Learning and Growing

I love photography and I work hard to constantly become better at it.  It’s fun work and I enjoy learning new techniques and tricks because the results are always worth the effort!  But what no one ever tells you when you start talking about delving into the world of professional photography is that you constantly have to get better at your business practices too!  And that can be a very daunting and confusing task for someone who knows very little about business.  You constantly have to re-evaluate, reorganize, and adjust your plans and practices so that you can get your products to your customers.  Learning new business techniques are just as important as learning new photographic techniques!

My first big challenge came earlier this year when I had the amazing opportunity to shoot the Kaufman County Junior Livestock Show.  It was the most fun I have had in a while and I got to meet and work with a lot of amazing people.  But I ran into a problem, in that my workflow and fulfillment methods weren’t up to the task and that caused me to be very late in getting images out to my customers.  Yuck 😞 I want more than anything for my customers to get their images quickly and to be happy with the quality, not just because it’s good for business, but because photographs are beautiful reminders of special moments and they last a lifetime!  After struggling through the process, I learned a lot of valuable lessons and we have put all those lessons to work as changes to our workflow and fulfillment process.  What took us well over a month to get done before will now only take a couple of weeks at most!  It was a huge struggle but the learning process was definitely worth it as we have learned how to deliver photos better and faster to our customers.  

I owe a huge amount of thanks to all of the Kaufman County family for the opportunity but mostly for their patience and understanding.  Most of the parents out there were very kind and understanding of our delays as we tried to process through the literal 10,000 total images and get multiple prints out for them.  These last couple of weeks we have put all of our new procedures in place and developed some new partnerships to help us get your photos to you faster.  I’m just as excited about this as I am about any new photo technique because what good are photos if we can’t get your orders to you!

Thanks again KCJLS, with over 200 individual customers our first county show was a challenge, but it was a blessing as we got to meet and work with some very kind and gracious people and improve ourselves along the way.  Hopefully we will get to see you next year!