One can look at pricing portraits from a different point of view. I benefitted greatly from attending workshops and presentations sponsored by the Small Business Development Corporation and the Service Corps of Retired Executives. You can visit
www.score.org to find a chapter located near you; you can try
www.xxx sbdc.org, where in my case the
xxx is NYS - New York State. Google will turn up useful hits if you search on "sbdc" and "
your state".
These seminars and workshops covered topics such as writing a business plan, obtaining financing, marketing, personnel, taxes and regulations. Obviously, some of the topics pertain to us more than others. In addition, both agencies provide one-on-one business counselling free of charge. These sessions are great for bringing up matters that we are likely to overlook.
So, then, how do I arrive at a price for a portrait?
1. Estimate your average monthly living expenses--housing, utilities, food, laundry, life-, auto- and health- insurance premiums, cable TV, gas and maintenance for the car, etc. If you have kids this amount goes up; if you pool your income with your spouse's, the amount goes down.
2. Now, add 30% to 40% to account for your Federal, state and local income taxes.
3. Now take a stab at determining how many portraits you can do a month. This varies alot, naturally. Conservatively, I know I can do at least one head-and-shoulders a month. Whether I get at least one head-and-shoulders commission per month is up in the air. The more conservative your estimate is, the higher your minimum price will have to be.
4. Add to that minimum price the cost of getting it photographed for slides, prints, transparencies -- whatever you think you must have. Add whatever you have included in the price, such as the cost of framing, shipping, insurance, and the like.
5. Take what you estimate to be the cost of advertising, creating promotional brochures, creating glicees, business cards, memberships in portrait societies, registering with SOG, plus a suitable amortization of the cost of capital equipment, such as cameras, printers, computers, software. Get a per-portrait average or guess-ti-mate and slap that onto the final price.
6. Round that to a nice figure and there you have it. Use any of the "level of effort" formulae proposed in previous posts, and compare the result with the competition's pricing. Just as you do with a household budget, you can jiggle the way you estimate the categories.
The tasks that my SBDC counselor set me to do was quite an eye-opener for me. I ended up almost doubling what I thought I should charge for a portrait. As someone starting out, I expect I'll have to augment my income with some temp work of some sort, or a part-time job. But once I get a waiting list, I know I'll be able to cover the costs of me and of my career.
I hope this was helpful!