495: Gary Hughes – How to gain traction and grow your headshot and commercial photography business

495: Gary Hughes – How to gain traction and grow your headshot and commercial photography business

 

Andrew Hellmich: After a string of jobs, today's guest, found his way to professional photography, which is the career of both his parents. He worked for several years with other studios before launching his own business in partnership with his wife, and since then, he's been recognized as one of the top 10 photographers in Central Florida, and has presented a CreativeLive, Imaging USA ,WPPI, and more. He specializes in headshots, events, modeling and commercial photography. And his mission, he says, is to empower professionals and creatives with awesome images to help them market their brands. I'm talking about Gary Hughes, who, with his wife Julie Fioretti, formed the team that make up Hughes Fioretti Photography, and I'm rapt to say that Gary is with us right now. Gary, welcome.

Gary Hughes: Hey, Andrew, thank you for having me on the show. Just before we do anything, I just have to say that I immediately started looking you up too, because clearly you Googled me. And so I have to tell you that now we have, we have a blood feud. You and I, we have, this is it. This is to the death, because your podcast on Apple Podcast is rated 4.9 stars, my podcast on Apple Podcast is rated 4.8 stars, and so I will not rest. I will not falter. I will not fail until I out-rate your crappy-nobody-listens-to-it-podcast. I will destroy PhotoBizX, and I will do it until my dying day. Anyway, thanks for having me on the show.

Andrew Hellmich: Game one, mole! Game on. Well, tell me, was my research correct? You know, did you find your way into the same career as both your parents?

Gary Hughes: Yeah, yeah, absolutely I did. You ever know anybody, and I don't know if you had this experience, you and I literally just met so, like, where somebody who does a job, if your parents do a thing, like if they run a small business, or if your parents, your dad's a cop, or your dad's in the army or something, you're gonna either absolutely do that thing, because it's just the family business or you're going to run screaming in the other direction. And I ran screaming in the other direction. I moved out of my parent’s house when I was 17, and I was like, I am out of here. And I got an apartment, literally 1/8 of a mile away from my house. So close, I know. Do you guys use kilometers down there? I don't..

Andrew Hellmich: We do. We're kilometers we did, but I can convert to miles pretty quickly.

Gary Hughes: So 1/8 of a mile is like 20 kilometers, so 20 kilometers away, and so, yeah, I mean, I've talked about this a lot, because people always want to know, like, you know, how'd you get into it? or whatever. I tried and did and successfully, even some of those things, a bunch of other things. I've worked as a janitor. I worked in music for a couple of years. You know, I was in IT. I had a construction business, and probably around about 15 or 16 years ago, I just kind of picked up a camera on a sale and just started taking pictures. And it was fun, because when you're a kid and your parents make you work in the family business, it's awful. It's terrible. Whatever that family business is, your kid hates working in it. I promise you, they resent you. They hate it, but they feel obligated, so they have to. And so that's the way it was, and I and so, you know, one thing led to another, and a series of incredible mentors, and then I met my wife out dancing at a bar one night, and it turns out she was into photography and I was into photography. I was apprenticing and assisting a great photographer that used to live here in town, and that was kind of one of the things that we connected on, and we hit it off. And six months later, we started our business together before we were even married, when we were only dating six months. And we've just been doing it ever since. And it was probably about a year after that, maybe less, you know, we hadn't even finished our first year in photography as a business, and this was at the beginning of the great global financial meltdown. So, you know. So this is 2008ish, and we both got laid off our jobs, our day jobs, in the same week. And so we had this business, this baby business, that we had probably, in that whole first year, done about 15 grand in sales, and that's for two people, dude. That's ,some of you be like, "I'd love to make 15 grand in photography." Well, let me tell you how much it costs for two people to live in the United States. So we, you know, we decided, well, we either have to go find other jobs, or we're going to lean into the photography business. And we leaned into the photography business. And when I say lean, I mean we ate like dehydrated noodles for a couple of years. It was not the easiest thing to create a luxury business in the middle of a global recession, and that may be typical. Again, but that's basically how it all started, and we ended up, kind of over the course of the next six or seven years, really finding our niche, our little area of practice, and made a few really clever moves along the way, some falling backwards into them, some on purpose, and just sort of found a way to work in this business that I love. Now I work full time, but I work Monday through Friday. I don't work nights or weekends, and my wife stays at home with our four kids, and the photography business pays for all of it. And so it's possible we were definitely sitting in my 2003 Toyota Corolla crying at how desperate our situation had become. And I think about that now, 15 years later, and I'm like, there's this 25 year old kid sitting in a car with his girlfriend deciding together what we were going to do. And if it were my kid, now, one of my kids, I'd be like, "Go get a damn job. What are you crazy? There's a recession on." But when you're young and you don't have responsibilities, it's, you can make dumb decisions, you can do crazy things because you don't understand consequences. And when you're an adult in middle age with reading glasses and lower back pain and a bunch of children that you have to pay for, you're much more cautious. And so sometimes, for people that are like a little older, with families going to the photography business, we have this caution that we didn't have when we were younger, and if this were happening to me now, if we are going into another recession, and I'm in a situation I'm in now, what would I do? I have no idea, but that's basically how it all started. In the darkest of circumstances, in a car we owed a lot of money on, under a mountain of credit card debt, crying with my girlfriend that, what are we going to do? And we just made a real stupid decision, and somehow it worked out for the last 15 years.

