We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Laura Murphy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Laura below.

Laura, appreciate you joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

10 years ago when I started my business journey, I was chained to my computer anywhere from 80-100 hours a week from 2013-2015, trying to chase this “dream business” of mine. I was a one-woman show, trying to keep all the balls in the air by myself (with no systems in sight) to help me out.

At the time, I couldn’t fathom how I’d get my work done by working less hours. And I also didn’t have any time to bring on more clients because I was completely strapped for time with my current client roster.

After continuing to hit revenue plateaus in my business, I decided that if I wanted my results to change, my habits and strategies would need to change too.

I had read the book “The E-Myth Revisited” in 2014, and decided to start pulling the strategies from there into my own business, so I got to work and started creating repeatable client processes (workflows), creating templates for every single piece of client communication, automating as much as possible, and streamlining every single task I did.

Previous to my “journey with systems” it was just lil’ ‘ol me, with my post-it notes, colored pens, and my composition notebook, ready to tackle the world.

But what I knew very early on, was that there was no way I could sustain my business working the hours I was. OR be able to sustain a lifestyle I wanted with the way I had to cap my revenue due to time constraints.

There were two majoooooor things sucking up my time in business:

All the business “admin” things like sending contracts, sending invoices, following up on payments, sending and collecting info from clients, emailing clients, tracking leads, following up with leads, following up with proposals, attempting to schedule calls with people– the list goes ON (and on and on and on!)

Actually working on the client work people booked me for (wedding and portrait photography) – things like culling, editing, blogging, social media, and the works were absolutely taking up HOOOUUUUURRRS of time.

So 2015 became the turning point.

It became the turning point that I got obsessed with 3 things:

1. Business Strategy
2. Workflow Automation
3. Streamlined Systems, Efficiency and Time Management

By the end of 2016, I was able to work 20 hours or less in my photography business – making almost 6-figures, without a team.

Go figure I used that spare time to start a second business, which now DOES have a team, but here’s the basic steps I took back then to really set a foundation to scale my business sustainably.

Step 1: I designed a repeatable process for my client work.
From point A (Contact form coming through) to point Z (the final thank you email and asking for a testimonial!) I mapped out the entire roadmap of what I wanted my customer journey to be like and feel like.

Step 2: Templated every communication touchpoint in the client journey.

Once I knew what thot customer journey was, I started creating templates for all the client communication touchpoints within it. If I was going to email all my clients about scheduling an engagement session, WHY was I rewriting it every dang time?

Step 3: Templated every other possible thing I could within my client journey and business back end.

This resulted in creating:
-Proposal Template
-Contract Templates
-Invoice Templates
-Album Design Forms
-Questionnaire Templates
-Album Design layouts
-Blog post templates
-Social media graphics
-Editing presets
…the list goes on!

The fact that I would no longer need to reinvent the wheel EVERY time I booked a client was a GAME-CHANGER.

Step 4: Signed up for a CRM (HoneyBook!)

I decided that my template library sitting in a Google Drive wasn’t enough – so I signed up for a CRM (HoneyBook). I had read that I could basically do all the admin things I needed to do in my business from this one software, so I gave it a whirl and never looked back.

Step 5: Built out my Template Library within HoneyBook

Once I had it, I started inputting my entire template library of emails, questionnaires, proposals, contracts, – THE WORKS, into it.

But let me tell ya – a bunch of emails in a folder don’t do ya much good if the system isn’t telling you when to send them.

Which leads to…

Step 6: Automate it, baby!

Once I had built up a library of templates, combined with my client roadmap, I learned about this thing called “workflow automation”.

Essentially, you input a RULE…
(Send Wedding Day Questionnaire 4 months before project date)

…and the software of your choosing (A CRM with a dedicated workflow/automation tool – ahem, HoneyBook) will either SEND IT FOR YOU – OR, populate the template on a task list for you, at exactly 4 months out.

When I tell you that this little realization changed my life, PHEW that would be an understatement.

I took my handy dandy client journey roadmap, combined with the workflow automation RULES I had recently discovered, and I made my very first partially automated/automated client flow for wedding photography.

Step 7: Let the task manager run my biz.

PHEW, then the magic happens. Once you have all your workflows DESIGNED and IMPLEMENTED into HoneyBook or your CRM of choice, it will populate a to-do list for you based on the RULES you told it. ON A DAILY BASIS.

Which leads me to my personal foundation to scale my business.

With these now automated workflows in place, I was able to do a few things that helped me scale:

1. Reclaim my time from all those pesky admin tasks so that I could focus on more of the actual income producing tasks.

2. Hire my first team member (a virtual assistant) to assist with more of the business “maintenance” work so I could start spending the majority of my time on the business “growth” work.

3. Increase my capacity for projects.

With gaining so much of my time back (we literally were able to reduce work hours by about 70-75% with my workflows and systems), I was able to take on more projects.

Once we were sustaining a bigger number of projects, we put together the final piece of the “Scaling” puzzle, which was writing out all of our standard operating procedures.

I like to think of it like this: If a workflow tells you WHAT to do and WHEN to do it, a standard operating procedure tells you HOW to do it.

