Phillip and Elieen Blume are husband and wife wedding photographers from just outside Atlanta Georgia who stumbled upon a unique way of doing mini sessions that after years of refining has is now able to consistently earn them $10,000 in a single weekend without watering down their brand. Today we talk about how they do it!
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In This Episode You'll Learn:
What sets Phillip and Elieen Blume apart from other photographers in their area
The rocky start Phillip and Elieen had with mini sessions in the beginning
What they struggled with the most when booking mini sessions
Why mini sessions are not just for clients who cant afford a regular session
How youre going broke shooting $150 mini sessions and why you should be charging less!
How their average sale is so high even in a country with the highest poverty rate in the country
and how to get enough variety of images in a 20 min mini session
Premium Members Also Learn:
How to set up your mini session funnel
Why most photographers get wrong when it comes to minis and how you can get it right
How to turn mini session clients coming back year after year after year!
Resources:
Join the LIVE Maximizing Mini Sessions Webinar July 29th at 2pm Est
Did you enjoy this episode? Check out more recent interviews with other great guests!
Full Episode Transcription:
Disclaimer: The transcript was transcribed electronically by Temi.com and may contain errors that do not reflect accurately what the speaker said. Because of this, please do not quote this automated transcript.
Raymond Hatfield: 00:00 Listeners are gonna remember from the last time that you were on a, that you were actually a high school English teacher, before you got into photography and Eileen, your wife was working at Starbucks as a barista, you guys decided to shoot weddings when a friend of yours asked you to photograph their wedding. And then within that year, you two were able to go full time, which is something that obviously many photographers aspire to do. But in those early days, was your initial plan to just shoot weddings or was it to take whatever came your way?
Phillip Blume: 00:32 Yeah, so R I mean, goodness, did we have a plan? I have no idea. We were flying by the seat of our pants at that point. And the whole idea of, of experiencing, you know, the, the dream realizing the dream of going full time so quickly as we did it, it felt really good at the time only because we didn't know the reality of what was going on under the surface and how our cost of business of doing business were outweighing our income and all those sorts of things. It was just, we were inexperienced and we didn't know what was going on. And I think that's, that's the story for I try not to feel too ashamed about that. I think that's the common story for a lot of us as we start photography businesses. So it was, it looked exciting on the outside that, you know, within that first year, pretty much we both left our jobs.
Phillip Blume: 01:24 We had to, we were just so overwhelmed with work, working into the night, putting off so many aspects of our personal life, not seeing our friends to the point where, you know, you get called up to hang out with friends and then they call us off and they just stopped calling cause they know the answer's always no. So we were really isolated in our work, you know what I mean? And that was a hard time for us, but, but it was at that point, all wedding photography. And it just kind of happened that way, I guess, by happenstance. But the more we started to get into the industry and listen to the fact that they're, you know, a lot of the kind of rock star photographers and people we learned from were primarily wedding photographers. That was the whole the whole kind of belief system was built around.
Phillip Blume: 02:19 You have to specialize in niche, down niche down until you are super niche in your photography. And, and there are some marketing benefits to that. I think what I know now after 12 years of building a a photography business that has done well, but also that leading to the freedom to build other businesses is that niche is important when it comes to marketing. So there's this whole side of things that you have to separate out in your brain or being niche is very important and how you market yourself and how you speak and how you, you sound to the clients specialized and expert. And they know you're going to do a great job there, cause you're not just doing everything, but that doesn't have to be the case in what you're doing behind the scenes. And in fact, a healthy business.
Phillip Blume: 03:07 And we'll go into this cause it's kind of a part of our story, but we, we learned that a healthy business is not all tied up in one thing. It's diversified, you know, diversification, any, anyone in business understands how important diversification is. And yet many of us as artists getting started trying to be business people just kind of throw that away. And so, yeah, even, even before the, the days of of pandemics and things, when now, so I think so many of us realize all of a sudden many of our students who were focused a hundred percent on weddings are in a really tight spot right now because weddings are postponed, canceling the whole face of the wedding tradition industry. And our culture may for, you know, years into the foreseeable future be completely and suddenly reshaped. And so we're, we're grateful that kind of early on from smaller, less, less traumatic experiences, we realized that doing weddings alone wasn't super safe or stable.
Phillip Blume: 04:13 So we, we did actually broaden and become a diverse business that specializes in a lot of things, but you would never know that if you go to our website, it looks like we're just wedding photographers and kind of in the industry. That's what we've always been known as is wedding photographers and what people don't know. And we're going to talk a little bit about this today, Raymond, of course, but in the background the actually the most profitable part of our business that has kept it growing and scaling has nothing to do with weddings. So it was kind of funny to think that you can actually make a really successful, super profitable, profitable business without even showing the work on your website or mixing up your brand message at all.
