What She Actually Means When She Says She Just Wants the Digitals
I've been thinking about doing a pricing philosophy episode for a while now, not really sharing a formula or a step by step like I do in Get Rooted since that's proprietary and wouldn't really be fair to the women in the group. Just the actual beliefs underneath the way I work and the way I teach. So today, that is what we are doing. What I believe about pricing, why I believe it, and how I actually set prices in a way that has worked really quite beautifully at every different stage of my business. I have pivoted so many times, but every time this philosophy has worked.
Laura Esmond:Welcome back. You are with Laura Esmond. Really glad you are here for this one because I've been wanting to have this conversation for a while. There are a lot of ways to approach pricing in this industry, a lot of ways that you can be successful, and I have a lot of respect for the educators out there teaching their version of it. Today, I just wanna share mine, the philosophy that is underneath everything I do and everything I teach inside Get Rooted, not because it is the only way.
Laura Esmond:Anybody who's ever worked with me knows that I believe that there are a lot of different ways to experience depth in this business. I don't believe in a one size fits all, but I want to share this because I think it might resonate with some of you who have been looking for an approach that feels like you, like something that you can really wrap around and and just get on board with. So let's get into it. The first thing I want you to know about how I work is this. I do not hold digital files hostage.
Laura Esmond:That is just not my approach and it is not what I teach. My philosophy is client led. What that means in practice is that before I ever make a suggestion about what a client should buy, I am listening, really listening. What her home looks like, what her life looks like right now, what she is actually hoping to walk away with from this whole experience even if she has not fully articulated it yet. Most clients come in saying they want digitals, and sometimes they genuinely do, and digitals are exactly the right thing for them, which is why I don't hold them hostage.
Laura Esmond:But a lot of the time, I just want the digitals is not really a decision. It is a delay. Think about what it takes for a family to actually show up to a session. She got everyone on board, which is its own type of miracle. If you're a mom, you know that.
Laura Esmond:She got them styled. Even if it was with your help, she still got them dressed in the morning, which probably involved at least one argument about whether her husband could wear that shirt. She got them fed at the right time so nobody was melting down. She got them there. She got through it alive and happy and feeling good about herself.
Laura Esmond:That is the finish line she had in her head. The question of what to do with the images afterward, she just hasn't gotten there yet. It is just it's too abstract. She does not have a frame of reference for what is even possible. Nobody has walked her through it.
Laura Esmond:So when someone asks, what do you plan to do with your images, which is a completely reasonable question, but kind of hard to answer without context or a guide like you, the default answer is all to save the digitals. It's the safe answer, the noncommittal answer. The answer that does not require her to make a decision, she does not feel equipped to make yet. She's like, please just let me get through the rest of this. She is not saying no to artwork.
Laura Esmond:She is saying, I have not thought that far yet, and those are completely different things. So unless you got some suggestions here, I'm just gonna go with the digitals. So that means my job is not to redirect her away from the digitals. My job is to be a guide and provide the context she didn't have when she booked. I need to ask better questions to show her what is possible in a way that is specific to her home and her life.
Laura Esmond:Give her something to actually respond to rather than an abstract question she has no framework for answering. When I do that, when I actually show up as the guide, the conversation changes entirely. She is no longer defaulting to the safe answer because she is no longer in the dark. She's visualizing now. And from there, I can make a real suggestion based on what I actually hear back from her.
Laura Esmond:I mean, I have worked with interior designers who wanted the digital files so they could print them oversized through their own vendor. They've got their own contact. They wanna frame them in the exact right way for the room they're designing. Perfect. That is exactly what I gave them, and it was the right call.
Laura Esmond:I have worked with artists who had very specific ideas about how they wanted their to display their images, and they had the tools and the skill to get it done. I have also worked with incredibly talented DIY moms who really know quality. They know their home, and they came with an idea, and they can create something really beautiful, and they really do just wanna buy the digital files, and that's it. So I have to price that accordingly. I can't have that be the the smallest thing on my menu, but I'm okay to give those up to them because they are fully equipped to use those digitals.
Laura Esmond:I've also worked with clients who simply could not afford artwork through me right now, and I would never, not ever make a client feel ashamed of where she is. I honor her budget and her needs with zero judgment. I do not treat her differently and I definitely do not try to convince her otherwise. I give her exactly what she came for and I send her on her way feeling great about the entire experience that she had with me because this is a relationship business. This business is built one session at a time, and I've learned in a very specific and personal way that I will tell you about in a minute that her financial situation today is not her financial situation forever.
