023 The Art of Selling with Shaun Gordon of Kiss Books

The Photo Report

Shaun is the co-founder of Kiss Books. Having been a photographer for 15years, photographing over 500 weddings, he has a lot of insight into what it takes to run a successful photography business. Out of that, he started Kiss Books, a high end album company to help serve his fellow photographers. In this interview, Shaun shares advice on how to sell and upsell by casting a vision and setting expectations. Below is the transcript of the interview with timestamps: Braedon Flynn: 00:00 Welcome to the photo report where we have conversations with top level photographers and other people that create for a living to hear stories about how they do what they do, how they've done, what they've done, struggles along the way in a way that hopefully inspires, encourages and gets you to go out there and create more work. And this episode was with Shaun Gordon who is one of the founders of kiss books, which is a high end album company and we hear the story about how he goes from being a photographer to launching this company, which is now a significantly sized company. And we talk a lot about being, you know, when you're in business, you have product and you're. And as a photographer you are a service. You're basically selling your time for dollars. And so we have a conversation about how do you take the things that you're already doing and then make more money through sales and doing it in a way that's just really great. Braedon Flynn: 00:44 So we actually recorded this live and so if you want to watch the video, you can go to the photo report dot Com. And see it there, or search youtube for the artist report and then type in his books. I'm sure it'll show up that way, but I hope you love this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. Before we get into the show, want to tell you real quick about our sponsor film supply club. If you shoot film or you're interested in film, I love film. It is the best place to get it at the best prices than an amazing community of some of the top photographers in our industry. You can check it out at film supply.club/join now onto the show. Thanks. Thompson being here and after getting into that, can you just give a little intro on the sort of how you got to where you are to give people that don't know you a little bit idea? Shaun Gordon: 01:30 Sure. Yeah. I was a photographer for about 15 years, a shot around 500 weddings. I'm mostly based out of Orange County and up traveling to 10 for, for that and I'm just saw this gap in the industry and cofounded kiss books because of this space that was like I loved, I, you know, she didn't over 60 weddings a year for a few years, which is kind of crazy. But the amount of albums that I was selling, it just became such a bottleneck in my business and it was basically at a point where it was like, it has to be easier than this at some point. And so having chosen the album makers that were in the history at the time, we kind of made our version of kiss and then decided like this is something I think that we can do on our own. Shaun Gordon: 02:17 And created a system, a very simple way to get to the product and we launched kiss about 11 years ago now. So her dad and what like with, with that though. Braedon Flynn: 02:30 So how did you transition from photography to then launching a thing to them becoming a thing where now you are just doing that? Shaun Gordon: 02:38 Yeah, I love creative entrepreneurs and having been one for a long time, I was raised by an entrepreneur that knew the business side of things, so that was one thing that I loved and learned from my dad and um, understood what it meant to hustle, you know, shooting that amount of weddings and things like that made sense during that season. But also knowing that like I loved entrepreneurs as a whole and how could we create a space where we can all thrive together. I saw a lot of friends kind of like come in the industry and go out of the industry because of the business side. Shaun Gordon: 03:10 It wasn't --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thephotoreport/message