No BS Advice to Be the Biggest Photography Studio In Your City

0:01So this photo was taken over eight years ago and at the time I was making thousands of dollars a month but I'd never made over $20,000 in a single month.

0:04This was 2016.

0:07I'd met a bunch of really cool people that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of making that kind of money and the things I was interested in.

0:14If you've been following me for a while, photography to profits and the high rollers club, we have a big community of photographers and there's a reason why a lot of photographers in those groups, or when you see our testimonials, they have success that is just generally major outliers from the rest of the photography community.

0:39I'm going to get into why they have success and why I had success this exact month because it really comes down to the people I'm sitting with here.

0:47I was listening to a podcast and I got the idea for this video because they were telling a story about this competition community called Kaggle.

0:54There they do a bunch of machine learning research projects, competitions and stuff like that.

1:00There's some sort of leaderboard and for this community, anytime there's a competition or some sort of puzzle people need to figure out, it can get stagnant.

1:08Nobody makes progress in it and nobody jumps up the leaderboard for a while.

1:14But the moment one team or one person just jumps ahead of everybody else, then there's a phenomenon where other people realize there is a solution to this, it's not a trick.

1:23Somebody figured it out and then they figure it out shortly afterwards.

1:32It's funny because the real life example of that is Roger Bannister.

1:36For over 10,000 years, there'd never been a recorded person to ever run the mile in under four minutes.

1:42When Roger Bannister did it, within a couple months, I believe three other runners did it as well.

1:50Is it just so happened that all of them had been training at the exact same time and they were all going to break it independently if they didn't know about each other?

1:56Probably not.

1:58It's probably that when they saw Roger Bannister do it, they realized this is actually possible.

2:05This is my new goal. Otherwise, they might have thought it was impossible.

2:08In that podcast, they actually shared a story of a Tony Robbins event.

2:16In that event, at the beginning, someone's hyping everybody up and they play this game, Simon Says.

2:21This is actually probably the coolest story out of all of these.

2:27Let's just say you have 5,000 people in the crowd, everyone's doing Simon Says.

2:32The person says okay, everybody sit down, and of course, half the crowd's eliminated because he didn't say Simon Says.

2:37He goes through this: hey, Simon Says clap your hands, jump around, and people are just kind of getting disqualified as they go.

2:45The speaker looks at one of the people that got eliminated in the first round or two and says hey, when we started this exercise, did you believe you were going to win the Simon Says?

2:56The person was like no, it's a silly game, I didn't really know what we were doing this for, probably killing time.

3:02He goes to the next person that sat down pretty early too and says did you think you were going to win?

3:08The person was like no, not really, and they got eliminated in the first couple rounds.

3:14So then he asked the entire crowd, who here thought that they were actually going to win Simon Says?

3:19Only about 5% of the audience, so imagine 50 people or just over 50, maybe 200 people, raising their hand out of the 5,000.

3:30He did that to point out that when you're competing in these things and in life, it could be your photography studio, not everyone is actually raising their hands.

3:37So you might say hey, there's 50 newborn photographers near me, there's 50 boudoir photographers within 200 miles.

3:45But if you were to survey all of them, if I was to independently go to all of them and say hey, do you actually think your photography studio can be successful, the answer would probably be not really, I'm just kind of doing this, I need a hobby.

3:57I like paying for my lenses.

4:04So what's that tell you?

4:05It tells you that if you're intentional, all these three stories, if you're intentional about actually winning, you're not competing with everyone.

4:11You're competing with a small subset of people and you're competing with yourself.

4:15Because if you just believe that it's possible, it'll happen.

4:20That's what happened here in 2016.

4:22It's funny because one of my really close friends, before I started this business, they took me to coffee and they were talking to me about all this online marketing stuff, they were talking about Facebook ads and Google ads.

4:32They were telling me hey, Umberto, you need to get into this space, you're really passionate about it, you do SEO already, you're teaching all these classes for free locally, you're doing it online, you need to do all this.

4:43This was maybe 3 months before this photo and I basically said to them no, I don't think so, that's dumb.

4:47I just want to do photography.

