How Entourage Yearbooks uses AI to speed up workflow, with Elias Jo

AI is moving fast, but the real advantage isn’t sounding smart, it’s getting work done faster without breaking your team. Gary Pageau of The Dead Pixels Society sits down with Elias Jo, CEO of Entourage Yearbooks, to talk about what’s actually changing inside the yearbook and volume photography workflow and what studios of every size can do right now to keep up.

Joe digs into how Entourage built a technology layer around yearbook production, from a Canva-like yearbook builder to online sales and a redundant print network designed for today’s supply chain reality. Then he discusses practical uses for artificial intelligence in business: Why “AI as search” is a dead end, where the 20% to 30% efficiency gains are coming from, and how mid-size photography companies can push their SaaS tools, CRM systems, and automation platforms to work together instead of creating more spreadsheet pain.

One of the most actionable moments is Jo’s simple model for “AI talking to AI” using ChatGPT plus app builders like Lovable to prototype a tool that cleans messy school data and turns it into a repeatable process. We also talk about AI for content creation and podcast production, why human review still matters, and what an AI-first world could look like when prompts start replacing traditional applications.

The Climb with Cherie Clonan
The Climb is a podcast for people building something meaningful and finding their..

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Independent Photo Imagers
IPI is a member + trade association and a cooperative buying group in the photo + print industry.

Photo Imaging CONNECT
The Photo Imaging CONNECT conference, March 2027, at the RIO Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, N

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Erin Manning 0:00

The Dead Pixel Society Podcast is brought to you by Media dlip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers. Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by Elias Jo, the CEO of Entourage Yearbooks, which is one of the leading yearbook providers in the country. He's based in New Jersey. But we're going to talk a little bit about yearbooks, but we're going to talk more about AI and how you can use it in your business. Hi, Elias. How are you today?

Elias Jo 0:41

Hey, Gary, great to see you. Great to hear from you.

Gary Pageau 0:43

For the folks who may not be Entourage Yearbooks, can you talk a little bit about how long you've been in the business, where you started, and where you've been going? Because the yearbooks segment has gone through some crazy changes over the last few years.

Elias Jo 0:55

That it has. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about Entourage anytime. We founded Entourage, my brother and I back in 2006. So this is year 20 of operating the business. We're probably serving somewhere in the magnitude of about 14,000 institutions right now. Wow. The way that I talk about Entourage yearbooks is there's kind of like regional yearbook printers and book printers, and then there's like the big nationals, which are like the Jostons and the varsity. And so we've historically played in this middle ground where we're a little more expensive than the regional guys, but we're way cheaper than those big nationals. And then we bring a lot of technology and workflow, and we took a lot of the red tape out of the yearbook process. And so right now we participate in that middle section. And then what we do is we try to expand up and we try to expand down in service model. But that's basically where we've been playing for the last 20 years.

Gary Pageau 1:51

So do you work directly with schools or with studios who offer your entourage as a service?

Elias Jo 1:59

So Entourage has really evolved. So originally, when we were founded, we went straight to schools. And the Entourage model is a good, I'd even say a great service model for schools that are kind of smaller and out in the middle of nowhere. And we do a job of kind of finding a lot of schools that wouldn't want to drive two hours to go to. Right. Over the last 10 years, we've been developing our partner channel. So we have two partner models that we work with when we work with high-volume photographers. One is where they kind of hand off your book production process to us. So we handle the money, we handle the customers, we handle the teachers, we handle the parents. We also have a wholesale model as well, where we license our technology and our pre-capacity. So we have three different models for going to market now. And that's kind of been the right model for us going forward, where it's like if you have a school that's pretty far away, our direct model's pretty good. If you've got an area where they want to combine photography and yearbooks together, that's what the partner model has been very effective at.

Gary Pageau 2:59

Sure. So when you talk about a technology layer, you said you kind of add a technology piece to that. What does that mean by that? Do you have your own layout platform, CRM production platform, APIs? What is it? What do you mean by a technology layer?

Elias Jo 3:17

I think at the core of everything, we've got a software called Edeonex, which is our yearbook builder. And it's kind of like a shutterfly or Canva for building yearbooks. Right. You know, there's the CRM piece of it, there's the online sales store. We've got a network of about 15 book printing companies across the United States. If you've been doing your books for a while, you know that through COVID and the supply chain issues and everything like that, everything's about redundant supply chains. And so we've got a really nice technology layer to kind of leverage a redundant production platform.

