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If you’re like most people, the start of a new year can serve as a great opportunity to pause, take a deep breath, take a look back at the last year, and think about what you want the next year to look like. Today, we’re going to provide you with a bit of structure to begin thinking about how you might approach the start of a new year as a photographer and as a business owner!

 

If you’re a fan of our our blog, you might be aware that just a few weeks ago, we started a series all about shooting in manual, and learning the basics of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. But we’re pausing that series this week in honor of this being the FINAL video/blog of 2022.

 

And for starters, we just wanted to say thank you. Thank you to the 600+ new YouTube subscribers who joined us on this journey in 2022, and for the 24,000 video views and 46,000 blog views that you all gave to our content this year as we strove to help photographers build profitable and sustainable businesses.

 

As a thank you, we’re switching gears a bit and covering some of the content that we typically reserve for our paid coaching students during their last coaching meetings of the year. While this isn’t the full self-analysis that we go through over the course of an hour with these students, here are 5 questions to ask yourself at the beginning of a new year — or really at the beginning of any new season of your life and business — that can help give you some direction moving forward. So let’s jump in!

 

 

Question #1: Am I happy with where my business is at?

This question is intentionally vague, and also very broad. In all likelihood, there will be some areas of your business that you’re happy with, and some that you’re less happy with. For example, maybe you’re thrilled with how your photography has grown this past year and have really nailed your editing style, but maybe your website doesn’t reflect these changes, and you’re not happy with how you represent yourself online and on social media.

 

Or maybe after watching our Pricing for Photographers Workshop earlier this year you finally feel so confident in how you’ve priced yourself, but you know that your marketing could use some work, because you’re not putting yourself out there enough. Or maybe you’re feeling great about how much you’re booking and how much you’re getting paid, but you need help organizing yourself and your workflow so that you can keep on top of the growth that you’re experiencing as a business.

 

No matter what, make sure you write down at least three areas of your business that you’re happy with, and that are worth celebrating. Then celebrate them! Then, try and think of at least one but no more than three areas of your business where you aren’t quite as excited about, and where you could focus on as an area of growth this coming year.

 

 

Question #2: What is my NUMBER ONE goal for the next 12 months?

So, now that you’ve identified 1-3 areas of your business where you desire some growth, let’s really narrow in on one of these areas. It’s of course really helpful to reflect and realize that it’s your shooting or your editing or your marketing or your workflow that you really want to improve, but “get better at editing” is waaaay too broad of a goal to be an effective heading for an entire year.

 

And just in case you’ve never heard of “smart” goals, we’re going to really briefly introduce you to them. We find that in business — and sometimes even in our personal lives — setting SMART goals can help you actually achieve more of what you desire.

• • The S is for specific. Don’t just say, “I want to be a better photographer”, but instead say, “I want to improve my composition and my posing when on portrait sessions”
  • The M is for measurable. “Spend more time doing what I love”  isn’t something you can easily measure, but “reduce my editing time from 8 hours per wedding to 6 hours per wedding is obviously something that you can actually measure.
  • The A is for achievable. This means that when you sit down a year from now and look back at your goal, you can answer with a yes or a no whether or not you accomplished it. This helps combat vague goals like “Edit better” and replaces them with achievable goals like, “establish an editing style that I love and use for every job”
  • The R is for realistic. If you made $5,000 this year, making $10,000 is an ambitious but realistic goal for next year. But if you made $5,000 this year, setting a goal to make $100,000 next year is probably setting yourself up for failure.
  • Finally, the T is for time-based. Your goal should be focused on this next year, these next 6 months, or per month. Don’t set a nebulous goal that may never have an end date.

With all of this in mind, what’s a goal that you can set for your business that’s SMART, and in that same category of improvement you identified with question #1?

 

 

Question #3: What can I do each month to work toward that goal?

So with questions 1 and 2, you now have a goal that’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based (SMART), and is rooted in an area of your business that you want to improve. Now, let’s take that goal and break it down into smaller pieces.

 

Let’s use a financial goal as the first example. If you set your goal next year to make $25,000, let’s break that down. If you average $1,500 for wedding coverage and $250 for a portrait session, that $25,000 could be 16 weddings and 4 portrait sessions. Or it could be 12 weddings and 28 portrait sessions.  If we used the latter as our example and divided that by 12 months, that comes out to one wedding and about 2 portrait sessions per month. Making $25,000 can sound really scary, but shooting a wedding and two portrait sessions each month can sound much less scary!

