Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mackenzie and Josh Jakola. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Mackenzie and Josh, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you take vacations? Why or why not?
Something Josh and I (Mackenzie) pride ourselves on is making sure to keep each other and our family a priority. For us, this means only taking on so many films a month. We aren’t the videographers who strive to book every single weekend or do double headers consistently, especially during through the Summer (ie: a wedding Saturday and another wedding Sunday). We LOVE our Washington summers, so make sure to enjoy them! On top of blocking one full weekend (Friday through Monday for us) a month and dedicating that to ourselves, our family and our personal friendships, we also plan quarterly vacations for us. This isn’t always a “get on a plane for a week” type of trip, at least 2 of the vacations are little road trips a few hours out of our hometown for a few days- either spent in the mountains or the ocean. We’ve found that these trips trips every few months help give us the boost of energy we need, really fill our cups and we come back feeling more inspired, motivated and refreshed. Sometimes it can be hard to step away if you’ve got a lot on your plate. As business owners, there’s always something to do whether it’s admin items or editing/filming but the burnout in today’s fast paced type world is so real and we absolutely love what we do. We want to continue to love our work, our people and our projects and in order to do that we need to take care of ourselves. With any business owner/entrepreneur we know we always, always emphasis making sure to give yourself the time you need to avoid burn out. That might not be a vacation every quarter for everyone but giving yourself weekends or a couple weekdays off back to back to enjoy something for you and step away from your work is so crucial. I tell people, remember when you worked a 9-5 Monday through Friday and were so happy for the weekend?! To have two days off from work! You still totally need to do that as a business owner too. We get loving your job so much that you can’t seem to step away or feel overwhelmed with your to-do list but your productivity is much higher if you allow yourself some rest vs trying to give 100% when you’re sitting at less. Don’t loose sight of your passion and why you started your biz. Give yourself the freedom you deserve.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Mountain & Maker Films is a husband & wife owned business specializing in wedding and business videography in Washington State. We are based out of Kitsap County and absolutely love our hometown- from all the small businesses here to all the beautiful wedding venues! There are so many in the area! When Josh was a teenager he enjoyed filming and he got me interested in it when we started dating 10 years ago. We used to vlog our dates if we went on hikes or explored new places. When we got married in Summer 2018 I mentioned to Josh in the Fall that we should see if anyone would be interested in video marketing and we got our first business film inquiry January of 2o19, followed by our first wedding film inquiry for Summer 2019. We absolutely loved doing both and got everything we needed to start our business. We initially thought this would be a fun side-hustle for us that would allow us to pay for fun vacations as this continued while we both worked full time careers through early 2020. We picked up a small handful of more business films and a couple more weddings and then the pandemic hit in the Spring and we were both laid off of our jobs. At this time, we both obviously had a lot of time to think about what we wanted to do next. We invested in all new gear, invested in a lot of education and courses and told ourselves we were going to commit to this becoming something we could do full time. We also knew we wanted to start a family soon and I (Mackenzie) always dreamed of being a stay at home mom and thought having the business would be really great for us. Fast forward to December 2022, I quit my day job, our daughter was 1 1/2 and we hit the pedal to the metal to have our film business be my full time job and we haven’t looked back or second guessed it since. We have filmed almost 100 films in the last 2 years between businesses and weddings. We have used our marketing backgrounds to help businesses best implement their films and create strategies to help their businesses grow with the use of video and we use our customer service background (and big love for weddings) to help our wedding couples feel comfortable, loved and a part of our family.
