Scaling Out Loud

It's Saturday night, you finally sit down to dinner, and your phone goes off. It's your attendant, and the printer is doing the same thing it did two weeks ago, the same thing you already walked them through standing right next to the booth. If you've ever typed "how many times do I have to explain this?" into a text and deleted it before you hit send, I recorded this one for you. When the same mi...

I basically live inside AI now. Most of my day is spent building apps, building schedules, and working with AI employees that handle work that used to eat hours of somebody's week. I'm getting about 10 times more done in a day than I was before. Being that deep in it for this long has me thinking about AI very differently than most of the people you hear talking about it online. This one is short....

Somewhere around $100,000, something strange happens to a photo booth business. You finally hit the number you chased for years. Then you look around and you're more tired than you were at $40,000. More events, more emails, a helper or two who kind of work out, and a take-home that looks almost exactly like it did two years ago. I know that stage well. When my business was around $100K, I was stil...

There was a decade of my life where I didn't trust a single person to run one of my weddings. Now I try to avoid going to them. Same equipment. Same clients. Same standard I've always held myself to. Completely different relationship to the work. That shift didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen fast. If you've ever caught yourself thinking "nobody can do this as well as I can" about your...

I spent two months boycotting AI in my business because it kept handing me copy that used the word "elevate" like a life insurance commercial. I decided it was overhyped. I decided my business was too weird for it to actually help. I decided I was right. I was completely wrong, and it was an expensive two months. This episode is not about AI photo booths. We already covered that and it's a totally...

Three years ago I'd sit down with a corporate client and spend half the meeting explaining what a photo booth even was. What happens at the event. What the guest walks away with. Why it belongs at their conference at all. That meeting doesn't happen anymore. Now I sit down with a marketing manager who's already been to four events this year with something in the corner. They've seen the mirror boo...

There's a version of this conversation I have on repeat. Someone tells me they had a great year. More weddings booked than the year before, prices finally went up, reviews are five stars across the board. Then they say the part that gives it away: the calendar is packed during wedding season, and then it just stops. If that's you, stick with me. I want to tell you why weddings can only take you so...

Ever wondered if that viral "scribble booth" trend is actually worth the investment, or if it's just another shiny object eating up your equipment budget? I put the Scribble Booth by BoothActive to the test so you don't have to guess. You've probably seen these popping up everywhere lately, ever since a videographer put a piece of plexiglass in front of a celebrity red carpet and had people sign t...

At PBX earlier this year, I sat down for an on-stage interview with Brandon CEO of PBSCO in front of a room full of photo booth owners. The questions went past pricing and talked about territory I don't usually cover here: the three plateaus that almost stalled this business, including the stretch where I took it from $500,000 to $1.5 million in eight months. I wanted to bring you this conversatio...

I used to think my business was a photo booth company. Turns out it was never really about the booth at all. If you asked me twelve years ago what my business would look like today, I'd have told you we do weddings and we're a photo booth company. That's it. That's all I could see. Today we're an experiential marketing and brand activations company, and we're in the middle of pivoting again toward...

  If you've ever used a piece of software that's more powerful than it is intuitive, something that takes real time to learn but rewards you once you know it, you've probably used Breeze at some point. And today's guest is the reason it's gotten more accessible without losing that depth. Steve Bliesner is the founder of Hey Okay, formerly known as Photo Booth Guys in Australia and the UK, and...

Illuminate Is Coming to Miami. Here's Who's Already Signed On. Every photo booth conference you've been to probably felt like the same room, the same faces, the same "how to do the thing everyone's already doing" content. This episode is different because the thing we're talking about is different. I sat down with Lisa Oler and Meir Israel, my co-founders on Illuminate, to give you the real update...

You've hit six figures. You've built the team. You've got the systems in place. By every metric, you're winning. So why does success feel hollow? This is the conversation that had an entire room of six and seven-figure founders coming to tears at Jasmine Star's mastermind. I sat down with Dr. Natasha, an industrial organizational psychologist and my personal mentor, to talk about the invisible sid...

