The Truth About Building a Business you Actually Love with Alice Benham

In this episode of Photography Adjacent, I chat with Alice Benham, business strategist, coach, and host of the Starting the Conversation podcast. Alice also happens to be my own business strategist, which makes for an unusually candid conversation on both sides. What starts as Alice's origin story, leaving school at 16 and accidentally stumbling into freelance work, opens up into something more honest and searching. We cover burnout, the trap of endless diversification, and why making business look easy online might be doing more harm than good. There is also plenty here specifically for photographers and creative business owners, from pricing confidence to client experience and why your best marketing strategy might already be sitting in your inbox.

Tom Trevatt Hello everyone and welcome back to photography adjacent, a podcast about photography and everything else. This week I'm chatting to Alice Benham, who is a business strategist and business coach based in London. She is also my business strategist. We've been working together for the past, I think just under a year. and I have also just joined, your on it course, which is a year long kind of cohorts of business owners working on their business rather than working in their business, which is obviously why it's called on it. Alice is a dab hand at being on podcasts because you've run your own podcast and have been on many podcasts as well. you've got an amazing online presence. I think you just ticked over 20 K on Instagram the other day. So something worth celebrating there. thank you very much for joining me, Alice. I'd love to hear on your own words a little bit about how you got into where you are at the moment. Potters history, the journey that you've taken.

Alice Benham Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. That was such a generous and very eloquent intro. I was just watching you in all that. You were just so smooth and brilliant. When I used to do guest interviews on my podcast, I'd have to record the intros afterwards because I was just couldn't do it live. I didn't have it in me. But yeah, very excited to be in. Always love when I obviously, you know, see your business from one perspective. Weirdly, I have the opposite experience to most. I see people's businesses from the inside and the behind the scenes. It's always fun to come and engage on the outside as well.

So yeah, kind of quick intro to me. I've been in business now just over 10 years. My business has in no way looked how it has today, however, for that whole period. Very short story is I left school when I was 16. Just was a bit done with the system, wanted to go out and make some impact, have some challenge. Found myself in a job that was quite literally managing a Christmas grotto. So I was kind of queen of the elves was my literal job that I quit school for.

God bless my parents. And yeah, about six months after getting that job, I got offered a freelance role in marketing, said yes, didn't know freelance meant setting up as a business owner. And yeah, the last 10 years has kind of just been about really falling in love with businesses, with growth, with understanding what it takes for people to kind of get from A to B. So probably about five, six years ago, really lent more into not just marketing strategy, but kind of wider business and growth strategy, which now looks a lot like helping people to kind of, yeah, connect the dots between vision and action. And yeah, so, so grateful that 17 year old me was naive enough to give it a go because now, yeah, just run a business that I absolutely adore. Lots of variety, lots of challenge. So yeah, that's me.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, great, fantastic. So the maths centred or the maths centric people amongst the audience will have been able to add the 10 years to that 17 age and understand that you're very young still and running a successful business.

Alice Benham It doesn't feel it, but thank you. I realized early on in business that a big identity, you know people are like your brand story, like what's your like, you know, thing. And it was always like, I'm a young entrepreneur. I'm a young business owner. And it kind of hit me, I think I was about 24 when I was like, age is a really rough thing to attach your brand identity to because it's the one thing in life that does change. So it's going to come a point where I'm like, oh, I'm not a young business owner anymore. So thank you for saying that because that makes me feel much better.

Tom Trevatt Sorry. But that means that this growth that you've, okay, so for people who don't know, people who've only just come across Alice, let's be a little bit more specific about this. Your journey has gone from, you yeah, you were queen of the elves, but now there's, you're running something quite substantial at the moment. You're helping, I think it's just over 175 people per, per, like, or in a year's cohort in Onnit. And you have a number of kind of one-on-one mentees, I suppose I'm one of them. The business is looking fantastic, right?

Alice Benham Thank you. And yes, I would agree with that. I think we have a weird tendency, don't we, to kind of under, underplay things. And actually when I step back, I'm like, yeah, the business, like it's a really great business. It's, it's established, it's consistent. It's not in a rapid phase of growth, which past me would think is a negative, current me loves. I've definitely had over the last kind of five years, pretty much since kind of actually 2019, which is definitely not five years ago. That's terrifying.

Every year on year, you know it was big evolution, lots of diversification, new saying yes to everything. And actually now being able to kind of let that settle. Yeah, the business is at a point where, you know, to put it really bluntly, I'm really in control of my workload and paid well, I think, for the work that I put in. I love it. I feel in control. And actually, I think that set of statements isn't something that's true a lot of the time in business and it's taken a lot of time to actually get to a point where I'm not just busy or have a job, but actually feel like I've built a business. So yeah, I do feel, feel proud of that.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Great. Yeah. And I think quite often when we, you know, I'm, halfway through my, you know, my first 10 years of business. but like I've got to a place now where you kind of, get into a rhythm, you understand how it is that you can do the thing you do. You repeat it, you repeat it, you repeat it. Right. But then of course, every single year you go, Ooh, what else can I add to that mix? Well, what can I do to grow? Of course, as the business grows, your outgoings grow, cost of running it grows. You bring in staff members, you have a greater expectation of yourself, but it is quite nice to say, do you know what it's, it's in a position where it's a kind of steady, steady growth rather than being like, it's flash growth or like, you know, it's only growing because I've got this one particular client and, rather than, rather than this kind of, you know, sort of steady thing. So it's really nice to be in that, in that position.

