For photographers : Why I call myself a small business owner first and a photographer second

Sometime this year, my answer to the question “What do you?” shifted from “I’m a photographer” to “I’m a small business owner, I own Reversed Eye Photography”. Now don’t get me wrong, I still strongly consider myself a photographer. My passion for photography and capturing art with my camera is why I started Reversed Eye Photography in the first place but I have also come a long way from 2014 when I was just a girl with a camera.

As any business owner knows, you have to wear the “hat” of every position; marketer, editor, photographer, graphic designer, head of communications, accountant, bookkeeper, the list goes on and on. These days I would say my job is 60% everything else and 40% photography. I’ve started a podcast, I’m working towards launching merchandise and have a dozen other ideas on the go. Somewhere along the line, my main job shifted significantly from photographer to entrepreneur and business owner.

This can be a scary transition to make, and one that I think a lot of photographers are fearful of. After all, for most of us, we didn’t start our businesses because we were avid marketers or had the brains for business, most of us didn’t even get into it because we wanted to make money, we just loved the art of capturing images and memories. I have learnt though that we should be proud to call ourselves business owners and that it is something that we should strive to be better at! I could improve my photography skills a million times over, but without the business know-how to back it up, I would likely get nowhere.

As photographers we need to recognize that we are also business owners and we need to focus on furthering our business education as much as our photography education, if not more and invest time and effort into marketing, getting our books on track and coming up with solid business plans. I proudly call myself a business-woman and a small business owner because I am so much more than just a photographer. I’m not afraid to say that I am doing this to make money, to pay my bills and to grow my business, so that I can invest money back into it and it can thrive for years to come.