22. 4x Your Bookings with this 2 Step Method

Have you ever heard me talk about the booking slump that I hit in 2019, where I didn't book a wedding for, like, I think 4 months? I thought it was 6 months, but I think my brain just exaggerated that fact. In reality, I did not book a wedding for 4 full months and this is after 10 years in business. This is after having our best year ever in 2018. So I want to get into what happened and then how I fixed it.


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Have you ever heard me talk about the booking slump that I hit in 2019, where I didn't book a wedding for, like, I think 4 months? I thought it was 6 months, but I think my brain just exaggerated that fact. In reality, I did not book a wedding for 4 full months and this is after 10 years in business. This is after having our best year ever in 2018. So I want to get into what happened and then how I fixed it.

Let's face it, most of us would rather be creating art than running a successful business, but we can 100% do both. My name is Erica Ewing. I'm a wedding photographer in sales and marketing expert for creative entrepreneurs. I'm here to help you define the life of your dreams and create a business that supports just that. Welcome to the Successful Creatives podcast.

Okay. You know those years where everything just works out really beautifully and business is amazing. Revenues are up, profits are up, clients are happy, personal life is going really well, like friends and family. It's all just love and blessings and adventures. That was 2018. 2018 was amazing, at that point it had been our best year, by a pretty big amount. We had had a pretty big jump in clients and revenue and all of the things, it felt like we really hit our groove.

2018 was easy and amazing and beautiful. It was also a lot of work. I did a lot of work in 2018, so when we got to the end of the year, I was ready for a break. I felt like I had deserved the break. So I actually took the entire month of January off. Then when I got back to business, this was like January 2019, which, honestly, when I'm saying these years, it sounds so long ago, but because of the pandemic. I feel like we lost a couple of years in between. So maybe think of it as, I don't know, 2020. So January 2019, I took the whole month off, I just relaxed, I don't even remember what I did now because it actually was a while ago, but I just chilled out and enjoyed the fruits of my labor. Then when I finally had to start showing up again for my business, I realized that I was showing up a little too late. 

So I launched a new website in early 2019, I did it on my own. I just thought, I can do this, I can launch my own website. It was like a WordPress built website with an Elementor, I don't even know what they call skin, maybe, I don't even know the terminology. There's no reason I should have been launching my own website. So I launched my own website, it looked beautiful. All of my links, my blog, everything broke. And a big part of how I grew my business, and a lot of my inquiries for the first half of my business came from Google. So I basically cut off my primary inquiry stream, and I didn't even notice because I was just in my own little happy bubble, la la land, traveling, living my best life. Not even noticing that wedding inquiries really had come to a halt. So there are seasons in every year where wedding inquiries get slower. Summertime inquiries tend to be slower because everybody's on vacation. Before the holidays, wedding inquiries tend to get slower because everybody's getting ready for the holidays. Everybody's got their own things going on. So it's normal to see dips. I just wasn't even paying attention to my business. I felt like I had done the thing, and now my business was just going to run itself. I'm all about efficiency and systems and creating consistency, but it also takes consistent action. Right. 

So by the time I realized that my inquiries, something was up with them. It was kind of too late. At this point, we had also had our tax appointment with our CPA, and he handed us a massive tax bill that we were not prepared for because 2018 had been such a beautiful year. That was seriously like a huge slap in the face that year. So now I'm in this position where I fix the inquiry issue. Inquiries were turned back on. They were starting to come back in, but I was sitting in a place of lack, right? Like I was feeling kind of desperate, like, what am I going to do? I just broke my business and now we have this huge bill which we were able to pay, thank God. But it was definitely draining for us. So now I was in this position of I need to fix this, right? Like it's a little bit of panic. If you've ever felt that way about feeling desperate for bookings or feeling like you need to fill your dates, you need more clients. You're looking at your calendar for next year and you're feeling stressed out about it. You know it's not a good position to be in, right? It’s really, really hard to book weddings and to attract the clients you want when you were coming at your business from a place of desperation, right? Like when you're coming from a place of need and lack. The most beautiful bookings will come in when you're serving from a place of abundance, when you’re detached from the outcome, right? When you are showing up to just help this person realize if you're the right fit for them or not. Not feeling like, oh my God, I need this booking or else or else something bad is going to happen, right? That is not a good place to approach business, so take into account the dip in the bookings to start with and then that desperation mindset. And oh boy, I was really trying to just push this giant boulder up a hill. It was tough. And then and then it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, right? Where I was having consultations and literally nobody was booking. I couldn't understand why. I had been in business for 10 years already, and I had never had an issue like this. Like, yes, you know, like like right now I book almost every single one of my wedding consultations because of the magnetic marketing and like sales systems that I have in place. So right now it is very easy because I have systems. Back then I did not have a sales system. So it was like, you know, 50/50 that people would book with me when I would chat with them. This was 0%. This was nobody was booking with me. 

