How self-taught skills, continued learning , and determination turned a photographer's hobby into a seven figure business with chad david kraus

Chad went from being a self-taught photographer hobbyist that took photos of his family's travels and memories the way many of us do. In 2008, after experiencing reduced hours and a shrinking paycheck at his job, he boldly launched Chad David Kraus Photography. Since then, he has photographed over 1000 weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and several iconic Broadway shows and red carpet events with images featured in the New York Times and on Times Square billboards as well. He shares his story.

Anne McGinty
Can you take us back to before you had your business and tell us a little bit about what you were doing and what your life was like?

Chad Kraus
Yeah, absolutely. So before I started my current business, I worked for a world music record label called Pudemayo World Music, and I was...

the head of the sales department that actually did sales to what we called the non-traditional market, which was independent bookstores and gift shops and museums and zoos and coffee houses and natural product stores and stuff like that. So I would work with those accounts and get them music CDs to play and sell in their stores. It was a great experience for me. I learned a lot of what I now utilize in my current business.

from what I learned when I was at Pudemaya World Music. But it was also, it was a traditional job in the sense that I had a boss and I would commute from Westchester County where I live just north of New York City, about 45 minutes on the train into the Grand Central Station in the city and then would walk usually a mile or so to the office. So door to door, probably about an hour and a half each way each day. And at the time I,

was perfectly happy doing that and didn't think twice about it. But then once I ultimately started my new business, which we'll get into, I realized what a difference it was to get back that time every day. I enjoyed my job at Putamayo and I was doing fine. I wasn't killing it. I became complacent in just accepting what I was doing and fell into the routine of it all.

Anne McGinty
So then can you talk to us about the moment or maybe it was a long moment when you started exploring other options and why?

Chad Kraus
So for me, it was going to my cousin's daughter's bad mitzvah that I was invited to in Phoenix. And this was in like 2006 or 2007.

And I had been into photography since I was 12 years old. I actually bought my first camera with my lemonade stand savings from in front of my apartment building in New York City on the Upper West Side when I was 12 years old and really just was always a passion and a hobby of mine. I took photos of my family and hanging out on the New York City streets as a young kid growing up and on family vacations and New York City street scenes and just whatever I saw, but I was totally self-taught.

I didn't ever go to school for photography. It was truly a hobby and something that I liked to do. And what ultimately happened was when I went to my cousin's daughter's bat mitzvah, I had just bought a new digital camera and I brought the camera down with me and took a ton of photos just for the fun of it and sent them to my cousin and she called and said, these are better in the thousands of dollars I paid to the professional photographer. And that was my light bulb moment. And that was when I.

kind of just all of a sudden said to myself, why not? Why not see what I can do with this professionally as opposed to just personally as a hobby? And I started the photography business. But you still had a full-time job, is that right? I did, I did still have a full-time job. I was still commuting in on the Metro North Railroad into Grand Central every day. And there were three or four guys that I would see pretty regularly that lived.

the next town north from me. So I would get on the train. They'd already be on the train and I would find them. And when I was first riding in with them, I hadn't even started the photography business, it was probably three or four years of riding in with them. And then I went to my cousin's daughters by Mitzvah and decided I was going to start listing myself on Craigslist and taking odd jobs here or there as a photographer. And over the following year or two or three, I remember probably monthly, one of them would say to me,

So when are you leaving Putomayo? When are you gonna make this your full career? I would literally laugh and say, it's never gonna happen. But little did I know that they were foreshadowing a bit, weren't they?

Anne McGinty
Maybe you should go ride that commuter to training and go and catch up with them and let them know how you're doing.

Chad Kraus
They all still do. I'm doing the bar mitzvah of one of their chains.

Anne McGinty
That's awesome. How did you balance getting...
a side gig photography business going while still doing your hour and a half commute each way and going to work. How did you do that?

