What I am learning from Chick-fil-A

Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, built his business on sampling and giving away food. So at the Chick-fil-A Kickoff, the company gave out its newest dessert, the chocolate chip cookie. Let me say from first-hand experience that those are pretty addicting.

Chick-fil-A gave away free cookies at Centennial Park on game day for the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic.

Truett Cathy knew that once you tried his food, the odds were pretty good that he could turn you into a customer.

Just to let you know how it is currently going for the Chick-fil-A chain, system-wide sales in 2012 reached $4.6 billion. These figures reflect a 14 percent increase over the chain’s 2011 performance and a same-store sales increase of 8 percent.

They have been debt free since 2012 and, in the future, plan to remain that way. What a position of strength they are in for growing the business today.

They built the success of giving away food is done all the time with simple Be Our Guest cards that Truett Cathy started. He realized he couldn’t have sandwiches with him all the time to give away, so he created a card with no strings attached that gave the holder a free product like their signature Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich.

Too many companies put up barriers with their promotions where they will give you something if you spend money first.

If anyone did a promotion where you didn’t control them, you would go bankrupt pretty quickly. These giveaways are strategic.

One of the best books on this concept of giving things away to build a business is by Chris Anderson. The book is Free: How today’s most innovative companies profit by giving something for nothing. Many, as the guy who “identified the next big thing,” praise Anderson.

Free is something ancient and not new.

Mr. Cathy founded Chick-fil-A, Inc. in the early 1960s and pioneered the establishment of restaurants in shopping malls by opening the first Chick-fil-A Restaurant at a mall in suburban Atlanta in 1967. Since then, Chick-fil-A has grown to become the second-largest quick-service chicken restaurant chain in the United States, with over 1,700 locations in 39 states and Washington, D.C.

Some of the comments about Chris Anderson’s book summarize what I think is happening today with today’s marketplace, and I feel it first hand happening to photography.

“Chris Anderson’s Free unpacks a paradox of the online marketplace—people making money charging nothing. What was once just a marketing gimmick has morphed into the basis of a trillion-dollar economy.”

—Newsweek

“Anderson’s timing couldn’t be better. Free arrives as whole swaths of the economy are having to contend with consumers finding ways—some illegal, many not—to go Free.”
—Boston Sunday Globe

The best one that I agree the most with is:

“I’d put Anderson and his work on par with Malcolm Gladwell and Clayton M. Christensen as one of the more important pieces of business philosophy published in the emerging global, digital era.”
—Alan T. Saracevic, San Francisco Chronicle

Tips for the Photographer

First, you must give a taste of what your clients will get when they hire you. Too many photographers make mistakes and forget that the client looks for examples of what they need. Most clients will not look at a photographer’s portfolio, which may be studio portraits, and assume they can also shoot environmental images.

I suggest having an online portfolio and breaking the portfolio up into different categories and examples. Due to how search engines like Google work, you must have other pages for those categories. When someone types in “photographer environmental portraits,” this will direct them to a list of photographers whose page will give them what they are looking for. They will not see your general portfolio. They are looking for a specific topic and type of image. Again, they are looking for a photographer to fulfill their need.

The key is not just to have a page with your specialty; to give this to the client just like Truett Cathy gives out free sandwiches. Of course, they need to see your photos to get a taste of what you can do. But it would help if you got them in front of them, not wait for them to find you.

Second, you need a marketing plan. You have images to show that a client need gives you the samples to now market. Just like Truett Cathy, you need to be strategic. Consider shooting examples that help clients know you can shoot for their needs. Who are you going to approach? What is your market?

Most of us do not have a bankroll to blanket our communities in advertising through a newspaper, television ad spots, direct mail, and more. Therefore, we have to target those who are most likely to need our services and have enough need that we can support our lifestyle.

Third, you need to market continuously. Too many make a mistake and market until the business starts getting work, and then one day, the market changes, and they wonder where the company went.

A good book on this topic is Spencer JoJohnson’sook Who Moved My Cheese? My friend Gary S. Chapman and his wife Vivian exposed me to his book a few years ago.

Fourth you need to change with the market. The key here is understanding your marketplace. If you want to shoot things your way and the way you want to do something, then keep this as a hobby. Professionals must satisfy a client to pay their bills.

I can see how I have moved into different markets throughout my career. For example, I started shooting for my college. Even as an independent photographer, I am changing jobs just like staff people might have to do when their company goes through layoffs. The market changed, and that client is no longer in business or no longer needs your services.

Last should be first, which is to know your vocation. Those who are the most successful are those who recognize a calling. Calling is what vocation means. You may have to move to continue to follow that calling.

There are two people in history that I think about that had primary callings and changed the world.

In the bible, Saul was the guy who tortured and killed the early Christians. You can find SaSaul’soment when he understood his vocation for the rest of his life in Acts 9. Here is a link if you have never heard this story here.

Saul changed his name to Paul and became the leader of the missionary movement for Christians. I want to point out that from the time of his calling until the time he went out as a missionary was three years. Please think of this as his college time to hone his craft.

The other person I want to point to is Jesus Christ. From his birth until his ministry began was 30 years.

Too many photographers buy a camera and announce they are photographers. But, unfortunately, it takes time to hone your craft to do this professionally.

Your goal is to create Raving Fans. Read Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles’s book Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service to learn more about a Raving Fan.

Once people taste your work and like it, they will hire you to fulfill their needs for images.

