[00:00:00] I used to be a terrible photographer and an even worse freelancer. I couldn't take good photos. Clients didn't know I existed and I was stuck in a job I hated. Fast forward a few years and I've worked with over 50 companies to transform their online presence with product photography. There are five big reasons most photographers struggle in their career.
These are the lessons I learned the hard way I'm sharing the mistakes I learned along the way in the hopes that you won't make the same mistakes that I did. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures.
Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. So why should you even trust anything I have to say here? If it's your first time here, my name is Chris Pieta. I run a production company and in my spare time I teach others how to succeed in creative business.
All right, so let's get into the show. A lot of photographers struggle in their career simply because they're bad at photography. That's reason number one. Their portfolios suck. They don't know much about lighting. Maybe they bought a camera because they heard you can make a quick buck [00:01:00] taking photos and assume that the camera does all the work for you.
Whatever the reason. If you're bad at this game, no one will want to pay you for it. You need to pay your dues. Getting good at photography is something that takes time, it takes practice, and not just any practice. You need deliberate practice. You need to analyze your work, figure out where you're lacking and improve those areas.
I personally have no formal photography education. I studied chemistry in college. I learned everything about photography from YouTube. I used to be terrible, but every day for a year I would go out and shoot. And over time I got better and. I would go out, take photos, go home, edit those photos, analyze and see where I can improve.
The next time I went out to take photos, I started out doing landscape and cityscape photography and quickly moved into portraits, and eventually I graduated to pro photography. Each time I switched genres, I had to relearn a lot of things. . I thought I was a good photographer, but when I switched to pro photography, I realized that I sucked.
I learned all about flash, [00:02:00] about continuous lighting, all these new things. I had to start over and get better, and that's exactly why I did. I knew I could get better at pro photography because I've already done this with landscape photography and portraits. So I practiced, I watched YouTube video after YouTube video of how the pros did it, and when I thought I was decent enough to attract some low budget clients, I went.
I started small with coffee shops and over time as my skills grew, so did my clients. As I got better, I went for bigger and bigger clients, and now some of the companies I work with are pretty big brands. Being self-aware as a photographer and especially as a creative business owner is so important to your success.
If you think you're the best, but in reality, you suck. That's gonna get in your way. How do you know if you're good? If people are willing to pay you? Chances are you're good, but what if you're still good but can't get any clients? That brings me to point number two. The biggest complaint I hear from Bell photographers trying to make in this industry is that they can't get clients.
If you want to be a professional photographer, you need clients. You need to keep your business. And [00:03:00] yourself alive. And in order to do that, you need money. Clients are the lifeblood of your business, and if you can learn how to acquire clients, the rest comes easy. But how do you actually get clients? When people ask me this on Instagram or on Twitter, I'll go out and check out their portfolio.
by the way, I post a bunch of educational content on Instagram and Twitter, so just look up Chris Patta on there. Anyway, I'll go to someone's portfolio and see their photos are all over the place. I see their profile has product photos, landscape photos. I see portraits and headshots. Simply put, they don't have a niche here.
I don't know what type of photography they're offering. If I was a potential client, they would seem like a jack of all trades, and they wouldn't come off as an expert at any one of these 10 niches that they're. I don't know if they're working with clients, I just don't know what they're offering here.
If you want to attract quality clients, you need to niche down. This means only posting about that niche. This means creating a website focused on that niche. If you go to my company website, pta [00:04:00] productions.com, you'll see all the photos there. Our product photos, and not just any products, they're all food and beverage CPG brands.
My prospective client visits my website. They know exactly what I do. I take product photos for food and beverage companies. This portrays me as the expert in the area. This means I've worked with brands like them before. They can picture in their head what working with me would be like. All because I'm niche down.
If you want clients niche down, like Alex from Ozi says, riches are in the niches. Now I have a whole free course on how to get your first paying client. It's on my website. It's. , check it [email protected]. But let me quickly summarize here what I teach in there. Once you've got that website portfolio in a niche and you get clients to that website, how do we do this?
We can either spend money on ads, post a lot of Instagram reels, or my personal favorite and most effective. We do cold outreach, specifically cold email. Cold email is simply finding brands or people to reach out to, emailing them what we do, and then ending the email with an ask from them. This is how I do it.
I'll go to [00:05:00] Amazon, look PR category, let's say Bobba T, and from there I'll take all the brands I see, find their email addresses, and then email them. Now, this is a lot easier said than done. There's a lot more steps and nitty gritty here. If you wanna learn more about. Go on my website, check out that free course I'm offering.
But let's move on to number three for now.
Okay, so we've had some clients, but no repeat clients. You've been able to sell your service, but after one project, the client ends up going with someone else. What's happening here? Okay. Mistake number three is that creative professionals aren't professional. Creative professionals need to be just that professional.