Let's go back a little bit. Let's go back. I mean, you know, obviously that first five years of being self-employed, what are you doing? You're working in a marketing, you're working in a marketing capacity, but like what happened to make you want to switch into helping other people run their businesses and how did you do that switch?

Alice Benham So I'd say there's kind of three eras to the business. So there was era one, which lasted a very short amount of time, which is when I was a social media manager. So that's the like first ever iteration of me working for myself. And the short answer as to why that was so short is that I just completely found out. I was 17, so naive, so optimistic, so enthusiastic, quite literally just said yes to everything. And also at that point, the online world looked very different, had no community, had no other business owners to learn from, connect with. And so within about a year and a half was just at burnout. Didn't have the language for it, but actually ended up spending about four months in bed, like completely like stopped. And probably to a lot of people externally, it was like, she's quit school. She had this like crazy growth, made a lot of money for a 17 year old and then like, that's it. And I remember in that period of burnout thinking like, no, if this is what running a business is like, you know, it's not. It's not for me. And then as I started to kind of feel a bit better, actually felt, no, I loved a lot about running a business. I love, let me be honest, I love control. I love feeling like I can kind of decide things myself. I love challenge. And so that's when the kind of the second iteration came where I went, I love marketing. I really think I'd got a natural skill set for it, thankfully. And so then I moved into kind of being a marketing strategist. So actually really similar to a lot of my one-to-one work today, but we would just talk about people's marketing. And I stayed there for a good number of years. I really believe in business that a lot of the time diversification comes sooner than it necessarily needs to and actually getting really good at something and building really long, strong foundations is valid. So I did that for a good number of years. And then it was a real, I'd say kind of long, probably one to two year transition between that and then more what I do now with the business strategy.

And very simply that just came from having conversations with clients and feeling like there was this other elephant in the room. Don't know if that's right phrase to use, but you know, we would talk about their marketing. It was like, actually your marketing is pretty good. What's wrong is that your services aren't quite lined up in the best way or your systems and processes aren't there to support scale of people coming in that your marketing might create. And very slowly, very carefully, I did a lot of kind of training and testing behind the scenes, realized I could also bring that work in. And again, then stayed there for a long time. One to one was the heart of my business for the majority of it. And then, yeah, slowly added in kind of courses, programs, a book, retreats, all of that fun stuff. So, yeah, evolution has been the only constant change in my business.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. So, I mean, you you just mentioned a book, a retreat, you've got courses, but I'm also aware that like, you've also been slimming down your offerings recently. So the major offering is on it. And by the way, the reason I know this is not just because you've been telling me, because you run a podcast called starting the conversation, which you put out nearly every single week, which is fantastic. I know what it's like running a podcast. So I need breaks. The idea of running a podcast every week is a lot. Um, but this is like, going into deep dives into your own business and you don't really hold back. You talk about the failures. You talk about the wins, but you like it's using yourself as a case study. So we get to hear week on week, week on week about the things that you're doing. Like you just came back from a month away from London. You just, you know, you were in Australia, you were in Bali.

Obviously you got sick in Bali, we know that. But also you talk us through, so you've cut out some of the events that you do, you've really focused on one particular offer and I think you said that you really want the rest of what you do to kind of be as good as what you do with Onnit and to kind of live up to that expectation. So it's not just about kind of like adding, adding, adding more and more and more, it's about kind of creating more space, more feeling of ease and those sorts of things as well, isn't it?

Alice Benham Completely. And I think that's the joy, but also sometimes it can be the annoyance in business, right? Is that you're never done. There's always another, another focus, a slightly different vision. And I look at even just, you know, what probably feels more like the business I've run for the last kind of six, seven years. There's been a lot of kind of phases within that, which ultimately I would say for me, my business externally has always just reflected who I am internally in the sense of where I'm at with my life and also what kind of energy and capacity I have to want to kind of do these things. So yeah, probably up until about two years ago, my whole mantra was say yes to everything, messy action, just do it, you know, very much just like, if I give everything a go, something will stick. And that served me very well for a long time. And then I probably was starting to feel it was actually in line with my book coming out, which was a really weird experience because it was this, you know, business high. It's the most shiny thing I'd ever kind of done at that point.

Everyone else is clapping me and actually behind the scenes I was just feeling really, I didn't have the words at the time, but I just didn't feel very good. I'd really over-committed on my book tour. I had Christmas parties coming up that I'd somehow snowballed into becoming a big organizer of. I had like at one point, and it was actually in this kind of realization, it was summer of 2024. I mapped out every single piece of the business model, you know, like one to one, I got a stationary shop, retreats, every service. And there was 29. I'm a company of one for people that are, you know, might not know my setup. I don't have a full-time team. I don't want one. I run the business in quite a lean way. And I just had this realization of like, okay, maybe at this point, more is not going to be better. And I'm going to be honest at first, it felt really unnatural and wrong to like stop doing things and to say no.

