Shifting Your Clients From One-Time Projects To Monthly Recurring Subscriptions | With Annemie Tonken

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 276

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, welcome, thank you for giving us a chance. On this show, we try to take inspiration from all the different industries in our creative field, talk to different people in different industries, and see what they're doing that we can bring to our world. It doesn't matter if you're a photography, videography, graphic design, you're in music production, anything that is a creative service you're offering as a freelancer, you will likely take something away that you can bring back to your business directly to help you grow, to help you make more money, and ultimately make a living doing what you love, preferably without selling yourself and feeling gross in the process. So today we have a wonderful conversation with a photographer named Annemie Tonken. She is doing something really interesting in the photography space where she is earning recurring revenue.

And we've talked about this in the past with Mark Eckert, where he had recurring revenue in his music production business. And this is the first time I've had somebody in the photography space doing this. And she has not just done this, she's perfected this, I think. She is bringing in over 6 figures a year with 5 to 6 hours per week of work. As a photographer, I think if you're listening right now, you know how hard that is to do. And 75% of that, at least from the math I did on this, I may be a little off, 75% of her income is 100% recurring. It is every single month people are paying her. And I think no matter what space you're in, you need to hear this interview because there's likely some way you can take her model, what she's doing in her photography space, and bring it directly to what you're doing, whether you are in video, in audio, music, whatever it is you're doing, design, copywriting, there's some way you can take this and directly create what we call automatic income or automatic customers. I recommend a book called Automatic Customers. You'll hear more about that in here as well. But so many freelancers make this mistake of not thinking through their business model from a way that is sustainable. So we talk about the business model behind being a freelancer in this interview. We talk about how recurring revenue can help the business model. And if you get this wrong, you're gonna probably do what most freelancers and specifically photographers are we talking about in this, but most freelancers do, they start out, they realize how hard it is because they've picked the wrong business model, the wrong pricing model. They're not making enough per client in order to have a sustainable business.

And so what they do is they start out, they burn out, they give up and they move on. This is kind of the story of so many freelancers and the entire point of the show is to keep that from ever happening in the first place. And so for those of you who are struggling to find clients because you're not marketers, you're not somebody who is wanting to sell themselves constantly, this model is wonderful for you because once you find a client and they start paying you monthly, your revenue is at a certain point where you no longer have to search for clients because they're automatically clients every single month. And I don't think I have to really talk about this much more because who doesn't want recurring revenue as a freelancer every single month hitting their bank account, having consistency, having predictability, not having those big peaks and valleys that most freelancers experience. So without further delay on this, here's my conversation with Annemie Tonken.

Annemie, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Annemie Tonken (3:13)

Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. This is a fun one. It's a little outside my standard comfort zone.

Brian Hood (3:19)

Before we get into this, can you just tell our audience what exactly do you do and who you do it for? I think that's a good place to start with you.

Annemie Tonken (3:24)

Yeah, sure. Well, which of my many hats should I put on for this intro?

I am a family photographer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I have been doing that since 2010, so long time now, and got into the education and podcasting space coming up on three years ago because I run my business a little bit differently or a lot differently than a lot of other photographers and was starting to get a lot of questions from other photographers like, hey, you sure do seem to be making the business part of things easier. And so, yeah, I realized that that was a big need in my creative space, and so I have been helping other photographers with the business side of their businesses since 2020