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I would not sabotage my long-term business in order to survive a panic attack or a short-term crisis.

Panic attacks — we all have them

“My bookings are down.”

“I’ve gotta cut my prices.”

“I’ve gotta slash my costs.”

We all have anxiety attacks, so maybe this chapter’s for you.

Anxiety is worrying in advance, worrying without a plan, psychological rather than rational. And the actions you take while you’ve got the cold sweats could affect your business for a long, long time.

Breathe deeply and, before you do anything, remember a few basic facts:

You're a professional. Most of your competitors are “back-yarders” … “weekend warriors”.

You will never, ever, ever compete with them on price. They have a job to pay their bills.

If you cut your prices you’ll spend years getting back to where you are now.

Maybe you’re not the only one struggling. If so you could end up exactly where you are now but with even less money coming in.

Everyone needs options

I would not sabotage my long-term business in order to survive a panic attack or a short-term crisis.

I might even take a lesson from the back-yarders and get a job. Or another income stream, maybe in photography, maybe not.

I’m serious!

We’re eating our own cooking here.

Heather and I have a few miles on the clock.  While we were building Queensberry, Heather also made and sold leather goods and souvenirs. I worked in marine architecture and later did accounting work for other small businesses.

In 1987 New Zealand was near broke and the government almost put us out of business by allowing in cheap imports that retailed for less than we could sell wholesale.

We didn’t say, “Honey, we need to start making cheap crappy stuff ‘cos that’s all we can sell.”

We just decided to keep our other income streams running for longer.

We stayed true to our dream. And eventually our sales started growing again.

The work you do defines you

If you cut your prices, each job you do will make you less money, so either you’ll need more jobs or to work harder. Either you’ll be busier or you’ll be poorer.

Once you cut your prices it’s also hard to claw your way back. The jobs you do define you. Word of mouth starts coming to you because you’re cheap, not so much because you’re good.

People cut their prices because they don’t feel they have a choice, but in fact there are two ways to be competitive: differentiate or drop your prices.

It’s easy to calculate how much harder you’ll need to work after dropping your prices, although not many people do. You should.

Now what?

You know how much you need to charge for a job, but you’re falling short.

What should you do?

Having someone who’s prepared to buy — even if not for the price you need — is lot better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick, as my mother used to say!

And the brute reality is that, like airline seats, your days are valueless if you don’t sell them.

But if you become known as someone who gives away the Crown Jewels for too little money, you’re lining up against people who’ll do the work for even less.

Financially and professionally that’s a bad place to be, especially if you’re proud of your photography.

What to do? First, don’t listen to me. Well, listen critically anyway! You need to respond to your own situation, your own numbers, your own psychology. But a few thoughts...

1. It seems you’re less and less likely these days to meet people face to face until after they’ve made their purchase decision. That doesn’t make it a good thing, and I’d certainly encourage in-person meet ups, but it means you’re very reliant on your website, your blog and social media. Make sure you’re out there, setting the right tone and showing people what you want them to buy.

2. Take a good look at yourself through your customers’ eyes, online and in person. Do you inspire confidence? Does your studio? The way you speak, write and dress? Your sample albums? Your photography? What looks tired, bedraggled or out of date?

3. Remember there are three stages in the sales process: getting people to engage, making the booking, and the final sale. Your price list and sales technique need to acknowledge all three. The fact you need a price to “get them in the door” doesn’t mean that’s what they’ll end up buying. Base your Good Better Best strategy around that thinking.

4. Structure your Good (cheap) deal so it gets people’s attention but doesn’t give away the Crown Jewels at an unsustainable price. And always offer people a way to spend more after the event.

5. Remember you have two bites at the sales cherry, pre-shoot and post-shoot. Just because their budget was limited pre-shoot doesn’t mean they won’t be prepared to spend more afterwards.

6. The airlines offer cheap seats when the plane’s empty. If they think they can sell a seat for full price you won’t see it on grabaseat. Maybe you shouldn’t accept cheap deals until a few weeks before the date. And definitely don’t publish them for everyone to see.

More questions than answers here, maybe, but something to chew on.

No way of knowing

Darlene once told me a good story about a guy from a rust-belt town who was charging $1500-3000 for a wedding coverage. He told her, ‘I can’t sell your albums – they’re too expensive and I can’t get $5000 around here’.

Darlene was our rep at the time, and told him he’d be surprised to learn, then, that one of his competitors (20 minutes away) was using Queensberry albums. His packages went from $4000 to $10,000 and a good half of his weddings were in this guy’s town. The brides with money didn’t consider him because he was too cheap.

