Kim Nagle is the creator of The DAMN Plan® and an entrepreneur since age 14. For more than 35 years, she has helped entrepreneurs turn ideas into sustainable businesses.
You're putting in the hours. Are they paying off?
Join our 7th annual Profitability LIVE for two days of live, practical sessions to help you find the right clients, price with confidence, know your numbers, and build a business that can grow with you, and eventually without you.
The questions change as your business grow
Maybe you’re ready to take on clients but don’t know where they’ll come from. When someone asks for a price, your stomach drops, and you wonder whether your number is too high or too low.
Once the work starts coming in, new questions show up. Did that last project actually make money?
Then, as your business grows, the questions get bigger. What would it take for the business to run without you? And what will it be worth when you’re ready to step away for good?
None of this means you’re doing it wrong. These are the questions every photo manager runs into at some stage, and they all come back to the same place: the decisions you make about clients, pricing, time, and growth.
A profitable business isn't built by accident. It's built one decision at a time.
Keynote speaker Kim Nagle builds the event around that idea. She opens by giving you a clear lens for what’s true in your business, and closes by helping you turn what you learned into decisions you’ll actually follow through on.
Kim Nagle
OPENING KEYNOTE
Profitability by Design: The Decisions Behind a Business That Works
A profitable business isn’t built by accident. It’s built one decision at a time. In this opening keynote, Kim Nagle shares the power of Determined-Decisions™: decisions grounded in truth and backed by the willingness to act. You’ll look at how everyday choices around pricing, cash flow, capacity, marketing, and growth shape the business you’re building, and why every business decision eventually shows up in the numbers. You’ll leave with a practical lens for the sessions ahead: understand what’s true in your business, decide what needs to change, and use what you learn over the next two days to build profitability by design.
CLOSING KEYNOTE
Decisions Into Dollars: Turning What You Learned Into Profitable Results
You’ve spent two days learning how to find clients, price your work, understand your profit, build capacity, create systems, and grow. But information only changes your business when you do something with it. In this closing keynote, Kim Nagle helps you turn what you’ve learned into consistent action and measurable results. You’ll identify what matters most for your business right now, choose what you’re actually willing to change, and create a practical path forward once the conference inspiration wears off. You don’t need to do everything. You need to make the right next decision, and then actually follow through, the heart of Kim’s signature framework, The DAMN Plan®.
Two tracks for every level of business
Registration includes every session, regardless of the track you choose to take. Follow one track or mix and match between them. Everyone comes together for the keynotes and facilitated conversations.
TRACK 1:
Foundations
Where will my next client come from? What should I charge? Did that project actually make money?
Practical sessions on finding and keeping clients, estimating with confidence, checking your profit, and building higher-value offers.
TRACK 2:
Growth
What happens if I step away? When should I hire? What’s my business worth, and where can it go next?
Strategic sessions on building systems, making your first hire, growing transferable value, and adding new revenue streams.
Event Schedule
November 5 - 6, 2026
Each breakout slot has a Foundations session and a Growth session running side by side, so you can follow one track or switch between them. Everyone comes together for Kim Nagle’s keynotes and the facilitated conversations with Cathi Nelson.
Thursday runs from 11:00am to 4:30pm ET, with open networking afterward. Friday runs from 12:00pm to 5:30pm ET. Can’t make a session live? Every registrant gets lifetime access to the recordings.
Breakout Sessions
Eight 90-minute breakout sessions across two tracks, Foundations and Growth. Follow one track or mix and match.
Get Clients, Keep Clients: The Two Things That Actually Grow Your Business
Foundations Track
Most marketing advice assumes you already have an audience, but what if you’re starting from zero, or you’d rather not live on social media? This session tackles the beginner’s real first question: where does the work actually come from, and how do you keep it coming? The answer comes down to two things: getting clients and keeping clients.
Getting clients starts with your network: the referral partners, like estate attorneys, senior move managers, and professional organizers, who send business your way, plus low-effort channels like Google and local speaking that let clients find you without ever opening Instagram. Keeping clients comes down to quality customer service. In this field you’re not handing someone a shopping bag, you’re being trusted with a family’s most irreplaceable memories, and how you make people feel is what turns a one-time client into a referral source for your next one.
We will show you how to build both in a way that fits your own personality: a relationship-building approach for referral partners, a simple Google Business Profile setup, and concrete service tools like the Peak End Rule and a client process map for designing moments of surprise and delight. You’ll leave with a short, prioritized list of client-getting and client-keeping actions you can start this week.
• Identify three realistic referral partners in your market and know how to make first contact.
• Set up a simple, sustainable way for local clients to find you without relying on social media.
• Apply the Peak End Rule to design one memorable moment and one intentional ending in your own client process.
• Sketch the first draft of a client process map for consistent, referable service.
• Build in one low-cost moment of surprise and delight that turns a client into a referral source.