Then I started to lower my prices after 10 years in business. I mean, not huge cuts, but I was definitely moving in the wrong direction and still no one was booking. And so I decided, I need to figure this out. I need to take a step back and figure out what the fuck is going on, because this is ridiculous and I'm going to run ourselves out of business. The year after our best year ever. I just I need to figure this out. So I basically summer of 2019, I essentially dissembled my entire wedding photography business. I built it back from the ground up. So what I did and I'm going to give you some like tips so that you can do this if you're in any sort of similar place or you just want to raise your booking rate, or you want to raise your prices or, you're ready to elevate your clients. All of that is possible with what I'm going to teach you. So what I did ended up having a massive result. I went from not booking a single wedding for four straight months for feeling that desperate, horrible, disgusting feeling for having so much shame, for just messing up my business and feeling like, just desperate. I went from that horrible place to booking 100% of my consults.

So I booked 5 weddings in four weeks. I'll tell you what, if you ever want to get your confidence back, book 5 weddings in four weeks and that'll do it for you. So I did that. I booked 5 weddings in 4 weeks and then I literally doubled my prices. I did it overnight. I just basically said, like, you know what? I am way under selling myself. I am way undervaluing myself. And, I want to hold myself to a higher standard. I want to hold my clients to a higher standard and go bigger. And so I did. The crazy thing is, I didn't lose a single booking. I was still booking at 100% on my consults. I didn't scare away any clients. I remember in the past. Like considering increasing my prices and feeling so hesitant or feeling so nervous about setting my price list and then refreshing my email. Like, did they get back to me? Did they get back to me? Because I was always so like price scared. I was scared I was going to lose bookings. It's that like place of lack again, right? But the change that I implemented really shifted me out of a place of lack, out of a place of desperation, into a place of abundance, into a place of like electricity, of magnetism. Everything became really easy in my business. So what did I do? You're probably wondering. Right.

Well, that year, I said I broke down my entire business. I looked at what I was doing, and I created a very intentional sales process for my ideal clients to go through. My background is in marketing. I worked for an advertising agency for alongside for a long time. I ran lead generation for a tech startup before I left the corporate world to pursue my studio, my photography business in the studio. So I have the know how, on how to message myself to attract my ideal clients. Right. I was already doing that. That's really 1 of the things that was contributing to the high quality inquiries that I was bringing into my business, once I fixed my broken website. So that piece was already working, but I was losing them from the point where they were dropping an inquiry to the point where they were like booking with me and saying, yes. In 2019, I started getting ghosted like crazy. I really, truly believe that there was a shift in the market at that point. I think everybody is just saturated with information. There are so many options. All of the options are readily available because of Instagram and Facebook and ads and Google.

There's just so many places to look now, right where it wasn't always that way. Or maybe it's been that way for a long time, but it hasn't felt as saturated as it feels now. And so I was looking at what my process would feel like for my ideal client. I created and implemented 2 specific pieces into my business. So the 1st piece that I implemented is called The Runway. What this is, is a series of connection points, basically emails that I send to my ideal clients that really hold their hand. So it's like the bridge between my website, which they saw and they loved enough, or they were interested enough to drop an inquiry, fill out the form, hit submit, and get more information. Right. So there's already a certain level of interest there. The runway is basically going to holds those clients hands and then leads them through to booking the consultation. The # 1 goal of the runway is to book the consultation. It does this in a way that adds value to my clients. I really thought about how can I like meet them where they are on this journey. Like they're excited. They're overwhelmed. They're kind of nervous about finding their perfect photographer. How can I hold their hand through a series of emails and make them even more excited to talk with me, right? So I created this runway and I implemented that.

