It's Not You, It's Them

You will often find people who will try to discourage you from following your dream profession: "there is too many photographers!", "there is too many makeup artists!", "there is too many designers!", "there is so much competition, you will never make it!". You find them in your family, in your circle of friends, in your current job and even in your profession-to-be. But when I hear things like these I always wonder: has there ever been a time when any of these were true?

Back in the 90's when I was in the university (I will save you some time trying to figure out my age, I'm 40) I studied Systems Engineering and everyone would tell me "why are you studying that?? There is too many computer people out there, you will never find a job, nowadays even a 9-year-old can do your job!". But during the 20 years that I worked in IT I never struggled to find a job and there was always a place for me in that industry. And then I changed professions, I became a photographer, and when I started out in 2012 I found out that people would tell me the exact same things. Which made me realize that no matter which profession I chose or which decade I was living in, people will always say these things.

You see, in the early 1900's, when cameras started to be widely available to any enthusiast, the professional photographers of those days believed that now that anyone could take photos the industry was going to be doomed. There were going to be too many photographers. But nothing really bad happened and a hundred years later, when we look back at those days, we think of them as the glorious past of our profession.

So, why then, do we still find people who think this way? The answer is fear. On the one hand, you will find people who care for you and fear that you will fail and they will do anything to try to avoid that. On the other hand, you will find people who only care about themselves and fear that you will make it and they will do anything to discourage you from becoming their competitors. Either way, the fear is theirs, not yours, so don't let it affect you.

If you have a dream and you have a plan to make that dream come true, don't listen to anyone else. Just go for it. There has always been too many of every profession, but too few who actually are brave enough to follow their dreams.

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If I Walk Slow Is Because I'm Going Far

We all want to see immediate results for our actions, but like I've said before: freelancing in the creative industry is more of a marathon than a sprint. Your business is like a living creature in the sense that it needs to learn and grow before it can survive on its own. It takes a lot of persevearance and hard work to make it through those first years, and once it's up and running, it takes a lot of persevearance and hard work to keep it alive. But even with all the patience and the sweat things can go wrong, which brings me to the question: why do freelance businesses fail?

According to the RSA Group, the UK’s largest commercial insurer, the UK has become a nation of micropreneurs, and the statistics seem to support this. The Department For Business Innovation & Skills show in their 2015 report that 99.3% of the private sector businesses were small businesses and 62% were sole proprietors. At first sight, these figures suggest that the UK is a great place to be a freelancer. And it's true, it is. But still, according to the Office for National Statistics, about 50% of the new small businesses don't make it to the 5-year mark. These doesn't necessarily mean failure, some of them might have voluntarily closed even if they were being successful, but for the purpose of this post I'm more concerned about the ones that actually failed.

So, what are the main barriers for small businesses to survive in the UK? Well, according to the RSA Group research, these are the most mentioned ones:

• The UK tax system
• Lack of bank lending
• Too much red tape
• The cost of running a business
• Late payments or cashflow

Which seems to prove that while we are striving to make our business grow by focusing on the quality of our product/service, its pricing, the market and the competition, we are not paying enough attention to other factors that can also bring our business down.

A successful business is not the one that sells more and grows faster, but the one that is sustainable in time. Maybe it's good to slow down from time to time and check how healthy our business really is before continuing with the race. See you at the finish line.

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Don’t Create A Reputation And Go To Bed

Whomever thought that running a successful business was only about offering a quality product or service has probably already gone out of business. If you want “what you offer” to reach “who will pay for it”, you must create some sort of channel of communication between the two of you. Because if you want the world to know that you are in business, you must go out there and tell the world.

In Spanish there is a saying that goes ”Create a Reputation And Go To Bed” (Crea Fama Y Acuéstate A Dormir), which is the equivalent of saying ”Give Dog A Bad Name” or ”Make Your Own Bed And Lay On It.” What all these sayings basically mean is that once you have a reputation there is nothing else that you can do. You are stuck with it. For good or for bad. But I don’t believe this to be true. You see, if you have a very bad reputation (and I don’t mean being a badass, but really sucking at what you do) you can always correct what you do wrong and tell the world that you have improved. It will take some time, but eventually someone will trust you again and with hard work you can clean your reputation. And on the other hand, if you have a very good reputation (you are the best at what you do) and you just rely on word of mouth, eventually someone who tells the world that they do it better than you will make everyone forget about you and your reputation. So, in the end, if you have a reputation (good or bad) you must work hard to improve it or keep it. Either way, you have to market yourself and definitely not “Rest On Your Laurels” ( I can’t help it! I just love the wisdom of popular sayings).

