“I feel like I am in control of my life and my business in a way that feels like I can continue doing this for years to come. Whereas before I felt my business was not sustainable. I was miserable. It was constant confusion and stress. Now I got my life back and I can be present with my kids and my family.”

What we worked on in Cait’s custom mentor program

BUSINESS FOUNDATIONS: SET REVENUE GOAL + INCREASE REVENUE & PROFIT
CLIENT MANAGEMENT PROCESSES: UPDATED WORKFLOWS + STREAMLINED HONEYBOOK
BUSINESS PROCESSES: SET UP CLICKUP + WORKFLOW TO DETERMINE WHAT TO WORK ON
BRAND STRATEGY: POSITIONING, IDEAL CLIENT, BRAND MESSAGING
SALES: LEAD GENERATION PLAN TO REACH TARGET REVENUE
WEBSITE: WEBSITE DESIGN & SEO AUDIT

Mentoring Case study - Cait Morgan Photography by Flourish Online Management

Cait Morgan Photography by Cait Morgan

Cait Morgan is a birth, maternity, newborn and family photographer who is based in Indianapolis but who serves the Midwest. Her motto is; nothing fake, just the good stuff and you’ll notice this instantly. Because as soon as you’ve met her you will feel like you’ve been friends forever.

And this is her super-power as a photographer. She will not only be able to make you feel comfortable in front of the camera but as a mother of 4, she is not fazed by crying babies or unruly toddlers. Within no time everyone will feel at ease and is ready for an amazing shoot.

Website: caitmorganphotography.com

Instagram: @caitmorganphoto

The challenge

Cait applied for the mentoring program because even though she was very confident in her abilities as a photographer, she felt her business wasn’t sustainable anymore. Instead of her business giving her joy, it felt like it was all-consuming all of the time. By the time she applied, she had felt stuck for years wondering why she couldn’t make it work and get to where she wanted to go.

In the past, she had taken workshops from other photographers but felt that learning how other photographers are running their businesses didn't work for her. As a result, she was questioning herself instead of the process. Because she couldn't make stuff work for her and also didn't know how to change it to work for her personality and for someone who has ADHD.

Her main struggles were:

That she was feeling so overwhelmed with the business side of things that often she did not take any action
She was offering services she no longer enjoyed but did not know how to replace the revenue from this service
She had clients coming in but no repeatable lead generation process to draw in ideal clients and grow her revenue
She was unsure how to spend her time and prioritise what she should work on. Everything felt important and it made her feel like she was always behind.

Home Page Laptop Mockup Cait Morgan Photography by Flourish Online Management

THe custom mentor program for cait

Because each mentoring program is custom made we started with a 3-hour strategy call to have a clear understanding of her business. Topics for this call include;

+ Your big vision for the business: We want to know what your big dreams are and what is at the heart of your business. Where do you want to be three months from now? Where in 3 years from now?

+ Your business model & product suite: Here we dive into the services you offer, the pricing and the profitability of your business.

+ Productivity: We want to understand how you’re spending your time, what your client experience looks like and how you are using your project Management and Client Management Systems

+ Ideal Clients: Here we’re looking at who you are working with and are going to identify who your ideal clients are and how to reach them

Because one-size-fits-all approaches don’t have a place in transforming a business to be more aligned & sustainable, the next step was to create the plan for the mentoring program based on what we talked about in the strategy call. There are 2 weeks in between the strategy session and the second session which I use to create a concept plan for Cait’s mentor program.

Based on the struggles Cait mentioned in the strategy call and the this-is-enough-for-me-goals she had for her life, the overall goals for the mentor program were:

Business foundations: set revenue goal for 2022 + increase revenue & profit vs 2021
Client management processes: set up workflows + streamline Honeybook
Business processes: initial set up of ClickUp + workflow to determine priorities
Brand strategy: determine positioning, ideal client and which brand messaging to use to reach them
Sales: create a lead generation plan to reach the target revenue for 2022
Website: update website design to speak to new target market & SEO audit to identify opportunities

During the second call, we went through the suggested plan and made adjustments where necessary. With this plan, we had a clear overview of what topics we were going to work on each session and in which order we would do this. This order is very important as everything in your business is connected.

You can't, for example, look at pricing without knowing your revenue goals, how much time your spending on your projects, what your hourly rate is etc because everything is in your business is connected.

Month 1: Evaluate current profitability, services and pricing
Because one of the main goals for this mentor program was to set a revenue goal for 2022 and to increase revenue & profit vs 2021, we first needed to have a clear overview of the revenue and profit from the past years. So we looked at:

How many times each type of service was sold? How did this compare to previous years?
How much does each type of service contribute to the total revenue? How did this compare to previous years?
How much revenue was made per month? How did this compare to previous years?
How much time did each type of service take to complete? What workflows were used to deliver the service?
Based on this; How much profit was each service generating?

