058 Non-Negotiable Time Off And Other Ways To Avoid Burnout In Your Photography Business This Year

We're at a tipping point in wedding season where a few key changes are what could be what sets you on a path away from burnout at the end of this year's wedding season. Discover actionable strategies to set boundaries, prioritize self-care, protect your well-being while managing a busy photography schedule, and more on today's episode!

Show Notes: Coming Soon

Chronically Ill, Disabled & Neurodivergent Photographers Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ndspooniephotographers

The Unfiltered Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/unfilteredphotocommunity

Template Shop: https://simplysandrayvonne.ca/shop

Takeaways

• Set boundaries and prioritize self-care to avoid burnout during wedding season.
• Intentionally schedule time off and make it non-negotiable.
• Learn to say no and stop squeezing tasks into an already busy schedule.
• Delegate tasks that you don't enjoy or that take up too much time.
• Consider raising your prices to avoid overworking yourself.
• Seek support from your local photography community and refer clients to other photographers if necessary.
• Use tools like AI editing platforms to streamline your workflow and save time.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and the Importance of Avoiding Burnout
05:10 Setting Boundaries and Intentionally Scheduling Time Off
06:36 Learning to Say No and Stop Overbooking
10:02 Delegating Tasks and Lightening Your Workload
10:31 Raising Prices and Valuing Your Time and Energy
11:26 Seeking Support and Building a Strong Photography Community
12:21 Streamlining Workflow and Using AI Editing Platforms
15:43 Conclusion and Sponsorship Message for Aftershoot

Transcript

[00:00:00] Sandra Henderson: It's already the middle of August, and we are more than halfway through wedding season. At least for all of my friends that are with me in Canada or the northern U. S. For all of our friends in the south, you're probably still enjoying a little bit of time off or just starting to ease back into your busy season.

[00:00:19] So, if that applies to you, then just take some notes on this episode that you can hold on to when you're in busy season, Or better yet, that you can apply before busy season, but for everybody that is in busy season, this episode is absolutely for you.

[00:00:36] Because we are at a tipping point at this point in the season where you're either going to spend the next few months heading right towards burnout, or you can make a few changes now, put some boundaries in place and start working towards a better work life balance so that by the time busy season ends this year, you are not ready to throw in the towel and close your business for good.

[00:00:59] There are very few things I think photographers all have to deal with across the board but burnout is one thing that I think every single person is going to experience at one point or another because you don't really know what it feels like and what kind of impact it has on your life until you're there and you don't know what what it takes to get there until you're already in it.

[00:01:23] Anybody who has experienced burnout in their business before, I know you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you don't, then consider yourself one of the lucky ones. And hopefully these steps that I'm going to be sharing on today's episode are going to help make sure that that doesn't happen for you or it can at least impact you for less time and with less intensity.

[00:01:45] If you're not sure what burnout looks like in your business it can look a lot of ways for a lot of people, but some of the most common aspects are the fact that you are absolutely exhausted and you have no motivation to keep going with any of the tasks in your business that are usually things that you enjoy doing. You are feeling overworked and overwhelmed, and like you can't make any progress on your to do list, and it can actually start to seep into other areas of your life as well outside of business, like not sleeping properly, having stress impact your relationships and your friendships. It impacts your appetite. It can impact your skin. There are so many different ways that that burnout and stress can start to manifest itself in your life.

[00:02:30] I unfortunately have a long and complicated relationship with burnout.

[00:02:35] It's like the toxic partner that just does not want to go away because As soon as I started to figure out ways that I could change the way that I was approaching business to be able to avoid heading towards burnout at the end of every season, I started having to navigate chronic illnesses with running a business.

[00:02:53] And now I go through shorter bursts of burnout throughout the year, rather than having one huge push of busy season that drives me towards needing to take a huge chunk of time off at the beginning. Because my energy levels are so unpredictable sometimes, and I'm never quite sure how much energy one specific task is going to take.

