How to handle clients....a few questions

[TheKenTurner]

Lemonade Stand Photography, isn't really a business, but a paid hobby, that doesn't really make money, just like a child selling lemonade for 25¢, even though the parents are losing 50¢ a glass.

My dad is an accountant! That's why my lemonade stand, although not losing money per glass, didn't get very many sales...

-Ken Turner

 

[bunny99123]

Well, never had anyone call me pass 9 pm about a shoot. I always ask my client if they are happy with the shoot, and can add a couple more poses if they want too. That covers why I did not get a certain pose. I also use a contract with a list of poses and add poses that we photographed. Turn your cell off at night if you have a land line.

Where I live the market is over saturated with Photographers. Although it is a large city, there are not a lot of photography studios, so it is hard to find work as a second shooter.

I agree a honest person knows their ability and charge accordingly, and increase fees as their ability improve and have more accesssories. All clients I talk to want a cd. I am a working class photographer and happy with that. Never plan to have a photography studio. I enjoy people and taking photos.

I just tell people to not call me past 9PM, and I use my cell phone to inform clients I am at the site, and make sure they are coming.

Keep shooting, and be more aggressive about the phone calls or just turn it off at night.

 

[amolitor]

Sounds like you are priced for bottom of the barrel clients.

If you are a business, you should have a business phone, and then the calls and texts won't be a problem.

I see that you provided more useful information in your followups, but this seems to have been a completely unnecessary bit of nastiness. There is nothing helpful in it, just a sort of smug unpleasantness.

You're a better man than this.

 

[imagemaker46]

Thanks for posting that blog, some very interesting reading. Some people are much better at putting down in words what other people are thinking.

 

[manaheim]

Wow. Quite honestly I am not sure what to say to that first statement other than I am priced according to my current skill level and market.

I have a business phone however I use my cell phone to give to clients on the day of their session in case they are running late etc. I am not a "huge" business therefore I can't afford the expense of a business only cell phone.

Then you are not priced to be a successful business, that covers costs of doing business, such as seperate business phones.

You say you are not a "huge" business. I am not sure what you are trying to say other than you are not making enough money to be a proper business. Do you have a Million Dollar Liabilty insurance plan? Have you made a business plan?

I have a business plan however I just started charging a month ago, literally. Therefore when I say "huge" that is what I mean. I just started and until I build a reputation and get more in my portfolio my cost is what it is. I have a separate business phone but not a cell phone for business. As soon as my business takes off I plan to add a business only cell.

I am not sure what your implication of not being a proper business is. You don't just start out overnight and charge $500 to clients unless you have previously been working or have a large portfolio. I am assuming based on your comments you charge way more than I do. While that might be fine for you and your business market where I am located it wouldn't fly. Even the best photographers in this town do not charge anywhere near what you are implying. I know my market and what my current portfolio and skill level are. As I build on both of those I will adjust my pricing to reflect both.

I appreciate you taking the time to comment on my thread but I feel a little belittled by them. This board is for all levels of photographers who are charging for their work be it $5 or $5000 and for help in doing so at least that is what I thought it was for. If this is the wrong board to ask the question I posed feel free to point me in the right direction.

My mother once opened a retail dance, excercise and activewear clothing store.

The day she opened she had already spent a significant amount of time computing costs for her labor, her electricity, her rent, her inventory and related shipping and storage and even her gas back and forth to work. She factored all of that into how much she needed to charge for her clothes in order ot make a profit, set the profit level she was comfortable with, and priced her inventory appropriately. On day one she opened up with the markup that she continued to charge until the day she sold off her small CHAIN of clothing stores and quit the business.

If she had worked in the manner that you (and many) photographers work, she would have been selling her clothing at a loss on day one. She would have had a LOT of customers, but they would have been people who would normally have been shopping at walmart shopping at her boutique to get high-end brands for cheap, and those customers would have been a pain in the ass... and she would have been out of business within 2-3 months because she couldn't have afforded the rent.

