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019: Jesse Goff | How A Photographer Reinvented and Diversified His Business
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution podcast, episode number 19. This is John Corcoran, and in this episode, I talk with a photographer who discovered a creative way to diversify his photography business. He set up a series of narrowly targeted photo printing websites. I wanted to know how one photographer in one small studio with a couple of printers could make money printing photographs when large companies that have been in business for a long time, like Kodak, are filing for bankruptcy. His name is Jesse Gough, and we'll talk to him right after this. Welcome to the Small Business Revolution. Revolution. Revolution. Do you want a revolution? Do you want a revolution? You say you want a revolution? The revolution? It's going on right now. Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution podcast, your source for how to grow your small business without working 24/7. Now, now, you're host with a revolution, John Corcoran. All right. Welcome, everyone. This is John Corcoran, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast. Jesse Gough has distinguished himself by working for a number of the major companies in America, like Nike and Apple, Google, Disney, Sony, Hilton. You name it. And he's also photographed some big names, like President Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Francis Ford Coppola. You name it. But like everyone else, and a lot of businesses, around 2007-2008, when the economy was really going into a crater and companies were scaling back, they're spending dramatically, his business started to suffer. So, you know, rather than sticking his head in the ground, Jesse and his wife got really creative and they had a light bulb go off over their heads figuratively, and they decided to create a series of side businesses, which were photo printing businesses. So, right around the same time, this was the time that a lot of photo studios were going out of the business, particularly the commercial photo studios, because so much was going to digital. And so, he saw a need in the market and started providing these printing, large-scale prints and setting up websites. And his wife actually does search engine optimization, and she would help to create the site. And then to drive traffic to the site. So, I'm very fortunate to actually have Jesse as a client, so I've gotten to know him pretty well. And he's a great guy, a really real family guy, and it really was a pleasure talking about how he's taken this profession, photography, and added a new element to it. And I think that it's got some great lessons, no matter what line of work you're in. So, I hope you'll enjoy it. And finally, if you do enjoy this episode, please do go into iTunes and subscribe so you can receive future episodes of the podcast, incidentally, without even having to think about it. I'd also love it if you would give us a review in there. And if you sign up for my email list at smartbusinessrevolution.com, I will keep you up to date on all kinds of interesting interviews, like this one with Jesse. And finally, if you're driving or if you're at the gym and you want to go to the show notes afterwards where I will have links for anything that we mentioned in the show, you can just go to smartbusinessrevolution.com/podcast19. That's one nine. So here is Jesse. Okay. Welcome, everyone. This is John Corcoran, and I'm very pleased to welcome on the line. Jesse Gough. Welcome, Jesse. Thank you. I'm going to be here. And thanks for being here. So, Jesse, you're a photographer focusing on commercial advertising work. You're in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I just wanted to start off with that has got to be one of the most competitive areas of any type of career to go into. You know, I know that my wife is friends with, it seems like dozens of photographers. You know, it's a variation between somewhat of a hobby and a profession, sometimes, depending on how much money they make at it. But how do you manage to not just eke out a living, but also do quite well, having worked with a number of high profile companies like Apple, Disney, Google, Nike, there's a bunch of very well-known household names that you've worked with. Well, it turns out that it's all related to media buys, and any company that's going to be putting out photography to help grow their own businesses. Like, let's take Hilton Hotels, for example. We did a job, a couple of jobs over them, for them over the last few years. And when you look at their media buys, it turns out the photography portion is pretty small in terms of the entire budget, but very important. So for example, Hilton decided to do some advertising for one of their hotel chains, I think it was Courtyard, and we needed to do just a one image for them. But that image was going to be distributed in the Wall Street Journal in half-page ads, and some other really large magazines, a hard to remember, but like USA Today or something like that. Well, the media buys on papers like that, or publications that have such a wide distribution is phenomenally expensive, talking tens of millions of dollars. So once a company commits to spending that kind of money for advertising buy or media buy, they want to make sure the photo looks just about perfect. They want to distribute a photo that doesn't look that good, and spend that much money doing it. So they'll really take the time and the money to make sure the photo is right, and that's kind of the field that I'm working in, where we work with an ad agency, and they spend a lot of money on the ad agency to figure out what their market is, they do market demographics, research groups, they figure out exactly what kind of people they're marketing to, and the talent is reflective of that. And so quite a bit of money goes into the photo shoot, and I'm kind of what I bring to them as an insurance policy that the photo is going to turn out well, because I know what I'm doing. And it requires putting together, I mean, it's not like a movie, but sometimes we have to hire 15, 20 people to make one of these shoots go off correctly for just maybe even one image. So that's where I'm able to make a living out of this, because I'm not just doing small projects. It's for large media buys. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's kind of a funny image in my head. Would you have like a line of 20, let's say, 25-year-old Asian women that are kind of waiting in line, and you try each one, and maybe something's not right about someone else, and you're just kind of like try each one? Is that how it works sometimes? Well, it's funny you ask about Asian women, because the last library shoot that I did was for Citrix Corporation, which is down in Santa Clara in Florida, and they're a large enterprise class backend solution for all kinds of corporations. They've got like 5,000 employees worldwide and billions of dollars in revenue, and they needed to do some marketing to the Japanese market. So we did a casting originally online, and we had 1,400 applicants. And then we went through those 1,400 people and narrowed it down to about 100 that we thought might work, and then we invited those 100 people to call back casting call, and we took photos of them and met them, and then we narrowed it down to about 30, and then we took their pictures and put them up on a huge wall, and kind of created groups and families so that it all worked, so the images flowed. And so there's quite a process, so it, you know, I hope that kind of makes it more clear how it's a lot of editing and whittling down to get it right. I imagine when you're dealing with these companies, especially the larger ones, there are perhaps high-level executives, maybe this is within the advertising agencies, but people who have a clear vision of what they want. And yet they're also bringing you in as the artist who they obviously are trusting in your judgment. Do you ever have disagreements about, you know, what the vision is going to be and how do you handle those disagreements? That's a good question. Generally, that doesn't happen very often, luckily. It would certainly be not very fun if you're doing a shoot in the CEO walked in and said this is all wrong, and you need to be doing something differently, especially if their idea was really dumb. So generally, that doesn't happen. The executive-ledible management usually is kind of delegated that to, you know, their underlings, the creative team, they're usually vice president of marketing, vice president of creative services, and they're either working with an in-house team and/or an ad agency, and they work out their concepts, and those concepts are maybe signed off on by a CEO, you know, before the contractor's awarded, or maybe not, but they're all pretty much in the know, and they've decided that this is what they're going to do before I'm hired for the most part. So, luckily, we don't have those kind of headaches, and we sign off on things before we do them. In fact, I'll even have people sign photographs, not the actual photographs, but when we're on a job, if I'm working with, let's say, an art director from the agency or the client after we do a shoot, and we work on it, and we, you know, change the lighting, blah, blah, all kinds of things. When we finally get to a spot where the art director says, yes, that's great. That's what we need. Then I say, okay, great, sign this, and it says they viewed this file, and they approve. So, they can't come back later and say, you know, you should have done it in red. You should have read the background. Well, you said you liked it, so we try to avoid those kinds of disagreements as much as possible. That's a good idea. So, you've got some incredible, and I'm going to link to your website in the show notes for the podcast, but you've got some incredible, I have to say, iconic photographs. One that looks like it's in sand dunes or a desert, and another one where it's a woman with a horse in Redwood Grove, which I think you said was up in Sonoma County. I think you told me that at one point. And do you come up with the vision for these ideas and then have to sell the company or the agency on them ahead of time, or is it that they've said, well, we want a horse in Redwood Grove, and you just kind of follow through on that. Yeah. Well, thank you first for the compliments, and it goes both ways. So as a photographer, I have to develop myself in addition to the work that I do, otherwise I'll end up having somewhat disjointed message. In fact, I'm working on that right now. I'm kind of in the stages, pre stages of kind of doing a renaissance, if you will, of my work and trying to figure out where I'm going to go for the next five or 10 years. So those images that you just mentioned were actually self-development projects that I did that I funded myself that were not jobs, where I took a team of people out into the Mojave Desert, and we spent two or three days out there to come up with that image. And I did that in the Redwoods, too, and we did it up in the CRAs, and those were basically portfolio projects, and they are part of a series that I