Why everything now just clicks for Charlie

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‘I would say we are the world’s most successful marketing company for independent photographers’; Charlie Kaufman, Head of The Click Connection Corporation

Churchill described Russia as ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.

In a different age he might have used the same phrase about Charlie Kaufman too.

Charismatic Watford-based Charlie is the head of The Click Connection Corporation (tag line: ‘generating more clients for your business’) and he really is a puzzle.

Not yet forty, this guy has been up and down more times than Tower Bridge. He’s seen huge success, devastating failure and major success again. The man is simply irrepressible.

Other words that come to mind: obsessed; driven; risk-taker; focused; fearless; open-minded; fatalist; enthusiast; supreme salesman.

Charlie has never made any bones about it. He has always chased ‘the big pay day’.

As a photographer he has had his work published in major newspapers and magazines – and when he has time to pick up a camera and shoot under his ‘Charlie K’ brand he says he still commands an average £12,000 per wedding.

But he tells Imagemaker: “I am not going to lie. My creativity is entirely financially driven.

I am more of an entrepreneur and salesman than I am a purist photographer. I know I could settle for making a highly lucrative career just taking pictures, but being a wedding photographer isn’t achieving anything truly entrepreneurial in my mind.”

But there is no question that it was photography itself that first lit the touch paper on the Kaufman commercial rocket.

“Photography found me at eight. My grandparents bought me a Kodak disc camera and I just loved it. I remember taking it on a family holiday to Italy and using it to shoot a wide range of scenes and people – including a terrific shot I still relish of a fire eater with three metres of flames coming out of his mouth. I was hooked from that moment.”

At his elder brother’s bar mitzvah he hung on to the shirt-tails of portrait photographer Richard Shymansky – and told him he wanted to work for him one day. (By age twenty Charlie owned 50% of two studios with Shymansky but they went their separate ways a few years later.)

At thirteen Charlie’s mother allowed him to spend all the proceeds from his own bar mitzvah on photo-equipment.

He recalls: “It was £5,000. A lot of money. I bought a Bronica and lighting equipment plus everything else I needed to build a darkroom in the family garage.”

On his fifteenth birthday Charlie starting working as an assistant to a photographer near his home town ofMill Hill.

“I worked mainly as his support video shooter at weekends. One day we covered an event at Claridges. I earned £80 and I was right up there on Cloud 9.”

Charlie left school with five GCSEs: “My mum was constantly pleading with the school not to expel me for buying and selling stuff – I think she thought I was racketeering. Then finally my parents asked the careers’ master what he thought I should do with my life. He told them “Well quite honestly he has to make his own way because one thing is for sure; nobody will be telling him what to do.”

But it was a spell of working with Golders Green, London-based photographer David Chesner that eventually catapulted Charlie into the world of sales, marketing and promotion.

“David was doing very well with video but after working with him for eighteen months I

urged him to put me on a percentage of turnover as an incentive to generate new portraiture business. In one month we shot £40,000 worth of images.

But we had a disagreement and I left to start offering telesales - in the form of lead generation, for many of the big name photographers; Ray Lowe, Peter Dyer, Eileen Mason and Trevor Yerbury. That was seventeen years ago and it was the launch of The Click Group.”

Charlie went from zero to £1 million turnover in two years. He employed almost fifty people to create studio bookings for over a hundred Click-affiliated studios up and down the country.

It couldn’t go wrong, right? Wrong. It could. And it did. Twice.

Says Charlie: “At that time no one had ever united a group of independent businesses and marketed them as a national enterprise without it being franchised.

But I was young and it all went to my head. It got too big and out of control. I had opened in Bushey, Finchley and Willesden and I had a formidable £50,000 payroll to find each month. It all just imploded. I had employed accountants and bookkeepers but it turned out that we hadn’t being paying VAT or PAYE.

I had to liquidate it all. Then I started again but that business failed too.

I had huge personal debts so I started shooting more weddings and bar mitzvahs. But in my heart I just wanted to get back to creating a marketing business that I knew could once again rise to the top.”

So he did.

