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.