Gary Pageau 4:03

And it's hard to make look easy, right? That's one of the inverse problems kind of in the technology world is you get an easy-to-use builder, but there's a lot behind that that makes it complex to make that look easy.

Elias Jo 4:18

Yeah, I mean, I'm a software developer by trade. I went to school as an engineer. And before I founded Entourage, I spent 10 years building software for other companies. It's gotten a lot easier with AI. There's no question about it. So I would say this last 18 months, I've never seen the transformation in the building technology like I have in the last 18 months. Historically, the developers, if anybody worked with developers, they're kind of squirrely, they're hard to communicate with. It's hard to build great software sometimes unless you speak the language of technology.

Gary Pageau 4:52

Sure, sure. So let's move on into the AI discussion because that's kind of where we wanted to start. I was at your SPAC session about using AI in your business, and that just kind of sparked our conversation. We got to have you on the podcast because this is really kind of where the rubber meets the road, right? Because AI is the tool that people are using. And in some cases, people are trying to use a hammer that a screwdriver should be used for, kind of thing. It's finding the right tool for the right job. And for the people who weren't at the SPAC session, you did a really nice breakdown of this type of business. You should be looking at these things. Can you kind of just provide an overview of those three areas you were talking about?

Elias Jo 5:34

I appreciate you attending the session, first of all, Gary, and for noticing that. I've been a member and I've been presenting at SPAC for over a decade. And so at the end of the day, what I've learned over there is people just want practical advice. Like what can I do, make more money with this thing that you're talking about in this session? But the challenge of SPAC is that you've got guys who've got five, 10, 20 schools, and you've got people with 200, 300, and 400 schools. And so they're different things they need in order to actually utilize what you're talking about. So I think at the most fundamental level, if you're using AI like the glorified Google search, then you're not using it. And that was one of the things I wanted to share because a lot of people start at that level, which is like, should I use Google or should I use Chat GPT? And once you use it for a while, you really realize that it's not a good search engine, it's fine. It actually, but it keeps that context of what you're talking about so it can remember what you were. Is this consistent with what you were asking about before and what are you learning? But I think as I think about you know smaller partners, smaller photographers that are using AI, I think the most powerful thing to do in that regard is to just dive right in and start building some software and using it to kind of do things you've never done before as an enabler. And I think that gives you three things. Number one, right, gives you the confidence to know that with AI, there's really nothing you can do, at least when it comes to technology. Maybe you can't finish a project, but you can sure get started. Right. The second thing that it really does is it really crystallizes your thinking. You're like, how do I want this to work? How exactly, where should the buttons be? And what how does that affect me in my life? Right. Right. So those are the things that even if you're not a software developer and you've got, you know, you don't have a multi-million dollar, 10, 20 million dollar studio, right, you can still use it to kind of crystallize your thinking. Now, as you get bigger, these big studios that I talk to, they have their own development teams or they're working with development shops and all of that. The expectation there is that if they're not giving you 20, 30% more than what they were giving you two, three years ago, chances are they're not using the AI correctly because everything I've seen is pretty much pumping out 20, 30 percent more. So everything that used to wait four weeks for, you should be waiting three weeks for. And everything that used to take six months should take about four months. There's the speed that the AI is giving to everybody who's been using it.

Gary Pageau 8:03

That's an interesting point in terms of driving the efficiencies, which is kind of what the volume photography business is about, right? Unlike other forms of photography, portraiture, where the aesthetic may be what people are driving. With the volume business, it's really about driving those efficiencies. If you're a mid-size player, what are some of the first things you would recommend people should be looking at for driving some efficiencies within their things? Like you said, the small guys probably can cope with inefficiencies because they don't have many schools, right? They can just kind of bootstrap it. Big guys have development teams who hopefully are agile enough to figure it out. But the vast majority are the middle-sized people, and they're kind of stuck between the two. So what would you say to somebody who's like, listen, I'm having really trouble managing this process? Where would you suggest they start?