Raymond Hatfield: 04:54 Yeah, that's crazy because I would think that common common sense marketing would be to show what you want to sell. Right? So it's, it's, it's really peaked my interest there to hear that, you know, one of the most profitable parts of your business is not even weddings, which is what you would find on the on the homepage of your website. So how long were you shooting weddings before you decided to branch out into other areas of photography?
Phillip Blume: 05:19 Yeah, so, and we still shoot weddings. We just now we limit ourselves to, we won't do more than we, we aim for five. Sometimes we'll take on a couple of extra, we'll do up to eight a year and they're all great, you know luxury sort of luxury priced, high end wedding. So it's very worth our while and we love that still. We love the time with couples. But being a, as being just a wedding photography studio, just focused solely in that. I would say that lasted for maybe just for the first two and a half, three years of getting our, our business really rolling and, and kind of figuring out our branding and all of that over those first three years which is a hard time that's like that time in your business when you're, you're, you're climbing the curve and, and putting in all of the extra legwork to put your systems in place and working around the clock.
Phillip Blume: 06:12 And so during, during that time of, of just wedding, some of the experiences we had were like crazy stuff that maybe it was a fluke, but we realized that you can never predict everything. One example was one year about 30% of our couples. So like one out of every three couples broke up before their wedding. And so we had a sudden crash in like our, our numbers and it was too late. You couldn't book a new wedding because the dates were coming up and we're like, this is kind of risky. How often does this happen? Maybe it was a fluke, but I had also lived in New Zealand during going to uni, going to university there. And I lived in a culture where marriage just, wasn't a thing. I mean, people just, most people don't get married. So they may, they'll, you know, they'll couple up and have a family and stay together as much as we do, but they don't, the culture just didn't value the, the tradition of marriage and the ceremonial pieces of that.
Phillip Blume: 07:08 So it was like that, you know, you look at politics and you look at different opinions on the things, and you're like, ah, who knows, how long does that have a, will that be around for my entire lifetime, the way it is currently? So we get asked those questions. And yeah, I would say during those early days, you know, we weren't charging as much for weddings as we do now. We were still learning out some pricing strategy and that sort of thing. And so we were more open to just taking whatever came our way and, and we wanted to learn everything and figure out what was, what did we really love? What do we want to put our, our effort into? So there was a lot of kind of having our fingers in many pies, for sure. But we did, we, we, I think we believed the common belief, which is that the money is in weddings.
Phillip Blume: 07:57 And so we kept pursuing that. And what we found was when you break it down to actual hours spent on a project, then you look at your work flows and you start realizing, Oh man, my, you know, my cost of goods, can't just be, it's not just one day that you shoot a wedding. Of course, it's a day. And then it's followed up by a week of post-processing. It's actually proceeded by weeks of emails and drama occasionally from mothers of the bride and family situations and questions and answers. And so actually, you know, all of that workload and then you break it down into how much do we actually net and income at the end of all that we're making, you know, X amount per hour. And it was something that we loved when we had the great, our favorite couples.
Phillip Blume: 08:49 It was really a fun process. And a lot of times we had couples or their families who were difficult and it was like, it's not worth, it's not worth the IX, the energy and the really bad anxiety. I think a lot of us, including myself, have a lot of anxiety building up to that big of a a project when you're not just creating portraits, but you're, you're on the hook for catching things in the moment that a lot of a lot is resting on your shoulders. So there's pressure there. So, so I would just kind of leading it to, I guess, a segue into what did we what did we realize getting away from that would be good to get into? We, we essentially came to a point in our business at the end of those two or three years where we saw we're losing money, despite our endless work.
Phillip Blume: 09:44 We had a really, just a really hard year personally, our marriage was suffering cause we didn't have time even to invest in one another. And we wanted to start a family that we had some hiccups along the way with all of that. And so essentially we said, we need to restructure our life. Basically we need to restructure and decide, you know, like what are we doing with this business? Is it, what are our values like, do we want to just create pretty pictures and then, you know, time flies by and all of a sudden you're retiring or of retirement age and you're looking back in your life and thinking, what did I achieve? Well, I took a lot of pretty pictures that ended up on, you know, CDs that got put in a junk drawer somewhere. And that's all you exactly.
Phillip Blume: 10:30 That's all you created with your life. And so at that time, I think we talked about this a little bit before Raymond, so I won't go into the story, but we ended up just needing to step away and pour ourselves into a personal project to kind of get our heads back together and did a big personal project that went really well. It wasn't, we didn't get paid for it. It was, it was kind of like we spent the last of what savings we had to do this project, helping kids and the third world doing sort of documentary photo and video work. And it went, so it was so impactful and so effective beyond our expectations that we realized how powerful visual media is, how meaningful it can be how, how just world changing it can be. And so when we came back it was amazing how that personal project actually connected us with people.
