Thomas Birke

After reading my last post about how to become a millionaire, I think the most important aspect is, to never start the process with the number in mind in the first place. So my goal is not to become a millionaire. What for, it’s just a number - if I reach it one day, fine, if not - it depends.

My primary goal is to be able to do what I want in my life. I don’t want to be forced to cancel things I fathom, just because I don’t have the money. Currently I am in such a phase of my life - I want much and have too little. But staring at that million Euro border is limiting my thoughts - the amount is not important.

The only thing that is important for me personally is the amount of money I need in a month to live the lifestyle I want - so let’s take a look at the figures to get a more differentiated picture:

• for basic living, I currently need about 2.700€ a month, including rent, insurance, food, transportation, entertainement, debt repayment and other common stuff - I can cover that by my salary from my current job, but that would not allow me to do much more

now to the financial backing I need for the fulfillment of my desires:

• I want to shoot 10 large format (8x10) images a day - that amounts to 4.500€ a month for film and development
• I want to travel half of the time, so I need approximately 1.200€ a month for hotel fees and 3.000€ in airfare

One time investments:

• a Gitzo GT3541 LS - 700€
• Arca Swiss Cube C1 Head - 1.400€
• Arca Swiss Monoball P1 - 450€
• Schneider-Kreuznach APO-Tele-Xenar 600/800mm - 4.000€
• Schneider-Kreuznach Super-Symmar XL 210mm - 3.000€
• other small things - 1.000€

This would amount to 10.550€ - since I intend to make a 3 year plan, this would amount to 350€ repayment for a loan.

The final math looks like this now: 2.700€ base + 8.700€ desires + 350€ investment repayment = 11.750€ per month I need after taxes.

To earn such an amount of money with my daytimejob as an IT consultant for one of the largest IT companies in the world would easyly take more than 20 years to achieve if I work my ass off and don’t do ANYTHING else. So this is inacceptable.

But it is a revelation too: to live the life I dream of, doesn’t require me to become a millionaire, but only a mere 12K€ a month!

So here is my plan of how to achieve this:

I will pursue my dream of taking 10 large format images a day. I consider 10% of my images to be quite good enogh for hanging on a wall and 1% to be potential killer images that sell massively. So after doing the math one can easily see, that at the given rate I could publish one image per day for sale. Let’s assume a month has 30 days - this would mean that I would only need a profit per image of 400€ - this seems so much more realistic to achieve than some abstract goal of earning 1.000.000€.

I even have a plan of how to cash in on these images - I will create a shop, and sell one new image every day in 3 different editions, all highly limited and every sole edition making at least 400€ of profit, if it’s a better image it could make 1.600€ in profit and cover 4 days, taking out pressure to succeed, and if killer image, it could cover 14 days of profit. For Example:

• 10 images at a smaller format / of a simple make, 40€ of profit per image
• 6 images at a large format, like 1 meters in width, making 200€ of profit per image
• 1 image at a really large format, like 2,25 meters in width, making a profit of 4.000€

I consider the market for my imagery to be quite endless. Many people want original images on their wall, no 10€ posters that everyone has. But original artwork of photography masters is damn expensive, so they shop the midmarket of limited but not overpriced originals. The success of midmarket galleries like yellow korner or lumas that cater the 100€ - 1000€ range is proof enough. The best thing about that market is, that not the name is the key purchasing trigger, but the perceived quality of the imagery, and that is an arena I have no problem picking up fights for attention. Further nurtured by the evergrowing importance of social networks and the fact that open web personalities can gather lots of attention. So I make my venture public, open my accounts and motivate everyone purchasing my photos to see the person behind the lens and do something good and fuel my desire pursuit. I hope this also motivates people to do their thing respectively. The tagline could be: independent images for independent minds.

I can’t wait to start, and will talk about the transition from wage slave to knight of desire pursuit and about my photography philosophy during my next posts!