Profits differ from net income, and no where is there clearer than for small business owner-operators, artists, and creatives. Just because you have a certain amount of money left over after covering expenses doesn’t mean you’ve made profits. Why? Because you have to factor in the cost of your labor and the risk you took and so after factoring that in, millions of small businesses and artists and creatives are operating with little to no profit. However, it doesn’t have to be this way and so we wanted to create a space where sharp entrepreneurs and creatives could come together and discuss the challenges to profitability and potential solutions. If you have something valuable to add to this conversation that can help others achieve profitability, please reach out to us as we want to get your ideas in front of our readers.

Collette Portis

In the coaching industry there are no licensing requires or regulations. As a result, anyone who decides to help others in any way can set up shop as a coach. One of the greatest challenges in the coaching industry is not understand who you serve, why you serve them and what outcomes you seek to achieve with them. Oftentimes when a coach is engaged what the client gets is a lot of great ideas, but not many usable practices and tools to help those ideas impact the audience they seek to impact. As a result, revenue is greatly stalled making the average annual revenue of a coaching company around $25,000. Read more>>

Ryan Stewart

I run a number of companies, all of them are service based businesses. Service businesses run on people, people are a wild card for a number of reasons. In regards to this questions, the biggest challenge to profitability is balancing smart, talented individuals with the ballooning salary requests. Inflation is real. People need more money just to earn a decent wage. In the past few years we’ve seen salary requests jump 30 – 40%, which doesn’t exactly map to how much more we’re able to charge. Read more>>

Alejandro Veliz

To me the biggest challenges to profitability in the photography and filmmaking industry, its the lack of understanding from costumers and other in the industry, that taking photos or video isn’t simply a hobby, its a craft that has been perfected with years of experience, studying and learning something new everyday, there isnt a shortcut to success, you have to put in the time to learn as much as you can about the career path you choose, wether is landscape photography, portraits, director, director of photography, etc. Read more>>

Judith Hanson

Customer education is first and foremost. Most people aren’t aware of what goes into creating a custom cake for special occasions. An incredible amount of time and passion is invested from the time I meet the couple up until the wedding day. My speciality is bespoke wedding cakes, which includes baking from the cake from scratch, creating artisanal fillings and frostings, hand crafting sugar flowers and edible sculptural decor, which are all hand applied. This type of quality is an investment. Read more>>

Mehrnoush Moslemi

I think the biggest challenge to profitability in the industry is not conforming to the current trends. At some point you have to come to realization that what you do is not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak. So you have to learn how to compromise by finding a way to stay true to your art while bending the rules a bit to satisfy your core audience, which will eventually pay off monetarily. Read more>>

Sai Jarvis

The biggest challenge in profiting is figuring out how to bring in customers willing to pay for the quality of service provided. What seems to be the issue is the want for quality service with very low budgets. What I had to do is stand firm and that has caused some of my clients to seek other DJs however, I have slowly gained a new set of clientale willing to pay what is asked. Read more>>

Michele Williams

The biggest challenge to profitability in creative industries is really knowing and understanding the financials. Most creatives love the idea of sharing their gifts and abilities and want to be paid, but truly having a grasp on all that goes into the pricing and profitability can be difficult. For example, how do they get paid to think about a project? Work goes into the deliverables and the process well before the hands on work begins. Capturing that value in pricing may feel challenging. On top of the pricing, fully grasping the financials and cash flow management is an added layer of complexity. It can feel overwhelming and laborious to analyze numbers so deeply, especially to a creative entrepreneur. When faced with these money issues compared to creating – they would much rather create. And I get it. Read more>>

Derricka Clayton

Simply put… Inflation. It impacts every aspect of my industry, from labor costs, materials, transportation and ingredients. Everyone in our industry, no matter if you are a private/personal chef, caterer or restaurant, it is imperative and a must to adapt to the changes in our economy in order for your business to survive. It’s so importatnt to manage rising costs and budget to ensure staff is compensated fairly as well as having the ability to attract and hire new employees. Not to mention, no matter what grocery store or food supply where you source your ingredients, one thing is for sure… Everyone is feeling the impact. Some ways to combat this is to offer customers new or seasonal items to choose from by periodically changing menu items to help justify the prices. Read more>>

Sean Whiteman

The audio world has grown exponentially in the past 20 years. With the digitization of hardware plugins and new DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) options it has never been easier to record yourself. A lot of these programs are now basically doing the work for you when it comes to mixing. This has driven me in to the field of doing a lot more live sound for corporate gigs and less in-studio work for bands and artists. Also, people are surprised by the amount money they need to spend to pay for quality studio services, and the competition for recording studio clients is very intense. Read more>>

