How to Change Without Losing Yourself

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So let's get solving. Some entrepreneurs love change, embrace change. They're ready to throw out whatever they did yesterday and just try something new. They are adaptable. They are constantly, constantly shifting. But let's be honest, that is not most people. Most people are more like Jake. My first job coming out of high school, going into college, was working a camera counter at a camera retail shop in Baltimore, where I grew up.

0:44And I, you know, I did that in Maryland and in Texas and in Colorado. And then he moved to Portland, Oregon, just as digital photography was starting to blow up. And that was something he didn't know anything about because he was raised on, you know, cameras, film cameras. It was a struggle to come into a new town and find a job because everyone was interested in skill sets that I didn't have, even though I had a lot of skill sets behind the counter. And they're like, well, what do you think about this new digital camera? And I'm like, I don't know or care about that new digital camera. And so Jake says, screw this.

1:22I am not interested in reinventing myself. I just want to do the thing that I have always done, sell analog cameras. So he decides to start his own company doing just that. Hello, I'm Jake Shivery. I am the proprietor of Blue Moon Camera Machine located in Portland, Oregon. We started here in 2001 with a mission to keep analog photography viable over the long term. And he's done it. That little company that he started in 2001 now has 26 people working for it in a 12 ,000 square foot compound, selling analog cameras, accessories for analog cameras, and also typewriters, if anyone's interested in old typewriters.

2:06And I told Jake when we talked, this is not usually how the story ends. Usually what happens is that somebody tries to hold on to what came before. Somebody doesn't want to change. And they fail as a result. They get left behind. But he didn't. and so i wanted to understand why what did he do differently than others i was sitting in a bar downtown a long time ago and the guy that i'm sitting next to strikes up this conversation with me about what we do and we're having you know we're having a general conversation it's like oh my god uh we're in the automotive age and you're selling buggy whips and i'm like yeah we have all the whips man and that and that was my point all the way back into 2001 i'm like look it's good that you can do all these fancy things with these electronic cameras, but really, you are never going to get the sort of tactile sensation out of this kind of gear that you're going to get out of us 50-year-old Hasselblad.

3:03That's the case that you're making, and that may be true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can build a business off of it. You have. So what did you do? Like, what was the starting point here? We're not just doing one thing. We're doing a whole strata of little things that we're lashing into one big business model, and they all sort of fall under the analog umbrella. But we're basically taking up everything else that has been either dismissed or completely disposed of by basically everybody else in the industry. And we're taking all of those little tiny things, and we're putting them into one big bucket and saying, okay, from this, we can make a business.

3:39But there's something else, something even more important than the tactics of lashing together lots of little pieces into a business. And that is that Jake, the guy who did not want to change, the guy who built a business around doing the thing he had always done, he had to change in ways he didn't even anticipate. That is the real heart of this conversation, which we're going to get to a little later in the conversation. Now, before anything else, I should tell you that the reason I'm talking to Jake isn't just because of this incredible story, but also because his company is on our new America's Favorite Mom and Pop Shops list.

4:20Each September, Entrepreneur Magazine runs a America's Favorite Mom and Pop Shops list, 150 of the most beloved hyper-local businesses around the country. It's a great list, and we surround it with all sorts of valuable resources for local businesses. So go check that out on the newsstands right now. It's in the September-October issue of the magazine. Anyway, Jake, this is a really lovely conversation that you're about to hear about what it means to build a business and what it means to change and to not change and to find what really matters today. And that is all coming up after the break. This episode is brought to you by CLA, with you on every step of your financial journey.

5:05To learn more, visit claconnect.com. All right, we're back. Today, I'm talking with Jake Shivery of Blue Moon Camera and Machine in Portland, Oregon. And before the break, he was talking about the way in which he structures his business by addressing a lot of different abandoned categories in a digital world. But there is another thing that is super interesting about this business, which is finding who the customer is. If you're going to build a business off of resisting change, right, of selling analog products in a digital world, then there's a question of who the business is for. And also, how do those people feel about the product, which turned out to be more complicated than Jake imagined?

5:58For the first 10 years that we were open, it was a, you know, it was a quasi-political sort of argument. Everyone that came in the store for the first little bit was like, I love my digital camera and I'm here to prove it to you that you shouldn't even be selling phone cameras. Really? Oh, yeah. Or the opposite with people coming in saying, oh, thank you so much for doing what you're doing because I never want to shoot a digital camera. I only want to do phone cameras. And like this, as I say, quasi-political dichotomous sort of argument where it is not in any way. You don't have to give up one to do the other.

6:34And that philosophy is really sort of born out, has proven out in the intervening years, which we have a lot of people, we have a significant number of professional clients now that are building hybrid systems, right? So you don't have to make a decision about only taking one screwdriver in your toolbox, right? You can have all of the different screwdrivers and use the one that is most appropriate to the path. Sure. But let's pause on that moment because it's an interesting cultural one that also probably has to translate into shifts into how you're appealing to your consumer and who you think your consumer is.

