We sat on the airplane telling him our story and he shook his head.
All he had to say was, “You guys sure are go-getters. I mean, you just get up and do it!”
Five years ago Jon boarded a plane with Dave, Erica’s dad, to visit the Pacific Northwest. He fell in love with the change of scenery – the tall green trees, cooler climate, and perfect summers – and listed our house the day after he landed back in Phoenix. One week later, our house was under contract and we were moving with no home or job lined up at our new destination. Erica’s first time seeing Washington State was when she stepped off of the airplane with Brody and Paislee and drove to the house Jon had moved our things into.
Jon found a job, we purchased a home and we made an incredible life full of new experiences, life-long friendships, and the birth of something life-changing – our business.
Jon became unhappy with his day job so we decided to start our own business. We jumped in headfirst and took educational courses together. It was more than a side-hustle. It was all-consuming. We knew we needed to take it full-time, but it was terrifying.
We also knew we needed to move back home to Arizona if we were going to go into business full-time for ourselves. We paid off all of our debts, saved feverishly, sold our house (on our own – no realtor!), and moved back to Arizona to start fresh and new with our business.
We’ve had great success to this point with our business, but you know what? It’s never been perfect. Truthfully, it never will be, no matter how hard we try.
For all of our wins, if you look back at the things that didn’t work out for us, if you saw anything else besides the highlight reel, you’d probably label us failures.
We started out with a hardcore focus on being luxury wedding photographers. We branded ourselves, intentionally marketed and created relationships and found very little success in that space. If that was the end of the story then yes, we failed.
But that wasn’t and isn’t the end of our story.
Wedding photography was a stepping stone for us into what we do today. If we had waited until we felt like we were in a perfect position to be wedding photographers we would have NEVER started and would NEVER have the opportunities we do today. That would be tragic!
Today, you might be needing someone to help give you a little kick in the butt and we’re happy to step in and help! 😉 Because friend, YOU have what it takes.
YOU are uniquely equipped to accomplish the dreams in your heart.
YOU are perfectly positioned to make those dreams a reality if you stop waiting for perfection, embrace the hustle and start DOING today.
Sometimes we feel like everything is holding us back, but sometimes the reality is that WE are the only thing holding us back!
At almost every ‘big decision’ kind of point in our business where we’ve wrestled with ourselves over what we should do we’ve asked ourselves an important question: “What is the worst that can happen?”
The answer? Usually something like, we fail and have to go back to work for someone else. Is that an unfavorable outcome? Of course it is. But do we all live? Do we all survive? Do we still have the important things in life? Yes, yes, and YES!
If this journey of ours has taught us anything, it’s to face life with tenacity and take advantage of the opportunities we are presented with, even if we have small failures along the way.
You see, friend, fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.
“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed” – Theodore Roosevelt
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