Teacher Interview Tips

Teacher Interview Tips
Teaching jobs can be extremely difficult to secure. Discover the Insider Secrets to Acing your Next Teacher Interview!
Teacher Interview Tips

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Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Nicola Stokes, Anz

Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Nicola Stokes, Anz

SSON: How did you become involved with ANZ’s shared services program?

Nicola Stokes: I was appointed General Manager Shared Services in 2005. There was probably about two-thirds of the organization that exists today in place when I got there; the organization was all based in Melbourne at that stage. I think the most striking feature for me when I arrived was probably that the people didn’t really understand why they were all put together in a shared service; each piece was run quite separately, and was very much a cost-driven service-delivery focus.

SSON: What functions are in place now?

NS: Basically as ANZ Shared Services exists now, we are responsible for HR Operations such as recruitment, remuneration, learning and development, pension/superannuation; Finance processes such as payroll, accounts payable, reconciliations, indirect taxes, information and reporting; Strategic Sourcing (IT and business services); and ANZ Environmental sustainability program and system. We’ve expanded quite a lot over the last couple of years. We have a team of 400 now, half in Melbourne, and the other half are in India, in Bangalore with our captive center there. The clients are based in various geographies, Australia, New Zealand, India and SE Asia. The headcount for ANZ is about 35,000, and the 400 of us service all of them.

SSON: That does sound like a major expansion. So was this planned when you came in, or was it as a result of your own strategy formulated after your appointment?

NS: When I went in, you could just see the opportunity; I looked at ANZ’s strategy, where it was going with its five-year plan, and it was definitely based around having a very efficient and effective and high-quality infrastructure to support its planned expansion. ANZ had a captive center in Bangalore for nearly 18 years, and it was used for software development; my boss at the time – Mike Grime, managing director of Operations Technology and Shared Services (OTSS) – understood we had a huge competitive advantage in India and we weren’t using it. So I looked at how we could use the captive for shared services and started to move the transactional elements of our service offering to Bangalore, with great success. We kept the roles that interacted with the client in the same country as the client – a hub and spoke model. I also looked at overall cost, because obviously in all SSOs cost is an important factor, but we had quite a different way of approaching that I think. ANZ’s products are not the cheapest banking products on the market, but they are cost-effective, and so the question was, how could we match the cost-effective nature of shared services to meet that sort of customer delivery.

When I talk about “customers” I mean the customers of the bank; my “clients” are my internal customers, if you like. Sometimes when you use the term “customer” for your internal clients, you create a kind of master-servant relationship within the organization. That doesn’t actually do any good, because in the end what we’re trying to do is all oriented around the end customers, which for us are the retail banking and institutional customers.

My strategy involved using the Heskett model of the service-profit chain, to help my own staff understand why they were all in a shared service: basically if you can deliver an excellent level of internal service, that will enable the front-line staff to deliver a similar level to customers. Indeed Heskett’s model shows how front-line staff can ONLY deliver the level of service they receive on the inside of the organization. So that gave everybody a bit of vision as to how all the pieces fit together given everything we were responsible for was about the internal operations of the Bank. It also helped our clients understand what else we could do for them and what would or would not be effective. It was also important that we did not become the dumping ground for things the rest of the Bank did not want, so if a process/service was customer-facing or revenue-generating it did not belong in Shared Services. Then when we started to demonstrate this strategy/model to our clients, and to articulate our value proposition, that’s when we started to grow and we started to take on more work for them, which was wonderful.

SSON: Does the SSO have any clients beyond ANZ or is it still all internal shared services?

NS: It is still all internal shared services.

SSON: Was there the plan eventually to sell services to other organizations?

NS: It’s a really interesting question. Sourcing and partnerships are one of the strengths of what we developed, but a lot of shared services entities start to fail when they start to take on third-party work, because they’re going against the reason they were set up in the first place. What in my experience you need to do is draw a line in the sand – and then if you decide that now it’s about revenue generation, ANZ then becomes a client. There are many documented cases where this had been attempted and has been a failure as the shared service starts to believe it exists for its own revenue-generation – and the business we are in is banking. If this step is to be taken the most successful ventures I have seen are when the shared services is sold or JV’d.

Part of the vision that we had for shared services was that we would enable the Bank’s growth whether organic growth or through acquisition. Shared services traditionally get involved after the acquisition has been decided, whereas what we believe is that because of the responsibility placed in our shared services organization – we had financial stewardship of Abn– we would become part of the decision-making process about what we would acquire because we would be able to demonstrate that we would enable the benefit delivery of the M&A by getting things up and running and integrated more quickly. So, my strategy was to ensure that shared services would move from a purely cost-focused, internal transaction operation to something that was a crucial part of the growth and development of the Bank through operational excellence and energetic and agile service delivery.

