TIPS60 - Partnering with other vendors to grow your business

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here's a way that you can grow your business by partnering with other vendors. I'm John Harrington. When you're dealing with variety of different vendors for a client, say a wedding client, partnering with vendors like the hotel that they might be having their event at, the person doing the flowers or the person producing the wedding dress, making the wedding dress, those types of vendors are vendors that you want to have relationships with. If they are talking to a prospective bride, for example, and that bride's talking to them you might want to be the person that that particular company refers to. ""Hey you should use this photographer"", in turn, if you're talking to a bride first and you say that bride ""Have you picked out your wedding dress yet?"" and they say ""No, I haven't, I'm still looking."" You can encourage the bride to consider that wedding dress vendor as well. There are a variety of different ways you can partner. This was just one example for weddings. You can do it for family portraits and newborns and all different types of photography.

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TIPS60 - When discussing an assignment, get off the phone and THINK!

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on managing client interactions. I'm John Harrington. When you're talking to a client, after you've got some of the pertinent details from that client, it's really important that even if they ask you, ""How much is this going to cost or can you give me a ballpark?"" is to say, ""Let me give it some thought"" and get off the phone. You need to get off the phone and think about what's going into this shoot. Do you need an assistant? Do you need a crew? Do you need a larger production? You really need to just, after you've talked to the client, get off the phone. That gives you time without the pressure of a minute or two phone call to really think through the details of the shoot. Think through the creative, and come up with a really thoughtful and thorough estimate because if you don't have everything thought through when you send the estimate it's going to reflect on what you're doing for that client. They're going to look at you and go, ""Well, maybe they just don't know what they're doing."" It also lets you really come up with a fair and reasonable number that accounts for the production level of the shoot.

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TIPS60 - The value of having staff in your business

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on the value of having a staff. I'm John Harrington. We have a staff at John Harrington Photography. It makes my life a lot easier. It lets me get out and make the pictures that I love to make. It does minimize my need to sit behind a computer doing post-production, sending out invoices, sending out estimates, I get to go out and be creative and make the pictures that I love. I can't stress enough the value of doing that can be underwritten by having an additional few dollars applied to an invoice. We use our administrative fee in our business to justify the value of an office manager, to pay those bills and get the invoices out and follow up on unpaid invoices. A post production manager is really invaluable and and is something you should be billing for as a part of your everyday expense of dealing with clients. A post-production charge should be part of every invoice. Because it does take time whether you're doing it yourself or using the staff that you rightly should have to make your life easier and let you focus on making pictures.

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Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

TIPS60 - On Quickbooks - Explaining "Splitting" a Transaction

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on splitting transactions in Quickbooks. I'm John Harrington. Quickbooks is a great solution and a great tool, but you need to make certain that all of your all of your expenses are properly categorized. In one instance, you're actually going to be writing a check to, say, a credit card company for $1,500, but the credit card company expense is actually comprised of three separate expenses. In this instance, you have a $1,000 expense to a camera store for a lens, you may have a $400 expense for office supplies to Staples, and then you may have a $100 expense say, for a client meal that you took a client out to. Each of those has to be categorized as a separate expense in Quickbooks and you do that using the splits category that is an option within Quickbooks. So use splits to make certain that you have all of your expenses properly categorized.

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