I can’t even begin to tell you how lucky you are to be reading this blog post today!  Heather Rivlin of Heather Rivlin Photography in Toronto, Canada has written a feature article exclusively for our Photographer Cafe readers.  Whether you are a new or established photographer, I know you will want to read through this more than once and bookmark it for future reference… it is truly a wealth of information!

Back in early 2006 when I first met Heather in Toronto, (I had flown into Toronto to attend a Cheryl Jacobs workshop) I was blown away by her generous spirit, her passion for the art of photography and her skill at the business of photography.  Late one evening, we talked shop over a smoothie from Jamba Juice (mmm!), and she showed me around her beautiful studio.  The experience left me feeling energized (it was more than just the juice!) and knowing I wanted to take my own business to the next level.  She is not only a talented photographer, but she is also a naturally gifted and passionate teacher (as you will see below) who now runs a series of 2-day workshops.  Her workshops are devoted to helping photographers improve their technical skills, how to approach the business side of photography, how to identify their target market, set their prices, increase their sales and find a balance doing this work we love.  With photographers who offer “workshops” becoming close to a dime a dozen, I know that it is hard to know who to trust and who actually has the artistic knowledge combined with real-life experience in running a successful business.  Heather has all of that to offer and more…I know her workshops would be worth many times over what the financial investment to attend would be.  If you are interested in attending one you can contact Heather for more information at info@heatherrivlin.com or through her studio at (416) 782.6482.

Before we get to her article, I just want to show off some of Heather’s beautiful work.  She specializes in black and white portraiture for newborns, babies, children and maternity…

 

 

“So you want to be a photographer: Pitfalls and Pearls for those first five years.”

- by Heather Rivlin

Perhaps you were born with a camera in your hand.  Perhaps a trusted relative gave you a camera as a gift.  Perhaps you became interested in photography with the birth of your child, and suddenly found yourself taking more images than you could have ever imagined.  Regardless of how photography came to be your passion, at some point people started taking an interested in your images, and perhaps some even told you that you should start your own business.  Intrigued by the idea that you could actually get paid for doing something that comes naturally to you, and that you enjoy, you started seriously thinking about the possibility.   After a great deal of thought, after a great many pep talks, or perhaps after one too many glasses of wine, you decided to take the leap – and a concept photography enterprise was born.

Once the shingle was hung, the work of attracting clients began.  “I’ve got to find a way to make money at photography”, you thought, and you started brainstorming about how you would find people to photograph.  For the first while, you photographed anyone you could convince.   You photographed family members and friends and couldn’t possibly charge them because deep down you still didn’t feel good enough to warrant being paid.  If you did muster up the courage to charge them, you charged them only enough to cover your expenses related to the shooting.  When you discovered the lack of reward in photographing ungrateful friends and misunderstanding relatives, you vowed that you would find REAL clients somehow, and you even gave the process a new name: portfolio building.  You worked for very little.  Some of you even worked for free.  You spent hours pouring over images in photoshop, analyzing each image and comparing it in your mind’s eye to images you’ve seen “the real pro’s” take. Somehow no matter how hard you tried, you always felt you were coming up short.   You spent hours at the computer learning twenty seven different methods for converting an image to black and white.  You learned about curves, about levels, about sharpening for web and print.  You learned about exposure, digital artifacts, composition, bokeh.  When your first cold client came along, you tried desperately not to show your anxiety, and once the session was over, you ran straight home to download the images and see what you’d captured.  You then proceeded to spend countless hours editing the session until the set was complete.  Perhaps you printed the images and gave the proofs to the clients to take home.  Perhaps you put the images up into an online gallery on a website, and then waited frantically for some feedback and an order.  Perhaps you sat with clients in person showing them an album of images and taking their order.  Regardless of your method of presentation, when the order did come, you felt proud!!  Your first order!!  And, although the total may not have been what you had ideally wanted, it didn’t really matter because someone out there thought enough of YOUR images to pay money for them – and a photographer was born.

