Family legacy means different things to different people. For some, it’s a big part of who they are, with strong traditions and high expectations. For others, it’s something they’re still trying to figure out. But how do you build something new while honoring where you came from?
In this episode, I have Leslie Lane, the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13. Photography runs in her family, and she’s been able to take that legacy and shape it into something of her own. In our conversation, Leslie shares what it was like growing up in a photography family, how she found her own style, and what it means to her to carry that legacy forward while doing things her way. Tune in and learn more!
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What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about a topic that we’ve yet to really cover in this particular podcast, and that is the idea of a family legacy. I know some people have a stronger family legacy than others. For some people, it really looms large and there’s a lot of expectations, and, for others, it’s maybe even lacking direction too much. But my guest today, Lesle Lane, is the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13 but she comes from a family that has a legacy of photography and she’s been able to take their business and kind of move it in a direction that puts her own mark on it.
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Lesle, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure.
Definitely. So, tell us first about how photography is part of your family legacy.
I sure will. So, my grandfather actually started the business. He came into the photographic industry because when he was an eighth grader, his father tried to kill him with a garden hoe and so he ran away from home. You’ve got the shocked look on your face. It’s true. He ran away from home and they didn’t have Child Protective Services and so he ended up getting in with traveling salespeople, nomadic people, that’s what they did, and one of the things that they did was teach him how to be a photographer. And so he would go from town to town taking pictures and then going back several weeks later to deliver the pictures and, finally, came upon my grandmother, who he ended up marrying, though he was hired to shoot her engagement portrait so that was quite scandalous. And then they settled, started their portrait photography business in Columbus, Georgia. And then my mother and father divorced where we moved to Indiana together, she married my stepfather and then I took over his version of the photography studio, which was corporate and commercial work.
It’s just shocking to hear someone trying to kill their own son with a garden hoe because people will oftentimes joke about it and they’re like, funny, like, “Oh, I could kill you,” or something like that, but like this was a literal attempt to end his own son’s life.
Yes, and, actually, I misspoke, it was a stepfather, but still, the man that was married to his mother, and it was during the Depression times, things were not good, there was no work, there was no money. It doesn’t excuse it at all but he had no choice. And so my grandfather, he survived and ended up running a very successful business and dying a multimillionaire. He made something amazing of himself after leaving home in the eighth grade. That is a legacy. That is something you can grab on to. Great father, great grandfather, and I’m blessed to have known him.
One of the things that I’ve done personally and I know a lot of other people have talked about recently and it gets a little bit spiritual sometimes is this idea of multigenerational patterns and how they affect anyone’s life going forward. And so you have this family legacy of photography, which I definitely want to talk about as well as that’s your business, but is part of your family legacy also this event that, no matter what time period, is still really, really messed up but also what your grandfather went through, he left home he was in eighth grade so that means he was probably 13 or 14 years old, so being a 13- or 14-year-old suddenly being a nomad whereas most people at the age of 13 or 14 are, I don’t know –– well, I mean, nowadays they’re teasing each other on Instagram but, in general, for what I remember 13, 14, it’s like, okay, you’re getting into the cool music, you’re hoping that your parents will take you to a show, you’re anticipating getting your driver’s license and trying to figure out where you fit into the social circle of your junior high into high school.
Yeah. I mean, some of us were still eating mud at 13, let’s be clear, and he’s out there making a difference.
And certainly that level of grit and determination, there is no doubt that it is deeply ingrained in our family. Share on XI was just talking to my mother about it this week and none of us were really allowed to quit, if that makes any sense. And so, of course, as messed up as that was, my grandfather made a commitment as a pacifist. Because of it, had real problems when world wars came along and when Korea and Vietnam came along and raised his children to believe in peace and love, and, yes, there is a spiritual level to it but he passed that on because he wanted it to end with him. And, for the most part, it did end with him.
So he wanted what his stepfather had done and whatever patterns led to his mother inviting that person into her home because I sometimes think about nowadays how sometimes if someone’s marrying into a family with someone that already has kids, they’ll make sure that the children are okay with that. And that’s a part of the process now. So whatever pattern that was, he was like, “Okay, this ends now,” and then he established this new pattern, this new multigenerational pattern which is that grit that he had to turn to to get this business started when he was just a teenager.
