A staggering analysis for running a successful photography business in Michigan.

I’m in the process of doing some major evaluations on our business. Our goal is to be one of the best Michigan wedding photographers along with having a success portrait business serving high school seniors, kids, families, and babies. We spend a lot of time running our photography business to make this a reality…too much time in fact, which can make family life difficult sometimes. I really needed to understand what jobs are getting done, how long they take, who’s doing them, etc. to help me evaluate our current state and plan for the future of our business.

I knew that we spent a lot of time working, but I never really knew how much. During peak season, on average we might have 1 wedding, 1 portrait session, and 1 sales session. Sometimes it’s more than that, and some weeks it’s less, so I used that as my median. If we did everything that needs to get done, we put in about 113 man hours per week between Cheridy and I which doesn’t include anything related to taking care of the home/family. I typically spend about 81 hours per week on the business and Cheridy spends about 32. By the time you account for our home related chores and activities, we both are busy for about 85 hours per week and that includes having some help. The numbers used to be higher before we had any help.

A large portion of my time is spent working ON the business which is important for continued growth and long term success and this whole project has made me realize that for the sake of our family, we need to either cut back on business or get more help. That led to another analysis to determine the costs of running our business to figure out if hiring more help is even feasible. Most people would laugh at the excel spreadsheets that went into figuring all this out. I’m an excel nerd but at least I’m using that engineering degree for something!! It’s always eye opening to start looking at the real numbers!!

Here’s just some of todays geekiness!!