SSON: Before we move on to talking about your role as thought-leader for which you’ve been recognised, can you tell us a little more about the environmental sustainability department you mentioned?

NS: Absolutely. It’s quite unusual within shared services. Part of ANZ’s strategy under the previous CEO was ensuring the bank became more environmentally sustainable; there was quite a big community and employee engagement plan, but the environmental sustainability area, our understanding of our consumption, was still in its infancy. We started with the basics: we designed and implemented an environmental management system, around creating baselines and understanding performance. If you look at the other pieces of shared services – especially the procure-to-pay process and the responsibility for the supply chain, the processes and methodologies we used, we could control the type of things the Bank consumed.

Our next step was to further understand how we could become carbon-neutral. We started working on a strategy and education program, internally for bank employees and all the way through our supply chain. We started to only select environmentally sustainable products for the catalogue; we worked with current suppliers so they could get to a benchmark with us; and we stopped doing business with people – new work – if they didn’t understand their own footprint. We taught our suppliers things and they taught us things.

And I was actually voted onto the United Nations Environment Program Finance Steering Committee, and went to Geneva representing ANZ. I was voted onto the committee by 80 of the banks globally who are members of the UNEP-FI. And our crowning glory was that in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index we, ANZ, became the number-one sustainable bank for 2007/08 – pipping WestPac at the post – which wasn’t the aim! But it was a wonderful outcome, and it’s now embedded in the way that the bank does business. We can now monitor everyone’s buying behaviour on an ongoing basis. It was quite a wonderful achievement: a lot of hard work – and a lot of scepticism – but one of the great examples of shared services being able to demonstrate that its value is much more than transactional or purely operational functions.

SSON: That’s a very impressive achievement. Congratulations.

NS: Thank you. We’re very proud of it.

SSON: You deserve to be. Let’s move on to your award. Why do you think you were honoured as Shared Services Thought Leader of the Year?

NS: Two things I think. Firstly the leadership program I put I place and secondly the strategy, business plan and implementation methodology I designed and used to ensure the ongoing effectiveness of shared services in ANZ.

The leadership program that I put in place was a three-year rolling program for all of the leaders in shared services – so not only the leaders in line management, but my direct reports and their direct reports functionally. And then we added people who hadn’t worked in a bank, because they bring in all this other experience. Shared services is full of young people, so we picked out all the older people with experience in life, and knowledge, so the whole leadership forum could get that sort of balance.

We used a Human Synergistics tool called Life Style Inventory which is very well-known in this part of the world, and it talks about moving from passive-aggressive or defensive-aggressive styles to constructive styles, and their tools show that the constructive styles lead to increased share price and profitability. We ran that over the first year of the program, putting 38 people through this: we launched it for the whole 400 in Melbourne and Bangalore because when people see shift in their leaders they get concerned, they don’t know what’s going on – so we simply articulated what was going on. I employed a leadership coach and for six months the 38 each met with me every eight to twelve weeks and with the coach every four weeks, working through the program – so they sort of practised for six months and then went up to implement for the next six months.

Then Year 2 of the program was positive psychology: this is a way of thinking and discussing what’s good in life, and doing more of it, rather than as most organizations operate – on deficit, grading performances on what you haven’t done or what you’ve done wrong. This research is quite phenomenal. It’s run as a course at Harvard, and it’s the most attended course. [Martin] Seligman did a lot in relation to happiness, and what he’s actually shown is that it’s not about being happy but being happier, and the effects on the physiology of the brain and what that does for individuals and therefore the organization. By rolling this program through, we got the biggest shift to constructive profile that Human Synergistics have ever seen in their history and they’re actually doing a profile on us, that’s out in the next couple of months.

The Heskett service-profit chain model worked really well for us; I’m not sure if it has to be that one in particular, but it has to be something that will bind all the people who work in shared services together. And then we had a robust business-planning methodology which we developed that other parts of the bank started to use, using end-to-end process management approach, and Lean and Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard and a lot of those basic tools that deliver an effective process but then free up the individuals in the process to think and be innovative for our clients. We automated end-to-end so we could use our ideas and our people to deliver a better service. You know, if our clients have a clunky process that takes their time away from managing existing and new clients – the consequences are quite well documented.

The combination of these two elements ensured that we were moving up the value chain and would continue to do so.