Perhaps you worked from home.  Perhaps you worked on location.  Perhaps you built a small studio space in your home which also doubled as your children’s play area or your dining room when clients weren’t around.  Perhaps you and your spouse spent more time staring at the pictures of OTHER people’s children that were strewn across the dining room table than you did staring at pictures of your own.  Either way, it didn’t matter because you were now charging clients and getting paid for this wonderful gig!  You needed to establish a pricing structure for yourself but weren’t sure where to start so you consulted other local photographer’s sites and determined where you felt you ought to be based on how well your work fared against the others’.  Perhaps you were like many and charged significantly lower than most in an effort to capture high volumes and attract clients away from other photographers.  Perhaps with that ultra low session fee you also gave clients the full set of high resolution files.  Perhaps, on the other hand, you priced yourself competitively because you’d heard some advice from others about not pricing yourself alongside chain studios and other cheap ventures for fear of cheapening your product.  Either way, you now had a price structure to follow….if only you could get over how awkward it felt to state your session fee price out loud when asked.   You vowed to work on that too.  Perhaps you spent some time in front of the mirror saying “Hello, my name is _____ and I am a photogra….a photo…..a photographer. “Did that look natural?” you asked yourself, because it surely didn’t FEEL natural to say it out loud.

Slowly but surely, clients started talking to their friends, and suddenly you were getting referral calls. You weren’t as busy as you’d have liked to be, so you spent your spare time making marketing materials, designing a logo, designing a website, learning HTML coding, researching packaging materials, and talking to other photographers in online chat rooms.  Within the first few months, you received your first request for your tax installment payment, and you realized that you don’t get to KEEP all of the money that you’ve been earning, and started writing out the cheque begrudgingly – and a businessperson was born.

Before long you soon discovered that you wear many hats.  You determined that you are not only a photographer, but also a digital retouching artist, a receptionist, a bookkeeper, an accountant, a marketer, and advertising director, a sales associate, a packager, a delivery person, a website maintenance worker, a secretary, a product research and development expert, a bill payer, a blog writer, a cleaner, a merchandiser, a lab order technician, and a buyer for your business.   I’ve possibly left something out of that list, so feel free to itemize in your head the roles you’d taken on over and above the ones listed.

By now you are getting regular paying clients, but are feeling resentful of how much time this business is truly taking from your life.   After all, you’d entered the business with the idea of working part time at photography, and you soon realized that there is NO SUCH THING as part time when you own your own business – and burnout was born.

Many of you reading this will relate to the above progression through the infancy stage of your business.  Perhaps some of the facts aren’t exactly as you’d experienced them, but many of us started out just this way, struggling desperately to build the shiny business we’d hoped for, and finding that the reality had lost its sheen.  Perhaps some of you are simply freaked out about how similar the above statements are compared to your experience and you are now left wondering if I’ve been stalking you and have used YOUR life as the inspiration for this story.  Don’t worry – I haven’t.   What I have done, however, is compile the many stories I’ve heard over the years from my colleagues and students about the trials and tribulations of those first five years of being in business as a photographer.  The simple fact is that this is common to MANY of us as photographers.

We all love to photograph.  We opened our business for just that reason. The exhilaration that comes from capturing that perfect expression under the perfect lighting conditions with a composition that is to die for cannot be underestimated.  We crave it, and hence we struggle so hard to recreate that feeling again and again.  We constantly struggle to be better than last week, to outdo the image we’d once coveted.  We are artists, and we love the artistic process.  We enter the business keen on using our artistic skill to propel a venture that will also bring us the secondary gain of being paid.  What we don’t realize when we start out, however, is how much we dislike the business side of owning a photography business, and how crucial it is that we learn to love it if we are to succeed in this industry.  

Owning a photography business is much more than taking pretty pictures.  It is striking a balance between the love of the art, and the need for an understanding of the numbers inherent in setting our costs.    ‘Understanding our numbers’ simply means having a solid grasp on what YOU need to earn as a photographer in order to turn a profit in your business.  Knowing our numbers is at the heart of everything we do as business owners from setting our session fee and print prices, to purchasing our products, choosing our vendors and making smart financial business decisions, such as when to hire our first staff member, what to pay them, and how to set their hours.

One of the first things all photographers must do is come up with a business plan.  A business plan provides you with a blueprint for where you want your photography business to go in the future, and the steps you plan to take to get there.   Some photographers, when asked where they would like to be in 5 years simply say that they want to be getting regular business, charging more than they are today, and expanding their skills.   Others still may look further ahead, and see a day when they’ve hired staff, associated photographers, sales people.  They envision a day when someone else is handling their sales, their accounting, their client communications. These people see a day when they are not working IN their business as much as they are working ON their business.   Let there be no mistake, the two statements are drastically different, and so I think it bears some significance to discuss it in more detail.

