If you are a business owner and you're not harnessing the power of your personal brand, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with your audience!

My name is Laurie Brown, I am a portrait photographer in Calgary who is transforming the way you see yourself in photos.

I help you level-up your small business with branded portraits you'll love to share.

Personal brand photography is something that I'm known for, but not many people even know it exists. 

In order to spread the word about the power of personal branding, I like to interview past clients to ask them how their personal branding photos have impacted their business and what led them to search for a photographer in the first place.

Read on to learn why Membership Operations and Marketing expert, Cheri Dufresne decided to hire me, how that has impacted her business and why she feels more confident about her personal brand image now that she has a library of professional personal brand photos.

You'll see lots of the awesome photos from the two sessions we did together throughout this article!

(Our conversation is also on YouTube!  Scroll to the bottom for the entire video with Membership Operations & Marketing expert, Cheri Dufresne.)

My name is Cheri Dufresne and I am a Membership Operations and Marketing Expert, and I primarily work with artists or creatives who want to sell their talents online. For the most part, they are women who are working to create art and share it with the world.

Because of the space that I'm in and my understanding of marketing in general, I was looking for something very specific when it came to my personal brand photos.

I knew in my world what it was called, but I was struggling to find a photographer who understood what I was looking for.

If I was searching for "personal brand photography", I was getting the "LinkedIn headshot" photographer, and that was totally not what I was looking for.

I wanted to be able to have something that was fun and bright and full of creativity and life that would appeal to my clients.  All I was finding was photographers doing corporate headshots.

Then, I came across your site and knew that you understood what I was looking for in personal branding. So, that's how I found you and why I selected you! 

You understood right away the application of images and how I was going to use them, so that was really helpful. It’s a struggle to explain to photographers that on the web, everything needs to be landscape orientation. 

I definitely was not looking forward to being in front of the camera.

It's not something that I enjoy.

It's something that makes me uncomfortable.

So, there was a lot of giggling. I knew it needed to be done and I just kind of accepted that it was something that I wasn't going to enjoy and that I was going to have to do anyway.

One thing that I found really helpful was that you provided me with a list of the things that I needed to do to prepare. (I love lists!)

It helped me be a little more excited and have less anxiety about preparing for it. 

It was more of a fun experience!

My brother is a professional bodybuilder and so he is comfortable getting his photograph taken all the time.

There are always all of these amazing pictures of my brother with the perfect smile and the perfect pose and the perfect everything! And then there's me with an awkward look on my face.

I never quite understood how to stand or how to move, and you really helped me feel comfortable learning how to do those things.

I literally took all of the photos that I purchased from you and put them all in a Dropbox folder for my team and told them these are all approved and to do whatever they want with them!

I have a writer that does all of my blog posts, and she actually does all of the captions for my social media as well, and she has a library of images to use now.

It's nice to see my team using the photos and for me to be comfortable letting them do whatever they want with them.  

Thank goodness I have good photos of myself!  

It makes it so much easier for my team to promote my brand. They love you!

I've absolutely noticed a difference in my business since doing the personal brand session with you.

I AM my brand, and the photos were essentially the building blocks for all of the rest of the things I wanted to do but hadn't done yet because I didn't have good photos.

We needed the photos first to start promoting myself at a totally different level.

Now I'm a lot more confident about promoting myself. I feel as though I'm presented in a way that is credible, I know what I'm talking about, and I'm not just a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person who is going to disappear tomorrow. 

I'm established and it really makes a difference in how people see me. I'm more confident in sharing myself because of that.

All of the photos you took are on-brand because we talked about brand colours when we planned the sessions.

Everything is cohesive, even between the studio and on-location sessions.

In the planning session, you gave me ideas of things to buy and bring. 

The picture frame photo is a favourite of my business manager because she can take that and put captions on the image. It can be a unique message to whatever she's trying to promote.

We had a lot of fun and everything feels like ME.

There are all these fun things that you created that I wouldn't have thought of on my own.

You encouraged me to think about the way I wanted to be presented.

It was really helpful for you to do that.

Now people see the images and they recognize that it's me!  And, it's super easy for my team to use as well.

You encouraged me to include my little dog, Atlas, and he's a pretty popular little guy now!

Just about everybody I work with has a dog at home, and so many people are working from a home office so their animals are around and you get used to seeing them.  

He's such a big part of my brand.

I was worried about him being in your way, but he was like a comfort to me during both sessions. He supported me.

I was glad he was a part of the whole project.

I recently launched my own membership community.

I would love to be able to reach more creatives and more artists and be able to help them to create their own membership communities, but there are only so many hours in the day and it limits how many people I can help.

Since I'm launching memberships for other people all the time, I decided to create a membership community for myself to help other women build their own memberships.

I have a great group of women who are learning at all different stages.

One of them has a membership community of over 2,000 already!

She was looking for a way to connect with other artists and bounce ideas off each other in a safe environment - almost like a business group for artists where they can talk to one another and be able to get ideas and chat about what works and what doesn’t.

One woman bought my annual membership and is starting from the beginning. She's doing her first recording to try and teach online and we're walking through that together.

At the time of this blog post, I'm busy getting these ladies ready and comfortable so I'm not accepting new members. However, you can always get on the waitlist. The membership will be open to new members a few times a year.

Everything you need can be found at cheridufresne.com

You might be an artist who wants to teach worldwide. I can help you create a membership community where you teach people how to create art and they pay a membership fee to be able to access that training.

Once you teach it one time, you can sell it thousands of times - it's very scalable.

It allows artists to teach maybe two or three projects a month and make a really good living with their talents.

It's a perfect model for artists, and most of these women make more money in a month than the average person makes in a year.

The tech part is where they struggle. That's where I come in and give them the tools, get them in place, and give them the guidance that they need.

It's so gratifying. 

It's by far my favourite thing about my job - being able to watch them do so well. They really just need a little bit of help with the operations and marketing.

I usually tell people that if you are constantly being asked, "How did you do that?" or "How did you create that?", then you can turn that into a membership community.

The only other thing I would say is: thank you.

Thank you for pushing me to get out of my comfort zone and providing an environment where I was comfortable having my photograph taken.  

Thank you for making me look good even though I was nervously giggling.

You really did such a good job of creating something that I was so confident to just hand over to my team.

You created such a valuable asset for my business and I've really built everything on that, so thank you!

Thank YOU, Cheri, for trusting me to create your branding images!

It's on my list, I need to work with you to create my own membership community. 

One day!

Here's all the links so you can follow Cheri on Instagram and go sign up for her membership!