Taking Back Monday

A friend of mine sent this to me and it's brilliant. Full-disclosure, we're re-printing this without permission because it was pulled from another source. Robert is a great guy and has been a leader in the school photography business for years.

By Robert W. Kerr

ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHICS INC

If your fall school portrait season is anything like ours (and I believe it is) we have only about ten weeks to get all of our school portraits taken. To make maters worse very few schools want to take portraits on a Monday even though parents seem to prefer this date because they have more time to prepare their small children.

For several years I have had a difficult time booking school portrait dates on Mondays and was looking for any solution to this problem I could get. I figured giving up 20% of our school portrait capacity in an already short school portrait season was no way to successfully operate our company.

Think about this! Lets assume you have two portrait photographers (cameras) in place and that your portrait season is ten weeks. If you eliminate the requirement to fully book each Monday you are limiting your ability to book 20 more school portrait sessions (10 Mondays x 2 Photographers = 20 portrait sessions) in the fall. This can amount to as much as 8,000 or more students on these very useful days. This lost capacity problem is only compounded as you grow to more photographers and cameras.

There will come a time when you will have to spend even more money to add additional photography staff and expensive photography equipment just to grow beyond this limited capacity.

So what is the solution to this problem. It could not be easier. Just give your schools the financial incentive to select a Monday over any other day of the week. In our case it is $100 for each portrait camera put into production payable to the school or PTA on July 1 each year. This is even before portraits are taken. We call this our Monday Bonus and many schools are finding out now that Mondays can be a great day for portraits as well as instantly rewarding financially.

Using the scenario above selling 20 new schools on a Monday can increase your sales by as much as $100,000 and it will only cost you $2,000 in Monday Bonus awards. On the first day we initiated this program we rebooked four of our long term school accounts and three of them took a Monday as their portrait date even though they had never selected a Monday in the past. Sounds like this is a solution we all could live with.

Making better use of your personnel and equipment will help improve your bottom line by as much as 20% because you can now increase your business in the fall without adding to the cost of staff and equipment.

This is a great solution to the problem because we have made it a win-win situation for the school and the photographer.

DVD Yearbooks?

Interesting perspective on DVD yearbooks from someone outside the industry, a student.

JA

More on Charter Schools

This from the American Enterprise Institute on Public Policy Research.

JA

Marco Photo Service School Picture Delivery Times

It's no secret in the school picture industry that Marco Photo Service has delivered fall undergrad packages in record time this year, but I got a few stats this morning that I just have to share.

• By close of business today, we will have printed and shipped all work received in the month of October!
• Late orders, corrections, and other one-off orders are shipping in betwen 12 - 36 hours.

A hearty round of applause to all of the dedicated Marco Photo Service employees who are helping schools and families all over the country receive their picture packages in record time!

Jay

OASSA Conference - David Warlick and the Role of Technology in Today's Learners

MPS Foto just finished our first educator's conference and trade show. Over 300 secondary school administrators learned about our company -- many for the first time -- and we learned a lot about them.

I also had the opportunity to listen to a keynote address by a gentleman named David Warlick. He's an educator who travels all over the place talking about the changing role of technology in the lives of our children. He talked about how classroom blogging, the idea of a flat classroom, cell phones, texting, video games, YouTube, and any number of other things -- ever hear of machinima? -- have made young people into dramatically different learners. His point, as I understood it, was that educators had to make a commitment to making today's schools relevant to tomorrow's learner. The educational community cannot afford to go the other way and try to force students who are now, in Warlick's view, genetically coded to learn differently than we are, into educational situations where they are just going to tune out.

Here's his links if you want to check him out. Fun stuff.

David Warlick
For Teachers: http://landmark-project.com/
For Clients: http://davidwarlick.com/
Blog http://2cents.davidwarlick.com/
Podcast http://connectedlearning.davidwarlick.com

Jay

Charter Schools a Growth Opportunity?

Charter schools have popped up all over the country in response to failing public school systems. They have absorbed thousands of students that formerly went to public schools. Now, assuming that the statistics showing falling public school enrollment have stayed steady, this means that many of the schools we are working in are seeing a decline in enrollment. Currently, Ohio has 328 charter schools, enrolling about 88,800 students at an estimated public price tag of $603.2 million this year.

That's a lot of students. For example, look at the stats from the AP / Cleveland Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND (AP) — Enrollment in Cleveland's public schools keeps shrinking.

The state's second-largest school system had more than 150,000 students in the late 1960s. Now, district chief academic officer Eric Gordon says the count has fallen below 49,000, after a recent accounting of students who never show up and have been confirmed gone.

