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The Birth of Hybrid Sales

I'm gonna spend most of my time guys between seated here because I've got a ton of videos and a ton of notes that they need to show you as well as the conversations that we're gonna have. We're gonna have a handful of different conversations on a variety of different topics, but they're all going to be related One where it or another to how we're going to be able to generate a dollar with creative photography. Now, this does go hand in hand with traditional photography, and it does depend on what kind of photographers you are. Did get a chance last night to talk to ah, few of the folks on the Lincoln Group as well as some of the private emails that I received yesterday, and they're concerned that all right, well, you've seem to have abandoned your commercial photography roots and have gone more towards portrait photography. How do you extend hybrid photography back into in the commercial world? That's a great question. We are going to answer that. In fact, let's kick off with that. If ...

you don't mind the first thing that we we realize what we talk about the old days of the Will Crockett educational system is I became popular, maybe as an Internet type of person, because I was able to go with him. That crazy technical knowledge we talked about yesterday the fact that I can fly a color meter and I know how filters work, and I can read a dense determiner. And I know all those different types of pieces that are inside a color lab because I was trained to actually be a guy that could be a technician in a film based color lab. Well, one of the things that I did was I kept crazy notes about when I would go into a factory and I would see a very specific type of light. I would take a picture of it. I would document it. I would try to find out from the technical person what kind of light that was, and I try to get a model number as best I could. Then I would figure out what the filtration value was for that. So if I was going to use a particular film and I wanted to have pretty decent looking color, I was gonna have to use filters on my camera remember, not gels or filters, if you will up on your light source, because that's not the way it's gonna be. Well, we did that for 2025 years, and we talked a little bit about it yesterday that I got to travel the world to in order to photograph all those factories, right. I was a commercial industrial advertising photographer. I still do a little bit of that, but the images that you see surrounding me air primarily one of the things that I really like to do and that are generating a profit for us. There are many reasons for that. It's kind of funny as I started my career as a portrait photographer, and now, as I'm ending going into the twilight years of my career, I'm gonna end. My career is more of a portrait photographer. Ah, lot of it's got to do with the fact that I do have some health issues, right? I've got an artificial leg and I can't really climb and go and go up on catwalks the way I used to us. But that doesn't mean I have abandoned my my commercial photography folks at all my commercial clients in the slightest bit. I think the e card pro, the big bust out peace that we've had, which is only one of many different pieces of E products that we're going to be able to sell, has has been a success. And in fact, it's been success primarily because of the commercial folks, Right? People asked. They said, Okay, will you meet somebody into an airport? And they say, Well, what do you do it? So I'm a commercial hybrid photographer? Wow, that's interesting. What's a commercial hybrid photographer said. Well, that's a photographer that has the ability to shoot photo and video and whatever. Of course, then you know the next thing. The next question is, I'm gonna ask you for your card. Well, they want to know what my business card is, so I'm going to use the link system that I typically will send them an email. So here's how it works, I asked them. In fact, we'll go over this back a little bit later today to I'm gonna ask them. Remember, we're in an airport condition and they're going to say, Hey, I use an electronic business card. I no longer use a printed business card. Would you mind if I sent you one to your cell phone? Said, But I will delete your cell phone number once it goes through, and I'll show them that. I'll delete that because, ah, lot of people are very resistant in order to giving up their cell phone number. And I get that. And I don't want I want to know, because if you're meeting the CEO of some you know, Bank of America and you don't even know it, you don't want to have their personal. So well, you sure you'd love to have the personal cell phone number? But they probably don't want you to have it, so I'll ask them what their number is. I'll send them over a little text, of course, And then we're gonna hit. We will play our e card pro right on my card Pro. You've seen it already. Let me just show you here. So I'm gonna be doing my presentation. Here. We are in the airport, right? I'm just kind of taking a look at it. I'm holding it out just like this. And at some point because of my body posture, my body language pretty much going to grab it. They're going to take a look at it. Remember, it's only gonna be 28 seconds loans, and they're going to be impressed. They're going to be impressed because of what we talked about yesterday, Chris. The fact that they're seeing that I know what I'm doing, obviously, because of the quality of the info that's on there, I've got skills, right? I've got the ability to go ahead and light. But what they also see is something that they that they don't normally see. And this is something I got a ton of questions on the Internet last night was Will. Why