Lessons

Lesson Info

KUMU Studio Management Software Pricing Demo

This is a studio management software. It does a lot of what we talk about in those spreadsheets, so if you don't really need a piece of full-fledged piece of software like this, then just use those spreadsheets, that's fine. You don't have to have this, but if you're looking something to help you manage everything, contacts, products, packaging, all that kind of stuff. This is a software I developed for my own studio years ago. And sort of evolved it to a point where we could actually offer it to other photographers as well. So, it's called Kumu Studio and you start at the home page here, kinda walks you through what you're gonna do and you have several components to it. There's a company setup page. Company set up page is just all your information, your logo, which you wanna have on your invoices, your letterhead, et cetera. You can change a lot of these preferences here for job types which will cover correspondence for your contacts, et cetera. So, once you've got your information in...

here, what you would do is you'd go to the products section in the top right. And this is the product builder, which is based on what we talked about earlier, the pricing. So, I have prices in here. This is a demo thing, so there's some silly looking things in here if you're wondering, "What do I sell that's a blaster board for $1300. (laughing) I use this for demos so, sometimes I get a little loopy. Especially when I'm drinking before I start talking. (laughing) Makes it kinda weird. But here's how we do it. So, you wanna build a new product, you go to the new product button on the top and our product name, let's just type in some regular ol' stuff, an 8x (typing) machine print, 'cause some of them are custom some of the machine. (typing) Product category, you can change these. I've already got these set up. So, we have standard lab prints. If there's a product note, I order this from, and the pricing comes from WHCC, White House Custom Colors, my lab of choice. Okay, here's those numbers we talked about earlier, remember the admin time and your art time. So, admin time, say I'm gonna charge 50 an hour, might take me 15 minutes, I put .25 of an hour. The art time, what am I gonna charge? No, I said our admin time was 25 an hour. That's what we said for that. Part time would be 50 an hour and that might be .15 assuming it doesn't take a whole lotta retouching. And then we have the 8x10. Let's say it was 3.50, what we had in there. And packaging, which was 2. (typing) And I had a board (inaudible). It was 2.95, I think. (typing) Alright, so it rips it all down for you, does the same thing, calculates your cogs, your cost of sales target, which you can change, so if you say, "I'm not charging 30 percent, maybe I want more money. I'm gonna charge 25 percent, my cogs". So you just put that in there and that just raises your MSRP. Otherwise, leave it at 30. Now you gotta plug in, what are you gonna decide to do about this. Are you gonna take my advice or go wayward? (laughing) So, here I can say, "I'm gonna do this, baby! I'm gonna go $74, oh my god! I typed in the number, what's gonna happen! (woman laughing) IRS is gonna knock on my door!" Alright, so then it says your cost of sales is, alright, 30 percent, that's good and it says pricing okay. And it you click on the little question mark it'll explain why it's okay. If you were to type in, I'm not ready to charge that, I'm gonna charge 50, it says, "Attention K-Mart shoppers!" (audience laughing) Price too low. It doesn't stop you from charging 50 bucks, it just lets you know, it's not ideal. You could put a photo of your product here, you just click this button here and it adds a photo. So you can add, if there is like a frame or something particular, you add that in there. Then you go on and just keep adding product, and once you have all your products in your list view here, you can see here it will summarize anything that says "pricing okay", anything that has a bad price on it, "price too low" will show up. So, you can go and modify those or adjust those, or consider whether you want to change something with those. You can sort by all the different categories et cetera. So, now you got products. Now you need to start with your contacts. Now they're gonna do some jobs. So, my contacts, same thing, I'll go to new contact, and I've got a lot of information I can collect and this information is helpful for your marketing and this is really important. The reason I put all this stuff in here is to give you suggestions as for what to collect from your clients so that you can market to them. You need to stay in touch. Remember that yesterday? Your most powerful form of advertising is your word of mouth and your repeat clients. So, to ensure that, you stay in touch. You keep information about them. Alright, we're gonna view Sally again just 'cause it's the only name I can think of. Sally Smartypants. And put her address in here. Phone numbers, email, you can send an email direct through her webpage. You can click on that goes to her webpage if you want. The next tab, more, if she's a company you can put her company name in here. Even more, now we collect the juicy information. We collect Sally's birthday. Oh, she wasn't born today. (typing) Ooh, when was Sally born? (typing) Let's make her old. (audience laughing) Alright. (laughing) Okay then, Sally's anniversary, of course. More information. If this is a family portrait, you wanna collect information on the kiddos, okay? So, we have a son. His name is little Billy. And little Billy was born in Novermeber 23rd and if you know what year he was born, it keeps track of their age through the time so you'll be able to do promotions, like, "Hey! It's time for Billy's 10 year picture or his senior pictures or whatever coming up". So, let's say Billy was born in 2000. (typing) So he's 16 now. And same, so spouse... The dog? The dog. (laughing) Pet photography you need to know the dog, right? Spot. You don't care what's Spot's birthday... Well, maybe you do! I don't do pet photography, but I would imagine that pet photographers do birthday pictures for their dogs. Anybody here do pet photography? You know? (crowd muttering) Okay. Well, if you do pet photography, most people who bring their pets in for photography treat them like their kids, so they would probably celebrate their birthday. (laughing) So, You should have a pet birthday card promotion. You send that out on all your pets birthdays. (laughing) (woman laughing) It's funny but it's a money maker. I'll tell ya! [Dark Haired Woman] The vets do it. That's true, they send reminder cards, you know, "Hey! So and so's birthday's coming up" you know, they should cut their teeth clean, you know. Exactly. Why not get a portrait right after their teeth is cleaned. Do a co-promotion with the vet. Get your dog groomed and their