InPix – Photo editing service for film & digital photographers
I’ve made a ton of mistakes outsourcing and I’ve saved a ton of time and made a ton of money outsourcing. I’m gonna give you everything I know and all the tips I’ve learned about how to do this the most effectively. But before we jump into those specific things I want to share with you a little bit of background on the topic and share with you the mistakes I made and the mindset.
I had that prevented me from really growing my business at the start so when i first started my photo business like many photographers I thought that it was me, that I was special, that I knew how to do it my way and that they were paying for my style and so this is more of a delegation conversation. But if you can’t delegate you definitely won’t be able to outsource. So I worked like this for a while and I really didn’t make that much money because there was only so much time I could shoot and I wasn’t charging enough. And I had no idea how to outsource anything and it came to the point where I couldn’t shoot anymore. So I was forced to get over the fact and get over my idea that I was the only one that could shoot so I brought my brother on board. He started shooting real estate. Clients liked his photos instantly and I was like dang that’s crazy. I thought for so long that it was just me they were paying for and so that broke that first mental barrier.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Photo Editing for Photographers
When he started shooting and people started loving his photos i was like dang, it’s not me, it’s my process that people like. It has nothing to do with me personally and so we continued along and we would shoot in the morning and shoot part of the afternoon. And then we would spend a lot of the evening and sometimes the night editing our photos. We did that for another couple of years. And because we had to spend usually from like two or three in the afternoon until late in the night, sometimes editing we weren’t able to do any more shoots.
We maxed out and about this point I started thinking that we could either hire another person or we could figure out how to get someone to do this editing for us. Because the editing is taking so much time and if we didn’t have to edit we could fit in like three more shoots, make like at least another six hundred dollars per day on average and that would be super awesome. I thought editing was the hardest part. I didn’t even let my brother do it, I did it all for the most part. He would do the easy stuff and I had that mental barrier where I think I’m the only one that can do this the way that I need it to be for my clients. And so again necessity is the mother of all invention.
I had to outsource the photos if I wanted to continue growing so I started looking online and we started working with some great companies who did awesome results and some did poor results. But we figured out that we could actually outsource our photos. We were able to do it cost effectively and save a lot of time.
They were able to do it better than us in a lot of cases because it was what they do for a living. It’s not like me where I shoot most of the time and then I edit a little bit. They’re editing all the time they’re great at editing. And so I learned very quickly that a bigger lesson in business is you don’t want to think that you’re the best at everything. You need to figure out a way to get someone in the position to do that for you in a position where they can succeed and where it’s based along their skill.
So outsource the photos completely changed my business overnight. Went from being able to make maybe a thousand dollars a day and i easily being able to do over two thousand dollars a day. And that was super awesome and even better than that when we got home for the day. We offloaded the photos off our chips, sent them to our editors and boom – that was it. The next morning we got photos in our inbox like Christmas morning. We delivered them to our photographers and that was it!
I’m telling you that you can outsource every single part of this business. Outsource your photo editing is the number one thing that separates people who do 50 60 70 80k a year from people who do 150 200 250k a year as a single photographer. It doesn’t cost a lot of money but it really allows you to grow so don’t make the mistake I did. Right now i want you to get in your head that everything you do could be done by another human and probably better than you, so once you have that in mind outsourcing becomes the next right step. I recommend outsourcing your work!
Number one you obviously need to find an editor and so there are a bunch of ways to do this but most commonly and the easiest way – use our photo editing service. You can see that that is pretty cost effective and if you’re paying $0,2 an image your photos are going to look so much better than you can possibly do. And you’re not going to spend hours doing it. It’s one of the hacks that I tell new people in this business is just outsource your photos from the beginning because it makes you look like an instant pro. If you outsource them to someone who’s been editing for years you’re going to get an awesome product from day one in your business which will really help you grow.
You can see that a dollar spent in outsourcing is really not that bad. let’s say we charge $175 for a 36 photo package which is what we do in my business. We’re going to spend about $8 on outsourcing and we still get like 168 bucks and we can do so many more shoots per day and our results are awesome.
Eli Jones