Nick Church: Taking the Plunge

In 2015 while exhibiting landscape photographs at a local gallery, a couple asked if I shot weddings. 15 minutes later, I had my first wedding booking and my hobby just got a bit more serious. As my portfolio and bookings increased, becoming a professional photographer started to seem possible, so I set my sights on making it happen.

I was working 50+ hours a week running a software company and shooting 10 weddings in 2016 was hard, but the 35 shot in 2017 nearly broke me! But I had to build the business to a point where I could make the transition from employee to business owner without facing a financial cliff-edge.

Throughout my career in software, I’d planned and tracked performance of large projects. I decided to treat the development of Nick Church Photography in the same way. With 50 weddings already in the pipeline for 2018, timing was critical and I couldn’t spend too long procrastinating. I needed to work out a realistic formula for what my earnings might be 12 months into the future and with some analysis of historical and current data this was not the guesswork it sounds.

I knew my income would come from the following activities:

Weddings booked for the next 12 months. I used Lightblue Software to provide the reports of the fees that would be invoiced.
Weddings booked beyond the next 12 months. Based on the previous 12 months I could forecast bookings and related booking fee income. I used a multiplier to model the fact that the number of bookings was increasing year on year, as was average spend.
Late wedding bookings. Bookings placed for weddings that would happen within the next 12 months would bring in booking fees and full-payment fees. Again, this was based on the previous year’s data and a multiplier used in the same way as above.
Other photography income: professional headshots, architectural photography, commercial shoots etc. I calculated bookings taken in the last 12 months and applied a multiplier to represent a likely increase due to increased promotion of this part of the business.

Adding the values of 1-4 gave me an estimated total revenue. Undertaking a similar exercise for my expenses allowed me to estimate net income over the next 12 months. Once this figure reached my software salary, I knew it was now or never!

Taking the leap has been exciting and liberating, and I have not regretted one moment. I have total confidence in my product and my ability to succeed, but I would be lying if I did not admit it is nerve-wracking to face life without the safety-net of a 9-5 job. In order to monitor performance, I have a spreadsheet that tracks the four income areas above and this will give me advance notice of any problems. While I can still do something about it.

One month in, thanks to a flurry of wedding bookings and an architectural shoot, I am currently tracking well above the revenue forecast, and this graph has become my new desktop image! Though I have also noticed I’m spending more than I thought on photography kit. This is a habit picked up when I had two income streams, and one that I’ll need to nip in the bud moving forward before it has an effect on bottom-line income.

With more time to focus on photography, I can be more intentional about what I want to achieve. I can better develop new opportunities, plan for business growth and expand in to commercial photography as well as weddings. I am also able to concentrate more on creativity because I build in the time and space to develop. That was previously hard to do if I was editing and planning a shoot from an airport somewhere in between business meetings.

Going full-time is not for everyone. If the main thing you love about photography is taking photos, then perhaps a balance between paid work and a full-time job is better. Doing this full time needs you to be a photographer, an accountant, a salesperson, an administrator, and a social media freak. Oh! and the hours are awful. But Nick Church Photography sees me spring out of bed in the morning ready to get cracking, and it’s a long time since I’d done that!