Episode 004: Behind the Price Tag: What It Really Costs to Run a Photography Business

Hey, hi, hello, and welcome to this, the fourth episode of the Kelsi Bailey Photography Podcast. I am really excited about our conversation today. I think we’re gonna pull back the curtain a little bit. We’re going to chat about all the little and the not so little things that I invest in to make your photography experience what it is. I’m sharing the software, the education, the tools, the subscriptions, the gear, even the tiny personal touches that help sessions and my business run smoothly. these are behind the scenes costs so there are things that you are not going to see on your invoice my pricing guide or my investment page but trust me they make a huge difference in your overall experience photography is a service-based business so I know that it can feel really overwhelming when you’re shopping around like if you visit 10 photographers websites you are likely going to see 10 different photography price points But I’m here to remind you that service-based businesses like mine still have a cost of doing business, even if it isn’t tangible, like in a product-based business. Now, listen, you know me, I am nothing if not an open book. So come on, grab your coffee mug, cheers, and let’s jump into today’s episode. 

I think the easiest way to chat through these is going to be to break them up into sections. So the first section that we can discuss are my annual expenses, the things that I pay for once a year and they serve me for the entire year. And then without hesitation, I re-up my subscriptions for the following year. So I only have two of these for my business, but they are biggies. So I’m going to talk about them first. The first one I want to talk about is called HoneyBook. HoneyBook is… the backbone of my entire business. HoneyBook is my CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management Tool. And if you have ever sent me an inquiry, if you have ever signed an electronic form like my portrait contract, my model release form, if you’ve ever paid an invoice electronically, if you have ever… Scheduled a session via my scheduling tool where you’ve clicked a link and it’s brought up a calendar and you’ve gone through the calendar and selected a session date and time. If you’ve ever done any of those things, then you have reaped the rewards of HoneyBook. In fact, I’m not quite sure how I ran my business before I invested in HoneyBook back in the day. in the infancy stages of my business, none of this was available electronically, perhaps through QuickBooks, which I did use for a while. But otherwise, guys, I was carrying clipboards to my sessions that had all of my forms in them, my portrait contracts and my model release forms. And I was having people sign those in person at all of the sessions. And then I would file them away in a filing cabinet. And as far as payment went, I had designed a… an invoice in Photoshop. And so when people would book a session, I would jump into Photoshop and I would edit and tweak the invoice per their session. And I would email them the invoice and it worked okay. It allowed them to see what they owed and what their balance was, but they couldn’t actually pay via the PDF invoice. the Photoshop PDF that I sent. And so it just required an extra step, more correspondence to figure out if they wanted to pay with a check, if they wanted to pay in cash on the day of their session, if they wanted to make a payment via PayPal. And it was really, like I said, it was messy. I don’t think it came off terribly professional when I was doing all of those things. And so when I decided to invest into HoneyBook, I jumped in headfirst and I have never, will never look back. It has all of my clients. So with just a click or two, I can hop in. I can see all of our correspondence. I can see all of the files that we have on file for you. I like to refer back especially to the model release forms. It’s important to me that I am honoring your wishes at all times. So I like having those handy just a click or two away. I also love their automation features. So if you have sent me an inquiry, you should immediately receive an automated reply. And it just lets potential clients know when they can expect to hear back from me. And it also is really beautiful in the scheduling tool we talked about with the calendar. When you book those sessions, that jumps onto my personal Google Calendar immediately. Our family lives and dies by our Google Calendar. Everything is in there. It’s all color-coded. And so it’s especially helpful when my clients book a session via HoneyBook. It just jumps right onto my Google Calendar. And I have automation set up for those as well so that you should receive reminders before your session. And… Gosh, like I said, if I am working, my HoneyBook tab is open at all times. So it is one of the biggest investments that I make in my business. But it’s kind of like my personal assistant, if you will. And I don’t know how I would manage that. without it. So first one is HoneyBook. 