This was the final puzzle piece to our scaling journey – essentially my goal was to be able to remove MYSELF from parts of the process with our client services, and as long as I wrote out HOW to do it, someone else could easily follow it.

This allowed me to go from 1 woman show to having a team of 2 employees, and 3-4 subcontractors on a regular basis.

With that, our revenue has scaled, our profit has scaled, and I’ve been able to sit in a place in my business where I’m doing the things I LOVE and not getting bogged down by the day to day.

If you want to scale your business, you MUST learn to trust others, delegate, stay in your zone of genius, and create systems to support the foundation to scale.

It’s been a wild 10 years and I couldn’t imagine life any other way than being an entrepreneur.

Laura, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hello there! I’m Laura! Armed with a pile of half drank coffee cups, I’m on a mission to help purpose-driven and multi-passionate small business owners pursue and conquer their wildest dreams while they SHOW UP and LEVEL UP with confidence.

I’ve been married to my husband Scott for 3 years this June, but have been together for over 11 years after meeting in the Copenhagen Airport Passport line when we both studied abroad in Denmark in 2012! We LOVE travel and it’s odd if we’re not heading somewhere at least once a month. We’re also part time RVers, living and working out of our 34′ Travel Trailer for 3 months of the year to ski, hike, and explore the US! To sum it up: I’m a mountain lover, wife, cat-mom, part-time RVer, and charcuterie board enthusiast.

Business wise, I’m a Northern NJ and Naples, FL based brand photographer and business coach, freedom chaser, workflow and systems expert, HoneyBook Pro, organizational business ninja, speaker, business strategist, over-achiever, and multi-passionate visionary,

PHEW. Say that 5 times fast.

My point is – I’m not just one thing and I never will be.

I started my journey into entrepreneurship with a camera in hand when I photographed my first wedding in 2013 – but my spark and my drive for business started when I was just a toddler. From the age of 2, I always knew I wanted to be a photographer, and starting that business eventually led me down the path of business coaching, and workflow strategy.

I’ve had a lot of careers in my life already (by the age of 32) – and have had pinch me moments like eating Thai takeout with Alex Trebek at his house in Beverly Hills, to photographing weddings in Colorado, Dominican Republic and Key West, to working with HUNDREDS of business owners to help them reclaim their time and their freedom.

Every business venture has been a stepping stone to the next idea, and I just love that entrepreneurship allows me to not put myself in a box and continue to find new ways to explore ideas, and bring them to fruition.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

If I had to pick two things, it would probably be consistency early on in all of my businesses with content creation + delivering a really incredible client experience once people were in the door.

When I first began my coaching and workflow arm of my business, I consistently blogged 3x a week, wrote 2 newsletters a week, 5 Instagram and FB posts a week, all on the topic of workflows, systems, productivity, work-life balance, and time management. This really helped establish me as an authority in the space.

Once I started booking clients for our workflow services, the goal was deliver such a top-notch client experience that I’d feel confident in asking for referrals.

I think I’d answer the same for my photography business.

I think sometimes people tend to slack off when business starts getting busy, and then wonder why all their client leads are “drying up”. When the reality is – I think a lot of business owners tend to stop doing the things that were working so successfully for them in the first place.

Stay consistent, show up when no one is watching and no one is listening, and deliver a high end experience to every person that comes through your doors, and there is no doubt that your reputation will soar.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

COVID!

When the dreaded year of 2020 happened, it’s safe to say I had to throw nearly everything out the window and rebuild.

I was lucky in the sense that I had already created other revenue streams like online courses and digital products, but hadn’t put a whole lot of time into marketing them. Primarily up until that point, Wedding Photography was my main source of income. Since I’m from NJ, that meant that literally 100% of my weddings were canceled and or postponed, and my income dropped by 80%.

In March 2020, I had launched a passion project called “The Deeper Roots Retreat” which was a 5 day FB challenge about building a strong foundation for your business. That helped give me the courage to actually start marketing my more “passive” “online” products and services, and by March 2022, our main source of revenue became our Done-For-You Workflow and CRM Set-Up Services.

This pivot also allowed me to take my work “on the road” and I’m fortunate to now be able to travel the country with my husband in our RV for 3 months of the year. Pivoting from full-time wedding photography to pretty much full-time workflow strategy and business coaching allowed me to make that life pivot too. It’s one of the best things we ever did!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://findyourfreedomco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/findyourfreedomco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/findyourfreedomco
• Other: All links above are for our business that is now workflow/systems and business education based! Our photography and 1-1 coaching lives here: http://lauraleecreative.com/ and on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/lauraleecreative/

Image Credits
Headshot Image: Sara Fitz Co. – https://www.sarafitzco.com/ Images in set: 1. With Blanket flowing behind: Austyn Elizabeth Photography – https://austynelizabeth.com/ 2. Group of girls on hike: Sara Fitz. Co – https://www.sarafitzco.com/ 3. Speaking into computer with orange background: Kira Whitney Photography – https://kirawhitney.com/ 4. Wedding Image (By me: Laura Lee Creative) – https://lauraleecreative.com/ 5. Image with laptop: Rosemary Green Photography – https://rosemarygreenphotography.com/ 6. All other brand photography images by me (Laura Lee Creative) -https://lauraleecreative.com/