Hi! My name is Rachel. If we’ve not met before, I’m a wedding photographer and business coach on a mission to help wedding professionals elevate the quality of clients you attract, craft a luxury client experience, by focusing on what matters and profitably automating everything else.
Today we are talking about pricing yourself for profit. This is something I know a lot of photographers have questions about.
I’d like to start out by just addressing some of the elephants in the room. There are a lot of photographers who are booking clients, making money, and yet, they don’t actually know what’s going on in their business finances. It’s kind of a mystery till the end of the year, or you just kind of look at your business bank account, see how much is in there and say, I’m good.
So, when it comes to your pricing, and being profitable, it’s kind of a wild stab in the dark- or you might be basing on the other photographers around you are charging, and the underlying work of knowing how much you actually need to make in order to be profitable is often not really done. Because it’s not done, it can be hard to “justify” a raise, because you don’t actually know the status of your business health, your profitability, and what you are taking home even if you are bringing in really good money.
Let’s start today with talking about what I mean by being “profitable”. A lot of photographers make the mistake of believing that they are profitable if they get to take home any pay from their business at all.
I like to use the Profit First method, which is a fabulous book, go get it today if you haven’t read it.
Basically the premise of this method is:
Most business owners think that:
Sales – Expenses = Profit
In addition, a lot of photographers believe that:
Sales – Expenses = My Pay
The problem that these two ideas cause, is as your business grows, the expenses also grow, and your profits don’t really. So you can be bringing in 50K a year into your business or 110K a year into your business and still be struggling, because you’re just one check away, one client away from making it big, finally getting ahead, etc. etc.
Parkinson’s law goes into effect, and the business will eat everything that comes into it, unless you change how much it’s allowed to eat and rearrange the priorities.
This is the Profit First method:
Sales – Profit = Expenses
Where the business owner takes their profit first, THEN what is left is available for the expenses of the business. Your regular and steady pay as an employee of your business IS one of the expenses of the business, it is not the profit.
The profit is your reward as the OWNER of your business, as a shareholder in it’s risk and success.
So now that we’re clear about what I mean by profit, you’re going to want to watch the video because it is a lot of visuals showing you the spreadsheet I use to keep myself profitable.
I do want to give you something. It’s HOT OFF the press. I made this really cool document into a product. My Empowered Weddings students get this included in their membership, but I decided to make it available for others who aren’t yet students as well. I’ve been using this spreadsheet for over six months now and seeing my profits grow and really having a very firm grasp on what is happening with my business money has been life-changing. I’m going to be selling the document along with a training on how to use it for $99 but for this week only, it will be available for $50. I have not released this anywhere so you guys are the first to know.
Again, that pricing will only be for this week, but even at $99 it’s a steal because of how much it will effect your finances for the better.
