How to Add Capacity to a Photography Business Without Additional Employees

[Jeanette Garcia]

You own an expanding photography business. You are working long and
hours and still struggle to keep up with the growing demand for your
service. You don't want to be stretched too thin with the result being
lower quality of work. You also want to spend more time with your
family. You decide you need to hire some help, but have heard of all
the headaches associated with managing employees - payroll, benefits,
additional liability, inflexibility etc. In addition, you don't know
if demand will continue to grow. You'd hate to hire someone and then
later find you'll have to let them go.
If you are a photographer in this situation your concerns are valid.
Before you hire an employee you should consider other options that can
expand capacity. Often, these other methods are simpler, allow you to
retain greater control and are less expensive than hiring employees.
This article suggests several non-employee capacities expanding
measure a photography business owner should consider.
1. Increase the hardware capacity of your computer information system.
If your system is slow to bring up images, post images to the web, run
macros, or apply your Photoshop or Lightroom changes, you can greatly
expand the work you can do with an efficient information system. Find
the bottle neck to your system and expand that bottleneck. Do your
computers run out of memory? Add RAM. Are you using an external
scratch disk? Add an internal drive to use as a scratch disk. Are you
spending an enormous amount of timing copying images back and forth
between the web and different computers? Invest in a network or a
faster network if you already have one.
2. Increase your ability to multitask by utilizing two computers.
Studies have shown that those who work on two computers are able to
accomplish more than those who use only one computer. When one
computer is busy, the photographer can work on the other. When a
computer is rebooting, running a batch process or loading images to
the Internet it can often leave the photographer waiting for the
ability to perform the next task. With two computers, a photographer
is able to start one working on a task and immediately begin another.
3. Use services that can perform common tasks. Services exist for
photographers which will perform photo selection, color correction or
photo book creation. Utilizing these services can help a photographer
reduce the number of hours needed to complete each photo session,
allowing the photographer to shoot more sessions.
4. Before hiring an employee, consider raising your prices. This may
have the result of reducing demand and hence the workload - which is
exactly what a busy photographer is looking accomplish. Profits will
likely not fall. Increasing prices should increase margins by enough
to maintain current levels of profitability.
Expanding a photography business can be a wonderful challenge.
However, before taking on the responsibility of hiring employees, a
photographer should consider the above capacity expanding techniques.

http://groups.google.com/group/cameradt/

[Brian Shaler]

I let this email through, even though it's a little spammy, especially
the link at the bottom that directs to a page that says this:
> Discover How to Make Money
> - Lots & Lots of Money -
> With Your Digital Camera!

Pretty lame, but I figured the content of this email, sans the link,
could be considered informational.


- Brian

[Adam Nollmeyer - AcmePhotography.net]

I'm thinking about adding...

Downsize from dual monitors to ONE monitor for increased productivity.

Less chance of having "too many tabs open" and or watching youtube, chatting w/ a friend, etc instead of editing.

;-)

Adam Nollmeyer

http://acmephotography.net
http://acmephotography.net/stalk-me
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acmephoto/

602-326-2263 mobile
602-795-0906 office

Arizona Top 10 Photographer of the Year 2005, 2006 & 2007 AzPPA