Jun 6, 2025
If you find yourself completely exhausted by October, dreading the next wedding weekend, or feeling like your business is running you instead of you running it, this episode is exactly what you need to hear. I’m diving deep into why photographers burn out (hint: it’s not just about being busy), how to plan ahead so busy season doesn’t destroy you, and what it actually looks like to work ON your business instead of just IN it. This isn’t your typical “just take a bath and everything will be fine” self-care advice – we’re getting to the root of burnout prevention with actionable strategies you can implement starting today.
Listen to the episode below, or keep reading for a summary of what’s covered.
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Let me tell you something: burnout isn’t only about being busy. I know photographers who can shoot 30 weddings a year and really love every minute of it, and then I know photographers who can shoot 15 and feel completely overwhelmed. What impacts burnout the most is how your business is structured.
I learned this the hard way when I booked 33 weddings in one year. On paper, it looked like success, but I had completely lost myself. I remember being on a cruise with my husband – it was like the first vacation we took where I did not take my laptop. I didn’t even take my camera. It was my first vacation since truly starting my business where I had zero photography involved. And it felt so weird to not talk about my business with my husband. I was trying to grapple with questions like, what are my hobbies? What do I even enjoy doing anymore outside of my business? My business had truly become everything that I was.
While I did have a lot to show for all of the work that I was doing – the 33 weddings a year, the 60-plus hour work weeks, all the financial income – I had burned out personally. And that definitely comes through in how you’re running your business as well.
Here’s what I’ve discovered after mentoring over 100 photographers: burnout happens because most photographers have a reactive business structure rather than a proactive business structure. They think more short-term instead of planning for the long term.
Here’s a small example that I see all the time: You’re in your busy season and you say, “Okay, next year is going to be different. I’m not going to do this to myself again where I do a double header. I’m just not.” Then the slow season comes around. Maybe it’s slow booking season as well, which is normal for all of us. And you’re like, “Oh, but this inquiry came through and it’s going to make it a double header. But I really need the income. So I’m going to just do it. I’m going to say yes.” Then they book with you, and you keep doing that over and over again.
You don’t have that long-term plan of how to actually be able to avoid needing to take a booking during the slow season to bring in income. Instead, you just go ahead and book that wedding anyway, and you put yourself into this same cycle over and over again. I’ve seen it countless times. I’ve also been there. There is no shame. And if this is you, then I need you to go back and listen to episode 33 of the podcast, where I talk more about avoiding short-term thinking and planning for long-term growth.
Planning ahead and thinking more long-term is really the foundation of burnout prevention. The ways that you choose to scale and work on your business strategically now really do impact you like a year from now, just because we book so far in advance.
What I want you to do is look at your capacity – and I mean your real capacity. How many weddings do you think you can actually handle while still maintaining the quality of the work that you’re proud of and the life you want to live? For some photographers, that’s truly 15 weddings. For others, it could be 35. For others, it’s 10 for yourself and 15 for your team. None of those are wrong, but you just have to be honest about your number.
You also need to reverse engineer how much income you need or want to make and what those numbers mean for that income goal or income need that you have. We are living in an expensive world, so it’s really key to think about these things early and to plan ahead for what your capacity is.
If you determine that you can only do 15 weddings but you’re not going to reach your income goals or needs, then that’s where you do need to plan ahead for how you’re going to scale. Because scaling truly does not happen overnight. It is a long-term strategy for your business and for yourself.
If your income is 100% tied to your time – meaning you can only make money when you’re actively shooting – then you will eventually burn out. It’s not sustainable long-term. The photographers who I have seen have the best longevity in this industry have learned to create multiple revenue streams and scale beyond just their own time.
That might mean building an associate team, adding higher value to your services, or creating passive income streams, adding prints and albums, or for some, pivoting into education if that’s natural for them. But it definitely means moving away from the business model where your presence is absolutely required for every dollar earned.
Sometimes this can even just mean having advanced funnels and systems in place where your business is running on autopilot without you having to be present or “on.” Moving beyond trading time for money is going to be a really important part of avoiding burnout for the future.
This is something that you can start doing literally today, and it’s one of the most powerful things you can implement, especially in busy season: CEO days. A CEO day is a day where you’re not editing. You’re not shooting. You’re not responding to client emails. You’re not getting on client calls. You are working ON your business instead of IN it.
What does that mean? It simply means you work on your business. So you’re looking at your numbers, you’re planning out your marketing, you’re updating your systems, you’re making big decisions about your business direction. Maybe you’re investing in your education, and so you’re taking time to learn. You’re looking at the money-making, needle-moving parts of your business, and you’re really thinking like a business owner. You’re taking time to be that CEO and give yourself the time and space to think.
Even just having one CEO day per month can completely change how your business operates. You start being more proactive instead of reactive, and you can really make more decisions based on strategy instead of desperation. You’re giving yourself that time to work on your business without constantly just giving more of yourself to other people.
If you don’t make this time to work on your business, then your business is always going to feel like it’s running you because CEO time is truly time for you to sit down, think, refine, optimize, and make big moves toward your biggest goals. If you take nothing else from this episode, absolutely implement your first CEO day this week. It will change everything for you.
Without going through a list of all these self-care things that you can do (I’m sure you could think of a couple right off the top of your head), it’s so important not only on CEO days or during your CEO time – and I say time because it could just be a couple hours, one time a week – that you take for CEO time, you can also use CEO time for self-care.
A lot of times on my CEO days, these aren’t days where I’m getting ready and showing up on stories and looking like my best self. I am taking time to be in the back end of my business and work on things I’ve been dreaming about for a really long time, gaining more clarity on things that I’ve been thinking about, or executing the ideas that I’ve had. And also taking time to go get a massage. Being a photographer is hard on your body, and we’re also sitting in front of a computer screen editing for hours or responding to emails.
Self-care looks like going out and hanging out with friends. It looks like knowing and trusting that your business can run without you, especially when you do take the time to have this CEO time every single week where you can work on and refine your business and how it’s operating.
If you are in the middle of a busy season right now, here’s what I want to encourage and challenge you to do this week: Block out one CEO day in the next week or two weeks if that feels easier. I know a lot of times photographers are like, “But Claire, there’s so much on my calendar. I can’t block out this time.” No, I really want you to. I want you to block out one CEO day in the next couple of weeks and protect it like you would a wedding day.
If you’re like, “Okay cool, that sounds great, but I don’t really know what to do with the CEO day,” I have just created a new freebie that if you join the waitlist for my mentorship program Scale It, it’s a bonus that you get just for being on the waitlist. It’s completely free, and I am breaking down my entire framework for my CEO days and how that was my first step to scaling my business.
The reality is you can plan and dream about all kinds of things, but if you don’t take the time to really refine your business as a whole and figure out what to do during that CEO time, then you’re going to burn out if you’re adding more and more to your plate with the scaling that you want to do.
Taking this time to audit your current workflows, audit what tasks are eating up the most of your time, audit what could be systematized more or delegated, or even setting better boundaries for yourself, or planning for next year now and what you want your business to look like and feel like in 2026 and in 2027, and understanding what changes need to be made in order for that to happen and for that to be possible – you have to take the CEO time.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode! If you found value in what we discussed today, I would love if you would screenshot the episode, share it to your Instagram stories, and tag me @itsclairehunt. I always love hearing from my podcast listeners and knowing that this episode helped you. It helps me know what to create more for you too. Remember, your future self will thank you for taking action to start scaling today instead of just hoping next year will be different.
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