Thoroughly B-School Thursday

Good Morning Everybody,
This idea has been in my head for a while now. While Technique Tuesday has been quite a hit with the tutorials on photography and Photoshop, many of Thursday's posts have been about sales, marketing, and business building.

So here is what I am thinking - I'm going to focus this topic as the lead story every Thursday. I'll discuss ideas on starting, building, growing, and enhancing your photography business whether it falls in the "full time", "part time", or "emerging pro" category. Let me know if you like this idea. I'll run with it for a while and see what the feedback looks like. With that said, how about our first edition of "Thoroughly B-School Thursday"...

All Smiles Wednesday

Good Early Evening Everybody,

Well, today just keeps on changing. I thought I was going to get the posts up today around 4:00 P.M. and get a good start on tomorrow's, but the laws of nature, physics, and marital harmony - just kidding LaDawn - have changed all of that - it was not meant to be. So on with "Plan B" - today's post will also be tomorrow's post too - read no post on Thursday (so you can fully enjoy the late Wednesday post), but the Thursday post will be made up in it's entirety in future posts a small bit a time. "Technique Tuesday" which was to be "Technique Thursday" is now going to be "Technique Friday" for sure.

So now let's rewind to how the post started earlier today ----

Hopefully everyone enjoyed a little time off this last day or two. I have to tell you, it was wonderful having a nice and easy day yesterday. But we are back at it again today, but not too heavy - just a nice portrait shoot for some great clients. They are really fantastic friends too. This week is always kind of slow (ha) since staff is mostly on hiatus till after the new year. I'll tell you, the break is well needed.

Anyway, in addition to the regular posts, I'm posting some thoughts on small business management today - check out "Training New Personnel In Record Time" below. This was going to be a quick post about the Camtasia software but it got extended quite a bit and I think there is some "food for thought" here - please give it a read. What else is happening, well everybody likes free stuff, especially good free stuff, so read on - some really cool stuff today...

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!