Hi everyone. Nicole here from hair of the dog, and welcome to episode 10 of the hair of the dog podcast. Today's episode is how books fill your calendar with Kaitlyn Nicole from ragamuffin pet photography and the pet photographers club. If you've ever wished for some more clients in your pet photography business, you definitely want to stick around for this episode. Enjoy.

Welcome to the hair of the dog podcast. If you're a pet photographer, ready to make more money and start living a life by your design, you've come to the right place. And now your host, pet photographer, travel addicts, chocolate martini connoisseur, Nicole Begley.

Hey everybody. It's Nicole from hair of the dog and I am here with Katelyn McCall from ragamuffin pet photography down in Melbourne, Australia. And I'm so excited to have you here with me today. Katelyn, I've been on your podcast, pet photographers club a couple of times, but I'm so excited to have you on mine now. Yay. So nice. It's so nice to have the role service. It's great. It's awesome. So yeah, so thanks so much for joining us from a

down in Melbourne. I'm saying that right, right. Yeah, you are actually. So basically, no.

Excellent. Well let's just go ahead and start diving into it. I guess before we get into kind of the cool book ideas that you're kind of known for, guess just tell us a little bit about your business and when you started and how that all took place.

All right. Um, I started at the ripe old age of 20. Um, I've been doing ragamuffin for 10 years now. I started, I went to uni to study photography. I thought I was going to be a fashion photographer, so that was kind of my background and everything. My apologies if you can hear my dogs barking target. Yes. So I was studying photography, doing a bit of wedding, the poor families, but the fashion and then adopted my dog Lyra and basically decided screw everything else. I want to be a pet photographer. Um, yeah, it's also a 10 years here. I am absolutely obsessed with pets, dog Raphy and teaching pet photography and I love where our industry's gone. No small thanks for you inherit the dog. You were here before me.

Yeah. You started like way back when there probably were, people were like, Whoa, wait, what? I mean there's still some people that are like, wait, what had photography. But back then it was really,

um, I think I remember putting together my business plan and um, it was, it was starting to become a thing in America. Charlotte, Charlotte ruse was one of the only full time pet photographers I could find in Australia. Um, so yeah, it has changed a lot over years, but

I love it. That's awesome. What year? What year did you start your business? 2010. Okay. So did I, yeah, cause I remember I started mine. It was the same time then. Um, and I was like, man, I would love to be a pet photographer. I'm like, no way. I can do just that. So I did families for probably the first five years along with pets until I realized, Oh wait, there's family things. I could just do pets. Yep.

Totally. Well, the first, I mean the third year I, up until I published my first book, actually I wasn't shooting full time. Like I was still working for a portrait studio and doing my own weddings and that sort of thing. And I really wasn't sure if I could make it a full time thing, but it was awesome once I could, that was nice. Yeah. Who wants to shoot anything other than pets?

Well listen, I know I always choke. I'm like, people were like, do you do family? So like if you bring a dog,

photographed one or two weddings, like in the last few years of client, like when clients, if their dog will be,

I'm referring you out. Yeah. No, weddings are a whole special breed. I've never done a wedding. I have no desire to ever do a wedding. I think you have to, I mean, I have some friends that absolutely love it, but it's just not my cup of tea. I can't, I can't. Um, the whole freedom is my number one core value and having to give up my days and know like the exact date that I'm working that far out, just as a huge no-go. Even if I would love the actual act of photographing a, a fun, busy day. But I'm out on the weekend, two hour shoot

versus a whole Saturday. I can't say the photographer must be very patient.

Absolutely. For sure. So yeah. So you mentioned a little bit about you kind of dove into the pets, um, big time when you started your first book. So tell us a little bit about your book. So