Gordon thinks the figure could dip to 47,000 in early October, when Ohio schools take formal head counts.

The Cleveland school district trails only Columbus for enrollment. But many students have left Cleveland's public schools for privately run, publicly funded charter schools or attend private schools on state vouchers.

More than 25,000 Cleveland school children went to charter schools or used vouchers last year.

———

Information from: The Plain Dealer, http://www.cleveland.com

What this means to us (and our competitors) is that we now photograph fewer students per public school on average than we did years ago. This fact, combined with declining school enrollment is a real challenge we have to overcome.

So how can we grow our photographic businesses with the charter school boom? Here's what we're finding as we photograph and process more charter schools.

1. Charter schools primarily pull students from failing urban school districts. In Ohio, that means Columbus City Schools, Cleveland City Schools, etc. The prevailing demographic that we have seen has been one where 70+% of students are on free and reduced lunch.

2. Charter schools are pretty well-funded and often operate in great facilities.

3. Charter schools are photographically under-served -- many never having seen a school photo rep as late as this past September.

4. Charter schools operate with a refreshing lack of traditional school bureaucracy and will make decisions quickly.

5. Charter schools will accept -- and understand -- that high commissions and giveaways are not realistic if they want top-notch photographic services.

Our studio division is betting that charter schools can be a big part of a rapid growth strategy.

The value proposition we put forward is basically this.

1. We remove risk from the parents by providing proofs of the portraits. Allow them to see what they are purchasing.

2. We keep prices competitive and allow parents to purchase whatever they want. There is no requirement that the parent purchase a package before adding single sheets.

3. We allow a variety of payment options. We allow payment via cash, check, credit, or debit cards. Credit or debit cards go through our online store.

Obviously, proofing entails a greater up front risk for us. In exchange for what we are offering, the school makes a couple of concessions.

1. They accept a very low commission, or no commission at all.

2. We work together to limit the number of service items that they receive free of charge.

We're gathering data now and will post it as soon as the photography season closes, but we're interested in what you have to say. How have charter schools impacted your area? What are you doing to capitalize on their emergence as an academic force?

Jay

Youth Sports Marketing

Interesting discussion on marketing youth sports photography.

Jay

Performance of On-line Commerce in School Photography, Part 1

Online photo ordering has recently gained a lot of traction in school photo marketplace. Our company, Marco Photo Service, has been engaged in the online model for a number of years. We've been collecting data for some time and thought it would be interesting to make some of it public, and possibly start a discussion.

Everybody's raging right now about pre-pay online services and web-enabled proofing which have really begun to hit their stride this year. These areas are probably going to prove the tipping point for our industry that takes us from cash or check into the internet age, but we'll look at these in a different post.

On-line re-ordering has been around a little longer and we've got more data on it. Here's a summary, but if you would like to know more about it you should contact us. We'll be happy to go into detail.

Hard Facts
Number of subjects offered opportunity to order online: approx 200,000

Average sale to those who ordered: $48.00

Purchase rate: About 1%

Things to Think About
As a rule, if you assume $15.00 - 20.00 per unit retail, getting participation at or above one percent is the key to profitability. If you can drive participation past one percent, profitability is almost assured.

Don't get fixated on only the hard numbers. Remember that outsourcing your customer service to the web can be a great money saver. Example: one large studio processed 305 reorders through their site last fall. At 30 minutes total labor saved per reorder at $15.00 / hour (that's conservative, we think) that studio saved 152.5 man hours -- or $2287.50.

Schools with great pre-pay buy rates will probably not be net profitable, simply because most of the parents have already purchased. They are just going to be less likely to order again.

Novelty items like coffee mugs and aprons do sell -- but not very much. The overwhelming leader in terms of sales are still traditional flat prints with no enhancements.

Again, if you want to know more, drop us a line.

What have others experienced?

Jay

Size Matters -- The 11x17 Proof Envelope

This past spring, we introduced a new item to our catalog for underclass proofing that worked really well for our photography customers. That item was the 11x17 custom proof flyer. I know, I know... photographers and labs have been printing proofs on order envelopes for years now. What's the big difference?

