Create and share live run of shows using You're Up!

G'day. Welcome to the Wiser Wedding Photography Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Jack.

I've shot over 1,000 weddings and corporate events in Brisbane since 2015. I'm also the founder of 1PM.app. 1PM is a sales-driven CRM for event professionals, just like wedding photographers, or it could be celebrants, caterers or DJs.

It costs just $20 a month.

So today, I'm going to be talking about a new app that my company has released, and it's free. It's called YoureUp, and it's software for building live run sheets or live shared run of shows.

It's exactly what a wedding photographer can use to build a run of show with a client in a collaborative way, and for that client to then share it with everyone they need to share it with, which might include the MC, the best man, other vendors such as caterers, decorators, florists, etc.

Everyone wants the run sheet, but the problem has always been sharing the run sheet because of the run sheet going stale.

And what that means is you send out a run of show or run sheet, as we call it here in Australia, and then the next day you've got to send it out again. Or you've got people who are looking at the wrong version of the run sheet and acting upon that as being the single source of truth when it's actually not.

It's a stale, old, useless run sheet that has the wrong times on it.

This is one of the problems that YoureUp solves.

And I want to emphasise that YoureUp is free. It's free forever. Go to Y-O-U-R-E-U-P.co, youreup.co, and you'll immediately see you can start creating a run sheet.

So the concept here is that you would be probably initially talking to the client with their first inquiry. So they have inquired to you on a date, you've replied back with availability.

If you just don't want to spend any money, but you still want a live shared run sheet to share with your clients, then you use YoureUp because it's free. It's free forever.

Now, of course, there are a couple of features in there which are designed for power users, which you can subscribe to.

You can subscribe to a paid plan and get those extra features. It will allow you to create a live shared run sheet for your client, digital run sheet, which they can then share. They can adopt it, and anyone who adopts it can then add their own private or personal items to it, which is just so useful.

That's when you start to create in YoureUp the timeline. You start to create it then, because then when you send the quote, you can send a link to their run of show so they can open it up and go, "Okay, this is my wedding day starting to appear before my eyes."

You've treated it with such professionalism that you've sent them a draft timeline of their wedding day already.

It's got the sunset time in there. It's got a few tips in there. It's got everything that you'll need later when they come back two months later and want to book you. You'll be able to refer to all that information and know what the timeline looks like.

It's super handy to have a draft timeline created for each client when they initially inquire. It's one way to show the client that you care about them and that you're treating this as a professional.

So I do recommend, even if you don't use YoureUp, I do recommend that you create a run of show for a client who inquires and send it to them and keep that on file somewhere.

And obviously, that will iterate.

The next stage is normally, for me at least, the pre-wedding consultation, which I like to do about one to two weeks before the wedding. And that's when I'll bring up the original draft run of show in YoureUp, and I actually share that link with the client so the client can see the timeline right in front of them.

And the way YoureUp works, as I edit the timeline, as I collaborate with them on their wedding day photography timeline, it will update in real time right in front of them.

So they can — as they're literally talking, I can type, hit Enter, and bang, it's updated in front of them.

They can comment on it. They can say, "Oh, you know what? I'm just looking at your notes here. I think we should move that a little bit later."

Whatever. You can explain why the times are what they are.

You can share your run sheet with the client using YoureUp for free. They can adopt it. They can add their own private items to it right from the word go, which is incredibly useful for the client.

So you're providing a very valuable extra service to the client in terms of giving them essentially the basis for their run of show, which they can then adopt, and they can add their own items.

So then they're obviously going to add, "The flowers are going to be delivered at 11:00 AM," and they're going to add that they're going to have breakfast, or they're going to go to a barber shop at 10 o'clock.

Those are their private personal items that they can add to your run of show, and everyone is looking at the same page. Everyone's looking at the same run of show.

Now, they can also share their version with someone else, and so on and so on.

So people can adopt this one, original kind of centralised run sheet, and everyone is looking at the same times.

Anything you want kept private, you can keep private.

I think it'd be fair to say that every wedding photographer already builds timelines. They just do it in a different way.

I've found, honestly, this is one of those things. What it reminds me of is another statement I made about portfolio being the most important thing you can do to generate more business.