Bridgette Baldwin

The biggest challenge is the cost of goods right now. With the pandemic and how it has affected the economy, supplies that used to cost us $100 an event are now upwards of $300. To find the balance with cost and profitability without price gouging our consumers has been quite the challenge. We are doing our best to maintain reasonable pricing, integrity and quality of goods and service. Hopefully it balances out soon! Read more>>

Vicki Adams Beam

Our family loves being in the antique industry and being surrounded by beautiful antiques. We search high and low in Europe to select fine and unique antiques to display in our spacious showroom. However, over the years, this process has become more difficult for everyone in this industry. We are fortunate to have such strong contacts we have established over the years, especially given recent shipping challenges. These people are invaluable in helping us locate great antiques (as well as particular pieces requested by interior designers who frequent our showroom). Read more>>

Indu Aromal

Software Services as an industry is the most sought after, yet at the same time you compete with companies globally, from different countries and at different hourly billing rates, with no clear standardization criteria for differentiation. How much we ever we try to differentiate using detailed proposals, processes and criteria’s that makes your product look superior compared to competition, the difference in rates from a different city or a different country, makes it very difficult to bag the projects at the desired billing rate, and consequently posing a bigger challenge to profitability. We were faced with situations where we had to adjust billing rates based on the geography of the client. Read more>>

Ritchey Robin

Currently, with all the events occurring in the US and around the globe, it makes it extremely difficult to calculate an accurate Costs of Goods. And, that makes it difficult to determine an accurate profit for industry. Why? The frequent fluctuations in costs of goods or commodities. And, currently the rapid increase in this. It is a very volatile economy, right now. What one can price at today’s costs, may and probably will increase by the time the job is actually being built. So, when my profit margin was where it needs to be to for a reasonable profit, that can quickly diminish by the time the job starts. This leave you guessing at resolutions to minimize this. Read more>>

Kristine Vowles

The lack in our supply chain from upholstery, furnishings, lighting, hardware, fabric, parts, appliances, and the list goes on and on has become one of our biggest challenges. All of us designers across multiple sectors, are dealing with the issue of reselecting products due to availability of product. And while breaking the news to a client that they can’t get a sofa for 24++ weeks is not a fun conversation, that’s only part of the problem, when there is a will such as in demand, there may not always be a way in regards supply. The financial implications are stunting growth where demand exists and stressing precious people and resources in the reselection process. Read more>>

April Laster

The biggest challenge is that most people that need the services and could benefit most from the services can’t really afford what is would cost if we charged regular prices. This industry was made to cater to those that have the funds and resources to go all the way and those who can’t they get left behind or no service at all. Another challenge is the way finances and funding is funneled to organizations and businesses that are minority owned in this industry. Read more>>

Marcus Campbell

The biggest challenge currently is the food chain. One week prices are one thing then literally 2 days later prices could have increased by 3 dollars per pound. Also being able to consistently get the products you need from one distributor is a challenge in itself. A lot goes on behind the scenes trying to secure product to cook and serve my customers. Read more>>

Terrence & Daisey Shields

The biggest challenge to profitability in the seafood business is knowing how to do price comparison and having more than one supplier. Knowing how to portion your product as well as knowing what percentage you should be at for food cost can help out tremendoiusly. Most importantly is know how to price your product and staying within that 30% price range. Knowing your season is critical as well that way you can schedule staff accordingly and you might have to adjust your opening and closing times to accomendate your slow seasons vs your busy seasons. Read more>>

Etana Holowinko

The accessibility to graphic design programs for everyone; on your phone, on your tablet, on your PC on the web. Graphic and Web design software is everywhere now and because of that everybody thinks they are or can be a graphic /web designer. Although they do not know or understand all of intricacies, technique, and education it takes to truly design and create proper graphics and properly working websites. But as a result, it takes away from the value of what we do and offer; why pay me my hourly rate for a project when they can download and app for five dollars. Many of these clients are willing accept a lower quality graphic or forgo function of a website to not have to pay a professional to do the job. Read more>>

Anna Perks

The construction industry, in general, is very linear. We take resources from the environment, build a structure with those materials, and, then, when we want something different we knock the building down and throw it all away. Homeowners and contractors want demolition done fast and cheap. There’s a lack of awareness for the value of our existing building materials. Our challenge and opportunity is to increase awareness along the Front Range and help expand the reuse culture. We are urban miners and disassemble buildings so that materials like dimensional lumber, plywood, hardwood flooring, doors, cabinets, fixtures, insulation, garage doors etc can be reused instead of landfilled. Read more>>

Victoria Bryant

Our biggest challenge like all businesses after the pandemic is staffing. Maintaining a health pool of employees continuées to change how we employ to to serve our largest demographics, our elderly clients. Read more>>