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