Signed Electronically Wedding Photography Contract Template Made Easy

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hi my name is daniel and i run a wedding photography and videography company with my wife called little brick house productions and today i want to talk about contracts so we actually signed a couple of contracts this past week and just wanted to share a little bit about how we handle contracts and just some different methods that you can handle them as a photographer as a videographer or really anyone who is in a service type of business so contracts are super important they protect your business they let your client know exactly what you are delivering to them and it just provides a sense of professionalism and really just you know security for you and your business um so i would say for a lot of photographers and videographers you know there's kind of like three stages of handling contracts stage three being much more professional looking a much probably better option than say stage one now a lot of new photographers filmmakers they'll they'll start in stage one where they just have a verbal or a handshake contract and you know this is where you you know you're maybe you're advertising your business a client reaches out to you you talk to them a little bit and you tell them yeah i can do that for you we'll do it for uh you know we'll do a 30 second video and i'll do it for 500 um you agree upon this you know price and you do a good job on it best job you can you give it to your client and they're like um i thought we agreed upon a one minute video not 30 second or maybe even worse they say we said 400 right and you're like uh no i think we agreed upon 500 point is you don't have anything in writing it's kind of your word against theirs and that's the big flaw with this type of a contract the handshake contract is actually not legally binding really because it is just your word against theirs i did this one time and it only took one time for me to realize that this was not a good method for my business basically there was a guy who was a dog breeder who needed photos of his dog told him i could do it i did it for a pretty cheap price because i've never photographed dogs before i knew it could be kind of difficult so you know we meet up we go shoot you know i've got my my camera in you know high frames per second boom boom boom boom boom taking photos of this dog because it was moving probably took like 250 300 photos and i knew i got some good shots in there and so i took the photos home i called through them and i delivered about 20 edited photos which i thought you know for the price we agreed upon 20 edited photos they were great shots of his dog i deliver those to him and he hits me back with is that it question mark and i was like are you kidding me and i got annoyed i felt like he didn't appreciate what i was doing but you know most people just don't really understand how photography filmmaking actually work and he you know he expected to get all 300 photos that we took and at the end of the day it was really my fault because we didn't have a written contract i didn't spell out exactly everything i was offering to him and i learned from this and since then i've never done a verbal or handshake contract again and hopefully you aren't doing that either stage two of handling contracts would be you actually draft up something in writing and you know you meet with your client and you you hash out the details and you sign that contract that is the the stage that i'm in right now i use very simple setup i use google docs i have a very organized system of folders and i pretty much just sort of drafted up my own contract based off some free stuff i saw online i meet with client preferably face to face if i can't do face to face i'll do something like a zoom call and i highly encourage that as well because you get to know your client you build a sense of trust you could build like you know friendship type of thing and you learn really quickly within the first five minutes or so whether or not the two of you are going to be a good match and so i always try and do this with clients we we have the paper copy printed out um you know i talk about their wedding talk about kind of stuff they expect we talk about the schedule we go over the contract everything from how many photos they'll get how long their wedding video will be we agree upon the price i have in my contract that if i'm there all day you know if they have food they need to feed us uh pretty much it's pretty thorough it's pretty thorough contract um and then we if you know if we both agree upon it they sign it i sign it we take a photo of it we bring it home we print it out we have we both have it on record they have a copy i have a copy this is great because it protects our business it lets the client know exactly what they're getting so it benefits the client but everything is spelled out and you know we're relatively protected because you know i have information in there like how long i'll archive the their footage after it's gone i've got for three years so you know four years they hit me with hey we lost our wedding photos can you send them to me um you know i i just would point them back that hey in our contract you know i only had to keep it for three years i actually don't have it anymore it's just gonna save you a lot of headache and just really protects your company not to mention uh you know i think your clients can can feel the sense of professionalism when you have a written contract and in their mind i think you know it makes your business seem more uh secure and established and i highly highly highly recommend you at least do this type of method of handling contracts some pros and cons to it though okay pro obviously i've kind of already went over those professional um it protects you um it's just it's good to have a written contract um some of the cons with this method though are you know if you're using just like google drive with me you've got to be a super organized person you don't want to accidentally delete it or lose it so forth for me another con is at this stage in our business we are just signing it with the couple and then we just kind of take a pdf picture and bring it home and print it out i don't feel like that's the most professional way to go about it uh you know after they sign it asking us and we pull out our phones and take a picture having something that could actually scan the document or maybe even using something like docusign which costs a little bit of money but being able to actually electronically sign the document i think would be a little better a little bit more professional what we ultimately hope to do though is to eventually move to what i would call stage three of handling contracts and this is using a dedicated software to help you handle the entire contract communication approach as a whole so one option that i've really looked into uh you know not affiliated with it in any way but is honeybook so honeybook is a great software it looks like it's great software at least that allows you to handle not only contracts you know through its platform electronically but you can also handle invoicing you can handle communication all of this in one package so like for me i use a lot of paypal or venmo to handle payment we meet up and we do our print contract it would be nice to have everything all in one and that is stage three uh so that's where we hope to be at some point that is the more costly option i think honeybook is maybe like 35 a month or something like that and so it definitely has its values but it is expensive and just as a business we're not quite there yet but we hope to be soon so that's how we handle contracts let me know what you do in the comments below if there's a better way that i don't know about let me know and we would definitely look into it but that's it for this video thank you for watching and hopefully i will see you in the next video peace