11. My Own Personal (Very Vulnerable) Journey

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Transcript

Today I share my own journey - everything from working in advertising and marketing  - to starting and running a successful wedding and portrait photography studio  - to a complete collapse and then a rebuild into where we are now, where our business is easy.

We serve clients that we love and we get to show up to a job that fulfills us and makes our absolute dream life a reality. We're no longer stressed about money. Our home will be paid off before we know it, and we're able to do some really cool things with our kids, like travel that I would have never even imagined as a child. And just being consistently at their activities, their sports, getting off the school bus. We're really working in balance with our life and it just feels good. 


My story has all of the things.

It's got romance, it's got struggles, it's got triumph, it's got the fetal position and all sorts of hardships that you could ever possibly imagine, that happened within one year.

And I want to share all of that with you so that you can really see what's gone into building my business. I hope that sharing my story will give you some inspiration on what's possible in your own world, and it will also help you avoid some of the mistakes and struggles that I experienced because there have been a lot of them over the last ten years.

THE BEGINNING
I mentioned that there was romance here and my story actually starts back in college when I met a boy in his name is Ben Ewing. We graduated, we both graduated from the same college and we met about three months before we graduated. It was serendipitous timing. We were both ready for a relationship and our connection was like almost instant. I say it was love at third sight and we are so beautifully different in so beautifully similar that it's just worked. We've been together for over 20 years and he is a huge pillar of my business and just my life. He is like my rock, he's my strength. We both graduated with college degrees, with bachelor's mines in business. His is in engineering and we dove into the corporate world. 

My goal when I graduated from college was honestly to be VP of Marketing. By the time I was 30.

My career was very important to me.

We had what looked like a picture perfect life. The two of us bought our first home together. We got married. I was already on fast track to becoming marketing director and he was working at a very successful engineering firm. We got married, I mentioned that and we got pregnant in shoot, what year? 2008.

And at that point, seemingly things were picture perfect.

But honestly, what life really looked like was I was stressed out all of the time I was in this job that I thought was the thing I wanted to be doing, but I was like sick with anxiety. I was commuting 2 hours every day. I was working really long hours and I was honestly losing myself and definitely losing my joy. A friend of mine said that there were two Ericas. There was business Erica and there was fun Erica. So if there's a fun version, you can guess what the other version is. When the baby came, when Trevor came in 2009, everything shifted for me.

I was away from work for three beautiful months and so much re-entered my world, so much goodness like joy, love, peace. These things reentered my world.

And it really was such a stark difference from the world that I had been living that everything became really clear. I decided in that moment that the corporate world was not for me. So I left. I didn't know what I wanted to do just yet, but I knew it wasn't that.

And Ben agreed.

He had been telling me for a really long time to start my business and to leave and that we would figure it out. But I was the breadwinner at that point. Well, being away from it and seeing what else was available to me in my life and available to us as a family now with a new baby, it just really made it so clear that the corporate world that this job, that this goal that I had had for all of these years actually wasn't what I really wanted. So we put our heads together.

We made an intense budget because we had to figure out how we could survive without my $85,000 salary. And this included things like really limited like, you know, kind of dinner dinners out was no longer a thing. We got allowances and we cut out cable. 

Like we got really focused on making our goal, which was simply to not go back to the corporate world for me. 

We committed to it. 

And so I resigned. I ended up getting a part time job where I was renting apartments on the weekends for this apartment complex. I got my realtor's license. I was figuring out what could I do that was outside of a normal 9 to 5, and I stayed home with Trevor for 15 months. That time was magical. I like it makes me feel really emotional just thinking about how lucky I feel to have been able to do that.

But I also realized that I wasn't really fulfilled.

I needed more. I just it's not in me to be a stay at home mom. And so I needed to figure out what my next step was going to be. I started my photography business out of my spare bedroom. Literally, people would come to my home. I would make Ben and Trevor, like, hide upstairs so that I could have consults for weddings and so that I could shoot sessions in my spare bedroom.

I was selling sessions for $250 for the session and all the digital files weddings started at. I think I was like somewhere around $1,000 starting price.

And then I opened up a studio.

To be honest, the reason that I opened it was honestly like it gave me somewhere to go besides home and it was so silly, cheap. I really didn't even need to be making like any money to be able to afford the studio. It was such a gift. And then I did my first wedding expo, so I have a long history of trade shows in event marketing through my advertising and marketing experience and my business exploded from this one wedding expo. I went from zero weddings to ten in my very first show, and kind of the rest was history.

That was really the start of my business.

But we found a problem. I was working weekends in, Ben was working weekdays, so really our son Trevor became like the button that we passed in between.

So each of us was getting time with Trevor, but we never saw each other. We weren't getting time together. And while we were so happy in a lot of aspects, we were also really sad. We just missed each other. He's my person. I just want like if there's one person that I want to spend all of my minutes with in this life, it's him. So he picked up a camera and we found out that he was really good. And of course, I'm really simplifying that.

