We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nikki Moore. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nikki below.

Alright, Nikki thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

Many photographers (and other creatives who find themselves running creative businesses based on passion) don’t realize how much their business skills, or lack of them, will impact their success. We may fantasize about the pure creative energy that will fuel us to success and an endless line of clients, eager for our unique and undefinable creative spirit! The reality is a lot less sexy: accounting, tax forms, endless emails, unhappy clients, and a creative spirit that’s burned out and discouraged. To be a successful business person, we have to develop actual business skills and also, I think, learn to enjoy and be energized by the “businessness” of it – almost just as much as we enjoy that creative work.

The combination of passion/creativity with technical/hard skills can be counterintuitive and, I think for many, feels “against the grain” of the spark that fuels our creative energy. Many creatives feel a sense of raging self doubt, and initially struggle to set prices at sustainable levels. This is one great barrier to profit – and it’s not just the lack of business skills like professional communication, accounting, client project management, tax management, web / graphic design, copy writing, and social media/content creation. It’s the fact that these “hard skills” can actually threaten and drain energy from the “joyful flow” spaces that energize us. The challenge of holding these two realities together is why so many creative businesses fail – and they may not even fail in the sense of “going out of business” but they fail to provide profitable income that is proportional to time put in. Eventually this leads to burnout and resentment of our own clients, which further dampens creative joy; and the spiral continues downward.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Over 14 years of photography experience has brought me to the headshot and portrait niche in my small city of around 300,000 people. I’m a photographer for businesses, and I help show professionals in their best light! Whether they need photos of themselves, their products, their spaces, or their services, I create photos for them to market their things and brand themselves. This niche isn’t completely saturated (yet – although there’s more competition now than when I pivoted to this space about 5 years ago). I work with brands and companies and universities – from the biggest ones in my city, to solo ventures and individual professionals, and everything in between. I think I could spend hours photographing just one person – the endless nuances of posing and body language is deeply fascinating to me! It’s my goal to serve my clients in a humane, conscious way that holds their vulnerabilities kindly and values human connection above all.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I became burned out as a wedding & family photographer around the time that I gave birth to my second of three sons. The wedding industry seemed to be asking too much of me, feeling commercialized and false – and I felt my creativity draining away at nearly every wedding. The photos I was constantly asked to create seemed often contrived and manufactured; my weekends were exhausting and socially overstimulating; at the same time I was homeschooling a very challenging and brilliant child, and staying home with a new baby. During the week I was drained from the children and the array of midweek shoots and client work; weekends brought another level of exhaustion with the stress of wedding work. It was just too much. I decided I had to 1) be around fewer people, and 2) mostly shoot for shorter blocks of time. I stopped booking new weddings, and rather than resenting the couples whose weddings I had yet to fulfill, I was able to end my wedding photography career with love and joy for those final wedding clients.

Meanwhile – before the wedding work had ended – I developed another arm of my business, shooting products and professional photos for local businesses. I realized quickly how there was an unmet need in my small city for someone who specialized in modern, fresh-feeling business portraits and headshots. It was a sparsely populated niche, partly because many photographers (myself included at one time) were intimidated by the technical skills of studio strobe and off-camera lighting. This was the perfect space for me to step into! I developed those technical abilities through lots of late-night practice, online workshops, and mentoring; and today I shoot mostly headshots and portraits along with products and lifestyle marketing / branding photos.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I do a LOT of reading, and I try to include a few books each year about money, creativity, and personal / business growth. Some that I’ve really loved are The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and Dare to Lead by Brene Brown.

But, I’m also convinced of this: anything that deepens and nuances your own engagement and curiosity about the wide world, will also beautify and human-ify your business life. “Who we are is how we lead” says Brene Brown in Dare to Lead (I’m rereading it now and that phrase stuck out while I was thinking about this question).. One of my strengths in business is being a strong empath, sensing energy and connection with my portrait clients; and my own continual learning deepens my understanding of other humans. I take in a wide range of poetry, essays and novels by authors like Maya Angelou, Madeleine l’Engel, Jane Hirschfield, Ta’Nehisi Coates, Henri Nouwen, John Muir, Anthony Doerr, Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Brene Brown, and Langston Hughes; as well as a whole lot of history books…because swimming in the kaleidoscope complexities of the world creates in us a living ecosystem of understanding.

I encourage everyone to read widely, learn continually, and above all become a curious student. And I believe curiosity – the honest, inquisitive, humble kind – is one of the most important qualities we can curate in our own souls. Anything that deepens our souls will guide us to wholehearted practices, in our businesses and elsewhere.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nikkimoorephotography.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/nikkimoorephoto
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/nikkimoorephotography

Image Credits
All images copyright Nikki Moore Photography