Parlaying Sales Through Good Karma

August 31, 2009 at 5:15 PM (Education, Professional)
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Camera Girl

Camera Girl

So today’s entry is about leverage, more specifically how to parlay one job into the next. For this discussion I will review one of my latest projects, a group portrait for Disney Animation Studios. Read the Group Portraits and all that Schtick entry to get some background info on the actual shoot.

As some of you may be aware I had an ongoing business relationship with The Walt Disney Company from 1982 through 2001.  During this time I maintained excellent interpersonal relationships with about eighty different buyers throughout the company’s many divisions. I produced quality work for them, on time and with the gratitude that comes with being self-employed. They had chosen me to work with them and I was grateful. I generated a lot of good karma during this time. For a variety of reasons (9/11 being one of them), it declined and eventually stopped in early 2002.

Let’s forward to 2008. My teaching career is starting to decline (low student enrollments and the recession) so to take up the slack, I head back into the photography business more or less full-time. I have an agent, Wendi Kaminski who has been working with me to develop new work. I’m also working it on my end and have been getting back in touch with some of my past Disney connections. Slow going for sure but I am finally getting some traction. A professional colleague was booked for the group portrait but became unavailable when the date changed. So who ya gonna call? Exactly.

I was mentored early in my career by three different men, a photographer, a software engineer and a sales professional. The photographer told me that you have to put it out there in an honest and positive way and that karma will bring good things back to you. You cannot dictate the time or place, but it will find you as that is how the world behaves. At the time, being young and impressionable (as opposed to being old and impressionable), I bought into his philosophy hook line and sinker. This belief system has served me well. I have seen it work for me many, many times and I have seen it work for others.

In this instance when this colleague called me I was surprised, touched (that he would think of me) and not really surprised at all. I had been thinking about how to get in touch with some of these past Disney clients and this golden opportunity opens up before me. I look at my photography assignments holistically and in this case, I saw that if I could split this assignment into two separate photographs, I could send this second photograph to another division and perhaps develop a new contact and sale. I was also compelled to look for an opportunity to sell to another division because out of professional courtesy I agreed to not solicit my colleagues’ client for additional work. But nothing was said about other buyers/clients within the company. This second photograph was of the building by itself. After running the files through an HDRI Photoshop plugin, I printed it and sent it to the correct person within the division of Disney that handles architectural photography.

He was impressed and as of this writing, asked me to call him on Monday so we could talk about the photograph I sent and the potential for getting an assignment or two from him. He is the decision maker and the one person I needed to meet in order to get new work.

There is always  a way to parlay one good action into another, but you have to think first and act second.  And persevere. Until the people I’m trying to sell to say no and tell me I’m wasting my time, I see every contact as a sales opportunity. These opportunities  are always present, it is up to you have to bring them alive.

Sort of like Frankenstein only not as scary.

Do good work out there and don’t let others impede your forward motion.

Cheers!

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Engineer Bill

August 17, 2009 at 5:52 AM (Personal, Professional, Training)
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Train

Back in the mid-1960’s, there was a show on television called Engineer Bill. Ran weeknights on KHJ. Some of you may recall fondly how innocent and fun kids TV was back then. If you young’uns put on rose colored glasses you’all see what I mean. And it was in B&W no less. And lo-def. And kind of cheesy. OK, maybe it wasn’t that great, but I was in single digits back then and I loved watching each Engineer Bill show.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Engineer Bill had an interactive portion of the show called RED-LIGHT, GREEN-LIGHT. It involved he and the kids at home holding a glass of milk. When he said “GREEN LIGHT”, we began to drink the milk. when he said “RED LIGHT”, we stopped drinking. The trick was to try and finish drinking before he said “RED LIGHT” for the final time. And you had to do it without spilling any on you. It was a fun game and it  spilt a lot of milk.

Fast forward to 1988. I’m building up my photography business again (after a catastrophic series of events, yet another blog topic) and it involved making a lot of calls, often referred to as smile-and-dial. It was not uncommon for me to log ten to twelve calls before noon and up to two dozen by the end of the day, which often ran into the early evening. (A side note: self-employed people get to work part-time and also get to decide which twelve hours of the day they get to work.)

In order to stay laser-focused on achieving the goal of any particular call (sales, portfolio appointment, follow-up, pre-production, etc.), I affixed two small red and blue dots to the base of my phone. If a conversation took a turn for the worse I looked at the blue dot to remind me to stay cool and not become the red dot. I am a thermostat not a thermometer, I am in control of how I respond to people, they do not control me. This is a major component of salesmanship, overcoming negativity in a positive way. Easy to say but hard to implement on a consistent basis, especially when staring down the endless twin tunnels of cash flow issues and payment due dates.

Find your own method(s) to help overcome the highs and lows of phone calls for self-employed business professionals. I did and I have to thank Engineer Bill for that.