did, and that I was working on, and I put those on my site, and people, well, my clients will look at that and go, "Oh, wow. You know, that's interesting. You know, we like to hire you." And I said, "Oh, you want to go out to the Mojave Desert?" No, we want to shoot a product, but we like the Mojave Desert shot. Sometimes there's been times where I've actually been asked to do something really similar, too, but it's mainly to just kind of develop myself as an artist. I have to keep on that as much as possible, and it's really challenging in a business environment, because ultimately, and that's probably another reason and another topic is why a lot of people have a hard time with this, is it's more than just being an artist, it's a business, and you're trying to manage a business and your own sense of style as an artist, as well, and your creative vision, and they're really not necessarily intertwining with each other. It's like oil and water, so you have to develop one, both at the same time, and they are not necessarily related. I did want to get into asking about that, so before we get to that, I did want to ask a little bit, just getting back to the pictures of the Mojave Desert and the horse and the redwood trees. So there's kind of a conscious decision that you made when you decided to put those photos on there. In other words, you didn't put up photos from a wedding or from a baby shower or anything like that. You said this is the type of work that I want to do, therefore I'm going to fund this kind of photo out in the Mojave Desert that really stands out to people, and then that'll attract the kind of business that I want in the future. Is that correct? Is that how you went about it? Yeah, it kind of, and I'm sorry I didn't really answer your other question, how do those come to me? But yes, I wanted to kind of start from scratch and do some imagery that I thought that I just really liked and that I hope they can make a great success out of them as individual pieces and a series and hopefully it would create a stirring or other things that could lead to more work. And to ask you how I came up with those ideas, I basically started from scratch and said, "Well, where do I live? I live here in California, most beautiful places in the United States and this part of the world." There's so much diversity in the geography from being close to the tectonic plates and just you've got mountains and the Venus North-South state that runs a long distance. You've got deserts, you've got almost like tropical areas. You have the mountains, you've got savannas, dense redwood groves, rivers, lakes, you name it, right? And it's like the tropics and tundras you've got quite a bit here to work with that, you know, unlike maybe like say a photographer in New York, you know? So I thought, "Let's take advantage of that." So I started looking around the map of California and just saying, "Let's hit all these places in California and come up with scenes." And we thought about the desert, the redwoods, the sirens, and I just kind of started thinking about them and just kind of dream these little ideas of these kind of fantasy worlds around these things. And I wanted to make it seem like you were in a different place all you were in California. So the desert scene, I kind of wanted to make it look like it was like a caravan scene in the Middle East. Because when you're out there in the sand dunes in the Mojave, you could be in Syria somewhere. I don't know. It looks like you're in Northern Africa, like in the Sahara Desert, which is not Syria by the way, but whatever, one of those countries is in the Sahara. And then the Sierra Mountains shot, I thought, "Well, it'll be really cool to make it look like maybe it's a Japanese woman in a forest in Northern Japan." So we did that. The redwoods, who knows, but you just have to take a look at the world. It was just kind of a fantastical kind of a theme, basically, like let's make some fantasy. Well, what I love about each of those images is that it begs, it makes you curious what the story is. You see, like, why is there a woman holding a horse in a redwood grove? Or where are these people going? They're going across these sand dunes. Where are they coming from? Why are they all by themselves? Do they have any water? So it just makes you crazy curious. Is that what it is inspired and the clients that you've gotten out of it? Yeah. I get it. When people look at the images, I get those kind of questions all the time, and they look at me like, "You got the answer, right?" And the answer is, "It got you to call." Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The answer is, whatever you want to fill in the gaps, really, I mean, put it above your where you sleep at night and dream about it. So you talked about the merging of business and passion, so I want to talk a little bit more about that. First of all, has there been any times where you've put your foot down and said that's wrong or that's not a reflection of what I want to do, either in terms of turning away business, a paying client that wants to hire you because you have such a fundamental disagreement with something that they want you to do or in the middle of doing a job for someone? Luckily, no. I haven't been presented with a job opportunity that was like ethically unsound so far, although I'm sure directly unrelated in an indirect way that's probably done, helped things that are exactly great for the planet, but don't we all? I have had to have put my foot down with clients that were a little bit out of their mind at times. I don't need to name names, but you know, I've had