At PhotoDay, we believe that investing in continuing education is essential for expanding your volume photography business. And we’re not alone in that conviction! Many well-known educators and thought leaders in the industry consider PhotoDay their best business partner.
With our platform and solutions helping streamline workflows and increase sales, photographers have new, valuable free time to focus on other ventures, like teaching others how to scale their businesses.
PhotoDay proudly sponsors and attends numerous events throughout each year, including Boatwright Bootcamp by Jay & Carinna Boatwright, Sports Photography Intensive by Brad Deel & Dani Mack, Do It Different Workshop by Rose Coleman & Emily Davis…who we’re interviewing today!
Owner of Click Studios and Kiddi Clicks in Dallas, Texas, Emily Davis is a photographer by trade and entrepreneur by heart. As a highly successful business owner and industry leader, she’s passionate about sharing her tips for scaling fast and having a plan for where your business is going so you'll know when you've arrived.
Keep reading to hear Emily’s story of how she broke into the volume photography business, where she’s headed with her new coaching program, and how PhotoDay has helped her along the way.
The Starting Point
PhotoDay: Start from the beginning! Tell us about your journey and how you ended up doing photography.
Emily Davis:
In 2010, I was at Texas Tech University doing music education. I thought I wanted to be a choir director or a music teacher—in high school, I was a choir kid, theater kid, did a little bit of dance, and I thought that I wanted to be in the arts that way. But the more we were going into the schools and kind of seeing how all that worked. I was like, “I don't really know if teaching is for me.” I didn’t connect with being under administration or following rules...I’m not a big rule follower.
Next, I thought that maybe I wanted to be a wedding planner. I was about to get engaged to my high school sweetheart (and now husband), so I was already looking up stuff for our wedding.
I sent out all of these emails to all of the wedding planners in town saying, “I just want to come work for you for free. I'm moving to Dallas afterwards, so I'm not going to be competition. I just want to see if this is the route that I want to go down.”
No one got back to me. After that, I realized that I was obsessing over wedding photographers’ blogs to get ideas for my wedding (this was before Pinterest), so I thought, “Maybe I could be a wedding photographer.”
So the summer between my junior and senior year of college, I bought a camera off Craigslist in a Walmart parking lot, taught myself photography, and launched a wedding career from 2010 to 2017.
The Pivot to Volume
Emily Davis:
I did that till the end of 2017, when I was pregnant with my daughter. With two babies, not wanting to work weekends anymore, and wanting to have a more flexible schedule…I moved to photographing preschools.
Back in 2014, my own church had asked me, "Hey, we have a little preschool. Do you want to shoot the pictures?” And I was like, “Sure, I'll shoot the pictures.” Do I know how to do that? No. But I can figure it out.
So I did that, loved it, and realized that it was good, easy money doing volume. Over those years, I started really growing that side hustle and got to where I was capturing 60 preschools a year as Kiddi Clicks.
But then COVID obviously tanked the preschool business, so I was making zero dollars in March 2020. Then in May in Texas, we started playing baseball. So, I just decided, “I'm gonna have to learn sports.” I was never a sports girl in high school, so I just kind of got on the internet and said, let me figure out how to shoot baseball…and here we are.
It was kind of a forced pivot, but oh my gosh, it was the best thing that ever could have happened. We still do preschools, but now schools and sports are our main focus.
PhotoDay: What did your workflow and sales solution look like at the time? Were you doing traditional paper order forms or online sales?
Emily Davis:
I did paper order forms one time. For that first preschool job in 2014, I edited the photos, sent them to the lab, they sent me 3.5x5 prints, and I stuffed all the bags individually then handed them out to the parents. I came back to the school and was there morning and afternoon four days in a row, trying to get all the order forms turned in. And then I was getting late order forms, but I had already ordered pictures, but you have to have a $15 minimum…After that, I said, I'm never doing these paper order forms again.
I was using Pixieset for my weddings, so I tried putting preschool photos on there and only sold prints and digitals. It was very clunky and not set up for that at all, and I couldn’t offer any specialty products. I used Pixieset like that up until 2023, when we finally moved fully to PhotoDay, which we’d been using since 2020 for anything that required private galleries.
Scaling & Streamlining with PhotoDay
PhotoDay: Having a full lineup of products can do wonders for sales and customer satisfaction! So how did you come across PhotoDay, and what convinced you to slowly adopt it for all of your different markets?
Emily Davis:
I went to Boatwright Bootcamp in the summer of 2020. At that point, I knew that PhotoDay was the best solution for private galleries because we’d tried another company for the preschools three or four times, and it was always a nightmare with the QR codes, manually matching them up, etc.
Once I saw the Capture App and how easy it was to take the reference picture on your phone, it would just match it all up in the system, and I didn't even have to do anything with it—then, every time we had to do private galleries, we went with PhotoDay.
What originated the discussion about switching over to PhotoDay for all of our jobs was we had a baseball league that said, "Hey, if we can't do memory mates, we got to go somewhere else,” and they still wanted to use public galleries. We couldn’t do memory mates in Pixieset, but we said, "Okay, we're going to figure something out."
