As a business owner, have you ever felt like everything within your business must be managed and handled by you? Have you ever thought, “I’m the only one who can do it the right way?” In this ShootDotEdit Review, Leeann Marie talks about her journey in answering that question.
It’s easy to feel like you’re the only person who can manage all of the tasks, especially as you’re growing and getting busier. But there are ‘tipping point’ moments, when the workload you’re bearing becomes, well, unbearable. That’s when many business owners start seeking help from a specialist who specializes in photography editing services.
Here’s wedding photographer, Leeann Marie’s, personal journey to outsourcing her post production to her trusted specialist, ShootDotEdit. Leeann knew trusting a Specialist with her post production made business sense, but she wondered if she could maintain her Signature Style at the same time.
Not only was she able to keep producing beautiful images with ShootDotEdit, but her business has skyrocketed over the past two years.
– Added Two Associate Photographers – Increased Social Media Engagement by over 40% – Cut Weekly Work Time Down to 2 Days/Week – Maintained Same Profit Year over Year
Download this FREE Case Study to learn more about how Leeann transformed her business with the help of Specialists.
It’s easy to lament the rapid evolution of the photography industry. It’s a fact – the industry morphs quickly as droves of hobbyists enter the market. Meanwhile, technology constantly changes the accessibility of equipment, and iPhone photos inundate Facebook on a wedding day, mere moments after the event occurs.
But it’s important to remember that in evolution lies opportunity. There’s a silver—maybe even golden—lining for businesses that are willing to step up and respond.
So to encourage you to not settle for what worked a few years ago, but instead step up to the plate with new ideas, here are three companies who are doing just that: innovating. They came out of nowhere, changed the rules, and thrived against all the odds. Here are three lessons you can learn from them.
1. Amazon.com: Innovate in a Changing Market
In the mid 1990s, everyone said that e-publishing would kill books as we knew them. Amazon found a way to keep publishing alive by delivering books to your door. In 1995, it sold its first book, titled Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, and then quickly expanded to offer boatloads of products – products that they sell today to consumers around the world.
One of Amazon’s innovations is a single fee for unlimited shipping; another is rapid delivery times, even promising same-day delivery in some cities. Amazon turned the slow publishing industry into a fast-paced, at-your-fingertips model.
What Photographers Can Learn from Amazon:
As technology develops, photographers will make their clients happiest by embracing consumers’ desire to have their images quickly AND in a format that is easy to share. In addition to how quickly you deliver images after a wedding, examine all aspects of your business, from your pricing structure to your product offerings. Imagine what could make the overall experience better for your clients. These innovations within your company will point the way to a new success.
2. BuzzFeed.com: The Importance of Sharing
In 2006, before Facebook opened to the public and when Twitter wasn’t yet born, BuzzFeed realized that sharing was about to become big. If a story, image or video is going viral, it’s on BuzzFeed. They don’t feature traditional news; they track what’s “buzzing” in the social world and share it, while encouraging readers to rate and comment. It’s simple – they get you involved in current conversations. And something simple, like unapologetically sharing trending topics, turns the traditional news model upside-down. BuzzFeed harnesses the inherent value of participation, enabling readers to post tags on stories which then become searchable categories for future users. Sharing begets sharing – and that means a growing audience for BuzzFeed!
What Photographers Can Learn From BuzzFeed:
Socialbakers recently did a study of social sharing and found that 77 percent of shares are photos. Having an image-driven business gives professional photographers an advantage: people will want to share your images. Because sharing is a key component of generating social engagement, make your images easy to share, whether that’s on your website, a client proofing gallery, or in your social networks. If you prefer, watermark your images to ensure that every share is also a free advertisement for your business!
3. Toms: Stand Out by Doing Good
Toms started in 2006 as a way of introducing an ancient Argentine shoe to North America and helping the children of Argentina at the same time. The model was simply to donate a pair of shoes to a child in a developing nation for every pair of shoes that Toms sold. The section titled “Evolving Our Giving” on the Toms site showcases the company’s commitment to social responsibility, and is an example of how having an altruistic company cause can attract customers. More important, it’s an example of how companies can make doing good a core competency.
