With Laura Esmond

Hey, friend. Welcome back to the podcast here with Laura Esmond. This is step three in a four-part series for planning your 2026 portrait business with intention. So far, we've started with gratitude, which helps you ground yourself in what's already good about what you've done. Then last week we moved into reflection where we got really honest about.

What worked this year and what didn't. If you didn't catch that one, I highly recommend going back to it and downloading the worksheet that accompanies that episode. You can do that at laura esmond.com/reflections. That is plural for some reason. Not sure why I did that, but I did.

And now we're stepping into planning. Before we jump into the numbers and calendar, I wanna say something that's really important because this is where strategy and mindset meet. You might hear the word manifestation tossed around. I'm sure you have, unless you've been living under a rock, and, but you might kind of wonder what that actually means.

I think that word has become such a buzzword that in the end just sort of got diluted and people are like, what does this mean? Let's kind of clear this up. It's not about making a vision board and hoping the universe delivers. Manifestation is not magic. It's simply about clarity. It's about intention.

It's about putting what you want into the world and allowing your awareness to start noticing the opportunities to go after it. That is the most important part. It is about allowing your awareness to start noticing the opportunities. To go after what you want. Let me give you an example. Actually, a couple, I think here.

We recently bought a car for my son. Before we did, I had never paid attention to this type of car. I couldn't have picked it out of a lineup, but once we did the research, once we decided this is the car that is right for him, suddenly I started seeing that exact car. Everywhere. It wasn't magic. It wasn't the universe dropping clues that this was the right car for me, it was my awareness shifting because now I knew what I was looking for.

I was aware, and that's how manifestation works. It will feel like the whole world is starting to move in your direction.

Here's another quick example. I once really wanted to move into a different neighborhood. I didn't feel like we were in our forever home, and I actually put on a vision board this like beautiful home that I wanted to. Manifest. Well, the next step was I was out to dinner with a girlfriend and having a glass of wine.

I was like, yeah, I'm kind of dreaming of maybe a different house. I don't know if this is the right neighborhood for us to stay in forever. I don't know. Maybe we'll find something new someday. I had not even started looking online. I had no intentions of looking online for Newhouse. I wasn't even really sure my husband would be on board with that, but that friend lived in a neighborhood that I had never, I'd never gone to her home.

She lived in this beautiful neighborhood. I actually, that fall went out and photographed her family out there in that neighborhood and I was like, where is this magical place that you live? This is so beautiful. It was kind of nestled in the foothills of, of Denver and you know, had access to trails and biking in the mountains and so much snow and deer everywhere.

And I'm like, this is literally. Magic. Well, I started saying that to her and she recalled that I was kind of loosely looking for my dream home, and she started sending me house after house after house. So not only did I start to talk about it, which was directing my awareness, then I showed up in a neighborhood.

Again, my awareness was like, oh, radar going off. And I had also told my friend who started moving things in that direction eventually. About a year later, or maybe a year and a half later, we found our, a beautiful home that we ended up buying, and that's how that happened. So it wasn't magic, it was awareness.

when you write your goals down, when you say them out loud, when you build a plan, you bring your awareness to what you want, and your awareness shifts, your energy starts to move with it. You begin to see the next steps more clearly. But that car for my son wasn't going to show up in our driveway on its own, and neither was the home that we eventually bought.

We still had to go get it. There's this old parable I love. A man prays every single day to win the lottery. He likes a candle. He sits quietly and he begs, please let me win the lottery. Please let me win the lottery. Day after day, night after night, same request. Just once. Let me win. I promise I'll use the money for good.

This goes on for years. Finally, one night, as he finishes his usual plea, he hears a small voice whisper back my son. Please go buy a ticket. The message is simple. Wanting isn't enough. You have to participate in your own miracle. It's the same with your goals. You don't manifest by wishing you manifest by moving.

So as we talk about planning today, I want you to keep that in mind. Planning is a form of manifestation or a part of it. It's the way you begin to turn what you want into something real. Now let's talk through the two parts we will focus on most inside the Peace and Profit Bootcamp, which I'm hosting by the way, the week of January 6th.

You can sign up at lauraesmond.com/bootcamp. We will be focusing primarily on your money and your calendar. So let's say your goal is a hundred thousand dollars. It's just a really clean number for me to use, or you can plant into your mind right now. Whatever number feels right for you. If you're charging $500 per session, that means you would need to shoot 200 sessions per year, which breaks down to about 16 to 17 sessions per month, which by the way, does not take into account that the math and sessions never works perfectly in that way.

We do have a heavy season and a light season, so there could be some months that you shoot almost none and some that you're shooting 30. So for some people that might be totally doable, but for others, especially if you're like many of my get rooted students who want to offer a really high touch client experience or you are interested in protecting your time for rest and family and creative work, shooting that many sessions a month could feel pretty overwhelming.

Get to a point of being totally unsustainable. Now let's look at what happens if you're charging a thousand dollars per session. To reach that same a hundred thousand dollars goal, you'd only need to shoot a hundred sessions per year, which comes out to just over eight sessions per month. That's a significant shift in both your time and.

