Creativity – It’s A Service Business

In the faster digital age of today, “What have you done for me lately?” has been sped up to, “What have you done for me today?” I run a service business so these are words I need to listen to. After all, my business relies on the success of my clients. Plain and simple I provide a service. Yes there is the tangible image or print. But when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s a matter of what I can do to make my client’s life easier, more profitable and simpler. To do that, I have to provide services – good services.

Something that I can offer my clients that hasn’t been traditionally offered is speed of service. In the days of film I was at the mercy of the lab to take my images, develop them and turn them into prints that my client then had to have processed in order to use them in whatever way they needed. Often this meant days more processing and prepping. Now that most photography has gone digital I am able to process them in record time. But not only can I do this processing fast, I can do it better. Now, along with better imagery, if it is at all possible, I am going to turn a job around just 24-48 hours. I can do this partly because of new technology. My clients should reap the benefits of the faster and more detail oriented advances. It’s my job to make that happen.

In the past I could dodge and burn images, reprocess, analyze and process again, if I had my own lab. If not, I was spending more time waiting for image to come back from the lab than I was actually editing. And quite often I was not consulting with my client until after the product was completed. Today I not only can process and make adjustments faster, often my client is on location with me looking at the images as they are taken. That means you as my client get more input into the final image. You get the opportunity to guide the creative process. In post production, clients can make suggestions, ask for color adjustments or just simply approve the images faster. This gets them more involved and more likely to receive exactly the results they want and need.

The most important thing that I can do is understand. Having been in the corporate world for many years I know how business works. I know what it’s like to have to go through approval processes, getting sign off and trying to meet everyone’s expectations while not sacrificing the end product. As a person with over 20 years in the business world along side of 20+ years of photographic experience, I can work with a client to guide everyone through the business of creativity. I help guide my clients through the creative process and make sure that they get the results they are striving for and do it with an approach to their business needs.

Understanding business and the needs of my clients is what helps me help my clients.

Until next time…

Happy Shooting!