Yeah. He and my grandmother were married for 64 years and good, bad, or indifferent, no one ever heard them argue publicly. We know that they did because there are accounts of them having words behind closed doors but that was part of how they raised my mother and her three sisters and everyone was expected to respect each other and that translated into the business because both my grandparents and my parents ran their businesses out of their home and so talking about connecting the legacy of kindness and respect with each other, we used to joke all the time, we all lived on the top floor, that was our apartment. You walk down the stairs and that was the business. And so it came from that legacy of perseverance and kindness and respect. It came down from the apartment on the second floor to the business on the first floor for both my grandparents and my parents.
So your grandfather started the business and I’m assuming that means that he did photography for his entire life.
My mother was born in the 40s and my grandmother was helping him run that business so a strong lineage of strong women on top of it, and so she handled the money, she handled the business side of it, and he handled the photography and the processing of the film.
And then did he pass it along to your mother then or was there ––
Yeah, actually, my aunts took it over. So my mom is the oldest, and because she relocated to Indiana and my other aunts were younger, my grandfather didn’t retire until he was old enough, and so they were actually the ones that ended up taking it over and then my mom and I came to Indiana.
I see. So, are your aunts, are they still in Georgia then or do they run the business out of Georgia?
Yeah, they ran the business for a long, long time out of Georgia. In fact, up until when my grandmother passed away, and then my two aunts decided that they were going to sell the big home where the business was and my youngest aunt continued on to do fine art photography for quite some time but they are now both retired and enjoying the spoils that they deserve.
I see. So then the mantle was somehow passed along to you. Is this indicative of a tight knit family where you got to see how your aunts were doing it, how they were running the business, and, of course, how photography works?
Sure, we have a very tight knit family, especially when it comes to this photography. They’re constantly, when I launched a new website last year, everybody in the family was sending me emails to tell me their opinion on what was going on, but just the mentorship that comes from having people behind you. My stepfather, unfortunately, got taken out of the business before I could get fully trained and so my mom was there, my grandparents were there, they were still alive, and there was just a group of people supporting me. And it’s not that there hasn’t been bumps in the roads, there certainly have, but each bump that I had, there were people propping me up. We kind of joke in the family, it’s the difference between jumping from the springboard in the swimming pool to jumping from the platform.
It’s fully your business at this point, right?
It is fully my business at this point, but it has changed a lot. So I took it over when I was, oh, 23 years old, I think was when I ended up taking it over because my stepfather had a stroke and he was unable to continue on and I was still growing up. I got married, I had children, I got divorced, just so many roads of trying to get from here to there so that I might carry that mantle on for the family.
And what were your interactions with your family like with respect to the business? Did you ever feel they pushed you in that direction or was your interest in photography and interest in doing the business completely just genuine to you and then you just kind of take them as inspiration?
You know, I had a camera in my hand from the time I was six. My mom had gotten a new camera system. They were tired of me complaining and whining, because we would go on all these trips, my mom being the fine art photographer, we would travel to barns and corn fields and Amish acres and there I was bored to tears while they were taking pictures and so they got tired of it and when I was six, they gave me my own camera. And, from then on, I mean, I had a love for being behind the camera. But because my stepfather was a commercial photographer at the time, women did not do commercial photography. It is a physical job, lots of equipment, heavy equipment, and so they really wanted me to go into portrait wedding photography. They brought both of my brothers up here to Indiana to see if maybe they would take over the family business. Neither of them wanted to do that. And so, really, it just came down to the fact that they didn’t have anybody else. It wasn’t that they didn’t think I could do photography, they just weren’t sure I had what it took to be in a man’s world. I mean, think about Mad Men, the ad agencies of the 80s and 90s, and that was the world that I was stepping into as a young woman.
And 23 is also a pretty young age to be running a business. It just makes me wonder about just even how you were treated at that moment in time, because I think anyone at the age of 23 saying, “I’m the president of a business. I’m running this business,” people are like, “All right, that’s cute,” or something like that.
