How To Do An Annual Review Of Your Photography Business

I realise that doing an annual review of your photography business may sound boring. But, I assure you, it’ll be well worth the effort!

You’re ambitious and determined, right? You want to help more of your ideal photography clients and build awareness of your work and your brand. Your photography business is not only your passion but your livelihood. You NEED to make it a success.

But, if you don’t have an understanding of how the past year has panned out, there’s a very real danger that you may continue to miss opportunities and not make the necessary changes in the year ahead that will boost your business.

Why bother doing an annual review of your photography business?

As an established business owner you’ll know that no two years in business are the same, and that time stands still for no-one.

It can be easier to keep using the same old tried and tested methods for securing more photography clients and winning new business. But, what’s comfortable to you – and what you did this year – is not necessarily what is going to drive traffic to your website or generate more leads and sales next year.

So, I recommend that you take some time to work ‘on’ your business rather than just work ‘in’ the business, and reflect on the past 12 months.

This will help you to;

• Evaluate what’s working and what isn’t

Without a review, do you really have a clear understanding of this?

• Recognise that you need to make changes if you want different results

The insights you’ll gain will confirm that doing more of the same is not a strategy for growth

• and, decide how and what you should change in the future

The aim is to highlight missed opportunities but also anticipate future changes that could impact your business.

Carrying out an annual review of your photography business could ultimately become the difference between decline and growth, between failure and success.

So, if you’re now convinced and are ready to conduct an annual review of your photography business, read on. I’m about to go over how to assess your performance so you’re in a stronger position for making plans for next year.

How to conduct an annual review of your photography business

An annual review will aim to assess the good, the bad and the ugly in your photography business. You’ll need to schedule some time into your diary to perform a thorough critique and to document the highs and the lows.

STEP 1: Gather insights for your annual review throughout the year

In order to make doing an annual review so much quicker and easier, a habit that I’ve found to be helpful is keeping notes regularly throughout the year. This is the approach I’m suggesting you follow too.

So, while you’ll do the annual review in your final month (perhaps in December, or in whichever is the final month of your business’ tax year), you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort by having kept notes as the year has progressed.

Therefore, the process I recommend is this:

1. (Ideally) Keep a weekly (if not daily) journal throughout the year,
2. Do a monthly review at the end of every calendar month,
3. Do a quarterly review at the end of every three months,
4. Then, complete an annual review of the year.

Even if you haven’t been tracking your year though, just aim to carry out the following based on the stand-out moments (good and bad) that you can recall.

Daily/Weekly Reviews

In your daily or weekly journal, note down what went well and what didn’t that day, how you were feeling about the work you’d done, and what strategies you tried. Finding a few things to be grateful for is really important to maintain a positive mindset and celebrate your successes, however small.

Monthly reviews

Monthly reviews could include a summary of these daily/weekly notes, along with the numerical data relating to that month. Think about:

• your overall revenue,
• the number of new client enquiries received,
• the number of sales-focused conversations you’ve had and the number (or percentage) of conversions to sales from these,
• your monthly website traffic,
• amount of website traffic generated from i) organic search, ii) social media and iii) your marketing content, and iv) other sources.
• email list subscriber numbers
• social media followers.

You can pick whatever metrics matter most to you, and you don’t need to track all of these if you’re new to monthly reviews, but these would certainly be good to focus on.

Quarterly reviews

Quarterly reviews summarise the highlights and lowlights of each of the three-month blocks throughout the year.

Annual reviews

Annual reviews then bring all of these insights together and are a complete, succinct summary of how the year panned out.

Regular reviews don’t need to be a time-suck

Now, if you’re reading this but you haven’t been keeping notes about your business performance throughout the year, do stick with me!

You can still do an annual review based on what you recall. Plus, you can always go back to look at historical social media insights, Google Analytics stats and customer emails to pull out some of the key data you’ll need.

But, going forward, if you can aim to keep notes regularly next year, you’ll find doing an annual review of your photography business in twelve months time, soooooo much easier. And it won’t take as much time as you might imagine.

• My daily journal takes 10 minutes max. each day
• The monthly reviews take me about 30 minutes to complete
• The quarterly reviews are done in even less time, at the end of March, June, September and December.

This needn’t take over your life or become a huge pain in the a***!

STEP 2: Summarise your year

So, having refreshed your memory about what happened during the year by re-reading your monthly and quarterly reviews (if you have them), you can then start the annual review process.

