How to Grow as a Photographer

Time Management and
Management Style

The best business sense is common sense.
—Dan Wolfe

There are all kinds of horror stories of how a good product was run into the ground because the person in charge was overwhelmed with managing (and micromanaging) and had to walk away, or was carried away kicking and screaming. You and I both know people who have been so consumed by the managerial demands of their work that they lost the love they once had for their profession, some even paying a high physical price for the stress they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis. There’s only so much the body and the spirit can take before they pay consequences for such a situation. The question that always arises after a physical or emotional breakdown is, “Was it worth it?” And the answer is always the same. In this chapter, we will look into several ways we can take control and become more vigilant, more knowledgeable, and more effective in managing ourselves and others.

Creative entrepreneurs who make the decision to reinvent their careers have to determine what kind of management style they will bring to the workplace. Will the business operate as a democracy or a dictatorship? Will the entrepreneur have a laissez-faire approach or use some other method to run the business? Knowing what your most efficient management approach will be, and more importantly, getting yourself and/or your team to buy into it, will significantly ease your transition into a new career orientation. And even if you chose to be a one-person shop, you still need to have some sense of order, some kind of organization, to help you stay on top of things before they overwhelm you and send you back to that dreaded Valley of Despair.

We are aware of all kinds of bizarre management styles—and apparently they work, as long as people are dumb enough to perpetuate them. I know of a photographer who used the Management by Chaos method. He would stand in the middle of the studio and scream out, “I can’t find the Polaroid back!” and everyone would run around frantically and look for the Polaroid back. When someone found it they were given an “attaboy,” and things were calm again until the photographer would yell out, “I can’t find the loupe!” and everyone would rush around to be the salvation for the next half hour. Apparently it worked, because everyone said, “Oh, he’s an artist, and artists are temperamental, so that’s okay.” And apparently he surrounded himself with a studio of codependents.

There is a story around Hollywood that a well-known director once defined “teamwork” as (I am paraphrasing here) “a whole bunch of people running around doing what I say.” This is another management model based on the chaos paradigm. To pull this one off, people have to be afraid that they will lose their jobs, so they will do anything as long as they appear to be moving and acting busy. The way to do this is to look like you are doing something (even if you aren’t) and stay out of the way. Meanwhile the boss thinks things are getting accomplished when, in fact, everything stays the same. This is not teamwork: it is just an exercise in mindless self-deception that ensures mediocre performance.

And I have known the most insidious method of managing, which I call Management by Deceit and Manipulation. This takes a very intelligent person who can keep straight all the lies he has told different clients and subordinates in order to get his way. That person puts a new level of complication on every aspect of his relationships and manages to keep things bumbling along only because everyone else is missing an important piece of information, which they need to do their job.

I am sure that you have experienced scores of other management styles, including intimidation, ignorance, incompetence, management by whim, misguided vision, puppet leadership, arrogance, and of course, greed. But, by far, the most useful method I have encountered is management based on discussion and consent. This form of management has the magic ingredient: all participants feel they have had an opportunity to be heard and have their contributions taken seriously. Of course there has to be a decision maker, a team leader who ultimately selects the course of action, but that decision must be accepted as the result of each voice being valued.

I believe that every successful relationship, no matter whether it is business or personal, is built on communication, cooperation, and mutual respect, with trust as the foundation. Keep in mind that all four factors are interrelated and have equal value. First there has to be free and open communication among all the participants. Whenever communication is not allowed to be free and open, the stifled voices will resent the fact that the final decision was made without their input. If they resent the decision, they will be less willing to cooperate with the other members. If that lack of cooperation spreads, then the members of the team lose respect for the leadership and those who align themselves with the leadership. As factions fragment the team and individual agendas grow, the members increasingly distrust each other and each others’ motives, and that lack of trust spreads like a cancer throughout the group.

The important thing to keep in mind is that trust is at the foundation of it all. A lack of trust can erode communication and then, in turn, cooperation, and mutual respect. Once trust is lost, everything is lost. How do you build trust? For one thing, if you say you are going to do something, you do it. That is why you have to be very careful about what you say. You have to do your homework to know that your decision is well considered, not just a reaction to a problem or an action based on faulty or incomplete information. In other words, you have to perform your due diligence. Once an atmosphere of trust is fostered, it has to be maintained through even more diligence by the management. It is amazing how far a team will go once a two-way system of trust, open communication, cooperation, and respect is created.

