In this episode we are breaking down mini sessions, best practices and a sneaky little way that you can have some mini sessions now and fill your calendar for next year. So whether you love mini sessions or hate them, I think you should listen to this episode because we might change your mind if you are in the non mini session camp. So no matter what, stay tuned and let's dig into it.

I'm Nicole Begley, a zoological animal trainer turned pet and family photographer. Back in 2010 I embarked on on my own adventure in photography, transforming a bootstrapping startup into a thriving six figure business by 2012. Since then, my mission has been to empower photographers like you, sharing the knowledge and strategies that have helped me help thousands of photographers build their own profitable businesses. I believe that achieving 2 to $3,000 sales is your fastest route to six figure businesses that any technically proficient photographer can consistently hit four figure sales.

And no matter if you want photography to be your full time passion or a part time pursuit, profitability is possible. If you're a portrait photographer aspiring to craft a business that aligns perfectly with the life you envision, then you're in exactly the right place. With over 350,000 downloads. Welcome to the Freedom Focus Photography Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Freedom Focus Photography Podcast. I am your host Nicole Begley and I'm so excited to be back for a solo episode.

I can't remember the last time I did a solo episode. Here's the thing, when I started this podcast, you guys, four, almost five years ago because it was right before COVID started. So we started this podcast in February of 2020 and when I started back then I thought oh my gosh, I'm going to love doing solo episodes. But then found out that I really loved doing interviews. So I do a lot of interviews on this podcast.

I have a lot of guests which I know you guys love, but I know you guys also love the occasional podcast episodes where I just kind of dig in and give you some major, just like action item to dos that you can implement into your business right away. So I was thinking I should do some more of these and start mixing them in a little bit more. So if you guys don't know, in our Elevate program we talk a lot about thoughts and how our thoughts affect our behaviors and you can change your thoughts which then change the actions you take which will change the results that you get.

So a lot of times Heather likes to start at that thought line and I always go straight to the action because I don't know I just do. And so anyway, within elevate. They love to call me Action Girl. So with my Action Girl status, I want to bring to you guys on these new podcast episodes some action that you can take. And if you find out that you're having thoughts about the action and you're not taking the action or you're delaying starting the action, that is likely because you have thoughts that are tripping up the action that you want to be taking, which are going to prevent you from getting the result.

So anytime I'm sharing actions and if there's like some break on that is preventing you from moving forward, ask yourself why. Ask yourself what you're thinking about. Are you usually not moving forward? It's because of one of two things. Either you don't know what to do, which I'm going to share what to do. So that likely will not really be the issue. And if you don't know what to do and you're part of my world, come to our next office hours and we can talk through it.

But the other piece that causes a lot of friction and procrastination that people don't realize it's because they're scared of the result. So it could be being scared of not. Not hitting the result you want. So a fear of failure and what you are going to make that failure mean about you. Spoiler alert. It means nothing. It means that you didn't get the result you wanted and now is your chance to try again, change something, do something different and try again.

So people can be scared of that, but they can also, and this one's more sneaky. You can be scared of success. So what if it works too well? You know, what if, say, you wanted a $200,000 business. What if you did that all of a sudden? What would you know? Would that cause thoughts from other people in your circle, like your family or maybe friends that feel that, you know, we all have to have a job that we hate and we slog through.

So sometimes there's just this fear of what if I hit success? Is that going to get in the way of the relationships that I love? So anyway, long story short, usually one of those two reasons is the reasons that we're not taking action. So anyway, action girls here. This episode is not about thoughts. We'll save those for when Heather's on the podcast with us. What I wanted to talk about today is mini section.

Mini sessions. Not mini sections, mini sessions. I'm recording this on Friday, November 8th. This is getting released this coming Tuesday. So it's firmly in the middle of November. We are usually in the peak of craziness in our photography businesses right now. We also have a lot of people calling us and asking for what? Hey, can you do a Christmas card session? I just need one photo for my Christmas card.

Now I have a lot of thoughts about that. Number one, I never want to tell a potential inquiry no right off the bat, but for this time of year especially is one reason why I believe it's so important to have our pricing in a way that we can say, sure, I'd love to help you with that and then give them a reason to do that. So one reason could be that you have packages of digital files or prints so you're not selling a single digital file.

Because there's no way we can really price that single digital file enough for us to make enough profit to do a whole entire session, leave our house, shoot a whole session, edit a whole session, do a wholesale session, do all of those things. Usually it's about 10 hours of work, right. With each regular full time client. So instead I can answer those questions to sure, I would love to do a session.