The question is, as creatives, what sort of things can we do to market ourselves? The answer is: tons! Here are just a few examples:

• Photographers, Graphic Designers, Illustrators: create an online portfolio, collaborate with as many creatives as possible, create an online presence through relevant social media channels, write a blog, create a newsletter and send it to prospect clients, contact creative agencies and reps, make print promos and send them to prospects that you can’t seem to reach online, print business cards and go to networking events, send your work to magazines and contests to gain exposure…
• Makeup Artists, Hair Stylists, Fashion Stylists: test with as many photographers as you can, create an online portfolio, create an online presence through relevant social media channels, write a blog where you promote yourself as an expert in your field (putting looks together, making tutorials, reviewing products), contact creative agencies and reps and if they are not taking more creatives at the moment offer yourself as an assistant to the ones they have, print business cards and go to networking events…
• Fashion Designers: create an online store, create an online presence through relevant social media channels with links to your online store, create contents on your online channels that engage your specific audience (the story of your brand, how you make your pieces, how to style your clothes), collaborate with as many creatives as possible, have a network of stylists that can push your work to publications that target your customer, collaborate with relevant bloggers, wear your designs everywhere, create contests targeted at your audience and gather their emails so you can send them monthly updates via newsletter, dress influencers with your clothes, if you want to do wholesale, pack a bag with your samples and go knocking on the doors of the stores that you would like to have as customers…

These are only a few of the things that you can do to promote your business. Don’t do just one, pick several and mix and match until you find the combination that best targets your audience. Some of them cost less, some of them cost more, none of them are for free (remember that even if you don’t have to pay in currency, your time is money and self-promotion requires heaps of it). But if you want to make some, you have to spend/work some… Happy Marketing!

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Where Do You Go From Here?

Have you ever looked in the mirror and asked yourself: What am I doing? Where am I going? Who do I want to be? I spent 20 years of my life stuck in the wrong industry and not because anyone was forcing me, but because I didn’t know how to make the switch. I believe that most of the times the solutions to our problems are so hard to find because we just don’t know where to look. And when we start looking, we feel like we have been left stranded in the middle of the desert without knowing which way to go. But more often than not, the correct way is not taking the right nor the left but going inwards. If you want to change your world, you have to start with yourself.

Who am I? Who do I want to be? In Pedro Almodovar’s movie “All About My Mother”, the character of Agrado has a line where she says: “…you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.” After a long time of asking myself these questions, I realised that I knew who I was: an IT guy; I just needed to figure out who I wanted to be: a Photographer. Once I was able to answer that second question, I felt like the hardest part was over. Now I just needed a plan to make it happen.

Venturing into the world of Photography, all of the sudden my whole future became uncertain. Back when I was working as an IT guy, I had a steady job with a steady income and a good progression in my professional career. I wasn’t a 100% sure of what the future might hold but I had a sense of security in my life. When I became a freelancer, that sense of security vanished in the blink of an eye. So I had to make a commitment to myself and I wrote down the basis for my new adventure:

• If I was going to do this, I was going to do it 100%, full-on mode. This was not going to be an expensive hobby, but a proper business with a proper structure (accounts in order, sales oriented, marketing minded).
• I was not going to give up easily. Like any other business, I knew that income and profit would take some time to come so I needed to have enough funds to survive and also I needed to manage my own expectations. How long was I going to do this for before deciding that it might not have been a good idea? I gave myself 5 years.
• I needed a plan, a business plan that is.

Before becoming a photographer, I had never been a freelancer in my life. I had always been employed by someone else so I had zero idea of what running a business was like. And I was not only going to start my own business, I was going to do it in a completely different industry that I had no clue about and in a culture alien to mine: I had just moved to another country. So in order to make this change more digestible for myself, I sat down and wrote a roadmap of how I was going to approach this. Or what I call: “The Plan.”

This is how it looked like:

• Year 1 - Creation of the business: during my first year I was going to do mainly research. I was venturing into a new industry in a new country so I needed to find out how things worked. Also, I knew absolutely no one in this new industry so I had to network like crazy. These two things were going to go hand in hand because I knew that the more people who worked in the industry I met the more I would understand how everything worked. And where would I find those people? By googling “networking events” and going to at least 1 each month, by going to job search websites and finding photographers who were looking for assistants and learning from them and eventually by doing my own shoots and sourcing creatives who wanted to do stuff with me. Once I started figuring out how things worked, I would be able to start defining the services that I was going to offer (my portfolio), who was I going to offer them to (my target), what was I going to expect in return (my rates) and how was I going to reach those people (my marketing strategy). 
• Year 2- Opening of the business: on my second year I was going to officially open the doors to the public. I was going to roll-out the marketing strategy that I had created (strong focus on social media), and I was going to self-promote in various channels to start getting paid clients. Also, I knew that I couldn’t stop networking so this time I would go for both industry contacts and prospect clients. 
• Year 3 - Focus on clients: by the third year I would focus on turning previous clients into returning clients without forgetting about getting new ones. 
• Year 4 - Focus on scale: now that I had been working with clients for a couple of years, it would be time to focus on getting bigger projects and bigger clients. 
• Year 5 - Consolidate: if the second year would be the one when I would start seeing income, the firth year I should start seeing profit and focusing on the 20:80 rule to run a healthy business (20% of your clients should give you 80% of your income). And by the end of the fifth year I would focus on opening my own studio.

