While today’s post is an introduction to Sarah Petty’s Quick Boutique Breakthrough Workshop, she makes a great point about doing business the same way, year after year. Just as technology keeps changing, so does consumer behavior, trends in style, and consumer demand.
What worked in marketing just a few years ago, may not be successful at all today. That means you have to stay cutting-edge in your style, marketing, and communication. Sarah makes a point early on about how often she’s talked with photographers who want to make a change, but the timing isn’t right.
There’s a great quote from Zig Ziglar…
“If you wait for all the lights to turn green, you’ll never get started on your journey.”
Stop waiting for the lights to all be green – look at the areas you need the most help in your business and then refocus. You know how to selectively focus with your camera – now it’s time to do the same thing with your career.
For most of you, it’s about diversifying. For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, then why wouldn’t you expand into maternity, newborn, and family imaging? And if you hate those specialties, then align yourself with another photographer who compliments what you’re missing in your skills.
Working together and building relationships with clients that extend beyond one specialty will make your business grow. Plus, it’s often so surprising how creativity when working with another artist also grows.
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Take a look at where your photography business is right now…
Is it a baby business that you haven’t had a chance to put much into yet because the timing hasn’t been right? Or maybe you have big plans to grow your existing photography business.
Either way, if you’re telling yourself you will work on it “later” when the timing is “better”, then this is definitely for you!
Many photographers tell me that they would love to make their business rock and they will one day, but just not “now”. Sometimes they feel the timing isn’t right because they have young kids in the house, they want to get out of debt first or they want to get their ducks in a row first. What if you actually went all in on creating the business of your dreams?
“All in” doesn’t mean full-time, it means being profitable.
What if you did that WHILE you have three kids under three like I did? Or WHILE you’re doing whatever it is in your life that you’re doing?
No matter what that is, you’re going through hard things and wouldn’t it be nice to feed your soul and find your life, too?
With a business, we have to make a conscious decision to go out there and look for it. We have to decide over and over, as all of the obstacles come at us, to have a business.
It’s like having children! We don’t all of a sudden restructure our entire lives to revolve around the baby.
When we had our twins, we got some structure and systems to keep our lives sane.They learned that when they cried at night, someone wouldn’t come running.
When we would go to dinner, they learned how to have table manners at a restaurant. They had to learn to fit into the life of the family and I believe the same thing with our business.
The time will never be right to make the leap into parenting a baby business or an advanced business that you’ve pressed the pause button on. Don’t you agree that time is going so fast?
It’s amazing how a day can so quickly turn into a week, and a month into a year, and a year into a decade. How long have you been telling yourself that the time isn’t right?
I want to show you the cost that no one is talking about in your photography business. And it’s not the cost of growing your business, it’s actually the cost of not making money in your business. What I’m talking about is the cost of inaction, the cost of staying the same.
Is learning what it takes to build a business, to make decisions, to take action, to invest in yourself, to talk to people, to learn marketing, to learn to sell, and how to price profitably hard?
Yeah. But if you’re saying that you can’t do it now but you can do it “someday”. “Someday” can really steal your dreams for you if you keep putting it off.
I hear these excuses every day and my thought is, your actions are not aligning with your desires. If you’re telling me, “I want it so bad, but I can’t,” you’re probably creating a lot of internal conflict that you don’t need to create.
I see so many of you with talent and I have worked with so many photographers who have been where you are. They didn’t think that they had the time or the money to learn to pursue their dreams. Rarely at the end of people’s lives do they say they wish they had put off their dreams longer.
Think about that.
I hope this spurs you to make a decision that so many others before you have made and are living with the results of that decision. They’re loving their life and they have the time to do the things they want to do and surround themselves with amazing people.
And listen, getting it done is actually the easier part. It’s the decision-making and committing the time and the resources to get it done that is harder.
You don’t have to do this alone, my friend.
But I want you to know that you do have a choice, and I think it’s time that you make that choice.
