619: $100/hr Organizing Other People’s Pictures

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1:15What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. It's the business podcast you can actually apply. and on the docket today, a side hustle I've never heard of that can pay$5 ,000 plus per project. You're going to love it. It's photo organizing and apparently it's in high demand. My guest says she's got more than enough work to keep herself busy full-time and is building a six-figure business in the process from mymemoryfile.com. Cheryl DeFrank, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thanks so much for having me, Nick. I'm thrilled to be here.

1:50Me as well. Looking forward to this one. Stick around. We're going to learn how all of this works, who it might be a good fit for, and how to get this thing off the ground. But I want to talk about this transition moment from, really, there are people who would pay me to do this to actually landing that first client. Walk me through the early days of my memory file business. It was quite a surprise to me. I was kind of in between jobs, trying to figure out what my next thing was going to be. I was just helping a friend organize her digital photos, all her photos on her phone and her computer. And she just couldn't handle it and was overwhelmed.

2:24And so I was just helping her out, just getting things organized. And she said to me, she said, you should do this as a job. And I thought, that's crazy. That's not a job. That's not a thing. So I kind of dismissed it. And I just happened to be talking to my sister who lives in a different state. It's a crazy idea that my friend had. And my sister said, oh yeah, I have a friend that does that. And I just thought, what in the world that there is actually somebody who does this? Yeah, this is a thing. This is a thing. At least this woman has figured out how to do this. And then my sister said to me, yeah, and my friend who does this is a member of an organization, a trade association of photo organizers.

3:02I thought, well, that's crazy that there's not only one, but apparently there's more than one. It's big enough to have its own association. Yeah. Exactly. To have their own association. So obviously I got in touch with this friend of my sister who put me in touch with the organization, which is called the Photo Managers. And the rest is history. As soon as I kind of decided, I was so excited, I learned kind of the potential. I talked to other photo organizers. I decided to kind of go with it. And pretty much from the get-go, as soon as I talk to people and tell them what I do, their reaction is always, oh my gosh, I need to hire you.

3:35I had no idea that I could hire somebody to do this. They're just thrilled. And granted, not everybody turns into a client, of course, but the number of people who are just so excited and thrilled to know they could hire somebody to do it is the same thing. We're all capable of cleaning our own homes, but many of us don't want to, or we just don't have the bandwidth to do it. And this is a much, much bigger project, a much more emotional project for many people. It creates so much stress for them knowing that their photos are in the attic and heaven forbid if the house burns down or, gosh, I wish I could find that picture of my great-grandmother or what happens.

4:12I'm so worried that my phone's going to fall in the toilet and I'm going to lose all the pictures of my kids. And they are just so thrilled to know that there's somebody that will help them with it. A lot of times I'll be at like a cocktail party or something where everyone says, oh, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? And, oh, I'm a lawyer. Okay, great. Or, oh, I'm a whatever. Okay, great. Oh, I'm a photo organizer. And everybody stops. Like, I mean, they're just so curious and excited and so on. So it has been a great ride. It has been a great career. It's fascinating because, right, I mean, we're 600 episodes into this show and I never heard of it as a thing.

4:46there's this education component in the marketplace that you could hire somebody like Cheryl to come and help you out with this heavy anxiety feeling of how do I digitize? How do I back the stuff up? How do I organize? Like there is a lot of emotion surrounding that and a level of trust and like, well, how would somebody else do it the way that I would want it done and all of that. So you find the photo managers, there's a professional organization. And we had another guest who he was talking about starting a software business. He's like, if it is a big enough industry to have its own association, it's worth going after.

5:19If it's more niche than that, maybe not. But what happens from that point, your sister says, I've got a friend of mine is doing this from that point to first paying a customer or practicing for free first with another friend. How do you go from zero to one here? It was pretty quick. The friend that I was helping who had this initial idea, who I will always credit to me being in this business. So I did her photos for free to kind of get some confidence and just kind of see how it worked or if I was able to really. And then I just started talking to friends. And my first actual paying client was another friend who just said, Hey, can you help me out with the photos on my phone?

5:57Because they're such a mess. And I know I've got so many duplicates. Everybody has tons of duplicates. It was a relatively small project, but I helped her out and she was grateful. And then she just started talking to other people. A lot of people would say to start with friends and family, and that's a good idea. I mean, they obviously will already kind of have a certain amount of faith in you and already want to support you, but it can also be a little bit hard to work with friends and family. So I kind of started spreading the word as quickly as possible. I'm on a neighborhood listserv, which is kind of like Nextroom.

