Episode 73: I Don’t Care What Sarah Jane Is Up to Anymore

NOTE: This is the transcript from the original recording, rather than the edited episode so timings may vary.

Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Mum Means Business podcast. Summer seems to have come to an end with a crash of thunder and lightning. The kids are all back in school and the pace of life seems to have quickened quite dramatically in comparison to those lazy days of the holidays.

Personally, I’m feeling a little frantic as I’m going into the fourth launch of my signature course, Print Over Pixels, which I put out into the world for the very first time in January this year. Launches are so full on, especially when you’re managing all the moving parts yourself and you have a coach like Theresa Heathwaring, who is the queen of launching and recommends trialling and testing all of the things to give yourself the best chance of success.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I thought I might go back a few years to the moment I first heard the word launch in the context of online businesses, because before then the first thoughts that would have come to mind would have been about rockets or cannonballs.

When I was in the thick of it on my second maternity with two under two, podcasts were my comfort blanket. I had discovered them in lockdown when I was alone at home with my newborn baby and my partner had been called away on a job in Oman and got stuck there for three months. Podcasts gave me access to adult conversation whilst I was isolating with my eldest daughter, who was of course seriously cute, but not exactly offering the best chat at that stage.

It was Jenna Kutcher talking on the Goal Digger podcast, telling the story of when she launched her first online course. She had gone through Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Academy, implemented everything and made $35,000 in her first launch of what I think she called the Jenna Kutcher course. And obviously this spiked my interest. Here was a recovering wedding photographer, just like me, packaging up her knowledge, building a course and offering it for sale and making $35,000. And of course she went on to make many millions more. It sounded too good to be true.

But once I’d heard this word launch, I kept hearing it, a bit like when you decide on a new car and then suddenly you see it everywhere. I say that, I’ve been driving my mum’s second-hand car for years, but I do remember feeling that way in my twenties about Mini Coopers.

Anyway, the more podcasts I consumed, the more I learned about this world of online business, which had boomed through the pandemic. There were success stories here, there and everywhere, and I started to unpick the funnel process. Thinking back to that PDF I downloaded from Jasmine Star, another recovering wedding photographer, way back in 2012, I realised that in downloading that PDF I had opted into her email list and so leapt willingly into the top of her funnel. I realised it was all strategic. And at the time, I have to say, I was oblivious. I literally didn’t know what an email list was until Jenna started telling me about them in 2021.

I was fascinated by the whole thing and became a bit obsessed with learning about it. Every nap time, the headphones would go on and I’d listen to entrepreneurs talk about growing their social media audience, adding value and nurturing their list, all with the intention of selling to those people. And I was okay with all of that as long as what they had to sell was good and worth having.

But therein lay the problem. Lots of people made lots of money selling online courses that weren’t good and weren’t worth having, perhaps because we were all stuck at home with more disposable income than we were used to and time to kill. And so the bubble burst once the world reopened. As consumers we became more savvy and we looked at the collection of incomplete courses we had amassed and wondered why we were still in search of that big transformation we had thought we were investing in.

So the scene shifted, the honeymoon period came to an end, but nevertheless it was clear that online businesses were going nowhere. And having seen these success stories, lots of people still wanted in on the action. And I will hold my hands up and say I wanted to be one of them. As a new mum, I was all at sea when it came to my work. What had worked before wasn’t going to work now, and I needed something more flexible that would allow me to work around my babies. I was curious, but also I had this sense that that world wasn’t for me.

I do think it’s interesting that so many photographers have moved into this online space of course creation and done so well there. I have this theory that I often harp on about on photography podcasts, that the tidal wave of self-taught photographers that flooded the industry with the digital revolution of the late noughties and early teens did a lot of damage to the professional photography industry. And I don’t mean it critically, I was one of them, spraying and praying and hoping there’d be a good shot in there somewhere.

I just think it’s interesting to reflect on because when you have such an enormous influx of self-taught photographers bringing all their fresh creativity into the industry to shake things up, that’s great. But we also brought our self-doubt and our imposter syndrome. And we brought very little business experience. We had no idea what we were doing and it showed in the way we ran our businesses and the way we served our clients.

Digital photography meant we could deliver a thousand photographs from a wedding at no additional cost than if we delivered a hundred or so, we thought. We trained our clients to expect quantity over quality and we had no idea how to price. So we looked up the website of Sarah Jane Photography up the road, decided whether we were slightly better or slightly worse than her, and let her prices inform our own. Before we knew it, we had a race to the bottom on our hands, selling JPEGs for pennies, as all the professionally trained photographers who had been in the game for decades held their heads in their hands. And of course we couldn’t make the numbers work. We didn’t understand why we were so busy and yet we felt so broke.

We shot beautiful family sessions, spent all the hours editing each photo to perfection because hello imposter syndrome, uploaded them to an online gallery with an automated slideshow, fired off an email with a link and a cart to fill with digital files, and job done. We’d make £200, £300, perhaps even £500. Not bad for a one hour session. But it wasn’t a one hour session, was it? From client communication back and forth to planning the shoot, prepping the gear, shooting the shoot, editing the shoot, prepping the gallery, it could be a full week’s work. And then constantly blogging and marketing to attract new clients all the time, because the service we were offering was transactional and the experience was in the session alone. There simply weren’t enough touch points with our clients to build real lasting loyalty with all of them. And we were always on, trying to attract new clients via social media or SEO or blog features. And so it went on.