That’s exactly right. And my parents had like six employees at the time and only one of them jumped on board this train. The rest of them were like, “Whatever, dude, I’ve known you since you were like eight years old.” So I did have one person that jumped on board with me. She felt that I could do it. I had a lot of clients that left. They just ran out the door. And then I had clients that stuck it out and they helped not just educate me, because, photographically, I’m a very strong headed person. If you tell me I need to learn something, I’m driven to learn it. So I didn’t need anybody to push me to learn the industry, but I did need some clients to kind of put me in my place because think about what kind of 23-year-old would say, “I can do that. I can take over a business that’s been in existence for 40 years. No problem.” So I did have several clients that helped bring me back to where I needed to be, a place of humility that I probably needed, I know I needed, and, again, grateful for the lessons.
And what role since you’ve taken over the business has the rest of your family played, whether it be your siblings or even children or anyone else in the family? Does it still feel like a family affair? Do you still get a lot of input from them?
Oh, I get a lot of input but none of them are on my payroll. So they always have something to say. But my mother stayed on board to help me as I transitioned. She is a constant source, she still is a constant source of guidance. She still mentors me to this day. I will call her regularly to talk about the business and what’s going on. Unfortunately, she lives in Florida and so she’s not a daily part of the business. Three years ago, we had another tragedy strike. Remember, I told you that only one person got on board this train and she stayed with me for 30 years and she passed away suddenly. And so when that happened and tragedy struck, my daughter came on board, and she made a commitment to stay with me for a few years while I got the business stabilized, and then she too left because that was the plan. And so does it right now feel like a family business? Only from the opinions that I receive but not because of how I’m running it, because, truly, today, it is a different business, inspired completely by my parents and grandparents but it is a different business.
And so you left your own or are leaving your own mark on the business with some changes. What has that process been like? When you took over the business, was it still, like you said, mostly focused on the commercial stuff?
Yes. We have not changed that at all. We have stayed within that commercial realm. It is something I absolutely love. It’s different every single day. There’s no day that is the same, and it is, for the most part, highly complex and so that has been steady. But when we started this business with my mother and my stepfather, they had salaried employees, they had a lot of overhead, and they shot film. So even at the time I took over, they were processing all their own film, they were printing all their own prints, and shooting in a traditional methodology. Within three years of taking over the business, digital was taking over. Luckily, I was young enough that I embraced it. It didn’t matter how much it cost, I knew that this was the way it was going to go and so we made that transition pretty seamlessly. Then when my mother retired and we sold their big house and moved again, that was at the same time that the great recession was happening and so lots of changes, lots of disastrous things that happened during that time, including my divorce, and then we downsized it again so that the business was just me and my long-term assistant, and we only took the amount of work that we could do just the two of us. And so when she passed away, and you’re looking around, for a moment, I’ve got to be honest, I thought I’m just going to quit. It’s too much. And my mother wouldn’t let me. She said, “You can’t You’re the best photographer that the family’s ever had, and I’m not gonna let you quit. I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’ve gotta keep going.” And so my daughter helped me take this business from being just me to leaning into the gig economy of so many people that want to take pictures but they don’t want to do it full time and they don’t want to go out and network, they don’t want to do the invoicing and the quoting, they don’t want to do the editing, they don’t want to do all those things that take 40 plus hours a week. And so we came up with a business model that is loosely based on what my mother thought of after my stepfather passed that it just didn’t work at the time and we had this community of photographers that now work in our company and so I go out in the world and I do business development and I find the work and then I distribute it amongst all of us so that I have no W-2 employees on my team and everybody works the amount of hours per week that they want to.
Oh, is there ever a mismatch if you look at like how many people that you have and how many hours they want, are there ever periods of time where there’s like more work and you have to try to convince people to take on a little more or there’s less work a little while and you have to say, “Sorry, I know you wanted 20 hours, I can only give you 15 this week,” and stuff?
Sure, there’s always a shortfall during slow periods, but that’s the joy because they have clients of their own, they have other photographers that they work for, and so that’s never a worry for me as far as the low hours. Now, as far as the high hours, yes, we have had to turn down work over the last couple of months because I had no one available. That’s just, unfortunately, part of it. Hate it. That is, as a business owner, you always hate to turn it down.
Hundred percent, yeah.
