I’m excited to share this conversation from the Unscripted Small Business podcast, hosted by my friend Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. While I host the Women Who Work From Home Podcast here at True and Good Blog, I was thrilled when Zaneta shared her recent interview episode featuring Stewart Cohen, a Canadian-born film director and photographer based in Dallas on the Unscripted Small Business podcast.
As someone who explores faith, motherhood, and wellness through my blog and podcast, I’m always drawn to stories of entrepreneurs who’ve built businesses aligned with their values. Stewart’s 30+ year journey in photography and content creation resonated deeply with me—particularly his thoughts on adapting to change, maintaining fiscal responsibility while pursuing creative work, and the importance of understanding the business side of any venture.
Zaneta and I share a passion for authentic storytelling and building meaningful community, and you’ll see that connection come through in this conversation. Whether you’re a creative entrepreneur, a small business owner, or simply someone interested in how people build sustainable careers doing what they love, I think you’ll find Stewart’s insights as valuable as I did.
Zaneta Chuniq Inpower: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Unscripted Small Business podcast by Permacast Walls. I am Zaneta Chuniq Inpower and I am here with Stewart Cohen. I’m very excited to learn more about his business, what’s new and what’s next. Because the best introductions are often given by the person themselves, tell us a little bit more about yourself, Stewart.
Stewart Cohen: Well, thank you, Zaneta. Thanks for having me. So just so you all know, we had a little connection issue and we finally got together—I’m excited to talk to you. I live in Dallas, Texas. I’m a Canadian film director and photographer, and we have a boutique production company that creates content for marketing companies, advertising agencies, and the like.
My specialty is I work with people. It’s all about people. Whether it’s a celebrity, a real person just off the street, a pharma ad, an athlete—doesn’t matter as long as it talks back to me.
Getting Started in Photography
Zaneta: That’s awesome. On a previous episode, I had a photographer who focuses on real estate—so definitely not people. And that aspect of photography is very important. There’s so many different arenas that you can delve into. So how did you get started in photography?
Stewart: I got started—well, I mean, I’ve been doing this since college. I was drawn in by a guy who actually turned out to be one of my mentors who came to my university. I went to University of Texas undergrad, and he showed his work—it was shot all over the world. Great colors, interesting people. And I thought, wow, that looks like fun.
So I worked as an apprentice for four years for a couple of different people and then kind of hung my own shingle out and started shooting on my own. After that, I went back to film school to start to do live action. So I started doing commercials way back when. And ever since, I was trying to do the live action and the stills. Now, of course, everybody needs both—so it works out perfectly for me.
Adapting to Digital and AI
Zaneta: Awesome. I love how you mentioned the integrated needs that exist right now between having still and motion videography and photography. How have you grown in being able to manage all of the different needs that exist in this age of digital and AI when it comes to photography? My cohost Jeremy Rivera was recently talking with Matt Brooks of SEOteric, about the impact of unleashing AI tools that are “not quite finished” and can generate tons of content, but also can miss easily in terms of content quality. What’s your take?
Stewart: Well, I think it’s a mindset. I think all small business owners probably have this same mindset: you adapt or die. And part of it is I like change. Maybe not as much as is coming so fast, but evolution of technology is great and evolution of the way we do business is great. I’ve always been one to try to stay up with it—not necessarily the bleeding edge, but definitely on the front edge of it.
I’ve just continually innovated and tried new things and experimented. I do a lot of work that’s not client related, that’s not client driven. So we’re always shooting something, and we do that so we’re always experimenting and trying new things and trying to stay ahead of what’s coming next.
I also, through another long story, own and manage a media licensing company. It’s like a stock photo agency—kind of like Getty, probably most people know that, but smaller. We still manage 30 million digital assets like stills and video that we have available for licensing for people that don’t have the budget or the time or the need to actually go out and do a full production. That way we can offer them existing work at a price that really fits most budgets.
Content Licensing and Market Evolution
Zaneta: I love that. Not just music licensing—that was the first thing that came out of my brain because of my background in the entertainment industry—but content licensing, right? It’s all the same. It’s another way to…
Stewart: Same stuff, except we do visuals—we do video and stills. Of course there’s music as well. Music is harder, I think. We don’t touch that. And it’s more expensive.
Well, I mean, there are places, as you know, that you could get tracks to lay under videos that are not expensive. Once you get into arrangements and singing and stuff like that, it’s different.
But you know the difference. There’s a crazy dichotomy now. If you come from music licensing your own work, it used to be at a certain price all the time. And now the prices are all over the place. So I think, as creators, we need to figure out where we want to be in the market—and maybe address multiple markets. Maybe there’s a different offering for a different market.