Working IN your business means that your day to day operations involve, to a great extent, many of the tasks that we’d outlined earlier.  You are the technical photographer, but you are also the one who determines where the company is going, the one who hires staff, the one who sets processes, etc.  Working IN your business means involving yourself technically in the day to day tasks involved in getting your images from camera to client and the various stages in between.   Working IN your business makes you a technician.

In contrast, working ON your business means that your day to day operations involve, to a great extent, the visionary and conceptual planning work needed to identify where you want your business to go, how you want your business to run, the processes by which your clients move through your workflow, and the systems on which your company will rely in order to provide your clients with a reliably positive experience each and every time they hire you.  Working ON your business makes you an entrepreneur.

For most of us there exists an internal struggle between the entrepreneur in us who wants to dream up plans for the future, and the business manager in us who tells our inner-visionary that we are far too swamped in holiday orders and editing to be daydreaming about the future.   There is a struggle between the manager in us who wants to outline new processes for moving clients through the workflow in a more efficient way (something the entrepreneur in us things is a great idea as it will only help us improve), but which sadly takes time away from what the technician in us wants to be doing – taking pictures.

There exists a great book which I recommend to my students during my workshops called “The E-Myth”.  In fact, the concepts of the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur were taken from my reading of that book.  It is a book that I highly recommend to all persons who run a small business.  The biggest pearl of wisdom that I took from this book wasn’t a particular line, a quote, or even an idea.   It was instead the dissection of a business owner that allowed me to make a conceptual shift in my mind from the photography business I had to the one I wanted to have.  

According to Michael Gerber, the author of E-Myth, businesses need systematic ways of doing things in a reliable, efficient and predictable way such that another person could easily learn the methodology and take over the processes for you.   He challenged his readers to look at their business processes and consider working each day as if you were going to write a manual for others to follow.  He proposed that if you don’t approach things the same way each and every time, and have a process for how you work then you ought to consider getting one.  Since reading this book, I have started microanalyzing how I work in my business, how clients are moved through the systems that I have created, and where I could be more efficient.  It has allowed me to take a step back and thoroughly examine where I think I could do better and develop a roadmap for how I would like others to do my jobs when I decide to take off some of the thirty-odd hats that I wear, and share them with others.

So, I would like to compile a list of things that I have learned over the years of owning my own business, all of the mistakes, all of the pitfalls. I would like to outline what you should ensure that you do, and what you should ensure that you DON’T do.  These are in no particular order:

1.       Your time is valuable, and you deserve to be compensated for your time.

2.       Most of us don’t factor in our own time invested in doing our work and don’t factor it into the final cost to the client.  All of those hours of retouching, learning, researching, calling, emailing, etc. need to be accounted for.

3.       Don’t work for friends – it rarely works out in anyone’s favor and someone always ends up angry and disappointed in the end.

4.       If you do work for friends, at the very least be compensated for your time as you normally would be with clients.  Are you working LESS hard for them?  Likely not, so why should you be paid less for this job? It is, after all, taking time away from another job who WOULD pay you in full.

5.       Don’t look to your family for praise in this work – they don’t understand it, nor do they understand how you could ever fathom charging what you do for what you do.   Ignore it, and push ahead.

6.       Family and friends will undervalue your work more than you could imagine. Don’t place any weight on their beliefs or let it influence how you feel about your work.   You’re awesome, and they simply haven’t ‘seen the light’ yet (wink, wink)

7.       Don’t work for free – ever.  You aren’t a slave.

8.       Don’t undercut your fellow photographers thinking that it will help you get ahead by attracting you more clients.  It will only attract to you those clients who are seeking a deal, or who want to barter and negotiate on price. 

9.       Don’t negotiate your price.  You are worth more than you have probably set your prices to reflect.  If your clients can’t afford you, release them and make room for those who can.

10.   Keep a file of all of the responses that you write back to clients on tough issues because you will be faced with them again, and it pays to have a well-written response at the ready.

