We recently connected with Victoria Grace and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Victoria thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

Do I take vacations now? Yes. Have I always? No.

In the first few years of my business the only time I took what could be considered “vacation time” was when I had an out-of-town session or wedding. Or, and this is not sarcasm, if I ran myself so ragged with stress that I landed myself sick and in the hospital for a few days and literally could not work.

For years, maybe the first six of the last eleven, I would try to justify to myself that if I drove 8 hours on a Friday to the coast, spent an hour or two not working on Saturday morning, let the twins and Nick play while I shot a beach wedding, stayed up late with take out food editing after working, and then had breakfast on Sunday with them before heading back that as long as I snapped a nice sunset photo and my bare feet touched sand and ocean water that it counted as vacation time for me and not just them.

Did I spend the whole time working minus the little bit of time when it was eating or sleeping working? Yes. Was I more tired on Monday than I was on the Thursday before leaving? Absolutely yes – especially if the twins tagged along. But did I get to see the ocean and that felt nice and kind of like a vacation when it was really just a change of scenery? Yes – again.

If a burnt out small business owner is reading this – I hope you know that a change of scenery is nice and it is a boost but it is not a vacation. Helpful for sure, but it is not the same thing as rest.

I didn’t even realize how much I was NOT vacationing until the first time I took my family somewhere and left my camera at home. I knew if I brought it to Hawaii (we live in NC) that I would end up posting on social media that I was in Hawaii, with my camera, and that I could make time for a session. Which would mean my restful vacation would turn into a work trip. So. I left it at home knowing it would mean I only took cell phone photos of my own family. I also left my laptop at home so I couldn’t stay awake editing after bedtime.

That whole week in Hawaii was truly time off – and when I got back home I wasn’t feeling burnt out and exhausted, I was ready to get back to work and recharged. Had I taken my laptop with me I would have had a great time, but I would have also not given myself a chance to miss my job for a minute. We, as business owners, need time to miss our jobs. To actually recharge.

We’re more patient without clients when we aren’t exhausted. More creative. More empathetic. More engaged. More joyful. Ironically, we’re more productive when we aren’t burnt out and we schedule time off than when we make unending to-do lists that LOOK productive but are so draining we can only operate at 60%.

We’re also better to ourselves. To our loved ones. More patient. Joyful. Giggly. Fun.
I’m a better mom when I’m not a burnt out business owner. A better friend. A better partner. A better person.

For a very long time, there were no days off because if someone messaged me to ask if I had any openings I would look at my calendar and FIND the time. A blank space on my calendar meant room for a session – and as a single mom who was struggling with income security it was impossible to say “no, I want a day off,” when I was just thankful for income. The problem became that even after financial security became a thing, I still found myself having a hard time saying “no” to income. (COVID made this even harder to stop doing because income for so many people was unpredictable).

On one of the long drives to a session out of state I happened to be listening to The Goal Digger Podcast (I don’t recall the episode and I’m paraphrasing horribly because it has been awhile). In the episode, Jenna was talking about burn out from small business owners and how we never feel like we’ve made enough money, so we say yes to every project because we are afraid to lose out on the opportunity to make more money.

I felt that way all of the time. The condensed version of what she taught in that episode was that every business owner should have specific goals – not just the goal to make “more.” Small business owners with families (like me) should have a specific goal for money “needed” every month/year and for how much money earned every month/year is “enough.” After we hit enough? Say no to the extra work. The whole point of owning a small business is supposed to be freedom – and ironically, I have never worked more than as my own boss.

So – after listening to my body (which was exhausted after years of burning the candle at both ends) and her podcast I made a few decisions. The first – having an actual vacation every six months or so. As in not a trip just for work. I am becoming a big proponent of “stay-cations” in this economy and because I don’t want to get in the habit of teaching my kids that vacations have to be elaborate or expensive or somewhere far away. Often, our vacations are fun places close to home and look more like days blocked off on my calendar where I don’t edit and I don’t return emails and we do fun random things. Sometimes they are big vacations that we spend a year planning for very intentionally. This summer our big vacation for the year is a road trip through Canada after a wedding. I had to purposefully set time aside for this after a wedding that is close to the Canadian border.

