3 Bottlenecks That Burn Photographers Out Every Fall (And How to Fix Them)

Hello. Hello y’all and welcome back to Business First Creatives. It’s July, it’s hot, and yes, it’s my birthday month, but today’s real gift for me to you is helping you not burn and crash this fall. Okay. I do wanna say this episode is mostly for family photographers, and so if you are not a family photographer, I do still think that there’s always some value in listening to me tell you to outsource your things and feel more confident in your workflows.

But the examples that I’m giving in today’s episode are specifically for family photographers who are about to get hit with like the wave of inquiries that comes every single year. Okay. And that’s because family photography season is coming and it’s coming fast. And if your inbox hasn’t already started dinging with inquiries, it will soon.

Once the kids are back in school, those floodgates are going to open. I feel like after the pandemic, the inquiries are coming later and later, but they are still coming. If you’re not prepared, you are going to be crying in a closet hiding from your family come November because of the decisions that you make now.

So I really want to help you avoid that. This episode is short and sweet, and we are going to walk through the three biggest bottlenecks that crush photographers every fall. And here’s the thing, these are totally fixable now before it’s too late. All right, let’s get into it. Bottleneck number one, editing is going to eat you alive. Now, I used to be one of those photographers who swore up and down, no one can edit like me. Special Snowflake syndrome, right? But in 2016, I literally couldn’t see my screen, and so outsourcing was no longer optional.

Now, I don’t need you guys to go blind like I did in order to be forced to at least try outsourcing. I want you to try it before you absolutely say no to it. You need to start now. Okay, so in order to get the process started, here’s what I need you to do. First, I need you to decide whether or not you want to invest in a human editor or an AI editor, because yes, now in 2025, you have that option, and the AI editing tools out there are absolutely fabulous, but.

If you want to start with a human editor, you’ve got choices. Not only can you hire like an individual freelance editor in order to get things started, you can also try out a company like the Image Salon. But before you do this, I don’t want anybody waiting until fall to start that process. I want you to choose two to three of your past galleries, and I want you to send them to the editors.

In order to see what kind of editing comes back. Now, almost all of these, like human editors that you will hire, will want to see samples of your work. Some of them will actually get on a call and build a profile and edit live with you so that you can give them real time feedback in what you like and what you don’t like about the editing process as they are doing it.

You have these options with human editors, but if you don’t wanna go the human editor route, you can do AI editing tools like imaging tools like Imagine After Shoot, even Image Salon has human editors and they also have an AI editing tool, are all solid options, but. The prep process for AI editing is very different.

You are not gonna send them just two or three of your previous sessions. You’re going to send them hundreds, if not thousands of your edited files so that the AI tools can train themselves on your editing process and create a profile unique to you. Now, that’s not the only way that you can do AI editing.

You can actually use like pre-done profiles at most of these companies to where it will take like profiles that they’ve already created based on a specific photographer’s work or just something in general, like colorful and punchy, and you can apply those to your work. I personally feel like everything else that I’ve talked about related to ai, the more context you give it related to your sessions and your editing, the better output you’re going to get.

But here’s the kicker. No matter which route you choose. Now here in July, in the middle of summer is when you should start that process because no one should be trying to get editing, you know, inside of your business in October when you’re already flooded with completed sessions. Okay, let’s talk about bottleneck number two, and that is your booking process.

Every single service provider, whether you’re a photographer, a website designer, a copywriter, whatever it is, needs a five minute booking process. That starts with a templated proposal where you are asking the client to choose the services or just confirm them, and that can be customized in less than five minutes.

Like if you don’t wanna offer someone everything that you typically do, you can quickly customize it before you send it. But the first part is the services. The second part is that contract, and the third part is the invoice. Now, two ways that people push back on me when I tell them that they need this.

No, everything in my business is custom. No, it’s not. I have honestly never met a business owner where everything was customized. I’ve been doing this for five years. Guys, there are parts of your process that are in fact the same from client to client or from offer to offer, because I’m not telling you that you only need one proposal template for your entire business if you have three.

Four, five very different offers. You can create a proposal template for every single one of those offers and which one you’re sending to a client. You can take five minutes to customize it before you send it. That is totally possible. And that contract, y’all, you have no idea how many people tell me no, my contract has to be customized every time.

And so I push back and I say, okay, what needs to be customized? And they tell me and I’m like, well, no, they could get that off the proposal. Your CRMs will take the offers and the like, you know what’s included and the price and all of those details. Your CRMs will take that from the services selection on your proposal, your quote, your smart file, and it will transfer it to the contract with just a field, a custom field that you can tell it.

Then there’s the invoice. I know people are like, well, no, you know, I have to customize the payment plan. I encourage you to find a way to make it more standardized for everyone, because every time you say something has to be customized, I hear booking friction. I hear you. Stopping the process and putting yourself in there as the bottleneck in order to get these leads.

