We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katy Weaver a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Katy, appreciate you joining us today. Before we talk about all of your success, let’s start with a story of failure. Can you open up about a time when you’ve failed?
I recently had to fire a client which felt like a massive failure to me, but ultimately taught me a LOT about business, even in my 15th year.
This couple reached out about their wedding and had a phone consult with me. I had a little bit of a hard time connecting with them over our call, and didn’t really expect them to book. But they booked me anyways a few weeks after the call. The difficult thing was that they wanted me to split my normal coverage over two days, at two different venues. One of the venues requires a ride up a mountain, and they wanted me to ride up early and ride back down later, despite being beyond the number of hours they had booked. This didn’t sit well with me and it felt like my boundaries were being crossed, and I already felt really frustrated. I was excited to take photos at the venue but felt like I was about to get taken advantage of.
Fast forward several months and we meet up in person for the first time. It was terrible. The entire meeting felt like I was pulling teeth – SO awkward and like no matter what I said, I couldn’t get a read on how they were feeling. I went into major people-pleasing mode and it felt deeply inauthentic. I just could not connect with them or with the parent they brought to the meeting. The parent added “can we please wrap this up” and made me feel even worse toward the end. I went home and stupidly emailed them my typical after meeting summary of what we had discussed, but I told my husband it was the worst meeting I had ever been in and I wanted to cry. Everything in my gut was screaming, THIS IS WRONG.
After sleeping on it, the next day I decided I couldn’t move forward. I spent hours crafting an email, reading it and re-writing it, and finally sent it to the client, essentially telling them that I felt like we weren’t a good fit and I wasn’t going to be able to do justice to the beautiful wedding they were planning. Everyone deserves to have a photographer who is excited to be there and really connected to them and their vision. There was no way I would be able to feel that way at these two events. I offered a full refund and sent a list of talented photographer friends who were in the same price range and available on their date. I thought the client would agree and think I was doing them a favor by being the one to bring it up – but no! They liked me and were completely blindsided by my email. I was shocked. How did my normal systems and booking processes go so wrong? How could I be in business for so long and still run into this?
After some back and forth, the client accepted that I wanted to back out, took the refund, and hired one of my amazing friends within the next week. When it was over, I felt a deep sense of relief, but also of failure.
This one incident led me to re-analyze my systems and change one big thing. I’ve been doing consults over the phone for years, but after this experience, I knew I had to bite the bullet and switch to video calls. I’ve always been more stressed about meeting over video, and I LOVE to take a ton of written notes during consult calls, but I wanted to avoid this ever happening again. I feel like with video, you really get a sense of how people are interacting with you, and with each other, and that awkwardness would have been much more apparent from the start. I signed up for an AI notetaker app, and my recent switch to consults over video gives me so much more confidence that I will truly connect (or NOT connect) with clients, and that it will help both of us make the right choice before a contract is signed.
It was difficult and uncomfortable to fire a client, rather than muster through a contract I knew I didn’t want. But at the end of the day I felt empowered, the opposite of desperate, and I knew that I was serving that client best by letting them go. I hope I never have to do this again, but I also know that if a situation arises, I will be able to handle it much better this time.
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?
I’m a wedding and portrait photographer in Portland, Oregon. I started my business in 2009 when I was 20 years old, in the middle of attending college at Oregon State University. I had been interested in photography for years, and grew a following through the website Flickr in the early 2000s. I was one of those teens with a perfect academic record and dreams of attending medical school – just because that was the “esteemed” path to take. I loved photography with all my heart, but I didn’t think it could be a real job. After 2 years in college, some real-life experience, changing my major from Biology to New Media Communications, and working as Editor in Chief of my daily college newspaper, I felt confident enough to start a business. I always had a back-up plan (go to grad school!) in case it didn’t work out. But it did! The college environment was the perfect incubator, allowing me to connect with so many amazing people and hone my skills. When I graduated 2 years later, I had created a full-time job for myself. I lived with my parents to save money for my first year after school, and then was able to purchase my first home 2 years later at age 24. I never thought something as fun as photography could lead me toward any type of success, but I was wrong. This career has taught me SO much and brought me so much joy over the past 15 years.
To put things in perspective, I didn’t even own a smartphone yet when I first started my business. Now I use AI daily for photo-editing and other tasks. Its crazy how much this industry, and my business has changed! Right now my focus is primarily on photographing weddings, but I also do a lot of individual portrait work and have a budding commercial portfolio as well.
There are SO many talented, incredible photographers out there and it can feel daunting to stand out in this industry, or wonder, “am I bringing anything new to the table?’ I feel like my greatest skills are in the consistency of my work and the way I communicate with my clients. I know that people can usually identify a Katy Weaver image when they see it. I know that from start to finish, I will take care of my clients and show up SO fully for them at their weddings or their portrait shoots. I’ve created a brand that goes beyond creative, beautiful imagery; its also about connecting with people and storytelling in a trustworthy, dependable, honest way. I really work to go beyond what is surface-level, ask deep questions, and anticipate people’s needs.
