Five Tools I Use to Run My Business (so it doesn’t run me)
A bull elk browses on foliage and grasses during the elk rut in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Photo and story by: Annalise Kaylor
As I’ve written about before, most of my job as a professional wildlife photographer happens in my office and behind my desk - not in the field. I have a firm stance that when it comes to running my business, I should outsource as much as possible and automate as many of the other tasks as possible. Personally, I try to find outsourcing or automation options for the things that I hate the most. On that note, does anyone know of a service that will come to my home to fold and put away my laundry for me?
I’ve tried a lot of different tools over the years, and the tools below are the ones I’ve found to be the most helpful. When possible, I’ve also listed some competitors that I think are worth checking out. I don’t earn any kickback or consideration for promoting these in any way. I just think they’re really terrific at what they do, especially through the lens of running a business specifically in the area of wildlife photography.
Dubsado - A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Tool
Running a small business with a lot of variables means that there are a lot of things to track, measure, and file away. A CRM, like Dubsado, does A LOT of this work for me. Here are just some of the ways I use Dubsado:
Scheduling portfolio reviews and client meetings
Collecting email inquiries about our different workshops
Creating proposals and contracts for my editorial, commercial, and non-profit clients
Managing the contracts and invoices for our workshop clients
Sending invoices and automating payment processes
Storing client personal information in a secure database
Automating workflows and processes with managing our workshop business
Maintaining a library of templates and emails
Monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting of profit/loss and income categories
If you are planning to add tours or workshops to your business, having one system that does 95% of the organization for you will save you hours and hours of time. For example, when someone books one of our workshops, we need a few things to reserve their spot: a deposit, the registration form, and the signed terms and conditions.
If you don’t have a CRM setup, you’ll need something for invoicing, something to host the forms and a place to store them where they are easily accessed. It doesn’t take long before you are stuck with five or six software platforms cobbled together to run your business.
With Dubsado, I click one button, “Start Workflow” and it automatically sends them an email with the invoice attached, and once that is paid, it will send them the two other forms to finish the registration process. These forms are all stored neatly in one client file that I can open at the click of a mouse. ALL of their workshop info is stored here, too, so every invoice paid by each client is in their personal file, as are all of their emails and forms.
With our workshops, we require a deposit upfront with the balance due 90 days ahead of the workshop. I am often traveling across multiple time zones and for most of the days of the year, which means I don’t always have the time (or internet access) to watch the calendar for when the 90-day mark hits. Dubsado does this for me and automatically sends out an email with a link to the balance due when it is time. As part of the workflow, Dubsado also sends our clients the guides we create about what gear to bring and what to wear, too. All without managing any of it once that Workflow has started.
I also use Dubsado to keep track of the expenses associated with each workshop. This way, at the end of the workshop, when everything has been totaled up, I can generate one report that shows the immediate profit and loss for each workshop. It’s incredibly helpful for when we’re planning for the following year, too.
For editorial and commercial client work, I lean heavily on Dubsado for creating my proposals and managing my contracts. I made proposal templates of my most popular services and options. When a client chooses which items they want from my proposal, Dubsado automatically generates a matching contract and an invoice with those items for me, so they can easily sign the contract and pay me for the work all in one fell swoop.
Dubsado isn’t the only program out there that can do this. Much like a camera body, the kind of programs you use have to fit the right way for you and your business. 17Hats is another CRM tool that’s popular with photographers, as is Honeybook, although it’s my opinion that Honeybook skews a bit toward lifestyle photographers.
Some photography websites also have their own CRM setup available. Format, which is the site builder I use, has a Workflow setup, but it’s not as automated or robust as I’d like compared to Dubsado. Most of the photography websites I’ve looked at (SmugMug, Zenfolio, Pixieset, etc) offer extra management tools, but they’re largely geared toward lifestyle, wedding, or portrait photographers - they have gallery sharing and print sales management, but they don’t offer anything for contracts, proposals, etc.
ConvertKit for Newsletters
If you’re reading this in your email, then you just received it via our email provider, ConvertKit.