As you can see, it was a very simple business plan but it gave me the guidance and the focus that I needed in order to answer the question: where do I go from here? If you are struggling because you don’t know how to answer that question, the internet should become your new best friend. There are plenty of resources online, these are only a few to give you a head start:

• The Freelancer Club: Matt Dowling and Nina Malone created The Freelancer Club based on their own journey to help creative talent achieve their goals.
• Marketing Mentor: Ilise Benun is a Marketing Mentor. She has been successfully self-employed for 25+ years and has guided thousands of creative professionals toward growth. She changed my life.
• Crunch: they take the stress out of accounting and bookkeeping for freelancers, contractors, startups or just about any small business.

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Impossible Until It’s Possible

A goal is impossible until it is achieved. And in order to achieve it, we must take the first step towards it. But even if this sounds so simple, most of the times we don’t take that first step because of fear. Fear that we won’t be able to accomplish what we set ourselves for; fear of not knowing what to do next if we manage to achieve our goal. We tend to describe successful people as fearless, but I’m more than sure that they have the same fears that we have. They just know how to deal with them better. So, how do we turn fear from a paralysing feeling into a driving force?

I believe it is all a matter of perspective. On the one hand, we have the fear of failing, the fear of working so hard on something and wasting all that precious time. But if we think like this, we are looking at failure the wrong way. Failing can teach us valuable lessons and allow us to learn what not to repeat in the future. If we go through life without failing we are definitely not pushing ourselves that much.

On the other hand, we have the fear of succeeding, the fear of discovering our own potential and not knowing what to do next. And I would say that there is more people afraid of this than we might think. What happens if I get all those clients? What happens if I get that promotion? What happens if I can’t handle all that workload? I’ll tell you what will happen: you will figure it out. The same way that you have been able to figure it out to get where you are right now. Don’t underestimate yourself and above all, don’t be your own biggest obstacle.

Right now, if given the two options: A. Make things possible, B. Leave them Impossible, I will always choose A. Because while trying to make my goals possible I will either learn or succeed, and to me that sounds like a Win/Win.

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Wisdom Comes From Unlikely Places

We tend to only learn about the things that we like or that we work on, we usually engage in activities in our spare time that we already know will amuse us and we hardly ever surround ourselves with people from other industries that we don’t care for or that we just don’t understand. We have limited our lives and jobs to what our work involves because, to be honest, it consumes the majority of our time. But as creatives, aren’t we putting boundaries to our vision by just allowing ourselves to experience what is related to our craft?

I am guilty as charged.  More often than not, I find myself reading about photography, following fashion publications or attending industry events. And that is all good as it helps me grow as a professional, but I also want to grow as a person and as a creative. I should read about other industries and see how they do business and apply their best practices to my own. I should learn something that doesn’t involve photography nor fashion so that I can acquire a different skill. And I definitely should get out of my comfort zone and go out and do activities that have nothing to do with what I do even if it’s just for fun.

I should and I will, because every new experience is a learning opportunity and one never knows when the answer to any of our struggles lies outside of our current scope.

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Professionalism Is Undefinable… But Priceless!

Darth Vader would find some people’s lack of professionalism disturbing. And I do too. But sometimes I wonder if it is just me judging others by my own standards. If I give my 100% on any project that I get involved in, paid or unpaid, why is it that sometimes others give me their 50%? Is it out of unprofessionalism or is it that what I consider their 50% is actually their 100%? Could it be that there is not a proper definition of what being professional is? Or like Groucho Marx, could it be that people have different standards depending on who they work with?

In my quest for understanding what professionalism is, I decided to look for a definition of the term and to my surprise it is all very subjective:

• The Merriam-Webster: “The skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well.”
• Oxford Dictionary: “The competence or skill expected of a professional.”
• Cambridge Dictionary: “The combination of all the qualities that are connected with trained and skilled people.”

And if we dig a little bit deeper, it does not get any better. The three dictionaries define a professional as:

• The Merriam-Webster: “Relating to a job that requires special education, training, or skill.”
• Oxford Dictionary: “Worthy of or appropriate to a professional person; competent, skilful, or assured.”
• Cambridge Dictionary: “having the qualities that you connect with trained and skilled people, such as effectiveness, skill, organisation, and seriousness of manner”

If the dictionaries cannot give me a unified definition of the concept, how can I expect other persons with different backgrounds than mine to have the same professional standards that I have? Can I rely on common sense when we all know that such thing does not actually exist? Some organisations opt to write their own Codes of Professionalism for their members to know what is expected of them. And in some industries, people who work in a profession have a common code to abide by as well. But for the rest of us, specially those who work freelance and worldwide, such types of code do not exist.