I'm now a couple of years on from that change and very slowly what's happened in learning to be maybe just a bit more focused on simplicity, still doing quite a few things, but to me this feels so simple. It's just everything's been better and I've been able to bring my best to everything, but actually I don't think I could have got here without having that period of just experimenting. You know you learn best by doing in business and so everyone's timeline is going to look different. But whenever I meet anyone at the start of their business journey, I'm like, just do everything for as long as you can and then step back and go, right, what have we learned? Yeah, what can we take from it? But yeah, probably now I'd say my, I look back at how I used to work and I kind of worked hard for fun. I think now I work hard to get things that matter to me. So it's like, again, that's what I mean, I guess, by how I've changed. So the business has changed because of that.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. With on it, there are 175 or so people in the group. And I've seen like their names popping up in the chats and with a few people started adding each other on Instagram. And I know that we talked about that being a kind of social connection thing. But who are the businesses, who is in the, you know, how, first of all, okay, let's talk about on it. Tell us about what is on it. Sorry. In your own words.

Alice Benham Good question. I like how you described it. On it is all about helping business owners to work on their businesses, not in them, right? The difference being working in your business as a photographer, you're on shoots, you're editing galleries, you're delivering to clients, you're keeping the business running today. But on the business stuff where you may be acting more as the business owner, CEO, that's actually going to create growth in the long term. The trouble is on the business stuff never feels urgent.

And it's quite hard to do for and by yourself. That's why jobs like mine exist. And I realized over the years, long time of, again, this experimentation could have never landed on it earlier than I did, that so many people didn't need to be told what to do. They weren't in a place to need like direct, you know, advice from someone. They just needed some space, some structure and some accountability to almost ask themselves the questions. I kind of think of on it as like being your own business coach.

where I every month ask people questions like, well, what is the vision? How could you be closer to it? What's going well? What can we learn? What's the data saying? And it's, it's simple again, that concept of simplicity. I really can't, I really came into this season of like making things simple, kicking and screaming. But I'm a real believer that data doesn't lie. And I'm looking at my business today and I just see that across the board, anything that's simple has done well. And I think that's what.

Yeah, before Onnit, I'd never ever had something that wasn't one-to-one that really felt right. And I always want to point that out to people because Onnit is a unicorn. It's incredible. It's transformed my business. I think it's a, I really, really think I've nailed something, but it took me nine years of feeling like I couldn't move out of one-to-one for Onnit to come in and do that. So yeah, I won't keep rambling, but that's kind of what the concept, yeah, year-long program.

Literally just one session a month is what people pay for. And yeah, this year there's lots of people in it. I would sum up my main audience as lifestyle business owners, which I'm reclaiming not as an insult. The tech startup companies love to say lifestyle like it's a bad thing. I'd love a lifestyle business. I'd love a business that gives me a life. Like that sounds great. So it's a lot of people like ourselves, you know, they might have team part-time or full-time, a lot of people running their businesses on their own, but typically kind of service providers, people that have built businesses for and by themselves and really just want to work out how to make it better for them. You know, everyone's in the same position where you've got limited time, but lots of ideas and just that space to kind of work out what to do. But yeah, it's a whole spectrum of different business. When you realize what you can do, it's wild. You're like, that can be a full-time, it's amazing. I love what people can turn into jobs is incredible.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, right. I, when I came to your Christmas lunch, there was one of your, one of your ongoing clients is, was, was her whole business. It was about like, what's working at like working out what's in your fridge. Like to know that, like not to buy this particular thing. So you keep eating the right things and like, it was just brilliant. It's like she had this whole amazing business and she'd been featured in different articles, like, you know, sort of magazines and stuff. Just about like how to know what's in your fridge. So yeah, what you can turn to business is incredible.

Alice Benham 100%. And it's so good to get out there, isn't it? I'm sure you'd be the same where I can so easily just be in my same circles. And there's so much value in people that really understand your business model, but also just meeting people in really different worlds, but actually again, have such similar, yeah, experiences. It's really magic.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, absolutely. I was a member of a local BNI chapter, and I'm sure you know what BNI is. For our listeners, okay, I've got a BNI. So I was a member of a local BNI chapter and for our listeners who don't know what BNI is, it stands for business networking initiative. As far as I remember, it's essentially a collection of small business owners or people who work in an industry. And you meet together on a weekly basis, usually very early in the morning. Thankfully mine was not early in the morning because I'm not a morning person. But you'd meet, you'd meet for about an hour and a half. You talk to other people about your business and the implication is that, you'd be like, each person would be there to kind of grow each other's business. Do you know, I can feed you leads. I can do this. I can feed you leads. The thing that I felt when I was in this group and I'm really sorry for any of my BNI people who are listening.

It just felt like people were there because their business was failing rather than they were on a kind of upward trajectory and growing their business. And it was almost like, we have to do this thing because it's like, this is our networking for the week done ticked, you know, I'm doing my marketing done. And I just, I just didn't really feel like this was a sort of place where you could be like ambitious and celebrate wins and like have that kind of real kind of like warm, friendly, fuzzy feeling about running a business. It felt like an annoyance. And I'm just like, I don't want to be like the affect of being in this place was just so like miserable. I'd come away from the sessions being like, and to advertise you as an antidote to this, when obviously we have our sessions, I come away from those sessions feeling like positive and challenged and like got these kind of tasks that I can do that grow, not just my business, but my capacity, my understanding of myself and myself as a business owner. So in a way, like, you know what you do is a bit of an antidote to the drudgery of the weekly meetups for BNI. So well done.

