The grand unveiling...

It's here! A little later than we planned, and we've had to do things in a different order than we'd've liked to, but at last, our new website is here: hiltonsandersphotography.co.uk.

It's easier to find the information, it allows us to show off the different sides to our business, it's simple, clean and fresh. Just what we wanted.

Please have a good shufti, and if you've got comments to make, we'd love to hear them, either to info@hiltonsandersphotography.co.uk, or as comments on here.

C

Spot the new logo!

Did you notice? Brand spanking new logo, and the HSP website getting a new look too! Things are being tidied and tightened, spruced up and smartened behind the scenes, and we'll be launching it shortly.

With our first year in business under our belt, we thought it was time to update our appearance, re-dress the e-shop window, and show off the different streams of our work with dedicated galleries and more easily accessible details about each service.

Watch the website for details!

C

Getting into the seasonal swing....

Ok, it's mid-October, therefore it's time to start shooting for Christmas. I am the least Christmassy person I know, and would rather ignore it, but it's our busiest time of the year for portraiture, so the last few weeks have been a whirl of preparation of all our publicity to get the word out there about our fantastic studio and the type of photos we can take.

The customer service team from Leeds' nicest call centre arrived en masse and largely in the buff to shoot 12 different sporting scenes, and then we were theming the events of the year for our Bosom Buddies ladies. Both organisations chose us to help them with their annual charity calendars, which put is into the festive mood. The breastfeeding mums brought some great kids costumes for Halloween and Chrsitmas (kindly supplied by Mamas and Papas) and so we borrowed lovely Aoife and showed her presents for the first time in her very young life. She knew exactly what to do with them too! The schnauser pup is the 3rd member of the HSP team, and she hates us for making her wear a Santa suit, but look.... she's so cute!

So now we're distributing flyers for all we're worth, the word has gone out through an email campaign, and we're making sure everyone we come into contact with knows that as usual, the sitting is free at the studio, but we're giving away a 7x5inch print to get everyone off to a good start from now until 23rd December. We could be the answer to your family Christmas present list. Just give us a call on 0113 2826116 and book your appointment.

See you soon!

C

Networking like a .... spider?

OOOh.... if I see any more chocolate, coffee or wine this week... I'll probably just guzzle it happily whilst engaging in interesting conversations with the nearest businesspeople to me. Yes, it's been a monster networking week for me, with 3 events in 3 days. Usually I manage 1 every week, and we run our No Frills Business Networking for Women evenings on the 3rd Wednesday of each month (ie this week), but last night's Make Your Mark Ambassadors Networking event at beam in Wakefield is the one that's filled me with the most ideas.

I met loads of fellow ambassadors, all dedicated to encouraging people to get involved in businesses, and sparking inspiration in areas of our community otherwise not well known for entrepreneurship. We first came across Make Your Mark when we started the No Frills nights, and decided to apply to become ambassadors because I feel very strongly that businesses need to work with schools and colleges to encourage the next generation to have ideas and confidence. We're intending to do our bit for the Global Entrepreneurship Week by inviting young business minded women to our November No Frills event which falls smack bang in the middle of it.

I ended up deep in conversation with James Clegg from Operation Hoodie. James lost a good friend to cancer at far too young an age, and his response was to start something amazing. It chimed with me, because my mate Kim's death to a brain tumour when we were 20 has so far led me to run 2 Races for Life (5k) and a Run for Life (10k) to raise money for Cancer Research Uk. We're also currently shooting a naked calendar at the studio which hopes to raise money for breast and testicular cancer charities. I hope to connect these dots and see if we can help James out. Watch this space!

So .... networking is fun, and as someone who likes to talk about anything at any given moment, and is passionate about our business, I am settling into it as a natural, but it's essential for businesses to find others who they can connect with to push their ideas forward, and I hope to report back soon with some exciting developments!

Sanders' Pregnancy Economic Recovery Model

I am no economist, and I am pretty much an accidental business-woman. When my sensible mates chose to study maths, economics and business studies at A-level, I was tackling English literature and philosophy and ethics of religion. I wanted to learn what words meant and why people used them to make things. Then I fell in love with photography and became one of the many photography students who graduate every year who never paid attention to such considerations as how to keep body and soul together while you are creating works of art which speak eloquently to the viewer. I expected the world to recognise my talent with payment as soon as I had my degree in my hand. Now sometimes I forget the details of our fees and charges, carried away by the idea of taking the pictures. I am a photographer first, qualified to take photos, and I have a post-graduate certificate in what translates as observing how things are connected in visual culture.

But.... when I was growing up, my parents had a private day nursery, situated in our lovely big house in Chapel Allerton. The ground floor was for the kids, and we lived upstairs. My mum was a nursery-nurse, and set up the basics of the business when she was on maternity leave with my big brother, and when I came along, my dad quit his job at the foundry and they took it from there. It eventually became one of the most successful and best regarded nurseries in the city. By the time of the last serious recession I was a teenager and was helping out after school when they needed an extra pair of eyes in the garden, or a spare nose-wiper and hand-washer. I remember hearing them talk about how things were going to get very difficult, because people would lose their jobs and stay at home with the kids instead of bringing them to the nursery. And then people who might've been thinking about having a baby, or a second baby, would think again. Sure enough, the numbers got thinner at the nursery, and mum and dad had to open up the nursery at the weekend for kids parties (which was my job - make sure no-one trashed the place, tidy up if they did, make party food, clean up sick, clean the toilets....). Dad also predicted that the first thing people did when there was money again would be to have those babies they'd been holding back from. Sure enough, we had a clutch of 8 3month olds start with us as the country started to climb out of the doldrums. The lesson I absorbed from that was that you can tell when the economy is starting to recover becasue people start having babies again. I think dad thought it was because of the types of jobs the parents worked in, in Leeds's business district, in the media, in the NHS, they'd see the early indicators and get cracking on with kids ahead of anyone else.

