It’s all about that Myelin! …”She stopped frequently, she made mistakes. She started over”…

6 months into my Food Styling Business, 2000 hours of practice and a batch of amazing people…is this what it takes to run your business and build your portfolio of clientele?

I wish I could answer…Indeed after 6 months you know better what’s happening out there but everyday is a new day, everyday kind of holds a new lesson…

The Product

FoodArtConcept is a Food Styling platform that creates food moments for the pleasure of the eyes. At FoodArtConcept we are passionate about Food and Photography. Not any type of Food or Photography. We awaken the taste buds through the mix and match of colours, material and textures. We create Food Moments and engrave them in the visual memory for a very long time. FoodArtConcept assists Restaurants, Advertising Agencies, and Production Houses with their Food Styling requests. Food styling is actually the Art of crafting and enhancing the food image on Menus, Packaging, Cookbooks, food e-commerce platforms and TV Food Shows.

The Brand, the name

As small as is FoodArtConcept branding today, the first contact I have –like any other business owner- is through my business card and that smile, that flipping across the card says it all. All credits goes to you Layal Shuman, It’s a simple yet an elegant branding; both very important points: Simple, gives you more room for printing and design purposes, elegant, attracts other elegant brands.

The Name, which name to choose and why? At that time I had a list of 10- 15 names…but listening to others comments, listening to how friends were pronouncing it and how they were perceiving it helped a lot in making the decision. Living in a cosmopolitan city like Dubai, made me run some random calls to see how people will spell the name over the phone. Something you may want to keep in mind if you don’t want to spend your time spelling.

The Website

Typing today “Food Stylist Dubai” and appearing 3rd on Google search engine makes you realize that following best practices does pay off at the end.  You probably heard that to be featured on top of search engines you must use a web press based tool. Correct but not enough. Mazen Khatib, Web Developer and behind the success of FoodArtConcept.com, will tell you how in a span of a week, more than 15 plugins are available and can be downloaded, all for free, all with the same function. But STOP here. Like Google will penalize if you have a repetitive title or inconsistent keywords, Google will also penalize you if you use poor plugins. Serious homework is needed. Or / and go back to people you trust in other words experts like Najam who helped at every stage of the website setup.

And because almost everything around us is volatile, being up to date is no longer an option but rather an obligation to keep your business running healthy. We recommend you going through this educative #Inbound Certificate, it covers some solid basics, from building a successful website to how to engage and reward your future evistors…It’s a free tool and renewable on yearly basis.

The Market, the network

Subsequently, every time you receive a request you want to ask – preferably at the end of the discussion-  how did you find me?  To be fair, Food Styling is a niche industry, and that definitely helps a lot. It helps penetrating and acquiring market shares that others don’t find interesting, irrelevant or just can not deal with the language’s barrier, especially when it comes to Arabic speaker clients, lets admit it, it helps a lot to be able to speak, read and write Gibran’s language.

On the other side, it remind us once again the opportunities that UAE is offering, opportunities that none of my native countries could offer. Today I am a recognized FreeLancer with Sole Proprietor license, sponsored by TwoFour54 and supported by its partners phd and Flash. Being part of 2454 means accessing a pool of contacts. It also means security, security because whether you like it or not when you ignite such a business you are alone and getting to meet other freelancer fellows makes you –to a certain extend- feel better.

Hold on, it sounds like freelancers’ life is all about une vie en rose…indeed it is, until you get scammed. Scammed yes, that client who has zero business ethics and tries through more than one channel to get quoted for the same job …well what can be done? Nothing. No nothing, that is the industry and being transparent and moving on is your only way to keep your positive energy and concentrate at what you do best.

It’s all about that Myelin

It’s only in March 2015, that I discovered this substance. I was lucky to receive a beautiful book titled The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle highly recommended if you are willing to push your way of thinking, highly recommended if you believe you can achieve more…

So the book in my hands, fingers flipping across those pages, me not wanting to finish it…what is it all about? It’s all about that excelling at something is not out of this world, I laugh when I say this sentence, but it’s funny enough to say that we –all of us with no excuse – can get really good at something. How do we unlock it? Well practice or 10000 hours of run-through is one of the ways but I won’t spoil the read, try it or tell others who are willing to improve to do so…”she stopped frequently, she made mistakes. She started over”…

Photography Credits : WStudio