As a wedding photographer, booking weddings is necessary for your business growth and success. A fast and efficient wedding photography business workflow is a crucial piece to help achieve those same outcomes. You could say you cannot have one without the other. Whether it’s keeping track of what you need to do on the wedding day or the work you put in before or after that, just by changing a few things you could free up precious time to spend booking more weddings or perhaps even creating that much sought-after work-life balance. Read on to find out how!
Tips to Speed Up Your Wedding Photography Business Workflow
A wedding photography business workflow checklist is invaluable when implementing new ideas. It helps keep things organized and also tracks your progress. Create a checklist using the items below and assign dates and deadlines to each. If it feels overwhelming, consider breaking the items up into multiple sections and accomplish them over time.
- Pre-Wedding
- Couple consultation
- Contract signed
- Wedding Day Timeline
- Wedding Day Shot List
- Client Questionnaire
- Deposits and payments
- Engagement session scheduled
- Second shooter contracted
- Thank you sent to bride and groom for booking
- Overall Business Organization
- Contracts signed and filed
- Reminders scheduled for deposits/final payments
- Clutter-free workspace achieved
- Images backed up and secured in a second offsite location
- Post-Wedding
- Images downloaded and backed up
- Editing completed or outsourced
- Album designed or outsourced
- Slideshow designed or outsourced
- Gallery delivered
- Orders processed
- Final payments completed
- Asked clients for a review
- Send second thank you to bride and groom
- Wedding blog written
- Social media images shared and tagged
Now, let’s explore some of these checklist items!
1. Pre-Wedding Planning
Once you book a wedding, it’s time to start planning. Even if you have time on your hands until the wedding, more than one early advance meeting with your couple will help you accomplish all the necessary pieces to photographing successfully on the wedding day. Ask questions, discuss ideas, finalize the shot list, set the engagement session, get to know their vision. As they continue to plan their wedding, they might not have a lot of time to discuss photography with you later on, so try to get all your information as early as possible. When you spend more time with them on the front end, you speed up your wedding photography business workflow because everything is ready and organized long before the actual day, which allows you more time for other things in the interim.
Suggested Read: 10 Ways to Help Your Couples Decide What to Wear For Engagement Sessions
2. Why Get Organized?
Being organized speeds up your business workflow! Even if you are not a naturally organized person, organizing all your documents and paperwork will help you to think beyond the clutter (literally). Studies have often shown that a clutter-free work environment enables you to work better. Therefore, organizing won’t just help increase the speed of your wedding photography business workflow, it may also impact the way you work. Organize everything you have – from questionnaires about your couples to invoices. Make separate folders (if you have hard copies) or sort them electronically (don’t forget to create backups). Anything that you won’t need in the future could be categorized as archives. If feasible, you could also sign up for a client management service or simply update an Excel sheet with all the necessary information.
3. Outsourcing Can Help Your Wedding Photography Business Workflow
Outsourcing will help you to improve and to speed up your overall photography business workflow. From culling thousands of photographs for you to editing your pictures your way and blogging for your wedding photography business, outsourcing to editing companies (like ShootDotEdit) can do a lot for your brand. When you outsource activities like blogging, culling, photo editing, etc., to experts, you essentially create more time and opportunities for your business to expand. Not just that, outsourcing also enables you to book more weddings without having to worry about any backlog in the other departments. But, if you don’t want to outsource, try building an organized workflow or a strong, responsible team you can delegate to.
4. Build a Strong Team
Having a strong team that understands your brand and work process might turn out to be just what you need to not only speed up your wedding photography business workflow but also to streamline your business. You could hire experts from various fields like writing, editing, accounting, marketing, etc. Then, instead of outsourcing your work, you could rely on your team to care for all your business needs, which in turn will lessen your pre and post-wedding burden and give you the opportunity to focus more on improving and expanding your skillset.
Your Way to a Faster Wedding Photography Business Workflow
Improving your business workflow boils down to getting better at managing your time. Making lists, planning ahead, organizing your business documents and files, outsourcing, and/or building a team – these are all ways to scale up your wedding photography business so you can find more time to work on your business rather than in it.
Further Read: The Best Photography Workflow Tips for Wedding Photographers
At ShootDotEdit, we try to offer suggestions that could help speed up your wedding photography business workflow and improve your overall wedding photography process as well. We can also help you improve your time management by handling all your editing needs. To learn more about how we can help your wedding photography business, check out our price plans.