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Month 1, Week 2 (Sept 15-21) - Assignment Video

Hey, guys, Welcome back for week two. Hopefully, all of you survived Week one, and you're still here with me a week to, uh, sorry to say, you've got some more spreadsheets to do in a little bit more math, but we've gotten through the 1st 7 assignments, and now we're ready to give you seven more. So the first thing that you're gonna do this week, we're gonna talk about banking and paying yourself. That's your first assignment of the week. And if you're reading through this business and marketing workbook, which I hope you are, you're just going to continue right on where you were from the week before. By now, you know, we're just going very linearly through the book, get in our way through it and getting it all done for you. So we're gonna talk about banking and paying yourself. And this is the section where you kind of need to figure out how your money is going to flow through your business, your personal checking accounts, your business, checking accounts, making sure you've got a sav...

ings account set up debating whether or not you want a credit card for your business and if so, which one? This is the assigned where you really lock all that down. So if you don't have your business savings account, go out and get that set up. Get in there, make sure they're all online, and you can look at them. Make sure you've got make sure you've got your checks. Make sure you've got your debit card and you're all ready to go. And then you need to take some time and think about how you're actually going to manage your books. Are you gonna have somebody come in and do bookkeeping for you? Is your C p a. Helping you out month to month There. Is this really just a tax times? How are you recording all of this? Are you using QuickBooks? What are you using? This is when you need to make those decisions about how you're handling that part of your finances. So that's assignment one for this week Assignment to for this week starts to get very exciting. Assignments two and three sort of flow in together, so I'm just going to give them to you together. So assignment number one is banking and paying yourself a science assignments Number two and three are about pricing and profitability. You're not sure what I'm holding right here. This is your pdf of class assignments for the week. This will be on the course page in case you forget where it is. But let me talk to you about Assignments two and three, which are pricing and profitability. The first thing we're going to do is you're gonna figure out whether your packages are all a cart. You're gonna do a little research into what's popular in your geographical area and what your competitors are doing. And then you're going to make the very personal decision to yourself which way you want to go with your pricing. Then you're gonna go out, you're gonna look for your vendors. And if you have vendors already, I highly suggest running the numbers with those vendors and then looking around and seeing if you're not maybe entirely unhappy or not really sure, now is the time to do a little bit more research and see who you might want to use for things such as outsourcing or album design or things like that. The goal of this part of this assignment is for you to come up with the hard numbers of what it's going to cost to put your packages together. Like, for example, if you're going to use Madeira albums, which is the album company that I use for my albums. If you're going to use them for albums, what does it cost to put together an album? Everything from printing to binding to embossing imprinting? Putting a photo on the cover? You need to know if I'm going to sell this book to my clients. It needs to go out at X Price. So that's the goal here. You need to figure out what you're paying your assistant. If you don't have an assistant, now is the time to figure out when you do have that mythical assistant what you're going to pay them, because it is very important when you're putting together your packages that you figure in the cost of paying that assistant into your packages, you're going to need to figure out if you're going to do your processing or if you're going to outsource, and this is kind of a personal decision. I know a lot of people sort of battle back and forth on whether they're going to do it themselves or whether they're going to outsource. But if you do decide to outsource, you need to know exactly what it's going to cost toe outsource. So that's the number that I need you to come to during assignments number two and three. You need to figure out if you're going to have an employee helping you with any of this. And I'm not talking about your assistant on the wedding day. Do you have a full or part time employees who helps you? You need to know what that's going to cost because you're going to build that into your package costs as well. And then you just need to think of every single thing that it will cost to produce the wedding. So if you look at this Pdf you know, do you include shipping on the album? Do you pay for parking at the weddings? What does it cost you? Do you by batteries? You take your assistant coffee literally. What we're looking for in the first parts of assignments two and three is every single thing that it costs you to put together a wedding package from parking the car to producing the wedding to producing the album. We're looking for your hard costs again. You're gonna find this in the business and marketing workbook. You'll see a lot of text about it, and then you need to actually sit down and start doing it. Their spreadsheets in there for you. Now, the second part of Assignments two and three, I want you to complete your package calculator spreadsheet in the package cost spreadsheet. It's the spreadsheets are both on the page and they're listed in the business and marketing workbook. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to determine every single thing that goes into your packages. What does it cost? What does it cost to produce the package? And then what do you want to sell the package for? So all of that information is in the book for you in great detail. But now is the time for you to go do it. So go do it. So then the second parts of this again it's still incredibly scary. You're gonna take that big number. The number that you came to that says I'm gonna make up numbers here. I need to make $100,000 a year at the end of the year. And I'm doing weddings for $5000. Well, how you know, divide ah, 100,000 by 5000. That's the number of weddings that you need to shoot per year. So we're looking for that number that I need to make this amount of money. My packages cost this much to put together. Therefore, I need to shoot X number of weddings per year to make my desired goal number. And I want you to really sit with that number because you need to figure out, um, if you can do that realistically or not. So that's assignments one through three. I find that four is what happens when you don't live in a perfect world. Um, you're gonna sit down, you're gonna analyze your market. You're gonna figure out if it can support weddings. At that rate, if you need to do something else to supplement your income again, read through the book. This is your next assignment. Then we're going to talk about knowing how to raise your rates. So, talking through your assignments of this week, I'm looking through my own pdf here number one banking and paying yourself numbers. Two and three, or pricing and profitability. Parts one and two. Number four is What do you do if you don't live in a perfect world? Number five is how do you know when to raise your rates? I want you to plan a rate raising schedule, right. This is something you have to determine yourself. Am I going to raise my rate every time I book a couple of extra weddings? Am I going to raise my rates every time I hit a certain dollar amount per year? And how am I going to raise my rates? Um, I'm gonna bump up a couple $100. I'm gonna reconfigure my packages. And then how long am I going to be willing toe? Wait and see if those prices take or not before I back them down to what they were before. So you're sort of figuring out the psychology that you're going to use behind how and when you're going to raise your rates and then when you're gonna adjust them backwards. If it doesn't work after that, we're gonna talk about making money in the off season. I want you to come up with a plan for making money in the off season, right? Like figure out when you're off season is first. And if you don't know what it is, if you haven't shot that many weddings, look around at photographers around you and figure out when they're less busy. When I was in Florida, my off season was the summer because it was too hot. And now that I'm in New York, my off season is the winter because it's too cold. So you need to figure out those months where you don't have a lot of money coming in and then make a plan for what you're going to do, right? You need a plan for things you might want to sell to your current clients, like album sales or Holiday portrait or something like that. And then you need a plan for what you're doing with vendors during your off season. Are you gonna meet with them? Are you going to make them albums? What are you going to do when you're less busy to really maximize those relationships that you have with the vendors that you work with at weddings, to the above and beyond that, you're going to create your contract and this is where the business and marketing workbook really comes in. There is a huge section written by Rachel Bronchi, who is the law dog, and she talks about everything that you need to find in your packages everything that needs to be included. So that's really great Help to get yourself started. You either need to purchase a contract and take it to your attorney and have it looked at, or take your current contract and review it again and make sure that it is bulletproof for you. And then the next thing that you're going to do, if you are using a studio management software or anything like that, you're going to make sure that your contract is in there. And if it's not, you're gonna figure out how you're going to deploy that contract to your clients and do it. I booked my clients online using Shoot que. If you are going to just email them a pdf, make that PdF and then make sure that it e mails correctly. So we are going through one more time. What I want you to do this week one. Banking and paying yourself two and three pricing and profitability number four. What to do when you don't live in a perfect world number five. How do you know when to raise your rates? Number six. Making money in the off season and number seven creating your contract. So, as you can see, some of these are going to take more time. Some of these are going to be a lot easier. I am here for you in the Facebook group. Hold your questions and bring them to me on Friday, good luck and happy spread cheating.