Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lauren Roberts. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lauren, appreciate you joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

When I first started Archie’s Views Photography, I’ll admit I started off blindly. They weren’t joking when they say on average it takes 7 years for a photography business to break even. I had started my business going to every single Little Elm High School football game from 2015 to 2018 when my baby sister, Sydney Archibald, was a cheerleader with the school. From there, word had seemed to get around that Sydney’s older sister was photographing the games, cheerleaders, and halftimes which in turn help received some recognition within the school. I have photographed a number of seniors from Little Elm and the surrounding towns before I started getting involved with the community from photographing local events in the areas from towns and colleges. I’m still growing within the community, but I am still meeting a number of exciting new people as I gain more clients who have became clients for life!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Archie’s Views Photography was first started during my cousin’s Courtney & Justin Abbey’s wedding December 19th, 2015, when I had a small point and shoot DSLR when I had taken a few images of the event that resulted in a few images that I absolutely fell in love with (along with others as well when they saw some of the photos), that it was during that moment that I knew I wanted to start my own business. My daughter, CJ, was just barely a year old at that time and she (along with her brother who was born on my cousin’s 3rd anniversary) were my motivations to try to become my own boss and helped with the decision to go back to college to achieve a Bachelor’s Degree in Digital Photography with a minor in Business and Computers.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

My best source for new clients is simply getting involved with the town and the local areas. By doing this, I can interact with wonderful and interesting people to be able to gain some insight into what type of photography they are looking for to where even I can’t be lucky enough to be their photographer, but I could be able to refer them to someone who was at the time more suitable to help. There have been a few times to where even though I referred some clients to other photographers for some reason or another, they come to me for other styles since of how professionally the referral process was taken care of and how they enjoyed seeing my pictures on my social media accounts as well.

How did you build your audience on social media?

When I first started my social media presence, I’ll admit for a while, most of my fans were family members and friends. Though with enough time and effort, I was able to grow my audience to clients, businesses, schools, and just people who love the photographs I share. Even if you don’t have an audience to interact with, still keep posting updates with yourself, your business, products and even sometimes your clients if they are all right with it. I would occasionally post an image on social media (with their permission of course) would tag them in the post so they can have those on their socials to see how they were fabulously amazing during their sessions!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.archiesviews.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archies_views/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/archiesviewsphotography
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBWZ0H6caSr32Ih-F6nh7cA

Image Credits
Julie Cho, Sampson the Great Dane, Cecilia “CJ” Archibald, Benjamin Roberts, Sydney Archibald