Here’s a personal story to demonstrate this point: The studio I work at had a sizeable crew made up of full-time and part-time employees. I kept noticing that people would leave after a typical shooting day was over, but I was still working and they could have helped me with some of that work. I would go around picking things up and resenting that I could have left by now if they had done their work better. Finally one day, I had had it. I called everyone together at the studio and said, “Listen up! There will be a studio meeting in five minutes in the conference room!”

I told everyone of my disenchantment and how it was unfair for them to just leave the studio with so many things left undone, and that I was regularly staying late just to complete their duties. After I finished my tirade they all looked at each other incredulously, and one by one they said something along the lines of, “You never seem pleased enough with the way I do things, so I figured, why should I work so hard? I decided I would do what I have to do to a point, and then leave the rest of it for you to finish up.” Needless to say I was a little amazed at their candor and the similarity of their responses. Was it true that I was sending out a message that was undermining my efforts?

Apparently I had fallen into a trap of my own making. Either I was dealing with some very clever operatives who had read the same reverse psychology book, or I was subverting my own objectives by picking up their slack and robbing them of the joy of completing their job. Also, I had apparently set standards they felt they were incapable of attaining. Furthermore—and this was particularly distressing—I was guilty of not allowing them to find their own way of doing things. Sure they may have wanted to take an alternate approach, but I had stolen the initiative from them by implying that my way was the only correct way. And (gulp) sometimes I was going to have to let them fail in order for them to find their own style. This was a turning point in my education as a manager.

The Life Cycle of a Freelance Job

I struggled to communicate my willingness to create a better team atmosphere. In the process, I decided to dissect a generic job into its component parts and then work out with each team member the expectations we shared about their role. This had several interesting outcomes. One was the development of “nine steps” each assignment goes through from beginning to end. The other was the concept of expectation versus observation. First we will explore the nine steps.

Presentation

The first step of any freelance job is Presentation. You must put together and update a portfolio that conveys your passion and you must show it to those who need the vision and caliber of execution you demonstrate in your work. Presentation is the first step, because it sets up the level of excellence your client will expect, and they will see this in terms of how much money your imagery of their product will bring into their coffers. Your job is to leave the best impression of your capabilities and that starts with your portfolio. It puts a positive light on your talents. That has to be followed up by your personal presence, your verbal and written presentation skills, the way you communicate your enthusiasm to work on their project, and the value you will bring to the table. Presentation sets the stage. If you don’t get their attention, you will not get the job. Your portfolio must contain the work you want to do, and keeping it up to date requires a lot of work.

Client Contact

The second step is Client Contact. You remember I stated in chapter 7 (Marketability) that first you have to define what you LOVE to shoot, then you have to find those people/companies who NEED what you LOVE to shoot. By using the Passion First marketing approach, you will be able to target your market and create a program to stay in touch with prospective clients, so they will have all the ammunition in place when the right job comes along.

You can buy extensive lists from mailing services, but you will not know how to target those lists effectively unless you make some inquiries about those potential clients yourself. You may have to go to the library and look up annual reports, or spend some time on a search engine, or go through reference books such as the Standard Directory of Advertising Agencies (The Redbook), or the Adweek Agency Directory, or other information services, but you must familiarize yourself with who is doing what and understand how your work fits their needs. Your client contact list has to contain current entries with specific information, and it must be updated regularly. That requires a lot of research work, but the more thorough your research, the bigger the rewards.

Self-Promotion

Step number three is Self-promotion, which we also addressed in chapter 7. Virtually all art directors, art buyers, and photo editors I know have a system in place to hold onto reference material, with headings that relate to the type of jobs they normally encounter. When their boss runs into their office with her hair on fire and yells, “Quick, I need ten portfolios of someone who can shoot chrome and glass, now!” you can bet those art directors or art buyers are going to look in their hanging file folder or manila folder titled, “Chrome and Glass Photographers.” If they don’t have one, they will look for the closest title, or reach for their resource books, or check their Web-site bookmarks, or call a colleague—but their job is to give their boss some alternatives, which they can take to the client with recommendations. That’s your shot at getting considered. Your self-promotion and advertising has to be updated and distributed regularly, and that requires a lot of work.

Estimating

Now, if the presentation did its job, and the client was the right match, and your self-promotional items were retained, you just might get a call that you are being considered for a job and are now being asked to submit an Estimate on how much the job will cost. The back story is that the clients already have an idea of how much they are willing to spend, but they want you to commit to a figure, just in case it might be less than what they have in mind. You, on the other hand, are trying to get the most you can for the job, so you ask them “What’s your budget?” and they say “What will it cost? And the dance goes on and on until someone blurts out a figure and the other person responds in any one of a number of ways (see chapter 9).