SSON: You mentioned targets there; what were your personal targets? Did you set yourself specific benchmarks you wanted to surpass?

NS: I had a three-year plan for shared services. My targets were around employee engagement; financials; risk; process effectiveness and client/service delivery. This was all wrapped up into an overall measure of how many new products or services were we asked to take on for the Bank. Did my colleagues want to do business with my organization? This combination of qualitative and quantitative data was fundamental for our success and progress towards the achievement of our strategy – and of course to help us stop doing work that was no longer valued by our clients.

SSON: What were the biggest obstacles you encountered?

NS: It’s really interesting question and I feel the longer I think about it the more I come up with, but there are a few key ones. The first one is understanding that most business units want to control their own stuff – not wanting to give anything up. If you think about why that is, in most organizations roles are scoped and scaled and paid relative to the actual size of the job – headcount is important in this equation – so by taking people’s staff we’re actually decreasing their own roles within the organization. So we began taking in pieces of work, saying “just give that to us, we’ll put it through our process and then we’ll give it back to you, and you can just run it” and they thought this was just wonderful. Eight times out of ten they never took it back, because they were still getting the credit or the kudos or whatever – we’re all human beings – for the outcome of the process running really effectively or the engagement running really well. And I think that’s something that people all over the world running any form of shared service continue to challenge. We in shared services need to keep our focus on the benefits to the whole organization, not the benefits for our own SSO. Another challenge is that when you take on other work all of a sudden the expectations change. So somebody that’d been running their own process and had a quality score and a time rating and error rating and complaints rating, when we came into the equation the expectation changed massively and our clients want a much higher quality rating for example. So that’s where we introduced client councils, so we could say “this is what we’re taking over and that’s what it looks like now”. This started as a plan over 12 months but we were able to make traction much more quickly, achieving targets over six to eight months. This approach only works with a lot of face-to-face interaction.

Another major change – maybe not an obstacle – but the transformational change through the leadership from being a reactive organization to being proactive, so not only doing what was asked, when the answer was always yes irrespective of what was possible or not, but actually coming up with thoughts and ideas for our clients because we understood their business just as well as they do.

SSON: Let’s look at the future now. What are your plans? You’ve moved on from ANZ…

NS: Well… I moved from Sydney down to Melbourne to take the role, and had a three-year timeframe in my mind. And that’s what I did. I think I’m where a lot of people get at a certain time in their lives… I got very involved in the environment and community agendas, and I’ve decided that I want to work in more community-focused organizations. What I believe is that the things that I do around consolidating internal activities and organization, reducing costs while keeping service levels high, and enabling access to products and services – I want to do within a more community-oriented organization, rather than in an organization where any monies I was involved in saving or producing go back to the shareholder only.

I’ve got to this stage in my career that I want to do something with a bit more purpose to get me up in the morning! I’ve had a ball, ANZ was wonderful, and I want to do something that takes that commercial acumen that we develop in corporates into working for an organization that’s more community-oriented. It’s a pretty huge step for me. I’ve given myself six months, by the way, to see if they want me – and if not I’ll get back into corporate and will still really enjoy it! But I’m really very excited by trying to make the change.

SSON: Please do let us know how you get on!

NS: I certainly will. You can do so much within an organization, it’s really amazing. You can really positively impact on a lot of other people in their daily lives whether inside or outside the organization. But we’ll see how I do!

SSON: So let’s wrap up. What advice could you give to an individual or a team embarking on shared services?

NS: If you’re going to establish shared services you need to understand two concepts. The first one is: why, and who are the sponsors? What does an organization think it can get from shared services? And understanding if there have been any attempts in the past and what were the outcomes of those attempts. So that’s a really important piece.

The second piece is a bit about understanding the organization’s culture and life-cycle. So in a command-and-control, why would you attempt a shared service model?

The glue that keeps it all together is knowing what leadership model you’re going to bring into the SSO. Your classic line manager is one thing, but you need influencing skills and negotiation skills at all levels. Shared services clients are always there, whereas in any other organisation I think the average interaction with your customers in financial services is around four times a year; so this understanding of the client’s access is really crucial, and you need the best leadership for that. Finally, if you only focus on getting all of your transactions and processes and data perfect before you move up the value chain, you’ll never get there.

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Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Steve Hodgson, Hmps

Shared Services Excellence Award-winner Interview: Steve Hodgson, Hmps

SSON: Can we have a bit of background, Steve? Tell us about how the HMPS journey began and how you got involved.

