Setting Up Your Business: Lessons from #PhotoWeekLive

Mean Business (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sal Cincotta is definitely one of my favorite photographers. He is not shy about his business, practices, or mistakes and shares the wealth of them all constantly. I have learned a lot through workshops with Sal and this one is no different. In this segment he took me back to the assessment that is needed prior to as well as through your business in regards to my series on Free Doesn’t Always Mean Free. How can you assess your value of what free means to you if you do not know how to properly report your metrics?Sal took the breakdown of reporting and broke it into mini steps. These steps being rather more like questions to ask yourself. Some examples would be “What is your top selling product?”, if you operate in multiple niches such as weddings and commercial “How much do you gross annually in commercial business?”, and lastly “How much are you spending in the lab?. Sal stresses that you can only run your business on actual metrics. Therefore meaning if you do not know the answers to these questions your business is in serious trouble. As photographers we are not accountants but we do need to be able to effectively analyze our numbers no matter what those numbers may be.

Bottom line, the only way you can truly know where you are going is if you know where you have come from. Interestingly enough, that very concept is the topic of one our articles in the Autumn 2013 issue of Young ‘n Fly Magazine. All mistakes and mishaps are not necessarily a bad thing. Through properly analyzing them you allow yourself to learn what works versus what does not for your business. There is no blueprint to success; we each offer unique approaches to our work. The only person in charge of what your success will be is you. If you missed this lecture, I highly recommend you purchase it, which can be done by visiting www.creativelive.com