👷 How to build structure to your business

Almost to the day, it’s been 3 years since I left my corporate data & analytics job to join Jo full-time with our business. Coming from a business background, conceptually working in a small business all made sense to me but it’s interesting the things that I’ve found myself learning and focusing on in the last three years.

In my corporate job I worked in a very focused area. I was the subject matter expert for a small portion of our data used by a global organization. Joining Jo started with shifting my perspective, I was now focused on a little bit of everything to run whole businesses.

Some days we’re client facing planning a session, teaching a masterclass or taking photos during a session. But I quickly learned that we spent a lot more time on the “non-client” things like planning & creating our own content, deciding what we’d be launching next, how to fairly price offers, or even just tracking our own expenses (I didn’t really know what a 1099 was 3 years ago…).

And don’t get me wrong I’m a biz nerd, so all (ahem most) of these things are really interesting to me. It’s still taken me a **while to adjust my perspective of what a work week should actually look like.

One of the big things I learned early on is building structure for myself allowed me to be more productive. So I started myself down a path of trying to build structure into our business.

Structure can look like a lot of things, some of the most common are:

• Time: Setting working hours, communication times when you’ll reply to people, building routines, defining “rituals” to train your mind to switch into & out of work

• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): defining a specific process for repeatable things, eg the 5 steps you take to onboard a new client, this makes it super easy to simplify once you have them, or outsource once you are at that level

• Frameworks: how you choose to think about a decision or problem in a more efficient & comprehensive way since you ask the same questions each time

• Templates: Emails, Sales pages, DM responses, pricing, etc, starting with most of it already created saves a ton of time and mental energy when you can start with a template that is applicable

For better or worse we started talking about structure almost every time we did something new or repetitive because I wanted to organize the chaos.

Tangent: unorganized chaos can be great for brainstorming and creativity, it’s much less good for consistency and delivering on a schedule.

Since branding photography was the majority of our business when I joined 3 years ago much of the structure I was trying to build came down to our branding offers & clients.

Earlier this year when we created Capturing Luxury we centered it around the 4 main areas we’ve pushed the envelope, experimented with new things, and improved on what we’ve learned over the years. These areas are Client Experience, Creating Offers & Pricing, Marketing, and Sales.

Let’s take client experience for example. When Jo launched branding offers for the first time, the experience was similar to a portrait session. Each session she slowly learned that the needs of a branding client were different than a portrait photography client. They needed a lot more help planning, thinking about how the photos would be used, quicker turn arounds because clients needed to market with the photos, and even down the composition of photos needed space for marketing text.

Every client taught her (and me eventually) something new about what clients cared about and what drove the most value to each one. To start adding in some structure we formalized our process of Inquiry → Chem Call → Contract & Invoice → Strategy call → Session, along with what were the questions we’d ask at each step, templates for each stop, and how few emails we actually needed to send.

To go from Inquiry to Booked Client is fairly straightforward now, and we never have to worry if we missed any important detail along the way.

Fun fact: at one point we even had custom sticky notes printed with the process to check off the steps as they were completed

How would you create more structure for yourself? Ask the questions:

1. Is there something you i) feel friction with, ii) you put off forever, or iii) it feels very repetitive to you?

2. Can you create an SOP? Take the next time you do that thing and write down each step, then see if you can reorder, combine, or remove any steps to make it more efficient. Then test out your process next time you do the same thing.

3. Can you define a time boundary? Use a time block on your calendar to set aside time for things that you feel like you never get to. Use a time box for things that seem like they balloon and take up way too much time. Set cutoffs of when things will wait for the next available block or box.

4. Can you define a framework? What information do you need to properly do “the thing”, what questions do you need to ask at minimum, or is there an analogy for the information that makes it easier to think about

It feels like extra work, and yes it will be more difficult than you think it should be. But take for example if you spend 2 hours creating a structure that will save you 10 mins a week for a year (probably a lot more). That’s 2 hours spent now to save you 8.6 hours of work in the next year. Worth it.

Education is the even faster shortcut. You can spend hours building your own structures and frameworks, or pay someone else to teach you ones they’ve already put the time into building. If you’re interested in jump-starting your understanding of branding photography we’d love to have you in this round of Capturing Luxury (doors close this evening).

If you’re stuck on creating a structure for your business and would like some help feel free to check out our coaching offers or hit reply. It’s one of our happy places helping people put things in more efficient understandable structures.

Have a great weekend!

Lyndon

Fun finds on the internet this week:

Sponsored-by-Cheese Gymnast Giorgia Villa Is the Luckiest Athlete in Italy - authenticity and luck make for great brand partnerships 😂

This is my favorite graphic of the week - I love how much information they packed into one visual chart: