Vicki Taufer – Episode 008 – A Photographer Podcast Interview

From Nothing to Profit

Today Vicki Taufer tells about what is working now in her business. Vicki has been in the industry almost 20 years now. She focuses on artistic portraiture, located in Morton, Illinois (pumpkin capital of the world). Vicki teaches internationally and values work life balance. Work life balance constantly changes and just being aware of trying to be balanced is important. She went from 300 sessions/year, 9 employees, to Vicki being the only full time employee and being more hands on. Now Vicki goes into the client’s home and does design work, producing some of their highest sales over the past 20 years. “I’m working smarter, not harder” Vicki is hopeful about our industry as she’s getting higher sales than ever, offering full service experiences clients aren’t getting elsewhere. Doing things you can’t duplicate with snapshots on phones gives clients things they are willing to pay for. Vicki tells us about what it was like starting their business 20 years ago, and what to do and not do. She received the advice “hire slowly, fire quickly” and highly recommends following that advice. She also talks about how much more profitable in person sales are than online sales and not leaving money on the table as the client doesn’t know what their images will look like large on their walls if you don’t show them. Resources: WHCC Podcast by Jed Taufer “This Conversation” https://conversation.whcc.fm/ WHCC card editor - https://www.whcc.com/products/cards WHCC inspiration guides: https://www.whcc.com/inspiration Read Full Transcript Transcription was done by Temi.com which means it’s an AI generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video. Vicki: 00:00 Hey, this is Vicki Taufer and you are listening to from nothing to profit. Speaker 2: 00:05 Welcome to from nothing to profit, a photographer's podcast with Matt and Kia where each week they talk to photographers about what is working in their business now so you can swipe those ideas and grow your business faster. Good morning everyone. Kia: 00:22 We are so excited that you are here. It may not be morning where you are, but it is where we are and we are interviewing one of my favorite people in the world today. Her name is Vicky topher and she has been involved in the photography industry for almost 20 years now. She focuses on artistic portraiture and loves to photograph people, pets and she does a lot of commercial shoots as well. She is located in Morton, Illinois right now, although she shoots all over the country and she has a passion for people. Her camera journey has taken her all over the world and if you follow her you'll see that she's taught internationally, traveled internationally, and her goal right now is a healthy work life balance and I bet you that that's something that we're going to talk quite a bit about. Matt: 01:14 Well, awesome. Welcome Vicky. So tell me a little bit more. So where do you live in Illinois is like more like central Illinois. It's a suburb of Chicago. Vicki: 01:21 Tell me more. Yeah, yeah, we are in central Illinois and the small or smaller town that both my husband and I grew up in. You know, we've moved around a little bit but have ended up back here. It's about 17,000 people a couple of hours south of Chicago, a couple of hours north of St Louis. Matt: 01:39 Awesome. Yeah, I, when I was in college, my buddy, his parents moved to decatur and so we every break we have, we would drive out to the cater like and like 16 hours on had all the way out there. It was, it was actually a lot of fun, but I probably wouldn't move to decatur, but it was, it was a cool experience to have in common. Vicki: 01:57 Right. And that's about an hour from us, but yeah, I mean the communities all in central Illinois there, it's similar in that it's a lot of smaller, you know, industry farming communities and then we have the bigge...