Steve Hodgson: I joined HMPS in 2005 to establish a shared service for them, which is how and when I became involved. The Prison Service had a program to transform its support functions (HR, procurement and finance functions); this program was set up with shared services and an ERP solution at its heart with a go-live date of April 2006. Its objectives were to improve the service, and to reduce the cost of the service, whilst also enabling improved performance in its mainstream business through better control systems, and better management information. That was the objective.

SSON: Who had ownership of this program – where was the impetus for change coming from?

SH: In particular, the board of the Prison Service. Obviously the functional directors – the finance director, the procurement director, the HR director – had a particular interest in their own areas, but they all needed a similar capability which was a shared service and the IT that underpinned it.

SSON: What’s the governance structure?

SH: If I tell you the history of it, it’ll make more sense! Although it was originally conceived as a shared service for the Prison Service, during 2006 we agreed that we would begin to deliver services for the Home Office, which is a separate government department now. That went live in February this year. That puts some context on your question about how it’s governed. It’s a cost centre within the Prison Service and it’s part of the finance function – that’s just somewhere for it to reside really. We have a Service Level Agreement with the customers – so one with the Prison Service and one with the Home Office – and alongside that SLA, which defines the services and the standards to which they’ll be delivered, there is a budget allocation to cover the cost of it. So the service and cost are governed through that process.

The processes are aligned through what we call a policy gateway; so for example how we transact HR transactions, is aligned with HR policy, and there’s a similar set-up for finance and procurement. That’s the point at which we discuss with the policy owners, or agree with the policy owners in the business, any change in process which impacts on policy, and where any change in policy which impacts on process is brokered.

SSON: What’s your role? Whereabouts do you fit in that process?

SH: I’m the Head of Shared Service, so I’m responsible for running the shared service operation. I report to the finance director in the Prison Service, but I also report to a steering board made up of board members from the Prison Service and board members from the Home Office. The steering board is the overarching governance.

SSON: Where are you based and how many employees do you have currently?

SH: In shared services we currently have somewhere in the order of 800 employees. Of those approximately 500 are based in Newport in South Wales, which is the shared service centre, and of those 500 just under 400 are at work in the Prison Service account and just over 100 – rising to 240 by the end of this year – deal with the Home Office account. We also run a prison service training college in a place called Newbold Revel, near Rugby, and that is a big training centre where predominantly we train new prison officers; there are about 100 employees there.

Then the rest of the staff are based in one of the following three operations: field-based teams, which is where the recruiters are (we recruit people out across the UK; we don’t keep recruiters in the SSC, they’re geographically based); regionally-based trainers, to deliver training where it needs to be delivered close to the point of use; and we have a number of purchasing teams who do low-value high-volume transactions for things which cannot be bought from catalogue. We run i-procurement so the vast majority of transactions go through self-service, but if you can’t get it on a catalogue and you can’t use your purchasing card you can raise a non-catalogue requisition, which is a manual transaction. We do those.

SSON: Were these installations built to order or did you occupy existing sites?

SH: The Newport one was a brand-new empty building which we kitted out, so it actually looks like a SSC. The one in Rugby looks like a cross between a stately home and a teaching college. I think there’s a hundred bedrooms – it’s something which you wouldn’t commonly find in shared services. It’s not unique but it’s unusual.

SSON: Turning to the Shared Services Excellence Awards: you won Best New Shared Services Operation of the Year 2008. What was it, do you think, that set you apart from your competitors?

SH: I think there are a couple of things really. One is the scale and pace of the change – we’ve gone from no shared service to a multi-customer, multi-service-line shared service in less than two years – at scale, so we service 75,000 employees across the Prison Service and the Home Office. I think the second one was probably the maturity of some of our practices; we already have quite a lot of automation self-service; we’ve used, since we started, Six Sigma process improvement. I think those are probably the two main reasons.

SSON: To what extent has your personal experience been a key factor in these endeavours?

SH: For me this is the third one of these that I’ve done at any scale, which obviously helps: you know what you want it to look like when you start out, so you have the end in mind from the beginning.

SSON: To do all this in two years is impressive: was that the rate which you had in mind from the start?

SH: The Prison Service had the ambition to do it at that pace. What it didn’t have was the ambition to take that second customer. So that’s the kind of ‘exceeded expectation’ element of it. The reason for doing that was that it’s reduced the Prison Service operating costs by over £2m [m] a year because the overhead is spread over a much wider user-base.

SSON: What kind of benchmarking have you done to measure achievement and how successful have you been in hitting your targets?

SH: We’ve benchmarked the services using PWC, so we used the PWC Saratoga benchmarks. We’ve found that in some areas we’re already upper-quartile, and in most areas we are median or better.