the very first one, um, was called happy home tale. Uh, and it was 2011 maybe. Yeah. So I basically thought I, I didn't have confidence that I'd be able to photograph an entire book by myself. So I went to this charity that I was volunteering with and I said, I have this idea, um, that we could publish a book and then you guys would be able to raise funds with the book sales and we could probably raise more funds by charging people to be in that book. So that charity at the time had a few different photographers that I worked with. So basically they then approached those photographers as well. And I think there was like five of us in the end. People could choose which photographer they wanted to work with. And we basically use the strategy that I still teach today, which is essentially that there's a registration fee. So your client pays to be in the book and a percentage of that registration fee is donated to the charity and the photographer keeps the other percentage. So yeah, that's what I did with the first book. And then following that when I realized it's possible to shoot entirely by myself and once I had sort of put the systems or learnt the systems that I needed, which that process is doing, the first book taught me that there is a big learning curve and you're managing that many sessions. Absolutely. You start to get some systems in place really very different going from shooting. I mean at the time I wasn't even full time with ragamuffin so I was shooting maybe one client per month, just suddenly shooting 40 clients in three months. Oh my gosh. It was a lighting kit. Yeah. I'm working full time otherwise, right? Yes, yes. Full time kindergarten photographers during that ESA alert. A lot almost burnt out. But um, hold it, pull it back. Um, but yeah, since then I've published by myself, published five books. Wow. I didn't realize this but that many. Yeah. And teach other photographers how to do the strategy. That's awesome. So yeah. So what are the, some of the benefits about, you know, if I'm photographer here and I'm like thinking about a book, what are some of the great benefits of, of doing one of these books? It's not to sell books. As weird as that might sound. I feel like a lot of people get hung up or misunderstand that they make a big profit out of the actual selling of the book. Whether or not you go to the self publishing brute or traditional publishing group, either way is not a money maker. The reason why I advocate the self publishing route is because you get full control, you get full responsibility, you get full profit. So it's an easier, I'm putting a lot bunnies up there. Additionally, it's quite competitive to do submissions with traditional publishing. There's indie publishers, so usually the publishers that do like less than 10 books per year, they have more welcoming with submissions. But these days self publishing doesn't have the stigma that it used to have. So I I advocate going for self publishing but basically, I mean there's lots, there's lots of reasons why publish a book other than not to sell the book. Um, in general like it establishes authority, builds your credibility, it increases your client base really quickly. Like there's not a lot of other um, strategies or publicity, uh, marketing things that I can think of where you might bring in 50 clients suddenly. So it's a really great way to increase your client base. It's really great way to boost publicity or your charity, especially as pet photographers, newspapers, TV, all those kinds of outlets. Then looking for local charitable great imagery stories. We sort of take all the boxes with this. Yeah, it's great way to boost publicity for your business. It raises funds for charity, which I mean, who's going to argue against that? And it's a great way to I guess spark your creativity. Do something a bit different. If you're getting bogged down and you're always doing client work and you can come up with a concept for a book that is something a little bit different and it was the to push you out of your creative concepts zone, then I always find that it sort of refuels the artistry behind it. So you know, y'all shooting for your clients, you shooting for yourself as well. So

yeah. That's awesome. That's so important. And um, yeah, and just being able to have, like you said, increasing that client base because if you go and then you have this great experience that you give all these people, all of a sudden that's 50 people that know about you or talking about you or sharing you with they're friends and especially with their dog in a book, they're going to be talking about that because everybody thinks their dog is the cutest, most perfect model. And of course they all are. But, um, so it's,

it's so exciting for them. Um, I often find that with my subsequent books, it's people whose friends were in the first book, but they missed out on registering and they found out about it later. So they're so excited to be in the next book, that sort of thing. So it's a really easy way. I mean obviously if they had any client who has a great experience with you and has your wall a lot of walls with that, so things you're going to talk about it hopefully. But if they don't get to in the book, it's just such a quick, unique experience. They just get so excited to talk about it. I love it. And I guess I should have mentioned with the increase in client base, um, and what I said before about the goal is not selling books. The profitability does not come from selling books with this strategy. You treating these clients like any other clients. So I'm selling Waller, I'm selling albums, I'm selling packages. I in general the sales from a book project client of the same as the sales from another client. And there's, we can dive into what you do to get that. But yet, so that's where I personally make my money and yeah.

