DOES OUR BUSINESS HAVE A STRUCTURE?
The short answer is yes. I’m a photographer, so that means I’m a creative person, and according to The National Science Foundation, I lean towards using my brain’s right hemisphere. Innovative people are considered to be "right-brain thinkers" whereas "left-brain thinkers" are considered to be more analytical and logical. Us creative types are not exactly known for being structured. When you consider creatives you would be forgiven for associating that with starving artists; I’ll forgive you! And starving artists, if they are lucky make a little money here and there in return for their efforts. But the one thing that creatives are never associated with is structure.
That can be a real problem as to be successful in business we have to have our stuff together. Clients depend on it, they don’t want to work with small-time businesses that are happy to make a little money here and there. In their world, they constantly face deadlines, have their own business goals to achieve, and cannot afford to work with anyone who doesn’t have their stuff together. What camp do I fall into all? To help answer that question I’m going to provide a brief peek into my career background, as that will help answer that question. It will also hopefully provide you with the confidence that if you have looming deadlines, we can be a good choice for your business needs.
My Background
My career started in the British military. Nothing has more structure than the military, as its effectiveness relies on it, whether that be in its organization or execution of immediate action drills. Structure is everything, it’s about understanding, it’s about discipline, it’s about planning and it’s ultimately about performance and its execution. After leaving the military I entered engineering and was involved in several military and commercial aviation projects, all of which had strict processes that had to be followed, as well as multiple deadlines that had to be achieved for both technical and commercial reasons.
The latter part of my engineering career focused more on telecommunications, in particular working for Nokia in both their research and commercial product development divisions. To me, Nokia was, and still is, an extremely well-structured company. I must admit, when I first joined the company I was shocked at how thorough they were, and sometimes it appeared as if they were unnecessarily thorough in areas where they didn’t need to be, which was surprising considering my own background. However I quickly came to appreciate the reasoning behind their thoroughness, which resulted in errors rarely occurring, and if they did, they never escaped the company.
Systems
So, with that background, I can claim to fully understand the importance of structure within any business. With this understanding, it has been my aim to adopt what I have learned from larger organizations and scale it to my own business. My previous post, “What is our process? Our 13 steps to client satisfaction”, which you can read here, described our process. Within this, everything is governed by an internal system, whether that is the payment of bills, image storage, or the pre-delivery detailed image review, every task falls within a predetermined and intentionally designed structure.
Having systems helps us create and deliver images with the same level of consistency. Having dedicated the necessary time to system design, we are able to diligently follow sequential steps and thus consistently follow our procedures, monitoring each of our processes continually so that they can be improved when necessary.
But the most important aspect of our systems is it they create the structure that our clients need, ensuring we are able to meet their needs by providing on-schedule deliverables, which differentiates us from our competition. Perhaps we innovative people should also be credited with being able to become "left-brain thinkers" on demand, as we can also be analytical and logical as well as creative.
Wrap Up
So here's my usual end-of-post reminder, True Images Photography provides professional beverage, food, and product commercial photography that gets your business noticed. Feel free to book a free 30-minute consultation here. But we are not strict about the 30-minute duration, it can take as long as it needs to.
Do look around the rest of the blog here for more helpful posts, and if you have any questions please reach out. I’m happy to advise. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn where I always answer messages with a detailed reply.