Why replying, turning up and sticking to deadlines will do more for your career than another month of posting.
This morning I cancelled four shoots. Not because of the weather, or a client pulling out, but because I couldn't get a meeting locked in, or the person went MIA after we'd agreed to catch up. I do this pretty regularly. It's not personal. We all get busy, and it's incredibly easy to get distracted. But I can't organise a shoot with someone I can't get hold of.
I'll also start with a confession, because it would be a bit rich to write this otherwise. I'm not great at this stuff either. I let emails sit. I miss follow-ups I meant to send. I give people a lot of leniency, partly because I know I need some too, and I've lost work because of it, which I'll get to.
But after years of working with models, photographers and creatives, and seeing who actually moves forward, I keep landing on the same thing. Talent is common. Reliability isn't. And it's one of the biggest reasons I see people get stuck.
The models who want to get signed and the photographers who want to get booked are often doing the same thing: waiting. They post, they tag, they hope someone notices, and they're flaky with the people who already have.
Followers aren't clients
Posting on Instagram is a bit of a wank, if we're being honest about it. I know photographers, content creators and influencers with huge followings who make almost no money, because they still don't have clients. An audience is nice. It isn't a business.
The numbers back this up. In Linktree's survey of 9,500 creators, only 12% of full-time creators said they earned more than US$50,000 a year, and 46% said they earned less than US$1,000 (TechCrunch). It's a few years old and self-reported, but the gap between being seen and being paid is pretty clear.
Being seen is the easy part now. Being someone people can rely on is where the work goes.
Reliability is the skill nobody puts in their portfolio
When I'm deciding who to work with, or who to recommend, the questions in my head aren't only "are they good?" They're: Will they reply? Will they turn up on time? Will they do what they said they'd do, when they said they'd do it? Will I have to chase them?
If the answer to that last one is yes, it doesn't matter how good the work is. Every job has a producer, a client, a deadline and a budget behind it, and nobody wants to stake those on someone they're not sure will show.
That's the uncomfortable bit. You can be the most talented person in the room and still lose the job to someone slightly less talented who simply replied first.
It's also how most work gets passed around. People hire who they've heard good things about. In Nielsen's 2021 Trust in Advertising study of more than 40,000 people, 88% said they trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel (Nielsen). Nobody recommends the person who went quiet on them.
The way I think about it: put value on other people's time, more than your own. Treat it like an investment. Every reply, every confirmed time, every deadline you hit is a small deposit, and people remember who made their life easier.
For models
Go to castings, and go on time. It sounds basic, because it is, and it's still where a lot of people fall over.
Keep your book moving. This is the one a lot of models get backwards. It's usually not your paid work that books you the next job. A lot of paid work, especially ecomm, is shot for the product, not for you, and it rarely shows you at your best. What books jobs is a great test, images made for yourself, with a team that knows how to get the best out of you. Keep testing, keep your portfolio current, and update your digitals regularly. Clients want to see how you look right now, not how you looked eighteen months ago.
Pester your agent, nicely. Your agent has a board full of people. Ask what they're putting you up for, send them your new tests, tell them when your look changes, and check in when it's gone quiet. The models who stay front of mind are usually the ones who stay in touch. If you met a client you liked, or a photographer you clicked with, send a short message afterwards too.
Tag the brands you wear and work with, but don't stop there. A tag is a nice nudge. It isn't a conversation.
None of this is about being pushy. It's about making yourself easy to work with and easy to remember. When someone is choosing between two girls who are both right for the job, easy to work with wins more often than people think.
I've written before about what new models should know about being signed versus being represented, and part of it is this: even a good agency works better for the models who show up for themselves.
For content creators
Talk to the brands directly, and to the PR agencies that look after them. That's who decides who gets sent product, who gets the paid campaign and who gets asked back. Waiting for a brand to find you in a feed full of people doing the same thing is a long wait.
Make the things you actually want to see. Try things, experiment, keep what works for you and drop what doesn't. Nurture your own voice rather than chasing whatever went viral last week. A viral post gets you a spike. A voice gets you remembered.