When Jo and I started the studio, we reckoned that we'd spend the recession slowly getting the word out about the quality of our portraiture work, and that by the time people started having kids again, we'd have built a really solid reputation, with lots of happy customers telling their friends about us, and that we'd be in a great position. That's still hopefully the plan, but it's occurred to me that my dad's reasoning might've been the wrong way round. I think the end of the recession is brought on roughly 9 months after the deepest point.

I know lots of couples who've either just had or are about to give birth in the next month or 2. When there was no money to do anything else back in January and February, I bet I can make an educated guess as to what people got up to. All the things you have to do when you know there's a small person on the way - the painting of rooms, the buying of cots, car-seats, new cars, maybe moving house - help to stimulate the local economy and suddenly there's more money to go around, and as more and more people go through the same pattern, the whole country moves back into action. (I was about to say the black, but that's not going to happen for a while.)

I have done no research. I may be utterly wrong, but I'm enjoying telling everyone that I have formulated this model from the point of view of 2 generations of Sanders', each with small businesses dependent on people having babies regularly.

Good luck and congratulations to everyone about to add to their family. Come and see us when you're ready for some lovely family photos.

Better late than never

Inspired and spurred into action by my mate Ed over at the Soundmill studios, I remembered I had started a blog for Hilton Sanders Photography a few months back, and am now determined to write some stuff down about what's been going on.

We're now into our second year of business, older, wiser and in my case carrying a little more weight. At first we could hardly believe we could legitimately state our professions as "Photographer" let alone that we were both directors of a company, with all the imaginary images that accompany those terms. The reality was definitely not glamorous. We started HSP just before what was already a credit crunch became a full-blown recession, and spent several weeks covered in paint while we prepared the studio, just as people stopped spending on everything, and getting professional portraits done was definitely the last thing on the list. The run up to Christmas is a reliable time for any photographer, and we saw enough people to get us going and start to get our name out there and be recognised. But come January 1st...... tumbleweed. I think we probably started naively with the Field of Dreams credo -"If you build it, they will come." After a cold and quiet winter in the office, we realised that we needed to push harder to get commercial work in, because businesses always need promotional photos, to give us a chance of avoiding the impact of the seasonality of portraiture.

And it took us until May to get our act together. We'd tried a couple of different networking groups, and although we were only visiting, we came away with jobs from each one, but we always felt that we were either the only women there, or the youngest people (our average age is creeping towards 32 these days....), or that we were just in the wrong place. Whilst our business is split between domestic/family and commercial/business work, we were there to secure work from businesses - ideally product shots, or a little PR, and as much as we'll never turn a customer away, there's just not so much you can do for your average accountant! So in May, we launched No Frills Business Networking for Women, with the idea that we can't've been the only new, small company looking for a way to make friends and connections with others in the same situation. And we were right. We've made some great business friends, and they've introduced us to some other local networking groups, and more local businesses in turn. No Frills (the pun's obvious if you know me and Jo) kicked off with Lindsey Davies of Open Communications taking the 5minute intro spot, and she invited me to attend the weekly MBE (Milford Business Exchange) session the week after. Lindsey had been right - this was a networking group I felt comfortable with - a mixture of businesses of various sizes, ages and services, where I feel like I am supported and encouraged, and it's resulted in some great jobs. The combination of an early-morning weekly, semi-formal(ahem!) mixed-sex group, and the monthly, very relaxed and women-only session suits HSP fine, and we have now worked with great local businesses from start-ups and one-man bands to some of the biggest international companies with premises in Yorkshire.

Even better, whilst we've built up our connections with local businesses, we've continued building our reputation for great portraits, and we hear from our customers that they came to us because they had friends or family who've already used us, and loved the shots. There's no better way of getting portraiture business than good word of mouth. With this in mind, we opened our studio up for photo-parties - for any celebration. They're a great alternative to taking a bunch of kids to the cinema, to the fast-food restaurants or for a swimming party, but equally good for hen-nights and silver wedding anniversaries. From our point of view, it's s way for people to come and have a look around the studio, meet us and see the sort of thing we can do, without spending too much. We have had some amazing fun with our parties - the creativity people come along with has been incredible! Our suggestion that people bring a change of clothes and a theme for the second outfit, has so far has been recognised as an artistic opportunity by most of our parties. Our favourites have been the apparently simple theme of "fluorescent", which turned a team of 13year old girls into Oulton's next top models, and "Hollywood", where 4 girls brought their own red carpet, fun cameras and cuddly "airdog" (never touches the floor) and so we set up a "papping incident" in the studio. Fantastic.

Every challenge and idea we're approached with is exciting. We try to find out what all of our customers are looking for and take them just a little bit beyond what they were expecting, and that's fun to attempt, and satisfying to achieve. What more could I ask for from a job? Yes it's terrifying knowing that each month we have to earn our living, rather than being able to depend on a regular wage, but every single penny we make feels ten times more valuable knowing how hard we worked to earn it.

So... that's roughly what we've done in our first year. In the next few months we've got some great jobs coming up - naked fundraising calendars, in-house newsletters, playgroups and nurseries, and lots of family shoots. I'll try to update this blog a little more often and maybe shed a little light on what goes on behind the doors at HSP, and our experiences in business as we adventure through the turbulent times at (hopefully) the end of the recession. Please feel free to follow us and chime in with any ideas!

Cheers,

Caroline