Hello and a very warm welcome. I believe we are live. Please give me a moment. I'll make sure everything is working fine and we'll get started. Hi Sandy. Yes, absolutely. It is party time today! Thank you very much. I believe everything seems to be in order and we are pretty much good to go. Hello, my name is Uzair and welcome to todays...
A very special live stream, I must say! It is four o'clock in the UK and today is the 5th of October, 2020. It's a very big milestone and occasion for us as a business and as a personal milestone, as well. That we today exactly, eighteen years ago, we started our little business and we've passed through eighteen great years and today, I would like to share our ups and downs, how the journey evolved, how we got started, where we are right now and where we are heading towards.
So, thank you, Sandy, for your messages and if you do have any questions, please do put them in the comment box and I'll try my best to answer them for you. If you are new or you are thinking of starting, please send us any questions. Or if you have been running your businesses, then we share your challenges.
Especially the last six months or the whole of pretty much 2020 has been extremely challenging for everyone. Lots of people have suffered tremendously, and we thank God that at least we are well, we are alive and in good health. So, let's all pray for everybody to stay safe and let's pray that this virus goes away so we can go back to our normal life sometime very soon.
But in the meantime, if you are starting a business, if you are thinking of starting a business, then this is a time where it will be one of the most challenging times in a lifetime. We don't know what's going to happen every day, the things change. The landscape is changing with regards to economies and lots of people, losing their jobs, companies closing down, but in all this doom and gloom, I should say there are always opportunities.
Every cloud has a silver lining and I believe that digital marketing is where there are lots and lots of new opportunities, which one must avail. Like we are, we went online at least. Well, we have been online pretty much since the start, but the last six months we have... Last two years, we have been solely focusing on YouTube and video marketing and since the lockdown, we have pretty much tripled down on our online activity, especially with video marketing.
So, what I would like to do is to go right back to 2002, when me and my wife Farzana, were having a conversation... But before I start, before I forget, first of all, I want to thank all of you, who have supported us through all these years - without you, without your support, well wishes and prayers we wouldn't be here.
So, we truly appreciate all our customers, suppliers, well-wishers, friends who have been all along with us throughout this journey. So, we truly do appreciate it and also our team members, you know, they've been a great help and those of you who still are working with us, it's great to have you on board. Some of us, some of our team members, they've been with us for about eight years now.
So, they've been loyal to us. We've been loyal to them and we want to continue this journey for hopefully the next eighteen years. Okay. So, let's go back to 2002. Me and my wife Farzana, we were having a conversation. We had had our second child, Sehar, our daughter was born, and we were having this conversation about not taking too many pictures of her.
Now, I've always been a photographer since I was a kid. It was my hobby and I always enjoyed photography. But in those days, I was very busy, hardly taking any pictures. So, Farzana said to me, well, I'm going to take her to the toddler group where a photographer is going to come along and do some pictures or some portraits.
I said, okay, I didn't think of anything, off she went, came back...the next day or so we were having this conversation and the topic popped up. Okay. How did it go? Oh, he was useless those were her words. He was useless. I could have done a better job than him. So, I said to her, why don't you, she goes, what do you mean?
I said you'll be able to take better pictures like you said, and why don't you start doing that? And as they say, the rest is history, this idea came along and she said, well, that photographer was horrible with the mums. He wasn't patient with the kids and to do baby or kids photography, it's much easier for a woman to do it because they warm to a woman completely different compared to a man and Farzana knew a thing or two about photography because she used to, we used to go together everywhere, especially landscape photography.
I used to do a lot. So, she knew the cameras, the lenses, the apertures, and the shutter stops and all that and the ISOs. Off she went and did the pictures. And the other thing, the other problem was that photographer would not come back for three weeks and if you missed him on that day, you will not be able to see the proofs and you'll miss placing the order.
So, that was another problem and then after you placed the order, you'll be waiting for another four weeks. So, it was a long process. At that point in time, the digital cameras were coming along, very brand new. So, I said, look, we have these digital cameras and then you can have these inkjet printers where you can take the pictures, download it onto a laptop, print it straight away then and there in a matter of minutes, and you can hand them the prints to the mums at the end of the toddler group session.
But we had another problem. We didn't have any money. So, luckily for us, our sister-in-law, she loaned us the money and we went, bought all the equipment and this is how we started our business. Now, those of you who remember the first generation of cameras, laptops, and printers, they were not very good. But in those days, obviously, it was brand new.