to ask clients to leave the room because basically at the end of the day, they were going to make it a failure. And I was going to be accountable because they, I don't know, they just had trouble dealing with it. And I did them a favor and said, look, you're struggling with this. I think I know what you need to get done here. Why don't you just go for a two hour walk and I'll get this handled because it's three o'clock and three hours this day is over and we're going to have nothing to show forward if, if I don't get started moving on something here. Yeah. But otherwise, you know, things go really well and it's a fun business. It's a fun. The people that you work with generally are interesting people and creatives and fun to work with. Yeah. Now a lot of creative types like photographers often struggle with the business side of things making, you know, making a living at it. And I imagine that there have been some stumbles along the way and you've kind of figured out different, different strategies. But have there been any areas where you had to grow and evolve, you know, in terms of pricing your services, identifying the type of client that you want to work for, you know, making sure that you have regular gigs on a regular basis. So it's not like Feaster Famine. Mm hmm. It's amazing. Just the flow seems to always just run. It got pretty bad at the end of 2008. I had a, I had three major clients that accounted for 70% of my work. And I thought, man, if I had just lost one of these clients, it'd be pretty bad. But that probably won't happen. Well, in about 30 days, I lost all three of them due to the financial meltdown because one was a financial services company. One was a real estate development company and national one. And the other one just got hit hard like everybody else. And those were tough times, but otherwise, you know, we've bounced back from that. Otherwise, it's just been a good trickle or stream, but there's always something coming in. And as far as the business side, I can say it one thing, you know, if I wish I'd done things differently, looking back now, I do wish that I had educated myself more in business at a young age and hadn't just been all liberal arts because it would have been nice to have those skills more tuned in right at the beginning and it would have been because I kind of had to struggle and learn how to run a business at the same time as I was starting my business. I already knew how to be a photographer, but I was starting a photographer business without really knowing how to run a business. And even if you're an artist, you're running a business, it would have been really useful to have some, you know, business education, some kind of business management classes. So if anyone out there is a young photographer listening to this for whatever reason, get some business school too, because it's really helpful. Yeah, good advice. So what did you do in 2008 when you lost those three large clients that are 70% of your work? How did you go out and get other clients to fill your work? Well, that was one of the first times that I really started calling people and saying, "Hey, I'm available, in case you didn't know," and my schedule was pretty wide open. So I'm like, you know, because I had a lot of other clients too. And you know, I think clients kind of understand that times might be tough at certain times, and they want to see you thrive and survive as well, and they want you to still be around. So some of them would think, "Well, there was this project I was thinking about doing, and maybe this is a good time to do it now," and it would help Jesse out. And then that was cool, and that got me through as things started ramping back up again. So that was good. And then we worked a lot on SEO. We've been able to tune our site pretty well, actually almost too well, to just get a lot of interest just through the web, through search engines. And I say too well because we've actually been hacked a lot recently because we get so much traffic and so many were so highly ranked. We've been hacked by companies trying to sell pharmaceutical products through our site illegally, really challenging actually, and it's really, we hear a lot about cybersecurity these days and it's a different topic, but it's amazing what an issue that can be if that comes up in your business, any kind of security issues, because it is hard to solve. Very challenging. The real hazard of all that traffic coming in then. It is, and it's not something that you just pick up the phone and call the plumber and say fix it. It can be very complicated to get rid of that problem because if someone's targeted you, as someone that they want to leach off of, and they're committed to it, they'll just keep finding ways in. It's like having a family of virtually indestructible rats or moles outside your house constantly trying to burrow in, it's kind of scary. Yeah, not a lot of fun. No, not a lot of fun. Yeah. And then I don't want to jump ahead too much, but maybe I can just say that the other way we solve the financial crisis problem or help with it is that's about the time I really started putting investing into the printing businesses. Well, that's actually a good transition, and I did want to ask a little bit more about some of your high profile clients so we can get to that after we talk about the printing business. But you started some, I guess I'll call them side projects, I don't know how much of your time they occupy, but I think print my canvas, print my watercolor, backlit print or a couple of them. So tell us about the origins of these. Well, we had invested in some