Scope It, Price It, Send It: Estimating a Project with Confidence
Foundations Track
You’ve got a promising client on the phone, they want a price, and your stomach drops. When you’re starting out, estimating can feel like pure guesswork. But most pricing mistakes don’t happen in the estimate at all; they happen earlier, in the intake conversation, before you’ve written a single line item. This session walks the full path from a client’s first call to a number you can send without second-guessing it. You’ll learn the discovery questions that reveal a project’s true size, how to spot the scope surprises that quietly erode your profit before they happen, and how what you uncover in intake maps directly onto the line items in your estimate, so the price you send is one you can stand behind.
• Run a discovery conversation that surfaces a project’s true scope before you quote.
• Recognize the common scope surprises that shrink your profit and head them off early.
• Build an estimate whose line items connect directly to what you learned in intake.
The Profit Check: Did I Actually Make Money?
Foundations Track
You finished a big project, the invoice was large, and it felt profitable, but did you actually make money? This session gives beginners a plain-language way to answer that question, no accounting background needed. Starting from a single real project, we’ll uncover the true costs of completing it (e.g., employee labor, outsourcing, supplies, vendor costs, your own time) and surface the hidden costs that make a “great” project less profitable than it looked. From there, we’ll widen the lens: you’ll see where those same numbers live on a Profit & Loss statement and what they reveal about the health of your business, then use a simple budget to turn what you want to earn into the revenue you actually need. You’ll leave understanding not just whether a project made money, but whether your business is making enough.
• Calculate whether a project actually made money by identifying its true direct costs, including the ones that are easy to forget.
• Read a basic P&L statement and understand what revenue, profit, and expenses reveal about your business’s health.
• Use what your projects and P&L tell you to price smarter and set the revenue targets your business needs.
Stop Selling Hours, Start Selling Solutions: From $1k to $10k Per Client
Foundations Track
Why do so many new photo managers stay stuck in small, hourly work? Often it isn’t a skills gap; it’s what happens inside when it’s time to name a bigger number. This interactive workshop is about closing that gap. You’ll start by taking inventory of the skills you already have and the real problems your ideal clients face, then use that raw material to build a complete, solution-based offer that you price for the value it delivers, not the hours it takes. From there, you’ll confront the fear, shame, and imposter feelings that keep your prices low, and shift how you see yourself as a seller. Drawing on her mindset-and-spiritual approach to selling, Sensei Victoria Whitfield has helped many small business owners move upmarket and charge with confidence. Come with your current offers ready to workshop, and you’ll leave with a higher-value offer in hand, and the confidence to sell it to a right-fit client.
• Take inventory of your transferable skills and your ideal clients’ problems as the raw material for a higher-value offer.
• Build a complete, solution-based offer rather than selling hours, and leave with your own custom offer in hand.
• Confront the fear, shame, and imposter feelings around charging more, and gain the confidence to sell it to a right-fit client.
Building a Business That Runs Without You
Growth Track
If everything in your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you own a job that owns you. This session is about becoming replaceable in the best possible way, and it starts with an idea most owners discover by accident: you can’t see what your business truly depends on you for until you step away from it. When Danielle Regout moved a significant distance from her team, the distance became a stress test, revealing which systems genuinely worked and which only held together because she was filling the gaps. In this session, you’ll learn to create that distance deliberately, and use what it exposes to document processes, transfer judgment, and build the systems that let the work get done to your standard without you. Whether your goal is more freedom, more capacity, or simply a business that doesn’t fall apart when you take a week off, you’ll leave with greater confidence to step back, see where you are still the bottleneck, and start building a business that depends on you less.
• Diagnose how dependent your business is on you by using deliberate distance to reveal the hidden dependencies, undocumented knowledge, and decision bottlenecks that only surface when you step back.
• Transfer not just tasks but the judgment and standards behind them, so the work gets done to your standard without losing the personal, high-touch quality clients trust.
• Build in the checkpoints that let you step back without quality slipping, and treat becoming less essential as an ongoing practice, staying intentional about where the business genuinely needs you.
Making Your First Hire (Without Losing Money or Your Mind)
Growth Track
Going from solo photo manager to employer is one of the scariest leaps in the business, and one of the most necessary if you want to grow beyond your own two hands. This session shares Darla DeMorrow’s 15 years of experience building a team, including when you’re ready to hire, whether a contractor or an employee is the right first move, and how to run the process so a hire grows your business instead of draining it. You’ll get the systems behind it (a structured interview and a real onboarding plan) plus the harder-won mindset shift: seeing yourself not as a solo operator who’s overloaded, but as the kind of boss the right people want to work for.
• Recognize when you’re ready to hire, and why waiting often costs more than the hire itself.
• Run a repeatable process for finding and onboarding the right person, from a structured interview to a defined first-two-weeks.