Thus, out of a lack for a standard definition of what being professional means, I decided to write my own based on what I expect from myself. For me, being professional means:

• Being committed: if you say that you are going to do something, you do it, and you do it all the way through the end.
• Being punctual: if you say that you are coming at 8, come at 8. Not at 8:15 or 8:30, but 8.
• Being reliable: if you do a job well one time, you should do it the same way all the time.
• Being responsible: you should always be accountable for your actions.
• Being respectful: value others and their time.
• Being honest: telling the truth can get you second chances. Being caught in a lie will harm your reputation.

These are the minimum traits that I feel a professional person must have. For me, having professionalism has nothing to do with being friendly, or hard-working, or even the most skilled at what you do. Not everyone likes an outgoing personality and not always being the best in your industry guarantees that you will land the jobs. But I believe that having at least these traits will make you have a good reputation in your field.

Feel free to share your own definition of professionalism below.

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The Future Is Now

Cliché alert: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. And before the daily phrases police comes to arrest me, I have to admit that there is a lot of truth behind this phrase.  If you want something in your life to change in the future, you need to change something in your life today. Because nothing will ever happen if you don’t make an effort. So, what have you done today to make that change happen?

It is a very overwhelming feeling when you want to achieve something and you just don’t know where to start. And it’s even worse when you don’t know exactly what is it that you want to achieve. But dwelling on this thought and constantly banging your head against the wall in frustration won’t get you anywhere. I have been there. I went to school, I was taught to graduate, get a career and work in it for the rest of my life. But the rest of our lives today is very different from the rest of our parents or grandparents lives. They either didn’t have the choices that we have or had shorter careers due to lower life expectancies. And then reality struck and I found myself dreading my career and my life choices. Luckily, I didn’t let my frustration paralyse me, at least not for too long, and decided to turn my life around. It was a slow process, with little actions here and there, but after 5 years I was able to switch industries and start a career in something that I am passionate about. And I can’t be happier. And all it took was taking the first step.

Whatever you want to achieve, it doesn’t matter how big or small the challenge is, you have to do something about it right now, as soon as you finish reading this post. Do you want more or different clients? Change your marketing strategy. Do you want to have different skills? Go back to school or google tutorials and learn them. Do you want to change your life around? Research people who have done it in your industry or in a different one and get inspired by them. You can start here.

But don’t let fear stop you from doing what you want to do. The worst that can happen is that you fail and the best lessons are learnt from failing. Like Dolly Parton once said: “‘If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.”

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What’s The Rush?

The limits between the old year and the new one have been erased from the Fashion Industry’s calendar. We had just come back from the holidays break and it was already LCM in London. No time to get comfortable in our desks or recover from the vacations hangover, it felt like we went literally from zero to a hundred in one second. And, paraphrasing Suzy Menkes, in the following weeks we have the haute couture shows, then March is ready-to-wear, May is cruise, June is LCM again, July couture again, September ready-to-wear, November resort. “Or is it cruise again?”. And then back to square one. It is as if we are all running a race but no one really knows where the finish line is. We just follow the money and see where it takes us. Fast is the new black, and if you can’t keep up you better step aside.

But, if Fashion in 2015 taught us something it’s that we are only humans and there is only so much pressure that we can take. Last year we saw the departure of the Creative Directors of some of the big fashion houses: Raf Simons from Dior and Alexander Wang from Balenciaga, both after only three years, Alber Elbaz from Lanvin… whether they left or were made leave, what’s undeniable is that the pressure that these designers are exposed to has a high toll to pay. And none of them want to be the next John Galliano or in worst case scenario the next Lee McQueen. Raf Simons told Cathy Horyn: “This is the feeling I have all the time, there’s never enough time.”

I was having a chat the other day with my friend, who is also a creative, and he was concerned that he was too old to not have accomplished anything yet and life was passing by in front of his eyes. He is only 25. And I bet this reality applies to other young people in and outside our industry. Where are we all running to? Where do we think this race takes us? What’s the rush?!

What’s funny is that we like to think of ourselves as living healthy lifestyles with our cross-training and our juice cleanses, but there is nothing healthy in the reality of our jobs and it is driving us to insanity. Why do we avoid Fast Food like the plague but think all this Fast Fashion model is harmless? I think that before the year goes any further we all need to take a break, have a sip of tea and remind ourselves that it is the journey not the destination. Especially if we have no idea where this road is leading to.

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Information Overload: How Much Is Too Much?

Former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, addressed the attendees of the World Bank Conference ‘Global Knowledge’ in 1997 saying: “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.” In the following decade and a half we have seen how the internet has made information available to anyone with a device capable of connecting to the web. If these days you want to find out about something, the answer is just one click away. But with so much information at our disposal, when does so much become too much?

When I decided to start my photography business, I literally had no idea of what I was getting into. I knew that I wanted to take photos for a living, but I had never been self-employed before and I just didn’t know where to start. My solution was to go online and google keywords like “photography business”, “freelancing in London” or “taxes in the UK”. I found hundreds of thousands of resources to research from and it was frankly very overwhelming. I was on my own and all of the sudden I felt like I needed a whole team of people to take care of my accounting, my marketing and my sales while I was out there taking photos. It was just too much for a person to take in. And sometimes one information contradicted the other.