Chad Kraus
That is a good question. The thing that I wanted to do, photography, event photography, bar and bar mitzvahs or weddings or special family events, were almost always on the weekends. I was able to keep doing my day job, as it were, at Putomayo, and then I was able to book.

certain gigs initially on the weekends, on Saturdays and Sundays. And it was to not do that traditional leap of faith of leaving a job and completely risking everything. I really didn't have that option because I already had kids and my family and a mortgage, and I couldn't just leave one job and start from scratch at another. So this was really the

perfect scenario for me because I was able to keep doing my day job and slowly build up the photography business. And honestly, I never had the expectation that the photography would turn into anything more than a really nice side gig, a dozen or 15 or 20 times a year, do a shoot on a weekend and have this extra money on the side to supplement my day job. And it was just as big of a surprise to me.

that it turned into something much, much bigger than what I was doing at my day job. Much bigger.

Anne McGinty
So, okay, you have your niece's bat mitzvah photos, but beyond that, you didn't have any experience or any reviews and you didn't have a portfolio. So take us through that.

Chad Kraus
Yeah. So after I had the impetus to give it a go and see if I could actually book some clients to trust me to shoot their events. My first step was to pull together.

photos that I had taken over the years, even if they were on film, and scan them and convert them to digital files. And then I had the photos that I had taken at my niece's Padmitsva and I put them all on a Flickr photo stream. I don't know who remembers Flickr, but it was out there and rather than building a website right at the get-go, I just put up this photo stream of a bunch of my photos and I listed myself on Craigslist.

Anne McGinty
What did you do after you had those photos? How did you get your first client?

Chad Kraus
I never had a business plan. Again, I didn't really go into it with the expectation of turning it into a real business. It really always just felt like, oh, this is a nice way to make some extra money doing something that I enjoy doing. And for me, I've always been a big people person and I love interacting with people and having a great time alongside. So in this case, I put myself up on Craigslist.

I got my first inquiry and my first booking and it was for a Sweet 16. And it was $75 an hour for two or three hours. They booked me. And the time I was like, great, I'll take $300 cash or whatever it amounted to and go and have fun at a party and take some photos. And I sent them to the client and the mom of the Sweet 16 girl loved the photos and it just kept going from there. The big part of what allowed me to.

give a go of it was the fact that it was digital. If it had still been film, even though I believed in my abilities as a photographer, there's a whole different leap of faith if you're shooting with film, because you can't review anything in the moment at an event, it didn't matter how many photos I took, it wasn't like I was wasting film, right? It was just going on a memory card. And I was able to quickly glance at the back of the camera and see what I captured. So I would know if I was doing a good job.

And if I was capturing the moments that I wanted to capture, and if there was something that didn't quite get captured as I would have wanted, I could try and do it again. Makes so much sense. I mean, just the evolution of the technology enables you to do this. That's amazing. Absolutely.

Anne McGinty
And so after the Sweet 16, how did you go from $300 into more?

Chad Kraus
Well, I would say that the progression of the business really...

fed into itself. So I kept listing myself on Craigslist and I definitely got more inquiries and jobs from there. But then I started getting the referral business. I think with any service business, the businesses that are successful compared to those that don't make it, a huge part of that is the service part. Right. It's not all about the artistic part because there are plenty of photographers out there that can take a great photo that technically know what they're doing that have been.

trained and educated in school, college. But what sets me apart from a lot of other event photographers out there is that for me, it's not just about getting a great photo, it's about the experience that you're giving your clients and the families that you're working with. And what I mean by that is, are you a photographer that

is there and just going through the motions. And if you had your druthers, you'd be taking pictures of mountains in Colorado or animals on a safari or whatever, or are engaging and fun and friendly and love interacting with people. I love family histories and learning about these incredible stories of families and then especially with bar and Bob Mitzvahs, which is

what my main business now is and we can get into that. I myself am Jewish as well. So I have a little bit of that historical and ancestral background to fall into, but it's always just an honor and fascinating to me when I meet a grandfather or a great grandfather that lived through the Holocaust, or Bat Mitzvah boy or girl that is wearing the talus, the prayer shawl that was passed down from like three generations ago, that was from over a hundred years old.