Your portfolio is it. Curating and building strategically your wedding portfolio over time is the most important thing you can do to build your wedding business.

As my portfolio improved, my inquiries increased, word of mouth increased, reviews increased, etc.

So that is a tenet that I do believe in. I solidly believe in that when it comes to building a wedding photography business.

The second thing I firmly believe in, the second tenet or principle I believe in, is that developing a timeline with the client from day one right through to the wedding day is the number one way to reduce your stress and anxiety throughout the whole process and to reduce frustrations with the client that otherwise might occur.

What I mean is, if the client, for example, sends you a mood board, right? And I've had this happen. I've literally had this happen.

I've had a client send me 27 pages of their mood board for the photos they want for their wedding day. It literally had everything you could possibly think of.

Back then it was in vogue to have the bridal party run over a hill and then Photoshop Godzilla, I think, in the background is what she wanted.

I mean, this... You couldn't make this up.

It contained all sorts of funny, quirky, silly photos. It contained various photos that the bride wanted for her wedding day at various stages of the day.

But you know what? It wasn't in chronological order. It was just one big mess of mood board and photo requests.

Now, at the time, I was a little bit naive. I was silly enough to go along with it and take it with me and print out all 27 pages and try to refer to it on the day.

Now, suffice to say, it wasn't a complete disaster, but I learnt from that because, of course, I barely got through page three or four.

I learnt that that's not the way to do things.

The only way to manage a client like that who has requests — they could be anything from certain photos they want captured on the day to a certain style or mood that they want the photos to portray.

Every client has a different way of communicating various things that they think are important to them, and I think it's important that we make note of those.

But my rule is this: if a client requests something such as, "I wanna do a silly, funny, quirky photo during my bridal portraits," I discuss that with them and I put it in the timeline for a specific time on the day, 'cause it has to be chronological, otherwise it's not gonna happen.

That's my attitude towards it.

And at the time, because inevitably what happens is I talk to the bride or the groom and say, "Hey Sam, we've got these pre-ceremony getting-ready shots with the groomsmen scheduled for like 10 minutes before the ceremony. Did you still wanna do those?"

And quite often, inevitably, it's like, "No, sorry, I can't."

That's fine.

But at least the client has made the decision not to do those.

So it is literally having a chronological plan for the entire day that the client has agreed to is your single best get-out-of-jail-free card that you can just play again and again and again.

Because if it's not in the timeline, it doesn't happen on the day.

And, of course, you can emphasise or accentuate that it is just a guide, and of course, the client can change their mind on things throughout the wedding day, and they often do, and times change and stuff.

If you do that, then all you have to do is refer to the timeline on the day.

You're not having to refer to all these other documents or try and remember all these things that were mentioned to you during the pre-wedding consultation.

If it's not important, it's not going in the run of show.

If it is important, it is going in the run of show chronologically, where it matters, at the exact time it matters.

So that's why I'm so meticulous about preparing a detailed timeline for my clients.

And I used to do it in Notepad and then send it in an email, and that's fine.

But then I discovered all the limitations of that, and that's why I built YoureUp.co.

I built it to be the ideal platform for sharing timelines with clients and for having the client adopt it, so the start time is calculated from the row above it.

If you're entering a run of show with a client on a Google Meet or a phone call, you can literally just type it in, hit Tab, and it will calculate the start time for the next item.

So you don't have to calculate that in your head, so you're not making mistakes.

You can pin stuff if you need to.

So if the ceremony is always at 3:00 PM, then you can pin times as well. It doesn't affect times that need to be pinned.

In a spreadsheet, every time it's typed by hand, right? Well, if you can work out how to get the formatting to be correct for times in the spreadsheet, every time is typed by hand.

But in YoureUp, you can just type "9:30," it will work out that's probably in the morning. You can type "9:30 AM."

So you send the client one link. It's a tokenised link, so the password is in the link, and you send it to the client.

It's one link.

I quite often will just jump on a Google Meet, and I'll send the YoureUp run of show link to them in the chat. They just click on it, and it opens up, and that's all they need to do.

So they don't need to enter a password because it's already got the password built into the URL.

