Business Success, Part 2 – On Specialty & Skill

This is the second post in my series, “How I Sold $100K My First Year in Business.” When I look back at my first year—as objectively as possible from six years hence—and I ask myself how I sold $100K in the first 365 days, the first two things I see are:

#1. I specialized in an in-demand, sells-itself kind of service: wedding photography. People plan and budget for their wedding. You don’t have to convince them that they want a wedding photographer, just that you’re the right one for them. That clears a major hurdle from your marketing efforts.

Selling portrait photography (and many other creative services) requires that more time be spent marketing to and educating prospective clients before they’re convinced of the value and willing to make a purchase. Also, because people can buy most services anytime—after all, they’re not predicated on one-time events—they’ll tend to wait unless there’s a compelling reason not to. But that’s a topic for another day.

My #1 takeaway from my early business success is that my primary service was wedding photography. That’s not to say I didn’t also shoot portraits, because I did. But while portraits accounted for 62 percent of my session count, they produced only 16 percent of my total revenue year one. Weddings accounted for 38 percent of sessions and 84 percent of revenue.

My second takeaway is:

#2. I was decent at it. I was by no means an exceptional photographer—my work still doesn’t hang in MOCA—but I was a decent photographer. Photography was a skill that I’d practiced for more than 10 years before I hung out a professional shingle. I had taken several university-level classes and spent a semester abroad at the world famous FAMU in Prague, studying with masters like Viktor Kolář and Miroslav Vojtěchovský. My work had been published during college and I had been paid to photograph events and exteriors when I worked at a preparatory school following college. I was also a regular attendee at museum and gallery shows. In short, I’d honed my craft, and I don’t believe you can call yourself a professional until you have done so.

You may be wondering what decent means. Since it means something different to each of us, here are some spreads from my very first wedding clients’ album so you can decide for yourself:

On the topic of talent, laymen often can’t tell the difference between exceptional and passable—and they don’t need to. There is a reason my husband owns Bose noise-canceling headphones and I don’t: as a audiophile, he can tell the difference; I can’t. And when it comes to photography, most clients can’t tell the difference between good enough and outstanding, but that doesn’t remove the burden we have as service professionals to be as good as we can be.

So, there you have it. The first two takeaways from my first year as a photographer. Do you have any questions or need a clarification? Please shout it out in the comments.

Thanks,

If you missed a post in my “Business Success” series, here they all are in order:

• Part 1 – How I Sold $100K in Year One as a Wedding and Portrait Photographer
• Part 2 – On Specialty & Skill
• Part 3 – On Peers & Enthusiasm
• Part 4 – On Market & Pricing
• Part 5 – On Instincts & First Impressions
• Part 6 – On Doing the Work & Believing in Yourself