Good luck!

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One Self-Employed Success Measurement

August 5, 2009 at 6:39 AM (Professional)
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sword

These days, one of the tasks I relish is when former students who are now in the workforce (as self-employed individuals), reach out to me for advice. They are finally experiencing what I mentioned in a class lecture. At the time they may not have listened well enough or perhaps it had little relevance for them at the time. But boy do it ring bells now!

One such story I wish to relate here: that of a former student and recent graduate of Brooks Institute who was lamenting how she was a “complete bust” (her words, not mine) on a self-assigned ski photography shoot. I wrote back to her with this note of support: (more or less)

“Even though you say the ski photographer gig was a complete bust, in fact it wasn’t. It’s not uncommon for folks new to being self-employed to focus only on a narrow range of how success is defined. You may not realize it yet but you learned a tremendous amount about yourself, your perceived value in the marketplace, how you interact with people and how they respond to your professional presentation.

This information is in your head, now it is up to you to retrieve it and use the information efficiently. I spent quite a lot of time training myself in this discipline and I can tell you the rewards are invaluable. But you must train to get to this state of mind.

It’s hard being self-employed, it even harder to make money being self-employed and the hardest of all is doing it for decades while supporting a family. Talk about tough.

Don’t get discouraged, success will come if you truly want it and are single-minded in succeeding, no matter what curve life throws and it will throw all kinds of junk at you.

Good luck.”

Stern

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Slightly Deep Thoughts…..

August 4, 2009 at 3:47 PM (Personal)
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Random Thoughts_02

Random thoughts went cruising through my mind and after they parked and were eating, I felt they wouldn’t mind if I shared some of them with you:

Your work should be a true reflection of self.

Keep yourself relevant in the marketplace.

Inhale = Belief

Exhale = Doubt

Teaching makes me stronger because I am in service to others while honoring my own creativity.

I’m always looking for new challenges which often results in a sacrifice of steady money but I do this because I become easily bored.

I am at my weakest when I feel sorry for myself.

When someone purchases your service, it’s the ultimate compliment and validation of your thought processes and life course. Good for you.

Life is not about avoiding the storms but rather learning how to dance in the rain.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and if that doesn’t work, add a bit of vodka, find a comfortable place to sit and relax.

Success is a daily grind.

Success is a daily ritual.

Success is a daily practice.

Success is a daily breathing exercise.

Well that’s it for now, they packed up the kids and are off again.

’till next time….

M

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The Great Flood

August 4, 2009 at 6:23 AM (Personal)
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Venice Beach

As I went about the task of writing my book, there were several stories excised from the final manuscript. Don’t despair though as I fully intend to bring them to you here. This first one I’m calling the “Great Flood” and after telling the tale I think you’ll agree.

Picture me on a Saturday night in 1980, dateless, shirtless but not hopeless because I was in my custom built studio in my custom built B&W wetlab in my very first studio in Hollywood. Right on Hollywood Blvd! I was printing for a client and for my book and had been at it for hours when I decided to take a break. My first studio was a cooperative arrangement on the second floor above the F. W. Woolworth store on Hollywood blvd., just west of Cahuenga blvd. There was a common area that fed into five individual studios on the floor. There was a jeweler, an interior decorator, a product designer and two photo studios. It was a fun time and one I will always cherish even if it turned out in ways I would have wished otherwise. (I’ll get to that in another blog, full of tension, fisticuffs and sorrow)

So as I’m walking through the common area to go down the stairs to get some fresh air, when I hear yelling and rattling of the metal security gate that I had closed before I went up to my darkroom to print. It was a fireman. I go down to investigate and he tells me what had happened: the ceiling of the Woolworth store had collapsed from the weight of a tremendous amount of water that had accumulated…somehow. The reason the fire department showed up at all was equally amazing: two drunks had gotten into a fight and one had punched the other through one of the plate glass doors of the store. When the police and paramedics showed up to investigate and provide first aid, the cops noticed all the water, the collapsed ceiling tiles and all the damage to the women’s lingerie section of the store. They in turn called the fire department.

Where was the water coming from they asked? Guess who? Remember I had been in my darkroom printing for several hours before I took my first break. The water had been running for hours as I was flushing my finished print holding tank with fresh running water. The studio drain pipe apparently had clogged at the point where it joined up with the drain pipe that connected to the drain pipe for the store below. It was quite a scene, broken glass, water, damaged goods and many missing ceiling tiles. The store had been closed for several hours so there was no one around to see the problem develop. If it hadn’t been for those two wonderfully impaired stand-up LA citizens, who knows how much damaged would have been caused?

My first reaction was am I covered? I figured I was but a bit of panic set in. Turns out the owner of the building took full responsibility for the problem as there was a clause in the lease that specifically stated that the building owner was responsible for those types of concerns.

Whew!

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