So I think people can see that interest that I have and that I'm not just there as someone just snapping photos. It's much more than that for me.

Anne McGinty
Which I wonder if your job working in sales with Putumayo kind of trained you, or maybe you just have always been like this. Maybe you're just a people person.

Chad Kraus
One is that definitely my work at Putumayo, it was a small independent record label. I think at its height.

There was 30 or 40 employees. And because it wasn't a huge organization, I was very much involved. I learned a lot about customer service and, and marketing and promotion, which has definitely lent itself to my current photography business. The other thing that I would say that has helped me in terms of my people person skills was that I grew up as a young kid in New York city in theater.

I went to the high school performing arts for drama and I went on to college that was a conservatory of theater arts, Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. And so I think a big part of my education was working with others, right? Like doing scene work or doing a play and being able to collaborate and work with other people.

Anne McGinty
You're a connector.

Chad Kraus
Yeah. In the words of Malcolm Gladwell, right?

Anne McGinty
Yep.
So, you're taking the jobs on the weekends, you still have your full-time job. How did you navigate leaving your stable full-time job with benefits and do that full transition? How many years was that before you decided to take a leap of faith?

Chad Kraus
Yeah. So the whole idea of leaving a stable full-time job with benefits and moving over to my own business was definitely a very gradual one.

lose sight for a minute, the situation and the luck, being able to thread that needle and walk both sides for quite a while. I was at Putumayo until I believe about 2017.

Anne McGinty
Oh wow.

Chad Kraus
Yeah. It was probably about seven or eight years that I was still working at Putumayo. I was building up the photography business, but it was almost like one elevator going up and another going down.

So when they met in the middle and there was that sweet spot, I was able to fully leave Putamayo as it got to be too much in terms of time away from my family and, and too much focus needing to be put on the photography to continue to build it. I was able to eventually go down to four days a week at Putamayo and then three days a week, and then I started working remotely from up here in Westchester before.

remote work became all the rage with COVID. I was able to do my job from up here and that gave me more time again to focus on the photography. And then eventually to be perfectly honest, what once I was making as much in the photography business as I was making as a salaried employee is when I started floating the idea of letting go.

Anne McGinty
Such an exciting moment that your side gig had just built this momentum to a point that you had a choice. Yeah. But you took the choice.

Chad Kraus
I did, and it was definitely still a bit of a leap because you feel like you can make a go of it with something that you've built yourself, but it's still feels scary to let go an organization that's been in business for a while. And as you say, benefits, you know, it was a big concern having to find my own health insurance for my family and having to depend on myself, but I will tell you this, that's the real beauty, right? Is when you realize that you can do it, you are in control.

and you don't have to worry about layoffs or downsizing or cutbacks on hours or anything like that. It's all you.

Anne McGinty
So as you mentioned, cutting back on hours and you said you went down to four days a week and then three days a week and then remote work. How did you convince the employer to allow you to shrink your hours and also to work remotely?

Chad Kraus
You know, I had worked there for so long and had the benefit of that. Wasn't like I was working for some big.

corporate organization where you're really just a name on a board and there's not as much personal influence. The owner of Putamayo knew that I was doing photography, knew that it was something that I loved. And at the same time I was really good as a salesperson. So I don't think wanted to just let me go have to find somebody else. So they were trying to accommodate me as best that they could as well.

Anne McGinty
Have you spent any money on advertising?

Chad Kraus
I have, but not anywhere close to what one might expect or anywhere close to maybe what used to have to be spent. I benefited from social media in a huge way. So there's a magazine here in Westchester, it's called Westchester Magazine. And when I was first starting my business, they approached me and I quickly found out that it was three or $4,000 for a quarter page ad or a third of a page ad in a monthly magazine that had a circulation of

You know, maybe a hundred thousand people or something like that. I didn't feel I had to be a rocket scientist to recognize, okay, for three or $4,000, it's going to be in this magazine, which gets a lot of distribution. I would sit there and I would say to myself, okay, if a hundred thousand families, households get this magazine, how many of them actually even open it at all? Maybe you knock out half right there. Right. And so, so now you're down to 50,000 people. And then of those 50,000 people.

how many of them actually get to the page where your ad is. And then of those, how many actually stop and look at your ad. And then of those, how many actually have an event that's coming up in the right timeframe to where they would be interested in your services. And it becomes so, so minuscule that it just never seemed worth it to me. Now, as opposed to that, I maybe spent three or $4,000 in an entire year.