Elias Jo 8:58

Well, I think for me, what I have seen is the work workflow is a big one, right? Removing layers, taking the glares off the glasses, retouching the faces and everything like that. If you're working with a partner or a software that isn't thinking about this in terms of automation of workflow, then you're probably working with the wrong company. Because just like photographers and your book companies are looking at AI, I think workflows, all those pieces of software that we're paying 20 bucks a month for, 80 bucks a month for, they're all doing it too. Right. And so my big push is to really push those software companies and those SaaS companies, so software as a service companies, to give you more in terms of automation, more connecting to the other apps so you don't have to connect your CRM to your workflow software, right? That used to be a really complicated thing to do. It shouldn't be complicated anymore. It should be something that these softwares need to start talking to each other in order to get your job done faster and easier. That should be the standard. So I've seen it already in a lot of softwares I use. Like I used to spend hundreds of dollars for like gyra and some other softwares, and now there's no reason to do that, but there's little software that connect all these pieces together that kind of makes money faster. So I would recommend that is if you don't have a software development team, chances are you're paying 20 bucks a month for somebody who's built some software that you're using, right? Right. The question is, what am I going to do? What's my expectation for that? And if you've got a partner that's building good AI layer to their software, then you're in the right place. That's me changing from constant contact to right, and I'm not I don't promote Clavio, but it's a great example where constant contacts is software. I spend a thousand dollars a month for it. I'm like, this is crazy. I can go and build this with AI much faster than the $12,000 I'm gonna spend this year on it. Now I switched to Clavio, I'm still giving them the thousand bucks a month, but the automations that come with it now allow me to kind of run better email campaigns and more automations. And so that's an example of kind of what I would expect other people to do who are in the mid-size and have their own development teams, be like, listen, now is the time to make some changes. Now is the time to do some investigation. And you can use AI to do the investigation, so you don't have to go and figure this out by yourself.

Gary Pageau 11:16

So that's kind of a circular thought process. Use AI to find out how to use AI.

Elias Jo 11:22

Yeah. Well, I think that's the compounding nature of why this is so exciting. We were talking before, Gary, how the this AI evolution feels a lot like the internet evolution that happened back in the 90s and early. So the compounding nature of using AI to use AI to then with AI, right? That's where this thing really starts to compound in ways that even I myself, like this weekend, I was building a piece of software that using ChatGPT to talk to Claude Code, which then built a piece of software that basically does something that I never really thought I'd needed, but I was just like, AI is gonna do it for me anyway. It's effortless out of it with a glass of wine and build software. That was something that I would never think about doing two years ago.

[Ad] Make your podcast work for your business - Listen to Podcasting Amplified

[Ad] The Climb with Cherie Clonan

Gary Pageau 12:08

So for someone who may not have a development background like yourself, right? You're talking about building software, that is almost like a almost like changing oil on my car. Yes, I know I can do it, but I'd rather have someone else do it. But maybe it's more a better idea to do it yourself and with AI these days, with certain things. Give me an example of a very simple process that someone can have. Let's say, for example, how could AI help someone who is maybe getting a list from a school, right? And it's a mess, it's not formatted properly because that's a lot of stuff. So, what could someone do with an AI, very simply, to help with that something like that really a utilitarian type function?

Elias Jo 13:23

I think not sponsored by any of these companies, but they're just an active pen des or one of the things I shared at SPAC was that I realized how powerful this was is I taught my daughter how to use a site called Lovable Diet, which is a site where you can build an app. And she's not a software programmer, she's 12 years old, and she built a beautiful app that's associated with a cooking competition and rating cooking, and you take pictures of your dishes and you put your recipes in. And it's something one of my developers would have taken a month or two to build. She built them in two hours using mobile design. And I myself, right now, you know, am trying to break break the mindset of my staff. So I've got all kinds of people in my staff where I'll go to them and be like, listen, you're gonna be a software developer, not because you're gonna I need you to be a software developer, but I want you to kind of like crystallize your thinking in terms of how you want your processes to work, right? So, what I have them do is they go to Chat GPT, and this is what I recommend to a lot of people. It costs 20 bucks a month and 20 bucks a month for lovable. So go to Chat GPT and be like, listen, here is something that pains me, right? It takes me a long time. You know, I've got this spreadsheet, the data's a mess, right? I heard from this guy, Elias and Gary, that I should use this thing called lovable. I have no idea how to do that either, right? But I've got this spreadsheet. Can you take a look at it? I want to build an app in lovable to go and clean this up and use it going forward, right? And then ChatGPT will give you a nice little lovable prompt. It'll ask you a bunch of questions. You take that, you dump it into lovable, right? So this is AI talking to AI, right? And you're just copy and pasting it. You don't have to do any integration. Right. And again, it's $20 a month, right? You don't have to spend a ton of money to try this out. You dump that in there, lovable will build an app that goes and cleans up that spreadsheet for you. You'll take a look at it, and it's gonna be about 80% there. Right now, if you don't want to get that to 100%, I get it, right? I get it. You don't want to take that to 100%. But that that thing that you built in lovable that's 80% of the way there, you can tweak it, make it better, and then you can hand that off to somebody who knows what they're doing and get that in. Right. And then assuming that 80% of the work is what's gonna save you 80% of the money in getting these automations done. And so that's why even for my staff who are not technical, I'm like, listen, I want to teach you this, not because I'm trying to get you to be a software developer, but because it's gonna save us all so much money and time, make your easier.

