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.

Jeffery Banks

If anyone knows anything about this industry, they’ll tell you high risk-high reward . . . low chances. Extremely low chances. If I could give my younger peers a single piece of advice, it would be that corporate availability of jobs doesn’t exist for audio engineers (in a musical setting). To make a living, I had to work on my soft skill of videography over the years to open a job possibility in the Communications field as an Audio/Film Specialist. If you’re looking for a 9-5 in a studio environment, there is virtually no such thing. From a practical standpoint, there is no need for scalable employees or redundant hiring in a studio environment. The traditional studio workplace was built for 1 or 2 main engineers and possibly studio technicians and customer service. Read more>>

Camryn Carpenter

My biggest challenge currently is art market fees. The overhead costs of renting a space, marketing, and application processing take a lot of time and money from the organizers and the market fees fund that. There are some markets I have paid $100-200 to attend where the profit margin is slim to none. Of course there are people buying your products and spreading your business name is always a perk, but not everyone has money to attend the markets in the first place and if they do it’s always a gamble. Finding the right audience for your products isn’t always guaranteed even with a larger more expensive market. Read more>>

Nicole Butler

The beauty industry can be tough because it takes A LOT of work to gain new clients. Not only am I juggling doing the actual services and keeping up to date on education, I also have to push out marketing on social media and all of the other responsibilities that come with running a business. Not getting that immediate swell of new followers or having a viral post on social media can feel really defeating but I’ve learned to not focus too much on social media and work on providing exceptional service for every client. Read more>>