Booked has actual clients, okay? Every CRM that you could possibly be getting has a way to connect the services, the contract, and the invoice. Everybody needs a five minute booking process, okay? So. I want everyone. If this is something that’s been on your to-do list, absolutely do it now and honestly do that immediately so that the next inquiry that you get for a fall session can get your new five minute booking process.

Make it easy, make it fast, and make it mostly standard.

Okay, that’s the first two bottlenecks. This last one is where people start to feel a certain kind of way, and it’s sneaky because you feel like manually replying to every single one of your clients makes it personal. And it doesn’t. It just makes you a slave to your phone or your computer every hour, every minute, every day that you own a business.

You feel like it’s luxury, but really it’s killing your fault conversion rate. Because every minute that it takes you to watch your inbox and see that you got an inquiry, and then go sit down and write them a completely from scratch, personalized email, is a minute that if they’ve inquired with more people than just you, they’re probably gonna go with the people who gave them the information fastest. Now, does that mean that I’m saying you automatically send them everything related to booking your services when they inquire? Absolutely not. But what you don’t want there to be is like this huge gap between when they inquire with you and when they actually hear from you.

Now your inquiry, your first response builds trust with the lead. I want it to be an automated branded reply within 30 seconds. Okay? People expect it now. Automation is something that is here to stay. What should that email, what should that response say? It should always give them the next step. It should totally sound like you, and it should give them something to look at, chomp at, think about before you personally respond to them.

Now, that also gives you a little bit of wiggle room. You should no longer feel like you have to immediately watch your phone or your computer. Every waking minute so that you are not losing inquiries or dropping the ball. This is really gonna give you a sense of ease and release some of the stress that you are feeling about missing things inside of your client experience.

And this is why I built the workflow FastPass now. If you want to learn about what should be in your client experience, I have an amazing freebie that will walk you through that. If you go to Colie james.com/workflow. What I hear a lot of people telling me is that they don’t have time to build their own workflows, or if they take the time to build the workflows, they’re never confident enough to actually use them.

They’re afraid that they did something wrong. They’re afraid that the wrong email is gonna go out or that you know it’s not gonna work as expected, or that it’s gonna depend on a form going out. And then they realize three weeks later it was never sent. Okay. There are still too many of you that are too scared to use the tools that you are actually paying for.

So if you’re nodding along and thinking, yes, Colie, that’s totally my life. Okay? I want you to listen to this. The workflow, FastPass is minute new, AI powered, human reviewed offer. I wanna explain.

So when you purchase your very own workflow, fast pass. This is what’s going to happen. You’re gonna fill out a quick intake form. It is not like this lengthy thing where you have to tell me all about your business. It’s really gonna ask you some straightforward questions that are gonna help me design the perfect workflow for your business.

Do you wanna have a consultation call? Yes or no? Do you wanna follow up with clients if you make the offer? They don’t respond. These are questions that all of us are going to be able to answer without a lot of thought and stress. And so once you hit submit on that form, it is going to be run through one of my AI assistants and they are trained on my workflow and automation strategies.

I have one for HoneyBook and one for Dubsado. It is going to build your entire workflow for me. I’m talking about your inquiry workflow, your booking workflow, your onboarding workflow, your delivery workflow, and your offboarding workflow. All five of those are gonna be built by my AI assistant, and then I am personally going to review every single step the triggers, the emails that it’s suggesting, and make sure that there are no red flags before you get it.

The real kicker, I am going to be delivering these within 72 hours of you submitting your intake form. So at the end of three days, you could have a completely mapped out automation blueprint in your hands where you are going to be able to go into your CRM and just push buttons to build your entire workflow.

Now, even though I know it’s going to work, I am also going to show you step by step. In a training video, how to test the entire system so that you feel most confident using it inside of your business.

But no more figuring it out from scratch. No more binging YouTube or trying to DIY it yourself. Just a custom workflow built for your business, reviewed by me.

Your favorite client experience, system strategist. Okay, and so today this offer is available. There are only 10 beta spots available at 1 97. If you would like one, please go to Colie james.com/automation and grab one today.

But coming back around to the whole point of this podcast episode this year can be different.

What I really want from you is to come out on the other side of Fall family photography session and not feel the same way that you may have felt last year. I want everyone to be like, wow, that was a great season. I can’t wait for next year. Instead of, oh my God, I don’t know if I can ever do that again.

Guys, fix the bottlenecks now. Outsource your editing. Get that five minute booking process set up, and finally create some workflows that are gonna help automate and streamline your client experience going forward. I don’t want anybody to go into fall season with a lot of caffeine and crossed fingers.

This year you can go into your fall booking season more confident, and on the other end realize that there is a version of you and your business where you are not stressed and burnt out at the end of the year.

Alright, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.