On Our Best Behavior
On Our Best Behavior is a heartwarming podcast where Mom, Kelli and 15-year-old son, Maccoy delve into the complexities of school, life's struggles, highs and lows, and various challenges. With a blend of humor and sincerity, they navigate through these topics while sharing their own experiences and insights. Their conversations are not only relatable but also enlightening, offering listeners a fresh perspective on everyday issues. Alongside their engaging discussions, they welcome intriguing guests, adding a dynamic element to each episode. Tune in to join this duo on their journey of growth, learning, and discovery.
On Our Best Behavior
Preserving Memories with Cathi Nelson
Cathi Nelson, the visionary CEO of the Photo Managers, unpacks the art of photo management, showing how it transforms scattered images into a compelling narrative tapestry. Learn from her journey from the fast-paced world of advertising to pioneering a thriving business in photo organizing. Cathi passionately explains why organizing our photos is not just about tidiness but about preserving stories and memories that define our lives. Her insights bridge the gap between the nostalgia of physical photos and the complexities of managing digital ones across countless devices and platforms.
We also venture into the business side of photo organizing, where Cathi shares the secret sauce to turning skepticism into success. With the ABCs of photo organizing, she offers a simple yet effective framework to breathe new life into your photo collections. The episode doesn't just stop at organization; it delves into safeguarding your digital treasures with the "321 backup" strategy. From providing practical tips to shedding light on the emotional significance of our cherished images, Cathi's expertise makes a compelling case for why photo management has become an essential service in our digital age.
You're listening to another episode of On Our Best Behavior, and today we're going to be talking about organizing photos. So I have Kathy with us today and she is CEO of the Photo Managers, and she believes that photos, videos and keepsake items tell a story and it's their mission to ensure that those stories are not only preserved but also celebrated. Through their innovative solutions and personalized services, they are transforming the way people engage with their memories, turning scattered photo collections into curated legacies. Memories turning scattered photo collections into curated legacies. Today, kathy is going to talk to us about the photo managers. She is the CEO.
Speaker 1:She is a passionate advocate for educational and community building within the photo management industry. She is constantly seeking out new. She is constantly seeking out new opportunities to collaborate, learn and share insights with fellow professionals, all in service of advancing our collective mission. Probably your most common clientele of a person who has no photos organized and just hopes that I can find them sometime on social media when I'm looking for them. So explain who you are, how you got started in this and what does a photo manager do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, you and the rest of the world I mean it's a worldwide problem at this point. You and the rest of the world, I mean it's a worldwide problem at this point. And we are. So I started the photo managers. We are really the umbrella, like the association or trade association that supports this growing profession. Just like there was once no such thing as residential organizers or fitness trainers or personal coaches, lifestyle coaches, all those things, there was no such thing as a professional photo organizer. Because you know we would go take our roll of film to our local, you know one hour photo lab, we'd get a pic, we'd wait an hour or two, we'd get our doubles and we'd bring them home and we'd probably put them in the drawer. Now we're in the process of finding all those and you know, going through those for clients or sometimes you put them in albums or scrapbooks or things like that.
Speaker 2:But when we switched to digital technology where we were able to suddenly take, you know, a thousand photos in an instant, that problem just has really accelerated.
Speaker 2:And people, as you mentioned in the beginning, I really believe I always say organizing photos is like watching paint dry. I mean, there's nothing sexy or exciting or fun about it, but it's when you want that photo that you care about, or when it's you know your kid is graduating from college or high school and you want to make that video montage from the time they were a baby and growing up. Or you know your parents suddenly are an elder family member is, you know, has early dementia and you want to get those stories before it's too late, that's. Or you have a flood, like we're just dealing with these horrific you know hurricane flooding in North Carolina right now and just knowing the heartbreak there in in those all that pile of mud and floodwaters are hundreds of thousands probably of photos that were still in the bins and boxes and the whole old home movies and, you know, baby's first shoes and letters, and so that's what we're really about. We're about supporting independent business owners who help clients with manage that whole process.