The Entrepreneurial Journey
Zaneta: Absolutely. Let’s take a few steps back. We know that you are a photographer and we’ve dove deep really quickly into the types of photography that you’re an expert in and your background. But I would love to just breathe with you as an entrepreneur. So how long have you been an entrepreneur? There’s different challenges to face whether you’re operating an agriculture machinery manufacturer like Newton Crouch, or leading a creative studio, as a business leader, what have you learned along the way that’s really keeping you steady and thriving right now?
Stewart: Well, I think that’s an important question, actually. And I think the challenge of being in a creative business—and why so many of them don’t last—is that it’s a real balance of how do you manage the business versus the creative. I think that goes for any small business.
I think I’m wired—luckily. I think I have a good, I think genetically, I just got lucky in that I have a creative side, but I also have a very fiscal-minded side and a business side. I’ve always kept my eye on the business and appreciated the fact that we’re in business. Personally, I consider what I do a personal service business. So it’s people again—it’s relationships. Do people come back?
You know the old saying: it’s easier to keep a client than to find a new one. So we always make sure we take care of our clients.
Running a business has changed a lot. It has gotten—people say it’s gotten easier. I think a lot of things have gotten streamlined. Say for instance, early days, you used to need to go to the photo lab to get your film developed. Well, we don’t have to drive back and forth five times a day anymore. So that’s great.
You think of what AI has done—because everyone’s talking about AI. Yeah, it definitely helps us back office, do a lot of back office stuff easier. And maybe that allows us to be more efficient. But I think that’s something I’ve continually watched.
As any small business owner, you need to continually watch the bottom line. You need to continually try to understand how companies operate and how they succeed—or actually, it’s good to know how companies falter also, because that’s a lesson taught.
I don’t think you need to be an accounting whiz, but I definitely think you need to understand your profit and loss sheet. Be able to go through that on a monthly basis and understand what things are costing.
Being in a small business, some days it’s not always a great day fiscally. And I think that’s something that’s a mental state also. We could have a month that’s a down month. We could have three months that are down months. But hopefully I try to put away for those months to smooth it out and to understand. Now I’ve been doing it long enough that I kind of know the sky’s not falling. There will be a tomorrow. It might not be tomorrow—it might be next week.
I think you need to understand the ebb and flow of industries. And I think you need to read a lot.
Born Into Entrepreneurship
Zaneta: Yeah, it does. And it also lends me the opportunity to ask you—once you left university and you had the initial exposure to decide to delve into photography, did you know from the start you wanted to build a business? I know firms like Lamar Law Office work with entrepreneurs on business structure from the beginning. Did you want to have a photography business, or was it something that you enjoyed and it became a business? What was your path there?
Stewart: You know what? Nobody’s ever asked me that question. I think it’s a great question. And I don’t know how to answer that except—I come from, my dad was a small business owner. My stepfather was a small business owner and I never knew any better.
We grew up in Canada and it wasn’t—there weren’t as many big companies, or at least it didn’t seem that way. Most of my friends, their dads were small business owners or taxi drivers or salesmen. I didn’t come from a lot.
When you come to the United States and you meet people whose parents worked for IBM or Boeing—it’s a different mentality. And I didn’t grow up with that. So I think I thought you had to be in your own business and I just didn’t know any better.
There have been plenty of times in my career that I stopped and thought, hmm, maybe having a job might’ve been a better thing, you know? But I get over it.
Zaneta: Yeah, some are born and some entrepreneurs are made. It really depends on the economy, seemingly.
Stewart: Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I do love—I think I would thrive in a big corporate organization as well. Although I’ve never had the opportunity, my wife says I wouldn’t. She said, “Yeah, no, you’d be fired in like a week.”
But I don’t think so. I like to keep people—we have a pretty decent sized staff here. And again, I like everyone’s ideas. I’m really the kind of guy that—I manage, it’s not my way or the highway. It’s what’s best for us. And people come in with ideas.
We have a morning meeting every day or every two days and we talk about things and people throw out ideas and it’s like, “Hey, that’s a great idea. Let’s try it.” Because things change all the time.
I think you need to be open to evolving. It’s funny, there have been people who have worked here that, you know, they don’t evolve as fast. Like, “Well, this is the way we used to do it.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I think we got to start looking for a new way because there’s a better way.” Or a different way.
Growing as an Entrepreneur
Zaneta: Well, we know that entrepreneurs wear many hats and already we’ve talked about the service itself, being a photographer. We’ve also talked about fiscal management and team management. Outside of you actually taking photos—which I know is what you love the most—what is something that you love the least but had to grow into as an entrepreneur?
Stewart: Ooh, okay. Well, so the amount of time—just to back up a bit—the amount of time we spend on set, whether we’re filming a commercial or doing a still shoot, it’s a small amount of time compared to the amount of time running a business.
