I Quit. Why I SHUT DOWN my Wedding Photography Business.

i'm back give me a quick second so of course of course you want to make some noise get it literally within 10 seconds of every recording he starts whimpering and whining as if i'm not paying him any attention but literally all he does all day is just lay in this bed until i start recording or talking on the phone then he wants to play and when i try to play with him at other times of the day he just doesn't want to play but i'm not here to talk about my dog what i wanted to talk about today is quitting i'm i'm quitting this is the end not for this but for my wedding photography business [Music] here in southern ontario we're in the i don't know the beginning the middle of uh a really bad third wave of covet cases there's no way of getting around the topic right like i watch a lot of youtube videos and they try and like kind of skirt the issue but here's the reality is i know so many wedding photographers who are shuddering their business this year is their last year business i have a couple of weddings still to shoot but beyond that i'm not taking on any more wedding clients once this is done i don't know when this will be done here in the hamilton area here in ontario but when it's done uh it will take me about a year to recover for my business to recover and based on our timeline here in southern ontario i'm not even going to be able to start advertising again until the fall while i'm in the southernmost part of canada everything kind of like shuts down the sun starts setting around 5 30 6 pm in october so we don't have a lot of hours to get photos to meet with clients and do engagement shoots and things like that so it wouldn't be for yet another year from now today's april 21st before i could even really start advertising and building clientele again and then it would i would be looking at booking weddings for 2023 2024 that's two or three years away financially i can't survive two or three years without an income nobody can we are getting some financial support from the federal government here in canada which is an absolute blessing but for the most part weddings here are very seasonal and they're just something that as a business no longer makes sense for me to pursue so i'm quitting so that brings us to a question when is it okay to quit i think there are a number of reasons and conditions that make it okay for you to you know want to quit or to have to quit first of all any reason that you decide you want to stop doing something is a perfectly valid reason perfectly valid in my previous business i ran an improv comedy training center in toronto i ran that business probably for two years longer than i should have definitely a year longer than i should have possibly two i should have gotten out a lot sooner commercial rents in toronto were going up it was very difficult to find a space to like have a multi-classroom training center that wasn't exorbitant that would you know that we could afford and break even let alone making a profit we never really made a profit and when the company shut down um i had a lot of debt and wasn't able to pay most of it off so that really sucks it's something that haunts me and something that actually drives my decision-making process now so the first reason why it would absolutely make sense to shut your business down is if you're losing a lot of money if you cannot afford to pay your expenses shut the doors now the great thing about photography is as a business you can scale back and ramp up as you need as long as you have another income if photography is your primary income but it is not paying the bills you either need to make some significant adjustments to either lower expenses or bring in more clients increase your rates change your brand positioning in the market or you need to shut down a lot of people just do not talk about when is the right time to quit your business there's never a good time but there is a moment when you realize this isn't working the way i had planned the second reason you might want to quit your business is you just don't love what you're doing anymore often a lot of people get into something like photography because they love it as a hobby but then when it becomes a business that they have to rely on to pay their bills it becomes work it is work it's not easy work either as a professional photographer your job is to solve client problems if something goes wrong on set you can't reschedule you need to figure out a way to make it work and get the job done you have to use your ingenuity your skill and your creativity that's the job of professional photographer is to be a professional creative it's hardly ever when you're working as professional an artistic pursuit the artistic work is something you're probably going to do on your own in your spare time but if you stop loving what you're doing you should not try to pursue it as a career you often hear this advice if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life it's just not true it's not true i love what i do but every single day feels like work there hasn't been much of it over the past year and that's one of the reasons why i am shutting down the wedding side and i'm just going to continue focusing on my commercial photography and my editorial photography i went to university for entrepreneurship and i remember the very first class i had at brock university i had a professor named jean lucky and he came in i remember the i'll never forget it clear as day he walked into class the first it was my first day in university one of my first classes he walked in and it was entrepreneurship 101 and he said i'm going to tell you the only thing that you need to know to be successful as an entrepreneur first of all figure out what it is you love to do and then figure out how to make money at it now that's tough i love photography figuring out how to make money at it has taken a long time so if you stop loving that thing you're doing it's going to be very difficult for you to figure out how to make money at it a third reason that would be a clear reason to to stop running a photography business is if there are health issues involved whether it's your health or you have to become a caretaker for someone in your family photography in most cases relies on you as the primary photographer as we get older as well for a lot of us our bodies start to feel the strain and stress of being a photographer being hunched over 10-hour 12-hour wedding days our bodies get to a point where they can't handle that stress if you have a physical health issue or a mental health issue make that your priority these past few months for me for my business have been a real roller coaster in january we went into lockdown we came out of that far too early in february in march i had more photo shoots than i did in the entire span of 2020 i was crazy busy and then boom locked down again it's one of the reasons why i have taken a long time to get back to getting the youtube videos up and running i was busy but because we're in a pandemic there are a lot of mental health issues that come along with that for small business owners for entrepreneurs the anxiety of being able to make money when you're not allowed to work the anxiety of being able to pay your bills put food on the table it's just so difficult right now for me to make a living doing what i love to do because the work that i love to do is not allowed to happen i can shoot commercial gigs but there just aren't a lot of them happening right now now one of the things that i love is that i've been able to do a lot more video work and i'm going to be building a video portfolio but but i can't even work on building that portfolio right now because we are under stay at home orders we literally are ordered to stay at home right now um and i'm going to be doing a lot more videos for youtube the podcast for studio builder is going to be archived i'm not quitting it but i'm just not focusing on it right now i have to focus on youtube in order to build enough of an audience and build enough videos and content that it can become a second income that can help support my existing business but can also provide some small no matter how small it is bit of income that will help stabilize me through the next year or two because i'm sure at least here in ontario we're going to be dealing with this for at least another year so how i want to end this video is i want to give you permission to quit if you want to quit if you've been feeling like this is probably something you should stop doing you should probably stop doing it you probably should have already stopped doing it if you don't love it anymore you should probably stop and investigate other routes that's perfectly okay you are allowed to change careers that does not make you a failure you can look back on the work that you did and be proud of it and want to give you permission to move forward to pivot to quit and that's really all i have to say for today i'm gonna go walk the dog [Music] yeah we're gonna go out right now okay