Picture perfect success story

By Natalie Brown

Local girl Melanie Summer has achieved outstanding success for herself and her small business, turning a $250,000 debt into the successful Flash Fotos brand, and all in the space of two years! She recently accepted the MYOB Small Business Award and the Regional Business Award at the Telstra Business Awards for 2011. Now her hard work and dedicated effort has been recognised on a national scale, winning again at the Telstra National Micro Business Awards in Melbourne recently. To look at her now it might be easy to believe that she was born with all the right moves. But it took a lot of fearless self-searching, guts, determination and a clear plan about how she was going to turn things around and achieve her goal of running a successful business.

After migrating to Australia from Germany with little more than the equivalent of a property diploma, single mother Melanie founded Top Shots Glamour Photography in 2005 with two other partners. When the business was close to bankruptcy after only two years, her partners wanted out, and pushed for the business to go into liquidation, but Melanie decided to stay, and became sole owner in 2007. The first thing she realised was that there needed to be change, and lots of it! So she set about determining how she could turn things around and what she needed to do to make it happen. One of her guiding mottos, the words of Richard Branson, became her mantra during this time: “I don’t know how, but I will do it anyway.” She realised that she needed to become focused on the person, not the profits. While the bottom line appeared to be the most important thing to her business at the time, she realised that she needed to look at the bigger picture and focus on providing a service that would help people to feel good about themselves.

First stop was looking at herself. At the time, a friend had looked at the business in terms of potentially investing, and he believed that the business was salvageable, but decided not to because the unknown factor was Melanie. He decided that he couldn’t take the risk. Melanie grappled with the realisation that perhaps she herself was a large factor in the success of the business. She thought if the business was okay, and the thing standing between failure and success was her, then she was going to have to change personally. This realisation was just what she needed. She embarked on a crash course of personal development, and began reading books, attending seminars and enlisted the help of a coach in an attempt to make sense of where she was at, and how she could move forward. She believes that her fearless work on her personal development created the right mindset to achieve success. She went from feeling like a victim to someone taking responsibility for themselves and the business.

The first gift of her personal development was recognising that winners know when to ask for help. Instead of sitting back and letting failure wash over her, Melanie recognised that she couldn’t do it all on her own, and began by asking for help. She spoke with her 10 staff, explained the situation to suppliers, and sought advice from outside experts. She engaged the services of external consultants and began to implement new ideas, and with her new outlook she was able to inject new energy into the business. She developed a clear picture about what she wanted for the future of the business and how it was going to run. While the bottom line was an important aspect of the business plan, she looked at the bigger picture of what she wanted for her business and her clients. Melanie turned the focus on providing an experience that would improve the self-esteem of her clients, not just the photography, and Flash Fotos was born.

Today Melanie Summers is a big picture person. Her business is debt-free with a healthy turnover. She employs 23 staff, has moved into servicing regional areas, and this year Flash Fotos proudly introduced its new charity shoots. Plans are underway to move into strategically aligned international markets, and Melanie is now building a speaking career focused on helping small business owners transform their own businesses. The sky is the limit for this local girl, and she is reaching for the stars.