Scheduling

Transcript

Transcript of the recorded lesson. Recorded 2023, reviewed 2026.

In this video I'm going to talk about scheduling.

Now there are many different scheduling systems on the market today, and some are made just for photographers. Many allow the customers to book specific time slots based on your availability. We personally never like this scheduling method because you can organize your day and do more jobs if your customers don't set your schedule. We let our customers give us time preferences, giving us the flexibility to accommodate as many orders as possible. If you're a one-off photographer and don't plan on growing outside of yourself or maybe you don't do much volume, then a self-service system might work for you. But if you want to grow your business beyond yourself, I think it's a lot easier

to manage who's doing what job and when on the company side. Today we have a pretty sophisticated scheduling system that creates calendar events at specific times with variable event durations based on what the customer orders and the home size. If you're just getting started, this is overkill. All you need is an order form and Google calendars. We have always used Google calendars and we still use it to this day. We have tried other calendar services but never switched because of Google calendar's reliability and simple interface. Now if you have multiple photographers, it's a good idea to map out where they live and try to schedule jobs in that area.

This isn't always possible and some of our photographers have to travel extensively, but when possible we try to keep people in the area in which they live. Also when hiring photographers try to have a large coverage area. You don't want to hire photographers that all live in the same area. Now our cutoff time is 5 p.m. but we will typically accommodate customer orders until 6 p.m. You don't want your customers to be in the habit of submitting last minute orders because it can lead to a bad team member experience. We usually like to have everybody's calendar set by 6 p.m. the night before so that our media

specialists can schedule activities outside of work. It's also a good idea to use Zapier to automate the tedious process of calendar event creation. Zapier will save you a lot of time from manually adding events and it also helps reduce errors like forgetting to add orders to the calendar. Alright guys that's going to do it for this video. Reach out if you have any questions. We'll see you guys on the next one.