Yeah. No, I find that too. I do quite a bit of charitable marketing in my business because I feel like it's just such a great marriage of what I offer and helping a charity that I love and getting some more exposure. And when you're working with certain charities, I find that the people that love that charity then automatically love you and it just, it just goes really, really well. And I find the same thing when I do my charitable sessions. Like it might be a special deal on the front. Um, two things. I'm a huge believer, number one in that people have to pay something to get in front of my lens. Whether it's pain to purchase something at a silent auction or paying like the registration fee that you have for your book or pain for even a discounted session fee for one of my charitable fundraisers, they have to pay because if they don't them, like you're not sure how much they really value it, but if they're paying for it, then I feel like they're more engaged. They're more excited about it. They're, they're more ready to take on the loan experience. Absolutely. Um, yeah, and then I, I don't know if you do it differently, we should definitely chat about this. Like for my charitable things, I really treat them as a regular client. So even though there's a special offer at the beginning that sounds like a really great deal, they know that for$100 they're not getting digital files. Like we're still educating them on who we do wall art. We do custom albums. Princeton digital files are an add on, but most clients spend at least a thousand dollars. Like they have the whole education aspect of it leading up to it. So some people choose not to do it and that's fine. But the people that do tend to be had just as good, excellent regular clients, they're just as good as my regular clients that find me through other means. So yeah, it works really, really well for me.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm all about the education and don't get me wrong, as you'll learn in this sort of high volume process, you are going to have some people who just want their doctor to be in the book and that's okay. It's dab averages. But if you have three out of 55 people who just wanted their doctor be in the book, okay, so you had five sessions that didn't lead to sales. Um, if you, uh, educating your client and collecting the right answers in a booking form or a preeclampsia patients, then hopefully before the session even occurs, you already know that they don't want to be in the book, in which case you're not going to spend an hour the shoot, they know what they're there for, you know what they want. So you can literally just get the shot that you need in the book. And so therefore you're not wasting time. But every other client I'm trading like they want pull out, well they want an album or whatever it is that we're chatting about. And it's important not to feel, cause I know some of my students get worried that the other knows like being sleazy, being slimy on selling. It's not, it's, it's part of the experience. It's what your clients deserve because, Oh my goodness, they're having this amazing experience where they get their dog professionally photographed. How many of them ever do that? Twice I'm listed, you know, the big excited ones.

Um, there's our favorite clients, the one that do it twice, the ones that do it twice, most of them. This might be an experience that they only do once.

And so why wouldn't they want to make the most out of it? You're not being sleazy by upselling. Just giving them the opportunity to get really beautiful keepsakes out of it. And we're not advocating that they, you know, we're not doing sliming sales tactics or anything like that. If you're interested, here's what we could do. You've dog is guaranteed to be in the book either way, but I tried not to have the conversation focus on book. Once it's booked, the conversation is all focused around what do you want to, what do you want to eat? The new dogs in the fundraising book so that that's guaranteed. We don't have to chat about that anymore. The conversation is all about what are you going to get out of the photo session?

I love that. Yeah. I always tell people to couple things we'll selling that if they're approaching it truly with the intention to serve their clients and to listen to what they need and what they want and just giving them possibilities. You're just letting them know what the possibilities are. You're not being slimy, you're not being salesy, you're just helping them to keep that in mind. It kind of takes the pressure off that a little bit. And I also encourage them to think about a time when they really want in something, when they were really excited to purchase something and you know, and you go in and you'd like, can't wait to give your money to this person or this business or whatever it is to buy. So I want them to remember that feeling too because our clients are feeling like that. And on the flip side of things, I think sometimes people get nervous of, well they won by the wallet wall art, but I'm scared to offer them an album too because you know, maybe they just feel like it'll be too much, too much selling. But then I also say, you know, look at when you go to a restaurant and you're like, okay, I want this for dinner and that. And when the waitress or server, I should say, when the server asks, would you like super a salad on top of that? You know, you're not going to be like, Oh no, you're a terrible person. How rude of you would ask, you know? Or if they ask if you'd like dessert or this or that. I simply, Oh, no, no, thanks. Like, yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's simple as that of to just role play yourself in that situation and that's how your client's feeling. They're not going to be sitting there saying, Oh my God, how dare you offer that album, make me look at that album.