And that was for many boosted posts and ads. Facebook had what they called a targeted ad where you could feed the ad to people who liked your page and their friends. So connections of connections basically. And so I spent a good amount of time encouraging anybody that used me and anybody that had been interested in booking us to like my Facebook page. And that way, when I

put up an ad and targeted it in that way. I knew that it was not only going to the people that already knew about me, but their friends. And the beauty of that again, in the bar and bat mitzvah world and the Jewish world is that if you've got a mom that booked my studio for their kids bar mitzvah, and then a lot of their friends that have similar age kids that are also having upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs, I was getting in front of a lot of people.

that would be interested in my services, as opposed to a magazine where I had no idea who was going in front of.

Anne McGinty
That makes so much sense. And you keep on mentioning bar and bat mitzvahs. So this is the niche that you picked, it sounds like.

Chad Kraus
Yeah, I would say bar and bat mitzvahs are the niche that I picked and that picked me. And what I mean by that is it quickly became apparent to me that it was a perfect niche for my location, my ability.

my personality and my style of photography and the marketability of it. So that's really the key with a bar and bat mitzvah. What I really quickly discovered was there was a huge built in audience that would likely their own events, right? As opposed to say a wedding. That's what most event photographers would be going after, right? You'd be going after the big weddings and you know, everybody's getting married and all of that, and I honestly didn't really think about.

bar and bought Mitzvahs too much. The first few came to me, booked me, asked me about doing it and was like, yeah, absolutely. What I realized now and why I think it's such a great business and a great business model. I was shooting a wedding and there were 200 guests and people see me at the party and love my personality, love my work, see my work afterwards. That's all well and good. But if you don't have a wedding coming up in the next year or two, then there's not going to be as much.

word of the mouth, it's going to organically spread or they're not going to have just seen me. So if I do a wedding and there's 200 guests, a hundred of them are already married and of the remaining hundred, 50 or 60 of them are from out of town. And you know, far away and of the remaining 30 or 40, aren't going to have a wedding anytime soon. And so you've really limited your potential new clients from doing that one event. Now counter that to a bar by Mitzvah where same number of guests, but

What I've learned and what I've seen and what I know to be true is that the mom of the Mitzvah kid that I'm photographing and the family that I'm photographing has invited, you know, maybe 10 or 20 of her friends that all have, or a lot have similar age kids to the mom's kids that I'm photographing and they oftentimes have Bar Mitzvahs coming up or they have friends that have Bar Mitzvahs coming up. And then on top of that, you add in the sibling business, which

is really nice because again, at a wedding, the bride might have one or two siblings, but they might live elsewhere or they might already be married or they're nowhere close to being married. Whereas with the bar about Mitzvah, you've got a 13 year old kid that's having theirs. If you're lucky enough to get in on the top floor, as they say, with the first kid in the family that's having their bar by Mitzvah, a lot of times they've got a sibling that's one or two years younger and another one possibly that's another couple years younger than that.

bar and bat mitzvahs for all four of their kids over the last eight or nine years. So it's a really great business to be in.

Anne McGinty
And you're building connection with the families and as you were saying, getting to know them more and understanding their histories and that's a win-win. It's savvy. But it also, it feels good. If a budding photographer, aspiring photographer came up to you and said, hey, how did you do this? I want to get started. Do you have any advice? How would you suggest that they find their niche?

