699 Sarah Dupree:

Even if you are not the face of your brand, how you show up day to day on social media can make a big difference in how potential customers perceive your value. What are you doing to build consistency, authenticity and the magic of “know like trust”? After talking to my guest today – Sarah Dupree – I know I’m not doing enough, so listen on to learn from an advertising expert turned top photographer how to build your personal brand to grow your business.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring mompreneur who has built a very successful photography business here in southern California. Sarah Dupree started out at large advertising agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Yamaha, and ultimately found her place in the marketing world as a commercial photographer. She’s shot for large companies such as Boot Barn, Sprouts, and Kotex as well as many local small businesses and entrepreneurs. She’s also worked with highly influential social media personalities like Christa aka SalvagedSoul, and Cayla Craft of Mommy Millionaire, as well as TikTok celebrities David Bonfidini aka The Magic Crasher and Rachel Mueller aka thegirliq.

It’s hard to stand out in all the noise – or perhaps you’ve heard me say this before… the “infobesity” of our fast-paced, short-term culture. That doesn’t mean there is not a way to do it right, whether you are the face of your brand or the founder and CEO of a company with a brand that transcends you as a person.

Whatever the case its become vital to build a personal brand in our attention economy, so today we dig deep into the best way to do that with brand photographer and mompreneur Sarah Dupree. Sarah has helped her clients – whether TikTok influencers or other entrepreneurs – experience dramatically higher engagement and establish authority with high-caliber social media and website content.

Sarah has been in advertising for 17 years, starting out at large agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Yamaha, before becoming a commercial photographer. These days she works with many CEOs, solopreneurs and social media influencers, including Christa aka SalvagedSoul, and Cayla Craft of Mommy Millionaire, as well as TikTok celebrities David Bonfidini aka The Magic Crasher and Rachel Mueller aka thegirliq.

So today we get practical advice from Sarah as we also talk about what she’s learned along the way on her entrepreneurial journey.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Sarah Dupree, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Sarah, welcome to Wings.

Sarah Dupree:

Hello. Thank you Melinda for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Your photography speaks for itself. You have so many amazing clients, and you’ve been doing it for a long time for advertising agencies and then on your own. And it strikes me that there’s so much demand out there right now because everyone needs their personal brand, everyone’s got to be relevant on social media, so much demand. How do you find your ideal clients?

Sarah Dupree:

The best way to find an ideal client is to just be yourself because those people that are meant for you, they’re going to come to you. So just make sure that you’re out there marketing yourself and you’re being authentic with who you are so that when those clients do come to you they already feel a connection to you. And it helps you to stand out from the other people in your industry that may not be the perfect fit for these people.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so what is the right fit for you, who do you look for? Who are the type of people that you love to work with, and why?

Sarah Dupree:

It’s funny because my target demographic tends to be a lot of women who are a lot like me. So busy, entrepreneur, moms who are trying to juggle it all. It’s hard being an entrepreneur and a mom. Having that gallery of images is what I provide so that you can just be able to focus on your business and your life completely separately. But take some time out of your day and not have to worry about business anymore because you’re not having to spend hours a day taking these pictures for social media and your other marketing. Because that is a huge part of marketing these days is showing up on social media consistently. And when you have that gallery of images, you’re no longer having to spend hours getting a photo every single day. So you can share what’s on your mind and what’s relevant for your business that day.

Melinda Wittstock:

So when you’re looking at photography and the type of photography that works and works best to stand out from all the noise on social media, what’s the trick there with your photographer’s eye? What’s working, what’s not working?

Sarah Dupree:

What’s not working is inconsistency, showing up and then not showing up because it confuses your clients. What’s also not working is not staying on brand, so showing up one day as one person and then showing up another day as a completely different person. And that’s not to say that you can’t share different interests that you have within your brand, but you do have to stay with your target market in mind while you’re sharing the information. Also what is not working I would say as far as photography goes is just throwing a selfie out there now. Everyone’s got selfies.

Sarah Dupree:

So even if you are using your own camera, just taking that camera out of your hand, having somebody take that picture for you or putting it on a tripod makes a huge difference. And then other things that just help to up level that, not that people need to do this right away, but when you’re ready to if you start doing the professional photography, it adds that extra of authority and trust that people are looking for. You kind of stand out from the crowd, and people know, “Oh, this person’s really serious. They’re coming at me, they look very professional.” And they instantly trust you a little more than somebody else that’s just doing photos from their iPhone.

Melinda Wittstock:

Say you’re a CEO of a growing company and you got to build your personal brand. How often should you be getting photos done, how many do you need?

