Be so good you can't be ignored.
This October marks 6 months since I left corporate to be a full time photographer and i've been having this conversation with friends quite often since I arrived in Brazil.
The questions i get the most are WHY and HOW
Well, I spoke about the why quite a few times here and on my Instagram.
And the how can be summarized into two main things:
Planning and education
When I made the decision of switching careers I had 4 months of notice at my previous job which was enough time to create a strategic plan to achieve my financial goals, and the execution of that strategy.
While the goals were mainly financial, as I had a minimum income I needed to make over the course of 6 months to support my lifestyle as a photographer, the strategy to achieve those goals involved a variety of things, because you don't just achieve financial goals without sales, and you don't sell without the gear, the knowledge, the quality in your work, the portfolio, the practice and all other things that comes with being good at the job.
But with all of those things that I had to tick in order to get to the sales, the most important to me has always been education, one that I didn't hold back in investing into since I started as a professional photographer.
Not only was I turning a hobby into a full time profession and I had to master my photographic skills so I had the confidence to sell my work, but I also had to rewire my brain on everything I knew about business to suit a photography business.
Surely business is business and the same concepts apply to most things. And having my business management background and an experience in high end customer service helped a lot in this new photography career.
But how do you create a customer workflow in a photography business? How do you price yourself? How do I widen my reach to be visible to new potential clients?
I've mentioned this a few times already but there's this one book I really like - So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport - that really changed the way I look at my career (or any career, for that matter).
The author brings a lot of perspectives on career, and one of them is to adopt the craftsman mindset, which is treating your job as a craft: which means focus on gaining rare and valuable skills until you ‘become so good they can’t ignore you’ (this last one is from the comedian Steve Martin).
To justify this, the author defines what he calls ‘The Career Capital Theory of Great Work’:
The traits that define great work are rare and valuable. Specifically, desirable jobs are creative, allow you to create large impact, and give you control over your work and life.
Consequently, supply and demand indicates that you need to offer rare and valuable skills in return. These rare and valuable skills are what Newport refers to as your career capital.
The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming ‘so good they can’t ignore you’, is by definition the pursuit of gaining rare and valuable skills. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.
Which is why I believe that when you invest on your education and acknowledge that there will always be something to improve and learn more about, you will become un-ignorable.
The thing I love about the internet is that you can learn pretty much anything for free from amazing people, and then choose where to invest your hard earned money.
(But there's also a lot of shallow education being aggressively sold online, so I strongly encourage you to do your homework and look up the educators, their career progressions and perhaps watch some of the 'free trainings’ most educators offer before selling a product so you know what is the quality of the material.)
When I was first hooked into photography I learned A LOT from Peter McKinnon's YouTube channel - that offers an abnormal amount of free high quality photographic skills training and editing lessons, which also made me start looking at new names in photography and branch out to other educators.
Gordon Park's documentary ‘A Choice of Weapons’ also shaped up my perception on having empathy for the subject and on documentary photography (seriously, watch it if you haven't yet)
Greg Williams teaches a great deal on photography at any lighting situation, which also changed how I look at the lighting that is available in any setting and working creatively with it.
And everything - seriously, everything - I learned about customer workflow, pricing and photography business I learned from the one and only India Earl, who has a million years as a photographer on her back and learned everything from her own experience of charging $50 per session until getting to where she is now.
A couple months ago I went to Utah to an in-person workshop with her, Sam (CEO of Sauce Media Group) and Kinzie Madsen (Entrepreneur and Business Coach) and I was lucky enough to do a 1:1 on pricing strategy with India the very next day.
Everything I learned was a game changer to my business and it has only been a little over a month. She talked a lot about how to position yourself as a photographer to whichever niche you wish to explore, to know your worth and mostly to know how to charge for it
If you're not a photographer, I encourage you to follow her just to see her beautiful work.
But if you are one, then check out the Pricing Workshop she just launched. It has everything and more, and is the best investment I've done so far. Click on the link to learn about the whole content.
There are a lot more incredible educators out there, teaching exactly what we need to learn right now. If you know of any one that you swear by (doesn't need to be a photographer) please share with me, and I'll keep sharing my findings here and on my instagram.
Obrigada,
Fernanda.