Why I’m Relaunching My Freelancing Practice

Even though I have a successful content business

Photo by Nathan da Silva on Unsplash

Since I started my content agency Gado Images in 2010, I always had a clear goal for structuring my work day. I would spend about half my time on my own business, and about half my time serving clients as a freelance content consultant. For many years, this worked great; I built a successful social enterprise while simultaneously getting to work closely with awesome clients like the Maryland State Arts Council and Johns Hopkins University.

Covid-19, though, was hard on my business. Like basically every other entrepreneur, I found myself reworking our business model essentially overnight.

Pre-pandemic, we would send photographers out on assignments all over the world. Covid put a stop to that. In the Beforetimes, I would travel to organizations’ archives to evaluate the commercial potential of their historical photo collections. With a deadly virus raging around the world, no one wanted to spend hours cramped together in an unventilated room combing through massive stacks of historical photographs.

The Pivot

With pandemic-related shifts, I found myself basically back in startup mode, even though my company was then almost a decade old. We had to go back to the drawing board, growing…