Do you ever feel like you’re doing things on the fly in your business and can’t keep up?

You’re maybe sacrificing all your time to give your clients the best experience and you feel like there’s GOT to be a better way?

Well, there is and if any of this feels like you, this episode with Latoya Dixon-Smith is for you.

Latoya is a fellow creative here in my area, Greenville, SC. She’s a wedding photographer, mom of a 6 year old and a 2 month old, as well owner of Systems for Photographers.

I invited her onto the IDP, because I love how she shows up in her own business. To me, it’s the perfect blend of automation + personality or humanity that saves her time while providing a fantastic audience experience, I can only imagine how fantastic her client experience is!

She’s gonna share what systems are + how you can create them inside of your business!

Enjoy the story.

More Goodness:

• Connect with Latoya Dixon-Smith: One Union Studios | Systems For Photographers | Instagram | Facebook Group


• CRMs Mentioned: Dubsado, 17hats


• More Tools Mentioned: Trello, Asana, FullStory, Fundy Designer Suite, Loom, Zoom

Full Transcription with this week’s gut check questions:

Marie Masse: Okay, Latoya. I’m just ecstatic to have you on this podcast! I found your Instagram in the fall, and I remember how I found you, which was by searching the hashtag #greenvillecreatives and fell in love with your Instagram feed right away.

It’s this perfect blend of just this value bomb after value bomb of information on all things systems, but then also there’s enough humanity there to where I feel like you’re still a person on the other side of that feed.

So, welcome! Thank you so much for being here.

Latoya Dixon-Smith: Thank you, Marie, for having me. I’m really glad to get this time to sit and chat with you, especially learning that we were in the same area, it was really cool and seeing that you have this platform, so I’m just really grateful that you invited me along.

Marie: Thanks, yeah. So, tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do, who you help, and what you’re doing right now.

Latoya: Okay. So, a little disclaimer. I’m nursing right now. My husband and I, we welcomed our second child, baby girl Leanna, back in December of 2018, and we also have a six year old son. So, just for anyone listening, if you hear some sounds in the background, that’s just my daughter nursing. No big deal.

But yes, I’m also a wedding photographer. My wedding brand is called One Union Studios, and I specialize in couples portraiture as well as weddings and elopements, and then of course, Systems for Photographers is where I help photographers understand and organize their business back end. More particularly, their CRMs, to help them manage the day-to-day and streamline their business processes. It’s something that I really nerd out on and I love to help other photographers with as well.

Marie: I love that. Can you explain what a CRM is?

Latoya: Right. Thank you for asking because sometimes I overlook that fact. CRM, it stands for Client Relationship Management, or customer relationship management. It’s just a tool for you to kind of have a dashboard of your clients. Think about it as your hub…

Anytime a client inquires with you, if you start a client project with them, you can manage everything from one portal or dashboard.

I use a CRM that allows me to have my clients inquire. So, you think about if someone wants to contact you through a form. You can host forms there. You can send out contracts, invoices, all sorts of things with a CRM. It’s just really a good way to keep track of what you’re doing instead of using a bunch of different things that can essentially do the same thing, but having it as an all-in-one just kind of helps alleviate the task of managing even more than what you can accomplish with just one single CRM.

Marie: Okay. Yeah. I’ve been seeing you sharing a lot about Dubsado?

Latoya: Yes. Dubsado.

Marie: Dubsado. Yeah. They clearly must be your favorite? You’ve been using them a while?

Latoya: Yeah. I think I’ve been with Dubsado for a couple years now. I actually didn’t start with Dubsado. Before, I think I was using PayPal to send invoices to clients, and then I realized that wasn’t necessarily the most efficient way for me to do it. Then I had heard about 17hats, which was the first CRM I started using.

17hats has a few integrations with Fundy Designer Suite, which you can design albums and things like that, that are more tailored and geared to photographers. So, I was with 17hats for maybe a year or so, and then I’d heard about Dubsado.

Dubsado has a free trial, so with the first three clients that you have in your dashboard, you can do business with them for free.

Once you go to the fourth client, then you can get into a paid subscription. I decided, with the free trial, to just try it out, and I just fell in love with Dubsado simply for the fact that it was a lot more user-friendly, in my opinion, and it had the flexibility to customize things a lot more than I was able to do with 17hats.

I liked the design as well. So, for any designers, too… design totally matters in how your platforms look. But Dubsado was just really flexible for me, and I could see that I could grow into it as well, which was another selling point for me.

Marie: Yeah. For sure. The user interface, to me, matters so much and if it matters, to us, it’s for sure going to matter to your clients—the way things look and feel as they’re going through getting a contract from you, or filling out a form, or whatever the case may be. It makes so much sense that it’s an area that you’d want to pay attention to.

Have you heard of the website FullStory?

Latoya: I have not. What’s FullStory?

Marie: Oh, man. You’re probably gonna spend a lot of time on here! You put just a little piece of code onto your website, and it then tracks every single interaction with your website. You can replay it like you’re watching Netflix, but you’re binging on what people are doing on your site.

Latoya: Oh, yeah. I could definitely spend some time on that.

Marie: Yeah. And it’s free. It’s so cool. I’m in the middle of a trial right now, so I’m just getting to know it. There’s heat maps and all that fun stuff, so you can see what people are clicking on. It’ll tell you where people are trying to click, but there’s actually nothing there that’s clickable. It just gives you so much insight on how people are using your website.

I’ve seen you offer these things called Whiteboard Sessions. What is that?

And, also, I can see people listening to this and thinking, “Okay. My solution is I just need to go check out Dubsado and then I’m good to go.” What kind of work do people really need to look at to build a strong, solid system?

Latoya: Yes. That is a great point. I always tell folks that a CRM or any sort of tool at all is not going to be the answer to your problems. It may be something that we use to help correct or to help minimize some time consuming processes in our business, but it’s not a simple solution that’s just going to fix all your problems.

In fact, it could actually create more problems if you don’t really think about it from a really strategic way.

Or, at least try to figure out how you can use it in the best way you’re able to.

So, Whiteboard Sessions from my company, Systems For Photographers, is really a time where we can sit one-on-one and go through what it is that you’re doing in your business.

We go through each process step-by-step in or