So often photographers jump in to a business thinking it’ll be fun and low-key. I mean, all you have to do is take and edit some photos, right? If they’re treating their business like a business, though, they quickly find they’ve underestimated how much time it takes. Between being the photographer and editor, the marketer, the accountant, the website developer, the SEO expert, the administrator and everything else, they feel overwhelmed and wonder, when am I going to have time to do the things that I love? I went through the exact same thing about 2 years into my business and I’m going to show you the three steps I took to lessen the load and how you can make more time in your photography business.

Step one: Create boundaries. When building a business we can let it take over our lives if we aren’t intentional with how we spend our time. To help you make more time in your photography business, you need to intentionally plan how you spend your business time. When working from home or our own office, we can let ourselves get sidetracked and have little things seep into our work day like folding laundry, washing dishes or scrolling social media. Create boundaries around your work time and decide what is permitted within those hours you’re working and what is not. Then, stick to it.

To create more balance, I recommend doing the same with your personal life. Don’t let work seep into your personal time. If your work time ends at 5, don’t answer emails or the phone after 5. Don’t spend the time you had set aside for your family, friends or leisure activity working on business things.

Step two: Prioritize and automate. Next, figure out what the biggest priorities in your business are – the money making activities and the things that are needed to keep the business functioning. Once you know what HAS to happen each week, see what you can automate. Obviously, you need to reply to inquiries. A great CRM like Dubsado allows you to do this automatically, without you lifting a finger. (Please note that link is an affiliate link. I do get a kickback if you purchase a Dubsado subscription, but I promise I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t think it was an amazing product!) You can also create workflows to send automatic emails to client at different points in their photography experience. Connect your bank account to Quickbooks so that your expenses are already present. Schedule out a months worth of social media and have it auto-post for you. Figure out how you can get technology working for you, so that you can free up your time for the things a human actually needs to do.

Step three: Outsource. This is the biggest thing that helped my business. The ability to offload some of the things that I didn’t love doing allowed me to move from struggling to run one business in about 25 hours a week, to running three in that time, with my photography business taking less than 10 hours per week. Things you can outsource include: editing, bookkeeping, SEO, blogging, social media, emails and phone calls, album design, marketing, just to name a few.

Personally, I recently started using Ai to edit, which takes hours off my plate and makes my turn around time much quicker. I also outsource my blogging, which has led to almost double the traffic to my website. I have a VA working on my Facebook, a digital marketer posting to my social media and a bookkeeper keeping track of my expenses. And since these people are all better at what they do than I am, it leads to not only more time in my business, but also more clients.

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