• Step into the role of an employer people want to work for by designing the job around your business’s real needs, not the corporate models you left behind.
Building a Business Worth Selling: Exit-Ready Value at Any Stage
Growth Track
Most photo managers aren’t planning to sell tomorrow, but the decisions that make a business sellable are the same ones that make it more profitable, more resilient, and easier to run today. In this session, business-sale expert Marla DiCarlo, a CFO who grew and sold her own company before spending years helping small business owners prepare for successful exits, shows you what actually drives a business’s transferable value. You’ll learn why “someday I’ll sell” thinking should start shaping your decisions now, and how building value on purpose gives you options, whether you exit in three years or thirty.
• Understand the key drivers that determine what a small business is actually worth.
• Recognize how reducing owner-dependency builds both a better business today and a sellable one tomorrow.
• Identify where your business currently carries value, and where it’s quietly leaving value on the table.
New Ways to Grow: Diversifying Your Revenue Streams
Growth Track
Trading hours for dollars on one consumer project at a time has a ceiling, and many established photo managers hit it. But the way beyond it usually isn’t a colleague’s business model; it’s the strengths, skills, and reputation you’ve already built. This session starts there: with an honest inventory of what already generates revenue, what clients keep asking for, and what’s calling to you that you haven’t explored. We’ll then help you filter the real paths beyond one-off client work through that foundation and your own vision for the business. You’ll look at leveraging your expertise through courses, memberships, speaking, and digital products, or moving into higher-value markets like business, corporate, and institutional clients such as museums and schools. Rather than a how-to on any single stream, this is a strategic look at what each path actually demands, so you choose the direction that fits your business instead of chasing someone else’s. Through worksheets and group brainstorming, you’ll leave with the one or two directions that are yours to take.
• Name your existing strengths and revenue drivers as the raw material for your next stage of growth.
• Filter the growth paths open to a photo business, from expertise-based income to higher-value institutional markets, through your own Vision and Core Values.
• Run a real cost-versus-return check on the paths that rise to the top, and name the one or two best suited to your business, capacity, and goals.
Learn together, not alone, with facilitated conversations and reflections
Cathi Nelson
Founder of The Photo Managers
Two days of sessions can leave you with a lot of ideas. The facilitated conversations give you time to make sense of them together.
Cathi Nelson, founder of The Photo Managers, brings both tracks into one room for two structured conversations. You’ll share your biggest takeaways, hear what’s landing for photo managers at other stages of business, and connect with colleagues who understand exactly what you do.
Session details:
• Thursday, 4:00pm – 4:30pm ET: Reflect on Day 1 and share what’s sticking
• Friday, 1:45pm – 2:30pm ET: Connect across tracks before the final sessions
WHAT YOU GET:
- Two keynotes with Kim Nagle, creator of The DAMN Plan®
- Eight 90-minute breakouts across the Foundations and Growth tracks
- Freedom to follow one track or mix and match
- Two facilitated conversations led by Cathi Nelson
- Open networking time with fellow photo managers
- Lifetime access to the recordings, so you can catch the sessions you missed
Here's What Past Attendees Are Saying...
“Every session was informative. The speakers fantastic and I really appreciated their candor and honesty. I came away with a concrete list of things to change or implement in my business. Profitability Live gave me the knowledge and confidence to change some of the ways I do business. It was full of great information for both new and experienced Photo Managers. Thank you for a wonderful program!!”
Ana C.
Posterity Pro
“Profitability Live was packed full of invaluable information. Receiving advice from the pros in this growing field, while also realizing I can do what they’re doing was a great way to build confidence. As someone who spent seven years in competitive MLM, I was so impressed with the level of encouragement I felt in just three days worth of training. It truly is a giving and supportive community that I’m proud to be part of already!”
Kari K.
Kari Kane, LLC
“The Profitability training was excellent, it helped me understand my value and it encouraged me to move forward with pursuing new clients. I feel much better about the value of what I have to offer and have a better understanding of how I should be charging of that different services. I highly recommend it to not just beginners but also to those that have been in the business but are still not charging what they should.”
Katherine B.
Memories Preserved
“This has given me the confidence to promote my new photo management business in my local area (where most people have never thought about the value of having their photo collections organised). Looking forward to the next sessions!”
Liz M.
Starred Photos
“I will never NOT attend this! My business really took off after implementing some of the tips. But I also like to think it was just being in the Profitability LIVE headspace that really helped. Thinking differently, asking questions, trying different approaches to see what works… I recommend Profitability LIVE to everyone!”
Marci B.
Past Present Pix
“What an incredible 3 days of an incredible information feast!! So many remarkable presenters, ideas, colleagues etc. There was something for everyone. And once again in evidence, the remarkable generosity and thoughtfulness of The Photo Managers was evident. Well done!!!”
Maria P.
Phipps Photo Management