Phillip Blume: 11:23 We're interested in the work we were doing because they had a heart for the same thing. They, they shared our values and we realized that really making sure that our brand was about something important that we believed in was going to help us connect with people on a deep level of trust. And that trust with a capital T really is the number one quality that leads to to client conversion, client sales. If people trust you, they want to do business with you, they share your values. So that was great. And that was that actually fed back into our business completely unexpectedly. The problem was we came back from that project overseas and still had no money. We were literally bankrupt. We couldn't, we couldn't book weddings. And then you know, you know, low end cheap weddings and then try this new business structure.
Phillip Blume: 12:13 And a year when the weddings, my Lincoln route, we needed money, right. Then we couldn't pay our mortgage. We couldn't, we could barely buy groceries at the time. And so we decided many sessions, let's just experiment with a new business structure and what are we going to do? Oh my goodness. Like, I guess we'll just try let's do a weekend of mini sessions and experiment with some business structure stuff. We hate many sessions. This is the last thing we want to do. We had tried mini-sessions once the porn is a huge failure. And so we, we tried it and this new upside down kind of way. And literally two weeks later we do it and we walk away from that weekend with over $8,000 from many sessions. And we didn't even shoot that many portrait clients. It's not like it was all about booking tons of people.
Phillip Blume: 13:00 It was just like huge print sales from putting the system into place. And we realized my goodness, not only can we apply this system now to our weddings and make our weddings luxury, but maybe we, maybe we actually stepped back a bit from weddings and continue doing these mini sessions. Because hour for hour, we were actually profiting Mike two, three times more than weddings hour for hour of work. Just doing many sessions above weddings. So it's been really cool to see now after a decade that that has not only been sustainable and continue to work, but that we've been able to kind of like tweak it over a decade and make it even more profitable and see it work in markets all around the country. So that's kind of our, our crazy rollercoaster of a story through, through our business in life.
Raymond Hatfield: 13:51 Wow. So you mentioned that there's obviously a lot to get into, but I'm really interested in obviously making money with, with mini sessions. And you mentioned there earlier that when you first had, had your shot at mini sessions in the beginning, you failed and that it was a huge that it was a disaster for you. So what was it that made you think, you know what, we're going to give this another shot and we're going to put in all that effort again and hope that it turns out better this time.
Phillip Blume: 14:17 Yeah. Desperation. But, but we, I think one thing was we had put our, when we came home from that trip, we put our kind of put our heads down and realized when we started our business up until now, we were just, we were artists. We didn't even know we were going to start a photography business. It just kind of got away from us. And people started calling and we started booking weddings and stuff and we didn't price it. Right. We didn't structure it. Right. We, we thought, you know, we're, we're creatives, we'll the wheel and we'll kind of have this successful thing. We'll do it. We'll we won't just do some things differently. We'll do everything differently than everyone. And it will be. Yeah. So it was, so that was, it was chaotic to say the least when we came home, we're like, okay, we're humbled.
Phillip Blume: 15:07 We're pretty humbled at this point in our lives. And we say, Eileen, you know, my, my wife, we're the blooms. We worked together with Eileen. Like you have a business degree, let's start thinking about what you learned in college. Like, let's look at what are some of these business principles and financial principles that you sat in a classroom and dug through books and have been tested for centuries. You know, almost scientifically they're all, yeah, crazy. Right. We are just like refuse that sometimes. But it's based on human psychology, marketing psychology and, and we put a lot of that into place and we got mentors not only in the industry to learn, you know, kind of go where we want it to go with our photography, but mentors almost like life coach style to guide us into making sure that we knew our values and based our business on that achieve our goals.
Phillip Blume: 15:59 So that really played into it. And we're like, okay, now we have this system in hand that is proven that his experts have shown this to work for centuries. Now we just want to use it in a new way. We just want to use it in a way that maybe no one's used it before, but we have to trust the system. And so we basically, I think that's what gave us some confidence. We're like, okay, it's mini sessions. We know they don't work from personal experience. But let's apply this system and everything we know, we're just going to put faith in the fact that this, this pricing structure, this marketing technique, everything should work is proven. And, and that, I mean, so we were pleasantly like shocked when the money flowed in that first weekend trying it, but we weren't a hundred percent shot.
Phillip Blume: 16:51 We weren't surprised because we knew that it should. The difference was this random basically came down to, we all know what a mini session is when we think about when, in our minds like we have, it's almost universal. It's crazy. If you, whenever we teach this, we'll ask people to write down like secretly, what do you, what is your definition in your mind when you think of a mini session, how much does it cost? What's included, et cetera. And the answers on the paper will all be almost identical. The same thing. If you just go, you know, go in at the beginning of fall or spring and type hashtag mini-sessions onto Instagram, and you'll get post after posting. And they're all virtually identical from around the world, everybody's doing about a hundred and a hundred dollars, $150 is kind of the average around the world.