SSON: And how long did it take to get there?

SH: We did the benchmarking at the end of last year. The SSO was designed from the outset to run at pretty much the performance levels we’re at right now.

SSON: What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome? Obviously taking on that second customer has been a huge one…

SH: I think the biggest challenge is business change. Clearly creating one of these things, going from no people to 500 people, all trained and knowing what they’re doing; implementing pretty much a complete Oracle IT system, is tricky. But the hardest bit is business change: getting 130 jails in England and Wales – 50,000 people – to change the way they do things. For example they’ve gone from everything being paper-based and done locally, to increasing amounts of self-service all done from Wales, no local contact, in just under two years. So that’s been a tremendous change for them. And then I guess the third thing is dealing with the things that go wrong: unknown IT, unknown processes, it’s all unproven so things go wrong. Sometimes things happen that you wouldn’t expect would happen: sometimes you have too few people, the IT system doesn’t behave – all those things which are euphemistically referred to as teething problems.

SSON: Has the resistance among general staff more or less been overcome now, or is there still some way to go do you think?

SH: I think there’s still some resistance. I think the approach to what’s seen as resistance is important. We haven’t necessarily always designed a service solution which works for them. And the good news is that they’ll very soon tell you it doesn’t work, and if you change it they’ll cooperate with you. Now a lot of the services they now receive, they’ll say are better. Some were not as good when we initially implemented them, but since then we’ve used process improvements and enhancements in technology to improve those services, so we’ve filled the gaps pretty quickly.

I think that’s what takes them with you. Talk to the average prison officer and say “I run shared services: what do you want from me?” and they’ll say they want to be paid on time, they want their expenses on time, and correctly. Anything else? “Perhaps some training.” This is not rocket science! If you speak to the governors, who run the jails, or the finance people or the HR people, they’ve got a much more sophisticated list of things they want, so they’re much more difficult to satisfy. It’s usually in that area that the battle is won or lost.

SSON: Where are you hoping to go over the next couple of years?

SH: I think if you’re going to run one of these with the workforce based in the UK, with civil service terms and conditions of employment, you have to achieve very high levels of productivity, because otherwise you’re not cost-effective. Our strategy is one of growth: the more users we can put on our systems, the more transactions we can put through this building: that brings unit-costs down. So we’re embarked on a strategy of growth which is what the Home Office project was all about really.

We’re currently preparing a business case to deliver some more service into the Ministry of Justice, and we’re hopeful that’ll get approval later on this year. We have the option of delivering a broader range of services to the same customer base – there’s still some administration activity that goes on in jails for example that would respond to the application of a shared service. So that’s where we’re headed.

SSON: Finally, what advice could you give to someone just embarking upon planning and implementing a large-scale shared service operation in the public sector as you have?

SH: Make sure you’ve got a team around you that knows how to do it. This is not something that should be a journey of discovery: it takes too long and it costs too much money. Set off with a clear vision and a capable team around you that already know how to do this. If you can sort that out, then you’ll probably do ok.

Interview with Rick Becker-Leckrone, CEO of BlendImages Stock Agency

Interview with Rick Becker-Leckrone, CEO of BlendImages Stock Agency

John: Rick, I know you as the CEO, principle founder and chief architect of Blend Images, a young and very successful stock agency owned and run by photographers.  You have a long history in stock as a shooter, an entrepreneur and in management.  Can you fill in the details on your experience in stock?

Rick: I graduated from  Rochester Institute of Technology in 1990 with a BFA in Photography and headed west with my then girlfriend, Megan, who was to be a PhD student at UC Irvine in California.  I was intrigued by stock photography in the late 80’s when I stumbled upon one of Westlight’s early catalogs.  Naturally, I contacted Westlight when I landed on the west coast and ended up taking a job within months of getting settled in Irvine.  At Westlight, I started on the light-table doing research – pulling transparencies from the filing cabinets for client requests.  I then moved on to be an Account Executive and finally a Photo Editor working directly with photographers.  I, too, began shooting some stock but it was a bit intimidating as I edited work by some of the world’s top editorial and commercial photographers like Craig Aurness and Chuck O’Rear. 

After a relatively short time at Westlight, I was hired as a Director of a small traditional photo agency in Orange County, CA called PhotoBank.  While a much smaller operation, I enjoyed the opportunity to work in a collaborative environment and to have the flexibility to work both with photographers creatively and in digital systems development both on the imaging side and on the business systems side. 