large format printing equipment fail to print our own portfolios when people use portfolios, they don't really anymore at all on the web or on iPads. And the advent of the digital camera kind of spelled doomsday for a lot of the photo labs that were all around the United States because they had such tight margins and they produced prints, which people still needed, but less of, but more importantly, they were doing a lot of film processing. And in a matter of just a few years, it went from everyone using film to no one using film practically. It's pretty astounding change. And a lot of these poor labs, they just had to shut their doors. There used to be about six or seven professional photo labs in San Francisco in, I'd say, two thousand and three, four, and by 2007 or eight, they're all gone. Wow. And these are some of these employed like 20, 25 people. And so some of my clients who would get prints made started calling me and saying, Hey, I want to get a print made and all the places I used to go to, they're all gone. So we invested in some printers and started just helping our clients out. And it was just an additional revenue stream, but it wasn't that much coming in. I wasn't really pushing it. It was more like a value added service that we had. And I looked at the printers one day and thought, man, they're just kind of sitting there. We should get those things pumping. And my wife is CEO of a search engine optimization company. And I thought, you know, people still need printing, but the mom and pop shop is model is changing. This is internet version 2.0 happening right now. Now it's going to actually, I think, stick where people are going to feel comfortable placing orders online and getting things shipped to them. Why go to the photo lab and deal with that and messaging something over there or driving over there, parking, blah, blah, blah, find a place that somewhere in the United States that does great service at a great price and then just ship it to us and maybe we'll get it a day or two later, but save money and it's really easy whenever we have to leave our office. So let's just try and take advantage of this new paradigm. So the first thing we started to do was one of the things that labs really stopped doing, which was backlit printing, which is a special film that's opaque that you see in backlit displays. Like a bus stops. The bus stops outside of movie theaters and airports, they can get really big inside of airports. A lot of retail stores, like say around Union Square in San Francisco, like the more the bigger ones will have big ones inside. And they show off the imagery really well. So we figured out a way to create backlit prints on an inkjet machine that look really good, just as good as the old technology, what they do with photo chemicals with machines that are like as big as a bus and those machines cost a million dollars. And we were able to do it with machines that were still expensive, but a fraction of that cost. And we built a website called backlitprint.com, and my wife did the SEO, her company. And we are ranked number one for backlit prints everywhere in the United States. So if anyone goes, I want to get a backlit print name and types in backlit printing. We're right there at the top. So we just get orders in every day and we're processing these here out of my photography studio. So we've had to expand and get more people working here. And I do put energy into it. But I do have to, and it's hard to manage the photography business and these other printing business at the same time, especially as I'm growing them. But I'm hoping that they're going to continue to take more of a life of their own and get to the point where I can kind of step away and have more management helping me just manage that part. But they're not quite profitable yet to do that. But I think in the next year or so they will be hopefully, if things continue as they happen. They've grown every year by about 20 to 25% a year. So it's a good growth rate. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it's been somewhat successful. And if it's growing at that pace, and you've been doing it for a couple of years. Yeah. But we started from nothing. Right. So 20% on top of nothing isn't very much of nothing. Yeah. Right. It's keep changing multiply in 25, sometimes zero. Yeah. Right. We have 20% growth. But it equals zero, right. So in the mean of that or in the midst of that, you've had employees that you've had to add or independent contractors. What's your experience been like with that? Yes. Pretty good, actually. You really have to make sure you take the time to find the right person and it's exhausting. But it's important that that person is someone who knows how to work hard and he's excited about the business. And now I've recently just moved from San Francisco to Marin County. So we've actually just gone through a major transition with workforce because some people just couldn't make that trip for whatever reason, public transportation. So we're undergoing change and for the first time in a while, I'm going through that right now and it's definitely challenging, got to be honest. But good people is certainly one of the core foundations of a successful business, I think, is having good workers and good business bookkeeping practices. So essential. And what kinds of things have you done just as you've transitioned from a photographer to a manager and CEO of your own company? How have you kept the employees that are working for you satisfied? I throw them little licorice treats. I just try and be as positive and empathetic as I can and I help them