219: The Capacity Math Every Photographer Should Know

 Welcome to Shoot It Straight, the podcast for women building businesses and lives they actually want. I’m Sabrina Gebhardt, and around here we believe in clarity over hustle, alignment over burnout, and giving yourself permission to want more, more ease, more beauty, more income, more space to live. So if you’re ready to grow without losing yourself in the process, you’re in the right place.

Welcome back to the Shoot It Straight podcast, my friends. Today we’re gonna talk a little bit about problem-solving, and I’m gonna kinda cover different types of problems really quickly, but there’s an overarching theme today, and that is that I think many of you are trying to solve the wrong problem.

Here’s an example. You have low inquiries? Post more. You have too many clients? Outsource your editing. You have a low profit? So raise your prices. You’re overwhelmed? Buy a new planner. You have a weak launch? Create a new offer Does that sound familiar? Any of those problems and solutions sound familiar to you?

Maybe you’ve done one or more than one, or maybe all of them at some point in your business. The thing about those problems is that you are actually medicating symptoms without diagnosing the actual problem first. You are working on a symptom level instead of getting to the root. You’re solving a problem that you feel like is the loudest when actually the quietest one buried underneath layers is the one that you should be focusing on because it will give you the most lasting change.

Last week, we talked about an outdated system of running your business when you’ve been in business for a few years and you’re still doing things as a beginner would do. This week, we’re gonna talk about why the, quote-unquote, “fixes” that you keep making in your business are not actually fixing it. The problem making the most noise, the problem that seems the most obvious, the problem that is the loudest or maybe even feels like the sexiest thing to attack is almost never the actual problem.

I do office hours with my Root to Rise women. We get on two calls every single week. One of them is a coaching call in one capacity or another, and the other one is an office hours call where everybody can ask questions, give updates, share what they’re working on, what they’re stuck on. I coach them, and then also the other women mastermind together and support each other.

They are fantastic. Every single call so far this round of the program, someone has asked in one way or another, “What do I work on first?” The words are different, the situations they’re in are different, the things they’re facing are different, but the underlying question is the same: “What do I work on first?”

These are smart, very experienced women. We don’t have beginners in this group, okay? These women have been in business at least a couple of years, at most, a decade or more, and they’re still getting stuck on what to do, right? They’re still getting stuck on what are their priorities. They still are having a hard time filtering what they really need to be doing to get to the deep, lasting change that they want to not just solve the sexy problem, the loud problem, but to get to the bottom of it There are so many layers of things, and I’m just gonna kinda go through rapid fire what some of them are.

And I think what’s gonna happen is that you will pick up on the ones that maybe are speaking to you right now. You’re gonna pick up on the ones that you’re like, “Oh, no, that’s definitely me. I definitely feel that way or have felt that way before.” So you’re gonna latch on to one or multiple of these. So let’s just kind of run through them very, very quickly Your vision.

This is so often skipped with photographers because photographers are artists first. They are creatives first. They are business owners last. It’s why so many women struggle. It’s why I am able to help so many women, because I have a business first brain. Vision is very much a business brain question.

Artists, creatives, they want to do the thing they love, right? They want to take the photos. They want to edit the photos. They want to deliver joy and beauty. They’re not thinking about big picture vision for their business. But ultimately, if you want to have a business that has longevity, that is sustainable, you need to have a vision.

What is the purpose of your business? What are you doing? What are you creating? Not just for your clients, but for your own life. What’s the point of being in business? Because if you just wanna create to create, that’s a hobby, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve heard me say on the podcast before, I love needlepoint.

It is my hobby that I’m currently obsessed with. It is wildly creative, and it is stretching me in lots of different ways, and I’m having so much fun with it. I’m not starting a business out of that. It is my hobby. I am creating just for the sake of creating. If I were to take it and turn it into a business, I would need a vision.

What is the point? Not just what is the purpose of the business to make money, what is the purpose of what I would be delivering or selling or putting out into the world? And also, what is the purpose of that for my life? Why am I taking it from a hobby to a business? You need to have a vision underneath what you’re doing, and so many photographers don’t have that.

So you’ve gotta have an understanding of your vision. Then you need to have a very clear offer, okay? I see so many women get stuck in this too. They are photographers, therefore they sell everything. They want to do headshots and branding and weddings and seniors and products and everything under the sun, and not all of it is the right work.