6:30It's basically an email listserv. All the families in my kids' school are on a listserv, all the people that belong to our pool are on another listserv, and so on. So you've got all these different kind of groups. Either I would post something about my services, and sometimes there's rules about self-promotion, but either I would post something or a friend would post something for me, kind of maybe even a scripted thing like, hey, you guys wouldn't believe this person I found to organize all your photos and give her a call. And of course, now, years later, my previous clients will post things on their own listservs.

7:01So just the word kind of spreads and the phone hasn't really stopped ringing in 10 years based on just kind of word of mouth. I always say like someone told me early on, and this is probably true in every business, someone told me early on to put your company name and kind of a little tagline of what you do at the bottom of every single email you write, no matter who you're sending it to, whether it's a business email or not. But yeah, and it's not a new concept. But in my case, because it is so unique, I'll send an email to somebody about my son's lacrosse game or something or lacrosse team. And they'll see what I'll do.

7:37And they'll write me back having nothing to do with lacrosse, but say, wait, what is that you do? I see you're a photo organizer. Like, what's that? And then it might turn into a job, might turn into a project. It's a conversation starter, if nothing else. And we've talked about that. It absolutely is. That email signature space, underutilized marketing real estate in some cases. I was assuming this was going to be almost all digital. But when starting locally, I guess maybe it is in person. So it's that box in the attic. It's like the physical pictures. And so does it need to be kind of a local radius for it?

8:08It's both. It's really both. The three main areas of photo organizing. Number one is the print photos. These are usually maybe older families that still have print photos in the attic. You know, it's a mess. They've been hiding up there for years. And so they'll give me the boxes of print photos for me to organize and sort. And usually it's chronologically. For the most part, because there is a physical exchange there, those are usually local clients. But I've had people mail me boxes and boxes of photos from other places. So that's one area. And then the other area is digital photo organizing, which is, again, the photos on the phone and the hard drives and all those little camera cards that we have in all kinds of drawers around the house and so on that the clients also have no idea.

8:51where everything is or what's on these hard drives. So in that case, again, it certainly can be local, but then you can have people either send me hard drives or sometimes, for instance, and we'll log into their online storage. So for instance, I can log into a person's iCloud or a person's Google Photos or something, obviously with their permission, and organize straight online and never meet the client in person. And then the third aspect, which is kind of one of the main areas is scanning or digitizing photos. There's certain photo organizers that just do that. So they just do scanning and they don't really even do the sorting process.

9:27So there's lots of different aspects. And then there's other kind of offshoots like just creating photo books. There are certain organizers, their specialty is creating photo books for all kinds of different events or slideshows, kind of anything having to do with photos that a lot of people either either just have no idea how to do or don't want to spend the time figuring it out. Or the other thing, too, is working with your own photos, whatever you're doing, whether you're sorting them, whether you're creating a slideshow, trying to pick the photos for the slideshow, is a very emotional process when you're working with your own photos.

10:01So what I tell clients, which is true, is there's no emotion for me. So I can do it much, much faster. And I'm not reliving my son's three-year birthday party in the process and so on. Yeah, it takes three times as long because you're going through everything again. Right, right. All right. So yeah, so there's a variety of different ways, different things you can do in the business. Was there anybody else doing it in your neighborhood? Or was it a blue ocean when you were starting out? There were definitely people locally. When I first joined the photo managers, that was 10 years ago, they put me in touch with some people that were in my local area.

10:35I'm in near Washington, D.C. So there's kind of the tri-state D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area. So they did. They put me in touch with a few other people, and we would get together periodically locally just to kind of compare notes and just support each other and so on. And one of them is now still one of my closest friends. She lives about 20 minutes away, and we see each other, but we text daily kind of, hey, what would you do in this situation and so on. Actually, one of the nice things about the photo managers is they will create regional groups. We actually now meet once every two months with people in the mid-Atlantic region, obviously by Zoom, but just kind of compare notes and ask each other questions, share stories about projects and so on.

11:13All right. I looked up photo organizing near me and sure enough, this company has got 29 five-star Google reviews. They've been in business for a while. Like somebody is doing it. It's interesting, but it doesn't seem too, too cluttered because I think the third result is Yelp and it says the best photographers in Sammamish. Like, well, that's not exactly what I'm looking for here. That's a different skill set. Right, right. The good news, the reality is that you're right, it's still not saturated at all. Even in New York City or major metropolitan areas, there may be several, at least members of the photo managers organization doing it.

