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“Measure results, change activities.”

— Keith Cunningham

Focused

I’ve never met a photographer with a more analytical approach to his business than Craig.

He was a wedding photographer whose goal was to clear “100k in 100 Days” from 30 weddings.

(The actual figures don’t matter — they just sound snappy — so I’m not going to tell you when, where or in what currency.)

Many a photographer has built a profitable business out of shooting 30 or 40 weddings a year, bur Craig’s goal was to do it in a hundred days.

As described to me, here’s how he allocated his time: one day pre-shoot (in reality the time he budgeted to sign up the thirty weddings), one day for the shoot and another post-shoot.

The post-shoot “day” was spent preparing the files, meeting the clients (twice), choosing the images and designing the album.

I’ll describe what those two client meet-ups were about in the chapter on sales, but how did he do all the post-production in half a day?

The answer is he didn’t.

He was highly focused, he spent minimal time editing the images (until they were sold), he was a confident album designer … and Queensberry did the rest.

There are so many demands on your time. Think what you could be doing if you weren’t doing production work.

Question your assumptions

Think about it. Back in the days of black and white photography most professionals had their own dark room. Some people loved it — it was part of their art. Others had no choice.

Then came colour and the advent of the pro lab. Photographers still did what they’ve always done — take pictures — but the lab did the rest. Well, most of it.

Our lab had a platoon of retouchers and darkroom specialists coaxing the best out of our clients’ negatives, but for the photographer, masking those negatives and writing out instructions and orders was certainly tedious, as was assembling albums.

Still, it was a golden era for professional photographers, not least because, as I’m fond of saying, colour management was phoning the lab to complain about your prints. Unfortunately for us it still is for some people.

Then came digital, and photographers took back much of the work the lab had been doing, and more — editing, enhancing and often printing the pictures as well.

Photographers could now do much more with their images than simply retouch and colour correct them. Within a few years what had seemed remarkable became a normal part of the service. Just something more that customers expected … and often disliked having to pay for.

Meanwhile lab owners did the happy dance because their customers were doing the work, and they had a built-in excuse if the quality was no good. You no longer had to assemble albums, true, but you did have to design them.

Studios were shooting on average up 20 or 30 times more images per wedding than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Reviewing, culling and editing them became a new problem. 

Then came the internet, and on top of everything else you were spending a heap of time blogging and on social media.

You need to decide who’s going to do this work in your studio, and in some cases whether you need to do it at all, or if so at what charge. Your answer may be different depending on whether you’re starting out, or short of work, or up to full speed.

Colour management used to be phoning the lab to complain about your prints.

Earnings per hour

Try these two scenarios on the back of an envelope.

Work out how much you make on average from a wedding (for example) and divide that by the number of hours it takes you to do it. Assume you do all the production work.

Next, assume you don’t do the production work, but deduct the cost of outsourcing from what you earn. Then do the calculation again. Note how your earnings per hour go up!

You’ll never earn $100 an hour doing $20 tasks.

Outsource

It’s easy to focus on the cash, but really the most valuable asset in your business is your time.

How could you possibly do all the post-shoot stuff in a day, like Craig? Including album sales, album design and image editing? Outsource.

Getting Queensberry to do a lot of the production work took money out of his pocket, of course, but his focus on productivity saved him two days a week.

Maybe he could have used the time to shoot portraits or something, but what he actually did was care for his kids after school while his wife worked in the city, and go fishing. You’ll have your own ideas, like working on your marketing to book more weddings, or developing a whole new income stream from portraits, or honing your golf/surfing/gardening skills, or simply getting home early.

By all means do the production work yourself if you have the skills, you enjoy it, and you’re getting paid for it. But to say it again, for most people the money is in shooting pictures and selling them.

Good, or good enough?

If you checked out many suppliers these days — OMG, I just said “these days”! — you’d find that the only people who look at your prints are the Dispatch team. Strange as it seems, that makes sense — it’s your files they’re printing, you edited them, and something has to give if you want low prices.

It doesn’t make sense to us. We prefer to be “eyes on, hands on”, and for good reason.

We can’t afford to put our clients’ images into expensive products, ship them around the world, and then have a debate about who’s to blame for the printing.

It’s not just about print quality either. We need to check for other things that can spoil a product, such as alignment, cropping and panorama problems in an album, for example. Otherwise we risk converting a few wasted prints into a major expense, with neither party wanting to wear the cost.

Equally important, we have our own standards to maintain. People are paying for the very best when they choose a Queensberry. Many of our staff have spent a lifetime in this industry and deservedly hold their heads high. What should we do if they come to us and ask, “Is this OK to put in one of our albums?” It happens.

I’m not saying we’re perfect. There’s no unspoken “We’re right and they’re wrong” here. You might not like our colour correction policy, for example, or the characteristics of our equipment, and that’s OK. There’s no “blame” attached to differences of opinion or taste. And yes, we do get it wrong sometimes.

But in a quality-focused organisation we can’t ask staff to compromise our own standards, and we certainly don’t want you to compromise yours.

Workflow

Before our industry went digital, pro labs and corporates like Kodak ran it. They toured speakers, educated photographers and supported professional organisations. They were in charge of workflow too, and took it seriously because if it didn’t work they lost money. And photographers paid attention because things worked so well.

The labs made their money job by job, just like their photographer clients. If photographers weren’t making sales they weren’t either.

Now — I almost said “these days” again — photographers are more likely to listen to their hardware and software suppliers, and to the speakers who are often aligned with them.

The difference is that the people who sold you your camera, your computer, your software, already have their money, and generally have no involvement in your workflow.

Today you need to ask who, if anyone, will be there for you if your stuff doesn’t work, or doesn’t play well with the rest of your set-up. Often the answer is no one; you’re on your own.

How much do you need to charge?

Not how much can you charge, or how much would you like to charge – how much do you need to charge to pay your bills and make a living?

Suppose you sit down to calculate your overheads, promotional costs and capital costs, plus what you want to earn for yourself. Then work out how many paying jobs you might get over the course of a year. And how much you reckon those jobs might cost you.

Add all that together— your overhead expenses, the job costs and what you want to earn personally — and you’ll have an idea of what you NEED to charge per year and per job to make a living.

Queensberry has an online calculator to help you think through different options and scenarios. I remember years ago I showed the prototype at a seminar. The first guy who came up to talk about it after wasn’t a newbie, he was our most successful customer.

More about this in the section on pricing.

Pricing rules

What makes you different from most other professionals is that you need to charge hundreds (or thousands) for something that nobody really needs, and that has no value to anyone but the people in your viewfinder.

You can only do it if you get your head around two things.

First, as a photographer you’re tapping in to one of the fundamental human needs, to remember and be remembered. People will pay for that.

Second, there’s a huge difference between what something costs you and what it’s worth.

I certainly wouldn’t assume that the price of what you sell should be based on what it costs, although that is what most people do.

My own measure is this: What perceived value am I adding, and how much will people pay for it? How much of that will stay in my back pocket, and how much time will it take me?

More about this, too, in the section on pricing.

Love and pride are the heart of social photography — to remember and be remembered.

But it’s logic that keeps us in business — an analytical approach to workflow, costs, pricing and sales strategies.

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