What happens to your photo booth business the day you decide you're done running it? Not the day you sell it. The day you actually try to walk away, even for a few weeks. For most owners, the honest answer is: nothing good. This week I sat down with my cousin Adrian Salomunovic, mid-rainstorm, on a sidewalk in Ottawa, because that's apparently how we do interviews now. Adrian built an eight figure...

It's 2 a.m. and a stranger is backing a car into my driveway. He just dropped off a photo booth, fresh from a wedding. The next morning, I grabbed it from the garage in my pajamas and loaded the galleries. My neighbors probably thought we were running something out of that house. And honestly? We kind of were.  For a long time, that was just our life. Booths in the garage, the basement, the l...

You've seen the thread. Someone posts in a local wedding Facebook group asking for a "reasonably priced" photo booth. Within an hour, 30 booths are in the comments. Links, DMs, pick-me energy everywhere. I want to talk about what's actually happening in that thread. Because if you're trying to charge more and build a business that actually pays you, that thread is one of the worst places on the in...

She came in as a photographer, almost sold her business in 2020, and is now on track to hit $400K, all while packing up and moving to a brand new state with her team still running things back home. Stephanie of Juju Booth in South Florida is the kind of operator that makes you want to audit your own business. She's been in the photo and events industry since 2007, built a loyal team with insane re...

New apps are popping up in the photo booth space faster than I can keep up with. And the pitch is almost always the same: I couldn't find a solution that worked for me, so I built one. And now you can have it too. Sometimes that's exactly what it is. A founder who solved their own problem and wants to share it. That part is genuinely cool, and I'm not here to knock it. But there's a whole other si...

You're exhausted. And it's not even peak season yet. Your calendar is packed, your weekdays are spent prepping for the weekends, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, you're supposed to still have a life. Missing dinners. Pushing vacations. Your body hurts. Your phone never stops. And underneath all of it? This quiet panic that something has to give, but you can't figure out what. The thing th...

  I just got back from two weeks in Japan and I am still not over it. Honestly, Asia was never really on my radar. Not because I didn't want to go, but because the flight is like 20-something hours and it just never felt urgent. But my friend Mir, who owns South Beach Photo Booth Company, got married in Kyoto and invited us. And I am not someone who turns down a wedding in Japan, so off I wen...

The future of the photo booth industry isn't in your next gear purchase. It's you. I bought my first photo booth over 11 years ago from Photo Booth Supply Co. Charged $9,000 USD to my parents' emergency American Express card without telling them. I had a vision. Got back to Ottawa and realized everyone had the same booth in a different shell. That was the moment I understood that the gear was neve...

In 2022, we ran over 500 events, crossed seven figures in revenue, and I sat in my kitchen at the end of that year looking at the numbers, looking at the calendar, and wondering how my body got this tired. I had built something I was proud of. And the cost of running it that hard was catching up with all of us. That year changed how I think about growth. Because somewhere along the way, I had conv...

Do you know what your clients are going to be asking for six months from now?   I do. And it started with me sending my friend Zach to run around Coachella with one job: grab samples from every photo and video activation he could find.   Here's why this matters. Whatever big brands are spending their experiential marketing budgets on at festivals like Coachella is exactly what's going to...

You've been thinking about free events all wrong. What if I told you that one single free event,  one where you spent maybe $500-$1500 on setup and staff, could bring you millions of dollars in revenue over the next decade? Because that's exactly what happened to me. If you're stuck on marketing, struggling to find consistent leads, trying to raise your prices, or desperately wanting to break...

I'm going to tell you something I've never said quite this directly before. I didn't think a photo booth business could make a million dollars. Not mine. Not anyone's. I thought there was a ceiling on this industry, that you could do well, make decent money, have a good little business. But seven figures? From photo booths? That felt like it was reserved for other kinds of businesses. More "legiti...