When the Start-Up isn’t Starting-Up

“One of the hardest actions in life is patience. It tests loyalty to your goals and endurance while you wait for positive outcomes” – Mohammed Dewji

Is your start-up taking a while to actually get started? Perhaps, your business is busiest during specific seasons.

For me, I started a photography business and with living in the city amongst so many wanna-be photographers, the competition is getting a little overwhelming. I am averaging 1-2 gigs per month which is good for now with a small child. However, I wouldn’t mind only 1-2 gigs a month but with a nice rate, ha.

While the business is slow, I thought of some things to can do in the mean time to ensure I have the best service when business starts to pick up. Hopefully, you find these ideas useful as well

•  Learn something new

Take a class on Lynda or Skillshare that relates to managing the business such as financial management, social media, marketing, or drafting contracts.  Learning something new in a field that is not related to your craft or area of expertise will help in developing the business overall and give insight to managing your business from a different angle.

• Join a meet-up

Living in Washington, DC blesses us with so many meet-up options. I have noticed that there is a meet-up for everything. With meet-ups comes networking and potential clients.

• Fine-tune Processes

Pick a process that will occur in your business such as invoicing, corresponding to inquiries, pricing, refunding, posting on social media etc. Then go through that process from both the owners point of view and your future customer’s point of view. Do your emails sound professional? How quickly do you respond? How can your customers contact you for information? Are your prices negotiable? Some processes can documented and the standards can be set ahead of time before any complications or confusion happen.

• Study experts in your field

Best way to learn is from others who are where you want to be in 1 year, 5 year or 10 years. Study them and learn how they got to where they are. Their story may surprise you. As a photography, a female-photographer, I decided to take a look into Jasmine Star. She is a really good wedding and engagement photographer and I learned that she started out with the same lens I did! (nifty 50). She also still uses it! Not sure why, but that some how motivated me into thinking that this photography business can seriously go places if I put my mind to it.

So while business is slow or while the business is still in the works, take advantage of the extra time because you never know when your business will pick up!

-Cassandra