What Photographers Can Learn from Toms:
Use your talent to give back to causes that you care about! And when you do, don’t be shy about it. Consumers are compelled to engage with companies that do good – companies that stand for more than just generating profits. Remember, consumers are captivated by stories. And when they personally connect with a story, they’ll feel inspired to do business with a particular company. When clients connect with your values and the story you’re telling about your brand, they’re more likely to tell others about you. And that helps make companies like yours (and Toms) stand out in a crowded marketplace!
What’s unique about you as a wedding photographer is that you have the opportunity to outsource your wedding photography editing post processing needs! That means that you have more time to work on your business to make it stand out from the rest of the photographers in the industry.
Innovating, focusing on shareability, and aligning your business with a larger cause are three windows of opportunity. You have the chance to continue redesigning your business to evolve with the changing times. The question is simply, will you step up?
To learn more about what ShootDotEdit can do for you and your wedding photography business, download our free guide.
As creatives and business owners, it’s hard to accept help in our business. We can feel like it’s cheating our clients when we aren’t hands-on with every image we shoot – from start to finish.
But when your time is limited, it’s not always possible to be involved in every detail – from start to finish. When you reach that point, the best thing you can do for your clients, business, and craft might actually be partnering with a specialist who will help you deliver the best results to your clients, while also enabling you to stay creative.
You’re not at your best when you’re maxed out on time and running on empty. Trying to manage every aspect of your business likely means longer turnaround times for your clients and sacrificing on client service. By partnering with specialists who help manage particular areas of your business, you’ll find the focus you need to be successful.
Here are a few areas that are prime candidates for entrusting to a partner:
The first step in setting your business up for success using partners is to give yourself permission to do it. You may be accustomed to trying to manage everything yourself, so it’s a paradigm shift to trust specialists to manage various aspects of your business.
But you’re not the only one who will reap the benefits of working with specialists to manage certain areas of your business. Here are three people who will not only give you their permission but will also thank you for partnering with a specialist:
1. Your Client
Your client is giving you permission to partner with a specialist for two reasons. When you work with an editing partner to do the bulk of the heavy lifting, your clients see the benefit of getting their images faster (which makes them very happy).
But time isn’t the only benefit your clients see first-hand when you work with a specialist. There’s also a chance that there are other people who can perform tasks in your business better than you can (gasp!). When you bring those partners into your business, your clients enjoy the benefit. Just as your client trusts YOU to be their photography specialist, you can trust a partner to be your specialist in specific areas. It’s like creating custom cabinetry for your home – you play an important role in envisioning the final result, but a specialist can help you make your vision come to life efficiently and beautifully! It’s the best of both worlds: a superior product in less time.
2. Your Bank Account
Ok, so your bank account isn’t actually a person but nonetheless, it will reap the benefits when you partner with a specialist. Outsourcing aspects of business that don’t directly make you money allows you to focus your time and brainpower on the parts of your business that do make you money! By entrusting others with tasks that aren’t increasing your bottom line, you’ll have more free time to build new industry relationships, talk to leads on the phone, or work on marketing materials – activities that directly increase your profits.
In addition to allowing you to focus on profit-generating tasks, outsourcing also allows you to enlist help that can scale your business without having to hire additional in-house staff.
The time you save on every project by partnering with outside resources will give you more capacity to bring on new clients without having to hire additional staff, which increases your profit margin and the balance in your bank account (making you and your bank account very happy.)
3. Your Hobbies & Loved Ones
As a small business owner, you’re well aware that your time is a finite resource. Every hour you spend on your business is time not spent outside of work doing personal things you love – with the people you love! No matter how much you love shooting, working with images, and running your business, the reality is that you’re on a path to burnout if you don’t take time away from work to do other things that you love. Being stuck at your computer for countless hours is only sustainable for a short time. So it’s up to you to get a long-term plan for managing the demands of running your business, while still living a life you love outside of work. Trust us, your loved ones (and your dog) will thank you!
If you’re ready to scale back on the tasks that don’t make you money and can be done by someone else, it’s time to find some trusted partners who can help you. If you’re not quite ready, here are a few more cases for making the transition to partnering with a specialist:
When it comes to delivering images to clients after their wedding, the faster you do it, the happier your clients will be. Although you know that there are thousands of images to sift through and edit, your clients are only concerned about one thing: when do they get to see their beautiful images?!
