Photography Business Success Course Introduction Lesson 5...
Putting the parts of your photography business together and getting a fast start.
Over the past few lessons, we’ve been talking about different aspects of the people and pet photography business. But, individual “parts” don’t make a business...
A business is not any one particular thing — it’s a system of activities that gathers prospects, converts them to customers, and delivers value to them... and it has to do it at profit, or it will cease to exist! To build a viable business, you need to pay attention to...
- The type of business you choose
- The markets you select
and you will need to determine what those markets will respond to — what will cause people to happily give you money.
And then, of course, you have to be able to deliver on the promises you’ve made to your market, plus, you’ll need the ability to smoothly flow the prospects and clients through your business “system.”
And the “kicker” is, you need to do all of that in a way that not only preserves, but enhances the lifestyle you seek.
Does that sound like a lot to figure out? Sound complicated? Well, in the end, it’s all pretty simple, but if you don’t know where to start or what to do — if you don’t have access to all the “little details” you need to know — the whole process can be a little intimidating and overwhelming.
That’s the problem Pam had when she was trying to get her business going full swing.
You know, when we were trying to get Pam’s business going, we bought tons of books on photography; we checked into a number of schools and seminars; we even started taking a well-known correspondence course, but nothing we found helped us much. In fact, the materials we received actually made the situation worse because we were wasting our valuable time learning things we didn’t need to know.
And that’s the “root” of the problem.
Let’s take a look at a typical scenario...
Many, if not most, aspiring pro photographers spend a ton of time — sometimes many years — learning a broad range of photographic techniques because they think their superior skills will automatically make them “in demand” in the marketplace.
They also spend gobs of money on all sorts of equipment thinking that having better “stuff” will give them an edge in the marketplace.
Adding fuel to this fire are all the traditional photo schools, books, and other information sources that teach the same thing — first you have to be a technical master at a wide-range of things, then you can become a professional photographer.
Well, that’s just completely wrong and the proof is obvious...
Pam and I see it all the time — students come to us with amazing technical knowledge and skills, but can’t take the kind of client-pleasing photos that Pam and I taught a 10-year-old to take in a matter of a few days.
And even worse, they don’t have a clue about how to find a market that will pay them for their skills.
So what happens? Unless they “wake up” and decide to acquire the skills they really need, they end up doing something else for a living — like taking a “real” job that has nothing to do with what they love to do.
They lose out, and so do the people — their potential customers — who could have benefited greatly from their talents and skills.
That’s a sad thing and a lose-lose situation all the way around. Talent gets wasted; people who could have had their lives enhanced by fine family photography go wanting and photographers who could have lived an energetic, creative, and fun-filled life — one that people in the community look up to and admire — end up in jobs they hate.
Jeff’s secret trick to success and the immutable laws of “just enough” and “good enough”
If you want to springboard yourself to fast success, you first need to narrow your focus. Learning a little bit about a lot of things will do you no good.
Instead, you need to learn enough about one thing — photographing people and pets in a certain style, for example — to get yourself going and start getting paid.
Then, if you like, you can branch out.
And once you’re up and running and making some money, you can go back and learn all that technical stuff if you want. As Pam and I continue to do — we’re always improving our skills, but initially, we concentrated on getting something going — the right way according to our lifestyle choices — so we can be a little “looser” in our pursuits now.
There’s a special bonus to doing it this way, too — I’ll guarantee that you’ll learn a lot faster and better when you’re getting paid! You’ll have more energy, more enthusiasm, and your brain will be more open and receptive to it. Getting paid — or the imminent prospect of it — is one of the best educational and motivational “tools” you can have.
And the fastest way to get paid, is to get good enough at one thing — good enough to deliver an acceptable photographic product — and learn just enough about everything else you need to know to get yourself started.
Anything else is wasted effort that will slow you down and get you off track.
