Best Business Practices for Photographers [41]
* * *
The Hurdle of Growing from Just You to Having People Working for You
I evolved from having just summer help to having part-time help twice a week. Every month, I looked at how much I was spending for this assistant, and in a short period of time, I found that I was signing at least two additional assignments each month simply because I had someone in the office not only to handle the phone calls, but to send estimates out and lock in assignments that I couldn't for no other reason than my lack of availability to lock them in myself. I saw these transactions initially as a form of "trade" between my accounting/new business departments and my creative department. The creative department would do two assignments, usually a total of two or four hours in length, and in exchange, the accounting/new business departments got 16 hours a week for four weeks a month in help. This was a really good trade in my mind—four hours of creative for 64 hours of help per month.
* * *
NOTE
Sometimes thinking about the various types of work you do as serving different "departments" within your business can help you to understand how you spend your time, and demanding that as many departments as possible remain either profitable or cost-efficient can ensure that you stay focused.
* * *
Within a year or so, I realized that incurring the additional expense to have someone in every day of the week was really going to have an impact. This impact would be felt in sending and getting back signed contracts as well as serving client needs, but also because in the downtime between doing these things, the person I hired could work on projects that I needed to get done but just couldn't find the time to begin, let alone complete. This created a new concern that I did not address: Must this person be an employee or a contractor? As a small business, I could not take on the additional work of issuing paychecks that took out taxes, social security, and so on. I needed to ensure that I could handle this extra help as a contractor, not as an employee. I took the time to review the Internal Revenue Service points that they use to determine whether someone you have working for you must be defined as an employee or may be deemed a contractor.
Working with a Rep or Consultant
"The good craftsman is a poor salesman, absorbed in doing something well, unable to explain the value of what he or she is doing." So wrote Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman(Yale University Press, 2008) when speaking about American sociologist Thomas Veblen's 1900 observations about the 1851 London Great Exposition. Thus, the notion that artists are not businesspeople is not new—not by any stretch.
Almost every photographer I know, at one point or another, thought that getting a photographer's representative (a.k.a. a rep) to handle all their portfolio presentations, marketing, billing, and so on would solve all their problems. Frankly, it's just not that simple.
First, there are those who are reps and those who are marketing consultants. A rep has an ongoing relationship with you, actively marketing you to prospective clients, and will likely (but not always) be the one handling the negotiations for the assignment. For this, the rep will take somewhere around 20 percent of the photographer's fees as their commission. In addition, you and the rep will often split the costs for marketing outreach. From postcards to promo pieces, new portfolios, e-mail blasts, and so on, you and your rep will work together to get your assignments. Some even handle the billing for the assignments they win for you.
Most photographers would do just about anything to get a rep, but the fact is, the rep would actually be working for you, so you need to actually see