An Efficient Photography Business is Central to Profit & Wellbeing
As a professional photographer, I’m always looking for ways to improve my time management skills. This often feels like a losing battle, partly because it requires so much self-discipline. This doesn’t always mean spending less time working (long hours are a given for virtually all business owners) but rather prioritizing how we spend those hours so we can achieve more in our working day.
If we were to properly scrutinise our business processes it’s very likely there are areas (or habits) which can be refined or even removed entirely. We grow more experienced over the years, we learn from our mistakes (hopefully) and we learn more about the things our clients value the most. A clear staged workflow will make our clients’ lives much easier and of course our own as well. A coherent business is an efficient business.
What does “business efficiency” mean in a practical sense?
“Being efficient means understanding all of our costs, how much we need to earn in order to meet our profit margins, and how much time we can realistically invest in each project.”
It seems that most other businesses have no problem keeping a tight rein on their time, and charging accordingly for it. But for some reason photographers flinch at the mere thought of looking at a spreadsheet. In the past I’ve heard the odd utterance along the lines of “I’m an artist not an accountant”. All I can say to that is that you must be an accountant before you can profit from your art. The most successful photographers aren’t always the most talented photographers. A successful photographer is able to satisfy his or her customers’ requirements whilst fully understanding the process of profit generation.
Arguably profit is inextricably linked with a good understanding of marketing. Unless we can find our clients it’s unlikely they will find us. But even with plenty of clients, it’s all too easy to fall down at the many hurdles running a business can throw at us.
As well as being a professional photographer, I’m also an educator and speaker. I enjoy every moment of it. Well, almost. Whilst it’s always lovely to have a captive audience there’s often the nagging feeling that good advice can occasionally fall on deaf ears. The sad reality is that most new photography businesses will fail, very often due to a poor understanding of overheads and profit margins. Tutors and lecturers can give the best advice in the world but we can never force anybody to take it. If you expect your photography business to turn a profit then you have to behave as any other professional business person would behave, no matter how friendly you might be with your clients.
I remember when I got married many years ago. I was dealing with lots of different businesses, from florists to venues to hairdressers. And none of them, absolutely none, gave me time or goods I wasn’t being billed for - nor would it have crossed my mind to expect them to. Unless more photographers are prepared to adopt a business mindset then it can be very hard to offer a real world perspective on how to improve their income or their job satisfaction. If photography is your sole source of income, or a significant and much-needed source of income, then taking a casual approach to your work is the fastest route to failure.
With all that in mind, I’m going to touch on some of the areas where business efficiency is paramount and very often a lifesaver. There is nothing worse than feeling we’re losing control of our workload, with desk time often extending into the small hours. Even worse are the photographers who complain that their clients are unreasonable. Show me an unreasonable client and most of the time there is a photographer enabling them. This is one of the biggest complaints I hear from photographers, yet the solution is simple. Clear information and professional boundaries will stave off the kind of misunderstandings which can arise.
Because photography clients probably haven’t commissioned a photographer before we’ll need to make sure they understand the process and what our fees do and don’t cover. This information should be freely available on our website, at least in some form, and provided in more detail when a prospective client first contacts us. Reinforcing it in our literature or post consultation follow-up is equally important. If our clients have all the information they need then confusion is unlikely, particularly when we can direct them back to it.
When setting out to make our business more efficient, a useful exercise is to ask yourself what would make your working life easier. Make a list of those things and think about what you can do to tackle them. It may be as simple as firming up your policies or applying timescales within which your customers will need to respond.
The First Rule of Efficiency is the Provision of Information
A comprehensive set of Terms and Conditions is gold dust. This document must set out all of your policies from cancellations, attendance, copyright to ordering. Clients don’t always read what we send to them, what matters is that we’ve made the information accessible. Rather than spending too much of your time (and overhead) answering questions, it’s much easier to simply direct the client to your Terms.
Or perhaps you’d like more control over your workflow. An example of that might be arranging viewing sessions after a shoot in a way which is timely. All photographers build capacity into the month following a client session - there is capacity for editing and retouching, a viewing session and product design. Allowing those tasks to carry forward into periods which may be very busy (or when we might be absent) can make our workload unmanageable. There will of course be times when delays need to be accepted – we or our clients might be unwell or suffering a personal crisis. But outside of that we must make sure that scheduled work isn’t deferred or disrupted by tasks which should have been completed weeks before. Think about how this might be incorporated into your FAQ or business Terms.
The Second Basis of Efficiency is Time Management
There have been several occasions when I’ve browsed the websites of other portrait photographers only to be baffled by policies which can’t possibly be cost-effective (or even of any benefit at all). I’ve come across photographers who are prepared to travel 75 miles to their clients whilst making no charge over or above their standard session fee. Think for a moment what a 150 mile round trip will cost in fuel and time - or lost revenue if you could have taken a local customer that day instead. This is a straightforward example of where controlling our time equals efficiency.