Phillip Blume: 17:38 Why are we all doing, why are we all doing this the same? It's because we look at each other and we copy each other and we don't ever ask the question of why do we do it this way? We just copy. And so it spreads like wildfire. We're more like a virus. Let's put it that way. Cause it's negative. And and also like, we tend to give away about 10 or 15 digital images. So that's included and it's like, we don't even ask, why are we limiting? Why are we limiting our clients? Like almost making it like a there's, there's other images, you know, they're going to like, but you're going to keep those away from them because you're like, it's almost punitive. It's like, well, you didn't pay enough. Cause it's just a little mini session. You only paid her $150. You don't deserve more than 10 images.
Phillip Blume: 18:19 And even if they're like, okay, I understand this is a cheapo kind of product. I'm fine. You know, the client's okay with that. They still don't go away with a great satisfy taste in their mouth. They go away with like, this was limited. This was not a full experience. And if, if Eileen and I have learned it, anything is that people don't buy products. Russell Brunson says it really well. People don't buy products, people buy offers and experiences. And that's what ideal clients. If you study marketing research, they're called Neos and economic terms, but the best ideal clients who are, are happy to like spend money on things that give them great life experience and improve the quality of life. Those people they're not looking for deals and sales, that's too much stress for them. You know, there's a whole crowd that just goes to Walmart and looks for sales all the time.
Phillip Blume: 19:10 There's a whole crowd of the market who is looking for experience. And if you can sell that, that's where photographers need to park and run their businesses from because we're not selling a commodity. We run our businesses like commodity businesses as if we're selling reams of paper at Dunder Mifflin or something like that. And that's not what we're not just selling paper. The images, you know, the print may be made of paper, but the images on there and more than that, the relationships they represent and the experience that your client has during a session while they're interacting for their portraits and how your image then sparks the memory of those feelings. If you are able to sell all of that, instead of just selling paper and saying, well, my pictures are the prettiest and you can say something different. Like we help, we help your family to connect.
Phillip Blume: 20:03 And to remember that family comes first, every time that you see artwork on the wall, on your beautiful home. And if you spelled portraits do instead of what they are, then all of a sudden you're going to attract ideal clients who are very happy to pay the amount that you deserve for the time you put in. And it becomes a very, a lot less stress. Cause you're not always chasing, feeling desperate to book every person in your market. You just want to book a few people in there in secret kind of side note here very open secret is that there are a lot easier to find those ideal clients than most people think it's not a huge challenge. You can find them pretty easily once you know how once you have those types of people, then you don't need to spend three, four hours with them, photographing them until, until their kids are you know, exhausted and cranky.
Phillip Blume: 21:01 And dad has lost his patience and just wants to go. Why, why do we think that we have to just keep giving them more and more time for a full length session? When what you can really do is bring them in and give them just enough time to create the portraits that you through a system have learned that they need and will serve them best. Just get those portraits create exactly what you know, that they're going to value and purchase. And then all of a sudden you have a business that is selling artwork. It's not just selling time. You can't trade your time for money forever. You trade your time for money. You will sell your life away. What you have to do is create something of value that then the client can buy and you can multiply that product and it can sell more and more copies of that product essentially while you sit at home and enjoy your life, spend it with your family. So that's the real, that was the real, the real change. And that's kind of a big way to describe it. But I think my mind had to go through that big of a mental shift over time to realize how different a business, a photography business could look.
Raymond Hatfield: 22:08 Yeah. And that, that makes sense. But I still got a few questions here and I know that, you know, one thing that I'm thinking and I'm sure that many others are thinking right now is that you had talked about you know, there's many people who, you know, just go to Walmart and they look for the best value and or they look for discounts, but the ideal client is somebody who's looking for. Those experiences is looking for, you know, a great time and something unique to them. Well then, you know what is it about those mini sessions? Why aren't aren't many sessions just for clients who can't afford the full session, how are they, how are they related and how are they different from each other?
Phillip Blume: 22:50 Yeah. And it's funny because like some of our students, some of the people in our coaching program, depending, you know, some of them have made the choice to not even use the words mini sessions we always have, and it hasn't been a problem for us in our market, but there, there is concern out there that I understand. Like if you use that term photographers kind of, we talked about photographers all have in their minds, what that means. And they're thinking a lot of people in my market, a lot of customers already have a preconceived notion of what that means. And so I'm just not going to use the term at all. But we, we, we still use the term personally because it's just, it's just kind of a gateway is how I think of this. So people are looking for many sessions at a certain season.
Phillip Blume: 23:35 You know, often at seasonal when we do our public mini-sessions we might not have time to get into it now, but we're doing mini sessions all year long. We just don't. We keep them a secret which is wild. You can book it many sessions while keeping in the secret, but we do publicize them twice a year in the spring and fall. And people are looking for that. So when you, when you promote yours it catches their eye. And next we do something which is odd, which is we don't, we break the mold. We're not, we're not we know that our system, when you put it all together will attract ideal clients. But we know that interestingly, even ideal clients are usually attracted at the front end in the same way that those traditional bargain hunting clients are, which is what the special offer.
