Affordable Outsourcing for Photographers

By Michael Shilling
Friday, October 1st, 2010

Just because you have no money and business is slow doesn’t mean you can’t outsource! In fact getting someone else to lighten the load might even give you more time to make some more bookings!

Bookkeeping
Amazingly we spend nearly 10% of our time crunching the numbers. A good accountant can not only save you time and money but they can be written off as a business expense!

Editing
My goodness, you people are spending up to 40% of your time sitting at that computer and messing around in Lightroom. Ask yourself ‘What would you do with 40% more time?’

They’re are plenty of companies out their who can take care of batch processing and retouching for a lot cheaper than you might realize. Many of these companies have trial offers so why not give a few a go to see what results you get back.

Websites
This is one of those immeasurable drains on time! If you don’t do much then you’re probably not doing enough and vice versa.

The best advice I can give is get someone to put together a site for you that uses a simple content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla. If they offer aftercare training then all the better! If not, these open source CMS’s have such a large community surrounding them that you won’t have to look far to find a little assistance.

The biggest mistake many photographers make is going for an out of the box website with it’s own CMS. After a while they get frustrated with it’s limitations and end up either spending a lot of time learning to do it themselves or paying someone else to do it for them anyway.

Album and Storybook design
This is another one of those things that is taking up around 10% of your time! Ask yourself are you a photographer or a designer? If you prefer the former then this is one of those services that you’ll find surprisingly affordable.

In many cases your album supplier will probably offer this services but make sure you have a good look around and if any other companies do offer a trail service then give it a go. Make sure you always know how many changes they allow and how much extra changes cost….. be sure to pass this cost onto your client!

Data Collection and client calling
There’s lots of companies out there who are more than happy to sell you their data. Even better there are even more companies who will make calls and arrange bookings for you! Do lots and lots of research on this one and make sure your pricing can swallow what you’re paying to book each client. Chances are it’ll work out much cheaper than print adversing.

Conclusion
Have you worked out your client capacity?

Take this example…. A portrait studio with 1 photographer working 40hrs a week (47 working weeks a year). This example doesn’t include the ‘photographer’ doing data collection or finding the clients.

Time spent per client

  1. Booking and confirming appointments – 20mins
  2. Shooting – 1hr
  3. Editing – 2hrs
  4. Prep of images for print framing etc – 1hr
  5. Viewing – 1hr 20 mins
  6. Social media marketing (blog posts/Facebook) – 20mins

Time spent per client = 5hrs

Studio capacity – 8 clients a week

Studio capacity per year – 376 clients

If you’re average sale is £400 ($627) then your maximum turnover is going to be about £150,400 ($235,737). Doesn’t sound bad but take out the editing and have a look at these figures….

Time spent per client = 3hrs

Studio capacity – 13 clients a week

Studio capacity a year – 611 clients

Max turnover average sale £400 ($627) – £244,400 ($383,072)

That’s nearly £100,000 more just by getting someone else to edit for you!

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Categories : Grow Your Business
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Comments

  1. What do you suggest to those photographers or digital production artists to help other studios? Where can a photographer go to find the outsourced help? I’d like to be the outsourced help 🙂

    • Hi Katie, thanks for your comment. Well this is a good place to start 🙂 Are you looking to do post processing and retouching for other photographers? Are you looking to connect with photo studios for shooting gigs (second shooter)?

      Start by making some phone calls to other local photography studios. Try and get a meeting to show them your work and detail your experience and capabilities. “Freelancing” for other photographers is a great way to start.

      Once you’ve built up a client base of local photographers, and have a portfolio of freelance work to show, you can start moving towards a virtual assistant role. With todays high-speed internet connections and file transfer services, you could work with photographers anywhere in the world doing post processing and retouching.

  2. Some good ideas here. I have to raise the point that this statement “That’s nearly £100,000 more just by getting someone else to edit for you” ignores the fact that someone would have to be paid for the editing that the photographer no longer does, thereby leaving less than the stated amount.

    Also, the writer states that “in my short 10 ten years in the business I’ve taken over 100,000 people’s studio portraits”

    So using averages, that translates like this:

    10,000 people per year
    200 people per week (50 weeks)
    40 per day (5days)
    5 per hour (8 hours)
    Of course there is editing, retouching, sales presentations, viewing etc that has to be done.

    This model assumes that each of the ten years had the same amount of customers. More like, the business needed to build up over time and more sitting had to be done in the later years.
    I would love to hear how this is possible.

  3. Thanks for your comments Richie. I wanted to deal with NET figures rather than get into costs as that really opens a whole other Pandora’s box.
    It’s really about increasing your capacity for clients, just as a chain of shops might open another site.
    As a photographer we our product is sometimes ourselves so opening another studio or hiring another photographer might not always be the best move.

    In regards to my 100,000 portrait tally……. my baptism of fire into the world of portrait photography began with event photography.

    Over four years (actually 5 but I’ve taken out holidays) I shot approx.

    600 people a week – 3 shoots – 100 couples per event
    56 weeks a year for four years comes to the total of 134,400 which is a bit of a conservative estimate.

    No editing – perfect lighting, cropping and posing was needed – each ‘shoot’ involved the same 4 poses (with a few changes here and there) plus a couple of individual shots. I shot 6 frames per couple in about 60 seconds.

    This was the first few years of my career and was an amazing foundation to build from. I shot over 40 different nationalities and just about every type of personality you can imagine.

    It’s all very different from what I do now but having the experience of working at such a pace yet still maintaining a certain level of quality and interaction with the client is invaluable……..

    3 weddings, 5 renewal of vows, 200 couples’ portraits and a few hundred candid new years eve party shots was my busiest day to date…… not sure I have the energy for that anymore!