You know, if they're not into it, they'd say, Oh, no, nothing. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. I totally agree with you. It's such an important mindset shift that to have that we're helping, helping them by giving them full the options. Um, on that note, I think I want to clarify or underline more the importance of shooting enough. So it's really easy, especially with your first book project to get hung up on the fact that you're shooting for the book. If you're doing something like my tales of the world, um, that collection where it's different photographers all over the world and the books are about the location by necessity that involves, you know, you're looking for specific locations in the city and that sort of thing. And one location might not necessarily be enough for a whole album, but maybe that client wants an album. So I see a trap that some, some of my students fall into at the start of just shooting for that one location. Just shooting for the book. And then that doesn't mean you have enough variety for this client who might have wanted more. So if you know that they are interested and there's a few different that you can gauge whether or not they are really interested. But if you know that they are really interested, make sure you allow enough time. If it takes you and usually it takes you an hour to shoot a client session. Make sure you allow an hour for their session. Make sure you go to a park after you go to the location in the book and make sure you head to the beach afterwards or whatever it means, whatever it is that you need to do and make sure you get photos of the client with their dogs, even if that's not what will end up being in the book. Really important to remind yourself to shoot if they're, if they're interested to shoot it like a regular session and with all the variety of irregular sessions don't get limited by thinking, well it's just a book. So I would usually show 40 photos but I'll just show them 10 photos cause you're just shooting in the foot. Absolutely. Do you for though the people that like you've done your pre-session consultation, you've been talking with them and they really are just, Nope, we're just in the book. We just want the book. We just want the book for those guys, you do tend to just scale it back a little bit of what you shoot. Absolutely. So what I don't do like myself, like it's foreign coal or anything like that because it's high volume work. So I have a booking form. One of the questions is, are you interested in learning more about the thing? And there is I think four answers. Yes, absolutely. I'm interested in, yes, absolutely. I love ragamuffin pet photography and the FAFSA. Um, I might be interested maybe or no, I just want my dog to be in the book nor I just want my book being the book I'm in and out of there 10 minutes I'll get the shot. I'll give myself a little bit of variety. I will after the session still give them the opportunity to either come in for an in person sales session or if they selected no, they just want to be in the book. I also give them the opportunity to view an online gallery. Sorry, that online gallery option to all the other ones. Yes. Right. Um, because as as we know, typically online galleries, the full experience and they usually result in lower sales prior to the session though. No, they just want to be in the book. After the session they've had the experience. Then they're thinking, Oh maybe I want a couple. So I have maybe 10 or 15 to show them. Yup. I lost the big online gallery quite a few times. People who have said, no, I just want to be in the book, my end up purchasing one print from the online gallery. Right. I do with the online galleries charge a$100 deposit because I want to just edit again. If it was just, if they say no, they don't want to view the online gallery, then I'm literally gonna edit one photo to be in the book and it's so it's cost me what less time, but if they pay the$100 online gallery deposit, which is refundable if they don't purchase anything, but at least I know that semi-serious they've already got money in there. They might exactly. Once they spend it, I imagine it's a lot easier for them to be like, Oh, well maybe I will do a print a little bit extra for one print, but yes, the noise in general are low percentage. Most of them maybe yes is, Oh absolutely, and that's great. Then it just comes down to how you're shooting and how you're selling and your own confidence in your work and making sure you have enough variety that there's some really cool photos in there for them to pick from the same as any other sessions. Yeah, that's fantastic. That all sounds great. Those are great suggestions for selling in protecting your time. What does it kind of look like with how you reach out to the charity or what would the relationship really with them looks like? They've really, really important part of the strategy. You charity partner so you almost you can do it without, and I have had some bad experiences in the past with charity partners. Um, so I'll chat about that without saying names cause I don't want to get in trouble. Um, no, of course. Um, but yeah, that your charity partner if you can get them on board is pretty crucial to the success of the strategy. Especially if your business is new or you're, um, don't have a large following or a large audience. So basically the charity partner's role in the strategy is to promote on social media to their mailing list, however they want to do it. I recommend putting together a pack, a promo pack is what I call them, where essentially your charity partner can just copy paste with some photos, what they want to make it as easy as possible. If you don't already have a tardy that you're working with, then you know, reach out to a few different charities, gauge the interest. I have some photographers who have multiple charity partners to do with one book and then the client piece, which charity they want their donation to go to. I think it's a little, I think it's simply just to stick with one charity if you don't know for sure how Intuit big in the Bay and then multiple ones. So the phases that I did one book where the charity partner, they just, they just weren't promoting the strategy. We're talking about, you know, three thousand four thousand dollars that they would be getting in donations. All they had to do is post a couple of times on social media and you gave them all this stuff and I gave you, they literally just had the price of farther can we pay. So that was really frustrating and I was being pickiest since then. Do you, do you have any sort of contract with them that you kind of plan that out or is it just kind of verbal going over when your verbal agreement? Like could, although I guess it's so the depends on the charity and like sometimes if you told him to volunteers and that's the thing, right. And for them to have their legal look over it, I'm sure they might be like, Oh, this seems serious. Worst scenario, they don't promote the book and to get as many people sign up to it, it's not as big of a donation. The minimum number of dogs that you want in there is day 15. You can get 15 people be excited to be in a book. It's a small book, don't get me wrong. So tales of Tasmania, which is in a different, and everyone knows what has my name on my very long bucket list that gets longer. The longer I'm cooped up at home in Tasmania is what I was tales with Pez mania in two trips down to Tazzy. Um, and I think I had 20 dogs and they had like it. It's a much smaller book than a lot of them. I didn't have any client base in there. I should have but didn't partner with a Tasmanian based charity. So it was a smaller book. But what ma, what I'm trying to say is it's okay to do smaller books. Like don't be worried about am I going to be able to get 50 people? It's a smaller book. It's going to cost you less. It's still 15 clients that come in. You'll still learn how to do it and you'll change things and adapt for next time. But yeah, basically the charity pot is there so they can promote to their own audience. That's also the reason why I like to change charity partners with each book that I do because my audience has seen me do this strategy five times now, but every time it's a different charity and they have their own audience. So the most recent one I did was a book, um, about pugs basically. Um, and that charity, the poke rescue Australia charity was really great at promoting it. She was really excited. So we got a really wide rates with her audience. So basically the way that the, the donation works, the way that I recommend doing it is for your registration fee. Keep it low. I recommend keeping it under$100. What you want is for it to one, be able to raise funds for charity. So you don't want it to be too low and store it to at least you want it to be high enough that not everyone's going to do it. Right. That it's a little bit of a qualifier. Yeah. But not so high that they really have to think about whether or not they might do it under$100. You know, like why not? Awesome. Um, so I recommend keeping it under$100. Now you can, sorry, I get sidetracked. You can do a session extension. Um, just while we're on this subject of registration phase, which is what I recommend doing, so you can have the initial registration fee. If you want, charge an extra 10 bucks per dog if you don't want to cover the extra pages. And then you can do a session extension, which I usually do. It's like$150. So that's a great way to work out whether or not someone's serious about like wonderful session, someone's getting an extension. I'll usually take them to like the park and the beach, which is does that just,

