How to scale a photography business?

This article focus on the topic of how one can scale a photography business. If you have been running your photography business for a couple of years and noticing your business is stagnating. You are not getting any new clients. The hours are getting longer and longer. There are no time left for you or your family. Your business is taking a lot out of you but not making any progress. It’s time you should think hard about scaling your business. This one is for you.

To scale a photography business, one should consider a number of things:

1. Setting some S.M.A.R.T goals

2. Improving your products and services

3. Bettering customer acquisition and customer service process

 

This article will help you walk through the various steps of potentially growing your business. We are an editing house working with photographers working in different countries around the world. Our insights explore and put together things that have worked for other photographers like yourself. However, each business is unique just like you.

 

Here are some key aspects to consider when scaling your photography business.

 

Setting S.M.A.R.T Goals for your photography business.

What are S.M.A.R.T Goals?

 

This acronym stands for 5 elements of a goal.

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Timebase

Let’s apply this concept to your business. Because you are setting a goal for your business, we shall stick to business metrics.

 

First, begin with specific. What are some Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of your business?

 

The common ones are: Sales Revenue, Net Profit Margin, Gross Margin, Sales Growth Year-to-Year, Qualify Leads per month.

 

Out of these goals (there are many more), pick 2 to 3 that you can focus on. Pick on that is most intuitive to you and the condition of your business. If acquiring more business is your priority, then Qualifying Lead per month is a metric you could focus on. Another one every business should focus on is Sales Revenue. Without sales, your business will not grow.

 

Second, make sure your goals are measurable. If you want to improve your sales. How much exactly do you want to improve by? What is your sales number currently? Be specific.

 

Third, make sure you have an attainable goal. This will take some time to plan. Be realistic but don’t set a goal that is too easy. Your goal should be just a little out of your comfort zone. That is where growth lies.

 

Relevant, your goal should be in alignment with your values and the long-term objective of your business. If you are comfortable with the revenue of your business, it could be that your goal is to improve the quality of your service or better customer experience. A very personal ordeal. Set something that speaks to you the most.

 

Finally, your goal needs to have a deadline. If you have all of the above without a deadline to meet. It’s easy to leave hard things for the next day, next week, next months or even next year. Come up with a date that makes sense to you. Remember, it has to put you a little bit on your toes. “The idea is that flowing water never goes stale, so just keep on flowing.”- Bruce Lee.

 

Improving Your Products and Services

 

This goes back to the fundamentals of a business. Provide as much value for your customers as possible. If you can do this. Your business will scale. Why? Because you will have to face many challenges that forces you to up your game! Outwork your competition and stand out in your market. Simply having better products and services will ultimately get you more customers and scale your business.

 

However, this is too vague. Let’s break it down into specific things that you can do. These are some things you can also set goals for yourself and your business. They are:

• Quality

• Execution

• Additional Services

Improving the Quality of your work

 

How do your work today compare to your work a year ago? Is it better or is it exactly the same?

 

If it is better, narrow down what aspect did you improve upon over time. After that figure out the aspects that are still stagnant and find ways to improve on those.

 

If your photography is no different than it was a year ago, perhaps you need to update your knowledge and expertise. Before you go out their and continue to practice the bad habits you have built up over the years, consider these:

• Joining a photography group where your peers hangouts. Try to find groups where you feel like you are the least experienced or skilled person in it. There you will have the most opportunity to improve. Break down the things that you admire about what they do into actionable steps that you can go and practice with.

• Get some educational books on photography, different things that you could do improve your work. There are many great instructional videos out there on youtube as well that would help with your workflow at the shoot and also in the editing room. Do a search for whichever aspect you need.

• Practice with more shoots. If there are chances where you can have an opportunity to practice with unique cases, different lighting conditions, so and so, take them on pro bono or do it for full price. Never give discounts. This will protect your brand and not attract discounts seekers to your business.

• Get professional feedback. If there are educational programs in your city that you can attend or experts giving mentorship programs, do your research and consider signing up. Their experience will serve you and your business greatly. Sometimes all you need are some personal pointers.

 

Improving the execution part of your photography business.

With any successful business, execution is everything. Whether you are providing a product or a service, you need to deliver these things to your clients for your business to work.

