Bare Bones Systems: The Minimum Setup Every Photographer Needs

Hello, hello and welcome back to Business First Creatives podcast. I’m gonna be a little controversial today. I wanna talk about bare bones systems because I feel like there is a theory out there that in order to make a lot of money in your business that you need to have systems. And coming from someone who sets up systems for a living, it’s just not true.

If you want to be a six figure business owner, and guys, I am picking that number out of thin air, I know that it is problematic. I’m doing it for a reason. But if you want to be a six figure business, there are plenty of ways that you can do that without having serious client experience systems in your business.

You can, I mean, especially if you have like a really bespoke offer that costs like $10,000. 10 people get you to six figures. I mean, it’s just math y’all. Now, what people who have systems in their business feel is ease. They don’t feel the stress of micromanaging every single part of the client experience or the business administration in their business.

There are times where you just want to take a fucking day off. If you have good solid systems in your business, you can in fact walk away without worrying that your entire business is gonna fall apart while you are offline. Now, I know it sounds a little strange for someone who’s always like, oh, you need systems in your business.

Oh, you need to improve your client communication. Oh, you should have an inquiry, a booking, an onboarding, a delivery, and an offboarding workflow. I realize that I talk about these things all the time, but I am not saying that they are mandatory in order to have a business that makes money. I do think that the more systems you have in place, the more sustainable your business will be.

I truly believe that the more systems that you have in your business, the easier and more professional you will feel as a business owner. Now, you know, come at me, I’m at Colie James on Instagram if you wanna argue about it or threads, but you’re not gonna change the way that I feel about these things because I have seen what systems do for my business, and I have seen what significant systems do for all of my clients.

I mean, it’s funny, there was something on threads like a couple weeks ago where it was like. If your clients get time from you, that is not the win that you should be talking. And I was like, yeah, fuck you. I give my clients their time back. I also reduce their stress and enable them to make more money in their business.

’cause again, I didn’t say that you needed systems to make money in your business, but the better your systems are and the more thought that you put into them, I guarantee you you’re gonna end up making more money on the other side. It’s simple math. If you create that five minute booking process that I am always talking about, the thing is when you send it to 10 people, the easier it is for your clients to say yes, accept the offer, sign the contract, and pay you the money.

You conversion rate will naturally increase. It has to it’s math. Now, systems cannot cover a shitty offer. I hope that you believe me when I say that it does not matter how good your systems are if you are trying to sell an offer that doesn’t make sense. Now, that’s why one of the first things that I do when someone hires me, when it was done for you, when it is now in systems, in session with, when I do it with you, uh, I look at your offer.

I sure do. Um, and if it doesn’t make sense to me, I’m gonna ask you a lot of questions until it does make sense. Because if you are going to take the time. To put together that proposal that has all of the elements that I talk about that makes it high converting, which is, you know, language about your offer, discussing your process, including frequently asked questions, um, laying out your offer in a clear and concise manner.

Like all of these things in this proposal. If the offer is shitty, I don’t care how good your proposal looks or how easy it is to book you, that’s not gonna increase your conversion rate. Okay? But so what do you actually need in your business as systems? Like what does Colie feel is truly the minimally viable system that you need to have inside your business?

Now as I talk, I could add more and more things, but honestly, I’m going to say. When I always talk about the workflows that you need in your business, and if you recall, I originally talked about four, and now I’ve kind of expanded it to five. But basically all of the things that I talk about that go in your workflow phases like inquiry, booking, onboarding, and offboarding.

Every one of those has an anchor activity. And what I mean by that is that there is one activity that is really like the goal of that phase and everything else supports it. And so if you bare minimum, do the anchor activity and get that set up inside your CRM, that is what I am going to call bare bone systems going forward.

So let’s break it down first. We’ve got your inquiry workflow. The main point of the inquiry workflow is to qualify your leads and basically bring them into your selling system. You do that by giving them a contact form that is easy to complete, that automatically loads them into your CRM, and you immediately send them a lead response that tells them what the next step is and when you will personally be contacting them.

