Meet Allison Pihl | Entrepreneur and business coach

We had the good fortune of connecting with Allison Pihl and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Allison, how do you think about risk?
Taking risks can be very emotionally challenging for all of us. In my experience, most of us prefer to avoid risk whenever possible. Having grown up in a home with an entrepreneurial father (and enormous risk-taker), however, I have come to view risk as something that I can plan for, something that’s very necessary to achieve any outsized goal, and crazy-fun when it pays off.

When I look at my personal life, it’s the moments I was willing to jump into the unknown that have been the most fun and rewarding. I chose a college half-way across the country from my friends and family, and it was life-changing. I chose a husband who followed his passion in science rather than a safe career, and I’ve had a richer intellectual life. I’ve traveled all over the world, staying with friends I met along the way, and have had my eyes opened to the cultural richness of our world. I’ve run marathons, and learned I could push myself well beyond what I thought were my physical limits.

My professional career has been interesting and varied because I have always been willing to jump into a new industry or new venture. This is where the planning comes in. Before leaving my first, very safe job to work in the tech industry at the start of the 1990s, I made sure I had a cash cushion behind me. I did the same when I left a position in consulting to launch a start-up in the senior housing industry. My business partner and I built our company into a successful venture by taking multiple risks – adding people and assets before we were ready – but always with a plan B if the growth didn’t materialize as we thought it would. I’ve been able to challenge myself and take risks by examining the worst-case outcomes and creating a plan for the “what if”.

If you’re going to take risks, either personally or professionally, you have to be prepared to fail. And to realize the failure doesn’t define you, it’s just a stop along the way. The next exciting venture is ahead of you. Surround yourself with people who love you, a strong team of like-minded people, think through your worst case scenarios, come up with a plan for the “what if”, and then jump!

What should our readers know about your business?
Photographic Memories LLC, my second entrepreneurial venture, is a photo management business specializing in preserving, digitizing and archiving families’ photos and films. We organize and digitize photos, photograph memorabilia, restore old photos that are deteriorating, and work with families to share their stories.

We are at the very beginning of building Photographic Memories, and it’s proving to be an interesting venture. By taking on people’s photos, we are also taking on their memories and life stories. It requires a tremendous amount of trust to turn over your family history to someone to have it preserved and hopefully shared with your entire family. We create that trust not only through personal interactions, but also by having a very well-defined process for handling photos, and having a very professional, competent internet presence. At the same time, we are balancing the brand with some fun and light-heartedness, because sharing memories should bring people together. It’s definitely a challenge to create the right marketing mix.

We are also doing something different with this company, in terms of social good. Our team has worked in plenty of places that were very corporate, largely male-run, and where the profits went to the executives and not to the workers at the heart of the business. My last business, instead, was an almost entirely female team, with lots of women who were returning to the workforce after raising children and/or caring for parents. We are planning that Photographic Memories will be a business with opportunities for people to reenter the workforce, have career development paths while maintaining flexibility to manage families, and be compensated fairly. Our profits will go back to our team and our community.

I’ve had a varied career, working in small and large organizations, in technology, consulting, finance and the senior housing industry. I’ve always loved small business because of the potential to really grow something new, and the opportunity to see how far you can take it. For me, it’s all about the adventure. While I have an MBA and plenty of business experience, I have learned so much from the association of senior move managers (NASMM) that I am part of through my previous company, as well as The PhotoManagers association. These are both groups of small business owners who really support each other – sharing information on business tools, process and technical know-how to help each other build a better business and industry. Both associations have created a collaborative environment where even competitors can learn from each other. Having these groups behind us allows us to take risks, knowing that if we crash and burn, someone in the association will have good advice and guidance to help us.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Living between Baltimore and Washington DC provides plenty of opportunity for fun. For a weeklong trip, we’d have to spend a day in DC seeing the various monuments. It’s especially beautiful to drive around the mall area at night, when all the monuments are lit and the lights are shining on the Potomac.

After that, I’d want to take them to spend a day in one of our museums. We have so many, it would depend on what they were interested in – Natural History, Air & Space, National Archives and the National Gallery of Art are always good. There are fun restaurants in Georgetown to try – lots of farm-to-table as well as many different ethnicities.

Next, I might take them for a day of hiking. We’ve got gorgeous hiking either in Virginia (Great Falls, especially) and in Maryland. After a day of hiking, I’d want to take them to eat at Busboys and Poets, a DC-centric bookshop/restaurant that often has authors doing signings and has a great vegetarian menu.

To get a taste of Baltimore, we could go to an Orioles game in Camden Yards – my favorite ball park ever. Otherwise, a trip to the Federal Hill area for a stop at one of the up and coming pubs and restaurants, or a tour of the Guinness brewery and dinner at their restaurant – you can get a tasting of their experimental beers along with dinner.

Final stop would probably be Annapolis, with a quick tour of the Naval Academy, a boat trip on the Chesapeake Bay, and a stop at one of the local breweries for a tasting. Then a dinner of the famous Maryland crabcakes at G&M, or whole crabs (in season).

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
So many people in my life deserve credit for supporting, encouraging and mentoring me along the way that it is really hard to limit myself. So I’ll first single out my husband, Ed Wollack, who has always believed I could do anything, has never held expectations that I needed to “be” anything but myself, and has ridden the rollercoaster of life right along with me. Oh, and he cooks, too!

This past year I lost both my parents to cancer. While it has been difficult to walk through that grief, I have been able to revisit so many wonderful memories of them, and to really feel how much I was loved by them. And so I would credit my parents with building the foundation that both allowed and pushed me to be smart, hardworking, risk-taking and – most importantly – kind and thoughtful. And my dad – serial entrepreneur – for being a role model in business and an example of overwhelming optimism.

I always knew I wanted to own my own business. I have to give credit to my first business partner, Kim McMahon, for fifteen years of amazing partnership as we built a multi-million dollar move management business. It’s not easy to balance a partnership, but we risked it all together, and it worked beautifully.

Website: www.photographicmemories.net

Instagram: @photographic memories_llc

Facebook: @photographicmemoriesllc