He Made $1M and Took Home $120K. Solo Pays Better. w/ Scott Proposki

00:00:00 One day I'm going from LA to New York City. I'm meeting Sylvester Stallone to Andy Cohen, and the next day I had nothing.

This is Scott Proposki who shot for National Geographic and the White House for 27 years. Build a multimillion dollar business in sales. Then lost everything literal, overnight, spent three years in silence before rebuilding from nothing. I'm Gabe Marusca, and this is Authority in the Wild, Scott. You lose everything overnight. Can you get me back to that moment and share what actually happened?

I think we're all familiar with something called the um, COVID-19 pandemic. Hey, listen, in the course of history you had the Great Depression in the United States, right? In the 1930s. You had the Spanish flu that went on. You had all sorts of basically pandemics and some sorts as well as nine 11 in the United States and, these are all life altering events 00:01:00 that. It happened and it's gonna happen again. And the question is, are we prepared? And I wasn't. I wasn't. So I went from going a mile a minute towards, just launched my second book to get the call about a something to call a virus. And it was like, what are you talking about?

Global pandemic. What's that? To fully understand within 24 hours what all that meant. Because basically I picked up my computer, all my stuff, brought it to the dock at the office, loaded my truck up, and I knew I was dumb.

Yeah, because when you are like locked down, like to photograph, right? Like, and back then, you mentioned, you weren't prepared. And obviously it's in theory, hard to prepare when it comes to your type of business back then such an event, like a pandemic. But if you are like to roll back the time, how you will do 00:02:00 things differently in order to be prepared for such a situation.

You can't prepare. And people say how, I mean, you are a photographer. Some people came back, any business, some people came back, they pivoted. Right? Um, it depends on what size business you are. Sometimes it's just a little bit faster to shut that faucet off. So it's just not leaking out, just draining out.

Right? And the one decision I would've made is to make the call to figure out if I'm all in or I'm all out. If you remember, the pandemic happened. We didn't know what was really gonna happen and time went on. But if you remember correctly, the following year in 2021, it was, eh, it still came out a little bit.

You know, it was around Q3 and Q4. People started to stall off again. That's when I knew there was no point in return,

why?

Because I should have made a decision to go all in or all out. And all out. I did do, but it wasn't the right decision. Honestly, looking back, the right 00:03:00 decision would've been sane in the moment and figure it out versus just stop.

It can't just stop. And that's what I did. But the world we were programmed to stop, you know, it's pandemic. You gotta stop, go home, don't do anything. I shouldn't have stomp, I should have kept going

Hmm.

ways of doing things. Uh, online video, people pivoted to look at the coaching industry, right? It's, it's, everything's done on video conferencing.

It wasn't like that in 2019. The norm became this, the calls that we're doing, the coaching programs at coaching has exploded. People want information. They want to know, they wanna learn from other people in the Zoom technology. Everybody's camera focused on the camera, on Zoom and the world, and I should have just steeped and pivoted and changed the way we were doing.

Yeah. We weren't having any big events. Yeah. I wasn't going back to the White House. Yes. The Patriots weren't 00:04:00 doing it a big event because of people there. Absolutely. But some did come back. Again, can't go back in time. And I think that's the biggest shift that I did. I let it all go. It took me three years to figure it out.

Had a great business. It was 28 years. It was a great one. It was amazing. And that's, that's was the difficult part. And I, I came to terms with letting it go. And the only way I can move forward in the future is to plan a better future. And that was the thing that I shifted over that time. I had to realize what just happened.

Huh. Deal with that, that crisis in my own way, but then I had to, I had to figure out what I wanted to do. Before I could do that, I had to let it go. You just gotta let it go. It's only money. It's business. I'm not the only one. Other people have done it. And honestly, I'm at a point in my life where it's like I can actually make this bigger now than my original plan.

But speaking of letting go, because you mentioned there were, were 00:05:00 just money. It was really that, or was more like yourself being attached to the identity that you had.

Well, you know, you 100% right there. It was the identity, right? I mean,

Uh.

in this so deep that it's, it's not about money, it's my identity. Right? Um.

I'm proud of it, but this is who I am. This is what I do. I was a photographer. National Geo, worked at HBO and the list goes on to Microsoft tv. God sports ulcer.

It, it went on, it was part of my life. It became the norm. Right. And I didn't know anything else. And when you, it gets taken away, um, you're like, Hey, I, I like that life over there. This, this one I'm really uncomfortable in. Right. And um, it was just. Accepting the change. Right. Accepting meaning, let it go.

And perhaps you listen to this. I, I talk to a lot of photographers and I feel like they've been like 00:06:00 the core people that have had a big, big psychological and physical and financial problem, but letting things go because things are not the same in the photography industry. It's not.

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