That’s when I realised that I needed an action plan, part of which I talk about in my previous post ”The Man With A Plan”. I took all this ocean of information and divided it in little pieces to set myself attainable learning goals. And I started studying and learning bit by bit all the different aspects of the business to help me devise a coherent business plan.

One of the first things that I did was to decide which were going to be my trustable sources. I figured that the information needed to come from somewhere closest to the origin. So I did my research on taxes at the HMRC website and read everything about the business on the book ”Beyond the Lens” by the Association of Photographers of the UK.

Then I thought that if I wanted to learn about other aspects of the business, I needed to learn it from people who were actually working on those parts of the field. So I contacted the people from The Freelancer Club for mentoring and advice, started following Crunch’s blog for everything accounting and trusted my marketing learning to experts like Ilise Benun.

So by narrowing down my sources to fewer experts I was able to take all that information and turn it into digestible pieces. And by subsequently creating a business plan for myself with realistic goals I was able to put the fears aside and worry less about the business side of the craft.

In future posts I will talk about the goals and the timeline that I set myself as part of my plan.

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Happy New Year 2016!

I have no words to express my gratitude to everyone who has been by my side and who has given me their love on 2015. I send you all lots of love for 2016! Happy New Year!!

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My Grandma’s Turkey Recipe

To show my appreciation for all the amazing things that have happened to me in 2015 I am giving you my grandma’s turkey recipe so that you can share it with those who you care for. Doesn’t it look mouthwatering? I know, I am no food photographer, my business is Fashion, so instead of pretending to be one I just took a snap of how our table looks like during the season. 

My Grandma’s Turkey Recipe

Serves: Aprox. 8 people 

Ingredients: 

• 4 kg (8 lb) Turkey 
• 2 Heads of Garlic 
• 2 Tablespoons salt 
• 1 Teaspoon Ground Black Pepper 
• 175 ml (3/4 Cup) White Wine 
• 175 ml (3/4 Cup) Orange Juice 
• 120 ml (1/2 Cup) Lemon Juice 
• 60 ml (1/4 Cup) Melted Butter 

Preparation: 

• If you are using a frozen turkey, thaw the turkey in its bag in the refrigerator for at least two days before baking. 
• Make sure that the bird is completely defrosted and that there are no ice crystals anywhere in the bird. 
• The day before baking, remove all packaging and the neck and the giblet pack from the cavity. 
• Place the turkey, breast side down, in an oven proof roasting tin. 
• Mix together the crushed garlic cloves, salt, pepper, wine, the orange and the lemon juice. 
• Pour the mix into the roasting tin around the turkey. 
• Cover in plastic wrap and put back in the refrigerator. 
• Let marinate for at least 12 hours. 
• Then turn bird and let marinate in the fridge for the remaining of the time until baking. 

Cooking: 

• Preheat the oven at 170°C (325°F). 
• Remove the turkey from the fridge and take out the plastic wrap. 
• Brush the skin of the bird with the melted butter. 
• Loosely cover the turkey with foil and place into the centre of the preheated oven. 
• Cook for 4 hours. 
• Periodically baste the bird with the juices at the bottom of the roasting tin. 
• Remove the foil 1 hour before the end of cooking. 
• Once is cooked, remove the turkey from the oven and cover with foil. 
• Leave to rest for 30 minutes before carving. 

Bon Appétit and Happy Holidays 2015!

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Know Thy History

“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”, according to Edmund Burke. And those who know history, according to me, know what to repeat and what to avoid repeating. And can even figure out what was not tried in the past that might work in the present. But in a society only concerned about the latest this and the latest that, how relevant is it to know about our past?

Very relevant, I would say. And more than necessary, mandatory. One of the first pieces of advice that I received when I started shooting fashion was “Study the classics”. And some might argue that knowing the life of Elizabeth Arden won’t make you a better makeup artist, the same way that knowing who Stieglitz was won’t make you a better photographer. But the truth is that knowing where your craft comes from, how it all started and why it is the way it is nowadays will definitely give you a deeper understanding of your industry. And hopefully help you make better business decisions.

Here are a few resources from where to take a little peek into the past of our industry:

• Fashion: http://www.businessoffashion.com/education/courses/fashion-history
• Photography: http://photohistory.jeffcurto.com/about
• Makeup Artistry: http://www.historyofcosmetics.net
• Hair Styling: http://www.ukhairdressers.com/history%20of%20hair.asp

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Deeply Superficial

Andy Warhol famously said that he was deeply superficial. I like to believe that I am the opposite of that. And even though our industry has a reputation for being shallow, I feel like most creatives don’t relate to this quote. And that is why it is so hard for us to sell ourselves, because we are afraid of sounding fake, egocentric and self-centered.