Gary Pageau 15:58

It's just kind of funny. I'm having a flashback. You mentioned earlier early internet. I remember when an office when people first started getting email, right? That's how old I am, where it used to be paper-based memos, and then people switched to email. And again, it was a change. It was like, you know, oh my gosh, you're changing how I'm working. You're telling me that I don't have to sit at a typewriter or word processor, create a document. I can do it just straight within an email. And then, of course, we had all the disasters of everyone being CC'd on a company-wide email and all the response, no one knew how to use it, and then everyone figured it out. So I think we're kind of in that world again. I mentioned earlier the early internet. This really feels like the next bubble is gonna happen, right? And I don't know what's gonna happen, but the real companies are gonna happen after the AI bubble bursts, probably. Yeah.

Elias Jo 16:47

Well, so a couple of things. I don't want to say AI is the answer to the world, just like the internet wasn't the answer to the world. It makes sense better, and it's annoying in other ways. Yeah, email's a great example. Like my email annoys me. I get so many emails, so much garbage, right? And chances are it's a lot's gonna happen in AI. I wanted to bring this back to what you were doing, Gary, which is this type of podcast and create awesome content and to share that. And to me, I think AI plays a big role in making that awesome, but it's also a piece of it that makes it kind of dangerous. So I'll give you an example for me. I go and I write a blog post every week now. I never did that before until AI came along. And the reason being is I'm not a bad writer, I'm just a terrible editor. And I don't I put stuff into my chat to write an article, I'm like, this article sucks. But if I write the article, ask it to edit it, I'm like, well, that's not kind of it helps the workflow go through. I think that you got to kind of find the pieces that are gonna work. Big things about AI is it kind of it makes everything go to the middle, right? It doesn't write awesome, it doesn't write crappy, it's like in the middle, it's like good enough.

Gary Pageau 17:55

Yeah, you're exactly right. In fact, a little inside baseball here, the host for my podcast is called BuzzSprout. They have a lot of AI in the back end, it does transcriptions, it does a summary, it does a blog post. Now, like you said, it's 80% there. I never would use that blog post or any of that content without reviewing it and cleaning it up and all those other things, but it saves me the hassle of writing those summaries or transcribing and doing those things, and it's what people expect. Then it makes a better product from from that, but it's not gonna replace me talking to Elias, who is telling me lots of great things.

Elias Jo 18:31

No, not at all. But the amount of work that you and I now have to do after this podcast is over is probably shrunken quite a bit, and so that's been my experience with it as well.

Gary Pageau 18:40

Yeah, it's really been it's interesting because again, you don't know where it's gonna end up, right? It's one of those things where we were talking in before we you know, we were talking about the idea of an application gonna change radically over the next few years because you don't need Photoshop to edit an image anymore, you can just ask an AI to do it for you, and who knows where it's bringing the code in to do that from. And as long as you're getting the results you want, do you even need a Photoshop or a Microsoft Word or an Excel when the front end of an AI is gonna provide those functions? So when you think of it from that standpoint, how can someone kind of prepare themselves now for that world where we're really gonna be in an AI first world as opposed to an application first world? Well, I think a couple of things.

Elias Jo 19:31

I think one, I'm I have a very hopeful view of the impact on our society. Absolutely. Big thing I said at SPAC, and I think you were touching on it before too, is if you use the tools and we do the automation and everything like that, we get all this capacity back, right? Because it's gonna do the work and we're gonna have more time. The question is what do we do with that extra time? And so my whole point is if you're using that extra time to make your product better, right? To create new types of products that you can sell, more creative ways for you to interact with your customers or better channel strategies. If you're using that capacity for that, right, you're gonna continue to excel and expand because you're trying to cut your budgets or you're trying to fire people or you're trying to work less hours in the day, right? You're gonna get left behind from those guys who are like, listen, this job that used to take me 30 hours a week, now only take me 20. Well, what it's like.