The second one is called Flodesk, F-L-O-desk. And I want to be really careful with what I say about Flodesk because I love it. I will never leave it. But when I compare it with HoneyBook, if you are a creative and you are looking to build a you’re in the process of thinking about building a business, if you are any of those things, I would say that HoneyBook is a must-have and Floodesk is a nice-to-have. So I just, I’m gonna throw that caveat out there now because Flodesk can be a bit of a steep investment right at the beginning. And I’ll circle back a little bit and talk about why I think it’s worth it now, but not when you’re in the process of building a business. So Flodesk is my… email list keeper, my email list guardian. When I log into Flodesk, I can see all of my email subscribers. I can see which list you are subscribed to. And then I also create all of my emails from Flodesk. And what I love about Flodesk is their templates. All of their templates make it really, really easy for me to send really, really beautiful emails. All I do is just drag and drop. I put in my text. I drop in my images, all of my branding colors and my logo. All of that is already in there so that it all looks cohesive. It’s all on brand. And when I jump in to craft an email, I have plenty of templates to choose from. I just click and do all the things. And then like voodoo magic, it sends it all out to you. And voila, it makes it really, really, really easy to do that. I say that it is a nice to have at the beginning because I don’t think that Flodesk… When… Okay, before I was using Flodesk, I was using MailChimp and I had no problems with MailChimp other than it was just plain text, which is fine because remember at the end of the day, it’s the content that matters, not what it looks like. But it is also nice to have really beautiful emails sent out to all of my really beautiful subscribers. But I don’t think it has any… bearing over like your subscribe or unsubscribe numbers or your open rate. I think all of those have remained the same from platform to platform. So when you are just starting out and you’re looking really to just build your email list, I would stay with MailChimp. And then what I would do is as your subscribers jump onto your list, I would just manually copy and paste all of that into an Excel spreadsheet and So that when you are ready to move and migrate into something different, perhaps Flowdesk, then all you have to do is copy and paste all of those contacts, all of those subscribers into Flodesk. So now that I have been using Flodesk, and I think this was like a COVID thing for me. I started it… during COVID got it all set up. And now that it’s all set up, I will never leave. It’s super easy. It also allows me to do email funnels. So when someone joins my email list, I have a welcome sequence that it sends out. So I believe it’s a series of four right now where it sends automatically one email a week, just to kind of welcome you to the Kelsi Bailey photography family. If you are not yet a subscriber, I invite you to do so. Obviously you can see flow desk in action. If you go to kelsibailey.com, there is a little, there’s some text at the top of my webpage that says, let’s be pen pals. And you can just click there and you can join my email list. When you do that, you’ll notice that there is a little form that pops up and that is all part of Flodesk as well. So they make it really easy to add to your link in bio. They make it really easy to copy and paste that code onto my website. So Flodesk just makes things really easy peasy to keep all of my email subscribers in the loop. And it does feel a little bit extra with all of the beautiful templates, but you know, I don’t have any complaints about that. So those are my two big annual expenses, HoneyBook and Flodesk. 

And after that, I suppose we can jump in and talk about my monthly expenses, the things that I pay for every month to keep the business running. So The first and foremost and probably no-brainer here is my subscription to Adobe Cloud. Adobe Cloud houses my Photoshop and my Lightroom software, and this is obviously what has me editing all of your images. So Lightroom is something that I’m using 99.99999% of the time when I’m editing your images, and… If necessary, I can hop into Photoshop and my subscription to Adobe Cloud allows me to do that. So you guys are seeing the benefits of Adobe Cloud all the time in every image of mine that you see. So that is a very important payment that I make every single month and one that I obviously have no complaints about. The second is Shootproof. If you have ever received a photo gallery, a session gallery from me, then you have Shootproof to thank. They make it super easy. All I do is drag and drop. I upload your images to Shootproof. I name the gallery. I upload the print release. I also… have recently, very recently, actually added a print shop function to your gallery, which allows you to print images directly from your gallery versus downloading them yourself and printing them yourself, which I also love for you to do. But I know schedules are busy and things are tight, so I have added that as an additional feature. And so far, you guys have been loving it. So all of that is courtesy of Shootproof. Prior to Shootproof, when I started my business back in the day when I was still carrying around clipboards with all of my contracts on them, I was also delivering my galleries via WeTransfer and Dropbox. Shootproof was the first software that I found that allowed me, that was tailored specifically to photographers. And so I have tried a couple of different ones since then, and I just have not loved them as much as Shootproof. So Team Shootproof forever and ever and ever. If you’ve received a gallery and have ever had any trouble with Shootproof, I would love to hear from you, actually, because on my end, it is seamless and worth every penny that I pay to them every month. 

