Peter: We're with two members of the Next Level photography training program, Kaiel and Stephanie Jackson, and their son is with us too. I'm excited to dig into your story. Introduce yourselves and tell us about your business.

Kaiel: I'm Kaiel. We live in Southern California, and we run [Studio name]. It's a photo and video company. We've been doing this for a couple of years, and we rebranded back in July.

Stephanie: I started doing this full-time back in June. We're excited to talk.

Peter: When you first came across me, what was the real challenge you were looking to solve?

Kaiel: Lead generation in general. We wanted to find something where we weren't so reliant on referrals from specific vendors. If they stopped working, for whatever reason, that would quickly diminish how many couples we'd be in contact with. We also wanted the potential to scale. If we got busy enough to hire an editor for the photos and films, we could dedicate more time to finding couples and shooting weddings. And if we were finding more couples, we could charge more, so we didn't have to shoot as much, and save money to buy a house. It's expensive down here, and we know what we like, so we don't want to settle.

Peter: Stephanie, you've been doing photo for a while, but you had a full-time job until June, right? What were you doing?

Stephanie: Admin work. I'd been doing it since I graduated from college five years ago, office administration and executive assistance. It was a little soul-sucking for me, the same thing day in and day out. It was exhausting, and I had a toddler on top of it. With COVID going on, I came to a crossroads. I was working at a CPA firm at the time, and we were trying to move back to Orange County. We were living in a little city farther away, and I'd been looking for work for about three months with recruiters and had no leads. Then Kaiel said, "Why don't you do photo full-time?" He'd been doing video full-time for about a year and a half. Something just clicked, and I said okay. And here we are.

Peter: What was it that really made you decide to go all in?

Stephanie: Realizing how much of my son's life I was missing. I missed his first steps, and the day-to-day silly interactions we have with him. I saw Kaiel having those with him, and here I was working a job where you literally cannot work remote. As an executive assistant, you have to be with your executive. You can never work from home, and taking time off isn't really a thing. You get maybe two weeks a year. You're a slave to the nine-to-five. So the biggest thing was time and schedule: the flexibility to say no if I don't want to work a certain day, or to travel, find a gig somewhere around the world and make a vacation out of it.

Peter: When you go full-time, there's uncertainty. Kaiel was saying the big challenge was knowing you could consistently get leads coming in and book more consistently.

Stephanie: Yes. And there was a huge fear at the very beginning, because of COVID. I went full-time in June, and a couple of weeks later we launched our new website. It was a super unknown time. We weren't sure whether we'd be working, or whether people would even be allowed to get married. There were so many question marks.

Kaiel: Having a kid, we had priorities, like whether we'd start daycare. But I don't think there was a huge risk, just a whole lot of unknown. For Stephanie, it was going from a full-time position where she knew how much she'd get on every paycheck to something much more unpredictable. So it was more of a mental and emotional adjustment. We were confident that as a photo and video team in Southern California, we wouldn't have trouble finding work, even if we had to lower our prices for a few gigs. I'd been doing video for a while. If I can do video, I knew she could do photo. As a husband and wife doing both, I knew we could be successful. It was just a question of how quickly and how much.

Peter: This is a big thing for a lot of people listening. A lot of people have a part-time photography business, want to go full-time and really struggle to make that transition. So it's inspiring to hear how you did it and what you did to make it work, because you put up some big numbers in October. But first, how did you come across me?

Stephanie: It was through your ads. I saw them maybe three times before I actually read the description, like, "All right, who's this other photographer who brought in $200,000 in her first year with Peter?" Then you had two testimonials on two different ads. Seeing results from more than one person mattered. I didn't want to invest in someone who's just starting out and doesn't have a track record. Seeing your track record, I said, "We should do this."

Peter: We had a call and talked about what you were looking to do. What ultimately made you go for it?

Stephanie: A few things you said in your intro spoke to us, like fighting for scraps in random Facebook groups. Someone posts, "I need photo and video for this day in this place," and 50 or 100 photographers jump on the thread: "I'd love to be considered, here's my portfolio." And the price is really low, like $800, when we charge about four times that, so we wouldn't even comment. People were fighting over a $500 photo and video budget. It was a wake-up call. We needed to do something about lead generation, especially for the photo side, because I was starting out full-time and didn't have Kaiel's connections, the planners and past couples who refer their engaged friends. I didn't want to fight other photographers for really low-budget gigs. I knew my worth as a photographer, and our worth as a photo and video team.

