My 2025 Goals: Photography, Business, and Big Plans Ahead (Getting Real)

hey what's up everybody okay this is my obligatory 2025 goals video January's almost over this is my first video this needs to be turned down a little hot on that mic anyways my photography goals for this year still number one top of the list getting an agent will see if that's ever going to happen but I think I have a lot of work to do on my portfolio in order to make that happen so one of the things that I'm also trying to do is is do some pro bono work and I'm uh anticipating being able to do that with some nonprofits in the area I happen to be at a Food Bank nearby they put out an announcement on my local buy nothing Facebook group saying hey they have too many like uh soda drinks like bubbly and my mother's husband loves bubbly and they had just like cases and cases of mango bubbly so I went to pick that up but I ended up talking to like the director of the nonprofit and they said that they put on a fashion show and I said I would love to do some work and help you promote cuz I've been thinking a lot recently about my photography and what I want to do and this Channel and what I want to do I feel like I don't have purpose and so I've been thinking about like I what I want to do I have this set of skills and uh and this I want to be able to use my skill set to help people so I'm I'm really trying to figure out like how I can do that with my photography but also with this Channel and then also in in in my personal life and so this sort of like felt like a fortuitous moment they had this thing that really fits my skill set that I can help uh promote and I'm also looking to like help create head shot for Refugee families that have arrived here in Canada and maybe now like you know they didn't have to before but now they have to have like a LinkedIn to help them get a job and and so if I can organize a day of just doing head shot on a volunteer basis for people who need them but couldn't afford them they're they're new here everything in Canada is is pretty expensive right now you know probably not getting any cheaper so I want to do things that uh have purpose I want to be doing a lot more commercial work not just the consumer and corporate work that I do but I want to be working in advertising however uh advertising is kind of like devoid of purpose so I want to be able to do like humanitarian work I would love with this channel to just make videos that could fund my travels to work with organizations you know maybe an organization that is is uh working on building permaculture food forests in the Sudan something like that that's something that that interests me and I would love to be able to do that so in terms of getting an agent I'm you know I'm still like reworking my portfolio with more attention to video and I'm really going to be leaning into my comedy background my background in improvisation and conveying that personality in my work and getting that my sense of humor across in in my work personality character work also going to be working on uh art projects and and leaning into sort of the artistic side of what I do I've been working on an Artisans project and and really approaching things uh you know if you've watched videos on this channel before you will have heard me talk about my approach to photography is well at least my artistic work is that of a visual Anthropologist and and that's something that I want to keep working on and investigating and pushing further into and I have another personal project that's not that but it's more creating portraits around a very specific lighting approach and my goal is to shoot many portraits this year with a a singular approach to lighting not only that lighting for all of my work but just for this project have that specific approach and have that be the kind of work that I'm sharing out like sort of my personal work and then also expanding the corporate side of my business I've I've set myself up with that with the SEO and building out my website I'm already seeing dividends uh from that I have a couple of calls this week with potential clients for corporate shoots and so the work that I did on the SEO on my website is starting to pay off as far as Studio Builder goes last year I released an ebook called the ultimate SEO guide for photographers I've been doing SEO longer than I've been doing photography for almost no uh over 20 years now I've been doing SEO I had to learn it out of necessity but I'm I'm very good at it now if I'm on almost always the first result on Google for the keywords that I want to rank for so I took everything that I know and I put it into an ebook it's over 120 Pages it's actually over 140 pages but that's if you count like the table of contents and like the workbook that I've included in the like the work plan that I've included in the back but there's 120 pages of like my knowledge into that book very neatly organized and it's also I don't think it's daunting I think it's like hey here's a concept I I wanted to make make sure that I explained it very simply and then provided multiple examples how to create like categorize and tag your blog posts and then create meta blogs and and things like that I want to get this channel to 20,000 subscribers I'm approaching 10,000 organically so I think 10,000 would happen this year so I'm going to try and push to 20 uh if you haven't subscribed yet then by you know now's your chance if I'm at 20 by some miracle then help me get to 50 let's continue pushing and and I really want to like make this channel row and allow it to Foster the purpose-built work that I want to do in in helping other people also when I used to shoot weddings I had developed a system to generate leads cuz organically a wedding business at least here in Southern Ontario might get 50 organic leads a year that's it our wedding season here is really only from about may maybe April into October maybe November depending on the weather but generally in the winter really we have like 5 to six months where we're not shooting that's one of the reasons why I initially got my Irish passport prior to covid my Irish citizenship was so that I could live in Europe in the winter and shoot destination weddings throughout the winter so that I could have a full calendar year of weddings instead of just half a year of weddings and then a half a year of trying to do Studio work and make the studio work for my business I developed a system where I was instead of having to rely on like 50 organic leads a year I was able to generate over a 100 leads a month in some months over 125 I've been working with a photographer here locally teaching her my whole system and we're sort of in like the final stages and what she like needs to do to continue to allow that to grow but I was just talking to her last week and she said I'm I'm a little overwhelmed and she's like I currently have 90 requests that I have not even answered yet and so that's something that I I'm putting a course together on that whole system if you're interested in that let me know in the comments ments because that will help me speed up the production of that course but that course is like just all this knowledge that I had building my business to what would amount to almost ,500 leads a year that is just like insane like the system was so good that like you as the photographer get to choose who you want as your clients not the other way around you're not begging and trying to get every single lead that comes through the door to sign on with you as a photographer cuz that's not realistic I think when I was running the system I only needed a booking rate of about 3 or 4% which is insane it didn't need to be 50% it was like 3 or 4% and I got to pick which clients I wanted to work with I've created a list of goals and I'm tracking them I'm I'm using clickup to manage my my goals my to-do list I'm even using it for mood boards for shoots and so I'm I've like put all of my planning into clickup and I looked at other production and like task man management software things like that clickup is the one that works for me because you can really sort of customize like the the layout of things and as a tool I was using simple like uh todoist and like Microsoft tasks Google Tasks I tried all that Assa Monday but clickup because I can set a priority on the goals and then I can also create custom Fields I can really sort of organize the goals in the way that like my brain thinks about them not only planning goals writing them down which improves your success of them but I've also scheduled it into my calendar every week to review where my goals are for the quarter and where my goals are for the year so I have quarterly goals and I have annual goals I look at my business that way what's happening in q1 Q2 Q3 and Q4 and plan out my year accordingly so that it's not just like you know more of an ethereal I have a goal this is going to be done by this day and if I get this done in q1 then in Q2 I'll be doing doing this and once this is done in Q2 that will lead to this in Q3 so I have dates that are very specific about when I need to start doing things and and have them finished by and so it's very clear I use the smart goal system I find it very helpful for me and my brain in the way that I think and trying to like take the chaos that's in here and and translating that then into like goals that I can use and have an app on my phone if I think of something that oh I need to do or have an idea for a video in the middle of the night I just like open the app I add the task and you know I don't hope I remember it the next day I'm very active about writing things down and and adding them and and trying to organize this ADHD chaos that you know is up here that I have a very hard time trying to organize and clickup I'm finding is very helpful for that stick around we'll see how much of that I actually get done or if I just you know if I get off of my weight tracking goals the world goes to hell and I just start she cake in it every week you know and and see we'll see what happens uh let me know what your goals are in the comments and subscribe to the channel like this video and do all the things buy the SEO book you can get it the link in the description and then let me know if you are a wedding photographer who wants to learn my system for generating more than 100 leads a month that's it take care