The business of photography is the perfect profession for maximizing Relationships & Relationship Marketing. In 1982, when we first opened our doors, high school seniors were a big part of our revenue. Five to ten years later, those seniors returned as brides and grooms. Fast forward to today, and the majority of the seniors we photograph are the kids of those first seniors we worked with in our first decade in business.
Weight in your business is not bad or wrong, it’s just something that is not necessary for our lives. The excess weight we carry while running our businesses can be a lot of things. It can be a relationship, it could be an activity, it could be a problem customer, etc. We all have excess weights.
A few years ago, I was photographing a fundraising event for Make-A-Wish in Delaware. The featured speaker was a woman in her 30s who’d had her wish granted when she was 14. She grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, and her wish was to go snow skiing. She’d never felt snow, never seen it in person, but that was her wish.
The truth is, there are rarely successful people in the world who have not experienced some sort of failure on their rise to greatness. There is, however, one thing that all of those successful people have in common—they all learn from their failures and also from the failures of others.
In today’s market, it’s becoming more important to set yourself apart in a sea of photographers. How do you even begin to stand out from the crowd in this social media age where everyone considers themselves a photographer?
In my 20 years of experience as a professional photographer, I’ve discovered most people find family portraits to be boring, overwhelming or generally chaotic (if not all three). I felt exactly that way until I began incorporating Stylized Family Portraits into my business.
When my sister became pregnant with her first child, I knew I wanted to do a maternity shoot that was different. It was to be dramatic and new. It would instantly stand out. In my head, I told myself that this was just for me. Maybe it would create a little buzz on social media, but it was a passion project, because “no client would hire me for something this over-the-top and different.”
When I first realized that we would need to move from our sleepy little suburban town on the Hudson River in NY to the Los Angeles area for my husband’s job, I was flooded with so many emotions—fear, sadness, and a general sense of being overwhelmed, but also a little bit of excitement for the adventure that lay ahead.
When I was a junior in high school, I became interested in pursuing marketing for a career. That same year, I went to Imaging USA with my father. Someone at the show said I could make my dad a lot more money with photography if I learned Photoshop. So we got a student copy of Photoshop and I started learning how to use it.
There is nothing like talking with similar businesses about what is working and what is not. This is why I believe so much in investing in face-to-face relationships over the years.
I don’t know about you, but I desire to walk in love, but it can be so hard, especially in business. I wonder what would happen if we did a self-check of how we walk in love in our businesses. What if we simply changed the saying from “walk in love” to “work in love”? Do we work in love?