The Importance of Setting Boundaries and Paying for Your Work

When it comes to building a successful career in your field, there are many things that can help you achieve success. One of the most important things is setting boundaries and paying for your work. Unfortunately, many people struggle with this concept, especially when they're starting out. In fact, I've seen people get so caught up in justifying working for free that it becomes a real concern.

When someone offers to do work for you "for free," it can be tempting to accept. After all, who doesn't want to help out a friend or colleague? But the truth is, free work often ends up going nowhere. Instead of getting rewarded with a new business opportunity or recognition in your field, free work can be lost in the void of someone's portfolio or forgotten altogether.

I remember when I was younger, I fell victim to this trap. I helped out some friends and colleagues with their work, thinking that it would help them get ahead in their careers. But instead, my time was spent on tasks that didn't even matter to me. It wasn't until later that I realized the importance of setting boundaries and paying for my work.

One example that comes to mind is a local non-profit organization in Dallas that specialized in creative arts. In the 80s, many people in the community were willing to do pro-bono work for this organization, hoping it would boost their portfolio and reputation. However, when the organization received a large grant in the '90s, they decided to outsource the rebranding efforts to a major agency in New York instead of hiring one of the local designers who had done the work for free.

This decision was based on the value that the agency saw in their services compared to what was offered by the non-profit organization. Instead of rewarding the people who had worked for free, they paid junior designers to do the job. It's a sad example of how free work can be taken advantage of and undervalued.

So what should have happened instead? The organization should have rewarded the people who had done the work for free by hiring them to do it in an official capacity. This would have shown that their efforts were valued and appreciated, rather than discarded in favor of cheaper alternatives.

In general, when someone offers to do work for you "for free," it's essential to set clear boundaries and negotiate a fair payment. This doesn't mean that everyone has to be paid the same rate; however, everyone should get compensated for their time and expertise.

One strategy is to trade services with others in your industry. For instance, if you're a photographer and a friend of yours needs a logo designed, you could offer to take photos of them in exchange for the design work. This type of trading can be beneficial, especially when both parties are experts in their respective fields. However, it's still important to come up with a clear agreement and ensure that both parties get what they want.

Ultimately, setting boundaries and paying for your work is crucial to building a successful career. It shows that you value your time and expertise, and that you're willing to negotiate fair rates for the services you provide. By doing so, you'll be able to attract clients who respect your worth and are willing to pay you for your work.