Hate to turn it down. But I feel I’m working very hard to get more team members on board, but I have to train them because they have to do it the way I want them to do it, there’s a look and a style. But I have to circle back a little bit to this legacy conversation that we’re having. For small business owners, when you have W-2 employees, there is such a fine line between family and employee.
You can’t be a small business where you only have maybe three to five employees and not be really, really close with them. Share on XAnd so when business gets slow, you’re hurting. I stopped paying myself. I don’t know what other people do, but I continue to pay my employees when I can’t pay myself. And so, now, by having everybody responsible for their own hours and having everybody on a 1099 basis, I still want to make sure I distribute the work evenly but they understand if they’re not getting called, that’s because the work’s not coming in. So it really has taken a level of stress off of me to not worry so much about everybody else’s power bill when I can’t even pay my own power bill. So that’s really been the big transition over the last three to four years is just being good to my people while also taking care of myself.
One of the challenges is that your name is still on the product or your business name is still on the product, so anyone that you bring on needs to be someone that you’re comfortable with representing your product. And so I know that the job market, the labor market has been chaotic, to say the least, with some jobs being so crowded that there’s thousands and thousands of applications and other jobs being like, “We can’t find anyone to hire.” Is it ever a challenge finding the person who wants to go out 15, 20 hours a week and take pictures and get the rate of pay that you are able to pay them?
Absolutely. Because photography is a creative industry, people feel like their look and their style is what defines them. And as a business owner, the look and the style that I promote on my website defines the business. And so finding photographers that want to be trained, who think they’re not already trained, that is the challenge. Then finding people who think they’re ready to go, I always send everybody on a test job. They don’t get paid for it ’til I can see they can handle it and sending somebody on a test job and getting the images and knowing that they’re not to the caliber that I want to be and then having that very awkward conversation asking them, “How would you like to proceed? I can continue to send you on practice jobs until you’re up to speed or we can part ways. What’s best for you?” It’s very awkward.
I guess we all have to have that moment where we have the conversation that you don’t necessarily want to have. No one wakes up wanting to have a difficult conversation of any kind but you have to be like, “Okay, I can’t –– I don’t feel comfortable presenting this,” and, oftentimes, you’re thinking about the photographer and then maybe not understanding, “Why was my work insufficient? Why are you not okay with this? This looks good to me,” etc., so it does sound like a challenge.
Yes, because our vision, people don’t understand, with cell phones these days, they truly don’t understand looking through the viewfinder, through a certain magnification of a lens is a graphic moment. Your cell phone is not a graphic moment. It really isn’t, because you’re not even paying attention to what compression factor that you have on a lens. Most people don’t even know they have a compression factor on a lens. And so when a photographer comes in and they’re using their eye to create this graphic moment, and then another photographer says, “I don’t like your graphic moment,” that’s just –– it’s no fun. But I’m running a business. I’m not just a photographer, I am running a business, and I think you would agree with me that people like to hear no or not yet rather than hear nothing.
Yeah. Oh, of course.
Yeah.
Now, do you have any kind of operational people that do the things, such as dispatching people to jobs based on how many hours this person has, where they’re physically located, all that stuff?
All those things, and the specialty of what they do and don’t like to shoot. So part of my feeling in both life and in business is that life should be good. You should be doing things you want to do. And I have certain photographers that wouldn’t want to shoot a head shot if their life depended on it, just like I don’t want to shoot event photography. I don’t like it. I’m not good at it. And so I have an administrator. She takes care of the quoting, she takes care of the scheduling, and then she takes care of applying the right person to the right job. My daughter, before she left, she wrote operation manuals for me. Every single position that I have has a standard operating procedure that is sent off to each vendor to let them know what we expect from them right down to what they wear and how they deliver the files.
Yeah.
And so, yes, I have that person, and I just recently hired a salesperson as well to help me get out and build more business because there’s just not enough of me to go around.
Yeah. I mean, those are all awesome things. And do you in your community, whether it be physically in person, Indianapolis where you live, or online, network with other kind of small business owners regularly?
