Give yourself a high five – you survived the holidays! Now that you’ve had a couple weeks to breathe and relax, this is the perfect time to do a business check to make sure all of your ducks are in a row. These are simple things that can get overlooked throughout the year, but can create hurdles for clients trying to connect with you. Here’s what we recommend you double check before your calendar picks back up again!
- Links – Go through each part of your website and actually click through everything to make sure it navigates correctly. Have a friend go through too to see if they have any issues as well. We tend to set up our website and not look at it again for awhile, so it’s always good to go back through and look at it with fresh eyes. If you link to your website from anywhere else (The Knot, Google, Facebook, IG, etc.) make sure those are working as well.
- Portfolio Images – You don’t have to do an overhaul of your website but maybe pick your top 5-10 images from this year to feature on your homepage and update your portfolio. As you grow as a photographer, your style or focus is going to evolve and you want to make sure your website is a reflection of that. If any images now seem out of place, pull them out. Don’t wait years to do this, take time each year to show off new work!
- Pricing Listings – If you’ve updated your pricing or changed any package structures, make sure that it’s up to date on your website or any other listings you have too. You don’t want clients thinking you’re at one price point and get something different in an email from you. On that note, make sure if you have a year listed anywhere on your pricing page or sheet that it gets updated now!
- Contact Info – Have you moved or changed phone numbers? Is your email the same? Make sure that all of you info is updated on your website, google, and social media pages. You don’t want to give any potential clients a hurdle to get in contact with you.
- Customer Happiness – This might be a heavier question to get into, but overall how happy were your clients? Were there any times that a client was unhappy because they weren’t educated on price, number of images, turnaround time etc. Make sure that those items are explained in any welcome pdfs you send out or that you have automated emails that explain/remind clients of those processes.
- How is your turnaround time? Do you feel like you are in line with your competitors? What can you outsource to help make it better? (Editing, house cleaning, day care, blogging, etc) Taking time to review your post processing workflow can help get your images to your clients more quickly, creating happier clients and a better referral source for your business.
- When was the last time you reviewed your backup system? If you have old hard drives or haven’t checked on your backup system for your original files, it’s time to give it a checkup! Don’t get stuck assuming bad things will never happen, because it almost always does. Have multiple drives for your working RAW files, have a system for backing up finished client images, and make sure you are using something like time machine or back blaze to also backup your computer. Things like your editing programs (if you’re not on CC), presets, templates, etc could all be lost in a system crash. And a lot of times those are things that we don’t even think about backing up!
What are some business tasks that you makes sure to review yearly? Let us know in the comments below!
—
Recent Comments