Sarah Dupree:

It really depends on your marketing plan. I would say at least 30 images from a single shoot is what I provide in one of my photo shoots. And what we do in a single photo shoot is we have several different looks in one shoot so it doesn’t look like you’re taking pictures and like, oh, why is she wearing the same dress every day? We’ll do several different looks in one photo shoot so it looks like you took pictures on separate days. Nowadays there’s a lot of video that’s involved too. So having a picture for every single day is not really what people are doing by and large. You can mix in videos, you can mix in infographics. So 30 images could last you an entire quarter if you plan appropriately.

Melinda Wittstock:

So really it’s kind of like one session every quarter. And during the pandemic I think a lot of people fell behind I was doing all this consistency with personal brand photos Then pandemic hit, I’ve got to update everything now.

Melinda Wittstock:

During the pandemic, how did that affect your business? Did you still have a lot of clients looking for these images? Because most people were at home in their yoga pants.

Sarah Dupree:

Yeah, yeah. And what was great about that whole experience as far as photography goes is one of the things that became a safe avenue to open back up a little earlier on than a lot of other things was outdoor photo shoots. So if people didn’t feel safe having me come to their space and take photos of them, we could stay social distanced and be outside and really feel like we were in a safe space. And they were still able to get those professional photos and still move their business forward.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think it’s interesting what you say about trust and authenticity because there is an argument that a less polished kind of spontaneous look is more authentic, some people would say that. But on the other hand, a more polished look can show more authority. So how do you balance the authenticity with the authority in your photography?

Sarah Dupree:

So the way that I shoot is not like a studio. Sometimes I’ll sit you in front of a backdrop and have you like cheese because everyone needs a solid headshot. But for the most part, we’re going to come and just try to get you in your space and really try to tell the story of who you are. Not so much looking at the camera and cheese, more show me, show me what it is that you do so that your clients can see what you do. And we’re going to do it in a way that looks professional but still looks really relatable. And that’s where the lifestyle photo shoots come in.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so the spontaneity and whatnot. So when you work with your clients, how much goes into, and I guess your advertising background would speak to this in terms of figuring out what their image actually is, what image do they want to portray relative to the message or the purpose that they’re conveying to customers and would be customers?

Sarah Dupree:

Yeah, absolutely. So what I do when I’m planning out my photo shoots with my clients is we’ll sit down, we’ll talk about everything from their brand image, what social media accounts they admire and why they admire them. Not that we’re going to copy them because that’s not going to do anybody any good. But we want to see what really speaks to them so that they can use little bits and pieces from people that speak to them and turn it into their own. From there, we decide what images match that so that we’re able to use the images to draw people into the greater message, which is going to be their voice, their message exactly what it is that they’re trying to share with their clients.

But the pictures are really just the hook, they’re just some things that people will stop scrolling, pay attention and go, “Wow, what is this person going to say?” So the higher quality pictures are going to be a way to kind of break out of that noise and get people to stop scrolling and go, “Okay, all right, let’s see what this person has to say. She seems like she’s really put together.”

Melinda Wittstock:

So tell me a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and what it was that led you to make leap from, working for folks like Saatchi & Saatchi and all the kind of big brand work you were doing to launching out as a photographer on your own and building your own business?

Sarah Dupree:

Well, like a lot of other women, it started with a baby. I was working for large agencies, and I was doing the nine to five corporate lifestyle. After I had my son, my first born, he was failure to thrive and I just didn’t feel comfortable going back to that lifestyle and leaving him at home because I really felt strongly that I had to be there for him. But I also had to, I mean, I live in Southern California, you can’t just not work here. So I had to find that balance, and where it started was with photography. But as a lot of other women entrepreneurs quickly find out it is not that it’s just, “Oh, I’m going to go spend a half day shooting. And then, look, I can spend the rest of my time with my family.”

That’s been a journey. Figuring out that balance is so much harder than I think people realize until they thrust themselves into it because you go, “Wow, I’m getting paid this much per hour.” Yeah, billable hours. But you don’t think about the marketing and all the other hats that you have to wear in order to run a successful business, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

This is a really well developed topic in the entrepreneur book, The E-Myth where someone starts out, and I think they use the example of the lady who loves to bake pies. So she loves to do that, and she’s really good at it. The pies are amazing, there’s all this demand for her pies. But then when she goes into business and she realizes that 80% of her time, it has nothing to do with making pies. And she’s no longer doing the thing and after a while hates making pies. And so this is something that’s very interesting for people because just because you’re good at doing something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be great at building a great business around it.