Most of my clients choose artwork because that's what I focus on. However, I do have packages of digital files that you can use for your cards that are starting at X number of dollars. So for me, it starts at about $1,000 for digital files. My like, bare minimum, there's no way I'm leaving the house for less than $1,000 session because I'd actually be losing money with a number of hours that it takes me to hold that session.

So anyway, that's number one. Another way that we could serve these potential clients is to create a mini session event specifically for Christmas card photos. So it's now middle of November. I mean, you guys could throw this together and do it for the first weekend in December, throw it together in two weeks so it will be really, really easy. And basically what the overview of this is is that you can hold a little special mini session weekend for Christmas cards.

And you could market it as, hey, I know you guys want Christmas cards, Here's a special mini session Christmas card. You can even get this for free. Ask me how. And asking me how is when they book a session for 20, they get this little free mini session so you can have a price for it or you can say, you know, give them the option of paying whatever price, like a little flat fee.

Or I just love making the fee for that, whatever my session fee is for a regular session. So my session fee has always been usually at least $200. Right now it's a $500 session fee. But you know, really anywhere in that 200 to $500 range works really well for this where that's the cost of this experience. But you're not really marketing it as that cost. You're marketing it as, hey, do you want a free Christmas card session?

All you have to do is book a 2025 session. So when they book that 2025 session, you give them a free slot on this mini session day. And so two things, you are serving these clients that want to have some Christmas cards, but more importantly, you are filling your calendar for next year. And if people don't book or sorry, if people don't follow through, so say that they give you the money to book their 2025 session.

They come and they do the complimentary session. That would only include one digital by the way. They could then purchase additional digitals or additional prints. They would come and do that one session. They get their one digital. If they never actually followed through and booked their 2025 session. Well, you were paid for your time for this weekend, so it's not like you're actually doing it for free. It's a non refundable booking for their next year session.

And then if they do book their session like they do follow through, then that's great. You've given them all the education of what the session entails, what your price points are. They're just like any other client. So you should expect whatever your session average is from those sessions. So this is just a really kind of fun way to create some easy mini sessions and then also fill your calendar for the next year.

Now we do have a couple best practices when it comes to mini sessions and that's whether you're doing this type of mini session, like a micro session, like a Santa pause, you know, like dogs with Santa, or like a fundraiser studio at a doggy daycare. Like, you know, like I call those micro sessions where it's like 1520 minute sessions, you're just getting a couple images. Um, the, the price point's usually fairly low.

And then there's the middle, what I call a traditional mini session where it is more like your regular session. So if you shoot on location, you're going on location, maybe it's a little bit less time, maybe it's dog only, maybe it's, it's the same as your other sessions, you know, can include the whole family, but it's on certain days or times or only for a Limited amount of time.

So those are the two different kind of types of mini sessions. And I have a couple kind of rules for them to get the most success out of them. So number one, I don't call them mini sessions. This is for our verbiage only. I would call them something limited edition sessions, artisan sessions, Santa sessions, lavender sessions, whatever it is that you're doing. I would call them something else.

Don't call them mini just because mini sounds kind of mini and yucky and it sounds like it should be cheaper. The other important piece is to make it some sort of different offer. So if you are going to have like, say you're an on location photographer and you want to do many sessions, but you don't want to shoot studio, you know, then you're going to do still on location.

How can you make that different? You can make it different, like I said, by doing just dogs. If you usually do dogs and people, you can do just dogs and they're like primary person. You can do certain location that you usually don't have access to. So like a lavender session or a Christmas tree farm session kind of thing. You could also do the same thing that you usually offer, but have it be very limited in terms of the number of sessions available or really the timeframe.

So it's going to be like this weekend only or these two dates only. What you don't want to do is to have like a regular on location session where it's the, you know, the immediate family, the dog and their people. And then, you know, you also are offering the same thing as a mini session all year long at the same locations on the same dates. You want to make sure around your mini session that you're putting some restrictions around it.

So is it only on Tuesdays? Is it only at a location that's really close to you? Is it only, like I said, like a single dog or something more specific? So make sure you're putting some sort of urgency or differentiation around these mini sessions that you're offering so that they don't cannibalize your full session. Because if it's the same thing as your full session, why would anyone want to book a full session?

All right. Another best practice for mini sessions is because they are by definition mini sessions. So the profits are usually a little bit less, the price points are usually a little bit less. You want to make sure that you're really streamlining your time. So how can you make everything so much easier and more streamlined for your clients to book these sessions? For me, when I was doing these.

I would like to have one page where I had all the information for my main full sessions. Yeah, I want to talk to the people beforehand, talk to them about the experience, build the value, make the connections of our values and really just kind of warm them up for what this experience is. Because it's a higher price point for these mini sessions. I don't want to spend the time doing that.

