As a business owner you will cultivate relationships with clients, other photography studios, venues, event planners, labs, software, and photography editing companies. When starting any professional relationship, it’s helpful to communicate clear expectations, deliver on promises and always remain loyal. Your partners should have an onboarding process to set you up for success. Here are some things to expect when setting up a team of editors.
Get Organized. As a creative you have got to get organized and take some time to standardize your processes. Doing something different every time is why you are weeks/months late on turn times. Write down your entire process so your new team can replace you and make it simple!
Image by Gary Evans Photography
Standardized your process. Stick to the script that your editing partner is guiding you towards, remember they are your life raft, and you are drowning. Listen, learn, and trust they are removing the busy work from your plate while you still have control over the style of your edits.
Communicate efficiently and effectively. Please for the sake of everyone’s time, re-read emails before responding. We are all guilty of it! Editors have a rigid process for a reason and not reading emails wastes everyone’s time. Not to mention if the editing is off, speak up as well. If you find yourself emailing 2 or 3 times and it’s not clicking, request a call.
Just let go. You cannot clone yourself and no one edits exactly like you. Getting 80-90% is the goal and honestly do you think your clients sees what you see. My guess is no. The point of outsourcing is removing the work from your plate and maintaining service level agreements or SLA with your clients. They won’t care who edits their pictures if they are seeing them in 1 to 2 weeks.
Trust your team. End of the day it’s all about depending on your editing team to deliver for your clients. Follow their lead, this is what they do. Working with a business gives a different peace of mind. You don’t have to micro-manage employees or worry if they show up to work let alone its more cost effective for your bottom line. Be an entrepreneur. Let the creatives create and you focus on making more money. This does not mean you lose control of your brand. You are the Owner and CEO, be the vision of the company and run your editing team like an employee. This is where you’ll gain more success for your business. This is a high-level guide for what to expect when outsourcing your photography editing. Here is some advice from one of our current clients Gary Evans, owner of Gary Evans Photography on how outsourcing changed his business for the better.
Image by Gary Evans Photography
Images by Gary Evans Photography
Q: What advice would you give to another busy studio joining Evolve?
Answer: Joining Evolve and outsourcing your editing will allow you to focus more on your core business. Instead of spending your valuable time in front of a computer you will be able to spend more time doing the thing you love which is shooting. Freeing up time will also you to focus on other parts of the business that may need attention, such as marketing, vendor relationships, enhancing the client experience, portfolio building and education to name but a few.
Q: How has your business changed outsourcing your editing?
Answer: It’s allowed me to focus on our client experience, with faster turnaround times I can deliver weddings in an efficient and timely manner. It provides a very consistent look from wedding to wedding so that couples looking our work know what to expect. Gaining access to their expertise and technical knowledge helps us to provide our couples with some amazing portrait images that are beyond their expectations which in turn has helped increased IPS sales.
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