Photographers: Become a Solo Agency and Increase Income and Stability

As an agency, you can create more streams of income.

A storm is brewing at the ranch. Taken today on the way home from lunch.

Everywhere I look these days, I see creatives expanding their reach by expanding their skills. That expands their offerings, and expanded offerings can expand their wallets.

No matter what anyone tells you about the art of commercial art, in the end it is a business based on IP. Intellectual Property.

We don’t sell things, we sell our expertise at creating things.

Whether it is photography, design, marketing, or any kind of media, the brains behind it are what we are selling.

The rest of it is just…. stuff.

I have watched designers become photographers, writers become photographers, bloggers become photographers, marketers become photographers, and even illustrators become photographers.

But I rarely see photographers becoming designers or illustrators.

I don’t know why, but then there are a lot of things that I don’t know.

Like, why we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?

Or why TV commercials are so awful even though they spend millions of dollars in production?

Or why Tacos aren’t free. We need a national subsidy for tacos, dammit.

But why photographers don’t embrace other skills is one that has me totally flummoxed.

For one thing, photographers are already designers to a high degree.

FRAME > COMPOSITION > HIERARCY > LIGHT > PRODUCTION > PRESENTATION.

Yeah, we can be a bit daft with typography at first, but everyone is daft with typography at first.

(Pro Tip: Just because you have 547 typefaces in your font catalog, it doesn’t mean we have to use all of them on a business card.)

Design takes some learnin’, yeah, but we learned Photoshop and mastered the Blend If tool in less than an hour. Or so.

We good.

We can learn typography - at least well enough to do it at an acceptable level.

We can learn structure and white space and flow.

We can also art direct.

In fact, so many photographers are being called on to art direct as well as make the photo that we can safely say the days of the art director breathing over our shoulders and making tiny tweaks to our work are essentially bygone.

Photographers are shooting to briefs that are as brief as briefs can be.

Often without art directors even on set.

And, when working with direct clients, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and brands, the ‘art director’ is usually the client telling you kind of what they want, and you are then on your own to build it out.

Photographers are being asked to do a lot of things, but we are not seeing ourselves in a greater light as much as I want us to.

Today a photographer is called on to be:

1. Advertising Exec

2. Art Director

3. Marketing Expert

4. Casting Director

5. Wardrobe Consultant

6. Stylist

7. Food Stylist

8. Prop Manager

9. Set Designer

10. Producer

And more.

All of you reading this know you have done all or most of the above for clients in the past four years.

We all have.

So why are we giving all that away?

Pragmatically it is probably because our clients - small businesses, entrepreneurs, and brands of all sizes, would choke dramatically if they saw the bill from us for all of this work we simply give away.

But that shouldn’t stop us from expanding our toolkit and finding ways to build a more flexible visual studio and offering items that we can certainly be paid for.

Here are places where photographers should consider expanding into:

1. Art Direction:
   You do it for your work, do it for someone else’s work. Freelance art direction is something you can build up, just like your photography portfolio. And you can charge for it.

2. Design:
   Graphic or Web. You can work on the skills in your spare time. Start creating an ad or an Instagram reel once or twice a week. It’s fun, and it can make you an irreplaceable asset for your clients.

3. Visual Marketing Expert:
   You know what looks good. You know color, and you know what a good visual marketing piece looks like. You are a visual artist. Think about how to expand that knowledge and offer that expertise.

4. Curator:
   Help brands and clients manage their visual mediums. Continuity, brand identity, and more are things you work with all the time.

5. Social Media Visual Asset Creator:
   Yeah, in other words, use your skills in photography and design to make stuff your clients can use in their expanded social media marketing efforts. This can be steady and lucrative.

I can hear some of you saying “I’m not ready…”

But I am going to shout you down and say… “Have y’all heard of the internet?”

Are you aware that Kanye West uses freelancers from Freelance.com and Fiverr to do a lot of his design work?

Did you know that you can do that too?

Are you aware of all the places where you can bring in freelancers to help you do what you need to do?

I bet you are wondering, “Don, are you suggesting I become a solo agency?”

I Am Suggesting You Become a Solo Agency

And there are good reasons why I am doing it.

The impact of AI is just now being felt across wide swaths of the creative arts.

See this chart from Reddit:

Note the red stripes:
Down in writing, social media management#, translations, and customer service.

All of that makes sense.

(# Management, not creative work.)

But up in design, video, and web design.

The need for creativity is growing.

Fast.

Learning to utilize the assets at our fingertips is a powerful way to expand our bottom lines while continuing to do what we love to do.

Scenario:

A business contacts you and you have a meeting to assess what you can do for them.

They obviously need photographs, and you have that covered.

But they also need a website, new brochure and collateral, and as yet they have no email list or any way to capture emails for further online marketing.

You help them work out a wireframe for the website, and then contact a good designer on Fiverr to do it for you. (Most of the 5-Stars are solid and will also do as many as five revisions on the first ticket… What?!)

Need a copywriter?
You can find one.
Need an illustrator?
You can find one.
Need an SEO expert?
You can find one.

And they work for you.

For that gig, they are your team.

I just met a guy here in Phoenix who is a one-man creative shop, and he doesn’t do any creative production; it’s all freelancers.

A former art director, he is now a one-person powerhouse of ideation and client management.

He has never been happier.

Look, I am not forcing this stuff on you, I am only asking you to consider all the other ways you can use your visual arts work to help clients who need you.

And for you, the multi-channel income helps keep the ups and downs of this business a bit more even, allowing for more cash flow and more ancillary work.

I am a pragmatic creative.

I want to be happy, and I want to stay afloat in a crazy time that seems to be getting crazier every day.

I hope you think about it, do a little research, and dig deep to discover what else you have going for you.

I can almost guarantee it is more than you imagine.

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Hey there! You wanna build something cool!

Check out the “Build a Killer Website Sprint”

And remember, this is No-code work. Visual only.

We will start at the beginning by understanding the underlying structure of a website, how to think of it when you are putting your ideas down, and ways to make this part of the work easier.

We will then open our browsers together and build the site. You building yours, while I lead in the structural creation.

You do not need to know how to build a website on Friday, you WILL know how to build one on Monday.

March 22, 23, 24, 2024.

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When you are ready, here is how I can help you succeed.

Group Mentorship: a small group of photographers who meet to show images, work on their portfolio, and build their businesses with help from a wonderful group. Lifetime membership for one fee.

One-on-one Mentorship: You and me - working together in an intense 6-month push to get you on the way to over $30K in additional revenue. The work we lay down will help you increase and scale your business for years ahead.

The Creative Class: Expand your toolset and become a one-person visual agency capable of pulling in steady and repeated income. If you have questions, let me know, and I will answer them as fast as possible.