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By following these tips and strategies, you'll be able to build a successful career as a photographer and establish yourself as an expert in your field. Remember that setting boundaries and paying for your work is essential to achieving success, so don't let anyone take advantage of your time or expertise.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody Ted Forbes here welcome back to the Art of Photography I want to do a real quick video today to answer a question that I got in an email yesterday and this email was sent to me by a gentleman named Glenn and I asked Glenn if I could use this in the show he said yes I could because I think this is a really good question that really should be addressed and it deals with should you work for free Glenn had asked me he said he had an opportunity that had come up and it was with a high-profile client um that was asking him to do a project pro bono and he was because he's starting out wanted to know if this was something he should do uh to maybe get his foot in the door and this is a tough question and I know that everybody's career path is different there is no formula there's no way you can do it um and personally working for free is a very controversial topic uh personally I hate the idea and I don't work for free and I want to talk about this a little bit um on this video and make a couple suggestions first of all working for free um if it's a high-profile our client that wants you to do free work uh I would question the quality of the project that you're about to do so for instance what I'm saying is is if they're high-profile and they know what professional work looks like my concern is that they don't take this particular project very seriously in their high-profile and want to use you as a means to maybe get this work done and pass it off to somebody they're doing a favor for because you're just starting out and you'll probably do it for the exposure even as these words come out of my mouth it's a little bit annoying because you would never ask your accountant to do your taxes for free you would never have somebody come fix the sink and say hey I can get you some exposure if you'd fix my friend sink too and you do them all for free I mean it's really pretty ridiculous but for some reason Visual Arts is in or really all the Arts are in a position where people will do that work for free and somehow it's become a little bit accepted to be able to ask and for that to be cool personally and you're going to have to figure out and I this is what I told Glenn and I think you watching this if you've ever considered working for free this is very common especially people who want to try to break into doing weddings or doing portrait sessions you know I I understand when you're starting out you don't have a huge portfolio of work that's certainly acceptable my own experience in working for free though is that the client and you know we used to use this fancy word for it called pro bono and I guess because pro bono sounds really Latin or something it really because it applied to nonprofits organizations and I've always had trouble getting the respect from the client let's say you do the job and they're not really even a client cuz they're not paying you you still have to behave like their employee and they have expectations that a client will have on you during the course of the job and I think that's where it gets really tough and then when you're done with this real high-profile thing that got your foot in the door then it's up to you to do all the footwork to try to promote the work that you did for this client pro bono and again you're not in the position to dip much promotion out of it because you're that's why you did it for fre anyway so see the cycle that we're getting into here and it really is a little bit concerning I think to see people do this what it comes down to is this is what we call boundaries and boundaries are something that should be talked about a lot more um you know you can deal with them in personal relationships you deal with them in business and boundaries basically are a set of rules a set of things that you will not do and at the top of my list is working for free I have done it in the past and it never worked out and today I'm in a position especially years and years later after having done those projects early on where I can see these things and I realize how bad it is and so my advice to you is to please consider drawing that boundary um I'm going to give you another example um there was a I'm not going to say who they are but there was a local here in Dallas a nonprofit that meant they were a creative arts organization and over the years this is all throughout the 80s I remember as a kid cuz I you know my parents were in the business and we knew people I knew a lot of people who did pro bono for this organization they did free graphic design they did free photography they did all this stuff so they could put it in their portfolio and attach this illustrious name to the work they did in hopes that it would take them somewhere the interesting thing was is in the '90s this particular organization um got a large Grant a large gift of money to specifically address their rebranding efforts their logo their colors their type face their signage everything and it was a significant chunk of money and so one would think after all those people did favors for them all the years that they would select one or two of them and reward their efforts by saying here's the grant money that we have we would like to hire you now to do this in official capacity but no that's not what they did they had to go to New York because you know you're not here they're going to get better quality in New York of course and they had to go to a very specific major name at a agency who in turn saw that is not a lot of money compared to the corporate clients they're used to and they put it off under some Junior designers and honestly they got what they deserved out of it but anyway all this to say is the what should have happened as a result of that was to reward the people who had been working for free so my point is is that free just about never ends up in the right place let me make one suggestion because I understand when you're starting out and you need the work you need the portfolio it's really easy to justify these things in your mind in fact I've seen people get to where they justify them a little too much and all they do is work for free and it's really concerning sometimes to see this happen because then their careers don't work because they never have any income coming in and they can't run a business but let's say that there is a friend of yours or somebody that you really tempted to help out and I just want to throw this out there you know believe it or not money was something that humans invented at one point and currency and this whole way of putting it in a bank and exchanging it and having it be representative of value and that's what you're getting paid to to do before all of that was invented there was this thing called trade and let's say you were in a village and you dried meat and you were really good at hunting and saving and curing and drying meat you made beef jerky and you needed to have your roof fixed so you might trade some of your beef jerky for a new roof and I know this is a ridiculous comparison but hope you get my point my point is is that doing a trade-out can be different and so for instance this works really well with people in our business so if you're a photographer and maybe a friend of yours is getting married and they want somebody to shoot the wedding and he's a really good graphic designer maybe you could trade him for a logo or maybe a portfolio design or maybe a web design or something of that nature or you know whatever that is there is such thing as trading and that is a little bit different um I still don't really recommend it over the traditional method of I do work and I get paid but like I said earlier you're going to have to figure out what works for you and I can't tell anybody what to do on this because it's amazing to see people justify it and believe it or not when I was younger I did it too I think it's really important though to come up with that list of boundaries and write them down and these are what my Manifesto is in my business and I will not do these things and I think working for free should be at the top otherwise you have no business if you do too much of that your time is worth something anyway just a couple thoughts on working for free and I appreciate Glenn for allowing me to share that email with everybody and uh anyway I hope that helps as always remember if you enjoyed this video to like it and share it with your friends as always remember to watch The Art of Photography And subscribe and I will send you more