Tips to help grow your school photography business
Ask any school photographer and they’ll tell you that when you get to a certain level in your business growth, it can get more challenging to keep on top of orders. Organising, managing, editing and printing photographs takes a lot of time – it’s probably the most time consuming part of running your own school photography business.
When you get to a business crossroads and need to take action in order to manage your working processes – there are actionable solutions you can try. For example, enlisting the help of an assistant or you could use specialist software to streamline your workflow.
Let’s have a look at a few options you can use to help grow your school photography business and improve your operational efficiencies:
Management Workflow Software
Forget about disorganised spreadsheets flying about and hundreds of photos in millions of different folders – MaxLab is perfect for high-volume photography management. It can help to manage your workflow and reduce manual work through a variety of automated processes.
Features such as Face Detect and Blink Score can help to minimise production errors, speed up editing, improving your efficiency by automatically cropping shots and helping you build your portfolio.
You can also keep account of all of your files and photos really easily with a Powerful Search function that will help you to scour your database in an instant and find the specific files you’re looking for. Images will be profiled with meta-data and tagged, so you can find them quickly.
If you do your own print fulfilment, you will know that this can be a large part of your working day. Streamlining this part of your business can result in enormous gains in productivity for your business, freeing up time to focus on your business growth. MaxLab enables you to take control, ensuring higher quality and better efficiency. The software has direct integration with many printers – wet or dry – including the latest from Fujifilm, Epson, Noritsu and essentially any printer with a Windows Driver or a hotfolder interface. This is the perfect solution if you want to run your business with a bar-code proof card system – you can manage your workflow and oversee your printing process.
Adding a unique product to your school photography portfolio
Win new contracts and consolidate relationships with your existing customers by offering unique products, such as composites. Images can be easily personalised and tailored to each school’s individual requirements with the help of MaxLab. Bespoke options such as Star Composites where each child becomes the star of a group shot, school house colours and emblems can be incorporated, school buildings can be used as a backdrop…..The possibilities are endless – you create an idea for a unique product and we can make it happen through linking data and other advanced functionality of our volume photography workflow software!
Hiring help
Getting an assistant to come on shoots and help with your photo purchasing and organisation can be a savvy solution. However, this increases costs. If you think you might have friends and family who would want to help you out, that can be a great option.
Having an extra pair of hands can prove invaluable and they can offer a fresh set of eyes on projects and your photo management process.
Become more efficient
Whatever method you choose to help make your business more efficient, making sure it’s cost-effective and leaves you with creative control is important. Being able to oversee your business and manage your processes allows you to make better decisions. Finding the right volume photography workflow software will help increase your operational efficiencies, allow your creative flair to flourish and design exciting new products to attract customers and ultimately, help to grow your business.