It was really good. Just like the iPhone One came up, everybody was thinking, well, great. We got them and she started doing these toddler groups and from one to the other, everybody wanted her to come there and they were thrilled at how quick these photos were being printed and they were taking away and, in our town centre in Watford, we had a very big shopping mall.
So, she went to the Bear Factory in those days where they used to make teddy bears and they used to stuff the teddy bears and make those stuffed teddy bears and she said to them, look, this is what we have got and they said, but how do you do this? Because nobody knew what digital on-site printing and everything was.
So, they said, well, we've got a very big event coming up in a few weeks time. Why don't you bring your equipment and try it and see, we'll have the big bears with the costumes on, and you can have photos of the little ones or kids, with the bears I said, yeah, that's the perfect opportunity. Off she went and we started all up and then after a couple of hours, or so she quickly phoned me and said, just come here quickly and then she put the phone down.
I thought, Oh, it must be an emergency. I don't know what was happening. Soon as I went in there, the queue was so long. As long as the eye can see, it was like, literally, like, it felt like miles long and I didn't think of anything. I thought maybe they must be queuing for something. They were queuing for the photos and Farzana said well, here is the printer keep printing or here's the cards, I will take photos.
You keep downloading and keep printing. We couldn't keep up! Anyway. It was so tediously slow. Those printers that we just couldn't print them. But what happened was we got a new brand dye-sublimation printer, which was printing out in a matter of seconds and then somebody from the main town shopping centre saw us and then they called Farzana after a few days and said, what you did was amazing.
We want you to do the same thing at our centre's grotto and that's where our big break came through. Okay. How many kids come? Well, we get about forty, forty-five thousand kids come to see the centre!!!! Okay, we've never done anything this big before, but we'll try our best. He goes, yeah. How many, no matter how many staff you need just tell us, we'll have it.
We had a team of nine and then obviously two centres. They used to do shift from eight o'clock in the morning until nine. We used to do nonstop. We shot almost twenty-seven thousand kids and printed those photos for them in a matter of three weeks. So, that was quite a big opportunity and a big break for us.
Then, we stumbled upon equestrian photography, where we went somewhere, where there were lots of cute ponies and kids and we'd like...You always do when you have got a new business, we offered, or Farzana offered her service that we can do these. He goes to us, but we are very small, but you go to this equestrian centre they're very big.
And they will be very interested in you. Off we went to the equestrian centre and asked for the manager, the manager saw us and we said to him, this is what we can do. We can literally give you the photos within a matter of seconds and he also couldn't understand how you can do that. Because in those days, the film roles used to be sent off and they'll come back in the post and all that and he goes, have you done any equestrian photography?
No. Okay. Don't worry. You'll learn. Come tomorrow. You've got a very big shoot. Now, in the winter months, those of you who are into horses, everything goes indoors and in the summer months, everything goes outdoors, especially the showjumping and the dressage. Off we went the next day. I had no clue and the guy who was in the arena, he said, stay with me.
If you haven't done anything like this, no problem and then the horses came in, and they were just jumping over the jumps and going at two hundred miles an hour, I was like scared! That was the scariest time of my life! In fact, not the scariest thing. Next day was the scariest and we were downloading, but not many people were buying, and we said why aren't they buying.
So, we asked the customers and because we were putting the pictures on the print, they were saying, well, you need to take the photo when they're going up, not coming down and they showed us the angles and Farzana would come to me, tell me to look you need to do it at these angles and this is.... The timing needs to be right.
Started taking really good pictures and we used to start selling like crazy. Because again, in those days they would get the proofs in the post. Then, the order will come in the post. Whereas over here, they would take the prints along with them within a matter of seconds. So, that was, we got started with equestrian. We had never done any equestrian photography before and we used to do about, three hundred horse shows with a team of eight photographers every weekend.
One of the biggest breakthroughs came along from Nikon. I got an email and, in those days, emails were very new, pretty much brand new. I used to dial in those of you who remember it, wasn't just like, Oh, the internet is connected all the time we had to dial in and then the emails will download and it was from Nikon from Jackie and I said to Farzana this is somebody pulling our leg or it's a scam.
No, it might be true. I replied back and Jackie said, well, come and meet me at Nikon house. Next week, or whenever it was. Off I went to Nikon and then she handed me a camera and she goes, Okay, take a photo. I took a picture and then within a matter of seconds that picture appeared on the computer's screen and I was like, thinking, wow, this is like some kind of black magic.