videos or somebody will you'll get more videos out of it and you'll be able to follow up on always the latest and the greatest so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next episode laterhey everybody Ted Forbes here welcome back to the Art of Photography I want to do a real quick video today to answer a question that I got in an email yesterday and this email was sent to me by a gentleman named Glenn and I asked Glenn if I could use this in the show he said yes I could because I think this is a really good question that really should be addressed and it deals with should you work for free Glenn had asked me he said he had an opportunity that had come up and it was with a high-profile client um that was asking him to do a project pro bono and he was because he's starting out wanted to know if this was something he should do uh to maybe get his foot in the door and this is a tough question and I know that everybody's career path is different there is no formula there's no way you can do it um and personally working for free is a very controversial topic uh personally I hate the idea and I don't work for free and I want to talk about this a little bit um on this video and make a couple suggestions first of all working for free um if it's a high-profile our client that wants you to do free work uh I would question the quality of the project that you're about to do so for instance what I'm saying is is if they're high-profile and they know what professional work looks like my concern is that they don't take this particular project very seriously in their high-profile and want to use you as a means to maybe get this work done and pass it off to somebody they're doing a favor for because you're just starting out and you'll probably do it for the exposure even as these words come out of my mouth it's a little bit annoying because you would never ask your accountant to do your taxes for free you would never have somebody come fix the sink and say hey I can get you some exposure if you'd fix my friend sink too and you do them all for free I mean it's really pretty ridiculous but for some reason Visual Arts is in or really all the Arts are in a position where people will do that work for free and somehow it's become a little bit accepted to be able to ask and for that to be cool personally and you're going to have to figure out and I this is what I told Glenn and I think you watching this if you've ever considered working for free this is very common especially people who want to try to break into doing weddings or doing portrait sessions you know I I understand when you're starting out you don't have a huge portfolio of work that's certainly acceptable my own experience in working for free though is that the client and you know we used to use this fancy word for it called pro bono and I guess because pro bono sounds really Latin or something it really because it applied to nonprofits organizations and I've always had trouble getting the respect from the client let's say you do the job and they're not really even a client cuz they're not paying you you still have to behave like their employee and they have expectations that a client will have on you during the course of the job and I think that's where it gets really tough and then when you're done with this real high-profile thing that got your foot in the door then it's up to you to do all the footwork to try to promote the work that you did for this client pro bono and again you're not in the position to dip much promotion out of it because you're that's why you did it for fre anyway so see the cycle that we're getting into here and it really is a little bit concerning I think to see people do this what it comes down to is this is what we call boundaries and boundaries are something that should be talked about a lot more um you know you can deal with them in personal relationships you deal with them in business and boundaries basically are a set of rules a set of things that you will not do and at the top of my list is working for free I have done it in the past and it never worked out and today I'm in a position especially years and years later after having done those projects early on where I can see these things and I realize how bad it is and so my advice to you is to please consider drawing that boundary um I'm going to give you another example um there was a I'm not going to say who they are but there was a local here in Dallas a nonprofit that meant they were a creative arts organization and over the years this is all throughout the 80s I remember as a kid cuz I you know my parents were in the business and we knew people I knew a lot of people who did pro bono for this organization they did free graphic design they did free photography they did all this stuff so they could put it in their portfolio and attach this illustrious name to the work they did in hopes that it would take them somewhere the interesting thing was is in the '90s this particular organization um got a large Grant a large gift of money to specifically address their rebranding efforts their logo their colors their type face their signage everything and it was a significant chunk of money and so one would think after all those people did favors for them all the years that they would select one or two of them and reward their efforts by saying here's the grant money that we have we would like to hire you now to do this in official capacity but no that's not what they did they had to go to New York because you know you're not here they're going to get better quality in New York of course and they had to go to a very specific major name at a agency who in turn saw that is not a lot of money compared to the corporate clients they're used to and they put it off under some Junior designers and honestly they got what they deserved out of it but anyway all this to say is the what should have happened as a result of that was to reward the people who had been working for free so my point is is that free just about never ends up in the right place let me make one suggestion because I understand when you're starting out and you need the work you need the portfolio it's really easy to justify these things in your mind in fact I've seen people get to where they justify them a little too much and all they do is work for free and it's really concerning sometimes to see this happen because then their careers don't work because they never have any income coming in and they can't run a business but let's say that there is a friend of yours or somebody that you really tempted to help out and I just want to throw this out there you know believe it or not money was something that humans invented at one point and currency and this whole way of putting it in a bank and exchanging it and having it be representative of value and that's what you're getting paid to to do before all of that was invented there was this thing called trade and let's say you were in a village and you dried meat and you were really good at hunting and saving and curing and drying meat you made beef jerky and you needed to have your roof fixed so you might trade some of your beef jerky for a new roof and I know this is a ridiculous comparison but hope you get my point my point is is that doing a trade-out can be different and so for instance this works really well with people in our business so if you're a photographer and maybe a friend of yours is getting married and they want somebody to shoot the wedding and he's a really good graphic designer maybe you could trade him for a logo or maybe a portfolio design or maybe a web design or something of that nature or you know whatever that is there is such thing as trading and that is a little bit different um I still don't really recommend it over the traditional method of I do work and I get paid but like I said earlier you're going to have to figure out what works for you and I can't tell anybody what to do on this because it's amazing to see people justify it and believe it or not when I was younger I did it too I think it's really important though to come up with that list of boundaries and write them down and these are what my Manifesto is in my business and I will not do these things and I think working for free should be at the top otherwise you have no business if you do too much of that your time is worth something anyway just a couple thoughts on working for free and I appreciate Glenn for allowing me to share that email with everybody and uh anyway I hope that helps as always remember if you enjoyed this video to like it and share it with your friends as always remember to watch The Art of Photography And subscribe and I will send you more videos or somebody will you'll get more videos out of it and you'll be able to follow up on always the latest and the greatest so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next episode later\n"