087: Lucy Cooper – The Importance of a Well-Oiled Workflow & Top Tips for Wedding Galleries

The first thing I addressed was my email system. Templates were an absolute godsend for me. These are not going to be in any particular order, by the way. It’s going to be all over the place, but it will make sense at the end, I promise. So, emails for me were the first thing that I addressed. I got some really good templates together. I chatted with a few friends. We bounced ideas off of each other. Natalie Pluck, actually, really helped me quite a lot with these. She’s fantastic with her workflow, and she really helped me streamline the whole email system. Getting the business software was invaluable for me so that I could have all my templates in one place. I could automate them if I wanted to. I don’t necessarily do that very often, but it does help when you are stopped for time and you need to get things out quickly, and you don’t want to forget things, because we can’t be all places at once. We can’t be thinking about everything at once. So, having that system in place for my emails really, really helped me.

But then it sort of went on to the actual physical workflow of coming in from a wedding, what I did from then on, and even getting ready for the wedding. I have a whole system in place where I prep things well in advance, set out my uniform, and I get my bag packed. And I do that about two days before so that the day before the wedding, I’m not stressed, because even 10 years on, I still get really nervous for weddings. So, I put in place a system where two days before I will, I iron my clothes, get my bag packed, make sure I’ve got absolutely everything I need, wipe my cards, clean my cameras, because I don’t know about anybody else, but I treat my cameras pretty badly.

The one thing that I always say to people is your self-worth, and I say self-worth because we put ourselves into our work, is not based on the amount of likes you get on Instagram. Now, our entire industry now is driven by social media. And I got so hung up for so long on the amount of likes I was getting on Instagram and the amount of followers I was getting on Instagram dictating whether or not I thought a picture was good. And I’d look at that photo and think, “Oh, it must be crap because no one’s liking it.” But if your clients love it, then that’s all that matters.

And I think a lot of us all get really hung up in being almost famous within our industry, and that’s just not what we’re here for. We’re here for the clients, which I know is so easy to preach. It’s so easy for me to be like, “No, it doesn’t matter.” But I just don’t pay attention to it now. I just think if that one person finds that picture and thinks, “That’s absolutely perfect. That’s what I want,” then my job here is done. It doesn’t matter whether I get hundreds of likes or whether I get two likes. If you’re getting the bookings and you’re making people happy, that’s all that matters. And I think a lot more people need to know that because we all get so hung up and so depressed about it, don’t we?