We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nick Clarke a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Nick , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?
A Flick By Nick started because of failure. Becoming a better portrait and event photographer came from failure. Learning how to become more confident came from failure. Now how do you gain success from failures? Through connecting dots, and learning from every experience thrown in your way socially, academically, and in business. The quote, “Say Yes, and figure the rest out later” has been one of my favorites lately, and when used correctly opens doors once thought impossible.
This journey started during the end of my first year at the University of Washington, a time filled with lots of drama, chaos, and uncertainty within my life. Going into college I knew that I wanted to pursue becoming a clinical pharmacist, but after a few bad tests and sinking grades I was feeling a bit lost in life. Feeling lost, I decided to pick up some old hobbies of mine from childhood, which is how I picked up the camera for the first time again in years. Now I would be lying if I said at this point everything clicked, “A Flick By Nick” was made, and everything was happily ever after.
I started by just taking portraits for fun, with no intent of starting a business. After recruiting some friends to be my first models, I quickly realized that the best photos were ones where the model feels completely confident in what they’re doing, and when we can blend ideas to produce the best portraits possible.One of my models enjoyed the photoshoot so much, she wrote me a personal note and attached an amazon gift card in gratitude for my services. That little form of appreciation sparked into a new idea: create a business. So I must shout out and say thanks to Irene for this spark and support since day one. After a week of brainstorming names with some of my friends such as “Nick’s Flicks”, “Flick Nick”, “Flicks By Nick”, the name “A Flick By Nick” stood out and ever since that day has been associated with me.
Now if it was only that easy to run a successful business with a catchy name and mediocre at best photography skills, which is where it took some risk, blind confidence and luck to achieve my first client. Working with my limited knowledge and an archaic Nikon D60 with a kit lens, I valued my services at $200 at the time which is a bit overzealous in my opinion now, but got me a start into the industry. When I told him the price, all I was expecting was a resounding “no” because at the time I had little work to back up my portfolio and no credibility. But I stood to my believed value and took a chance, and he agreed to the terms and that’s how I got my first client ever to “A Flick By Nick”. If you’re too afraid to fail, you’ll never fully grow into the person you want to be, which is why you should take every opportunity given to you even before you think you’re ready.
Here we are about a year and a half later where I’ve not only gained money doing something I love, but have grown so much more in my leadership, confidence, and problem solving skills. I take every opportunity to refine my craft with every photoshoot and learn from past failures, gather friends to test my ideas in a low-stakes environment, volunteer my event services at non-profits, and overall just do the best I can to provide the best service to the client.
You don’t need the nicest equipment to start, you don’t need completely flushed out ideas to start, all you need is a solid “why” to guide you, a growth mindset to allow you to learn, and my personal favorite: radical optimism to seek whatever good you can in challenging situations. Figuring out taxes, dealing with various types of clients, or developing your marketing scheme can all be done after opening your business. There is no need to hold off on starting the business until you believe everything is perfect, because that perfect time may never come so it is better to just start and figure the rest out later.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
What’s up readers? My name is Nick Clarke or A Flick By Nick and I’m a third-year at the University of Washington obtaining my B.S in Public Health and currently applying to Pharmacy school, but also run my Portrait & Event photography business “A Flick By Nick” right here in Seattle, WA. My goal as a photographer is to bring out the inner confidence of every individual that is in front of the camera and bring out their true authentic self, even if they’re a bit camera shy because I think anyone can become a model. I bring out the true authenticity within clients, which is why for the first five minutes of every portrait session I try to form a connection with clients. I want to know how their day has been, are they nervous about getting their photos taken, what major events are happening in their life, etc because it allows me to better understand my clients. I never liked photographers who are so set in their style and say you must pose like this or that, because I felt most of the time it makes the photos feel forced and stiff. When you take photos with me, we’ll have music playing, I’ll help guide you in posing, and I’ll keep the vibes upbeat and playful because photoshoots should be fun after all. What I’m most proud of however, is how much I’ve grown in this journey becoming a photographer and all the experiences it brings starting a business doing something you love and how I’ve been able to take lessons from these experiences and apply it in my academic life as I continue my journey to become a clinical pharmacist. One of my newest favorite hobbies is attempting to inspire those around me, and be that spark and push they need to pursue an idea and make it a reality. Especially here in college, I feel like there is so much competition in anything we do, so I just hope to be that voice that inspires you to build that dream you’ve always wanted and don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work at first and to try again. Each of us are on our own path, so we might as well build eachother up instead of trying to tear eachother down. And with that I leave my favorite quote by Stan Lee, “if you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.”
How did you build your audience on social media?
I strive to build my audience on social media through authenticity and providing them with value they can use in their daily life, mixed in with some fun content here and there because that is also part of my personality. For anyone who’s been on the internet recently, you know how fake everything is nowadays. Staged videos, outrageous actions, and all the brain rot you could imagine goes through millions of peoples’ feeds everyday and I hope to provide something different that either inspires them or show off my genuine unserious side and make them laugh. My two biggest pieces of advice to building an audience on social media is to provide value to your audience and just post that piece of content you’ve been holding on to, even if it’s not perfect. Hook an audience by providing something authentic to them, whether it’s your art, teaching them something, or just brightening their day. Along with this, make content you’re proud of and post it even if you think it’s not completely perfect because that will make you procrastinate from making more content or improving your business. From these pieces of content, learn what works with your audience and what doesn’t work through your analytics. Are people just skipping through? Improve the hook. Lacking engagement? Alter the content to encourage people to interact with it. Just post that piece of content and see what happens! Who knows, it could go viral.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the biggest lessons I had to unlearn was being afraid of mistakes and failure, because it led me to having anxiety which was extremely counterproductive to my efficiency and performance in school. Growing up, I always felt this immense pressure to succeed in school, which actually did work all the way up until I got into college. I was a straight-A valedictorian in high school, but what drove this success was ultimately the anxiety of failing and not the love for learning. I thought I could harness this power of fear to be successful in college, but in my first quarter while taking Calculus II I would fail my first exam ever in my academic career. This trend continued through the class, and to this day is still my worst grade here at the University of Washington. But it was only when I started my business that I realized all the mistakes and failures don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things if you can genuinely learn something from them. Fail, connect the dots, try something different, and hopefully you can produce a new result. During my second year at the University of Washington, I had to take the infamous organic chemistry sequence which is known as a weed-out course. After a rough first year, I knew something had to change but I didn’t know exactly what. Two average quarters of Organic chemistry later and I was fed up with not being able to excel to the grade I wanted, so I took a step back to see what I was doing wrong and took some advice from this girl in my class who was doing well. Using her study technique I realized the issue in my studying methods. I was studying really well the content I knew and was confident in, but only semi-studied topics I was shaky in because I saw the topic and said I knew it when I didn’t. Through mind-mapping and working on my active recall, I now write down everything I know from active recall and expose exactly where my lack of understanding was. The dots connected, and I got a 4.0 in that last quarter of Organic Chemistry. Now I take this approach into my own life and instead of hiding my mistakes as best I can and having anxiety about them, I look for them with an open-mind and solve them the best way I can. I know now I will never be perfect, but I know for certain I will always make progress. Progress that lights me up, and makes me content in my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.aflickbynick.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aflickbynick
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickclarke04
Image Credits
A Flick By Nick
Photaingraphy
Bao Khong