Having been a computer geek since my father purchased me one of the first Apple II in about 1979 while I was in Junior High, I have always enjoyed programming and still “get under the hood” every now and then.  Following Photobank, a close friend of mine purchased a software company which produced programs for Mac users in Real Estate.  He asked me to come on board as President and oversee development of the products. 

As I had begun to spend a lot of my time shooting stock, and I was very interested in early digital image databases – like those starting to come on board for MLS services and Kodak’s new stock on-line service based on PhotoCD, I thought running a software company would be a fun change of pace.  BusinessEdge ran for about 3 years and we ended up moving to Santa Barbara and becoming an ISP and a web-design company emphasizing database services. 

Our first client was DigitalStock, one of the first Royalty Free agencies, located in San Diego.  Coincidentally, I had been producing stock content for one of the owners of Digital Stock, at the same time the other owner used BusinessEdge software to run his real estate company and had contracted with me to build their first web-site.  One thing lead to another and I decided to come on board to work with the owners in developing Digital Stock from both a technical and creative perspective. 

We ended up selling Digital Stock to Corbis, and I joined Corbis as Co-Director for Commercial Content Worldwide.  I truly enjoyed my time at Corbis and met some great photographers and created a lot of wonderful content.  Due to an integration of RF into the larger RM strategy at Corbis, I was laid off in 2001.  Often opportunity comes from what one might perceive as a difficult situation.  Having the free time to actually shoot stock was a real blessing. 

I signed with a few agencies, and did some custom work for Corbis and was having a great time being a full time stock photographer for the first time in my life.  My wife had moved to Las Vegas as she took a job as Professor in the English department.  So, I moved from Los Angeles to Vegas (we were a commuting couple for several years), and shot a lot of stock photos for all the usual agencies. 

After about 3 years of shooting, I got wanderlust again and missed the company of working with others and the entrepreneurial energy of the ‘start-up.’  Throughout my entire career in stock there was always one unresolved constant – a dearth of high-quality, non-stereotypical, multi-ethnic business and lifestyle content. 

As a photo editor at Westlight, Digital Stock and Corbis, it was all I could do to get photographers to really concentrate on generating these much needed images.  And as the world around me seemed to be continuing to become more and more diverse, it seemed to me the time was now to “to it right” – not just shoot a few African-American images, but to really put together a collection with breadth and depth and with a real mission to create content that helps everyone communicate respectfully with one another through marketing and advertising messaging. 

So, I knew what I wanted to do, and tossed the idea around with my friend Jack Hollingsworth, and we got together a list of photographers we thought might be intrigued with the idea.  I said, “come to Las Vegas and bring your checkbook, I’ve got a thought.”  They all did, they all wrote checks and committed to shoot, and Blend was born.  We started with no images and of course, no revenue.  About 4 ½ years in we have about 80,000 images, over 70 photographers and sales just over 6M a year.  It’s been a great ride so far.

John: Blend Images is about four years old now.  From just an idea, to a full service agency with ,000,000.00 in sales, an innovative and fast growing web site, an ownership position in a larger agency, and a roster of some of the biggest names in stock, Blend has been a remarkable success.  Can you share with us some of the factors that have made Blend so successful?

Rick: Three things made Blend successful

1. Our photographers and their photographs.  We only brought in top selling stock shooters to start Blend, and we’re really choosy with whom we offer contracts to shoot for Blend.  We have a small staff and we simply don’t have the ability to ‘hand-hold’ shooters who are just getting started (but always happy to help photographers find a good home for their work.)  I believe in experience when it comes to stock.  We have 23 owners / investors who founded Blend.  There is only one of these investors younger than me (I’m 40).  Why?  Experience counts.   I’m all for new blood, new techniques, hep, cool, pix.  But understanding the concepts that sell and those who have survived, and indeed thrived throughout the ups and downs and changes in the stock world are folks I want on my team.  We had such a strong roster coming out of the gate, that we signed many of our distributors without showing them a single photo.  They got it. And they wanted to be a part of it. 

2. Our staff.  We have a small staff only about 9 full-time employees.  But each, in their own right, is an entrepreneur.  They all have the ability to do jobs outside of their main discipline.  In fact, we just hired a new employee to handle our royalty accounting.  But, true to form, she was one of the first employees at Photodisc and has done everything from creative to sales.  Training took about 3 hours. She’s up and running.  We all take the trash out, we all do windows.  I only hire people who have their own ‘deep bench’ in terms of skills. 

3. Timing.  We got lucky to start the company when we did.  Everything came together at the right time. 

John: You have twenty-four founding photographers.  There are many who have said that it would be impossible to get so many photographers to work together successfully. Has that been difficult?

