Episodes
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Imagine it’s breakfast time.
You wake up starving and head to the kitchen to make some eggs and toast, but you’re sleep deprived and forget to turn on the burner. The eggs don’t cook.
When you finally realize, you turn on the burner and after an extra long time, the eggs are ready…not awesome, but edible. And the toast is cold.
Think of a sales system as a pre-heated pan, with the burner on just the right temperature.
Drop an egg (or in this case, your lead) onto that sizzling surface, and it cooks up perfectly every time.
A sales system heats things up before clients even walk in, showing off your value and building desire in a clear, repeatable way.
I share the story of how focusing on my sales system—without changing my website, portfolio, or client experience—brought me an additional $38,000 in one year! I also unpack why every business needs this setup first. From standing out in a sea of ads to raising perceived expertise, a good sales system builds desire and guides clients smoothly to a ‘yes’ without discounts or endless persuasion.
Tune in to learn how this approach shifts your business from struggling over every price point to confidently showcasing your worth. And if you’re ready to set up this sales system shortcut and skyrocket your results, Super Attractor Academy is open for you! Doors are open, but only until 11/16!Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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In this episode, we explore a common pitfall for many wedding vendors: the relentless chase for more leads. We challenge the traditional notion that more leads are the key to growing your business and examine why this focus might be holding you back. With real-life examples and insights, learn why the quality of inquiries matters significantly more than quantity and how a strategic approach to bookings can transform your business efficiency.
We'll discuss how prioritizing your sales process and conversion rate can free up crucial time that could be better spent on your craft, clients, and family. See why investing in the right systems now can pay dividends by drastically reducing admin hours and improving client alignment without sacrificing your precious time or resorting to underpricing. Navigate common issues like ghosting, price shoppers, and the pressure of endless marketing with renewed clarity and strategy.
For more in-depth guidance, check out the free masterclass that breaks down my simple 2-step approach that booked 5 weddings in just 4 weeks, without chasing leads or discounting: https://the-ewings.com/otfb.Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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Missing episodes?
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The industry has experienced "seismic shifts since 2023" according to Tim Chi, CEO of The Knot. Those who are successful are the ones who understand AND evolve with the market.
There’s a growing gap between creatives who are booking well and those who are struggling. 🥵
Why is this happening? Well, there are a few culprits at hand, namely:
the economy - record inflation, election uncertainty…you know, you’re living it, too
the “dating gap” - this one was so interesting to me! Couples typically get married 3.5 years after they’ve started dating. Think about life 3.5 years ago - we were in the middle of a global pandemic, social gatherings weren’t happening, bars were closed, dating was DOWN. So it makes sense there’d be a wedding gap 3.5 years later!
the sheer amount of information and options availableBut there’s a silver lining: budget predictions are actually up, for a total of $70 BILLION in revenue forecasted for the wedding industry in 2025. Experts are predicting 2.1 million weddings in the US alone.
So how can you capitalize on this?
My top 3 strategies to help you thrive in 2025:
1. Niche Down
Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, niche down within your specific industry.
CLARIFICATION: I don’t advocate niching into one TYPE of job if that’s not aligned with your goal…we photograph weddings, newborns and families because I love them all and the diversity helps with market fluctuations buuuut you can niche down within each job type.
For example, if you love vibrant, intimate celebrations in the mountains of Utah, make that your calling card. You’re not just a wedding photographer - now you have a “specialty.”
When you niche down, you get known for something. You’re an expert, and you’ll stand out in a crowded market.
2. Be specific in your messaging
Specific messaging is like a magnet to right-fit clients. Vague messaging gets overlooked…and most of the industry is stuck in vague messaging.
The most valuable way to be specific is to use your ideal client's actual words in your messaging.
For instance, if your ideal couple is family-oriented, reflect that in your messaging: "Our couples are so excited to celebrate with friends and family." This clarity will draw your right-fit clients in.
3. Take a “human-first” approach
The slow decisions they’re making have nothing to do with your worth; it’s a reflection of an oversaturated market.
They’re stressed, so be the one who makes it easy:
Think about “WIIFM” - what’s in it for me (for them!).Break your info down into bite-sized, digestible pieces of information. Create a simple process that guides them from inquiry to consultation, and consultation to booking. IMPORTANT: focus only on what they need to know to take the next step.Act as a guide and you’ll build trust while positioning yourself as the expert who can help them achieve their dream wedding.
Bottom line: with the predicted 2.1 million weddings for next year, there’s plenty of opportunity out there. Embrace the evolution and make 2025 your best year yet
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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There are three essential systems every creative needs to run a business like a well-oiled machine.
How to build a pricing system that reflects the true value of your work and makes clients excited to investWhy a marketing system that targets the right clients is key to consistent bookingsThe power of a simple, repeatable sales system that converts nearly every inquiry into a booking
Here’s what we’ll cover in this episode:These three systems work together to create a business that runs smoothly, letting you focus on doing what you love while knowing you’ll always book the right clients.
