Best Business Practices for Photographers [12]
Whether or Not You Think You're a Business, You Are
You are a type of business. Not you the photographer, but you the individual. Your ability to generate revenue is seen by the IRS as a form of a business, and you must pay taxes for the right to generate that revenue and reside in the United States. The government has deemed that your taxes are the necessary amounts they collect to provide you with the services you're better off not paying for yourself—roads, the police, mayors, and so on. A percentage of your revenue goes to these items. How you choose to function as a business is your choice; you may be an employee of a company who pays your taxes out of your earned check, you may opt to be self-employed, or you might choose to run a formalized corporation, LLC, partnership, or the like, but taxes are inevitable and not a matter to take lightly.
What you do for your earned revenue is your choice as well. However, over a period of time, what you earn must exceed what it costs to earn it—not just now, but projected into the future as well. This reality is lost on most graduating photographers and those entering the profession from other arenas. This message is important—not because you're reading this and hoping to go into business; rather, so you can understand that regardless of whether you see yourself as a business, everyone else does—especially the IRS, as well as your family and your current and prospective clients. How you run your business will be the primary determining factor in your success. And remember, vendors—some as simple as MasterCard and Visa, not to mention supply houses and camera stores—see you as a business, and not only expect to be paid promptly, but will cut you off and damage your credit rating if you do not do so.
Save for the independently wealthy, anyone can operate a photography business for free for a short period of time, after which point the money runs out and the debts pile up, and you must then do something else to pay the bills. Understanding this extreme means you can understand that if you have not taken into consideration all of the factors—short term and long term—that go into being in business, at some point the expenses will catch up to you, and you will be required to do something else to earn a living. To a lesser degree, you might eke out a living, renting apartments rather than buying a home, always buying an old used car instead of the occasional new one, and scrimping to afford new clothing and the expense of children (from diapers to graduation and everything in between). While this may be an easy out for the new graduate, it provides no plan to upgrade equipment in a few years or replace the dropped $8,000 camera that is now a paperweight. The eked-out living is worse than living paycheck to paycheck; it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Many photographers approach their photography purely as a calling, and their goal is to change the world by making pictures that reveal poverty, despair, suffering, and the human condition. These photographers believe that making money for these types of assignments is contrary to that effort, but nothing could be further from the truth. If this is truly your philosophy, and you believe that your pictures can and are making a difference, then if you make business decisions that make it impossible for you to remain in business to make this difference in the long term, you are doing the world-changing movement a disservice. It's akin to a physician, who has been trained for years to save lives, not taking the necessary safety precautions (for patients and for himself) of