How is your photography business going, Steve?
Printable View
How is your photography business going, Steve?
Heh. When I found out we were doing okay-to-fine on just DW's salary, I retired. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by fidgiegirl
I kept the business name and insurance and all that. I think I'm going to -- err, focus -- the business on fine-art photography. That would have been my first choice all along, but I didn't think it would bring in the kind of money we needed. Now I think it will. That will, however, require some rejiggering of the Web site (still unpublished) and some of my equipment. I let myself coast through the holidays without doing much with the business; now it's time to get going on that.
Thanks for asking!!
I look forward to hearing about your progress. :D
I can't believe it's been a year since you started this topic Fidgiegirl!
How are everyone's business ventures going? Did you run your numbers for last year yet?
Last night I finalized our financial reports for 2012 and all of our business efforts are paying off, finally!
It's taken us 5 years to get to the point of making enough money that we're not dipping into savings every month, and we'll actually owe income tax this year. I guess that's a good thing but it kills me to pay it!
Our previous business which we sold in 2007, was started in 1998, when the dot-com craze was in full-swing. We grew fast, made decent money from the get-go, and boy was that much easier than trying to get our most recent business efforts up and running during a recession. At least now I can say "been there-done that" during all types of economic climates.
What IS your business, HumboldtGirl?
Unlike Iris' DH, I am lazy and a know-it-all and generally speaking a poor enough employee that the only way I was ever going to get a job was by working for myself. That was 30 odd years ago and nothing in that time has changed much. A couple of the ventures I tried ended up being pretty successful. I hated those, too much work. Some never got past the business card stage. Hated those, no money. Most were in the middle. I have now made it to that lovely stage where I can be a little eccentric and scheme to do what I enjoy and when I feel like doing it without a whole lot of pressure to make it pay off. That's nice. And its a good thing because at this stage God knows no one would hire me! Just hold your nose and jump Kelli, the water's fine!
Well, I decided some action was better than spinning my wheels deciding on the PERFECT business, so I made a post to my GF blog. Part of me wants to say to myself: BIG DEAL - but why the negative self-talk? It is! It adds up. I also figured out that you have to submit your blog address to the search engines so I did that. I also put up another page I'd been mulling over and changed my signature here on the forum to reflect the blogs I actually update. So! A few steps!
we did our numbers.
I doubled my clients last year, but we didn't gain any new practitioners (new goal for 2013 -- to get 4 half-day rentals sorted!). We also doubled our revenue again, which is awesome, and had several very successful marketing strategies pan-out.
We also decreased our workload. I have been pushing and pushing and pushing myself to get the business *MORE* successful. Of course, it was at the expense of my own health/wellbeing and family life. So, I worked on getting more life-work balance and we have a good plan going right now that is working *really* well for us.
First, we "work hard" during the school terms, and set up for the school holidays so that we can spend less time in the office and more time with the kiddo/family time. DH also aligned his writing schedule to this, which also opens up more family time. Thus, we technically take off about a quarter of the year -- we still work, but we cut the work-load in half with careful planning.
Second, we prioritize the work we want to get done, dividing it up. We gave ourselves 3-big-tasks for this year, one on each of our lists is training the other in an underlying system of the business so that both of us can do "all" of the work. That leaves us two tasks, and we divided that into quarterly goals. Each quarter is the 10-week school term, so it's set up to keep the work at work and the life just going outside of that.
It's been working really well so far.
Third, I decided to step back from high-intensive, low profit activities to develop the low-intensive, high-profit activities. For example, our Kids Yoga Training is proving really popular among kindergarden teachers. So, I'm making sure that the foundational information (our curriculum) is rock-solid and clear, and hten making sure the training is properly managed (so that's a secondary curriculum process). In the mean time, we are setting up more teacher trainings, and working with our first 'test batch' to make sure that their questions are answered as well as their training needs. This provides us with a good way to make sure the curriculum/etc is solid. Once those teachers are out there, it expands our brand (high visibility), and they pay an annual license to use our curriculum. This means it's less wear and tear on me (i'm not teaching the classes), and yet high profit.
To demonstrate the other side, a friend invited me to utilize her space to open a second location in a "slow growth" process. It would require about 10 hours of work per week (both teaching and admin), which would dramatically increase my work load (see above information about cutting work load). It would also take a long time to get to profitability in terms of the cost-of-time vs earnings, so it's just not the right time.
Since I'm training teachers this year, and I do have a plan to run a second location in the near-future, I will have teachers to take on classes here, removing about 10 hrs of hourly work, which will allow me to expand into a new market without having the struggle of need to find an "extra" amount of time under my current schedule.
It just means waiting until things are ready to move forward before moving forward, and not over-taxing myself.
So, I'm learning. :D
What a great thread! I have been AWOL from this board for a few days as I have had better luck doing secret shops lately - higher quality ones with better pay and fewer situations that give me pause - so I have been applying like mad with mystery shopping companies and am not looking to do this F/T but as a sideline. Something really cool is I am getting myself a digital voice recorder - not to tape shops - which legal in Arizona without consent but I'm not comfortable with that - but to record my impressions as soon as I leave a shop and am out of sight. This is a freebie, too, as points I have earned doing surveys last year are paying for it.
I have also bought the domain name for my first and last name and am now pondering what exactly to do with it.....Rob
Oh this thread is getting good!
What IS your business, HumboldtGirl?
I never did explain what we do, did I? We work on a number of different things (we call them "projects") that make us happy and allow us to work from wherever our home is parked. After having a single-focus marketing and design business for the last 15 years, we've found that now we would rather have lots of little ventures so we can diversify our revenue sources, which helps us live anywhere as full-time RVers. Most of what we do is internet-based.
Our main project is more of a labor of love...it's our Tripawds three-legged animal community. We offer support and resources like assistive devices to people when their dog or cat is losing a leg. It makes us very fulfilled to be of help to others, but it doesn't pay all of our bills so we do other things like: paid freelance journalism, graphic design, website development, small business coaching, jewelry making, and we are also marketing executives for a health and wellness company. I know it sounds like we don't have focus but it really does all gel together in the end.
Zoebird, you sound like you are right on target with how your business is growing. I like your long-term thinking and strategizing.
Gimme...I've always been curious about secret shopping work. Have you been doing it for a long time? Do companies want people who can move from location to location? Would this be something that I could do as full-time RVers? We move around a lot.