That was the 1st piece. I knew that was working because the ghosting really stopped. I started to get notes from people like, I loved your email, just scheduled a time to chat. That's awesome, because these are canned emails. They are written in a way that's very personal, but everybody gets the same email. So that's a system that makes my life easier. That actually saves me time. I am in my inbox less. Also, 1 thing, just side note, I would really love to suggest that you use a scheduling app if you don't have 1 built into your CMS, or you're not using a CMS just yet. I highly recommend Calendly, and there's a free option for you to be able to do this to. That's going to save you a ton of back and forth with your potential clients, and it also gives them a better experience too, right? As much as you don't like emailing back and forth, they don't like it either. Okay. So side side note plug for Calendly they don't pay me, but I just really love their service. We've used them for many, many years and it saved so much admin time. 

So the runway is that 1st piece. The runway really has to address a couple of things in order to be effective. So it has to reaffirm that they're your ideal client and that you’re the ideal person for them. It has to reaffirm that. It also should leverage a couple of really powerful marketing principles that I think so many wedding creatives are just overlooking. That is the principle of scarcity. That is the principle of exclusivity in the principle of urgency. Just to give you a little bit of insight into what each of these are, and they sound obviously pretty straightforward. But, scarcity is just understanding that you as an event based provider, service provider, your time is limited, right? If you're a wedding photographer or a videographer like we are, you can only take 1 event a day. And if you are a seasoned wedding photographer or videographer like we are, that might actually be one wedding a weekend, right? At this point, we're in our 40s. We don't have the the stamina or the desire to shoot multiple weddings in a row. We just don't. So that means that we have basically 52 dates that we could fill if we wanted. Now we also really take a lot of pride in our work/life balance, and we’re very involved parents when it comes with our to our boys. We want to be there for all their baseball games and so many just share special moments with them while they're still living in our home.

Our oldest is 14 now, he’s going to be 15 in May. It blows my mind. I feel like I only have 3 years left with them, but Ben keeps reminding me that they always come back, like they go to college and then they come back, right? So it's really important for us to not work every weekend. So in addition to only taking 1 wedding a weekend, because that's what is good for our bodies in our inspiration and all those things. We also want to be home for our boys, which is why last year we set our account at 10 weddings. Typically we were doing like 15 - 20. So that is a very limited # of weddings that you're available, even if you're taking more, even if you're taking 30 or if you've got a different specialty where you could serve more clients, you might be taking like 50, right? Whatever your capacity, it is capped at a certain #. So your dates are scarce. Does this make sense? Like your dates are very limited, so use this to your advantage. 

Okay, this is a marketing principle that people make up all over the place. In your case, it’s very real and you owe it to your prospective clients to let them know. So that should definitely be in your runway. The other thing you want to do is also urgency to incorporate urgency. This is already intrinsically built into the wedding industry because your clients know that they are planning a wedding that's on a certain date. That's a deadline they need. They know that they've got like rough timelines of when they need to get their vendors booked for things. So there's really already urgency kind of built in, which gives you an like an up level over other industries that don't have a built in deadline. So know that the urgency is something that you can also, like speak to and play upon and then exclusivity. If you are like us, we really cater to a certain type of couple at a certain type of venue. So this is something that we’re really, really clear on and we start to become an exclusive provider for those people. Okay. So those are the 3 principles to incorporate into your overall sales process. Definitely your runway. It's the principle of scarcity urgency and exclusivity.

Now the 2nd piece is your consultation, and it's all about creating a consultation that goes beyond what most people are doing. It's what I was doing before I had this massive shift in my bookings. So before what I was doing is, I would like get an inquiry. I would send an email with the price list. You know, I had a few extra pages on it to help sell my value. Then I would ask if they wanted to chat, if they did want to chat, we would go back and forth over email to schedule and find the right time. Then we would meet over zoom and just get to know each other, just decide if we liked each other. This worked for me for a long time, to be honest with you, I think it worked because my prices were lower for a long time. But I was ready to up level the weddings in the clients that I was serving. I wanted to step into that, like that higher echelon where I'm not serving out of this world, luxury weddings that are like half $1 million weddings. No, but I want to serve clients with a certain aesthetic, with a certain level of like detail, with a certain level of investment in their venue, with a certain level of uniqueness and style. Like all of that is all very interesting to me. I wanted to provide a higher level of service to them as well. So the higher your price point, the less easy it will be to just book people over a a conversation.