The goal is to end up with an informed summary of the overall performance of your photography business and lessons learnt.

When reflecting on the year, answer these three questions:

1. What were my achievements? / What worked well and why?
2. In what areas did I not succeed? / What didn’t work so well and why?
3. What was holding me back? / What could I do better or change next year?

You can do this on old-fashioned pen and paper, on a spreadsheet, in Trello, Evernote or whatever works for you.

Things to consider during the annual review of your photography business

During the annual review process, it’s crucial that you’re honest with yourself about your successes and your failures and, with the benefit of hindsight, the reasons for these.

Chances are you excelled in some areas, but maybe you also let yourself down in some ways? You’re only human so it’s likely that not everything went to plan.

• Perhaps you weren’t focused on the right things (hello, shiny object syndrome!)
• Or, perhaps you weren’t as consistent with your marketing as you would have liked to have been?
• Maybe, there were mitigating circumstances that you could never have foreseen, and these impacted your business performance this past year?
• Perhaps health, personal or family issues meant you weren’t working in the business as much?

Do also remind yourself of what positive things happened throughout the year – about you, your work, or business in general.

For example:

• Maybe you’ve finally defined (or redefined) who your ideal client is and now only want to market to that person going forward?
• You may have decided to niche down, or to add in a new genre of photography to your range of services, and are feeling excited about this new service
• Or, perhaps you’ve realised that you want to work more in the year ahead, or conversely, fewer days every week to get a better work-life balance?

Keep these learnings in the forefront of your mind as you go into the new year so that you can move forward in a positive way, and don’t risk replicating actions and behaviours that don’t serve you or your business.

• If you know who your ideal client is, make sure you’re marketing ONLY to them
• If you plan to focus only on a niche, then stop accepting work that is pulling you away from that focus!
• If you want Fridays off from now on, make sure you block off that day in your diary and make it happen!

STEP 3: Set intentions and define your word of the year

Once you have fully reviewed the current year and have a long list of learning points, you can now set out how you want the next year to pan out.

So, the final step in the process is all about setting positive intentions. When doing this, consider what you are committed to achieving in your business in the year ahead:

• Do you plan to do more, or perhaps less, content creation? (By the way, fewer pieces of quality content is far better than more poor-quality content)
• Perhaps you’re going to try a new sales approach or change up your packages and pricing?
• Maybe you’ll refine the services you offer or stop offering something that isn’t attracting much interest?
• Do you want to build more of a presence on Threads, Pinterest, or LinkedIn?
• Will you tackle video marketing, do regular Instagram Lives or create videos and Shorts for YouTube? Host workshops, start a podcast etc?

Whatever your intentions, write these down. But these shouldn’t be vague New Year’s resolutions that you’ll forget about by February, like ‘do more marketing’ or ‘be more consistent’.

STEP 4: Set SMART goals

Get really specific and create S.M.A.R.T. (Smart, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-bound) goals that reflect actionable themes or steps that you’re committed to taking. For example, ‘I’ll grow my email list by 50% by 31st March’.

Then map out these goals and the steps you’ll need to take to achieve them. Actually put them into your calendar, being sure to assign completion dates to them.

By working backwards from the goal, and being specific about the individual tasks you need to complete, you’re effectively creating yourself a roadmap to success.

Aim to plan out the first 90 days of the year ahead and to plan in quarters as you go. This is a great approach since it’ll help you make a short-term plan in advance, without having to complete a plan for the full year which will no doubt need to change over time.

STEP 5: Choose a word of intention

I also highly recommend that you come up with a word that summarises the general intention that you’re setting for yourself. If you keep it top-of-mind, this will help you to keep focused on what you are trying to achieve as you progress throughout the year.

Over the past few years, my words of intention have included ‘FOCUS’, ‘CONSISTENCY’, and ‘VISIBILITY’. I tend to share this publicly on social media to keep myself accountable and I also mount it on the wall of my office so it’s always visible.

Some popular options for a word of the year that you may wish to consider for your own business are Flourish, Thrive, Grow, Balance, Nurture, Freedom, Action, Impact etc.

Related: Why and how to set photography marketing goals

Complete an annual review of your photography business

Now it’s time to do your annual review! When you have, what insights have you gained? Which word of intention will you choose for the year ahead?

I’d love to know, so comment below or share it in the PR-Savvy Photographers Facebook group – my free photography community. Request to join if you aren’t already a member.

Related: Five ways to optimise your client enquiry process (and convert more leads)