Interview with David Norris, CEO of OnRequestImages

OnRequestImages is focused on providing custom image libraries for large corporations that are marketing their brands in either the consumer marketplace or the business marketplace. Our clients include many of the Fortune 500, and typically companies that use a lot of imagery to market their product or service. Initially, we started marketing to advertising agencies, because they were an obvious target for people that use imagery. Over time, we evolved our business to focus more on corporate accounts, mostly because we found that the corporate accounts are the end customer for us, and we wanted to build a relationship direct with the end customer.

This is a business that is growing very rapidly, our needs on the long term were to build sustainable relationships with the end customer. Ad agencies would sometimes have a relationship, and then the agency would be switched out, and we’d lose that connection with the client. In the end, that’s really what we want for the long term.

After working with agencies over a period of about a year, we found that there was too much switching going on, that the corporations would begin to lose the relationship with an agency and eventually would switch, and at that point, our business would be disrupted with that end client. After doing that for about a year, we decided that while that was a sustainable business, that switching was very costly for us, because we had to re establish the relationship with the end client. So we decided to go ahead and focus our energy on building the long term relationships with the end accounts. We still work with agencies, but typically we establish the relationship with the end company first, and then they direct us to work with their agency of choice, the agency that’s currently dealing with that account, and we’ll work with them on each project. That tends to build a better relationship with us because we’re working with the end client, and the agency has a role to play, but it’s not between us and the client, but complementary to it.

Exactly. Since we made that change, almost two years ago, we’ve build a direct sales force across the US, in all the major cities: New York, Chicago, L.A., Denver, Dallas, and so on. Our business has expanded dramatically. We’re growing over 100% per year, and as that growth has expanded, our relationship with those accounts has expanded. We’re now experiencing a really interesting effect: as we build a relationship with an end account, they continue to work with us over a long period of time, so our repeat rate of customers is very high, and our success rate in maintaining those customer relationships is extremely high. We have over a 95% retention rate with customers, meaning that they’re very happy with the work we’re doing, but also that the relationship is doing what it’s supposed to do, it’s effective.

The model really has not changed in how we produce the imagery. One difference in what we’re doing now is we’re producing larger volumes of imagery. Where an ad agency might request five images, a corporation will typically request five hundred. We build libraries of imagery. Rather than doing very small projects, we’re doing much larger projects. Over the past two or three years, our business has focused almost entirely on producing custom libraries of imagery, with a specific focus on making sure that the imagery we produce is high quality, but is also aligned with the brand that we’re shooting for. Every brand faces an interesting challenge: how do they differentiate themselves, with all the competitors they’re going up against. What we help them do is to find a look and feel that they can own, something unique, so that when a consumer sees their image, they immediately know who it is. Then we produce sets of imagery to reflect that look and feel. By doing that, we’re taking a broader, longer term perspective, and we call that being on brand. Defining a unique look and feel and then producing imagery that aligns with the brand has been overwhelmingly successful. The clients loved it. It’s just what they need to accomplish in building their brand, and it satisfies their long term need for imagery.

That’s correct. We’re shooting imagery that’s fresh, unique, and it’s focused for a brand. Our business is all about creating imagery for a particular client, for a brand. We have a pretty good technology background called OnPro that allows us to manage the overall production process, and then we have a digitalized set management solution that allows us to deliver that imagery to the client, and allow them to manage it, post it, share it, and secure it, so that they can share it internally and with their ad agency. We’ve continued to expand our services. Now we do production and we do the digitalized set management.

When you’re working through agencies, it’s more of an inside sales model, where you have a large volume of salespeople in house that are doing telephone sales. With the larger deals that we’re doing, and the end customers being corporate accounts, we had to build an outside sales force. Internally, we made the transition, two to three years ago, where we went from having a primarily inside sales team to now having an outside sales team direct sales, all over the U.S. We have an inside team that supports that outside team, but most of our efforts are direct with the clients, so you have to be where the clients are. The deal prices are obviously much larger too.