It used to be more. I think we used to shoot more days for less money, less production. And I enjoyed that early in my career. I enjoyed being out a lot. As the jobs get bigger, of course, there’s more pre-production and there’s just more time in between projects.
So what do I like least? I’m okay running the business. I really enjoy running the business. I’m sometimes slow at certain things that don’t need to happen immediately and they pile up. So I guess I could call myself a little bit of a procrastinator. And then when you have to get to something, it just seems to take so long.
Zaneta: That’s so relatable.
Stewart: Actually just today—so like I was saying, if we’re not shooting jobs, we’re usually shooting something, a self-assigned project. We’ll find models, we’ll build sets, and it costs money to do that. And then I do nothing with them.
So actually earlier today, I was going through some stuff and I’m looking at it. I’m like, my God, this has been sitting on hard drives for like two years. This is great. And you spent money to do it.
If you think about a small business—say you’re making products like manufacturing blue jeans, but you’re not getting them to market for two years—well, that’s not really a smart small business owner. So I’m guilty as charged on that front. Part of it is just—there’s only so much time in the day. I enjoy working and I work a lot, but yeah, at the same time, it gets away from me.
The Value of Professional Photography
Zaneta: How would you assert the value proposition of personal portraiture and photography right now when everyone thinks that they can take an awesome picture with their iPhone? What do you say to that? Or those who believe that those experiences are superior to a trained photographer?
Stewart: Well, there are great cameras out there today. The technology has made it very easy. The retouching has made it very easy to go out and shoot. And yeah, some stuff might be great.
What we’re called to do is really to do it on command and to illustrate maybe a little bit more specific, difficult stories on command. That’s where I think the value add comes.
I love just doing portraits of people. That’s really fun. I’ve never done that for a living. We’ve done a lot of portraits of famous people that we get called to do. And that, just like doing it on command, that’s like—you have four minutes.
So you have to be ready with three setups, the lighting all set up in each one, and you’re going boom, boom, boom, boom. And everyone’s smiling still and that’s a success. Whereas, you know, Joe average guy with his iPhone or a little camera—that would be a harder thing to accomplish for them.
Zaneta: Yeah, there’s definitely a different utility in each type of photo and who you go with to shoot that photo. As Stuart and I were talking earlier to our listeners out there—my background includes pageantry. And a good pageantry photo is not cheap. You cannot do that on your cell phone. Knowing who to go to, who can match that style, who has an eye for editing and can really put you in the best light is something that’s truly invaluable.
Stewart: And I want to know more about your pageant world. How long did you—you still doing it?
Zaneta: Yeah, well currently, yes. Currently I’m International Miss Georgia 2024–2025 and Miss Georgia Global Continental 2025. So looking forward to a new title in 2026—more to come on that.
My pageantry experience started in high school actually. I was Miss Riverside Park competing in Miss Teen Michigan in 2004, and actually spent some time as a pageant director in my 20s and just recently returned back to the pageant stage in this stage of life. So it’s been really fun to just get back into the swing of things with women that are like-minded and just really empower a community with our platform. So pageantry has been a great fulfillment to all of the other work that I do.
Stewart: I think that’s great. And of course, next time I’m in Atlanta or next time you’re in Dallas, we have to do a little photo shoot.
Zaneta: Awesome, I have family in Dallas, so it’ll give me something other than—
Stewart: Come on. And then we’ll film you, we’ll interview you talking about it, then we’ll get some good B-roll. It’s like, you know—Zaneta, the movie.
Zaneta: I love that. I knew when you mentioned you were from Canada and I’m originally from Michigan that we would have an instant vibe. Oh my gosh.
Stewart: Yeah. We grew up with snow.
Reading and Inspiration
Zaneta: Well, I would love to ask you—you mentioned earlier the importance of constantly reading. As an avid reader, I have over 210 books at home. So for myself and other listeners, what are some books that you love, whether it’s about business or anything else? What has inspired you over the years that you would recommend to someone listening to us today?
Stewart: Well, that’s really good. I’m going to go for a genre actually, because my reading today—there’s the quick read. I love biographies. And then I read a lot of trade media and newsy things because I like to know what’s going on.
And I’m going to deviate for a sec. I ended up—I don’t know, I guess I was probably like in my late thirties or something—reading the business section of newspapers, like local paper and then a national paper. I did that because it interested me, but at the same time, you also see—hey, XYZ is moving to Dallas. Or there’s stuff you see that I’ve acted upon and it’s gotten us work.
Or you understand it when you get in a conversation with clients. Especially when I was younger and you get in a conversation—like you’re photographing or filming a CEO and you can carry on a conversation with them. I think that was really, really important for me. And I still enjoy it. It’s really interesting just to see how the business world works.
