There is always talk among the wedding industry of ‘the perfect client’. How to find your perfect client, how to book your perfect client….and how not to work with clients who aren’t such a great fit for your business. In light of recent events in our state legislature, we want to talk about who is the ‘perfect client’ for our business.
At motionworks, we’re pretty upfront about what we do. It’s one thing really. We tell stories. We’re pretty specific in how we go about doing that as well, because we’ve learned how we need to do it. Of course, we’re all about thinking outside of the box and coming up with creative ways to capture events, but we also know our limitations. Video is not inexpensive, and just as much as we want to book new clients; what we really want is clients to receive the product that they want.
As business owners, we want the freedom to say to a client that that we aren’t a good fit. It’s something that rarely comes up, because usually by the time we’re talking to someone; they’ve watched our films and know what we do. They love it, totally get it, and want it for their wedding, promo film, or event.
The one thing that we want to be really, super clear about is that when we’re in the ‘get to know you’ stage with someone – trying to figure out if they’re our ‘perfect client’ – what DOESN’T factor into that is race, gender, orientation, religion, culture, economic status….or any of the other random things our culture uses to put people in boxes and categories.
We tell stories. A lot of our stories are love stories. If you are a human being, in love with another human, we want to tell your story. If we can’t tell your story, we want to at least appreciate your story and celebrate with you, as one human to another.
When the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed by the WV House of Delegates, we debated whether we wanted to say anything. The RFRA won’t change the way we do business here at motionworks. Making this statement won’t gain us any business; and the last thing we want to do is use it as a marketing point. There’s business and there’s politics, and generally we prefer to keep things non-political around here.
But there’s a human aspect too. That human aspect makes it feel necessary for us to say that we don’t discriminate. Often we stay silent about that which we don’t agree, because it’s polite, because we want to keep the peace. In this case; we fear that silence looks like agreement. We do not agree with RFRA.
If you’ve watched some of the other films on our website, you know that we do a lot of work for churches as well. It’s probably not a surprise that we’re Christian. In fact, both of us have even been on staff at area churches. We’re down with religious freedom. We just don’t think it requires discrimination.
All that is really deep, and heavy, and maybe too much for a simple blog post. But we wanted to put it out there. If you ever want to chat about our thoughts on the many complexities raised by these issues, we’d love to grab some tea or ice cream with you sometime and talk about it. We may not agree, but we like you anyway. As one human being to another.