RICK BILLINGS, LLC
WINTER GARDEN, FLORIDA

Meet Rick Billings and his family… Rick Billings 2017 Company Incentive Trip – 9 Day Cruise for our company this year in North America. So our company gave us an all expenses paid 9 day cruise through the Caribbean with many other top successful leaders. We took our 3 boys with us and had the times of our lives. To my this is what hard work as an entrepreneur is all about.   2016 Company Incentive Trip to Cancun My wife April and I were married in 1984 celebrated our Wedding Anniversary in Cancun in April 2016. We won a company trip and everything at this 5-star resort was paid for by them. We also had our photographs professionally taken on the beach. Here are a few of the images. It was 1970 in Omaha, Nebraska and at the age of 11 my father gave me my first professional camera. He was a photographer in the United States Air Force, for 34 years. Those pre-teen years were very informative for the development of my career. He taught me a lot about my craft, business and life and he didn’t even know it. I can remember one of my first money making ventures was taking photos of horses and returning with finished black and white 8×10’s to sell the same day. By the time I graduated from high school in 1978, I was photographing weddings and working for my second photography mentor, one of the top award-winning photographers in the Midwest, Les Hassel. Little did I know at the time…but my father was my first mentor. Rick & April Billings when they purchased their first business in October of 1985. The David Lee Studio in Omaha, Nebraska. Rick & April Billings when they purchased their first business in October of 1985. The David Lee Studio in Omaha, Nebraska.Rick & April Billings when they purchased their first business in October of 1985. The David Lee Studio in Omaha, Nebraska.It was 1985, and the hardest business decision to date was upon me as I had been working for my mentor Les Hassel for 7-years and we had become the best of friends. His kids were my age and so he was like a second father to me. I had become one of the top ten photographers in the state of Nebraska for 5 of those 7 years. One day a West Omaha photographer asks me if I would be interested in buying his studio and if so stop by sometime and we could talk about it. WOW, I was 24 at the time and he had one of the top 3 successful studios in Omaha. Just recently married, I decided to buy this beautiful home photography studio in Omaha. It took me months to put it together and after convincing a banker, I went in debt $267,000, in October 1985. Later in the summer of 1995, after a year of studying the latest digital photography technology, I started the transition of my professional portrait studio in to the new world of digital technology. Little did I know at the time that I would be a pioneer and be one of the first photographers in the country to use digital capture technology in their portrait photography business. It started when Kodak developed a camera for NASA with a CCD (charged couple device) that in my opinion met the quality of film. The biggest hurdle was the cost, at $29,950 for just the camera body with the CCD. But I had a vision and my peers thought I was crazy. After gaining the interest of Kodak, I started lecturing on digital photography and spent the next 8-years traveling to over 40 States sharing what I’ve learned to help others. I coached people on how to successfully transition their film studio in to the age of digital technology. From 1995 to 2003, I was a member of a select group of professional photographers who serve on Kodak’s Digital Professional Photography Mentor Team. One of my top three goals in business was, to develop a business that could continue without me. I achieved that in March 1998, when I merged my business with aPittsburgh based company called PhotoWave. I relocated my family to Pittsburgh in June of that year and remotely operated the studio until April of 2003 when we finally decided to the studio to Tim & Jinnie McCormick and I’m proud to say So, it was 1999 and my partner and I decided to launch a sports photography business online. Youth sports was a growing market at the time and we wanted to offer action photos along with the traditional team and individual photos that were taken every year. At the time my partner and I built and launched ASPN.com (American Sports Photo Network). With 5-million dollars invested as partners in April of 2000 there was a dot com crash. Thus, our path to an IPO was halted and we began to reorganize the business infrastructure. Rick Billings Digitally Photographs 189 Heads of State at the United Nations The Millennium Summit – September 2000 – New York City Hosted by President Bill Clinton Rick was hired by the Eastman Kodak Company to Digitally photograph the 189 Heads of State at the United Nation in September 2000. In 2001, Kodak had stated “Rick Billings is one of the photographic industry’s foremost authorities on digital imaging.” In 2003, Canon selected 11 photographers throughout the United States to be featured on a CD about “Digital Workflow” and I was selected as one of those featured photographers. Canon has distributed a quarter million of these digital workflow CD’s in our professional industry. January 2003, we relocated our ASPN.com business to Orlando, Florida as we continue to reorganize. In my photography business for over 30-years I traded my time for dollars, working 12 hours a day. Yes, I made a nice six-figure income but I was always working. That got old! Then a couple years after my merger with PhotoWave, my world started to change financially. I knew I needed to make a change, so as a visionary I soon began looking for a business that would give me the ability to build it as large as I wanted, help others, and achieve the financial freedom in a shorter time frame then I had in the past. Being online since 1994, I loved the power of the Internet, so I knew that had to be a major component. I have been using WordPress since 2006 and have mastered it very well. Today, I’m a Professional Network Marketer. I help people build multiple streams of residual income and achieve financial freedom. The freedom to be with your family and do the things you want to do, when you want to do them.