Having a strong, supportive community of past, present, and future clients who are passionate advocates for your brand — it’s the business owner’s dream! But, how do you get there? It takes work, patience, and above all else, a passion for building long-lasting client relationships. There are so many factors (at every stage of your client’s journey) that go into building this type of community, but one of them gets looked over far more than the others: Legacy Workflows.
This week on the Ascend Together Podcast, Kiaya Smith joins me to talk all things Legacy Workflow — what they are, where to start, and the enormous impact they can have on the success of your biz.
Kiaya (owner of Kiaya Marie Photography) is a California-based wedding photographer, an Ascend Together Academy member, and a passionate advocate for growth and education. Some of her passions include: being outdoors, learning new things at every given opportunity, and relentlessly loving her adorable 5-month-old menace of a kitten. In Heart-Led Business and Legacy Workflows, Kiaya shares with me just how impactful Legacy Workflows have been in her business, what it means to serve others and seek support, and what burnout means for your clients!
Legacy Workflows
Kaiya has been running Kaiya Marie Photography for about two years. In that time, she’s found that when it comes to optimizing the experience both your client and you have, solid workflows are the secret sauce.
A workflow is a sequence of processes with which you guide a client (past, present, or future) from point A to point B. There are all sorts of workflows that make up a business! Your Lead Workflow is what brings potential clients into your world. A Planning Workflow is what you use while working with a current client. And your Legacy Workflow is how you nurture and care for your clients long after they’ve worked with you.
Think of it this way: you’ve put in a lot of effort to work with your client. Once your time working together is done, do you really want to say “l8r” and never interact with them again? For many business owners, you could potentially work with clients more than once. If your past clients need you later on down the road, maintaining your already positive relationship with them makes it so much easier to pick up where you left off. If in your field of work, clients rarely (or never) need your services more than once, sustaining your client relationships is still so important for client advocacy (AKA referrals) and community-building.
The moral of the story? No matter who you are, or what your business is, a Legacy Workflow is really, really important.
Seeking Support
Pssst — we need to stop glorifying DIY.
Far too often, we praise the notion of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and gettin’ it done all alone. Just about any business owner will agree — if you want to achieve big things, it takes a village!
Before starting her business, Kaiya was on the path to becoming a lawyer. She pivoted her career, and in that time, experienced what it feels like to DIY your dreams vs. pursuing them with the backing of a support system. Now, she’s a huge advocate for seeking support! Why? Because when we lean on one another, we are capable of amazing things. When you have an excited community behind you, pursuing your dreams feels (and is) more attainable than ever.
What Burnout Means for Your Clients
Kiaya runs her business on the belief that if your cup is empty, you can’t fill the cup of others.
In other words, we provide the best experience to our clients when we’re at our best. Nearly every business owner, at some point throughout their career, experiences burnout to some extent. The feeling that tasks are piling up on top of one another. That nothing is quite as fun as it used to be, or that your processes are slow, that you’re isolated in your work, etc. When we begin feeling burnt out, it inevitably shines through in our work. Perhaps we lose our attention to detail and let tasks slip through the cracks. Maybe our lack of enthusiasm makes our clients feel as if they’re not being valued.
An empty cup doesn’t just affect us — it affects everyone in our circle. That’s why it’s so important to be mindful of our own relationship with our work. Because when we’re energized, passionate, and in a healthy place with our career, our cup begins to overflow.
More in This Episode
Kiaya and I dig into the big questions in this episode. What does it mean to be an authority in your field? How do you immerse yourself into your business? How do industry standards keep you from trailblazing?
To hear the rest of our conversation, you can listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
To learn more about the amazing Kiaya, and to see her photography work, visit her website at kiayamariephotography.com, or follow her on Instagram.