11:47And there are some professional photographers who I've seen who are getting into it, who may not be members of the association, but there are people getting into it. But there is definitely plenty of business to go around. I mean, I can't stress enough that even in our local area, there is absolutely no feeling of competition or competitiveness. It is really very collaborative. We talk all the time. And sometimes, again, my colleague in Virginia will refer a client to me or vice versa if she just doesn't want to come up to Maryland. It's a very collaborative. Customers aren't in the position of getting multiple competitive bids and say, well, Cheryl said she would do it for this price.

12:27Yeah, yeah. I think I've come across that maybe once in 10 years. And in that case, again, we realize that they're doing competitive bidding and we kind of collaborate. It's not a competitive thing. It's not like we say, well, I'll do it for a little less to get the job because that never really works out anyway. Okay. So taking a look at the local competition, maybe not too much was going on and even still today, not crazy oversaturated, but then opening up the local marketing playbook in terms of your local neighborhood, Facebook groups, the next door pages, the local listservs, and almost playing this education game of here's what I do to the extent that self-promotion is allowed.

13:08One of the creative ones we heard recently was, I just got my truck wrapped from this great truck wrap company. But of course, the picture of the truck is blazoned with this business's logo. You're ostensibly plugging the car wrap company, but subtly plugging yourself as well. And then if you can have happy customers post that on your behalf, that's something that we see really commonly in our neighborhood Facebook group. Hey, if anybody needs a painting recommendation, we just had so-and-so out and they were fantastic. If anybody needs a handy person, you got to give these guys a call. So we hear that all the time.

13:39Absolutely. Anything else on the local or even online marketing front, like to what extent does SEO come into play? Or do you have to do any paid acquisition? Maybe some percentage of the customer base is like actively seeking this out. But it sounds like it's almost more like, you know, somebody who had this done, and then they tell us like, is that a typical customer flow? I think that's a lot of it. Marketing and how to get clients is always a big topic of conversation in photo manager meetings and just among our groups and so on. And I do think that word of mouth is a lot of it. There's such a trust factor here, right?

14:13Because whoever you're gonna give your photos to, you want, you have to trust that they're gonna take care of them and trust that they're gonna be confidential and so on. So I think there's such amount of trust that it really is so valuable getting that referral from either someone that they trust or a previous client who's actually worked with me. As far as like online marketing in terms of social media, honestly, I don't do a lot of it. And quite honestly, probably partially just because I am not a great person at constantly posting, whether it's Facebook or Instagram. And I say this all the time, too.

14:44I have been intending to put together a marketing plan for 10 years, and I just haven't had time because I've been too busy with paying clients. I'm busy doing the work, yeah. Right, right. I mean, it's still important to have it. I just haven't gotten around to it. However, I certainly do know that there are plenty of photo managers who are much better at that who get a fair number of clients. Again, you can get remote clients with the digital organizing or people sending you their photos because they don't know of anybody in their local area. And they're thrilled to find you. They'll send you the boxes of photos.

15:15I have a colleague in Colorado who a client sent her a bunch of stuff from, I think, the Midwest or something. One of the things I had done early on was you have like those school auctions, right? Parents are donating things or either items or a weekend beach house or something. And I would donate two or three hours of my time. But the nice thing is you get the chance to do a nice display of what you do. And again, it catches people's attention because it's photo organizing. And the nice thing is that two or three hours of my time was only going to scratch the surface of a project. So I'm giving away two or three hours of my time, but I know that they're going to most likely end up paying me for many more hours because the project itself is just going to require that much more.

16:03More with Cheryl in just a moment, including how much she charges for this work, potential startup costs, and how AI may impact the business right after this. Whether you're a seasoned business or you're experiencing your very first Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you need a platform that can handle the rush. The last thing you want is inventory errors or your point of sale crashing when new customers are trying to buy for the first time. So make sure your business is ready for the busiest time of the year with help from our sponsor, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including dozens of side hustle show guests and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US.

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17:58Because if you can't answer the phone, Quo's AI agent can. It can qualify leads, it can route calls to the right person, and it's going to make sure no customer is ever left hanging. Think of it like having 24-7 support without the 24-7 payroll. More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. That's q-u-o dot com slash side hustle. You can even keep your existing number. Quo. No missed calls. No missed customers. Yeah. What's typical? How do you figure out how much to charge for this stuff? I mean, I will say that is hard.

