How to Create an Annual Plan for Your Photography Business

How to Set Your Schedule For Success

Creating an annual plan for your photography business is the key to building a thriving a sustainable business. As a photographer, your life and business is one big balancing act. Keeping up with client communication, client sessions and your personal life can often feel like an impossible juggling act. Building a thriving and productive photography business begins with your systems, and there is no place better to start than with your calendar. Organizing your yearly calendar and then breaking it down monthly and weekly can help you plan for success and avoid burnout – even in the busiest seasons. In this blog, you’ll learn how to  map out your year, manage your time, set boundaries and create a balance between work and life. 

1. Start with Your Annual Plan

It may seem overwhelming to look at your entire year and plan it out, but a clear annual overview will help you prioritize when you’ll work and when you will have time off for rest, vacations and holidays. 

To start with your yearly plan, you have a few options. If you are a techy like me, you might want to use your online calendar. If you are need a more clear visual, printing out each month and laying it out on your wall or floor might work better.

Next you are going to go through the whole year and block out any holidays, vacations and personal time off. Know that you are taking a family vacation to Hawaii in October – block it off. Don’t want to work the last two weeks of the year to spend time with family – block it off. You get the idea. 

Once you have your dates mapped out for the year, you are going to set your financial goals and align them to your planned workload. This might look different depending on what type of photography you do, however here are a few options: 

1. How much revenue you want per quarter = x number of sessions or weddings per quarter. 
2. Your yearly revenue goal/ average session cost = number of sessions needed per year

Finally you are going to identify your busy seasons (e.g. wedding season, fall family photos, etc.). You are going to mark these on your calendar.

At the end of this planning session you will have a calendar that includes a rough outline of your available dates/busy season dates – more than enough to make your yearly revenue goals – as well as plenty of time blocked off for self-care and vacations. 

2. Break It Down: Monthly Goals and Planning

After you have created your annual photography business plan, the next step is monthly goals and planning. By tackling your plan month by month you are able to focus on goals in more manageable chunks. 

For each month, you are going to look at your calendar that you have already mapped out, and outline the following: 

• How many sessions you’ll take on – specifically map out which weekdays and weekends you want to have sessions and match this with your yearly/monthly revenue goals.
  • It might be beneficial to start with your identified busiest months, and then go back to your less busy months. As a photographer you will absolutely have a low season, but during that season it doesn’t mean you can’t bring in any revenue. By planning this way you can ensure that you meet your revenue targets without being stressed during the less busy months. 
• Identify any major projects or events (e.g. editing deadlines, marketing campaigns etc.) 
• Personal priorities, such as family time or hobbies. 

Once you have identified your session dates use any booking tools to make the sessions available to your clients. If you are a HoneyBook user, you will use the scheduler tool to map out your sessions and then put them into a lead form or a link in an email to make them available for clients to book.

3. Plan Your Week for Balance and Productivity

With your months mapped out from your annual plan for your photography business, creatiing your weekly calendar will feel so much easier. Weekly task lists keeps you focused and prevents overwhelm. 

As someone with ADHD, weekly scheduling really helps me to manage my week, keep me focused, and builds in flexibility. Depending on your organizational style there are several ways you can go about planning your week, but here I am going to share what has worked best for me and allowed me to be the most productive. 

5 Ways to Set Up Your Week For Success

1. Take time either on Friday afternoons or sometime on Sundays to do a brain dump of ideas and tasks to complete for the week ahead. I find that having everything out of my head before Monday morning allows me to hit the ground running and not feel overwhelmed when Monday begins.
   1. A brain dump is exactly what it sounds like – dumping everything out of your brain – ideas you have been thinking about, tasks you know you need to accomplish, tasks you didn’t complete from the previous week. Anything and everything can go on your brain dump. 
2. On Monday morning you are going to take your brain dump list and prioritize it. Using a tool like the Eisenhower Matrix can help you to easily prioritize without emotion. (see diagram below) 
3. Once you have prioritized your tasks, you can map them out throughout the week. I like to create a daily task list that also includes any meetings, client sessions, or personal items on it like appointments or things like grocery shopping. 
4. Another option is to assign specific days for key tasks i.e. editing, marketing or administrative work. 
5. A pro tip is to stick to time blocks and avoid overloading any single day. As someone with ADHD I know that my days need variability in order to stay focused. If I overload my day with content creation only, by mid-day I may feel burnt out and lose productivity. 

4. Set Boundaries and Stick to Them

Another key to mastering your photography calendar is setting boundaries. Boundaries are important in any business, but in a creative business setting it can be incredibly easy to shove off boundaries in order to take on another paying client. Without boundaries, work can creep into your personal time, leading to burnout. To have a thriving creative business, you need to set boundaries. You can read more about setting boundaries in this blog, but here are three ways that I set boundaries in my business to help ease stress and keep my creativity at the center. 

1. Clearly define your work hours and communicate them to clients. Whether this is by setting office hours and listing them on your contact page, or including your average response time in your initial inquiry email, knowing when you will and will not be working is an easy boundary to set. 
2. Schedule regular days off for rest and recovery. When you start your annual plan for your photography business, and are blocking off times for vacations, holidays etc., make sure you also block off days for rest. Photographers are notorious for working furiously during busy season and then burning out with sickness at the end, only to not be able to enjoy their planned holidays and vacations. 
3. Use automation tools to handle tasks outside of your working hours. Inquiry responses and appointment confirmations can be automated. Using a tool like HoneyBook can drastically reduce your time spent individually responding to emails and inquiries and allow you more time for your creativity, or rest and recovery. 

Boundary Check-In

Check in with yourself – what would it look like if you scheduled a Friday or Monday off during busy season, and gave yourself a true day of rest? Would the rest of your time be more productive, and fun? Probably. Here’s how I structure this in my business. If I book a full weekend of sessions, or a full day of mini sessions, I take the following Monday off completely. I set up an out of office email and take the day to recover. 

5. Review and Refine Your Annual Plan for Your Photography Business Regularly

Finally, you can’t expect that your calendar will stay the exact same as how you set it up at first. Vacation dates may change, you may get an unexpected influx in clients one month, and decide to slow down for another. Things change…and that’s ok!

Instead of stressing when things don’t go to plan, work into your schedule some regular reflection. Whether that is once a month or once a quarter – reflect on what worked, what didn’t work and what you need to prioritize next. 

Monthly asses your progress towards your goals and identify any gaps. As part of your annual plan for your photography business, take stock of your accomplishments, and adjust your annual plan for the next year. 

A regular review will not only allow you to readjust if necessary, but also to recognize all of the amazing work you are doing in your business and how far you have come over the course of a year. 

Balancing Photography Business & Your Life With Your Annual Plan

Mastering your photography calendar is about more than just scheduling sessions – it’s about balancing your life and your business.  

By creating an annual plan, breaking it into monthly goals, organizing your weeks and setting boundaries, you can transform your approach to managing your photography business and reclaim your time. 

As a photographer’s coach and HoneyBook systems strategist, I have helped photographers just like you transform their businesses so that that they can spend more time doing the things they love. Working with clients, planning sessions and delivering stunning galleries is why you got into this business, so let’s give you more of that, and less time on repetitive administrative tasks. 

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level through individualized coaching, or transforming your systems, let’s chat! I would love to work with you and see your business thrive, and your life have balance! You can contact me here and get started with a discovery call this week!