Building a strong creative business: the view from the inside

Nearly 7 years ago, Joseph Radhik and I founded Stories by Joseph Radhik, a wedding photography firm based in Mumbai, India. In the time since that first day, we have shot over 400 weddings, across cultures and across continents, travelling to 29 countries around the world. Our work has received significant press, and we are closing in on our 100th international award. All of this work has been in service of building a strong company and a strong brand, one that will last the test of time and tide.

So how have we done this? A well recognized brand, a well respected team, very well reviewed work, and clients who review our service very well. All built in the first five years of our existence, which has propelled us to interesting places in the years that have followed. I'll credit this first to the quality of the work that Joseph and the incredible team at Stories have produced, and second to the quality of the ideas that we have employed all through at Stories: across product design, service, sales, marketing, strategy, image, brand, costs and control, pricing and much much more.

This blog is a series of notes on these ideas. Welcome.

Here's one foundational idea I'd like to leave you with from these seven years.

The map is not the territory.

I heard Jason Silva talk of this a few days ago, and I'm struck by how true this is when you're in a new industry (new to us, for sure) building a brand new rocketship (with brand new ideas) aimed at the sky.

We tend to believe in maps, whether it's maps of the industry we are about to enter, or maps of the industry we're already in: someone clearly figured out that there's a mountain there, and a clutch of spidery roads here, that there's a lake you don't want to get stuck in, and that there's what seems to be a pot of gold on the other side of this forest. It gets even more compelling when you see that a whole bunch of people are using this map; if it works for them, it must be true and perfect. When we follow maps without questioning what lies beyond, what we get are businesses that look a lot like everybody else’s. How do you break this, then? By recognizing a few things about maps.

Maps are only rough estimates of the world; they're not the world itself. Far more lies outside of maps than we can imagine. They’re a great guide to getting started, but they’re not a perfect reflection of the world: the center of the map might not be the most exciting place to be in, and there’s probably lots of interesting ideas on the edges of the map you’re currently looking at. And there’s definitely lots more mapping to be done in several areas: that mountain you think is a roadblock right up ahead might not actually exist.

Maps tend to reflect prevailing wisdom. In 2012, when Joe and I were scoping the wedding photography market, the maps of the industry we saw existing players using, for how you create, price and sell your product, seemed to be already complete and perfect. They were, in that they reflected the current way of work. If we'd used just the maps we saw back then, and believed that those were the entire territory, we would have ended up with very different results.

Maps don't directly point to the possibilities that lie in the future. In 2012, the markers you take for granted now (X price, Y service, Z way to market your service) didn't exist. Heck, Instagram was nowhere close to being the defacto driver for marketing and business.

The maps we wrote as we grew tended to be far better for us. Writing a map for your business needs you to pay a lot of attention to your clients: what they want, what they desire, what makes them happy, what makes them unhappy, where they congregate, who they’re seen with, who they want to be seen with and much more. Maps can get even better when you listen to another group of people who are deeply invested in the success of your business: your team. What makes your team happy, what challenges them, what they desire and what they want to build up to are important boundaries that allow for a better map to be drawn.

Maps get outdated very quickly, so the mental model we have built of our slice of the market is one we’re constantly updating: are enquiries increasing or dipping from a certain channel, are clients hiring us for more days per engagement or less, what new trends are affecting event design, what new benchmarks are being set by other industries in service for the same client.

The best maps are ones that overlap ideas from parallel/similar industries: who’s offering the best in service and product to the same client, and how can we take the information from their map and apply it to our industry is a great question to ask.

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Goal setting and visioning at Stories have benefited from years of attempts at drawing better maps, and a large part of this has had to do with letting go of biases, and approaching the world with curiosity. As Silva reminds us, we don’t see the world as it is, we only see the world as we are.