That’s why fast turnaround times matter. And although it may mean making some changes to your post-production workflow, like using a wedding photography editing service to work on your images, it pays off because it’s an area that your clients care about – and they’ll directly benefit from! And happy clients make great client evangelists (which means you’ll be in business for the long haul).
Here are 3 reasons why fast turnaround times matter when it comes to creating client evangelists.
1. Sharing images with clients soon after the wedding capitalizes on their emotions.
In the weeks following their wedding, couples are still buzzing about their day and replaying the great moments in their minds. When you’re able to turnaround their images shortly after the wedding, they’re still on a wedding high. That means that they – and their family and friends – are more likely to share on social media, as well as face-to-face over coffee or cocktails. Your images will have more momentum with your clients, and with your prospective clients, when they’re shared soon after the event.
2. Fast turnaround times often surprise clients. And surprises make people talk!
Many clients expect you to take time to process their images after the wedding, and they’re prepared to wait. But by throwing that turnaround time of “6-10 weeks” out the window, and replacing it with a quick turnaround time of a few days or weeks, you’re exceeding expectations.
Nobody talks about when their expectations were met – it’s expected after all! But they DO talk about surprises that exceed their expectations. So when you surprise clients with faster turnaround times, you become remarkable. And THAT is what people talk about.
3. Fast turnaround times empower you to work with more happy clients.
By streamlining your processes, and improving your turnaround times, you actually create the capacity to take on more work. Photography businesses that are bogged down with editing aren’t set up to perform the tasks necessary to:
Proactively bring on new business.
Most businesses aren’t lucky enough to have a steady stream of new business showing up at their door without having to work for it! Instead, bringing in new leads and clients requires time spent blogging, on social media, on the phone with potential clients, or corresponding via email. When your workflow is optimized for fast turnaround times, you’ll reap the reward of more time to focus on proactively bringing in new business.
Manage those new clients when they come.
When editing for one client is sucking up all of your time, how can you possibly bring more clients into the mix and still meet their expectations, let alone exceed them? When you prioritize fast turnaround times and eliminate excess editing time, your streamlined systems create the capacity you need to bring on the workload associated with new clients.
But WHY are happy clients so important to your photography business? Sustainability. Businesses with happy clients receive more referrals and more sales, keeping them in business longer. Happy clients are invaluable to your business – and a sure-fire way to make your clients happy is through fast turnaround times.
What changes can you make to your workflow to improve turnaround times and make clients happy?
These days, running a wedding photography business that values speed and efficiency is the rule, not the exception. And, running a successful business is a central theme of successful photographers who are passionate about their artistry. Running an efficient, streamlined business doesn’t mean sacrificing your art or producing a poor product. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Creating an efficient business ensures that you’ll be financially stable and have time to create high-quality, artistic work. And it’s your art that inspired you to go into business in the first place, right?
As a professional wedding photo editing company, we believe that “Fast is Best” and that it can help grow your business. Here are 5 ways that being efficient empowers your photography.
1. It allows you to stay focused on your passion and your strengths.
What is it about your photography that you love? How you answer will likely identify your passion. But as we all know, running a photography business requires much more than simply focusing on your passions. The truth is, roughly 15% of your time is used taking awesome pictures! That leaves 85% of your remaining time devoted and dedicated to making sure the business will allow you to focus on the 15% you LOVE doing 🙂
Setting up efficient business practices will create time for you to focus your passions, on personal projects, on serving and loving your clients. And, this will allow you to stay happy.
Photographers all know what “busy season” feels like. There are shoots on the calendar seemingly every day, a steady stream of emails to catch up on, phone calls to return, bookkeeping to deal with, social media, album design, new client meet-ups, current client management, vendor networking, blogging, editing all of those shoots, and the list goes on!
With so much to do in so little time, it’s easy to lose your creative spark. Yet that creativity is exactly what your clients love about you! To keep them happy and to give you the creative space to do your best work, it’s critical to set up efficient business systems. Efficiency actually allows you to have (gasp!) freedom to keep that creative headspace.
Although it may sound counterintuitive, investing in services that streamline your business will save you money in the long term. For instance, outsourced services save you money because of the opportunity cost that goes along with the hours they free up. Instead of spending all that time editing (or doing your own taxes), you could take on more shoots, work on your marketing materials, or start doing more in-person sales meetings–all of which are activities that actually make money! Aside from opportunity cost, when you factor in the time that you spend editing, your hourly rate suddenly drops drastically–and you’re actually not making as much money as you could.
4. Faster delivery to your clients = happy clients.
As busy season is in full swing, you’ll start finding yourself getting farther and farther behind with weddings that need to be edited, uploaded for proofing, and blogged and shared. You know that dreaded email could come at any moment – that email from your client asking, “When can we see our photos?” It’s true, your clients (and their happiness with you) are directly impacted by lag time.
By setting up systems that help in the areas you need it most, you’re able to keep your clients happy and exceed their expectations with fast turnaround times. You can share their photographs when they’re still most excited, soon after the shoot. Keeping your clients happy means they’ll turn into enthusiastic referrers and evangelists that will keep you in business for the long haul.
Entrepreneurs and artists are alike in many ways. They’re creatives, they’re innovators, and they’re thinkers. That means burnout looms like a threatening chasm unless there’s time to breathe, explore new ideas, and wander into quiet thought. That’s exactly why efficiency can cultivate creativity and empower your photography. It gives you control over the tedious tasks of being in business so you can beat burnout by letting your right brain maintain its freedom.
Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, discussed the many qualities that set Jobs apart from other innovators, including his commitment to Zen Buddhism. Although each entrepreneur and artist practice different forms of “taking time off,” actually taking time to think and explore protect you from burnout.
The bottom line is that the best thing you can do for yourself as a creative is to take yourself seriously as a business owner. When your left-brain puts in the effort to create efficient, streamlined systems for your business, your right brain with see the return! You’ll once again enjoy your business for the reason you started it–your passion for photography.
Boston and Hartford…. check! Next stop…. California! The first two stops of the tour are complete, and they were a huge success! Check out the video from the first two stops! Don’t forget to RSVP for California!
” What an amazing night of information & fun at the Boston Unlimited Happiness Tour! Thank you & all the other sponsors/speakers for putting together such a great program & sharing your experience & knowledge!” Caroline, Brogen Photography
Our Partners at LensProToGo have launched a new blog they’re calling LensProToGo Labs! A top to bottom redesign and rebranding of their old blog, LensProToGo Labs will offer industry news, new product alerts, tips and tutorials, product reviews, and even just stuff they love, all geared towards photographers and filmmakers alike just like them! We personally really love how user friendly and easily navigable the new blog site is! Check out the site here: http://lensprotogolabs.com and make sure to follow them on Twitter @lensprotogolabs for a chance to win a $50 gift card to LensProToGo every day this week!!
Have you signed up for the Unlimited Happiness Tour yet? It’s FREE, and coming to 7 cities in August and September! Sign up while there is still free space! One of the company’s that we support is Preveal, which is an awesome software sales tool for wedding and portrait photographers. Preveal has joined in on the Unlimited Happiness Tour, and we’re stoked be talking about their brand new version!
Preveal Version 3 released on July 8 and, to celebrate, they’re giving away over $5000 in free prizes from some of the best businesses and educators in the photography industry! They’re giving away daily prizes every day this week, with a Grand Prize awarded on Monday, July 15 that is going to change someone’s business! Enter today! *This giveaway is now over.
Preveal is an iPad-based sales tool for photographers, making it absolutely simple for photographers to sell wall art to their clients by showing them exactly what their images will look like on their own walls, at the right size. This latest release brings with it support for international users, the ability to create and save your own custom templates as well as share those templates freely through the all-new Preveal Community. Preveal is on sale until July 15. *This sale is now over.
July 4th is right around the corner, and we thought we’d share our own version of Independence with you!
What’s freedom look like to us?
UNLIMITED Editing!
We love you guys, and you love Unlimited Editing. 48 seats JUST opened up for our 48 hour Unlimited Plan Promotion. Secure your unlimited editing now, before they’re gone!
