About Us
We didn’t always have this business. Almost 25 years ago, when Keith and I met- he was a part time photographer’s assistant and part time photographer in NYC, armed with a bag of receipts, a stack of unopened Amalgamated bank statements, a carbonless 3 part invoice book and the fear of lord knows what that he was either going to debtor’s prison or IRS purgatory.
Something that sticks with me (and I finally get it) is Keith's mantra about being a creative: that he never worked a day in his life because he loved being a photographer so much.
He would meet me every day after work with a huge smile on his face- patiently giving me space and waiting for me to decompress from my soul crushing CFO job.
But the starving artist thing only goes so far. (wink, wink)
Even creatives need to earn money- regularly.
He was an excellent photographer but without basic financial skills he was running a non profit. He had “No marketing, no customer service and no bookkeeping system in place.”
He considered himself a professional photographer running a business. To be fair, he was. But that business was limited by his lack of infrastructure. It would be impossible to grow without systems in place.
Enter me. We needed to create a solid foundation for him so that he could thrive. And so our business story began.
So what was he afraid of? Why did he need this money makeover intervention from his practically brand new girlfriend?
Keith will be the first person to admit that he ignored the business side of things, hoping it would just go away. He liked being creative and taking gorgeous photographs. He really never wanted to be burdened by the unglamorous numbers and structure side of the biz.
His limiting belief was that he was creative and not necessarily inclined to understand money and be good at business.
This thought process was preventing him from growing, from earning enough money, from being secure. He was just getting by.
But he deserved so much more than that. And needless to say, since we were now married, I definitely wanted his business to be successful.
This story of us demonstrates how when we tell ourselves these negative or limiting stories over and over, we believe them.
These thoughts limit our success until we start telling ourselves a different story.
The good news is that Keith was open to help. He embraced me taking a macro look at this business and coming up with the step by step framework that it needed.
He was able to scale from taking any random gig job that came his way, to us having 5 photography related businesses under our umbrella, multiple photographers working for us and a structured business in place.
Keith was able to recognize that he was standing in his own way. He recognized what challenged him, accepted the tools that would help and he overcame his limiting belief.
We set his photography business up for long term success. Everything was clicking, business was growing, he was paying himself well and the business had a profit.
Everything was going great - until 2008.
This was the year we almost lost it all. That was the lowest point in both our personal and business lives, but we doubled down.
We believed in the photography business and we believed in ourselves. But it was a really challenging time for us. We struggled. We were in debt. We were living job to job - when there were jobs.
The lessons of 2008 taught us a few things:
1. We needed to scale.
2. We had to diversify. We had to add revenue streams so that we would never find ourselves in this position again.
3. And most importantly, we needed to examine our relationship with money and own up to how it affected both our business and our personal lives.
To make a long story short, we paid real close attention to those lessons. And we managed to scale, diversify and add revenue streams just as fast as we could. But it took years. It took many failed attempts at different things. But our resilience won out. We figured out the formula for what works for creative businesses in the wedding industry.
We know first hand what keeps creative business owners up at night. We understand the pain points of growing a business in a saturated market, of missing weekends with our kids, the long hours, the unpredictable feast or famine income, all the stresses of working in the wedding industry.
But we also understand the joys, the rewards and the incredible relationships we have fostered over the years with our couples but also the wedding industry pros that have become part of our extended family.
The moral of our story: Success isn't about luck or talent, it is about understanding how money works, how we allowed it to limit us and implemented systems that reliably produces results.
