was a huge game changer, one that I’m ridiculously grateful for. I alsoooo started hosting rooms in clubhouse where I was testing out videography education for photographers, and the questions photographers had about video were making my head spin. So at the beginning of 2021, I outlined talking head videos for the course I was launching that reflected what photographers were ACTUALLY asking about video — thanks, Clubhouse.
The first launch of Videography for Photographers was in March of 2021 — I hired Nicola Dixon to help me with that launch, and we also became friends. So freaking fun getting to know that woman — we’re actually really similar, both creative writers who want to be authors but also find a lot of creativity in business. She helped me figure out how to warm up my audience and get over the last bit of fear about selling to a small audience, and she also made me make a financial goal for the launch. I met the financial goal, which I immediately used allllll of that money to hire a brand and web designer which made me look legitimate, which I guess is important. Thankssss Nikki Fanshaw, let me know if you want the best brand and web designer ever and I’ll send you her way.
Soooo just like that, we’re at the point where my business pretty much formed into what it is today.
WHAT MY BUSINESS IS LIKE NOW
I’ve spent the last year refining how I teach and figuring out where photographers get stuck, and I’m so proud of the system we have for teaching photographers video in the most simple freaking way possible — and it’s not about making you a VIDEOGRAPHER if that’s not what you want, it’s about utilizing video in your photography business. I’ve split up the course into three sections — mechanics, where I teach the HOW of hybrid shooting and editing photos and videos using super simple language, storytelling is the next module where I teach my thought process behind shooting and editing for story and how each niche can benefit from thinking about story, and then the implementation module is all about strategy and figuring out how to make video work for your unique business.
As for the service side of my business, I’m obsessed with figuring out how to make my client experience the best it can possibly be and delivering the best possible content and highest possible quantity — I’m still doing my own thing with structuring my packages and making my business work for me.
FREE VIDEO CLASS!!
Nowwww I have to tell you about an awesome free resource that I really think you’ll benefit from if you’ve made it this far in the podcast! It’s a free class for photographers, HOW TO UPLEVEL YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS USING VIDEO — this free class teaches you everything you need to know about integrating video into your photography biz without buying new equipment, getting super techy, or wasting your precious time! So pleaseeeee head over to montanadiaries.com/learnvideo to take the free class — that’s montanadiaries.com/learnvideo and there are other free resources at the bottom of that page as well.