So you could send it via group chat, WhatsApp, email, whatever you like.

And the thing about YoureUp is that it's live, so you can change something on your computer or your phone while you're chatting to the client, and it will update live on their run of show.

It also shows what changes have been made to the run sheet since you've last looked, which is awesome.

And it also has comments.

So you can share your YoureUp run of show with your client, and they can literally just enter into a communication exchange with you on a particular item.

So you might have first dance starting at 9:00 PM. They can click on first dance, click in there, and then just write a short message to you saying, "Hey, we've just had to move this a little bit later."

You can then update your run of show, which will then update their run of show, and that's how it works.

You can also print it. If you need to, you can just print it out.

This is all free.

You can absolutely just use youreup.co today to create beautifully printed and presented run of shows for your clients or for you if you don't wanna share it with your client.

There's a QR code, so anyone can instantly get a copy of the run of show, which is so useful.

So imagine you're at an event, and then suddenly you realise that there are some people at the event that don't have the run of show, and they want it, whether that's parents or other VIPs.

So they can just scan the QR code, and it will give them also a shared run of show.

Or maybe the coordinator's got it up on the wall, pinned it to a wall or whatever.

Go to youreup.co, that's Y-O-U-R-E-U-P.co, and just start typing a run of show, and there's no sign-up page.

It's free.

So you don't have to type your email until after you have the link.

So you build it, you see it work in front of your eyes, and then you decide if you wanna keep it or not.

There's no trial clock on youreup.co.

There are a couple of features which you can subscribe for, but they're like $9 a month, or cheaper on an annual plan.

So you don't necessarily need those.

But if you're assigning items to people, if you've got a second photographer, or it could be that the couple wants to subscribe to YoureUp so that they can assign the items to people.

So it's got colour-coded who assignments on run-of-show items, which is awesome.

Even better if you've got a colour printer, it works really well.

The actual sharing of the run sheet and the creation of the run sheet is never going to be the paid part of it.

So you can use it today without paying for it.

So how would you actually use it?

So imagine you're on a planning call with a couple, maybe two weeks out.

And you can just open up the run of show while you're talking to them on your Google Meet and just type straight into it.

Anything that they say to you, which you need to know, you can put in the notes field on the sheet, and you've also got a private notes field as well.

You can use it to store all your notes on the client based on their date.

You can create rows that can be hidden from the shared view.

So you, as the original creator, or even them if they adopt it, can create their own private rows.

And here's a big one for photographers as well: templates.

So in YoureUp, you can just choose a wedding day template, and of course it will give you a sort of generic typical wedding day timeline, which might be helpful.

But the real trick is to save your own.

Now, that's also a paid feature, but it's probably the single biggest reason a working photographer would pay for YoureUp.

That, and also the branding.

If you do end up paying for YoureUp, you also can put your logo and all your branding on it. That's pretty cool as well.

And with those templates, what I use those for, which is so helpful, is that I have a set of tips for various stages of the day.

So if it's getting ready, I will add the template in for getting ready, and it will suggest to my clients all the things that I always mention to them about getting ready, like have the dress on a decorative hanger by a window, not on the wardrobe door, that type of thing.

My pet hate is prams. Clear the room of prams and takeaway cups and all that sort of stuff, and please get all the detail in one place and leave it there and make sure it's all there and make sure the jewellery is out of its original boxes and plastic packages, please.

So there's a lot to talk about with getting ready in terms of tips.

I have put all those in a template in YoureUp. I don't need to type that again.

I just choose the template, I insert it, it adds it to the timeline each time.

And so I can actually be sending the client a very detailed, helpful run of show from their initial inquiry with all the stuff that they can just start thinking about and preparing for.

I firmly believe that you should use the smallest, easiest tool, I guess, that solves the actual problem.

You can just continue using the free version, or you can pay for it and put your branding on it and also have the calendar, which now shows for paid users, so you've got a full calendar in there as well, which is why I sort of said it was a mini CRM if you get the paid version.

So the free version has unlimited run of shows you can create for free.

You can create one live link.

There's no account needed for you.

It'll live-update on every device where that shared link is being displayed, and anyone can adopt the run of show, and they can sort of layer on their own private items.

