Photographers are your clients smarter after they hired you? They should be!

“Make your boss smarter than before he or she met you. Bring new insights to the place. Then, you become indispensable.” – Jack Welch

The Power of Insight

An insight is the power of acute observation and deduction, penetration, discernment, perception called intellection. It is an understanding of cause and effect based on identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario.

I really enjoy covering meetings for one reason—I get to listen and pickup insights from great leaders of our time.

I realize that many of the thoughts I have are like a bunch of strings just entangled with one another looking like knots. Often an insight or eureka moment is like the untangling of the string of knots and putting them onto a spool making them now ready to be woven into a tapestry of art.

Most of the time these moments are simplifying what appears to be complex. I am often thinking after these moments how beautiful this insight is to life.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, took the company from 13 billion a year company to a $400 billion and in 2000 was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine.

Mr Welch was one of the speakers at Chick-fil-A Leadercast and mainly was talking about how good leaders have a ‘generosity gene.’ They know when those who work for them is nourished they flourish and so too does the company.

While I am not running a $400 billion dollar company, I do believe good business practices are universal.  

The nugget I took away was this statement made by him:

“Make your boss smarter than before he or she met you. Bring new insights to the place. Then, you become indispensable.”

Now if I just make great photos and give these to my clients will this make them smarter? I don’t think so. To help make them smarter I will have to develop a relationship where I have the time to explain why certain images I believe are the best to use.

One way to do this is to provide two folders of images to your clients. You provide one folder that has all the images in them and another folder with the selects. My suggestion is you then take time to briefly state why you think these photos would be best to use.

I find myself often saying here is this photo, which is graphically very strong and captures a cool perspective of the event for you. With another photo I am talking about how this photo works best for the highlight of the coverage. It would be like picking the play of the game from all the sports photos of a game.

Often I am picking photos and explaining how the body language of a particular photo shows emotional connection that is the strongest of the collection of images.

The “eureka moment” for me was to remember to always help make my clients smarter. This means more than just dropping off photos for them.

Your client will not have time to go through all the images with you to have you walk them through your selections. Just be sure to summarize how the photo helped them further their cause and the reason they hired you to shoot something for them.