Not all of it feels aligned with them. Not all of it is aligned with their vision, okay? Just because you can take photos doesn’t mean you should be taking photos of everything. What do you want to sell What do you want to be known for? What do you want to specialize in? It doesn’t have to be one singular thing, although that is the easiest type of business to run.

It doesn’t have to be one singular thing. I understand that we’re multi-creative, but what are you doing? What is the offer that you should be selling? And within that, thinking of the actual offer within what you’re photographing, are your offers correct? Do they make sense? Do they align with you, your vision, your business, your ideal clients, and what you’re selling?

There’s so much to the offer being correct. It’s more than just pricing. It’s more than just availability. It’s more than just marketing. It’s more than whatever. It’s clarity. Are you selling the right thing? The next layer of this is profitability. You’re in a business, you need to be making a profit. Not just a little tiny baby profit.

You should be making a very comfortable profit. As photographers, we have very little overhead. Very little overhead, okay? You’re not investing in… Unless you have a studio, you’re not paying rent, you’re not owning a building. Many of us don’t have employees. Maybe we have some part-time help, but we don’t have full-time employees.

We don’t have to carry products. We don’t have to… There’s so many things that we don’t have to do in our business. The overhead is so small. Even if you’ve been in business a long time, even if you have your own studio, even if you have an assistant, even if you have a ton of props because you’re a newborn photographer, the overhead is still extremely low.

Your profit should be high enough for you to be very comfortable. Very comfortable. Does the math work on your business? I love to tell people to raise their prices. Sure, but it’s more than that. Because if you are raising your prices just to raise them, and then you’re also spending things on stuff that you don’t need, or spending on things that are excess, or whatever, and you’re not taking more of it home, and the raising of the rates is not creating more profit, what’s the point?

What’s the actual point? It’s not just raising prices to raise prices, it is profitability that we are talking about. And again, that’s a business-minded thing. That is not something that creatives naturally think about. The next layer of this is capacity, and I talk about this all the time. I talked about this very briefly last week, and we’re gonna get into this even more deeply in a couple of episodes.

Capacity and availability are not the same thing, but photographers seem to think that they, that it is. And that’s not the truth, okay? Capacity and availability are not the same thing. Does your life support the business model that you’ve created? And I’m talking about actual capacity of number of sessions, but everything else on your plate as a business owner, as a photographer.

For example, me. There’s photography, there’s the stuff that goes along with that. There’s the coaching, there’s the a- the mastermind, there’s one-to-one clients, there’s this podcast, there’s speaking at conferences, there’s attending conferences as a student, there’s continuing education for myself, there’s… I have several team members that I’m meeting with and keeping updated and giving projects to and giving feedback.

I have a lot of capacity in this season because all of my kids are in school full-time. All of my kids are big kids, so they don’t need me as much for a lot of things. So I have a lot of hours that I can pour into this business. I also have more capacity than the average person because I have team members taking things off my plate.

But you may not be in that same season, ’cause I haven’t been in this season forever Right? I haven’t always had this many things on my plate. I haven’t always had team members. I haven’t always had all of my kids at school full-time, right? I have been in seasons where I’m still having a baby, or I’ve got toddlers at home, or I’m working during nap time, or they’re in a preschool situation, or whatever.

Does your life support the business model that you’ve created, both with how much you’re working with clients and also the, all the things that you have your hands in? When women talk about being overwhelmed and burned out, this is generally the thing. They are trying to run their business in one model and their life capacity is in another, and they’ve been making it work, with air quotes, for as long as possible, but they’ve hit the end of the road where it no longer works to do that anymore.

‘Cause it never did work. They were just, like, making it work or what they thought was making it work, right? And generally, they end up being burned out and realizing, “Oh, wait, that was actually never working.” So really deeply understanding if your capacity and your business model are aligned ’cause if not, we need to make some changes.

I wanna talk to you about something for a second. I see this all the time in the industry, photographers who are good at what they do. They are genuinely talented, but they still feel like they’re one slow season away from questioning everything they’ve ever done. They are still making decisions from a place of scarcity.