[00:03:15] I know my fellow spoonies listening can totally relate to that. I have to just be very careful with how I'm scheduling, what kind of boundaries I have in place for my business and the time that I'm taking to rest just so that I'm able to juggle all the things that are going on in my life and all the things that make me a full human being outside of just working all the time.

[00:03:36] But all that being said, I don't want to focus on the bad. I don't want this episode to be all about all the shitty ways that burnout can impact your life and your business.

[00:03:44] I want to flip that around and start talking about ways that we can implement boundaries and start achieving a better work life balance throughout wedding season so that we don't have to worry about burnout once the fall gets here.

[00:03:56] So these tips that I'm going to be sharing with you are from my personal experience dealing with burnout as a photographer and the steps that I took, maybe not to completely avoid it, because like I said, my energy and my health really plays a huge part in that at this point in my life. But ways that you can at least lessen the impact.

[00:04:17] Welcome to Keeping It Candid. I'm your host, Sandra Henderson, an international wedding and family photographer and business coach. I help wedding photographers use systems to build out the backend of their businesses to gain control and continue to thrive no matter what life throws their way. And on a more personal note, I'm a strong eneagram three wing two who is obsessed with tacos and my love for traveling combined with navigating chronic illness life are just two of the many things that drive my passion for all things, systems, workflows, and beating burnout as a business owner.

[00:04:47] Join me every week for a candid behind the scenes. Look at what it's really like working as a wedding photographer, where I'll give you actionable steps to take your business to the next level. Absolutely no fluff here, friends. So go grab your favorite notebook and pen and let's dive into this week's episode.

[00:05:10] Okay. So let's dive right into this. Shall we?

[00:05:13] Three things that you can do to achieve a better work life balance for the rest of wedding season. Number one, take a look at your calendar and intentionally set some time off.

[00:05:23] Just the same way that you intentionally book sessions for your clients, you intentionally book hair appointments, you intentionally make doctor's appointments, you intentionally go on vacation, you intentionally have holidays with your family, you need to intentionally be booking time off as well. Because if you're just waiting for that time off to appear on your calendar, I can promise you, there is always going to be about 15 other things that make their way onto your to do list and that time off is never going to show up.

[00:05:54] So even if you have to pause this episode right now, I want you to go look at your calendar and I want you to find some days that you are going to block off and these are going to be non negotiable.

[00:06:04] When you get emails from clients, you are not going to be finding ways to put people in and shuffling those days to other days. You are 100 percent not going to be working these days.

[00:06:15] I know it sounds scary, but I promise you are going to feel so much better as you head into the rest of your sessions after those days off.

[00:06:24] And if you are looking at your calendar and you are feeling like, I just don't have time to take time off, that is the time that it is more important than ever. ever to take that time off, because at that point you are coming really close to burning yourself out and just having everything kind of feel like it's crashing in on you.

[00:06:46] And that leads perfectly into number two, which is that we are no longer going to be squeezing things into our calendar for free.

[00:06:53] For every single free amount of time that we have.

[00:06:56] If you get an inquiry for a client who's looking for a session, they're looking for a one hour session and you have one three hour window left on your calendar this month, you don't have time for that session. You need that three hour window to sleep. You need it to eat. You need it to run your business.

[00:07:14] You need it to edit.

[00:07:16] There are so many other things that are going to fill up that three hour window. If that's the only three hour window you have this month, we are not going to be squeezing people into that. Repeat after me, friends. We are no longer squeezing clients into every free window that we have. 

[00:07:34] That means that you have to get comfortable with saying no, and I know for all of my chronic people pleasers listening, that is going to leave you with this aching sense of dread, but I know you can do it, and I promise you it will be less scary after you do it a couple of times, and you will start to feel more comfortable with it, and you will start to see the positive impact that saying no can have on your business.

[00:07:58] This is also a really great opportunity to support your local photography community and start referring these clients elsewhere.

