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Formerly Creative Business Mindset Podcast™
Welcome to Business Therapy™ with Joké, where we separate the math from the drama so creative entrepreneurs can build profitable businesses with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
Joké Durojaiye, is a mom of three, Certified Life Coach, Author, serial entrepreneur and a business strategist who has lived through the real, messy middle of building businesses from the ground up. This podcast goes beyond surface level success and into the honest conversations around fear, visibility, burnout, reinvention, leadership, and what it actually takes to grow something sustainable.
If you are tired of guessing your way through business, overworking, or feeling stuck between your talent and profitability, you are in the right place.
Here, we talk about the mindset behind the money, the systems behind the success, and the emotional patterns that can either move your business forward or keep you playing small.
Whether you are a creative entrepreneur, home stager, designer, coach, speaker, or someone building a purpose driven brand, expect candid conversations, practical strategies, and real life stories designed to help you attract aligned clients, increase your income, and grow without losing yourself in the process.
This is not about overnight success. This is about building a business and a life that actually fit together.
Powered by Creative Business Network™.
Disclaimer: Business Therapy with Joké™ and Creative Business Network™ do not guarantee specific results and are not responsible for any business, financial, or personal decisions made based on the information shared on this podcast. The content reflects the personal experiences, opinions, and insights of the host and guests and is intended for educational and inspirational purposes only. Please consult qualified professionals for financial, legal, tax, medical, or mental health advice specific to your situation.
No paying clients will hire you based on your talent.
Perception is what brings them in.
And perceptions are built on brands.
You didn't lose that client because your price was too high,
even though that's what you thought.
You lost them long before you ever spoke to them.
You were probably just part of their process of collecting bids.
Ouch.
You lost them in the scroll within
three seconds because that is how long it takes for somebody to decide that you
are the one. I know, I know it is not a fair process but it is reality and
that's why today's guest Laurie who has spent the last two decades proving
exactly why this is true.
And she's worked in luxury real estate.
She's worked with several seven-figure business owners and coached them in logistics, sales, marketing, you name it.
And through all of it, what she keeps seeing is the same heartbreaking pattern.
Brilliant business owners doing incredible work but they
are invisible online or their presence is not matching the value that they can provide
and it's not reflecting exactly who they are. She has seen it all and she could not unsee it and
that's why she's built a whole business around fixing this branding problem once and for all for creative business owners.
You know her as BuzzBabeCreative on Instagram.
And I want you to help me welcome my friend Lori Graham to the show today.
Welcome, Lori.
Hey, friends.
Welcome to the Business Therapy Podcast with yours truly, Joker.
Business is like jigsaw truly, Jokey.
Business is like jigsaw puzzles, but it is no child's play.
The excitement of creating something of your own until you realize half the pieces are missing.
Been there, done that.
Fell flat on my black behind with scars to show for it.
I wear many hats, mom, author, certified life coach. At the core,
I'm just a Nigerian girl in America, navigating the glorious mess of entrepreneurship while living
my soft life with a side of crisis. I've figured out a few things along the way and I've got the
receipts. Join me as we separate the math from the drama, one small business at a time. Let's go.
drama one small business at a time let's go it's such a pleasure to be here i'm so honored and yes all of that that you said perception as stagers say is everything right there is a missing link
with so many staging businesses that they don't see the perception for themselves being very
important so thank you for giving me this platform and opportunity to speak
with you today. Of course. So Laurie is known as, you know, the brand experts, specifically works
with home stagers and I think designers as well. So Laurie, today we're going to talk all things
branding that goes beyond home staging, even though those are the people, you're going to get a lot of nuggets from there, regardless of the business you're doing.
