Profiting from your efforts

Dave newman HISTORICALLY , the word profit has been seen to include early deep rooted feelings of evil doings. Profit, I find, should not require a major gilt mind-shift and be viewed simply as the reason and purpose for my business: the business of operation a portrait studio. The goal of my business might well be to satisfy the needs of our clients but the purpose is to create and achieve a livelihood or degree of wealth from the success and profits of the operation. The portraits shown here reflect a limited level of expertise obtained in my craft. These completed portraits represent, however, only one third of the three-fold task of my portrait studio operation.

Allow me to list each:

1- M & M (marketing and managing)

2- Image Capture

3- Sales

The success of any retail business depends virtually on the passion one places into all three areas. Sales, however , is often thought to happen naturally as the clients shows approval of our efforts. Nonsense! Scientific and systematic presentation is a key factor involved in augmentation of the dollar volume. A sign hangs in the rear employee area of my studio which reads " Don't be order Takers, . . . be order Makers". Training people and hiring good people are a given. Dave newamn recives SWPP award

Eyeball to eyeball, face to face is the common law of 'salesjungle' but we can improve upon this with a few additional proven guidelines. Presenting your images to a larger audience can improve sales. Presenting your images in a larger format can seriously improve sales. Presenting your images in person will always improve sales (thus, eyeball to eyeball).

Profitable, large orders don't seem to rely on speed or immediacy of the presentation of preview images after the session. Give yourself some breathing time to prepare your sales presentation. Your client pays for the session but, as yet, receives nothing…they want something. As time passes, they realize more and more that they "need something" and will be even more anxious to purchase when presenting your images with some sophistication. Make a separate viewing (sales) appointment as they exit the creation session.

Dave newman painting Our Viewing Theater (sales room) is larger than many studio camera rooms: my chief salesperson demanded it when designing our new studio. We project our many daily digital files (we shoot digital mostly but otherwise when film is used for larger groups, etc., we scan our film to disc) using one of two LCD projectors: an Epson or the newer lightweight NEC projector. Projection is the key. This comes from previous years of Ektagraphic slide projectors and the like. Show big and sell big….is there a simpler rule of thumb for increasing print sizes? Show your clients a small beautiful proof print and they desire a small beautiful print. Present your images to your client with a wall size projections and guess what??? They actually begin to think of larger sizes. ACDsee 1.6 for Mac or Ulead Explorer 8 for PC become our functioning sales software tools. We download our Fuji S-1 cameras from Flash cards via a Zio adapter onto our camera room computer, then make a smaller working, less cumbersome, views copy via Adobe Photoshop Elements (plenty good enough). We make a fresh disc containing a copy of both the full files and skinny views files to be handled by our sales staff.

These working views are then dealt with as follows. We drop the images, before our client sees them, into a presentation software package such as Dave newman group

Ulead, then rotate, crop etc. ready for client viewing to music in our comfortable homey theater. Images are projected directly onto a bold white wall, for several reasons (hold off on frame sales, as yet) . Final image selections are projected onto actual blank white canvas panels, which are stretched for appearance and introducing the possible upgrading of this image to this profit-laden finish. Now Make that order!

We're not finished yet! Selling a "sampler" copy protected disc with all images can also be prepared in minutes, after the Ulead preparation and viewing, using a program called Foto Angelo 1:1 (avail. for PC only). This can be prepared for sales, shipping, previewing or internet usage, all containing music backgrounds, in less than three minutes. Do we sell this Foto Angelo disc? Yes indeed! We do, however, reduce the price of this "sampler" as the sale escalates . As an incentive, we gift the sampler when sales reach our specified goal. As a standalone purchase it must, of course, be seriously priced. This exe program is difficult to impossible to print from, but provides an interesting, fun preview presentation with your log, address, phone number tag after the final image in the series is presented.

Dave Newman Group

Presenting your images to larger groups of people can be best done with an e.commerce Site such as our favorite EZ-Post. This company provides website hosting as well as Easy to use presentation of our weddings, out-of-town clients, special party events, and etc. We pay .05 (US) for each image posted and each image can be compared to any other posted image by our clients from Burma to Squirrel Creek Idaho . Yes, that's right, side by side comparisons, black and white or colored are exactly what clients love most of all.

The SWPP 2008 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 138 days to get ready for the 2009 convention - which starts on January 14, 2009

Photo Quote: We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant. - Alfred Eisenstaedt