Why, oh, why have I never asked myself the most obvious of questions: Could I make a decent living from doing what I love and, if so, how would I do it?
I know part of the reason for this. I love my current job. I get to write, photograph and produce television. So technically I am already making a decent living ‘doing what I love’.
That leads to the next question: Can I make a decent living doing more of what I love, and experiment creatively in areas beyond my job? And bundled up with this is the question: What do I want my creative legacy to be?
In reading John Macadam’s The one-hour business plan: the simple and practical way to start anything new I’m realising creating a business plan is worthwhile even if no business is pursued. It might be a useful exercise in refining where I see my practice, who might care enough about my output to fund or pay for it, where it might find a home, how it might find that home and where I stand in relation to all those brilliant other artists either trying to make end’s meat or creating for the endeavour without much thought for recompense.
The one-hour business plan: the simple and practical way to start anything new
It raises similar issues to those posed by the Positions and Practice module, whose key challenge was effectively ‘know thyself and know they field’.
What am I offering?
Well, clearly I’m offering me, in all my strengths and weaknesses, skills and foibles, vision and blindnesses.
And I now plan to work beyond that and formulate a realistic inventory of my skills combined with where I want to take my photography and then relate those two to where the market for the types of photography done by people with my skillset currently stands.
Much of my market analysis is knowledge based and likely commercially valuable – to me. So I think, I hope reasonably, putting your business plan into a public forum, such as this, should be the first of rule of what not to do in business planning…
References:
Mcadam, J. (2013). The one-hour business plan : the simple and practical way to start anything new. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
