You’re a professional photographer who loves the creative side of being your own boss, but when it comes to actually having to do the “boss” stuff – things get a little less exciting. We’re here to change that with Scorecards for photographers!
Sure, you know how to manage your inbox, keep your finances in order, and maintain your schedule – but how do you grow a photography business? How do you make it more efficient?
Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or just starting out, a proven way to grow and better your business is through micro-goals set through Scorecards for photographers and micro-adjustments based on that data. It’s a burnout-proof way to help your photography business succeed.
So let’s look at those micro-goals and micro-adjustments and learn how to apply them to your business today using Scorecards – now in Sprout Studio!
No dashboard = no visibility = no direction!
To start off, think of an airplane headed from Toronto to Vancouver. The pilots don’t just fly into the sky and hope they’re going in the right direction. They have a dashboard to navigate them through the empty terrain.
Without this dashboard, their chances of getting to Vancouver are pretty close to zero.
Now think of this in terms of your photography business. How do you steer your business in the right direction without a clear overview of where you’re going? Your chances of getting to your goals are pretty close to zero too.
What if the pilots looked at their dashboard once, halfway through their flight? Or quarterly? Sure, you can change course and get back on track, but the time you spent off-track has been wasted with big gaps of misdirection.
You get the point…
This is similar to how most entrepreneurs look at their business’s health. There is so much wasted time, money, and potential because they can’t see how off-course they’ve truly been.
However, the probability of setting a goal and not hitting it becomes very small when you course-correct within a short window and check in with that “dashboard” every week.
The key to staying on track in your business is to constantly monitor your business’s health through measurable goals and obtainable adjustments (a.k.a micro-goals and micro-adjustments).
Step 1: Setting a Realistic Destination
Similar to how airplanes are consistently adjusting their path to get from Point A to Point B, we need to set ourselves obtainable business targets instead of rushing to the end result. These are called micro-goals.
Reaching these micro-goals takes measuring important data in our business and re-adjusting our strategies in a manageable way.
The three drivers of growth to measure in Scorecards for photographers are:
- Inquiries
• What medium is getting you the most traction/leads (ads, website, etc.)
• How many people have entered your sales funnel
• How many people have filled out your contact form - Earnings
• How many people have moved down the sales funnel and booked a shoot
• How many views does your booking proposal have
• How many leads went stale - Bookings
• What medium is getting you the most paying clients
• How much you’ve earned
• What is your biggest source of revenue
By looking at these three areas on a weekly basis, the points of your business that need extra attention will be clear. Each of these drivers of growth should be included in your photography business’s scorecard to optimize success.
Maybe your booking proposal is getting tons of views but no submissions, for example. That is an indication that, while your marketing tactics may be working, your actual booking proposal is not. From this information, you can then set micro-goals to re-adjust your path.
Step 2: Re-Adjusting your Path
A micro-adjustment is a small and realistic shift in your business that drives a specific outcome.
Let’s take that booking proposal example, for instance. You look at your weekly metrics overview on Monday morning and notice that your booking proposal submissions are lower than you’d like.
So, you set a micro-goal to get those numbers up, then make the micro-adjustment of dedicating 30 minutes to enhancing the quality of your booking proposal.
Over time with constant micro-adjustments, your photography business will be transformed without any overwhelming business decisions.
Sure, you may have a 3-5 year plan, but it’s easy to lose sight of your goals when you have too much on your plate, especially when those goals are far into the future.
You want to get to those goals from where you are right now, but you don’t just make one big leap to get there. It’s a process of smaller goals along the way.
And the easiest way to track the progress you make is with a compact overview of your metrics (a.k.a Scorecards) – think of it as a photographer’s dashboard!
Step 3: The Photographer’s Dashboard
We all know that the “entrepreneur mindset” and the “growth mindset” are interchangeable. You’ve gotten this far in your business, but you have more goals and more accomplishments yet to be reached!
Sprout Studio’s Scorecards for photographers are a friction-free way to monitor the growth and health of your business. They give you direct indicators of what is and isn’t working so you can deep-dive into solutions that help you succeed.
Once a week, you get emailed all of the “must knows” about your business in one compact card so you don’t have to dig around your website, CRM, or Google Analytics to find the data you need.
Each scorecard comes with a status report for your three drivers of growth: inquiries, bookings, and earnings.
With this data, you can stay in the know, make educated business decisions, and celebrate your success without doing any research or leg work.
And with monthly reports – we’ll even analyze your growth for you! Each monthly report comes with a comparison of your previous month so you can see just how those micro-adjustments are working!
Data and analytics aren’t the most exciting part about being a photographer, but they don’t have to be stressful. Let Sprout Studio handle that “business” side of being a photographer so you can focus on doing what you love.
Your Turn, Photographer.
Although you’re not a pilot going from Toronto to Vancouver, you do have a destination to reach in your photography business and it will be harder to get there without a dashboard to guide you along the way.
We’ll help get you there with Scorecards in Sprout Studio.