After you get those clients, could you do everything you can to keep them? It is far more accessible work to keep a client than the amount of work needed to find a client.

Using the 60 Minutes definition of a Robot as a machine that can perform the job of a human, I now see this is what happened and happening to photography.

Why should you read this?

I want to outline the way to avoid obsolescence of today’s photographer, but I need you to understand why this is happening.

Many people understand how many people lost their jobs to outsourcing, but this is also happening due to a machine that performs a job of a human.

I think many newspaper photographer for example are now “Technologically Unemployed” due to things like smarter cameras and smarter phones.

Early 35mm film cameras didn’t even have a light meter in them and today there is a computer in the camera doing much of the computations that a professional photographer would do in the past. 

Today’s camera is a robot that took over the job of the human: getting a good exposure and even focusing. This applies to all the clients that were hiring photographers for jobs that they knew what they wanted, but just didn’t know how to technologically make it happen.  That is no longer a problem for those clients.

How to avoid obsolescence

Evaluate everything you are doing for clients. If any part of what you do can be automated assume this doesn’t give clients reason to hire you.

This doesn’t mean get rid of this service, but know that this is more of a commodity.  

Evaluate all the resources your clients have and see what they have already designated to a machine. 

Selfies

Selfies are a good example where the machine has replace the photographer. In Wikipedia it says:

A selfie is a type of self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. The appeal of selfies comes from how easy they are to create and share, and the control they give self-photographers over how they present themselves. Many selfies are intended to present a flattering image of the person, especially to friends whom the photographer expects to be supportive. However, a 2013 study of Facebook users found that posting photos of oneself correlates with lower levels of social support from and intimacy with Facebook friends (except for those marked as Close Friends).

While self portraits go back to the brownie camera and using a mirror to take ones on photo, it was the advent of the camera phone and social media that these began to go viral.

I am sure this has hurt the portrait market.  What I thought was interesting that these Selfies are viewed as narcissistic if people are not close friends. This means that Selfies on Linkedin are probably not a good idea.

Be remarkable

Look to personalize your business model. Look for things you can do that are not easily automated. These personal touches are what clients will come back to you for over and over.

Too many photographers are looking to technology to separate them from the crowd, this is what makes them so easy to copy. Concentrate on your ideas, personality and creativity to separate yourself from the pack.

Look for the new technology and be an early adapter, because if you are the first in your community to offer something you can ride that for a while till the others start to copy you. Sometimes you can build your brand on always being the first to offer things in your market. You can charge a premium if this is your approach. If you are the late adopter to a fad you are entering a commodity market.

Here is a good exercise to help you think of ways to distinguish yourself. Think of those people you know that everyone enjoys. Now describe them on paper. After you do this with a few people you will see that their brand isn’t a machine, so why do so many photographers try and identify themselves by the camera they shoot? 

Be innovative. Be creative. Be yourself.

According to Rollo May, the first step in the creative process is the encounter. An excellent example would be something similar to this eight-point deer in our backyard.

Seeing the buck out our back window was engaging to say the least, for me.

For me, these are not all that creative in photography, but the encounter is what ignited my creative process of me. So I got my camera and was out the door shortly for a close meeting of my own.

To be creative, one must be intense. Just as the intensity of the encounter of the deer with me gave it a “flight-fight” response, so too must I be where my heart is pumping, and I feel the intensity of the encounter.

The more absorbed you become in the subject, the more you can think of ways to portray the subject. So instead of you feeling anxiety and fear, like the deer, and having a “flight-fight” response, Rollo May says the creative finds the “joy.” Robert Maslow would say we are self-actualized.

For me, this creativity comes when I have genuinely emersed myself into a subject to where all this information is firing the synapsis in my brain, making correlations that were not given to me but by my thoughts on the subject.

Before performing the genuinely creative act, one must have engaged all their being to the point that now the unconscious is as much at work as the conscious, allowing for those eureka moments.

However, when you start thinking like this, you must be courageous enough to start acting on these thoughts. They are new thoughts, and you are prone to failure by just working on them. You may try something only to discover that your thoughts are incomplete.

One of the main reasons for tenure for professors is for them to be creative. Therefore, they must be allowed to try crazy thoughts and occasionally fail at the possibility of scientific breakthroughs.

You may get help along the way to help you engage more on a subject. For example, my daughter spent most of the day with world-renowned viola player Pam Goldsmith and picked up a few pointers to improve her viola skills.

Stages of the Creativity

1. Encounter
2. Emersion into the subject
3. Incubation
4. Eureka moments
5. Execution
6. Verification

Some people never move through the stages. They may get excited about taking photos, for example. They are in love with the process more than the results. These people have difficulty understanding why no one hires them for jobs. They lack creativity.

Creativity can be in the form of ideas or new ways of thinking, but they are not bringing anything new to the table. 

Malcolm Gladwell says from his research that it is about 10,000 hours before the artist has mastered the craft enough to be creative. While this may be all for a bell curve,e I believe it comes much late for many folks. 

Time commitment is the best way to know if you are getting close. Do you have the courage and fortitude to commit yourself to what is needed? How much do you know about the subject you want to photograph? 

Become an expert on the topics you want to photograph, and I can guarantee that you are very close to seeing new possibilities and ideas for photographing this subject in a way others cannot. 

Some people are amazed at how some photographers are just always getting incredible photos. However, I notice that these people can anticipate where they need to be to get the best possible moment with the best possible light and composition.