Podcast Ep 320 - How to Price Your Photography: Lessons from my 16 Year Old Son

Make sure you check out Pricing 101, our free course designed to help you get up and running as quickly as possible! Click here to learn more. Use this link for the "click here"
https://flourishacademy.mykajabi.com/offers/sLNfKrrP

In this episode of the Flourish Academy podcast, host Heather Lahtinen discusses the common challenge of setting prices for photography services when you're just starting out. With 20 years of experience helping photographers, Heather shares her simple and effective approach to pricing: just make it up!

Through an engaging story about her son’s entrepreneurial journey, she illustrates the importance of experimentation, confidence, and avoiding overthinking. Tune in to discover practical tips and gain the confidence to set your photography prices without stress.


Show Notes:

• The common question: How do I price my photography?
• The simple approach: Making up prices and adjusting as you go
• Story about Heather’s son, Evan, and his power-washing business
• Lessons from Evan’s pricing strategy: Confidence and experimentation
• Avoiding overthinking and embracing the process
• Encouragement to experiment and have fun with pricing

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TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to the Flourish Academy podcast and today we are talking about how to price your photography services when you are just starting out. My name is Heather Lahtinen and I'm a photographer, educator and entrepreneur and I founded the Flourish Academy as a resource for photographers of all levels. We want to help you pursue your passion on your own terms because we believe there is room for everyone.

In this podcast, we focus on creating breakthroughs with your mindset to discover the things that are really holding you back in business and life. I have been helping photographers start their businesses,

market, set their prices, et cetera for 20 years. And one of the questions I get most often is how do I price my photography?

What do I charge? What's the structure? And I think that comes from a place of believing that there's a right or wrong way to do it and my approach to pricing has always been very simple.

Essentially, you make it up. At least in the beginning, there's definitely formulas for cost of goods sold. Of course, when you start selling products,

you want to make sure that You're profitable. I guess that's the name of the game. As long as you're profitable, I actually don't care how you structure it. Before I get into this story,

I want to share, I do have a free course on my website. It's called pricing 101. And I'll put that link in the show notes, but essentially it's setting your prices. There are three videos setting your prices,

photography pricing mistakes, and then a bonus. When will you be good enough spoiler alert? You will never think you're good enough, but good thing it's not up to you. But the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because something really interesting happened a few days ago.

My son, Evan, is 16 years old and him and his best friend decided they want to start a power washing business, mostly because I don't think they want to work for the man or have set hours and they are very hardworking,

industrious young men and I'm so proud of them. Of course, Evan knows that I have my own business and I've grown two businesses to six figures. He knows this because, you know,

I talk about it all of the time. So he started talking to me about pricing and he was looking at our house because he was going to give me a quote for power washing our patio and our siding.

And he just like pulls a number out of the sky. He just completely made up a number. He didn't calculate anything. He didn't think about how much time it was going to take.

He just made it up and that was the end of the story. That's how he set his pricing. He literally did not care about anything. Now let me tell you what I did not say.

I wouldn't say I was tempted to say this, but I thought about it. You could look at a house, estimate how long it's going to take you. You could have an hourly rate and then multiply that.

Obviously, there are some material costs and Hitman is friend split the profits. So I could have given him that formula, but I didn't because my thought was I want him to figure this out on his own and my only job is to encourage him.

I am so excited that he decided to go down this path and just experiment, which is all anything ever is when you start a business, you are just experimenting. So he makes up this number and then he's like,

yeah, could you share my Facebook page that I created five seconds ago to your friends? Cause Josh and I want to have a job by Sunday and I'm pretty sure this was Friday when he said this. I said, Evan,

I mean, yes, I'm happy to do that, but I don't know if you're going to have a job by Sunday. Well, Actually, I hired him so I guess his first job is in fact me and that's perfect because they need to practice and figure out what works and what doesn't.

But let me point out a few things that we do as photographers that Evan did not do. He did not for one second overthink this.

