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Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
It’s Time to Audit Your Pricing (Grab Your Packages and Let’s Go!)
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Today's episode is going to be hands on. So if you're multitasking, maybe editing or driving, you might want to come back to this episode later when you can sit down with your notebook and actually look at your pricing and packages. This is a perfect time of year to be looking at all of this to reevaluate how 2025 went for you. But also you are probably already starting to think about 202026 and some of your photography goals as well. So this is a perfect time to do a live pricing audit together. And that is what I have decided to outline this episode as. So that way you're doing this with me, you're able to pause the episode and do the steps and then by the end of the episode, if you're doing it live along with me, then you are going to have already re figured your pricing and packages for 20. So if you're ready, let's dive in. Welcome to the Book More Clients Photography Podcast. You can stop spending hours on Google and YouTube because you just found your number one resource for growing a profitable and sustainable photography business. Hi, I'm Brooke Jefferson. I'm a believer wife, mom at a 2 and Oklahoma family photographer. I left the classroom in 2018 to pursue my photography career full time. Now I'm here to help you do the same. In this podcast we're covering the most asked about topics including pricing, marketing, client experience and all things systems and workflows. You won't find any fluff or BS here. Just tried and true strategy. Are you ready? Grab your kids some snacks and charge those camera batteries. It's time to jump in. Step number one I want you to look at what you are currently charging and what your current packages are. So go ahead and write down on your piece of paper or type it out on a Google Doc what your session types are and I'm talking everything that you are offering. You know that I'm the niche police and that I truly believe, especially from a marketing angle, that the photographers that niche down are going to have an easier time building their clientele and becoming known in their community. However, I know and even for myself there are still other types of photography that I may not market for that I still get booked for if that makes sense. So I know you. I know you have a whole list. So I want you to write every single session type or event type or whatever it is that you offer and what you currently charge for them. So for example, maybe you have family sessions at 3:50, senior sessions at 4:50. Maybe you offer mini sessions at 200. I want you to do that for every single thing. Okay, then for each one, I want you to ask two simple questions. How long does this session really take from start to finish? And I'm not just talking about the shooting time. I mean all of it. The communication, the prep, travel, shooting, calling, editing, uploading, delivering galleries, posting sneak peeks, and everything in between. Really think about how long it takes you and calculate it and write it next to each one of the session types. And question number two, how much does it actually cost you in, in time and expenses? So I want you to think about gas, gallery hosting fees, client gifts, any props, especially for those of you that do mini sessions. What are you using? Every little thing adds up. So again, answer those two questions next to every single thing that you wrote down. Let's do some quick math. If your 300 session takes about 8 hours total, your hourly rate is not $300. It's about $37 an hour before expenses. And I want you to let this example really sink in, because this is usually where photographers realize, oh, my goodness, I am working way more than I thought for way less than I deserve. I want you to really, really drive this home. And this should be an encouragement to you that you need to raise your prices. Or it can be a reminder that you're right on track. So again, look at everything that goes into it. And I want you to determine, are you charging enough? It's a simple question. It doesn't need to be an emotional question. It's. It's a data driven question. And in step two, we're going to talk about hourly rates and profits and all the things. And the reason I'm bringing up an hourly rate is because a lot of times I see the question of I'm a blank photographer, but so and so's reaching out and wants to know what I charge for, you know, a different type of session. What should I charge? You should never be asking other people what you should charge because it always goes back to you, your business, your goals, your lifestyle, where you're located. I mean, there's just so many factors that go into pricing, which is why we're doing this together right now. So with that being said, feel free to pause me if you need just a minute before we go to step two. But in step two, we're really going to bring it all home as far as calculating what you should be charging. All right, so let's do that. Let's find your true hourly rate. Here's where my pricing for profit formula Comes in. This is the exact process that I teach inside of my coaching program. This is what I teach with one on one strategy calls to help photographers stop guessing at their prices and finally start paying themselves. Like business owners. You're not doing this for fun. You're doing this to make a profit. You're doing it because you're passionate about it and you love what you do. But you also know that you have some really big goals and you want your photography business to accomplish that goal for you. It might be leaving a full time job and just replacing it completely. It might be to bring in an extra $2,000 a month. Whatever your goal is, I want you to have a goal. Okay? Set a goal right now. Think about 2026 and if I asked you one year from today, what is something that would change your world or make life easier or make it more enjoyable? What is the goal that you could set for yourself, for your photography business? So now we're going to go through the step by step formula. And so you're going to need a calculator. So have your calculator ready. Number one is to set your profit goal. And in order to set a profit goal, you've got to know that goal we just talked about. So make a meaningful goal. All right. Make a meaningful goal. I will go ahead and tell you you're going to be seeing a lot more behind the scenes episodes come out over these next few six to eight weeks. And the reason why is because I really just want to pull back the curtain and be fully transparent with you about what it looks like in my world right now. And so this example, like if I had my notebook out right now and I was