We were lucky to catch up with Maggie Banaei recently and have shared our conversation below.
Maggie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with 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.
How we scale up! We can’t say it was an easy path or it happened overnight. As we all know these days social media and movies tent to cover up and polish unseen details to a successful business. As business owners we love to share our story in more depth with a glance to the ups and downs we faced during past years. We started photography as our hobby about 8 years ago and somehow it stopped because we were in process of moving to the USA. Once we were settled, we started it again as a weekend part time job. We had to educate ourselves because we face a new market with differed cultures and expectations. So, we join a company who outsource photographers and videographers. It wasn’t easy because we must change our workflow, artistic touches and other things to meet the specific requirements of the company. We also couldn’t connect with the client who got assigned to us until a week or two prior to the big day. But we can’t ignore the opportunity to learn many new things about our new multi racial market. Basically, it was a paid practice with less responsibilities which led us to focus more about learning new cultures, expectations, and styles. Less than a year, we felt confident to start our own company while we still had our full time 8 to 5 jobs and must communicate with our clients which was challenging because we must be efficient; ask right questions and make relevant suggestions to build a trustworthy relationship with the couple/client to share their thoughts & ideas. A wedding photographer not only captures the wedding but also must know how to act as a coordinator to handle the flow of a wedding day, make the couple feel comfortable to be themselves to capture the raw emotions while they’re enjoying the day. Building a smooth workflow system, editing, staying up to date, client communications, marketing etc. … are not easy tasks to get handled by two people but we did it together. We quit our full-time jobs in 2021, needed so much courage to do so but we did it and can’t say how much we feel satisfied now. We’re proud to own our photography & videography business. Sharing our story with y’all empower us to continue moving forward. Looking back to two years ago when I used to work for Amazon as a project field engineer and traveling weekly, while Hank was working full time for TI as an engineer, tells us that it wasn’t easy overnight path to be where we are now, but it makes us realize how important to focus on our dreams and stay appreciative of everything; bitter criticism or COVID era! Once COVID hit and most of events got canceled or postponed, we thought it’s the time to learn more about how to grow our business and how to handle such situations. We focus on ourselves as business owners like where we need to educate and improve. All the efforts got us to be here now! We truly appreciate our clients supports who trust us and helped with coming back again and refer us to their family and friends.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Hank & I met 10 years ago and fell in love after a year. We wanted a career expressing more about our artistry souls and make it last forever. So, found photography as our mutual soul that allows us to record moments and feelings. Our artistic photography style is letting people enjoy comfortable moments while we capture true emotions that will remind reminiscent of lovely days in future. During these years we had the opportunity to meet many good fellow photographers and cinematographer and finally gathered the best team to capture your beautiful moments. We appreciate your interest in our work; knowing there are so many companies and even couples who do either or both photo and video, we are super excited to be able to spend time with you and your lovely family and friends on your beautiful day to bring different style and elements while capturing your true emotions. We strive to be your one choice for both photography and cinematography! Even though we live in Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas we accept and thoroughly enjoy weddings all over the World.
These days our main focus are weddings and 1-hour sessions such as family & engagement. Recently we found in-studio sessions as our new interests so we’re expanding by adding a new brand specifically for in-studio portraits. Currently, we’re building our portfolio and will lunch our page soon in social “Sweat Miracles by Maggie & Hank”.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Being honest led us to build and grow our clientele. We try our best to be honest with our clients like not to suggest extra services or products while we know it’s not the best fit, ask appropriate questions and led them realize what key points they have to pay attention, make them feel comfortable during the entire session to loosen up a bit to capture true emotions are considered as our strategies to build trustworthy relations. We believe couples spend so much time and money to choose each vendor to create their dream wedding so it’s very important to feel like them so they understand our goal is being besides them in this one big day journey.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Self education! Hank & I try to learn daily. We both follow many fellow artist photographers and videographers in different social media platforms, they are our main source of inspiration. We learn a lot from all other artists around the world; technical aspects and different artistic views. As artists, we have to stay up-to-date about new technologies including our cameras & gears, know current styles, and new trends. We can tell consistent growth build our reputation within the market. With the high speed of growing technology we -as users- must spend time to learn them on daily basis.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.maggieportraits.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maggie_portraits/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maggieportraits
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMfPgO-rUROU6hg7sM4qWSQ
- Other: https://www.expertise.com/tx/dallas/wedding-photography#MaggiePortraits