Flashback to how it all started- We’re sitting in our office, newly self-proclaimed wedding photographers and videographers and we’re thinking, “how the f*ck are we gonna’ pull this off?”.
Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. Starting a business from the ground up is full-on. If you’re anything like us, you just threw yourself into the idea, full of passion and excitement but you didn’t have a whole lot of direction. For us, it felt like scaling a mountain without a guide or a clear path to the top.
Luckily for us, in those early weeks and months we stumbled across an absolute game-changer. By chance, we were recommended the podcast ‘Make Your Break’, hosted by Jai Long, an international wedding photographer and educator.
Jai’s podcast is centred around levelling up your business and is FILLED
with practical tips to make it happen. Elliott, being the ever-supportive husband (yay for the supportive husbands!), convinced ME to email Jai and get on his podcast… Yeah. I’m talking like a week after I found out Jai even existed. WTF.
I must have been hit with some serious blind confidence, because before I knew it I had emailed Jai and I was ON HIS MOTHERFLIPPIN’ PODCAST. During our episode together, Jai recognised the ambition that we had for our business and posed us a challenge. I’d mentioned that our long term goals were to hit 150K in sales and have Elliott leave his job to join me full-time. In our minds, this goal was looking to be possible within 5 years if we worked hard, but Jai had another idea for us.
If you know Jai, you know he loves to push boundaries and think BIG. On his very own podcast, he made a bet with me. He said ‘Join my Six Figure Business Map course, and if you DON’T hit your goals within 1 year, I’ll refund you the entire amount.
Um, excuse me?
Who is this random dude, SO convinced he can help us to blow up our business, that he literally bet his own income on it? (And on such a public scale!)
As you can imagine, we were way too intrigued to NOT join his course, especially after gaining so much value from his podcast episodes alone. I mean Jai even said it himself- it was risk free! But hooollyyyyyy crap balls. What happened next didn’t even seem in the realm of possibility for us.
Within our time in the Six Figure Business Map course, we LITERALLY blew our business out of the water!! Not only did we SMASH our 150K goal, but Elliott joined me full-time within a matter of MONTHS! We were able to turn what was once a ‘side hustle’ into our full-blown careers in less than a year.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “Steph, surely you were going to kill it eventually anyway”, and you’re not wrong. We always knew we had it in us to achieve big, but can we flashback to where we just said our goals were achievable within the next FIVE years?! Yeah. We did it in ONE!
The thing is, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Let me say that again. You don’t know what you don’t know.
We can wholeheartedly say that if it weren’t for the Six-Figure Business Map, we would be fumbling along, trying to figure everything out on our own and making a HELL of a lot of mistakes along the way.
The BEST thing about the course is that we went from not having a clue about how to level up our business, to having ALL the resources for success right at our fingertips. We got to skip all of the mistakes we were bound to make and instead were given a crystal clear path to the top.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “okay, okay I get it. But WHAT did you learn?” We’ve broken it down into the top 3 game-changing factors for us that we learnt directly from The Six Figure Business Map
1. Mindset
Above ALL of the technical info taught in the Six-Figure Business Map (BM), the number one factor that determines your potential for success is your mindset. We’re not talking about some hippy-dippy “the world is your oyster, bro” chat, we’re talking about real and radical shifts in the way that you view your business and your clients. We never knew that unlocking a growth-mindset is the absolute key to making your business THRIVE.
The BM course dives super deep into how to reset your mindset for success and offers practical solutions to make it happen. We’re not exaggerating when we say that shifting our mindset has been the BIGGEST game changer for us. We have completely changed the way we value ourselves as well as our couples and it’s truly transformed the way we approach business. Before the BM, we were two average Joe’s with a serious case of imposter syndrome wondering ‘why the heck are people paying us?’. Now, we believe with every fibre of our beings (wow, dramatic), that couples would be CRAZY not to come to us. And there’s no secret to how we got there- we shifted our mindset.
2. Pricing
Once our mindset had shifted into a place where we were ready to succeed, the next step was to price ourselves accordingly. We now knew our worth and the value we could bring to our clients and it was time to put that in writing.
Pricing yourself is something that we’ve learnt to be a universally feared step for any new business owner. It can be so difficult to know where to start and how to determine your worth. The BM course taught us to not only price ourselves for success, but showed us how to do it. We’re talking about determining who your dream client is, step by step sales funnels, pricing techniques to sell yourself AND exemplar price guides to show you the way.
Once working our way through the BM’s pricing module, we TRIPLED our prices overnight (no joke) and before we knew it, we were banking THREE TIMES the amount we were previously getting for exactly the same service. BOOM.
3. Showing Up
Now don’t get us wrong, we didn’t just start charging a hell of a lot more without increasing our value. But something we learnt is that you don’t have to add more hours or images to your packages to increase value, you have to show up in a way that you never did before.
What we mean by ‘showing up’ is the way you interact with and support your clients. If you want your clients to pay higher prices, you need the goods to back it up. Through the BM course we learnt about providing ULTIMATE service to your clients and exactly how to do it, as well as how to connect with your clients on a level that builds trust and confidence.
Every single couple approaches their photographers with questions and concerns on how YOU are going to fulfil their needs. The BM course literally spells out for you the perfect way to solve all of your clients’ problems and provide a service that blows their socks off. We’re talking game changing stuff here!
Now remember, these are just the top 3 takeaways we’ve had from the course. The BM is designed to help you with everything from mindset to branding, SEO, marketing, social media, networking… I mean it has it ALL. It’s set up in clearly defined modules that you can access 24/7 and move through at your own pace. You can also pick and choose which modules to start with so that you’re focusing on what’s most important for you and your business at the time. Not only do you have access to the year long course and ALL of its content, but you become part of the BM community which has a THRIVING Facebook page filled with members sharing wins, encouraging others and asking and answering questions on any and all business topics.
Being a photographer can be a lonely career as you spend most of your days locked away in your editing cave. We’ve made an enormous number of friends through the BM and have genuinely never been involved in such a positive community. There is no jealousy or tall poppy syndrome in sight- it’s all about smashing goals and helping one another to kick some serious business butt!!
During our time in the Six-Figure Business Map, we’ve not only completely levelled up our business, but we’ve come to find ourselves recommending the course to everyone and anyone who will listen. We’re not saying this as a shameless plug, we 100% owe an ENORMOUS amount of credit to the BM course for getting us over the line. We can’t even imagine being at the point we are today without the truckload of education we’ve received from Jai- this sh*t is legit!!
Our only regret is that we didn’t join up sooner.
We’ve been lucky enough to land an affiliate gig with Jai and the crew to help spread the word on how to level up your biz, because we’re just as passionate about helping others to succeed as we are ourselves. If you’re ready to change the game and start making some real money and real impact, click the link below to make it happen, baby! You’re not going to regret it.
If you haven’t already, connect with us on socials and flick us a DM so we can follow along with your journey and help you SMASH your goals as a fellow BM member.
We can’t wait to see the insane changes you make!
Steph + Elliott x
Leave a Reply