succeed. And what I'd like to do moving forward is start to talk about employee ownership and gain them really committed to things. But we've just gone through some transition right now, so that'll be down the line. But eventually I'd like to go down that road of employee ownership so that everyone has a stake in that. Yeah. I did want to step back and ask a little bit about your experience shooting some high profile individuals because I was taking a look at your website. You've got Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Carlos Santana, Francis Ford Coppola, I'm sure I'm missing some other names. But what's that experience been like working with world famous individuals? Pretty cool. And I can't deny that. It's exciting. It's certainly a little silly when you think about it, like these people are just human beings just like the rest of us. I guess since they've been immortalized on CDs and DVDs, it makes them feel like they're super human or any mortals. But when you actually are with them and just hanging out with them, just like you and me, my best experience, I think, was with Jimmy Carter just because clearly what he's done in his life is probably the most significant for the planet. It's not an entertainment career that he's led. It's politics and head of the most powerful country on the planet for four years was pretty present and even more as work afterwards. So I was hired to photograph him in Atlanta back in 1995, one of my first jobs at a college amazingly enough. Wow. That's really early. Yeah, it was. I was pretty surprised I even got the job. And I flew to Atlanta and I had to wake up at three in the morning and shoot him because what they were doing was the very first video teleconferencing using the internet, kind of like we're doing right now, actually, although we're not using video at the moment. But back then it was very early on technology. And Jimmy Carter was really interested in it because back then he was trying to broker deals between small countries that were worrying each other and those countries didn't have the resources to pay for satellite video linkups. And he saw the video linkups as a really great way to kind of help broker negotiations because you get people all in the same room quite easily on a TV set. But it was just prohibitively expensive. So this client of mine hired me was a conjunction with the United Nations to develop a technology using what they call back then and bone technology to kind of put away a certain amount of bandwidth to be able to have people do video conferencing over the internet when the internet was pretty new. In 1995, people were talking about the world wide web and they'd say, what is the world wide web? Yeah, I'm surprised there was even that technology out back then. It was definitely pushing the envelope back then. And they had to use a sun spar machines now, you know, we can just do it on our iPhone. But there was a video conference between Shmoen Perez, Ted Koppel, Jimmy Carter, I think the King of Sweden and the Prime Minister of Japan. So it was to prove that, you know, they could get these people from all different corners of the world and Nelson Mandela too, all at the same time. And so I went to this hotel in Atlanta because Jimmy Carter is down in Atlanta and got there at the hotel and there was Jimmy Carter with two circuit service agents because they're always with him and they checked me out and I had already been pre-cleared. And we're in this room, we're kind of waiting for things to happen and things were kind of delayed. And eventually the secret service agents still looked at me and I looked at each other and looked at the president and said, this guy's fine, let's go get some coffee. And they left us and it was just Jimmy Carter and I in a small room together with nothing happening. Wow. Just him and I. It's like any normal person that's in an awkward situation, you just start chit chatting. Do you remember what you talked about? We talked about computers mainly because that was the topic of the day, really. And he was just saying how remarkable he thought it was. I remember him saying something like, I have myself an IBM aptiva and I really like it. My impression was. I'm glad you offered that because if you did and I was going to ask if you had a Jimmy Carter impression, but just like a really kind guy, you know, it just looked me right in the eye and just was very relaxed and that was probably, you know, one of the coolest experiences I've had so far. Well, it's kind of hard to top shooting a former president. I guess. Well, Michael Gorbachev is pretty that's pretty close, not present in the US. Yeah, we didn't have such a congenital time together. It was. It was more quick and there was a language barrier. Yeah. Carlos Santana was definitely, I photographed him twice once for Latin American company that he was kind of helping promote and once for the Discovery Channel for a documentary. And those jobs were actually about 10 years apart, but he both times was able to totally display great traces of former craziness in his life being quite entertaining, saying things are pretty off the wall. And just generally making everybody laugh. Really cool guy. Really enjoyed being around him. And Francis Forticopla was the most imposing figure, by far, just, you know, he'd look at you and you'd kind of, I'd kind of shake in my boots that I was going to say something wrong or do something stupid, not only because he's a famous person, but he's also a famous photographer. I mean, essentially as a director, he's kind of running the show a big photo shoots with motion picture, and