Our teams talk every week, and have for twelve years, but it had been years since I'd stood in the same room as Matt Reed. The strange part is it never feels that way. "I don't know if it's been a year or five years," Matt said when I arrived. "It feels like we just saw each other last week." I'd driven down to Bibra Lake, where Sum Effect has its studio, to spend a morning with someone I've looked up to for most of my business life. I left understanding why the relationship works - underneath it, we run the same business
We met at the Fremantle Business Awards in 2014. Matt and his wife Lisa were at our table, and what struck me then still holds now - their humility, their kindness, and how much they cared about people. It felt like meeting people who saw the world the way we did, and they've been part of the Digit story for nearly all of it
Matte, shiny or round
Sum Effect makes commercial photography and film. Half in the studio, half on location - a vineyard one week, a mine site the next. Watching Matt work, you realise he doesn't light objects. He lights feelings
"If we want something to look matte, or shiny, or round, we match that feeling with how we light it," he told me, walking me through the gradient panels either side of a bottle. For one winery down south, the team photographed the vineyard the week before the shoot, then played that image on a screen behind the bottle in the studio, so the place lives inside the product shot. Ninety-five percent of it happens in the camera. The style he's spent seventeen years refining he describes as "a quiet confidence. They're not blingy. They're just solid." And every job answers one question - "How does this picture feel like this business, not some cool idea that's applied to many businesses?"
Then he proved the point on me. Matt handed me a camera to take his portrait and coached me through it, and around the fifteenth something shifted. "Here, it looks like there's a camera pointed at me," he said, pulling the shots up. "It's not until you started shooting that I thought, I might as well loosen up. And that's when the whole feeling changed." The picture is a byproduct. The craft is what he does to the person in front of the lens
The same business, in different clothes
He shapes light. We keep books. But the longer we talked, the clearer it became that the shape underneath is identical
We both get the same phone call - "Can you give me a quote to do X?" For Matt it's book photographer, do shoot. For us it's just do our bookkeeping, just run our payroll. And we've both learned that when a relationship starts that flat, it stays flat. How can I do my best work for you when all you want is something that doesn't enable me to do my best work for you
Matt's filter for it is now the whole business model. "Trust is the big variable. We do our best work for clients that trust us and we trust them. Neither of us needs a facade about anything. The best idea rises to the top." Ego and control are his red flags. Good people are the boundary. Mine is the first conversation - the questions someone asks tell you whether they're curious about what's possible or just hunting the cheapest quote. We'd arrived at the same place from opposite directions
Love projects
The clearest proof is an idea I borrowed from Matt and Lisa years ago - love projects. Work you do for people simply because you can. At Digit it became free reviews of Xero files for small businesses that need direction, workshops with non-profits, our long-standing relationship with the Wheatbelt Business Network in regional WA - and a fair part of why we became a B Corp, the formal, audited version of an instinct I first saw at a table in Fremantle
The week before my visit, Matt's team met a business they could help in exactly the way it needed, knowing it could never pay for the work. They just offered it. "To be able to be that for someone else is such a cool feeling", he said. "It's where it's at, I reckon"
No bump, no wobble
Sum Effect became a client within a year of that awards night. Sitting in the studio, Matt did the maths on what's happened since
"Every week for the last twelve-odd years, we've communicated with your business. Payroll, accounts, payables, missing invoices. That's at least five thousand communications backwards and forwards, and it's been flawless the whole time. When I'm communicating with any of your team, it feels like I'm communicating with myself. Same tone. It hasn't mattered who that's with. Thousands of interactions, without charge, without judgment, without blame." There's always been a sense of ease in our communications together. No friction or tension, just a positive desire to help
That consistency isn't an accident, and it isn't software. It's hiring on mindset and integrity for thirteen years, because hearts in the right place is half the battle and the technical side can be taught. Jen, Michelle and Gaycel have looked after Sum Effect for eleven and twelve years - through kids, partners, whole family chapters, and their own growth into mentoring others on our team. "You're having a significant impact on their lives," Matt said. "That's a quarter, a third of their life. How wild is that"
He was honest about the hard years too. "Sometimes it's been like, great, life's good. Sometimes it's been like, this is a nightmare, we're this close to the edge. And even in our most financially pressured times, we never considered messing with the bookkeeping, because that was the one thing that was just beautiful the whole way through. Everything's lodged. BAS is on time. It's all on the record, up to date to the week, for the last decade or more. When you wobble financially, you can go - here's everything. It's right. That's probably when I've been most grateful"
Near the end I asked if there was anything he wanted to add, and he waved it off. "We don't need to say, I trust you, I trust you. You just know it. Really, it's just honouring a long-term working relationship, isn't it? Life is better when you work with people you can rely on and trust"
Driving home, I kept coming back to the way Matt described his photographs. A quiet confidence. Not blingy. Not screaming at you. Just solid. Twelve years of weekly conversations, and I can't think of a better description of what we've built between us
