Today we have the first of a series of guest posts by Brittany Salay of Brittany Lauren Photography. Brittany is a photographer in Charlotte, North Carolina who also happens to have a degree in Finance. She will be sharing important information in a series of blog posts all about the financial side of a photography business.

The Bare Minimum

If you’re anything like me, photography was always a passion that grew into an active hobby and slowly turned into a business with real paying clients. The creative side came easy but getting a grasp on the business side of things wasn’t as simple. For me, it does help that I have a Finance and Accounting degree which gave me a solid understanding of what it takes to have a profitable business. Translating that to my photography business was an extremely important step before I could depend on my business to create an income I could live off of.

In this series, I will give you the tools and simple steps to make sense of your numbers and the business side of things. My goal is to make it easy to understand, follow and implement in your business. Many photographers are very intimidated by all the numbers but you have to be very familiar with them in order to have a sustainable business. We are going to call this first step‘Understanding Your Bare Minimum’.

To begin to understand what you should be charging clients, you have to know all of your expenses, personal and business, every month. If you don’t know your expenses, you can’t possibly know how much you need to make each year just to meet your bare minimum. As small business owners, we want to make more than the bare minimum but this is the first step in truly dissecting your business. During this series, I will also show you how to exceed your bare minimum, budget and save for your future. This is just our starting point. I want you to be able to enjoy your life but we have to understand what you need at the very basic level first.

Your first easy step.

Sit down and write out ALL of your personal and business expenses you are responsible for on a monthly basis. If you pay for some things yearly, make sure you divide those by 12 so you have a monthly cost. You need to make sure you include all of your fixed and variable expenses. Fixed expenses are bills that stay the same month over month. You know how much you will owe no matter what like your mortgage, car loan or office rent. Variable expenses can change month over month like your grocery bill, utilities and office supplies that you budget for. You will need to include everything you need and pay for on a monthly basis.

Here is my breakdown of what I am responsible for monthly. I did not include anything my fiancé pays for. I want to be very open and share my personal behind the scenes so you can be confident you are working through yours the right way. Mine may look very simple compared to yours so don’t sweat it. As of now, our lives are very simple. We just bought our first home and we don’t have any children yet. Please make sure you are thorough including things like health insurance if you pay for that, mortgage/rent, all monthly bills and so on.

You should now have a list of all of your expenses so add up your total. This is your bare minimum. This is what you have to make per month net of taxes which we will cover in a this series as well. Don’t worry it’s not as scary as you’d think. The next step in this series will help you translate this into how much you need and want to make per year. We will also cover how much you should average per client to meet and exceed that along with how many clients you can take on a month.

Brittany is the owner of Brittany Lauren Photography in Charlotte, North Carolina.