But for our purposes here, let’s just think about the responsibility of developing a workable estimate. You will, first and foremost, need to know what the market will bear. You will have to know your competition and their standards. You will have to know how to read the clients and their motives. You will also have to know how to read your own instincts and when to accept the job or bail out. And, very importantly, you will have to know that you have a lot of leverage at this point. You are setting a standard of professionalism that will be maintained for the rest of this job (and any possible jobs to come). Sometimes a client will just say, here is X amount of dollars to execute the job, and you will have to run some numbers to see if there is any profit to be made on the job. In any event, this takes some business savvy, some people skills, and, oh yes, some intense work.

Coordination

If the talent is appropriate, the numbers are right, and the schedule works out for all concerned, then you are awarded the job! Congratulations! But your job has just begun, because the next step is Coordination. First you get your estimate signed, and then you get a purchase order (PO) signed by your client. You go through the channels to get an advance on expenses (and find out who will be signing the check), and then you begin to make arrangements for personnel, equipment, film and/or capture media, travel and/or studio rental, props, permits, and a whole host of other elements to make the job run smoothly. Your ability to get the job done to your client’s specifications and to the demands of your own talent depends greatly on how well the job is coordinated and whether it gets off on the right foot. Surprise! A lot of work goes into this.

Execution

Finally you move on to Execution. This is where you actually get to do what you were trained to do. All the budgeting and scheduling have set the stage for you to spread your wings and execute the best interpretation of your client’s intentions.

But wait. What if the client wants some shot variations, or shots that go beyond the definitions on the estimate? How do you handle that? What if your client benignly asks, “Could you just shoot a few frames as a horizontal shot?” Does that mean he is considering also running the ad as a double-page spread or billboard, which goes beyond the limitations of the original agreement? You don’t want to flatly turn him down; by the same token you don’t want to be a pushover. This is where you have to use your interpersonal skills, along with your artistic skills, to find out what the client is intending so you can make whatever adjustments necessary to the artistic product and the budget. This takes experience, communication skills, and some additional work.

Expense Accountability

The Execution phase overlaps the next step, Expense Accountability. Someone has to make sure the job is not going over budget or over time. It is very easy to start spending money lavishly, thinking there must be some room in the budget to cover incidentals. Someone has to be in charge of making sure the money is not getting out of hand and providing some controls. This takes business skills and people skills, and some energy has to be put out here.

Billing

The next step, Billing, is particularly important. As I discussed in chapter 9, there are a number of preemptive steps you can take to ensure you get paid in a timely manner. Although billing is so monumentally important, a lot of photographers put it off because they are on to another job, or too busy doing other stuff, or just hate sitting down and doing it. All of this is crazy to me, because it can be relatively painless if a few procedures are put in order. Billing is a fact of entrepreneurial life, and it takes some work to get your bills out as quickly and accurately as possible—but the advantages are obvious.

Payment

And the final step is Payment. Whoop-dee-doo! You finally get the check. It’s a beautiful thing. But remember, you have to pay your suppliers, your expenses, your personnel, your facility, the government, the insurance, and yourself (your salary). Whatever is left over is yours to reinvest in your business, but you have to learn to discipline your pocketbook so you can build a career and have a secure future. This requires knowledge of your goals and how to attain them, and a lot of intestinal fortitude, along with (you saw it coming), more hard work.

The interesting thing about the Lifecycle of a Freelance Job is that it is a pattern we play out everyday without giving it much consideration. But if you look at it as a cycle, it breaks down into three distinct parts:

1 · Sales: Presentation, Client Contact, and Self-Promotion

2 · Production: Estimating, Coordination, and Execution

3 · Management: Expense Accountability, Billing, and Payment

Any small-business course will mention at some point that the three pillars of commerce—Sales, Production, and Management—support all successful businesses. Freelance photography is no different from any other business.

The Life Cycle of a Freelance Job

On any given day we walk into the studio, we spend some portion of our day on any or all of the following: portfolios, figuring out who to contact for work, working on our self-promos, bidding a job, pulling another one together, and/or shooting another. And at some point we have to give a little time to justifying the budget on a job, or billing one, or either finding out why we haven’t been paid or allocating the funds from a payment. The disposition of those hours may differ from day to day, but we all put in the hours, the hard work.

