How to Deal with the Client Pyramid

I know some readers of my blog and books are pros or aspiring professionals, so every now and then I like to present a few business related tips that they might like to try for the rest of this year and into 2027. I haven’t written that many business-oriented posts lately, mainly because these tend not to be popular but I’m going to try to write a few of these out on the occasional Saturday. Please let me know if you find these of interest or not.

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.”—Henry Ward Beecher

While the subject of today’s post is How to Deal with the Client Pyramid, my suggestions are, in fact, not the only way to do that. This is just one way to deal with these kinds of challenges and it includes some empirical data about how some photographers have dealt with the Client Pyramid, successfully and unsuccessfully.

There’s at least one reason why there’s a McDonald’s on every street corner in America and not a Ruth’s Chris Steak House: And that’s because Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers wanted to sell lots of hamburgers to lots of buyers. The average person isn’t going to eat Filet Mignon each week but no matter what the economic climate may be, he or she can afford a hamburger from Mickey D’s or In-N-Out, which is my current fave,. Many small photo studios ignore this reality when they fall prey to “carriage trade” envy, which happens when they disregard one of the oldest business realities…

The customer income pyramid

Some photographers and it doesn’t matter the size of their operation make the mistake of chasing big dollars while ignoring smaller sales that are available (by comparison) in greater numbers. I saw this when I lived in Maryland and later when moving to Colorado and openly confess to making this same mistake in both states!

How I Made this shot: Don’t let chasing the almighty dollar stand in the way of remembering why you got into photography in the first place: You love making photographs! I made the original image when Mary was driving through the Old Town section of Albuquerque. I saw these mannequins outside a boutique and knew I had to photograph them. although it amounted to me jumping out of the car and making three grab shots. It was originally shot with an Olympus E5 DSLR and Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4 ED SWD AF lens with an exposure of 1/640 sec at f/10 and ISO 320.

After I got home to Colorado, I realized I needed to create something different from the original image files. It turned out my as-captured image wasn’t as great as my previsualization, so I created this version. You can see the before and after images here to learn how I made this final version shown which had the Tonal Contrast filter from Color Efex applied.,

When competing for the tip of the pyramid, the competition is small but fierce, often with entrenched businesses that hold sway in the market not because of their photographic skills but often because of their political and social connections. One trend helping the independent photographer and small photo studios is the gradual disappearance of mall and “store” photography operations that used to siphon bread-and-butter business from small studios. They’re still out there bit in sharply reduced numbers.

Case Studies

I know a photographer who once dumped most of her smaller customers because she was “embarrassed” to admit to her peers that she was servicing a less prestigious, less affluent clientele but one that happily paid for her services. When her business floundered, she desperately tried to get these same customers back because she was more embarrassed about being broke. It took her three years to build her client base back to a level that she destroyed in just a few months by cutting these customers loose.

Another studio I know who specialized in Fortune 500 clients created a school photography division that had its own, separate staff. That separate operation provided recession-proof income and when tight economic times caused cutbacks from corporate clients; the school division boomed and eventually became more successful than its parent studio. Ray Kroc, it appeared, was right, you do “deserve a break today.”

Postscript: If you’ve seen the movie The Founder about Ray Kroc his attitude toward the McDonald Brothers and in general might give you a different perspective about the man than you might have had.