CPA tips for Successful Photography Businesses

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How lucky is Kathy Green from RCG Photography to be married to an MBA-holding CPA who manages her business financials?  And how lucky are WE that he wrote this article for us about financial success in the photography business?  Kathy and her husband Pat have collaborated to create Foto-Flow, an Excel-based tool for photographers that manages client workflow and also generates financial reports.   What’s even better is that they are offering TPW blog readers a special discount code to purchase the software (contained in article body) and are giving the software to one lucky winner within our forums.  TPW members, click here for a chance to win.  Thank you Kathy and Pat for your generosity and for sharing these tips with us!

My wife, Kathy, is an incredible photographer. When you couple that skill set with the previous success she had owning her own PR/Marketing firm, I knew that her decision to launch a local photography business was destined to succeed. I guess opposites do attract because she is married to a financially-conservative Certified Public Accountant.

I manage the finances for RCG Photography and from the onset, the primary goal of her weekend-based business was that if she is going to be spending time away from the family on weekends, when we have a plethora of baseball games, birthday parties, etc, we needed to ensure that she was going to operate profitably.  Over the past 5 years, we have learned many things that have kept the revenues significantly higher than the expenses:

1)      Buy equipment that you can afford and learn to use it to the best or your ability. As badly as you want that new Nikon D3x body, starting out over $8,000 in the hole is not a good way to begin a new career. Start with moderately priced equipment and then slowly upgrade over time. In fact, my wife has become an expert at selling her old equipment on Craigslist to help fund her latest craves!

2)      Establish a pricing matrix and stick with it. List all of your product offerings on a spreadsheet and know exactly how much it will cost to fulfill an order. That way, you will know how much profit will be generated every time a client orders an 8×10, 5×7, etc. Which leads me to the next point…

3)      Don’t heavily discount your offerings. Once you discount your product, that price becomes the new “norm.” And slowly but surely that price will begin to creep up against what it costs to sell your product. You want your clients to hire you because they love your work and thoroughly enjoy dealing with you over the countless other local photographers. If they hire you because you are the cheapest, you will slowly but inevitably discount your way out of business.

4)      Time is money. Utilize your resources effectively. So many photographers spend a great deal of time placing client orders, picking up prints from the lab, delivering the prints to their clients, etc. While many photographers feel that gives their clients a “personal touch,” it also adds on 5x the amount of work to get prints in their clients’ hands. They are hiring you because you take beautiful pictures… Not because the prints are in a pretty box. Utilize professional photo labs that have customer portals which allow your clients to crop, preview color/black & white, rotate, etc their images and then have them place the orders on their own. Yes, you will pay a commission to the lab (which you can build into your pricing matrix), but you will cut your workflow time by more than half, allowing you to complete your galleries more quickly.

5)      Get organized!!! On a car ride home from a family vacation, I asked Kathy “what is the one thing that keeps you up at night from a work perspective?” She mentioned the ability to keep track of what stage in her “workflow” she was for each client. For some she was still editing, others were waiting for customer orders, some were waiting to be paid, etc. Based on that feedback, we developed Foto-Flow, an Excel based photography workflow tool designed by an award-winning photographer AND Certified Public Accountant. With hundreds of units sold in the 2013 launch, this updated model helps you keep track of your clients from initial customer contact all the way through collection of your receivables. Plus, it automatically produces financial reports that can be directly submitted to your CPA at tax time.  Get $25 off the $75 price by using discount code “photogwithin” through March 31^st, 2014.

These five basic steps have allowed RCG Photography to attain double-digit profit growth every year since she launched in 2009. Most importantly, it has allowed Kathy to continue doing what she loves. If you ask her, this isn’t a job… this is an opportunity to capture a moment in time for her beloved clients.

Pat Green

Pat Green is a finance executive for a publicly traded technology company in the Chicago-area. He holds a BS in Accountancy from Northern Illinois University, a MBA in Finance from DePaul University and is also a Certified Public Accountant. More importantly, he is the husband of a wonderfully gifted and talented photographer (and wife), Kathy Green of RCG Photography, and father to 3 smart, energetic and active boys (Ryan, Colin and Gavin) whose first initials comprise the name of Kathy’s business.

Foto-Flow financial tool for photographers

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