Andrew Hellmich: I'm sure there's more than just somehow. I think there was some, probably some clever moves along the way, but tell me..

Gary Hughes: A couple.

Andrew Hellmich: Tell me what was it about your parents business that you hated, or what pushed you away?

Gary Hughes: I don't think there was anything particularly wrong with it.

Andrew Hellmich: No, but what made you think, "Okay, there's no way I want to be a photographer." Because a lot of, I mean, I know you're saying that it's a parent's job, so it's going to either push you away or pull you towards it. But photography, it's a pretty sexy job.

Gary Hughes: Yeah, well, unless it's photographing ducks and bunnies and people on Santa sets and stuff like that. I mean, it was like, you know, it wasn't the way I wanted to do it. But dude, I grew up in the photography business, the big names in the photography industry who were still around, that were around when I was a kid, these names were spoken with reverence around my dinner table, like, you know your Dennis Reggie's and stuff like that. Like, this is I knew these names from the time I was 10 years old, 12 years old, like I was a teenager in the 90s and growing up. And any photographer who was famous at the time, whether in commercial photography or whether in the portrait and wedding industry, I knew them all when I was 12. I went to my first photography convention when I was, like, 13 or 14 years old with my parents. Like I've been in this a really long time, and the world, the version of the photography industry grew up in, what I do for a living now, didn't exist. It wasn't a thing. And everything that I saw in the, I love the photography part of it, I like the people part of it, and I even like the business part of it, but I don't like making a business out of photography, because it wasn't for me. And so we did what everybody does, which is we started a portrait and wedding business, which we were pretty good at, but I hated it, you know? And so I was like, maybe this just isn't for me. And through a series of events, it turned into something else. But when it comes to my parents business, it wasn't that they had a bad business, or that they were mean to me, or that I didn't get on with them. None of those things were true. It's that it just, it wasn't me. And so the thing that I had to get past getting into the photography business was that, especially in 2022 almost 2023 you can pretty much make just about any type of photography into a job now. You don't have to do it the way anyone else is doing it. There's always a first person or a second or third person to do a thing, and so there's no reason like, if you're going to make the decision to leave a quote, unquote, "safe, stable, corporate environment to pursue photography as a full time endeavor" you should 100% insist on doing it in a way that pleases you, because if it doesn't make you happy, there's no freaking point. Keep your day job, buy a nicer camera and photograph cool stuff on your vacations.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, I agree.

Gary Hughes: But like, why would you do that? Why would you, because you know what? I made a YouTube video about this exact topic. I call it the hobby paradox. It's taking something that you love, that's a hobby, and then when you turn that hobby, that passion, into a vocation, you run the risk of destroying your love for that hobby, because now there's all this pressure on it to perform, and you lose the freedom of creation. But it is possible, and I do believe this, it is possible to have both of those things in balance. But what photographers fail to understand most of the time, because these are people who are chasing the creative and not the business, that if you don't feed the business first, your creative opportunities will die, not just that, but your love for the creative part of the business will die because you'll end up shooting something just to survive that makes you unhappy, that doesn't turn you on creatively, or that you dislike intensely just to put food on the table, and that is the hobby paradox. So don't take the thing that you love and then do a way that you, that makes money but that doesn't make you happy. Just keep your job. Keep your job.

Andrew Hellmich: I agree. So how then did you guys, you and Julie, make the transition to, you know, weddings and portraits, to the commercial business that you have now?

Gary Hughes: Yeah

Andrew Hellmich: Because that sounds like that's the part you love, you found what you love to shoot. Is that, right?

Gary Hughes: Well, let me ask you, then, what do you think it is that drives photography? Besides, I want to take pictures for money. Besides that, take that out of the equation, what really is at the heart of doing the thing you love for a living. What's at the heart of it? Do you think, what's the central impetus behind the idea that I should be doing something that I enjoy for a living?

Andrew Hellmich: What's the idea that I should be doing?