With PhotoDay, we didn't have to put in anything or do anything—we just clicked the sport, and it would just have memory mates for whatever sport it was. We got such good sales from that league, and customers were buying all of the other novelty sports products.
We like processes and workflows at Click Studios. To keep it all on one platform was important to us, and publishing jobs on two platforms just got to be too much. So we started using PhotoDay for every single thing.
PhotoDay: We’re all about simplifying your life in every way possible. How did it go once made the full switch? Did you see an increase in overall sales, AOV, etc.?
Emily Davis:
At the beginning of 2024, I thought, “Well, maybe this is costing too much money,” so we went back and looked at 2023 sales since we’d just hit one full year with PhotoDay. Looking back at those same accounts in 2022, the sales were up 12-15%. So, it wasn't even a question. it was worth staying with y'all.
Once we actually did the math and had the data on it, it was obvious: PhotoDay is making us more money than had we stayed with the other solution.
PhotoDay: We hear that story a lot! It's one of those things where once you run the numbers, the minor fees are more than worth it. After switching, PhotoDay Users see an increase in sales, higher AOVs, and priceless time saved.
Empowering with Education
PhotoDay: Let’s dive into the education side of things. You may not have become a music teacher, but you have found yourself helping others feel empowered with their volume photography businesses.
Emily Davis:
A lot of the education that I do is on scaling.
It lights me up when people come to me with problems—especially the burned-out photographers who are doing everything by themselves. They don’t know if they want to deal with an employee, they’re wondering if it’s really going to be worth it to scale their revenue up and if their net is going to come up with it…I’m here to tell you it does.
When you scale your revenue up, your net goes up, and your amount of working goes down.
PhotoDay: What education opportunities do you offer?
Emily Davis:
Rose Coleman and I have an education brand called Do it Different. In the fall of 2023, we did a workshop and a 12-week mastermind class where we talked about shooting, business, pricing…a true inside look at Click Studios and Center Stage Photos.
I also have my own venture called The Volume Vault that’s focused more on the business side. I’m currently running an evergreen coaching program that’s very personalized—one-on-one calls and emails with me, as well as group calls to focus on goals and how I can help each individual make them happen.
My coaching program is for anybody who is looking to get into the volume space all the way up to somebody who’s been in the volume space for years and years and wants to improve and streamline their processes and efficiency.
I also have some online courses coming out. That’s how I first got into photography education—I was in a couple of Facebook Groups where people were asking a whole bunch of questions about preschool, but nobody was out there educating about it. So I made a preschool photography online course, which I’m in the process of revamping and rerecording right now.
I have another course coming soon called “Book by Email,” which is all about prospect marketing via email. I’m really passionate about prospect marketing. When we’re targeting leagues, schools, preschools, dance studios, and all of the clients we want, we reach out to them to sell that “doing pictures with us will improve your life, because we’re going to make this so easy for you.”
I’m working on getting all of that business stuff out there—I feel like we get so much education on how to shoot and not a whole lot of education on how to get the jobs.
PhotoDay: That’s so important! We always say picture day is just one tiny (but important) facet of running a volume photography business. It sounds like you’re staying pretty busy. How does work-life balance fit into business goals like scaling and growing?
Emily Davis:
I’ve found that what a lot of people are looking for is just exponential growth. They want to quit their full-time job, but they need to scale. Or what I feel like is mostly happening in the volume industry is people are trying to run it all on their own, and then they're just so busy they don't have time for a personal life. They don't have anyone helping them, or they're trying to do virtual assistants, or they're trying to do “my cousin who's in college has a girlfriend who helps me on Tuesdays and Thursdays for four hours.”
I feel like I did the opposite of that. We've got four full-time adult employees, plus me, who work in-office 40 hours a week. We’ve got a real thing going, and I go to jiu jitsu at 4:30 every day, then we have basketball at 6:00, and I'm at their games on Saturdays—this volume business doesn't run my life because I have other people who can help me.
But to be able to do that, we had to scale really quickly from a revenue that could support just me to a revenue that could support all five of us.
Emily’s Favorite PhotoDay Features
PhotoDay: It's amazing that you're able to do that! We love hearing about photographers achieving that sacred balance between work, family, and fun. How has PhotoDay helped free up your time? Do you have any favorite features?
Emily Davis:
How are people still using paper forms? I did paper order forms that one time and said, “I'm never doing this again." With PhotoDay, we load everything in, set it to sell... and let it start making us money.
We also love the automated text marketing built into PhotoDay. We are able to send out messages any time. In one day, we sent a follow-up text to every gallery from this year, and ended up having a $10,000 day just from remarketing older jobs!
I think that's really important to be able to capitalize on those old jobs. Whereas if you did paper order forms, you can't remarket to those people.
We use public galleries for everything that we can, and private for what we have to, which includes a couple of our preschools and when we need yearbook selection. But other than that, we're public galleries all the way, and we try to steer accounts in that direction.