Alice Benham I'm going to add that to my website copy. Tom said this. No, and I, that's so generous of you to say, but I think what that also points out is just environment matters, right? I was thinking of, as you were saying that then is like, as a business owner, your brain is already pessimistic, doubting you, questioning things like the last thing you need is a community that does that out loud. Like what you need to be is around people that, you know, I'm not here for toxic positivity where we think that everything is possible on every time. Like, you know me, when I talk in on it about people's goals, usually my role is going like, what if this takes longer than you want it to? What if this needs to be slower? What if it needs to be different? Because so often we think self belief is like, I can do anything, anytime. And it's like, that's usually unhelpful because then you set yourself up with over ambitious plans. But I think actually as business and it's just that little self trust, isn't it? Where we go, do you know what? I think I have got this and actually being around other people that have that.

And seeing other people's wins expands your vision, right? Like I can imagine, especially in the photography world, it'd be easy to think like, okay, Philly books is a photographer, like that's the ceiling for me. And if that's a ceiling that feels good for you, like I said earlier, bigger isn't always better. But I bet if you want to go bigger, it's almost that vision is created by meeting people who were there, who show you like, no, it is possible to do X, Y, Z or diversify in this way. And almost it's that quote, isn't it? Like you can't want to be what you can't see. Like a big part of vision and self-belief is being around people that are there or going there with you. So I'm so glad that it's created that for you. Thank you for saying so.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I think this is this is really the center of what I care about when I do my mentoring of photographers, because they come to me, they're like, you know I'm just starting out, I can take some photographs, but I don't know how to price myself, I don't know how to market myself, I don't know how to build a brand and those sorts of things. And one of the things I see very regularly is a sense that while they may understand that they're quite good at photography and more often than not, they're fantastic. Like I had a mentoring session this morning. First time I'd seen like his full portfolio of images. And I was like blown away by how amazing they were as photographs. Like what a great photographer he is, but he was drastically undercharging. His kind of self-talk was people don't want to pay for this. People don't want this, this service. You know, nobody wants what I'm offering.

All of these sorts of assumptions that he'd made off the back of maybe speaking to three people who had said no, because it was too expensive for them in particular. And so many people have got this kind of, I'm going to use a phrase that is used all across business circles, but limited, limiting beliefs, set of limiting beliefs. And it's really like amazing those moments that you can actually say to somebody, no, I can actually see, you know, I know of 10 other photographers or 10 other business owners or whatever, who do something similar to what you do and charge very good money for it and have built a lovely life and a lovely living with that and they support their family and so forth. And I just think that that's like a really fantastic power to have, to kind of open someone up to the capacity, the possibility that they could grow into that space. You must have that, you know, working with people over the course of a number of years where you're seeing lots of different kinds of business owners achieving things.

Alice Benham Yeah. And it's such a privilege, isn't it? Like that's the coolest thing to see is people kind of doing the things that they want to do. And for me personally, like my biggest wins for my clients is not really the like, you know, I love to celebrate with them when they get, you know, Forbes 30 under 30 or hit six figures, what, you know, like, cool, genuinely love the shiny stuff. I am a magpie for shiny stuff in my business. It makes me really excited, but in business, like the most fulfilling stuff more often than not is someone saying to me like, I'm now able to like pick my kids up from school every day. Or, I haven't like been sick in a while because I'm not feeling burnt out. Like, I don't like have anxiety when I open my inbox or like, like we'd been able to, you know, retire my partner so they can do it. Like that's the stuff big, big or small. I think that really matters. And I really believe in thinking about business lifestyle first. I've definitely experienced myself the reality of building a business that's just all about growth that at the end of the day doesn't really do anything for you. And I think speaking of limiting beliefs, I had a lot of feelings of like, well, who says I deserve to like make this work for me? Or like, I should be a martyr to my business and my clients. And it's like, where does the world teach us these things? Like, it's crazy, but it takes unlearning, doesn't it? It's not an overnight easy thing.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, absolutely. Barry, I'm going to change the lighting situation because the lights just hit there. So cut this little bit out. We're coming back.

Alice Benham He's a photographer.

Tom Trevatt Get the lighting right. Okay, fantastic. Good old Barry. Amazing. So you've had 10 years running this business and we will at some point in the conversation talk about what the next 10 years looks like. But before we do, there's a lot of talk toxicity, you've mentioned toxic positivity, there's a lot of toxicity within the business community and the podcast community and, you know, finance bros and all of these kinds of people.

You run a podcast where you're basically speaking to people on a regular basis. It's just you at the moment rather than having to, you used to do more guests, but now it's just you. Who are your enemies? Who are the, who, not necessarily who but like, like what type of business advice is bullshit?

Alice Benham The enemy of my work, the biggest thing that I'm like on a mission to be the opposite of is the message that business is really easy. It's just complicated. I believe the complete opposite of that is true. Growing a business is actually quite simple. Like the steps it takes, they're not difficult. It's hard, right? Because of the steps you have to take whilst you're feeling demotivated, when you're not seeing results yet, when you've got to keep showing up. So I really believe, just to reword that even clearer, like the steps it takes to grow a business aren't complicated, they're simple, but the reality of running a business and putting those steps into place day after day after day and evolving all the time and never really stopping, that's really hard.