This podcast is all about creative women. So if you're in the creative business of any sort,
this, you're in the right place. But before we go into the nitty gritty and the technicalities
and all the things about branding, I want us to get to know Lori a little bit
more personally because all the amazing things you do today, I always like to start with the
story behind the glory. How did we get here? So just a few short words, tell us how you got here,
where you came from. To kind of summarize, I guess you could say, let's just go back
20 years. I got into, I got a job doing property management and coincidentally travel. It was a
husband and wife crew. He loved to travel. She liked real estate. And so they opened a company
together and I kind of worked my way up. And then I transferred, I met my amazing husband. And I moved out to where he was. And I got a job at a luxury real estate brokerage. And I did
transaction coordinating. And it was it's in La Cunada, California. And it's very, very, very
high end luxury, working with those luxury agents. And then I transitioned to Prudential, which is now Berkshire
Hathaway, and continued to work in that industry. I showed homes, I did everything in the luxury
industry. And one thing that was missing back then, this is like 2007, 2008, when the market crashed,
is staging in these luxury multi-million dollar homes was not a thing. It was more for the interior designers
but I cannot tell you the number of spooky houses I sat in for open houses that were vacant. That
should just be a seller of staging anyway. Nobody wants to come into a big giant house that's vacant.
So I was in luxury real estate for about 10 years and then I moved to Texas and I got a job for a
home staging company and I believe the attractor was the fact that I had so
many years in luxury real estate that same business owner also was the founder
of the home staging and redesign Alliance which there I stayed for seven
years coaching six and seven figure home staging business owners in all the different areas of their business until one day I said my sweet spot is in visuals and in branding.
And through that opportunity of being able to help so many business owners really level themselves up visually, the way they look, the way their messaging's coming
across, I realized this is my sweet spot. So Boss Babe Creative came along. Now I work with
home staging business owners, interior designers, realtors, but we also just work with influencers
and entrepreneurs because at the end of the day, visuals matter everywhere. It is how everything is perceived.
Any business has a certain perception around it.
And if you really peel back the layers, it's how they show up, whether it's on a billboard, it's in a brochure, or whether it's online.
And that is my sweet spot.
I love helping people shine.
So that's kind of how I got to where I am now.
I love it.
And I love to do this story behind the glory for,
because it's important for people who are listening,
who are in that spot where they're not sure you are in the,
maybe should I, would I, you know,
and to hear where somebody comes from and all the things that they've done, because we all see the amazing things on Instagram that everybody is this big person.
But how did they get there? I think those stories are missing.
And that's why it's important for us to say that you walked your way up pretty much.
Pretty much.
And the get rich quick thing is all over the place right now that nobody wants to bootstrap and do the thing step by step.
When somebody comes into my coaching program and they're like, yeah, but I did this.
I'm like, how long have you been doing this?
You know, I'm not teaching a get rich quick scam here.
This is a get rich quick scam here. This is a get rich slowly. If you put in the work and you have your mind right, and you have all the, I'm giving you all the tools, but you still have to do the work
to get there. So thank you for sharing background. So now you talk about, you are known for the
visuals, the visuals of how you look, how you present, how you show up, because that's what creates the perception.
Perception, yeah, all the words.
So all the big words. So we say something in the home staging industry about how we're creating perceived value.
When you stage a home that is for sale, you're creating perceived value. When you stage a home that is for sale, you're creating perceived value.
It is not so much that this home is $2 million, that's what it's worth, but we use visuals
to create that.
And when you're doing that for a house, would you agree that it is exactly the same idea
behind creating a personal brand and a business brand.
One thousand percent. Everything you do in your business revolves around a perceived value.
When it comes to home staging, I am so detailed with my stagers that I want them to show up in their brand colors on a consultation.
I want their visuals to represent the actual work and the ROI that they give realtors. But a lot of
times they're just so worn out and tired from wearing all the hats and doing all the things
that this doesn't even show up on their plate and so they get frustrated because realtors are negotiating their contracts with them or their
quotes with them right but then when I look at their social media their website I talk to them
or I see them like maybe a story or whatever I'm like like, well, yeah, because if you don't value yourself in your
work and how you look, why would anybody else? Why aren't people wanting to pay our quotes? Why
do they think I'm too expensive? Well, you have to really take a step back and look at your all
of your marketing materials. Number one, do they align across all platforms? So I was just speaking
with somebody yesterday and I was like, I think it's time that you
upgrade your website, at least the bare minimals.
Go in and change out your photos.
Now that you're working with a photographer and you have these great photos, go in and
at least do that.
Because if they find you first on Instagram and then they go to book you and they see
an old, older version of what you did maybe
when you first started they're gonna be like wait a minute is this the same person and vice versa
or if you're doing pop buys at brokerages is what you're visually presenting to them actually match
the level that you're staging so many staging business owners miss this part they don't find
their own value in doing socials or they just
really hate social media and they don't want to deal with it. But what I want to challenge every
business owner is when you think about social, especially a business owner of a certain age group
like my age group who really look at social media in a totally different way than maybe the younger
business owners, they're using it as a tool. We came up with Facebook and really just sharing
our day-to-day life, not thinking too much about curating it or what we're presenting.