What is this? It's just amazing. She goes, I've seen your website. You do lots of events, especially dinner dances. Said yeah, with this you don't need to download with the card. You can just WiFi it, send it straight to your laptop and print it. It will save you lots of time. I said, yeah, absolutely and this is how I started with Nikon for almost seven, eight years.
I used to teach photography for them, do seminars, public speaking at events, pretty much everything, so that was a great journey. This is one of my best photographic achievements and if you can see this, this was the photo taken inside the London Eye and the challenge was to go inside the London Eye, set up, shoot, pack up, all of it in a matter of thirty minutes and I then entered this image in the competition in Europe's largest convention and out of about eight and a half thousand photographers, I got the first prize for one of the portrait photography categories and here's my little award, which I've kept.
The other one, which is... Was a very proud moment for us was this award of excellence for the software we had created for our photography business and we sold through online and in lots of different countries as well and it was going very well. Then, we ventured into social photography, weddings and so on until 2009, when the Lehman brothers, the recession started, they crashed and everything, the whole world went into a recession.
So, our traditional marketing, like newspaper advertising, magazines, or fairs, trade shows and all these kinds of local events, they weren't working very well. They were getting more and more expensive. And we had to look at some other way to advertise our business. I had heard of Google Ads AdWords in those days. I don't know what the hell is this, but I started dabbling with it, playing with it, just set up a campaign and we will get traffic for like one p a click literally and we would be booked out literally for months on end, just with these little ads running on Google, I'm thinking well, and I had no clue what I was doing, how I was doing, but it was working really well and then before you know, it, other friends and other people, you know, the word usually goes around, doesn't it, if you know somebody or how are you running your business.
How are you advertising? Well, I'm doing Google Ads AdWords. Oh, can you do it for me? And before I knew it, I was doing other people's campaigns and it was affecting my own business. I'm thinking, you know, the whole day has gone and I've not done any work. What have I been doing? So, I looked at it and I'm thinking I've been on other people's campaigns and not at mine.
So, then I knew that there is a gap in the market, or there's a requirement where people need somebody like me. So, I looked at Google Ads and I came across the Google Partner Program. I applied for it and then we passed all the exams, qualified for all the certain criteria you need to have and then I went back to all my clients.
I said, well, I'm going to run ads for you. If you allow me and then show you the results. So, that was the journey of our... Into digital marketing. Now, with my photography background, I knew, and especially with my work at Nikon that things are moving away from photography and into video because all of a sudden, the DSLR's had a video on it and the mobile phones, the iPhone Ones, or I think the later versions started to have a video on the mobile phone.
Why would you have that? And why would you have a video on a digital camera? But I knew something was coming along and when I was presenting at seminars and workshops on teaching other people how to take photos and everything, I knew that they were going to be my competitor and with all that, recession going at the same time, people getting redundant, with their redundancy money, they'll buy a camera.
A couple of lenses set up a little website and they're in business and the photography market really crashed from a highly-skilled profession. You can now become a photographer by attending a few seminars, learn a few things and because of the technologies were so easy, you can take half-decent photos, but I knew this was coming along and we made a decision to pivot completely.
Now, this was one of the most hardest decisions because photography was our bread and butter to stop completely and start something new. Either you're completely mad or you are very brave. I don't know what we were, but I think we definitely made the right decision because here we are and I know a lot of my photographer friends, they are very...
They are struggling because the market is that people don't want to pay for good quality photography. Now, when you have Google Ads in your arsenal, you have photography and video. The only missing piece of the jigsaw was a website. So, one of our clients said to us, you're doing our photos and our videos. Why don't you do a website and I looked at it and I'm thinking, yeah, we can, because one of the most important things for any website are high-quality photos, videos.
If we can do that, doing a great design, or a half-decent website is not a big problem. So, then we started going into web design and when you do have a website, you do need traffic, but this is how we went the whole complete circle, from very humble beginnings, of just taking photos at a toddler group, to running campaigns for clients, literally all over the world.
Now, our business evolved two and a half years ago, we made the conscious decision that we are going to focus on video as our core at the heart of our marketing mix, everything starts from a video and this is what we have been doing and since the lockdown, we started doing these live streams as well, which is again, gaining traction, doubled up our views on our channel and it is heading in the right direction.
Where we are going, we have a growth plan and a future plan where we would like to be. We don't know what new technology will be around us in two years' time, you know, we are talking about YouTube right now and all of a sudden, everybody's talking about TikTok, and God knows what's going to happen in two years' time.