Now, I would say those are probably the most glamorous of the expenses. Those are the ones that you guys are really seeing on your end. And the rest of these, I have one more monthly expense and then all of my kind of miscellaneous expenses. And these are all like the super behind the scenes that aren’t super glamorous or sexy or exciting, but very much a big part of the business. My website host is a monthly expense that I make and websites are fun, but they are tricky, man. Like I bought my domain years and years ago and that’s a buy once, cry once kind of thing. You buy it one time, but I pay every month to have my website hosted, which is just kind of like the place on the internet where my website lives. So I do pay for that monthly. I I have not run into a ton of issues with the service that I use for this. But recently, I’d say in the last year or so, I did have some hackers that got in. So they were helpful in getting all of those issues resolved. So thankful that I pay for it every month. But it’s not always the most fun. When that invoice comes in, I just like to pay for it real quick and think, well, see you next month. Another expense that comes along with a website is anytime you want to… do a little glow up, a rebrand, a refresh. You can spend a little or a lot of money on website templates, or you can hire website designers. I did hire a designer once. That was a really large expense. I think it was right after my oldest was born. So that would have been like circa 2015. And I loved it. My website was beautiful. The designer was easy to work with. The problem that I had is that I like to change things a lot. And I like to be in the driver’s seat and in control of those things. And once my designer had gotten her hands on all of the things, it was hard for me to log into my website and try to change any of it. So since then, I have purchased WordPress templates on my own and done all of the design myself. I don’t know if that’s good, better, best or otherwise, but it’s just the way that I prefer to do it. So that can be an additional expense that can range in price when I’m doing any rebrands or refresh. So those are my annual expenses and my monthly expenses. And now the rest of these are going to be just kind of miscellaneous when necessary expenses. 

The first I’m going to talk about is equipment insurance. Not fun, not sexy at all. but 100% necessary. Back when I had my wedding videography business, which I talked about in episode one. So if you haven’t heard any of those stories, jump back, listen to episode one. But back in those days, we had an incident where we were shooting a wedding and one of our camera bags got run over by a car. It was not awesome. But having our insurance was awesome. And so ever since then, that has been like a non-negotiable. It should be non-negotiable in all businesses. But I know from time to time, when you’re looking to kind of trim expenses, you’re looking at equipment insurance like, well, should I? Should I not? I always do. And if anything were to happen, I’m glad that it’s there. Speaking of equipment, we can talk about all of my gear and all of the maintenance. I should probably do this more often than I do, but I will send my cameras and my lenses in to have them cleaned and calibrated from time to time it’s hard to find like an empty space on the calendar to ship them all off and be totally camera-less but I do send them in from time to time have them cleaned and calibrated and by the time you ship it all and have the shipping insurance that can be a really large expense but again necessary to keep all of my gear running and in shape When we’re talking about gear, it’s also important, I think, to mention not only the maintenance or the insurance, but also the gear that we have to kind of continually update, like laptops, hard drives, camera cards, lenses, cameras in general. I upgraded all of my equipment, actually. it might’ve been two years ago. Now I upgraded, I went to a mirrorless camera system and that’s a whole conversation for a whole nother day. But when you decide to upgrade gear, that is a very, very, very large expense. One that I do not make lightly. I do lots of research and I spend lots of time hemming and hawing. Should I? Should I not? Should I? Should I not? And so it is an expense that I’m not making super often, but it is a costly expense when I do decide to upgrade any of my gear. Also, like I said, your hard drives and your camera cards, those are things that I am buying pretty frequently. And those obviously are expenses that can add up quickly. So those… Also important, it is also important to note the wear and tear on my vehicle. My photography job is not traditional in the sense that I jump in my car and drive and make a commute, the same commute every day or three days a week or to the office, from the office. But I do love in-home sessions and I do a lot of newborn sessions in home. And so there are times when Months in particular where I am driving a lot to the session, from the session. Sometimes those sessions are 45 minutes away. Sometimes those sessions are 10 minutes away. But over time, that’s a lot of wear and tear on my vehicle. And so again, another thing to note in terms of investment that I’m making into my business is That is important. I also rent my studio space. So every time I have a studio session, I pay for that. Again, just an additional expense that I’m really glad to make. I’m glad I have the studio space available, but I do pay for it when I have sessions in there. It’s also important to note my editing and shooting time. When you look at a session investment, you see the one number, you think, oh my goodness, that’s a lot of money for XYZ, for her to take the photos, edit the photos, deliver the photos. But again, we have to remember that that is not all that a session entails. It entails all of the correspondence before and after the session. We’re talking about the drive time to and from the session, the time of the session itself, and then all of the time On the back end, where I’m putting all of her images onto my computer, I’m culling through them, which is the process of going through with a fine-tooth comb and saying, like at the eye doctor, yes, I like this image, not this one. This yes, this no. Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. And then from there, then I’m editing all of her images by hand, which I love to do. not complaining about that at all. It just, it takes time. And so it’s important to remember that when you pull away from the session and all of your hard work is done, most of my hard work is just beginning. So that time is valuable. My time is valuable and it’s just important to investment to think about on the backend. When you’re talking about editing, there are also times when we want to purchase what’s called presets or profiles. And these are the things that we can put into Lightroom or into Photoshop that will allow our images to look and feel a certain way. I have a set of presets that I use in Lightroom. I use the same one on every single image and they were quite expensive when I purchased them probably about a decade ago. So they’re not, again, an expense that I’m paying for every month or even every year. But kind of like camera gear, when you do decide to switch things up, when you do decide to change things, those can be a rather costly expense as well. 