air you lighting like a photographer and not lighting like a videographer? Don't you know that it's lots easier, the light like video guys line ago? Well, hang on a second. This isn't the Hatfields and the McCoys were talking about the ability for me to sell my product to a customer. I feel that it's important for me to use my lighting style, that style that you saw right there. You've got that beautiful soft mainland you've got that Sparky feel like you've got that background that's a lit, typically with a different color, right? I don't mind having contrasts, right. I like to have warm skin. Schoen's neutral fill lights. I'll take a typically a super warm hair light or kicker light, and then I'll make the rest of the room dark blue. Now that's more of a photo lighting set up than it is a video lighting set up. Now that's one of the things that I bring with me. So when I move into something like hybrid, I'm bringing things with me. I'm also leaving some things behind when I talk to photographers and I asked them, Why would you want to get into hybrid photography? Right? Say, for instance, when I go to a convention and I do a program or the volumes of email that I've got here, I have 1700 unready emails in the last 2.5 days. Now, I normally get about 60 emails a day, and that's a lot. All of it's got to do with questions from here. Opportunities from here. How do I get started from here? I mean, we can easily keep going for another week to answer. We could just sit and do what? Answer wills. Emails kind of question and answer session here, too, without a problem, right? And we could get a lot of info, but what I want to do. But he is. I want to call that info as quickly as I can to get to how you and you and you and you can start that process of selling hybrid photography because don't forget my big worry. You know what it is. My big worry is that photography will no longer be professional photography. It will become a commodity that can be created by anyone by anywhere. Yeah, camera technology, me. Look, a phone's camera technology has allowed us to make beautiful photographs. What if all of a sudden lighting becomes really easy? Because L. E. D's have made things super simple? Let's take let's take it a step even further, right? Let's say all of a sudden that there's a new technology that pops out and it uses a substrate, right? A substrate Say it uses a sheet of what looks like a sheet of paper. And what if you're able to take a small clip to it, you're able to clip to it like this, and then you can either take this to the wall. You can hang it from a ceiling, or you can wrap it around wherever you want to, or you can roll it up and you can put it inside the glove box of a car. And what if all of a sudden you gonna dress that wirelessly? And what if that little clip had a small little battery in it? One, if a little bit of electricity from a small little battery would allow a substrate toe light up, and it would give you enough volume of light without generating any heat that you would be able tow light. You know, eso 1600 from three feet, four feet at F 28 What if you're talking about riel light, then what if you're talking about the ability to address that with an app, But now all of a sudden will hang on a second. I now have a light in a glove box of a car that I could launch an app and I can adjust how bright I want it to be, what color I want it to be. And in fact I can put a timer on it so that if I wanted to open up If I wanted to be like When I open up the glove box, I can have it Wait 10 seconds and then it turns on or 10 seconds and it turns off. Look, you think all that stuff science fiction? Oh, it's not. Oh, it's not know that stuff's coming. My fear is that smart people, this next generation, but you know, us. Even those goofy looking is Louis is He's a smart kid, right? He's my guy when that generation realizes they're really comfortable with stuff like this, right? Our generation Chris Lorenzo were not comfortable with the idea of thinking that this is really they are. They don't have a problem with that. What happens when we have that little inverse where all of a sudden, the guys like you and I that have the experience all of a sudden we know how to sell, right? We've got that built into our blood, their generation, they don't know how to sell, yet they don't have those little cues. Not at all. They've got the technical skills. They've got the ability to learn real quick. Well, we don't our generation doesn't we break them up into two different groups. We break them up into the 20 year veteran photographers. The photographers that have been shooting for 20 plus years have seen a lot. They've got skills. They pretty much all got sales skills. They've all got photo skills. They've all got people skills. They've all got other skills that they can use that to apply to their businesses. Right. Well, that's one group then we've got the year olds that they are really quick to adapt to. Technology technology doesn't scare them. Their reflex time, for instance, watching them play gears of war. If you If you think just for a second that you know more about technology than a 20 year old does go play gears of war with your son, right? Oh, good luck with that, right? I got today laugh at me and they think it's hilarious. Alright, comes Mr Crockett. You were to kill him in less than four seconds or No, you're not yet. You already did it, sir. I'm already dead. Yeah. So we need to address the idea that as photographers move in to a way of generating an income, one of the ways they're gonna choose is hybrid photography. Ah, living example of that is ah, person that I hired right that I hired. We grew as, ah, hybrid photo company. We grew and we go real quick, right? You know the story here? We decided that