Photography is SUCH a personal business.
As an entrepreneur and artist, you have to win over the trust of your clients, capture their images, and reflect their visions in the photos you create.
Most photographers do all of this face-to-face—even the planning—since discussions about imagery are often emotional and nuanced. (This is especially true if you shoot weddings!)
Given all this, can a virtual assistant really be helpful to a photography business?
Heck yes!
In fact, having a VA to handle the back-of-office tasks that power the machinery of your business is a fantastic way to ensure you, as the visionary, can focus your energies on capturing spectacular images.
Naturally, you’ll need someone with the right skill set, but plenty of VAs have all the experience needed to help out behind the scenes.
Once you hire a virtual assistant for your photography business, she’ll become an essential part of your team. Here’s how.
Hire a virtual assistant to help process images
You’ll want to handle some photo editing and post-processing tasks yourself, including the initial edit. Since you’ve discussed the client’s needs and expectations, you’re the one who gets to thin the herd and pick the best images from the shoot!
But a skilled virtual assistant who has experience in photo editing and processing can help you with retouching, blending, resizing, cropping, creating black-and-white options for certain images, and renaming the finished files.
Just imagine how much time you’ll save by delegating all that fiddly work to a talented VA!
Hire a virtual assistant to schedule your appointments
Even if you field initial client calls yourself, putting your VA in charge of scheduling (and rescheduling) any in-person appointments or calls is a fantastic way to slim down your workload.
Even virtual assistants who aren’t artistic wizards can help you manage your schedule, populate your calendar, and ensure you’re on time for every meet and conversation.
Ask her to set your appointments with potential clients, maintain your availability on your calendar, and provide you with your daily, weekly, or monthly agendas.
Again, since photography is a business that relies on trust, showing yourself to be reliable and punctual is crucial.
Working with your VA to create a seamless schedule ensures you’ll put your best foot forward with every single client.
Hire a virtual assistant to handle client communications
Of course, some client outreach can be delegated, too!
Your VA can help delight your customers by coordinating email communication, handing follow-up after final images are delivered, sending cards for birthdays and anniversaries, and answering simple questions about your services.
If you offer package deals or seasonal specials, your virtual assistant can also help assemble and schedule any email promotions or website updates about these offers.
Imagine how much simpler your life would be if you could delegate this work to a trusted VA …
Hire a virtual assistant to oversee administrative tasks
In addition to calendar and communication oversight, your VA can handle organizing your emails on a daily basis, filing and formatting various documents, managing client databases, and other clerical tasks.
A photography business generates a TON of digital assets, from photo files to client correspondence to invoices, and a skilled VA will ensure all of them are easy to find and revise as needed.
Hire a virtual assistant to manage post-shoot client needs
Gone are the days when photographers created contact sheets for their clients to peruse. Now, clients expect online galleries of their images, and the ability to select and order photos through their laptops and phones.
Funneling the results of a multi-hour photo shoot into a client gallery can take some doing, so consider putting your VA in charge of setting up galleries, managing permissions, upgrading clients, and overseeing the ordering process.
She can pull you in if tricky questions arise but, should be able to handle the day-to-day of post-shoot client requests on her own.
And these suggestions are just a start!
Outside of photography business-specific work, you have additional marketing, social media, website tasks that need to be handled, too.
There’s no need to juggle everything related to your business on your own.
Hiring a virtual assistant to help manage and grow your photography business will make everything about your working life much less stressful and allow you to dedicate yourself to the creative side of your business.
xoxo
Melissa
PS. Not sure what you should outsource in your business? Click here to take my free quiz to find out the #1 task that you need to outsource.
