Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Morgan + Joel Borcik. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Morgan + Joel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

The biggest risk we ever took is the only reason we have our business today! In 2019, Joel and I were both working the night shift at a factory. We would wake up at 2 pm, go to work at 3:30 pm, work until 3 am and then go home and fall asleep by 5 am. Rinse and repeat every single day. We were miserable to say the least. Joel was the first to hate the job and would try to convince me to quit and tell me that we could do so much better. I’m the type of person who will just keep my head down and power through, but I couldn’t handle it anymore when we’d be getting our $800, twice a month paychecks. Finally one day, I broke down sobbing before our shift. I sat on the edge of the bed in tears while Joel rubbed my back and told me we didn’t need that job, that we could figure things out on our own.
We had been doing photography and videography for about 2 years at this point on the side, but never thought we could make a whole career out of it.
I believed him and we didn’t show up to our shift that day. That was September 11, 2019 and we have never looked back! We began working as hard as we possibly could to make sure we could pay rent. We lived off noodles and a case of pasta sauce his parents had given us for months to make sure we could make our dream possible. Every spare dime was put right back into making our business a reality and it paid off!

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.

We are Morgan + Joel, a destination-based Adventure Elopement and Wedding Film + Photo team. (What a mouthful, lol). We met in 2017 working at a small family photo studio here in Utah. Over time, we fell in love and decided to pursue our shared dream of being full-time creatives. In 2019, we became full time wedding professionals and have since niched ourselves down to Elopement Experts. As two people who eloped themselves, we love being able to help other couples do the same thing and capture it in a beautiful way that they can look back on for hundreds of years.
We like to take your typical wedding and make it something completely unique. We offer elopement planning and assistance, officiating, videography, photography, polaroid, and so much more for our clients. Our whole thing is to make their elopement day as easy as possible. As avid hikers and outdoors people, we love to guide our clients to their perfect wedding location to watch the sunset, drink a beer, and make some incredible memories together.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

The hardest part of owning your own business is that it is 100% on you. I’d be lying if we said we were always confident, always on top, and always trusting the process. We are completely human! We panic, we feel insecure, we get scared that we made the wrong decision, but in the end, it always comes back to our passion. About a year ago, I was so incredibly burned out. I thought my passion for the art was dead and that we didn’t have a future in the career anymore. Joel went back to school and I began working on the side as a social media manager. Needless to say, that was extremely short lived. We quickly realized that this is OUR heart. This business is like our baby and we built it from the ground up together. Everything we love has been tied into it and we could never leave it.
It gets hard when imposter syndrome really takes you and makes you believe you are someone you aren’t. Sometimes you need a second to swim to the surface, re-evaluate, and dive back down with so much more power than you had before.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

BRANDING. BRANDING. BRANDING. I absolutely cannot stress this enough. We had no clue how vital this was for years. Up until 2021, we were booking incredible couples and weddings, but very rarely were they one that we felt absolutely spoken to and passionate about. Most of them didn’t align with the art we wanted to be creating at all. We decided to make an investment on our branding to see if we could call out the client we felt truly connected to. In the late summer of 2021, we hired Christianna Designs to redo our brand completely and WOW did it work. We told her that we wanted “outer space meets the 70’s” and she could not have delivered more.
We immediately started getting clients who see the same vision we see and appreciate our style because of how it feels, not just because we fit within their budget. This has become one of our most important pillars in business. To constantly be calling out our people and ideal client through everything, especially our branding.      

Contact Info:

• Website: www.morganandjoel.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/morganandjoelphoto

Image Credits
All photos are shot and edited by us EXCEPT the photo of us which is shot by Brynlee Paige Photography