How to get more work from clients by ignoring their requests

I am currently designing a website for a brilliant award winning restaurant in Sydney, nilgiri's, owned and managed by Ajoy Joshi.

Ajoy Joshi making paneer in a cooking class

 Integral to the website's design are images as they are a very efficient way of explaining nilgiri's which is far more than a simple restaurant - it offers cooking classes, a chef's table (a dégustation dinner presented personally by Ajoy), a Tiffin Room, external catering, hosting of functions, a spice shop, a range of simmer sauces, a Sunday Buffet etc. Consequently, I have been busy photographing nilgiri's.

Recently Ajoy asked me to create twelve framed images for the four private rooms at nilgiri's -  each room has a theme, Earth, Fire, Air and Water and consistent with these themes, I could have supplied Ajoy with images like those below:

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

Bondi Wave

Waterfall, Cradle Mountain Lake St Clare National Park

Glacier, Chamonix, France

Bay of Fires, Tasmania

But I reconsidered Ajoy's request - instead of themed images which would have effectively given me a captive audience, something every photographer desires, why not use the images I had already taken of nilgiri's to create a series of internal advertisements for the restaurant? To do this, all I would have to do is add a suitable caption to each image. So that diners could read the text and appreciate the images without having to peer closely, I made the prints A2 sized. As an added bonus for myself, I inserted my website address below each image.

The twelve framed images were delivered on a Tuesday and were an instant hit - diners in the Private Rooms found out that nilgiri's offered cooking classes etc and asked their waiters to tell them more. The waiters were thrilled as instead of having to break the ice with the diners, the images were doing it for them.

On Thursday Ajoy ordered eight additional images as he was confident the framed images would pay for themselves in no time at all.

The moral of this blog is to understand first and foremost that your commercial clients are buying images not as collectors of your art but because they think the images will boost their businesses and the more they are convinced your images will meet this purpose, the more work you will get from them. Yes, I could have chosen not to subjugate my own ego to the needs of my client, and quite happily given what Ajoy initially asked for, but by truly appreciating his needs, Ajoy is already a repeat customer of my work.