They’re still running their businesses in a way that quietly exhausts them. I know that feeling because I’ve lived it, and I also know what it costs to stay there longer than you have to. Route to Rise is my mastermind for photographers who are done waiting for things to click on their own. It’s a high-touch group program, and it’s one I’ve been running for years, which means it’s been refined, tested, and built on what actually works.

Not a theory, not what worked for someone else, what is working for photographers in real businesses at real stages of growth. The women inside Route to Rise aren’t just growing their revenue. They’re changing how they think, how they make decisions, how they show up. That’s the work, and that’s what makes the results stick.

The next cohort isn’t open yet, but the wait list is, and that’s where you wanna be. Wait list members get first access, more details, the chance to have a conversation with me before the doors open to anyone else, and a discount at enrollment. If you’ve been circling this and wondering if it’s for you, that’s your answer.

Get on the list. SabrinaGebhardt.com/mastermind-waitlist. The link will be in the show notes. Back to the episode. The next layer of this is operations. Again, business-minded, not creative-minded. Can your business run consistently through thick and thin, let’s say? Do you have automation set up? Do you have a very specific workflow for things?

Do you have your canned emails written? Do you have a system in which things happen? Do you treat every single client you have with the exact same client experience? Do you have a set marketing time? Do you have a set editing time? Do you have time to balance your schedule and walk away from the computer and have white space?

Do you have your business set up so that it can run consistently? This is often not the case. Those of you listening that are like, “Well, I mean, I work during nap time and after the kids go to bed, and then on the weekends, I squeeze in more work. And some weeks, all I’m doing is culling and editing, and then some weeks, I’m sending a bunch of emails and contracts, and then I remember I haven’t done marketing in a while, and then I realize that I’m falling behind on my editing again, and then, and then, and then, and then…”

That is not consistent. That is chasing your business. That’s your business being like a big Great Dane, that you’re on the end of the leash, and the Great Dane is chasing a squirrel, and you’re literally getting dragged behind it. That’s what’s happening. You are not in charge. You are not leading your business.

You are not… You have not set the operational outline of how things are going to go and set yourself up for consistency and sustainability. That is going to end in, in big catastrophic failure at some point. That’s gonna, that’s gonna end in burnout. The last layer to look at when we are diagnosing the real problems is marketing.

The last layer. I know marketing feels the sexiest. We oftentimes blame marketing. I’m not getting leads. It’s my marketing. People aren’t booking my prices. It’s marketing. People are ghosting me. I must be marketing to the wrong people. I’m not getting any traction on social media. It must be marketing.

Okay? We blame marketing for everything. It can absolutely be a problem. I talk about marketing all the time. I love to talk about marketing. Oftentimes, there’s other stuff going on underneath that’s actually causing the problem. Obviously, when we think about marketing, are you attracting the right people?

That’s really the ultimate goal. Are we attracting the right people? Because if you are, the right people will book with you regardless of your prices. The right people will, will be obsessed with you. The right people will stick around and refer other like-minded people to you. When you’re working with the right people, everything else falls into place.

That’s the ultimate goal to marketing. So if you’ve gotten through all of these other diagnostics and the problem really doesn’t fall in one of those categories, it’s not your vision, it’s not the offer, it’s not the profitability, it’s not the capacity, it’s not the operations, then it could be a marketing problem.

But if you try and fix a marketing problem on top of an offer that’s broken, or a business that has operations that are broken, or a business that is over capacity, or that is not aligned in a vision, you’re just marketing a broken something faster, and it is perpetuating the problems. Okay? It’s not solving anything.

It’s making things worse So let’s just quickly… I’m gonna kind of go through an example of filtering through this and seeing what can happen, okay? So let’s say the, quote unquote, problem is low inquiries. We immediately automatically assume it’s a marketing problem, right? We go to the bottom when really we should start at the top.

Are low inquiries because the vision is wrong? Let’s say no, we feel confident in our vision, okay? Is it the offer? No. We’re only marketing newborns, and we feel really aligned that that’s what our thing is, so no, it’s, it’s not newborns. What about the profitability? Are the inquiries low because the profitability is high?

Probably not. That generally is… We can skip that, right? Profitability normally aligns with, um, how much you’re paying yourself or feeling undervalued or something like that, okay? So let’s get to capacity. That’s the fourth layer of this, of diagnosing. Could low inquiries actually have something to do with the capacity of your business model?

