Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, mini-workshops, and behind-the-scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She’ll challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business. Let’s do the ReWork.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hi friends, and welcome back to The ReWork. Today’s guest is Matt Hodgman, the Senior Client Success Manager at White House Custom Colour. Don’t you love that title? Senior Client Success Manager. So, his entire job is to work for his client’s success, so those who are customers of the lab of White House Custom Colour.
Allison Tyler Jones: And what we’re going to discuss today is the necessity of having empathy in your business, that empathy is actually a superpower, and we discuss everything from how to have more empathy, how to make empathy not work against you, and how sometimes your best marketing can happen after things go wrong, and what you do to fix it. So, I know you’re going to get a lot of good info out of this, so let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, I am thrilled to welcome into the podcast studio today, Mr. Matt Hodgman, a friend of below these many years, who also happens to be the senior client success manager, which I love that title. Senior Client Success Manager, not just the client success manager, the senior…
Matthew Hodgman: Right.
Allison Tyler Jones: … client success manager.
Matthew Hodgman: That’s referring to my age, Allison.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I don’t believe that. At White House Custom Colour, and in a Minnesota lab that we know and love and have had a long, long relationship with, and we’re here to talk today about the necessity of empathy. So Matt, take it away. Tell us what are you thinking? What are your thoughts on empathy?
Matthew Hodgman: Boy, I mean couldn’t we all use that in our lives and a hell of a lot of it?
Allison Tyler Jones: Certainly.
Matthew Hodgman: … every day. We live in a space and environment and world now where a lot of times we see the opposite of that, and unfortunately, it’s opinions and things that are put forth into your personal bubble that affect you as a human being, as a parent, as a friend, as a business owner, as a photographer. I’ve always said with photography, because I have a long history of photography. I was a photographer in the nineties using film, and I’ve been around the block, taking those things, and having some of those negative spikes being hurled at you or in your general direction, and then turning around and being able to wipe that face clean and put on the face, it’s necessary that we all know, that it’s necessary to be able to go in and do a great job for your clients in a session, in a sales presentation, in an installation, in a friend, talking, in anything. I mean, empathy is such a necessity in our lives.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so how is it failing? How are we not getting that? And then how have you had success using it?
Matthew Hodgman: Whenever I’m talking to people, Allison… You and I have had a number of conversations, and your wonderful husband, Ivan, and I’ve really enjoyed conversations with you over the years, and I do that with hundreds of people across the US and Canada in my own friend group, and photographers, by listening first, talking second. Being genuinely vested into people’s lives and careers, and listening to listen, not listening to respond, I guess. Because it’s hard. We live in a world where there’s so much coming at us all the time from a marketing perspective, from relationships, from finances, from politics, from all the things, and to be able to actually zip your lip and listen and genuinely care, it’s hard or it can be hard.
Allison Tyler Jones: I think even just to take a beat, even like look up from your phone and just look somebody in the eye and actually just be there.
Matthew Hodgman: Yeah, for sure. I mean, when’s the last time that somebody popped into your head randomly as you’re sitting at home or in your lovely kitchen, which I’ve had the honor of touring before…
Allison Tyler Jones: My kitchen is great.
Matthew Hodgman: It is great. I’m very jealous of it. And when that person pops into your head, you stop what you’re doing, and go and reach out to that person. I am proud to say that I do that. I don’t do it all the time, but I feel like if there’s a gentle nudge from the universe that puts this person in my head, whether it’s just a random hello, those things can mean a lot.
Allison Tyler Jones: I think for me, there have been times where I wake up in the morning and I’ll be thinking about a specific client. I’ll just think, “Oh, I wonder how they’re doing?” Or maybe I saw something about them on social media or whatever, and then it’s so weird, then they’ll call me that day or something. There’s these little weird alignments. So I think that’s a non-marketing, marketing trick, right? If you wake up in the morning thinking about one of your clients, maybe just text them and tell them that you’re thinking about them.
Matthew Hodgman: Right. It certainly can’t hurt anything.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, I think it’s just really nice. We’re so busy. We’re always thinking about how can we optimize our workflow and efficiency and all of these things, but I think sometimes we’re losing that human element, and that’s one of the things that I love about this business, that it’s still so analog in so many ways for me, and it’s still one-to-one human-to-human.
Matthew Hodgman: Right. Yeah, 100%, in every single aspect.
Allison Tyler Jones: Totally.