Phillip Blume: 24:22 And that's just human psychology. So we'll, we'll make our mini sessions actually cost a lot less than a hundred dollars or $150 or whatever that going rate is. So we break the mold. People are like, Oh, what's this, okay, I'm looking for this. This looks like an interesting promotion. Let me check on this. And then they'll inquire with us through kind of a backend link, a backend website. It's not even public for anyone to go to. It's very kind of you have to find our promotion, our advertisement, or our personal email that comes, that arrives in your inbox. And you feel very exclusive because it's not just available to everybody that you take that link and it gives you limited options. It's not just, you can book a portrait session with us anytime. Open-Ended no, it has all of the ingredients to help someone.
Phillip Blume: 25:18 And this is really what marketing is. It's helping people overcome mental blocks and we all have these. Like, I think sometimes we just feel guilty like, Oh, I'm, I'm not a very organized or disciplined person. I'm always wasting time on Facebook. I'm always doing this and everyone else is so good. No, we all, as humans, we all, as humans struggle to get our priorities straight and to remain effective and, and to achieve the things in our lives that we want to achieve. We all struggle with that. And that's true for our clients as well. So the best thing we can do is serve them by helping them, not only see the value in photography, but help them to attain it and, and get past that, that speed bump of putting it off forever. Right? So most of the time people will put it off and they'll look back with regret that they never did it.
Phillip Blume: 26:04 What we do is we limit, we say, it's like, it's now it's these dates. You come to the location, we choose. We're not going to give you lots of options. Where do you want to shoot? What style do you want? No. When it comes to mini sessions, it's, this is what it is. It's a great front end value. And let's just help you get this done. So we're literally like being life coaches to them and getting them past the speed bump. And then once, once they opt in, Oh, I'd like to do that. Yes. I would choose this time on the date that you offered that one Friday and Saturday that you offered I'm available this time and they choose the time. And then it starts a series of, to them. So they're not booked automatically. In fact, we make it a little bit hard for them to book because we know that the goal of marketing is not, this is something that Seth Godin, the father of modern marketing says the goal of marketing is not to attract clients only.
Phillip Blume: 27:01 It's also to repel clients. Yes. The literally good marketing. I may catch a lot of eyeballs, but the last thing you want to do, and I was guilty of this for years. If, if someone inquired with us, I was like, Oh my gosh, like inquiries do not come through every single day. I've got to book this person if I'm. And so I sounded desperate. I acted desperate. I tried to book everyone now with the system, we get so many inquiries. What I, what I know is that I actually want most of them to disappear. I'm happy when most of them ghost, cause I don't want to spend a ton of time with clients who aren't going to value what I do. I want to filter out and discover the few clients who I can spend a fair amount of time with get a lot of income and go about my life.
Phillip Blume: 27:48 Not be weighed down by trying to, you know, trying to compete with other tire person. I'm the only photographer in town and serve everybody. I never want to do that anymore. So that was kind of the key. And now, even though the front end price is so low, that that system of communication that they're put through that series of emails that explains to them what the experience is going to be like, what the session is going to be like. And then very clearly what the pricing is like, why the prints are sold separately and how to, how you can purchase those. And it's all strategically priced. So it's very appealing and, and frankly can serve anyone of any income level. But it gets people invested in the experience before they've even had a photo shoot. And then those who do commit and sign the contract are absolutely ideal clients.
Phillip Blume: 28:41 And we'll typically shoot about six families per day during our mini sessions. So it's very relaxed. Some of our students do 12 a day. Why don't we just slice? We just slice that in half because it's like we wouldn't be home in time to cook supper and be with our kids on a, on a mini session day, no more of this like long wedding day type stuff for us. We're out, we're done with that. So it was very relaxed six a day. And we do that for two days. And on average for Eileen and me, and this is not to like over, over promising and raise expectations too high, but we've been doing this for 10 years. So our mini sessions average about $1,200 in print sales per 20 minute session. So we'll be doing after 12 sessions on a weekend you know, well over $10,000, maybe 10 or $12,000 or more per weekend, which is more than we can make from very stressful, more than weddings. Right. And so hold on, hold on. I'll do the math, right. It's easy. So, Oh wait. Okay. So we're talking
Raymond Hatfield: 29:42 About these hundred and $50 sessions that most people do, right? For 20 minutes. This is like $450 an hour. That sounds pretty good to me, right? You to decide, you know what, we're actually going to charge much less than this. And now you're bringing home. I mean, 10 times the amount of money, right? 10 times easily, please just give me a 50,000 foot overview of how this mini session system works for you.
