Have you ever had a friend look at a business and randomly throw out numbers that made it seem like that business owner must be making serious bank? We’ve experienced that many times, and know from conversations with operators and owners in those industries that their real profitability is often far, far less. The reason is often that there are unique challenges to profitability in almost every industry and so we wanted to create a space for entrepreneurs from across industries and markets to discuss the challenges to profitability in their industries.

Deshon Junior

The biggest challenge of profitability in video & photography is how much competition there is. It makes it hard to charge customers cause you don’t want to have your price more or the same as a competitor, but you also don’t want to charge less, so you are not under-pricing yourself. Then this makes it more challenging for new people coming into the game to make it harder for them to make a name for themselves. From experience, it’s not a fun time being in that stage of the business. Read more>>

Trinity Marriott

The photography industry is extremely saturated and it’s quite hard to gain any clientele when you first start. I believe that since there are tons of photographers out there it’s a big challenge to gain any profit for your own business. I’ve learned that when you first start your own photography business the one thing that you should immediately start doing is getting in contact with other photographers around you area. Once you start reaching out to people who do what you do you’re able to learn from them as well as getting a foot into the right door. Read more>>

Erich Orris

I really feel that one of the biggest challenges to profitability in this industry is hits hardest on the best makers. It is simply time invested in fit and finish. I really find I have to constantly be trying to improve my methods to get the fit and finish that I really want to give my customer, without ending up putting an enormous number of man hours into producing the product. And the more time that is put into it, the smaller the customer base grows. It is a real balancing act putting out a product that is so nice it absolutely wows the customer, while still keeping the cost of the product in a reasonable place. Read more>>

Thomas Hamilton

This definitely has been a hard part of my career to navigate. As of recently, the market of what I do has become extremely saturated. Not only with new makers, but with very large corporations. The main issue is material costs are at an all time high with inflated shipping, goods pricing, etc. yet these new makers and corporations are using low grade lumber/ financial backing to drive the higher end market down. Read more>>

Kristoff Druva

Like many wildlife photographers out there, one of the hardest things to overcome is trying to be able to make enough money to survive and get to the wildlife itself while strictly photographing wildlife. The unfortunate truth to it is that money can be made, its just often not enough to fully support yourself without supplementing by being a Wildlife/Nature Guide or having a secondary job. And with a highly saturated niche like wildlife, I’ve definitely difficult to have livable income from purely that type of photography. When I’m in town at home, I do portraiture work for families, models, and other photos like that and photograph wildlife whenever I’m able to get out to it. Read more>>