Matthew Hodgman: Love it. From the time that somebody hears of you, the first time that somebody connects to your style of photography, connects to your voice on a podcast, through your Instagram, through your website, brand, it’s all the things.
Allison Tyler Jones: And really we can make people feel so seen. And I know Sue Bryce has definitely been a champion of this as far as helping women to be seen and valued, and to have confidence in themselves.
Allison Tyler Jones: And I feel like we do that with little kids, with families helping families, not only that we see them, but helping them see each other when they come and it’s fraught and they’ve fought the entire way there, but to help them to be able to have an experience where they can sit back and look at their kids. When I don’t send the parents out of the room, when I photograph the rest of the kids, I want them to stay in there, because I want them to see what they’ve created. It’s not me, it’s not my art. It’s like they have created. Those relationships with those kids, they have created those children, and to be able to see like, “Oh,” I am really glad that we had all these kids, even though it’s hard. And even though I wanted to strangle every single one of them on the way here, but actually I really do love them, and that informs every part of the process and makes the work itself more valuable. That level of love and empathy can be built into the actual product itself, I really believe.
Matthew Hodgman: Oh, 100%. There is not a piece of it, experience, that you can pull out and separate from all the rest of them. The product is what you see every day, but the memories and the experience of it, that’s really where the value of it is. A piece of canvas is a piece of canvas until you put the experience into it and the image onto it, and then that’s where the value comes from, and I think that point is lost a lot. To go back just a little bit in our conversation here, specifically talking about being empathetic and listening to clients and investing into their relationships with them. When you do that, that takes your brand unintentionally to a level that is not achievable through just marketing and sales.
Allison Tyler Jones: Say more about them. What do you mean?
Matthew Hodgman: I consider… We’ll use our relationship. You and Ivan are my great friends. We text, we talk about things. I was in your neck of the woods. I stopped in, you guys stopped what you were doing, you took me for a tour of your house. I feel like I’m part of the extended ATJ family when I’m around.
Allison Tyler Jones: Totally are.
Matthew Hodgman: And I’m very lucky to work for a company who invests themselves into that style of relationship, and that aligns very well with who I am as a human being. In your studio, in whatever that business may be, when you are aligning yourself with people who are like-minded and who will come alongside you as more of a partner, if you will, through the whole process, and they will enjoy the process and they will listen and they will follow the direction because you’re so connected at that point, there will be not a reason in the world that they would ever look any other direction. Because why would there be any reason to? There wouldn’t be at all.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’m glad that you brought that up because that does speak to… Just talking about vendor relationships, for example, I do want to talk about that for a second, because you are at the base level. You’re one of our vendors, but you’re so much more than that, and White House has always been very invested in relationships, and I can tell you story after story.
Allison Tyler Jones: I’m going to tell you one story, that maybe 10 years ago, we had a particularly difficult client that had approved a large number of holiday cards, so let’s just say, maybe 1,200 holiday cards, a lot, very high number. And she’d approved the retouching and they needed it really fast, and so we pushed print. And you know how it works at White House, the second you press it, it’s going into production. Then somewhere along the line, she looked at the proof again and didn’t like one hair on her back and wanted it retouched, and we tried to say, “Look, it’s already into production,” and she threw a fit and had her husband call us and just going to burn us down and make a big deal out of it.
Allison Tyler Jones: And I was, “It’s Christmastime, we’re dying,” and this was your predecessor actually. And I called and I just said, “I don’t know what to do.” I know that we’ve already printed it. I know that it’s already in production and stuff, and you guys literally just said, “Don’t worry about it.” Now, it hadn’t been that long. I think it was probably going, and I know that you can’t always do that, but literally we had a long enough relationship, I’d never had to do something like that before.
Allison Tyler Jones: Obviously this isn’t carte blanche for somebody to say, “Oh, we changed our mind,” but that was a huge amount of money. It would’ve really messed me up at that time in my business. We were earlier in our career and it was just very scary. And so the fact that a vendor could say, “Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ve got this.” There are other times where we totally screwed up and you said, “Look, we’ll split it with you.” You guys have always been so good to work with us, and that really does become a business partnership.
Matthew Hodgman: Yeah, 100%. And I mean, not to break my arm patting ourselves in the back or anything, but we just went through, we as in Kelly and I personally went through just a horrible customer service thing with a national retailer for a stupid refrigerator we were trying to buy. And the nightmare of trying to just figure out how to get this thing delivered, it really makes you appreciate how good and how efficient things run here.