Speaker 1:So Honor Best Behavior was born because we really wanted to bond and talk about life, but also to discover how people get on career paths. Not everyone goes to school just to be a teacher, a doctor or I don't know, or a nurse or whatever you do. So how do you get in the business of? I'm assuming that you like this, you're passionate about it, but now you've made a career out of it. How did you get on this path and how do you start organizing photos for a living?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a little bit, it's a complicated story, but you know it's an interesting timing of this. I just moved home, back into my home office, and I was thinking. Today I was journaling and I was thinking when my son was born and I worked in advertising and marketing sales for a local TV station. When he was six months, I left to come home to have a more flexible schedule to be with him, and that was not a family friendly business. And I got into scrapbooking at that time, which was new, because this was in the eighties, believe it or not, when people were still printing photos and things. And I mean not the eighties, what am I talking about? I'm sorry, it was. He was.
Speaker 2:I was not even married yet in the eighties, it was in the mid nineties and through the early two thousands. And so I became kind of known as the person in town who helped people tell family stories by putting photos on album pages. He was adopted and I wanted to create a life book for him and the only way I could do that was by putting photos on pages where I could write stories. So I got really passionate about that. So I was in when I called it my incredibly shrinking paycheck.
Speaker 2:When people stopped buying consumable products and started shifting to digital photography, I realized I needed a way to make another way to make a living, or I had to go back into a traditional workforce environment and I was terrified. I'm like who's going to hire me? Like what do I know? Now, in retrospect, since I've created this company over the last 15 years that's grown significantly and it's worldwide I realized I would have been a really good employee and I didn't give myself much credit. But I felt like, you know, I didn't have a lot of confidence. So a friend of mine asked me what did I charge per hour to help her manage her get her photos from her memory card to her computer? Cause in those days we didn't uh, we weren't using iPhones yet. Really, that was like in 2009. I mean, they were just coming SD cards.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, bring your SD card to the kiosk and then you'd stick it in the old computer and then you would pick which ones you wanted and how many you wanted. I remember that.
Speaker 2:You remember that Perfect right, and then people wanted you to email photos or things. You didn't know how to email them because they were too large and they weren't condensed yet at that point. Right, that was a hard time.
Speaker 2:And so I got to her house and not only did she have, you know, multiple SD cards that she didn't know how to get from her camera to her computer. I think her husband was a Mac user, she was PC. She was intimidated by the Mac she had. Her parents had just passed away and she inherited box of photos and she had told her siblings that she would get those scanned and digitized so they could each get copies of it. Right, she would divide them up. And her kids were straddling the digital analog world. So they had all their baby photos and things were analog, but all their current photos were becoming digital. And she said, kathy, I don't care how long it takes, but I guarantee you hundreds of other Marias would pay you to do this. And I was like, wow, I can't believe that.
Speaker 2:So, as I was driving home, she wanted me to make an album of her dad who was really into gardening. So I thought well, maria, I can't make an album of your dad who's passed away if your photos aren't organized. I need to get your photos organized first. And that's where the idea of a photo organizer came from, and I started going to my local, you know, chamber of commerce and I started introducing myself and I'd say I'm a, I'm a professional photo organizer, and people were lining up to hire me, and they not only.
Speaker 2:Then they all of a sudden they had old home movies or they had letters or they had all sorts of things that they needed help with, and so I quickly realized this is bigger than what I was envisioning. And then other people would find me and say oh, I'm the family photo keeper, can you teach me how to do a business like this? So 15 years ago I pretty much or you know, maybe more like 13 years ago stopped actually organizing photos myself and created there was no association model where people would get training, get certification, that we would connect with partners and they get discounted products and services. So over the years I have built, really created a new profession that didn't exist, and now I support all those people that do this for a living.
Speaker 1:I know I think about when I was going to meet with you. I was thinking about, like I have boxes in my storage of just like printed photos that are like piled up. And then, when my parents passed away, I inherited photo albums, loose pictures, you know, pictures of me from grade school, like eight by tens, home videos, journals, all those things, and same with my, my partner, when his parents died, like he found love letters that his parents had wrote each other and you hang on to them but like, what do you do with them? You don't want to get rid of them, but you know. So this I think this is a great concept.
