The Fourth Person is Your Suppliers Suppliers often take away your money by giving you lousy service, noncompetitive products and worst of all, sell you extra stocks! So have a JIT (just-in-time) system for purchasing and inventory, and you'll take money back from your suppliers.

The Fifth Person is your Staff

If you only have staff and not team, you're working for your staff for free! Staffs are simply reactive people on your payroll that you need to continuously ensure that they do their work, especially when you're not around. Team are those that work as though they're working for their own company. You need to build winning teams or you'd end up with losing money.

The Sixth Person is your Marketing

If you are like most people who believe that marketing will generate you name recognition, and once you have name recognition, customers will come to you, you're throwing away money for good. Marketing must be Profitable Marketing, i.e. it generates you profit every time you do it.

The Seventh Person is your Accounts (or your lack of understanding of accounts).

Many people don't know how to read Balance Sheet, and can't figure out what is a cash flow Statement. Lack of understanding of accounting can pull you down as you could be doing things that wrong and not know it.

The Eight Person is your Selling

If you are like most people still relying on providing answers in your selling, you're missing a lot. The only way to sell is to ask questions.

- For any order I would give them a CD with ALL of photos in digital form for them to use any way they wanted

- Add my contact information

- And finally my availability to book shootings with them in future

Now I could personalize this form letter and send it with proof sheets to band, and when I would call them about a 8 days after I made mailing to ask them if they recieved proof sheets and which ones they liked (and I liked)- and I simply asked for an order.

It was amazing how well this worked, and I expanded idea.

I would go to fund-raising events, marathons, special events hosted by radio station personalities... always getting contact information for reaching whoever is in charge of promotions and following same system!

As you go along, you realize some other benefits to you new "business"- like free admissions (and no club cover charges), press passes, exciting opportunities to meet interesting people and celebrities, discount drinks, and much more! It's amazing what people will GIVE you, if you just ask!

Then there are home-business tax deductions that are eye-opening in themselves!

As soon as you can, upgrade to more professional equipment so you can not only "play" part, but also "look" part. Print up business cards, and make up your own porfolio of your "best" digitally enhanced photos of all kinds of subjects and previous shootings.

Seriously, this could turn your love for digital photography into an exciting lifestyle and an income that could surpass your present one!

But then again, I know I have only just scratched surface with professional digital photography, and I'm sure you now have just entered a "think-tank" that will spur many more ideas for you to make digital photography more than just a love. Make it a great life!