is there anything included with that session extension or as you're marketing it as we're going to do a full bigger, longer session,

say guaranteed longer session. Okay, so rather than just the little mini one, it's a N and it's marketed as, they can definitely have family photos and that sort of thing. Basically want a full session but they also want to be in the book. Then that's what they do.

What happens if someone doesn't do the extension but they choose on your questionnaire? Like I'm super, super excited.

I would still essentially treat it like it's an extended session except I wouldn't take them to chill in other places. Yeah, I would to just the park, not take them to the beach as well. So you have the registration fee, say$100. What that covers is a custom photo session with you, a guaranteed double page spread in the book and 50% is donated back to charity. So say it's$100, then$50 was donated per session to charity. So if you can get 50 clients to register, that's immediately 2,500 donation to charity. Depending on your relationship with the charity, you might also donate the book sales. So I have done the pug rescue one for example. I'm 100% of the book sales is donated to them. So, but that's only do that if you already know that they're going to be promoting it. If, if they're really excited, if you're contacting the charity and they're, you know, a bit about it, um, you don't have to donate the books.

Could you do, could you do, uh, something like, Hey, if you find, you know, 40 X number of, of people that wanted, who the book, then the book sales will get donated to you too. That's a great idea. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Then then they have some skin in the game of like, Oh, we can make a lot more money. Let's, let's keep promoting this book. Doubling the, yeah. Yeah. Cause I feel like the way you're explaining it, it's a lot, you know, how kind of session fees always used to be. For me before I went to my reservation retainer where it was just like gravy. I'm like, I don't care about making money on this session fee. Um, it was really there for marketing. It was there for charitable marketing that I can donate part of it. Um, so it sounds like the books are really the same thing where you're not doing the book to make money on the book. You're doing it to create the book and you're making your money on your sales of the clients during the book development process. So enabled, uh, to, to donate that. And then that always feels like such a good marketing karma and I feel like it always comes back, you know, tenfold.

Yeah. Very nice to be able to say a hundred percent of proceeds are donated to the charity. But again, don't feel like you have to do that. If this is a new charity partnership and you're not sure how they're going to be working, it's totally okay that you donating 50% of the registration fee. That's still a the nation.

Yeah, and I've, I've found too, at least from my experience with different charities that some people are nervous to be like, Oh, I have to go after the big charity, and then like the smaller rescues maybe aren't going to be as good. I've found that some of the smaller rescues are fantastic because their supporters are just like rabid fans. They love their rescue so much and they will do anything for their rescue. So yeah. So have you found kind of the same that it's not about the size, it's really about their culture, I guess?