Speaker 2:So that's where. So a professional photo manager right now, the person that would come in and assist you is somebody that's ideally certified through us. That means they've gone through our training, best practices, we've checked their references, they agree to our code of ethics and you're in Minnesota. I think you said we have great members, we have a wonderful community of members there. There's way more clients than there are members at this point, but they would do.
Speaker 2:The first thing they would do is we do what we call a client assessment with you, kelly, and we'd ask you like, well, if you could wave a magic wand over that whole mess, you know what would be the ideal scenario. What, what are? What would you like to pass down? You know a legacy story to your kids. The next, those love letters. I mean that's an amazing. Those should totally be scanned and put into like an album or something so that your kids or your you scanned and put into like an album or something so that your kids or your you know the future children can read those love stories. I mean that love letters because we probably, they probably wrote so beautifully compared to text messaging, right the way that we communicate today. But really, we come in and we do an assessment and the goal is to curate help you curate that collection, cause we really don't believe that best practice would be for you to scan all those photos in those that are in all those bins and boxes and things.
Speaker 1:That's just really expensive and not and you remember, back then you just took pictures and hoped they turned out. You didn't really know, like if it was going to be a good one or not. So we have so many landscape photos, blurry photos somebody's talking in the photo so yeah, you get. You kind of get rid of all that garbage, yeah the 80, the 80, 20 rule.
Speaker 2:Some people will do it, but most people won't ever get around to do it. So a lot of our members will take your those boxes of photos back to their home studios, their home offices and they can pretty much go through your entire photo collection a lot faster than you ever will, because they're not getting caught up in that nostalgia. And people always ask well, how could you possibly know who's who in the photos and things? But it's really not that hard. First of all, it's not a mystery of what people take photos of. We've done it for years and we know that it's going to be vacation, holidays, first day of school, like you mentioned, those eight by 10 photos of yourself. I mean everybody's got them. You know family gatherings. So what are the things that you, what are the family traditions that you celebrated, what are the vacations that you all went on?
Speaker 2:And then we use a more like a, like a, like a family tree, almost like who was born, when we take the documentation down and then you can become like a sleuth.
Speaker 2:We can tell pretty easily. One of our members calls it a brace barrets and braces, and you know like there's a certain age when everybody gets braces so you can start really dating photos fairly accurately with, with clues in the photograph. It's really not as hard as you think it is, and so that's the goal is to like eliminate like 80% of all that stuff so that you only end up with about 20%, and then those are the photos that you want to scan and add the metadata, add the dating on it. So now, like right now, I could pull up on my iPhone if you asked me to show pictures of, you know, my twin sister and I when we were two. I can find I mean, I get them for you in a second because they were scanned, the dates were added and now they're in my Apple photos library, so I have access right away to any photos that I want to find in an instant.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm excited, yeah, so it's really meaningful.
Speaker 2:It's really meaningful work and it takes time, but right, it's. It's amazing, it's wonderful to have done, yeah.
Speaker 1:So you had said, like when you started doing this number one, you didn't even realize it was a career Number two, like no one was doing it, it's a brand new thing. So how did you manage, at the beginning of your business, the skeptics? And when they're saying, like you don't have any proof, like how do we know this concept works, how did you deal with that?
Speaker 2:That's a great proof. I remember I went through SCORE you can volunteer, there's SCORE business executives and I remember the first guy was like what's the proof of concept? And I was like what does that mean? Like what's the proof of concept? I don't even know what he meant.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of skeptics and I think, you know, I used to say I'm just going to do one thing really well today and I just kept moving forward and every once in a while there would be the non-skeptic. You know, the person that grasped, that immediately grasped what I was doing, and I would need to lean on that as really proof that this was. We are now well past proof. Yes, we have members all over the world. We have in our Europe group is having their second conference in Amsterdam. I'm not even going, you know, we have our 14th educational conference.
