The photography business is really very simple: you take a booking, you make the photos, you process the photos, you collect the client’s payment and then deliver their images.
In the start-up phase when you’re less likely to have a lot of work going through at once it’s very easy to know where everything is. I used to keep it all in my head it was that simple.
But what happens when your business grows? Between year 1 and year 2 my business doubled, then tripled between year 2 and year 3. I had a lot more work going through and my ‘system’ of keeping it all in my head started to develop cracks…
When I was really busy I’d suffer a lot of pain… I’d take shortcuts… I’d go off piste… Worst of all, I’d forget something and cause a delay for my clients. Not good!
Clearly this was completely unacceptable both for me and my clients. Carrying all this stuff in my head was limiting my ability to grow the business. My priorities were being dictated by my clients and that was causing a huge amount of pain. The net result was I ended up working 20 hours a day, just to grind through my workload. Business growth stagnated. I was no longer captain of the ship; I was stoking the boilers.
Then there were ‘exceptional’ requests. The clients who wanted to do things differently. Who wanted to go off piste. Who had their own agenda on how their project should be run.
This was really painful. Coming from a culture of “the client is always right” and “never say ‘no’ to a client” of course they’d get their way. Who suffered as a result? Every other client I had.
I had nothing to fall back on. Because I had no workflow, no system in place to manage every client through from booking to delivery, I ended up following their system, their agenda. They were the captains on my ship. Not me.
Something had to change. I needed to change. I needed to change the way I ran the operational side of the business and quickly too.
I needed a workflow. A way to manage and track every project that gave every client the same, consistent experience when they booked me. That’s what I set about doing.
Drawing on my experience as a software engineer, I developed a state chart for a generic photo-shoot — all the different phases of the shoot from booking to image delivery and how to move between them. The whole thing was a block diagram on a sheet of A4 paper, nothing more.
From this I put together a spreadsheet that showed every job, where it was on the state diagram and a few other things as well. I no longer carried all this information in my head.
I had a workflow!
A means to follow a defined process from booking to image delivery that was consistent between clients and shoots. It was scalable too. That year my business trebled and GavinThorn Photography won a Best Business award from the Business Excellence Forum.
It wasn’t all down to having a workflow but what the workflow gave me was time and breathing space. I had time to think clearly, to plan and to improve.
Two years on, the workflow I follow today is very different from that first sketch. I’ve refined and optimised it every time I identified a pain point for either my client or myself and that’s paid dividends.
A defined workflow means I’ve been able to use email templates almost everywhere post-booking. Instead of having to spend half an hour writing an email and looking up all the information, it takes just seconds. Raising invoices has gone from over an hour to literally 4 or 5 minutes.
Clients are happier. Repeat business and referrals have both grown considerably year on year in the last two years.
Time. On average in now spend 6 hours a day working, not 20. My family, especially my children love it as we have far more quality time. I have my family back again.
After all, that’s why I went into business in the first place.
A question for you…
If you’ve read all the way to the end of this post, I’d like to hear from you.
Is this something that would be of benefit to you? I’m planning to publish the details and inner working of my workflow and how to implement it yourself, in your photography business. Most likely as a downloadable info product for purchase through this website.
If this would be of value, take 30s and leave a one-liner comment to let me know.
Speak soon,
Gavin
