169: Scaling Your Wedding Photography Business: A Guide to Building an Associate Team

Ready to scale your photography business but unsure about building an associate team? Let's discuss! With a successful 15-year career under my belt, I've chosen to nurture my individual boutique luxury brand. Yet, I understand the allure of expansion and passive income for many photographers. This episode helps you decide if and when shooting solo isn't enough anymore. We'll tackle how you can start building your team as your demand increases and how it can catapult your business to accommodate more events.

As tempting as it is to simply start building a team, there's more to consider.  We'll  discuss how to visualize your business's future, tackling multi-photographer events, and how to provide effective coaching and feedback to your team. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newbie, this episode is teeming with practical advice to inform your decisions about your photography business's growth. So tune in and let's get started on scaling your passion.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello there, thank you so much for joining me today for this episode where we're going to be talking about whether or not to build out an associate photography team and how to do it if you do decide to in fact, move forward in that direction. If you're someone who's looking to price your photography and needing a little bit of help, be sure to visit the description and download our free pricing guide. All right, so let's talk about building out an associate team. I first want to say that, after almost 15 years of business, I have actually made the decision for now not to do this. For the past 15 years, I've just felt like that wasn't the direction that I wanted to take for the business. I wanted to focus my efforts on building up my own individual boutique luxury brand and, of course, working on education like this.

Speaker 1: 0:47

For others of those like you, however, there are photographers who want to build out their associate team. They want to grow so that they can build passive income without having to actually shoot themselves every single time. So how do you know when is the right time to start? If you are in a place where your workload and your demand are calling for help, that's a great time to start building out your team. What I mean by this is you're getting a surplus of inquiries, and not only are you getting a surplus of inquiries, but you're also getting a surplus of bookings. Or maybe you're having to refer out a lot of bookings because you're already booked. It's totally fine to refer those out to friends, like I do, who are in the photo industry, and then, of course, oftentimes they refer back to me, which is so nice. However, if you have a team, then you can refer those weddings to your team members and then you can make a percentage of that. So when you're at a place where you feel like the supply is not there for the demand, then you can start to build out your associate team.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Another reason to build out an associate brand is because you want to scale the business. You want to take on more volume, take on more weddings, make more money, but you don't necessarily have the capacity to do that yourself. In that situation, you want to hire out a team, but keep in mind that this may impact your brand, depending on how you do it. You can have those photographers underneath the umbrella of your business, or you could also create an entirely separate brand to house those photographers under, and that's a completely personal decision. What you want to do is essentially visualize what you want your business to look like in the future. Do you want to be a one man or one woman operation, or do you want lots of photographers on the team with you? That's a very personal decision and one that takes thought, and everyone's a little different. So think about the scalability, think about the vision and where you want to go.

Speaker 1: 2:39

You also may be in a situation where you find yourself often getting requests for events that maybe aren't the wedding day but that you need help with and you're not available for. So maybe like rehearsal dinners and welcome parties or multi-day events, multi-photographer events. If you find that happening a lot, that might also be a situation to start building out your team, or at least a team of consistent second and third photographers that can help you. That is a level of business that you might start finding yourself in after like 10 years or so, or maybe sooner, but when that happens, you do want to have that trusted network of photographers that you can turn to, and having them on your team really helps. Okay, so you've made the decision that you want to build out an associate team. What are some important things to think about and do before you enter that world of having an associate brand.

Speaker 1: 3:32

The first thing that I'm going to suggest is to see the previous portion of the episode where I was talking about if you want a separate brand or a brand under your umbrella, and how you want to present that to the clients. We actually have an amazing membership called the Wedding Photography Society. If you'd like to give that a trial, go to WeddingPhotographySocietycom. But we had Lauren Farre come in. She is a wonderful luxury photographer who has made the decision to build out a luxury associate brand and she's done such a good job of integrating it into her business in a way that doesn't take away from the elevated feel of her brand. So I would say to really spend some time learning and understanding how that works. Then, when you do decide alright, I understand how it's going to be laid out.

Speaker 1: 4:20

You want to create consistency in the work. So, however you do that, know that it's really important. Whoever you hire shoots in the same way and create the same type of images that you would create for your own business. I know in the past for us, although we haven't had an associate brand, we have used second and third photographers, and the way that we build out consistency is through trial and error, coaching and lots of feedback over time. So we usually start with a third shooter, for example, who can eventually move into a second shooter, and as they're shooting, I'm providing insight and guidance into what we're looking for. And then, of course, even after the images have been created, I'm going through, I'm screen shooting and comparing and providing those. Just know that it might not be an instant like right away consistency, but something rather that you can work toward over time. No-transcript.