Is your photography business bursting at the seams? Need help? Let’s get to it.
What’s up, everyone? My name is Sal Cincotta. I’m a wedding and portrait photographer based in O’Fallon, Illinois. Today, I want to talk to you about growing your photography business and how to add staff in a way that allows you to grow, make more money, make more profit, and maybe get a little bit of your life back.
Look, we’ve all been there. As a photographer myself for 16 years now, I can hardly believe I’m even saying that, part of growing was adding staff. But it was very difficult. There’s a lot of things I learned along the way. How do I hire staff? How do I fire staff? What should I be looking for? How do I pay them, compensate them? Things along those lines. These are somewhat easy questions to have answered once you’ve gone through it, right? So everything’s easier once you know how to do it. But if you’re just starting out and you’re a solopreneur and you’re struggling to figure out the answer to this, this video is for you.
When I started my business, I started in the basement in my home. I didn’t have a studio, I didn’t have staff, and it was just me. I started alone. I did everything. You know what I’m talking about. We did the marketing, we did the phone calls, we did the ordering, we did the photo shoots, we did the in-person sales. I was doing everything, you’re doing everything, and it just got to a point where I couldn’t scale my business.
What I had to realize was that if I wasn’t shooting and I wasn’t marketing, I wasn’t spending my time in the right place. So I needed help. Do I really need to package a customer’s order? Is that the best use of my time? Do I need to log into my lab system to place an order for an 8 by 10? Is that the best use of my time? What do I do when I need someone to hold a light or a reflector when we’re on a photo shoot? How do I manage all this?
Step 1: Hire an intern
The first step is hiring an intern. This is actually the most economical step you can take in growing your business. The reason is simple. If you’re not busy and you’re not working, you don’t have to pay them a salary. You’re just paying them hourly from when they are working. And the only reason they should be working is when you are working and you have business coming in. So it’s a pretty easy way to scale your business.
Where do you find that intern? Well, for me, we shoot high school seniors, and I ended up hiring one of my high school seniors to work in the summer. This particular high school senior, she was in the photography club at the high school, so you could always start there. It doesn’t have to be a high school senior. It could be a college student who’s in fine arts or photography, because they’re interested in what we’re doing. I paid them hourly and they were my assistant on all my photo shoots. During the week, they would work with me on my high school seniors and families, and on the weekends they would be there on the bag for my wedding photography, and sometimes I’d even throw a camera in their hands to get some pickup shots for anything that was going on that I couldn’t cover. It was a perfect way to grow my business.
Now, this particular person had no desire to be a photographer. They wanted to go to law school, but it was an easy summer job for them. They’re outside every day, they’re loving life, and it was a perfect fit for an hourly employee. This is the easiest way for you to get started in growing your staff. Start looking at high schools for kids that are in the photography program. Start looking at colleges and universities. You could post on their job sites or their bulletin boards, and you can look for somebody who’s either in fine arts or somebody who’s in photography classes or clubs. But that’s the best way to find somebody at a really, really affordable rate. Everybody wins.
Step 2: Full-time staff
But guess what’s going to happen? Your business is going to ultimately grow past that intern. This is a great thing, by the way. It means you’ve been able to spend more time focusing on more photo shoots, more sales, more marketing, and less time on the minutiae that goes into running a business. Even if you’re a husband/wife team, or you have partners as photographers, there’s work at your business that doesn’t require a salaried position. Right? It really is just kind of part-time work. But there will come a point in time where you do need a dedicated second shooter on all your jobs, right? You don’t want to necessarily outsource that or bring in help that every week you have a different photographer with you. We’ll talk about that in a second. You might want to have a studio manager that’s helping you, that’s processing orders, that’s collecting money, that’s packaging orders for clients or taking retouching for your clients. A host of job tasks that can go out to this dedicated person.
How do you find that person? Now, internally, we believe in a philosophy of hire fast, fire fast. Because I tend to hire, we as a company, I should say, hire based on personality. I know that might sound a little crazy to you to think about, but at the end of the day, there’s not much that goes on in our photography studio where somebody had to go to college for it or it’s a skill that they can’t be taught. I feel like it can be taught to almost everyone. But what you can’t teach people how to do is be a hard worker, have a personality, be committed to excellence, right? These are things you can’t necessarily teach somebody. Work ethic. You really can’t teach somebody that. They either have it or they don’t. In my experience. You may disagree.
I’m looking for the right person that I can train to do everything else. I think that philosophy has done well for my company over the years. We’ve been at this for 16 years and have grown exponentially over those years because of that philosophy. Sure, we do have to fire people that aren’t a fit. But by the time we get to that point, everybody realizes and accepts, “I’m just not a fit in this organization.”
Find your team's strengths
Over the years, I’ve had everyone on my team take a test called StrengthsFinder. I took it when I was in corporate America. What makes this test so good is that it organizes you by strengths, not by weakness. When I worked in corporate America, typically your boss is managing you by your weaknesses. So the philosophy there is, “Hey, this year you could have done better. Your communication skills need work.” But maybe you’re not a good communicator. If you’re not a good communicator because you hate it or you’re an introvert or anything along those lines, no matter how hard you work at it, if you’re a five on a scale of 1 to 10, I’m never going to get you to an 8 or a 9. It’s never going to happen. Why? Because you hate it.
This test says, if on a scale of 1 to 10, you’re a 7 at something, it’s going to prioritize that and it’s going to tell you, the owner, the manager, “Hey, on a scale of 1 to 10, this person is 7 at communications. Let’s manage to their strengths,” hence StrengthsFinder. This test is really geared towards finding your strengths.
What we’ve done over the years is now, even if somebody’s interviewing for a job, we don’t wait until we hire them. Before they come in for a face-to-face interview, we make them take this test. Now, that test is going to cost you 40, 50 bucks, but it’s well worth it. Because now when they come into the interview, I already know what their strengths are and I know what strengths I need in my company for them to be successful. This ensures that the person we hire, with a certain level of confidence, that they’re going to be a fit inside the organization.
Let me give you a perfect example. One of the strengths in StrengthsFinder is called a Commander. Well, that’s one of my top five. What I’m not going to do is hire someone who also has commander in their top five. Think about that for a second. There can only be one leader on this team. There’s going to be one alpha. Somebody is in charge. Has to be. So if you start bringing in on your team that you want to be able to direct, depends on what type of team you’re building, if you want to bring in people who are going to take direction, follow orders, execute on a mission, I can’t have five commanders on my team. No one’s going to listen to anybody, right? Nothing will get done. Everybody’s going to have their own ideas. Everybody’s going to want to build their own fiefdoms. This is held true over the years. We’ve seen it happen where we did hire a commander and it was chaos. They were trying to circumvent process all the time.
After you and your entire team take this test and start comparing your strengths to each other, you’re going to realize that together, each of you compliment one another. Meaning my weaknesses, my team has as their strengths and vice versa. This is a huge part of building a successful team that will grow with you and share the mission to grow forward.
Look for a personality fit first
In the end, look for the right person, the right personality fit for your organization, versus looking at a resume. Remember, there are certain skills that we have as small business owners that we can train our team on, but there are certain traits like hard work, ethics, commitment, dedication, that you can’t necessarily train someone on. To me, those are more important than any resume or any checkbox that’s out there when you’re hiring a new employee. I know that I would not be where I am without my team today. I hope this philosophy of how to grow your business is helpful for you.