But to think of it as a marketing tool, just like if you're getting flyers made, business cards made. When you're going to market and you're shopping for perfectly amazing furniture and accessories that you're going to fill this beautiful home with, you're filling your feed.
Fill the feed with the beauty, with the perception that you give when people walk in.
I mean, I could literally talk about it all day because I've seen it and had to coach people on it over and over again.
Like, yes, it does matter.
Or just saying, hey, you need to allocate a certain amount of your funds for your business into partnering with a photographer who really understands how to capture your work.
And this is just, it doesn't have to be on every stage.
Because the thing I get is, oh my gosh, that's it's so expensive and I can't I don't have the
budget for that you have to move things around to make the budget for that
because otherwise you're just gonna stall out and get really tired and
frustrated and so in order to increase your perceived value to have pricing
confidence you need to show what you can do.
This is all that people need to hear because I think about branding, like you were saying that you think we're talking about home stages, yes, but this applies to any creative business.
I'll also use my own staging business as an example, Genesis Home Staging.
When I started, one of the things that I invested
heavily in was amazing photography. Because I know that once I'm trying to attract a certain
kind of clientele, and for me to attract those clients, I need to put that face forward. Yes,
it's very expensive to hire photographers. And like you said,
you don't have to do it for every single home. You just pick some amazing ones that we've done
and we photographed the heck out of them. They still live on my website till today,
eight years later. It was an investment then. And I did it. I did it. I did it. And I don't
have to do so much of that anymore. And we can still slice and dice because there's so much you can do
with one photography session. As you know, you can slice, dice, put it everywhere. And this becomes
the face of the brand. And because of that, at the beginning of my business, I wasn't scared to
charge the price that I knew I was worth. I wasn't scared to put out those proposals like
take it or leave
it. What are you making your decision based on? If you're making your decision on pricing, I may
not be the person for you. If you want value, this is what I can do for you. And I have receipts
to prove it. And that's just what it is. And it plays so much into, you said you get stressed,
you get frustrated and all of that because you're doing the work behind the scenes.
But if nobody is seeing that work and it's not translating into the language that your clientele, the target market that you're looking for, that they understand.
Because I hear a disconnect.
I see somebody come to me like, I want to do luxury only.
Okay, let's take a look at your portfolio.
It is not speaking luxury.
You're not going to attract luxury.
And there's so much that goes into being a luxury brand.
You have to also be able to speak the language.
I will come into a coaching session like, okay, bring all your assets to me.
We'll take a look at them. Like you don't speak to a, you know, a luxury person in that tone of
voice. You are catering to their every needs white glove service. So you have to show all of that.
And I've seen you go, like you said, granule, very granule in everything you do, even your brand colors, what you wear online.
I see you're carefully curated.
I'm like, okay, girl, I don't know how you do that because I love to wear color.
I'm in blue today.
My favorite is pink.
I love pink and white.
But every once in a while, I throw in a bold color because that's just me.
And I understand from your perspective what that means. And so
help us understand, I've heard of storyboarding, how you get into people's heads. I know that you
do that too for your clients. Like you really want to get to know the core of who they are,
who they want to serve, what makes them tick and what makes their client.
So you can put all of that together as their front-facing storyboarding that is consistent.
It's not just about the logo.
It's the messaging.
It's the mindset.
It's what comes through.
So walk us through how that plays into the branding process.
Hey, quick word before we continue.
If you are afraid to start a new venture
or you're ready for the next step
but not sure how to get there,
I want to invite you to join me inside business therapy
at jokedurojaie.me.
This is where we take it to the next level.
We talk it out and map out your next steps so you
can move forward with clarity and confidence. Jokedurojai.me. I'll leave a link for you in the
show notes. All right, let's get back to the episode. Which is so fun for me. Thank you.