Speaker 2:But boy, in those early years it was just a lot of heartache, kind of and just but belief and kind of looking for signs almost from the universe that would tell me I'm on the right path. And there were many. There were a lot of moments that I've gone back and thanked a lot of people over the years who kind of did, did see me in a way that I needed. In the time they didn't even know they were doing that. So, even if you, as a person who's listening to this, if somebody's starting a business and has an idea, give them, give them a good you know, let them hear them out and encourage them, because sometimes that's what they really need at that moment.
Speaker 1:And we all have a lot of ideas, but to actually follow through on your idea and make it a reality, that's a big thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I used to say my brain. Well, I still say my brain hurts every day On the wall behind me.
Speaker 2:Well, now in my new office, but it will be as soon as I get up is everything is figureoutable. That's a Marie Forleo quote. So I always believe you can figure it out. But it's also okay to be brave and afraid at the same time, which is Brene Brown. So I feel like I hold those two things at all times. You know, I have to be, you have to have some courage, right, but you're also terrified and you can figure it out.
Speaker 2:But I used to go to the library quite a bit and I would and just like schedule a couple hours on a Saturday where I would just sit and think a lot about what was I trying to put together. Today there's membership communities right, I mean, it's not a. It would fit in a model today that we all know about. But when I was starting this, there was no internet the way that there is today and there was no such thing as like membership communities, and I used to. People used to send me checks.
Speaker 2:The way I decided to make it more like a membership community is I was giving people, sending them examples of my brochure that I had created my website and I started thinking, wait a minute, I'm giving up my intellectual property. It took me like a whole summer to design this and I started thinking, well, what if I charge like $100 to get a business card and a brochure? And people used to mail me checks. I had like an Excel spreadsheet, I mean, and we did our like support calls on a 1-800 number. I forget what that was called in those days but at some point I realized that what I was thinking had value and that it was okay to ask for the value of what I was creating. So hopefully that's helpful to people who are listening. You have to at some point shift that mindset from I'm lucky or I came up with an idea, to realizing no, what I'm bringing to the world has value and I can ask for people to pay for the value of what I'm bringing.
Speaker 1:So you created the ABCs of photo organizing. Tell me about what that is. What are those steps?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when I first got my first clients and they were confused too. Fortunately I did have some people who knew me through the scrapbooking world, so they kind of were. I did have a few of them were a warm audience, but I would help them understand. I created this acronym so that when, how are you going to help me with my photos or how?
Speaker 2:can even you right now if you were organizing your own photos, and we also have a whole DIY market where we have a whole training program. We help people do their own photos. But the a you have to ask yourself is this an A photo? Is it album worthy, archive worthy? Even on your digital photos? You should be going through your photos like that. The B is does it belong in a box? Right?
Speaker 1:Because most we can't make that decision.
Speaker 2:It's really hard, right to decide.
Speaker 1:Is that an A photo? I think it's kind of.
Speaker 2:So those questionable photos, you can put them in a box, especially if they're analog, with a note on it saying if you inherit these photos after I've passed away, you have my permission to throw them away. Right, because it's really hard to throw photos away. People just, we just love them from generation to generation, because we have this overwhelming sense of guilt that we're throwing away memories and you know, even if we don't know who they are. So you want to make sure you give permission. The C is yes, you can throw photos away, and you already quickly sum that up Like go through the photos, get rid of the scenery shots. You know you went to the grand Canyon. Maybe we need one photo of the grand Canyon.
Speaker 2:If there's a person or people that you love in the picture with the grand Canyon, that's probably a more of an a photo. But if there's a picture in front of your house of, like, the little tree that was, you know, you planted when your son was born and now it's a towering, you know for tree, that's an a photo, right? Because because it S, it tells a story. So the S is does the photo tell a story? And if it does, because I believe, as humans, we're wired to tell stories. We're doing that right now on a podcast all these podcasts, right? People, we, we love to hear stories. We love to hear. That's how we communicate and that's how we learn, and one of the ways we do that is through our photos and videos. To this day, I mean, that's why it's so popular. So the photo doesn't tell a story, and if it does, you want to keep that photo because you want to make sure that you tell that story.