Well, what we were betting on was the concept that, as a professional lab, we are obligated to provide the best tools to our studio customers. So we looked at the current standard for spring proofing and here is what we found:

• 60 lb uncoated offset paper
• 8.5 x 14 with a money envelope
• Smallish proof image
• In-house design
• Not enabled for e-commerce (most of the time)

So what we decided to do was try to each one of the above things differently or better. Here's where we ended up:

• 60 lb gloss coated stock
• 11 x 17 in size with a money envelope
• Room for larger proof images
• Professional graphic design
• E-commerce ready

We don't have comparative data from one year to the next, unfortunately. Anecdotal feedback from studios and parents was universally positive, though. The coated stock gave every proof a really professional look to it that uncoated stock couldn't touch. It had the added benefit of boosting the contrast and quality of the proof image as well.

Customers commented that the larger size was a great feature. The two most commonly cited benefits were that they had more room to market to their customer and also that it made the proof flyer more prominent and harder to lose track of at home.

Finally, the e-commerce ready ordering was a huge boon to those who took advantage of it. In the case of our in-house photo studio, orders are being accepted and fulfilled today, months after jobs were photographed. The data we have shows that buy rates and total dollars spent are both up in the online space when compared to traditional ordering.

If you would like to learn more about how we made this project go, just contact us.

Build A Sales Machine: Stop Obsessing Over "The Decision Maker"

This is a great post. It makes a lot of sense in terms of who we (as labs or photographers or printers) sell to in 2008. Even speaking personally, in my own team I often refer salespeople to people who work for me because I will not make a decision until they have met and talked to him or her. Their buy in is imperative -- and the lack of it will be a huge negative influence on a potential deal.

Here's a quote form this short article and a link to the whole thing.

"One of the changes in B2B selling is that, instead of decision makers making their own, often arbitrary decisions, purchase decisions today are made through a collaborative process involving multiple people and teams. This has always been a part of B2B sales, but now it's dominant. The 'decision making process' is now more important than 'the decision maker'."

Build A Sales Machine: Stop Obsessing Over "The Decision Maker"

Developing Sports Leads with Google

Part of Marco Photo's business model is to also serve customers as a portrait studio. We photograph and produce picture packages, programs, marketing, and yearbooks for schools and leagues all over Ohio.

One of the interesting things that cropped up as we began to develop our sports league business concerned the question of developing valid sports leads. Schools are easy. Either subscribe to a data service or purchase your statewide directory and - boom - you've got everything you need to get started.

Sports leagues have been a lot more challenging. We think that has a lot to do with how leagues are organized. By and large, they are associations staffed by volunteers that have no central mailing address or location to visit. They are very, very fluid in terms of who to contact, when to contact, & where to contact. This left us with a problem to solve and I thought it might be helpful for us to share how we solved the problem.

In a nutshell, we love Google.

What we've found is that the internet has become the central location for youth sports organizations. Most have their own web sites, which will often list coaches, boards of directors, schedules, etc. For example, one search on "youth soccer in arkansas" took us here, one click later we were here, and one click later we were here. Check out all the valuable data that is there for the taking. It takes a lot of effort and manual work, but the content of these sites can be entered into spreadsheets or e-mail applications like Outlook. Once the work is done, the marketing and sales efforts can begin. Now, of course we have to be mindful of SPAM laws and smart about what we do with the data, but there is a lot of it there to work with when the effort is expended to get it off of the internet and into a database.

Jay

How to Copyright your images

As a photographer, you may not feel like it is necessary to register your images with the U.S. copyright office. However, there has been a few cases, where if the photographer had take the time to do so, they would have been much better protected.

I don’t think most photographers would ever sue a parent over copyright infringement. The publicity alone would be enough to put the photographer out of business. But, there have been some cases, where the media copied the image from a yearbook or received one from a parent and used it without the permission of the photographer.

The authority on Copyright issues is:

Al Hopper, CAE
Director of Membership, Copyright & Government Affairs
229 Peachtree Street NE, Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303-1608 USA
phone: 800-339-5451 x232
ahopper@PPA.com

He is from the Professional Photographers of America. They actively lobby congress for image copyright laws.

Images must be registered with the U.S. copyright office. You have up to 3 months after an image is taken to register it. For a flat fee of about $30.00 you can register your images in bulk with the copyright office. This means you can register all of your images 4 times a year (everything you’ve taken over a period of 3 months) and be protected. This doesn’t mean that someone won’t still steal your images, but you have done what you can to legally protect yourself.

Unless a work is registered before a copyright infringement takes place OR within ninety (90) days of first publication, damage awards may be limited to “actual damages”. This is often the fee a creator would have been paid for the work had it been licensed properly.

The problem comes from the fact that copyright law is a federal law and copyright claims must be prosecuted in Federal court. This can be very expensive. Just filing the claim and initial briefs can cost in excess of $10,000.00! In fact, a protracted copyright case can cost hundreds thousands of dollars in legal and court costs!

