When Annemie Tonken built her photography sales system, she wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. She was trying to survive a season of life that left her with less time, less bandwidth, and a business that still needed to pay the bills. On this episode of The Motherhood Anthology podcast, host Kim Box sits down with Annemie, the photographer and educator behind This Can’t Be That Hard, to talk about the system she built to bridge the gap between all inclusive pricing and traditional in-person sales.
Annemie has been a family photographer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina since 2010, and she got into education in 2016 after co-founding a conference for family photographers called the Family Narrative. But it was a season of major life changes, including an unexpected ankle surgery, that pushed her to build the systems she is best known for today, the Simple Sales System and a membership model that has kept her business steady through every kind of disruption.
The Simple Sales System
Annemie describes the Simple Sales System as the bridge between the ease of all inclusive pricing and the earning potential of in-person sales. All inclusive is simple to run, but it caps how much a photographer can make and limits the client experience. In-person sales can be lucrative, but it demands hours of repeated meetings and conversations that eat into a photographer’s time. When Annemie got divorced seven years into her business, she no longer had that time to give, so she reverse engineered her own in-person process and rebuilt it using tools most photographers already have access to.
The system runs on six steps, starting with education that gets dripped out to the client from the very beginning. Instead of repeating the same explanations meeting after meeting, Annemie records a video once and sends it to every client, whether that is 25 people or 2,500. Clients pay a session fee up front, just as they would with in-person sales, and after the session they receive a link to a preview slideshow they can watch at home for 24 hours.
From there, they choose between three flexible collections (small, medium, and large), each built with a set number of digital files and a print credit that keeps clients shopping in the online gallery instead of downloading and disappearing. Once a collection is purchased, the gallery stays open for 30 days so clients can choose their images and shop at their own pace.
What makes this a true photography sales system, rather than just a checkout process, is that it preserves the emotional impact of seeing images for the first time while removing the pressure of deciding everything at once. Clients only have to make one easy decision (small, medium, or large) before they have a full month to handle the details. Annemie has run this model for seven years and says it consistently earns her the same income she made with in-person sales, in a fraction of the time.
Building Through Real Life
Annemie is candid that her biggest business decisions did not come from a strategy session. They came from crisis. Her divorce forced her to rethink in-person sales because she suddenly needed to care for her kids and take on more clients without the extra hours that in-person sales required. A few years later, an ankle surgery she expected to recover from in a couple of weeks turned into four months on crutches, and as a single business owner, that meant no income coming in if she could not shoot.
It was during that recovery that the idea for her membership model was born, and from an unlikely source. Annemie was signed up for a quarterly HVAC filter subscription, and she realized her family clients kept coming back to her every two to three years instead of annually, always with the same excuse: life got busy, or something else came up first. In August of 2019, she launched a family photography membership with three tiers, billed monthly over 12 months, with renewal built in. She signed up 42 families in that first launch, and the recurring income covered her mortgage and groceries before she had even booked a single session.
The timing turned out to matter more than she could have known. When the pandemic hit soon after, Annemie’s membership clients had already paid into their sessions, so instead of losing income while she could not shoot, her business stayed afloat. When outdoor sessions became possible again, those same members were ready to book immediately, since their session was something they had already committed to rather than something they had to decide to spend money on all over again.
Building a Business That Lasts
Much of Annemie’s teaching centers on what she calls alignment, and she breaks it down into five Ps: preferences, parameters, pricing, policies, and products. Preferences are the business a photographer actually wants to run (high end and low volume, or lower prices and higher volume, or somewhere in between), while parameters are the practical realities that shape what is possible right now. When those five areas are out of sync, whether it is a high end photographer selling low cost products or a boutique brand charging bargain prices, clients can sense that something does not add up, even if they cannot name it.
Annemie uses three avatars to describe this: the donkey (lower prices, higher volume), the unicorn (high end, lower volume), and the workhorse in between. She is quick to point out that none of these is better than the others, and that a well run donkey model business, like a friend of hers who charges approachable prices for a high volume of beautiful, efficient sessions, can be just as profitable and just as fulfilling as a high end boutique studio. The goal is not to chase a particular label. It is to build a business that matches what a photographer actually wants and what her real life allows.
That same clarity shows up in how Annemie talks about pricing. She encourages photographers to run their numbers before they raise prices, so that when a client pushes back, they can hold their ground from a place of knowing exactly why that price is what it is. This is the kind of clarity that community and ongoing education make possible. Learning alongside other photographers who have faced the same pricing fears, the same slow seasons, and the same identity questions about what kind of business to build is part of what makes a resource like The Motherhood Anthology valuable to so many members working through these same decisions.
Listen and Learn More
This episode is worth a listen for the full walkthrough of the Simple Sales System, Annemie’s honest take on the donkey, workhorse, and unicorn models, and her reflections on what success really means after building a business through more than one unexpected life change.
Find Annemie at thiscantbethathard.com or on Instagram at @thiscantbethathard.
Ready to build a business that reflects your own creative voice? The Motherhood Anthology membership gives you access to expert mentors, live coaching, monthly marketing suites, and a private community of photographers who are invested in your success. Learn more and join at themotherhoodanthology.com.
The Motherhood Anthology is a community and educational resource for photographers who want a profitable and sustainable business they love. With 15+ expert mentors and 7+ years of proven content, TMA helps portrait photographers build confident, thriving businesses through monthly education, mentorship, and a supportive community of 700+ members.