Today The Click Group and Fresh (his sibling ‘makeovers’ business) hold approximately 90% of the gift experience market and supply almost every major marketing agency. And the group supplies portrait and makeover offers and packages for national media and third party loyalty promotions.

“We are responsible for over £8 million of our studios’ turnover in the UK – this makes us the biggest player photographically speaking of any independent marketing company. It is no boast for me to say I believe Click is the world’s most successful marketing company for independent photographers. Nobody does what we do worldwide – and since the demise of Olan Mills our turnover and profits have almost trebled.”

So what suddenly went right?

Confesses Charlie: “I just don’t make those same mistakes anymore. I am still happy to stick my neck out but I am now far more careful about ensuring our future security.”

He says that now.

But in 2003 Charlie’s obsessive desire for success led him to acquire a two storey office in Watford and IN ONE DAY he launched The Hair Group, The Restaurant Group and The Travel Group. He remortgaged, took out five personal loans and eleven credit cards. He invested £300,000 across eighteen months.

He admits: “The Restaurant Group was a waste of time – I was ten years too early with that idea. Today everyone has voucher codes.

Just as we launched The Travel Group the world was dealing with the tsunami, Iraq and 9/11.

But The Hair Group went well – and The Beauty Group just naturally followed on.

Then I thought about the potential in makeovers and Fresh was launched.”

On his company’s website Charlie explains: “For nearly twenty years we have been generating new clients for studios via four main initiatives; media promotions; on-pack loyalty rewards; company incentive reward schemes and more recently by being a major photographic supplier to the ‘gift experience’ market. Our leads have historically had a conversion rate of lead to booking of 97% and studios usually enjoy sales averages in excess of £300. We currently generate in the region of £8M a year for our members excluding other incomes earned from our Photopod, Bump 2 Baby and My 1st Year divisions.

The promotions are either spend-related on-pack; retail offers; readers' offers within newspapers and magazines or photographic experiences purchased on line or in-store. All have one thing in common - a free service provided by yourselves for increased footfall to your studio.

Most promotions are either based around:

Free Family Portrait Session and Print (minimum size 5x7 in a presentation folder) - worth a combined value of £50.

For Fresh most of the magazine and newspaper offers include a free session only, valued at £100. The session includes a style consultation, hair styling, make up, photo shoot and viewing.”

At the WPPI convention in Las Vegas last year Click Connection Corporation launched Click and Fresh to the US portrait industry. Currently Charlie’s investment in the US had led to the recruitment of over 150 studio members spanning 36 States.

Now Charlie has ‘bumped’ into The Societies – and in particular the SWPP.

Click will take a Stand at our Convention in January, for the first time.

He tells Imagemaker: “Since last year The Click Group has had total prenatal exclusivity for its Bump to Baby and My First Year schemes with Bounty, the UK’s largest prenatal and postnatal data company. This gives us exclusive ‘opt in’ data from Bounty, for women who are 6 months pregnant.

Now we are very excited to be offering The Bump to Baby scheme free of charge (to join) for SWPP members – for a limited period only.

Members will be able to select the postcode area of the leads they wish to receive, at a low cost of £5 per post code, per year. Postcodes are obviously dependent on availability, but photographers can have as many as they like.

The leads are charged at 75p +VAT each and subscribers only pay for the data received each month. Once photographers have the data, we already have beautifully designed mail pieces at incredible prices for them to use and get started straight away.

The data may be used twice… once on initial receipt and again eight weeks later.

The first mail piece gives the recipient the chance to have a Bump to Baby photo session… one with ‘the bump’ and again when the baby is born; providing a 5”x7” print free of charge from each session.

I invite SWPP photographers to compare the lead cost with charges levied by a competitor photo organisation.

Bottom line? SWPP members can buy our data cheaper and they get it earlier.”

Charlie K is a non-stop whirling dervish of a guy. His entire psyche is wired to sell; to communicate and to achieve.

He told me that he has never loved the business more than he does today – and that if he won the lottery he would still continue to work seven days a week.

If I were a gambler I’d put money on that being the truth.

www.clickconnectioncorp.com

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