Speaker 2:The other thing I always tell people, though, is can you break the rules? And a lot of times people think oh, I have to organize in chronological order. With analog, it's easy. With digital, right no-transcript series of photos, not necessarily always in chronological order, it gets a little tedious, but to see the theme of your life kind of coming across the pages, if there's a certain family tradition that you always have, like you know, you get the, maybe it's going to get the Christmas tree and then watching, you know you trapping through the woods every year over the years, it doesn't have to be like oh, you know, this is when John was, johnny was three and now he's four or five. It could be when he was three and now he's 16, or maybe he's bringing his fiance. It's those photos tell that story of that tradition.
Speaker 1:So if somebody hires you, are you giving the? So what I'm trying to. What's the process? So do they meet with somebody local and like, say here's all my photos, go through them, and then do you get a digital copy and you get like a hard copy, or how does that work?
Speaker 2:It's really personalized. A lot of our members can work remotely because they can. They can log into somebody's computer and do remote digital photo organizing. But if they work locally they would first they would do as probably a zoom meeting, like a call like this with you, with doing it through zoom or a phone call or maybe going by the house for half an hour and to just kind of what we do, an assessment where we kind of talk about what are your goals, what would you like to accomplish, what's your budget? You know, forming that it's becomes a very trusting relationship. So you want to make sure there's a connection. That happens.
Speaker 2:And I always say the people who sign up to do this for a living you have to be curious about people, you have to have love stories and love photography and if you have those personality types then you're going to love this and so you're kind of like going to become like a detective. So they would, we would talk with you about and then we'd start to prioritize. So, for instance, kelly, if I was coming to see you, out of all the photos that you have from a priority, what would be the first priority Do you think for you?
Speaker 1:For me. Well, since my parents aren't here anymore I mean my childhood I feel like I would want captured, because that's something that I can't ask them about, but it would be nice to like revisit that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Wow, yeah, so we would. I don't blame you. I think that would be really. What about a childhood which? And then what would be? How would you like that presented back to you on an external hard drive or on a? There's great photo sharing sites that are private. We can put it make a photo book. I mean, there's great photo sharing sites that are private. We can put it make a photo book. I mean, there's lots of different ways that we can return that. Return that to you, and we would. I would show you different ways, but it makes sense to me. Yeah, if your parents are passed away, do you have any siblings or cousins or things that fill in some of the gap for you?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:So I would think we would get. We would then find all your childhood photos, sort them out of the big you know all that. Get those boxes of photos, find your childhood photos, maybe your siblings we'd get to know who your siblings were and then find the ones that that touch on the memories that you have. Like, what are some of your, your fun memories of, of your childhood? And maybe there were hard memories too. It's not always. I mean, that's kind of a Pollyanna.
Speaker 1:I mean, you want it and you really want to remember like the good times, right? I mean, that's what we're trying to capture with something like this or sometimes, though.
Speaker 2:One thing I did with our kids is my husband lost his job. Now it's been 15 years or 20 years ago. It was pretty traumatic and he it took him three years to decide to become a teacher and go through the whole process, and when he got the job as a teacher, we burned the one at. Those were the days in the one ads, and I took photographs of that and I journaled that, because I wanted my kids to know someday if they went through a job loss, to have the to know what it was really like. Of course, that would have been a traumatic experience in my parents.
Speaker 2:My father had lost his job and he didn't talk about it. He went into a depression for many years, and I think I was probably also wanting to kind of demystify that a little bit. But that's just an example of things that you can do with photos and stories, right, but for the most part we'd want to find your first day of school, probably all the family traditions or vacations you took, and then we would scan those, and then that's that next step Once they're digitized. And then we would scan those, and then that's that next step. Once they're digitized, then we can do anything with them. Right? There's lots of options of ways that you can relive those memories.
