2011 Business Highlights

It’s the small things that can make all the difference.  Like, what worked in 2011 and what didn’t for Brita Photography.  One of the things I love most about owning our own business is learning something new every single day.  It’s the small things!  Along the way, we made mistakes and learned what worked, what did not work, and how we can improve.  In retrospect, I wanted to share a few of our best decisions made last year, that will make 2012 even better.

1. Saying no:  It’s okay to turn down clients.  This may seem to go against the grain; it was one of the hardest things to learn, but had the biggest impact on our business.  We want to focus on quality, not quantity.  In order to deliver quality weddings to exceed our expectations (and keep our sanity!), we can only accept a certain number of events and sessions per year.  This is what works for us.  We want to handle everything ourselves:  From the initial email to the final delivery of our package.
2. Enrolling in Pixifi:  A time saver & a life saver.  Before this year, we haven’t explored the option of using a system to manage our leads, clients or events.  Thankfully, we gave it a try and are so glad we did!  We wrote a full review on how much we love Pixifi (click here to read it).  Just imagine a place where studio management = peace of mind.
3. Managing our time:  This has been the hardest to learn.  That fine line between work and life.  Work/life balance?  What’s that?  It’s something that we learned how to manage and we will be much better at in 2012.  We have a super organized list of to-do items (urgent vs. not urgent), and even schedule for “down time.”  Otherwise, we’d be working from the moment we wake up to when we go to bed.  It looks something like this:  Eat, work, eat, work, eat, work, sleep. Repeat.  Been there, done that.  Now that we have an understanding of what every week looks like and how we need it to run…we have  little bit more life in our schedule.
4. Updating our blog, hosting company:  We have used ProPhoto Blogs  since we started our first blog ever.  We just recently upgraded to ProPhoto 4 and switched our hosting to BluHost.  Those 2 changes have saved us hours of  time.  From the inserting all images at once feature in ProPhoto, and using a hosting company that can load a page in under 5 minutes (who knew?!), we’ve saved time, energy and stress.
5. Switching to Mac: I thought long and hard about this one before making the switch.  Because I never had a Mac, I never understood the value of one.  I always thought, well all the cool designers and photographers have them.  But I don’t need it.  My PC can do everything Apple can do.  So, years went by…and my increasing frustration for my slow, frozen, new PC led me to the nearest electronic’s store.  I wandered around Best Buy and played with all the demo Macs on display.  They were so pretty.  I wanted one to just sit on my desk!  After speaking with the Apple representative, I was sold and went home with my first Apple product:  An iMac.  Not only does it look pretty darn awesome on my desk, but it’s lightning fast (thus, saving me more time & energy).  And, I’m one of those photographers now and proud of it!  With all the time we saved, we bought a MacBook Air, too (which I can use to remote into the iMac).  It’s amazing.  Fast, powerful, and pretty.  :)

We bought this mug at a Starbucks in Shanghai (check out pictures from our trip, here)!  We always buy coffee mugs as a souvenir to every place we travel (we love coffee).  I love that it has a dragon on it!

We also love Starbucks :)
Okay, one more picture of this mug :)  The right picture:  One of my favorite places & where I spend most of my time.  
AND, we just received wedding invitations from one of our bride & grooms, Ian & Victoria!!  We have the most amazing clients – it’s so awesome.  These invitations are freaking cool, too!  Did I mention that Ian is a designer?  He MADE those invitations.  Ahhhh!  I just love how creative they are.