We were lucky to catch up with Marykate Stallings recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Marykate thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?
I am happier as a business owner than working for someone else. I think I would feel more trapped working for someone else, without the flexibility to take off the days I want. I also do not like people telling me when I’ve done something incorrectly, or how to do something in general, or what the rules are I definitely have a little problem with authority and respecting rules. And I love having the freedom to take on as little or as much work as I’d like. As long as I save up money and bring a laptop to work remotely there’s nothing stopping me from going on a month long trip at any point and that’s pretty awesome!
That being said, I think my like would be easier if I worked for someone else. Someone else would have the pressure of the business succeeding or failing, I would just need to do my one job correctly. While I wouldn’t make my own hours I would have consistent hours, with a consistent income, and could stop working when I would leave work! That would be the biggest upside of a normal job, being able to leave work and being done with working for the day, and able to free up my thoughts with other things! As a business owner I can never really clock out and be done, there’s always more things to do, and work on, and clients inquiring. People joke about how they left their real job since they hated working a 9-5, but now they work 24/7 for themselves, but it’s so true! I also have such a hard time not putting my own money back into my business, I’ve done better in the past coupe years about keeping business and personal money separate but I don’t do it perfectly and still dip into my personal money often for business expenses. The concept of working for someone else and having 100% of my income from them being used on myself is pretty mind blowing.
That being said I am still growing my business, and have great plans to one day have several employees and managers keeping everything running and I can just relax and travel and enjoy my freedom and money without needing to work constantly. So at that point, it will be a million times better than a normal job, and I believe I can get to that point quicker by growing my own business than working for someone else.
Marykate, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’ve always been interested in photography, since I received my first camera at like age 6. I decided I wanted to be a photographer when I was about 1o and have been extremely focused on making that happen since then. In Middle School I photographed flowers and trees, and wanted to be a wild life photographer, in High School I found the amazing photographer Brooke Shaden and she inspired me to start doing conceptual photography which is more art like and extremely edited, so I saved up for a real camera, turned a corner of my parents garage into a studio. I spent every weekend doing photoshoots with my friends and starting to show my work in local small galleries and art competitions. The work was somewhat dark and always had deeper meanings to it and was a great way for me to get all my teenage angst out. (I later on got to to an artist retreat she hosted and got to learn directly from her!) I graduated Highschool a year early as I was so excited to go to art school already, but everything happened too quickly I ended up needing a gap year to figure out what college I would attend. In this time, I took local classes and visited photography conventions and found the incredible photographer Sue Bryce. I joined her photography education program where she taught photographers how to create a business and make real money with their photography. I was all out of teenage angst at this point so my darker meaningful art had gone away and I needed a new genre anyway. So I started photographing women, and seniors in her style at this point while building a real legit business. I loved the business aspect of it but photographing women was somewhat boring. I was also babysitting a lot at the time to pay for my business’ startup costs and loved working with kids. So I realized maybe I should put those two things together and photograph kids instead! Once I switched to this everything clicked, I was immediately doing really fun photoshoots with adorable dresses, mermaid tails, glitter, and eventually unicorns too! I loved working with the kids and their parents loved having a photographer with the same energy level as their excited kids! My photoshop skills I learned years earlier really helped me stand out from the crowd, I was able to photograph parents out of the photos when their kids needed them nearby, I could edit out all the snot, stains, and drool that comes with kids. I could do “face swaps” which is when siblings don’t smile at the same time so I combine multiple photos so they’re all smiling at once. As well as adding extra magic to the photos like more glitter falling down, or butterflies and fairies flying around them. I did this for a year or two, just all kids of whimsical and fun children photography. Then I did a handful of first birthday photoshoots, and those completely took off and gave me consistent bookings and the ability to upgrade my studio space. While I had started with a corner of my parents garage several years prior, at this point I had taken over the whole large garage and renovated it but at the end of the day it was a still a garage and I was so excited to get my first real space! I got an office space in a large commercial building – right in the middle of the pandemic so June 2020 but ignored thoughts of how bad the timing was and got it anyway. My business only grew more once I was in there and I was doing many shoots every week – most of which were first birthdays. A year later I outgrew this space and now have a really wonderful place with my own entrance, bathroom, kitchen, storage room, and room for just my adorable kids dresses I’ve collected over the years! I still specialize in children photography, my goal with my shoots is to make the experience easy on the parents and fun for the kids! I can provide all the props, dresses, and cake for a cake smash shoot so they can just show up and have fun! My style is very bright and colorful, and I still do lots of photoshop to make the photos perfect!
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Get every social media there is, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, doesn’t matter if it’s something you use personally if there’s people on there then there’s people that can give you money. Post often and ask your clients to tag you & share your work! Instagram Reels & Tiktok are the most important ones now so I’d highly suggest learning how to make those work for your business.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
In the past few years Google has been the best source of clients for me! I worked very hard for several years on my website and learning SEO and hiring someone to help me too. So when people look up things like “Houston first birthday photographer” I’m very high up on the results so they can easily find me. There is a lot of competition on Facebook, and a lot of people that are not running a proper business on there so they can charge way less than me and people can book them instead . However, everyone on the first page of Google’s search results is running a real business so our pricing is similar. People rarely look past the second page of Google for a service so if you can get yourself on there then you’ll guarantee at least a lot of people will look at your site! Then it’s your job to entice them enough to book/contact you.
Contact Info:
- Website: mkstallingsphotography.com
- Instagram: @mkstallingsphotography
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MKStallingsPhotography
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/mkstallings-photography-houston-2
Image Credits
All taken by me aka MKStallings Photography