Okay, so it's the experience, right? It's the experience we have. So a lot of times
when I speak, when I get the opportunity to speak at brokerages, I will start because I'm not only
working with home stagers. I am actually out in the trenches with at brokerages speaking about
branding, but guess what is one of the top things in a realtor branding
themselves home staging right so you have to stage the property so think
about this when like I don't know if you're like visual like me but like
imagine you're at a mall and I don't know Rodeodeo Drive in LA, right? And you walk into a Chanel store, you are literally
going to have an experience, right? Everything. There's a smell, a certain fragrance that they
have. Their staff have requirements on what they wear, how they stand, shoulders back,
their hands in front of them. They walk up to you and they're not like hey
girl hey how are you they are very professional their voices are probably even a little bit lower
hello how are you today is there anything i can help you find or if they have somebody coming in
they already know everything about that hello miss graham I'm so glad to see you today. I have your selection over here. That is a whole experience, right? People don't seem to think about that sometimes.
And when they see that and we play this game, who, what, how, who are they? What do they sell?
And how do they make people feel? I go through Chanel. I go through Nike. I go through In-N-Out,
which is a favorite in Southern California. And they all
stick to one thing, their branding, their visual perception and how they make a person feel. And
it's fun to watch the light bulbs come on to people's head because they use these people. They
go to In-N-Out because they have the same thing over and over again. They wear the Nike trainers
because they're into fitness.
And so all of those things do matter.
In fact, this morning at the gym,
I have a great example of how I articulate my brand.
My gym clothes are in my,
everything I have is in my brand color.
I do have a few like blues and reds
and things like that for special occasions.
But I came to this realization, I am my brand. And why do I choose my brand? Just like we talk about a lot of times with our
brokers or our realtors when they're like, well, why can't I have a neon green pillow on the sofa?
We talk about color psychology, right? And so the late one of the ladies at the gym was like,
I love like you're always wearing the same colors you just look like so refined and like so peaceful and I said bingo I said when I
was building my brand I thought what is Sager's feeling right now chaos frustration I want them
to come to me and I want them to feel calm I want them to feel like, okay, I can do this. And I personally feel calm when everything around
me is more muted. I mean, there's always a time in summer where I'm like, I want to go do something,
you know, I want to incorporate some bright color, and then I have to rein it back in like,
no, Lori, that's not it, right? I got to stick to what I know. So it's the same thing when you're
building your brand, or when you're building out your grid.
You don't just choose a random template on Canva.
Now, I use templates. I go and I find templates and I use them for my clients, but they're not the ones on Canva.
They're ones maybe I purchased or I created and I stick to that template for them and their brand colors and their brand font with their imagery.
People don't seem to like think they're just too tired to think about it at the end of the day.
But what it does is it builds up your credibility and your visibility. So if you see the red palm
tree for the Southern California people on something, you're going to know it's in and out.
If you see the Nike swoosh without even knowing it's Nike or it's saying Nike, you're going to know it's Nike, right?
That's what you need to build to eventually build up your credibility to require the amount and get
the amount that you want to get paid and to attract the clients that you want. They already
are expecting a certain thing and And that's the disconnect.
So your luxury client, which I always giggle a little bit, because the amount of times I've talked to stagers that are like, I want to do luxury, and then they don't realize they put
$1 million worth of inventory into a luxury house, right? They're like, well, do you have
that money to source and spend, right? Or even the level of having to deal with not maybe just the realtor, but maybe
the house manager, the estate manager, having to deal with all these other people and actually give
them more attention because they are luxury. All of that goes into it. And those people,
if you're trying to attract luxury, they're going to expect from you a higher level,
a more structured level a more
professional level so that means when you show up for the walkthrough you're
not showing up in your leggings and a t-shirt in a hat that's not branded like
you and your sneakers your it may be uncomfortable you can even what I'll
give you the leggings wear some cute high-end sneakers and a blazer yes
they're gonna love it wear your company hat that says your company on it that's structured and cute.
Like, you can do comfortable but luxury, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's the granule that I get into.
All the staff members, no matter what, whether it is a starter home or a luxury home, all the staff members are branded, right? Everybody's showing up
professional. Everybody's on their P's and Q's. This is how you build a strong brand that people
want to be, you know, to do business with or that you'll be known for. And you can add in,
once you get your structure, you can sprinkle in your personality, right?
Like if you're known for a certain catchphrase
or you're known for wearing really quirky things,
like you add that in after you lay the foundation, right?