4:49I was taking every photography course known to man, I had taken cinematic headshots, I was taking real estate photography, I was doing jobs in other countries, I was doing weddings everywhere.

4:57I was 100% certain I was going to be a photographer.

5:01You would have asked me in 2016 before this photo, I was certain I'd be a photographer for the rest of my life.

5:04This guy right here, Jason, he actually reached out to me over Facebook and someone basically networked me with him.

5:09I was at a wedding, I believe August 2016, and the woman saw me flying a drone.

5:13One of the guests said hey, I live in Brickell, Miami, it's a financial part, and she said I'd like you to do a video for me.

5:19I was like okay, I didn't really ever do any commercial video, I'd always done vlogs for myself, so I kind of knew what to do and I had some gear, so I agreed to a price with her that I thought she wouldn't pay.

5:27I took half the money and rented a bunch of equipment and then I took half of the money and I paid somebody else that knew what they were doing.

5:33So I made zero money on this.

5:35I thought I did an amazing job.

5:36I got a stabilizer, I got those sliders, I had my drone flying, I had music.

5:40I edited this thing for like 10 hours, it was pretty good.

5:43She was crying when she got the video and afterwards she was like hey, I want you to travel with me, I want you to do all this video and photo stuff for me for my brand.

5:50A couple weeks later she said hey, I know this guy Jason, he needs some help here in Miami, he's flying in for this major conference, you should help him.

5:57He needs to hire a videographer, you obviously did good with my video.

5:59So I reached out to Jason, I said hey, we agreed to a pay rate of like I don't know, two or 300 bucks a day or something like that.

6:02Again, I was learning, every day before I'd show up, I was just a couple steps ahead.

6:07I went to this woman's conference.

6:09That's his wife right there, all these women are women coaches, they're all fitness coaches, business coaches and stuff like that.

6:15Going to this conference, I realized holy crap, all these people are super successful doing this thing that my friend told me about in the coffee shop that I should be doing.

6:23This is incredible.

6:25Even though somebody told me the exact thing, they told me all the websites to look at, they told me who to model myself after, what funnels to look at, I still didn't believe them until I went to this conference and I was surrounded by all these other coaches and consultants.

6:36So how does that tie in to you for photography?

6:41Well, number one, if you don't do anything else, I suggest join our free photography Facebook group because you'll go in there and you'll start seeing testimonials where you'll see a studio and they'll be like hey, I made my first $30,000 and I just started boudoir like two months ago.

6:52I know it sounds crazy, but before you get so skeptical, just go look at their website and you're going to start seeing things like holy smokes, I can implement that today.

6:59Okay, now I'm getting the retargeting ads, I could implement that tomorrow.

7:03Okay, when I sign up for their form, they're doing this with email and they're calling me back really quickly.

7:08I didn't even think to do those things.

7:10Even if you do just 10 or 20% of what they're doing, you're going to jump leaps and bounds if you're not doing those things.

7:18It's really important to just be surrounded by people that not only are where you want to be, but also believe.

7:25Because if you're in Facebook groups, before I started this group, I was in groups where a lot of people were just saying the market, the market, the market, everything's cheap.

7:32People just didn't believe you could make money or they had different thought processes.

7:38I'm lucky because when I started photography, I immediately found Sue Bryce and all the Sue Bryce education group.

7:44So I knew that I could make money in photography, just seeing how successful the glamour photographers were.

7:52That's why I was inspired to create my own group with Jen, my own community, my own email list, and we should put this information out to the world.

7:59You wouldn't believe how many people, even if they've never signed up for our Mastermind, never worked with us one-on-one, they'll reach out and say hey, I follow your free content, I implement some of the things you do, I imitated this, just want to thank you.

8:12It's really cool to hear.

8:14So who's your group going to be?

8:16Eight years from now, if you guys are making a presentation like this, I'd like you to join our Facebook group, schedule a call with us, see if you want to work with us.

8:25We do have availability for 2025 to do one-on-one work.

8:30But maybe you're not at that level yet, you can always join our group Mastermind and be surrounded by individuals like this every day online.

8:40Hope this inspires you guys and it's a little bit more about my story.