 

Let’s use another example. Let’s say your big goal for next year is to improve your workflow and reduce your editing time by 25%, from 8 hours to 6.

• • Maybe your goal for January is to watch videos on YouTube to help figure out which culling and editing softwares are going to be best for you.
  • Then in February your goal is to purchase or download those programs and familiarize yourself with them.
  • In March you want to re-edit an old gallery on this new software to get the hang of it.
  • Then in April you want to spend between $50 and $200 on an online workshop to understand the program better.
  • Then in May you begin incorporating your new workflow into real jobs.

You get the idea. We used this example to show you that whether your goal is numbers-base or not, it can still be broken down into monthly chunks, which can make big scary goals feel that much more achievable.

 

And of course, if the goal you set was relatively modest, you can set 2 or even 3 big goals to focus on next year. But be warned: if you set too many goals, you’ll quickly get overwhelmed and not achieve any of them! One big goal that you work towards tirelessly and then achieve is better than 5 medium-sized goals that overwhelm you and force you to just give up on all of them in a few months.

 

 

Question #4: Am I taking care of myself?

Now, we could do an entire multi-hour workshop — much less a whole video — about healthy boundaries and taking care of yourself as a person while also running a business. This is really where the “sustainable” part of our “profitable and sustainable” motto comes in. And even though we’ll likely have other blog/videos about these ideas sometime next year, we do want to touch on this briefly in today’s post, because this is SO important.

 

If you’re not taking care of yourself in order to grow your business, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Of course, there will be seasons where your business grows a bit faster than you can keep up with, and you’ve gotta just buckle down and get through the craziness. Especially as wedding photographers, our spring and fall seasons are typically crazy busy, and sometimes unsustainably so!

 

But those busy seasons are punctuated by slower summers, and really slow winters. The only reason we can shoot 6 weddings a month for multiple months in a row is because we know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and a season of rest that follows it.
If we had to shoot at that pace for an entire year or for multiple years without a break, we’d eventually just burn out and our business would suffer. And that’s just one example from our life! For you, it could be any number of things that might be leading to burnout in your business.

 

 

As you’re considering the question, “Am I taking care of myself?”, here are a few sub-questions to ask yourself:

• • Am I sleeping enough?
  • Am I getting a healthy amount of exercise?
  • Am I eating in a way that sets me up for success each day, and in the long-run?
  • Am I spending time with the people who are most important to me?
  • Am I being poured into with life-giving relationships?
  • Am I a part of a community that knows and cares for me?
  • How has my mental health been?
  • Have I been experiencing sadness, loneliness or anxiety lately in a way that isn’t normal for me?

While you don’t need a positive answer to 100% of these questions 100% of the time, if you’re answering these questions mostly negatively for most of the year… then maybe your goal for this next year should be centered around taking care of yourself. This could mean finding a counselor or mental health professional who can coach you to a better place emotionally or mentally.

 

But if it’s just about sheer workload, you need to find a way to still be profitable, but also potentially scale back on your workload by outsourcing, automating, eliminating, or turning down the volume of your work. Because at the end of the day, a healthy business run by an unhealthy business-owner is NOT a healthy business.

 

 

Question #5: What can I do to give back in the coming year?

Over the years, one of the coolest things that we’ve have found about running small businesses is all of the opportunities they’ve given us to give back to causes and communities that are important to us. And this has actually looked differently at different stages in our business! While we were still doing photography for fun and building our portfolio, we would say yes to basically anyone who asked us to shoot, which was often people or causes who couldn’t afford to hire a professional. That’s how we ended up at 60th birthday parties or church fundraisers.

 

As our business grew and our time became more scarce than our money, we committed to giving away 10% of the profit from our business every year to charities that we care about. But we’ll still occasionally photograph an event or even a wedding at a reduced rate if it’s for a cause that we care about or if doing the job will really nourish our souls. That’s one of the beauties of running your own photography business — if you decide that this couple is really deserving or that charity would really benefit from new photography, you can just give it to them, and it doesn’t cost anything but your time!

 

But if you’ve never done anything like this before, we’d encourage you to consider right now what sort of impact you can have in the coming year. Whether it’s giving away one wedding at a reduced rate for a couple who could really use it, or a charity that you’ll partner with financially or with free photos. Either way, it’ll be good for your soul, and maybe even your business to give back!

 

Want More?

 

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