The Challenge of Scale
Last week it was art, this week it’s commerce
When you’re considering becoming a professional photographer, nobody tells you one of the biggest issues of running a successful business: it’s nearly impossible to scale. This seems to be true across the arts, whether you’re a photographer or a hairdresser, a painter or a poet. When it’s your personal talent that drives the business, it’s difficult to grow.
Growth, of course, is what fuels capitalism. It’s why public companies are concerned with profitability above all else, and why simply maintaining a reasonable level of profit is considered a failure. Growth alone is the benchmark of a truly profitable enterprise, at least according to the rules of capitalism.
This is, I know, a gross oversimplification. Talk to any of my professional photographer colleagues and we’ll tell you there’s a lot more to being “successful” than making lots of money. I am by no means suggesting we would have been better served by pursuing careers in accounting and personal finance, but I am saying that if you are trying to keep your creative business afloat and you have aspirations of having a family, buying a house, or simply leading a reasonably comfortable life, the acquisition of more money becomes important.
This is not news. The same is true of hairstylists and actors and any creative profession in which one person’s artistic vision makes up the bulk of the business’s unique selling proposition. “Work with me because nobody else does it quite like I do!” Isn’t that what we’re all saying, essentially?
It’s not that nobody else can do it, obviously, but there is truth in the idea that we each bring our own unique skillsets to bear. Given the open world nature of the arts—in which there aren’t well established industry standards and regulations, or even quantifiable metrics to determine whether or not a work is “good”—the only thing you can sell is yourself and the unique way you do that thing you do.
The problem is, that means you can’t scale.
Let’s examine a practical example in another industry in which individual craftspeople try to scale their businesses. Hairstylists pool together and share space and marketing efforts and grow collectively. Or they hire additional stylists to increase volume and grow that way. I’d say that counts as scaling up. Could this work for photographers? There are certainly studios in which multiple photographers work together, or in the employ of a chief photographer, but I think this is the exception that proves the rule. And the conundrum is, the better you are the harder it is to scale.
Think about it like this: It’s 1988 and you want to hire Richard Avedon, so you pick up the phone and call his studio. The receptionist explains that Mr. Avedon is not available but his third assistant can do it. Are you let down? Most certainly you are. Because no matter how good that assistant is—and he probably is—you want a very specific thing that only one person can provide. The better you are, the harder it is to scale.
So the burden is really on the best artists among us. We pedestrians, we should be able to scale our businesses no problem.
Consider volume photography businesses like school portraits and team photos. These companies are much easier to expand because the standards are somewhat limited. Nobody’s expecting to get Arnold Newman when they hire a yearbook photographer. They expect a trained, competent technician who understands the system for getting kids to smile and producing consistently sharp, well exposed pictures. That’s it.
To be clear, I’m not throwing such photographers under the bus. Many of us got our starts or make ends meet with this kind of photography, and I’m sure there are plenty of talented photographers doing what they’ve got to do to get by. But it is a scalable business model precisely because, just like the fees, customer expectations are lower with team photos and school pictures. With an afternoon’s training, anybody can shoot for Sears. The same is not true for, say, Vogue Italia.
That cover was shot by Elizaveta Porodina. One look at her portfolio illustrates my point exactly: this is work that only she can produce. She can have assistants and apprentices train with her for years, and they might turn out wonderfully—maybe even better—but I am confident when I say that whatever they do, they won’t do it like her.
So how does Ms. Porodina scale her business? The same way as you and me. We don’t. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
There are advantages that come from a lack of scalability. When you call us, for example, you actually talk to us. Even the world-class photographers I’ve met, they may have assistants and staff, but it’s still pretty easy to get the brand name on the phone. I’ve encountered some photographic empires, and even they remain fairly small businesses— smaller than many hair salons, in fact.
Have you noticed how everything sucks lately? That seems like a non-sequitur but hear me out.
What I mean is, have you noticed that when your car insurance went up and you tried to call someone to figure out what could be done about it, you ended up speaking to a person in a call center who doesn’t remotely care? If they do it’s happenstance, luck of the draw that you chanced upon the rare helpful person who stumbled into the job. Such skill is a huge benefit for the customer, but unfortunately no longer remotely part of the customer service job description.
Have you also noticed how phone numbers aren’t really a thing for many businesses any more? If Amazon ships you an empty envelope, as happened at our house recently, there’s no simple solution. When your bank makes an error regarding your loan you might think you can just pick up the phone and get assistance, but you would be wrong. The system is designed specifically to keep you from speaking to a helpful human. Because at scale, helpful human customer service is not cost effective.1
This is not just another old man yelling at a cloud (although it is that too). This is a growing problem that is going to continue worsening. It will also, however, amplify the benefits that small, unscalable businesses like ours provide. When our customers have a question, they get us on the phone. This thing that used to be no big deal is becoming the hugest of deals. Because scaled up businesses are no longer making it easy to connect with humans and get things done.
Is scale even worth aspiring to? Maybe not. I’ve started to think scaling up just increases the suck.
Scale does not suck for shareholders and CEOs. But for customers? Definitely. Think of any business you’ve enjoyed that has gone public or been purchased by private equity.2 Did it get better? No, never. It got better for the investors, sure, but not for the customers. The suck increases because corners get cut and pennies get pinched and money gets raised all because why? Because they’ve got to keep growing. Shrinkflation anyone?
So if you’re a small business, one in which your artistry is your brand and your reputation is everything, how do you become more profitable without becoming big-business-despicable?
The ones I know suffer through some lean years and benefit from some big years all the while genuinely aiming to deliver our own special brand of creative work and customer service that sustains our business. This is true whether we’re photographers or hairstylists, graphic designers or writers. Whatever we are, we are not big, faceless corporations. And that means, unfortunately, most of us are not getting rich.
In an effort to counteract that, some of us bust ass to do as much as we can. This has got to be a good way to get better and take home more pay, no? Well sure. Until it leads to burnout, compromise, and your own version of cutting the corners that inevitably end up enshittifying your business.
It seems to me that the best way photographers and our creative colleagues can attempt to scale is to delegate all of the tasks that take away time from working on our art. This could be as simple as hiring an accountant to do the taxes and an office manager to take care of scheduling. If you’re a commercial photographer, you might hire assistants and digitechs, studio managers and retouchers. Or it might mean partnering with a rep to help with bidding and negotiating. Anything you can delegate effectively provides more hours in the day to do the thing you love, to get better at the part of the business that’s ultimately the most profitable. That has got to be a worthwhile investment, no? It’s a lesson I need to learn myself, actually.
There is one other way to scale, at least in terms of boosting profits. And it’s actually easier to do the better you are. Since there are only so many billable hours in the day there’s just one thing we can do to bring in more moolah: raise our rates. Pricing is a whole other cumbersome issue. Maybe I’ll have more to say about that soon. Stay tuned!
This also happened to me recently. I called my midsized midwestern bank, got transferred to someone’s voicemail, and never heard back. Bankers are frequent headshot customers in my studio, and when I mentioned this to one of them they explained that being able to speak to someone is now considered concierge service. We’re doomed.
Apologies to my private equity clients who are genuinely lovely to work with. I’m guessing, though, the overlap of finance types with people who read newsletters about the business of being creative is fairly small.