A couple of months ago I wrote the post ”Are Creatives Sales-Challenged?” about the challenges of selling yourself as a creative. At the end of the post I encouraged everyone to try and do these four things as an exercise to make you feel more confident when talking about your business:

1. Know your business to the last detail.

2. Believe in yourself.

3. Find out what others say about your business.

4. Speak of yourself in the third person.

So I decided to put them in practice myself to see how that changed the way I promoted my services to others. If you have been following my blog you know that the first two points are basically what I have been praising and putting in practice for a long time so I skipped straight to the third one. I went ahead and asked for client recommendations and took out some keywords from the things that they said about me:

• creative
• easy to work with
• understanding
• patient
• good eye for detail
• talented
• enthusiastic
• motivated
• committed
• organised
• hardworking
• professional
• honest
• clear

Then I tried step four and put all those keywords together in a phrase talking about myself in the third person as if I were recommending a brand to someone else:

“Grey Pistachio is a creative and talented photographer with a good eye for detail and a commitment to bringing your brief to life. He is clear and honest and patiently takes the time to understand your brand and your vision. With more than 20 years of experience managing projects, he is a hardworking and organised professional and his motivation and enthusiasm make it really easy to work with him.”

Not bad, right? I know that it’s still a work in progress but I went from not knowing what to say about myself to a whole paragraph on the benefits of working with me just by asking my clients what they thought about me. And by putting everything in the third person I didn’t feel like an egomaniac while talking about myself.

So now that I have all these selling points that I didn’t even know that I had I can go out and better promote myself. Not as a fake sounding elevator pitch but more like the strengths that my brand has. I will keep on working on this exercise and will definitely write my findings on future posts.

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To Blog Or Not To Blog: That Is The Question.

I have been writing this blog for more than a year now. It all started as a way to remind myself where I had been and how had I gotten to where I was. But it ended up being a resource for starting creatives, because while I was telling myself all the steps that I followed to become whom I wanted to be, I was actually creating a source of information for people who are where I was back then and didn’t know how to make their career dreams come true. But today my blog is much more than that. It has evolved into a key piece of my marketing strategy with results that go far beyond my initial expectations.

Writing a blog, no matter the subject, is hard work. It’s setting some time aside every week to spill your thoughts on the blank page. And sometimes you have loads of things to say, but other times you are so busy with life that your brain just doesn’t seem to be able to put two thoughts together. It requires commitment, because if you promise a post every week you can’t skip a single week or you will risk disappointing and loosing your readers. It requires research, because even though you should talk about the things you know, you must contrast your information so that you don’t mislead your followers. And it requires love, love and passion for what you write about, because it will be the only way to engage your audience.

But not matter how much work and effort it takes to put a blog together, the rewards are bigger than the sacrifices:

1. Writing my blog has helped me show my existing and potential clients how much passion I put into my craft and this translates into the trust they put on me.

2. There is no better life led than the one that is led trying to help others succeed.

3. The traffic on my website has grown from 10 visits a month to 200 visits a week since I started writing my blog. And on the day that I post I get an average of 71 visitors on that post.

4. But most importantly, it has helped me grow as a person and as a professional. Because by wearing my heart on my sleeve every week I have learned so much about myself that it has helped me work on my weaknesses and improve my strengths.

So if you are thinking on a way to diversify your marketing strategy, writing a blog can be a good idea. My last piece of advice would be that if you decide to do it you have to go all the way or you will do your brand more harm than good. 

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21 Documentaries For Fashion Creatives

The Fashion Industry has often been described as shallow and frivolous by those who are looking from the outside, but the people in these documentaries will let you take a peek into what is really like to live their lives, walk their paths and have their fears and their dreams. 

On The Industry

Future Of Fashion: It began with Alexa Chung approaching Vogue over coffee, with the desire to tell the truth about fashion as she found it. The plan was to show this world from the inside out, to dispel the myths of a frivolous unprofitable industry and introduce young people to exactly what being in fashion means today and what opportunities there are for everyone.

The True Cost: The True Cost is a documentary film exploring the impact of fashion on people and the planet.

On Designers

L’Amour Fou: A documentary on the relationship between fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his lover, Pierre Berge. 

Ultrasuede - In Search of Halston: No one represented the 70 s quite like legendary designer Halston and, in his new documentary, Ultrasuede - In Search of Halston filmmaker Whitney Sudler -Smith takes us on a fabulous fun-and-fact filled journey through that man s life and times.

Dior and I: Dior and I brings the viewer inside the storied world of the Christian Dior fashion house with a privileged, behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Raf Simons’ first haute couture.

Valentino: The Last Emperor: A look at the life of legendary fashion designer Valentino.

Paul Smith: Gentleman Designer: An intimate and provoking portrait of “Lord Paul Smith”, quirky designer and formidable businessman, through exclusive access to a poet of British fashion.

On Creatives

In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye: Documentary film takes a look at some of the world’s most influential fashion images as conceived by the magazine’s iconic fashion editors.