Custom Mentor Program Mockup Cait Morgan Photography by Flourish Online Management

Month 2: Update pricing + workflows in Honeybook, brand strategy
We were able to pinpoint what could be updated in her client workflow to on one hand speed up the process of delivering the service but also improve the client journey. Once the updated workflow was determined on paper it was built into Honeybook by Cait.

Cait was offering an unlimited number of photo’s in her packages, leading to countless hours of editing. So we decided to limit this, which increased the profit margin as she would work fewer hours per project. But we also found that there was room in the market to increase her pricing. Past clients had even told her she should. So we did.

Based on all the information we were able to:

Calculate how many times she needs to sell each of her services against the new pricing to replace the revenue from the service she stopped offering (which used to be 50% of her total revenue)
Understand what that would look like per month to make sure she was not overcommitting

When Cait saw the revenue overview her first reaction was: oh that actually looks doable. So instead of feeling overwhelmed by the numbers side of her business, which she had in the past, these numbers actually gave her peace of mind. They made her feel confident she could do this.

But to help her get there we had to update her brand strategy. So we determine how she was going to position herself and who her ideal client was so that we could work on creating a brand message that would help her reach them.

Month 3: Website, SEO + Lead Generation Plan
Originally we had not included working on her website in the planning, but as Cait had now niched down and we worked on her brand strategy she felt her website was not speaking to this in the way she wanted to. So we made some changes in the custom mentor program for Cait to accommodate this. We did a walk-through of her website and made a plan to:

Add in additional sections to her home an about page to give potential clients all the information they needed,
Update imagery that only represented her new niche and would attract clients that loved her photography style.
Worked on the website copy based on the brand messaging we had determined in month 2

We had already planned to look at how her website was performing and how she could optimise her SEO strategy. But with these changes to the website, it was even more important for Cait to know how to read the numbers in Google Analytics and how to use Google Search Console to optimise her SEO strategy.

Next to that, we worked on creating a lead generation plan. As we knew exactly how many times each service needed to be sold to reach the revenue goal for 2022 we created an action plan for Cait to get there.

After working together for 3 months Cait extended the program with another 2 months in which we worked on:

An initial set-up of ClickUp with a clear process of how to determine what she needed to work on in her business to keep her moving forward
A monthly review process to help her evaluate the metrics and financial results from the past month and plan ahead for the new month
Repeated the process we had done for her home and about page now for her session info page so that she could also update this website page.

The results

I could not be prouder of Cait. She truly had gone all-in and put in a lot of time and effort to implement everything that we have talked about. And as a result, at the time of writing this case study in April 2022, we can say with 95% accuracy that she will not only be able to replace the lost revenue from the service she stopped offering, but she will also grow her revenue vs last year.

But even more important results:

She has never felt so good. She finally feels like she is in control of her life and business and can continue like this for years to come.
Her anxiety levels have gone down and the people around her tell her how much she has changed and how much more relaxed she is.
She now takes days off when she needs to, to take of herself or to join one of her kids on a school outing without panicking or feeling anxious.
She feels like her goals are achievable. She used to spend a lot of time looking at other photographers and wondering how they did it. Now it feels like she can set goals that are appropriate for her and feels prepared for the things she needs to do to reach her goals. And because she is so clear on her goals and direction, it has made her to-do list shorter.

“I’ve now opened up all this space for me to dream and be creative. And I know that I can achieve those dreams because I know how to run my business like a business. I always thought that it took the feeling out of it, but it actually has given me the space to personalise my services.

I had convinced myself that running it like a business made it un-personal so I never wanted to do that. And that it would take away from my creativity. And now I’m like, oh my god, it’s the literal opposite.”

Custom Mentor Program Laptop Mockup Cait Morgan Photography by Flourish Online Managemen

AND THERE YOU HAVE IT

The case study of the custom mentor program from working together with Cait Morgan Photography

Do want similar results? Don’t hesitate to reach out! You can fill out the contact form, send me an email or have a look at this page to see how I could help you to transform your business to be more aligned, less draining and more profitable & sustainable.

And if you’re struggling with the business side of things where you’re supposed to map out client workflows, work with project & client management systems, have a solid process for your finances and have a clear action plan to reach your goals because it’s just too overwhelming. And as a result, you’re not implementing anything.

Then the program Cait was on might be just what you need.

This 3-month mentoring program not only gives you a custom plan to be more sustainable & profitable but is centred around a learn & implement approach. In the sessions, you’ll learn all the skills you need so that in between the session you can work on implementing the action plan so that you’ll see progress straight away.

Yes, I need this