Yeah, and I see it all the time. People think low inquiries is because it’s a marketing problem, but what’s really happening is she’s at capacity. She’s unconsciously hiding. Energetically, she’s, quote unquote, showing up on social media. She’s sending emails. She’s putting herself out there and marketing her business, but, but really energetically, she is at capacity, and yeah, her calendar might be lighter for sessions than they normally are, but her life is absolutely at capacity and couldn’t even take more sessions if she wanted to because she’s got a kid in the hospital, and she had to take her vet- dog to the vet on s- you know, surprisingly, and she’s been feeling really burnt out, and she’s been dealing with an ankle injury and whatever.

Fill in the blank. There’s been a lot of life lifing, and she doesn’t actually have the capacity to take on more sessions this month or next month. Energetically, there is a misalignment there. I have coached women through this so many times, where they’re like, “I, I’m just not getting nearly as many inquiries this month as I normally would in the month of,” fill in the blank, May, June, whatever.

And we back it up, and we talk about, “Well, wait a minute. You actually have a lot of stuff going on personally. If somebody emailed you today and wanted to slide onto your calendar in the next week, could you even do that?” And she says, “Technically, maybe I could. Yeah, I’ve got time.” But then we talk about, “Well, energetically, what would that do to you energetically to take on that client right now?”

And that’s when the… she realizes, “Oh, I don’t think I could handle that at all. I’m already absolutely stressed out with all the things going on. I’m absolutely fried. I don’t think I could give this client the best time and attention. I don’t think it would be my best work. I have no idea when I would edit those images.”

And that’s when we realize that in this particular situation, low inquiries is actually a capacity problem. It’s not actually a marketing problem This is my thought process of, of when I’m coaching someone, when I’m working with someone. I’m helping them diagnose what the air quotes actual problem is, because it’s often not the one that seems obvious or the loudest or the sexiest.

Okay? When you think about what I’ve said in this episode, I want you to think about the biggest problem that you have. Name it You have a problem with X. And now I want you to go through these levels, this diagnosis, and think about where does it actually live? Could it be a vision problem, an offer problem, a profitability problem, a capacity problem, an operations problem, or is it in fact a marketing problem?

Go through each level and really think about it, okay? Don’t just skip through it because it may not be obvious. Just like the example I just gave, low inquiries is not an obvious capacity problem. So really think through it and go… Just go through the list and think through where the truth actually lives.

And then I want you to trust the process that you don’t need some random strategy, okay? We don’t need to just pick up strategies off the internet. We don’t need to just assume that low inquiries equals marketing equals this problem because Jane on the internet said that this is how to get more inquiries.

You need to solve things in the right order. Because when you can get to the root of the problem, that’s how you stop it from happening again, and again, and again, where you feel like you have solved this problem and then you can move on. That is literally the hierarchy of how I coach women. It’s how we work through things in Root to Rise.

We go through the foundation and the clarity first, then we go through infrastructure, and then we get to visibility, and growth, and marketing. And we diagnose it together. We get to the heart of things together, and that looks like listening, and sharing, and bouncing ideas off of each other, me holding up a mirror to women, them listening and supporting each other in pods and small groups as a community.

That’s how we get this work done. That’s how women who have been in business for years who look great on paper do a ton of foundational work, undo a lot of things, build their business back stronger, and come out of the program with more ease, with more clarity, with more profit, feeling more joy in their business, feeling lighter.

It’s like they’ve done a 180 when they didn’t even realize they needed to. It’s the foundational stuff. We don’t just talk around the top loud problems. We do the deep work underneath, and that’s the magic of the program. That’s it for today, my friends. If you want to get on the waitlist for Root to Rise because it will be opening for enrollment later this fall, I would love to have you do that.

You can hop onto the link sabrinagebhart.com/mastermind-waitlist to do that, and I will also have that linked in the show notes. That’s it, my friends. See you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Shoot It Straight podcast. You can find all the full show notes and details from today’s episode at sabrinagebhart.com/podcast.

Come find me and connect over on the Gram at xo sabrina gebhart. And if you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you’d hit that subscribe button and leave me a review. Until next time, my friends.