Personally, I love biographies. And I don’t know how I got to love them, but I just love them because you get somebody else’s story and you see where they came from and where they got to and what the path was. And I usually enjoy biographies like the earlier part of people’s lives—until they got, you know, whether it’s famous or wealthy or whatever.
Say Richard Branson had a great one. But by the time he started Virgin Airways or Virgin Records, I had read enough because I was really interested in how did he come from being a kid on the street to building that. I found that to be really fascinating. How do people get there? Once they’re big time movie stars or big time business people, it’s a different part of the story. But I really enjoy the origins of people’s lives and how they got places.
And this is going to sound morbid, but I will say it. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the obituaries in the New York Times. There’s a whole book they come out with every year with obituaries. And basically what it is—it’s like articles about people who unfortunately, of course, just passed on, but it’s their quick biography. It’s like a couple of paragraphs, like a half a page, quarter page.
And you realize that the stories of where people came from and what they overcame and how innovative they were and how they overcame obstacles to become—to cure diseases or become movie stars or start companies. It’s really, really fascinating. And I think that keeps me inspired. It really does. It keeps me inspired just to know the road’s never over and people have come from a lot worse than I did.
There are people that overcome a lot and you really need to respect them. And I really do when I get them on the other side of the camera or film camera—I really, really respect people’s origins.
The Power of Storytelling
Zaneta: You know, I actually picked up a physical paper on Sunday. The Atlanta Journal Constitution will no longer be printing very soon, unfortunately. But I love a good physical newspaper and there are obituaries within the paper. And so it’s funny you mentioned storytelling.
As a personal storyteller, I have a draft as a part of my end of life planning because I’m like—I don’t think anybody can actually write my story how I would want it to be written because you guys were not there. So I always encourage people to feel more comfortable, and it’s not morbid at all. It’s insightful to think about how you want your story to be told.
And that is exactly what having a portfolio of your own photography does. I scroll through my phone all the time and it tells a story of what I was doing last week. It could be nothing. I could have been on a walk but I have a picture of flowers that I took. I thought it was pretty. So it’s just a story, and pictures do a very good—it’s a very good method for being able to share that with others.
Stewart: It is. I think our phones have been great. Back to what we were talking about early on about evolution of technology—I mean, it’s not news, physical newspapers, all the time anymore. It’s rare.
I remember back in the day, like an early morning flight is all these people with newspapers. You don’t see a newspaper anymore. People could be reading phones. I find it hard to read long stories on phones. It’s just kind of tedious. I do like a little bit of a tablet, an iPad or something, because it’s all right there anyway.
But here’s the one thing I will say about old school magazines or newspapers. You could stand there, say it’s morning time and you’re having a coffee and you’re turning these pages. There’s stuff like in the corner of page seven that you would never see on your phone or on an iPad, but it just caught your eye and it’s kind of interesting.
But hey, back to what we started talking about—things have changed. It’s evolved.
I think Pinterest is amazing. It’s just such a plethora of visuals that come at you. It’s nearly overwhelming and it’s so great. And you talk about how everyone’s a photographer. You start going through Pinterest, making boards and you realize—does the world really need another picture? There’s so much good stuff out there.
Zaneta: That is what I think every time I’m deleting pictures on my phone. Do you need 20 versions of this one pose? No, delete.
And that is because I am from the age where we would go to the grocery store and drop off film. I only have 28 pictures, okay? So I’m going to make the best of these 28 pictures. So you guys stand right there, don’t move, because we got this right.
Stewart: Right. Okay. So you know what’s going on today? I don’t know if you see this. We always have a BTS—a behind the scenes photographer filming us working, or we always get a crew picture at the end with the clients, a nice wrap picture. And we’ve been doing that forever.
And then when you go back through the archives—you know how on Facebook it has a memory from 2018, that kind of thing. And you look at, oh yeah, I remember that job. And then you look at the clothes you’re wearing and then you’re like, ooh, I still have that shirt.
So it’s making you really—I need, I seriously looked at it. I’m like, okay, I need to really start moving that wardrobe through the closet a little more.
Zaneta: My thought is always—where is that shirt? I say that a lot. What happened to that?
Final Takeaways for Aspiring Photographers and Entrepreneurs
Zaneta: Well, before we go, I would love for you to leave us with three things for any aspiring photographers or entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their business—things you didn’t know, things that you’ve learned along the way or are applying right now. What are your quick three takeaways for our listeners today?
Stewart: I think—be very open to comments from other people. You don’t have to take them all to heart, but be very open.
Go out and meet people, network, be kind. There definitely is no place in this world for people that aren’t friendly. So be nice, be gracious.
Mind your bottom line. Look around at what else is being created in the world. Look at visuals wherever you find them. Look at movies and try to stay current with what’s going on.
I think that’s the one way people get old—if they kind of stop looking and stop just trying to stay with it.