Anyone can comment on a timeline item, and also you can paste in an existing timeline.

This is all free.

So if you initially don't like the way you create a run of show in YoureUp, if you think it's easier just to use Notepad when you're talking to the client because it's just easier and less thinking, you can create the timeline in Notepad and just paste it into YoureUp, and it will interpret that text and add all those items in.

That's called Paste an Existing Timeline In.

That's free forever as well.

Once you confirm your email address, it's basically kept for as long as you want. You just confirm it with that six-digit code.

You haven't seen YoureUp before. This is not something you've heard of or seen before.

YoureUp is a new product. You're hearing about it here on this podcast for the first time.

So do check it out.

I want you to use it. I want you to share it with others so other people can use it.

And if you do decide to pay for it, it's just $8.95 a month anyway, or it's like $79.95 a year, 25% off.

And there is no trial because the free tier is the trial.

And if you do decide to go with the paid version, you get your people on it. So you get a Who column you can assign stuff to, which is cool. It's all colour-coded.

You get your brand, so it's not using the YoureUp branding. It's using your brand and your logo, your colours and your name all go on the live run sheet.

So the couple and their suppliers see your brand and not my brand, which is quite useful.

And you do get a calendar now, so every dated run of show shows on the calendar by month, week or day.

So that's pretty handy.

And you can save your own templates. You can create internal notes with the paid version.

You also get, like, 30 days of deleted rows with undo. You get an email every time someone comments.

You've got the kiosk mode, and it's under $9 a month.

So it's pretty feature-packed for the paid version if you really, really want to pay for it.

I've kind of been flipping between run of show and run sheet in this podcast, but others call it an order of the day, or most US photographers say wedding day timeline, actually, is what I understand.

So you can call it whatever you want.

You can change the vernacular within YoureUp. It will look the way you want it to look.

Check it out, youreup.co.

It's free. There's no account sign-up. It works instantly. You can export the PDF instantly.

You can paste in your existing timelines that you might have in Notepad.

And look, I would say just initially when you first use it, just take your next wedding and put it in there. Build the timeline and send the link to your second photographer, the couple's planner or to the couple directly.

And then test it as well. Open another tab and just see how cool it is that when you change the run of show in your original timeline as the author, it'll just update instantly, just like sort of chat software.

It's pretty cool. It's pretty unique.

It's youreup.co.

I just want to talk about 1pm.app.

You might have heard me talk about 1pm.app.

So YoureUp.co is like a little baby brother of 1PM, so it's an offshoot product.

So 1pm.app is essentially a sales-driven CRM for event professionals.

You can imagine it does everything that you'd possibly want to convert more inquiries into sales.

It's ultra-slick software for full-time wedding photographers and wedding professionals.

It's ideal if you're running a serious wedding photography business and you regularly get inquiries, and you want to reply to your inquiries as quickly, as efficiently as possible.

I'm saving, I would say, about an hour a day using 1pm.app to reply to my inquiries.

So it's very lead-driven, so everything is driven from leads.

Check it out, 1pm.app.

It's just incredible how much time it is saving me now.

So what happens now is that a client will inquire via a lead form on my website.

That lead form populates right into 1PM, so I'm not copying and pasting stuff.

And now that's not a particularly new concept. A lot of more advanced CRMs do that already, so that is a pretty well-established pattern for a CRM to do that.

1PM does that, but it does things in a slightly different way because it's based around events.

It knows that the booking is going to be about an event, and an event is special because it has a start time and an end time, and that's all integrated into the whole booking workflow.

You embed the lead form on your website, and it just looks like your website.

So we've got help articles up on 1pm.app for how you do that on Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.

It's very easy. Takes, you know, 30 seconds to add a lead form to your website.

So you then get rid of your existing lead forms, inquiry forms, because you won't need them.

You will get an email when someone inquires on 1PM if you're using 1PM.app. You will get an email to say you've got an inquiry.

But in the background, what's happening is that lead is going directly into your 1PM system.

And if you've got 1PM running in the background, a little notification pops up, and that's the lead that's come in.

Now, 1PM will know what the lead type is because you can use different forms on different pages of your website.

So it will know that it's a wedding inquiry. It will know that it's a seniors inquiry or a family photography shoot or an engagement shoot.

It already knows the genre of photography that the lead is, and it can then reply automatically if you want it to, which is pretty cool.

It's ideal for wedding photographers because we often will only shoot one job a day.

So the way the heuristics work is that 1PM looks at your calendar, it's all built into the CRM, looks at your calendar, goes, "Okay, am I free on the 20th of September? Oh, look, I've got another booking on that day," so it will not auto-reply if you've got that set up.

In that case, what it will do is it will just allow you to reply to them because it may be that you are available.

But if you're completely free on that day and you haven't blocked out the time, then you can have 1PM, if you switch it on, auto-reply after X number of minutes.

You can set that to five minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes or two hours or whatever you want.

So if I'm shooting a full-day wedding on a Saturday, which is pretty much every Saturday, it's not uncommon for me to get home at 9:00, 10:00 PM at night.

Last night I got back at 10:00 PM and I had two inquiries, and both of them had been automatically replied to by 1PM, like way earlier in the day while I was shooting the wedding, because they were both on dates where I had free availability.

So 1PM replied with a PDF brochure, which was set up to reply, and it can actually send a quote to the client automatically for whatever lead type they've inquired to.

And they then get a client portal, so it doesn't stop there.

They then open up this client portal, which is just out of this world.

They can see their quote, and they can change the number of hours that they're going to book, if it's hour-based, if that's relevant.

So if you have any wedding photography services that are hourly-based, so that's particularly applicable to event photography. But for me, I also use it with wedding photography because I charge by the hour for wedding photography.

So I can set it up so that it's a dynamic quote, so the client can actually just change the amount of time and coverage.

So if I've quoted like four hours or whatever, they can just go in there and change that to six.

They can initially accept the quote, so they can just click a button, accept the quote.

That then tentatively reserves the date in the system, which is awesome.

And the next stage is the agreement, which they can review.

And in 1PM you've got these terms which are set up in the system.

So effectively, you've got a version history on all your wedding agreements or client agreements.

You can make them sign, or they can check a box. They can accept a digital signature as well.

So that's the agreement side of it.

They accept the agreement, and then 1PM has built-in deposits, so you can take a deposit from the client, or you can take the full amount, depending on the way you've got it set up.

And you know how some clients will want to pay the full amount?

Certain clients are just like, "I'll just pay it all now."

So they can just pay it all if they want to. It gives them that option.

And also, it deals with situations where a client wants to use a card to pay. It connects to Stripe for payments.

Or they may just want to have an invoice that they can do a bank transfer.

So it gives them those options.

That's all managed in their client portal, so they've got this client portal where they can do all those things.

It's completely hands-free.

So they can do all the things they need to do to progress their booking to being confirmed without me doing anything.

So I can be shooting on a Saturday, and this is all done in the background automatically.

How would YoureUp fit into this?

Well, a YoureUp run of show, you can actually show that in the client portal as well.

So you can imagine the client's just absolutely blown away when, if you're using 1PM and YoureUp, they're just blown away.

Because they open up their client portal, they see a fully live run sheet, run of show of their day on the right-hand side.

They see the quote. They can change the quote if they want to.

They can agree to the terms. They can pay the deposit.

It's like everything you could possibly want the client to have on one page with your branding, and that's 1PM.app.

And it's like 20 bucks a month.

20 US dollars a month gets you all of that, and then, you know, if you wanted to add YoureUp, you could.

So in summary, YoureUp.co is the run of show.

You build the run of show for a wedding day. You simply share one link, and the couple, the planner and your second shooter can all see the same live version on their devices without logging in.

So that's what YoureUp.co does.

It's the fastest way to create and share a live run of show or run sheet, and it's free to start and free forever.

1PM.app is the whole business behind that day.

So the inquiry comes in, you quote it, they accept it, they sign it, you invoice them, they pay it via Stripe, and the run of show is actually just one tab inside the booking.

So you use YoureUp for a single day, a solo operator who doesn't have a big budget for software, and for any successful established wedding photography business, you'd definitely want to consider 1PM.app to run the whole business.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.

Cheers.