7:11Because what you're saying is that in the first 10 years of business, when digital cameras were still relatively new, or at least good digital cameras were relatively new, there was a time where there was a bunch of really crappy early stage versions of digital cameras, and then they got better. that it created a polarization among consumers where people either thought, I am the new vanguard, digital replaces whatever came before. Look at this idiot trying to sell old cameras. I'm going to come in and tell him what's what. And then you have other people who I guess really are more your people who are saying, this digital revolution lacks something.

7:59you just cannot replace or replicate what came before with these high quality film cameras. And so I feel even more attached to the manual cameras. That I assume was what it was originally. And then people got over it. And now we're in a world where there are cars and bicycles, and there's TV and radio, and nobody feels polarized about these things, right? So those are two different kinds of consumers. And I'm wondering if you had to do anything differently in terms of the way that you positioned your business or the people that you reached out to as your consumer or the way that you talked to your consumer in these two different cultural moments.

8:42Sure. I mean, I think one of the most surprising things that happened to us early on was we assumed when we started that we would be picking up all of the old timers, right? Everybody who had been using a particular kind of equipment and had processes and systems in place that they had been using for decades and wouldn't want to switch. And I was 100 % wrong about that. Those were the very first people that jumped the fence. Instead - Jumped the fence, you mean like those people all abandoned - Immediately. Manual cameras and they went to digital. Yeah. And what happened instead was that our demographic turned out to be our most ambitious demographic turned out to be young people.

9:20And that remains true to till today. Right. We have so, you know, so much of our clientele is under 30 and has been under 30 for the last 25 years. Right. Like we we've been watching that grow to the point where we have people that are that are having their kids and they're coming back and their and their kids are buying their first round of gear. It's really interesting. That's fascinating. Although as I'm thinking about the shift that's happening now, which is vinyl and record players, my parents, I'm 45, my parents don't have a record player at home and I don't have a record player at home.

10:00But 20-somethings are buying record players and vinyl, which is very interesting. Was there something that you had to do? So actually, could you just walk me through, what did you do to assess who that consumer was, aside from just the very obvious you see with your own two eyes who walks into the store? But what were you doing? And then how did you have to respond and react? Were there things that you were doing differently when you thought your consumer was going to be the old timers versus when you discovered that they were actually young people? You know what? I got to tell you, we didn't really switch gears at all.

10:29Like we had a plan and the plan was in short to do what all of the camera stores had always done. Right. We're basically just going to keep on offer the thing that has very, very rapidly dissolved all over the country so that if you need something, you come in and it is predictable and reliable. and the consumers responded very well to that you know we we have had growth effectively every year that we've been open even though the the demographic kind of switched around on me and to your point about assessment it the question that you're asking me is very interesting and i'm struggling to think sort of think back that long uh i don't i i honestly jason i don't think we did anything except use our own two eyes and say oh my gosh look look who's actually coming through the door in a way that was surprising but also irrefutable right like yeah oh okay so this this is who is responding to us right now and again continues to this day they you know they are starting to get older but i but they also don't age out of it right like everybody who was shopping with me when 25 years ago, who was 20 at that time and is now 40 or in their 40s is still shopping here.

11:45Right. You know, we have we have customers that go back decades, which is really good. And the loyalty of them has proven to be critical to the business. I mean, it is why we are. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is interesting and maybe just challenges my own thinking about what it means to serve an audience if it's hyper local. But Jake, let me just tell you a quick story, which I've shared on this show before, comes from my friend. His name is Rochelle DeVoe, and she is a consumer research expert. And so companies hire her to go research who their consumer is, and to then bring those insights back into their marketing and product.

12:21And the reason that you need somebody like Rochelle, in many cases, is because you're not operating a storefront where you can just see literally every consumer who walks through the door. That's what you can do. And so, you know, if you're like a direct to consumer compression sock business, then you don't see your consumer, you got to hire somebody like Rochelle. So in this case, there's a company called Vim and Vigor that hires Rochelle, they make compression socks, they're founded by an athlete who wasn't able to find the compression socks in the marketplace that she wanted. And so she made her own.

12:52And then she marketed it to athletes like her because she thought she was solving her own problem. And growth was good for a little bit and then it plateaued and they hired Rochelle. And so the thing that Rochelle does is that she goes out and identifies what she calls the best customers. Those are the people who are the largest repeat buyers and who are saying the nicest things about you on social media and who are telling their friends and so on. And she wants to understand who those people are and what motivates them and what problem they came to this company to solve for. And she tracks down a whole lot of them and she does interviews with them.

