Really digging this thread. Interesting insights for sure.
I'm a professional artist. To this day, that's both an uncomfortable and rewarding thing to say out loud because it doesn't seem like a real job. Anyone can call themselves an artist or a photographer and hang a shingle. In fact, so many people (usually soccer moms whose "business" is subsidized by a spouse with a real job) start up low end photography businesses, it makes getting a legitimate family-supporting business started almost impossible.
The barriers to starting this kind of business are very low, but as a result, the market is conditioned to believe that you really can pay $100 and get a CD full of unedited "good enough" images that a girl your sister went to high school with shot on her Canon T3i. We call em shoot and burn photographers, and you get what you pay for.
Anyway, my degree is in PR and all my business experience is in sales and sales management. I found that really helps me avoid some of the pitfalls that most "professional artists" (whether they are painters, musicians, photographers etc." fall into - which is that most practically give their art away and ruin the market for people who want to charge grown up money.
In any of those fields, you have a lot of enthusiastic amateurs who believe the path to success lays in "getting their name out there" by shooting, playing, painting and designing for free or damn near it. It makes the first few years in a business like this VERY hard. But, I've found that if you can last through that and you actually do deliver quality product, your demand grows and referrals come out of nowhere. In my case (and I know i've left a LOT of money on the table and have been very disorganized at times), it's taken 5 years to get to the point where I can actually project income, rather than just see what comes in this month and decide what bills I can pay and what will have to wait.
Lots of life changing things happened at the same time; Divorce, parents divorce, remarriage, death of best friend, death of cousin, death of father in law, family illnesses... Lots of things that cost money, distracted my focus and really kept me from being able to bring all available resources to bear on this new business.
I can finally say that 2014 was the year that I had waited for. Contracts in place, clients lined up, finally upgrading some overdue equipment, and finally will be able to afford health insurance (something I always took for granted). Glow and I are taking the first vacation we've had since our honeymoon 3.5 years ago and we are able to absorb a large (for us) business expense without it affecting our ability to buy groceries. That may seem modest (it is) but it's a big win for us. I now "employ" two interns and will be hiring additional photographers to handle some of my overflow work.
So, again... this is the first year that I feel I will have made something like what I would've made in my last corporate sales job five years ago and I have no reason to believe the growth won't continue. Getting past that "startup phase" in a photography/graphic design company like mine is critical and damn near impossible - given some of the challenges and distractions we've faced, but it is an incredible feeling of accomplishment.
Everyone wants to own their own business right? Well, there are major up sides but some major challenges too.
On the upside,
I do create things for a living. I no longer work to make money for someone else's vision. I create tangible products that make people happy, exceed their expectations and memorialize a specific event or moment in time that will exist in theory, forever. There is something so intrinsically rewarding in that simple fact that it has made everything else worthwhile. I work from home for the most part, though I usually shoot on location. I've had three different studios and ultimately decided the thing to do was to simply rent studio space as needed when I do studio shoots, which is rare. Working from home is great in many ways. In some unforeseen ways, it's challenging - more on that in a minute. But I do get to work when I want to and can (again in theory) stop working and write a long post in the middle of the morning without looking over my shoulder to see if anyone knows I'm goofing off.I am my own boss and can (and have) fire troublesome clients. I am a huge customer service guy but the simple knowledge that I don't HAVE to work for a jerk customer if I don't want to is incredibly empowering. I have to be mindful of things like referrals, reviews, etc. so I usually bend over backwards to accommodate clients. But it's still great to know I won't get fired if one of them just needs to be told to go f*** themselves some day. Being thought of and recognized as a professional artist is really really rewarding for me personally. I come from a family of artists and musicians and as far as I know, only me and one of my cousins have managed to make a go of art professionally. I feel strongly that my dad and my uncle could've been very successful artists, but for me to stick it out and get to a point where I'm paying the bills with this is a really empowering thing personally.Did I mention I LOVE what I do? I do. It's not unusual for me to be up until 2:00 on an editing project. Unveiling someone's gallery or delivering a print and seeing a mom cry out of joy or seeing a new bride light up and hug my neck... well, man you don't get those kind of reactions when you sell another customer a print ad or radio spot (previous jobs). I love doing shoots, I love editing the images from those shoots and I love creating digital art in Photoshop. I love that those things define me and I welcome that.Through the flexibility of my schedule, even though I work a LOT, it's easy to put my kids activities on the schedule and build my appointments around that. Easy for my wife and I to enjoy two hour lunches, date nights etc. Just a matter of managing which nights and what times are booked with family first and then clients. Win or lose, you are in control - not office politics. You may run into office politics with the bidding process for big jobs, but you aren't limited by smarmy middle management douchebags who've managed to get elevated to their level of incompetence. For years I felt like I was Peter from Office Space and my natural tendency to be a smartass would kick in when I found myself in performance review meetings. it's nice not to have to deal with the obvious ridiculousness of life that anyone whose ever worked in a corporate job has to endure. No TPS reports for me.