doing this myself, I already know what I want for 2026. So I am now, starting in January of 2026, I will be working a full time marketing job, which you guys know if you've been around any length of time. I am passionate about business and marketing. That's why this podcast exists is because I'm passionate about your success and what you're doing. And while I love photography and I To do that 100% at least for one more decade, I love small business owners, I love marketing, I love all of that. And so I was given an opportunity to work my dream job. And so I accepted that in real time of recording this podcast. I accepted that yesterday. So very, very excited about that. It's what I'm doing right now, working for my chamber of commerce, I will get to do that, but at a full time scale instead of A part time scale. With that being said, I know that I'm going to have a full time income coming from that job. But I also will tell you that I still have other goals and I have other reasons like essentially becoming, you know, completely debt free minus our house is a really big goal of mine. And so in order to do that I still need additional income. And so basically how I'm doing this is I'm looking at my profit financial goal and then I'm subtracting what I'll make from my full time job and then whatever is left over that is guiding me, that is my North Star in my photography business. Okay. I'm still like still going to be working a full time photography business next year in 2026 on top of working a full time job. And it sounds like a lot, but I do have really good boundaries. And yes, sometimes it's super overwhelming, especially like in the month of October, but, but I'm really excited about it overall. So I'm giving you guys an example so that you know, okay, wow, that actually really inspires me to do this for, for my own life or whatever. So we're going to go through an example here. Okay, let's say that your profit goal, which a profit goal is the amount you want to pay yourself from your business. It could also just be how much you want to profit in your business and maybe out of the profit that your business did, you only pay yourself a percentage of that. That is very normal. But let's say your goal, your profit goal is $60,000. The second thing you need to do is now you need to figure out what are your annual business expenses going to be. Think about everything it takes to run your business. The subscriptions, software, gear, insurance, education, if you've got any education funds. I normally don't include this as business expenses. It does count as a business expense and I'm trying not to confuse you because there's a lot that goes into this. But there are certain things like there are certain expenses that have to be paid regardless of how many sessions you have. It's quote unquote to keep your lights on. And then there are other expenses that you incur in your business throughout the year. But typically you are using your business profit to pay for that. So for example, let's say in January you have generated $5,000 in your business. Well, a portion of that is going to go towards taxes like be set aside for taxes. Some of it you're going to have to pull expenses out of and then you're going to have a big chunk. Hopefully that is your profit. And so maybe you say, okay, well, out of this profit, I'm going to pay myself $2,000 and I have 500 left, and you want to go take a course. Hopefully that makes sense. Rather than saying, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and have $5,000 worth of education expenses. You really want to only pull that out when you're making money. I hope that makes sense. If I confused you, just like totally forget what I just said, but think about your annual business expenses and then add all of that up. And so this is a really big expense category. Like this is a big example, but just look at the numbers. Okay, so we said $60,000 was the profit goal. We're saying $15,000 for the entire year are going to be business expenses. And then we're going to add in our estimated taxes, and I'm just going to go off a really high percentage just to be safe. That's 25%. Okay, so here's the formula. You take the profit goal of 60,000 and you add it to your expenses, and then you see what that number is. And then you're going to add in the taxes. Okay, so we've got 60,000 plus 15,000. That gives us $75,000. And then we've got to add in that 25% tax amount. And so that brings us to a total of $93,750. That is the amount of total gross sales that you will need to have in order to pocket that $60,000 profit goal. Okay, so I'm sorry, that is. That was a really long example. Don't let it confuse you. Pick your profit goal for the year, Figure out what your yearly expenses are going to be, add those two numbers together, and then add in anywhere from a 15% to a 30% tax percentage to that number. And then that is going to give you a grand total of your basically your 2026 gross sales goal. Okay. All right. That's what you need to know for step two. Step two and three estimated taxes was actually step three. So I just kind of combined two things together. Okay, so then you need to decide how many sessions you can or that you want to take each year. Be really honest with yourself. Don't overdo it, because typically you're going to say yes to more things than you need to anyway. So just be really realistic with yourself. Let's say that your goal is going to be eight sessions a month. That equals approximately 96 sessions per year. And so we're going to go back and we're going to take that big gross sales amount. For this example, it was the 93,000 number. We're going to divide it by 96 sales sessions, and that tells me or this photographer's example that they would need to charge $976 per session. Now, I know that this example can seem extreme to most of you listening. I just did this for numbers, okay? I just did it for numbers. If your goal is to make $30,000 in your business, that is fantastic. You obviously are going to get a much lower amount that you need to charge for your session. Okay? But this, this formula is going to show you that that is the minimum price per session that you need to charge if you want to reach your goals and pay yourself fairly. Okay? So then we are going to dive into finding your hourly rate. This is just like a bonus thing. I've never taught this. I've never put this in any of my programs. I've never even talked about this on the podcast. But it's important for you to know your hourly rate because then you can, you can pretty much put together a package for any type of session if you ever needed to. If your average session takes six total hours, again, that includes the traveling, the shooting, the editing, the calling, all the things, then you're going to divide the. Set the