13:28And then she comes back to Vim and Vigor. And she says, I have some very interesting information. And that is that you are marketing to the wrong people. Because Vim and Vigor was founded by an athlete, and it thought that it was making socks for athletes. But actually, athletes are not its best customer. Its best customer are just people who have to work on their feet all day. They're like nurses and teachers and stuff like that. And so this company had been succeeding despite itself because it was talking to athletes and it just happened to be picked up by the people who needed it the most. And now that they had that information, they can make some major changes about the marketing of this product and the positioning of this product.

14:14And that is what unlocked growth. Now, that is a very typical story that I hear and repeat. And anybody in a direct-to-consumer business nods their head and either says, yes, we went through something similar or, oh my God, we should do something like that. But it's interesting to hear you talk at a local level where you're seeing everybody come in and you're like, yeah, there was a difference in who we expected to come through the door, but we saw different people come through the door and we basically did the same thing that we were planning to do in the very beginning anyway, and it just worked fine.

14:44And number one, that is interesting. But number two, I wonder if you can think back, were there any subtle shifts that you had to do? Anything that you did, local marketing or trying to appeal to people or events in store or anything that shifted once you saw who the consumer actually was? Yeah, I really, I appreciate the recontextualization of that question because it definitely puts me in mind, but it also brings up some personal baggage, right? So on one hand, the reason that we're here in the first place was because I was very mission driven. I wanted to do this very specific thing. And if the public responded and we could have a business from it, then great.

15:23And if it didn't work out, I wasn't going to suddenly start selling digital cameras, for instance, right? We would have just closed down. Okay. The reason that we're still here and the reason that we have as loyal a customer base and as loyal a staff as we have, because again, we have relatively low turnover, especially for a small business, is because everybody here is mission-driven and sort of dug their heels in in the most cantankerous way possible. Okay. That's the baggage. When we first started out, I had absolutely zero interest in taking your film and turning your film into an electronic image.

15:57Because my point, my internal point was, what the heck are you doing? Why don't you just use your, wait, I'll just use your phone if that's what you want. But we really, the more and more requests, I had to soften on that, finally relent. And we set up very, very significant, very robust production lines for the scanning of negatives so that we could take that, so we could take the physical artifact of the film and turn it into an electronic file. And we really leaned into that and do it in the best possible way that we can do it. principally by applying the same roles that we use when we're doing optical printing or when we're working in the darkroom and implementing real professional personnel who's actually looking at it and nothing just runs through a machine one time.

16:43So we're using the same sort of philosophical precepts that are the underpinnings of the company, but we are, we're, but I'm giving up on the politics of if you want digital, just shoot digital. I'm like, okay, what you want, which I did not expect. You want to shoot film, but you want it with the convenience of the digital file. So we're going to do that. And then similarly, much, much later, I gave up and we started embracing social media. Right? Where I was being a cranky old man and saying, no, we're not doing social media. It's the end of the world. And yes, we are. We have to do that. And now, you know, and that both of those instances where, again, I have to I have to sort of take accountability for my own baggage like oh my gosh I could have put us out of business by by hewing too close to this mission right but because we started doing electronic files that's been a boom business for us and because we went into social media and as with the scanning of the film we are we're when we're doing content generation for social media we're trying to stay on our philosophical brand right the way that we approach it we're trying to lead the pack.

17:53We're trying to make sure that everything is actually refined and thorough and well thought out. And, you know, as I say, both of those things are, have been giant growth areas for us and have absolutely sustained the business. Now, let me tell you what that makes me think of. So I was a number of years ago talking to a guy named Hamza Mudasser, who is a disruption expert, teaches at Cambridge. And he was talking to me about how disruption tends to come from spaces that a business doesn't think of as naturally competitive. And that's the reason that it catches us off guard, because we're closely watching what we think our competition is.

18:44But the thing that actually disrupts us can come from some completely different place. And the example that he gave, very apropos to your world, is Kodak. So the story, as I'm sure you're very well aware, the story is that Kodak was the leader of developing the digital camera, and then they just put it on a shelf, and they didn't do anything with it. And then digital photography was created elsewhere, and it totally undercut Kodak's market, and that was Kodak. But he said, you know, not actually the best way to look at that story. Instead, it's not that digital photography killed Kodak. It's that Facebook killed Kodak.

19:27And the argument for that would go like this. The early digital cameras were pretty, they weren't very good at all. They barely had any memory. The pixelation was awful. They were noisy. It was terrible. So when they first hit the market, people said, I mean, this is sort of fun, but like, what the hell am I going to do with this? And they kept taking their camera film to Walgreens and printing things out and putting them on the fridge. But then Facebook came along and Facebook was the first real use case for the digital photo. Facebook enabled people to share digital photography, to store digital photography in these albums.