There was a ton of work that went into it. If you know me in real life, you know that I've got a high standard. And so he went to classes. He endured critiques from me, like proactively, he wanted these critiques and he was practicing all the time. So he was bringing his camera to work out on his lunch breaks. He was taking pictures and he was getting really good. So he started second shooting with me, which meant that now we got to see each other more.

And I always joke and I still to this day I say it, that our weddings are our date nights.

We get to be at a party, at a celebration and have dinner, just the two of us. If you have kids, you know what a gift this is. You know what I'm talking about.

So, like, weddings became our Saturday nights together or Saturday nights out. But now we had a new problem that he was working literally all the time. He was engineering during the week and he was wedding photographer on the weekends and he never had any time off and he never saw our son Trevor. And that is really a sad place to be. Again, he wasn't fulfilled.

Now he needed more.

So what did we do? Well, we put our heads together again and we made a new budget and we made our first business plan. Now people get overwhelmed when they hear the phrase business plan.

This was literally the two of us sitting on the floor in my studio, mapping out with a Sharpie marker on an 11 by 17 sheet of paper what we needed to bring in revenue wise to replace his his income and his benefits.

So that included like health care and everything like that. We came up with a big number and then we got to work to figure out what our plan would be to hit that number, how many weddings I had to shoot, at what price, how many portraits I had to shoot, at what price, and how I was going to do that, how I was going to make that a reality. We also set a deadline in. Our deadline was 12 months. We wanted to free him from the corporate world within one year.

We needed to bring in an additional 120,000 in 12 months.

We had a very clear vision and a super clear plan to get there. And guess what? We did it. So that was in 2013. This year will be celebrating ten years where we have both been full time photographers, ten years. I want to tell you what, 2013 was not an easy year. I don't regret it in the least, but I will create another episode on what I would have done differently if I was planning for big growth because I learned a ton that year. I burnt out that year, but we made our goal a reality. We actually brought in an additional 135,000 in 12 months. My business up to that point was really not making a profit before that business plan, before that first plan that we ever made, I was basically making enough to keep my studio open and to support my gear and workshop habits. I definitely was an addict in the building phases of my business. To both of those things. I'm a workshop junkie. I still am to this day. I love being coached, I love learning, I love stretching and growing. And at that point I was new. So gear like we've all been there where we want all the gear and we think that we have to have it. Well, that's what I went from, from no profit really. Just all of my money going right back into the business to being profitable enough that we could free my husband from his job.

He left Engineering and never looked back. And we've supported my family of four ever since then. And every year has been a growth year.

The goal for the next year for 2014 was to increase work life balance for me, because that level of growth, the way that I was doing it, was not sustainable.

I didn't outsource a thing. I literally did all of it on my own and that wasn't sustainable. So the next year, our goal, we wrote a new business plan and it was all about a better work life balance. And since then, we've had really, truly beautiful balance between work and family. And and that's something that I absolutely will advocate for, is if you are feeling overworked, look at how you can. You structure your business to bring in more time off because as creatives we need that time to recharge and refresh. Otherwise, you're going to burn out and you're not going to be able to serve your clients in the way that you're meant to. And eventually it might just lead to you shutting down your business, to be honest, because we need that refresh time, right? We need to serve ourselves as much as we serve our clients. So at this point now, business was just feeling really good.

Every year we were growing 20% year over year. In 2018 was our best year ever. This was the year that we felt unstoppable.

Everything just clicked.
My business was fully booked so early and we had more profit than we really had ever dreamed.
All of our goals were a reality.

I was traveling a ton and working not a ton, and just stuff just felt really good. To be honest, I lost track of my business and I lost track of all of the things that go into being a good business owner. And guess what happened? We went from 2018, our best year ever to 2019 being our worst year ever.

Our business plummeted by 25%.

That's huge. Imagine if your business decreased by 25% in. The crazy thing is, I didn't even notice it for a really long time because I was so enamored with how my business felt in 2018 that I dropped the ball on a ton of just really foundational basic business ownership things like marketing. I am a marketer to my core and I literally walked away from that in 2018. I got really busy, but I was also really focused on work life balance. And so the thing that got left behind was marketing. After those first few wedding expos that I ran to launch my business, my business has grown solely from word of mouth, so referrals and SEO and I completely stopped blogging. Not only did I stop blogging, but I also DIY updated my website and I broke it. So all of the links that I had created were now broken and Google couldn't send people to my site.

What this meant was that my normal lead pool got a lot smaller, and I didn't even notice because I was just out there living my best life. I was literally delusional YOLO, dropping the ball and messing up my website. My leads had basically just completely dried up. Then since we had such a great 2018, we got hit with a big tax bill. Another business basic is to make sure that you're always planning properly for taxes, right? You never want to get that unexpected tax bill of 20,000 like we did in 2019. So shoot, think about where we were.

Bills are up, revenue is down. Leads are down.

