I’ll share my thoughts after you read this:

You’ve probably seen it. The fish monger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don’t clean up as often, so of course, business declines and then they have even less money… Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that’s out of business.

The doctor has fewer patients so he doesn’t invest as much in training or staff and so some other patients choose to leave which means that there are even fewer patients…

The newspaper has fewer advertisers, so they can’t invest as much in running stories, so people stop reading it, which means advertisers have less reason to advertise which leaves less money for stories…

As Tom Peters says, “You can’t shrink your way to greatness,” and yet that’s what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don’t. This isn’t a dip, it’s a cul de sac. It’s over.

Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum… Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.

Change is a bear, but it’s better than death.

Seth Godin can be read here.

Man, a light bulb just went off in my head.  Just apply this article to ‘photography’. Hell, apply it to whatever it is that you do.  This is sort of like one of my favorite photographers, Zack Arias, said.  He has said a lot of times that he will shoot anything but porn, if it keeps a roof over his head and food on the table.   I also, now, subscribe to that notion.  When I left my job, I just knew what I was going to do.  COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY!  That was it.  I was going to go out and find some businesses, take some badass photos, those would land me bigger businesses, rinse and repeat.  Wrong!  That ain’t how it works.  Sure, it CAN.  But it hasn’t. Not for me at least.  Don’t get me wrong, it has worked somewhat.  But for someone that quit a steady $50K income, it hasn’t worked fast enough.

So it’s like Seth said. Shift gears, do something else and move on.  This is why I blogged the other day about ‘weddings feed the family’.  That’s because I woke up and realized that I need to shoot weddings, engagements, bridals, babies, senior portraits, musicians, etc.  Because right now, I’m not sustaining with what I WANT to do.

So with that said, if you’re in the same boat as me, and I know who some of you are, shift those gears.  Promote what you want, but shoot the stuff that pays so you can live stress free.  Don’t be a dummy.

-Matt