Rick: Yeah, I think it was Jonathan Klein, CEO of Getty Images who gave me a friendly reminder that “co-ops” are hard to run. Or maybe he said “you’re f’ing crazy” – something like that.  Truth is – they are.  Photographers are passionate people and they all have relevant business experience.  So there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen from time to time.  It’s to be expected.  But we’re really blessed to have just the right amount of sugar and spice.  We do an annual owner’s meeting in NYC every year where we can all talk about the business – what’s working, what’s not. 

But ultimately the key to our success so far with regard to corporate governance is that we immediately set up a management structure which allows me to operate the business unencumbered day to day.  Of the 24 owners, we select 4 to manage our LLC, and the CEO also sits on this Board of Managers.  This group hires the CEO, and the CEO is tasked with all of the day-to-day operations.   The CEO then reports monthly – financial / operational reports to the Board of Managers and we in turn report to all the owners quarterly with updates.  It works out pretty well.  Of course, some of us ‘get into it’ now and then, but it’s like a family.  It happens.  But we’ve been fortunate to work through individual concerns in a respectful and constructive manner.

John: What can you share with us about your vision for Blend’s future?

Rick: Blend Images will be the “go to” service for licensing ethnically diverse media for marketing and advertising.   We have room to grow both vertically and horizontally through our brand.  Obvious extensions are motion content, audio content, and editorial content.  We may have a lower-priced RF collection as well.   To grow the business further we will, of course, need to shoot the best pictures we can.  But also, we need to continue building out our technology base to generate a “closed-loop” between photographer, agent and client. 

We want photographers to be able to understand what our clients are looking for and be able to respond rapidly.  Our new back-end system for photographers we call “Loupe” allows our shooters to track their sales in real-time, download their royalty reports, and review their sales history all the way back to day one of Blend.  In the future, photographers will be able to analyze all aspects of our sales data. 

What’s are the best selling Latino subjects in the UK?  Do African-American family dining shots sell better than African-American family TV watching shots?  Craig Aurness, founder of Westlight, was a master of data mining.  I learned a lot from him and want to give our photographers as much information as possible.  Agencies hold this kind of data too close to the chest in my opinion. 

Micro agencies have been successful for a number of reasons – price not being the top reason in my opinion.  Transparency, community and ease of use are prime drivers of micro’s popularity.  Blend has learned from micro’s success and while we’ll never be a micro agency, we do want our photographers and our creative team to understand, as much as possible, objectively what’s working and what’s not.

John: Blend has expanded beyond the original founding photographers and now includes contributing photographers as well.  Is Blend continuing to take on new contributors?

Rick: What do you look for in contributing photographers?

We’ve been blessed to have so many great photographers want to be a part of Blend.  And yes, we’re always looking for new contributors.  Blend is more than just a photo agency – we truly are a community.  Blend photographers are automatically added to our Stockpros forum where top end commercial shooters share information, offer assistance, and sometimes just let off steam.  Are you looking for a modeling agency to work with in San Diego?  One post to the Stockpros list and you’d likely have it solved.  

We also provide our photographers with more creative research and feedback than any other agency that I’m aware of.  It’s understandable that larger agencies can’t offer one on one service as much as they used to — just too many photographers and too many images.  Blend can still provide the one on one.   We absolutely understand that our shooters make images for many different agencies.  Heck, I do. 

I wouldn’t suggest to anyone to put all your eggs in one basket.  What we aim to offer our shooters is, of course, to make a decent return on your shoots for Blend, but as important to open doors to a community of the best of the best stock shooters.  When you’re a Blend photographer our concern is that you do well in stock – all of it – not just at Blend. 

We all celebrate a shooter having a great year at Getty or Superstock or Veer.  Our feeling is together we’ll all do better — it can be lonely out there!  Of course anyone interested in learning more about our agency, just e-mail Sarah Fix, our Creative Director at sarah@blendimages.com, or you can even e-mail or call me directly.  We’re casual.

John: We are in a very challenging time for stock photography.  Microstock has burst on the scene and is sorting itself out, RF seems to be drowning in its own weight and the economy is setting the wrong kind of records. Can you give your perspective on Microstock, the oversupply of Royalty Free, and how the economy is going to be impacting stock?

Rick: The economy is in shambles.  Advertising and marketing budgets are some of the first to go.  It will get better in time, but seriously – it’s a mess out there.  2009 is going to be very hard for the commercial creative arts.  It’s not a Microstock thing (completely).  It’s not an oversupply thing (completely).  It’s mostly a ‘the whole world is broke’ thing.  But still – even if there’s a 50% decrease in stock sales, we’re still talking about, what?  700M in sales out there. 