I love how you said that you build the foundation
and then you can do sprinkles.
It's like the vanilla ice cream
and then you add the sprinkles on top of it for personality.
Love that.
So I mean mean everything you're
saying you can see me nodding because i've been there done that still doing it and there are
people who have interacted with our brand and agents randomly that i haven't even worked with
they will send me a text i just saw this and i knew it was you and i knew it was your staging all the
time we still get that i saw this is this you somebody would just go and be like this is your
staging right like yeah they just know the signature it's not like and somebody also said
it's not like every house looks the same but there's just a an aesthetic that you're known for
in the industry and that is because we have intentional,
it doesn't happen by accident. And branding, intentionally branding with the right message,
the right colors, the right whatever that means to you. And it's not just whatever that means to
you because you can't go on a whim and be like, oh, I love purple and you're fantasizing over it and you're building all
these things. It is about the people that you want to attract. If purple is the thing and you
want to attract, you know, the 15 year olds who cannot pay for your service, then by all means,
go for it. But you have to match the level of people that you want to attract
into your business. I am in also, I'm a student of, you know, all things. I'm working with Amy
Porterfield right now, and she's teaching me all this mindset things and all this, you know,
messaging and all those things that I'm bringing into my business. And it's never ending. Nobody is an expert.
And that's where I like to stay in my zone of genius.
If you feel like you are the branding expert, you are the this, you can be everything.
And somebody like Lori, who this is her jam all day long, it's her zone of genius,
call her and be like, girl, I'm at my wit's end.
Can you help me build my brand and she will hook you up and i i see you know i do some stuff in canva i consider myself very creative
but it can be so exhausting sometimes i haven't figured out i'm sure you'll look at my instagram
feed and be like girl you need me and i do need some help but I haven't figured out like that story budding like what
story am I telling what am I refining who am I attracting I I know it's in my heart but I don't
know that I'm articulate I'm just putting myself on blast right now because I built yeah it's true
I built a home staging business I knew exactly what I was doing I mean not at the beginning not at the
very start but as I built it I learned what what that was and then I refined the message around it
I don't do a lot of Instagram for the staging business anymore but we have a background
marketing that is still consistent with what we do and all of that is working into six-figure months. So I am not fixing what is not broken right now.
But there's also the layer of now I'm building a new business with a coaching program, with a teaching, with a speaking engagement.
And I'm learning who I am in that situation and trying to build that up.
So there's never, you have to be introspective first of all
know who you are who you want to start because yes it's about the people you want to serve but
it also has to be something that doesn't drain you something that that's it's naturally the way
you approach things then it will make your business so much easier. And when the branding is supporting that
to attract the right people, then it makes it a little easier. Because let's get into this about
what we see in the home staging business. Everybody's carrying this heavy weight.
Business is not easy. But when we are always appearing as if, it breaks my heart, first of all, but it also
annoys the heck out of me.
Like, everybody's walking around with this heavy thing on their shoulder.
Just on their shoulders.
Like, it's such a pain in the butt.
You build this business.
Why is it taking over your life?
Like, that's a lot of, you get get into things and because you see people doing this and
yeah you want to do that yeah you want to you don't have any structure around it and you don't
know what and you're not reaching out for help you're spending all the money buying all the
inventory because that's the fun part right you want to go shopping you can shop all day long put
all those things together and you're still heavy and now you're in debt you owe so much money because you're buying stupid things but you haven't spent that money to build up the
brand that will support what you're buying to put in the houses right and this goes for any business
as well but i am talking about home seders because i have been one i have coached a lot of them and i
still do and i would like to see people lighting up their load to
embrace this. You lose the joy because when you start a business, it comes with a lot of
passion and joy. Along the way, you lose that when you have all these things going on that you have
not addressed. I have been there, done that. I'm not standing on a soapbox just preaching.
I have been there, done that. I'm not standing on a soapbox just preaching.
I have been in a place where I was completely like deflated.
I was ready to walk away from it. And I had to ask myself, like, girl, you build this.
You know, I can cancel appointments. I can walk away. I can do whatever I want.
And that is the freedom of building a business. but then we can make it become a burden.
And that's why I started also the business therapy, because we all need that therapy to get back into alignment and find the joy again.
And it starts with the messaging, what we put out there to attract the right people.
