There’s a lot of talk around what’s the best way to set your photography prices. The reality is, when you become a small business owner or entrepreneur, you have to charge people money for your work. I knew if I wanted to build something that allowed me to put my family first and have a career in photography, I needed to get over my own money blocks about what I thought others could afford. I was able to do it. I want to share with you how to avoid the danger zone so you can charge what you are really worth.
Money is such an interesting topic and I love talking about all of it, but it wasn’t always that way. My dad was a mechanic and a small business owner and he could fix and do anything himself. He raised my brother and I with the belief that we don’t pay for services. This childhood belief followed me into my own photography business. I remember thinking, “How can I charge people for things that they can do themselves?” Danger #1 that I want you to think about is your childhood beliefs about money.
I have my master’s degree in business, but when I got out of school and started my own photography business, I couldn’t get my arms around the pricing part. I thought that as long as I’m charging a little more than I pay, I’m making money. Once I started paying for studio rent and other real costs like mileage, gas, computers, printer paper and printer ink, and all of the things, I started realizing I had to charge way more than my current prices, or I’m not going to be able to keep any of the money that I’m making. That’s when I realized I have to make sure that my dream is stronger than my fear. All those fears like people are going to talk about me, people aren’t going to be my friend anymore, I had to let go of that because I knew that someone else was doing this. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own so I found a mentor who taught me how I needed to price to be profitable.
For the next couple years, I even sought out profitable photographers and picked their brains about why their things were the way they were on their price list. I really kept fine-tuning, but it was that first mentor who said, “Sarah, the bottom line is it doesn’t matter how good or bad you are as a photographer. You have to charge a certain amount or you’re working for free or losing money.”
In the past, you’ve probably heard me talk about my Julie. My Julie was my first right fit client after I dramatically increased my prices. I followed a process that I was really creating. I was trying to create a system because nobody seemed to have a system that I could just plug into. I had no idea that Julie was going to be my first big order. I was used to getting $75 per client and giving them all the proofs and nobody was ordering anything. But with Julie, she ordered $1,800 worth. It was so scary but I knew what I was doing was worth more.
Julie was young and newly married and these were portraits of her first baby. They didn’t have a lot of money. She was actually a stay-at-home mom and her husband was a small business owner getting his business going. I had this set of beliefs that what I thought she could and couldn’t afford were different things. Danger #2 when it comes to your prices is to not tell yourself stories about what someone can and cannot afford. If I had let my stories about what this new mom, the stay at home young mom could afford, I would’ve robbed Julie of some of her favorite things she ever purchased.
This is why we work so hard at the Photography Business Institute to create the support that photographers need to succeed. It’s about more than information. We know you need the tools as photographers to have a transformation, to be able to have those conversations so that people are excited to invest in artwork with you and not just focused on talking about what your prices are. Because if you do it right, your price doesn’t matter so much because they are going to be so in love with what you’re offering that they don’t care about the price.
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