The more complex and more damaging time/efficiency equations can reveal themselves if we apportion additional hours to an agreed service. I know what my fixed overheads per client will be and I also know that my session fee doesn’t come close to meeting that. Then there are the variable overheads per client such as the cost of printing and framing, travel etc. Photographers are one of the few (if not the only) professions who undertake many hours of work (travel, shooting, editing, retouching, proofing, and presenting) without being paid for it until the point at which the client buys our goods. Minimising those risks always comes back to ensuring we work with the right clients and we avoid pricing our products too low.
Every photographer is different in their level of input. At one end of the scale we have the ‘churn and burn’ snappers who offer a quick and cheerful service with little or no retouching and simple products such as a pack of loose prints. In order for a low input business model to be effective, the time and skill invested must be absolutely minimal and the client turnover high.
Then we have higher end photographers with an established brand and a very high level of input. A high value photographer will carefully plan every photo shoot, and will spend many hours afterwards during postproduction in order to create a signature set of images for each customer. A high input photographer will offer beautifully crafted products and every aspect of their service will be tailored for each client. Once again – the session fee doesn’t cover the fixed overheads per client, nor the variable overheads associated with the cost of our luxury products, nor the hours we spend shooting, travelling, editing and retouching. Put simply, the greater the time investment the more we have to rely on sales to meet those losses and to bring in the profit we need.
Incidentally “efficiency” should never mean subjecting your clients to any kind of hard sell. Ugh. Why would you even need to go down that route - after all your clients have come to you for the purpose of buying the kind of photographs you create. There should be no question that they don’t want to invest in your work. This conversation is reminiscent of one or two well-known high street studios whose selling methods became legendary (uncomfortably so) throughout the industry. This behaviour is not the province of a small boutique photography business, and it never will be.
The Value of a Project Timesheet
If you keep a timesheet (something I do for every project) you’ll soon start to see the hours racking up. There is no worse feeling than putting your heart and soul into a project when the weight of your overheads is hanging over you like a sledgehammer. The feeling will grow ever worse if you start applying additional hours to that project which are arguably over and above the provision of your standard service. The only way to tackle this is to have clear policies and very clear boundaries. Your customers need to understand what they will be getting for their session fee and what isn’t included.
Never take on a project which is likely to take more time than your quoted service allows for. The pre-booking consultation will help to inform you about whether additional time and therefore additional fees will be necessary.
Less is More – Photographic Quality vs Quantity
Where else can we build in ‘efficiency’? Very likely in the number of photographs we process and retouch and ultimately show the customer. Going back to our risky business model - remember we’re doing all of this work without any payment. It isn’t uncommon for a ‘high input’ photographer to tally up over 30 hours on just one client before we’ve even got to the ordering session!
Does it really make sense to show the customer dozens of images when many of them may be very similar and where all of them have taken time to edit and retouch? All we’re doing is making it harder for our clients to make their choices whilst making the viewing session unnecessarily long. I’m a great believer in a restrained approach to numbers. It’s better to show your client 20 distinct and well crafted photographs than 50 images where 30 of them are mediocre.
Introduce a Photography Project Final Calculation
If you’ve worked out your overheads correctly you’ll know how much of your yearly fixed overhead is apportioned per client. This is what it costs you to walk out of the door when you meet each customer. You also need to keep a tally of your variable overheads, such as travel costs, any tolls and other expenses. Your variable overheads will also include the cost of printing, framing, albums and courier charges.
At the end of each project you should be able to add a page to your customer file - and it’s a simple calculation. In the left hand column you’ll have your outgoings, starting with the fixed overhead per client. In the same column will be everything you’ve paid to your suppliers when you fulfilled your client’s order, as well as travel costs and any other expenses. The right-hand column will be your takings – that’s ‘money in’ and includes your session fee and the value of your client’s order.
It’s fairly obvious what these figures are going to tell you - it’s your project’s financial statement. Assuming you have at least turned a profit the next thing to do is look at your timesheet. You’ll be amazed at how many hours have accumulated when you add up the phone calls, the admin, the photo session, the editing, retouching, proofing, preparing for the viewing, the viewing itself and ultimately the product design. Now divide your profit by the number of hours you’ve notched up. If you’ve barely earned minimum wage it’s important to examine why that might be and if there’s anything you could have done differently.
Low Profit is as Bad as No Profit
Photographers are notorious for miscalculating what they need to charge in order to survive. Your basic target hourly rate (calculated as above) must at the very least meet this subsistence level. But it’s not the only thing you should factor in to your hourly figure. You should always include the value of your experience, your talent and your brand. Your brand is your ‘name’ and a style recognisable as yours. Part of your brand will be your professional achievements, awards, honours, your standing within the industry. After all, that’s why your clients chose you above other photographers they might have considered.
When we sell a framed wall piece for £700, we’re not selling the value of the wood which made the frame and the paper on which the photograph is printed. We’re selling our professional judgement and the years of expertise we need in order to produce a finished product which a client could not reasonably produce themselves to the same standard.
By adopting such a risky business model photographers have taken all of the risk out of our clients’ hands and we’ve placed it squarely in our own. After all, our clients have the option of walking away without paying a single bean for all of that effort. Thankfully that should never happen - by choosing the right clients we’ve made sure those clients will value the images we’ve created for them and the excellent workmanship of our producers.