093: Miranda Hayek: Creating a Sustainable Business & Adding Video To Your Business Model

So I’m going to speak to it from two perspectives. I do have a marketing background. I went to school for marketing. So there’s this whole camp of thought on marketing, and of course it’s evolving all the time, like we just said with social media and stuff. But I think with marketing, I would encourage people not to jump on the bandwagon.

We had this time where you wanted to have all these websites because you were basically spreading your wings out in the online presence. The more territory you occupy, the better you offer. Then it was no, you want to funnel everything into one page and the one-page website. And so everything was there. And then it was social media ads and then now, it’s … So it keeps evolving.

But I think whatever you do, you really have to be true to yourself and true to … You got to run your course. It’s kind of like the tortoise or the hare. It’s like it’s better to make little progress forward every day than to be jumping like a flea all over the place thinking where you’re going to get your next bite.

And so for me, that is really proven helpful and successful in my career. And so I live by them. I live by the big fish philosophy. I am about 25 miles south of Los Angeles and people assume that I do a lot of head shots for actors or actresses or whatever. And then I’m doing all that and I’m chasing that market.

And honestly, I do very little of that even though I’m so close because I feel like Long Beach is such a big city. Even in the United States, it’s such a big city. And even within that city, if you don’t dominate your zip code and you don’t funnel your energy into marketing in your area and not just in one platform. I’ve done radio, I’ve done print, I’ve done … You name it, I’ve kind of dipped my toe in a little bit of everything.

I feel like if you are not the big fish in your pond, then you have no chance of being a fish at all in bigger ponds. And so my marketing efforts and what I would tell people starting out right now, it start with your circle of influence and grow from there. It’s kind of like the pebble in the lake. You drop it and those little waves.

And just stick with it. It’s not going to happen overnight, and keep a very consistent clear message. I think what I see a lot when people start something new and it’s good to some degree. In fact, I was on a very, I won’t say unusual, but different than my typical shoot yesterday. And I kind of laughed a little bit and the gal goes, “You’re doing great. I don’t know why you would do this more often.”

And I said, “I love it.” I said, “I used to do a lot of this at the beginning of my career.” I kind of miss it a little bit because when you first start taking photographs, you’re just taking photos of everything. If you give a kid a camera, they’re just like the floor, the sky. They’re laying down everywhere and you’re tilting your camera and you’re doing all kinds of funky stuff because you’re just playing.

And I think at some point when you start to create a system and you start to make it a “legitimate business”, you lose some of that playfulness. And so I think if you can, it’s kind of many of the philosophers and even the Bible talk about keeping a childlike heart is that you need to play. And so along with being consistent in your efforts and dipping your toe into things and seeing where it takes shape is that I feel like you have to play, you to just explore a little bit.

And I think that it applies to marketing, it applies to growth, it applies to your specialization. It’s okay to decide all of a sudden that you just don’t enjoy that part of photography, you want to really work on this. The more you know yourself, it’s kind of like dating. The more you know yourself, the greater chance you have of connecting with the person that gets you.

And so the same applies to business. I feel that your marketing efforts have to be consistent. They have to start in your circle of influence and they have to be a clear message to be effective and just keep at it, keep … Repeat, repeat, rinse, repeat. And of course if it’s not working, you don’t want to, what is it they say that doing things over and over again is not going to change them?

But yeah, for me, that’s proven very, very successful is that I’ve kind of figured out the things that work in my city and I just, I’ve dominated them. I’ve become the big fish in that pond. And what I found after 15 years is even though I have had the pleasure and luxury to work in different parts of the country and different parts of the world, I really have no need for it. There’s so much business in my zip code alone that there’s plenty here. There’s plenty to go around. I love all the photographers in my city because there’s business for all of us.

And so it trickles into every aspect of my business. And it’s something that I really do talk about with people that I mentor, is that if you haven’t figured that part of it out, you’re just throwing money or effort at things that you’re just darts on the wall. You don’t really know what you’re doing.

And people that are out in the industry today that are coaches and marketers and whatnot, may have a different skew on it because you do have to keep a thumb on the pulse, on what’s happening with marketing and like we talked about earlier, social media. The aged old consistency and clarity will still pay off 10 times over anything else.

