articles/Business/makingmoremoney-page2
by Gary Williams Published 01/04/2011
Both Gary and Sue always laugh when they hear 'It's OK for you, you had it easy, you have a natural talent etc, etc...' It really has taken enormous quantities of work, blood, sweat and tears, sleepless nights, the occasional crossed word (mostly lost by Gary) as well as attending as many individual seminars and structured courses to make this business in to the amazing success that it has become.
There cannot be many photographers out there who can honestly prove that they have earned £150, 000 a year from photographing weddings from home. This is not a bland figure, but a workable one. It was one of the targets for Gary and Sue. One of the other targets was to keep as much as possible of this money in their own pockets. This meant doing a lot of work in-house, which meant having to have one of the slickest workflows out there; this, for someone who always used a professional photographic laboratory and who had never printed a picture in his life and that colour balancing was a matter of telling the lab the feel that he wanted in the images. It was not a vertical learning curve, it was an overhanging cliff to climb!!
Again, by attending seminars and talking to great friends, Gary learned the best, and sometimes off-the-beaten-track software to help maintain the business and reduce the amount of work he had to do. Interesting here is the fact that Sue still reckons that he does too much, but the standards of Gary and Sue Photography are exceptionally high.
As for letting the clients have as many images as possible, (this after all is the aim of the business), we aim at thrilling clients as much as possible so that they just have to have the images. Hard to believe though it is, Gary and Sue don't sell to their clients, they just let them buy! They could possibly SELL more, but they want their clients to keep coming back, knowing that they will be spending money, but getting something that is amazing for their hard-earned money.
Gary and Sue would tell you that it's not easy, but if you put the effort into it, it can be very rewarding indeed, both financially and for a feeling of self worth. If they can do it, as long as you love people, you can do it too, from home, starting NOW!
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