But what we do know is that we will be at the forefront of whatever new technology throws at us. Because if you don't keep pace, there's no way in the world you are going to succeed. You got to change with the times and you got to be brave enough and bold enough to accept these new technologies because, without these, it's not going to work for any kind of business.
So, this is, this has been our journey, in a nutshell, eighteen years is a long time and I've been talking for about twenty, twenty-five minutes or so and it's been tremendous. It's been challenging, a lot of hard work, without hard work nobody can achieve anything. I would always, you know, always I say in these sessions and to people who I meet and see that there's no such thing as an overnight success, but to do the long hours, got to do the hard work and you will get the rewards.
Okay, I'm going to go to the comment box. Now, if you have any questions, then please do bring along and thank you so much. I'm not going to name names for everyone who has put in the comments, but I absolutely truly appreciate your support and thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and some of you, you know, Richard, Mike, Adam, Sandy, who are literally here on a very regular basis, we truly do appreciate your support.
Okay. So, Prateek, "Just to inform you that your latest video on dynamic search ad displays a live streaming time of seventeen hours." Yes. We used to be at five o'clock. We have changed to 1600 hours now, which is four o'clock in the future if the time changes. The old ones will still say 1700 we can't change that.
The best thing is to when you do come on to the live page, the notification time will be there and there's a button set reminder once you click that, every time we go live, you will get the notification. That's the easiest and the quickest way to do that and also, maybe in the near future, especially for our friends in Australia and Hawaii, where the time zones clash and right now it's in the middle of the night, but early hours of the morning, we might do a few sessions for them as well.
Okay. Prateek, "I have a question today, for real estate client, he has some properties listed on the website for sale. So, which leads will I target buyer lead or seller lead?" Well, you can target... If you are looking for... You will have to run two different campaigns that we buy any house or whatever and then you have another campaign, which is for those who are looking to buy.
So, you will have a buyer's campaign, as well as a seller's campaign. Sandy, "One person told me to upsell are based on customer experience, but it will not be based on customers modality. What is the difference between?" Well, it's the requirements of the customer, upselling, you can do lots of ways. Our upsells would be, for example, if you came to us as a Google Ads client, our upsell would be month two month, three months, month four, you staying with us, as long as your happy your getting the results and so on.
And this is what you want to do is to keep, not necessarily upselling as well, but if you want to cross-sell, down-sell, they can't afford your services. If you can't afford our services, we point to our training courses, which are a lot cheaper. You can do that, or you can have one-to-one training with me on Google Ads.
So, every business should have upsells, down-sells, and cross-sells. If they can't afford one... You go into a BMW car showroom. They will have a BM from ten thousand pounds to one hundred thousand pounds plus, at every price point so that somebody can afford to make a purchase for their budget. Yeah. Okay. Adam, "Is it always be best to use broad modified keywords instead of broad match keywords even in TCPA smart bidding or does your match types are still relevant?" Yeah.
Match types will be relevant and what you want to do is obviously you can't bid on the smart campaigns, but you can set up your keywords for sure. I never, we never use a broad match ever. It's always either broad modified, or those are the two... Hi, Mike, "Is there any way to change billing options, so that you pay Google Ads in advance?" Yes, I believe so.
You can. Ours and also for most of our clients, it's all on a monthly basis or through that threshold, whatever the threshold is for that account. But you can give Google your money, they're not going to say no, to receiving cash from anyone. Okay. T Butt, "Didn't know about your photography background. Any tip on product photography, lighting, setting, et cetera?" Yes.
I can talk on lighting all day long. The best thing is to keep things simple. It depends on how many lights you got and how you control the light. That is the key. You got to make sure that you got the main light, your fill light, your background light, for product photography too. If it's a small one to two lights is more than enough and with good light modifiers, softbox, and you should be good to go.
But the best tip I can tell you is how much... How to control the light going through your lens and using aperture and shutter speed. When I used to do pictures and I still do, every now and then, I never used the camera in auto mode, always in manual mode. That was how I had learned and that was the discipline, which I had known.
So, even if I'm looking at the lighting condition, I can pretty much say, you know, I need F eight at one-twenty-five, shutter speed at ISO 320 or whatever. Yeah, that would be my tip to just learn how to control the light and how much light goes through your lens. Brilliant. So, I think I've covered everybody. So, thank you so much for being here.
Truly appreciate it and from tomorrow, we'll be, well, as I say, back to business with some more Google Ads and then stay safe and goodbye.
