How I became a marketing mogul
Entrepreneur uses her passion to build business
Jenna Kutcher started out with weddings.
Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers.
Marketing multi-hyphenate Jenna Kutcher got her start as a wedding photographer with a $300 Craigslist camera and side hustling like crazy outside of her full-time job to build her business. Now, Kutcher mentors the businessminded everywhere, hosting the Goal Digger podcast – which has more than 18.6 million downloads – teaching courses on everything from Instagram to email marketing, and even working as a #AerieReal Role Model for Aerie.
USA TODAY caught up with the photographer, marketing entrepreneur and new mom to Conley Kate to talk about everything from breaking away from the traditional 9-5 to building a business that allows for flexibility.
Question: How did you get your start as a photographer?
Kutcher: I was 22 when I bought a camera on Craigslist for $300, and I was working as an executive for Target at the time. I thought that the executive position would be my dream job – it had a salary and benefits and I got it right out of college – but I ended up just feeling like my soul was being sucked out of me every day.
My husband and I were planning our wedding at the time, and I just thought, man, it would be so nice to have a nicer camera for things like the shower (and) bachelorette party. So I bought this camera, and I just felt like I was passionate for once. I’d never taken an art class, I’d never taken a photography course, I knew absolutely nothing about entrepreneurship, but I kind of got bitten by this bug.
As a bride planning a wedding, I knew what brides had to go through in order to book a photographer and what that looked like. I created a blog, and I started sharing photos of our life. When I look back they’re hilarious, because they’re terribly edited, and I was taking pictures of the DIY projects we were doing for our wedding, and pictures of a random cat, and pictures of anyone who would ask me to take their picture.
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law got married in Jamaica, and they had gotten a resort photographer for free, but they were like, ‘Hey, can you bring your camera with and take some photos?’ I went all in. I did some really funny things – I hung her dress up in a palm tree, did all of the things I thought you had to do, but I absolutely loved it. I was very smart at the beginning and started crunching numbers and was like, man, if I could photograph weddings I might be able to leave this job. For the next year, I side-hustled every single night, marketed myself even though I didn’t really have much experience, put myself out there, and was able to book 25 weddings for my first year. When I was 23, I left Target for good, put in my notice and became a wedding photographer.
Q: How have you built your business to expand past photography?
Kutcher: The next few years after that, I kept booking more and more weddings. I was kind of on this upward trajectory: I was getting a ton of referrals, people started knowing my name, I definitely got a lot better at the whole photography thing.
I did 30 weddings my third season, and that season I kind of hit burnout. When you think about the wedding season in the Midwest it’s really condensed – basically just because of our weather – so I was shooting one or two weddings almost every single weekend from April through October, and it basically killed me. My husband and I sat down and I was like, if I do another year of this, I’m going to be out. I cannot do this again. We made the decision right then and there that I was going to cut my workload in half, and we were just going to live with less.
And I realized, man, I built a really successful business in three years flat without having any experience. I can teach other people how to do this. So, I created my first course that year, which started the education side of my business and is now mostly what I do. Fastforward, every year I started shooting a little bit less and I started having other revenue streams.
My business today looks so different than it did when I first started. Today, our main thing is running the Goal Digger podcast. I teach four different courses to entrepreneurs, I do social media influencing and speaking engagements, and we’ve even expanded to have two condos in Hawaii that we rent out to our followers. I’ve been able to build a business around the life I want, which for me – especially now as a mom – looks like flexibility and less obligation and more working during naptime and whatever that looks like.
Q: What’s a typical day for you? Kutcher: I’m just coming off of maternity leave, so we are definitely trying to figure out what is going to work for us. We’re really fortunate that he is able to be home more as well. I’ve been getting about three to four hours of work in each day, and honestly, I’m so much more productive than I ever was before, which is insane. We’re just kind of trying to figure out that balance.
Q: What is your favorite thing about your job?
Kutcher: I love work. I am a workhorse, and I think my biggest fear of having a child was that I didn’t know if I would feel like I could do both things well. For a long time, as a lot of entrepreneurs do, we focused so much on numbers and metrics, but now that I’ve switched to being like, we have enough: How can I make a bigger impact, and in turn, how can that impact change the world? That is what fuels me, and that is truly what I think about almost every day. I love sitting down and recording with amazing women, I love thinking of different ways to get the right tools and resources into the hands of the people that need them.
Q: What do you credit your success to?
Kutcher: A lot of hard work. I think that a lot of times it’s easy to look at people and think they were an overnight success, and I see that a lot with my students or with people who are wanting to start businesses. I kindly remind them that this has been eight years in the making and 4,000-some Instagram posts and 200-some podcast episodes and hundreds of blog posts, and I think that a lot of times we see people’s ‘after’ and we forget, hey, they had a beginning, too. I think my parents raised me to always believe that I could, and I think that has been huge.
Q: What advice do you have for someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
Kutcher: Visualize the life that you want 10 years from now because overnight success doesn’t exist. The decisions you’re making and the things you’re doing today will directly influence what will happen in your future. Build the life that you want to live.