Chad Kraus
I think that the first answer is, as a lot have said before me, is to find what you love. If you love nature photography, then go for that. Don't necessarily squeeze yourself as a square peg into a round hole by trying to do event photography. Or if you love events, don't try to make a career photographing nature. So, you know, and if you love music, then try to follow that passion. It's really about finding what you love and also not pressuring yourself. Right. I didn't start.

this photography business till I was 36 years old. And before I had that fortuitous moment of going to my cousin's daughter's bat mitzvah, taking a bunch of photos and realizing that this could be something I figured I would be at Putumayo world music for the rest of my life. A lot of times it just needs to fall into your lap, but I think the key is being able to recognize it when it falls into your lap. Right. Yeah. And as a self-taught photographer.

Anne McGinty
What have you done to refine and expand your skills because you're competing with others in the industry who do have professional training? What do you do?

Chad Kraus
I would say that the best lesson that I learned was to not compare myself to others. I think that in a lot of life, not just business, but life in general, comparison is the surest path to misery. All you're looking for is personal growth, right?

is your own expansion of your own skills. There are, without a doubt, I will sometimes look back at a shoot that I did six months ago or a year ago or a couple years ago, and I can see mistakes that I made or things that I would have done differently. And so that's how I learned by reviewing my own work and always striving to get better and to look for new ways that I can capture similar moments. I even do it in the middle of a shoot. There's times where I will.

consciously have gotten a shot of a certain moment, and I'll be like, oh, where else can I move to, to get this from a different angle or a different view? And how is that going to tell the story a little differently? Then when I go back and I review my work from a certain event, I can see that it was a great choice to go and try something else. That's amazing and so inspirational because I think a lot of people feel like they can't do something because they don't have the training or they have never taken the class. They don't know how to do it. But with the right determination, they can learn anything.

Anne McGinty
Yeah, it's determination and it's confidence.

Chad Kraus
Right. I think a lot of it is believing in yourself, you know, and I've had people say to me like, are you nervous? Especially when I first started going and doing the first events, I charged like 900 bucks or something like that. Now it can be 10 times that, but I had several people that would say to me, are you nervous? And I would be so nervous. There's no do-overs with events, right? It's not like portraits where if something went terribly wrong, you'd be like, all right, we'll come back another day. Let's try it again with weddings or bar but mitzvahs or other.

special events, it's one time only and you can't do it over.

Anne McGinty
Speaking to that, has there ever been any catastrophic situation that you've faced in your career as a photographer? No, the closest that ever came to a big problem was when one time I dropped a lens and it didn't break the glass of the lens, but I couldn't mount it to the camera body anymore. And another time where one of my flashes just failed, stopped working, the bulb.

went out or something like that. And the answer to that, and I would give this advice to anybody that's looking to book a photographer. One question you should always ask is do they have backup equipment? Because that's huge, especially for an event where you can't tell everyone to just stop doing what they're doing while you go out to a store and buy a replacement or reschedule it for a different day. So in both cases with me, you know, I have backup lenses, I have backup flashes and I just calmly went and the client was not the wiser that anything had happened and I just continued on.

Anne McGinty
You're lucky that you had it.

Chad Kraus
Yes, definitely. When I first started out, you know, when I was doing that sweet 16 or, or even that first bar by Mitzvah, I don't think I did have backup equipment because it was a side gig, right? I wasn't investing in all of that because I, I wasn't sure where it was going to lead to.

Anne McGinty
Can you share some insight into how you approach pricing your photography services and how that's evolved over time?

Chad Kraus
I think for any business, I think it is difficult to know your value or the value of your products, if it's not a service and to know where to put that pricing, right in terms of you don't want to price yourself too low and you don't want to price yourself too high, right? Trying to find that sweet spot is really, really hard, especially in the early going. My

initial concern was, okay, if I raise my prices, then people maybe aren't going to book me because I'm just not good enough. And I think that's also where like imposter syndrome plays into it. And I know it's a big word these days, but there's no doubt that at times that I've felt that I'm self-taught. There's others that are better than me. Am I really that good or am I just fooling everyone and making a career out of something that I shouldn't be? You really are that good. Thank you. I appreciate it.