Gary Hughes: Yeah, why did anyone in any profession, why does the belief exist? Why do people believe that they should be doing something they enjoy for their job, because that's a new idea. That's a very new idea because that's not the way the world really works for 90% of the people on the planet, because it's survival. It's a very westernized idea. It's a very Shakespearean romantic idea, the idea that you should be doing something you like for your job. No, no, what you don't understand, not you. Andrew, obviously this is, you know, whatever hypothetical. What people don't understand is that it's only been like the last 100 years, that people weren't like, mostly dying in childbirth, that people weren't like, having to walk to a well and poop outside in a shed, like, like people had light bulbs in their houses. Like, it's a very new idea in terms of mankind that we insist upon joy in our vocation. Your vocation was anything that you could do to survive until recently and so, like, it's almost arrogant, isn't it, but if you live in a place where you can do it and you don't do it, I think you're kind of just taking a crap all over everybody who worked hard for this, for this world to exist, you know. So, like, it's a new idea. It's not a bad idea. But what's behind it is this, I think, and you tell me what you think, if I'm right or wrong, what I think is really behind it is time. What's really behind it is our finite existence, right? And so if you have 24 hours in a day and you spend eight hours sleeping, theoretically, I have a newborn, so I don't but whatever, if you spend eight hours sleeping and eight hours working, that means you get eight hours maximum. That's not including making bank runs and doing your laundry, eight hours maximum to do what you want to do with your time. So if you are able to get back eight more of those hours, you have literally doubled the quality, potential quality of your life. So it's not about anything other than not really then, than time. And so if you go into this vocation that's supposed to please you, do you think you're going to work just eight hours? Do you work just eight hours?

Andrew Hellmich: No

Gary Hughes: No, no photographer I know works eight hour days. That's insane. When you work it's sometimes it's 16 hour days, and sometimes it's two hour days, and sometimes it's a 20 hour day, sometimes it's 2-20 hour days. So like, if you're going to give all that time to this thing, why would you give all that time and have even less free time, even less happiness, even less of what you're wanting? Because it's about time, we want more time to do what we want. Because we're just, as Matthew McConaughey said, bugs on a rock in a void. So like, you know? And so it's 'time'. And so everything that I do, every business decision that I make at this point in my life, is about time. Do I particularly want to throw a bunch of money at paying a guy to mow my lawn? No, but do I want that Sunday afternoon back? You damn right, I do. So I buy that time. Everything I'm doing is buying time for myself, and I always factor time in as part of the equation. When I buy something, when I spend money, when I make a business decision, when my wife and I are talking about how we want to plan our life, time is the central motivator. How do we buy more time? How do we buy more valuable, how create value with that time that we buy? How do we make space around ourselves to breathe, and then how do we fill that space up with joy? And all of that is enabled by smart business decisions, not smart creatives. Is not passionate, reckless decisions to do what we want in the moment. It's intentional decisions to purchase time and then fill that time up with joy, and our business is the vehicle for that. And if you don't feed the business, if you don't fuel that take in the business, if you don't put oil in that engine, and if you don't get that engine service, then that is going to break down. And then you lose all that time, and you lose all that money. And so, I mean, this is probably, like, maybe more intense than most people want to hear, but it's really this is the truth. I don't want to be totally fatalistic, but that's what we're buying. And yes, your photography business can buy that, but so can many other things that you could do with your time and money. So don't do photography and then say, "Well, I'm sacrificing for my art", because that's terrible. Don't sacrifice your life for your art. Go go to dental school and then take a vacation to Hawaii and take pictures there for like, three weeks. Because guess what, you make a lot of money now. You don't need, you know, photography doesn't need to be your job, but if it's going to be your job, insist, demand that you do it in a way that pleases you. And in 2023 all of these incredibly smart, brave, brilliant people have created a world for you were almost anything is possible in terms of how you make a living. So there's no excuse not to make money doing it, and there's no excuse not to have fun, making money doing it.

Andrew Hellmich: I agree with what you're saying, but what scares me about your way of thinking about time is you must be scared to waste time. It sounds like you have to account for every minute of every like, can you just sit back on the couch and relax? Or do you think, "Hey, this, this is wasting I'm wasting my time."