Absolutely. If you have a charity partner who has a really loyal following, then they'll be so excited to help support the charity. So yeah, it's good comma all around. I love the strategy.

Yeah, absolutely. It's charitable marketing in general. It's just like that's the thing ever

you will get. So because you're not donating 100% of the registration fee, you're going to get comments just to just a one. You listening to this, you'll get comments saying, yeah,[inaudible] two different Haiti comments you get, why isn't 100% donated? Yeah, I would love to know who else is donating 100% of, okay, shouldn't you be charging me for my book, for my dog, my dog to be in this book? You're going to get them every now and then. You get, people are excited and they get it, but I just want to preface that almost everyone gets those sort of haters.

We get those periodically. Um, for, uh, when we're looking for Barca models because you know, we're in different parts of the world and we're like just putting out just like, please, we need models and you know, finding local people to help promote that. And it's amazing how many people are like, Oh, well, no, well no, you'll have to wait. There's a fee for my dog to model. She's like, I'm sorry. You're going to get dog photographs, like professional pet photography, photographs from like the world's best pet photographers. Like you couldn't get these, these people in a room anywhere else. Like what? You're crazy. You can have spot modeling. He was very excited. I have a lab in a golden like, okay. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, no, it's always good to know because I think sometimes things like that happen in people. We, all of us fall into the same trap where maybe it just hits us on a bad day and we start to take it personally and we're like, Oh my God, see I shouldn't be doing this. What the heck? This is terrible. I am a monster. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a great point. So tell us, I guess, um, well first let me back up for a second too. So we are recording this. What is at the very end of March? It feels like, who knows when it is? March, end of March, 2020 the world is in the process of being turned upside down or really just hidden in everybody's house from the the coven. So I'm talking about like I know I've been talking a lot with everybody about like, all right, what we do at this time is kind of really important because even though we're at home and we can't be shooting, we can still be working on our business and we can still be making marketing plans and we can still be planning on moving forward because this will pass. Um, is something like this a good thing to kind of start researching and looking into and possibly start planning when the, um, you know, crazy times

like we have right now. Absolutely. I'm planning my own now, wasn't going to do one this year because I've, I've done a few. Um, but because it's a great way to suddenly get an influx in clients and I, like many of all of us, I would guess probably shooting for, I don't know, however many months isn't it? I'm such a plan in there called the uncertainty.

The lady believes me. I'm like, can I just know when this will be over so I can plan my year? Like I get it, I'm willing to give up a month or two or three or whatever it's going to be. Just like, are we talking one month, three months, six months, a year? Like what's happening?

Yeah, I was getting to, okay my cohost and I was saying I just, what I, what I want to do is put in my complaint from Corona virus and this is going to end. I don't mind one, can we have some semblance of normal can get back to shooting. I like all of us will have gone however many months without having human rights. Um, and so I want to bring in as many people as possible because it's just a great way to honestly make a lot of money in sales in a short amount of time. Um, so I'm planning to do that. I have contacted my charity partner and sent them out like the promo pack and my little PDF will about it and they're all boards. So when we're ready to go, we're ready to go. If you hadn't done something like this before, there's a lot of logistics that you need to put in place to be able to handle suddenly doing high volume if that's not something that you're used to. So like when I teach it, I teach it to 12 months strategy and you're not shooting until month four, five and six. So the first three months are just about getting the marketing together, contacting the charity partner and most importantly building the booking system that you need. So acuity is what I teach. I do like Deb saga for anything other than something like this because of their scheduling limitations. So because you suddenly have say 50 people all at the same time. Um, as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong, cause I have actually looked at the father's schedule as since last year, but you still can't put a limit on the number clients per week.

I honestly don't know because I use Calendly for my podcast interviews and my laser coaching scheduling because it connects with zoom so that way I don't have to like set up all sorts of crazies apps. Like it's a native connection. So I don't use their scheduler so I'm not sure.

Okay. So I'm PR, I'm pretty sure they still don't have a limit on weekly, which if you suddenly it's a nightmare and you absolutely would not want to be doing this the way I did it the very first time, which is not having an automated booking system. Oh my gosh, trying to organize 50 different people and when are they available and when are you available at blah blah blah who signed their contract and who I paid. And yeah, you want to give yourself enough time to set up the system. You want to give yourself enough time to start slowly marketing you can put together with the webpage and have it open for people who are interested in start building a mailing list that way basically. So you can, once this is done, we can hit the ground running. So that's what I'm planning to do. I've had a few people, um, in the last couple of weeks have signed up to do the 12 month course cause they're thinking the same sort of thing. Like, if we get it all going now, then at least we can bring in that influx when we need it. So for sure using our time now. Good idea.