Matthew Hodgman: And how, from the top down, from Mike, that’s where it all starts, that attitude of, “We’re going to step up. We’re going to do what’s right. We’re going to be empathetic to the photographer and to the people that are our partners and business, and we’re going to do everything that we can.” And we do that on a daily basis, and it filters down to my team, to production team, to the software teams, to all the products. I mean, it’s all the way across the board, and that’s what makes us, us, honestly.
Allison Tyler Jones: Which is awesome, because I can confidently guarantee my work to my clients, because I know that if something fades or comes into it, if a weird, funky color or whatever, then you guys are going to back that up for me. I mean, if something is really structurally wrong with an album, you guys are going to back it up. And so that is huge, because I don’t have to then say, “Well, your kid probably messed it up,” or, you know what I mean? It’s just like you’re saying…
Matthew Hodgman: Because that goes over really well.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, yeah, right.
Matthew Hodgman: Yeah. Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. I love having those good vendor relationships, and I have the same vendor relationship with my custom framer, he is so great. And so I think that’s really amazing that you guys do what you do.
Matthew Hodgman: Absolutely. To carry that further and to go back into the way that filters down from us as a partner, to our clients that we work with, and then to the final end user, that when you have that chain of command, that’s probably a bad way to say it, but when you have that connection point that starts at a good place, it goes to the client of our client, that’s a good place. It goes to your client, it’s a good place.
Matthew Hodgman: It makes it easier to continue that positivity and that stickiness between all those relationships when you’re not constantly beating your head against the wall, and people are happy to do business with us and your clients are happy to do business with you, and everything continues to work. Because we’re all appealing to the other through the ways that we can understand, and that’s easy to digest things when we’re doing that, and you’re partnering with people who are like-minded.
Allison Tyler Jones: For sure. And I think to take that to the logical conclusion is that White House is not necessarily the cheapest lab, but you stand by everything that you do. And it’s the same with us. We’re not the cheapest photographer, but we’re going to stand by everything that we do. And so for those of us who are photographers, you have to have your pricing structure such that you can absorb when things go wrong and you have to redo things, that if you have priced yourself so cheap, that you’re right up against the bone all the time, you can’t do that. And your clients feel that. Like when they say, “Hey, I know we approved this, but we really wanted it to be this other way.” And you’re like, “Well, in Subsection A, Paragraph, B, it says that you…”
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s like, then you get your refrigerator experience, you have no empathy. But if you’ve charged enough, then you know that, “Okay, there’s buffer built in here, that if we have to redo it, that we can.” Certainly we don’t want to do it on every project, but on off occasion, it’s going to be okay.
Matthew Hodgman: Yeah, absolutely. And that removes a tremendous amount of stress if you can just say, “Yes, I will do that.” And I can say, honestly, some of the very good relationships and friends that I have in the industry, potentially didn’t start off as everything being hunky-dory. Maybe there was an issue, maybe there was a thing that happened a few times and it caused stress and problems, and then you get in and you have the opportunity as a human being, as a business owner, as a person who is representing a business to, in the face of a challenge, you can go one of two ways. You can piss that person off and tell them they can pay for another one, or it was not your fault, or like you were saying, “In Subsection 2, Paragraph A, we referred to this and you signed off on it,” that’s not going to solve anything in an empathetic way.
Matthew Hodgman: Sometimes the best way to do it, is just to say, “I’m sorry, I messed up. It was my mistake. I apologize. I will take care of that. And on top of that, I will deliver it to your house. I will put it up for you, and I will bring you a gift card to a place that you will love to go get coffee.” And what do you think is the best scenario there for whatever the monetary amount that it may have cost you to create that bonding relationship? That is a 180 degrees very, very quickly, and you can’t put a price on that.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, and I think some of the best marketing that you will ever do in your business is after something has gone horrifically wrong. There’s no marketing book about that. Somebody needs to write it. Because that shows you who that business really is, like you learned that with your refrigerator. That shows you who they really are. It’s when they have your money like, “We already have your money,” and then it went wrong.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so already they’re loaded for bear. They’re ready to fight, they’re ready to defend. And so then immediately it’s disarmed, “I’m so sorry.” Even if it wasn’t your fault, even if it wasn’t your fault, “I’m so sorry. Here’s what we could do.” And then they talked about you because they came in thinking that it was going to be this completely negative thing, and not only was it not negative, it was positive and better than what they thought it was going to be.