I’m saying this all in the past tense, but in truth this is how I ran my photography business until the start of 2025. When I pivoted away from weddings to family work in 23, 24, I brought that business model with me. I was a shoot and burn photographer, as we used to call ourselves in the old days of CDs. I was treating my business like a conveyor belt and actively avoiding too much connection with my clients. Heaven forbid they’d want to talk to me on the phone. I’d hide behind emails, show up to blind date sessions, work my magic, come home and hope they liked some of the photographs I’d taken. And that hoping was so challenging, almost as challenging as the waiting to see what your client would order, or if they’d order at all, after you sent that email with the gallery link.

The business model I was working within had been inherited, copied really. But I started to realise it was designed for convenience in the digital age of photography. And the cost was actually my profit margin, my confidence and my joy. I couldn’t just raise my prices because I felt like I’d hit a ceiling on the going rate. In order to raise them, I’d have to do something radical. I’d have to raise the value I offered. As things stood, there was no value in the experience of working with me outside of the shoot itself. And so I started to wonder if I could change that. And I started getting curious about in-person sales.

To clarify in case you don’t know, in the world of social photography, in-person sales is where you don’t upload your finished photographs to a gallery and fire them off into the ether, leaving your clients to decide what to do with them. You invite them to see their photographs for the first time with you. You carve out a time and space to share that experience with them. You get to watch them really immerse themselves in the photographs you took and notice the connection you captured between them and their child, the moment their toddler reaches up for their hand, or the moment their teenager actually cracks a smile in their direction after he promised he was going to hate every minute of the session.

And my goodness, the first time I did this I knew I could never go back. For the first time in what was then fifteen years, I actually felt like my work mattered, like it had impact. I wasn’t worried about whether my photographs were as good as Sarah Jane’s up the road. That didn’t matter, because my photographs were good enough for the client in front of me, more than good enough.

I started to learn how to lead a reveal appointment, gallery appointment or ordering appointment, people call it different things, and help my client choose their favourite photographs and decide what they’d like to do with them, so that they don’t languish on a hard drive but instead bring comfort and spark joy in their homes every single day. I invested in samples so they could envisage what their framed print or family album might look like. I set up a reveal wall so they could hold their own photographs mounted and printed beautifully on fine art paper. And pretty soon the reveal appointment became my favourite part of the process.

I soon realised that if I built in more touch points earlier on, before the session, I could get curious and ask my clients what they actually wanted and what they wanted to do with the photographs they were investing in. Then I could tailor that session to them and actually deliver on their desire. And because I was shooting more intentionally, I was actually shooting less, and I wasn’t labouring so much late into the night preparing images that they hadn’t even asked for. I was behaving like a professional creative, doing what architects, graphic designers and illustrators do, consulting with my client, creating a project brief and then delivering on it. I felt very grown up, and inevitably this led to sales. Rather than selling a full gallery of hundreds of digital images for £500, I was selling legacy artwork, and there was no limit to the sale I could make.

My clients were happy knowing that they had invested in a set of portraits beautifully framed on the wall that their children will see every time they clatter down the stairs on their way to school. There’s neuroscientific research showing that photographs don’t just remind us of emotions, they actually reactivate them, because our brains don’t know the difference between living a moment and remembering it. The same neural pathways fire, and before we’ve consciously registered what we’re looking at, our body has already responded. Our heart rate shifts and our facial muscles mirror the expressions in the photograph. And studies show that every time you look at a meaningful photograph, the memory doesn’t just replay, it deepens. The emotion becomes more deeply embedded and more deeply felt.

Knowing that the photographs I take will come to mean so much to my clients over the years to come is everything. And the sad fact is there are trillions of digital files languishing unloved in storage, holding incredible memories that, if never triggered, are destined to fade. We now take three trillion photos a year, which is mind-boggling, and the vast majority will remain digital dust for all eternity.

As a mum, and especially as a photographer, I feel the burden of curating, storing and backing up the tens of thousands of digital files we’re amassing of the kids. And I know there are a handful of marvellous dads out there taking the time to do this labour, but for the most part it’s falling on mum. And I don’t want to sell my family photography clients more of something they already have in abundance. I want to give them something different, something lasting and impactful. So now I lead with print in all my family work, and I feel more fulfilled by the business than I have in seventeen years.

I feel confident in my ability, secure in my pricing, and I literally don’t care what Sarah Jane is up to anymore. No offence, Sarah Jane, because I know the impact my work has, I’ve witnessed it firsthand, and I want every family photographer to feel this way about their business.

So that is my mission. My signature course, Print Over Pixels, is designed to help family photographers lead with print in the digital age, elevate their client experience and get paid properly for their time and their talent. The doors are going to open on Tuesday the 8th of September. So if you are a family, maternity or newborn photographer, or you know someone who is, I will put all the links in the show notes so you can go and take a look.

I am still learning how to do this online business malarkey. It took me such a long time to finally build up the confidence to launch the course, and that in itself felt like an enormous victory. I’m still very much a beginner, still building my email list, still figuring out how to attract the right people on social media and all of that. But I really believe in what I’m teaching, and I honestly want to help as many print curious photographers as possible feel the way that I do about my business right now.

So wish me luck as I embark on my fourth launch and all that it entails. And at some point I’ll dig into all of the launch numbers with you in another episode, because I am, as always, here to normalise things taking time, to normalise the trying and the striving and the perseverance even when things feel slow.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I will speak to you soon.