we were going to move into educational content, Of course. Still, in the commercial and industrial vein, we're still shooting all kinds of commercial work. We do still do a lot of corporate headshot, you know, boring kind of corporate headshots stuff. But I wanted to make more. I wanted to make the e card pro. Now I know that there's a lot of people that we mail wise that got in touch with us and said, You know, well, it's a little bit much about the eat card Pro. I don't care about selling e card pro. I want to talk about some of the other eat products that you got it. OK, we've got him. And don't forget we're developing more as we go. But here's my story. My story is that there's a young lady in Iowa and her name is Patty Bradley, and she'll be joining us a little bit later. Patti Bradley had a very successful business in Iowa and Iowa has very rural of course, community. And she was not in one of the larger city. She was between three or four, you know, maybe be level or sea level sized cities and was with go to spot in order for people to go to get Senior Portrait's done and for weddings. And she had a very healthy business for a long time. I could remember meeting Pat years ago and seeing her as a successful photographer. Innately, really, That's really cool. I know the lab that you used. I was very proud to be able to know her well. I ended up contacting back to her a couple of years ago, actually threw her lab on her lab, is their friends of ours and asked her. I said, Hey, how's business do? And she said, You know, we're doing okay, but we're kind of getting clobbered from the folks that by digital camera, and they're able to go shoot a wedding and then they sell the DVD for 550 bucks and they walk away. You know, it's really killing us. Well, hang on a second looking. You've gotta understand their business Bible first, and that business model first is that, well, they're going to be selling that right for them. That's profitable. They're spending six or seven hours and they're making 4 $500. Well, OK from their porn of you, they've only got, say, $1000 invested into photo equipment. They're having fun doing it share. It gobbles up Saturday, but to them, that's very profitable. But to somebody like Patty Bradley, that's got a studio. It's got overhead with That's not profitable, the slightest right. That's a problem. That's a big problem. So we need to be able to have what we call the birth of hybrid photography sales. And that birth is going to be different methods and different ways. In fact, so your hybrid photography birth. How you inject that into your business is going to be different than it is for Chris. And of course, it's going to be very different than the way that we do it here right the way that we've done in the past. So we're gonna talk about that today in a couple of different ways. I want to show you first of all, one of the ways that we handle how we're going to deal with the first major product of E e product photography, hybrid photography, and that is the Eat Card pro. Now I'm gonna go back and forth between a handful of different websites, and one of them is, uh, it's going to be our current one, of course, which is Chicago Portrait photography dot pro were migrating that away from our old brand, which was called Hauser town dot com, in honor of world famous photographer Mark Hauser. But we're we've got some videos that are still going to be on the House of Town thing, and I want you to freak out any time you see a video that will be on the house or town piece. Don't worry about it. It's actually going to be on the new new version. The Crockett version. Well, the 1st 1 that I want to talk about is when I sell an e card pro to a small business person and guess who this happens to be. And today I'm here to tell you why I am so excited about that new e card pro template. Now, like many people here, I come from the portrait side of photography, but I do have some one of a commercial background. I have photographed office spaces and little kids on green Tractors were toy companies and big machines for factories. But my biggest client commercially was always for a head shot. So that would be working with the bank or a real estate agency or an insurance agency, that type of thing. And in the past few years, I've noticed that there's been an increase in this business because more people are building websites and the website developers are encouraging people to have a professional headshot done now. A couple years ago, I looked at my portrait business and I looked at my competition and I realized there were a lot more photographers and a lot more photographers that were willing to work for a lot less money. Now that had me concerned. So I realized that my portrait business was probably going to be a little more contained in a little more part time, so I needed to find a new market, and I look at the small business market and I thought, Well, this is something I could dio and I added in another feature, I also sell insurance. Now. Something happened that proved to me today that we could all profit by selling the e card pro. Now the first insurance company I went to work for was a really large company and had a really great CRM system that would instantly send out an email to a prospective client. Now the email originally did not have photographs and their work photographs on the website, which I kind of made a change there, and I also photographed quite a few of the agents and of the agents were able to have their own personal website with their own photographs and information and again that went instantly out to a client. And I know myself that that was what made a difference in booked a lot of clients. As a matter of fact, we ended the year as a sales team of the year, and our agency manager