Monday, December 31, 2012

You will, trust me.



If I could offer a mantra to new business owners, this would be it.

If you are as hard on yourself as I am, then you are constantly criticizing your work and desperately wanting to improve every step of the way. Every winter I go through a major depression in terms of our business and my work. During the summer and fall I am too busy working to slow down, but when I finally just sit and look at my work for the past year, I want to do better. I hate to say it, but I can get really down on myself. I am glad that I have Charlie who always reminds me that I am good at what I do, and that I will get even better.

When the New Year hits though, it's an exciting time, it's goal setting time. And there's nothing I love more than making me some plans. As important as it is to look at where we want to be and write out the steps to get there, I think it's equally important to reflect on the previous year and admire where we came from. Today I'll do a little of both.

If I had to choose one thing to be the most proud of this year, it's how far we've come in organization. If you are unorganized, you cannot offer great customer service, when you don't have great customer service, it strains your relationships with your clients, when that happens, your word of mouth referrals aren't going to flourish. That was where we were at the end of last year, but I made it my goal in 2012 to be more organized and prepared, and in turn we've had fewer mishaps and have wonderful repertoire with our clients. There is nothing better than hearing your couples, and their friends, and their families, tell you how happy they are and how they are going to tell everyone about you. What more could you ask for?

Because we have better systems in place now, we are ready to take on more clients, which is where our 2013 goals come in. It may seem obvious that your goal for the new year would be to simply get more business, but if you really aren't prepared for more business, then you should focus your efforts on filling in your cracks first.

My main goal for this year is to find ways to:
1. Be more accessible to our clients
2. Engage our clients more

Overall, I just want to be more involved with people, and get people more involved with our business. I want to move beyond offering "sales" and "deals", and find out what really thrills people. All this is because our work is the most meaningful when more people are engaged. We don't want to be shoot and burn photographers, we want to be your photographers. The one's you can count on.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Baby to be

If you are friends with me on Facebook, then you heard our big news on Christmas... I am pregnant and we are expecting our first baby on July 24!

I promise this wont turn into a pregnancy or mommy blog (I love those, but there are enough already :), but I will post updates every once in a while and I'm sure a bombardment of photo's after baby is born. I also tend to be the most pensive when I am struggling or can't stop mulling over things and that's typically when I like to lay my thoughts out in a post. I'm excited to write today because my pregnancy has been (mostly) a secret until this week, and I haven't gotten to share it with anyone so, time to catch up! 

We found out I was pregnant the day after Thanksgiving. I was previously diagnosed with PCOS and told I wouldn't be able to get pregnant without the help of a perscription drug, so pregnancy was far from a concern of mine. Even after my wonderful monthly gift was a bit late I wasn't too worried, it was far more likely that it was being weird (as usual). But I was having something weird, very mild cramps on and off throughout the week. Finally by Friday I googled it and saw that can be a symptom of pregnancy (mild cramping as the fetus is implanted), and then I thought 'Wow, I really could be pregnant." We bought a test and within seconds the line over the pregnancy window was visible. My heart started racing, I was in disbelief. I called Charlie in, we were both shaking and having a major adrenaline rush. 

That weekend was by far the worst days of my pregnancy so far. I was nauseous every second of the day, I could hardly eat saltines. I was exhausted and could smell everything from a mile away. Not to mention that I was going through a grieving processing over all of my materialistic and self absorbed idols. ('I'm going to get fat, my body will never be the same, it will take me forever to finish school, I have no energy to workout or study.'). The following Tuesday I weighed myself and I had lost four pounds from being so nauseous. After another week it started to get better, and as of now I've gained those pounds back and then some :) 

Throughout the last month, Charlie has truly been a blessing from above. He makes me food without even having to ask, he always makes sure I have my water and whatever I happen to be craving at that moment (oranges!), he wouldn't leave my side for five hours at the hospital while I got rehydrated and checked out. He has been so sensitive to my moodiness and has never given me a hard time for being  tired/emotional/crabby. I praise God for this man!

At our first appointment we got to see the baby on an ultrasound (not normal, but I was having some side pain so they just wanted to be cautious). It was such a sigh of relief finally getting to see that yes, there was a baby in there and everything was normal. We even got to see it's heartbeat flickering on the screen. I have never seen Charlie so happy in my life. 

Right now I am ten and a half weeks along, and greatly looking forward to my second trimester. I haven't had very much energy over the last month, but I'm hoping that second trimester energy isn't a myth! 




Thursday, December 13, 2012

Redemption

I'm not afraid to share my failures with you guys. Hopefully if you've read some of my past posts you have seen that already. I love to learn from my mistakes and share them in hopes that you can feel encouraged in areas that you've made mistakes, or even avoid them altogether (possible? Who knows.).

Today's story is a great one for me to share, because it's about a time when I made some mistakes and thought I had lost a client forever, only to have them give me a second chance to redeem myself. In our business we more often have trouble with customer service than we do with the satisfaction in our actual work, but obviously we strive for both of these things to be top notch.

Last September Charlie and I shot our first solo wedding together as Have Heart Photography for a couple of friends from our church. The pictures were fabulous and we were happy to have them as friends. A few months later the bride e-mailed me to ask if we would be available to shoot her companies Holiday Gala that December. She works for a financial consulting company, and most of their clients are wealthy business owners. She specified that they would like individual portraits of each family as they arrived at the gala, and that they would like to send out the photo's in a paper frame to each family with their Christmas cards. The event was on a Saturday evening, and she said they would like to have the prints and frames all ready to send out by the following Wednesday.

We were excited to shoot the event as we had never done anything like it before. Our inexperience would prove a challenging obstacle, but what is your first time if not a learning experience? We rented a single strobe light that ended up not being enough lighting for the extremely dark corner we were placed in. This forced me to spend extra time editing each photo to lift the shadows to where they needed to be.

But here is where my real mistake took place. We did not know how many families to expect, so we held off on ordering the frames until after the gala. Our photo printing lab consistently ships prints in one day, so we knew that as long as we placed the order by Monday, there would be no problem. It was not the same case for the frames, however. The shipping costs for two day shipping were outrageous, over $100. I let our client know that even at that price, the frames were not guaranteed to be there by Wednesday. She stated that they really needed to send them out by the end of the week, and were willing to pay extra to do so. The company ended up paying an extra shipping fee, but the frames did not arrive until Friday.

I felt so awful that I did not deliver what I had promised that I ended up giving them a large discount on what they owed us. I was sure that I had left a poor impression in their minds and that I had possibly burned a bridge with a repeat client.

Imagine my shock when a few months ago, the same client contacted us to shoot their gala again this year. I was thrilled to have a chance at redemption! She said they wanted the same things as last year, and she didn't even mention the mishap.

The event took place last Saturday and I was so much less stressed out than the previous year. We rented two lights and I barely had to edit the family portraits. I ordered the frames last week, and since we didn't have an official headcount, I ordered plenty extra. On Sunday night I ordered all of the family pictures and sent them to our printing lab and had them shipped directly to my clients and they arrived Tuesday afternoon. I finished up the rest of the pictures that night, and I dropped off the frames and DVD on Wednesday. Because of my planning, it didn't even feel rushed or hard to pull off.

This may not seem like a huge mistake in your eyes, but in my opinion, great customer service is doing what you say you're going to do, and beyond. Not only did I not follow through last year on what I said I would do, but I inconvenienced by clients because of my poor planning. This is a great example of how you not only produce better work over time, but you also learn how to give your clients a better experience and manage your business more efficiently.

Merry Christmas!