Own Your Work, a Pitch for a Sprint, and Chapter Two of "Dare to Succeed"

Happy Thursday everyone. Let's dive in, as they say.

Welcome everyone!

Almost the weekend. Yeay!

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me.

Today I have a little story about a time when I learned something about being in charge of my own vision and being responsible to it.

Fall is in the air. Our mornings are getting cooler now, and soon the color will begin to overwhelm the senses. Photo by me. Keblar Pass, CO.

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“Who is this clown”, he whispered sharply to me as we huddled over the light table to examine yet another instantly created “Fauxlaroid”.*

The smell of fixer was still fresh, and the large, 8x10 print was dripping water on the counter. I reached for a towel and hushedly asked him, “Can we please this guy?”

He looked up at me and shook his head.

“I am beginning to doubt that outcome,” he said wryly.

This was the fifth or sixth time we had worked together on a shoot. He was a tyrant of an AD. He knew what he wanted; he wouldn’t accept anything less than 100% perfection to his standards, and he fought hard for the image he needed.

Emotions ran high on shoots like this.

From being amazed at what we did together to hating each other’s guts within a matter of a few minutes.

But I loved shooting with him because he made me a better photographer.

This time, it was a little different.

We were working on a still-life product shot on this crisp autumn morning, and tempers were wearing thin. The client, a junior guy from the company’s marketing department, had no idea what he wanted, and the art director from the ad agency was getting impatient.

With each other.

With me.

“Take over this shoot and make this guy happy enough to think he’s got it”, he said as he stood up, walked over to a chair, and sat down with a magazine.

I approached the client with the new ‘fauxlaroid” floating the aroma of fixer across the studio and showed it to him. He mumbled something about depth, and I told him I needed to know exactly what he wanted on the set and where. We were running out of time, and he was all over the place with changes.

All I could think of was “Doofus”.

Maybe it was a little unfair to be so critical of the guy, but this occasionally happened in the ad world. A junior worker was sent to do something ‘important’ with a skewed vision inside his mind of what a powerful senior “marketing god” would do and how they would behave.

You know; in charge.
My way or the highway.
I’m the marketing genius here.
A literal tyrant whose every whim was to be obeyed.

He looked stressed and a bit flabbergasted, but I began to insist he make some choices as there were only so many ways to shoot a bottle of hand soap on a sink.

“Own your work”, I was saying to him in my mind.

“Show me exactly what you want”, is what I said out loud.

He set about putting the items on the set into the composition he felt was right.

It sucked.

In fact, it sucked the suck clean out of suck.

I pulled another “fauxlaroid” and he finally said yes.

“Excellent”, I said as I handed him the sign-off sheet that put his responsibility for the acceptance of the image front and center.

Twenty minutes later, we boxed up the exposed transparencies and sent them over to the lab. I would pick them up in the morning and deliver them to the ad agency.

I wondered what to do at that point. It was not my best work, in fact, it wasn’t even good work.

I felt really uncomfortable with the whole thing.

I had charged a lot of money to make a photograph that was, well, ugly.

Ugly as shit.

After he left, the AD came over and said… “now, let’s get to work.”

I smiled and jumped into action.

We spent the next two hours reshooting the ad correctly, the way we knew it had to be done.

And we were right to do so.

The agency director was very unhappy with the shoot when the AD delivered the images to him and the marketing VP that afternoon.

He looked at the huge slides on the light table and said, “This is not what I expected. I thought we were clear on the direction.”

The junior marketing guy began throwing the AD—and me—under the bus.

“I kept telling them how I wanted it, and they wouldn’t listen,” he whined.

The AD later told me that he just sat there while the marketing guy blamed everyone but the governor for the bad shoot before he brought out the two versions we had done together after Junior had left.

And the sign-off sheet with his signature on it.

The marketing VIP loved them.

Well, not the sign-off sheet so much.

Things got frosty between VP and Junior, and the agency ran both of the other shoots in trade magazines for a year.

Own your shoot.
Own your work.
Own your vision.

Sometimes things will come along and try to derail you or push you into a place where you don’t want to be. Fight back and do whatever you have to do.

We could have let that guy walk out of the studio with that terrible shot and just said - screw it, I tried.

But we stayed on for a few hours more to own our vision, own our work, and own the reasons we got into this game to begin with.

It is what keeps us grounded in a sense of knowing who we are.

(* For those of you who are wondering what a ‘fauxlaroid’ is. 8x10 Polaroid film was very expensive in those days and hard to get to boot. There was none available for the shoot, so we used PlusX black and white sheet film to test our shots. Shoot the film, rush it back to the darkroom and develop it for 90 seconds in Dektol, which is a developer for paper. Fix and rinse it quickly, make a contact black and white print - also fixed and rinsed quickly and deliver it up front for viewing. Real Polaroids took two minutes, fauxlaroids took five. It was a cheap and relatively fast way to make sure focus and composition were what we wanted.)

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I am contemplating doing a Client Acquisition Sprint in Mid-October.

Instead of taking six or eight weeks to do the course, we do it in two days.

Course outline:

SATURDAY

9 - 11:30:
2.5 hours:

• How to know what to offer

• The difference between goals and systems

• Developing a client-driven portfolio

• Genres and Markets

1.5 Break for lunch and prep for the next session.

1 PM - 3:30 PM
2.5 hours

• Finding Channels (sub genres)

• Understanding how to find subchannels

• Types of clients and how they differ

• Getting Personal with your contacts

5 PM - 6:30 PM
1.5 hours

• Questions and Answers

SUNDAY

9 AM - 10:30 AM
1.5 hours

• The Google Method of finding clients

11 AM - 1 PM
2 hours

• Bidding and Contracts

• Best practices

• Understanding the sales process

• Creating a simple marketing plan

2 PM - 3:30 PM
1.5 hours

• Questions and Answers

That is an eleven-hour sprint that will take you from not knowing any clients to a list of possibilities that you can launch on Monday.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I want to keep the price under $100 so as many can take it as possible.

Real, actionable information you can use.

Your thoughts?

I hope you consider becoming a subscriber, or even a premium subscriber if you are so inclined. Premium members get more content to keep them happy. I am giving away my book, “Dare to Succeed” one chapter at a time in the Premium Membership.

Join us - you’ll have fun.