What’s been the best source of new clients for you?
Over half of all my inquiries in the past year have come from Google or other search engines. Optimizing my website for SEO has been pivotal to my success.
I’ve had many iterations of my website over the years – Smugmug, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and now a custom static-generated site build on Hugo with the help of my amazing software developer husband. Before this current website, I I used a strange combination of a Squarespace website with an old WordPress blog. The blog was key – I blogged SO MUCH when I was starting out in my career, and all those blog posts, while low-quality – led me to start ranking for some top keywords in my area. When I eventually transitioned my website and blog, I worked with a local SEO coach Dylan Howell and he taught me ALL about how to create a simple sitemap, cornerstone pages, and how to index a lot of my past blog content that was no longer serving me well. These simple tips, when implemented on my lightning fast, unconventional, static-generated site, boosted my ranking to the top page of google for many of my search terms.
Once I learned the basics of good SEO; a simple website structure, usefully written content, not cannibalizing myself by targeting the same keywords on all my pages – my business really took off and jumped to the next level. This helped me get more inquiries, book more work, stay in higher demand, and eventually be able to raise my prices and set better boundaries around my work-life balance.
My own wedding photographer, Catalina Jean, has INCREDIBLE SEO resources available and I highly recommend her content to people who want to learn more! https://indiaearleducation.com/shop/products/seo-for-creatives
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
For a few days back in July of 2023, I was a wedding photographer who didn’t own a single camera.
That’s right, I got robbed.
Not like, someone broke into my car robbed.
No, someone broke into my HOME, 5 minutes after my family left for the airport. They disconnected our front door camera, shut off our wifi, and then systematically stole things out of every single room of my house. They may have returned more than once that day. While we were able to recover footage of what the perpetrator looked like, we never caught him, and I never got any of my gear back. Or my jewelry. Or checkbooks, car keys, or my massive RAID array with all my photos from 2019-2023 on it. Gone.
I’ve always been so paranoid about my gear getting stolen while I am out – if I have my camera bag with me, it is physically on my body at all times, never in the car, never out of sight. I never thought someone would target my HOME though.
It was one of my worst nightmares come to life. It was the one weekend that month that I decided to leave my gear at home, to take a true family vacation for my uncle’s wedding in Denver. It was my first time flying on a plane with my 7 month old baby and I was distracted! What did I forget to do as I left the house at 6am that morning? Set our security alarm. That one small thing may have saved me close to $30,000 in loss.
Having my home broken into was violating and traumatic, but having all my gear stolen and hard drives taken was another thing entirely – especially from a business perspective. After we got home from our trip, I had about 5 days to put my house back together and cobble together enough gear for my next wedding weekend. It was July, so I was smack in the middle of my busiest time of year.
This could have been business-ending, but what it taught me was that I had decently great systems in place to protect myself. While I may have made a catastrophic error with the security system, in many ways I was able to bounce back after this event very quickly.
First, I had my brand new laptop and one tiny hard drive with me on the plane, with photos that I was currently working on and hadn’t been delivered. Because of this, and because of the way I backup my non-delivered images, my clients were completely unaffected by my loss. No images were lost that hadn’t been delivered yet. On my clients side, there was no impact. I just lost a lot of my own personal work and past RAW files.
Second, I had business insurance. This was a plus and a minus. A plus, because my insurance covered a big portion of the loss – $16,500 worth of gear. A minus, because I had been auto-renewing my insurance for several year (big no-no) and hadn’t updated it in awhile. So the insurance was great, but it didn’t come close to covering how much was stolen. I remember dropping 20K the next day at the camera store, having to call my credit card company to bump up my monthly limit, and thinking wow, I have never spent this much in one day other than on a house or a car.
Third – I am lucky that I had savings and a healthy chunk of money in my business account to cover me when I had to buy all-new gear. I have always erred on the side of having a rainy-day fund in my business account, especially when business booms in the summer and slows in the winter. Did it suck to spend so much money all at once on new gear? Absolutely. But did I survive it? I sure did.
The lessons I learned from this experience were:
-Always set the alarm. Have a security system that WORKS.
-Never tell anyone other than immediate family or friends when you leave town; don’t post on social media publicly that you are away.
-Don’t be obvious packing up suitcases in the driveway
-Have offsite backups. My Backblaze account only used to backup my computer, now it backs up ALL my drives and my archives
-For photos that are undelivered, make sure you have backups upon backups upon backups. I did luckily.
-Update your business insurance every year and make sure its up to date with all the gear you actually own
-Keep a healthy rainy-day fund in your business account for emergencies
-Therapy, friends, family and community are all wonderful resources when things go horribly wrong. Its okay to cry and lean on them when times are tough.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.katyweaver.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katyweaverphotography/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katyweaverphotography
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/katyweaverportraits/
Image Credits
All images by Katy Weaver Photography