And this is one of the things that so many solopreneurs, we all start out as solopreneurs. One of the things that takes women I think more than men a long time to realize is they really need a team, really how to double down on your strengths and hire your weaknesses. Or just not necessarily weaknesses, but the things that you don’t want to do or like it makes someone else’s heart sing to do. So what was the trajectory for you around that where you found yourself like, “Oh man, there’s so many other things I have to do besides actually taking the photographs”?

Sarah Dupree:

I’m not at a point where I can hire a whole team, but I send out my editing. There’s certain things that I do hire out for. But by and large, this is still mostly a one-man show over here. And the only way that I’ve found that it works is planning. Planning in advance is a huge, huge time saver. And it’s the only way that I’m able to wear all the hats and still homeschool my younger son and still taking my older son to all of his tournament baseball things and show up for my clients, all the things and still move everything forward too. So if I plan out my content in advance. And that’s why I think I feel so passionately around the photography that I do because it does help these women to have that freedom of that planning.

That’s something that I can take off their plate for them every single day. They have these images, they can market themselves, they have the tools that they need. With my photography, I also include a planning guide to all of my clients so they can plan out their content before their shoot even happens. So all they’re looking for after that is just to marry some images with that. They can hire a VA and just hand them the raw materials and say, “Here, do this for me. And look, marketing is done.”

Melinda Wittstock:

I think as women it takes a while to develop the muscle to actually not only ask for help but to be willing to receive the help.

Sarah Dupree:

Yeah, no, it’s true.

Melinda Wittstock:

It sounds so silly because who wouldn’t want to receive help. And yet we do tend to, gosh, more than 700 episodes into this podcast now, there’s not one woman I’ve talked to that hasn’t struggled with this in some way or another. Just being able to realize that you don’t have to do it all to have it all.

Sarah Dupree:

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re all sitting over here screaming for help, but then someone goes, “Oh, you need help? Here, let me help you.” You’re like, “No, no, no, no, no, I have-

Melinda Wittstock:

No, no, no, I’ll do it myself.

Sarah Dupree:

I don’t know, I don’t trust you to do it.

Melinda Wittstock:

All the time that happens. I think that’s wrapped up with perfectionism, which is a recurring theme on this podcast too. We all have this. I don’t know whether we learned it in school where our homework needed to be neat, I don’t know, or just we have to look great. I don’t know what it is, but that perfectionism whatever the root of it is really holds us back in business. Have you struggled with that as well?

Sarah Dupree:

Not so much perfectionism. As a creative entrepreneur, I kind of fly by the seat of my pants myself. I’ll show up to a location and I don’t know what’s going to be thrown at me. The lighting might be different than what I think it is. And I’ve learned to really just go with whatever is thrown in my way. But more a control issue because I trust myself to be able to handle certain situations, certain client relations and things like that, I trust myself. I know that I have fostered these clients, I have fostered these relationships with these clients. And I trust the relationship that I have with them, but I don’t really trust somebody else to take that from me and really keep that connection that I have with these people or to really help them in the way that I trust myself to help. So it’s more of a control thing than a perfectionist thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

I wonder to what extent the two are linked. But because of the control thing, that’s a really interesting one that I think we all have to let go of because trusting someone else to do it that’s one of the biggest problems in business. Whereas guys have no problem with that, they’re just like … You know what I mean? They really don’t. I scratch my head all the time because guys are always like, okay-

Sarah Dupree:

How are you doing this? You’re giving it to somebody.

Melinda Wittstock:

So yeah, it’s a really interesting thing. What have been some of the main challenges that you’ve faced as you’ve built the business?

Sarah Dupree:

I would say some of the main challenges I’ve faced is the same thing a lot of women are going to face because, again, we don’t want to give up pieces of our business. It’s finding that balance. It’s taken me a while to get to a point where I feel like I’ve found balance in my life and I can show up for all the things and not be overstressed. I have kind of a weird path to where I am today. I came from the I advertising background. But when I went into photography, I started in weddings of all places and from there came back into advertising as a brand and commercial photographer. But that weird stop into weddings really taught me how to be a better photographer for marketing, which is a topic for another day.

But photography also was this huge, stressful business because no matter how big a shoot I’m booked for now, if something goes wrong, worst case scenario, it’s not, not fixable. You know what I mean? If something goes wrong going in a wedding day, it’s not fixable, that is what it is. And I never messed up anybody’s photos in the years that I did it, but that thought was always in my mind. And the stress of that. Literally there was one day I was supposed to shoot a wedding for another company because at this point I had already started stepping away because I was feeling that stress . And I’m like, “I don’t want to run a business for myself anymore, I just want to shoot things.” Another business hired me to go do that for them.