Actually, I network with businesses of all sizes because we actually work with multinational companies right down to your mom and pop as well. So, I am out in the world, probably 30 percent of my time is actually physically in-person networking. I have found that online virtual networking is not quite as effective as building the relationships. We sent a survey out to our clients last year when we redid our website to ask them where they find and buy photography. Not one of them said social media. So even though we have a social media presence, it’s mainly just to make sure if people Google us and search us, they can find us multiple places. I am physically out meeting with the leaders of Indiana very frequently.
These trends happen in our society, social media was one of them, now it’s AI and we’re seeing how that’s going to shake out, but people look at these trends and they’ll like throw it into everything and one thing that I say often is that we had these two amazing inventions, first the automobile and then the internet, where, okay, they made so many things possible but they don’t need to be everywhere. They don’t need to be every minute of every day. We still need to have times when we’re not using them. And love to hear that you –– and I love networking in person here in Denver as well. And one thing I’m wondering is whether or not you’ve had any conversations with other local, small- to medium-sized businesses regarding specifically your use of the gig economy and whether or not you have a pulse for where we’re going as far as utilizing this tool and utilizing some people doing or wanting gig work.
Sure, and just to tell your listeners so that they understand, because many people don’t understand that portrait, wedding photography is a B2C industry, business to consumer industry.
Yeah, yeah, B2C.
Yeah. So, social media works beautifully for them. So I don’t want people to not understand that it’s because I’m a B2B, I’m a business to business operation, that social media is not as prevalent for my industry. Two completely different sides of the coin.
Oh, yeah, because when I think of B2B and social media, I tend to think that like LinkedIn is really the primary platform on social media where B2B stuff happens.
Correct.
But, other than that, it’s a lot of like your Chamber of Commerce and stuff like that.
Yeah, correct. So we were talking about if I’d spoken to other business owners.
Yeah.
There are people like coaches, professional coaches, authors, people that are maybe in the past were solopreneurs, so I’m not talking about businesses that have five producers, I’m talking about people that may only have one producer, and those are the people that I think are really leaning into the gig economy, and that’s where I was for a very long time, but having the ability to have other people produce for me, that really is where the difference lies. So my photography takes up a lot of my schedule. If you were to try to book me right now, we’d be looking into late May before you can get onto my schedule. Well, that’s not great. I mean, everybody can’t wait that long and so we have the ability to shuffle and say, “Okay, well, that doesn’t require Lesle’s expertise, her 30 years of experience in the industry. Ask the client if they feel comfortable if we trade it off.” So many of these photographers are actually my assistants as well. So I take them on the jobs, the clients get used to them, and they will be more comfortable using that photographer. So the difference would be that the small businesses who may be leaning into this gig economy, and I think they are, especially for administrative purposes, social media purposes, all the things that that solo producer doesn’t have time for, I think that that’s what they’re doing. But finding a business that is finding a way to use the gig economy to produce more, that’s what’s really been interesting as I move over into this. You got to get enough work to be able to have somebody else produce for you.
Yeah, that makes sense, because it feels like when you start a business, you’re either a solopreneur or you’re having partners. And there’s pros and cons to that, which I promise now that it’s in my mind, I promise I will seek out another episode where we recover kind of that dichotomy, but if you’re a solopreneur, you start out, it’s just you yourself, and then you think, “Okay, what do I wanna off board as I start getting more money coming in?” and I think most people say the first thing they want to off board is accounting, typically, and then, typically, it’s marketing after that because those are things that most people don’t go into business, but when it comes to actual production, producing your specific product, whether you be a photographer, whether you be a coach, whether you be a consultant, whether you be someone that provides a specific service, then the question is do you want to bring on a partner? Do you want to bring on a W-2 employee that’s like on a permanent level, like you mentioned before? Or do you want to just hire a network of gig workers? And it feels like there’s like three distinct kind of directions on where to go with that and that you have at least the experience with two but probably experienced all three given what your aunts and your family had done. So you can probably talk pretty well to someone in that situation what’s the best kind of route to go.
Right. So, funny story, my father, my biological father, not the person I took the business over from, he was actually not a W-2 worker for my grandmother because my grandmother only paid her wedding photographers $100 to go shoot a wedding, and she wasn’t going to put them on staff to go work on the weekends only and she didn’t want to withhold taxes and she didn’t want to do all that. And so my dad, my biological father, even though he shot weddings, he wasn’t real keen on not getting paid and so he ended up starting his own business that he and my mother and my grandparents partnered on. But I think that that’s really where the whole thing kind of started is that if you’re going to send out, whether it’s a photographer, producer of some kind, you don’t want to pay them all week long just to work two weekend gigs to go shoot a wedding. So, yeah, my grandparents were already making this happen decades ago.