I want to lay it all on the table and say, hey, this is what we're doing. Here's the approximate price points, here's how you sign up. Of course, here's a place to reach out for questions. But the call to action there is go ahead and sign up and then they click the button to sign up and they can have their name and information they give to me. They would also, they would also go ahead and sign the release and they would pay for their session.

All right then and there. Now how do you do that? It depends what you have. If you have a CRM, you can likely go ahead and do it in that, like a Dubsado or a honeybook type situation. If you don't have that, you can kind of create this on, on a Google form even, or a Jotform or you can use like calendly or acuity. Both of those calendly and acuity are only like $10 a month.

So you can sign up for the month and then they have a free version. But I think to take the pricing and to create some of those custom workflows, you do need to pay, but it's really, really affordable. There's also some softwares out there specifically for creating mini sessions that keeps things all sorts of streamlined for you. So whatever way you choose, try to make it as streamlined as possible.

So the client goes the book and then you have an automatic email that goes out that thanks them, that gives them the next information. You're not doing a planning call. I would definitely have some emails set up to remind them a couple days before of their session date and time and the details that they need to know, what they need to bring, what they need to expect. And then afterwards you just have some sales.

So for the sales of mini sessions, really depends what you're doing. If you're doing a super micro session, if you're going to do, you know, kind of what we talked about with doing a little Christmas card session, those I would probably just put up in a gallery and then have them choose whichever one they want is their complimentary included one, and then have the ability for them to add on additional prints or things like that.

You could, if you wanted to, and you are, you know, had some artwork or other things that you can envision selling. And these are sessions that, because they could kind of go either way, they can be really themed, which could be really fun for people, but they're not necessarily going to buy a big piece of art for their, for their wall. So the, the themed way, I think gets more people to be like, oh, sign up.

That would be fun. That would be great for a card. Which again, if you're doing the promotion as when you book a 2025 session, you get this for free, then that could work out really, really well. So in that case, I would go ahead and do an online gallery. And then if you're doing a more kind of traditional limited edition session where even if it's like a lavender field, Christmas tree farm, something like that, where it could create really beautiful artwork, then I would probably go for a live sales option.

So creating zoom live sales, you could have try to kind of put them all together on a day, you know, so that you're shooting all in the same day and you're trying to do the sales all in the same day to save you time. You could potentially do, shoot and sell on the same day. But I do recommend having some sort of live sales if you're wanting to sell artwork or kind of your normal products.

So speaking of those normal products, best practice number, I don't even know what number we're on, three or four, is that you don't need to sell special things. You don't need to discount your artwork, your products from mini sessions. A lot of people have made the unfortunate connection that, oh, if I do a mini session, I need to create these little mini offers and have discounts on my products.

And that's not true. You can have the same exact product suite that you're selling at the same exact price. For instance, I used to do mini sessions for really, it was, I had my full session and then my mini sessions were weekday only at certain locations and only really kind of during certain times of year. So in the fall I would offer some and sometimes in the spring.

And my normal session fee was about $300, I believe at the time. And then I would offer these mini Sessions for a $75 session fee that did not include anything the client still got like, I still did a pre, like an inquiry call with them and a pre consult call with them. So it was my full experience. But the session was shorter and the session was on a weekday, but I still sold my same products.

So for the shorter session it was probably like 30 to 40 minutes and I would show 20 to 30 images where my full session was probably an hour to an hour and a half and I'm showing about 50 to 60 images. But I'm selling from the same product menu and I'm selling in the same way with a live sales session. So what I had with the results is I had some people that spent, you know, maybe 500, $700, but I had other people that spent 2,500, maybe even close to $3,000.

My average sale from those was almost $1,500, where my average sale for my full sessions was just under $3,000. So it was still really profitable for me. It was still really beneficial because I put those kind of fences around it to differentiate it, keep the urgency because they weren't offered all the time and it gave people way to experience my services because the barrier to entry was so much lower than, you know, the $500 or the $300 session fee.

So just something to think about here. I wanted to just kind of put this together with these mini session best practices to kind of review them. It is making sure you differentiate your offer, streamline your back end admin services as much as you can, make sure that you are creating urgency. And then of course, you know, with the marketing of them, don't call them mini sessions and also don't discount, you know, sell your same products at your same prices.

It is 100% okay to do that. And then of course, if you want to have some fun and book up 20, 25 in advance, go ahead and put together a quick little Christmas card type session. And you know, even if you say I've got five spots and yeah, it can be really, really simple. So anyway, I hope you guys found this helpful. If you want to dive deeper into pricing and sales, check out my [email protected]

and of course all of our pet photography craft content can be found@hairwithdog academy.com until next week. Have a great one and I'll talk to you soon.