What will you do if 1000 wedding planner rejected your enquiries? It’s hurt actually and I know how is the feeling cause back in 2013 I spread all my wedding photography packages to thousands of wedding planner around the world.
Hi brotha, I’m Bima and thank you for visiting my page, back few years ago I have to survive in photography business without any gears at all.
After watching a Master of Wedding Photographer movie I always have a dream to be a destination wedding photographer, a dream job for every photographer cause they will hired by world-wide couple and travel to their hometown or any chosen destination for pre wedding and wedding. In 2012 I choose to close my services for traditional wedding after 4 years of experience and bloody hell competition with other local photographers. But I don’t consider because of my decision, there is a big financial storm waiting for me cause I don’t have any booked client within 6 months and almost make me bankrupt.
What I did To Covered my Expenses While I Got No Booked Client
Through this condition I have to feed my 2 kids, my wife, and cover all of the credit card installment and what I did to secure my family is selling all of my gears such as Canon EOS 7D, 70-200m f2.8 L series lens, 17-40mm f4.0 L series lens, and my tiny 50mm f1.8 lens.
11 months later than I get 1 couple booked my wedding session in Bali for US$500, they are lovely Singaporean couple that I’ve meet in a nice coffee shop around Raffles Singapore. These couple bring me into one step higher in my photographer career for sure cause following them I got another from Hong Kong who brought me to Lux* Maldives for pre wedding session too.
If you read through my story here than you will find that every steps that I have was super easy but the fact is NOT, I struggle on it and this situation bring me down many times even my wife saw me cry so often cause 9 banks call me every day and push me to pay the loan without any excuse at all.
My wife keep giving me a support and love during this time, now we try to promote our studio to as many online wedding planner by giving a greeting emails and proposal about my portfolio. We keep sending a 10-15 proposal/day to various wedding planner located in Santorini, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hawai, Vietnam, Bali, Australia and many more and finally we knew that it already 1000 email that we sent to them during 6 months. We still shocked that from 1000 emails only 5%-7% reply our email and came with the same answer..“We are in………and you are in Indonesia, so why we should invite you to come to our country cause we do have our own photographer?”…Yeah I know this is a classic question and I don’t have any power to answer it.
What If 1000 Wedding Planner Rejected Your Enquiries?
My wife asking me “Are you still want to grab this market? it is world-wide market, or how about to think that we come back to our local wedding market?” Than I told her “NO….KEEP GOING and WORKING ON IT, STICK TO THE PLAN, we should grab this world-wide market, this gonna change our life FOREVER!”
I know this kind a crazy option but I believe that if we keep going on what we believe, someday it gonna be happen!
I don’t know how many times I cry, how many times I fall, and how many times I heard my friend keep telling me that I will be failed with this plan, till 1 email come to me from a Singaporean woman which is ask me to go to Bali for wedding photo shoot, another couple from Perth ask me to go to Sumba again for renew their wedding, and finally there are 2 couple who asked me to do pre wedding in Maldives and they came from Hong Kong and Singapore.
Now I can say that God gave me an answer about what I did during this 6 months, just a classic quote that I read in Bryan Tracy book ‘The Art of Closing the Sales’ that if I failed 16x so that I have to get up for 17x cause may the 17th will be the answer.
Keep going, and stick to the plan, we should grab this world-wide market, this gonna change our life forever!
For any photographer friends out there who have a same situation just like me, please keep going man! don’t stop! because one reason that I believe why we keep doing this business is because of we really love wedding photography.
Stay close to me and I’m gonna share some other story of how developing a wedding photography business from scratch!