Similar to the prior question, I think you need to do what you like and what works for you. If you’re not doing print because you’re afraid or you’re not comfortable with it, a lot of times I hear from people I don’t like sales, then it’s really not the print or the digital. That’s the question, is that how comfortable are you as a business owner, and where you have to understand what it is your target is to sustainability.

And so the things I’ve found is that photographers, and you’ll go to any photographer’s website right now for the most part, probably my own. And it says something about capturing memories for a lifetime, heirloom, blah, blah, blah, blah. I used to see this when I did weddings. Everybody would talk about this is the one thing that will last your wedding is that these photographs.

But in reality, we are literally in the most photographed generation in history and we potentially could cease to exist because we drop our phones in the toilet, our computers get wiped out, whatever. And we don’t remember how many times a driver disk corrupted and we don’t remember what was on that disk. Not to mention that digital is not archival. And so somebody might argue, well neither is print because your house could catch on fire and you’re not …

So I’m a big believer of both. I love both. And I know that’s probably not the answer that you maybe were looking for, but I have two models in my business. The print model is what I use for my fine art family stories. And what I learned at about year five, and this is something that I would tell people all the time, is that if you’re not presenting your work in person, you’re leaving huge amounts of money on the table. There’s a reason why I’ve been able to ride pandemic through and dips in economy and still make the kind of money that I make is because I present my work in person.

And so I do that on the fine arts side, in the print model, and I also do it on my digital side. So the digital side of my business, which is Blossom Blue Studios, Blossom Blue Photography is the print model, which is for families. The commercial side is all digital.

My price point has not changed. In fact, if you look at the model, at the menus on both of my models, the pricing is very comparable. The only difference is that we’re printing. Occasionally with the commercial client like at the session I did yesterday, I will still print something for them so that when they see my work, they’ll see it in print still. But for the most part, the menu is all digital product and services like websites and logos and things like that and branding and whatever.

And so there’s a place for both. Obviously, in the commercial world there’s print in the sense of billboards and books and things like that that I do get an opportunity to work with authors and things. But even with books, they’re all downloadable on Amazon now.

So it’s one of those things, like at the beginning we talked about, it’s like you can’t just say, I don’t want to do that and become obsolete. The reality is that we are in a digital world. If you’re not embracing digital, you’re going to lose out. And if you are saying, “I don’t want to hassle with print and I don’t want to carry products and I don’t …” You’re also missing out because I actually don’t carry a lot of products. I literally believe in the power of one.

It’s kind of like on your phone and if you have an iPhone anyway, you have the little heart. So you take 10 pictures of your cat that’s doing something cute or your kid is walking or whatever is adorable in the moment, and you take 10 pictures of them on your phone and then you say you’re going to go back and pick the best one, right? Well, you never do. You never go back and pick the best picture of your cat. You just end up with 50 million pictures of your cat.

And so I tell people, look at the picture and just give it a heart. Give the best one a heart. And what it does is it creates a favorites folder. And so the same thing goes for anything that you photograph. It’s like you don’t have to print your whole session. It doesn’t have to be an album. It doesn’t have to be huge on a wall, pick one.

Because if you look in history, probably most of us have an 8×10 photograph matted in most cases of your grandparents or your great-grandparents. And the power of the 8×10, I mean I could do a whole session on the power of the 8×10. And it’s what’s helped me be sustainable.

When I was a single parent, I’ve supported … My kids are now in college, but I’ve supported my family full-time on photography. And it wasn’t because I was brave and I thought I was great, it was because I lost my job and I had no other option. So I got kicked out of the nest and I gave myself three months that turned into 15 years.

So I can’t say I was brave at all, but it happened. And I can tell you, I paid my last mortgage payment on those three months of severance pay with photography. And it was because I didn’t have the luxury to say, “Oh, this is extra cash that I’m using for our family’s vacation.” This was I’m putting food on the table. And if I had not incorporated some form of in-person viewing, I would not have been able to feed my kids.

And so more importantly than print and digital is that you should be showing your work in person regardless of the format, and that format should be easy and simple and appeal to you. Make it your own. If you do that, then you don’t … You don’t want to print, don’t print. You want to print, print. I tell people, if people aren’t paying your bills, they don’t get a vote. So, consult those that are paying your bills, which is probably you and you’re the only one that counts.