And I think the internet thrives off of content that makes business look easy. Cause if you make it look easy, people want to do it. And if people want to do it, but you tell them it's really complicated, they're going to want to buy your thing to make it happen. And I hate that. I wholeheartedly believe, especially for people at the start of their business journeys, probably the worst thing that you can invest in is someone like me. Hands up. I am too expensive for the value you would get at the very start of your business journey. At the start, I think you need to be walking around like a toddler, learning to walk, bashing into things, figuring out where the braces are, working out what to, you know, learning to find your feet. And so, yeah, I just feel really passionately that like, it doesn't need to be complicated, but let's not pretend it's easy. Like it's hard. It takes a lot. And I think when we make it look really easy, a lot of the time, I know what this did for me in the early days, it just makes you think that you're the problem. It just makes you think like, I'm the only one that's finding this difficult. And as soon as you think you're the problem, you'll stop. Whereas actually, one of the reasons that I share my challenges as openly as I can, there's always stuff I can't, or I'll share it in, you know, not in real time. But I try and share all of my challenges and failures as much as I share my success. Because I just want people to know that that's normal. And that's not, you know, I don't know, you never get to a point where it's easy, in my opinion.

I mean, who knows, but I've not got there yet and I've not worked with any, you know, I work with businesses way bigger than mine and they're not there. Can sell you that for free.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Fair enough. Do we think that we enter into business and we, we expect it to be easy? I'm not sure. I mean, sometimes I see people and they think that there's like, should be a one to one correlation between I put a piece of marketing out and I get a lead and they go, that hasn't worked. Therefore I must give up. Like sometimes I see that, people, I suppose maybe think it's easy. But yeah, I absolutely take your point about this idea that it's actually detrimental to assume that there's a high level of complexity involved in running a business, unless the business itself is some, for some reason is complex. Like it might be like a medical science business and there's complexity in what you actually do. But the business side of it is, it's a process of iteration in a sense, isn't it? It's trying out lots of different things until you find the thing that actually is working. Yeah, definitely.

So talking about challenges, talking about the things that you've struggled with over the years, what would be like number one, like the biggest thing, not necessarily like a big event, but like the thing that you've struggled with the most.

Alice Benham Goodness, I could literally reel like 10 off the top of my head. I mean, there's like the practical stuff that goes wrong. Like team members aren't right fit. Last year I lost about 50 grand because a system failed overnight. Like not glossing over that stuff. That's really annoying. And it has an impact, but like practical is practical, right? Like to the end of the day, once you're over it or it's fixed, like it is what it is. I think the biggest thing I've just always struggled with is my own... Probably, I want to go to say people pleasing. I don't know if that's quite right. I think it's the mix as a business owner between like your emotion and like your logic or your strategy. And I've always wanted to blend the two, but I definitely see like, you know, I do look back and think, well, if I had maybe, you know, said no to a few of those things in my business model a bit sooner, if I'd put those boundaries in place a bit sooner, if I'd communicated with that team a bit sooner, like I think I've often played it quite safe.

Partly because I know that the heart of my business is my community and the experience I give people and people's perception of me is like my most precious treasured thing. And so I've probably sometimes missed out on growth. Even things like you don't sell as hard as you could or you don't come in at a price that you want to because you're just conscious and cautious. I don't ever want to lose that carefulness. I'm always enjoy having a bit of sensitivity, but yeah, I would say I'm actually a very sensitive person and I can see how yeah, there's just always friction. I don't know if that makes sense to you. Like it's just always something for me to learn to balance and definitely some of the things that have gone wrong over the years. I can see how actually maybe I often say like, just wish I'd thick skin or I was just a bit like braver. Maybe that would have, yeah, changed it.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. I, so I finished a PhD before I started my business. And when my students asked me about like, what do you need to do to do a PhD, is it a difficult thing, a PhD. And like the answer is obviously yes. Like it's difficult to, to write a big piece of writing. Like obviously that's the thing, but the thing, the biggest challenge that I always say to people is that actually what you're doing is you're working on this thing that has got a massive great big like timeframe involved with the deadline that's way ahead in advance. And you have to get up every single day and be self-motivated to sit down on that computer and write some of those words. And what you're essentially doing is fighting to not to, you know, this is, this is somewhat glib, but fighting depression, like fighting the feeling of not having purpose, because you are, you know, the purpose is so far in advance in the future. You know, for some people it's three years for some people it's six or more years ahead of them. The like every day you have to motivate yourself to do this thing. And I think a business is somewhat similar. Like, you know, there isn't really a kind of goal. Like there's not a, this final goal that you're like, I've won this game. You know, it's constant ongoing thing. And actually when you get to the end of one year and you say to yourself, you look at your accounts and you go, wow, I made some good money, but next year it must be better. You know, so the goalposts keep shifting and you actually do end up, you know, pushing what can be possible or what is possible, and make yourself kind of almost like you, you don't mean you're not celebrating that win. Like, you know, oh, six figures this year and, but next year it must be multiple six figures or those sorts of things. Yeah.