I should note here that the vast majority of successful photographers I have spoken to say they spend about 80 percent of their time doing things that relate to their business other than taking pictures. Some even say the amount of time devoted to business is higher. All of them have told me that, back in the day, these business realities were seldom discussed in school, and that more emphasis should be placed on these topics to create a generation of photographers who understand that what we do is a business, and that there are certain expectations if you want to be competitive. I am happy to report that more and more schools and trade organizations are implementing business classes and workshops, and I believe the industry will greatly benefit from those efforts.

Expectations Versus Observations

That brings us to the topic of expectations versus observations. The basis for most interpersonal disputes (i.e., arguments) is that one or both parties have not received what they expected from an initial agreement and so distrust grows and anger erupts. Think about it: when was the last time you had an argument? Chances are it had something to do with unmet expectations. Someone did not do something you thought they were going to do, or, vise versa; you did not do something someone thought you were going to do.

I am not psychic: I am just an observer of behavior and a chronicler of the obvious. So, if we spend more time up front explaining our expectations, and listening and understanding the expectations of our counterparts, we will have a greater chance of arriving at a place where both sets of expectations are met. That’s why there are contracts, and covenants, and purchase orders, and prenuptial agreements, and directional signals—well, you get my drift. In short, we could be more efficient and lead more nonsense-free lives if we took the time in the beginning to understand what we are expected to give and, in turn, what we are expecting to receive.

The Business Partner

It is important to have someone you trust whom you can discuss your ideas with. Those people are not easy to find. There are a lot of opportunists out there calling themselves partners but let you do all the work. Earlier in this chapter, we looked at the four things that are necessary for a successful relationship. And, you will remember, if any one of them falls away the entire relationship is in jeopardy.

Business relationships are not unlike a marriage. With that thought in mind I asked Douglas Kirkland if he had a business partner: “My wife Françoise. And she is a very good one, by the way. I have the best of business partners and she truly is a business partner. She’s good at everything she does. She’s multilingual—French, Italian, English, of course, and German. She went to the Sorbonne. I met her when she was just graduating. We’ve traveled all over the world together. She worked for Sygma Agency in Los Angeles for a number of years. She worked for Life. Her background is quite diverse. She also worked in the movie business briefly. And she enjoys working with me. We enjoy working together. It’s not me and her, it’s us. It’s a mutual enterprise.”

I asked Pete Turner about his business partner: “My wife. Her name is Reine. Reine Turner. She does the stuff that I hate doing. She’s the cement that holds everything together. And she’s the hardest critic I have on my work. And she is also good friends with Francoise [Kirkland] by the way. The Kirklands are good friends of ours. They are great people. [My wife] studied art at the University of Michigan; she has a master’s degree from there. For estimating I usually call a producer, you know freelance people who do that, because it’s tricky and frankly I don’t like to get too much into that.”

And Phil Marco spontaneously offered the following without my asking: “My greatest asset is my wife. My wife is my partner in business as in life. She’s is my muse, my confidant. She is an amazing person. She is very much a part of everything I do. To a great extent she keeps me grounded. Pat is really a world-class producer, basically. She will bring in the coordinators, and the line producers, etc., but she’s done it all herself. She’s a very brilliant, sensitive, and intuitive person. I am prejudiced because she is my wife, but that’s genuinely the impression she makes on every one who meets her. I am very lucky.”

When I spoke to Pete McArthur he said: “Friends, assistants, and studio managers through the years have offered help and advice, but my closest partner with sound advice has been my wife.”

And David Fahey showed the value of continuity when I asked if he had a business partner: “In 1986 I opened my own gallery with my partner Randee Klein, and we started showing paintings, sculpture, and photography. And then, after a year or two we reverted back to photography only. I should point out that as of about the year 2000, Randee gave her shares of the gallery to her husband Ken Devlin who now is my formal day-to-day partner. He handles the gallery business, financial affairs, also has designed and maintained the Web site and oversees that aspect of our business. Ken’s a perfect partner, we are very well matched. I deal with artist relations, and he does all the stuff I don’t want to do, and I probably do stuff he doesn’t want to do. It’s a perfect partnership and he’s a smart guy.”

David noted that his partner and he are “very well matched” because they share the load. Each of us has to honestly assess 1) what we are good at doing, and 2) what we either don’t do well, or don’t care to do. You can look at the Lifecycle of a Freelance Job and quickly determine which issues you are best suited to deal with, and then look for someone who shares your vision as to what the business should be to do the other things. If it turns out, as is the case with most of the photographers I counsel, that you would rather not deal with money and money issues, then you have to find someone who can accept those challenges—someone you can trust. It isn’t easy to find that other person or persons, but if you do, it can make a big difference in how your business reacts to change, and whether it grows and prospers.