Turning Pro
| Focus on the demand side .The thing that makes you a professional photographer is having customers. You can have the best equipment, studio, business systems or even the best photographs in the world, but it's having customers that marks you as a pro. Far too many aspiring professionals take refuge in the supply side - what items of equipment, facilities, software, etc are needed? What are you going to do yourself and what will you have done by external specialists? They are all essentially easy decisions because all of them are under your control. Sure, you have to make all these supply-side decisions, but the really important thing is to get to understand what market(s) you're going to sell into, and get to be pretty sure that your chosen markets like what you do, might just buy from you, and are capable of buying in sufficient volume and prices to create a satisfactory business. There is more to this than producing a list of "might become customers", though that's at least a start. It's also getting to expose your work to them and getting some form of feedback on whether your work fits with their needs. It's learning about the price structures that apply in your selected marketplaces so you understand how much you're going to need to sell. It's about understanding your prospective customers' buying processes and where you'll need to insert yourself into them. These aren't the first things you should do after announcing yourself as a professional photographer- they are things you need to do before committing yourself. It's staggering how many people want to be stock photographers without understanding what is the average return per image held in different libraries; how this is trending; and whether any meaningful library is going to be interested in their work; whether there's any opportunity to be featured in their physical or online catalogues etc. Until you know these sorts of thing there's little point deciding to be a stock photographer. I do appreciate that this is much more difficult than deciding what sort of scanner to buy, but then it's more important too. Know why customers should choose you Not every brand or business in the world has a competitive advantage but it helps. Not least because prospects will surely ask you why they should work with you and it's best to be able to give them an answer that isn't obviously just made up as you go along. It's possible that your competitive advantage lies in your photography; that you have an approach or a skill that differentiates what you do from others. It could equally be in the service you deliver, in your "packaging " of your product, or in you. When everything else is equal, the nice guy, or in reality the guy who comes across as easy to do business with, gets the job. On the other hand sometimes your work has to speak for itself. If you're planning to make a career or just money out of stock, editorial work, calendars, greetings cards then your work is going to have to stand on its merits without much intervention from you, and being able to differentiate your work from others is a critical element. On the other hand if you're majoring on commercial work, portraits, weddings, then the customer is choosing you, the approach you bring to the task, and the service you promise as well as voting for your photography. The scope for creating "advantage" in the mind of the prospect is wider, and doesn't depend only on your photographs. Not all successful businesses have a true "competitive advantage". You've heard the expression "f8 and be there". Well, to win business just be there. If you can find out what triggers people's need for your services then you can work out a way to be at their shoulder when the need arises, you'll get more business. Commitment. Is this what you really want? Unsurprisingly there's a link between commitment and success. It isn't 100% - some people do seem to be fortunate enough to get a good living without overtly trying too hard - but I think most people would accept that there is a strong relationship here. The thing about commitment is that you'll only really deliver it sustainably if you can see some satisfaction from what you're doing, and if it fits with the other elements of your life. I can't stress too highly the importance of really, really getting the buy -in of those people to whom you owe responsibility. The life you're moving into may well take you away from home more than you've been used to. It is likely to mean less income in the short term and perhaps forever. It is likely to mean that your income fluctuates and if you have a high level of regular expenditure, that is not going to help. It means an ongoing degree of uncertainty - even if you're doing wonderfully well today it could all come to a halt in a few months. Some people are just better at coping with that than others, and see it as a spur not as a barrier. It isn't just whether you can cope with these things, it's whether you and any dependants all can. It's unlikely that you'll be able to sustain high levels of energy and commitment long term unless you have the positive support of those that depend on you. Equally you have to face up to the fact that a life as a photographer doesn't mean you get to photograph every day. You'll spend at least as much time generating customers, handling the logistics of your life, and managing a business as you do behind a camera. Personally I'm lucky if I photograph 100 days a year and I only manage that because I decide to outsource all printing and processing tasks rather than spend my life in a darkroom or behind a computer. 100 days a year means little more than I could do if I dedicated my vacations and most weekends to photography as an amateur. In some ways photography as an amateur is grand. You get to photograph what you like when you want; you get to stay in bed when it's raining. You get to throw away or suppress every single image that doesn't represent your absolute best in the right conditions. In most cases professional photography involves photographing what someone else wants and working to a deadline they set or which they find acceptable. Clearly, you're responsible for what you do and don't deliver, but sometimes you will find yourself handing over work that isn't as good as it could have been because behind every quotation or contract there is an amount of time that the photographer has budgeted to spend. In reality the client gets the best that could be achieved in that time, which is not always the same as the best that photographer could do. This in turn relates to the perception, raised at the beginning of this article, that there often isn't a lot of difference between the "quality" of amateur and professional work. The amateur has the luxury of comparing their best work with professional work which may have been severely budget constrained; produced under a tight deadline within which conditions were far from ideal; and then the client may have chosen the wrong images anyway! Books of photographs are another good example. Many of them, even those by photographers of great ability, contain at least some images that are less than imaginative or interesting. Why? Well unless you get very lucky indeed, producing books of photographs is unlikely to lead to fame and fortune. Well, fame maybe, but not to fortune. So the photographer has to budget time to accumulate the images, and this competes with arguably better paid work on other things. As before, the result is that some of the work in the book is not the best the photographer could do. He'd love to spend a few more days or weeks on this but his schedule, or his bank balance, or the publisher's schedule just don't allow it. None of this means to paint a gloomy picture. It is meant to highlight a very few of the realities of a professional's world in the context that if you enjoy it you'll possibly remain committed and if you're committed you'll possibly make a success of it. Manage for cash. Everyone tells aspiring professionals that they have to acquire business management skills, make a proper business plan and so on. Clearly that's just so right that there's little point debating or re-stating it. "Managing for cash" is a philosophy I'd commend within the generalized planning/ controlling/ analyzing/ evaluating/ re-planning cycle. What it really means is that you should try really hard to spend out of what you get paid, rather than spending in order to get paid. There really isn't much of a worse time than running a business that doesn't have enough cash. Not being able to pay suppliers because the check won't clear. Explaining to suppliers that even though you can't pay last month's invoice, you need continuity of supply, please. Wondering whether this will be the month when the bank gets bored with bailing you out. No cash is a nightmare; and it's by far the biggest reason why businesses have to cease trading. Provided you have made profit historically you can in theory run a business at a loss for as long as you want. If you run out of cash you have to stop. Short term, cash is more important than profit. Managing for cash comprises two elements. Influencing the speed with which money comes in on the one hand, and controlling the speed with which it goes out is clearly the other. Each of the businesses I've helped run has operated a very simple cash book in which every day the money we've received and the checks/ debits issued have been entered. This provides in essence a daily review of uncommitted funds in the business. And a clear limit on the value of checks/debits that can be raised. Monthly this is reconciled to the bank statement. It means that every day you know how much cash you've got and avoids the possibility that you slip into negative cash without knowing. This method measures but it doesn't fully control. Controlling receipts is something you start by building into your paperwork from the outset. If I see a business that has difficulty collecting its debts then I can bet that one or maybe all of the following apply. There is no contract in existence that describes the services to be provided and states when the photographer is going to get paid, including any advance deposits. There is no process for reminding customers of the obligations they've agreed to-chasing the debt. Waiting for the mail each day is not chasing the debt. There is no sanction available to the photographer if the customer doesn't pay or withholds part payment, because the customer has everything they need. If a large contract or job is available from a commercial organisation then enthusiasm for the "win" means that nobody's checked their credit record. Perhaps most common of all, there's a dispute over the invoice amount or the services provided. It is vitally important that changes to quotations, specifications etc are confirmed in writing. Wherever there's an invoice dispute I bet I can show you an important gap in the documentation. Controlling your spend means not spending money you haven't been paid. If you haven't got enough money it's much more likely you need extra customers than a Canon DS whatever. It's so easy to spend money out of boredom when business is slack, and you've plenty of time to persuade yourself that you'll be able to get so much more business, or fulfil contracts so much more profitably, if only you had x or y. Very occasionally that will be right. The vast majority of the time it's wishful thinking, and waiting until your business can afford to buy or finance something will prove a better policy than gambling your business on speculative acquisitions. You should view capital acquisitions as a reward for bringing money in. Be Flexible If I look at the best known outdoor/nature photographers in the UK, pretty much all of them earn their income from a mix of sources rather than on one thing or even one main thing. Some combine paid photography with a part-time or even full time job. Those that are fully dependent on photography combine income from stock sales, books, print sales and exhibitions, calendars and greeting cards, magazine articles, and tuition/courses, together with a little commercial photography or portraiture. The proportions may vary, but the creation of income across a range of different business activities is ubiquitous. I have little doubt that things are similar in the USA. What I guess all this means is that few if any of these markets are big enough to sustain many specialists, and that for most people it is necessary to have photographic and business skills across a range of activities to thrive. Similarly, if I look at most portrait studios, I see that they promote themselves a s wedding, location and small-scale commercial photographers as well. Again it's a question of how flexible you're able to be to fill your time, and your studio, to the maximum degree. In large measure, specialisation in a single narrow field is available only to the very successful, and then only in certain areas such as fashion, advertising, photojournalism, where the route in is unlikely to be conversion from a hobby |