Helmut Newton: Frames from the Edge: A camera crew follows Helmut Newton, the fashion and ad photographer whose images of tall, blond, big-breasted women are part of the iconography of twentieth-century erotic fantasy. 

Bill Cunningham New York: A profile of the noted and extraordinarily cheerful veteran New York City fashion photographer.

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens: This film traces the artistic self-realization of Annie Leibovitz, from childhood through the death of her beloved friend, Susan Sontag, and includes snippets of Leibovitz’s last visual memories of Sontag.

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie: Vidal Sassoon is more than just a hairdresser-he’s a rock star, an artist, a craftsman who “changed the world with a pair of scissors.”

The Powder and The Glory: it tells the story of two of the first highly successful women entrepreneurs in America, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein.

On Magazines

Diana Vreeland - The Eye Has to Travel: A look at the life and work of the influential fashion editor of Harpers Bazaar, Diana Vreeland.

The September Issue: A documentary chronicling Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s preparations for the 2007 fall-fashion issue.

Mademoiselle C: A documentary focused on former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief and fashion stylist Carine Roitfeld as she moves to New York to launch her own magazine.

On Style

Iris: A documentary about fashion icon Iris Apfel from legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.

Advanced Style: Advanced Style examines the lives of seven unique New Yorkers whose eclectic personal style and vital spirit have guided their approach to aging.

On Shops

Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s: A documentary on the Manhattan department store with interviews from an array of fashion designers, style icons, and celebrities.

Secrets of Selfridges: The story of the innovative retailer, Harry Gordon Selfridge, and the landmark department store he founded.

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How To Predict Your Future

Welcome to the DIY era, a time when you can be whomever you want to be. You don’t know how to take photos? There is a tutorial for that. You have never applied makeup? There is also a tutorial for that. You want to become an astronaut? Well, this one is tougher, but one day I am sure that we will learn how to pilot a spaceship on youtube. In this day and age when the access to information has been democratized, is the excuse of not doing what you really want to do with your life relevant anymore?

For the longest time in humanity, our professions were determined by what our parents did. Then times changed, and we were made free to decide our own future and become whatever we wanted to be… but with a twist. It was reserved to those who could afford it. But not anymore. The internet has really set us free and with so many people sharing their knowledge and experience online these days if you really want to learn something you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home anymore.

So to all those people who have been stuck in careers they wrongly chose or in jobs that they have hated for the last decade and still think that the only way to change paths is by spending tens of thousands in studying something else, I say: you are looking at the solution the wrong way. 

The DIY life is about taking control of your life, creating your own career, your own path. It’s about waking up one morning and deciding that you want to become something different, whatever it is. And going online to research what that new path is and what working in that field means. And then creating your own plan on how you are going to approach your change of life. And reading a lot, studying a lot, researching more, watching tutorials, watching TED talks, following industry news, going to industry events, meeting people in this new industry, interning with them and learning the craft, and before you know it you will be part of the industry as well.

Stop dreaming of a different life but be afraid of venturing into the unknown. Like they say, the best way to predict your future is to create your own future.

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You Already Have The Best Camera

People who work for camera manufacturers are like all of us: they have bills to pay and they need to make a living. And in order to do so, they need you to buy their cameras. So they have to convince you that owning their latest model is the only way to take great photos and if you stick to your old camera or buy one from their competitors, you are a loser. And a bad photographer. And if you want to be an even better photographer, you have to change your camera every year to stay up to date with the latest technology. 

The reality is that you already own the best camera available: your own eye. And as clichéd as this may sound, it is true. A camera on its own doesn’t do anything. It’s just a tool. And someone who doesn’t know how to take photos won’t be able to take a good photo even if you give them the best camera in the market today. And what is great about the eye is that it doesn’t matter that we all have them and that its technology has been unchanged for millennia. It was, it is and it will be, at least for a very long time, the best camera out there.

And what is even better about the eye is that it will never take two photos alike, not even when a group of people are looking at the same subject at the same time. Because the beauty of this technology is that it’s connected to our brain and in consequence to our emotions and experiences. Thus, the image that I see will be based on everything that I have lived in my past. Which is completely different to everything that you or any other person has lived. And this makes the resulting image a unique piece of art.

Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” wrote:

“For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”

If you feel that your photography is not at the level that it should be, I’ve got news for you: I’m 99% sure that it’s not your equipment. And I don’t say a 100% because there are photographers who from the nature of their work need specific equipment. But the majority of us out there are able to take great photos with the camera that we already have. We just need to push ourselves and our craft further.

There are various elements that make a photo great. And none of them involve the tools:

• have an identifiable subject.
• use good composition. And I’m not talking about the rule of thirds. Research composition in classical painting and train your eye.
• learn how light behaves. Photography is nothing without light.
• location, location, location.
• and if you shoot people, like I do, learn people skills and do not take for granted good makeup, beautiful hair and great styling.