Yeah. So it’s interesting, because that’s, before, I think most people think of the rise of the gig economy as a 2010s phenomenon that we have now in the 2000s, the aughts, whatever you want to call it, I don’t remember too many people talking about the gig economy.
No, they certainly didn’t. I keep going back to this solopreneur idea and concept, and, at some point, that solopreneur, you’re right, has to take something off their plate because it caps their ability to make money and so they have to decide when they reach that cap and they’ve already handed off the accounting and the marketing and the things they hate to do, is that really what they want to do? And for me, I started to think about I’m getting older. I mean, I’m not old by any state, but I’m getting older. What if I get sick? Who’s going to shoot for me if I get sick? And, you know what, that happened last year. I got breast cancer last year and, luckily, I got it treated and I’m doing great, but I had people that could help me. And so it is an interesting concept because people that work for themselves, they don’t think very often about what am I going to do if I break my leg? What am I going to do if I need to go take care of my mother because she’s not doing well? And so it’s another way that we can add balance to our life so that we can do the things we need to do that give us meaning but also so we can take care of ourselves a little bit better.
Yeah. And so how has that played out having gig workers in your particular situation? I’m just going to spit ball a scenario that may or may not be accurate for you or any specific person listening, but let’s just say you have the choice between bringing on three W-2 employees or having ten gig workers all handle the job. How does that play out differently with those two choices, you think?
Well, relationships, so you’ve got those three people W-2, you guys are probably seeing each other at least three times a week, you’re building that relationship, you’re building that trust, and so that’s probably the largest thing. But what the producer is not saying, is not communicating, is the pressure. And so I would definitely say that the pro of the W-2 is building the relationship, having the connectivity with the people that are working with you, liking and trusting them. You’ve got these ten 1099 employees. What do you do to do that? Well, I work on that. So I meet with my 1099 employees. If they’re not assistants, if they’re people that I don’t see on the job regularly, then I make scheduled appointments with them. I make sure that at least once every other month, I’m seeing them in person, I am communicating with them, I keep up on their life, “How are you feeling about things? Are we doing okay?” And then once a year, I throw a party for everybody, and everybody comes together once a year so that we can maintain that relationship and then I give everybody a bonus. So even though they’re 1099 employees, I treat them as if they’re not. If they do a great job, I write them a thank you note. I thank them for how they did on that job. I thank them for how they treated this client. Whatever it is that they’ve done, I make sure that they’re appreciated. So, again, the pro is that you don’t have to pay all the W-2 money, the con is you’ve got to work a lot harder at building those relationships but it’s not impossible.
Yeah. And I can also envision that in this three W-2 full-time employees versus ten gig workers scenario also, one departure means a very different thing in those two scenarios. Whereas if you have three employees, obviously one person announces departure, you’ve got to kind of scramble to replace them, whereas in the scenario with ten gig workers, as sad as it is for any of them given you’re building those relationships to leave, it’s still not nearly to that level of what percentage of the work you need to scramble to find someone new for.
Absolutely. And it goes both ways. So when an employee has to quit and they know they’re leaving you in a bad space and if you have a good relationship with them, there’s guilt and fear between them, where with ten 1099 employees, they’re not as worried. They know somebody’s going to be able to take their place and you can maintain that good relationship with them. So if anything changes, you come back. I’ve only had one person leave me and it just happened actually recently, and she said, “I hope we can maintain a relationship.” I said, “Oh my gosh, yes. Thank you so much for letting me know that you don’t have time to do this anymore,” she had taken a full-time job, and I just thanked her for her time.
Yeah, that’s amazing. And now I’ve also heard different people speculating about the future of the gig economy, with some people saying that we’re actually going to move in a direction where more people do the gig economy and other people thinking that that would be a horrible trend because of various reasons, I won’t necessarily get into the specifics here. What do you feel about that? Do you feel that a broader, larger gig economy will serve humanity better as we go forward?