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Raymond Hatfield: 30:34 That is a perfect tip right there. And something that I've definitely made the mistake of doing in my own ads where, you know, you use the beautiful landscape with the tiny little people. It has a beautiful photo, but you're absolutely right. That is the worst photo that that you can use to get somebody to connect with your, with your ad. So, so thank you. Thank you for, for sharing that. What I want to know right now is that there are going to be people listening to this who think to themselves, wait a second, a $1,200 average is crazy. There's no way that my market can sustain that. So what do you say to those people
Phillip Blume: 31:13 Now, Eileen Eileen's in my market that we started our business in and where we still do our business has the highest poverty rate in the United States of America. So, so we know something about hard markets. It's, you know, it's the town of our closest town. 20 minutes away is a hundred thousand people. And the majority of that is so close to the poverty line or below. There's only a small number of people who we can even target and grow our business through, but that's all you need. It doesn't matter how much competition around it doesn't matter how small your market, how poor your market. You, if you're, if you're serving the right people the right way, you only need a handful of clients every year.
Raymond Hatfield: 31:56 That is incredible. Especially because as you said, I mean, you live in one of the most impoverished markets in the entire United States. So to know that your system has not only worked for you, obviously, like if it works for you, it's going to work everywhere else in the country, which you've shown by the success stories of your students when it comes to mini sessions though, you know, one thing that I struggled with and I know that many others struggle with as well, is that if you're doing such a short session, how do you possibly get enough variety in your images?
Phillip Blume: 32:33 Yeah. And this is the great thing is that we have to ask her if I had to sort of step back and ask ourselves a question, which is just like we were talking earlier about you know, what should a mini session be? What you should include? What, what are the assumptions we're making about what a photo shoot has to be? And I'm not, I'm not here to tell anybody like you're doing it wrong. And let me tell you the right way. There's actually a lot of open space for you to do it exactly how you want. But you have to ask yourself why first. So for example, Eileen and I create a lot of variety in 20 minutes hour style. What I do, and one thing I am very proud of. I'm not humble about this at all. I'm a child whisper.
Phillip Blume: 33:16 I know how to like kids and I are, maybe it's cause we're on the same level and I'm sort mature, but I connect and I can control the experience with kids. I can, they're like putty in my hands. So what we do and we teach this a lot to our students as well. So even if you're not, maybe you're not, don't feel naturally gifted at working with kids. A lot of this is just stuff that we even learned when we were adopting our son. And we had to go through so much training of like how to deal with kids who come from traumatic experiences in the foster or adoption world overseas and connecting with them. And it works for every kid. So what we'll do is when the families arrive, I don't greet the parents first, as if they're my peers, I immediately get excited and wide eyed and are like the kid, Oh my gosh, Jimmy, Janice, you know, I've got their names on my sheet because we sent a survey out before the session.
Phillip Blume: 34:08 I know who they are. I already know what they're into. I'm like, Oh my gosh, I know you really love unicorns. Right? That's my favorite animal. I can't wait to have some fun with you. I heard all about you. So I agree with them first. And the parents know I'm going to do that. So it's not creepy. Right? We've had this communication beforehand through these automated emails, they know exactly what to expect, but man, I'm there for the kids. And I tell them, Hey, we have a secret. And the secret is your parents can't hear. And of course they all know this it's coming, but we're going to, and I don't tell them exactly what we're going to do. All I do is get them on my side. I say, your mom and dad think that this is regular old, boring pictures, but actually we're going to really surprise them and make them laugh like crazy.
Phillip Blume: 34:50 Will you help me do that? Oh man. Like at that point, instead of being an authority figure and which, which is why kids test authority and they'll test limits, and you end up with a really difficult situation on your hand that you can't control, unless you try to bribe and that doesn't work instead. Now I am in cahoots with them and, and they will do anything I say, because we together are testing the authority. Right. So, right. So I'll get this. And next step is to get exactly what I want. I'll say, Hey, look, come sit over here. Don't worry, mom and dad, this is just a perfect normal picture. You know, Janice and Jimmy are just such little angels. Look at, look at them, smiling like little angels and they will smile. They'll do exactly what I say just as I say it, because it sounds like a joke building up to something.
Phillip Blume: 35:41 So I get my perfect portrait. I get that. And then we call it, we have what we call balloon theory, posing that Eileen and I kind of created a book around. But once we're there, I'll say, now I'm going to count to three one, two, three, and then there's a whole number of scenarios that we might end in that perfect shot with. And it explodes into laughter tickling, whatever it is. And we run in and get just a number of angles, close ups medium shots of, of interactions and those crazy enough like that, that one perfect picture may end up being the one over there, mantle. But all of those authentic expressions, connecting moments, dozens of little like quick snaps that we take that we'll never win a print award. Those end up filling coffee, table albums and other products, and they're just become the favorite images of our clients.
