022: Freedom Edits – How Ryan Created an Associate Brand Shooting 200+ Weddings Per Year & Why Outsourcing Your Editing Can Change Your Life

March 10, 2021

“The key to success is progression. If you’re not progressing you’re not succeeding. So if you find that you’re standing still for too long it’s because you’re not trying different things, you’re not stepping outside your comfort zone”

TOMMY REYNOLDS

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about our good friends at Freedom Edits – we are really excited to speak with Co-Founder Ryan Welch.

Check out some of the biggest points from Ryan’s interview below:

What marketing techniques do you find has been most useful? What can our listeners perhaps take away that they can think, well I can go and implement that or try that on my business?

Yeah, totally. I think one thing, in terms of marketing techniques I think everybody focuses really heavily these days on social media and if you’re that way inclined then 100% go with what you’re naturally drawn to and what you’re naturally good at, I guess. If you really enjoy being on Instagram all day and building relationships that way then go for it, but I think a lot of photographers these days think that to build a successful photography brand you’ve got to have 15, 20000 followers, you’ve got to be doing reels all day and you’ve got to focus on beating the algorithm and getting everyone to save your posts and share your posts and all this stuff. But there are other ways to build businesses.

We very much started, when I started shooting weddings it was like Facebook was the place to be and I still believe that Facebook is incredibly powerful as a marketing machine for photography business. Maybe more so than Instagram from my experience, but you would finish a wedding, we’d have done the slide show so we’d have like 80 images ready. By the time the bride and groom woke up the next day there’d be 80 images on Facebook, they were tagged in them, all their friends shared them because you could do that back then, and we built the Facebook audience. Now things are slightly different now and I personally still think that if you go to a wedding venue and you book your wedding and they recommend a photographer to you, those people are very likely to at least go on your website.

If the venue says, there’s always going to be some couple and again I don’t know how much I believe what I actually believe for this point, like I think there’s two sides to every story, right, there always is. A wedding couple that know exactly what they want from their wedding photography and then there are other couples that don’t know anything about photography and they really don’t have a preference, they just want to go with somebody where they know what they’re going to get and they’re going to get a good service, they’re going to have a good time, they’re going to get really great photos and they’re not too concerned about the editing style. They’re not too concerned about all this other stuff that I think as artists we really heavily focus on. So one of our biggest marketing techniques was building great relationships with wedding venues, and I know that isn’t anything new and I’m really sorry that I don’t have the top tip of 2020 about how you can book 100 weddings next year. I really wish that I did because I’d be in the penthouse apartment right now.

I still think that building relationships as a wedding photographer, it’s such a personal experience the wedding couple, building relationship has got to be one of the most important marketing techniques that they can be and I also think that reputation is incredibly important in treating people with decency. Photographers typically work in a local industry, most towns, cities aren’t that big. Especially in the UK where we work, we’re based in South Wales and we’re very lenient with our terms and conditions, we’re very lenient with our contract, especially during all this kind of Corona stuff. I think it’s important to have a contract in place to protect you and the client. I don’t think I’ve ever booked a wedding without a contract, even when I first started. I think it’s very important but also I think showing human decency at the same time. If they go and they say to 10 people, “Our photographer wouldn’t give us a refund and it was completely unreasonable.” And all this stuff, that could potentially damage your business more than what losing the I don’t know what, 52000 pounds or whatever it is, money that they paid you, right. We’re always very careful about that. There are some instances where it’s very clear and outlined in the contract, but when something like an international pandemic comes around, I think maybe people should…

So, talk to us a little more about Freedom?

So we are a full service post production company I guess you would call us, for photographers and videographers. We also edit film. We offer a full range of photo editing services from culling and editing through to delivery of complete wedding films. So we do colour grading, all that good stuff. Audio syncing, all that, you should receive a completely finished film, if not we’ll do 50% of the work and then you kind of polish it off which I know is what a lot of other companies offer in that industry. We are probably the most personalised outsourcing company there is in terms of our onboarding process. Like I was saying before, you jump on a call with one of our call handlers, they’re going to run you through what we need from you as a customer and what you should expect from us. They can answer any questions about pricing and monthly plans. We do our Freedom annual membership which we call our FAM, be part of the FAM which is quite fun.

And that entitles you to faster turnaround times and you save a lot of money actually, I think up to about 30% depending on what plan you go with. So yeah, we very much focus on delivering a personalised service. You’re able to jump on a call with one of our account handlers if you ever wanted to change your style or maybe chat to us about recent weddings and things you’d want changed. It’s very much, like I said before, born out of a… born very much out of frustration where I was using other companies to edit my work when we were shooting a lot less weddings and I wanted to just jump on a call and show them a wedding they’d returned to me and tell them what I would do differently. So that’s kind of where we differ I guess. So yeah, being a Freedom customer you can very much expect to be able to receive a final product that you’re able to deliver to your client.

If you could add one final piece of advice for our listeners, maybe something that’s made a big difference in your life personally, or in your business life, what would you say that piece of advice would be?

A few months ago read a book called, oh shoot, I think it’s called the art of getting things done.
I’m sure that’s what it’s called. And that really… it’s funny because I was reading it and I was doing a lot of the things in that book anyway because I’m a fairly efficient person and I’m kind of built that way in my head anyway. And one of the biggest things that he talks about is that it’s really difficult to be productive when your brain is reminding you to do things constantly. So he talked about doing a brain dump and you basically, anything that’s in your head you just write on a piece of paper, in a journal, or I use Asana for example because our entire team uses it. We use it for project managing stuff, I love Asana. If anyone is looking for anything like that I 100% recommend Asana for that. So everything that I think of, everything that I have to do goes into Asana.

So I will be sat on the sofa and something will come up and I will throw that, like you can write it in a notebook, you can write it in notes on your phone. I personally put it on Asana, I’ve got the app on my phone, it’s easy to do. And then every week I go through that and I say, okay, of all these things that I’ve thought of, and this could be business ideas, it could be marketing ideas, my mom’s birthday I suddenly remembered the other day and threw on there. All this stuff and I’ll just go through that weekly and belike, okay, and then I move it then into months of when I’m going to do those things. And that for me allows me to shut off and I think being able to shut off from a business is incredibly important to not burn out.

So yeah, that’s my one piece of advice that I’ve really been working hard on the last, since the beginning of the year maybe, and it’s really helped me be able to have work time and personal time and not have those two… I think as an entrepreneur and as a business person, they always cross over and I think it’s very difficult to have, okay I finish at five and I start work at nine sort of thing. I think that is really hard for a business person to do, kudos to you if you can do that. I certainly cannot, I never switch off. So just being able to write that stuff down and then just be able to forget about it rather than me sat there thinking like, don’t forget mom’s birthday, don’t forget my mom’s birthday for three days, it’s been a game changer for me.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Ryan from Freedom Edits for taking the time to chat with us!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally