monoatomic72
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Inku Yo wrote:
Do you have an office or a studio? Do you pay for advertising/marketing? Do you purchase office supplies, printing supplies, office equipment, memory cards, cameras? Do you pay for any continuing education? Do you attend workshops? Do you buy thank you gifts? Do you feed your clients?
If you answered yes to any of those, here's a follow up question... what quality of those things are you buying? Sure, you can buy cheap stuff that will "get you by" but how does that make you look in front of your clients?
Something of a no-brainer - memory cards. I happen to purchase Sandisk Extreme Pro cards. 32GB each at about $300 a pop. They give me the performance that I need. Are you buying the Kingstons for $100 and dealing with memory buffer issues and slow transfer speeds?
I recently bout the Neat Desk scanner to scan receipts and contracts to go to integrate with Quickbooks, which I also bought. Do you invest in things that will make your business run more smoothly and efficiently? My time is money.
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I know there are outlaying costs that I don't have because I choose not to have them. I understand that others have a higher cost to run their business and I understand that as well. To answer some of your questions,
1. No I don't have a studio, but I do have an office for client meetings. It's a space where I can talk with clients in privacy. It's a commercial space, but it's cheap for rent and it allows me to showcase my products on the walls and provides a greater feel of legitimacy to my work. I would like to someday move into a studio space as I have other photographic interests besides weddings, but that is a future idea and not one that fits my business at the moment.
2. Yes I advertise. I make it a point however to think of more creative advertising ideas than simply paying someone to do SEO on my site or putting a lifeless ad into a magazine. I've always been a huge fan of guerrilla marketing and I rely heavily on that. I also tend to lean towards the swapping of marketing with other companies.
3. Yes I pay for office supplies, but it's maybe a few hundred dollars a year. Maybe.
I do pay for cameras/lenses/equipment but there isn't a piece of equipment I own that costs more than $900 on the used market. I came into this with the gear I had and I've spent about $2000 in the past year on gear. I don't subscribe to wasting money on items I don't need in this department. I don't need ISO 12800 to take a picture. I don't need $1700 lenses when I can get similar enough performance out of a $600 lens. It's just that simple. I would never think of paying $300 for a memory card. I also don't need 32 gig cards, so I can't really comment on that. I will say however that I do very diligent shopping for my equipment. I live on sites like Slickdeals and other tech places.
4. Continuing education can be found at the library or online for free. Workshops are a money sink. To me at least. I know others find what they are looking for when attending a workshop or a photographer shoot out, but I just don't see the appeal. I have a few fellow photographers I talk to from time to time in a creative sense, but for the most part information is out there if you look for it.
5. I do send thank you gifts, usually something person specific. I tend not to feed clients as I run my business in a different way than most people, but I have on occasion brought clients out because we've made a connection outside of just the business side of our acquaintance.
6. I understand the ideas behind integrating this and that to make your business run more efficiently, but you don't need high dollar software and technology to run an efficient business. It of course makes it a lot easier, but having a scanner to integrate receipts into Quickbooks isn't a make or break it for productivity to me.
As far as how I look in front of my clients, I think that is a very subjective thing to discuss. To some people, I may look "lower" than someone who has a giant studio and who runs full page ads in bridal magazines, but that is probably a result of the people I go after as opposed to anything that I could be slighted for.
I know this probably doesn't compute with a lot of you, especially the ones who are always advocating go bigger/charge more/get better clients, but I actually am marketing to the lower-middle end brides. I know it's contrary to the belief that we as a industry should be pushing to get into the highest end that we can, but for me, and what I do, I live on the opposite end of the spectrum. I think there is definitely a place for a well oiled, well run business in the lower end that can completely trump all of the flaky, poorly run businesses. I think it is a much bigger pool of people to market to and there is no reason you can't run a successful business attracting from that client pool.
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... heck I'm the jackass who said my CRB is estimated at $8.5K per year... and that's without any CGS.... some of us with day jobs actually do have the skillz to figure out how we're doing