Roles and Stewardships

Roles and Stewardships

In running and owning a portrait and wedding photography studio, there is more to it than just taking nice pictures. To be successful one has to assess the various roles and activities that that are required to run any business. Many aspiring photographers and even many of the seasoned ones find themselves on a runaway train trying to keep up with all the other responsibilities of running a business. They have a tendency of attending to the business that is immediately in front of them, the more urgent things. Time is a businessman’s most valuable possession. My goal and objective is to address some of the areas that need attention and sometimes are neglected, and make some suggestions and give you solutions so that your business can be fun, profitable and successful in any way you want to define success.
As a business owner we wear many different hats. We become accountants, IT technicians, human resource managers, salesmen, marketers; the list is never ending of the roles we take on. In Michael Gerber’s book, “The E Myth” he takes on this challenge and states that once you start making money at the thing you love, the thing you love you will soon grow to hate. The reason being that the business takes you away from the very thing you love, photography. It requires that we tend to the roles previously mentioned, and if we don’t address them we are doomed for failure and burnout. What’s the solution? In a nut shell it is two fold. (1) Outsource some of the tasks and (2) delegate.
The first thing I would suggest is to list and define all the roles in your studio. A sample list might be salesman, marketer, trainer, accountant, retouch artist, production, photographer, IT technicians. After having made this list take each role and write a detailed job description for each. For instance it could be the sales person’s job to deliver proofs, first to answer the phone, deliver finished orders. Then decide which roles only you can perform, which ones you can delegate and which ones you can outsource. You have to be entirely honest with yourself. You might think that no one can do the job as good as you, but that usually isn’t the case.
In order to maintain some types of organization it is necessary to define the roles and assign stewardships to each role in the studio. Even if there are only 2 or 3 people in the studio, defining the roles makes it much easier to get control of your time, and delegate certain responsibilities. I use a flow chart and my main responsibility is to do the photography and the overall marketing. Some of the other tasks such as answering the phone, doing sales projection appointments, delivering proofs and orders are assigned to other people in the studio. Almost never am I the first one to answer the phone. There is a pecking order, and on the flow chart it lists the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person for a particular task. The tendency is to just handle the task if it’s immediately in front of us. This is not the most efficient way of handling things and can cause a lot of confusion and mistakes. Time is your most valuable resource. As a studio owner if you want to know how much you’re worth per hour take your total sales and divide it by 2000. 2000 is approximately the number of hours you work every year. If your sales are $150,000 and are divided by 2000, your value as an owner is $75 per hour in gross sales. You don’t want to be putting orders together or doing retouching when you could probably get someone to do that task for $12 to $15 dollars per hour. Remember the goal is to make a reasonable profit and maximize the dollars per hour. When we think we are saving money, it’s really costing us more in the long run because you are not using you your most valuable resource (time) to its maximum . This type of planning might seem unnecessary and burdensome, but for every hour you spend on planning you’ll save at least 3 hours of work.
When you assign a stewardship to an employee, it gives them ownership, responsibility and autonomy. You don’t want to micro manage every task. You can recommend a method, tell the employee why you think it should be done that way, and describe the pitfalls they might encounter, but in the end just be concerned with the outcome. Give them the responsibility and ownership of their stewardships in their role. They will perform better, and have a sense of pride in their contribution to the business.