Forming Strategic Partnerships

Many people seems to think photographers work in silos. That they go at it alone. Maybe it's fear of competition or what not. But there is merit to buddying-up with the right partnership within the industry.

It make sense to form partnerships with other photographers at some level. For us @ Veritas Images, we concentrate on dynamic modern portraits. It's something we really enjoy. But we do notice a growth gap that we can capitalize on and that is wedding. We get asked alot if we are interested in doing weddings. Therefore we have started to look for certain qualities of a photographer to partner with. Not necessarily have to be the same style, but definitely share the same values in photography. It's all about fit.

You can read more here: http://www.veritas-images.com/?p=812#more​-812

Like anything new really don't know how it will pan out. But we are very excited. Most of all it will be fun. I know Bruce even before this photography business thing took off and our kids play together too.

spam

JacobPhoto wrote in post #13997875
spam

Why are you saying that?

This post is about celebration and to instill some thoughts into running a business. Instead of the usual gurgle of Pricing, website design and my favourite "What should I do in this situation" threads, I hope to have people think outside the box a bit.

Your post is not just presumptuous. It's rude.

It's kind of spammy, I regret to say.

what is the purpose of your post? to get more people to visit your website?

I too feel the smell of over-processed, tinned pseudo-meat, oozing from this thread.

The point of the post is to have people think about their business directions in a creative and collaborative manner. It is also a celebratory one. Obviously it is misconstrued not intended to illicit any spamming purpose. If that is the case, mod please remove this thread.

So you have a studio, get asked about doing weddings.

What discussion are you hoping will stem from your post? It certainly reads like spam, to me.

Maybe the post was done to attract traffic to a particular site but it is also a good subject that could be discussed here. This is the business forum and building working relationships is an important part of any business, photography or not.

A couple of years ago I moved away from trying to land wedding or portrait work as the yields on these jobs just aren't what they used to be. If I am going to work I want it to be where I can maximize my revenue opportunities so we decided to move more towards commercial work. This is primarily working directly for companies or many times it is via an advertising agency. The city that I live in is not huge and has a service area of close to 200,000 people. A couple of hours away there is a city in excess of 1 million and plenty of photographers but not a huge amount of them are focused on commercial. Seems like everyone that jumps into this business is going after portraits or weddings.

I managed to land some contracts with companies across western Canada and as a result I needed to have some others to assist me in the completion of some of these assignments. I spent many years before going full time working for a large multi-national company in their marketing department. When I see the phrase "strategic partnerships" I think back to those days and it is a far cry from what I read in your blog. I think about a joint marketing plan for a common interest. If you don't want to do weddings and are simply planning on farming them out to someone else, I don't see this as a partnership but more of a referral program.

In our own situation we do not call these partnerships. We have work that we may not be able to personally attend to all of it so we solicited for interested parties and when we find someone that we feel we can trust and work with we get down to the contractual side of things. Our goal is that it the results have to be a work for hire contract with us or we won't proceed. My lawyer has done a contract for this so there can be no misunderstanding about what they are expected to supply and what they can do with the images after the fact. These are certainly not what I would call partnerships in a marketing sense. I have hired a small marketing firm to do some of the door knocking for me for where we may not be able to do it ourselves.

So in the context of this post, for the OP, are you forming a working relationship where you do joint activities or are you simply referring work to each other for work you don't traditionally do. Doing a "shout-out" as you say in your blog is not what I would call forming a strategic partnership under my understanding of what it should mean.

This is a subject that could be discussed here without everyone pointing fingers and calling it spam. Let's see if this can actually happen and have a true business discussion and forget what has been said so far.

I'm not in photography.

Still, I have only seen two types of relationships for partners actually work.

The first, which doesn't apply here, is a strategic reseller, where that reseller pays money up front and owes a minimum to the supplier every year.

The second is sub-contracting. That works because the customer deals with the controlling party (in this case, you) and the work is performed by someone else.

Any other arrangement either fails because one party has no skin in the game (cash at risk) or two parties end up dealing with customers. When the latter happens, it is only a matter of time before one party simply takes business the other one thinks s/he deserves.

So, if you can book a wedding, book it, and hire subs if you don't want to perform against it. Keep a margin for yourselves, and make sure the work is done, and that could fly.

If you are thinking win-win as in you refer they refer, I've never seen that work. When money is involved, if you think they will refer work to you when asked to do a portrait, they won't. Why not keep the money themselves?

Commissions can be even worse. Say you refer, they pay you a commission, the thing goes south, then the customer finds out you got paid for passing her/his name along? That's common. It is bad for your reputation.

So, other than sub-contracting, it won't be fun, it won't be exciting, and it is not anything new. What's likely is you'll give away some work in return for nothing, and wonder why. And when you ask the other party why they're sending you no work in return, you'll probably get a response you know is a lie.

About your original post -- Remove the link and it doesn't look so much like spam.