18:36I tell my clients off the bat that it's really impossible to know exactly how much it's going to cost. And I know there are other photo managers who are better at kind of giving an estimate or they feel that they need to give an estimate. I have not, because every project is so different, and you really don't know what you're going to get until you kind of dig into it and get into kind of those boxes of print photos or the hard drive of photos or whatever it is, that I will usually kind of say, we'll check in every six hours or eight hours or a number that we agree that Ryan and I agree on to give them a sense of where we are.

19:10But I would say an average project of, again, let's say four boxes of photos from the attic, I would probably say just to get those sorted and organized is probably 15 hours. That's after having done it for a long time. So 15 to 20 hours. And then if you're going to scan on top of that, of course, that's obviously more time. But a lot of it depends on if they want to scan everything or if they just want to scan kind of a select percentage and so on. So it just depends every time. Yeah. And then what's the hourly rate? And has that evolved over time or are you just kind of set on it? The average hourly rate for what we do across the US, and of course, it depends on your market, but the average hourly rate is$100 an hour.

19:54I can confidently say that there's plenty of people that are charging more than that. I would say the minimum is$50 an hour. That's kind of just for someone starting out. So most projects are probably minimum 20 hours to do. So that's a nice little chunk of change. Yeah, absolutely. It's like it may not take very many clients to hit your income goals, but it is, you are working for it. You're doing the manual hands-on organizing and everything else, but pretty strong hourly rate for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it's nice that the hours can be very flexible, right? First of all, very few clients have hard and fast deadlines.

20:30They're just so happy to hand it over to you that they don't necessarily need it done by a certain time, which can be good and bad, right? It's good that there's no pressure on us. Sometimes the people with absolutely no deadline, it's easier to put them off or kind of think there's no rush with that. But the nice thing is it's flexible. If you've got kids or family obligations or family events that you want to participate in and can't work one day or one week, it's not necessarily a problem with most projects. So that makes it a good side hustle. I can do it after hours. I can do it after kids go to bed.

21:01I can just squeeze it into the gaps in my day, provided I have some workspace to spread out and do the physical sorting and scanning. Yeah. If you're doing the physical just sorting of prints, probably all you would really need is some space to spread out. And honestly, I have an office here that I use that I have computers and so on, but it doesn't have a lot of space for me to spread spread out on a big table. I use my dining room table. If I haven't finished a project, I'll kind of put it aside. obviously when we're using the dining room table, but then I go back to the dining table. So the nice thing is the investment of equipment for that part of the project is minimal.

21:37You really don't need much but some rubber bands and photo safe pencils and sticky notes, really. And the scanner is probably the biggest ticket investment, something that can get through it quickly. Right, right. So as far as a scanner, a lot of photo organizers, especially when they're starting out, we'll use what we call a speed scanner or a feed scanner, kind of where you feed the photos through and it goes quickly. And a good one, a professional one is probably around $500. So it's a bit of an investment. But again, think about the fact that we usually charge, it ends up working out to be about a dollar an image to scan.

22:15Most people are going to have at least 500 pictures to scan in most projects. So that's usually paid for itself in one project. One thing that's cool is like once their images are digitized, especially if it's this old grainy photo, you can run it through some AI image upscaler and like you can make this like almost digitally remastered type of thing. That kind of begs the next question of, well, what's the role of AI, especially on the digital side to say like, look, you took 13 shots of your kid blowing out the candles at his birthday party. Which one is the keeper here? Like we don't need 13 of them.

22:51And the AI tool will help you pick, and I don't know what algorithm it's running through. Do you use any of that stuff to help speed up the digital culling side? Sometimes. There are some software options out there that will kind of start that process for you, right? They don't really know who the key players are necessarily in the family. Like, that's one of the things I learn as I'm going through these thousands of photos from a family is you learn who the important people are, right? Just who constantly shows up in photos. The software sometimes is helpful in, yes, figuring out of the 13 almost identical pictures of the group, which one is the best.

23:26Yeah, it could detect who has their eyes open. It could do that kind of stuff. But you're right, it doesn't know, well, which kid is your kid. Maybe over time, it would learn that. I don't know. I mean, facial recognition software has been around for ages, and you kind of have to teach it as a person progresses in age that, yes, this was Johnny as a baby, and that's him as five, and that's him as 10, and so on. So it does get better. I think it's going to be quite a while before they replace us. And again, with the print photos, there's no AI until they're digitized, but there's still a lot of work to be done there.