How to Prepare Bids and Estimates as a Professional Photographer

Photography Tips

Whether you’re a young freelance photographer or a well established professional with great accounts to run, you’ll always come across long processes of estimates before each job you perform. You know how hard and subjective this can be, for any lecture on the practical business side of successful negotiating may come very handy—this is a very serious step intrinsically related to how you manage and organize your work method.

Frank Meo, founder of The Photo Closer, lectures extensively on how to prepare and present an estimate for a particular job. Frank represents photographers with a broad range of specialties throughout the world. He is responsible for promoting the work of his photographers to decision-makers seeking high quality imagery. This is a one hour and a half presentation where Meo picks a few add campaigns and deconstructs them, breaks downs the whole process for a better understanding on how they were programmed and conceived:

The presentation is filled with great examples to help you establish your estimates. The process is bulleted and organized so that you can clearly understand the exact steps to follow on each job, separated in these 5 parts:

1. Digest
2. The call
3. The estimate
4. Creative Separation
5. Submit

Even following great practical examples, each project is different from the other and needs to be thought independently. But as Meo stated,

“It’s not always about your numbers. It’s about what you’re going to bring to this project.”