I woke up the morning I was supposed to shoot a wedding for them in an ambulance because I had stressed myself into a seizure. And that was the moment I knew that weddings needed to go. Like, “Oh, okay, well, I’m not shooting weddings anymore.” Leading up to that, I found myself at the end of the aisle waiting for the bride to come down just stomach and knots, literally going, “I think I need to vomit right now.” The stress had built up so much at that point. Learning how to manage stress I guess would be the short answer.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is an interesting thing is you get to a certain point of acceptance of it, it’s just part of the process and figuring out how to take the pressure off yourself. Because every deadline we ever set, it’s from our own mind. I mean, we’re the boss of our own businesses and our own time. So the stress to the extent that it’s self-created in that sense. One of the things that I had to come to terms with business number five now for me as a serial entrepreneur is that it’s a journey, it’s not a destination and that-

Sarah Dupree:

Ever evolving,

Melinda Wittstock:

Ever evolving, and when things go wrong as they inevitably will and as you have things beyond your control like rain at a wedding or whatever it is that you just have no control over. But being able to, A, let those things go that you can’t control, and, B, just create a sense of self-acceptance for yourself around, okay, so that little failure or that thing that made me stressed is actually showing me something about myself, a learning, maybe something I can let go out of my subconscious mind or whatever it is. Now I think entrepreneurship is just about learning, it’s just about growing as a person. And the moment that we can come to terms with that, it’s great. I just think we have a high degree of comparisonitis in our culture because we think, wait a minute, that woman’s doing that, and I’m not there yet, and oh my God. All those things and all the lists of should’s or things we think we should have done by now.

Sarah Dupree:

Absolutely. I hear that a lot with a lot of the women that I work with as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

I had a guest on recently, we were talking about I guess the competitive thing that women have with each other as opposed to just generally where we’re always measuring ourselves relative to the other and-

Sarah Dupree:

I really dislike that, I really dislike that mindset.

Melinda Wittstock:

I do too. And what does it take to get past that? You have a lot of women clients, I mean, do you see evidence of that? How can we get beyond that and really meaningfully help each other instead of comparing ourselves to each other?

Sarah Dupree:

By understanding that it’s not a competition, it just isn’t. I mean, I’m a photographer, my industry is super saturated and male dominated still honestly in the higher areas. Us women in my industry tend to be more the portrait and family photographers. But then when you get into the commercial photography, it’s still very male dominated. Trying break out from that is not a competitive sort of feeling, it’s more of a, like you said, knowing yourself. Taking that journey and really knowing yourself and feeling confident in who you are and what sets you apart because you’re not going to be the same as Brian down the street. My experiences as a photographer are going to be different from his. Maybe he came from an art school where I came from advertising.

So my background as a photographer, yes, I can take the pictures, but my background is in marketing. And if you want to get marketing pictures and maybe you do want to speak more to a feminine sort of a feeling, then I would be a better fit, I would be a better fit for you. Maybe personality is something that plays a role. Maybe Brian has more interests that are in line with this client, and he would be a better fit because he would understand that culture better. There’s so many different things that come into play that there’s no need for competitiveness. I’m happy to send people to other photographers that I feel like, “You know what, I don’t think I can service you best. Here’s some other people who I think would be a better fit honestly.” Because at the end of the day, shouldn’t we all just be there to service these people as best we can and to give them the best experience? It doesn’t necessarily have to be because we need that job.

Melinda Wittstock:

So you mentioned a saturated industry, very competitive, no doubt. How does it work in terms of how you differentiate yourself and how you compete whether it’s pricing or just how you stand out in a marketing sense?

Sarah Dupree:

Well, what makes me stand out in a marketing sense is that, again, the fact that as a photographer I’m not coming from an art background, I’m coming from a marketing background. So that’s what helps me stand out from other photographers in my industry. Also the fact that I’ve been doing this for 10 years. And that weird sidetracked area into weddings has actually, like you said, it’s going to rain on your wedding day sometimes. And you know what, it’s going to rain on photo shoot day. And you’ve just paid thousands of dollars for all of these people to be here at this big shoot. You’re not going to cancel the shoot, you’re going to have to roll with the punches. And because of weddings, I know how to roll with just about any punch you could possibly throw my away. So the weddings really taught me that. That’s for me, that’s what helps me stand out is my professional background and my background as a marketer.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Sarah, I want to make sure though that all the women listening to this podcast, every single one of us needs photographs. So what’s the best way to find you and work with you?

Sarah Dupree:

Absolutely. My website is sarahdphotos.com if you want to check out some of my work. Or feel free to connect with me on Instagram at sarahd.photos.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Sarah Dupree:

Thank you so much Melinda for having me.