Work/life balance is such a buzzword when you have your business. We are passionate about what we do but need to ensure that our passion for business doesn’t take over our life and turn it into a burden, a ball and chain. We must ensure we have the right balance to keep a healthy family and business. It’s time to set some rules and boundaries.
The best way to run your business is when you “chunky up” your appointment time and sessions. This way you are being your most productive and not jumping from one thing to the next.
There are a few task within a photography business that everyone must do:
- Client Session / Design appointments / Or same-day IPS
- Admin
- Marketing
- Editing/ Retouching / Production
- Client Calls / Emails and Follow up
- If you have staff you should always have team meetings and planning sessions
Here are my two examples the first one was when I was working from home solo and the second was when I had a studio and staffing. These are rough guidelines.
- First of all, I worked on 1.5-hour client appointments for both the session and design appointment. So work out your timing. You can do this per hour or 2 hours or AM / Midday / PM / Evening Whatever works for you.
- Then chunk down your days and time. Start with your days off or when your studio is closed.
- I prefer to rack them and stack them and I only wanted to shoot three days a week and 1 evening. So that’s when my client-facing sessions are. (FYI that doesn’t mean I can be fully booked each week. In the next topic, we look at how many sessions you can handle in a week)
- The first day of the week is always knowing your numbers, team meetings and setting up the week ahead. Including calls and Marketing.
- All Calls / Emails and follow-up and done at the start of the day. So they can call you back throughout the day.
- Production was once a week where All the products would arrive on the same day, they all needed to be sorted, check, rewrapped and called to collect.
- When there are no sessions we are editing / retouching / doing production / Calling.
- When we are not calling / Emailing we are Marketing.
- A session can be classed as a Photography session or a Design appointment. for the clients these were done on different days.
- Also please note that at full functioning capacity we would do 10-13 shoots a week. but some weeks we would only have 5-8.
In this example with team members Hence the two sections per time slot.
