Running a busy commercial photo studio is a complex task. There is research and cold calling. There are assignments with deadlines to meet. Estimates and proposals to create. Budgets to prepare and adhere to. Concepts to be detailed, sketched and approved. Employees and Freelancers to book and pay. Clients to invoice. Profit margins to maintain. Images to be marked-up and retouched. Approvals to get from clients. Final images to deliver to clients. The list seems to go on and on, and really that’s just the start of it.

In reality, all photographers are CEO’s of their small corporations. There are so many hats that we may wear in a single day. At any one time, our studio may have 25-30 hot prospects that we’re trying to keep in touch with, 10 – 15 jobs in pre-production, another 10-15 jobs in production, another 10-15 in post production, and still more jobs that we have to do the final invoicing and other wrap tasks. With so much to be overseen, there are way too many opportunities for important details (or the minute ones) to fall through the cracks.

As our client base at The KMR Group, Inc. began to grow and thus our staff began to grow, I slowly lost track of what everyone was doing, when they were doing it, how much time it was taking them, the status on every project, and worst of all, our bottom line on each job. As deadlines loomed, our staff would be forced to work overtime to keep our promises to our clients and budgets would be blown. Our productivity seemed to go down, while our billings went up. Priorities didn’t necessarily reflect those things that were most important to us as a company, as a team.

Here’s the problem: Over the years, I have tried nearly every photo studio management application available on the market and NONE of them fit the bill. They were either lacking in features, buggy, slow or just didn’t work in a multi-user environment. What’s the sense in an productivity tracking application that would crash every 15 minutes, or one that could only be installed on a single user’s computer? What’s the point in using 15 different applications for managing a single job?

At one point, we were using Sugar CRM to manage our prospecting and client management, Excel spreadsheets to handle estimates and proposals, Intuit Quickbase to manage productions, each user had a copy of OmniFocus to track their tasks (which by the way, I couldn’t see what was done unless they said “Hey it’s done”), Intuit’s Quickbooks to handle Invoicing and the financials, and all their other daily “stuff”. There was also no way for me to track, in real time, what kind of time people were putting in to each project they were working on. Now, I realize micromanaging is not a way to run a small company, but how are we to know if we’re billing our clients enough to cover our time and costs?

Last year, we brought our prospecting and production management side of things into Intuit’s Quickbase Platform. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Quickbase is an online database platform that allows you to easily build applications by just pointing and clicking. As we got busy, it was impossible for me to continue building our studio management application on that platform and every time Quickbase did a software update a part of our application would break. We still have several other pieces of software running on each person’s computer – email, OmniFocus, Excel for estimates and proposals, and Quickbooks for billing and financials.

We needed to find a way to increase productivity, understand what was going on in our studio, increase our effectiveness in building relationships, manage projects effectively, view and understand our profit margin, and see in a simple form what was happening, what needed to be done and who was doing it.

So my search began again to find a studio management application that would do it all!

In the last 6 months, I have reviewed nearly every piece of software made to manage photo studios, both online platforms and off-line platforms, single user and multi-user. Here’s the biggest issue – most of them are made for portrait studios. A commercial studio has much different client needs, financial tracking needs and workflow needs than a portrait studio. My search failed. Another month went by.

Earlier this year, I had an intern that worked at a major advertising agency, as an art director, for the last ten years (she was laid off during the down turn in the economy last year) who suggested that I look into the Ad Agency Management platforms. That was when I struck gold! Well, Almost!

Large agencies are managing 10, 20 or 30 times the amount of traffic that my studio handles, they have 10, 20 or 30 times the number of people working there, and they bill by the hour for everything. The biggest problem with most of the Ad Agency Management platforms is they are either too costly to implement or too costly to keep running over time (for example: high yearly per seat licenses).

Then I found Vancouver, BC based FunctionPoint. They seem to have it right.

Relationship management is built right into the application (track clients, vendors and prospects). Estimates and proposals can easily be created within their application, they’re then converted to jobs and tasks can be assigned directly to individuals at your studio. Throughout you can track time spent on each job and even issue purchase orders and track materials used to produce the job. You can easily and on-the-fly view reports on the progress of each job, the profitability of any job and when the job is delivered and complete send an invoice. (They also support interim and retainer invoices). Throughout the entire process, FunctionPoint syncs Job, Contact, Purchase Order, Time, Billing and Invoice information with Quickbooks with almost no user interaction.

Screen Capture of Function Point

All of this is done online and hosted on FunctionPoint’s servers. You may ask, how can this be affordable? Their per seat license over the course of 86 Months (that’s 7 years) would cost about as much as one Adobe Creative Suite license.

I think the biggest thing, beyond functionality, that sold me on their product is their service and support. Two days after my demo of the platform with my sales rep I received a telephone call from the CEO of the company, Chris Wilson, to have an “owner-to-owner” discussion. We spent 45 minutes on the phone and, if they didn’t have a staff meeting where their developers were showing him some new functionality in their next release, we probably would have chatted for another 45 minutes.

Needless to say, we signed our service agreement yesterday and are excited to get our studio running on the FunctionPoint platform.

Check out a video demonstration of FunctionPoint here:
http://www.functionpoint.com/demo.html

They also have a great blog with some fabulous information over at:
http://blog.functionpoint.com/

This article is one in a series that I will be writing on our deployment experience and usage of FunctionPoint over the next couple months.

Disclaimer: The KMR Group, Inc is a paying client of FunctionPoint as of June 2, 2010. They did not ask me to write this, they did not compensate me for writing this, I am just providing this information as a service to the photo community.

About the author

Kevin Michael Reed
Kevin Michael Reed (Google+, Facebook) is a fashion & beauty photographer and producer/director based in New York City and Los Angeles, CA. He is the President/CEO of RedFOG Visual Media, a production company in New York City, and a partner in Passion of Photography, Inc, a company dedicated to teaching photographers and sharing our passion through charitable causes. Kevin has lectured and hosted workshops throughout the United States and the world teaching photographers the business and creative sides of photography. (Kevin's Fashion & Beauty Photography Portfolio can be seen here).