On a regular basis? I start every month with 10 days blocked off on my calendar (for me, Mondays and Tuesdays are the easiest to do this on). I only use those days for work if the weather forces me to reschedule a session or if it is a session or project I am really excited about. Ten days sounds like a lot of days to set aside, right? But someone working a regular job most likely gets weekends off, and that’s 8 days a month.

I had to baby step to this point though. Because you don’t go from a calendar full of things to do with no time for yourself to suddenly balanced (I still way overbook myself sometimes and regret it). My recommendation would be to get on your phone now, scroll through your calendar, and find a week in the next few months that you have nothing scheduled for as of now. Go ahead and block three days, five days or the whole week off for some vacation time. If your budget always it – go somewhere you feel peaceful. For me? That’s always the coast.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

For those of you who don’t already know me – thank you for taking the time to read this. I go by Vicki in real life, even though my “grown up” name is Victoria Grace. I’m named after my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, and recently found out that Victoria is the name of my ancestor that walked The Trail of Tears (she registered on The Dawes Rolls – and now my twins are because for generations our family on my mother’s side has kept up with it for generations). Even though I live near Cherokee in North Carolina (it’s only thirty minutes away from Waynesville) I actually grew up in Florida and moved here when I started high school. So, every time I have a session in the mountains, I think about how wild it is that Victoria was forced to leave the same mountains, made her way to Oklahoma, and somewhere along the way I ended up back in the same area and get to raise my kids here. I think about it every time I take one of the cotton candy colored sunsets here in Wester Carolina that many of my followers have come to associate with me.

I’ve been told by many of my clients that the reason they chose to hire me was because they love how bright and colorful my photographs are. That they stand out when they are scrolling through social media. I love that, because for a long time I had identity crisis when dark and moody photography became very popular. I tell people the only dark and moody thing about me is my personality first thing in the morning if I haven’t had coffee (ha). Clients who find me because their friends have recommended me say they contacted me because their friends said I made them feel comfortable and at ease – that even though they usually feel awkward in front of the camera I made it fun for them.

As a person who doesn’t love having her own photo taken, I try to be considerate of how silly some people feel in front of my lens and to take away some of the awkwardness with my mom jokes.

Something that’s always set me apart as a person, not just a business owner, is my ability to empathize with others. It’s because of the ability to empathize with people (and the need to, really) that I can “read a room.” I know when a kid needs a break during a session. I know when a client is feeling uncomfortable in their own skin and needs to see a picture on the back of my camera for a confidence boost the rest of the session. I know when someone needs me to crack a joke, or ask about how they met so they can talk about themselves and forget I’m there for a minute.

That same empathy helps me deal with less-than-ideal situations on wedding days, when crisis’s occur and reschedules need to happen, when a child is in a horrible mood during an entire session that a mother was really excited about – and it helps me handle those in a way that (I hope) lets clients know that they are more than “just” income for my business. From the very beginning this business of mine has relied on repeat clients and word of mouth referrals – happy clients helped build this business from the ground up and helped keep it thriving during college, a six month pregnancy, a 115 day NICU stay, a recession, the pandemic, my dad’s heart failure scare, raising micro-preemies and almost losing one to RSV and so many other things that should have derailed my business because I’m just one person – but I have had the great fortune to have a community behind it who won’t let it fail.

I’m proud of being able to support my twins for almost seven years as a single mom with photography being my only job. I’m proud of a job that lets me take them to places like Hawaii on vacation and Germany with me. I’m really proud of awards I’ve won and the times I’ve been published in places like The New York Times. I’m proud to have aspiring photographers reach out to ask questions about how to get their business started.