Gary Hughes: Maybe I stepped on the gas a little too hard. Okay, I am really good at relaxing. My wife, on the other hand, no, because she thinks too much. You know, she's a thinker. She's a planner. I'm not. I'm not much of a planner. But that's a great point, because I really do believe that you're living a life of fear, or you're not. And everybody lives with some fear, like, I'm always afraid my kids are gonna get injured. My poor little daughter, my Charlie, three years old, has smashed her front teeth in. And so we had to go to the dentist this emergency situation. And the next day, she fell right down, face down in the dirt and hit her teeth again. And she's like, bleeding out of her gums. And so now we're all watching her like she's a porcelain doll, you know. So, I mean, if you're a parent, you have fear, you have lots of love, but nobody tells you that the terror comes in equal measure with the love. You know, that's parenting. But no, no, no, I'm not afraid, because I'm not always conscious of time. I'm just not that aware. I'm just not that in the moment all the time. But I am. Whenever I notice it, whenever a decision comes, I don't wake up and go, "Okay, if I go to the bathroom and then I go to the closet, I could save time if I take my clothes in with me to the shower." You know, I'm not that, not, no, it's nothing like that. Like I have a central theme of my life now. So all I'm talking about is creating a sort of singularity that your entire life revolves around. So when you need to make a decision, all you do is run that question through the gauntlet of your purpose in life, and then that equalizer will tell you what to do every time you run it through that filter, what is my mission? What is my plan? What do I value? And so if someone says, "Hey, Gary, uh, I'm gonna go watch the new whatever movie that comes out, do you want to come", and I look, I go, well, that how I want to spend my time this evening? "No, no, good. Hey, appreciate the offer." Like I'm good at saying no now, because having that sort of purpose, that sort of clarity, or if it's someone wants, someone invites me to a thing, and I go, I'm like, "No, that's, no, not interested, but I appreciate that you thought of me", like I'm good at saying no now. I was never good at saying no, but now I have this clear sense of purpose, and it applies to my personal life, and it applies to my business. From do I buy this piece of equipment to do we rent this studio to do we start offering this new product, and then I'm thinking, like, you know, all in time. Video is a great example. A lot of photographers are getting into video art, myself included. And so I'm like, "Okay, well, I have to find a way to manage this so that I don't get bogged down in post-production", because we outsource the majority of our editing. Now, on the photography side, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it the way I do photography is I'm not going to be the donkey pulling the cart the whole way. I'm going to hand that off at some point, somebody else is going to take it. So when we decide what we're going to offer, it's all built around doing it efficiently, because you can't obsess over stuff like this. But when you think of it, you just go, "Well, no, that's not how I want to spend my time." I've worked 15 years to get to get to the point where I could say "I don't want to spend my time that way", you know, and I think that's important, and that's if you really boil it down to what people want by saying, I want to do something that I love for a living, is they want more time with joy in their life. And the irony is that when you pursue your passions as a vocation, you can rob yourself of twice as much joy because you bleed into it, you sweat into it, you cry into it, and then you fail at it, or worse, you succeed at it to the point where it just absorbs your waking life, and then you're miserable, either way. So what I'm talking about is balance and doing what's countering intuitive, which is feed the business and the money you make will create space for you to breathe in, for you to live in, for you to experience joy and to spend time with the people that you love in and to pursue the things that you enjoy, other than the thing that you do for a living. And that's really, that's really what it is. But I'm not particularly single minded about photography. I enjoy it. I love it very much. But I find joy in lots of things, and so I'm able to naturally just compartmentalize photography and other areas of my life, like, you know this guy, right? The guy who, if you're at whatever photography workshop or whatever, does anybody have a variable neutral density filter for a 72 millimeter wide Canon lens. And guy goes, "Yeah, right here, my fanny pack." And he, like, pulls one like that guy, you know that guy, and that guy, photography is everything, and that guy can't breathe without it. And that's not me. I'm not that guy. I enjoy it. It makes me happy. I love my job, but I also fed my business, and made decisions to just create a space where I get to do that, and then I go home, and that's, that's what it's all about.

Andrew Hellmich: Right. So do you enjoy the business side or the photography side more?

Gary Hughes: Both equal, you won't enjoy the business side of your business until you start making good decisions, and when you start cashing big checks, and you start being able to pay yourself a reasonable salary, and where you stop looking at the price of gas when you fill up your car, and all those other things, to where you get to comfort level and to where you get good at marketing. Like nobody's good at, nobody enjoys a thing they're bad at, really, at least not for any sustained period of time. So I really believe that marketing your business is something that it, once you start to see it in the right light and find a way to do it this sort of authentic that also makes you successful. I've seen people go from "I just want to take pictures to like, shit, dude, we're making so much money, I'm just going to pay somebody else to do the pictures", you know, and that I'm going on vacation. And to me, that's the dream, right? It's like if I get a business that's making money and with headshots, which is 75% of what I do are headshots. If I've got a business that's, who can't do a headshot, like a clever chimpanzee could be trained to take a headshot. You just set the lights up. All they got to do is push a shutter, and people would always give a good expression to a chimpanzee, by the way, they'd probably be great at it, you to be honest. But like then I could pay someone to be the photographer taking all the boring, new higher headshots in my studio every week. And I can go take my kids to the park, you know, and then I could take my camera to the park and take pictures of my kids while I'm there. And, you know, like, that's the type of thinking that the clarity that you get when you're not killing yourself to keep your head above water. And I'm not being, I don't want to be insensitive to people that are struggling. Dude, I made so many bad decisions. I was poor for such a long time, and I still have concerns. We're always like, you have to really look back at where you were, to appreciate what you have, because no matter where you are in the moment, you feel like you're trapped and that the next decision could ruin you, especially when you're a business owner, but you know.

