Why I never picked one thing

I did not set out to run three businesses. People ask how a café, a hire studio and a small technology advisory practice ended up sharing one floor of an old mill in Collingwood, and the honest answer is that each one turned up while I was busy dealing with the last.

The fourteen years

I spent fourteen years in IT. The final stretch was as infrastructure manager for a freight company out in Laverton, where the warehouses run for kilometres and the coffee came out of a machine that dispensed something merely adjacent to coffee. It was steady work and I was good at it. In 2019 the company restructured, and the new structure did not have a line for me on it.

I took part of the payout and bought a second-hand Canon, mostly to have something to do on Tuesdays. A friend asked me to photograph her kid, then a friend of hers asked, and somewhere in the eighteen months after that it stopped being a hobby and became the thing people rang me about. I never advertised once.

The building

Late in 2021 the lease came up on this floor: one level of a 1930s knitting mill, the kind of red-brick building Collingwood is full of, from back when the suburb made socks and hosiery rather than flat whites. About 340 square metres, concrete floors, windows down the whole north side, and a four-metre ceiling that sold me before I had done a single sum.

That north wall is the entire point. Down here the sun sits in the northern half of the sky, so north-facing windows take light all day instead of for one flattering hour. It is why every painter in this city wants a room facing the same way, and why I signed a five-year lease on a building with genuinely appalling heating.

Ninety square metres did everything the studio needed, which left 250 square metres of beautiful, freezing, empty room at the front and a rent bill that did not much care how I felt about it. So the front became a café. Not as a grand idea. As arithmetic. I had run a commercial kitchen exactly never, which in hindsight explains the first six months.

Why I kept all three

The sensible advice was to pick one. Choose the café or choose the camera; you cannot do both properly. I kept all three anyway, for a reason closer to bookkeeping than to passion: they fail on different days. A café takes money every morning and has spent most of it by lunch. Weddings are seasonal and paid in lumps, busy from October and dead by July. Advisory is steady, dull and pays properly, and it is the only one of the three that uses the part of my brain the last fourteen years trained. Three ordinary incomes that do not slump in the same month beat one good one that does, and there is no more romantic version of that.

What a week looks like

The café is open Tuesday to Sunday, seven till three, and I am in it most mornings whether I am rostered or not, because the coffee gets made properly or I get twitchy. Two days I keep clear for advisory clients, usually the Monday when the café is shut, and one other. The studio fills what is left: a newborn session booked around the middle of the day when the light is highest, a headshot job for a firm in Cremorne that wants everyone looking approachable and faintly windswept.

The advisory work this year has been mostly one conversation. From 1 October 2026 Visa, Mastercard, eftpos and American Express bring in no-surcharge rules, so the little sign taped to the till comes down and the cost goes into the menu price instead. The card networks and the payment providers enforce that, not the ACCC, which surprises people. One client puts about $22,000 a month through a Zeller terminal at 1.4 per cent including GST, Amex included. That is a bit over $300 a month she has been handing to the customer and now has to bury in a menu of eleven items. Half my clients did not know it was coming; the other half want the exact number, which is the right question and one their provider has been oddly quiet about.

Who I work with, and who I don’t

I take four advisory clients at a time. When it is four, it is four: I will tell you there is a wait rather than take the money and stretch myself thin enough that you notice. The work is small hospitality, mostly — cafés, a couple of restaurants, one bakery. I am useful to a business that cannot justify a full-time IT person and should not have to pretend a teenage nephew counts as one. I am no use at all to someone who wants an app built, a fifty-seat venue rewired, or a yes to a decision they have already made and want cover for.

Photography is the same shape. I shoot twelve weddings a year and not one more, and if your date has gone I will say so in the first reply rather than the fourth. I do newborns, families and the occasional team who need to look as though they enjoy each other’s company. I do not do schoolies, I do not shoot products I would not use myself, and I have learned, at some expense, never to photograph anything I have strong feelings about for free.

The café will feed anyone who walks in. That is the one part of all this that was never complicated.