Keeping Your Photography Business Organized | Avoiding a Static Business

The sad reality of the pandemic is that many small businesses have been forced to close their doors. I know that’s the case for a great many photographers and I hope that in time some of those businesses will re-emerge and thrive. Change is inevitable, sometimes unwelcome, and sometimes change brings new horizons and new skills. It can be very hard to embrace change when it’s forced upon us, but humans are resourceful and I never cease to be inspired and motivated by what I’ve seen in the last two years.

Speaking more generally, being in business doesn’t mean that we should be static. In fact this is one of the reasons why many established photography businesses will fold. There’s no getting away from the fact that 80% of photography businesses will fail, usually in the first two years. That’s normally down to a poor understanding of profit and cost, a failure to properly identify who your clients are and a failure to effectively market your work to those clients. But being static can often be a much longer, slower death sentence.

What do I mean by a static business? Do I mean adopting all the latest fads and trends? No, absolutely not. I believe that a successful photographer has his or her own clearly identifiable style. That style will evolve over time, but it will always be something recognisable as ‘ours’. If we once painted like Constable it would seem very odd if we suddenly tried to paint like Mondrian. Our existing customers would be confused and we would have to find an entirely new client group, a new way of marketing and a new referral stream. Consistency is everything, but with incremental refreshing and the occasional rebrand - but still aligned with our own identifiable signature.

A simpler way of looking at it might be to ask ourselves “how can I adapt my business in order to remain profitable and rewarding?”

The New Year often brings a period of reflection, of both personal feelings and how we might feel about our photography business. I’m a huge believer in decluttering - it frees the mind like nothing else. I spent years bogged down by a chaotic workspace. I hadn’t realised how much it had affected my energy levels until I spent several weeks at the height of the pandemic redecorating my office and organizing every inch of it. The result is something professional and welcoming. A simple test is this - ask yourself whether you would be happy inviting clients into your office (be that a dedicated room or a zoned area in your living space).

Running a business can send us into gridlock because there’s so much we’re juggling at once. Simplifying our systems can make life so much easier. Here are some ideas to prep yourself for the coming season:

Refresh Your Photography Business Documentation

Take a look at your brochures, price lists, contracts and anything else you might routinely send to clients. It’s important we review them every few months, and update them particularly if any of our policies or products might have changed.

It may be that you’ve never got around to having much in the way of business documentation (a set of terms and conditions is of course mandatory from the get go). This might be a simple as adding an FAQ section to your website, or to your E brochure. Or perhaps designing an electronic leaflet with plenty of tips to send to your portrait clients before their session.

Give your website a once over every now and again. Do you need to rewrite any of it? Updating our successes and achievements is really important, as well as adding client testimonials. When you introduce new products it makes sense to write a blog post about them - this is all part of marketing your business.

Only Sell what you Love

This can be as simple as going through the products you offer and choosing only the ones you and your customers really connect with.

When we start out in business it’s tempting to go to a trade show and invest in product samples of as many options as possible. We might make the mistake of thinking we need to appeal to all tastes, rather than the tastes of our key client group. Overwhelming our clients with choice can be thoroughly unproductive. I’ve met photographers who offer 80 different frame options, when in fact 12 carefully curated frames are much more likely to help our clients make a decision. Why make life hard for you and your customers?

Increase your Session Fee and Product Prices

The pandemic has driven up the cost of living and the simple fact is that our suppliers are more expensive than they used to be. Photographers are no different to any other business - a 2022 price increase is vital if we’re to survive. A price audit is something we should all be doing at the beginning of every year since this is when most of our suppliers will hike up their fees. If we forget to, our already narrow profit margins will be whittled down to the point where we’ll no longer meet our operating costs.

On a positive note - long gone are the days (remember the last recession?) when clients might try to apply their own pricing to a photography quote rather than accepting the price photographers have to charge. Because all photographers are totally different in their style and skill level (and overheads), there is no such thing as price matching. The general mindset now, in all industries, is to expect prices to rise and customers will need to abandon any notion of haggling.

Think like a Photography Client

We have to remember that our clients have probably never commissioned a photographer before. It’s not like calling a plumber or a decorator, or taking the car to the garage. Almost no aspect of hiring a photographer is likely to be familiar or intuitive. For that reason we need to be able to guide our clients through the process seamlessly. That means making sure they have the right information at the right time. It means reinforcing expectations at every stage, ensuring our clients receive our terms of business early on, and ensuring clients always know what to expect. Good communication sets the groundwork for a happy client and photographer relationship.

For each new client I print out a checklist which sits in my ‘client’ tray on my desk. This lists the things I have to do during every step of the project - from sending an introductory email, collecting the session fee and confirming the date, sending through some hints and tips before the shoot, and briefing them about the viewing and ordering session. There’s also space for notes and anything else which may have been agreed. If a client phones I can grab this in seconds and refresh myself as to where we are and what needs doing next. It also means I’m never without a summarised communication trail - I also make a note of every phone call and what was discussed.

These are some of the small things we can do from time to time to help us feel organized. Running an efficient business means controlling every aspect of that business, rather than allowing your business to control you. Even worse is the feeling that your clients are controlling how you run your business. This is a rabbit hole many photographers can fall into, unnecessarily so. If that’s you then it can be as easy as introducing some new policies and a more businesslike mindset.