“On the fly" business ideas - moneymaker or money loser?
You’ll know right away what I’m talking about. You woke up this morning and thought “crap, I’ve got bills to pay and no one is booking. I’m going to do a weekend of mini sessions!” Then you spend the better part of your day doing loooong searches through Internet templates - Etsy, Design Aglow, general google search to see what comes up. Ooh! You found one you like - wow, it looks so nice and that sample photo is awesome and attracts you (even if it may not look anything like your photography) - that template is the winner!
Proceed to download, spending oodles of time picking the right image, which doesn’t look as great as the sample image, so you keep swapping, trying to recreate the feelings you had when you saw the template with the other image. Fail, keep going. Wow, how is it lunch already?
Ok, you’ve found an image that works, somewhat. You move onto the text. It goes something like this and in this order and size, approximately:
PRICE
Time
Number of Files
Online Gallery
Print release
Ok, not so original. Well, what else will you put there; you have to inform people of what they get, right? You’ve endlessly googled mini sessions that other people do and these are the things that everyone else puts on their ad. Must be the right thing to do! Price? Hmm, not sure. I haven’t truly run my costs, but so many of these photographers are charging in the $50-$100 range. I guess I have to be in line, because no one will book me otherwise!
Waking up in the morning and having an inspiring idea or an aha! moment is amazing. Waking up one morning and just deciding that you have to do something fast and furious because you got nervous about your balance sheet is everything but. When you do things on the fly, you tend to forget big things like:
Do I know how much expense this represents for me versus income? Could I be potentially losing money by pricing on-the-fly without understanding impacts on my bottom line?
Will this build a loyal clientele to my brand or invite one-time deal seekers?
Does this fully represent who I am and how I want to be perceived as a photographer and a business?
Does this achieve or sabotage my long-term goals and push me off my mission?
Everything that you do, or don’t do in your business matters. While we may have to experiment to find our perfect balance, going off the deep-end into a poorly thought out set of activities can hurt you much more than you might understand at the time. For example, you give a deal to a client or run a set of dirt cheap sessions just to generate some income. Done, right? You made some money, it’s all wrapped up and over now. Except those people don’t come back for full sessions. And they may send all their cheap friends over saying their buddy got a deal so can they? And now you’re dealing with these discount inquiries and not sure how to handle. Or one of those clients was difficult and they come back to haunt you weeks later with requests for free edits, refunds or requests for RAW images. Or these people didn’t value photography and just came for the price tag and are now posting your images everywhere - with terrible filters, and tagging you.
If you don’t take meticulous care of your business, you walk a risky path. You and your business deserve that care from YOU. If you don’t want toxicity in your life and want positivity, health and wellness, you might eat right, find activities you love, spend time with inspiring and uplifting people, because as they say with diet, “You are what you eat”. When people aren’t the right fit but attracted by something unspecific like price (instead of look, lifestyle, resonating with brand), you set yourself up for a bumpy road.
What’s a better way? Sit down annually and decide upon the activities you may want to embark on, projects that sound interesting, that will meet your financial goals. Create a campaign for each where you define the who, what, where, when, why and how. That will ensure you can go deeper than time+files on an ad, with a well-crafted message, a strong image and a strong call to action that emotionally drives people rather than just the price. Project revenue and expense to see if things are doable. Most industries work on these things in this manner. Flash sale on Amazon? You can bet no one woke up this morning and decided to run that. A team of people met months ago starting with a creative brief for the sale, and engaged the different departments to roll it out - creative, IT, marketing etc. Graphic designers made mockups of the design. Marketers thought of the most powerful messages and calls to action. Creatives ensured the branding was aligned. All of it was carefully tracked by a project owner who worked to ensure the campaign would yield the right profit that was determined to meet the financial projections. Social media people decided on content and frequency of posts. Things weren’t done by chance - even before the project started, the concept was included in the company’s annual plan. When you work by design, you can become deliberate and that maximizes the effectiveness of what you’re trying to do.
Next time you feel like doing something crazy, hold off and breath deep. Instead, sit down, even if it’s in the middle of your year, and create the campaign as I’ve described above - first to see that it won’t undermine your long term goals, but also so that at least you have a plan. The difference between you and my above example with Amazon is that you are the whole team - creative, the marketer, the IT person, the graphic designer (or the one who outsources some of these things), so there is actually a good amount of work to do.
Commit to a time at the end or start of your year to project how that year will go - holidays, summer, Fall so that you can set yourself up for an annual plan that incorporates these ideas. The fashion industry is usually 2 seasons ahead, which is why bikini models are usually shivering on beaches in colder weather - you don’t shoot summer in summer! While fine details might be nailed down closer to the actual campaign, the campaign itself can be imagined well ahead of time.
Now, creatives are creative by nature so this process is by no means meant to kill creativity. If something comes up that grabs your heart and your creative spirit, by all means pursue, but always keep your bottom line in the back of your mind. We might lose money on things here and then but it’s because those opportunities can yield some big and wonderful result other than money - collaboration, filling your cup, doing good for others. The key is to set yourself up for success the majority of the time with your bread and butter activities and indeed in order to give you the freedom to chase a creative whim when it comes.
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