I’ve tried a handful of platforms for my email marketing over the years. Some, like Klaviyo or Mailchimp, are full of bless and whistles that make them ideal for e-commerce or businesses with tens of thousands of subscribers. Others, like FloDesk, create beautiful emails with their gorgeous, minimalist templates, but don’t have the advanced analytics needed to scale a business.
I use ConvertKit for Going Pro and for my personal photography business. It’s the right size and price point for most photographers, and it’s a platform designed for creators more than any other demographic. It’s also intuitive, especially if an email marketing platform is new to you, and it makes it easy to schedule email blasts and make sure I’m sending the right emails to the right groups.
For example, all of you are in one of my Tag groups called “BOWP Subscribers.” When I write these articles and load them into ConvertKit, I simply apply your group to the email and everyone on the list will receive it. Like all email platforms, I can see when people open the email or if the email bounces. I see how many people in total have opened it and what links they have clicked on inside the email.
Outside of newsletters, there are other ways you can incorporate email systems like this into your business. For example, I have a list of all the editors I’ve worked with. I like to send out emails every quarter to them with a couple of low-res images showing off what I’ve been up to. This helps me stay at the top of their mind, but doesn’t require me to shoot off an email to each one individually. And, because I can design what those emails look like inside of ConvertKit, they look a lot nicer than me simply writing something in an email and attaching a couple of photos.
I like being able to see who has opened my emails or clicked over to my website from them because that tells me those editors are the ones who are most interested in my work and I should prioritize reaching out to them more than the others.
Another reason to have a robust email list is for selling your prints. I have it set up so that all purchases from clients are recorded in ConvertKit, too. Any time I’m announcing a new item for sale or promoting prints, I send emails to the people who’ve previously shopped with me first.
I also use my email newsletter to share stories from behind the scenes of my travels, which my family and friends like to use to stay in touch. People tend to really enjoy these and over the years, a lot of those people have ended up becoming long-time clients and friends.
Mojo Pro App
Staying on top of social media is almost a full-time job in and of itself. This is a task I’m currently looking to outsource for that reason. Visual platforms like Instagram can be fantastic marketing tools, but they’re only as good as the photos and videos that you display there. And, if you’re struggling to keep up with it, it doesn’t do its job either.
I edit almost all of my videos in Adobe Premiere, but when I’m on the road and making vertical videos for social media use, I don’t always want something as professional-level as Premier itself. Earlier this year, I discovered Mojo and it’s the first time I’ve actually liked using an app for creating social-media-specific content.
It’s pre-loaded with dozens and dozens of templates for Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, and Pinterest so half the work of designing a layout is done for you. You just choose the one you like, replace the images or videos with work of your own, and voila! It’s easy to add animated titles, music, transitions, and other special effects, too.
Even if you aren’t someone who is shooting video, Mojo can help you turn your still photos into things like an animated reel, a video slideshow, or any number of new ways to show your work. Some of the templates are designed to help showcase the things you have for sale, too, making it easy for people to click on the link and buy right from your website.
Whether we like it or not, ALL social media networks are prioritizing video content these days. Being able to create visually interesting videos, reels, stories, and highlights from your still photography will help you stay in the good favor of the social media algorithms.
My Instagram followers tend to really love a couple of the series I do on the channel. The first is “Today’s Office,” a series of photos that I take showing off all the amazing places my daily office can be, whether that’s in the heart of black bear country in the boreal forest or on a boat in the Kenai Fjords while Dall’s porpoise play in our wake. The other series I do is “Behind the Scenes,” which starts with me showing people what I see and how I am setting up to the final shot that came from the situation.
Both of these have been easy ways for me to create something that’s interesting to people who follow my work. They’re fairly easy to make, don’t take a lot of time, and I can do them all on my phone. With social media, looking “too perfect” can actually hinder your engagement and knock you down in the algorithmic priority of the various feeds, so I take advantage of that with these two thematic series.
