Best Business Practices for Photographers [13]
Further, if you operate all other aspects of your business profitably and you want to be a modern-day Robin Hood, you can take your profits and self-fund an assignment to document plights and underreported issues of our day. You can then take those stories and present them to media outlets and offer up a written and photographed package that they find very attractive. Absent a printed outlet, there are innumerable outlets with wide audiences on the Internet where you can get your story picked up and start making that difference. Charging enough that you can save for these projects means that you can take assignments from those who can afford to pay you top dollar and then transition those dollars into footing the bill for altruistic projects.
In the chapters that follow, I will provide the resources to answer questions on a wide variety of topics that will direct you through the confusion and give you guidance and insight based upon my own experiences and the lessons I've learned. In some instances, rather than reinvent the wheel, I will direct you to resources on which I rely, from pricing to digital asset management and the like.
Although this book was not originally written for someone who's just starting out, many who have picked this book as their resource have gone on to be successful. It does presume a certain knowledgebase that the beginning photographer might not have. However, that does not mean that a photographer just starting out wouldn't benefit from reading it. In fact, doing so truly can allow you to start out on the right foot. However, some of the content may at first be confusing to the beginning photographer, because you won't find much Business 101 content. The contents are designed to be applied to an existing photography business, so that those in business can take their enterprise to the next level, find poor and underperforming facets of the business, polish and fine-tune them (or make major overhauls), and make an overall improvement in the success of their business or save it from failing. Students or first-year photographers will take away from their reading of this book a roadmap of their future once in business and a practical set of solutions that will help them understand how an established photographer is (or should be) operating his or her business.
Making Decisions: Strategic versus Tactical
You've likely heard the statement about losing the battle but winning the war. This is when you may have made a tactical error in the battle, but your overall strategy was effective enough that you came out on top. Tactics are changeable, whereas strategies are more difficult to switch. The problem is that many photographers are so certain they are going to succeed despite their poor strategies and repeated bad tactical decisions that they continue to follow a path that is not in their best interests. In many cases, there may be a short-term gain but with a significant long-term negative impact. Further, studies in the investing community have shown that of people in the age group of 16 to 24, 20 percent consider "long term" to be three years or less. In the 35-to-44 age group, just over 40 percent consider long term to be more than 10 years, and three out of five believe that five years or fewer constitutes long term.1 Although this study was investor-focused, the mentality still applies. Someone just graduating from college might well see taking