We are so proud of the success we’ve been able to accomplish with this business being something we didn’t put much effort into for years and then it really taking off after we knew we were passionate about what we were doing and the service we were providing. We’ve been nominated for countless leadership awards, videographer awards and recognized in our community by not only our films but the experience people have with us. We strive to provide not just great films but be good people. We want to be your friend, your business partner, your family on your wedding day. You aren’t “just” hiring a videographer and getting “just” a film with us, you are getting an entire experience and our full attention and dedication. We put ourselves in your shoes to tell a story that is felt and not just seen. We pride ourselves on our working having emotion and making you FEEL something when you watch it. If you’re looking for someone to simply show up, film and deliver your video, that isn’t us. We are committed from the initial inquiry and even past the delivery of your film to provide excellent service and care. We remain friends with all our clients as we make sure to get to know everyone we work with more personally and they get to with us as well. We know getting in front of the camera can feel uncomfortable, we take pride in knowing we break those barriers with our clients/couples and feel that we do that by getting more personal with them. If you’re looking for a friend, a cheerleader but also a professional in the industry, that’s us.
How’d you meet your business partner?
This is a little off from the question but it’s one we get asked often in terms of “how do you and your husband work so well together”? Haha The short answer is we both know what we’re good that and know how to stay in our own lane haha! Primarily, I (Mackenzie) work on all the admin items. I’m the one all over our social media (Josh doesn’t even have the log in haha), I do all the emails and communications, all the meetings, all the prep leading up to the film (business and weddings), timelines, storyboarding. Everything before your film day is all me. Plus all the back end items like bookkeeping, taxes, gifts, calendaring etc is also all me. Then come film day it’s tag team. Josh is head shooter for business film days and I’m his sidekick. I’m lead shooter on wedding days and Josh is my sidekick. We have shot lists, timelines, storyboards, plans etc that we both know we’re responsible for. Once film day is complete I kind of pass the baton. Josh is the audio engineer and editing master. I do help a lot along the way with creative input, song selection, clip priority etc but Josh is the one at the computer actually editing it all together. We pow-wow every few days to review what he’s done and if we both might have suggestions or edits and then once the film is complete, it’s back to me to communicate the delivery and next steps.
So, that doesn’t really answer how we met but it does answer our biggest asked question on how we can work together. We know what are strengths are and we support them. I think it’s awesome to also have two different sets of eyes and different perspectives in the mix. You get double the talent with us ;)
Have you ever had to pivot?
Our biggest pivot was when we started to get really busy starting in January 2022. We started booking business films and weddings that started to overlap and it was proving to be hard to shift from business film mindset to wedding film mindset. It really threw us for a loop when busy season (Summer) rolled around and we had some many weddings on weekends and then so many business films on weekdays. We started to feel really overwhelmed. I recall sitting down in October (2022) and we decided we need to change something and so we both decided going forward that we would stop taking on business films come May and not start filming those again until last September, dedicating May through September to our wedding clients. We are in the midst of that right now and it’s working SO WELL for us. Our creativity this year is really amazing to see as we can focus certain months to businesses and certain months to weddings. We were nervous about clients who may not book us because of how we wanted our calendars like that but we’ve not had a single issue as our clients are our ideal ones and want to book US and not “just” a film so they are willing to work within our schedule. Business films and wedding films are two totally different things. We didn’t think that it would be an issues for us, and wasn’t even a timing thing or feeling too busy, it was simply the fact that we work with/edit two different ways with these two types of clients and it was too much for us to handle mixing those together.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mountianandmakerfilms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mountainandmakerfilms/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mountainandmakerfilms
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/mountain-maker-films
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MountainAndMakerFilms/featured
- Other: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/mountainandmakerfilms
Image Credits
The first photo of just us with the white background is by Pimper Photography Shots 1, 2 and 5 are by Vines Studios Shot 3 is by Debbie Gillman Photography The other shots are by us. And as we emailed earlier, with your permission, here are links to 2 films we would love to have featured :) vimeo.com/mountainandmakerfilms/sadieandmax vimeo.com/mountainandmakerfilms/nicholeandbrian We have a lot of shorter film content on our Instagram as well if you’d like to direct readers to that. Full length films are found on our website and Vimeo page (we are currently starting up our Youtube page :)