Andrew Hellmich: Give me an example of a bad decision that you made when you're up and coming.

Gary Hughes: Well, I think probably the bad decision, and I guess not a bad is everything's on the road to finding who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing. Probably the bad decision was I went to do what I was comfortable with, what I knew the best, and what like my parents did, and what my first mentor did, and I started a portrait and wedding business, and I was like, "This is what you're supposed to do." I never asked myself what I wanted to do, you know. Photography is my third business. I've had and sold two other businesses before I did photography. One was construction, one was IT. And I did that, got the business going, and I sold those to my partners, in both cases not to make a tremendous amount of money. They were both small time stuff, so I was still really poor. Don't act like I was selling businesses for like, a million dollars. That just didn't happen. But I got enough money from selling the construction business to go back to school, and without having to work, I went back to school full time. Then I started the IT business, and then the same again. It's like created a business where my partner was pulling the cart most of the time, and then I found photography, and I wanted to get out of the IT business, so I sold my piece off to him for a relatively small amount of money. So it's not like I was rich going into this I've never been rich, still not rich, but like the, what was the question?

Andrew Hellmich: Give me an example of a mistake that you made looking back.

Gary Hughes: That was it. The mistake I made was that I didn't ask myself what I wanted to do. All I ever did was follow the program, and I lusted over other photographers and their work and the apparent businesses they had, and this was in the early days of blogging, pre-Facebook, you know, being open to the public. Nobody was using MySpace significantly, like it was all blogs and stuff. YouTube hadn't taken off yet. But if you're following other photographers, and I used to just be in love, I follow guys like Jerry Jonas, I followed, you know, Susan Stripling. And I followed, I just I followed all these incredible photographers who are still operating today, still creating amazing work, and I would just be like, so depressed that I wasn't that good, and then I wasn't that successful, and that I wasn't, but let me tell you. Let me tell you the truth. Here's the truth, every photographer that you look up to is struggling more than they would ever tell anybody. You know, financially, personally, and I can't tell you, I mean, into the business. Let me, you know, how many people have you seen come in start swinging their junk around like they're the next big thing, and then they're gone in a couple of years? Happens all the time, you know.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah

Gary Hughes: I got a guy down the street from me. He's a barber. His name's Brandon, Brandon the barber, and he owns a barber shop, and he mentors young men and teaches them how to be barbers. He's a really incredible dude and a kind of a miniature, kind of local leader in the community. And I was talking to him the other day, and he's expanding his business. He's opening up a second barber shop, and in the barber industry, as he was explaining it to me, in the hair business, it's very much like our business, they have people that, like, get big on Instagram, doing really flashy stuff and like, "Oh my god, you know, like, all these cool haircuts and fades and designs", and stuff that nobody actually ever wears in real life, but just incredible stuff. And he's like, yeah, he goes "That's kind of how it is." It's like, but you know, he goes "The man who taught me told me, he's like, if you can give a good haircut, you'll always have a job." And that was an incredibly insightful thing. And this guy's just a little bit older than me. He's not like an old band. And I thought photography is exactly the same. If you're good at running a business and you can take a decent photo, you'll always have a good business, and you don't have to be the next big thing. And I wasted so much emotional energy, you know, wishing I was someone else.

Andrew Hellmich: Yes

Gary Hughes: And copying other people's styles, my style was all over the place. Have you done this?

Andrew Hellmich: Yes, yes.

Gary Hughes: You're like, "Oh my God. Now I'm going to all, my white balances are going to look like this, and now I'm going to shoot wide open with a 35 and everything", you're not like you just you keep shifting it. And the best piece of advice I can give any new photographer is to get a mentor, get another mentor, but stop looking at the freaking internet and just find your thing and ask yourself what you want to do. And the answer to that 'maybe, I don't know', and that's okay, but looking at these people who their job is literally to put the best, flashiest, sexiest stuff and to never say anything bad or negative or talk about their struggles or what they're going through, you need that deep tribal knowledge from somebody who's been doing it for 30 damn years. And you need to carry their bags, and you need to see how they run a business. You need to find somebody with gray hair and a mullet and a goatee who wears like Dockers with just a performance fishing gear shirt tucked into it with their logo on the chest. You need a dork who's been in business for 30 years, and that needs to be your mentor. And you need to figure out how they've survived in business for 30 years because those guys, those ladies, they get no love from the online community, but they're the ones that are going to save your damn life. They're the ones they're going to give you what you need to actually run an actual business. And if you can cut it, if you could just give a good haircut every time you'll be able to have a barber shop that makes money.