If your actual damages are only a few hundred dollars, say for an infringement of photograph in a ¼ page ad in a local newspaper, you need to be really motivated or independently wealthy to bring the case to court.

However, if your images are registered, you are eligible for actual damages as well as up to $200,000 in punitive damages per infringement. And, the courts may (and frequently do) force the infringer to pay all legal and court costs. The fear of the legal bill is often the leverage that motivates an infringer to settle a claim long before it moves to court. Registration clearly is the “big stick” for independent creators.

Here is a simple procedure to register all of your work. Keep in mind that you need to register every three months for full protection. Images must be registered before an infringement takes place OR within 90 days of first publication. Registering your current work every three months will keep you within that legal time frame.

You will bulk register all of your images as unpublished images using short form VA. http://www.copyright.gov/forms/formvas.pdf.

1.Setup a folder on your desktop and label it “Copyright”
2.On each assignment you photograph, simply make a low-resolution j-peg copy of each image and drop it in the file.
3.At the end of the second month, write the folder to CD-ROM
4.Fill out Short Form VA completely
5.Write a check to the Register of Copyright for $30.00
6.Send the submission, in a box, to: Library of Congress, Copyright Office, 101 Independence SE, Washington, DC 20559

Taylor Publishing in Hot Water

This has not been a good year for yearbook publishers. First Lifetouch makes the national news regarding the altering of images in a Texas high school's yearbook, and now, tonight, I see on MSNBC that Taylor Publishing is in hot water. A Google search revealed not one, but two scandals inside of a week:

First, there's a spell checker gone crazy.
When one reads the final comment (reported by the AP) of the Taylor representative, Ed Patrick you have to just get a little sick for our industry. Here's what he said:

"It happens all the time, every year," Patrick said. "Look at any yearbook in the country."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the school photography or publishing industries.

Then, as if that isn't enough, a Taylor Publishing representative was recently convicted of a fraudulent scheme where he bilked schools out of over $700,000 over the course of 4 years.

Wow. All that fun in less than a week. Who wants to bet if there might be a vacancy or two in the Taylor public relations department?

Jay

Now Introducing Michael Stevens of PhotoLynx

Hi, I'm the general manager of PhotoLynx, Inc. We develop software mostly used by school, event, and sports photographers and photo labs, such as Marco Photo Service. I consider myself a geek. I spend a lot of time checking out the "latest & greatest" gadgets. I particularly keep my eyes open for stuff I think will be helpful to school, event, and sports photographers.

I'm going to start off with what I think is a pretty cool device. I have actually used this and I was initially a little disappointed in the noise I see when used with modeling lights. But, after a while I got used to the noise and didn't notice it any more.

Zigview attaches to the eyepiece of most any digital or film SLR and displays the image in real time on a 2.5 inch color display. It also has an additional output that will allow it to be viewed on any video monitor. The Display flips around and up and down for easy viewing, without bending over to look through the display. It can also be detached and viewed away from the camera.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2oEVRJh4pY&rel=1]

Here is a list of camera Models that the Zigview will fit to:

I feel this would be perfect for school photographers as it will better able the photographer to frame and crop the students without having to bend over and look through the viewfinder each time. Much like in the days of long roll cameras such as the Camerz Classics, ZII, & ZIII. You can also just tape a camera mask on the screen for verifying head size and crop. This will save a lot of time in ImageMatch doing head-sizing. You won't have to send your camera in to have the viewing screen etched.

You can purchase the Zigview finders online at most of the big camera stores. It appears to be going right now for $399.00 at B&H Photo. The previous generation, which doesn't swivel or detach is going for about $279.00 online.

Creating a Sales Machine

For many salespeople (myself included) sales just kind of comes naturally. You meet the client, listen, exchange information, establish trust, and then go from there. Outgoing and social people like myself tend to do pretty well in this context. We also tend to believe we're doing really well when actually we're not. In my case, I think it comes from having a generally optimistic attitude combined with some adult onset ADD. Ha!

What I've found over the past couple of years however is that access to sales data, and having the discipline to understand and act on it, can be be a much more powerful tool than the ones that come to me naturally. This discovery has become particularly relevant as I manage a growing team of salespeople working in different markets. By working to understand where we're winning and losing, I can more effectively equip my staff to win more often.

Recently, I came across a blog I thought I would share with you. It's coming from one of the guys that was very involved in salesforce.com. We don't use salesforce.com software, so this is not a pitch -- leave it to a salesperson to have to issue that kind of disclaimer.

