When I first started my Private Photo Editing Business, I was excited to not just get started, but be busy. My overexcitement led me to make the biggest mistake when starting my career as a Private Photo Editor.
Be Intentional While Building Your Client List
Let me paint the picture for you. My husband (Jon) and I had moved to South Carolina in the spring of 2014. By the spring of 2016, I had established a successful portrait photography business, but only just. It had taken me two full years to earn a full-time income doing what I loved. It had been a true labor of love.
Just about the time when my portrait photography business was becoming successful, Jon and I came up with the crazy idea to become full-time RVers and travel the country. As you can imagine, a mobile portrait photography business isn’t the most ideal money-maker when we would be picking up and traveling to a new city or state every couple weeks (or even every couple days).
I needed a mobile business, and I needed it fast. One day, a sweet photography friend of mine suggested that I edit photos for other photographers. My first thought? “There’s no way that’s actually a thing!” To my surprise, it was. I just so happened to LOVE the editing part of my business. I love being able to take an image from my camera and create a beautiful finished product. So, I started to pursue offering editing services.
I started with people I knew first. I had made a lot of great photography connections while living so close to Charlotte thanks to the Tuesdays Together meetings through The Rising Tide Society. It just so happened, there were already plenty of photographers who wanted help with their editing.
So I took on anyone and everyone. Portrait Photographers. Wedding Photographers. Part-timers. Full-timers. Light and airy editing styles. Dark and moody editing styles. Lightroom work. Photoshop work. Everything.
This was my biggest mistake.
Instead of pausing to really lay out a solid business plan for my Private Photo Editing business, I hit the fast forward button, instead.
At first, I didn’t realize it was a mistake. I was already a portrait photographer and skilled in Lightroom. I knew enough to be dangerous in Photoshop. I didn’t have a plan for how I would charge for my services. I didn’t even know how I would go about transferring large quantities of images for wedding photographers.
After doing a lot of quick research, I at least had my pricing and file transfers in order. It was three months in, and I was already making a solid part-time income of around $25k a year. That happened to be enough to support our dreams of traveling full-time in our RV. Little did I know, I still had a lot to learn.
My mistake with taking on everyone, and not having a clear mission statement in mind, is that also meant that I didn’t have a clear ideal client in mind, either. I wasn’t attracting my ideal client, and that led to some difficult conversations later on down the road.
Fast forward to the beginning of 2017. Jon and I hit the road in our RV January 12, 2017. My editing business was gaining steam and still going well, but I was beginning to see red flags. I started having inconsistent delivery issues with some clients. I would receive wedding galleries weeks late from my clients. Some clients, on the other hand, just didn’t have the type of style that I enjoyed editing. I started noticing that I would be procrastinating getting certain galleries returned. There were even some who may have been new to photography, and they didn’t really have a consistent editing style, so their galleries would look drastically different from session to session. This made it really difficult to produce consistent work FOR them.
Eventually, I realized that I needed to be more “choosy” with who I decided to work with. But before I could that, I had to have some tough conversations with current clients. I think I ended up parting way with around five photographers that year. Sadly, that wasn’t the end of the mess I had created by making this big mistake.
The winter of 2017/2018 was a rough one. I had ended 2017 with a client list of around 18 wedding photographers. As I reached out to my clients in January 2018 to discuss their upcoming wedding dates for that year, I was met with closed doors. =(
I was crushed. A little less than half of my clientele told me that they would not be using my services for 2018. Thankfully, it had absolutely nothing to do with me or my services not being what they expected. Around 7 or 8 clients told me they were either going to be moving to a different state, having a baby, or simply just reducing the number of weddings they were going to book.
I lost nearly HALF of my clients!
In the moment, I didn’t care what the reason was for their departure, I was panicking.
How were we going to continue to travel?
What does this mean for my business?
How do I prevent it from happening again?
It all comes back to my biggest mistake I made when starting my Private Photo Editing business. I wasn’t attracting my dream clients. Heck, I didn’t even know who my dream client was!
It wasn’t until I sat down and really focused in on who my dream client was, and came up with a plan for marketing to them, that I began to see two things:
- I was booking clients who were full-time, consistent, and had an editing style that I loved.
- I was booking clients who valued our relationship and could not grow and run their business successfully without the help of my editing services.
If there’s one piece of advice I can give to you as you are beginning your own Private Photo Editing business, it’s this:
Know who your dream client is from the very beginning. Layout a very specific plan for finding and attracting those dream clients, and do NOT settle. Don’t settle for photographers who don’t fit the criteria that you’ve laid out for your business. Your business is important to you and the people in your life that it supports financially. That deserves intentionality.
I hope you found this post helpful. Leave your questions in the comments below. I’d love to hear about your feedback and your own journey in business.
Do you want to dive deeper into owning a successful Private Photo Editing business? Email us or check out our Mentoring page for more information.
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