Ready to dive deeper? Join the waitlist for Super Attractor Academy, where I’ll guide you step-by-step through a seamless booking process guaranteed to increase bookings and profitability.Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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Your client journey is one of the most powerful tools for growing your business. But what if I told you there’s a missing piece in that journey that could be costing you bookings, aligned clients, and even revenue? Most creatives divide the client journey into two stages: the pre-client stage (inquiries and leads) and the client stage (booked and working together). However, the real magic happens in the space between these two stages—the sales process.
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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In this week's episode, I dive into the powerful strategy of increasing revenue through your current client base. It's a game changer, especially when you're swamped with busy season!
Too often, we focus on attracting new clients when the real profit lies with those who already know and love us. In fact, did you know that returning customers spend 67% more than new ones? 🎉
Here's the key takeaway from this episode:
*You don’t need to overbook yourself or launch new offers.* Instead, a simple mini-session event—exclusively for existing clients—can bring in significant revenue without the added stress.
📈 Give this a try: Identify your favorite clients, and offer them a bite-sized mini session experience. It’s a win-win for everyone!
Ready for the fast pass? Skip the set-up struggles (or fix a broken mini, even if you've already launched) with my Quick Start Kit - now 50% off. But hurry, the sale ends September 30!!Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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In today’s challenging economy, it’s easy to feel like the only way to keep your calendar full is by lowering your prices. But before you start slashing rates, consider the long-term impact this could have on your business.
Lower prices might attract more bookings in the short term, but they also bring in clients who are more focused on getting a deal than on valuing your work. This can lead to burnout, resentment, and a never-ending cycle of working harder for less.
What if there's a more effective strategy that not only fills your calendar but also allows you to raise your prices?
In this week’s podcast episode, I break down this market-proof strategy in detail.
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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Lauren Carroll! Hear the story of this Ireland-based wedding photographer, and how her career took her from backstage with Steven Tyler in LA to traveling halfway across the globe to shoot weddings in Ireland.
I can’t help but think that if I had been a back-stage assistant to Aerosmith, Green Day, the Jonas Brothers (and so many more that I’m forgetting), I’d find a way to drop that into every convo for the rest of time. Hehe…but not Lauren Carroll.
I love her story. And I think you will, too.
June 5, 12:00 EST
Save a seat now:https://the-ewings.com/otfb
thesuccessfulcreatives.com
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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Featured Creative Episode!
Meet Gillie Bird, a fine art luxury wedding photographer in Toronto. She shares how she got her start, the struggle she was facing in her business and the steps she took to transform her bookings - from just 2 weddings booked for 2024 to ELEVEN booked in just 7 weeks, including her first 5-figure contract and a celebrity wedding (a Bachelor Nation couple!).
Learn how you can achieve the same results at my free upcoming masterclass on June 5,
Overlooked to Fully-Booked.
Sign up here:
the-ewings.com/otfb
And find Gillie on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/gilliebird_Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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Busy season is just around the corner, which is why we should have a quick chat to make sure overwhelm and burnout aren't a part of your 2024 season. How? With a few simple policies!
Let’s explore what this might look like for you…
Because this is a beautiful time of year. If you’re anything like me, you’re excited to dive back in. You’re rested and feeling creative and inspired…and also perhaps feeling a nudge from you bank account to get back to work, too!
At this point in the year, it’s easy to forget that - fast forward a few months - the end of the season doesn’t look and feel this way to most of us. We’re up late finishing client work, exhausted and stretched but also compelled to take bookings NOW as they come, like squirrels saving up for a long, hard winter.
So what’s the key to a healthy balance so that you can maintain your creativity, your inspiration, balance AND profits?
Boundaries.
Connect with Erica
@theewingsstudio
Episode blog postSuccessful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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Marketing and sales are my jam. But organization, and productivity? Let’s just say I’m a work in progress.
Luckily I met THE expert in this area, NJ Shelsby who sat down to give me some tips on how to get more done, with less stress.
You see, she was overworked and stressed that it disrupted her family and health so much that she experienced a scary bout of short term memory loss.“I was driving to a doctor’s appointment and I couldn’t remember how to get there. As in, I’m driving around for 10-15 minutes and have no idea on how to get there. And it was very scary and when I got to the doctor’s office, he was panicked for me.”
Her doctor told her “you have to take immediate steps to reduce your stress level.”
If you’ve been feeling stressed or disorganized, or get to the end of your day and wonder where the time went, never quite making enough progress on your business - you’re not alone.Check out these stats:
Internet usage in the workplace accounts for а 40% loss of productivity (ohhhh, we know the scroll!)Work overload decreases productivity by 68% (so wait, the more work you have, the less gets done?! Oof)
Here are 3 quick tips to increase productivity:1. Absolute clarity - what’s important RIGHT NOW.
