Steve Saporito Education Steve Saporito

Master -servant Relationship Master -servant Relationship. You need to work as a team. You're not beneath taking the rubbish out and neither are they. Right. They're not your servant. You're working as a team. That could be part of their responsibility, but that doesn't mean they do it every time. 

Right. The one thing my staff loved about me was that we're busy with clients all the time. If the bins are full, I take them out because I'm the one that's free right now. Yeah. Right. Yeah. 

I don't do it for them. I do it for my clients because my clients don't want to see a bin that's overflowing with, you know, wipes and shit. Yeah. No, it makes sense. It makes sense. I have a friend who owns two hugely popular bakeries in LA. They're called Jones on Third. 

They're insanely popular. Joan is kind of a celebrity and she washes the dishes once a month, which in the busy cafes, really s****y job. And she does it because she didn't do it for a year. She did it one time and she discovered that the way the dish thing was set up was so inefficient. It was shocking. 

So she had the whole thing renovated. And then she said, now I'm going to wash the dishes once a month to make sure that this always stays efficient. And it made a huge difference in her business. 


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You're hiring personality first. So always you're looking at personality, which means that your interview questions need to be behavioural. Interview questions. Can you give an example of some questions you yeah. 

So what sort of role are you trying to fill? So I actually definitely feel like I don't want a photographer at all, because it's actually the one part of a business where I feel like I don't need any help. 

I'm all set there. That's bullshit. It no wind machine for you. Because you're an owner, you shouldn't be doing any part of your business. But I want to keep doing the photography. That's the part that I like different. 

That's different. Wanting to and having to is different because if you get sick or if something happens or if you want to take a holiday, your business stops. Wanting to and having to are very different things. 

And okay, you're not at that stage yet, okay? But looking into the future, if the right person is sitting there slapping you in the face and because you're so close to it, you don't take up that opportunity, I don't want that to be the case for you because that is fucking bullshit. 

That you don't need a photographer because that's part of your business. That potentially if, as an owner, you're building your brand and you're building people's desire for. Then are you really going to be doing every shoot? 


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I heard somebody. Yay! No, she's gone. She's gone. What happened? Good. She booked like everybody she talked to and the sales have been great, but I haven't even gotten the payer commission because she heard therapist and heard disgusted and she didn't 

have enough structure because she was working. Yeah. Right. She was working from home because we're in a pandemic, right? And she wasn't actually living here at the time. She was going to move here and then she would have been working with me, but she... 

I think that's... I think this is part of planning when you are hiring somebody that most people need guidelines and most people need set hours that they're expected to turn up. It's great to give people flexibility, but they need a minimum requirement. 


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Okay. So that leads me to my next question. Can I kind of ask two questions in one? Yeah, go. So, along those lines, one of the things I've kind of been obsessing over and I kind of landed on one side of it, but I'm still questioning it, is bringing in someone who I would call revenue generating. 

In other words, someone who could do lead calls or do discovery calls, versus bringing in someone who would take a host of the admin off of my plate, which would free up more of my time to get better at discovery calls and get more leads, et cetera, et cetera. 

I've kind of landed on the side of the admin, but it makes me question myself because there's no direct revenue generating that they're bringing in. And then the other piece, well, freeing. Up your time is allowing you to generate more revenue. 

Right. So the fact that they're going to be freeing up some of your time so you're right. There's two ways of looking at it. The more time that they free up for you to do the revenue to generate more revenue, the more revenue you're going to make. 


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All right, so you're about to employ your first employee. That's very exciting. But look at your face, girl. Like, what is all this rubbish anxiety about? Like, really terrified. I am fucking terrified. 

Do you want oh, it is recording. I wanted to remind you to record. If it wasn't yeah, we're recording and we're capturing every swear word that comes out of your mouth. And the deal is you're not allowed to swear more than me because I'm the king of swearing. 

Well, I was going to say I think Anita should keep track of both of our swear words, and whichever one of us swears more gets a prize. Right? I don't know what it is. Sounds good. All right. Where is this anxiety coming from? 

What are you most afraid of? Okay, so I'll start with the Good super, like, just Brief Story, which is that new amazing studio that I'm in is also in this beautiful neighborhood, which my old studio was not. 


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Episode 5:- Time Management

So one of the things that seemed to be important to you when we were speaking earlier was that you felt that you were so tied to your business that you weren't giving enough time to your family. Your family is growing and you want to spend more weekends at home, more weekends being present for your family without those thoughts of shit. 

There's so much work to do. Yeah. And you're gone. Physically gone. So I think that the trap that we fall into when we become photographers is that we believe we have to do everything. And what we seem to do is create work and create busyness. 

And we become what we've really done is created a job for ourselves. But very few of us have really become business owners. So rather than you being a worker, you need to start to think of yourself as a leader, somebody that is there to empower people. 

And I know this is going to be scary, so brace yourself for this. Brace to be better than you. You because if you only hire people like you, then they also can come with your faults. True. Yeah, that's true. 

Right. So what we tend to do is hire people like us. But people like us have the same fears, the same fears about money, the same fears about talking to people to get on the phone to do all those sort of things. 

What we have to do is hire in the talent that we don't have. So there's got to be things that you could outsource and you got to look at. And the other thing you need to do is look at where is a person's value? 

So when you think about Jen, where is her value? What's her strengths? Like connecting with the. Pete people and taking their picture with a camera hands and not sitting behind a computer screen. So she may be good at retouching and sitting behind a computer screen and editing, but if you're saying to me her true value is the way that she connects to people, and if she does get in front of somebody, is she really good at connecting? 

And does she convert bookings? Oh, for sure. Because that's where the money is 100%. That's where she's more valuable, 100%. So can we make a decision now? That part of her job, where she's sitting behind a screen, where she's not being valuable. 

I mean, there's value in doing it, but we can outsource that quite easily, right? So the fear that I've always had is that that's how I supplement part of her income. That's how her income is determined, is how much editing she's doing. 

So by outsourcing it, the money that I was paying for her to do it is going somewhere else. So she wants to make more money. So I didn't want to take that away. So you were sacrificing your time and everything to do edit for us so that you could make that money to justify your salary, but you're thinking of. 


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