Darlene said, “I personally discount many people’s initial budget because they just don’t know what photography costs.”

And I would add, “And also because they don’t know what they can have for the money.”

What are you to make of this kind of talk?

Put your prices up?

Who knows.

Nobody knows.

Whatever your clients’ expectations (too high or too low) or how you price yourself (too high or too low), if you get it wrong they may never call you.

There’s no substitute for testing. Work out a strategy. Try it out. See if it works. Change it.

You need to constantly evaluate your prices and packages to ensure they’re delivering the results you want.

Print your price lists one at a time! Test. Change. test again.

When they want the old you

A photographer wrote to me saying they were sick of working harder and not smarter. They wanted to start all over again and aim at the high end of the market with the best products and service.

They could picture beautiful albums sitting on the coffee table in their studio, and gorgeous frames on the walls. But they had never done albums before, and didn’t know where to start.

Albums may well be part of the new business, but they’re not the place to start.

The place to start is with some deep thinking about where you are now, where you want to be and most important, the little steps that will get you closer every day.

Changing your business model is never easy, but I believe that anything you’re doing now that’s taking you in the wrong direction (eg “working harder, not smarter” for less money) is a real problem.

If you could afford it, having too little work could be better than have too much of the wrong kind.

At least that way you’d have time and energy to work on change. Too much of the wrong work wears you out, takes up your time and stops you changing.

And people who come to see you (especially those who know about you from previous customers) come wanting the old you, not the new you.

Of course the wrong work is probably what’s paying the bills! But you have to work out what to do about that.

Most small businesses face this challenge. Many don’t solve it. One solution might be to find a new revenue stream … or a day job.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, but the longer you wait, the harder it is.

Slash and burn

If you drop your prices, you need to cut your costs as well, or the lost revenue will come off your bottom line. Either that or you could be working harder for little gain.

But you need to take care where you cut.

You could do everything yourself instead of outsourcing your printing and post-production. That might make the revenue go further in slack times, but you could have a real problem when you get busy again.

You could buy cheaper products. But beautiful presentation adds value to your images, and the opposite happens if you present them in something “cheap”.

And cheap isn’t even cheap, necessarily, just ordinary. If your albums look like everyone else’s they may not make you money, they may cost you money. 

The cheapest of cheap is shoot-and-burn. Shoot and burn is a tiger. If you want to mess with it, hold it firmly by the tail. You’re officially a price taker, going head to head with every back-yarder and struggling pro in the business. Look forward to people printing your files on the cheap, putting them in crappy albums, or complaining because you didn’t artwork their images.

Back in the days when you delivered your files on a DVD or flash drive, let’s hope they got the photos off the DVD before it was too late, or they didn’t lost their flash drive down the back of the couch.

Now, when your customers download their images from Workspace (or wherever), what do they do with them? Any idea?

Rue the fact too that the images you’re so proud of may never see the light of day.

And again, look forward to more people coming in wanting the same.

We eat our own cooking

I’ve been talking about the dangers of the low-end, price-taking route, and I just wanted to say we know how you feel.

You can’t do cheap because you don’t have enough hours in the day to sell them cheaply, and you’ll never win on price.

We can’t do cheap because we live on the other side of the world, we have higher costs, and therefore we’ll never win on price.

Since we can’t be cheapest, we need to be best.

The curious thing is, the more people associate us with the best, the less they expect us to be the cheapest.

Never trust anyone who doesn’t eat their own cooking.

In my day

They say you can tell the last time a guy felt good about himself by carbon dating the clothes he wears.

Rod said it was time to think about retirement when he started thinking the mother of the bride was pretty hot.

Johannes wondered how successful photographers respond when they start to feel a bit like last year’s model.  He suggested that if you feel the need for a “hip replacement” you should do it in hospital under anaesthetic.

I didn’t think that was funny, which probably dates us both.

I tend to forget my age until I look in the mirror, but we do need to "act our age".

Allow for more time and money spent on personal repairs and maintenance.

Consider how we might project ourselves differently.

Make experience rather than youth and trendiness a saleable asset.

Project our skills and experience without saying “in my day” too much.

Heather wishes I took my own advice on this.

You may also need to think about how your business might change — clients, specialties, branding, and your personal role.

You can resent the fact that “experienced” translates into “past it” in many circles, but I can’t see, whatever your age, that throwing out the real you is a good idea.

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