what he has been able to do as a cinematographer is so much in my world. You know, I'm just kind of an idol of mine as far as my own craft. So, you know, I wanted to impress him too. And that's another little great side story is so that job, part of the promotion that Francis Forticopla was doing for my client was they had the right to refuse the photograph so they didn't like them. So we had to go through and edit and we sent them to the copel of team and they looked through them and then they called me and they said, "We have proved them and furthermore, actually Mr. copel, I really liked the photographs you took of him and he'd like to know if he could use them to promote his own businesses in Healdsburg at this new restaurant and winery he's opened called Rustica." And that was a very, very great honor for me to have him actually purchase the images for me. That was really cool. Wow, that's really cool. And actually you remind me of another question I wanted to ask about. You've gotten into doing some video more recently, is that correct? That is correct. Okay. And how's that transition gone? Yeah. It's something I, it's come up so far just on a project by project basis where a client has said, "We're doing a still shoot and we want to augment it with video." And I said, "Well, I can do that." And I said, "Oh, really?" So I've done a couple of projects and then something I want to be doing more and more because we know where things are going with photography, there'll always be the need for still imagery but more and more technology. People are reading their magazines on a phone, reading their news on their laptop. And there's the ability to have moving pictures, which can be more compelling for sure. You've got audio, you've got motion, dialogue. So it's a great thing to be learning from my business and new opportunities for work, too. So I pick up a great job for a company in San Francisco called Digital Realty, which creates big data storage service solutions. They have, I think, over a billion dollars in properties all around the world that house these nondescript large buildings that are filled with servers. And we did a project for them. And I think I was awarded the job because I did video, too. And when I do video, I step away from the camera and I turn into the, I put a director's hat on. And then I have camera operators working the camera and I direct them and I stand more at a monitor and just call the shots instead of actually touching anything. And I actually feel quite comfortable in it and I enjoy it a lot and I'd like to get more into it. Would you do a shoot much like you did years earlier with the Redwood Forest or the Mojave Desert only in video? I'd like to. Nope, one of the biggest challenges about video is lights is you have to use what's called hot lights. I don't know how technically you want me to get, but still photographers can use strobes, which are basically flashes, which put out a tremendous amount of light in an instant with not very much equipment. But with motion picture, the light has to be on all the time. It's called continuous lighting. And to get the kind of power intensity with continuous lighting, you have to have huge lights and they require tremendous amounts of power. So it gets to be complicated. That's why movies cost so much money is because of the amount of light a lot of a big part of it. It's just you've got to have semi truck after semi truck carrying these things around. So I can't do everything exactly the same. It kind of have to scale things back in a certain way, but like I couldn't have done the shot I did in the Redwoods on my own dime because it would have discussed tens of thousands of dollars. So but otherwise, yes, it's still the same principles in theory. It's lighting. Yeah. Well, I want to wrap things up. But before I do that, I did want to ask one more thing just because a photographer often has to jet off the different parts of the globe and you've mentioned a couple of stories about that. But in the last couple of years, you've had a family and you have a couple of young kids. And I'm just wondering how you managed to balance both of those things, having a career, having a kids and what advice you have for others who are listening to this about balancing those two. Three words with great difficulty. It's really challenging, very challenging with little kids. I've been traveling less, you know, I need to be around my family. I need to be there for those little guys as much as I can. And that's part of the reason to move to Marin too with my business and our home and just to be closer to each other because these times are precious and, you know, I don't want to look back down the line and think that I was an absent dad and then, you know, we're very lucky. We've got great family nearby and we've got great help but certainly it's very challenging. It's really makes a challenging to really be growing the business and with that happening at the same time, I've found that's probably the biggest challenge because, you know, you feel like when you're really trying to make big strides forward and not just doing a status quo that really takes a lot of additional hours, more than a 40-hour thing. So juggling that has been quite challenging and I really haven't solved it, to be honest. Well, good advice anyway. So well, thank you, Jesse, for taking the time to talk to us. It was really interesting. You're welcome, John. Thanks for the time to talk with you. Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you're there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast. [MUSIC PLAYING]