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Your Business Support Team: CPA and Insurance

so yes so let's talk a little bit about your support system your support team I think that there is uh certainly it's nice to have a high valued and treasured friend that you can call on to help you with certain things we all need help from time to time uh I've got I've got a guy in dallas that I call way too often to help me with projects and especially large projects the good news is he'll call me to do the same thing so it's a pretty good tradeoff he had to do a night shoot recently of cathedral and and he wanted to paint this whole thing with light with those multi million dollar candlepower uh flashlight things but beam you know being lights and and we went out with a team of other friends of ours and we lit this thing up and it took a while but we got an extraordinary photograph out of this thing but it took a team of folks to pull it off it was his obit his ideas his concept it was his picture based on what his client wanted but we were able to pull it off and got a pretty extra...

ordinary picture complete with deep rich sky behind it at night and it was just really nice uh but you have to have some help and so I think that that goes back to the discussion that we had a little while ago if you recall when we were talking about safety and especially with a woman working by herself in her home uh in that scenario you've got to make sure that you're safe when people are coming into your home uh guys to not I'm not just singling any sex out on this uh but but you do have to feel safe and often that's that's helped by having a trusted friend that you can call and say hey can you come over for an hour I'm a little uneasy about this call I got to do this man's portrait it's a business portrait headshot I'm a little uneasy about this guy can you just be in the background you know coming over for lunch or something so it might be a good idea I think those kind of things they're helpful uh but then there's the business support team and I think that there's ah there's something to be said for that uh the business support team often is made up of of the people around you that are also in business to support your business uh and if you look at the board appear I think there has to be let me see if I can do this like that how's that uh all those this one away you have to have a c p a I think I don't advise anybody that's in business to do their own taxes and to do their own sales tax reporting and all that sort of thing every laws all the states have different laws and everything changes a little bit and everybody's a little different situations but I think you need to have that person on your staff and it needs to be somebody that you know and that you trust and that they know you and can trust you and then of course insurance now let me let me just say this about insurance I uh I'm a very active member of the professional photographers of america peepee of a uh I'm a member of several photo associations but people have a specifically and I'll call this out them out on this and I and I applaud so much what they've done first off the membership fee for a professional it's organisation that actually does something for its members is three hundred and forty dollars here I think is what I pay as a pro and that's with full everything what I get with that is I get indemnification insurance which means if a client sues me because of negligence or because of something I did wrong this insurance covers me and takes care of my legal fees and takes care of going to court for me and takes care of all of that stuff number two what's what I think as as important if not more important is as a member of that association I automatically receive fifteen thousand dollars of insurance for my equipment free fifteen thousand dollars free guys some of you only have fifteen thousand dollars worth of equipment it's free to have it insured then they have another you can buy one more unit of another fifteen thousand dollars really really reasonably so I think the association which does goto washington dc and lobby on our behalf on our copyright issues they work tio take care of us in lots and lots of legal issues from sales tax tio created fees versus sales of prints all sorts of different things uh but they also take good care of us in the world of our insurance so I highly recommend that you check out all of your professional associations and try to spend time getting to know them asking questions go to people dot com you'll find lots of endorsements by by most of the big name photographers that use them they really do doing a nice job uh but for me the big issue was the the indemnification and I know lots of stories where that covered somebody took care of uh you know you lose files and you get sued ah hard drive crashes and you didn't have it backed up things of that nature guys they're gonna happen they're gonna happen cameras are gonna crash things we're going to go wrong things aren't always gonna be perfect and these association will cover you in addition they have uh business initiatives where they will help you with the business of your business they have publications they have articles they have videos that they consent to you that you can watch along on the sites that you can see to help you with your business and deal with not post imposing and lighting of your clients as much as the managed the care and maintenance of your business and it's pretty amazing have a great team of advisors on all those committees for all of those different topics and different product projects and it's really really helpful no one make a sound like a commercial I'm just saying I'm so sold on the fact that my first fifteen thousand dollars of my equipment insurance is paid for just because I'm a member and I get a great magazine ever and I go to their conference I've been going there conference since nineteen seventy nine so yes ma'am question just add in they also will go to bat for you legally speaking when your images air used illegally or something like that that my studio partner had some of her image is stolen and used in a really controversial way that had the clients as