028: Tim Williams – How To Establish Your USP & Use It + Why You Should Avoid Burnout As A Photographer

May 10, 2021

“Start building your Plan B sooner than you think you need to. If Covid has taught us anything, it’s to have a fall back plan.”

TIM WILLIAMS

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Tim Williams.

Check out some of the biggest points from Tim’s interview below:

Can you introduce yourself, take us on your life journey, your career journey?

Yeah, well, I’ll give you the nutshell version because the extended version might be pretty boring, but yeah. So my name’s Tim Williams, I’m a Kiwi lad born and bred in New Zealand. When I was 18, moved to Sydney to study music for my passion for music. Did a bachelor of creative arts and music. And after graduating, I realised that, I’ve got a degree and what do I go do now? So it’s not like I just launched into a professional musician and followed that career path. So I ended up in the world of business of digital media, and then it was through that journey and digital media I started working full time, earning a cape. And then I met my now wife and we got married and our wedding photographer was a good friend of ours and I was chatting to him because I was interested in all things visually appealing and aesthetically correct.

So I thought I’d explore the world of photography and get some advice from him in terms of cameras. And so he led me down the path of jumping onto the cannon route. And after I bought the cameras like, “Hey, do you want to come out and shoot a wedding with me?” So I jumped in and shot my first wedding with him and delivered the photos to the couple. And they loved the images. So I was like, “Oh, maybe I’ve got a, maybe I could pursue this. Maybe I’ve got a career for it.” So just started to hustle it from there.

And then two years later, we moved to your part of the world over to London, the UK. And it was purely just a time for us where we were newlyweds and I wanted to travel, explore the world. So I freelanced over there, got in with an agency and I was shooting all things from events, interiors for architects and real estate shot over a thousand properties between all over London and Italy through Sicily, which was just an incredible, incredible time. Then we moved back to Sydney, spent two years in Sydney again, so it reset. And then we were deciding where we wanted to raise a family. And New Zealand was the place that we wanted to do that. So after two years being back in Sydney, we moved to New Zealand and we’ve been here just over, just gone five years.

What is it about you and your business that makes you stand out from the crowd?

Look, for a long time, I’ve tried to distinguish what my USP or Unix house proposition is. And at the end of the day, it’s me. There’s no other me out there. For a long time I was really focused on building a style that was so unique and no one else was going to shoot like me. And at the end of the day, being a photographer is such a saturated market, especially in the digital world we live in, we have photography so readily accessible. Once I was able to put aside focusing on creating a style and really focusing on the technicalities of it and actually just being able to be myself and provide a service where people actually enjoyed being around me at weddings and had a good time and focusing on providing a great service, everything flowed from there.

But in saying that, that doesn’t come for someone who’s wanting to enter the industry, that was on the back of having developed the craft, understanding the technicalities or photography, how to actually take a great photo, take a beautiful photo, how to edit and how to be able to add the salt and pepper to a style that I like that kind of did become me. But in terms of finding my USP, I think I just have to say it’s me because there’s no other me out there.

If you can have one final piece of advice, maybe something that made a big difference in your personal life or your business life, what would that one thing be?

Get a mentor, get a mentor. Absolutely. A lot of reasons why, a mentor will be able to hopefully help fast track you in your career. Definitely did for me. They’ll be able to speak into your work and help critique your work and help you to get better as an artist, as a communicator, a visual communicator, as a photographer, understand the technical aspects. Hopefully they can also teach you good business acumen as well. It’s really important as a creative, we tend not to naturally go into the business space and know how to run an efficient business, know how to manage our accounts and things like that. So that in itself is really important. So yeah. Get a mentor, get a great accountant and start focusing on multiple streams of income as well. Because we live in such an uncertain world. If you’ve got one stream of income, your running super high risk. So focus on how you can build multiple streams of income through your craft or even outside of your craft.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Tim for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally