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The Road Ahead

Lesson 3 from: FAST CLASS: How to Start a Photography Business

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

3. The Road Ahead

Next Lesson: Find Your Passion

Lesson Info

The Road Ahead

So The Road Ahead, this is the truth. I wanna set some expectations here. If you are getting into photography because you think it's a fantastic way of making money, I'm gonna tell you that there's easier ways to make a living, Okay? Because there truly are. There are guaranteed ways. Go to school, get a law degree. You're guaranteed a hundred thousand dollar job, so start. What I'm trying to say is that if that's the expectation, you're setting yourselves up for failure. Let's talk about this for just one second. I'm gonna switch over to our workbook. (rubbing his hands together) Now we have, (laughing loudly) I'm actually gonna show you the workbook a little bit later, but oh, you're gonna see this, okay. Let's go to tab uumber four. In this class, in the downloadables is the workbook. We will talk about it as we go through. We're gonna introduce everything but for now, we're gonna go to tab four, which is the forecast, okay. Inside of this tab, as you're doing your competitor analys...

is, all of these different things. When you're setting your own goals, you can actually determine exactly how much another studio is making, how much you would like to make, how much you need to shoot everything I have in here and this is again, I'm a CPA. So those of you that are accountants, this is from my background. This is how we would create these kinds of documents. And what you see in here is a basic financial forecast. And under let's scroll down a little bit expenses and taxes, if you expand this section, you can actually modify. So if you wanna get in there and modify stuff, feel free. I've put in a basic guideline of the cost to running a business. Don't even worry about any of that. All I want you to do is populate this number, average wedding booking. Let's say, give me a number. How much do you guys want to be able to book a wedding for, what is the goal? A thousand. A thousand. That's a great starting point. Let's start with a thousand. From our a hundred thousand dollars. This will take out variable wedding costs. They'll take out variable, non wedding costs, fixed business costs and you land from a hundred thousand at a $70,000 operating income, which then you deduct state and local taxes based on your amounts. You end up with $46, from a hundred thousand dollars of revenue. What if I told you that's the best case scenario, okay. PPA, so our base calculation above is a best case. Like if you run a Lean & Mean Studio, you could possibly take home 46 cents on every dollar that you make, okay? On average, the PPA says that most photography studios are at 20%. From our personal experience and from watching friends, it's around 25%. So you're doing good if you're taking home 30 cents on every dollar of revenue that you generate. Now, your example of a thousand dollars per wedding, really quick starts to become unsustainable. But at a thousand dollars per it's a good side gig. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that. If you got your full time job, I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. There's nothing wrong with having that expectation of this is a side gig for me, okay? So down here at the bottom you're gonna see, so this is the average take-home based on our calculations and everything else. The average take home and then we have the simple revenue to take home calculator which states that with what you put in with an average take home of 20%, you need to shoot 243 weddings to achieve your goal to get $50,000 take home. So when you adjust the numbers above. So like, for example, if I put in $5,000 up here, it'll automatically adjust the numbers below to say, at that amount, you need to shoot 30 weddings. So you can put in your desired take home right here. So if I want to make a hundred thousand dollars, it will tell you that you need $300,000 of revenue at $5,000 a piece or you need to shoot 61 weddings. You can start a business. There's nothing wrong with starting a business charging $ for a wedding, that's what we did. I'm gonna tell you exactly how to do it. It's just not sustainable to maintain that. You have to shift and keep moving up to get to a bracket that's actually sustainable. This Road Ahead is not some super easy, I'm gonna throw cash in your face rockstar lifestyle that seems to be what people promote on social media. It is gonna be work. Okay. Lori Greiner, entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40. This is such a true statement more so at the beginning of your careers, then once you're five, 10 years into it because at the beginning you got to launch. And to get something moving, it takes effort. A lot of effort.

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Workbook (ods)
Workbook (xlsx)
Workbook (pdf)

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