Team Utilization During Off–season Months

Many industries have periods of intense work interspersed with periods of slow work. Retail is a great example: during the holiday months, the industry is in serious work mode, hiring extra employees and working 60–hour weeks to ensure every customer is taken care of and every sale is made. Immediately after the holidays, work slows. Fewer people have money left to make purchases and the workload gets much lower. These highs and lows occur every year based on holiday seasons.

The photo editing industry works in much the same way. Rarely is an editor working at exactly 100% capacity. During certain times of the year, editing is in high demand, and an editor may work countless hours to ensure the jobs are completed on time and within budget. During the slower months, an editor may have only 40% of his or her day taken by editing work, and have plenty of time to work on other projects.

The Best Photo Editors

It’s what editors do during this slow period that really sets the best photo editors apart from the rest. Some teams spend this time relaxing or letting themselves get complacent and avoiding any hard labor or challenging work. Our team is different.

During the slow times of the year, our editors are hard at work perfecting their skills and learning their craft. Photo editing is a lot like most artistic endeavors – unless you continue to practice, you’ll lose a lot of the skills and efficiency that you once had. So during the year, our photo editors:

• Train – Our editors go through constant training on new and old technologies, and various types of software to ensure they beat expectations on all of your projects.
• Review – Our editors go back and look at the year’s work. They try to see what mistakes may have been made and how better software or better editing could have improved on their work. They also see if there is any new technology that will help them avoid these mistakes in the future.
• Plan – Photo editing takes planning. You need to understand the best way to efficiently move projects through the schedule while still focusing on making each photo perfect. Every editor has strengths and weaknesses, so they plan on how to harness those strengths and minimize weaknesses to ensure a perfect final product.

For better or worse, photo editing is an industry with a lot spikes and dips. Most photo editors spend this time relaxing and letting their skills get rusty. Our editors, on the other hand, focus only on improving their craft, so that every job – including those during the busy seasons – is done to perfection, and that you'll always have your work completed for you with a quick turnaround, exactly as you wanted it.

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