I'm just end of rant.
Well, first, I wanted to say to say one it is perfectly okay and um the the thing i like to say for stagers building a business brand is to develop your own signature style okay that was i
wrote that down i'm a writer downer second what this whole purpose of this is to build your credibility. And so I think you're doing a
fantastic job. I love all the different pictures of you on your Instagram, like there's the library,
there's you traveling, there's all of these different things. I think you do a really good
job of showing how to live this lifestyle while running multiple businesses. Because honestly, that's our dream.
Like when you start a business, it is exciting. And you're like, Oh, look at me. I'm a boss,
babe. I run a business. And then you're like, Oh my gosh, help. I can't like literally drowning,
right. And then where I am so thankful that you're you you created your program is because
there's this thing that happens and i'm
just going to be real real and transparent because i ran a coaching business and i am not only in
doing business with a lot of stagers but a lot of the stagers are actually my friends right like
even ones that i don't work with same there's this there's this thing that happens and I want
to encourage every person that hears this to maybe look at yourself okay because there's this thing
that happens where a stager who's like really worn out and tired happens to stumble across another stager who's really tired and worn out.
And what do they do? Oh, I hate this. Oh, gross. Did this happen? Oh, gross. And the thing is,
is that when we complain, I don't know, to me, I feel like it's the enemy. It literally sometimes
feels so good. You're like, just like negative, negative negative and you almost like you feel empowered and there's
this energy that wells up in you that ain't it sis that is not it that is not this is not going
to get you any further in your business yeah and i feel for the coaching businesses out there that
have multiple people that they're they spend time, all their energy, all their resources trying to help other stagers to come up.
Right. And then the stagers all meet each other in this coaching business and then they get to complaining and then they're not getting whatever they looked for when they joined the coaching business.
And now they think it's the coaching business when really what it is, is not being self-aware. Yeah. I don't run that. What I run
is a very tight ship. I have a structure, a mindset framework and all the things. I don't
have time for the complaints. You have a specific time that we're going to get into the specific
thing that you want to talk about and we're going to deal with it.
And I'm not going to hear all your stories of all the, you know, we just want to get to the bottom of it to get you from where you are to where you need to be.
I don't have time for that.
It doesn't serve anyone.
And this is why I took myself out of the other group thing as well.
I'm not on Facebook actively in the groups. I shut down everything.
I muted them. I cannot hear the negativity because it doesn't help it. It doesn't move
anybody forward. And it just like when, when, when, when, when, like you said, it makes you
feel good in the moment. But then how has that helped your life? How has that moved your business
forward? Yeah, exactly it and I
would like I love that's why I said I love that you have what you have for the
stages who aren't part of your program just consider the fact that you may need
someone to talk to like some therapy but here's the thing the thing that's going
to move the needle for you is saying hey this is
the problem this is my responsibility this is what I've done to either cause it or like maybe
it's like I don't know how to do payroll or I don't know how to do you know manage people very
well I have a short temper like own the issue because you are the business owner and then if you can't solve it
then don't talk about it anymore until you're ready to solve it yeah because that's where I
see holds a lot of people back same with social like it's almost talking about it in a negative
way and not doing anything about it in their mind might give them a pass but it's not it's like don't you really want to move
forward yeah and it's just that cycle it just keeps going around the circle and if you find
yourself you haven't really moved you've just been doing this on the hamster wheel your business is
not any better you are not any clearer in your mind and you're just stuck and you can't talk for the longest time
yeah i agree and so wherever you're at in your business just be encouraged home stagers that
staging is not going away not with ai not with virtual staging we still need actual people with actual experience and expertise to come into physically walk into
a space and say, this is how I'm staging to the bones of the home. One of the people I work with,
Bianchi Interiors, she does such a fantastic job of dressing a home to its character, right? I not only do their socials, but I do their photography.
So on all of their properties, I'm going out and I'm doing the photography for them.