The point is that any business you are going to run needs to be profitable on day one or it's basically not a business. It's a hobby where someone is covering part of your costs. And when you are conducting yourself as a hobbyist, people will treat you as a hobbyist. That is to say, as if you don't really know what you're doing and don't have any real business practices to speak of.

You may well now say that you don't know what you're doing, and that's all well and good... then you are probably not really ready to do this. I'm not suggesting you have to have all the experience that you would attain from doing this professionally for years to open up your own shop, but some experience helps. Go work with/for some other pros as a secondary for a while. Ask questions. Listen and take advice seriously. Learn something... learn more than you do now, and then go for it. Absolutely go for it.

(I think) this is what bitter is saying to you. He's not kicking you to the curb ... he's telling you what your problem is. You are responding defensively to that, and I can totally understand that, but his advice is sound. You said "I'm having this problem", and bitter is saying why, and he's spot-on. It's also a broader answer than you were probably hoping for, but it's the root answer- the core- the real stuff that is not only affecting you here, but will affect you for every client.

And there ARE some pros on here... some are part time, some are full time, some were full time once and are now part time. I can tell you that all the people who say stuff like this are the ones that have done it professionally, and every single one of them started out with little or no experience... so not only are they telling you what they know as a pro, they are telling you what they know as somoene who once was not.

Take the advice seriously.

 

[MLeeK]

Manaheim has THE point in his post.
You wouldn't expect to walk into a new store in the mall and buy their goods at a loss to them because they are new on the market.
Todd and Jamie talk about that at some point in the blog too. Price yourself according to your product and value your skills. If you don't have the skills to be of value yet you need to stop charging and go back to skill building until you have it.
Raising your prices down the line will cost you ever client you have now-as it should, however that's where you are going to take the hard hit. At that point you are already known as the cheap photographer.
If today WalMart studios raised their sitting fees to where they should be? They'd be out of the business immediately. We'd all say "WTF? They're WALMART for God's sake!" Do you want to be WalMart or do you want to be something else?
Somewhere in there Todd says essentially set a value on yourself, commit to it and do NOT apologize for it.

 

[12sndsgood]

I had a million dollars in liability insurance before I ever took my first paying job.I've been opening for 2 months. Things like this are things you should plan for and put into effect if you want to open a business. It's not belittling for someone to ask you things you should have allready in place.

 

[MLeeK]

Ouuuuuuu !!!

I like this one - Photography is a luxury... - ...a Man to Fish...

Site bookmarked so I can pass it around too.

I think the guy is bloody brilliant and his wife is as amazing as he is. That is my favorite blog for business and I'd REALLY like to do one of his workshops should I find one that I am not at the opposite end of the country for.

 

[Todd_Reichman]

Hi everyone, saw a bunch of links from the ...a Man to Fish... Analytics to this thread. Thanks for adding me to the discussion. I'm glad something on the blog has resonated for some of you.

Please read this blog from the beginning to current. It's going to take you some time, but do it. It's well worth it. THIS post is probably the launch point for why I think you need to read his blog. Then the follow ups to it. Then everything after it about business.

Uh...Thanks!

Damn... he's smart... AND hot!

Uh...Thanks?

To address the OP - as a business owner you really do get to define how you are treated by your clients. You do this by dictating exactly what is going to happen and then executing on that. When you are first starting out you aren't going to get all this right, so it is important to look at every interaction and friction points you experience with clients and figure out what you did to cause it and what you could do to avoid that issue in the future. While we can sometimes get frustrated with clients we always have to take responsibility for everything that happens and assume we have the ability to adjust behavior going forward. The client isn't the enemy.

Thanks everyone. Feel free to follow on Facebook and bookmark the blog. I do take questions and respond in posts and I'm happy to talk shop here as well.

- todd

Todd Reichman
Reichman Photography
www.reichmanphoto.com
...a Man to Fish...
www.amantofish.com

 

[PhotoWrangler]

I love the fact that you popped in Todd. So many "pros" today are only interested in preying on the pocketbooks of fledgling photographers. Its nice to see someone who volunteers valuable information in a genuine effort to help.

