We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christian Wilson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christian, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?
The way I grew to where I am today I feel was a bit of effort, connections, and marketing. To grow your company you have to give a large amount of effort. You are the only one who can make or break it. So go as hard as you can. For connections – From my previous years of playing college football – I was able to meet a lot of people. One of my largest events(which grew my name) was Diner En Blanc. It’s an event where everyone wears white, Invite only, and you bring your own tables and meals. It’s a very large event for the wedding industry as planners and designers go there often. I was able to capture both video and photo at this event and after posting my work – weddings started coming extremely fast. My style of video and photo taking is heavy focusing on the details of the day. The things you see visually but forget when the day is over. When speaking about marketing – I simply just posted and posted and posted daily to catch peoples attention. All content is good content in my opinion. There will be some that hate it and some that love it. The ones that love it is your main focus!
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
My name is Christian Wilson. I am originally born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and moved down to North Carolina to play sports. I am a 4 year graduate – accomplishing my bachelors in communications and minor in Education. I have 2 lovely black golden doodles, a newborn baby, and a great wife! I have always enjoyed photography/videography. I thought it was amazing to create a story with amazing visuals that capture the viewers eyes. It was not until 4 years ago when I decided to say “Let’s try this”. I started out struggling as I could tell my footage was not very good. I did not understand frames, angles, speeds, and everything else that comes with photography. After a year and over 1000 hours probably of Youtube – I figured it out. This does this, that does that, adjust this to fix that, etc.. Then that when things scaled fast. One of the things I am most proud of is I did not quit. I say his because there were many times where I just simply could not figure out how to work the camera. Footage would be shaky, blurry, off center, dark, and everything else you can think of. My first camera was $200 so I knew there had to be something better out there that can make me better. Ultimately, I ended up upgrading which then showed me what I can really do. Fast forwarding to today I book over 25-30 weddings a year, engagements shoots, maternity shoots, and family shoots!
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
I am very interactive with my couples via IG and text messaging. I try my best to get to know the couple as well as have them feel comfortable with me. When doing weddings – I am with the couple for 12 hours, every moment of the day, so the more comfortable they are with me – the better the day goes.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Post Post Post Post! I think nowadays everyone is too worried about that one post they do will get seen by many vs just posting. That is my mentality. The world just enjoys watching footage regardless of what it is. Many of us already know that as some of the most viral photos and videos have 0 education or at times even a point. I mean the most viewed picture on Instagram is of an EGG. So my motto is to just post and see what happens. I believe the more active you are – the higher the chances are to be seen.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.peoproductions.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peo_productions/
Image Credits
All photos were taken by me! :-)