Original subtitles

Let's talk a bit about building your brand

or building a micro brand.

So clearly, when you look at Greg and his business,

Greg Williams Photography,

as I've already said,

it's a brand.

It would be fair to call it a brand

and it has this mad basically

because of Instagram

and all of Greg's connections.

Greg's brand has this incredible reach.

And from the minute you start out as a photographer,

you do need to consciously acknowledge

that you're building a brand.

Let's assume that you feel

that you've established your sort of singular voice

or unique view as a photographer

and you're starting to build that out as a portfolio.

What I mean by building a brand

is now that everything that you put around it,

everything that you put around the work

is consistent with it, right?

So if you look at Greg Williams Photography,

his unique selling point

is his candid, authentic photographs

of movie stars essentially.

Now, it's important to say

that that's not all he does

but that's the USP, it's the brand,

it's the first thing,

it's we hope the first thing

that people think of when they think of Greg.

So then when you look at what Greg's put around that

over the years.

So there's a company, Greg Williams Photography.

That company has an identity, a logo, a website,

a headquarters, it has employees.

We put on events, we put on exhibitions, we publish.

And the ambition is a brand with integrity

where all of those things that we do come

from the same voice.

And it's not massively difficult

and it's really important not to over complicate it.

But as and when you start adding more layers

to the business,

so a corporate identity or a website or an employee,

it's really important that you feel

that all of those things look, feel

and can be consistent with your unique voice

as a photographer, whatever it is you're selling.

Another important aspect of building your fledging brand

is to not run before you can walk.

If you look at what Greg does, for instance,

it includes a very ambitious website,

a massively prolific career as a photographer,

lots and lots of videos.

We're doing podcasts,

we do books, we do magazines.

We do events, we've got a gallery.

We do product collaborations.

So it's a sort of ever-growing list

of new opportunities and ventures, right?

And I would urge you quite strongly when you start

to not start racing ahead

to all of these different things, right?

At the beginning, you need a unique perspective

as a photographer.

And you need to put around it the simple elements

that allow you to deliver that.

And I'm really talking now about the nuts and bolts.

You need an email address.

It probably doesn't matter what that email address,

what it actually is.

What matters is that the emails get answered

and they get answered properly,

professionally, quickly, right?

So either you need to do that yourself

or you need to find somebody

who's prepared to do it with or for you.

Similarly, that fledging brand needs a phone number.

And when people ring that phone number,

who are hopefully prospective clients,

the phone gets answered

and it gets answered properly

and the voice that comes through,

whether it's yours or your partner's

or somebody you've managed to employ,

that everything they say

is consistent with what you do.

So let's say you're getting started

in the automotive world.

Everybody needs to know a bit about cars, right?

Everybody needs to be able to speak about that.

It's a highly sophisticated

and competitive industry, right?

So they are going to expect a good level

of basic professionalism.

So these are the things that you need to put in place

to begin to build a brand.

What do we mean by brand?

Now, I'm not gonna pretend to be some sort of expert.

It's a really complicated area

and there are lots of incredibly bright people

who think and speak to this point.

But a good way to think about your brand

is to think about the conversations

about your business that you're not party to.

So if you worked with a client last month

and they were at an industry event

and somebody said, "Oh, I heard you had some pictures done.

How did that go? What was that like?"

The answer that that person gives to that question

is essentially your brand

or the answer that five people would give

to that question pretty much describes your brand.

So if they say, "The photographer was amazing,

incredibly creative but you couldn't get ahold of them

and delivery didn't go very smoothly."

Immediately your brand is undermined.

So you've established the photography credentials

of that brand

but everything else that requires it

to hang together has failed

and your chance of success is massively undermined.

Whereas I'd like to think where we...

And I'm gonna give our example

'cause it's the only one that I work on.

I'd like to think that people

who interact with Greg,

oh, I hear you shot with Greg Williams.

What was that like?

Yeah, he's got a highly experienced manager

who responds really quickly

and they worked very hard

to make sure that things went smoothly.

They delivered quickly.

What were the pictures like?

Yeah, I mean, they were everything you'd expect.

Felt really authentic, exclusive.

Greg's very charismatic.

He's great fun.

It was brilliant.

I'm not saying it always goes like that

but I'd like to think that a lot

of the conversations that people have

about Greg Williams Photography

that we're not party to

goes to some extent along those lines

and whilst that doesn't define the brand on its own,

it's indicative of the fact

that we're hopefully doing a lot

of the right things with our business and our brand.

So the likelihood is that you may be incorporating a company

or you're starting to trade on the back of your name.

And in that very moment,

you be clear that you're building a brand

and it's essential that just as Greg says,

50% professional, 50% photographer.

Please make sure that from the get go,

you meet basic professional thresholds,

where phones get answered,

emails get responded to,

you have the right level of insurance.

Basic things like that

that avoid things going really badly wrong.

Another thing that's central to our brand,

a business, and I think it will be true

of pretty much any business I think

is that you've got to be personable

and you've got to be pleasant to be around

and you've got to work hard.

And that sounds really obvious

but quite apart from giving people great pictures,

you must always be aiming

to give people a really, really good experience.

And quite often,

they can get the pictures from somebody else

and the thing that encourages them

to keep coming back

is that they enjoy working with you

and they wanna keep working with you.

So some of us are more social animals than others.

Some of us are happier banging out emails

and taking pride in the simple aspects

of being professional than others.

But if you do wanna make this work,

you've no choice but to be highly professional

and really, really great to work with.

You don't need a website straightaway,

you don't need a logo and an identity,

you don't need an office,

you don't need a separate phone.

You don't need a number of different email addresses

that people can use to obtain different information.

You literally just need to be relatively easy

to get ahold of in whatever form you decide that takes

and you need a solid portfolio somewhere,

probably Instagram.

And I would definitely recommend less is more.

Do the simple things really, really well

and then as your business grows,

add layers and complexity and ambition,

rather than saying oh right,

we're starting a business,

we're starting a brand.

We need a website, we need all these other things

that I've mentioned.

And here's a sort a bit of housekeeping

relating possibly to building a brand

and possibly to the fact

that you're now starting a small business

is you do need to make sure

that you've got basic professional skills.

Either you can write a decent email yourself

or there's somebody working with you who can do that.

Try and give the best telephone manner

that you possibly can.

Learn the fundamentals of spreadsheets.

I mean, I work on hundreds of spreadsheets

and I absolutely would have to admit

that I'm no expert whatsoever

but I can do enough

to budget big jobs.

And even if the jobs you're budgeting

are really quite modest,

you do need to know the basics of a spreadsheet.

And then trying to make that spreadsheet presentable.

And that's not that difficult.

It's an hour or two of mucking about

in whatever spreadsheet program you've decided to use

to turn something that looks a bit of a mess

into something that looks really professional.

And lastly, decks.

So we produce a lot of decks

and I think pretty much every contemporary creative business

probably produces a lot of decks.

What we mean by decks

are either a Google Sheet

or a PowerPoint full of examples

from your portfolio, references,

test shots that you might have shot,

basically like a creative,

it can be a mood board or a presentation,

a visual presentation.

Learn how to put together good visual presentations quickly

because again, you might find yourself pitching on a job,

there are two or three other people

that could do that work

and the fact that you turn around

and you've got the right portfolio,

you turn around a professional looking budget

that's easy to read and looks smart

and you've put together this deck

of visual assets

that resonates, that people respond to.

It's very likely that that's what gets you the job

and that it wasn't just the portfolio.

So to reiterate,

spend the time, and it's only a few days,

developing a set of I would say basic professional skills,

which you can't afford to not have in this day and age.