GonzagaJere
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Let me be the first to say, brilliant. Eloquent, simple, solid. Thank you for taking time from your day to share your insights.
TRReichman wrote:
I checked in with the PPA/SMS people that I know and asked if in their experience any $2K wedding photography studios were making it. They laughed at the notion. I mean, I know that everyone here thinks they know better, but these people manage photography businesses as their core competency and have been doing so for longer than most of us have been photographers. All I can say, and I do this with as much support as I can offer, is that there is really no reason to be a $2K wedding photographer. As I tried to suggest to jcolman yesterday, simply readjusting your price list can add $1000-2500 to every wedding without shifting anything else.
I know if feels like a few more weddings are no big deal, but over time you reach a tipping point. Last year I made more money than any year previously, and I damn nearly quit after it. We just kept taking more and more weddings, thinking about the bottom line and not about the sustainable workload. More money = the worst year of my life. Each business has some number that it hums at, anything under and you get restless, anything over and you go all out of control. It usually takes a few years to figure it out. Every business coach I've talked to agrees that more volume, particularly for personal service businesses, can never be the only answer for hitting a desired income goal. At some point you have to stop selling out on yourself and charge more than you might be comfortable with to make your business support you. Being an entrepreneur is not about making comfortable decisions, its about finding comfort in difficult choices.
You either sacrifice "free time" improving the business or you sacrifice it photographing other people living their lives. Once you put in the initial work to get to a certain level that work is done - you still have to shoot the 70 weddings every year - who is losing more "free time?"
And I will keep beating this dead horse until I'm confident the point has gotten across - $5K is not a large amount. I am not balling at $5K per wedding. No Rolls in the driveway, and my grill is suspiciously bereft of gold teeth. $5K is the MINIMUM amount it takes to shoot a wedding profitably (for me). $5K should be average, not high.
Since you asked...
Booking the weddings that I do is probably just as easy or easier than the ones you book. No special work involved. Sorry to burst the bubble, or destroy the argument against me that I must work SO much harder to book what I do, but it just isn't true. People hear about me from someone who knows. They email, we talk, a week later they send me a check. Does this sound harder than what you are doing?
I'll go ahead and make an assumption about your clients (based on my own experience at that level of the market) - my clients are far easier to work with and less-demanding than yours.
I see this assumption a lot, I think it is a fallacy. The pool may be smaller than some lower-dollar pools, but there are WAY fewer sharks swimming in it. I would venture to guess that there are more clients at my level than there are photographers to service them. I know there are thousands more $2-4K photographers fighting it out than there are brides who want to hire them. Think about that and tell me which is more terrifying.
Having said that, I will admit that on some survival level, in the reptilian part of my brain, every day spent as an entrepreneur is terrifying. Goes with the territory. I personally found it to be more terrifying when the checks coming in were in hundreds and overall job amounts were a couple thousand than I do now.
Why should anyone be afraid of slipping? This is amateur talk. A business does not fail from a "slip." A business fails after a series of mistakes and poor performance that it refuses to adapt to. No one goes out of business overnight without some catastrophic, stupid move. Any good business is tracking their performance and can tell when they go astray. If you choose to not address the problems before they take you down, you weren't really all that successful in the first place. People get to a "successful" level by tracking/managing/adjusting what they are doing constantly. Once you get to the "success" point (whatever that means) you don't stop doing all that self-analysis - it becomes second nature. So all I can say to those of you worrying about reaching a peak and falling from it is that reaching the peak teaches you how to balance there. For the record I don't feel that I've reached a level of success or a "peak" personally, I'm still working towards that.
Once again, cue broken record. I am not in the clouds in this industry. I am in what ought to be the middle. If I am in the clouds, then this is a very sad industry to be in. It only looks like the clouds from below, where people are settling for so much less than they are worth/than they deserve. I am only in the clouds (relatively) by virtue of the fact that so many photographers are selling themselves short. If I were in the clouds I should have far more money, live far more comfortably, and be far more famous and in demand. I'm a small time player. I have said it before - everyone on this board good reach and surpass me.
Look. I like you guys. I am you guys. I just stopped envying the people making a living at this and figured out how to do it. To take it back to the core of the OP - giving discounts never seemed to be the source for becoming a success. That's because, at its core, discounting is compromising your value proposition to make a lower-price your selling point. I haven't seen this be a sustainable path to success yet. The path is pretty clear - managerial accounting, branding, and a solid work/workflow/client management approach. I know that everyone keeps wanting to focus on the work/workflow/relationship aspect, but the managerial accounting and the branding work are what separates the real players from the weekend warriors.
I'd love to see the photography community stop saying, "yeah, it worked for the other guy but I won't try it" and just believe that it could be the same story for them.
- trr
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