A Story About Asking Instead of Showing
How do I turn a client into a partner? By finding out what they’re actually trying to be before you tell them what you can do — because a client who has been asked good questions is already working with you, and a client who has been shown a portfolio is still deciding between suppliers.
Let me tell you a story about a man who was very good at being booked, and tired of it.
Hayato is a character I created — his situation will be familiar to anyone whose work is excellent, commissioned piece by piece, and never quite becomes a relationship.
Excellent, and Booked
Hayato was forty-seven, a commercial photographer, and had been working steadily for over twenty years.
He shot products, interiors, people at work. Manufacturers, hotel groups, a couple of architecture practices, food and drink brands. He was good — and the work came in reliably, which after twenty years he knew not to take lightly.
And all of it was piece work. A brief would arrive by email: shot list, deliverables, date, budget. He’d turn up, do the job well, deliver on time, invoice. They’d be pleased. Then another brief would arrive by email.
That is the shape of commercial photography, and there is nothing wrong with it. What had begun to wear at him was something else. Over twenty years he’d watched brands he shot for build an entire visual identity — the way they looked, the feeling they gave off, what a person understood about them before reading a word — and he had never once been in the conversation where any of that was decided. The decisions were made by people who had never stood in the places, at the times of day when those places became themselves.
He knew things about those brands that nobody had asked him. He’d been in the buildings. He’d seen the hands doing the work. He knew what they actually looked like, in the sense that mattered, and he had no way of saying so, because he was the photographer and the photographer gets sent a list.
When he pitched for new work, he did what everyone does. He showed the portfolio. Here’s what I’ve done, here’s the standard, here’s why me. He won plenty of it. He was very good at being chosen. He just never became anything more than the person they chose.
The Meeting Where He Showed Nothing
The change came with a food producer, and a portfolio he never opened.
They were a family business — three generations, a fourth thinking about it — who made preserves and sold to delicatessens and farm shops. They’d been recommended to him and wanted photography for a new range. He arrived with the laptop, the folder, the whole apparatus.
And the woman who ran it, who was in her sixties and had clearly sat through a hundred meetings like this, said: “Before you show me your pictures — everyone shows me pictures, and they’re all lovely, and I never know how to choose.”
So he didn’t show her pictures. He asked her a question instead.
“Tell me about a time you saw something photographed and thought: that’s it, that’s what we are.”
She thought about it. Then she described a picture that wasn’t of their product at all — a photograph in a magazine, years earlier, of somebody’s hands doing something ordinary. She’d looked at it and thought: that’s what this is. It’s hands. It’s people’s hands doing something carefully.
He asked her the other side. When had a picture of their products been wrong? She was quicker with that. A shoot they’d paid a great deal for, where everything was styled beautifully on marble, and it had looked to her like somebody else’s business entirely. They’d used none of it.
Then he asked why the business mattered to her, beyond the preserves. She talked for ten minutes. Her grandmother. Her mother-in-law’s hands, which were the hands she’d thought of when she saw that magazine photograph. What she wanted her daughter to inherit that wasn’t just a company.
Hayato never opened the laptop.
What he said at the end was: “So we’re not photographing preserves. We’re photographing hands and the things they’ve made, and it should look like your kitchen and not like a magazine.”
She sat back and said: “Nobody has ever said that to me. I’ve been trying to say it for fifteen years.”
The Year That Followed
He got the new range. But that wasn’t what changed his working life.
What changed it was the question he asked before he left: could he come back at harvest?
Not for a shoot. He wanted to see the fruit arriving. So he came in August and photographed nothing that went in a catalogue — crates, a scale, three people and a radio, someone’s forearms. He came again in the preserving weeks, when the kitchen ran fourteen hours and nobody had time for him, and got the best pictures he’d taken in a decade. He photographed the vans going out. He went to two of the farm shops and photographed the shelves, and the woman who’d stocked them since 1998 building her autumn display — squashes and bare branches that year, holly and dried orange by December, something different every season for twenty-five years.
By the end of the year, they had something they’d never had: not a set of images, but a way of looking. A visual language that was actually theirs, built out of a year of their own life rather than assembled from a mood board.
And they stopped briefing him. In January she rang and asked what he thought they should be doing that year. Not what he could shoot — what he thought the brand should be doing.
He wasn’t their photographer any more. He was the person who held how they looked.
Why Showing Your Work Keeps You a Supplier
Here is the mechanism, and it catches skilled, established people hardest.
A portfolio answers a question about you. Questions answer a question about them. When you show your work, you are saying here is what I can do, which puts the client in the position of assessing you against alternatives. That is the position of a buyer, and buyers compare. However good you are, you are being weighed.