Andrew Hellmich: That's true. I love that. I love it. Mate, tell me, then, how did you discover headshots? I mean, you were doing something you weren't enjoying. Did you see it online? Did you see another photographer with a successful business? Did you see Peter Hurley and say, "Man, I want to be that guy?"

Gary Hughes: No, it's funny. You know, Peter is an incredible marketer and obviously a great photographer, but he's taken this his style, and shown other people how to replicate it, and created this kind of revolution. And now it's like people who don't even know photography know his style, you know, and they know about squinching and all the other stuff, and I got a lot of respect for that. I had no idea who he was until the first time that I met him was when we were on CreativeLive for photo week. And I was teaching, I wasn't teaching headshots, I was teaching how to sell weddings because I was still in the wedding business, and headshots was something that was about half of my business. But in my experience, at that point, nobody would let me teach it. No places would let me teach a class on it. Nobody was really interested. Because even at that point, sorry, I'm drinking bubbly water, and it's like, this is not something that you drink, that you drink while you're on a podcast, but it was something that was like, half, maybe more than half, of my business at the time, and portraits and weddings were like, we were actually transitioning out of portraits and weddings. But I, they asked me to come and back when in those days, in CreativeLive Photo Week was a way that they sort of brought in a few heavy hitters, you know, like Peter and Roberto Valenzuela and Lindsay Adler and Susan Stripling and Sue Bryce. And then they would bring in a couple of new people just to see how they did. And I was one of the new guys they brought in to kind of see how they did. And based on that, then they would give you a like, two day class or a three day class at a later date. So it was about six months after that that I actually taught my first full eighth CreativeLive course. So I was there for photo week. I met Peter, and once I kind of found him, it was actually what he did. And he and I have had a kind of an interesting history together, but we're pals now, and everything's cool. I have nothing bad to say about the man. What he did for the industry was he sort of normalized being a headshot specialist, where before then, the only people that could be headshot specialists were people in certain markets where they made movies and television shows. And so that's how we got into it. And so we were doing portraits and weddings. Our business was relatively new, and my wife's friend Lisandra was an actor, and she, they were filming a movie in Orlando, where we live. And she said, "I need new headshots. My agent wants me to get new headshots." And so she asked us, and actually, my wife went out and did her headshots, not me, because she knew her. And my wife was still shooting at the time, and she doesn't really shoot in the business anymore, since we started having kids, she's a full time mom, and she does the books and pays the bills and pays the employees and everything. Then we met with the agent, and the agent liked what she did, and they started sending us other clients. They would refer us along with a couple of other photographers in the area, like, here are the photographs we like. So we started doing a lot of trade in actors, because Orlando has a small entertainment market, and that started feeding headshots into our business. So because of my aforementioned background in IT, I was one of the first to the punch on making a website and making it Google friendly and several other things. And so we started getting a lot of actors. So I had headshots on my website, headshots and all our SEO and backlinks and all that stuff. And then I remember one day a guy called the studio. Well, we didn't have a studio. The guy called the spare room in my house, that was the studio at the time. So a guy called the studio, and he sounded like an old man, and he says, "Do you ever photograph anybody who's not young and good looking?" And I thought about the pictures on my website. It's all 22 year old, sexy actors. I'm like..

Andrew Hellmich: Don't tell me this is Sean Connery?

Gary Hughes: It was, yeah, sure. We're Sean Connery, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: So what happened at that moment?

