055: Ami Robertson – How To Earn 6 Figures, Going VAT Registered & Switching Your Mindset With Imposter Syndrome

March 10, 2022

“If you’re a business owner, if you’re a creator, whatever, you need to be persistent and you need to be consistent and you need to do that every day – otherwise you’re not going to change things.”

AMI ROBERTSON

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Ami Robertson!

Check out some of the biggest points from Ami’s interview below:

What are your top tops for earning 6 figures?

I never planned to be six figures. If you said to me two, three years ago that you’d earn multiple six figures in a 12 month period, I would’ve laughed at you. So it’s been almost like my survival instinct kind of almost made me a victim of my own success because you just keep saying yes to stuff because you’re worried about losing everything then before you know it, you’ve almost overbooked yourself completely. And you’ve just got to kind of switch your mindset to be, actually, the work’s there now. There’s 10 years of work that I’ve put in is now reaping the reward so I can’t say no to stuff. So, I think that’s really important. And also pricing yourself properly. I know that I’m doing a price increase at the end of this month because you can’t work as much as I’ve worked over the last kind of nine months indefinitely. It’s not possible.

So, yeah. I completely agree with your point about not thinking that it’s possible. Again, if you’d said to me three, four years ago that I’d be running SNAP and doing the things that I’ve done over the last year, again, I would’ve just laughed because it just seemed totally unrealistic. The reality is that once things start kicking in, once all of your hard work… I always think of it as like you’ve got a big ball and you’re pushing it up a big, big hill and then eventually you get to the top of the hill and everything gains momentum and it almost spiral out of control.

I think if six figures is something that you want to do, then you need to plan and you really need to look after your money as well and manage your money properly. That’s a key, key thing. But I think also multiple income streams. I think there are some wedding photographers that can do it just on wedding photography alone. But again, it would depend on your business model, whether you’re going to choose to be high-end, luxury, or whatever that market is. Charging over £5,000 a wedding or you’re going to do a higher volume of weddings, which then means you can do that, but you need a team in order to do that. So, there’s a variety of different ways of getting there, but yeah, good planning and good pricing structure, making sure that your pricing is in place. I very much work backwards in the sense that I know what I want to earn in each tax year. And I break that down into how much work I want to do, and that gives me my kind of goals for bookings and what I need. It means that I know what I need to book in order to achieve that.

But also just… It’s having the multiple income streams to make sure you’ve got the support in place to be able to do that. Again, wasn’t something that I really planned. It kind of got to July last year. Well, it was probably June and I realized I was going to go over the VAT threshold. So I know that that is quite a big, scary thing for people. That was very, very stressful for me because there’s loads of myths about it. And that once you go over the VAT threshold, you’re going to have to pay 10% of what you earn on the year before. You’re going to have to immediately give the government some money and it’s going to be 10 grand or something ridiculous like that. There’s just loads of stories that go round about it. It’s actually with a good accountant, it’s pretty straightforward.

But I would say to be over the VAT threshold, you want to be bringing in at least 126,000 in order for it to be where you are not losing money. And it’s also a 12 month rolling period. So it’s not like April to April, the tax year. It’s any 12 month rolling period. So if you think you are heading towards that, you need to be kind of checking in every month with what you’ve earned in that 12 month period, and then looking at the following six months and seeing what you are going to be earning, so you can manage what you’ve got bookings-wise because obviously you don’t want to… If you don’t want to go over and you’re not going to push into that six figures, then you need to stay under.

So I think kind of planning and managing in that sense. For me, I got to June and realized that I was going to go over in July. And the only way that I was going to stay under was to cancel five weddings and not take on any new work until November. That was the only way that I was going to be able to stay under. So I reviewed the next six months and realized that actually I only needed to bring in another 10 grand in order for it to be worthwhile. And I didn’t want to bring my business to a grinding halt in order just to stay under. It was going to be easier for me to add to that 10 grand into my business than it was to try and stay under, potentially damage my business.

So, let’s talk SNAP for our listeners that haven’t heard of it. Can you give us a bit of background?

So, SNAP, for people who haven’t heard of it is a photography festival, conference, retreat, workshop, whatever you want to call it. It was run by Laura Babb for five years very successfully. One of the big things from speaking to previous SNAP attendees has been that they said it was a life changing experience for them. And obviously Laura approached me this time last year to see if I’d be interested in buying the brand, and obviously went away and thought about it, and said yes. And we announced everything last August. And we are doing the first kind of big festival this April, and we are really excited about it. We are very much sticking with the same format that kind of Laura had in place in SNAP because there was so much positive feedback. It’s very much an experience as opposed to a workshop. Community is one of the key parts of SNAP as well.

When you come to a SNAP event, you have lifetime access to the community and we do lots of free things throughout the year for members of the community as well as smaller workshops as well. We just had one of our smaller workshops two weeks ago, which went really well. It was the first one of the year and the first one that we’ve done. And it was just so nice to see everyone together like learning, being inspired and shooting together. So it was a taster of kind of what’s to come.

Then, obviously, there is also the education element to it as well. We’ve got 10 incredible speakers for this year. And the one thing we are changing that I would say that’s maybe different is that SNAP is no longer geared to just wedding photographers. Well, we have wedding photographers speaking. We also have non-wedding photographers speaking. And we also have people who aren’t photographers at all speaking. Covering a range of things from Facebook ads to online visibility, to confidence. We’ve got one of the best confidence coaches in the UK who’s coming to speak. They’re talking about photography, but it’s stuff that can be applied to all photography businesses because we are well aware that especially over the last couple of years, even wedding photographers have diversified their businesses or changed direction because of the pandemic. So we really wanted it to be a space that isn’t just for wedding photographers.

That’s obviously the education side. We’re also going to be hosting a really big styled shoot, which we are really looking forward to. That’s being curated by Carmella Weddings. We’re really, really excited about that. And we’ve also got other opportunities to shoot with Laura Babb who’s speaking as well and Nadia Meli. Lots of good, healthy food, campfires, board games. We’ve got a big party. Karaoke. We’ve got things in place for people who are a bit more introverted as well. We have got quiet halls, so people can go and chill out and do some work or read or watch a film or… I completely get that… I’m extroverted-introverted. So, I do sometimes need an hour or a couple of hours to decompress. So, yeah. We are really, really excited about it because as I said, it is very much meant to be an experience and not just a workshop. Yeah. That’s kind of in a nutshell.

If there is anything that you could change over all of your career, is there anything you could do differently?

Comparing myself to others and holding myself back because I think I’ve got to behave in a certain way or do things in a certain way in order to be successful. I think you can take inspiration from what other people are doing, but at the end of the day, it’s what you put into it. And if you are not taking action because you’re worried about what people are going to think, or it might not be what people normally do, or you are scared of failure, or you are scared of being judged, or any of those things, then you are not really going to get anywhere. So, yeah. Not worrying too much about what other people are doing or what other people will think about you.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Ami for joining us on the show!

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That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally