Thursday, May 14th, 2009...12:25 pm
Case Against 500 Dollar or Less Wedding
Image Shot by Flickr User: SqueakyMarmot
A lot of people make emotional decisions by pricing. You want to avoid that. If you can. Remember to be as rational and objective as possible. Most of the time good business decisions are made with solid information and empirical data. You may not be a good business person if you decide that one day widget a would be a good day to sell more only because of a gut feeling.
Emotions should only belong in selling to your client. You want to instill emotion in your clients by presenting something that is sensational and an offer they cannot refuse.
In this current economic condition in the US, it maybe easy to drop your prices in order to obtain a quick sale. Say a 500 dollar wedding. We’ve all done it at some point but you don’t want to admit it.
In my eyes, this presents several problems:
- Future Growth: If you’re starting off you don’t consider where you’ll be in the next 1-2 years. If you’re doing this for a profession it’s important to keep in mind that you need to make a profit; in order to continue wedding photography as a profession. Doing business without making profit means that you’ll quickly in the long run go bankrupt like the auto counterparts. In your case, you will not be receiving a bailout. Unless you have a rich uncle.
- Caste system: In an ideal world a rich client would be perfect. It’s easier starting to shoot weddings for the higher clientele than to move up on the food chain.
- Less is more: Why shoot 40 weddings for $500 when you can shoot 15-12 $4,000-8,000 and end up on top.
- Hourly wage: Your hourly wage decreases as you have more photos to edit. You don’t get paid for that time unless you already consider it in your fees in the first place.
- Deliver a poor product: at $500 dollars a wedding you cannot spend time to edit your photos. If you do; It maybe more profitable for you to work as a manager at McDonalds.
- Customer Service: Good word of mouth depends on excellent & sterling customer service. You need to pay yourself for that as well. Meeting with your client costs money as well: Gas, telephone bills,
- Risks: Traveling to a wedding where your equipment may cost more than what your making may present a lot more problems. If your equipment breaks at least once; you’ll have to work double as hard to make up for it.
I cannot stress more enough that profit should dictate your business actions & decisions. Time is finite and is only diminishing: More time should be spent on profitable endeavors: Networking; Meeting with clients; building relationships and closing sales.
The free and under $500 Lesson Here
Again, there are always exceptions. Frequently, you’ll encounter photographers who are pretty lucky; work hard and make it big starting of at $500 weddings. My message is that it is not sustainable. I’m sure you can do 30-40 $500 weddings; but it’s not sustainable in the long run.
If you cannot travel. Try engaging your clients through social media and creating conversations; helping others etc. This we will discuss later in an article titled; building word of mouth marketing.
Photo Source: Squeaky Marmot. This person has a huge collection of photos of antiquated cameras they’ve collected over the years
Join me in the next blog article when i discuss how to price yourself in a recession.
2 Comments
August 15th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
You have to start somewhere right?
August 18th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
We spend as much time as needed editing photographs, we love what we do and for now a $500.00 wedding is great. As I have stated above “you have to start somewhere” I believe that you can grow into a position where you deserve $1,000 plus for a wedding, but when your just starting out in the business you have to be competitive and just because we can shoot a wedding for $500.00 does not mean that the quality of our work has to suffer.
Like you state at the end of your article..this can sometimes be a good thing…but is not sustainable in the long run, I guess I agree 100% but time will tell where this road takes us.
Leave a Reply