well as her very upset that their images were being used and she was able to call people and just tell him here's what happened and hand over the information and they took it from there and she didn't have to worry about it that's great that's huge yeah it's nice to have somebody that has your back like that and that's you know the next the next person I was going to talk about is this make sure you got talk you've got some kind of legal representation you have to have in a trusted advisor's you've gotta have somebody that you can talk to uh I think that uh I think that's critical and that doesn't matter what kind of business you're in but certainly in this business listen it's a love of your life this this photo career you love it so much it is your greatest love for some people is there photo career don't forget it's also a business and if you are uh if you are in any way making money in photography you have to have an attorney that you can pick up the phone and call in sick I got a problem I need help nobody ever calls a lawyer to say hey I just want to call and say I don't have any problems how you doing nobody does that everybody calls a lawyer so I gotta problem of course you do you're calling that's what you do when you have a problem you call that's what everybody does when they have a problem uh but you find somebody you know and trust get referrals it be great if it's somebody that knows a little bit about your business or your industry and there are some people that work exclusively in the photo community there's two or three in new york any questions about that okay no anybody on their side do you have coming my dear well we just we do have a lot of questions and people's challenges that are coming in so you just let me know when you want to go now's a good time let's hit a couple of days all right you're fantastic and also just for people in other countries can you tell people what a c p a o sorry certified public accountant that's the account that's the bookkeeper that comes in and takes care of your books you know my count this guy was I don't have him any longer he had to retire but this guy was so great because I paid him a small set fee every month and he would walk into the studio he wouldn't let me pay any of my bills he said he always said you don't pay any bills I pay the bills so he would come into my studio uh every other friday and he would sit down in my desk and kicked me out and he would go through my bills that were incoming he would pay all the bills he would do the quarterly taxes he would do all the estimates he would you say it sounds like he did everything and then when he was ready to leave he would bring me the checks to sign and say see you later and he took care of my business for me and it was a flat rate that had just paid him every month and that included him doing my taxes of the year well he kept in my p and l statement he kept my balance sheet he kept everything for me it was really really great if you don't have somebody like that you have to get somebody like that because most of us that like to think that we're the right side brain the little heavy we're a little bit more on the artistic side and we're a little less on the more methodical left side we need people that are left sided left brained and so another another comment thank you well we could move on tio another question that has come in brian zim brodsky says I've only got one I've only got smaller rooms in my current home and light spell is great for high key hover I can't control light enough for lower key photos how do you control lights bill in a small studio what air the consideration this is a question that has come up before when we talked about that earlier with megan and I think the answer is you have to get some of those uh yeah the big the big white phone boards I think that you need to get you have to have white foam boards for different reasons but make sure that they're black on one side and if he if he can go in and put the black side facing out on both side walls and maybe even on the end wall it doesn't awful lot for sort of sucking all the light out of the room and so then light goes where he places it and no place else and it doesn't bounce off of those black walls or fabrics there are tons and tons of really good fabrics that are you know there's a there's a there's a fabric there's a certain not a velvet but a certain allure and you'll know if you go to a fabric store there's a velour that if you look at that edge of the fabric it has three green lines of thread I don't know what I'm talking about here because but this it's just got three green threads in the edge of the bat of fabric when you roll it out though that's the one that is the greatest light sucking fabric there's ever been it's just great for no bounce of light at all nothing will ever bounce off of it so he just has to cover the walls sidewalls and even the end wall with dark in order to have that light fall off and we're going to be going deeper into a lot of these setups and such as we go into seeing you working in the home studio and a lot of that will be tomorrow as it further in the class so we'll keep going and you know and on that let me just throw one other thing I can adjust a afterthought uh those five and one in six in one pop up you gotta be careful insane reflectors because they're not all reflectors summer absorbers and some are diffusers so those pop up those things those little guys are so great and they're so useful and none of you ever used the black side nobody ever uses the black side I used the black side more than any side and the way I use it isa subtract er of light I'll do it to bring in a portable black wall next to someone's face to pull ah higher ratio out of this picture and I'm doing the same thing that it's michael same thing that michael just asked is I'm going to bring in one those black pop up panels and closer and closer and closer to the face to absorb absorb absorb more is like a portable wall to me that's black and I'm bringing it in so that the light will fall off on that side so I do have more direction of light and it's not flat so use those panels use use all these tools and techniques they're all around us