Gary Hughes: It literally, like, sparked something in my brain and started, like, burn a you know, you could feel like the neurons firing and like, it's just burning all the synapses across your brain. I'll never forget that moment as long as I live. And I realized, as I stepped outside, every building, every window, every office, everybody needs a headshot. And I've been focusing on the .001% of people that need a headshot instead of everybody else. And then it was that following week that our local PPA affiliate group, which is like our AI PP but it's like the big one in the US. We have an affiliate group in Orlando that meets once a month, and a photographer, one of these guys kind of like that I mentioned before, just an old timer in the business who stayed alive because he's clever and he's canny and he's a good business person, and he gives and he just does a hell of a photograph, never crazy and flashy, just a solid photograph every time. Is this guy, Kevin Newsom, and it's the Newsome studio in Tampa. And this guy I met probably when I was 16, about 10 years before this happened, but he came to give a class at our local PP affiliate, and it was all about business headshots, and because he was really, to my knowledge, one of the first people to the punch that really started to specialize in it, because he's like, I'm 58 I don't want to run around weddings anymore. I don't want to do weddings on the beach. I don't want to put babies in buckets. I don't want to drag couches into fields and so and he was one of the first I ever saw to really market for it, to come up with pricing for it. It's just he always boxing clever, this guy, and he's just one of these people that just gave me so much incredible, life changing, tribal knowledge. And this was one of those moments, not the only moment he ever gave me something invaluable, but one of the big ones. And that was the point where I was like, we need to change how we're marketing headshots. We already have the corner on SEO for headshots in our area, yet we're showing only actors. What are we doing? And at that point is we started to shift. And by the end of that year, we looked at our books, and this is where we cry, and we look at how much money we're actually making, how much we're spending, and we're sitting there in tears, and we just do our end of the year meeting plan for the following year. And what was amazing is that at that point, now, 75% of our income was coming from headshots or headshot related business, and we were only putting about 25% of our marketing towards it. And yet, weddings and portraits were about 25% of our business, and we were putting about 75% of our marketing efforts towards that. And so at that point, we decided to just stop taking portrait and wedding commissions and put everything on headshots and corporate commercial photography. And over the next few years, we developed a business plan for what we call a commercial portrait studio. We take pictures of people for their jobs. We give entrepreneurs, business owners and creative professionals, impactful images to market themselves, their businesses and their brands. And that's what we do. And not only do we become more successful financially when we focused our business. And not everybody can do that. I realize some people live out and like the sticks and they can't, and you have to be a little more broad, but if you live in a decent sized area, you can specialize if you want to. But we got more successful the more we specialized, and our marketing efforts became a lot easier because we were marketing a narrower scope of stuff and so, and then a funny thing happened on the way to financial success, Andrew, I started to realize how happy I was to be doing this particular area of the job. I'm pretty gregarious and chatty, as you might have noticed. I like people. I like talking to people on airplanes. Don't boo hiss. I do. I like talking to people on an airplane. I enjoy that very much. And I realized that we had, some remember, some things were intentional, some things were asked backwards. I intended to change the focus of my business based on money, and along that way, I discovered that it was making me happy and how miserable I had been doing the other thing. So it's not like I one day had this epiphany and created this business to bring joy into my heart. No, I like discover this by accident. And this is the thing I should have done the entire times. I should have asked myself, What do I want to do? What makes me happy, what pleases me? And otherwise I'm going to go get a job. Because I'm a good soldier. I can be a good employee. And I could just go in nine to five and then mentally check out. I'm good. I can do that.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, and then enjoy photography on the side, if you had to.

Gary Hughes: Correct, or not.

Andrew Hellmich: Like, yeah, sure, sure.

Gary Hughes: Like, we have big goals, big dreams.

Andrew Hellmich: For sure, you've said, you've talked about a roundabout way about money, you know, quite a few times. But you've also said, I'm not rich, but it sounds like you've got a great business. What kind of revenue are you guys doing in the business today?

 
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Andrew Hellmich: That's interesting about six to seven years, and I look I totally agree with that, but I am curious on your thoughts as we're slowly wrapping this up, if someone was into wedding, say they were in year four or five, they weren't really loving it and they moved to headshots. Do you think it's going to be another six to seven years for that to work, Or you think they've got enough experience from what they've already been doing that?

Gary Hughes: It wasn't, it wasn't six or seven years from the time I started headshots. So it, no, I don't believe that. I don't, I don't believe so, you'll have learned, first of all, you've accumulated gear. You'll have accumulated, hopefully, some money in the bank, you know, a little bit. You'll have accumulated a lot of experience, a lot of contacts. You have a client base to draw from, portrait wedding clients make incredible headshot clients. So the first place to start shopping for your headshot clients is contact all your other clients. Because, as we said before, not everybody is going to assume that you do headshots because you shot their wedding. You know, I see my wedding clients from back in the day, and I see them on LinkedIn with these terrible headshots. I'm like, "Bro, I'm right here." So you know, you have a lot to work with. So no, it's not starting over, it's shifting your product offerings, and it's adjusting your business plan, and so you can absolutely make quick work of it, as compared to somebody starting from scratch. I do honestly believe, because of the size of the demand for the service, that it's actually a lot easier and you don't have to go to any wedding networking meetings, which is great, because you don't have to advertise in The Knot, you know, you don't have to do any of those things.

Andrew Hellmich: I love it, mate. I've got one last question about Google AdWords or Google ads, but before we ask you that, to finish off, like you mentioned your training. You mentioned you're helping photography with this. You got a class, which we're going to be too late for, I'm guessing, going to run another one. Where's the best place to go and learn more from you?

