Five Photography Business Goals for The New Year

I love the beginning of a new year – its a perfect time to reflect on what you did well last year and what you’d like to accomplish in the new year.

In this article, I thought that I’d share my personal top five photography business goals for next year.

Everyone has different goals and dreams, so I hope that you’ll add a comment and let us know your personal photography goals for the new year too!

1. Quintuple Passive Income

Right now about 20% of my gross income comes from passive sources. Passive income is income that is not dependent on an hourly investment of time – such as selling stock photography online (passive) vs. photographing an assignment (hourly).

My long term goal is to generate 100% of my current income from passive sources, allowing me to focus on daily work that I genuinely find interesting and rewarding (in other words to gain independence from time). To do this, I will have to multiply my income from my current passive sources by a factor of five. This is a pretty big goal that will require constant commitment to achieve, but this is my number one goal for the following year.

2. Stay Up To Date On Book Keeping

One of the thing I vow to do every year, but never manage to keep up with, is staying on top of my book keeping.

Switching to PayPal invoicing has been a big help – and I have started using Quickbooks Online, which downloads transactions directly from my linked accounts (instead of my book keeper manually entering them), so my goal this year is to actually stay up to date on invoicing, expenses and taxes every quarter.

3. Inbox Zero

I hate email – almost as much as I hate phone calls and voicemail.

Like most people I get so much email it is a real chore just to stay up to date with every message in my inbox. My goal for next year is to clean out my inbox and stay at inbox zero. To do this, I am going to unsubscribe from all social media notifications, sales lists and subscriptions and then automate as many day to day responses as I can.

The real goal here is to offer better customer service by simply responding to email right away (then filing messages), but I can’t do that without cutting out as much of the noise as possible.

4. Focused Social Media and Branding

Also like most people, I spend way too much time on social media with nothing to show for it.

Social media is a net operating loss for business (no matter what the social media platforms want you to believe), so this year I am going to re-focus on my core brand – my website. Instead of chasing likes and followers, my branding strategy for this year is keep my business website and blog up to date with current work and simply use social media as a multiplier – driving traffic to me and my brand instead of the other way around.

5. Sell Unused Gear – Only Purchase Gear That Makes Money

Over the past year I have been selling as much unused and underutilized gear as I can, and only purchasing new gear when I have generated enough cash from selling used stuff to pay for it.

From now, my goal is to avoid buying any gear, unless I have identified a specific business case (ie. I am buying gear I need to make money, not just because it’s new and I want it), and then to only buy used gear whenever possible. Like everything else in our consumerist society, this takes a lot of self discipline and you really have to know yourself as a photographer to figure out what it is you actually need vs. want, but besides making more money, spending less on gear it the number one thing I can do increase my profit margin.