was agency manager of the year. So that wasn't really to me a coincidence. It was good marketing. So my client is in sales and marketing, so this is my focus. Real estate, banking, insurers, hospitals, thes people understand the importance of this product and it makes it easy to sell. They understand that the phone is the best place to reach a client. And where else would I want my business card? But in the customer's phone contact list? If you want more information on building E cards, look for it here on discovered wireless dot com. Nonsense. Here we go. Guess we learned out of there we learned where a person who was struggling to keep their business alive right Patty Bradley may have waited just a little bit too long. A lot of photographers do that. A lot of photographers, when they see a change in the economic climate or they see a change in technology. Or we talked a little bit about it yesterday when they were photographers that were shooting film, and they said, I'm going to shoot film until the day that I die right? And they said, Digital is gonna take 20 years to take over and films always going to be around And the film manufacturers were real quick to say, You're exactly right. We're gonna have film for you for a long time. Well, of course they had to say that because they didn't want people to just bail out and start buying danger cameras, right? So it's not the film manufacturers fall. It's the photographers fault for not feel during through the right data that they needed. Patty filtered through the data, and she saw what she didn't want to see. Patty saw that her studio was going to fail if she wasn't able to somehow add a new way of reaching out to her folks and getting more business. Now, remember, PET is the opposite of Will Crockett. I was a commercial photographer first, and I had a successful business that was location based, not studio amazed for a long time now. Hers was a studio based. It was in the back of her home, but in fact it was its own building. I mean, it was very impressive space. Her space was shooting portrait's and shooting seniors and families and weddings. Well, all of a sudden, she has to enter into commercial photography. She's not real sure how to do that. So did you notice how she worded that she talked about insurance? Patty didn't want to give up on the on the photo business, and that's her dream. There's no way she wanted to bail out on that dream. So the smart thing for Patty to do probably would have been to just say Forget it. This photo business thing, is it gonna work anymore in this section of Iowa I'm gonna bail out and I'm going to go take a job somewhere. And there she's gonna be. But instead, you know what she did. She got a second job. She got a second job as selling insurance. You know why? She's a really good sales person. You know why she's a really good sales person because she's a really good photographer. Well, you're a really good photographer. You happen to be a real good sales person at the same time they go hand in hand. You really well. There are very few. I'm sure that there are very few people that are not good photographers. That happened to be good sales people. And of course, we know that there are plenty of photographers that wish they were much better salespeople. Patty said in that in that video, if you happen to mention that she went right to riel estate folks and she went to banker folks and she went to her hospital folks, why Well, those were the ones that were already coming in for pictures. So Patty already had the ability for people to come on into her photo studio and get business portrait headshots taken. So she had in her, say, geographical areas of 60 70 miles. She was the spot where all wedding photographers would come on in and our wedding people would go and they would get their wedding pictures taken. Okay, well, she also wanted to be the spot. We're all corporate business folks would combine in to get their pictures taken to. So she figured, as long as I've already got those folks, I'm going to reach out to them with something new and something exciting. There's gotta be something else. So what does she do? She got a hold of her old pal. Well, Crockett, she says, Well, I know this is gonna sound really strange, but the portrait business isn't doing so good. I'm sure you know that. And I need help. I don't know what I'm going to do. She says, Have you got any suggestions? And I said, Well, we happen to be working on this new thing called hybrid photography, and we're gonna be blending photo and video on whatever cheese. Nope. Let me stop you right there that I just bought a camera and it shoots video, and I tried it. And that ain't for me, buddy. The sound isn't any good. I don't understand all the buttons. I don't have any autofocus and used to autofocus. I don't You manual focus anymore because my eyes were getting old and then I try to edit video, and it's just not gonna work. This isn't gonna work for me. And I said, Look, I'm really sorry. So but hold on. There are other ways that we're gonna get around this. So her the first way to go was to be able to make her corporate clients come back in to buy some form of e product. Now, I don't suggest, by the way, that photographers that have portrait studios that that's the first way for them to go. In fact, I don't I think they should take a different route and will explain why I think that they should go more towards the pocket portrait and the recall little earlier. We showed yesterday day before the portrait that we did of a young lady called Sky. It's called a pocket portrait, and all it is, is it's a piece that fits in your pocket. That's has both a photo as well as video and, of course, the magic of the kid's voice, which is always a big deal, right? Always a big deal.