Laura Esmond:So I do not teach anyone to make people feel guilty or shame them into buying artwork. I teach you how to lead and guide. Your clients will not feel pressured. They will feel seen and cared for. That's what it means to feel seen when you're listening and you're responding to their real needs.
Laura Esmond:That distinction matters to me more than almost anything else in how I work and how I teach. There is a real difference between guiding someone and pressuring someone, and it lives almost entirely in whether you are actually listening before you speak. And the reason I'm going on and on about this is because I get that question often when people are interested in the art of selling course or they're interested in Get Rooted and I hop on a call with them. Their question is, I don't really wanna pressure people into buying. I don't want them to feel weird about me.
Laura Esmond:And I emphasize with them, as I'm emphasizing here, this is a no pressure sales environment. It is 100% client led. When you are genuinely present with what she needs, when your suggestions come from that place rather than from a script you are running in your head, the whole conversation has a different energy. You're her friend in the room. She feels it, and you feel it too.
Laura Esmond:There is no gross aftertaste. You don't go home wondering if you pushed too hard because you didn't. You go home knowing you did right by her and charged appropriately for the work, and she goes home trusting you. I wanna tell you about a client I have had the privilege of knowing for years now, and I wanna tell you this story because it is the one that crystallized everything I just talked about. Not a concept.
Laura Esmond:This is an actual person and an actual outcome. She first came to me when I had my big retail studio that had a very well oiled sales system behind it. I had people that were working this whole thing, and she had just had her first baby, a little boy, and she booked a newborn session. Session was great, and we made some really beautiful images together. And then we did her ordering meeting, and she bought the smallest digital package I offered.
Laura Esmond:That was it. And I did not make her feel bad about it. I did not add a pointed comment about how much she was going to wish she had ordered print. I did not give her speech about archival quality or the importance of print in the home. I was genuinely happy she was there.
Laura Esmond:We had a lovely experience together, and I sent her on her way. I wanna pause on that for a second because I think it matters. There was nothing in that interaction that should have left her feeling like she had made the wrong choice. She bought what she could afford. She left feeling great, and she loved the images that she walked home with, a small curated set of images.
Laura Esmond:And I moved on without a story in my head about whether she was the right kind of client or not. Okay? She was still my client in my mind. If I have something on my pricing menu, I am perfectly okay with somebody walking out with just that. So three years pass, and she came she comes back.
Laura Esmond:New baby, little girl this time. She wanted family photos, all of them together. The little boy was now about three years old. And from the very first message she sent me, I could feel that something was different. She was excited in a way that went beyond just wanting pretty photos.
Laura Esmond:She seemed ready to go a little bit further. But just as I had done the first time, we sat down for an ordering meeting in her home though this time. She bought all the digitals from the new session and ordered an album. And then this is the part that still gets me and makes me so happy. She asked if we could go if we could go back and design an album from her son's newborn session too, the one that one from three years ago.
Laura Esmond:She wanted both. She wanted to go back and do it right for her son now that she could. I still had everything stored in Pixie set. Thank goodness. I was so relieved and so glad I did.
Laura Esmond:So in that same meeting, I pulled those images. We sat down together, and we designed both albums at once. Her daughter's newborn session and her son's newborn session and complimentary albums side by side. And while we were working through them, choosing the images, talking about layouts, and just being in it together, she said something I have never forgotten. It went something like this.
Laura Esmond:With my son, we were just getting established and in survival mode financially. We didn't have the discretionary income, but now we are in a different position. And I'm so excited to have these in our home. Survival mode. That is what she said.
Laura Esmond:And she said it so matter of factly without embarrassment, without any trace of apology because she had just never been made to feel embarrassed about it. Three years earlier, I had just let her be exactly where she was and that created the space for her to come back and say that out loud without any fear of me judging her. We are in a relationship business. Her financial situation changed and because I had honored where she was without judgment, because I had not built my pricing in a way that made her first experience feel small or insufficient, she came back. And she came back completely ready and so excited to invest.
Laura Esmond:That is what it means to be in the long game. That is what client led actually looks like when you zoom out far enough and to see the whole arc of it. I think about her every time I work with a client who buys the smallest thing I offer. I don't know her story yet. I do not know where she is financially or what season of life she is in or what she is going to be ready for in three years.
Laura Esmond:My job is to make sure this experience, the one today, is so good that she wants to come back. And that starts with never making her feel judged for where she is today. Okay. I wanna shift from the philosophy to the practical now because I think these two things belong in the same conversation, and a lot of people treat them like they are separate, but they are not. How you think about your client and how you set your prices are completely connected.