11.   Raise your prices at the very least once a year.   Many of us raise them twice a year.

12.   Keep an email folder for saving client emails that you think you may need  reference later.  There is something to be said for having things in writing.  You don’t need to do this for all clients, but you will know when you have one that you do need to do it for.  Trust me J

13.   Take some time to think about various client scenarios that might cause you discomfort when you come upon them, and practice your verbal response so that when the opportunity comes up, you are ready.  i.e. “We’ve referred many friends to you, so I am wondering if you can adjust the price on this for me”.  My response: “Thank you so much for referring your friends, I really appreciate that!  The mere fact that you’ve referred your closest friends tells me that you place a great deal of trust in me, my product, and the experience of working with me.  Your recommendation to your friends also tells me that in your eyes, I am doing a good job.  Hopefully you will also agree that I deserve to be paid for a job well done, and I am sure you wouldn’t want to reward my hard work by asking me to compromise my income.  I would love to express my thanks to you for your referrals in a way that makes us both feel good, and so I propose _______ (complementary gifts with their order, additional prints thrown in, etc)

14.   Treat clients the way that you would like to be treated – with respect and genuine appreciation.

15.   Make it a point of learning something special about each of your clients such that the memory sticks with you.  People find nothing more flattering than you remembering a seemingly benign fact about them, their kids, or their family, and it really makes them feel special.

16.   Be prompt in your replies to clients, and if you can’t reply straight away with the information they need, at the very least reply letting them know that it may be a few days.  Keep them on the same page, not in the dark.

17.   If you feel strange touting the virtue of your work to clients, you need to hire someone else to do your sales.  If you can’t sell yourself, you won’t sell your work effectively.  Having a third party talk you up may be all that you need to get those larger sales.   Clients may be picking up on your discomfort and interpreting it as a lack of belief in your own worth.

18.   Don’t put anything online – ever.   (editor’s note: we had many questions about this point and Heather sweetly elaborated in comment section “I should clarify that sneak peeks to blogs are ok as long as it is 1-5 only and they are watermarked. You’ll notice I rarely sneak peek because I want a cient’s first reaction to be with me. What I mean is proofing galleries and leaving images up a week or more. No no no please no.”  Thanks Heather!)

19.   Make it a point of meeting with clients to take their order.  A couple of extra hours can easily increase your sales by more than what you would ever expect to be paid hourly.   It is worth the time, and clients like having their hands held knowing that you are invested in their artwork too.

20.   Make it a habit to shoot for yourself during your sessions too once you’ve captured your client’s wishes.  Doing so helps you broaden your repertoire and your skills.

21.   If you don’t want to shoot a particular thing (babies, weddings, events) just don’t.  YOU dictate what you shoot based on what you enjoy.   Show only on your website what you want to attract business towards.

22.   Become a member of your local camera club, and get to know other local photographers socially.

23.   Don’t look at other local photographers as your competition.  They are your colleagues, and are a tremendous resource.

24.   Know that your spouse really doesn’t want to know about F-stops and exposure as much as s/he pretends to want to know.  It is about as interesting to them as watching paint dry.  Join online forums or arrange to get together with the above-mentioned colleagues for a social gathering to talk shop….we love it, and our spouses will appreciate it.

25.   Approach every session seeking to see the beauty in your subjects, and it will appear for you.

26.   Don’t look to emulate your favorite photographers by copying their style, their websites, their pricing or their imagery.  If you do, don’t call it “inspiration”.  It isn’t flattering to those being copied and isn’t a constructive use of your time.  Devote your time instead to finding a new way of seeing something, or a new approach to something commonplace.  Endeavour instead to become someone worth being copied.

27.   Find the comfort zone for your pricing and then increase it slightly above that.

28.   Don’t stagnate yourself into doing things the same way as others, or the same way you’ve always done them.  Growth and change are imperative.

29.   Become aware of when you are burning out and take steps to remedy the problem.  Hire staff, reduce your hours, or increase your prices.  Don’t let the art you love become the job you hate.

30.   Be thankful for the gifts that you’ve been given, and be humble at the same time.

Starting a new business, we all make mistakes, and backtrack a little bit before finding a new path.  There is no straight path towards success because every step forward was borne of a step backwards to adjust what wasn’t working previously.   What would be the fun in reaching our ultimate destination immediately?  After all, they say it’s all about the journey, and getting to where you ultimately want to be in this business is a never-ending process.  Most professionals will tell you that they don’t feel they’ve arrived at their destination, and most would also tell you that they hope they never get there.   Enjoy the ride.

article © Heather Rivlin Photography 2009  |  www.heatherrivlin.com  |  email: info@heatherrivlin.com  |  416.782.6482