Matthew Hodgman: To the point that all they want to do is talk about it at that point.
Allison Tyler Jones: People don’t talk about when you just satisfy what they expected, because then it’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s what I paid her to do. She shot pictures of my family. Okay, great. Do I need to sing her praises? No.” But what they’re going to do is they’re going to talk about, “Okay, well, when my thirteen-year-old fell asleep in the car on the way there, and then woke up like a total troll,” and was ready to burn us down.
Matthew Hodgman: It never happens, does it?
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, my gosh, no. Not that this happened and wouldn’t take her Crocs off, wouldn’t wear the outfit that I wanted her to wear. And so the mom is thinking, “Okay, we’ve paid all this money, and now the kid’s not going to cooperate.” And then the photographer is able to say, “Hey, you like Sephora?” And then before you know it, we’re talking skincare with a 13-year-old, and we have everybody on board, and it’s all great. And so then it turns out way better than you thought. So that’s the thing that you talk about, is that, “I thought it was going to be horrible, and it was actually amazing.”
Matthew Hodgman: Yeah, I mean, that’s a significant piece of the puzzle that we’re all trying to put together without the box, having no idea what it was. I actually saw a picture of a puzzle the other day, speaking of puzzles, and it was like an absolute nightmare. It was all black, with no picture. And I thought to myself, I’m like, “Oh, man. Yeah, that’s kind of the black hole of trying to figure stuff out right there.” You don’t know what the picture is. You don’t have the box. You don’t even know if you have all the pieces, but you have to put that together.
Matthew Hodgman: And looking at your business, and one thing I’ve always enjoyed about your work is it’s so recognizable. You can take your body of work and mix it in with tons of other people, and I could be like, “That’s ATJ, that’s ATJ, that’s ATJ, that’s her.” It’s very recognizable and in a saturated field, market, if you will, to have that brand identity and to have as many pieces of the puzzle put together as you have, is very impressive.
Allison Tyler Jones: Oh, you’re kind. I appreciate that. But I think that one of the things that’s recognizable isn’t necessarily the lighting or the background or anything, but it goes back to your core topic that we’re talking about right now is that empathy, is that I am a mother of seven children. I get kids, I get a family, I get why people are doing this, and I get how horrible and hard, and horrible it is. And so if I can make that not just less horrible, but if I can actually make it fun, to where the kids want to do it, and that the husbands don’t hate it, then I feel like I’ve cracked a little bit of a code there for them.
Matthew Hodgman: Well, absolutely. And knowing you like I do, you can’t, and I can’t fake caring. You’re a naturally caring person. If somebody is looking at your work or looking at White House or whoever we’re going to talk about here, we have naturally caring human beings on all facets there. And if you’re not an empathetic human or you’re not capable of that or haven’t invested in that, it’s really hard. It’s going to make it hard. Those are going to be puzzle pieces that are missing, because at the core of our being, we want to do business with people that we like, and I think that I’m a textbook consumer, and I would happily pay more, significantly more, to work with somebody that I truly like as a person, that I think is genuine, that has invested in me and my story. Would you agree?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Well, it’s the intangible. And people don’t really express it. Although I actually have had a few clients say, I had one mom in particular, we did a big multi-gen session a few years back, and she just enjoyed the process so much. She had brought, had quite a few kids, and so they didn’t do one big family together. She wanted each of her kids and their families photographed separately. And then we photographed the grandma and the grandpa together, but she came to every single one of the sessions, so she wanted to be in on that.
Allison Tyler Jones: And she said, honestly, she goes, “I love the pictures. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to have them now.” She hadn’t seen anything yet. She’d just seen the sessions. She’s like, “It was worth the money just to watch my kids interact and watch them have…” And what she was watching, wasn’t me, it wasn’t my lighting. She was watching, it was like the trophy of her life’s work. She was watching those relationships of those children that she had birthed, raised, married off, and now these grandchildren. But my magic, if you will, is showing that to her, is taking control, empathizing with her enough to know that she can’t be the boss of this whole thing. I need to be the boss of the whole thing. And then create an energy in the set, an emotion and everything as that’s happening, so that she can see, “Oh, my kids, my grandkids are amazing.”
