No matter how you look at it, as photographers, we’re kind of in the business of exchanging time for money. We work one on one with clients and we only get paid if we produce something, which takes time. But that doesn’t mean our time has a limit on its value,

It also doesn’t mean you have to bill people based on your time. I talked about different pricing strategies in episode #16, so I won’t go into detail here, other then to say, no matter how you price your services and products, there are clients out there who are the perfect, ideal clients for our business.

Trying to be everything to everyone will slow down your business growth. It sounds counterintuitive but simply having more clients does not mean you have a profitable business; it just means you’re busier, and busier is not always better.

Busier can be what I like to call the Productivity Illusion. I use this term when I think about the work I’m doing. I’m kind of addicted to feeling productive, and it’s something I’ve been working on. One of the aspects of that has been learning to differentiate between actual productivity and things that just feel like productivity.

So, I now prefer to examine my time from a point of view of efficiency and effectiveness. Is what I’m doing the most efficient way I could be doing it? And is what I’m doing producing the most effective result? These two ideas can often be at odds with each other but they both fuel a singular purpose: to get things done in a way that improves my business and my quality of life.

Determine Your Life Goals

In order to improve my business and quality of life, I want to make sure I’m focused on serving my ideal clients. Before we can determine who our ideal clients are, we need to first determine what our goals are. We need to think about and put down on paper what it is we want, for our business, but more importantly, for our lives.

The first thing you need to do is stop setting crappy goals. Yeah, you do it. We all do it! Goal setting is hard. Most of us set crappy goals based on a reward instead of a journey. I want a Tesla. That’s true. But a Tesla’s not actually going to improve my life. That’s a crappy goal.

We need to start thinking about our quality of life goals as a journey. Ask yourself this:

• How do you want to spend your time?

• What makes you want to get out of bed every morning?

• Who do you want to spend your time with?

• Where, what environment, do you want to spend your time in?

Make a list of your goals. Put them down on paper. Create a vision board if you want. This is a crucial first step. This is what will help you define and direct your energy into things you are passionate about. Stop doing things that you don’t love to do and start focusing on the things you love to do.

I kind of have a digital vision board. I have an Amazon Fire TV and on my Fire TV, I can set the screensaver to rotate through a series of images in a folder on my Amazon Photos account. In that folder, I have images of my dream house, dream furniture, and the beaches of Menorca, a small, beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea where I hope to live one day. My screensaver rotates through these images and reminds me daily of why I work so hard.

Determine Your Business Goals

Once you’ve outlined your life goals, you can start to assess what it would require to get there. What do you need to accomplish in your business to fulfill those goals? How much money do you need to make, after expenses, after taxes, to live the kind of life you want to live?

Set targets for yourself. Make them specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and give them a timeline. Set a date by which you want to achieve each goal. A great way to think about this is to figure out where your business needs to be in five years’ time in order to achieve your life goals. Then break it down by year and figure out what you need to do each year to reach that five-year mark.

This is called chunking down. Breaking big goals or tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Make your goals reasonable and attainable. Have them build on one another. What goals do you need to accomplish in year one to get you to year two, and then years three, four and five?

Summary

So, take some time today to outline the journey you want for your life. Put together a collection of inspiring images and set it as your screensaver, the rotating background on your computer, or the lock screen on your phone. Then figure out how to get there over the next five to ten years. If you accomplish them sooner, you can always revise your goals and build on what you’ve accomplished.

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