We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Blair a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Michelle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?
We work with clients from all over the world. It is not uncommon to receive thoughtful gifts, tips, and/or cards. On a couple of occasions, however couples have brought us gifts for our dogs. This had us in tears! Our dogs, our lives, the reason we work. The couples had read on our website in the about us page about our two Boston terriers, Cooper and Bentley. They had brought them toys and treats based on what the website said they liked. Keep in mind that these are complete strangers, we had not met them until the day of their wedding. It was incredibly thoughtful of those couples, and we will never forget it. We even made posts about it on all of the social media platforms.
Michelle, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
We have been wedding photographers in Nashville for the past 13 years. In that time we had grown to a large company with 28 employees in three states. We were booking over 100 weddings a year and offering services of photography, videography, DJ, up lighting, photo booth And the occasional elopement. We were very blessed to have success right out of gate. Weddings are very seasonal so we would find ourselves with downtime in the winter and hottest summer months. Several times during these dry spells we created a new business, window cleaning and carpet cleaning to name a couple. Get it to the point of being successful with reviews, contracts and customers on the books. and then sell it when weddings picked up again. We had joked from time to time when we would have an elopement, “what if we could make a living just doing elopements?”, and we would laugh. After about 10 years in the wedding industry we were feeling a little burnt out and wanted to scale back. We ended up selling our big traditional wedding photography business with the stipulation that we would still be able to do elopements. We rebranded as Elopements of Nashville. It was the best decision we have ever made!
We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.
Oh, yes! We’ve sold several businesses. Even though our wedding photography business kept us very busy, July, August and late November through March were slow times. We would not only use those months to make any changes to our existing offerings, locations, pricing, etc, but on a few occasions we started new companies. One time we drove all the way to Dothan Alabama to buy a carpet cleaning van. The purchase included lessons on how to use the equipment, products, types of carpet and services to offer. We returned home and got to work building a website, advertising and networking. We barely got this one rolling when we decided to sell to a restoration startup. A few years later we started a cleaning company that offered carpet and window cleaning. It quickly took off and window cleaning was where it was at! In no time we had quarterly contracts and reviews from happy clients. We worked it for a few months and when weddings picked up again sold the company to a young man and his business partner. I remember being heartbroken to see that just a few months later they had several bad reviews, it felt as though they had kicked my dog. We then sold the wedding photography business a short time later. In our opinion, buying an existing business is much easier than starting fresh. We started the businesses more as a hobby during downtime, but once wedding season picked back up for us we wouldn’t have time to work both businesses.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Reviews, reviews reviews! Having a lot of really good reviews in multiple places is a must for the success of any business. If you search out your competition and they have 100 reviews, your goal is to have 101. Reviews are also the hardest part of being a business owner. For every 100 customers you have chances are you only have 10 customers that will take the time to leave a review. Unless they feel you’ve done a bad job. In that case reviews are very easy to get. There are a lot of things on the backend that people don’t think about sometimes such as the website, CRM, back office, advertising, etc. All of these things combined can make or break your success, but reviews are what people want to see when choosing where to spend their money.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.elopementsnashville.com
- Instagram: ElopementsofNashville
- Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ElopementsofNashville
Image Credits
Elopements of Nashville