One thing is especially important to keep in mind – now is not the time for a shotgun approach to production.  The last decade was about creating massive amounts of RF imagery.  Now there’s too much similar content. RM has been underserved with new imagery, but it’s a relatively small market.   Micro is interesting, but a lot of hard work and not completely clear one can generate the same returns as in traditional stock. (Yes, some do, but very few.)  Chill out in 2009.  Figure out what you’re truly good at shooting, figure out what the market is missing and make fewer, but better targeted content.  Don’t count the success of your 2009 in the number of images you produce. 

John: Blend is pioneering a new model; Non exclusive distribution of RM stock.  How does that work, and how is it working?

Rick: Truth is there are very, very, few exclusive sales — a couple of percent per year.  So we handle exception sales through our Seattle office and notify sales partners where appropriate.  The bottom line is that RM imagery simply has much less exposure than RF imagery.  RM shots might sell a few times a year, micro shots might sell hundreds of times a year.  Most folks license RM pictures because, well, they like the picture – not that it’s RM.  We sell RM on our site every day.  We sell RF on our site everyday.  Often the price point is the same. 

John: Do you see the market for stock photography changing?  If so, how?

Rick: I would concur with some of the stock smartypants folks that yes, there will be less need for high-res content as pictures are used more and more in digital environments.  But low-res doesn’t necessarily have to mean low cost.  We’ll have to work out new pricing paradigms in the future.  I know Jim Pickerell has given this a lot of thought.  And, no, the Micro or subscription model can’t work for all content — just not possible. 

It’s one thing to license a “long tail” shot for 9.00, quite another to license one for .00  A lot of content will simply not make enough money to justify it’s production costs in a micro environment.  Photographers will figure that out eventually.  And the rush to micro by photographers will abate.  The market will find new equilibrium – photographers need to make a living, clients need a good value, agencies need to generate profit. 

Right now in the micro world, some photographers are making good money, I assume Getty for example finds running iStockphoto profitable (and be careful here, being an agency owner I assure you that not all agencies are profitable), and clients seem to love the model (some clients of course.)  But if more and more shooters pile in more and more similar content, each shooter will make less and less and at some point, it’s just not worth the effort.  So, then the photographer will decide to make less fungible content – unique content – but truly unique content doesn’t work well in the micro environment which requires massive multiples of sales.  That shooter moves into doing traditional RF or RM content naturally.  The nature of images in the traditional RF and RM libraries is likely to change in the future because of micro option. 

John: What advice would you give to someone just entering the field?

Rick: Find a veteran, and offer to be a second shooter or assistant for a couple of years to learn the craft.  Don’t just throw stuff up on micro sites and assume the results you get are indicative of our skill.  Such an endeavor might be indicative of your skill at producing for micro – and / or your lack of understanding of key-wording, how micro agencies rank content, etc. but get with some folks who’ve been doing it a long time.  Heck, come by our office in Seattle.  Always love to meet new shooters.  Always help to point you in the right direction. 

John: Stock photography, looking ahead…optimistic, or pessimistic?

Rick: The world is getting more visually oriented, not less.  Still images don’t require a captive audience like motion.  Still images are portable and can evoke emotion almost instantly.  The world will continue to need more pictures and as “developing countries”, well,  continue to develop, contemporary photography will be licensed more and more. 

There will be micro RF collections, and subscriptions and RM, and even medium and high-priced RF. — lots and lots of options for licensing.   Database technology will continue to improve which will help researchers target content more effectively.  The value add an agency can provide to a client will be in the agencies ability to locate the right imagery from vast collections of content. 

The editing function / research function will become increasingly important.  At some point every agency could represent every picture (for all intents and purposes), the key is who can drill down most efficiently?   There used to be massive product differentiation from one agency to the next.  Of course with the consolidation of the industry at the top there is less and less differentiation.  At the next level, though, there is becoming less differentiation as well.  Ultimately agencies have to answer the “why shop here?” question.  This is something I ask myself all the time.  “Wow, another RM sale on our web-site!”  “Why did they come to Blend?

I know our content rocks, but there are so many places to buy our content.” – ultimately, for business and lifestyle shots, we’ve got a nice collection without having to dig through a bunch of other stuff.   In other words, our collection, in and of itself offers instant relevancy to certain clients.  Agencies that can provide the best search and retrieval tools for their clients are bound to do well.

As far as being optimistic – sure – why not?   The best thing about a massive economic depression is that at some point it’s all going to point up.

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