We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stephanie and Bradley Rogers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stephanie and Bradley below.
Stephanie and Bradley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made?
Starting a business isn’t easy, it takes a lot of money up front and unless you’re really lucky you will most likely have a period of time where money is very tight. You end up having to cut out as many expenses as you can so that you can pour money into the business. While this is a necessary part of the process, it’s easy to develop a mentality of never spending money on yourself, even for things you actually need.
And that’s pretty much exactly what happened to us. After about six years of doing wedding photography full time, we started to feel the burnout set in. We started thinking about changing careers, moving to a new city, pretty much any alternative to having to confront the cause of the burnout. But one day we had an “a-ha” moment, what if all we need is therapy? Of course, having the idea is one thing but finding the right person and being able to afford their rates is another. And when you have the mentality that you aren’t supposed to spend money on yourself, that’s an even bigger pill to swallow.
The biggest change was shifting our perspective from “I’m spending money on myself” to “I’m investing in myself.” The amount of money that has to pour into a business to keep it healthy can take non-business owners by surprise, but if you own a business you know that it’s necessary; the business can’t survive without it. Likewise, if you want to be healthy as a business owner, you have to invest in yourself. The sticker shock was overwhelming at first, but once we saw how beneficial therapy was, we couldn’t imagine going back.
Since learing to invest in ourselves we rarely experience burnout and are able to create more stability in our lives as business owners. When you’re more happy and stable personally, the rest of your life falls in place. Our confidence as individuals has grown and has allowed us to focus on one of the aspects we love most which is connecting with our clients in both of our businesses.
Stephanie and Bradley, 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?
We got married in 2010 and within the following year, Stephanie decided to pursue wedding photography as a career. Our photographer did not give us a great experience throughout our wedding process and the photos were sub-par at best. After pursuing wedding photography as a career for a few years, Bradley then graduated from UNT in 2014. We decided to go full-time as wedding photographers shortly after that and haven’t looked back since.
It took us many years of trials and errors to find our niche and figure out how we wanted to approach wedding photography or even what we wanted to offer. It wasn’t until 2018 when we decided to move to Austin that everything took a turn for the best. Our business grew naturally due to our photography style and our personalities matching up to more of our clientele in such a creative city. We were able to connect with more vendors and people who value the same things we do.
Over the years we’re most proud of ourselves for going to therapy and working on ourselves personally. In return, we’ve had more energy to put into our business and towards our clients. We’ve found more balance in our lives as business owners which is one of the most rewarding places to be.
Our main message and goal to clients are to be true to yourselves. Find a photographer you get along with and who understands what you are wanting for YOUR wedding day, and not something they are pushing onto you. We love wedding photography because it allows us to meet new people and work in different spaces all the time. Our goal is to photograph a wedding story that feels authentic to the day and where you can feel the energy living off of the photographs for the years to come. Authenticity is the KEY to success on both ends of a client/photographer relationship!
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
As mentioned in our story, Stephanie began photography in 2011 to pursue weddings full-time. It definitely took a few years to get the ball rolling and make it to full-time status. Stephanie already was working at HEB since she was 16 and continued working there until we went full-time in 2014 after Bradley graduated. HEB was a great company to work for as they were flexible with scheduling even with a full-time front end manager position with a side hustle of wedding photography. The key milestones were really the 3-7 clients a year who trusted Stephanie to photograph their wedding which in turn helped build a portfolio and practice to pursue photography full-time and long term.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We believe our reputation was built by being professional, a positive and calming presence, providing photography for ALL, and being creative and timeless with our work. There’s a lot that goes into play while building a reputation and we’re really proud of how consistent and true to our brand we have been over the years. As mentioned in our main message as well, going to therapy and taking care of ourselves can make A LOT of positive changes in your life and how you are perceived by others. That can be listed as one of the top things that have helped build our reputation too. Over the course of 8, almost 9 years, we have consistently received 5-star reviews across the board from our clients. Their happiness brings us happiness!!
Contact Info:
- Website: Stephanierogersphotography.
com - Facebook: facebook.com/stephanierogersphotography
- Other: https://society6.com/stephanierogers
Image Credits
Our headshot was taken by: Marisa Vasquez https://marisavasquez.com/