 

[amolitor]

It's simply FASCINATING the assumptions, unfounded as far as I can see, that people are making about the OP's business. Did he or she post details about expenses and margins and so on elsewhere, because I ain't seeing it here.

Photography is quite a different business than selling clothes, so manaheim's story is only tangentially related. You're selling your labor, and that's about it. You have a bunch of fixed expenses, sure, and a bunch of sunk costs, but the actual COGs boils down to whatever your time is worth plus some gas money. Whether or not you are "losing money" on day one depends almost entirely on how you are doing your accounting.

Restaurants, to pull out another example of a business, routinely lose money hand over fist for a while. There's as much reason to compare restaurants to photography as there is to compare clothing stores, and I think the comparison is in fact rather more apt.

manaheim's sentence: "The point is that any business you are going to run needs to be profitable on day one or it's basically not a business." has never actually applied to any business anywhere. Profitability isn't even a meaningful thing on day one, and if it was, virtually no business would be profitable on day one. There's too much cost up front and not enough revenue in the first 24 hours. So, what manaheim PROBABLY means (forgive me for putting words in your mouth) is that the business needs to have a viable model on day one to be a real business, which is a statement that means something at least.

It is, interestingly, also untrue. Frequently businesses will tinker with the model as they go along until they settle on one that works.

More importantly, we haven't a shred of reason to imagine that the OP doesn't have a perfectly viable complete business plan.

What we have is someone who said 'I gave my cell phone number to a client and she is calling me incessantly now, anyone got any ideas?' and everyone jumped in and said 'YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS **** YOU SHOULD DIE' which is, not to put too fine of a point on it:

a) typical of the semi-literate ill-considered mean-spirited garbage we see on TPF from altogether too many of the frequent posters
b) completely wrong-headed

EDIT: What's REALLY interesting to me here is that some of this nonsense came from posters I do not think of as belonging to the 'semi-literal ill-considered mean-spirited' crowd at all. manaheim and Bitter Jeweler are usually among the helpful and pleasant posters here, just to pull two names at random that surprised me here.

 

[eilla05]

I call it Lemonade Stand Photography.


Sorry, I am "Olde School", where you learned your craft, went to work for others to continue learning under the guidance of others, and then when you think you are ready, you jump ship and open your own business being able to offer good quality at the going market rates. As opposed to beginner rates, advanced beginner rates, intermediate rates...

Lemonade Stand Photography, isn't really a business, but a paid hobby, that doesn't really make money, just like a child selling lemonade for 25¢, even though the parents are losing 50¢ a glass.

Spending years working for others in your field, gives you a vast education in business that you will never get in school. It gives you experience seeing how an existing successful business handles the problems you are bringing up here.

Sorry if you feel belittled. It is my opinion that a real business is not one that is learning the very product they are selling.

I get that your old school and can appreciate that, however not everyone feels the way you do about photography. It is very competitive and most photographers don't want to take anyone under their wing to teach them anything. So finding someone whom you can work with for years to learn is not very feasible for the majority and if you know an easy way to do so I am all ears because I have called as many photographers as there are in this town to ask.

I appreciate your comments but what I don't appreciate is the tone and suggestion that just because I or anyone else on this board are not charging what you charge or haven't been doing it for how long you have it means we are not real photographers. That is BS. Again my market doesn't allow for charging $500 a session. I know the market where I am located. You do not. I am charging according to that and offering up a service to ALL people in my market not just the ones who can afford a $500 photographer. Not everyone can afford that and I personally don't feel like they shouldn't have a photographer because they can only afford $250 instead of $500.

I am actually making profit from what I am charging just apparently not to your standard of profit. Currently I am choosing to save said profit so that I can buy better equipment than to put that towards a business only cell.

Oh and by the way..photography is a learning business. Every session teaches us something and if you are not learning I suggest you ask yourself what it is you a missing out on.