Meanwhile, I was traveling all these amazing places. By the time it caught up with me, by the time I really realized what was going on. I was so freaked out. I was, like, instantly stuck. I didn't know how to fix this. And then there was this weird market shift where I had gone from easily booking pretty much all of my consultations without that much like effort to not booking a thing.

I started getting ghosted all of the time.

I would have these consultations that felt really great and I would get a note afterwards that said, We loved talking to you, but we went in another direction. And so this started to like add on to my spiral of just confusion and overwhelm. And really it ended up in depression.

I was like in the fetal position for six months in 2019.

On top of that, we had a ton of personal mishaps. So like multiple cancer scares, I had surgery that year. My littlest Cooper had two surgeries that year. My dog had surgery that year. We got into a car accident where literally Ben hit my car and it resulted in $5,000 worth of damage. My my computer died are hard drive died like a never ending sea of just bad stuff happened to us in 2019, and I could not get out of my way. I couldn't book a single wedding to save my life. My mindset was completely shot, and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I didn't book a single wedding for seven months. So I had been in business for a long time, in very successfully up to this point. And then I got into such a drought where I didn't book a single wedding for seven months.

Can you imagine what that does to your mindset?

Literally, I was crying all of the time. I stopped going to social events. I was depressed and I didn't know what to do. I feel like I could cry right now just talking about it because the level of sadness and just not knowing what to do next was absolutely overwhelming. And then one day my dad reminded me of something that I said to him when I was nine years old.

If you want something, you have to go get it.

That's it. 
If I want change in my life, I had to figure this out. 

I am a business owner first. Business is like ingrained in me, and I was sitting with just shards of a broken business all around me. I needed to pick up the pieces and figure this out. So I rose from the fetal position and I got to work something in my sales process. Something in my marketing was broken. Like, why was I at this point where I was in my business and I was actually decreasing my prices and I was discounting and people still weren't booking. Something had to change. I had to show up differently. Like the old the old methods just weren't cutting it anymore. And I needed a way to really stand out, like in a big way. I, I, I dusted myself off and I committed to fixing this. I literally disassembled my entire business and I revisited my messaging. I revisited how I was, what my customer journey was and what my sales process looked like. And I don't like selling to people, right? Like, I just want people to see my work and see what I'm all about and who I serve and say, yes, that is for me. And so I wanted to create a system that really became like irresistible to my dream clients. And this was something that I committed to. I was ready to stand up and stand out and really call in those dream clients that I wanted to be working for.

I can't even tell you the night and day difference between being in that fetal position and having these, like, broken pieces of business all around me to now doubling our minimum investment and skyrocketing my bookings.

So I went from literally none for seven months to booking 90% of my right fit clients.

And this was all because I figured out was what was broken. I figured out what wasn't working for my old method and why I was getting ghosted and why I was having these people that I wanted to be working with choose someone else over me. And I fixed it with a system. Now I have more job security than I ever dreamed. This system took me through the pandemic. 2020 for us was a better year than 2019, if you can imagine, like where everybody else's businesses were falling apart in 2020. I felt like the hard year that I had had in 2019 made a global pandemic feel like not that bad. So that kind of gives you perspective on how bad 2019 was. And it gave me like it gave me the the strength to get through that pandemic and to help others get through that pandemic. And it's honestly why I'm here today. I don't think I would have started a coaching business. I don't think I would have been so dedicated to helping other creatives really just figure figure this the business in the marketing side of things out.

If I hadn't gone through all of that hardships because now I have more job security than I ever dreamed. I book out a year in advance at life changing rates. Rates that make my dreams a reality. Like we get to give our kids experiences that I would have never dreamed to be possible in my own childhood. Our home is almost paid off.

We spent a month in Hawaii in 2021 during the pandemic.

We're planning a trip to Paris next year, just and even just not having to worry about money, just having that that piece, that financial peace and simply being able to structure my days, the amount of time that I'm working to be able to be present at my boys basketball games, to be home when they get off the bus, just really be there. There is so much possibility in owning your own creative business, and it's why I'm so passionate about helping other creatives really build businesses that are successful.

When I say success, I mean making whatever goals are on your heart a reality, like let's ditch the whole idea of starving artist because successful creatives truly make the world brighter. What you're doing for your clients is giving them such a gift and it's making their life so much better. And so your business should be giving you exactly that back.

All of the goals on your heart are 100% possible in available to you.

Your business can support everything that you want in this life, so make your wildest dreams come true. And I am here to help you get there. I hope that my story was helpful to you to show you what the possibility is and to show you that if you've gone through something hard or if you're struggling with something in your business right now, you can 100% fix it. What you need to do is really get clear on what's going on and then seek the solution. And if you don't have the toolset to be able to get there on your own, look for coaching to help get you there. Like I said, I am a serial. I am like a lifetime learner and coaching has made so much of the difference in my business. If you want something in this life, it's up to you to go get it. So commit to it, dive in and do the work.



Successful creatives make the world so much brighter and I'm here cheering you on every step of the way.