Thinking of Starting a Photography Business? You Might Want to Reconsider

Do you dream of walking into your boring office job, upending your desk, and flipping the bird at your horrified boss as you tell him you're starting your own photography business? You might want to hold off on taking action. Here's why. 

In this five minute video put out by SLR Lounge, the host offers up five very valuable points that many very skilled photographers who want to convert their passion into business might often overlook. The one that really resonated with me the most was number two, which touched on the fact that when you go into the business of photography, you're entering yourself into a service-based industry. Make no mistake, photography is a customer service business, and that means you need to deal with people. And people can be, er, challenging even at the very best of times. I wrote a recent article outlining this exact conundrum and explained why I'll never swap landscape work for portrait work. So before you do chuck in your day job to chase the dream of turning your passion into a profit maker, you have to honestly ask yourself if you really are up for the challenge of doing sales and marketing and justifying prices and dealing with all types of customer and everything else that comes with a service industry job. Are you?

There are some other really salient points in there that you absolutely must take into consideration before opening a business. Give the video a watch and let me know what some other challenges you think people need to know about are if they're to make that giant leap of faith with eyes wide open? I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.