Business, What To Charge?

What to charge for your business.

I get asked this quite a lot by photographers just starting out, and its a tricky one.

I started at the bottom and worked my way up, I am not recommending you all start at £20 all in shoots, but it was an amazing learning curve! I was shooting in dark cramped spaces, mid day sun with children in fluorescent tops, in the rain, in the snow, with autistic children, with babies, with groups of thirty people………. It taught me so much, what a base!

I used the money I earnt from this to upgrade my camera and invest in my business.

But how you charge yourself should be based on three things.

1. Your cost of doing business ( tax, insurance, staff wages, standing orders for editing software, music, image storage, building costs, kit to invest in if you don’t already have it, transport, props, etc)

2. How much you want to/can work a month, say three shoots a week.

3. How much you want to take home as a wage for yourself once the bills have been payed

So add how much you need to earn as a business with how much you would like to have left over to take home a month (be realistic, if you are earning a wage elsewhere to be comfortable then add less)

Then divide this by how many shoots you will be doing per month.

This is how much you need to earn per client.

Take this as a base then build everything else around it.

Do check out my mentoring for professional and amateur photographers via this LINK if you want to learn more. From online workshops to one to one mentoring.