Well, that is such an interesting question. I am deeply connected with the generation, what are they called, that are in their 20s right now.
Gen Z?
Gen Z. I’ve got two children that are Gen Z and they are so different from us, and I’m not saying that in a disparaging way at all. They think differently, they act differently. They want different things, and they’re not going to settle for anything less than that. So I think that probably what’s going to happen is the Gen Z-ers will probably continue to do this. I think that corporate America is making that easier for them to do, because corporate America is really losing their ability to create a culture that people want to go and spend 40 hours a week doing. I don’t mean to be rude because I’ve never run a corporation but I’m watching it all over the place where the employees are not treated as assets.
Yeah, they’re not.
They’re just not. And so I think that for a while we’re probably going to see more and more of this happening, but I think it’s going to have an adverse effect on the healthcare situation, because insurance is going to be harder. It’s going to be harder on the economy. I think it’s going to increase AI and it’s going to increase robotics. It’s going to increase all of those things. But I think by the time Gen Z is done with whatever they’re going to do with this gig economy, then it’s going to change again with Alpha coming next. So I think it’s just an interesting time in business. But these Gen Z-ers, they’re not to be messed with and they’re smart. They are smart. I lean on my kids all the time.
One hundred percent. And I need to state just hearing this that I really do wish we had adopted some more innovative names for generations going forward. I know the history is that we didn’t really think about generations until people started talking about the baby boom after World War Two, and then some people started labeling it, and then Gen X was this X factor, unknown. But then we ran out of letters pretty quickly. So I hope that Gallup, Pew Research that’s coming up with these names, there was a sociologist named Jean Twenge, multi-time author, I love her books, she had proposed iGen for that generation’s attachment to the iPhone and I think that would have been better. Anyway, sorry, rant about that over.
I think we should start over and do it like the hurricanes. Can’t we just start over and start with letter A and then move on?
One day when I was bored, my business is around cutting down on mindless scrolling, all this kind of brain rot, terrible content, and so I let my brain get bored sometimes and one time, I actually did try to map every generation back to the letter A and wondered if that was like the first settlers of America but I didn’t come to a conclusion because somewhere around the 1820s, 1830s, you start to run out of a clear mapping of what event, so it’s like, okay, before, after World War Two, before, after World War One, Lost Generation, you can go back to the Gilded Age, the Civil War, but then before that, I’m like, okay, what was someone born in 1825 different from someone born in 1840, blah, blah, blah, and it became a mental ––
Worm.
Yeah.
Became a mental worm.
Yeah, that’s the best way to put it. I also want to quickly cover where your business is now and how your family legacy, everything that you’ve learned from your parents, your grandparents, and your aunts growing up has kind of impacted where you are with the business.
Sure. That tenacity, I said to somebody earlier this week, “Business is messy.”
Business is never linear and so that tenacity and that resilience certainly has been a part of my life and I have passed it on to my children. Share on XWe joke about it all the time, we call it the Garrett women, that’s what we are. My mom was a Garrett, the Garret women are strong in this family but it goes along to men, women, and no matter your gender marker. But, for me, I think part of it is a little bit of sadness because I don’t have anybody that’s coming after me. There’s nobody that is going to take my business on within my family and so what I’ve tried to do is I’ve tried to mentor my current 1099 employees, be there for them, pass on the information. I also taught photography for seven years. I keep in touch with a lot of my students. In fact, two of them were 1099 workers with me so they still work for me, and I do a lot of work in higher education so I will go into colleges and take recruiting photographs for them, and if anybody in those schools expresses an interest to learn more about my business, then I bring them in. My alma mater, Butler University here in Indianapolis, go Dogs, I’m on the Alumni Association Board of Directors, and the school asked me if I would mentor somebody in the entrepreneur program and so I did. So that’s kind of how I’m passing the legacy on. The business is in a point that I probably, in 10 years, will be able to sell it, depending on how we integrate AI into it, that’s going to have to be a component in the next 10 years to make the business to be sellable, but, until then, I’m just going to keep investing and serving people that want to be a part of the business and that want to learn what I’ve gotten from my parents and my grandparents.