Matthew Hodgman: Going back to talking about the 13-year-old that came in like a troll that wouldn’t take the Crocs off and everything, it makes me laugh because as a photographer, being in the studio for years and years and years, I think everybody listening to this can probably relate to that, and may even have an image of a person or persons pop into your head in a specific regard. And being able to take that life’s work, because that’s life’s work too, and renegotiate that energy in a way that you, like you were saying, not only just make it acceptable and get the 13-year-old to just sit down and look grumpy, it’s to get them forget that they were ever grumpy.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And it’s hard and it doesn’t always work. Because she literally, no matter what anybody said to her, her mom was like, “Hey, how about…” “No.” Dad’s like, “Hey, how about…” “No.” Literally. And then me, usually they’re scared of me because they don’t know me, so I’d say, “Hey, no, I’m not doing that.” Literally, it was just like a hard no, everything was a hard pass, and I just thought, “Okay, okay, okay, okay…” And so then I just thought, “Oh, wait, they’re all into skincare right now.” Because I thought, like a 13-year-old, I’m not going to be able to say, “You want to Snickers a bar?” She’s going to burn me down. She didn’t care about that. So I just…
Matthew Hodgman: “She’s going to burn me down.”
Allison Tyler Jones: No. Well, and nobody can burn you down like a teenage girl. Let’s be honest. There’s nobody in this world meaner than a teenage girl. Nobody. I mean, that’s like Lady Macbeth with non-acid. But oh, man. Yeah.
Matthew Hodgman: Funny.
Allison Tyler Jones: No, but I just thought, “Okay, so maybe Sephora.” So I put my arm around her and I said, “Hey, you into Sephora?” And she literally got this huge smile on her face. She’s like, “I love Sephora.” And I said, “I have some little Sephora masks out there when we’re done. Remind me to give you one. But hey, could we change those Crocs?” And she’s like, “Sure.” I mean, it was like literally, a switch was flipped. The mom’s like, “What did you say to her?” “Sephora.” But I’ll promise whatever. I’ll tell them like, “Hey, you know what? Your mom will take you to Target afterwards. She’ll spend 50 bucks.” I’ve promised things in the name of clients I don’t… Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.
Matthew Hodgman: “What do you think of Porsches?”
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Matthew Hodgman: “What color would you prefer yours to be?”
Allison Tyler Jones: I mean, I try to keep it an under hundred-dollar range, but I’m…
Matthew Hodgman: Well, that’s definitely a talent. 100%. And honestly, if you really look at that situation, but you kind of back away from it and look at it as a whole, the way I see that is like she just wanted to be heard. She wanted to have somebody not tell her, “Knock it off. Get in there, quit acting like this, or you’re not going out until you’re 16 years old.” She, in her own way, wanted to just be heard. She wanted somebody to communicate with her the way that she communicates, and you did that. We all like that.
Matthew Hodgman: You think about a sales session and there’s so much discussion has been for years and years and years and years, and years and years and years. Difference of files versus print, and how do I do this, and how do I seemingly push this boulder up the mountain and all the things. And if you set the communication in advance, aside from that, if you feel like you’re doing your due diligence and getting that communication out and you’re showing product, and you’re doing all the things where people struggle and where that fear comes from, is we’re not communicating with people the way they wish to be communicated with. And if you go into a sales presentation and you are feeling salesy or you’re feeling that slimy, pushy, chances are that’s kind of how you’re coming off.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s for sure.
Matthew Hodgman: Just thinking about the buildup and everything that you put into your sessions, and the communication and the fun of the sessions, and looking at your images, just knowing that those kids, I would venture out to say, Allison, that you can almost hear your sessions when you look at images. You can hear the laughter and the fun in those. So by the time that you get to discussing multi-thousand dollar wall portraits, albums, your beautiful cards you design, the things that are very specific to you, your job’s done. It’s just choosing the final thing.
Matthew Hodgman: But when people don’t conduct that empathetic way of doing business, by the time you get to writing an order, if you don’t have the rest of those pieces to go with, the client’s going to dig their heels and be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn’t know this was going to be $6,000. I had no idea. What are you talking about?”
Allison Tyler Jones: So true. And so for us, what that looks like is in that initial consultation or even sometimes the first phone call, and we probably say it three or four different times, is like, “Hey, I like to know what I’m getting into whenever I do something that I haven’t done before.” I think we all want to know how much it’s going to cost. That’s going to be one of your first questions. And so, “Let’s get together. Let’s define what the scope of work’s going to be. Let’s figure out what it is that we’re shooting for, where these images are going to live, and then we can give you some ballpark pricing on what it’s going to be so that everybody’s on the same page.”
