Catherine Connor heads Aspire, one of the UK’s foremost training providers for photographers. She knows that business isn’t easy, and requires “buckets of courage”. Your first challenge, she says, is to create a business with the right atmosphere to powerfully influence the tribe you aim to attract — and of course fulfil you personally:   Make it your mission to consider the content of your business. First, study how it feels. Asking yourself if you want to be in your own business is a starting point for most creatives. What is the atmosphere like? Does To View More >>

I'm a little embarrassed to admit this but I've never read a business book. Not really. I've skirted around them … flicked through them … put them back on the shelf. Stephen on the other hand has shelves of them. He reads them and fills me in on the concepts. It's worked for many years :-) So a friend comes for the weekend and hands me this book … tells me I MUST read it: The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth by Chris Brogan, one of Stephen’s favourites. I think it's the title that grabbed me. I’ve always felt we've bordered on the right side of being freaks. To View More >>

Remember the little domestic drama about how my briefcase and laptop were stolen? And how, to judge from my own buying behaviour, not everyone is going to downgrade to cheap and nasty just because of the recession? Well, yes, I bought the most expensive laptop bag I came across, but... I asked for a discount. You're not to know this but I'm a shrug-and-pay guy. It's my role in life to pay full retail, so for me to ask for, let alone get, 10% off is unusual. But what struck me was how the store projected itself. There wasn't a sale sign anywhere. Nothing to suggest times are tough, or please make To View More >>

The other day I proposed a way to encourage enquirers to look past your prices and make personal contact. It was partly a way to start identifying people who should be your clients, and withdrawing (politely) from those who probably shouldn't. You need to demonstrate to the first group why you’re the right photographer to spend their wedding day with! The 3% rule The 3% rule is our way of saying that you can't succeed by trying to appeal to everyone, and you definitely shouldn't try. It stems from the time, years ago, when we tried to estimate the number of professional photographers in the To View More >>

You might remember a post called "the secret life of wedding photographers" on ISPWP a few years ago. Apparently photographers lead a great life – you get to spend your time taking pictures, travelling to exotic locations and partying like rockstars! Of course the sad reality is often quite different. This fertile little meme has got a lot more airtime recently because APE and now Seth Godin have posted about it. As always, Seth's post is well worth the read. He makes the point that everyone has a choice: get together the "guts and resources" too do what you were born to do, or spend your time To View More >>