Best Business Practices for Photographers [15]
Charging a fee of $12 to $18, commensurate with what outsourcing to a courier/delivery company would charge, means you are ensuring that your shipping department is not reliant on the other "divisions" (photography, post-production, reprints, and so on) to sustain it. Furthermore, when you get so busy shooting that you can't take the time to make deliveries, you will have in place a mechanism to charge for delivery, since you are now making more money using that time to shoot, and furthermore your clients now expect to pay for that service. If you can no longer make deliveries when you get so busy and you start charging all your clients a delivery charge at that time, they'll object, and you'll have to deal with angry customers who feel over-billed. Or, you'll have to eat the charge into your overhead. For the last decade, my shipping department has generated enough revenue to cover the expense of the vehicle I use to make those deliveries, including new car payments, insurance, gas, and the like. At the very least, the You, Inc. shipping department should offset those same expenses for you.
And, if you're a staff photographer doing work on the side (weddings, portraits, and so on), you really must examine your freelance business, because when you're no longer staff, you'll want to make sure that the work you're doing can sustain you. If you only establish clientele for a few hundred dollars a day that you can earn on your midweek days off, then when you go freelance (or are forced into freelance by being laid off) and that amount of revenue from an assignment can't sustain you, you won't be able to remain in business. Your existing clients will not understand when you suddenly have to raise your rates to survive, so it's better to use a rate structure that is viable from your first freelance assignment on. Even if you're a staffer, you should treat all assignments as if they were freelance—not only will this create a collection of clients for you that pay a self-sustaining rate, but it also will ensure that you're not cutting your freelance colleagues' throats with low-ball assignment fees that the client will no doubt use to beat down the freelancers in your market. But we'll discuss more on rates and such in Chapter 7, "Pricing Your Work to Stay in Business."
A review of what's profitable and what's not will ensure that you maximize your potential. Some photographers get into the wedding or event business and hope to someday become big-dollar advertising photographers, or they work in the mid-level family portrait business and hope to become a major magazine portrait photographer of the movers and shakers of the world. However, these photographers often become complacent in that model and never work to seek out the types of photography they wanted to do. They remain in a type of photography business that they had not intended to, and then they look back 10 or 15 years later and wonder why they didn't act sooner.
Perhaps having a studio is where you are now, yet you review the expense and find that because a majority of your portrait subjects want to be photographed on location, carrying the overhead of the studio for the small percentage of in-studio portraits you do just isn't wise. Although you don't need to sell the space, taking in two (or more) other photographers to share the studio expense could be a solution that makes more sense for you; alternatively, offering to rent it out and promoting it as available might be a better solution.
Suppose you are taking assignments for editorial work through a typical photo agency that takes 40 percent of the assignment fee, and you keep the remaining 60 percent. Perhaps that is not the best solution, and securing clients directly so that you keep 100 percent of the assignment fee is a more sustainable choice. If you are working for a photo agency and the editorial fee is $450, it means you only get to keep $270. If your per-shoot-day operating expenses are $150, then you only earned $120 for the day, which is