Receipt Tracking Apps
Anyone who has traveled for a corporate job knows the immense joy of expense reports and receipt keeping. If you’re in the business of wildlife photography, even part-time or less, and you want to use it as a deduction for your taxes, you have to keep track of all of your expenses. The easiest way I’ve found to do that is by using a receipt/expense tracking app.
These apps will scan the receipt with your phone camera and create a digital version for you that is then easily retrieved for accounting. Many of them sync with the most popular bookkeeping services, too, making it easier for you (or your accountant) to deal with at tax time.
I use Wave accounting for my bookkeeping. It’s like QuickBooks, but free. They have their own app called Receipts, which not only scans my receipts, but will automatically populate the record with the category it belongs to (meals, transportation, lodging, etc) and it syncs instantly with my bookkeeping software. In other words, once I’ve taken the photo and tapped about three things on my phone screen, it’s done.
Another way you can track these is simply with your phone camera. I got in the habit of doing it this way when I was a staff photographer who sometimes turned in 40-100 receipts for one assignment. I simply took a photo of my receipt when it was printed out, and then I no longer worried about potentially losing a piece of paper (and reimbursement of the expense).
I made a folder on my phone called (you’ll never guess) Receipts, and simply moved every receipt into that folder. At the end of my trip, I logged them as needed and kept a copy on my computer for long-term storage. Due to the Period of Limitations, the IRS requires that you hang on to receipts for anything $75 or larger for three years. They also accept electronic copies of receipts as long as they are identical to the original copies. So if you can print that photo of the receipt, you’ll be good.
There are also a few other apps to look at for receipts and expenses. Expensify is probably the most popular, as it’s used by tens of thousands of corporations and business owners. Expensify will automatically import receipts for things like Airbnb or Uber, too. If you’re using a company credit or debit card, it will also sync with the card so that you don’t have to reconcile your statement against receipts every month, as well.
Receipt Bank is another popular option that syncs up with most of the major bookkeeping platforms available, too.
Zapier
When it comes to automating systems and making a collection of apps, websites, and services all work seamlessly with one another, there is no better tool than Zapier. Zapier works like a middleman, allowing the various tools and services that we use in running our businesses to work together so we don’t have to do it manually.
For example, MemberSpace is the service that runs Going Pro, this subscription platform you’re in. But MemberSpace isn’t built for sending out bulk emails like when Going Pro sends out our weekly emails via ConvertKit. Zapier, though, automagically connects the two. Any time a person joins Going Pro, Zapier takes their information from MemberSpace and puts their email information into ConvertKit. That way, every time I go to send out an email to the membership, I don’t have to first export the email addresses from MemberSpace and import them into ConvertKit. They’re just already there!
Zapier also works with Dubsado. Every time someone sends in a payment, a form, or an email about a workshop, I get a text message alert. This is really helpful because it allows me to stay on top of some of those things while I’m in the field and away from my desk.
I use a handful of Zaps, as they are called, to automate social media posts, as well. While yes, I use some social media scheduling apps like Buffer and Meta Creator Studio, I don’t really want to think about updating Pinterest with my latest photos for sale, etc. I have a Zap that automatically posts anything I share on Instagram to my Pinterest page. Pinterest isn’t a major source of income for me, but it does drive a fair amount of traffic to my website, so I like to keep it fresh. I had 2,000 visits from Pinterest alone last month and a lot of people share my photography there.
Another way I use Zapier is to connect my email with ToDoist, the platform Jared and I use to keep our workshops and tasks organized. I use GSuite, or essentially the business version of Gmail, to run my business email. If I “star” an email in Gmail, Zapier adds that to my ToDoist as a task for followup.
Jared and I often joke that as entrepreneurs, we are the only people in the world who will work 80 hours a week for ourselves in order to avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else. Tools and automations are the only way we can do just that and also carve out some personal time for ourselves. It’s also the only way that our business can keep working in the background while we’re out in the field or off teaching a workshop (like we’ll be next week in Panama).
If you have any tools or automations that you really love, please send an email about them!