On the downside:
I work at least 80 hours a week and never ever feel caught up. The things I don't get caught up on weigh on me heavily. There's someone posting in this very thread that I said I would do a project for several months back and still haven't. That kind of thing happens because of all the deadline projects that come up. Yearbook, football orders, basketball orders, turnaround time for portrait projects and weddings. Those are all things that fuel the business and create opportunities to make art for people, but they also keep me from getting to the fun projects I *want* to do or the brother in law projects I said I would do and never get to. The hours I put in are never enough to get done with everything on my list. What's the answer? Hiring someone I can't afford, who will make me more efficient and (in theory) allow me to handle a larger work flow and make more money? Or do I need to streamline some of what I do so I simply have more time and only work on high end projects? Some combo of the two? Time management is easily the biggest challenge of owning my business.Speaking of time management... when you work around your clients' schedule for photo shoots and gallery reviews, you find yourself working early in the morning, late at night and nearly every weekend. Sure, you can take afternoons off, sleep in and do editing whenever you want to, but it results in a real lack of structure when it comes to availability for family, recreation etc. This is the first year since I was a little kid that I did not have OSU football tickets. I just knew I would be working every saturday and there was no way I could make enough games for it to be worth it. Speaking of lack of structure, in this day and age... you have to be able to network with your clients. That means... social media, email, texting and phone calls from people who think artists get up at 7:00 AM (We DON'T) or that it's OK to call you on a Sunday night at 7:00pm. And you have to be wired in to your phone so you can respond to those things in real time. There are very few boundaries or barriers between you and whatever randomly pops into a client's head at any odd time. I've gotten texts from clients at 1:00 in the morning. They assume I guess, that I'll see it in the morning but I can't work that way. I am OCD in the sense that if someone contacts me, I have to reply. The inability to escape from my smart phone is very stressful at times - especially when I'm working on deadline stuff. Even though I love my job, there's no sense of ever being off work. All the things that aren't your job, become your job. book keeping, taxes, marketing, collections... None of that is sexy stuff and it's really time consuming. I probably spend 5% of my work time actually taking photos. 40% of my time is probably spent editing or working on graphics projects. The other 55% is spent ordering prints, receiving, packaging, delivering prints. Marketing, networking, continuing education, generating quotes, following up with potential customers and customers who I need some kind of response from. Ideally you outsource this stuff. But it's a constant struggle to know what to outsource and what to handle yourself to keep costs down.Working from home actually can stress you out because you don't interact with other humans. That may seem counterintuitive, but it's true. There's a certain amount of human contact that is actually healthy and when you remove yourself from an office environment you really create new challenges for yourself. Can't take a break and visit with someone at the water cooler (that's what this board and a few other outlets are for). And there's no outside force to tell you to quit goofing off and get back to work. That all has to come 100% from within and when you are an artist, that isn't something that comes naturally to your personal.. look, a squirrel!
