Today I had an awesome coffee date with a fellow photographer. I try to do personal meetings and errands on Mondays so that I’m not stuck at home on the first day of the week. I find that if I feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction on Monday, it sets the tone for the rest of the week, and one of the major things that gets my satisfaction levels up is getting together with other creatives. We chatted about lots of things, from IPS and marketing, to personal care and photography software, but one of the major themes that came up in one way or another was metrics of success; no doubt, photographers of all skill levels struggle with measuring all the ways in which we judge our own success, and it’s a great topic to discuss with someone who operates in your area and specialization, since you share the same market anthropology. That got me thinking about how I measure my own success, right now, today. I have already hit my fiscal target for 2017, but there are so many more factors to think about than pure numbers.
Are my clients returning to me?
What percentage of leads actually book me for services?
Where are my clients coming from?
What is my average profit per session, and which type of session is most profitable?
How happy are my clients with the quality of my products and services?
Am I happy with the quality of my products and services?
That’s a lot to think about at once. And notice I didn’t even mention social media, because I’ve been quietly failing to launch on that front for a long, long time. To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be Instagram famous, so it’s fortunate that that’s not high on my priority list. I wouldn’t mind the clientele it would bring in, though.
I’ll end this post with a thought from my upbringing, since I did mention my mother in the title. One thing she couldn’t tolerate from her children was ignorance. As a kid, when I messed up royally (thankfully this happened very few times), I often resorted to crying, “But I didn’t know!” in order to absolve myself from the responsibility of my actions. My mother, being the most infuriatingly correct person I’ve ever met, would give me a hand putting the pieces back together (literally, or figuratively), look me in the eye, and say, “Well now you do.”
My point is this: We all have the information we need to succeed, or a way to get it.
So go get it!