 

[eilla05]

First mistake, giving a client your cell phone number, all you are doing is setting yourself up for the text and calls. You make an appointment for the shoot, if they are running late you wait until they get there, most people do show up on time for photo shoots. You have to set business hours, you have to tell your clients that they will receive the finished images within a certain number of days, and deliver on time. If they want a few for facebook, you tell them they can have a few. I work with my clients on the phone or e-mail, no text, no cell phone.

If you are going to run a professional business, treat it like a professional business, not an extention of facebook friends. You say that you are have only just started charging a month ago, so based on your skill level you'll shoot for whatever you can get. How long have you been shooting for and what kind of background do you have?

I have been shooting for about 3 years. Background as in what specifically like do I have a degree in photography? Nope and don't know anyone who does. I have taken some courses and learned by self teaching. Oh and I don't shoot for what I can get I have a set charge for everyone

 

[manaheim]

It's simply FASCINATING the assumptions, unfounded as far as I can see, that people are making about the OP's business. Did he or she post details about expenses and margins and so on elsewhere, because I ain't seeing it here.

Photography is quite a different business than selling clothes, so manaheim's story is only tangentially related. You're selling your labor, and that's about it. You have a bunch of fixed expenses, sure, and a bunch of sunk costs, but the actual COGs boils down to whatever your time is worth plus some gas money. Whether or not you are "losing money" on day one depends almost entirely on how you are doing your accounting.

Restaurants, to pull out another example of a business, routinely lose money hand over fist for a while. There's as much reason to compare restaurants to photography as there is to compare clothing stores, and I think the comparison is in fact rather more apt.

manaheim's sentence: "The point is that any business you are going to run needs to be profitable on day one or it's basically not a business." has never actually applied to any business anywhere. Profitability isn't even a meaningful thing on day one, and if it was, virtually no business would be profitable on day one. There's too much cost up front and not enough revenue in the first 24 hours. So, what manaheim PROBABLY means (forgive me for putting words in your mouth) is that the business needs to have a viable model on day one to be a real business, which is a statement that means something at least.

It is, interestingly, also untrue. Frequently businesses will tinker with the model as they go along until they settle on one that works.

More importantly, we haven't a shred of reason to imagine that the OP doesn't have a perfectly viable complete business plan.

What we have is someone who said 'I gave my cell phone number to a client and she is calling me incessantly now, anyone got any ideas?' and everyone jumped in and said 'YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS **** YOU SHOULD DIE' which is, not to put too fine of a point on it:

a) typical of the semi-literate ill-considered mean-spirited garbage we see on TPF from altogether too many of the frequent posters
b) completely wrong-headed

EDIT: What's REALLY interesting to me here is that some of this nonsense came from posters I do not think of as belonging to the 'semi-literal ill-considered mean-spirited' crowd at all. manaheim and Bitter Jeweler are usually among the helpful and pleasant posters here, just to pull two names at random that surprised me here.

You are correct - I really meant more along the lines of viable than profitable. Plenty of business's aren't profitable right away.

The OP said some things that are telltale signs of someone who is undervaluing their services, including implying that $500 was a ton of money and that they were not good enough to charge that. We have been around here for a while and I can tell you that's a leading forecaster. It is an assumption on our part, I'll give you... But I'd bet good money it is spot on.

And while you may not be agush over my particular anecdote, it is perfectly appropriate. Businesses are about expenses and profits, (including opportunity costs) - plain and simple. Every business has different concerns but if you spend more than you make, you fail. If you could have made more money doing something else, you have to at least question your choices.

Oh and thanks for calling me semi-literal illiterate and mean spirited. You know, you've been in the middle of just about every Nast derailed thread I've seen here in the past 6 weeks or so. Not JUST you, but you do always seem to be there. I wonder if there is a connection......

 

[PhotoWrangler]

I am charging according to that and offering up a service to ALL people in my market not just the ones who can afford a $500 photographer.....

I don't know why you're bitching at him.... you just stated the same thing he did, only with less explanation. If you cater to all, then you'll have the problems of all. Late night texting and everything...