Business Success, Part 3 – On Peers & Enthusiasm

This is the third post in my series, “How I Sold $100K My First Year in Business.” My next takeaways, looking back on my first year in wedding and portrait photography, are:

#3. I surrounded myself with successful peers & got their referrals. One of the charms of wedding photography is that there are only only 52 Saturdays each year—even fewer during peak season!—and most photographers shoot only one wedding per day. If photographer-friends were already booked, they referred prospective clients to me and vice versa.

I also networked with related service providers, including florists, wedding planners, and venues, but having a peer network of photographers proved more valuable for me. I think wedding photography is just that kind of service. Other entrepreneurs are likely to achieve business success garnering referrals from complementary services; for example, web developers probably get more referrals from graphic designers than other developers. Any other service providers want to share their experience on this one? 

You might be wondering how I surrounded myself with successful peers? Well, I second-shot for them. For free. To build my portfolio. By doing that, I was able to learn from experienced professionals and I met a bunch of people in the industry. There’s something to be said about being surrounded by people who have what you want (in fact, Kate Northrup recently wrote about this). Surrounding yourself with people successful in business breeds business success for you, too, because it helps you believe you can be successful.

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#4. I was excited. I was doing something I loved and it showed. I was happy to meet with clients and hear about their plans. I answered my phone every time it rang. I responded to email promptly. I generally made it easy for clients to connect with me.

In fact, I booked my second solo wedding primarily because I answered the phone… Seriously. A bride had just fired her wedding photographer less than a month before her wedding and she was crying when I picked up the phone. Heck yes, I was nervous—after all she was still crying, she’d just fired another photographer, and I had to wonder if she was a bit crazy!—but we set up an appointment to meet and the rest is history. She and her fiance liked, hired, and paid me on the spot. Her wedding was at one of the area’s premier venues and she and the event were absolutely gorgeous. Everything went well, the couple proved to be dream clients, and they became one of my biggest referral sources—and close friends—in the year that followed. Months later, I learned that she had called several big-name local photographers before me, but I was the first to answer. How ’bout them apples?

Any questions from these two takeaways? Let me know 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