The business side of photography
If your photography business uses PayPal then you should’ve received this notice:
PayPal must give the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) all your PayPal business information. This includes all your transactions between January 1, 2014, and November 10, 2017. People with personal PayPal accounts are not included.
Clearly this is a fishing expedition. The CRA is casting a wide net to find tax cheats.
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On January 1, 2019, Ontario’s minimum wage will rise 31.6% from today’s $11.40/hour. How much of a raise are you going to give yourself on January 1?
The average full-time, hourly-paid, Canadian employee makes $58,136/year, assuming a 40-hour week.
If you consider yourself average, then you should be earning the same $58,000 PLUS enough to cover all your overhead expenses. For example, if your annual overhead is $25,000, then you need to earn about $83,000 per year. Job expenses are not included in that sum.
Using the same example as above, if you do 100 jobs per year, then your average invoice should be at least $830 plus expenses. If you do 50 jobs per year, then your average invoice should be at least $1,660 plus job expenses. I said “at least” because (a) your fee should be based on the value of your work and not on time or a flat rate, and (b) employees get paid benefits and you don’t.
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Most photographers go through a slow period, or two, during the year. Perhaps it’s the time from Christmas to the end of January or maybe it’s during a summer month. It depends on what type of photography you do. So what should a photographer do during a slow period?
• Don’t panic (too much).
• Don’t use a slow period to catch up on your TV viewing.
• Don’t buy new gear. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you buy a new camera or lens, you’ll get more business. New gear won’t help.
• Don’t have a fire sale. Unlike a retail store, photographers don’t have marked-up merchandise on their store shelves that can be discounted. You have only time on your “store shelf” and, unlike a tangible product, time can’t be restocked.
When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story.
You can replace the violin in that statement with a camera and it would still hold true.
A decade ago, The Washington Post did an unscientific social experiment where Joshua Bell, a well-known classical violinist, dressed in jeans, t-shirt and ball cap, performed incognito in a subway station. The newspaper wanted to see how many morning rush-hour commuters would stop to hear classical music being perfectly played.
On the morning of Friday January 12, 2007, Bell set up inside a Washington DC subway station and placed an open violin case on the ground for donations. The unannounced event was recorded by a hidden camera.
The Post was worried about huge mobs gathering and the possibility of needing police for crowd control. You can probably guess what happened.
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Thinking of starting a photography business?
Your first photography web site and your first business plan will fail. Guaranteed. You will have to make changes and try again. Then more failure and more changes, and more failure and more changes.
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you won’t get anywhere important. And you won’t know if you’ve arrived anywhere important until you know where’s not important.
You must have a good answer to each of these questions or else you’re in the wrong place:
1) What problem will your business solve?
If your answer is that people want photography then you’re wrong.
When someone asks you to work for free, they want photography that’s good enough, pictures that are better than nothing, photos that are worth what they’re paying.
When someone hires you to work for pay, they want photography that’s good, pictures that are better than anything, photos that are worth what they’re paying.
Confucius was wrong when he said:
Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Running a photography business consists of short moments of photography broken up by long periods of business. But those moments of photography make it worthwhile.
While photographers do need to make money, the need to create pictures may be more important. It’s not always about money.
Making money is a job. Making good pictures is an accomplishment.
