A lot to read/learn in this one. Let’s start:

QUICK TIPS

1. When was the last time you reviewed your photography business?

Knowing when to pivot is a critical part of running a business.

If you’re just blindly focused only on taking more and better photos, you’ll lose sight of things around you:

• what your competitors are doing

• how your own sales are trending

• the state of the entire photography industry

This is scary. Sure. You might even need to completely change your specialty at one point, because of how the market and your skill set have changed over time.

So aim for a quarterly review of your business where you look at things like:

• How was your work schedule recently? How could it be improved?

• What can you change about your daily/weekly routine to work more on growing your business?

• If you’re juggling multiple photography specialties, are your spending time on them proportional to how much you enjoy them? Do you have the right balance between income and personal satisfaction in your work?

• Do you have enough confidence in your work? Are there any big gaps in your photography skills? Or in your marketing or web-design skills?

• Are you saying “NO” enough? Are you prioritizing a busy schedule over fewer and more impactful projects?

• Are there aspects (about your photography business) that you know you’ve been putting off for a while? Are you avoiding important tasks because of fear of failure or fear of success?

2. Start thinking like a business owner

Photography is a business. So besides shooting & editing photos, you have to learn many other skills: web-design, SEO, marketing, finances, contracts, copyright, etc.

You don’t need to be an expert, and you can surely outsource some of these aspects, but you still need to understand the basics in order to succeed.

Overall, you need to treat what you’re doing as a business. This change in mindset will help you take better actions towards your goals:

• you define your target audience to make sure your website copy is aimed at your ideal clients

• you don’t work for free. Spec work is bad for you.

• instead of just launching a site and waiting, you schedule a monthly review for your site, deciding what content could be updated/refreshed

• you take care of your finances, and you protect yourself using contracts for any assignment work

Otherwise, you’re leaving it all up to the wind.

You might be afraid that all this business-related work will take something away from your creative flow. I get that. You became a photographer to do what you love, not some boring business stuff. But by thinking long term, you soon understand that growing your business will give you the freedom to do more of what you love in the future.