From a paid perspective, the vibe you put out is probably worth more than another viral post. Brands are hiring you to stand next to their name. They want someone who's easy to deal with, replies, delivers on time and is good to be associated with. That's the part that turns into repeat work.
For photographers
Produce the work you want to be paid for. Not more of what you've already got, and not just what you've been booked for in the past (more on that in Your Portfolio Isn't a Campaign). If you want to shoot swim campaigns, write yourself a swim campaign brief and shoot it like it's real: references, casting, location, styling, deliverables.
Then get that portfolio in front of your ideal clients. This is where most photographers stop. They make something good, post it, tag the brand and wait.
Tagging a brand on Instagram isn't outreach. It's a notification in an inbox someone checks twice a week, sitting under a hundred others. If you want a brand to see your work, send it to them. Message them, email them, find out who actually commissions the shoots and talk to that person.
And if you see something a brand has done that you love, a campaign, a location, an approach, tell them. Give them props. People remember the person who noticed what they were trying to do. It's a much better way into a conversation than "hi, I'm a photographer, here's my link."
Yep… I've lost work this way too
This is the bit I'd rather not admit, but it's the most useful part of this whole article.
I recently realised I'd lost a client. The contact I'd been working with had moved on, and a photographer I'm friends with had taken over the work I used to do. Nobody did anything wrong. I just hadn't stayed in touch. If you're not making regular contact, you're not leaving any impression that you enjoy the work and do it well, and when someone new arrives, they go with whoever is in front of them.
To be fair, they were better suited to it. My heart wasn't really in that work, and if I'm honest with myself, I probably should have passed the job on to them in the first place. It would have been better for everyone involved. That's a lesson too: if you're not going to give something your full attention, hand it to someone who will, before it drifts away on its own.
The one that stung more was a dream client. We got deep into a pre-production document, then kept rescheduling, and rescheduling again. Eventually the job was shot by another photographer.
I don't think either of those was about the quality of my work. They were about momentum. Jobs don't wait for you to get organised.
And it's far more expensive to win a client than to keep one. Depending on the industry, finding a new customer costs anywhere from five to 25 times more than keeping an existing one, and research by Bain & Company's Frederick Reichheld found that lifting customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% (Harvard Business Review). Those numbers come from big business, but the logic holds for a photographer with ten regular clients: the cheapest job you'll ever win is the next one from someone who already likes working with you.
The follow-up is where the job is
Most people send one message, hear nothing, and decide it's a no. It usually isn't. It's a busy person who saw it on their phone and meant to come back to it.
In Backlinko's analysis of 12 million outreach emails, only 8.5% got a reply. But sending just one follow-up lifted replies by 65.8%, and messages that were personalised got about a third more replies than generic ones (Backlinko). That study was about business emails, not DMs to brands, but I'd be surprised if creative work is any different.
So follow up. Politely, and about them, not about you being ignored.
Know when to walk away
The flip side of all this is that you don't have to chase forever. When someone keeps going quiet, keeps moving things or can't commit to a time, I think it's important to acknowledge it and move on. This is roughly what I send:
Hey, I think I'm just going to leave this one! I need to be able to lock things in and communicate pretty consistently when I'm organising shoots, and I don't think it's quite lining up here.
No hard feelings at all, all the best with everything!
It sets a boundary, it says what I need it to, and nobody has to feel bad. Lots of us make this mistake, me included, and it's much better to close the door kindly than to leave it half open for months.
How I try to keep up
I keep a tracker of who I'm talking to, where each conversation is up to and what I said I'd do next. It gets messy. I try to stay on top of my diary and write everything down the moment I agree to it.
I still miss things.
But the tracker means that when I do, I can see it, and I can fix it before a client moves on or a shoot falls through. If you don't have some version of that, even a note on your phone, start there.
Who's going to get the job?
Here's the question I'd ask yourself. If you're waiting for opportunities to happen, and someone else at your level is out there creating them, sending the email, following up, turning up early, delivering on time, who do you think gets the job?
It's rarely the person with the most followers. It's usually the person who made it easy to say yes.
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Oliver Minnett is a third-generation photographer based in Sydney. He shoots and produces campaigns and editorial, scouts, and, by day, teaches and runs events at Georges Cameras.