Alice Benham Yeah, I remember quite early on in business, maybe kind of two, three years in, seeing someone post a quote online that said it's windier at the top. I remember reading that and being like, how arrogant that you've got the top and you're moaning that it's windy. Like I could only dream of getting there. And in those first few years of business, you know I equate these things like 10,000 followers or fully booked with clients or charging X amount of money. And I would think, well, when I get there, then I'll feel secure, fulfilled, happy, whatever else. And it was such a good lesson for me to learn in those first few years of what fulfillment actually looks like in a business and actually separating out. People would have heard me say earlier, the shiny stuff. I am not anti the shiny stuff. I love it. I live for it. In fact, I'm in a bit of a shiny stuff dry zone in my business at the moment. And I'm feeling a bit like, oh, I want to, I don't know. Forbes 30 under 30 came out last week, had a bit of a breakdown. So was like, I want that.

I think the shiny stuff is really cool, but I now know it's never gonna make me sleep better at night. It's never gonna make me genuinely fulfilled and happy. I think the shiny stuff is like collecting Pokemon, and I love that idea. But then it's knowing what your actual fulfillment looks like. And I think actually, if you'd have asked me a few years ago, like my biggest mistake in business, it would have been tying my identity to the business. And actually that links with the challenge I just talked about, because when you think your identity is your business, you're sensitive to everything. Actually for me, the more detached I've become, and my version of detached is still pretty heavily attached, I'd say, but it feels detached to me in comparison, the better the business has been. Almost caring a little bit less, being a bit less like, hi, I'm Alice and the most interesting thing about me is my business and the best thing about me, you know, that identity shift I think has helped, but that takes a long time, doesn't it, kind of work through.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, of course. I was going to ask you about this actually, because obviously on social media, on Instagram, you share quite a lot of stuff. Like you talk about, you know, you talk about your partner, you talk about your trips, you talk about doing parties every day. You talk about, you know, you did a big rebrand fairly recently that was not just a rebrand of the business, but also kind of rebrand of yourself to some degree. This is very personal. This is very much, you know, a lot more personal than I can be on, on online, or I feel like I'm able to be online. But in a sense, you know, Alice Benham, A, B, like this is very, like it's very much kind of embedded in what it is that you offer. Like what do people get? They get you. Like, you know, it's not just, it's not just the thing that you can do for people. It's kind of your personality and your approach. Like, you know, you structure the spaces that people enter into, whether that's in person or whether that's online.

And it's very much kind of comes from your personality. You must find that quite hard. And like you just said, you're trying to sort of step back a little bit from that or be a little bit more detached from that. I mean, you know, there's multiple different ways of approaching these sorts of things, but how have you felt about that over the years?

Alice Benham Yeah, I mean, it definitely just happened organically. I think when I started showing up online, you know, I was so young. I mean, there's so many things I didn't know. And definitely on that very long list was, you know, what the difference between perhaps like a personal brand, as we now call it, versus just me. Like there was no differentiation for me between the two. So I mean, if you think I share a lot now, Tom, you scroll back on Instagram because let me, I did an Instagram post to my followers, to my clients announcing that my boyfriend and I had broken up. That's where we've come from. So now the fact that no one knows my fiance's name is like, it's like I'm living a secret life. It's that level of like not sharing. So I definitely had to learn it the hard way of like, the way I think about it is just like what is relevant and what is fun to share? Cause it creates connection points and then what's like completely off limits. And that changes for me.

Like for a long time, I didn't share anything about like health, fitness, my wellbeing, because it was a journey I was like really on and like in the depths of and struggling with. And now it's more of just like a kind of lifestyle for me. And I do share it. So there's even, you know, a lot of kind of evolution there, things like, you know, not sharing. You wouldn't know really any of my friends that aren't business owners. You know, my partner's name. Various kind of personal, I think it's a funny thing where, and I'm really proud of it actually, people feel that they really know you, but actually there is a curation there that needs to be there, right, for it to be healthy. I learned with one of the biggest things I think I learned quite early on was that it's less about what you share and more about the timing of it. So I heard this quote that said, you know, is it a wound or is it a scar? If it's a wound, it's fresh, it's icky, it's sticky, it's painful, no one wants to touch it. Like, I don't share the wounds.

You know, when I lost 50 grand overnight, you wouldn't have known that at the time because that would not have been good content. It would have been like using Instagram as therapy. But I do then share things maybe when they're a scar and I can share with hindsight and perspective. And it's, you know, not sensitive for me to talk about. So, yeah, it's something I've thought about a lot over the years and definitely, you know, like I was trolled throughout lockdown online over various situations that went on that weren't to do with me. I got dragged into it and that really taught me a lesson. Because they came for me in a personal way. They found my home address. They found my, and I just took from that, like, I need to draw some lines here because this can't work long-term. So yeah, I guess now it's like really personal because like you said, that's relevant. People want to buy from people, but it's curated. So it's healthy for everyone. You wouldn't know if, well, you'd know if my partner and I broke up, but probably not the day after like I did last time. Touch wood.

Tom Trevatt Let's hope that never happens. Yes, it's very much boundaried. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. You run a podcast and this feels to me, I would assume that this is the kind of on ramp for a lot of people. It certainly was for me to get to know you, to become a client of yours. Is this the main place people find you?