The last and final thing I want to mention with regard to investing money into my business is education. I don’t think it matters how many years you’ve been in business, whether it’s one year, 15 years, 25 years. I think there is always something new to learn. And especially I think in a business that’s kind of technology based, I feel like things are always changing. There’s always something new. There’s always something shiny that you want to learn a little bit more about. And I think a responsible entrepreneur is going to explore those things from time to time. So I have, yes, invested in classes and courses. I took a bit of a mastermind, not this past summer, but the summer before that. I took an in-home session kind of mastermind. It took the duration of the summer and was a really large expense, but I did it and I learned a lot from it. So I do think it’s important to kind of keep those skills sharp from time to time. 

So I think that rounds out all of the expenses for my service-based business. I’ll run through them again real quick. My annual expenses, my two big ones are HoneyBook, my customer relationship management tool, Flodesk, which helps manage all of my email subscribers and helps me send out beautiful emails to all of you beautiful people. My monthly expenses are my Adobe Cloud subscription so that I can edit your images, my Shootproof subscription so that I can email you all of your galleries, my website maintenance, which… Like I said, it’s not my most favorite invoice to pay, but I pay it nonetheless because it’s important for my website to always be up and running. All of the miscellaneous expenses, my equipment insurance, my gear maintenance, my gear in general when I need to upgrade computers or cameras or lenses, and then all of the other additional expenses, my camera cards, hard drives, that kind of thing. Also, the wear and tear on my vehicle, driving to and from all of your sessions, my studio rental. So if you’ve ever, like I said, met me in the studio, I do… pay for that, my editing and my shooting time, the editing presets and profiles, and all of the education to keep me all on top of things, all educated in the latest and greatest when it comes to photography. 

Quick question. Did you know that I send out a little monthly love note to my email subscribers? It’s filled with photo session tips, behind the scenes peeks, podcast updates, and plenty of real life mama moments. You know, the kind you can read with your morning or afternoon coffee in hand. Plus, my subscribers are the first to know about session availability, mini session offerings, what’s new on my business, and I’ve been known to toss around some freebies from time to time. So if you haven’t subscribed yet, consider this your invitation to join the family. Simply visit kelseybailey.com and tap the Let’s Be Pen Pals icon at the top of the page. I can’t wait to chat with you in your inbox. And now back to the show. 

Wow, that was quite the deep dive into a dark, dusty corner of my business. Maybe this episode will have you thinking about my photography business or all service-based businesses, really, with a deeper understanding when it comes to the way that we price our services. Remember, behind every session investment is me, a real gal, running a real business, investing real time and my whole heart into every client experience. And I love the experience that I can give you thanks to the tools and the software and the gear that I invest in behind the scenes. 

Okay, lovelies, that’s a wrap on our chat for today. Thank you for allowing me to zip into your earbuds. I know your time is valuable and I’m so grateful that you chose to spend some of it chatting with me. I hope you’re walking away with a smile and maybe a bit of inspiration too. To revisit today’s discussion, you can head to kelseybailey.com slash podcast for show notes and discount codes from today’s sponsors. If you’ve enjoyed our conversation, I would be honored if you leave a review, subscribe to the show, or share this episode with a friend. Now, go give those you love an extra snuggle, may your coffee cup be bottomless, and I’ll meet you right back here in the next episode of the Kelsi Bailey Photography Podcast.