We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christopher Gonzalez. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christopher below.
Christopher, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?
When I first started working within the wedding industry, I expected most clients to remain business clients. That would mean that our connection to each other would be strictly transactional. I couldn’t be happier to say I was completely wrong. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much trust is necessary for a couple to hire you to capture your wedding day. It’s not like walking into Target and picking out a new pillow for your couch, these couples shop around and do significant research before deciding to hire their photographers and videographers. So when we get hired, its a great show of faith from the couples that they trust us more than anyone else to capture what’s considered to be the most special day of their entire life. Because of this, we make sure we truly build a relationship with our couples. We want to know what’s important to them; and us forming this connection with them allows us to share in their joy on the wedding day. We get to see months of stress and diligent planning finally paid off in celebration. We get to translate one day into a permanent memory they can revisit. So because we build personal relationships, its only natural that a personal touch is extended to the final delivery of our “product”. Initially, the plan was to have our final product delivered digitally, but once we worked our first wedding we realized our couples deserved something tangible that allowed a moment of grandeur for them to revisit their wedding. So we began to create a wooden memory box filled with loose pictures, a USB with all of their files, a personal letter written from our team thanking our couples for trusting us, and a few personal touches onto the box. But our favorite way to show our appreciation to our couples, is for the couples who have known us personally before hiring us. We all know how much of a sticky situation it is to hire friends, especially for something as big as a wedding. So what we decided to do, since these were deliveries we would be making in person, was create a canvas print of our favorite picture we capture from the day. The joy these couples have when they first open it and see their canvas is something so inexplainable. It makes us happy to see them so happy. Its the simplest most fulfilling way we can show how much we appreciate their trust through the whole process.
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?
My name is Christopher Gonzalez and its my privilege to capture a wedding day on camera. While we first set out to strictly focus on videography, we developed a similar passion for photography and now we offer both video and photo to our couples. We first got our start working weddings by the literal grace of God. We were blessed to develop a friendship with the owner of a venue in South Florida; this owner invited us to a Bridal Expo. We had no idea what this even was, and we were so overwhelmed by what we discovered there. Every vendor had years worth of experience and it showed. However, we were fortunate enough to get hired on the spot by one bride. This one bride taking a chance on us changed the trajectory of our lives and our business. We wouldn’t be where we are today if that one bride had decided not to hire us. The next few years following that day have led to some amazing weddings and some wonderful connections to the couples who have hired us. We wouldn’t change it for the world. Now we can confidently say we belong in the industry and offer not only a great product, but our attention to detail and our intentional focus on establishing relationship with our couples sets us apart. This allows us to go beyond a business transaction and truly capture the relationship of our couples through the moments of their wedding day.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
I think being raised on the idea of “don’t put off for tomorrow, what you can do today” has been a driving force in my work ethic. Previously I mentioned that we were first hired by a bride we met at a Bridal Expo. At this expo every other vendor working in our field was able to display samples of their previous work. They had albums on display, or TV monitors playing their videos on a loop; we had nothing of the sort. The only thing we had to show anyone was a one minute video I had uploaded to Instagram the night before of some footage we captured from a friend’s wedding reception two days prior – not the wedding itself, just the reception. So we obviously felt under qualified compared to the other vendors. On top of that, we couldn’t even display this video because the TV we had at our booth was broken! So we really had nothing to market ourselves. Somehow, this bride had managed to see our video on her Instagram before coming to the Bridal Expo. She loved the video! Her making the connection that we were the ones who published that video was the driving force behind her hiring us. Had I not worked tirelessly the one day between the wedding and the expo to create the video and upload it to Instagram, we would have had nothing to show and probably wouldn’t have gotten hired that day, and we certainly wouldn’t be where we are today!
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
I think most creatives would agree with me on two things: our mind works differently and our actual time spent working is incredibly overly simplified and underestimated. It’s not usually a bad thing for non-creatives to not recognize these factors. You can’t know what you don’t know. It’s funny cause my sister, who helps me with capturing weddings, will sometimes catch me standing and staring while I’m deep in thought and question me on what I’m doing but what I’m actually doing is mentally visualizing certain shots and angles to shoot from. I’m always thinking and processing how I can use the setting in front of me to creatively capture with a camera what my eyes are seeing. Even more so, I will intentionally shoot footage with the visual of the final video or image already in mind to help my editing time later on. Speaking of editing time, many non-creatives are unaware of how much time is spent behind the scenes, after the wedding, actually combing through footage and editing it all together into something that makes sense. It’s not a process of a few hours, sometimes it’s not even a process of a few days or even weeks! So as creatives, we always try to explain that we charge with our time in mind, and its hard to convey that to non-creatives who don’t understand just how much time of work goes unseen.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.vistapointvideography.com
- Instagram: @_vistapoint
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClEub0tWpBIFEfJOhbEGekw
Image Credits
VistaPoint Videography