Prepared for Amanda Upton / August 2026
Here is what your business looks like in two years if we build the thing you have already been describing: the place pageantry goes to get ready, compete, and get their photos.
Start with what is already true
Twenty-two years. The official photographer for Miss South Carolina, Miss American Coed and Royalty USA Nationals. This is not a plan to start something. It is a plan to stop leaving the rest of it on the table.
families have bought photos from you
orders through your event galleries
of those families come back for another event
what a returning family is worth compared to a new one
And that is just since you joined Waldo, on event photos alone. Your studio work, your seniors and your headshots are not in these numbers at all. Neither are the eighteen years before it.
The one problem worth solving
Pageant season is glorious and then it is over. December, January and February have brought in nothing at all, three years running. April and September are barely there.
That is not a work-harder problem. There is no pageant to shoot in January. The answer is to own something in those months that does not need a stage, and you have been circling it for a year already.
Your event sales by month, last full year.
The shape of it
Each one feeds the others. The events bring the people, the education keeps them all year, and the content makes strangers want in.
Pageant day. The thing you already do better than anyone, finally with software that keeps up with you.
What twenty-two years taught you, sold to the people who need it most. This is what earns in January.
The part that makes people want to be near you. It sells the other two without feeling like selling.
The platform
One for the girl and her mom. One for the director. The second one is how you grow, because a director brings you her entire roster in a single conversation.
The number underneath all of it
At your big nationals, between 25 and 40 families buy photos out of the couple of hundred girls competing. That gap is the whole opportunity, and it is worth being precise about why it exists.
You average $271 a sale. Your work is why these systems hire you in the first place. Neither of those is the problem.
They never see the photos. On the platform you use now, a family who has not paid is left unmatched, so the people most likely to become customers are shown the least. Matching misses girls who are plainly there. Nobody gets told anything arrived. Every one of those is a reason to leave, and none of them is about you.
$40,500 a year
Moving four of your nationals from about one buyer in eight to three in ten, at the average order you already get. No new events. No new travel. No price rise. No new clients. The same weekends you are already working.
Worked out from your own sales export, not an estimate.
How you open a door
You do not have to sell software. You offer to make her weekend easier and her contestants happier, and it costs her nothing.
"Let me put your schedule and your pageant guide on my platform, free. Your girls will have everything in one place, and when I shoot, the system tags them and sends them their own photos. You will not have a single mom asking you where the pictures are."
The person who makes branch three work
Every brand people want to copy has a face they can follow. Yours should be Kennedy, and she should own it properly rather than helping out with it.
She becomes the Girls' Guide. The one who shows contestants what to wear, how to pose, what a pageant weekend is actually like. That voice is what turns an audience into relationships, and relationships are what fill the pop-ups and the guides.
It also gives her something that is hers, inside your company, at exactly the point in her career where that matters.
A new thing to sell
A girl pays to have a content creator follow her for the entire event. Getting ready, backstage, the walk, the crowning, the drive home.
She leaves with a month of content she could never have made herself, and her mom leaves with the weekend as a film rather than a folder of stills. Nobody in pageantry is selling this yet.
How the whole thing goes national
You used to travel the country doing this. Bring it back, but as a tour with a name.
One weekend a quarter. A ballroom in a new city, hair and makeup on site, headshots and content back to back, booked out before you land. You already have the people in Texas, Florida, Atlanta, Virginia, Arkansas, Washington and Oregon.
Film every second of the first one. That footage is what sells the next four, and it is the reason girls in a state you have never worked will know your name.
What we are actually building
A company people want to
hang out with, be
like, and copy.
Every part of this is documented as it happens. The pop-ups, the guides, the girls who win, the behind the scenes. Not because content is a nice extra, but because being the one everyone is watching is what makes a director choose you, a contestant follow you, and a photographer pay to learn from you.
Where you sit in it
Right now everything runs through your hands. Every mismatch you fix by hand, every order you chase, every question a mom emails you at eleven at night.
The point of all of this is that the platform does the repeating work, Kennedy carries the content, and you spend your time on the two things nobody can replace: being behind the camera, and being the person the industry trusts.
Where we start
Your next event runs on your own platform, on your own Stripe, with your name on it.
Start with your own pageant. Prove the schedule and the guide work, then take it to the directors who already trust you.
One weekend, one city, everything captured. That is the asset the rest of it is built on.
There are a few different sizes this can be built at, from just plugging the leak to the whole platform. I will bring you three, each at a fixed price, so the only thing you have to decide is which one. Nothing open-ended and no hourly bills.