I am most proud, though, that over almost a decade I have clients who come back to me repeatedly and support me unconditionally. Without them I wouldn’t have the life that I do – and the twins wouldn’t, either. It’s a life I love, and customer service is something I strive to provide because I know that if I hadn’t had years of happy clients that things like the pandemic may have ended this career of mine. Does it mean every single person is always happy with me? Of course not – I’m not queso and I can’t make every single person in the world happy. But I do try, very hard, to do so.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When clients are going through their wedding contracts with me, we always get to the section that describes what will happen if I am “unable” to show up. Then I assure them I’m the kind of person who shows up – even when other people wouldn’t. Then I share about the times I came to weddings during my pregnancy with the twins, in between hospital stays, with a PICC line in my arm because I was throwing up blood around the clock and having to give myself nausea medicine and carrying a plastic bag to get sick in. If I wasn’t strapped to a hospital bed, I was there. I don’t cancel for colds. I don’t cancel because I have a freshly broken knee or a torn ACL (I wish that was an exaggeration). I know that my clients hire me for “me” and I do whatever I can to be there, no matter what is going on in my personal life or what is going on in the world around me.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

My business (that supports my family of four) didn’t start as a side hustle. It started even smaller than that – as a joke.

A friend of mine tagged me as “Victoria Grace Photography” after we took some photos of her little boy with her, and I edited them on some free online photo editing thing so she could update her MySpace photos (if that tells you how long ago that was at all).

After she tagged me a lot of people reached out asking how much I charged. I had to let them know I wasn’t a real photographer; I was still a waitress, and I was still going to college full time – it was just a joke. People asked so much, though, that eventually I started trading photoshoots for donations to The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. I think, if memory serves, they just had to show proof they donated at least $50. My little brother was a toddler at the time, and we were fundraising for him. It seemed like a good way to raise some money. The more I did, the more people asked for it.

In hindsight, if I had a different manager at the restaurant, it might not have been possible to transition from a joke to a side hustle. My manager, Brandy L., was so supportive from the very start. So, when one of the sweet hostesses’ mothers asked if she could pay me for her daughter’s senior photos. I told her I wasn’t taking anymore trades for the CF foundation because I was missing too much work. That’s when she offered me $100 or $150 – I can’t remember exactly how much now but I do recall thinking it was wild someone wanted to truly pay me for pictures. I also remember thinking that was SO much money.

SO I took myself to Sears, applied for a credit card (it got a $400 credit line) and I bought a Sony camera. It was a NEX-3. Google it because it’s almost funny that for the next six years (yes, six years) that was the camera I built my business on with zero photography education. Then I went home, made a Facebook page and an Instagram. Shared it. & took her senior photos. A friend’s husband drafted me an LLC (he was a lawyer) after seeing I was starting the business and so many of my friends and family members shared my social media and asked people to follow me.

After that, my manager would let me make my schedule at work a week at a time so that I could schedule photoshoots. It was because of her that I was able to continue making enough money to pay my bills while building my business and finishing my degree. She was so patient as I was able to work fewer and fewer shifts – and when I finally felt brave enough to quite waitressing and take on photography as my sole source of income, she was so supportive.

I made the decision to quit and take my side hustle full time when I was having to say “No, I’m sorry I don’t have any openings,” to enough potential photography clients because of my work schedule that I was losing more income than I was making. It was terrifying – because every single wedding or session I book could be the last inquiry I ever get.

Eleven years, a degree in Middle Grades Education I don’t use but am proud to have earned, a high-risk pregnancy, a long NICU stay, years of high risk baby/kid complications, a pandemic, and so many other potential Lifetime Movie moments later – and it is still the only job I have. So apparently, I made a good decision. The friend, Kasey, who started the rumor I was a photographer online? She and I were taking just the other day about how I’ve been doing this, and ONLY this for over a decade now. It’s wild.

PS – I will forever encourage people to donate to The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. We lost my little brother to the disease a few years ago while he was waiting on a transplant. The twins are now almost as old as Noah was when we lost him – and every time we talk about him, or I think about him I think about how differently my life would be if Kasey hadn’t called me a photographer while we were fundraising for him – if he hadn’t given me a reason to pick up my camera a second and a third and a fourth time. He changed the trajectory of my life by existing & Kasey changed it by cracking a joke.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.victoriagracephotography.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/victoriagracephotography
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/victoriagracephotographs
• Other: https://www.theknot.com/marketplace/victoria-grace-photography-waynesville-nc-972840 https://www.weddingwire.com/biz/victoria-grace-photography-asheville/f45a998aecc854de.html https://www.bbb.org/us/nc/canton/profile/photographer/victoria-grace-photography-0473-92027953

Image Credits
All photos taken by me (Victoria Grace Photography)