If you’re the best photographer in the world, the best filmmaker, the best with a camera out on the market, you must expect the money to come raining down on you for your talent. And when that doesn’t happen, you shouldn’t be surprised. Skill and talent are irreplaceable, but there’s something even more important to any marketable field, and that’s marketing itself. You may do everything right on the shoot with the right tools, but if you can’t communicate that then you’ll never get into the little leagues, let alone the big ones.

80/20 Rule

When you own your own business or run your own operation, you’re doing it because you have something that you love to do enough to make it a part of your life. You’re dedicated to your craft and making it the best it can be. But you can still lose out to the guy who’s worse because he has better marketing. Any business, no matter what, doesn’t get by on good work alone. It’s an unfortunate reality that marketing is what starts all sales. 80% of time and effort in a business is spent on the business itself, the marketing and communication, coordination and collaboration to get projects together. 20% is the actual work, from the arrival on-scene to the departure and later compiling of content into an end product. Most of your time will be spent finding clients, and the least of it will be working with them.

Creative Problems

A lot of people who get into filming are creative types. They want to make things, share a vision, use their skills that they’ve honed and enjoy just for the sake of using them. That’s the mindset of a hobbyist, and hobbyists don’t make the money that professionals do. If you want to make a filmmaking business, you need to treat it like a job. It’s a job you like, but it’s not all for fun. A good way to start treating it like a business is to film for business. Corporate videos are little more than getting good skin-tone lighting and having proper positioning for cameras so someone can talk into the lens for a couple of minutes. It sounds uncreative, unfun, but it pays out well. Walt Disney once said his company made money to make movies, he didn’t focus on making movies just to make money. You can have your creative passion and make a business from it, you just need to get the order correct.

Value Your Content

You may love what you do, but if other people don’t, you’ll never make the money you deserve off of it. You need to work to make your passion into a profitable business. It’s a hard step for some to take because it means doing less of what they enjoy and more of the stuff they picked up a camera to hopefully avoid. You can make a living doing nothing but camera work, but the people who focus on the business side of filming will always make more, sometimes even at your expense. You need to be the one calling the shots, then you can be the one who takes them.