The same goes for equipment. Forget gearing up with fancy equipment if you don’t already have it. You don’t need it. Get yourself going any way you can with the equipment you currently have available.
Money? If it took lots of money to start a business, there wouldn’t be many businesses around. Some of the greatest businesses in the world were started with little or no money, and that’s certainly true with many of the photography businesses I know of, including Pam’s.
A complete set of skills
There are plenty of photographers who have adequate photographic skills, but that is only one part of the equation. To be in business, you need business skills. Business skills are what allow you to be a professional photographer and those skills include marketing and business "administration" skills, as well as the photographic production skills needed to produce work efficiently enough to make a profit. The good news is, you don't have to be great at any of them. You just need to be good enough at all of them. And that is the "missing link" to getting a fast start. Most photographers try to begin with a very incomplete skill set, and don't do what they need to do to to fill in the gaps.
Where are you now, and where do you want to be?
We’ve spent some time together in this introductory course and you now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to build a successful business and how important it is to have a complete and focused set of skills.
You also know how important it is to take a “lifestyle approach” so you can craft your business and your skills to suit your needs.
In light of all of this, it’s a good time to ask yourself the questions, Where am I now? ... Where do I want to be? ... and How do I get there?
Those are three questions I’m constantly asking myself and recommend you do the same! Visit them regularly — they will keep you moving forward to an ever better life.
As you can imagine, the “where I am” and “where do I want to be” questions are generally a little easier to answer than the “how do I get there” question.
But one thing I’ve discovered is that wherever you want to “be,” there’s a good chance that some one has already been there.
And if you can find them, and learn from their experiences, you can vastly accelerate progress towards your own goals.
Because of this “discovery,” I have been, and continue to be, a heavy user of informational products. In an “information age” knowledge truly is “king,” and I literally spend thousands of dollars every year on “information.”
The investment always pays me back well.
As you probably already know, Pam and I have produced full online courses based our combined 50+ years of photographic and business experience (yeah, we learned a few things along the way!!!).
If you like photographing people and/or pets, and doing it for pay appeals to you, then Pam and I wrote the Photography Business Success Course for you.
You’ll get a complete set of skills — from the technical, to client handling, to business systems building — and you won’t have to endure educational “detours” that you don’t need to take and will ultimately get you side tracked... you’ll learn just what you need to know to get started; you’ll have it laid out clearly, plus you’ll get a massive resource of things you might need to know, depending on your situation, and what you run into.
You can check out the complete course description here so I won’t go over it now, but I will mention a couple things that may be on your mind...
I get a lot of e-mails from people telling me how much they've benefited from this mini course — how it has given them inspiration and direction, and how it has truly exposed them to new ideas, gotten their business on the right track, given them the courage to raise their prices, etc.
Occasionally, however, I hear from someone who’s mad at me because I don’t tell them every little detail in this introductory mini course, or they don’t comprehend the power of what they’ve learned.
Well, besides being happy to know that I am effectively repelling people who are not suitable for our school, the full-blown courses are hugely valuable, took a massive amount of our time to create, and require ongoing support and expenses.
I am also in business to make a profit.
And that should matter a lot to you — after all, who would you rather take business advice from?... a seasoned marketer who knows how to make a business profitable, or someone who just gives away stuff for free because they don’t know what else to do, like a lot of photographers who wish they could charge for the benefits they provide, but don't know how to promote themselves effectively, and ultimately, “ask for the money.”
Now, the reason I’m telling you this in a lesson about “putting it all together and getting a fast start” is because, in the end, getting a fast start comes down to taking shortcuts. And the biggest shortcut of them all is learning from other people who can sift out what you need to know and what you don’t... people who can light the way, and keep you from making many costly and time consuming mistakes! If you don't get it from us, please do get it from somewhere!
In the next and final lesson in this series I will reveal the #1 difference between people who are successful and those who are not!
Photographically yours,
Jeff Farr
co-founder, Not Your Normal School of Photography
