Clear Focus

Not so for famed landscape photographer Clyde Butcher, the founder of Big Cypress Gallery & Studio in the Everglades and Venice Gallery in Venice, Fla.

Working nonstop hours to grow a business is been-there-done-that for Butcher, 65. Back in the ’70s, he and his wife, Niki, built a 200-employee, California-based company that manufactured and sold picture clocks featuring Clyde Butcher color photos. The business, with manufacturing operations in California and Ohio, had their lives in its iron grip.

Hell-bent on keeping control over their lives when they opened their Florida galleries seven years ago, the Butchers took a different approach.

Says Clyde: "We don’t want to be bigger. We want to be better."

So the Butchers raised prices, committed to keeping all their employees, and put their daughter, Jackie Obendorf, in charge of operations. Obendorf streamlined production and added an Internet component to marketing. She extended the product lineup, adding cheaper open-edition prints to the more expensive limited-edition and big prints (which cost up to $5,000). She also raised prices every year.

The result: Revenues of the Butchers’ corporation, Window of the Eye Inc., have been flat over the past seven years, but profits are up. And the owners are happy about it. "We sell less and make more," says Obendorf.

Window of the Eye is unusual in another way, too. Butcher describes his photography, supposedly the company’s main product, as "bait." What he really wants to sell people on is care for the natural environment in general, and the Everglades in particular.

The Butchers’ stay-small strategy looks oddball amid Florida’s transactional economy, where growth is a fetish. Given what most business schools in this country teach, the Butchers’ business plan amounts to an act of rebellion against established thinking. But it is part of a larger rebellion popping up at thousands of spots throughout the U.S. economy, if you believe Bo Burlingham.

"There’s no law that says you must get big," says the Massachusetts-based editor-at-large of Inc. magazine. "You can have other goals. [Butcher] is obviously one of those people aware of the fact that he has a choice. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a big or fast-growing company. But that’s a choice, and he does what all businesspeople should do: think first about what kind of business they want."

A rising number of business owners have already decided they don’t want to go the corporate way. The San Francisco-based Business Alliance of Local Living Economies (BALLE), for instance, made up of entrepreneurs seeking new ways of doing business, has seen its membership triple over the past couple of years.

Using his bully pulpit at Inc. magazine—not exactly a rabble-rousing publication—Burlingham not only defends no-growth as a legitimate way, he actually dedicated a book to the phenomenon. In Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, he portrays 13 small businesses, ranging from Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Mich., to singer Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records, and a Boise, Idaho, company that makes signaling equipment for trucks and buses.

Problem is, small companies are overlooked, Burlingham says. Most media and academic attention is focused on multinational corporations, although they constitute only a tiny percentage of the total number of companies.

"Grow or die—that may be true for large, publicly traded companies," he says. "But there are plenty of businesses out there that aren’t growing, and they aren’t dying. They constitute a larger percentage of the economy, and they are responsible for most of the job generation."

Burlingham attributes five characteristics to the businesses he picked as "small giants." These companies are:

> founded by people with a clear understanding of who they are and what they want, and they have a long-term perspective (Of course, there’s nothing new about such attitudes, Burlingham points out. Many family-founded businesses have worked like this for centuries.);

> deeply rooted in, and reflective of, their communities;

> fostering close relationships and personal contact with customers and suppliers;

> treating employees as a first priority, before customers;

> run by people passionate about what their company does.

"People say you should never fall in love with your business," he says about passion. "I think that’s a lot of hogwash." These small giants have what Burlingham describes as "mojo." It’s not just about cranking out widgets to boost dollar figures. "There was excitement, anticipation, a feeling of movement, a sense of purpose," he writes in his book’s introduction. "That happens, I think, when people find themselves totally in synch with their market, with the world and with each other."

Butcher’s passion for nature is evident to anyone who has ever met the white-bearded, voluminous, always-on-message artist-activist-entrepreneur, and that passion makes him a natural salesman.

His gallery open houses and Everglades swamp walks are really teaching sessions about nature and state energy-
savings programs. One of the visitors Clyde subjected to a waist-deep "Muck About" two years ago was former president Jimmy Carter. "His Secret Service guys were really worried" about the ex-president getting too deep into murky swamp water, Butcher says. "He wasn’t."

Butcher has also rubbed shoulders with Govs. Charlie Crist and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florida politicians, Washington lobbyists, grassroots environmentalists, filmmakers, developers, outdoors enthusiasts and museum curators. Connecting people and organizations has become a second art form for Clyde Butcher—and a way of generating business.

His keeps his work and passion in the forefront by donating much of his photography in exhibitions to the state, environmental nonprofits and to traveling exhibits such as last fall’s Cuba show at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. He lets magazines reprint his photos at no charge, and he loves to grant interviews.

To be sure, Butcher doesn’t share everything. While he is sometimes called "the next Ansel Adams," he doesn’t exactly admire the business acumen of his famous predecessor. As a matter of principle—and unlike Adams, whose photos can be reprinted by everyone—Butcher never gives up control of his negatives.

But networking and volunteer activities pay off handsomely. Hundreds of thousands of people now know the "Clyde Butcher" brand.

"Helping other people helps you," Butcher says. "You can’t buy advertising that works so well, at least for an artist. Unless you have big, big figures, it doesn’t work."

To be sure, the artist-businessman is backed up by his no-nonsense daughter, a businesswoman with experience in operations and marketing. "He is a good businessman to an extent," she says about her dad. "He isn’t a good manager. Since I came in to streamline it, we have been doing great."

In fact, the Butchers have already transferred ownership of the company to Jackie. Son-in-law Neil Obendorf, forfeiting his part in Venetian Cleaners, his own family’s business, is also a full-time member of the staff, and Jackie is running an increasingly efficient shop.

In the 1990s, she operated her own wholesale design business in Venice, which was "very corporate—more the dog-eat-dog kind of world," she says. When she had had enough, she sold her company in 2000 and asked her parents if she could join theirs. She quickly made her mark on the family business, first moving the entire printing and framing operation to the Venice site.

"In the Everglades, your employees control you," she says. "It was hard to find and keep them." Most of the current 12 employees have been there for many years.

Jackie also put a lot of effort into developing and fine-
tuning the Web site as a systematic marketing tool. Extending her father’s personable approach, Jackie sends out regular e-mails on a first-name basis, alerting thousands of subscribers to events or deadlines for Christmas gift shipping. "What makes my marketing different [is] it’s very personable; it’s not corporate and cold," she says. "I want to make people feel like part of the family."

Meanwhile, Niki’s blog keeps people up-to-date with Clyde’s news about photography, projects and events. And there is, of course, the Web site’s "shopping cart" section. Internet business has really picked up, accounting for one-third of all sales, Jackie says.

As a side benefit of the urban location, the production site doubles as a walk-in gallery. Although the store is tucked away in an industrial area, separated from Venice’s charming downtown district by the Intracoastal Waterway and a block of chain link fence-protected commercial lots, dozens of visitors stop by on a typical open house day to browse, talk to Clyde and get his autograph. Few of them leave without making the cash register ring.

The separate Venice location also has benefits for the internal dynamics of the family business. "It’s scary having a business with your child," Niki says. "You love your child so much you don’t want that to be ruined by a business relationship. We’ve been fortunate with Jackie. She’s a good communicator. She doesn’t blow up and storm out. We can talk it out. One thing that helps is the distance—we’re in Big Cypress, they’re in Venice."