Our focus is providing a solution for our client, addressing their image needs, so the kind of people we bring on board to support that effort are people that understand how to work with large corporations, definitely senior executives that are dealing with big brand challenges, but also have an understanding of the creative side. Our people have to be good at both sides. They have to be able to work with senior executives, but have to have a good understanding of brand and imagery. That’s a really important part of our business, because that’s what we do for a living.

The biggest difference is kind of going from a transactional model with agencies, where you can do small projects and lots of those, to doing larger and longer term deals with the corporate accounts.

As an example, Starwood is the largest hotel company in the world and managing brands like Weston and Sheraton and W Hotels, we are the exclusive provider of all their photography for their properties, and they have about 900 properties around the world. We have worked with them now for many years, and we structure annual contracts where we shoot all their properties every year. That kind of a relationship, it’s better for them, because they have a preferred vendor that they can manage the relationships with very carefully. For us, it’s more predictable from a revenue standpoint, because we have a client that is going to continue to work with us over a long period of time. That’s the typical kind of work that we’re doing now, as opposed to the transactional work we were doing before.

It provides more consistency for them and better quality, and there’s also some economic benefits to making longer term commitments. They can get better pricing because we can plan the productions over a longer period of time. It allows us to be able to help our artists and our photographers, who are a real key part of our supply chain and we’re very protective of them. This allows us to manage the timing and the scheduling and the layout of the work with our artists, which makes their lives a lot easier. Rather than having to have an urgent, “got to shoot it next week” and have a two day project, we can lay out months’ worth of work over time, which is much, much better for everybody.

I think it was an obvious shift. After about a year, we went through this analysis of what we were doing and it was really evident that it was working well, but it was very costly, because the transactions were smaller and very frequent, and there were all of these switching cost. With the support of our board of directors and our investors, who have been very involved in the building of this business, we looked at the situation and made a pretty decisive action to change it, after a relatively short period of time. It was really looking at the numbers and looking at what we needed to do was the one big change in our business since I started it, and I think it was the right decision. It was made very quickly, very decisively, and we moved forward. And from there, it has been much, much easier to build the business in a more profitable way.

For us, it was having the support of our investors, and a strong board of directors that allowed us to make the decision quickly. Then the execution of that was supported across the management team. I have a very senior team of people that were able to, once this decision was made, execute on it very quickly. This entire transition was done in one quarter. So we made the decision, laid out the plan and executed it, made the transition. After the transition was made and we moved forward, we continued hiring and growing, and obviously, over time, continued to accelerate our momentum in that direction.

We made the decision quickly, and we immediately had a very strong focus on corporate accounts. But we’ve always had great relationships with the agencies, because we continue to work with them on almost every account. So our strategy didn’t change, from the perspective of having a relationship with the agencies. It was just the types of relationships that we had that was different. Today, I’d say our relationships with the leading ad agencies of the world are stronger than ever.

I think, as an entrepreneur, you can’t really look back. There’s always decisions that you’d make: “Well, if I would have known this, I would have done that differently.” But sometimes the journey is actually really important, because it teaches you things that you have to know. In this case, I think it was a decision that we made quickly, and based on the change that we’ve made, we have accelerated our business, and it’s been a very positive influence on our company. But I wouldn’t change the fact that we had the experience, because what we learned was vital to our success.

We are on track with our plans to achieve profitability. I think our business growth is really the focus from the management team and investor standpoint, because our opportunity is so large. We are not focused on achieving profitability in the short term; it’s more of a long term goal. Our short term goal is growth and achieving an overall presence in the industry that allows us to do more and more business with leading accounts.

I think the next stage for OnRequest, as we continue to grow in the US, will be expansion into a European market and into Asia, as well as introducing some new products that will be quite exciting. We’ll be making some announcements later this year for some new offerings that will be, I think, very, very exciting, and will be timely, given what’s going on in the industry.