Allison Tyler Jones: And to me, that’s an empathetic way. That’s how I want to be talked to. I don’t want somebody telling me, ignoring my questions, and being a politician, and just repeating their talking points. I want them to answer my questions. And then I want them to tell me the things that I don’t even know to ask. Because I don’t know if I go to a doctor or a dentist or a mechanic or a contractor, I don’t know their industry, I want them to tell me, “How does this work, and about how much am I going to be in for? So that I know that if it’s way more than I think, then maybe I need to delay it. Or if it’s not as much as I think, then I can do more. Whatever.”
Matthew Hodgman: I mean, if you don’t have, and to put in quotes, “the hard conversations to begin with, they’re not going to get any easier.”
Allison Tyler Jones: There’s always going to be a hard conversation. Is it going to be clean hard or dirty hard? Clean hard is upfront. This is how we’re transparent. This is how we work. Dirty hard is, “Everything’s wonderful and amazing. Let’s pick out clothes, let’s have fun.” And then you get to the end, and they’re like, “You dirty dog, you got me all excited.” That’s the, “If they cry, they buy,” school of sales, and it’s dirty and I don’t like it. And I’ve never liked it. I don’t like to be sold that way. I don’t like to sell that way. I want people to know… And then if they go away, they go away informed, and they never go away mad. Nobody ever goes away mad. Even if they decide not to book, they’re just like, “Oh, that’s so cool. I didn’t even realize that you could do something like that. Let’s save that for a more special time.”
Matthew Hodgman: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve heard you say that in presentations before, and you live and breathe that. And it’s okay. Somebody, most likely, and maybe you do have repeat clients that come every six months or every year and invest heavily, but I personally would love to have you photograph Kelly, and I, and Monty. I think that would be fantastic, but it wouldn’t be something that I would go into on an annual basis. It would be a buildup to, “This is really special. I’m going…” You know I’m a car guy, “I’m going to the Lamborghini dealership today. We’re going to drive right past the Chevrolets and we’re going to go right to the high-end Italians.”
Matthew Hodgman: And to be sturdy in your business and in your communications, and that in a big way is being empathetic for the people, understanding that maybe this isn’t going to be an every time thing, but when that occasion comes around, you are coming in completely prepared and ready to invest.
Allison Tyler Jones: And then it sets the bar for us that every client that’s coming through, we’re swinging for the fences every single time. We put that on ourselves that, “How can we make it special? How can we take this to the next level for them? How can we really see them in a way that maybe they haven’t seen each other?” So yeah, I mean, it’s good.
Matthew Hodgman: Well, I wrote some notes here before we got on today, and some bullets I have down, it’s personal, obviously, and empathy is personal. It’s simple. Keeping things simplistic, and we were just talking about it’s timely. It hits at the right point where that works. And people are receptive to that. And you hit those three points, and just like you said, “You’re swinging for the fences,” you’re going to knock it out of the park for those clients.
Allison Tyler Jones: And when we don’t, and we fail, which happens, then we knock it out of the park in the fix. And that can often be even better than when we knocked it out of the park the first time.
Matthew Hodgman: But that only happens when Ivan’s out fishing and he should have been at work.
Allison Tyler Jones: Totally. Right. It’s all his fault.
Matthew Hodgman: It’s all his fault. He’s not in the room, so we’re just going to throw him right under the bus.
Allison Tyler Jones: I know. No, are you kidding? He is the… Oh, my gosh, if we didn’t have him, he is the ballast. He’s like that cheesy “wind beneath your wings.” He’s the wind, the sun, all the things. He’s the best.
Matthew Hodgman: He’s a wonderful human being.
Allison Tyler Jones: He sure is.
Matthew Hodgman: Talk about empathy.
Allison Tyler Jones: Absolutely. And he has taught me a lot about that. He is definitely my better half for sure. So I love that. Well, I love your points, and I think that so many good takeaways from that, and I appreciate all the hard work that you guys go through for us, and keeping our albums and all of our work for our clients, amazing. We so appreciate you.
Matthew Hodgman: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s our pleasure, and we appreciate you, and look forward to many, many more years to come.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love it. Thank you so much, Matt.
Matthew Hodgman: Awesome. Yeah, thanks Allison.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at dotherework.com, and on Instagram at do.the.rework.