And so you're, I'm visually able to capture what they're doing, right? And Pantia and her partner,
Sharanya have told me time and time again, that choice has directly given them price confidence because now
they actually show what they're doing right because they made they owned where their weakness was and
said you know what we're just gonna have to bite the bullet make some adjustments it was slow at
first it was like okay can you come film this one property and when I photograph a property I'm
probably especially for stagers or designers they're probably walking away with 60 I've even delivered
a hundred images because there's so many different angles you can get with
photography for vignettes and in different rooms and all the cool stuff
they bring in and they literally could make that last for months if not a year
and then once they once they started
seeing like oh gosh now we're we're sending these images out on flyers and dropping them off at you
know brokerages and making partnerships with brokerages that you know hey we'll include
photography all of that type of stuff has enabled them to request what they're worth. Not even just saying like, oh, we're going to charge
more now because there's more expense. No, no, no. You've always deserved. Now they can see the
value in what you do. And so that's never going to go away. So whenever you do, if you look at
your budget, like every quarter, if you do it once a a year something really good to put into that is
where are areas of weakness whether that's coaching whether that's in purchasing or getting
rid of old inventory whatever that looks like investing partnering with a photographer not
just a real estate photographer but an interior photographer someone that knows how to tell a story and draw emotion out in an image,
just like you draw emotion out when you do a really cool, like maybe dining room table,
or you know, where people could be like, Oh, I'd love to have a dinner party here or seating area
and, you know, a secondary living area. That's drawing emotion. So you need to one look for a
photographer in your local area that gets it. Figure it out in your budget. So you need to one look for a photographer in your local area that gets it.
Figure it out in your budget. Do you need to increase your quote so that it covers that
photographer and at what price point or what homes not every home, it doesn't have to be a mansion
that you're getting photography in. It can literally be like in California, we have so
many cool houses, we have mid century modern Spanish revival, we just have so like all kinds of cool architect, it could be a really tiny home that's
$2 million, quite honestly, and have really cool features that you want to photograph that,
right? Because that's actually hard to when people walk in and they see it vacant or whatever,
they can't visualize themselves there. So you doing is gonna take you so much further and you're gonna be happier as a
staging business owner and also have the opportunity to not work in the business
but maybe you work on the business and then after you've worked on the business
like you you can start a new business and this business can run over here just
perfectly fine without you.
And then you have that freedom that we all want, right?
You know, I'm thinking the same thing.
I'm 30 minutes from the beach.
I just want to go lay on the beach.
But I have so much work to do.
I can't get there, right?
Eventually you can when you hire in your weaknesses and you present yourself in such a way that your value is easily seen and an experience is had when someone sees what you do.
Yes, I love that.
You know, it's all about we created it for freedom,
but we end up getting shackled to it.
And I would love to see more creative business owners get to that point
where they enjoy the freedom that they're building
for themselves and return to joy and return to passion, it is possible. Like Laurie said,
hire for your weaknesses. You're not meant to carry this alone. You're not meant to,
you cannot build a business alone for the longest time.
Yes, we all start alone, as we should, because we don't know what the hell we're doing.
But as we build, as we grow, open up yourself to find your own opportunities.
You can thrive in what you do and allow somebody else to help you build the other parts and that's what
the business ecosystem should be built around you have your zone of genius i have mine you have yours
everybody has this what if we all collaborated and so everybody can shine in what they do and everybody can bring what they do to help you,
to help you, to help me, so that we all shine and we can all go lay on the beach.
Yes, yes, please. Let's do that. Are you going to put together a conference or a retreat or something?
I mean, thinking about that, you know, the logistics of it, because every time I go on my retreats,
everybody's always like, I want to come next time.
I want to come next time. But I need to think carefully about I would love to do that.
So I'll keep you on the list. You're already in my ecosystem, my list.
So you'll hear about everything that's coming up.
This has been a much, much needed conversation, and I'm glad that we could do this.
much needed conversation and I'm glad that we could do this and I hope that everybody can take away something to start showing up because what you're worth is way beyond the hours that you put
in. You have so much value that you carry but if people can't see it, you'll continue to compete
on pricing. You'll continue to be beaten down and
feel frustrated and stressed with the joy that you've built. So I hope that you're able to get
to that point. And on that note, I'm going to sign off. Thank you all for listening. And, you know,
Laurie, thank you for joining me. I've had fun. Thank you. Such an honor. And I always feel so energetic afterwards.
Yes.
You've been listening to the Business Therapy Podcast produced by the Media Designers.
I'm your host and favorite business therapist, Joke Durojaye.
Remember to share, like, and subscribe.
Thank you for listening and keep doing all the things until next time.
It's a wrap.