Yeah, he is in our time now and that kind of stuff is so critical. Instead of just sitting at home baking, my kids are just like, Oh can we make cookies? I'm like okay, I'm going to have to do like a every three day jeans check or I'm just going to like not sit in my pajama pants at the ends of this corn quarantine.

Yes. That's the other problem is because they're all wearing tracksuit bottoms. So rolling out the front door when I'm finally allowed[inaudible]

you're like Oh man, I have to like it up and down to photograph a dog.

Good thing I had is um, cause obviously we can't do in person sales appointments anymore. Yeah. So I switched cause I still had five or six who needed to come in and I switched to virtual. Oh my God. Mind blown. It's good. Why have I had the room in my house? Dedicated clients coming in three times a week. Eight of the best technical, it's my silver lining.

Fantastic. Yeah. I've only done a handful for like clients that are further away, but it's always worked great. And I just do the same thing. I use zoom and I do really, everyone's like, what do I do? I'm like, do what you do in person, but just

that's great. I don't think if it had been for this I would have ever tried it. So

I would say I would still try to like make sure they see my, so if I knew I was going to do virtual, I would probably take all my samples to a, to the session just because that way they can touch everything I was thinking cause when this will finish this, I'm not going back to them coming into my house. Yeah, there's games, there's books, there's no way I'm getting back to class. Yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking I'd like bring albums so they got those and I've set up my office now so that everything that was in my showroom is now behind me and yeah. Nice. That's just my little positive spin on it. Yeah. We've got to find those positive spins for sure. Um, yeah, I'm using it as my positive spin as I had a whole bunch of projects that I wanted to get done. And also some like actual craft learning, some different compositing and things like that for me that I wanted to work on and I'm like, Oh, I can do that now. Yeah. So where can people learn more about, well first of all, where can they follow you? Where can they learn more about your book teachings and all that kind of stuff of this sounds like a project they might want to dive into. You can either follow me on ragamuffin bat photography on like Instagram, but my education side, so I've got the link to like the podcast and the pails at the will collective and the program and everything like that. It's just Caitlin J mccoll.call. Nice. Excellent. Um, and we do have a special offer for you guys. Um, you can, for hair of the dog, uh, H O T D use that you'll save$200. Sorry, you're back in our regular scheduled program interruption from dog barking. We've all been there in the most opportune times, so we all understand. But anyway, I was saying to, to the, to the crew here that's joining us that if they are interested in learning more about the book, um, marketing plan that they can save$200 with the code. H O T D hair of the dog hot and um, yeah, save$200 on the program. Yeah, it's a 12 month program. There's like a Facebook group, a very active Facebook group. So you've got not only the other photographers who have been through this, are they currently being going through it? Um, but I'm in there all the time. So that's a really great racial list. And then obviously it's however many hours is 1212 months of video content. You can go through it at your own pace, but I also have like an email system too. So they keep you on track if you want. Hey Nicole here. I just wanted to pop in because after we got finished recording the show, I realized that I forgot to tell you where to go for show notes and Caitlin emailed me an awesome freebie. If you want to grab it. She has, um, the five common mistakes that people make when creating a book project. If you want to grab that freebie, the freebie link will be in our show notes, which is [email protected] slash ten one zero. Um, so yeah, not 10 the number spelled out, but actual one zero. So hair of the dog academy.com/one zero and a fun fact, you can find all of the show notes for all of the episodes at hair of the dog Academy slash episode number for the single digits. It is just slash eight. Um, and then, yeah, that's it. So go ahead and grab those show notes at that link. Okay. Back to our regularly scheduled program. Well, thank you so much for joining us and um, don't forget, if you guys want to hear more from Kaitlin too, and Kirstie to check out the pet photographers club a great podcast, we always need more stuff to listen to for our pet photography passions while we're in the car and running around. So definitely check out their podcast and thanks so much again. Thank you Lynn, for having me. It was such a nice way to get my mind off everything crazy. For sure. Thanks everybody. I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of hair of the dog podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review and while you're there, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our upcoming episodes. One last thing, if you are ready to dive into more resources, head over to our [email protected]. Thanks for being a part of this pet photography community.