Speaker 1:But once they're like digitized, then you always have access to them forever, you don't have to worry about you know, that's kind of my. One of my old school worries is like what happens if because, to be honest with you, like I keep all my photos on, probably like Facebook or Instagram, right? So if those websites ever go out of business or crash or whatever?
Speaker 2:you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:So what happens?
Speaker 2:whatever. Yeah, that's, you know what I mean. So what happens? Unfortunately, with Facebook and Instagram too? Those are very compressed images, so you won't ever be able to print those. You must have the original somewhere.
Speaker 2:So we believe in the 321 backup, which is it's redundancy really. So you have three copies of your media on two different devices, one stored off site. So in other words, you want one on an external hard drive, or maybe two extra one that you have in your home, but one also in a safe deposit box, or maybe your sister or somebody has and then using the cloud as a backup as well. Because we don't know, especially with, like I mean, shutterfly, a couple years ago just shut down their entire sharing site for sporting events and things like that. People had a very short period of time. A lot of companies you don't own your photos Google photos, amazon photos, even Apple they kind of. They kind of hold your photos hostage in a way, like it's really hard to break up with Apple If you wanted to download your entire photo collection out of your iPhone. If you're an app, it's really hard. I mean, we know how to, we know how to do it, but they make it really difficult because they want you to just keep buying more storage, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's really important and, like we were mentioning at the beginning those, you know, disasters and things if your photos have been scanned and were on a um, you know private cloud storage site, then at least you would not have lost all your photos. They would still be available to you and they could be printed again and things. So it's really important to think about that and take the photos that you care about. Same thing, almost with digital overwhelm. We have so many digital photos that how in the world are we ever going to find just the photos that we care about, you know, and so it's keeping cleaning up your photo, digital photo collection at least once a year, or doing a maintenance program, really will help over time than just letting them. You know, get to 80,000, 100,000, 200, 300,000,. You know, digital images. It's just crazy amount of digital images that you can't ever find really the ones you care about if you don't get ahead of it.
Speaker 1:Very true, that's. That's where I'm at.
Speaker 2:Basically job security, and the good news is, though, what you don't know about with the average consumer is there's a lot of speed tools, so we interact. Another thing that I did when I started the business well, and as I've grown the business is we're kind of considered the thought leaders in the industry, so a lot of companies that are creating the technology to solve this problem will eventually find their way to us. We do a lot of testing and things, because they get so frustrated, but the consumer isn't, I would say. You know, they don't have time to be sitting around thinking, oh, who created the best new app today for me to, like, go through my digital photos on my phone? But we, they come to us, and so we know who they are, and we utilize those speed tools, so we can do this a lot faster than most people can, because we're just using technology in a way that the technology exists to help, but it's just, why would you bother running it, unless you're running it for a business?
Speaker 1:Right, and that's like. The perk of having the business or going through a business is that you guys are going to have equipment and technology that we don't have access to or it wouldn't be affordable for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, TV or, like you know, scanning. I mean you could, yes, Could you go buy a scanner? Absolutely, you know you could buy the Epson Fest photo, but after like a week of that, are you going to want to keep doing it? Probably not. You know, you got to clean the scanner and it gets dusty and the photos don't come in correctly and we'll color correct them and so that's. You know, really, we're providing a service for people, that for something that's really meaningful, and so it's a new service industry in a lot of ways, and there's more out there.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I happen to come on this one because I'm passionate about photos, always have been in stories, and so it's been a natural fit in some ways for me. But, um, I always knew that there were a couple of thoughts too when speaking about starting businesses, multiple streams of income. I remember learning that early on that when I was, that I needed multiple streams of income and also find a problem. See if you can find a problem and solve a problem that people are having. And so this kind of what I did is I, I saw a problem and I solved it again. No idea that you know I'd be talking to people in 2024, where the problem that's 10 times bigger than I'd ever dreamed it could be when I started.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure you hear like the same complaints or concerns over and over and over as time goes on.