 

2 things to consider: Efficiency and Expediency

 

The first is efficiency. To do more work, make more business, you cannot make more time. That simply doesn’t work. You need to become more efficient at each part of your execution.

 

Ask yourself, how much time does it take you to shoot a property? How much time does it take you to edit the photos?

 

Ultimately, apart from the act of acquiring more clients, these two activities will take up the lion’s share of your time. Also consider the administrative work that you will have to do as well. There are limited hours in your day. You cannot do everything yourself. Consider getting some help.

 

As a business owner, this is a serious part to consider. Of course, before hiring you should try to optimize each part of your business the best that you can. Only then bringing in additional help will really benefit your business.

 

So how can you delegate. First, consider what you cannot delegate or would be the most costly for your business. Some things that comes to mind are, hiring a photographer. It will take time and money to train and employ a photographer that can help you with shoots.

What about a clergy accountant. My guess is that you do not have such an overwhelming amount of clients on your lists. There is technological support that you can subscribe to for just under $50 a month that can help you with this. One that we would suggest is Honey Book.

 

The most time consuming activity of your business besides getting new clients is the post production part. You have 2 ways to make this process less time consuming. With technology or human resources. Technology is not yet available to provide products that are as good as premium professional editing.

 

That gives you the second option, using human resources. Either have an in-house editor that you employ or find some editors online. The latter is more cost effective but it really takes some testing to find yourself the right team. Try out our services if you would like. Havahedit.com

 

Secondly, let’s talk about expediency. On your customer end. If you are doing 48 hours turnaround time try to cut that time down. 48 hours is already a high task. Do your best to over deliver. Delegating your task can help you reduce your production time considerably.

 

There are 12-turnaround editing services available like ourselves. You can complete your shoot and upload your photos before you finish your day. The photos will be ready by the morning after. All you have to do is to send the finished products to your clients. All this can be done in UNDER 24 hours. Delight your clients!

Check out our real estate photo editing service.

 

This process can help you book even more clients than what you are currently doing.

 

Offering Additional Services

 

Another simple way to grow your business (revenue) is to offer more services. Up-sale. This has worked for many companies across industries. It will work for you too. Here are some that if you haven’t offer to your clients yet, you should consider:

• Drone photography/videography

• Matterport 3D walkthrough

• Virtual Staging

Videography

Most photographers that we worked with offer some level of videography to their real estate clients. There was a trend a few years back saying that video is overtaking the real estate market. Well that has not happened yet but the increase in technology certainly makes video walkthrough more available. Get on to learn some basic video filming techniques and have a go at it. There are many tutorials online that can help you with that.

The best news is, if you are using a version of the latest smartphones in the past few years, you should have a camera good enough to film. Get yourself a stabilizer and you are set.

Again, all that is left is the editing. We can help you out there with our video editing services. Our guys have experience editing real estate listing videos. Pick a style that you like. Then, let’s schedule a meeting where we can have a chat about the details and we got you a new services.

 

Side note with Matterport Pro 3D. This is a super worthy investment if you are serious about scaling your revenue.

 

We love to make calculations on our blog so let’s give this one a try.

Buying a new Matterport Pro 3D equipment is a $5000 investment. How do you justify this purchase. Well…. You can make over $100k annually thanks to this machine. Here’s how:

 

$500 per shoot. Assuming your realtor’s budget is from $10k – $15k. You can work everyday during the year but we will be realistic and say that you will only go out there and do 300 shoots per year. Reasonably, making an extra $150,000 in addition to your other services.

 

Wooww. We are surprised too. If we lived in a thriving real estate market we would get ourselves a matterport Pro 3D as well. However, let’s be real here. Can you really get enough clients to book 300 jobs for your matterport service per year?

 

It’s hard but it is possible. If you allocate enough time and resources to get MORE clients. How else will your business grow?

 

Virtual Staging Upsale.

 

If you are working with realtors who are property owners looking to tenants, virtual staging is a cost effective tool for them. Virtual staging is much cheaper than actually staging a house. Plus, if you do not know how to do it yourself, there are services online that do this.

 

We do virtual staging every now and then for our photographers. Just leave us a note if you want to try our services out. Check us out.