[00:08:05] Even if it's a client that you've been working with for a really long time, I can promise you that they will find value in working with you, even if you're not available right now.

[00:08:17] And I want to give an example from my own business where a few years ago, I did photos for a family who were longtime clients of one of my really good friends.

[00:08:26] My friend was unavailable because she was actually on maternity leave. And so she had sent her clients to me and we had best time. The photos turned out so great and they absolutely loved them. I got amazing feedback, but they also went and they told my friend that they felt like they were cheating on her. Like they just, it didn't feel right. Even though the experience was so great.

[00:08:50] It didn't feel right working with someone else. And I completely respect that. Both of those things can be totally true. And as soon as my friend was off of maternity leave, her clients went back to her and everybody has been perfectly happy with the entire situation. We don't own our clients, but when we give them an amazing experience, they will come back to us even if we aren't available.

[00:09:13] And for the first time ever, I actually had someone leave me a five star review on Google because I referred them some other photographers for their wedding date when I wasn't available for that. It was completely unexpected and I was so grateful for it, but the couple just couldn't believe that someone had taken the time to not only let them know that they weren't available, but reach out to some other photographers, find out who was available and give them some recommendations.

[00:09:40] It took an extra five minutes out of my day, and I got a five star Google review in return, which is like gold as a business owner. So you can see how there are so many ways that referring these clients out to other people can come back to you even when your calendar is full.

[00:09:57] If you're hesitant to be sending clients elsewhere because you need the money in your bank account, I totally respect that too. Trust me, it is expensive living in 2024.

[00:10:07] But rather than adding more sessions to your calendar, I want you to instead consider raising your prices.

[00:10:14] There's no rule that says that you can only increase your prices once a year or that it has to be in January or after you've booked a certain number of clients, you have the ability to review your finances, your expenses, your sales at any point during the year and making adjustments as needed.

[00:10:30] So if taking on less clients means that you have to increase what you're charging so that you're not overworking yourself, then you absolutely have every right to do that.

[00:10:41] Number three, the last thing that I want you to do is I want you to find a way to take some of your editing off your plate. We only have so much time and so much energy to get things done in a day, right?

[00:10:52] And we're photographers. We don't want to be taking the actual taking of the photos off of our plate. So that means that something else has got to go if we are feeling overworked. For me, the first thing I want to get rid of is editing because I hate editing. 

[00:11:07] If you love editing, maybe it's going to look like having somebody else doing your social media, someone else doing your bookkeeping, someone else even doing your housekeeping, whatever that may look like.

[00:11:17] I want you to find a way to take some of those things off of your plate 

[00:11:21] and get comfortable asking for help and not trying to do everything yourself.

[00:11:26] I'm going to let that one sit with you for a minute because it's not easy. I'm still learning this one myself on my best days, but no matter what anybody tells you or what your mind is trying to convince you, you don't have to do everything yourself. You may be a solopreneur, but that does not mean that there isn't help out there to help you get things done and run your business more efficiently.

[00:11:50] Okay. So let me quickly recap these. First, you are going to take a look at your calendar and you are going to intentionally set some non negotiable days off. Next, you are going to stop squeezing things into your calendar and you're going to get comfortable with saying no to things that you do not have the time for.

[00:12:08] And lastly, you are going to find a way to take editing or other work that you just don't love doing off of your plate by using tools like AI or outsourcing so that you don't have to do everything yourself.

[00:12:21] Like, let's think about the corporate world for a second and what a life of a CEO looks like in a corporation. You can guarantee they are not skipping their vacation days, and if they're sick, they're staying home. They are only available within their set working hours.

[00:12:37] And if you try contacting them outside of those working hours, you're going to have to wait because they're not around. They have a huge team of people to help support them in running every single aspect of their company. 

[00:12:51] Now, obviously things are different in the corporate world and these businesses have been around forever and they have a lot of things that help them do the things that they do and scale to the extent that they've scaled.