Laura Esmond:So let me share how I actually think about pricing structure. There are three things that I believe very strongly. The first, you've probably heard. If you haven't, please reach out to me. The first is that your cost of business matters, but it is not the whole story.
Laura Esmond:You do need to know your CODB. If you do not know that, please reach out. Your cost of doing business is a really useful exercise, and I do teach it inside Get Rooted. I also have the pricing workshop. You need to know what it actually cost you to run this business.
Laura Esmond:Not a rough estimate, the real number. Your all of your gear, your software, insurance, education that you would like to have or you're dreaming of have, the hours you spend editing and communicating and doing all the things that happen outside of the actual session and all the costs that are associated with you running your business. When you add all of that up and divide it by how many sessions you shoot based on your capacity, you get your floor. Right? You get your minimum.
Laura Esmond:The minimum you need to charge per session to ensure you don't lose money. Any photographer who has never done this math and they finally do it for the first time, it's usually a little startling because that floor is almost always higher than they thought it would be. But and this is important. This is the part that I really want you to hear. A CODB, your cost of doing business, only tells you the floor.
Laura Esmond:It does not tell you what to charge. What you charge above that floor is a completely separate conversation about your market, your positioning, the experience you provide, your body of work, and where you are trying to take this business. Pricing isn't just math. It is strategy. And those are two different skill sets that both matter.
Laura Esmond:The second thing I believe is that there is not one right pricing method. I mentioned that at the beginning, but let me dive into it here for just a second. There are several, and different ones work better at genuinely different stages of business and your life. I have personally used probably three or four different pricing structures over the years, and all three have worked. Not worked in spite of their differences, worked just because of them, because they're just all solid ways to to price your work.
Laura Esmond:Each one served a specific season of my business in a very specific way. The structure that made sense when I was building my client base from scratch was not the structure that made sense once I had a pretty full calendar and a client list in front of me and a strong referral network, and that structure was not the same one that I use now. Using the wrong pricing structure for your stage of business could be one of the most common reasons photographers feel like their pricing is just not working, and it usually is not the prices themselves that are the problem, it's the structure. And the third thing, the one I feel most strongly about, especially if photography is your primary source of income, is that your pricing needs to balance two things simultaneously. The ability to draw people in and room for them to grow with you.
Laura Esmond:Here's what I mean. Some people might not agree with this, but we're gonna go with it anyway. If you price yourself at a level that is genuinely, genuinely out of reach for the clients in your market before I'm being very careful with how I say this. Before you have the reputation and the referral base to justify it, you might struggle to fill your calendar and you need to have a very strong marketing machine behind your business to get that moving. And that is just the truth.
Laura Esmond:There is a version of charge your worth advice that does not account for where you actually are in building a business, and it can lead people to price themselves into a very quiet calendar while they wait for clients who are not coming yet. Now there are ways to work around this. I go into that in Get Rooted. Sorry to say so much about Get Rooted, but it is true. We really dive into that there.
Laura Esmond:It's proprietary. There are things that you can do to hold both types of clients while you're growing the one with the higher price point. The opposite problem is just as real. If your pricing is so flat, if there is no natural path for a client to invest more deeply as her life changes, as her trust in you deepens, as her discretionary income grows, then you are capping your own growth. You are building a business with no upgrade path, and that is exhausting because you are always starting from zero with every client.
Laura Esmond:The client I told you about, the one who came back after three years, she was a draw in client the first time. That smaller purchase was a safe purchase for her, an entry point that matched my cost of doing business. I did not devalue my work by having that smaller price point. I didn't earn a lot on that first session financially. I also didn't lose money, but I gained trust in a client who came back.
Laura Esmond:And every business person knows return clients are the best kind. So she was originally a drawn client, and three years later, she was something else entirely. Two albums, a much larger investment, a relationship that had been building kinda quietly the whole time. I didn't hear from her for three years, but when she was ready, she came back. That arc only exists if your pricing structure has room for it.
Laura Esmond:If the first experience is good enough that she wants to come back, and when she does, there is somewhere meaningful for her to go. She has the ability to spend more money with you, and you have the right pricing structure for her to get to do that. And over time, as you build your body of work, accolades, reputation, the kind of referrals that come from clients who genuinely love what you do, your floor can and should move up. That's where you go from a beginner phase of a business, maybe the first couple of years, and then you pop that up because you've been doing all the work to establish that business, but also to have the marketing engine behind it, to have the client list behind it, to have a referral list of people coming to you. That's when you can start to demand higher prices, and you should.