The thought or the belief that I had that yes, there would be some people that would not book me if I raised my prices to X or Y because it just wouldn't be in their budget. But then what I now know to be true is that for every person that wouldn't book you at a higher price, there's probably the same number of people that wouldn't book you at the lower price because that perceived value, right? Like, oh, he must not be that good if he's only charging this much. So it was a very, very gradual.

thing, and I think that that's probably what it's like for most people and businesses, you're going to run into a big problem if you suddenly went from a thousand dollars for an event and then all of a sudden you were charging 5,000 or 10,000. So it was definitely gradual. I would, you know, at the beginning, I might've stayed pretty even or level. And then it just kept going up and going up and going up. And part of it is also supply and demand as with.

anything in economics and in the capitalist society is that as I was getting booked more and more and as I had less and less availability and was booked further and further out, I realized, well, I can charge more because if some people don't book me because it's too high, then I have time for others to still book those dates. Other part of my business that developed, which was adding associate photographers under my studio, which again,

happened really organically that it was me coming to the realization that wait, I'm booked, you know, all these dates and I keep getting inquiries for these same dates that I'm already booked and I'm just turning away business. How can I not just send them elsewhere, but instead give them something to consider, even if it's not me personally. And I know my name is the name of the studio, but I think done a good job over the years of being able to use that.

sales acumen that I started learning at Putomayo in selling myself and my brand and my studio and my style and being able to tell people that, you know, yeah, I'm not available, but I've got these five photographers that have all been working for me for a number of years and all not only shooting a similar style to myself, but are also similar personalities to myself.

Anne McGinty
How did you find them?

Chad Kraus
Most of them found me, interestingly enough. The two that have been with me the longest,

Well, one of them found me from Facebook. Nancy was a budding photographer herself, but had a day job, had a passion for photography, did events for friends and family that she knew, but was not really interested in the business side of things and growing her own business. And so she sent me an instant message on Facebook and said, you know, I love your work and it reminds me of my own work. And, you know, could we talk or whatever? And we met and I first had her shooting with me at some events, second photographer, so that I could work with her and see how she works.

that she could see my style and how I moved through a party and worked with the guests. And then she became a full lead associate photographer. And then Alba, she actually was a nanny for a family that also lived here in my town in, in Westchester. And I was shooting the bar mitzvah, one of the kids that she nannied and the dad of the bar mitzvah boy came up to me towards the end of the party. I want you to meet Alba. Maybe you guys can connect afterwards cause she loves photography also. And she,

started freelancing with me. It sounds like it was sort of meant to be.

Anne McGinty
How would you feel if one of them decided to branch off and start their own?

Chad Kraus
I had one photographer with me that did that. I kind of knew it going in though. He came to me, already had his own website, was definitely entrepreneurial and wanted to grow his own business. And as he started building up his own business, he recognized that there were dates that people were inquiring to him direct about.

And he wasn't able to take them because he had already committed to booking through me and obviously could make more money taking a direct booking through my studio. So it was amicable. We talked about him finishing up those that he was already committed to.

Anne McGinty
Yeah. And I guess when people are starting their own entrepreneurial journeys, they're really trying to create a certain lifestyle for themselves. And how can you really hold that against them?

Chad Kraus
I totally respect that for sure. Especially having, you know, having done it myself, I wouldn't want to hold anyone back. The thing that has really benefited me and, and the photographers on my team is that in the case of each of the five of them that are, that are currently with me, they're all really happy with the arrangement as it is because just love to shoot and are more than happy to have me kind of do all the legwork and get them the bookings.

and then they can just show up on the day of and do a great job and have a great time and be done with it. And not handle the operational side.

Anne McGinty
Totally. And how many events are you guys doing approximately a year?

Chad Kraus
So we shoot about a hundred bar mitzvahs a year between the six of us. And then we'll do a handful of weddings. We do some corporate events and galas and some nonprofit annual gala fundraisers. The other thing that we do, which is mostly me, is for Broadway theater. So...

I've done a bunch of Broadway shows, photography of the rehearsal process and opening night cast parties and curtain calls on opening night and first previews and red carpet affairs and all of that. And I'll tell you, it's a ton of fun and it's great to still have my foot in the door of the theater world. Since I grew up in the theater world, the Broadway world is so welcoming and so friendly. Even the biggest of the stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda or Ben Platt or Idina Menzel.