Gary Hughes: Okay, if you, my website, if you Google Gary Hughes photographer, you'll find my website or Gary Hughes Orlando. My business is called Hughes Fioretti Photography. And so if you Google, if you type in anything near that into Google, you'll find me. On that homepage is a link to education. It's hughesfioretti.com/education there you will find links to all my social media. You'll find my latest YouTube video. You'll find all the classes and courses and actions and other crap that I have for sale. And you'll also find a list of where I'm going to be speaking and places that you can see me live. And you can also sign up for one on one mentoring. I do that. I save two Mondays a month where I do some coaching with people. It's not my main forte, but when people have a bunch of questions and they want to talk, you can always buy an hour with me anytime you like. And then, in addition to that, you can sign up for my email list. Email marketing is the bread and butter of my business. It is the thing that gives me the best client retention, and it is, I have an email list just for photographers, and I send out a newsletter every week with all the latest stuff, including early access to all my webinars that are free. I do a free webinar every five or six weeks on various topics related to the business, mostly of headshots, some live shooting, and it's all live streaming webinars where you can actually interact with me and ask me questions. I do a free one every five or six weeks. You gotta sign up on my email list to get notified about those, and so you can join the thousands of photographers on my email list and then get access to all this. I put out so much free information that you're going to just love to give me your money and buy my classes. That's, you're going to be so grateful for all the free stuff. They'd be like, "I feel guilty. I should give this guy some money." Like, that's how much free stuff I put out. So you never have to give me a dime of your money to learn from me. Just go to my page. hughesfioretti.com/education, everything's there in one place, including all the gear that I use, if you're into gear, and all that kind of stuff, everything you need to know. I'm on Instagram @GaryHughesofficial. I'm on YouTube GaryHughesOfficial, and I'm on Twitter @GaryHughes, I was one of the first 10,000 users on Twitter, which is a fun fact about me, and I still only have 500 followers on Twitter, which is wild, because I never use it, but like whatever you know so and I also have a podcast called Photobomb. It's the Photobomb Podcast that I co-host with my really good friend Booray Perry, and we've done that for seven years now, and it's basically just like hanging out with two photographers, where the first section is we just catch up and talk about random shenanigans, and then the second half of the shows, we always talk about what's new in photography, what gear is happening, what are big photography related, copyright related, video, related stories in the news, and that's a damn good time, and that's also free. So lots of free stuff out there.

Andrew Hellmich: I love it. I love it. I'm gonna link to all those in the show notes, so the listener can easily find that the subscription area to get onto your email list is top, front and center on your education page. So anyone can easily find that.

Gary Hughes: That's on purpose.

Andrew Hellmich: And yes, yes. And I know the listeners will be more than happy to help sponsor one of your kids through college.

Gary Hughes: Thanks guys

Andrew Hellmich: So they learn more from you.

Gary Hughes: Thanks, everybody.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, last question for you about Google ads. Do you send people from your Google ads to your homepage, or do you have specific ads sending to different pages on your website or to your blog posts?

Gary Hughes: You clever son of a bitch. Yeah, absolutely. Now I, that is the key to my advertising is I target specific ads. So here's a quick example. I create an ad specifically for Team headshots, and I don't use AdWords. I use Google ads, which used to be called AdWords Express, and now it's just called Google ads. It's faster, it's less tech knowledge required. And if you can have an ad going in just a few minutes. AdWords, for those of you out there screaming at your radio or into your Airpods or whatever, AdWords can give you a much better return, but the degree of difficulty to do it well is much higher. So if you want to go AdWords, that's usually for a larger campaign over a longer period of time, but you can get a better return by maybe a full percentage point or two, as far as click through rate on your ads. However, AdWords or spread AdWords, not, it's used to be called AdWords Express, but Google ads, the mini version, is very fast. It works really well, and it's not very hard to use, and so it's what I recommend to people. So I create an ad with Google ads all about team headshots for teams and staffs for specifically. And that ad links to the team and staff headshots page of my website, not to my homepage, because I want to take as many clicks out of the middle as I possibly can get them to. What they want is they want information, and I send them to the information, and then I give them a call to action and the ability to act. And those ads are very successful for us. So I spend about six to $800 a month on those ads, and have a pretty darn good return on them. And so it's a good way, in addition to those other things we talked about, to start driving headshot business to your studio. But again, ads will fail you if you don't send them to a place that is a good converting website with all the information they need. If you throw money at ads without sending them to the place with the information they need that's relevant to what they're looking for, you are going to fail at ads. You might as well take that money and flush it right down the toilet, which in Australia, I've heard goes the other way.

Andrew Hellmich: I believe that's true, I believe that's true.

Gary Hughes: It might be an urban legend. I don't know. It's called the Coriolis effect, right? So, you know, they go the other way. Anyway.

Andrew Hellmich: It's true. Gary, that is a fantastic place to finish. Thank you so much for coming on, for sharing everything you have. It's been a super easy interview for me. I just asked the question and let you..

Gary Hughes: Because you didn't have to say anything, did you?

Andrew Hellmich: Exactly, it was a breeze. So mate, thank you again. I'll add links to anywhere and everywhere people can find you. Really appreciate you coming on.

Gary Hughes: Anytime. Thank you.