Phillip Blume: 36:35 And so we create, we kind of go trigger happy between the perfect moments, but we just repeat that over and over again and get as many perfect pictures as we want. And then a bunch of playful ones in between some of our students and they'll, they use a part of the system that we also do, but they, they use it only and they kind of stay away from the, the mass creation of images and they're, they're more formal in their style and they will just, they know exactly what what portraits the family wants and where they want them in their home. Ahead of time. We used to do this by actually visiting people's homes and having a, a consultation to choose this ahead of time. Now we do it all through our online system. So all you really need ultimately is like most of our clients are going home with about like four, maybe three, four or five pictures. That's ultimately, they're getting enlargements of three, four or five favorite pictures and that's, what's adding up to our big sale. So if you just get three, four or five pictures and, you know, ahead what they want, so you make sure to focus on that, then you're set. Like you can just take a session for 20 minutes and get five pictures and you're good to go. So you can do it either way. I kind of enjoy them both.
Raymond Hatfield: 37:47 Yeah. Especially. What's great to hear about that is that I know when I show up for an engagement session, usually those first few photos, I know we're just going to be throwaways. It's just to try to get them warmed up to the camera, but that little exercise right there ensures, obviously, because you have such a short amount of time that you're able to get them to connect and get photos that you know, that they're going to love right off the bat. That's fantastic. That is a great tip. So thank you for sharing that. Okay.
Phillip Blume: 38:12 Absolutely. Yeah. Change changed our world.
Raymond Hatfield: 38:14 Yeah, I would imagine, I would imagine. But one of the big, I think underlying questions that we have here about many sessions that, that sometimes I think sometimes other people think is that, you know, all of this, what you're saying today sounds great. All of this, about mini sessions, making good, consistent amount of money is having a better connection with our clients. All this is great, but isn't ultimately the, mini-session just simply going to undercut our regular sessions.
Phillip Blume: 38:45 Yeah. And usually the it's a great question. Cause it's the, the question that everyone asks, I've heard this hundreds of times over the years my immediate kind of response that maybe kind of takes, takes someone off their guard is, so why isn't that what you want don't you want to just do mini sessions if they make this much like you can just spend 20 minutes on your sessions. You can ask people to come to you. I mean, most of our mini sessions we do in our backyard, we don't have to, we don't go to some special location. We still offer fooling sessions. If people want a different, if they have a special place, they need to do it. They want to do it at their home. They have a big family, a family reunion, and they're going to have several families and big groups.
Phillip Blume: 39:30 And well, we still do those sorts of things because mostly because clients who are loyal to us through our mini sessions need those services as well. And that's full, fully different product. But mostly what I want to do is people just to come to my backyard for 20 minutes and get, you know, over a thousand dollars a pop every time. That's what I want now that said our business, you know, we still photograph during normal, you know, during, during normal times we still photograph up to eight weddings really great weddings a year. They only, the clients that we want to photograph now, how do you end up, like, how do you know what clients you want to photograph? How do you, how do you hear people say that? Like I only, we photograph the best weddings the most. How do you know, did you know the people you didn't experience much with them other than their inquiry when they inquired about their wedding?
Phillip Blume: 40:22 Yeah. Well, I'll tell you how that works for us because our mini sessions have led to lead to almost all of our weddings and larger sessions now. So it doesn't undercut it. Lee, in fact, this is hilarious because I'm, I'm so glad you asked that I literally have, we have all of our cards and graduation. I'll cover her name. So I'm not like blasting her on the interwebs, but yesterday, a day before yesterday, book the wedding for this girl. Now I w we took this picture as a senior photo shoot mini session. We do our menus for seniors as well. And this was a mini session that we did five, six years ago. Wow. And yesterday booked an $8,000 wedding package for this girl. She's getting married now five, five or six years later. So that's just one example, like this happens to be right in front of me here. But it's literally our mini sessions because we now have a connection to so many clients over a short period of time. It's not like we worked with 20 wedding clients and that's all we did the whole year. No, like every weekend that we choose to do a mini session we're working with 12 clients just that weekend in a short amount of time. So it leads to so many connections and so many more inquiries for weddings and every other thing.
Raymond Hatfield: 41:41 Wow. Yeah. That was that response right there of the, so what essentially, Oh my gosh, just totally reframed. I think the way that I look at mini sessions and I really hope that it reframes the way that many others look at mini sessions as well, because you're right. I mean, ultimately, if you were to, you know, just do a, say an hour long session, you could only hope for like a $1,200 sale. Why not want to get that down to just a, you know, 20 minutes of shooting. That is fantastic.
Phillip Blume: 42:11 Yeah. And you just can't market, you can't Mark it the same way with longer sessions. Cause you can't do them back to back in Philadelphia. You can maybe do two or three sessions a day if you're doing and nobody wants you to just keep shooting photographs of them all day. They're starting. If when you do, they start to wonder like, did we not get some good ones already? Why don't we keep going? You could shoot forever. You could shoot forever. But really what matters is a great experience, which generally takes place, you know, brevity is the soul of wit brevity is the soul of a lot of good experiences. What matters is that experience and what matters is the product and you don't need to shoot all day long. You can stop trading your time for money.