2. Focus leak boundaries - identify things that steal your focus and set boundaries during your “work times” like turn email notifications off, close tabs, silence your phone, etc.
3. Structure your schedule around your most productive times:
a. Deep think times - like big projects
b. Shallow focus times - like emails, editing, etc.
NJ shares the free software she’s using now to help her get organized and increase productivity, and does a little live coaching that will undoubtedly help.
Connect with Erica
@theewingsstudio
Episode blog post
Connect with NJ
www.njshelsby.com
Free Training with NJ
Get out of overwhelmSuccessful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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A super talented wedding photographer who’s beyond lovely, with a stunning portfolio and over 70 5-star reviews should be fully booked, right?
But yet out of 40 inquiries, only 2 booked…that’s a 5% booking rate, ouch. AND she’s getting ghosted a ton.
Oh and her prices are a steal.
What’s going on?
The first mistake is in her initial inquiry email.Well-thought, she provides EVERYTHING her potential new client needs to know about working with her in the first email. No question left unanswered, how helpful is that?
It turns out, it’s actually not really helpful at all.
You see, sales is a process. And if you offer a higher-ticket service (i.e., a 4-5 figure wedding photographer), it’s not designed to be done in one step.
Consider that each step of the sales process should focus on just one thing - move your potential client to the next step.
Your website should move them to submit the form. Your emails should move them to schedule a consultation. Your consultation should move them to book.
Provide just enough so they want to move one step forward.
Revisit your initial inquiry email and see how yours stacks up. Or skip to the shortcut with my free standout email guide and get the exact wording I use in my emails - click here to get your copy now.
Connect with Erica
@theewingsstudio
Episode blog postSuccessful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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2023 was a really strange year for me and to be honest with you, it felt like I was riding a roller coaster at times. It was really hard at times. It was really beautiful and easy at times, and it all stemmed from the pivot that I've been making in my business while really starting a 2nd business. It's funny because so many people told me throughout the year, wow, you're crushing it. You are doing so well. So I wanted to give you an inside perspective on exactly what was happening on the inside. Even when on the outside, it looked like everything was incredible.
For a deeper dive free training: the-ewings.com/otfbSuccessful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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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.
For a deeper dive free training: https://the-ewings.com/otfbSuccessful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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The end of busy season is a magical time when you get to think about all of the exciting things that you’d love to see incorporated into your business dream clients. More or less bookings, higher prices. All of this is what will become available to you when you first look back at this year, and then really use that information to intentionally build out next year. This is exactly what we're about to get into.
2023 Audit WorkbookSuccessful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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You got together an incredible group of women to create this amazing shades of purple shoot in Providence, and it was such a fun experience. It was the inspiration behind today's episode and why I really felt called to have you on to share your expertise, because you were a master at running that styled shoot. So this is going to be a treat for our listeners.
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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When you're repeatedly ghosted, or told you're too expensive, and you wonder why...struggling wedding pros typically look inward first - wondering if it's your work, your website, is it because you don't have enough followers or likes...
But here's the crazy thing. It's actually not you at all. It's your marketing.Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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In last week's episode, I shared about the nightmare client who changed my business. I talked about the process that I used to make positive changes after the fact, and 4 lessons that you can take and turn a difficult situation into 1 that ends up being really beautiful for your business and your clients. So that was all about what to do after the fact, after you've had a difficult client situation. In this episode, I'm going to help you screen for red flag clients in advance and give you some tips on how to handle them if you've got one currently.
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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This is a personal story about my last difficult client (which was about 10 years ago!). This particular wedding gave me cold-sweat nightmares for a month, and changed my business indefinitely.
I share the full story in the podcast, but to get right to it, we’ve all had THE ONE. Who makes us question everything we do…or why we do it at all.
Here’s how you can turn a painful situation into a win for your business.
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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If you asked me last week if I liked the performer Pink, I'd say, Uh, I want to like her. I really like her message. I like what she's all about, but she just doesn't do it for me. Something about her kind of rubs me the wrong way, and I'm just not that into her. However, I did get roped into going to a concert of hers on a girls trip down in Nashville this past weekend. And it inspired this podcast episode because within about an hour I'd say even as little as 5 minutes, I went from a casual, honestly pink avoider. I was like switching the station when pink comes on the radio, to transforming into an absolute super-fan in such a short amount of time. I found it fascinating and I kept thinking about how we could relate this to our business throughout the entire concert, which was incredible, by the way. So I broke it down into 8 lessons. Eight lessons from Pink that will help you become the highly sought, fully booked creative that you know you deserve to be.
Successful Creatives make the world brighter. Follow @theewingsstudio on instagram for weekly tips and tricks to uplevel your bookings and increase profits so that you can accomplish all of the goals on your heart.
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