total session price that you got, $976, divided by the number of total hours it actually takes you, and then that is going to show you what your hourly rate is. So in this example, it shows that this hourly rate is $160. Now compare that to what you're actually charging. So if your current rate, like your, like your most popular package, if it's $400, then you would divide that by the six hours and it would show that you're paying yourself $66 before expenses and taxes. So you know what I'm saying? So that's going to show you, like, is it actually realistic? And am I even profiting? Okay, so all of that that we just talked about was in step two, Pricing for Profit. Now, this is an audio podcast. So if you are totally lost with what I just said, I have a free resource on my website. It's called Pricing for Profit formula. If you'll just go find that on brooke jefferson.com I give you the visuals and I even throw in a calculator for you to just plug in your numbers. So feel free to do that if that was super overwhelming. But I had to break down each, each section to Tell you why you do it. Okay, so step three in this whole process of auditing your pricing is now you need to look at what is included. So now you know what your numbers are, you know what your hourly rate is, you know what you need to change your pricing to. What is what are you actually offering inside each of your packages? Are you over delivering or are you under delivering based on the price that you see? If you're offering 50 edited images, but your clients really only ever download 20 of 50, then that shows you that you can scale back. Maybe it's time to include fewer images or maybe it's time to include more images. That's something that you need to decide. This is how you're going to start protecting your time without hurting your client experience. So I want you to just really evaluate everything that's working or not working with your current packages. Do you have a package that you wanted to do really well, but it's not booking at all? Reevaluate it. Sometimes you might need to just take it out completely and other times you might just need to like go in and edit a few things or you know, make it more valuable. From there you're going to move into step four, which is to check your client experience alignment. Okay, basically, does your client experience that you say you offer, does it align with the pricing that you're charging and vice versa? Right. If you're trying to give a higher tier VIP client experience and really be hands on and give a bunch of different types of gifts, well, are you charging enough for that? That's really what it comes down to. Does your pricing match the level of service that you provide? I want you to think about everything that you're doing. Or are you, you know, are you trying to give that full blown luxury experience on a budget photographer price? Right? Look at what you're doing. That disconnect is not only going to drain you, but it's going to confuse your clients. And so we want to just make sure that those things align. Step five, re evaluate and really look at your confidence level. Okay, this is a gut check. When you say your price out loud, how does it make you feel? Do you feel like you want to hide under a blanket? Do you feel fully confident saying that that is what you charge? Does it scare you? What are those feelings like? Are you whispering it? Are you apologizing for it? Are you trying to explain it? Right. I want you to feel confident in raising your prices and asking for more because you are delivering more. You can't expect clients to believe in your value. If you don't believe in your own value, stop giving discounts. Stop trying to explain your pricing. I want you to stand firmly behind it and know that you live up to the rates that you charge. Your last step is to update your packages for 2026. You've done all of the math. The calculations you've set, the goals, you have re evaluated everything that you are offering. Hopefully you are niching down. And so now it's time for you to actually create your packages and re. You know, maybe, maybe it's even like visually like you need to completely revamp the pricing on your website. Just redo the whole page or redo your investment guide. Maybe you've decided that you're going to do a small price bump or you're going to start adding traveling fees, or you're going to simplify your packages. You don't need to necessarily double your rates overnight. But I want you to start feeling encouraged to raise your prices if all the signs are there that you're ready for it. And if you've been booked out consistently for 2025, that is the best indicator that it's time to raise your prices. Do not be scared to do that. One question that I get, and I want to throw this in as a bonus, is do I tell my clients that I am going to raise my prices or do I just do it and just move on? That is totally up to you. You don't need to over explain it. You don't need to justify it. You don't even have to notify everyone. But if you want to, it could be as simple as saying, my 2026 pricing will will reflect the growth and the experience that I've gained this past year and I'm so excited to continue serving. Fill in the blank with your clients in a way that honors all of us. That's it. You just, it needs to be short and sweet. You need to have confidence behind it. And those people that truly built a relationship with you and enjoyed their client experience, they're going to stick around no matter what. So this entire episode and exercise, it isn't about a guilt trip. It isn't to make you feel bad and like, oh my goodness, I'm not ready for this or I'm really not charging enough. It's not about that at all. It's about really giving you the confidence and empowering you to take the next right step in your business. You have really big goals. You work hard for your clients. You pour your time, energy and heart into every session. That you do and you deserve to be paid fairly really for that. You do. You deserve it and there is room for you. So if there's anything that you take away from this episode, besides the awesome exercise that we just walked through, it is that you are the CEO of your photography business. You're not just the artist behind the camera. You're not just an employee to your own business. You are the CEO and you are making good decisions for your business. And so now you have a clear roadmap to make sure that your pricing reflects that. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I know it was a little bit longer and it was really specific with numbers, but I, I hope that this came at a very timely season for you, a timely week for you. I hope that you're getting excited bringing 2025 to a close and heading into a new year for 2026. And I will see you on the next episode.