Raymond Hatfield: 42:47 Yeah. Yeah. When I'm interested to know what is, you know, for you, when you have such a short amount of time, when you have such a diverse set of things that you're shooting, whether it be seniors, whether it be families what's the one shot or what's the one thing that just either has to happen or you have to get in order for you to consider that mini session a success.
Phillip Blume: 43:08 Yeah. I mean, I want to get that. To me, it's, it's one, it's kind of one simple thing. It's like that standard camera aware, formal portrait, which is, it ends up not being the main thing, but it is something that I have to get. And I get that so easily just, you know, at the outset outside of the shoot. And then I just, it's really, ideally I'm wanting to get authenticity because what people want in photos is the same thing I want. When I open up this album that I dug up from my family's history of black and white photos. Like literally my, after my grandmother passed away, my dad went to up to Illinois and brought home. All these things for, from her home. One was a ma it was albums full of photos, going back into family till back to Italy where like the kids had these ruffled collars, crazy stuff.
Phillip Blume: 44:07 I never even seen. And to look at these pictures and be like, Oh my gosh, like this isn't, this, isn't like a fake black and white photo of made at some studio at six flags or something. This is like legit old timey clothes and black and white. And, and these people look like us. Like they're our family, it's nuts. And it gives you perspective on identity. It makes you think it makes you grow, think and understand your place in the world. And that's, that's kind of on a historic scale. But when you just look at the pictures of yourself as a kid, and you're reminded who you are in relation to your family and the important people around you, that provides a, a valuable experience to all of us, that we can't even, we can't overestimate. So ultimately I'm wanting to get those authentic portraits. And I to do that, I just, I had to let go of a lot of ego. I remember when I started shooting seniors, for example, like this, this lovely young lady, I was always like, I've got to be cool. These seniors, they're, they're young, they're hip. Like,
Raymond Hatfield: 45:15 That's why I haven't gotten it. I need,
Phillip Blume: 45:17 I need to, like, I need to be the one that they want to hang out with because they think I'm a rock star. Opposite. Opposite is true. These kids are, I'll tell you what's going on in their heads. Cause I've learned it over time. They're so sick of all the inauthenticity and all of the people at school trying to be cool. They're sick of it. When I, when I photograph a senior, I'm like, Hey, listen, I am so sorry. You know, I've, I've spent all, I'm probably going to be a complete doofus because I've spent all week photographing six year olds and I'm a dad myself. And so you're going to hear a lot of bad, bad, bad jokes. And, and every, when, if I need her to pose, I'm showing her how to pose and just everything. And I'll be completely a ham and I'll completely make a fool of myself and excuse me in every, anything.
Phillip Blume: 46:03 I want her to do anything. I don't want my senior guys to do. I just, I model it first. And if I'm willing to put myself out there and do it first, then all of a sudden they know they're in the safe space. This is like, they can actually breathe. They're away from school and all the ridiculous drama. And they're finally in an environment where like, I'm like a dad figure and they can just be, be an honest version of themselves. So I've, I find that like those kinds of tips, that kind of authenticity is, is what I want most out of my photographs. That's what serves the most value to my clients over the years and actually has purpose. And it's actually, it ends up being a lot less work and stress to get that if, if you just loosen up yourself.
Raymond Hatfield: 46:50 Yeah. And that's definitely the type of the photo that I would rather have of my children than a, I mean, like you said, we have the camera where photo of the whole family sitting above the in the living room, but it's those photos of them being authentic to who they are that they truly, truly valued the most. So I know how to be happy. It doesn't have to be Epic. That goes back to that, that big landscape, tiny people photo. I would love that of my family. But anyway I know that I've kept you for far too long today, but before I let you go, is there anything that maybe I didn't ask that you want to make sure that the listeners know or understand about doing mini sessions?
Phillip Blume: 47:29 Yeah. I mean, it's, it is a, it's the kind of thing where as photographers, we get into this business and we realized that photography is about 10% of what we do and the other 90% is running a business. And so the one thing that we have been just Eileen and I have been more proud of than anything is just over our career building community where people don't feel like they're competing with one another, but where we're collaborating together. So that is our comm unity community. So it's literally spelled like com unity is the cry of our hearts that we would bring our life, our personal life, our businesses, and our art all together. And they're not competing against each other for time and for a place in our lives, but it's all unified. So come unity as an awesome we have a Facebook mastermind group that's free.
Phillip Blume: 48:23 I would love anyone who's listening to just come and be a part of that group. And then for those who want to really reshape their business, where we're coaching for years even through PPA and other organizations who have sponsored our tours around the country to do and help, help photographers, restructure their businesses or get their businesses going with minis we were only able to do so many people, one on one per year. So we have this whole course that I love for people to learn about where we can work with you personally to, to give you our whole system of emails, pricing strategies, and everything, to actually just build your business on top of that foundation. So yeah, well, hopefully we can connect through community group and all of the education and see a lot of people, especially as we come out from shutdowns and things just gangbusters grow their businesses without having to worry about weddings and things like that.