And if anyone out listening today wants to be part of your business, has an interest in photography, I’m guessing you’re looking for generally in the Indianapolis area, but if anyone happens to be there, what would be the best way someone would contact you?
So you can go to my website, studio13online.com, and it really doesn’t matter where you are. From time to time, I do have jobs outside of Indiana. In fact, frequently. I’ve put 6,000 sky miles on me already this year, and so we will, from time to time, hire assistants and photographers in other areas. On the website, you’ll find a ton of educational stuff, lots of things that you can do. And then also Lesle Lane, L, E, S, L, E, Lane, LinkedIn.
Thank you for clarifying that. You do a lot of stuff outside of the Indianapolis area. Any other cities specifically on your mind where you have some need for resources?
Well, I am supposed to be going to North Carolina and South Carolina in the month of May. I do shoot a good bit in Ohio. Already this year I’ve done Denver, Miami, Atlanta. So it just varies from year to year exactly where I’m going.
Well, that is amazing. And is there anything else speaking to my audience, people out there listening that might be thinking about various different career paths, whether or not to join the gig economy or whether or not to bring their business into the gig economy as far as their hiring practices, anything else you’d want to convey to people as they’re just making choices in life about how to really follow their passions?
One hundred percent. After my mom retired, I really was living my life, both business and personally, in a vacuum. So the people that were in my life were in my life but I wasn’t out networking, I wasn’t out talking to people, and I had a very small support group and they were mostly a personal support group. So, as you’re looking to change your business or change your life, whatever path that you’re on, find people that you can count on that are not just yes people and they’re not just no people, they’re just people. So when these changes came along the business, and let’s just take COVID, for example, I had a group of people that were in banking and human resources and marketing that I could call immediately and say, “What do I do?” So surround yourself with people that want to see you succeed and that will help you succeed in whatever changes you’re trying to make in your life.
And if someone doesn’t have those people in their life, is there a good way to go about finding them?
It’s not on the internet, I can tell you that much. So don’t go talk to people that are in the same industry as you. It’s not that they don’t want you to succeed, they do, but you need people that are coming at it from a different perspective. So I network and women in commercial real estate, because I take a lot of pictures for the commercial real estate industry, and that’s where we have bankers and brokers and all kinds of people. So you may want to go not only where your clients are but where you can strategically find people that have information you may need.
Yeah. So these like parallel, because you have the industry that you’re in, but then there’s always related industries. So, for example, I do habit replacement for cutting down on screen time on time on the internet, but that’s very, very adjacent to anything in mental health and anything in the wellness industry so even someone doing yoga classes is going to be related but also a slightly different perspective, as you’re saying. So I think it makes sense for you to think about that and think about what are all the different types of people that I want to be out there meeting as opposed to always just being in that same lane.
Right. And I have a board of directors, and it may sound silly that it’s my current husband and my daughter, but those two people, I meet with them and talk to them regularly about decisions that I’m making, and the reason is they know the business in and out. So those are the people that I count on when I’m making decisions that are specifically to this company. It’s the other people out there that I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and the economy and all those things. So you need both. You absolutely need both in your life.
One hundred percent, and I hope everyone goes out there and finds both. Lesle, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling people about, first of all, how you can navigate a family legacy but also navigate kind of where our labor movement is currently, such as the choices between the W-2, the increasingly relevant gig economy, and an entire generation of people, regardless of what we want to call them, really embracing the gig economy as an alternative to the lie of the, “Oh, you’re gonna have a happy life and that 40 hours in the office,” that we were all –– well, those of us older than Gen Z, that is, we were all kind of sold on.
Yeah, absolutely 100 percent. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
And I would also like to wrap up by thanking everyone out there for listening, for spending your time with me on Action’s Antidotes, spending your time with us. Hopefully you got some inspiration and, hopefully, you’re ready to go out there and network with the people that you need to network for your business.
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About Lesle Lane
Lesle Lane is a third-generation photographer with more than 3 decades of personal experience in the industry. She serves on the Alumni Board at her alma mater, Butler University, and earned her MBA from Indiana Wesleyan. Lesle has raised a couple of children into adults and loves being “Bam” to her grandkids. She and her husband live in Noblesville and enjoy days on the lake boating with their two fur babies.