I'm criticised a lot for never being completely satisfied with the results and fail to stop and celebrate the milestones. I don't doubt that... but I'll try to do it now. It's the last day of 2019 so let's look back a little on 2019, how it was for me/us.

It's started very rough, losing my job on the 24 December 2018 and not finding a new one since September inevitably started the depressive thoughts. Even though we had plans to grow Ingenious Photo Genies, even created a LTD company with the promise of a larger corporate contract by the end of January everything seemed to fall apart. Desperately losing money and not getting enough clients in to even maintain status quo, I felt like the world is conspiring against me in achieving the bare minimum (let alone being successful and thrive).

The first push come from a very unexpected place when I met with Suzanne Mk and she asked me to do a bit of charitable work. The initial feedback was great and oddly enough I found the most motivation from these jobs throughout the year. We started to push on other fronts as well and clients come in while I also secured a day job that was perfectly in line with my expectation to grow Ingenious Photo Genies.

After a lot of bean counting we made the decision to join a mentoring programme Focus on Marketing to get us to the next level. With the help of our great mentor Jeff Brown we made some great progress even though all along it felt like we are not getting anywhere until we actually got there (no fault of Jeff's, quite the opposite).

Back in June out of the blue, we were contacted by two local nurseries to do their year end photo shooting, the whole experience was amazing and we discovered an unknown strength of ours: we really enjoy working with children and school / nursery photography is great! And we are good at it!

Because of this and the increasing number of new jobs, we decided to segregate our brands so we introduced our new nursery brand, The Smile Factory and the mysterious, sexy boudoir photography brand Sensual You (https://www.facebook.com/groups/507049646455594/). Of course we kept Ingenious Photo Genies for family portraits, events and corporate photography.

In August we met with Nik Proctor and partnered up with Colorworld Imaging to get the best possible prints & albums for our clients. We sold our first album shortly after and the feedback was amazing.

From September we got really busy, lots of orders, managed to secure 2 more nursery contracts for 2019 & 2020, Musicians Against Homelessness asked us to work with them in 2020 as well. Our local Monkston Halloween photography was a smashing session, I'll never forget my neighbour "complaining" he couldn't get out of the house as the queue of people wanted to take their photos was so long they were blocking his driveway.

A new opportunity come to work with Supershoes, this brilliant and truly wonderful charity on an Easter project and hopefully more later.

November and December was basically gone in a flash, thanks to the family Christmas orders, the new Nursery orders and some of the glamorous boudoir sessions. We worked so much & so hard my mind is still somewhere in October E:)

All in all, when I stop and think about it, we did a lot, we achieved a lot and it feels like we are just getting started! We are full of plans for 2020 and looking forward to achieve our goals and face new challenges.

Special thanks to Shaun Beck, the best coach I know. Without him, I would be in a very different & dark place today.

Super special thanks to Nikoletta Mitro, my partner in crime and our 4 wonderful and amazing children who all supported us and helped us to get there.

I'm still not completely satisfied but I feel I personally as well as a team, achieved A LOT!

Happy New Year!

Mark

Ps.: Below I picked what I think is the dearest photo of the year for me.