If you're not acting professional around your clients, they have a lot of options to choose from nowadays. What makes you special? What makes you stand out? Professionalism comes down to how you carry yourself with your clients. Professionalism can mean everything from past turnaround times to also, if you say you're gonna do something, doing to that and sticking to your word no matter what.
If something comes up and there's no way you can finish the [00:06:00] project, given the time. You communicate with the client even better. You communicate and you offer some freebie because you fail to deliver the asset on time. You have to put yourself in a client's shoes. What if they're waiting all week for 10 product photos and they don't hear back from the photographer at all?
You were expecting the photos on Friday, and all you get is radio silence. If I was a client, I would not wanna work with this photographer again. They didn't communicate me that they would be late. and I'm fine with it being late. They just never told me that they would be late. On the other hand, if you hear from the photographer and they say that the photos are still in the works, but because they're taking longer than expected, they're throwing in extra two free photos for at no extra charge for you.
While this photographer was professional, they communicated the issue that was going on and they made it right by offering those bonus photos. They were very professional here because they made it right. One super simple thing you can do to be professional is to respond to your emails. I've heard of creatives waiting days to respond to a client.
Why? If you get an email from [00:07:00] a client in your inbox, you have to respond immediately. What's the point in waiting? Do you think you're gonna come off as desperate or something? If you respond immediately, the client gets the answers they need, and then that email's done with, it's no longer bothering you in your head.
You've cleared that mental space and you've accomplished a task.
When interacting with clients, just use common sense and always try to do the right thing. If you operate with these principles in mind, you'll be professional. Okay? So you've got some clients, you've made some money, but it just doesn't seem to cut it. You're barely making a profit, and with all the gear, you need softwares and potential contractors to pay.
You're not gonna last long. The first question you have to ask yourself is, are you charging? This is mistake number four. You're not getting paid enough. When clients ask you how much you charge, do they try and push back or do they just accept the rate as is? If clients don't push back, you need to raise your rates and not just 10% or something.
I'm talking about doubling your rates. Keep increasing that rate until people start saying no and trying to negotiate with you. . When you get a no from client, you [00:08:00] can then get the negotiation started. That's good. You can either lower your rate for that negotiation, which I don't really recommend, or you can offer to add more photos at the same rate.
By adding in more photos, you're providing more value for them while still maintaining that same high ticket price tag you initially presented them. Now, moving on to the other side of things. What if your rate is already high, but you're still scraping by? Well, this just means that you're not getting enough.
And to solve this problem, we need more volume. We need to go back to our client acquisition system. For this, you're getting clients, so that means you're cold emailing, but how often are you sending those emails? Do you send emails, sign a client and then stop sending emails to focus on another project?
Well, this is a recipe for disaster because your leads are gonna dry up. You need to be consistently working your leads. Sending new emails and even while you're working on fulfilling other clients, continuing this process. This way, when you finish one project, you'll be able to move onto the next without any break in revenue.
You've got a consistent pipeline of clients flowing in all because you're doing the work, you're doing the stuff every single day. [00:09:00] Sending emails is boring work, but it pays the bills and allows you to focus on what you love. Focus on the big picture and the small stuff will be a lot easier to do. Okay, number five here.
Last but not least, we've got taxes and all the legal stuff that happens and running a creative business. This stuff sucks and I don't like doing it either, but you gotta, you need to be compliant with the law or else you're going down. Now, I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. This is just what I've done.
If you've had any success and are making decent money with this stuff, go get an accountant. It's gonna make your life so much easier. I use an agency called Collective, but there are so many other ones out there as well. They're gonna handle your taxes, your bookkeeping, and all your accounting for.
I think I'm paying under 300 bucks a month for this, so not bad. For all the time saved. What I used to do was use QuickBooks for my accounting, which is another piece of software. Software that is great. I just watched a few videos there, rather guides, and learned basic bookkeeping, and then I had to file my taxes manual.
Which was a pain, but if you follow the instructions from the irs, it's not that [00:10:00] bad. Remember, if you're making any money from this stuff, you need to pay your taxes quarterly. Then there's all sorts of other legal stuff like forming an llc. For that, I use Better Legal. They'll do everything for you for a couple hundred bucks.
It's way easier than doing it yourself, and I highly recommend using a professional service to do this for you. And yeah, you have to do all this legal stuff and taxes are annoying, but you gotta do it or else you'll fail. That's all I got today. These are the five ways most photographers fail in their creative businesses.
There's a lot of things here, so break these down one by one. My name is Chris Pieta. Thank you for listening to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast. If you've got an extra 10, 15 seconds, please rate the show. It really helps me out in that case, I'll see you in the next one.
