“If you don’t know where you’re going…you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra
[by Judy Herrmann]
In 1989, at age 24, I started a photography studio with my partner, Mike Starke. We began by building a portfolio filled with images that looked “commercial.” These generic, safe images demonstrated our technical skills in lighting and using a view camera but left nothing to differentiate our studio but location and price.
For three years, we worked 12-14 hour days, 7 days per week building a business that barely supported us, producing images that bored us to tears and working for clients who didn’t respect us or our work. Here we were, “doing what we loved” yet completely miserable.
We knew that if something didn’t change fast, we’d leave the industry – it was just too hard and too unrewarding. But we didn’t know where to begin. How do you change your business? How do figure out what to change it into? How do you buy yourself time to grow a different business when the one you already have is killing you? How do you decide which risks to take and figure out how to minimize your chances of failure? How do you really build a business that lets you earn a living doing work you love?
For us, the answer was planning. The moment we set real, solid, concrete goals about what we wanted to do creatively and what we realistically should be able to earn given where we fit in the market, we began building the business we actually wanted.
For us, planning has been vital. Planning helps us recognize opportunities and respond to them quickly. It’s made us better problem solvers and taught us to make quick yet accurate assessments and better decisions. These skills spill over into nearly every aspect of our lives. They’ve even made us better photographers.
Planning can be overwhelming. If you’re running as hard as you can just to stay in the same place (or worse), it can feel like taking any time away to plan is going to kill you. Bitter experience has taught us, though, that failing to plan is what really kills you and the only way off that treadmill is to stop, take a deep breath, and figure out why you’re running so hard in the first place.
Award winning photographer, Judy Herrmann, teaches people how to earn a living doing what they love through seminars and her blog, www.2goodthings.com