Kaiel: The other thing was knowing that ads are constantly working for you. You can adjust how little or how much you want to spend, and it's trial and error, but the ads are working every moment of every day. That frees up a lot of time. I was totally fine spending money on ads, knowing that something is always looking for leads for us to potentially shoot. Ads weren't new to me, but how to run them effectively for wedding photography and videography was. On the video side, I get a lot of my work from referrals, because couples usually book video after photo, or two months before the wedding the parents say, "Here's a few grand, get yourself a videographer." Photo is definitely the priority. So if we get in front of couples sooner, we have the chance to book photo and video together, or at least photo. That easily makes it worth the investment.

Peter: I remember we talked about that. Most of the video work comes from referrals, but with Stephanie going full-time, you wanted her calendar full too, so you could grow your family business and do this together. Referrals are great when they're there, but they're not a lever you can pull in your business. Ads are like a workhorse in the background, pulling people to you.

Peter: So you joined Next Level. What happened after that?

Kaiel: A lot of work. Studying, rewatching and implementing the steps in your tutorials, setting things up and understanding why they're set up a certain way. Stephanie isn't the tech one, so I built the landing page and set up Facebook. Then I'd explain everything I learned to Stephanie in a way she'd understand. We got started pretty quickly and made minor adjustments to the ads. I think we were done with everything around mid-September, but I thought it would be better to start fresh at the beginning of the month so we could clearly see what the numbers looked like.

Peter: For people listening, the big challenge you were solving was getting more inquiries, so you could book more clients for both photo and video. In Next Level, we use Facebook and Instagram ads to generate leads, but there's a good amount of work to set it up. Had you run Facebook ads before?

Kaiel: Yes and no. Just the very basic ones, where Instagram says you should promote a post, you pick how much to spend per day and let it run. We didn't understand how much more granular you can get with targeting. So we did it, but it wasn't effective at all. It was just throwing money away and hoping something sticks.

Peter: That's very often the missing piece. It's not enough to just run ads. You need the whole funnel and sales process woven into it. So you built all that out and launched in October.

Peter: Let's get into your October results. How much did you do in total sales?

Stephanie: $27,000.

Kaiel: $27,500.

Peter: That's amazing. And you booked five weddings. One of them was a destination wedding in Iceland, just video. How did you get these clients?

Kaiel: Of the five, two were referrals from planners. Two were from Facebook ads, and the other one was through Facebook, but organically, which is another thing we learned in Next Level.

Peter: $27K for a husband and wife team. You're well on your way to that $200K goal. Now it's a matter of repeating it and building on that momentum.

Six Months of Salary in One Month (21:53)

Peter: What's your biggest takeaway from the last 30 days?

Stephanie: I did a little math. To have made $27,000 at my job, working 40 hours a week, not including commute time, I would have had to work about six months. Going to the office, buried in Excel all day, dealing with upset customers, upset bosses and work drama. And in one month I made that amount with a fraction of the headache. It was eye-opening. Why didn't I do this sooner? We're one month into Next Level, and if we can keep this going, we'll hit our financial goals within a year or two.

Kaiel: When you invest in something to make more money, at first it feels like something's caught in your throat, because you have to spend money to make money. So it's always a worry. But my biggest takeaway was patience. You want to look at the numbers every day, and you want to keep putting in time to make things better, but you can't rush the ads or expect them to make you a million dollars when you only spend 100 bucks. It doesn't work like that. You still have to put in a lot of work. If you stay consistent with it and keep feeding it, it'll keep performing.

Peter: That's a great insight. We all want the secret thing that makes it easy, but it doesn't work like that. If you do the work and stay consistent, you can have tremendous success, but it's not easy. If it were, everyone would quit their job and go all in.

Stephanie: Between you and the group, any question we've had has been answered and walked through. Even though it's difficult, there hasn't been a moment where we've been stuck. I'm not tech savvy, and I've had to ask for help, but we've had a lot of support. That helps a lot for someone like me.

