Best Business Practices for Photographers [14]
1 KUSI News - San Diego. http://www.kusi.com/business/2557181.html.
All tactics you employ must serve the greater strategy, namely remaining in business as a photographer for the long term (and I see that as much more than 10 years!). If you've looked at your annual expenses and divided them by the number of assignments you completed last year (or hope to complete next year), and that number is $178.80, then taking an assignment for a day that pays you $150 is a bad tactic and will lead to a failure of your strategic goal if repeated for long enough. A better tactic would be to spend that day researching higher-paying clientele in your market and developing an outreach plan to obtain work from them.
It is imperative that you look at all the decisions you make as being tactically wise. The purchase of a new computer or software upgrade must make you more productive or efficient. When every photographer had pagers and had to find pay phones or wait until they got home to return a page, or when they had to return home to find a message from a prospective client on their answering machine, it was tactically a good move for me to pay a large amount of money (at the time) for a cell phone and then use my local phone company's call-forwarding feature to forward all my calls to my cell phone when I left home. While prospective clients were waiting for the paged photographers to return their calls, I was already on the phone booking the assignment, and often colleagues would lose assignments to me for no reason other than I was the first photographer the client was able to talk to, and that closed the deal. Each month, more than enough assignments came through to justify the decision to pay for the cell phone. Tactically, it was a good move and served to advance my strategy in a major way.
Today, it's the immediate response to e-mails from clients, followed by immediate estimates, that helps me secure assignments. Tactically, it was a good move to pay the premium to enable my current cell phone to send and receive e-mails. Thirty dollars per month for unlimited e-mail over my cell phone is a small price to pay—just one assignment a year, and the costs for that service, as well as a few dollars a month to add the call-forwarding feature to my landline service, is of great value. This feature has paid for itself over and over—so much so that it now seems irresponsible for me not to do it.
Decisions must be thoroughly considered. Expenditures must be examined, but more important, revenue inflow must be at an appropriate level to cover expenditures. If you're not considering the appropriateness of decisions in the good-tactic/bad-tactic approach, then you are doing a disservice to the strategy.
Reviewing Your Current Business Model and Revamping What You're Doing
Your current business model must be reviewed. Whether you're a freelance news photographer, an advertising photographer, a wedding photographer, or a high school portrait photographer, all good businesspeople sit down and examine what they are doing and how they could do it better. Large corporations have whole divisions dedicated to productivity and efficiency, and you're a micro-version of that corporation—You, Inc.
One example of this is the You, Inc. shipping department. For freelancers, there are two main types of physical shipping—overnight delivery and hand delivery. Consider that You, Inc. actually has a shipping department. If every time you deliver the finished photography to a client by hand, you don't charge a delivery charge, you're taking a loss in two categories—labor and expenses. The labor is your time delivering the materials, and the expenses are the gas and parking (whether garage, meter, or other charge) associated with that the delivery, not to mention mileage. A 10-minute delivery means five minutes parking and going in and 10 minutes back, for a total of just under