At any rate, the theme is how sales professionals can use the data they have to better serve their prospective and current customers. I read it often and you might want to as well. The link to it is below. Enjoy.

Jay

Build a Sales Machine

An "Unfortunate Lapse"

This link on CNN.com is great. And that it happened to our biggest competitor is even better. But after reading it, I had to consider the many times we have had to do the same thing to satisfy a customer's needs. Lifetouch had their intentions in the right place, but sloppy execution sure did backfire on them here.

Check it out.

Jay

Integrity Selling

Recently, we've began to employ a sales system that we really like. It's called Integrity Selling and is based on the book of the same name by Ron Willingham. It tends to systematize the very best parts of Marco's corporate culture into a repeatable sales process that really values the person doing the purchasing. Our sales people have really taken to it and it is producing results across the board.

If you have any questions or would like to chat about it, give either Nichole or me a call at 877-811-9010.

Jay

MeadWestVaco Gets a New Logo

One of our paper suppliers, MeadWestVaco, just gave their brand a face lift. There's a review of the change at one of my favorite design websites, Brand New. The site has really nothing directly to do with the school photography business, but it makes for interesting reading about corporate identities and how they are shaped. It often makes me ask questions about the company I work for and our identity. Are we relevant? Does our branding, marketing material, web site, etc. work together to a greater end? What does it say about us?

Probably a good thing for us all to think about.

Jay

Brave New World

Hi, and welcome to the launch of Marco Photo Service's new web log. Our goal in creating and maintaining this space is to keep our customers up to speed on what we're up to, start some discussions, learn from others, and - hopefully - inform the professional imaging marketplace with insights from our little niche.

Thanks for dropping by, please bookmark us and make sure you comment on interesting posts.

If you are a member of the professional imaging community and would like to publish your thoughts to this blog, contact us and we'll talk!

Creating Upward Buying Pressure

What would happen if you could reach out directly to the check writers? Most of us in the school photography business take it for granted that we serve two customers -- the school principal and the parents. You can't get to the parents until you go through the principal, right? Maybe not.

Since we started our school & sports photography studio last year, we have been kicking that idea around. What if we could out-flank our competitors and reach out to the parents of our target schools at the same time we are selling to the principals? We're reasoning that aside from picture day communications, the parents rarely (if ever) hear from the big national companies. Why? They're following the traditional communication paths.

And when we stick to the traditional Studio >> Principal >> Parent communication line, they never hear from us either because we haven't passed the gatekeeper. We're filtered out by our own marketing because we accept that we have to go to the principal to talk to the parent.

Do you hear this? We stop ourselves -- voluntarily -- from speaking to our customers!

If we accept the above as true, this means that our primary paying customer is effectively isolated from the normal marketing and advertising traffic that would make her aware that there is a choice. While the parent doesn't (and probably won't) make the actual choice between studios, we're betting that they can certainly have an influence.

And so the question becomes, what is the best way to reach the parent of the target school? How can we create a groundswell of upward buying pressure that makes the principal and secretary take notice of us? What do you think? We're working on this and will post as we try different things and begin to make progress. But by all means, post a comment or e-mail us with your ideas. www.marcophotoservice.com

Jay

Marco Welcomes Paul Dzugan

Marco Photo is pleased to announce that we've added a new member to our team. Mansfield resident Paul Dzugan has signed on to help us build our exciting new commercial printing business.

Paul brings to Marco Photo many years of consultative B2B sales experience, most recently in the commercial printing and wireless markets where he was a leader in Alltel's business sales division. Paul's experience and his proven record will be instrumental as we add this exciting new dimension to our product offerings for our clients.

Starting now, Marco can supply our school and sports photography clients with a complete selection of marketing materials, printing services, direct mail services, and custom printed products that help them grow their business and upgrade their appearance. If you would like to learn more about these services, give us a call and we'll put you in touch with Paul. Hey, that rhymes!

Jay

Marco Photo Adds Offset Printing

Starting in the first quarter of 2008, Marco Photo Service is adding a brand new digital printing division that will serve professional photo studios and other regional businesses. We'll use this exciting new capability to do two things:

1. Add exciting new products and services for professional school and sports photographers.

2. Provide professional commercial printing services for all kinds of retail and service businesses.

MPSI will be actively building our services throughout 2008 around these two markets. As the division moves forward, we're very optimistic about how this diversification -- both in production method and in market served -- will help make our customers more competitive, build their brands, and increase profitability.

We'll keep you posted as we grow, but if you want to know more feel free to drop us a line.

Jay