Laura Esmond:What I see more often is that people stay stuck in that beginner phase and they never move past it. They never add in a way for people to be able to invest more in their session with you. So you stay at that floor or maybe just slightly above it. Let me land this before I tell you something I think could genuinely change the trajectory of your business. Client led.
Laura Esmond:That is the whole philosophy. Listen before you suggest. Honor where she is without judgment. Be the guide she didn't even know she needed. Talk a lot less.
Laura Esmond:Listen a whole lot more. Price in a way that is honest about your costs, but also strategic about your positioning and built for the stage of business you are actually in right now, and build a structure that has room for her to grow with you because she will. Her life, her position in terms of finances is going to grow. It's going to change. And when you create a business where your clients want to come back to you, they will come back to you with the ability to invest more, and I want you to be ready for it.
Laura Esmond:If this philosophy resonates and you have been looking for an approach that feels like you, I want you to think for a second about what it is actually costing you to not have a system like this in place yet, not in some abstract someday sense like right now, this season, and especially before it gets too busy to really make a difference. Every session you shoot without a presale system is a session where you did the hardest part. Listen to this. This is actually really important. You've done the hardest part, the creative work, the relationship, the showing up, not to mention all that turn editing, and then left real money on the table with no ability for your clients to actually invest in artwork because nobody guided them there.
Laura Esmond:You didn't have the price list for it. They walked in without context. They walked out with digitals, and they probably would have loved an album to hold if anybody had ever showed them what that could look like for them in their specific home and their specific family. That is not a small thing. If your average session could triple with a simple offer like that, that gap multiplied across every session you shoot this year, that is the difference between a business that exhausts you and one that actually gives you your life back.
Laura Esmond:And then there is the thing that I think hurts more than money, honestly, the burnout because the volume model, which mind you, a volume model, all that means you might think, I'm not volume. I don't even shoot that much. Shooting more sessions or the need to shoot more sessions to make more money and edit more galleries and deliver more files and doing it all again next week, that is a volume model and it has a ceiling. There there it comes a point that there's nowhere else to go, and you can probably feel it. The ceiling is your time and your energy and the fact that there are only so many weekends in a year, And when you hit that ceiling, the only options this model gives you is to push harder or accept that this is as good as it gets.
Laura Esmond:Neither of those is acceptable, and neither of them has to be true. The photographers who have more breathing room, who shoot fewer sessions and earn more on each of those just by providing a deeper service, who show up to each one with energy instead of just feeling exhausted, I am speaking from experience here. Okay? I've lived both sides. They are not working harder than you because they have an extra in person meeting or a Zoom meeting to help people pick images.
Laura Esmond:They're just working inside a different structure, a structure where the revenue per session is high enough that they do not have to fill their calendar to make the math work. That structure is learnable. It's not a personality type. It's not somebody who's just good at sales. It's just a system.
Laura Esmond:Building it is exactly what Get Rooted is designed to do. Get Rooted is my group coaching program for portrait photographers who are ready to shift to a client led legacy sales based system. We work through everything, your pricing, the full presales client experience, the ordering meeting, the marketing that brings in the right clients in the first place. This is a built working system that you have actually put in place by the time the program ends. The program runs in cohorts, which means it's open for enrollment on a set schedule and then closes.
Laura Esmond:When a cohort is full, it's full. And the next one does not open until, I don't know, for quite a while, probably. So we have one opening in April. I do it this way because the group dynamic inside the program is a real part of how it works. The calls, the community, the people who are in the same season of business doing the same scary things at the same time, that only works when we start together.
Laura Esmond:So if you've been sitting with this, if you've been thinking about making a change to your pricing or your client experience or your whole model for longer than one season, let me just say, the next cohort is not that far away, and the cost of waiting another season is real. It is sessions you will shoot without a system, and you're just leaving money on the table. It is weekends you will spend editing instead of being present, and and it is another season of wondering why the business is not working the way you kinda thought it would. You already understand the philosophy. You just spent twenty minutes with it.
Laura Esmond:The program is where you build the actual thing. If you wanna learn more, you can go to lauraesmond.com backslash get rooted. You can apply there. If you have questions, my inbox is genuinely open. You can find me there.
Laura Esmond:Thank you for being here with this one. It is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time, and I'm glad I got to have it with you. I will see you in the next episode.