Ask instead, and everything moves. The client stops assessing you and starts talking about their own situation, often with more clarity than they have managed before, because nobody has asked them these questions either. By the end they have not chosen a supplier. They have had a conversation with someone who understood them — which is a different relationship entirely, and it began before anything was commissioned.
Hayato had spent twenty years proving he was worth choosing. He had never once found out what a client was trying to be, which is why he kept receiving lists written by people who had never stood in the room.
This is why a better portfolio never changes it. More impressive work is still an answer to are you good enough. What changes it is asking the questions that make you the person who understands them.
You don’t become a partner by being more obviously excellent. Hayato was excellent for twenty years. You become one when you know what they are actually trying to be.
What Hayato Recognised
That January, after the call, Hayato thought about the meeting where he’d shown nothing, and remembered three things he’d never named.
A success. The meeting with the food producer. Not his best work — he showed no work at all. What made it was that he asked three questions and listened properly, and then said back to her what he had heard: hands, and the things they’ve made, and her kitchen rather than a magazine. She’d been trying to say it for fifteen years.
A failure. Twenty years of winning work by showing what he could do. Nothing had gone wrong. Not one dissatisfied client, not one job that went badly, not one brief he hadn’t fulfilled. That is precisely what had hidden it: from the outside it was a solid career. It wasn’t a failure of photography. It was that he had been answering a question about himself when he could have been asking questions about them — so every relationship began, and stayed, a booking.
A passion. When he looked at why he’d picked up a camera in the first place, it was that he could see what something actually was, and he wanted other people to see it too. Not to make things look better than they were. To find the true thing and show it. That was why the briefs had worn at him for twenty years. A list is somebody else’s answer to a question he was never asked.
Three things. None of them an image. All of them the difference between being booked and being trusted with what a brand is.
The Photographer He Became
Hayato didn’t get rid of his portfolio. He stopped leading with it.
With new clients, he told his success story — the meeting where he never opened the laptop, and the three questions. Several asked him the questions back, which is how he ended up in conversations about what a business was for, rather than what should be on a shot list.
With a drinks brand he’d shot for eleven years, he told his failure story: twenty years of executing briefs beautifully and never asking what anyone was trying to be. Their marketing manager admitted she’d been writing those briefs by adapting the last one. They spent a day together instead of doing the shoot, and the shoot they did afterwards was nothing like the one that had been booked.
With the architecture practices, he told his passion story: finding the true thing and showing it. One of the partners said that was the entire job description of an architect, and that they’d never met a photographer who’d said it out loud. They now bring him in at design stage, before anything is built, which he’d have called absurd two years ago.
And with a photographer starting out, who asked how to get better clients, he told all three — then asked her the three questions about her own work, and watched her find out what she was actually for.
He wasn’t a better photographer that year than the year before. He was exactly as good as he had always been.
He’d simply stopped leading with what he could do, and started asking what they wanted to be.
Within two years, more of Hayato’s work came from conversations than from briefs, and three of his clients had stopped commissioning shoots altogether and started asking him, in January, what they should be doing that year. His work stopped being ordered and started being made with people.
How to Turn a Client Into a Partner: What Hayato’s Story Shows
A portfolio answers a question about you. Showing your work puts the client in the position of assessing you against alternatives. However good you are, that is the position of a buyer.
Questions answer a question about them. Ask, and the client stops weighing you and starts talking about their own situation — often more clearly than they have managed before, because nobody has asked them either.
A better portfolio won’t change it. More impressive work still answers what can you do. Hayato was excellent for twenty years. Excellence was never the missing thing — understanding what they wanted to be was.
Say back what you heard. The meeting turned when he told her what he had understood: hands, and the things they’ve made. She’d been trying to say it for fifteen years and nobody had said it back to her.
Then ask for the thing that isn’t the job. He asked to come at harvest. That request, which had no invoice attached, is what turned a commission into a year, and a year into a partnership.
Your three stories hold the whole of it. A success that shows what asking does, a failure that shows the cost of only ever showing, a passion that shows why any of it matters to you.
You Already Have Better Questions Than Your Portfolio
Everything Hayato needed had been there for twenty years. He’d been excellent and available and easy to book, and easy to book is what kept him a supplier. The success that came from asking rather than showing. The failure that looked exactly like a solid career. The passion, and the reason he’d picked up a camera in the first place.
Yours are there in the same way — in everything you have understood about a client’s world that nobody ever thought to ask you.
Continue the Work
And if you want to go deeper — recognising your three stories and the journey inside each; telling them so people enter your thinking rather than receive your output; and turning the same questions outward, to draw out the thinking of the people you work with — that is what my new Professional Self-Coaching resource is for. The thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work, placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Get the Partnership — Professional Self-Coaching for Turning Your Expertise Into Genuine Working Relationships Tell the Three Stories That Make Your Insight Land, So People Engage With It, Not Just Receive It
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
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