Alice Benham I would say so. Yes. I think podcasts are amazing tools, aren't they? Especially if you're a service provider, because it literally gives people like a free taster. It's like they're going for, you know, hundreds of hours of sales calls with you, but instead, you know, you're just recording one thing that lots of people can see. So yeah, my podcast has been, yeah, honestly, the best thing I've ever done for my business. It got me my book deal. It got me featured in Forbes. It's got me most of my clients. Like hands down, it's made yeah, the biggest impact to the business growth wise and I'm a big advocate for people starting podcasts as you know.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's done the same for me as well. I think it's one of the best things I've done for the marketing side of the business for sure. Um, where did it start? Cause you wouldn't have known that when you first picked up the microphone, would you?

Alice Benham This is why experiment, take messy action, say yes to things. My role in business, if I haven't done it once, I have to do it once. And then I have to do it twice. But I do everything, even now, now that I'm all simple and boundary and whatever, still, still the same, I have to try everything once. And the podcast came from very early on, actually, it's been going now for over seven years. So I started it when I was 20, 21.

And yeah, it came from me actually off the back of that burnout, feeling really isolated in business. I know it's hard for people to imagine now, back then there was nothing online. Like I remember the first business owners Facebook group opening in the UK because it was such a big deal. Like there was, there was community in person, but that wasn't, you know, you got to know to know, I didn't know. And so when I came back to the business and I realized how isolated I was, it was like, we need to improve this. And so selfishly, the podcast was kind of making what I wanted. I wanted to hear, ironically now, not too hard to find back then was hard to find, like honest business conversations, like just, you know, simple stuff. How did you start? What went well? What worked for you? What didn't? So yeah, started up, bought a little mic from, I think it was from like some weird computer shop down the street when I used to live with my parents. And yeah, Googled how to start a podcast.

And if you go back and listen to my first ever episode, I sounded like an American child because I put on this weird voice. I didn't know that I could just speak like myself. And yeah, I mean, as the theme with the whole of my business, start messy, figure out as you go. But yeah, it's kind of evolved since then. And yeah, actually part of the simplification a couple of years ago is getting rid of guest episodes, which was a really hard decision. But yeah, just important, I think when you've been doing something a long time to not just keep doing it because you've always done it, kind of always asking like, do I want this now? A lot of the time I see people dissatisfied in business because they're just doing all the stuff they're past self chose. And actually you've always got to be like tweaking and evolving.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. No, absolutely. I would say a good proportion of the people who listen to this, all seven of them are photographers. And so they run businesses. Hopefully this is interesting for them as it is for me and interesting for them as what you put out there is for other business owners. But you've worked with so many different types of business owners, including photographers, including all sorts of creative business owners, as well as people that are maybe not quite at the creative end of the spectrum. But specifically to my audience, the creative end of the spectrum, hopefully, what sorts of things should we be looking at? For what sorts of things could we do to improve our branding, our marketing, our lead generation to simplify, to build a business that aligns with our values, those sorts of things. What should we be doing? What tips do you have?

Alice Benham Hmm. Okay. Let me come up with three things. They won't necessarily be connected, but three things that come to mind, people can choose their own adventure of which one's going to help them. I think the first thing I would say, which is probably quite relevant to a lot of what we talked about today, and you Tom, I hope would feel like this isn't something you need to do because you have the space already to do it, but it's for people to actually step back and just ask themselves, like, how's this going for me? Not how is this going? Because when we think about that, we just think of like, well, how busy am I? How much money? Like, leave that stuff, like how is it for you? Like right now, if you did a bit of a like business and life audit, what's good, what's not, easy question would be if in a year's time, nothing had changed, what would you hate about your business? Even just working that out, like gives you that clarified vision. Vision is not a one-time thing. It's just always getting clearer. Like a North star, it's a focus. So that would be one thing I'd encourage people to do. If they don't feel super clear is just spend a bit of time percolating, reflecting, sit with some questions, go for a walk.

Go in the shower, always where the best ideas happen. That then obviously helps guide the action. Cause you don't want to be busy for the sake of busy. Like these next two things I'm going to share and it's not going to help you don't do them. A couple of other practical things that come to mind. Second one, I think is big for service providers is look at every step from someone first inquiring to the end of their process with you. So you delivering them a gallery and look at how every single step could either be made more efficient or the increased in terms of client experience.

I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here, but like the experience you give your clients is your best marketing. Like how you make people feel not only is going to, you know, make your life so much easier because they're going to then refer in a better way, works better for everyone. They want to come back. They remember you. So look at, you know, how things can be automated, how things can be improved. I'm a big fan of like a free gift, a little something like look at those little touch points that make things feel more personal and also for photographers, like how are you after someone's working with you, inviting them to buy from you again? Like so often, I think we forget that our best sales strategy is our past clients. They're the people that know you, trust you best. They have a track record of wanting to pay for what you do. So I would look at, yeah, if there's any tweaks and improvements there. And then the third and final thing that comes to mind, I think is looking at where you spend your time. So if you haven't done a time audit recently, that's probably going to be really helpful. And what I mean by that is download an app like Toggl. There's loads out there that are free. Spend a couple of weeks logging every hour of your day. Are you editing? Do you want to shoot? You're on Instagram? Be honest. Are you scrolling? You're faffing? You're doing invoicing? It's so illuminating as a business owner because we all love to say like, how are you busy? But like, if you don't know why you're busy, you're just stuck. And then if you want to grow or work less, like you don't know what levers to pull. So yeah, one of those three.