[00:13:02] But the majority, if not all of these businesses did start with just a couple of people or even just one person. And they grew to the point that they have these corporations now. And so just because it's just you running your photography business doesn't mean that you can't apply these same boundaries and this same mindset into running your business.

[00:13:25] We pour our hearts and souls into everything that we do, but that doesn't mean that we aren't allowed to have lives outside of our businesses and that we don't deserve to have the same boundaries around our work as everybody else does.

[00:13:38] Remember, you are the CEO of your business. It's up to you to take control to support that work life balance because it's not going to just happen for you.

[00:13:48] So if you haven't already, as this episode is coming to a wrap, I want you to head over to your calendar. I want you to start putting that time off in. I want you to recognize where you don't have any more time available, no matter what your calendar says.

[00:14:01] And I want you to start getting comfortable asking for help. I know you can do it. I'm here to support you every step of the way and if you need more support beyond that, there are two Facebook communities that you can come and hang out in where you are going to get just that.

[00:14:17] First is the unfiltered community, a group for education and system strategy for photographers is a place to hang out, share your photos, get tips on how to simplify and streamline your business and all things photography systems education. And then my second community is brand new. I just launched it a couple of weeks ago. It's called chronically ill disabled and neurodivergent photographers, which is pretty self explanatory. This one is not an education space. It is meant to just be a community space for photographers who are dealing with chronic illnesses, disabilities and neurodivergence, because the way that we have to approach running a business is totally different than people who aren't dealing with any of those things.

[00:15:01] So I wanted a space where everybody could just come together with people who just get it. So that's my goal with that one. You can find the links to both of those in the description for this episode and in today's show notes.

[00:15:13] And with that, friends, that wraps up another episode of Keeping It Candid. Thank you so much for being here, as always. I am so thankful for you. I hope your wedding season or busy season is going well, and if you're on threads, I want you to come over and share some of the magic that you have been working on this summer. I cannot wait to see what kind of things you have been doing while you've been behind your camera. Anyways, enjoy the rest of your week, and I will be back with a new episode. Today's episode of Keeping it Candid is sponsored by Aftershoot.

[00:15:47] Full disclosure, I took a break from using Aftershoot, and I've talked a lot about how incredible some other AI editing platforms are. And don't get me wrong, that hasn't changed. But I cannot deny how amazing Aftershoot's new features are, and there was no question that I had to make the switch back.

[00:16:04] Aftershoot is an AI culling and editing platform that learns your style of editing based off the photos that you've already done in the past and then applies that to new photos going forward. It's not like finding presets where you just apply it to your photos and it doesn't make any changes and you really have to heavily edit each one yourself.

[00:16:23] This actually learns your editing style and applies Lightroom settings to your photos the same way you would if you were the one that was actually physically moving the sliders yourself.

[00:16:34] With the AI culling feature, it's able to sort through photos where people are blinking, photos that are blurry, and anything else that you might want to weed out as far as duplicates and things like that leaving only the best of the best for you to have to go through in a few minutes as opposed to a few hours.

[00:16:49] And the feature that brought me back to the platform is that all of this can now be done all in one. There is no more need to have to upload photos in the Lightroom and then call them an aftershoot, and then load them back into Lightroom, and then edit them into aftershoot, and now everything can be done inside the platform.

[00:17:07] The only time you have to bring them over to Lightroom is if you want to make any tweaks to the individual photos themselves. It's an absolute game changer and will save so much time.

[00:17:18] If you're interested in trying it out, I want you to head over to simplysandrayvonne.ca/resources to get a 10 percent discount using my affiliate link.

[00:17:28] Thank you so much for listening. You can find full show notes from today's episode at SimplySandraYvonne. ca forward slash keeping it candid.

[00:17:37] In the meantime, let's connect. You can find me on Instagram and TikTok. Just search SimplySandreeVaughn. And if you're loving this podcast, I'd be so honored if you'd go ahead and hit that subscribe button and leave a review. Until next time!