Speaker 2:It is especially around their photos, and it's not just us based. I mean, we have members, like I said, in Australia, south America, latin America, I mean it's it's and we also. People care about their photos the same way in every culture. It shows that as humans, we're so much more alike than we are different. I believe If you asked a random subset of people all over the world to find you their 10 favorite photos, there's going to be a theme that's going to come up, Probably parents, children, a wedding, some kind of celebration, a tradition. That's what people are going to give, no matter where they are. It's really rewarding to know that, I think, and that's why this is touches people's hearts in such a big way.
Speaker 1:Is it hard to run a international business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I work really. We have two overriding philosophies of rising tide lifts all boats and we're collaborative, not competitive, and I stress that over and over again. So international?
Speaker 1:So is it. Is it difficult to run a business that's international because you're dealing with different types of currencies and I don't know if you have to deal with any different kinds of laws, or I'm sure the internet makes it easy for you to be accessible to people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we personally we stay in US currency but we give a 10% discount to our international members because of the US dollar exchange rate. We're not big enough to deal with multiple currencies and we early on started members that were international. We gave them big discounts and we also just support them in unique ways. So they have worked really closely together and formed great communities themselves and then we just support them every way that we can together and form great communities themselves and then we just support them every way that we can. So that's been our approach with the international community and it's worked really well. So, like our Amsterdam meetup next week, two members from our board we have a board now, advisory board are going to that meeting to support them and welcome them and I did all the work to get the sponsors for them so they didn't have to deal with all of that. So every way that we can, we support everybody in all different communities.
Speaker 1:So you have a lot of members that are moms, and would you say that photo managing is a good business for a mom if you want to be around more for your kids?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a perfect business. Most of our members are women. We have more and more men joining, but it's predominantly female and on many of them it's like a side gig or like a part-time career. And then they do grow it full-time as their kids get older and their kids start working for them, often scanning in high school. It's a great, great way to pay your kids, like some extra money.
Speaker 2:But, um, what's great about photo organizing is that most clients it's not an emergency, it's not something they need done immediately. So, for instance, kelly, if I was doing your photos and I had taken back all those photos of you from your childhood and I was working on them and maybe I don't know, my child got sick with the you know the flu and was out of school for a week or you have school vacation week, I could say, hey, you know, I'm not going to get this back to you until the end of, you know, november. Is that okay? Most very rarely isn't an issue around the holidays. If you're getting photo gifts together and calendars and books, you're under a time crunch. But other than that it's really not a high time crunch and you can definitely do it around nap time, kids in and out of school weekends, all like that. It works really well for our members with families.
Speaker 1:So how can people work with you? How can they find you and connect with you or somebody from your team if they're interested in getting this done?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if they're interested in getting somebody to organize their photos for them and help them, go to the photo managerscom and look for find a pro, and that's our. All our certified members are listed there. You can put in your zip code or your city or town or state. You may not find somebody in your area, but if so, if you get stuck, you can always reach out to us and we can make a recommendation. But that that's a great way to find somebody to do this for you. If you're thinking, wow, maybe I want to do this as a business, go to the same website, thephotomanagerscom, and also look at Become a Pro, and there we have all the training. So we really have. We do everything we can to make this as turnkey as possible. We have five core, what we call our core curriculum. You know how to do printed photo organizing, digital photo organizing, home movie conversion, pricing and things like that. So we really have a great onboarding ramp for new members. And then you join our community. You get connected with our regional groups.
Speaker 2:We also have a great YouTube channel under the photo managers, where we interview a lot of members and also have a lot of great videos like how to organize your photos on a PC or how to organize your photos on a map. So we're always trying to bring quality training to the general public, but also ensure that we have good training for our members as well.
Speaker 1:Kathy, it's been so nice chatting with you today. Is there anything else that you want to tell us?
Speaker 2:No, thank you so much, Kelly, and I hope you. We have great members in your area, so feel free to reach out to me if you want a recommendation. But thank you so much, Kelly, and I hope you. We have great members in your area, so feel free to reach out to me if you want a recommendation. But thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Kathy. We'll talk to you later.