Your energy, same income, half the workload. This is why pricing is such an important piece of the planning process because it directly affects how many clients you need, how much time you'll spend working, and ultimately the kind of experience you can provide. Now, of course there is a lot more to setting sustainable and profitable pricing than that simple exercise, but it goes without saying that. If you want to offer a thoughtful, hands-on experience with personal touches and detailed prep calls, and a consistent follow-up routine with your clients shooting 200 sessions.

Probably doesn't leave space for that, and it definitely doesn't leave much space for rest or family life. So you've got a decision to make, right? This is where you can start to make decisions about your business and start planning. You can raise your prices so you can shoot fewer sessions and still reach your income goal.

You could lower your income goal to better align with your lifestyle and capacity or simplify your client experience to make it really streamlined and less hands-on so you can shoot 200 sessions without getting burned out. There's no one right answer here, but this is the power of planning with intention.

You get to look at your numbers, your calendar, your values, and choose what matters most to you, and then align your business with that. Inside the bootcamp, we're not just throwing goals on a page. You will map out your income, your session breakdown, your availability, and weave it all into your real life.

For now though, before you start building out your plan for 2026, there are some very real, very practical questions you'll want to answer first because if you skip this part, you risk creating a plan that looks good, but doesn't actually work for you. And that's the important part. Whatever you build out for this next year.

Needs to work with you, your family, the age of your kids, your capacity, your financial goals. The goal here isn't just to fill your calendar or hit a number. It's to build a business that fits your actual life and your energy. Your goals need to be built on creating a sustainable business. That's another buzzword.

I feel like we hear a lot sustainable, but really, I mean, resonate on. What does that really mean? It means something that I can do every day from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. Like what is the business? What is the life that I want to have from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep?

What do I want my morning to look like? What do I need my evenings to look like? What do I want from my weekend? How do I want it to feel? Do I wanna have a lot of buzz in my business? What do I want and need and require? Something that is actually. Calm and reflective. So this week, those were not my questions.

Here are my actual questions. So this week I want you to ask yourself one. What do I want to earn next year? So in 2026, how many sessions does that actually look like? Based on my current pricing, can I realistically shoot that many with the time and energy that I have? Uh, then what kind of experience do I want my clients to have, and does that business allow me to deliver it?

So based on the pricing and the number of sessions you need to book, does that give you the time to create the kind of experience that you want your clients to have? Then what kind of experience do I want myself to have while running this business? And that's a really important piece of the puzzle, and that is going to be different for every single person.

And then lastly, what's already on the calendar next year that I want to plan around? So this is where I pull out the annual cal calendar for my kids' schools, and I start to plug things in. I plug in trips. I have a daughter that's graduating in May and I basically wanna cry that whole month. So I basically wanna just take off that whole month.

And then again, she'll be leaving for college in August. So I'll spend a fair amount of time crying, probably won't be the best business person. I literally already have weeks blocked off for that to happen. So planning isn't just about getting more done, it's about getting clear on what you want. On what you're building and on how you want to feel along the way.

And I think that's sometimes something that we ignore because it's really hard to get that granular detail, uh, especially if you've never run this kind of business before. If you're still in a growth phase, I would say the first one to three years in your business, or for some, maybe you've been in business for 10 years, but you've never really taken it seriously.

And now you are ready to take your business more seriously. These are the things that you want to think through and really plant yourself in each month. Visualize it. What does it feel like to run the business that you would love most? This doesn't have to be perfect though.

You don't have to map the entire year today, or even the week in that week in January where I'm doing the bootcamp, but just. Start asking the question. Start noticing what you're planning by default versus what you want to be really intentional about. I feel like we get so caught up sometimes in planning mini session events and we don't spend nearly enough time planning for the sessions that really have our heart and soul, you know, the newborn sessions and the maternity sessions, and how are we going to market for those.

And draw people in. We just start planning all this marketing for Santa or a Valentine session or Mother's Day, and those are more hustle mode type events versus the ones that that really drew us to this business in the first place. So write the list, speak it out loud, believe it, but then here's that next step.

Then move because what you speak into the world becomes your reality. I now live in that house that my friend sent to me after multiple attempts that my friend sent to me, only because I spoke it to her. You don't manifest by wishing you manifest by acting it out, speaking it out. Manifestation is your dream put into motion.

If you want help with, with all of this, the numbers, the calendar, marketing, the experience, making all of this become real instead of just a manifestation, I'd love to walk you through that and more inside get rooted. This is where we work through all of those details and a whole lot more. You can learn about that lauraesmond.com/getrooted.

It is December and I am taking applications, and we are going to get started in January next week. We will wrap this series up with action, how to take everything we've uncovered and turn it into clear steps you can actually follow. So I will see you with that next week.

I do also have a little surprise for you. I've been kind of tacking onto this series, some learning as well. So you know, we're planning, but there's always something that we can learn.

So I have a bonus episode going up tomorrow that about marketing. It's actually called, uh, I think it's called, creating a Spectacle in Your Marketing. And I really can't wait to dive into this with you. So join me tomorrow. I will send out an email so you don't miss it.

And other than that, thanks for joining me today and I hope that you're planning for the next year. It goes beautifully and you can really sink yourself into it.