He was just like, "Yeah, we want to make money and I don't care and here's a number and if they pay it so what and if not, we'll just find the next person." I mean, I'm talking, he put his pricing together.

of the reasons and excuses why they have to overthink when the reality is they could just make it up, test it out, get some data and feedback and then adjust. Which is Evan's plan,

I think, loosely to be honest, I don't think he's thought it through that far. And then he says to me yesterday, he's like, mom, this house, there's just a lot of surface area. I mean, it's going to be a minimum of $1 ,000 and I hope you're ready to pay that.

And I said, Evan, you should probably give me a quote, we should talk about it. What's expected. He is just diving in and I love that about him.

I think that many of us should operate our businesses, maybe even our lives, I don't know, with the hubris of a 16 year old boy. And I was talking about this inside of our elevate group and everybody was like,

you should bring Evan in as a guest speaker, and I was joking. I told him about that. And he's like, yeah, you know what I would tell them? I'd be like, just pick a number and just, who cares? Evan doesn't believe that there's a right or wrong way to set a fee for his services.

He's just gonna experiment and figure it out. I had a friend in Elevate say, you know, I think that in my mind, I want to be fair to the customer and myself. So I overthink pricing,

pricing of products, pricing of services to be sure that I'm getting paid for my job, but I feel trusted by my clients and that they're not taking, they're not being taken advantage of.

These were her thoughts. And you know, like on the surface, I think that those are decent thoughts. There's nothing wrong with thinking you want to be fair to your client because you want them to trust you,

but it becomes a problem when it holds you back from moving forward or you're just overthinking it. Evan doesn't think that he is taking advantage of everyone like that thought didn't even cross his mind.

Therefore, he didn't have to think about, Oh, I don't want them to feel like they're being taken advantage of because it just like it's not in his brain. He's not Considering fairness or the client trusting him.

He's just, Hey, we're doing a job and we're going to get paid for it. Period. This is very black and white and straightforward. Now to be honest, there's probably somewhere in between that makes the most sense,

right? Someone who overthinks and cares tremendously about what people are thinking or feeling and then Evan, who doesn't care at all. Yeah. Okay. There's probably somewhere in the middle, But the point is everyone listening to my voice is for sure overthinking it.

When I started my business in 2003, I didn't have resources sort of to get these formulas or run this by or figured out.

So I had to make up numbers. There was simply no other choice. And I never had an issue with it. I made up some numbers. They were Probably they were for sure too low at the beginning.

I did the work. I started photographing weddings. I realized, oh my gosh, this takes way more time than I thought. I raised the prices and I just kept experimenting to see what was the best fit for myself and for my ideal client.

If you are not taking advantage of anyone, they will not feel like you are taking advantage of them. So why even bother using your brain space to think about it.

You're just zapping your creativity by overthinking everything. I always say, what are you going to do with all of this free time that you have when you stop overthinking? And you want your clients to feel good about their purchase and you want them to appreciate the value and maybe even feel like they're getting a good deal.

But that's not up to you. it's up to the client, whether they hire you and how they feel about it. So you just have to come from a place of integrity and feeling good about what you're offering.

And then your only job is just to allow people to hire you and pay you. And you don't have to overthink that either. Did you know that's an option here, like to drop the overthinking? And then photographers will say,

well, I don't want them. I'm worried they're going to think that I'm overcharging charging that I'm being overpaid. And I think like, okay, according to whom, what does that even mean to be overpaid?

And furthermore, what if it's okay to be overpaid for something? What if it's okay to be grossly overpaid for something? I bet you never overthought that one.

I mean, why are there $20 ,000 cars and $250 ,000 cars? They're both cars, they get you from A to B, so the consumer decides which car they want to purchase,

which means you could charge whatever you want, whether you want to be underpaid or overpaid, because the client decides whether the value is there and whether or not they want to hire you.

Here's the point, listen, make up a number and tap into my son Evan's confidence and just see what happens. It turns out there are no photography pricing police out there.

And if you're worried what other people are going to think, okay, so what? Just look at everything as a super fun experiment and don't take it so seriously. I don't think you got into photography to feel stressed out.

Did you? Just go out there, make up a number and have fun and make sure you check out the free pricing 101 class again. That link is in the show notes. I hope that you found this useful. I'll see you in the next episode.