Think about your vision, look at client experience or do a bit of a time audit is where I begin. And even as I say them, I'm like, yeah, I'm useful for like, it's never ending, isn't it? We're always coming back to those things.

Tom Trevatt Fantastic. I'm gonna go and do all of those right now. That's brilliant. Yeah, no, it's great. Okay, but just before we wrap up Alice, where can people find you? We've spoken about your podcast, spoken about your Instagram and your website. It's all around your name, isn't it? So how do people find you?

Alice Benham Yes, Alice Benham, Ben Ham, like a man called Ben that loves ham. So I like to make people think of it. Instagram is probably my main social hangout, Alice underscore Benham. But yeah, my podcast, I'd say is my favorite thing I create, as I'm sure you would agree with Tom, just having a space where you can kind of share nuance and detail. And yeah, I try and share just really actionable expertise there along with personal insights where they're relevant. So yeah, that's called starting the conversation. It's on YouTube as well.

And yeah, my website has lots of free fun things that you can explore. So come say hi.

Tom Trevatt Amazing. Fabulous. So before we wrap up, Alice, what does the next one, five, 10 years look like for you?

Alice Benham You teased this question earlier and I don't know if you saw it, I really pulled a face because I was like, gosh, I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. What do the next, if nothing changed, to answer my own prompt, if nothing changed in five to 10 years, I'd be happy. I'd love evolution, but like, I'm so grateful for where things are. My kind of vision for what's next is really just about stepping more, I think, into that expertise and thinking about how I expand on that probably in wider settings. So my ultimate dream when I'm being brave with it is that I would really love to be a full-time public speaker. So I would love to have another book deal about goal setting. I'd love to speak on more stages. That's a big part of my work that I love. But I'd love to still have on it. There's very little now in my business model that I want to be retiring or refining. I think, yeah, just the classic answer probably of what I have now.

But yeah, I do feel very happy and I'm hugely grateful to be able to say that.

Tom Trevatt Nice. Nice. And this is the question I should have asked at the very beginning of the session of the call. You do on it, do individual mentoring, you do the podcast and you do public speaking. Are there other things that are in the business as well that's apart from that?

Alice Benham There are, and they are currently on the decision shopping block. Literally this Thursday, two days time when we're recording this, I'm sitting down to work. Cause yeah, again, it's that thing of every yes is a no. Everything you do is a compromise of the other things that you can't do or bring your best to. So yeah, at the moment I've also got a stationary shop, which is a whole separate business. That one is potentially staying or going, we'll see. And then, yeah, I also run a group program, but yeah, long-term, really just looking to have on it, one-to-one, public speaking, book, podcast, retreats, fun. That's my idea of fun.

Tom Trevatt Great. Nice. Yeah, yeah, sounds great. I love the on paper because that's what it's called, on paper. Stationary because yeah, you but you whenever you start working with somebody you give them a nice journal a nice notebook to work with. So that's such a nice little touch there. So that's great. Anyway, I've taken up far too much your time already. Thank you very much. I know that when this comes out, it'll be a few weeks before the opening of the doors of the next season of Onnit. So do you want to just plug yourself a little bit?

Alice Benham Yes. Why not? It's not, it's not like I haven't spoken enough at this. Joking. Yes, on it, which we've said enough about, people can follow the link to find out more if they want to, but yeah, we will reopen doors just once for the next six months. So I like to think of it as the people that maybe thought, maybe I don't need that. I'll try it on my own. And if you're a few months into the year and thinking, actually, I'd quite like that structure and the people and the energy, like you said, then yeah, we will be opening doors for you to join for the second half of 2026. And I'll be running a few kind of free master classes and workshops to give people a taster because it might not be for you, give it a go. So yeah, if you just come to alicebenham.co.uk, if I've done my job right, you won't miss it. You can join the wait list and find out more.

Tom Trevatt And I can recommend it. I mean, one of the things I said to you when we first, the first session that we did is I said it in the chat is that I just like, it's a brain workout. Cause you are for two hours solidly thinking about something. You're not checking your phone. You're not looking at the news. You're not whatever being distracted by something else. And that is as like, you know, we go and we do a workout and, without personal trainers, we go to parties, we go to classes and we have that time set aside specifically for that. It's that for the business. And it just, I came away, I always come away feeling like, my God, that was so like exhausting, but also at the same time, so illuminating and so clarity gaining, clarifying, clarifying is the word.

Alice Benham That's the best thing I could hear. Honestly, Tom, this call has just filled up my cup. Thank you for not only sharing this platform with me, but being so generous as well. It's a real joy to support what you do. And yeah, I'd love to chat with anyone off the back of this episode. Tell us what you think.

Tom Trevatt Thank you. Yeah, I'm sure there'll be lots of people who want to know more about what you do. Anyway, thank you very much. I will see you soon.

Alice Benham Thank you. See you soon.

Tom Trevatt Amazing.