The chair of a successful photographer has four legs. You may be able to sit on a chair with just one leg but it won’t take long before you fall over. A second leg might buy you a little extra time on the chair but you will fall. It’s possible to sit on a three legged chair for the duration of a career but it won’t be a comfortable one. So you need a chair with four solid legs if you want to make it as a pro shooter. In the first article we talked about QUALITY and in the second one we focused on SERVICE. In this third part we’ll talk about what most photographers struggle with most: BEING A BUSINESS PERSON.

Let’s face it, we want to be creative artists, not boring businessmen. We want to talk numbers as long as it’s shutterspeeds, f-stops and iso ratings, not profit margins or tax percentages. We want to brainstorm about our first book project, not about marketing our services. Well, it’s time to wake up. If you want to have a good photography business, you’ll have to be a good photographer as well as a business person. Even if you can afford to pay someone to crush the numbers for you, you’ll have to know about that stuff too unless you want to end up with a bankruptcy and a wealthy former assistant.

If you are serious about making a good and long term living out of photography, the place to start is to make a business plan. This is a task that I’ve kept putting ahead of me for a while too when I just got started. But then the moment came that I needed to invest in equipment that I couldn’t pay for at that time. I was lucky that my parents wanted to loan me some money but they needed to be sure that I was serious about this photography thing. Sure, I could have smart talked them into it without too much trouble but I decided that this was a good time to finally make this business plan.
It’s beyond the scope of this series of articles to tell you how to make a business plan but there’s plenty of information on this subject out there. I found free software that helps you getting the right numbers and calculate the outcomes on my bank’s website and on the site of an organization that stimulates starting entrepreneurs. I’m pretty sure, there’s something similar in your area. Speak your plan through with experts (accountant, bank manager).
A biz plan doesn’t have to be about numbers only. Add your marketing strategies, long term goals and predictions to it too. This whole document will be your roadmap and every decision you make should be based on what’s in the plan. It will make you work harder when you haven’t reached your target for the month yet, it will stop you from buying gear that you don’t really need and it be very rewarding when your reach your goal.
Don’t be afraid to go off the track on your roadmap but don’t do it in an impulse. Tweak, change and adapt your business plan when you feel you need to but keep in mind that any change will change the other numbers too.

Business is not something that you do for half a day every six months. There’s the everyday practical stuff, like invoices, taxes, … But I also try to spend at least a few hours a week on just thinking about the business. Thinking of new services, products, investments can be done while waiting for a client to show up or when you are stuck in traffic. Just make sure you can write down your ideas. I usually am too busy to act upon those new ideas immediately but when you have written them down you can review them when you have time for it.

I get lots of questions about how to price a certain assignment and like many other photographer I have felt the need to drop a horse’s head into the beds of those guys who are ruining the business by charging ridiculously low prices. But pricing isn’t a difficult thing at all if you have done your business plan. If you know your costs, figured out how many hours a week you want/can work on actual paying assignments and know how much you want to earn, you can simply calculate the minimum amount of money you have to charge for an hour of work. You don’t have to bill for time, you can also charge per picture or per assignment but by calculating the time you’ll need to make that one picture or assignment you know how much to charge minimally for it. You may charge more than what’s required to keep you afloat, I hope you can. But you should NEVER EVER charge less. If you do, you are cheating on yourself, you are even robbing yourself. If you feel like doing something pro bono, you can, but not in the time you set aside for yourself to make money.

The last important part of being a business person is to make sure you can fill up your shooting time with assignments from clients who want to pay you enough money to live comfortably of your photography. And that’s where MARKETING comes in. Marketing is making sure that the right people know what you do and are convinced that you can provide the services or products that they want at a competitive price. When done wrong it can costs you lots of money and still be ineffective but the good news is that with some clever thinking it can be done effectively on a shoestring too. Knowing your market is key in defining your marketing strategy. Don’t put all your money on one horse but make sure you have what’s called a marketing mix. Use your creativity and you can go a long way.

Being a business person is still the weak spot in my business. But slowly I’m starting to learn something from hitting many walls with my head. I still (and always will) hate paperwork, quotes, … but once you start understanding the principles of doing business, it can become even interesting and fun (in a very twisted nerdy way).

Bert Stephani