If you master these basic elements, you are going to be able to take unbelievable photos, even with a smartphone. And of course, I am not saying that it is not worth it to get a great piece of equipment. But only invest on it when you really need to. I know that my business doesn’t need me to spend 40k on a camera at this point in my career. I will get there, eventually, but at the moment my current camera has still a lot of years of shell life ahead of it.

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From Zero To A Hundred In One Second

This is the third and last part of my posts regarding the key elements to a marketing strategy. If you haven’t read the previous posts, read first Part 1 and Part 2. 

I am a sucker for quotable quotes. And there is no better quote to exemplify the topic of this post than this one attributed to Eddie Cantor: “It takes 20 years to become an overnight success”. The third key element to a successful marketing strategy is managing expectations. Overnight success is the result of years of sleepless nights and hard work.

After you have come up with your plan and started deploying your marketing strategy you have to arm yourself with a lot of patience. Very rarely you see immediate results and even if you do you have to try to build a sustainable business. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

I see a lot of my peers who get discouraged at the very beginning because they don’t see enough business to make it worth their whiles. And maybe it is true, in the end we all need to pay our bills. That is why we need to plan ahead and take all these things into consideration when we are building our business. Sometimes we need to keep our day jobs for a while until we can go full time freelancing. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Having clear expectations will help us keep calm as we are navigating the ups and downs of building our business. It will be the only way to keep ourselves motivated on those first few years when we see that we are putting a lot of effort into our promotion but the results are far from great. I know, easier said than done. Here are a few pointers to help you manage your expectations:

• when you are putting together your plan, it has to be realistic, reachable and adapted to your reality. Don’t copy someone else’s plan because their lives are different than yours. You can get inspired by them but you have to adapt it to your current situation.
• define short, medium and long term goals to be able to keep track of your progress. For instace, lets say that your goal is to be able to open your own studio in three years. That would be your long term goal. What do you need to do to get there? Have enough clients and big enough projects to be able to afford it. So this would be your medium term goal. And how do you get those clients and projects? By reaching out to that target via your marketing strategy. There you have your short term goal!
• think of yourself as a business. And like a business, you can’t expect to have profit on your first year. You may have income, but it will most likely go to pay expenses or to reinvest it on the business again. So plan ahead for the following 3-5 years. 

So there you have them, these are what I feel are the key elements to a successful marketing strategy:

• having a plan 
• being consistent with the plan 
• managing expectations

At which stage of your marketing strategy are you? Is there anything in particular that you have done for your business that can complete my key elements list? Share your comments with us below!

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I’ve Got 99 Problems But Inconsistency Ain’t One

In my previous post ”The Man With A Plan” I spoke about what I feel are the key elements to a successful marketing strategy. These elements came to my mind while chatting with Marketing Mentor and Business Coach Ilise Benun, the author of the Marketing Plan + eCalendar that I used as a base for my marketing strategy and of which I spoke about in my post ”Your One Person Orchestra”. They are:

• having a plan 
• being consistent with the plan
• managing expectations

I have already covered what having a plan means. If you haven’t read it, please pause, click here to go to my previous post, and then come back. I will be waiting for you.

You read it? Good. Because having a plan is crucial. But just as important is following that plan consistently. If you are marketing yourself today as a fashion photographer and tomorrow as a landscape photographer, then your prospect clients will never know what to hire you for. But even if your offer is always the same, if you apply your marketing efforts for a week on your social media and then the next week on your print mailings and then stop for a while and then next month you decide to go with e-mailings, you might as well save yourself all the trouble because you will not get anywhere either.

What does being consistent mean? It basically means that after sitting down, doing your research and creating your marketing plan you must follow it to the last comma. Or at least for as long as it works. You are allowed to make amendments, but you just can’t go changing it every other day. It confuses your audience:

• Your message should be clear and free of confusions. You don’t want to send your audience mixed messages. If you are a makeup artist, advertise yourself as that. If you also do nails, say that you also do nails. But don’t say today that you are an MUA and then next month say that you are a Nail Artist. Your audience won’t know if you changed paths or if you are just being inconsistent. Either way they won’t hire you.
• You must choose your channels wisely and stick to them. Doing some trial and error is fine, but past the trial period you have to make up your mind. If you have done your research and you know that your audience is always on XY social network, then apply all your efforts in there. You don’t have to be in every single channel, you just have to choose the ones that the audience that you want to reach follows. And when you do, stick to those channels. If your audience follows your channel and you never post to that channel, they will get bored and leave. And they will never come back.

And with great consistency comes great regularity. You have to be both Consistent and Constant. If you are going to do this, you have to do it every day. Not just when you have the time or when you feel like it, but every-single-day-for-as-long-as-you-want-a-succesful-marketing-strategy. Period. Because results don’t come overnight, or at least not for the grand majority of us. Results are like the constant dripping of water that wears away the stone. And in this day and age, that stone is tough to wear.

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