Clear Focus

When the cash registers are ringing, how do 99 out of 100 business owners react? Rejoice, hire, sell more, work day and night to keep things kind of under control, and pray that overheated growth won’t blow up the company before a deep-pocketed buyer takes over.

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.