"Community Over Competition" Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means Anymore

I've built and failed a business, built and sold a couple businesses, and I am now scaling creative businesses well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales a year - and have done so in art forward spaces with creative entrepreneurship for nearly 20 years.

You can take my advice or leave it.

WRITTEN BY COURTNEY SPECHT | photographer, writer, speaker, mentor |  KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

Ten or eleven years ago "community over competition" was really a thing. Rising Tide Society built a whole movement out of it: Photographers meeting up, trading notes, genuinely helping each other get better at the craft and the business. Collaborative. Earned.

Now the term is a cudgel.

Scroll any photography Facebook group and you'll find someone furious that another photographer won't hand over their locations, pricing, their posing guide, their client list, their entire business playbook... for free, on demand (hell I even had someone mad because I wouldn't allow them to use my studio for free). Ya know, because "we're supposed to help each other out." If you refuse you're not a team player. You're accused to have lost the plot on community.

No. They have.

What do you mean, "help each other out"?

Message Annie Leibovitz and see how that goes. DM Sue Bryce. Do you actually expect any of them to jump on a call and coach you through your business for free? Or do you mean the people you follow on Instagram and Facebook in message and chat groups?

Not everyone knows each other. People gravitate toward folks who are like-minded, similarly experienced, running similar operations. Every industry works this way. You don't have to be besties with everyone in your field, and that's not a character flaw. That's just how humans cluster.

We're not all running the same business

Most established professionals think business owner first, creative second. A full-scale studio running a multi-person team operates nothing like a new self-proclaimed mom-tog three months in. That's not a dig or shame, but true more often than not.

Strip it down and the only real overlap is a camera. Pricing, client experience, delivery systems, team management, taxes — completely different animals.

Your playbook isn't public property

Somewhere along the way, "help each other out" started meaning "hand over everything you've learned for yourself." Locations you scouted and built relationships with. Client prep guides you wrote after years of trial and error. Posing flow, workflow systems, the actual mechanics of how you run sessions and deliver a product people pay real money for.

That's not community currency. That's proprietary. You earned it.

Nobody walks into a law firm or an ad agency and expects the partners to hand over their client process because "we're all in the same industry." Photography isn't exempt from that logic just because it feels more personal, more creative, more accessible. If it took you years and real financial risk to figure out, you don't owe anyone a download of it for free.

Same sport. Different teams.

We're kind of playing the same sport. We're not on the same team.

I saw someone say "but we're on the same team!" No. We're not. There are levels to this. Some folks are playing t-ball, some are tossing a ball around the backyard having the time of their life, some are managing the team, and some are team owners in the majors. You're going to tell me a 5-year-old whacking a plastic ball off a plastic stick is the same as Shohei Ohtani playing for the Dodgers?

Is it the same sport? Mostly, yeah. That's all it is.

Holding a glove doesn't earn you a roster spot.

Directness isn't disrespect

Greenhorn creatives often take directness personally. When someone with real experience tries to share what they know, and it lands as criticism... As talking down... As mean.

It's not.

Those of us further down the road aren't padding anything or tiptoeing around a point. We're not managing someone else's feelings. We're saving you time. It's like a parent talking to a teenager — believe me, I've done this, I've lived it, learn from my mistakes so you don't have to make all of them yourself. That's the whole point of experience.

Directness is efficient, and honestly it's more respectful than the fluff pad-everything version. Directness says: I think you can handle this straight. People who read that as an attack usually haven't been on the giving end yet. Give it time. One day you'll be the one handing someone a shortcut, and you'll get why the person who gave you yours didn't bother wrapping it in bubble wrap (huge thanks to those folks that didn't pussyfoot around for me).

What got lost

The correct iteration of this phrase was never an obligation. It was choosing to show up for people in your lane, your level, your kind of business- because you wanted to, not because some random on the internet guilted you into it.

The Covid-era boom pushed a lot of new photographers into the industry fast, and plenty never got the memo that this is a business, not a passion project with an invoice attached. Nothing wrong with starting out. Then, the language got diluted along the way. "Community" turned into a demand instead of something people actually had together.

You don't owe every photographer on the internet your time, your trade secrets, or your friendship. You owe your actual community (the people you've built real relationships with) honesty and support. You don't owe other people in the industry anything. Time we stopped pretending otherwise.

Let's work together.

I offer 1:1 business consulting sessions for photographers and creatives who need a thinking partner, a brain-storm buddy, not someone to do the work for them. In-person in the Kansas City area or virtual. I'm not here to hand you a formula. I'm here to sit across from you, dig into what you're doing (or aren't doing), and help you find the clarity and direction that's already in there. No big commitments, just an hourly consulting fee.

Start with a free 15-minute discovery call. We'll figure out together if it's a fit and if I can be beneficial to you.

Schedule your call to get a gawt-damn grip on your business with this link today: Discovery Call for Brand Developement with Court