20:05People don't really remember now, but that was one of the core products back in the original days of Facebook, were these photo albums that people would have. And then suddenly there was a reason to be taking digital photos. And because there was a reason to take digital photos, people started to shift more towards digital cameras. And so Kodak had spent way too long looking at other camera film companies and thinking, that's my competition. I need to produce film that is better and cheaper than them. When instead, what they should have done is looked around them at the use of photography, and they might have seen Facebook coming, and they might have been able to do something about that.

20:39And the lesson for that, and the reason I bring this whole story up, and this I promise will land back with a question to you, is that the lesson is that Kodak was thinking of itself as being in the camera film business. But what would have happened if it actually said, we are in the memory business. We are in the business of helping you capture your memories. If they had made that shift, they might have thought more seriously about not just digital cameras, but social media as well, which was in its infancy. And they certainly could have dominated had they put the money towards it. And that shift between are we in the camera film business or are we in the memory business could have saved that company.

21:25Now, the reason I'm telling you that is because you just told me, I think, a similar story, but with a different ending because you made that shift. You didn't use this language, but I'm going to repeat it back to you with this language. You were telling me that at the very beginning, you were anchored to the machinery. What we do is we sell the machine. And I'm not interested in anything that touches digital. I don't want you to digitize your photos. I don't want to be on social media. But then you made a shift and you embraced that. And I think, Jake, and this is where I finally make it a question and ask you if you think I'm right, is that I think that you went from a shift of thinking, originally, we are in the business of selling this machinery, basically, to we are in the business of better photography.

22:09Because if we're in the business of better photography, then you take a photo on this wonderful camera that we have sold you. and that by itself is going to create a better image than you would have ever made digitally and then once you've made the photo you can digitize it so that you can share it and that is a shift between i'm in the business of machinery and i'm in the business of better photography as i define it and that opened up the world and the marketplace to you am i right yeah good okay i'm gonna lean in on something you uh you mentioned about kodak if they had I've been focusing more on memory because that's really what we do.

22:48And that, that, that was one of the things that makes me back off my cranky stance and say it is that, you know what, I don't, I need this to be egalitarian. I need to be able to help everybody. And what I'm trying to help them do is make sure that they are preserving photography, that they are preserving their own memories through photography. And I don't really care how they get there. Right. So, you know, We have made more subtle adjustments as well. If you only have digital files, we can now make prints from those. We've been doing that for the last several years because we still want people to print.

23:21We still want the print to go up on the fridge. And then also really critically is that a significant amount of our processing business is very, very old stuff. We're digging a granddad's shoebox that's full of film and has never been processed. we have techniques and darkroom tricks where we're going to be able to salvage that and recover an image out of it. Or you have a perfectly well-preserved negative or a glass plate from 100 years ago. We maintain the ability to actually turn that into a print. And my point there is that because that was done with the mature film physical-based technology, we can still do something with it literally a century later.

24:03And, you know, I mean, not to make too grand a proposition out of this, but I am really have a focus on making sure that a century from now, we're still going to be able to get images out, right? The actual sustainability of film, right? If, you know, a hundred years from now, if the sun continues to burn in the sky, the technology does not matter. You're going to be able to hold the negative up and see what the image is. Right, right. That's a really, really thoughtful shift. I really like where we went in this conversation. Let me just ask you, maybe it's just a kind of open-ended thing. Yeah.

24:42Looking back now on the long history and successful history of your store, how impactful do you think those shifts in your willingness to be flexible and to rethink some of your original stances about the business? How much do you think that impacted the growth of the business? literally the difference between staying in business and going out of business if i had stayed dug in we wouldn't have lost it and i need to own up to that right because because i need to have learned that lesson and also apply that lesson in the future and i as i say when you know when we're dealing with with digital anything with be it your file to a piece of paper or your negative back to you an electronic file or our social media content or anything that falls into that we can still approach it in our own manner right you know we we keep a style book everybody sort of stays on the same page everybody that works here is on the same sort of mission so there is a collective consciousness that knows how we go about doing this and we're not okay So for instance, just this year, we started doing TikTok videos.

25:55We're not, you know, we are not doing TikTok videos like everybody else does TikTok videos. We are putting our own spin on it. We're putting our own flavor on it. And that market has exploded out of nowhere. So yeah. That's awesome. Jake, thank you so much for sharing all of this and being so open about your personal baggage, as you said, but also great lessons learned. I appreciate that a lot. and that's our episode now let's keep the conversation going i write a newsletter called one thing better where each week i offer one new way to be successful and satisfied and build a career or company you love you can find it at one thing better dot email that's a web address just plug it into a browser one thing better dot email and if you get one of those emails and reply it goes straight to my inbox and I will get back to you.

26:55Problem Solvers comes out every Monday morning, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. The show is produced by Emily Holmes and Money News Network. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.