1 of the members of my Super Attractor Academy, when she came in, she wasn't even actually doing consultations. People were just booking her over email.The truth is, it's because her prices were so low that she didn't actually like the people she was booking. Kind of just were looking for bare minimum, you know? That's not what I was looking to do with my business. That's not the clients that I was looking to serve. And a big shift came for me, or maybe realization. I'll call it a realization came to me when I had this beautiful get to know you conversation with a bride. We had a great chat and I was like, perfect fit here. She's definitely going to book. Felt so right. At the end of the call, she said 1 sentence to me. She said, I don't know how I'll ever choose. You are all so nice. And she was talking about me and whichever other wedding photographers in my area she had spoken to. I don't know how I will ever, ever choose. You're all so nice. That 1 conversation in the fact that she did not choose me made me just… It was a huge wake up call. I need to show up in a way that shows my value. I can't just show up as nice because we're in the wedding industry, we're in the industry of love, and everybody is so freaking nice.

It's the best industry to be in ever. So I had to do more than just have get to know you conversations. This was the biggest shift for me when it comes to my consultation process. So now I have a very thoughtful process that again, sort of picks people up, like takes my client, you know, again, that prospective client journey where I brought them from my website to the consultation with my runway. Now I'm going to take them from the consultation to the booking with a really value oriented, like sales system. I'm going to show them visually. So it's still over zoom, but now I have visual representation of our value. I dialed in to our messaging. I really elevated the way that I show what I provide to my clients. In a way that's irresistible. 

I actually had 1 client, I saved the sound bite from it, because he started the 1st half of the presentation saying something along the lines of, it's like you've been writing this as we've been talking, but I see that it wasn't updated recently, so that can't be the case. Because it's so dialed in to what my ideal clients want, it sees them right where they are, and it says, yes, I am your person. Here's why and here's how I serve you. It’s everything that you've been dreaming of and it's what I was already doing for my clients. I just wasn't sharing the value in a way that was so irresistible to them. So by the end of that same consultation, he said to me, all right, where do we sign? Okay, it was an amazing feeling. And it has been the experience that I've had over and over and over. It is highly repeatable. I show up to every single consultation and I say the exact same thing. Now I could do it in my sleep, I know my process. I know my my value. I know what resonates with my ideal clients and they are really easily seeing am I the right fit for them or not? Right? And if they've gotten to the consultation, they've already gone through my website, which has my dialed in Marketing Magnetic messaging on there. They've already gone through my runway, which has continued to add value and connect with them. If they're getting to the consultation, there's a really good chance that they've already decided that they're going to book. The consultation is just the nail in the coffin that says, let's put this baby to bed, we are the right fit. I am so excited to work with you. 

So for the sales piece, lean into a system, lean into something that is literally rinse and repeat. That really dials into your client's wants and needs, dials into how you serve them, how you're different from everyone else in. This is how you never have someone asking how they're going to choose, because we're all so nice. Your value is undeniable. You become irresistible to your dream clients and your bookings increase to nearly 100%. This is exactly what I did in my own business. It's how I went from charging or struggling to book, not booking a single wedding for 4 straight months. At that time for my base package was 4600, to implementing this system in immediately, booking 5 weddings in 4 weeks, and being able to raise my prices overnight from 4600 to 6500. All because I was showing my value differently, all because I was showing up for my potential clients differently. I was serving, I'm serving them. I'm giving them value throughout the whole process. I'm showing them really what they get by working with me. Don't make your prospective clients guess. Tell them. I feel like so often we feel like it's obvious on our website what they get right, and so they already know they're interested in us. So then the consultation is just to get to know each other, see if we really like each other. But that's not the case.

They are looking at your website, and they're also probably inquiring with a whole bunch of other people too. And so you really have to stand out and you have to remind them and hold their hand and really walk them through the experience that they're going to get working with you. What makes you different, what makes you special, and how they're going to feel, it's almost like creating a mini experience of of what it's like to work with you before they even sign on the dotted line or send in that retainer check. Right. If you're struggling at all with bookings. Take a look at your process. Create a runway. Create a sales like a consultation process for yourself.