 

Customer Acquisition and Retention

The key elements of a growing business is a growing list of clientele. Hence, one cannot talk about how to scale a photography business without touching on the subject of getting more customers. What is your qualified leads rate of growth? How many new clients are you getting each month? Each week?

Have you been satisfying your current clients to the best of your ability. What are your turnover rates? What were some of the major concerns and feedbacks that clients have given to you.

 

By simply getting organized you will be able to see how you are functioning as a business. There are only limited hours within  a day when you can work and you should use them wisely. Getting organized with your clients’ relation, logistics and accounting are also very time consuming. An administrative assistant can help you do this but they cannot go out and make professional photos and videos like you. Therefore, as you are growing, these are valuable times that you can get back by hiring some help with your administrative process.

 

Marketing your photography business

 

Now that part of your business is taken care of, let’s talk about marketing. Marketing is simply the process of getting potential customers aware of your products and services. Simple but not easy. Marketing is a billion dollar industry by itself.

 

Here are some quick and helpful tips that you can apply right away to put your business out there:

1. Go for the big guys

2. Referrals

3. No-discount

 

Going for the big guys. What do we mean by this? The real estate market is just like any other industry. There are hierarchies. The people at the top are making most of the big bucks. They own the most properties. Their marketing budget is the highest. They are most likely to provide you with the most consistent job opportunities. However, being the big guys also means that they have a lot of peers looking up to them as well as competition trying to replace them. Once your portfolio begins to feature properties owned by the bigger companies, chances are inquiries from other companies wanting to imitate and/or compete will start to come in.

 

Figure out who are the best performing realtors and brokerages in your area and try to get a meeting with them. Time to polish up your sales skills and go close with these companies. Your growth success will depend on it.

 

Referrals. Back in the day this was called word of mouth. Well it is still word of mouth. However what we mean by Referrals is the usage of technology in making it easier for your existing customers to recommend you. Word of mouth gives nothing but good will towards the people doing the recommending. With a referrals campaign, your clients who are recommending you can get a small reward (an additional incentive) when they talk about you.

 

No discount.  Giving discounts will not give you more money. According to one of the best digital marketers today, here are some reasons why you should not:

• It sets a bad precedent. People will continue to ask for further discounts

• It will ruin your brand. Only a few people can get these discounts, what about those who don’t?

• People who sign up for discounts usually cause more trouble. They have higher churns-over rate

• You will risk looking cheap and it’s your fault. Hence, devaluing your price. Similarly, we are not going to large companies and asking for discounts.

• Your business will attract the wrong type of customers. They will not continue to buy from you unless you offer more discounts.

Having said that, if there is a project you would like to do out of good will. Do it for free! Just know exactly the reason why you are doing it for free.

 

Networking and Photography

 

Another step towards finding more clients for your business is building up your network. Get the reputation of your products and business out there. Meet your people. Your goal is to provide value to their business with your services and products.

Where?

 

Be on the lookout for open houses in your local area. Visit them and introduce yourself and what you do. It really helps to have a printed version of your portfolio featuring some of your best work.

 

When do you network?

Whenever possible. Fit it in your schedule whenever you can afford to. Remember to bring something to take notes and always come prepared.

 

Customer Relationship Management

Since we have talked so much about getting customers, how do we manage all your new customers. Business grows with the customers of the business. With that, the capacity to proficiently manage customers also has to increase. If you have been managing 10 clients, how do you do with 20 clients? You cannot turn them away because they are necessary for your business to grow. The only way is to leverage technology or human resources to help manage your customer relationships.

 

There are many software out there that can help you amplify your CRM process before having to bring on assistance. If you do bring on someone, it has to really be justified by the size of the workload and your business growth.

 

Here are the 2 that you should check out. They are number 1 and number 2 on many sites pertaining to photographer productivity.

 

Honeybook.com https://www.honeybook.com

StudioNinja.com https://www.studioninja.co

 

Scaling a photography business is incredibly tough but also exciting. Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas on things that you can implement right away in your business. Let us quickly go over some points that we have touched today that will help you scale your business in the near future.

• Consider setting S.M.A.R.T Goals

• Improving your products and services

• Focusing more on your customer acquisition and retention

 

Good luck growing!