Slow Down, We Are Moving To Fast...

Holiday rush! We Wedding/Portrait photographers go through it every year. Sometimes its kind of difficult to balance the urgency, chaos and the frenetic craziness of a photography studio's rush season with the holiday spirit. Each year photographers promise themselves a better plan for the next year to avoid the stress and strain. Yet, the next year we find ourselves in that very same situation, and it continues year after year.

Hey, my studio was no different in the beginning - we were crazy every year, but then we came up with a plan to alleviate most to the craziness. In reality, it just better planning and has worked quite well for our holiday rush over (most) of the last several years. Here are the key points of our plan:

1. When it comes to album delivery, Holiday cut off is the 1st of October. Album orders must be placed by September 30 for us to deliver by Christmas. Chanukah may be a bit earlier cut off depending on when it falls in December.
   
2. Reprints for those clients will be delivered in time for the holidays.
   
3. We will continue to promise Holiday delivery on Portrait orders and wedding orders up to Friday the week before Christmas. We print everything in house so we have some added efficiencies here.
   
4. Work with your preferred vendors. If you are a really good client, they may honor a "one favor a year" request at the holidays and process an order for you after their cut off. (I can think of one of my vendor buddies who is giving me favor #2 - you know who you are and thanks again.)
   
5. As the time crunch gets tighter, review the work in process and see what can be postponed till after the rush. Give these clients a call and ask if it is OK to deliver after the holidays. You may also offer them a little "Thank You" incentive for letting you make their delivery shortly after the holidays. This is a great safety valve for the holiday rush. When you start calling those few clients that may relieve some of the delivery stress, it's amazing to me how many say "no problem" - they were going to out of town, etc. We were actually in that mode last week and one call lightened our commitment load quite a bit. But remember, if you can still pull off the delivery, by all means, do it. In our situation, it looks like we can still deliver by the holidays, but should something happen, I'm still covered for an after Christmas delivery without customer disappointment.

That's pretty much it - this is some of my best advise to all you studio owners out there still fretting over these next two weeks. So take a deep breath and try to really enjoy the season!