So, okay, that’s two things. The contact form and the lead response, those are what I call bare minimum for the inquiry phase. Now, I’ve also talked about a lot of other things on this podcast. I lay it out in great detail on my blog, but this is also where if you are someone who has to talk to a client before they can hire you, using a scheduler with a bunch of reminders and a confirmation email is good.

It is not necessary. It is just good. So let’s move on to the booking phase.

I think it will come as no surprise to anyone. The only thing that I really think that you need in this phase is a proposal. I will even let you get away with it if you do not have a confirmation email after they have booked. I think it’s bad practice, but if you have the proposal that allows them to choose the offer, sign the contract and pay the money, you are good with me.

I will give you a passing grade. Then there’s the onboarding phase. Now the truth is I actually think you might be able to eliminate everything in this phase unless you have a questionnaire that is absolutely required for you to work with someone and then you really do need to create the questionnaire.

Now, do you need to automatically send it? No. That’s a nice to have. It’s not a requirement, but if you have a collection of questions that you need answers to and you are not like booking a planning call where you ask your clients these questions and then basically write down their answers as you go, you need a form.

You need a form so that it’s organized and the client has it in front of them and it makes it easy for them to answer the questions and hit submit. I could say there are plenty of photographers that really don’t need a client questionnaire.

As long as you know the names of the people that are gonna be in front of your camera, uh, that’s good enough. And the rest of it you could do manually. I mean, again, this is like a, I’m telling you what you need, bare bones and as a reminder contact form with an automatic lead response and then a five minute booking proposal.

Now let’s move on to like the delivery phase. If you’re a photographer, you need a way to deliver photos. And in 2025, it should not be in a Dropbox. It should not be on a USB thumb drive. It should be in an online gallery. Now, I know you’re like, but Colie, that’s not a system in your CRM. I know. I didn’t say I was gonna stick the systems for CRMs today, but bare minimum as a photographer, you need something to deliver the photos. Now, if you’re a website designer, I mean, you need a way to get feedback that is absolutely crucial to your job. And so what tool, what system are you going to use in order to collect that feedback? Now, could you just send them an email with a mockup or with a link to you know, what you’ve done behind the scenes and be like, give me your feedback.

Yeah, it’s probably gonna be shitty feedback though. Anybody who performs a service where you know that getting a client’s feedback is crucial, no one should be fucking around with sending an email and saying, you know, Hey, can you tell me what you think? The more specific you are, the better feedback you will get.

The more likely it is that these people are going to be satisfied with your service and refer you to others. Now offboarding, I am now talking up and down, left and right about collecting reviews and rebooking your clients when appropriate as desired. But the truth is those are good to haves. Those are not must haves.

So at the end of the day, let’s come back to what I really said. Bare bones systems a contact form. An automated email response and a booking proposal, do you think you can handle that? Okay, now, if you still don’t have these things, please send me a DM on threads on Instagram. I have free resources that will help you do those things.

If you can’t dedicate the time to get those bare minimum things done, I can’t help you. I just can’t. Now again, I think those are minimally viable systems, if you will, when you’re ready for like the big girl systems. When you’re ready to start really looking over your client communication and making sure that it’s guiding your clients the entire way through your process. When you are ready to like add in that additional layer of automatic reminders.

For payments, for appointments that are scheduled, for forms that you send your clients that they still have not filled out… that is when you are giving your systems a, a glow up. That is when you are improving what you already have. That is how you build a business that is sustainable, but bare minimum. I mean, you don’t have to have all of those things in order to run a business.

I just truly believe that it makes it easier. Alright, so a couple of things. Systems In Session is my new Done With You program where you and I design and implement a rave worthy client experience inside of Dubsado or HoneyBook within 60 days. I also have a 30 day option available, and so if you are interested in hearing more about this done with you offer, please check out the next podcast episode because I am going to be sharing some of the information with the clients that I’ve worked with thus far, and literally their wins and how they feel about their business after they have implemented the systems.

It makes me cry. All right, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.