teeth cleaned and come in for a portrait. I think that's brilliant, thank you very much. With a neat cupcake. (laughing) Alright, so then, last pages there's notes, you can put whatever you want. This is all private, the client never sees it, so, if you wanna remind yourself something about them. But this, even more, section is really important. Remembering things about your clients. I'm horrible about remembering things. My wife is amazing, but she's not always by my side (laughing) to help me look good in front of my client. So, I can look in here and go, I'm on the phone with her, "Hey Sally! How's Billy? My gosh, his birthday's coming up in a couple of months" you don't have to sell them anything, but, she'll be like, "Wow! How did you even remember that? You're such a smart photographer!" (laughing) "Wow!" "And how's Spot doing? Oh my gosh, he was so cute at the photo shoot! Oh... (audience laughing) "Sorry". (audience laughing) "I hope it wasn't a big truck". (laughing and groans) (laughing) Alright, poor Spot. See Spot run. (laughing) See Spot get run over. (muttering) Okay, we're not gonna talk about that anymore, that's sad. I have a doggie that I love very much. Does it send out reminders? Like calendar reminders? You know, so and so's birthday's coming up? There's a complex search in here so you can say, "I wanna pull up everybody's birthday is within next month" and it'll give you a list and then you have to manually take that list and mail to everybody. But, you can search for almost anything you want. As long as it's in here, you can search for it later on. Okay? I used the program you founded last year at WPPI and the reason I stopped using it is because it wouldn't sync with the email. I could not send out emails... (mumbles) That was the biggest issue I had with one of the programs we found similar to this. It would send out it's own email, you mean? No, the link up our existing email through their server, it wouldn't align. Most frustrating thing ever. So, I've been looking for something. Yeah, this one basically sends the email through whatever email program you're using. The other one was supposed to do that as well. But it wouldn't align. I wouldn't be able to send out invoices and you name it. We stopped using it because we were paying money for something that wasn't working. That's no good. Last thing here, contact types. You click on this and this is another one that you're gonna use for marketing. You could say this is a kid's, this is a family portrait potential, this could be a wedding. Maybe you did their wedding in the past. Maybe they're pregnant, so there might be a newborn! (audience laughing) You can create these yourself on the fly so you can put whatever you want or just use mine. Like, you would have pets in here. I didn't put pets in here, but that would be put in there as well, obviously. So now, later on I can always go and search by, I want everybody categorized in the family portrait category 'cause I'm gonna do a family picture promo in the next whatever, okay? Anyway, there's a lot to it, but I'm just gonna cover the basics, so when I go to shoot a job now for Sally, I go to new job, boom. It creates her a job. It copies her information, it connects it to Sally. What kind of job? I've got categories already. I'm gonna go shoot a family session for them My shoot date, blah blah blah. Really, that's all I need to put in here right now. Later I can add a sample image, I can put location information if it's a wedding, all the gallery links, there's links to all the different galleries. You can collect all the galleries where you post it and their passwords. Vendors that you use so you can market to the vendors. Take these photos that you took and say, "I'm gonna send a copy of this beautiful cake at their wedding to so and so vendor" but you need to remember what vendor did the cake, right? So, that's all gonna be in here as well. There's a workflow checklist you can go and step you through all the pieces of your workflow and you can check them off, put the information in here for this job. Go back here, but the main thing is, you go and you shoot your job, if you hit "copy info", this copies this job number and her name to the clipboard, which you now paste into your job folder, which is a whole 'nother class on work flow and light room and organization and all that, but this is where it starts. My workflow starts here, where I start this into a folder for this client name and then we start building all their images, their lightroom catalog around this job number information. So, this now links to the lightroom catalog, so right here it says "catalog link", so once we have a lightroom catalog, I can choose it in the finder. Here's lightroom catalogs. Say click to this catalog right there, insert. Now it's linked to this, so if I double-click this in the future it just opens up their catalog, boom. Somebody asked, "Why do you keep separate catalogs for each client?" This is why. One of the reasons why is now I just, Boop! I can open their catalog and work with it. Okay. Now, we go out and we shoot. Boom! We come back. Yay! We're good! We need to invoice, so we go to "new invoice" and now I put in the information for Sally. I didn't enter all her address, but it would be there if I'd entered it. Has her job number and I hit "products". And here all the products now that I created are right here, so I just choose 'em. Okay? She's getting an 8x10, she's gonna get 11x14, she's gonna get the blaster board, let's get that. (laughing) Maybe a Grundge Fi, whatever that is. (audience laughing) So, here is her invoice. Boom, there's her total. Yes! Good day today. Discounts, if you do discounts, I put it in here, we talked about it. Sometimes, you gotta do a discount for some reason. She's buying 5300 bucks worth of stuff and you love her and you wanna give her a discount, hallelujah. That's fine. I'm not gonna yell at you. So, do whatever you wanna do. Tax, if you charge tax you would add it here. You click this button, there's a tax thing, (mumbling) I don't have tax where I live, lucky me, shipping (mumbles) There's a payments thing. So when she makes a payment, say she pays in installments or whatever, you can record all the payments or record your balance due. (mumbles) It's a lot of stuff. And then when you're reading to print your invoice, click on "print", and "give me control", and it's formatted for a nice invoice ready to print with your logo instead of my logo, of course. Okay? Ready to go. This is a full studio management package, you can find out more about it on our website, but again, you don't have to buy this, you can use the spreadsheets and you can calculate your pricing. You can manually do it, you're gonna do fine. But, you'll get to a point when it gets out of control and you just really wanna get everything in one place, this might be useful for you. Alright?