Nisha Ravji is a professional photographer specializing in destination weddings. She’s shot weddings for couples from New Zealand to Europe and everywhere in between.
Nisha is all about surprising and delighting clients by providing an amazing client experience. She’s spoken at multiple conferences and podcasts, and will also be speaking at Way Up North this coming April in Copenhagen.
Nisha takes the time to get to know each couple personally, along with intimate details of what’s important to them so she can capture moments of significance on their special day. But keeping track of all these details when shooting 30-50 weddings a year is no small feat. She needed a CRM to help her organize the communication, details, and process with each couple so she could provide a consistent experience across each of the 30-50 weddings she shoots per year.
By keeping all the customer details in one place, along with organized systems to track each lead, client, and post-wedding work, Nisha is able to provide a consistent experience for her clients, while staying on top of every detail.
Nisha used a binder with handwritten notes and printed emails to keep track of all the details for each couple, along with email folders. It was organized but not easily searchable or easy to travel with.
For each couple, Nisha needed to track where she was with each client from first meeting to signed contract, wedding shoot, final payment received, and post-wedding photo editing. She was doing this with spreadsheets which were becoming a nightmare to keep track of.
While Nisha’s binder and spreadsheets helped her stay organized, they didn’t scale well as she got more clients and they didn’t travel well either. She needed a CRM that gave her access to client info on the go and made it easy to search and find what she was looking for.
“I pride myself on having great communication with couples, but as I booked more weddings, I needed to map that communication to make sure I was delivering a consistent experience to everyone. It became overwhelming using a spreadsheet trying to track where I was with everyone as new equities came in. I was introduced to Daylite and I’ve been a fan ever since. It helps keep me consistent.” – Nisha Ravji
When Nisha gets an inquiry in her inbox, she creates a new Opportunity in Daylite with the couple's name and their wedding date. To keep track of email communication, she uses Daylite’s Apple Mail Integration to link emails and documents (like PDFs for pricing and invoices) to the Opportunity so it’s all in one place. To keep track of details over the phone or in a meeting with the client, she creates a Note in Daylite and links that to the Opportunity as well. This way Nisha can view all the details, communication, and files for each wedding – all in one place.
“People always tell me more details over the phone or at a lunch meeting. They’ll talk about their pets or a car that’s important to their family. I’ll put those details in a Note in Daylite and link it to the Opportunity.” – Nisha Ravji
While chatting on the phone with a couple in New York, Nisha asked about their day to day life and discovered that they – like most New Yorkers – travel via the subway and had spent hours together in transit – particularly on the L train. New York is not a city people stay in for a lifetime – it’s a career city and Nisha knew someday they would move on. She made a note of this in Daylite during the phone call and when it came to shooting their engagement session months later, she knew she had to shoot on their train! They really loved the sentiment.
After creating an Opportunity in Daylite for each couple, Nisha applies a custom Opportunity Pipeline to track what stage she’s in with each client and each step. Her pipeline stages include:
Once the deposit is received, she converts the Opportunity into a Project, and applies a new Pipeline to track the stages, picking up from the last stage of the Opportunity Pipeline:
“Daylite keeps me consistent. It helps me stay organized and make sure I’m sending things out on time. With 30-50 weddings a year, I can’t keep track of it all in my head. Daylite holds me more accountable than I could be on my own.” – Nisha Ravji
Once the wedding is photographed, Nisha creates a new Project and has a new Project Pipeline for post-wedding work. She likes having these separated so she knows what she’s already shot, and what she still needs to shoot.
For post-wedding work, her Project Pipeline stages are:
To track payments, Nisha uses Xero, and she also likes having a backup as a safety net so she uses forms in Daylite. She has a custom from called Finance where she uses the following fields to keep track of payments and links it to the Project:
To keep track of when she needs to invoice, Nisha creates a task for each wedding and sets a reminder so she knows when to send out the invoice. Nisha creates a repeating appointment for the 12th of every month to remind her to reconcile payments.
Nisha creates a Smart List for her Projects in Daylite by year. This way she can view all her 2019 wedding projects in progress in a list and see where each one stands and what needs to be done next.
“I still book majority of my work through word-of-mouth mainly because of the great relationships I build with couples. It’s because of the systems I have in place with Daylite that help me stay on top of everything and be consistent with clients.” – Nisha Ravji
With Daylite on her iPhone, Nisha doesn’t have to worry about carrying around binders or spreadsheets. All Nisha’s client info is with her wherever she goes so she can pull up the details from anywhere when she’s travelling.
What Nisha didn’t expect was how Daylite would also help her be more accountable and consistent in her personal life. Nisha set a goal that she wanted to run 10K last year and she had never been a runner before then. She got the Nike app and put the plan in Daylite. She created appointments in Daylite each week for the times she planned to exercise whether it was running, weights, or yoga. She left the category as uncategorized so it would show up on her calendar in grey. After completing the exercise, she updated the category colour to green. Doing this helped her build the habit and incentive to hold her accountable so she could reach her goal.
“It’s satisfying when I change the category to green when I’ve completed a workout. There’s something gratifying about seeing that I’ve done something green everyday. It also helps me have a better work/life balance.” – Nisha Ravji
Nisha uses different coloured categories for everything in Daylite:
Pink = weddings
Orange = Engagement shoots
Green= Health & well being
Blue = Personal
“Daylite helps me have balance so I’m not a workaholic. If I look at my calendar and see all pink appointments, that’s my reminder that I should schedule a date night with Todd or go to coffee with a friend to add some blue appointments.” – Nisha Ravji
Nisha has been using Daylite for 5 years to help her stay on top of client communication, follow-ups, and keeping a healthy work/life balance. She’s often asked how she manages it all and even has time to fit in exercise!
“My talks are often a lot about giving clients a great experience even more so than great photos. People often comment ‘Wow! You do a lot!’ and ask how I’m still able to fit in exercising. I tell them I use Daylite.” – Nisha Ravji
To keep up with Nisha’s gorgeous wedding shoots and to find out where she’s speaking next, connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and follow her blog.