Gary Pageau 20:25

Yeah, I had a conversation with somebody at Spec, actually. It was one of the attendees, and we were talking, he was telling me because I really don't know much about Claude, right? And he goes, Oh, you got to get into Claude. I was taking notes and writing stuff down, and you and he was talking about how he was using Claude with his staff, and he's got a team of about four or five people. And what he said was, he said, I want them to automate as much as possible so they can spend more time talking to customers. Because he says, That's our business is building human relationships with people. And if they're spending time in spreadsheets and editing docs and creating presentations and doing these things, that's time they could be talking to customers.

Elias Jo 21:01

Yeah, I love what he's saying, and it's a similar mantra that we have as well. I've got an account management team who talks to schools all day, and they say no a lot to the schools. They're like, Oh, that's too hard, or that's not part of the policy. And now they have all these tools to help them go faster, and so they have more confidence to be oh, problem. Oh, do you want this different? No problem. We'll take care of it. So I think that type of evolution is just going to make the industry better. And hopefully it means people spend more money.

Gary Pageau 21:28

Well, yeah, again, it is a lot of perspective, right? Do you have a blue skies approach where things can grow and things can expand? Is the yearbook dead? I've heard a lot of people say that actually the yearbook is actually the next frontier, actually, for growth because enrollments aren't increasing, people aren't building more schools. So, what is an opportunity for growth for the volume industry? It's yearbooks because there's so much untapped potential within a yearbook of what a yearbook could be. And people have been dorking around with embedded video and all kinds of stuff on that. And I have my own views on that. I don't, but I don't think that's the future. I think it's a feature, but it's not the future. But I think there's personalization, there's user generated content, there's generative content that could be in there. There's all kinds of things.

Elias Jo 22:15

Yeah. I I mean, so my perspective on the yearbook industry, it's healthy and strong. Honestly, it's shrinking at the high school market. So that $120 yearbook, right? That product is shrinking. There's no question about that. And nobody would debate that. But am I making more preschool yearbooks than I've ever made before in my entire life? Yeah, absolutely. Am I making yearbooks for daycare centers now? Sports team? So the reality is self-publishing, book publishing is a growing industry. It is growing faster than GDP globally. Right. This thing we call a yearbook might change a little bit in terms of what it means. People doing family yearbooks now, get together yearbooks. I think that's really where the opportunity is, at least for people who are adding a printed bound product to their portfolio, is lots of photos, you can sell that pretty easily for 30, 40 bucks. The question is, do you have the workflow to do that in a way that doesn't make you crazy? What it comes down to.

Gary Pageau 23:12

And it's really all about reducing barriers, right? Using some of these tools. It used to be autofill and now it's AI to help people tell the story. Because, like you said, if we can get consumers 80% there or 90% there, and then let them tweak it, whether it be a yearbook, a family memory book, an album or whatever, the buy rate's going to explode. I mean, that's just the reality is looking at a blank sheet or a blank layout for a yearbook or a family vacation book. It's the worst thing ever. Just seeing a blank page and not knowing what to do with most people don't have the experience to do it.

Elias Jo 23:50

Yeah, I think that yearbooks are going. I think the printed book is going to continue to be there. So I'm not too worried about the printed book. I'm in the business of giving software away for free and charging for the book, right? That's what I'm in the business of, right? I don't charge for the software and then give the book away for free. So I've played with that model before in my mind. But the question is just that process of making the book. So are you going to be able to use your voice and video to make a book? Yeah, absolutely. Are you going to be able to prompt a book into existence by being like, here's a bunch of pictures that we took? Can you go and make the basketball section for me? And to do that through a prompt rather than dragging the photos onto a template one at a time. That's clearly the future of where this is going. What that means is people are going to make more pages and more books. Your point, Gary, maybe they're more personalized. Maybe your book's a little different from my book. There is a question of that. But the process is going to get easier.

Gary Pageau 24:45

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of easy, where can people go for more information about Entourage Yearbooks and learning more about what you guys do?

Elias Jo 24:54

Oh, well, thanks for asking that. Anybody can come to EntourageYourbooks.com. That's Entourage. You can find me if you're interested on LinkedIn. You can just find me, Elias. I think it says something about being an executive there or something, but that's how you can find me on there. I don't think there's too many of that on there. And yeah, that's basically what we're doing.

Gary Pageau 25:12

Great. Well, this has been a great discussion. Like I said, I always went out. One of the great things about interacting with people in person at a place like SPAC is you start these conversations, then we can have you on the podcast. And this has just been a fun time. It's been great having you. Thank you so much.

Elias Jo 25:25

I appreciate it, Gary. Thank you very much.

Erin Manning 25:29

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.theadpixelssociety.com.