Peter: So the community has been valuable.

Stephanie: If you post a question, you get an answer within minutes, usually.

Kaiel: And it's encouraging to see how other people are doing. There are highs and lows with performance. You'll have a week, or even two or three, where you're not seeing many results, and then the next week you get a bunch of leads and you didn't really change anything. We had six leads in about a 12-hour time frame, and we didn't change anything. The two weeks before that were slower. Of those six, we booked two. The two Facebook ad bookings this month were both from that one day.

Kaiel: Also, learning how to actually run consultation calls helped us sell. We got the $27,000, but without what we learned in Next Level, it probably would have been two bookings instead of five, and maybe $8,000 in total sales instead of $27,000.

Peter: Let's drill down on that. What made the difference on the sales side?

Kaiel: How couples got to us, and how we communicate with them in the consultation. Before Next Level, we probably would have just said, "Hey, what's up? We do photo and video. Here's our portfolio, and here's our prices. Let us know if you're interested, and we'll send over our contract." That was about it. Now we ask the right questions at the right time, find out more about the couple and build more rapport. We bring emotion into the conversation, so it's not transactional, and we show how excited we are for them as they find their vendors and their videographer.

Peter: The sales process is one of the least talked-about things in our industry. There's a lot of talk about getting inquiries and the work itself, but that's where the money changes hands. When people make a couple of changes there, we always see them book more. It's about turning leads into clients.

Peter: What's next for you?

Kaiel: Spending more time honing the ads and investing more money into them, because they're proving successful. With a 12-to-1 ratio, basically, of input and output, there's no reason we wouldn't keep using what we've learned to find more couples. And it lets us be picky. We can target specific couples, in our ad copy or on the consultation call. If it's something we're not excited about, we can point them to another photographer or videographer who would be great for them. We're not in a position where we have to take anything that comes our way, which is really nice.

Peter: That's huge, and it makes you book more, because couples can tell you don't need them. That comes from a full pipeline. And there's a mindset shift: when your business is mostly referrals and you're investing real money in ads, there are ebbs and flows, and you wonder if it's working. But you spent about $1,000 and made about $12,000. Once you have a 12-to-1 return, you want to keep feeding the machine and see if you can spend $2,000 a month.

Kaiel: Hopefully we can keep figuring out how to target more specifically and what copy performs best. Maybe we don't need to spend more if we learn to target better.

Peter: Facebook is always changing, but if you know how to write copy and understand how funnels work, you can always adapt. Say someone listening is a photographer or videographer doing $30,000 or $40,000 a year and wants to scale. What would you say to them if they're on the fence about joining Next Level?

Stephanie: It's not going to be as hard as you think. If you have questions, there's a whole group of people who want to help. We celebrate each other's successes, and there's a huge support system. It's not as scary and alone and unknown as we think it is. Even if it was just me, there's everyone in the group, and whenever we message you, you get back to us within about an hour. A lot of it was just following the program, following the script and doing it step by step, and that's how we got here.

Peter: If I'd told you back in September that the next month you'd make $27K, would you have believed me?

Stephanie: Probably not. You didn't give us a number. You asked what our goal was, and you said, "That's easy. We're going to make that happen." I had no doubt it would be more successful than what we'd been doing, but I didn't know how much more. I just wanted to make the money back.

Kaiel: People are starting to come out of the woodwork again and not be so afraid to make plans. And we do mid-size to larger weddings, so that helps.

Peter: Last question. What's your number one piece of advice for other members of Next Level?

Stephanie: I like that there's no competition within the group. We celebrate each other's successes. When you see somebody having a huge year, don't get jealous, and don't become bitter. Let it inspire you.

Peter: That's great advice. People who win in life don't look at someone else's success and get resentful or tell themselves a story about why they can't. If you look at it and say, "That person's doing it, I can do it," it feeds you.

Kaiel: I'd say stay consistent and keep at it, even when finding the time is hard. Keep figuring out how to adjust your ads or the angle you're pushing. If you keep trying different things, you'll have a higher success rate. If you stay where you're at and don't try new things, it's going to get stagnant, and it'll be harder to find more leads. So keep trying new things, and be willing to keep reinvesting in yourself and your business.