All these people are just so, so kind, so welcoming.

Anne McGinty
That sounds like a blast. It really sounds like it's right up your alley.

Chad Kraus
Yeah, it's, it's great. And honestly, it's another way in terms of helping to kind of spread my brand awareness to even the bar and bar mitzvah world, because if you're a mom looking to book a photographer for your child's bar mitzvah and you're looking at photographer A and then you're looking at photographer B and I'm also photographing stars and Broadway and. Right.

Anne McGinty
credibility.

Chad Kraus
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Anne McGinty
Well, so to wrap up, just looking back at your journey from 2008 to today and all of the lessons that you've learned and now you're a successful entrepreneur and you didn't expect to be here, but you are, what advice, tips or last words would you offer to anyone else aspiring to follow a similar path?

Chad Kraus
I knew you'd hit me with this question.

I think that what I would say to anyone is don't pressure yourself into the belief that the first job that you get out of college or at a high school even is going to be, or has to be your lifelong profession. I think the thing that, that I learned is that anything that you do in life, and not even just professionally, but personally, all of your experiences help to shape you and take you on a path that is different from everyone else. Right. And I've had.

Many of times in my life where I felt dejected or felt like, Oh, I screwed that up. And yet I know today that as long as you learn from it, that's the gold. That's the reward. There was a quote actually from Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball star, who's no longer with us, unfortunately, but he was asked at some point by a reporter, something effective, do you play the games to win or not to lose? And most people would immediately say, well, surely he played.

to win, you can never play not to lose, but his answer wasn't one or the other. His answer was I play to learn and whether I win or I lose, as long as I learn something from it, then, then that's great. And think it's what I'm trying to get at here in terms of starting a small business is to take your time and not.

rack your brain trying to figure out what's the big thing that I'm going to do to be successful. Take your time and explore a lot of different things and then hopefully you will find the one or two things that really speak to you and that you do well that you can share with others.

Anne McGinty
And I think if people listen to what you had to say in your story, I mean it took you 10 years, a transition of 10 years from your full-time job to letting go of that and going fully on photography. So it's...

That wasn't a rapid process, it was gradual, but it kept building and building, and then it eventually gave you the opportunity.

Chad Kraus
Yeah, I believe people definitely set these timelines on themselves and expectations, and letting go of those expectations, I think, is the first step, because no one follows the same exact path. Some people might find success at 16 as a high school dropout, and others might not find it until they're...

35 and start a photography business like me and fill others might not find it until they're 75 or 80 years old and write their first novel a big part of my quote-unquote success is That I'm happy with where I'm at. I think there's some people that

are always looking for more and always looking for something bigger and something better and more money. And, you know, when I started out, yeah, sure. I wanted to grow the business. And now I'm at the place where I'm really happy and comfortable and not worried about growing it that much more. I just let it ride.

Anne McGinty
Today's key takeaways. 

Hobbies that you are or could be interested in can be explored as income earning.

Teach yourself how to improve with trial and error. 

It can feel scary to transition away from stable income. Keep your full-time job and start a side gig. Keep a strong relationship with your boss and wait until that moment when your side gig starts bringing in more and ask if your employer would accept a gradual reduction in your hours. 

What you are doing today for a job does not have to be your lifelong profession. 

A business plan does not have to be necessary to start a side gig. Start offering your service or product for a low price to get your first few clients or customers. As demand grows, increase your prices very slowly. 

Natural sales growth in a service business is about building relationships and establishing real, authentic connection with others. And getting referrals is free advertising. It's a win-win scenario.

Don't squeeze yourself as a square peg into a round hole. Find what you love and don't pressure yourself to try to do something that isn't you. 

Comparing yourself to others is a path to misery. Instead, focus on your own personal growth and expansion of your own skills in comparison to where you were six months to a year ago. 

Have determination and believe in yourself. Whether you win or lose does not matter as long as you learn from it.