One of our most frequently asked questions involves how Luke and I work together! We totally understand where the question is coming from… after all, not many couples are in business together before they’re even engaged, much less married! (I know… we were a little nuts!)
We’ve been slowly figuring out what being a husband and wife team looks like over the past few months, and before that, we had to learn how to work together while dating and while engaged. I’ll be honest with you: it’s not always been easy. But it’s 100% worth it, because doing what we love with the one person we love most is the biggest gift EVER. I wouldn’t trade our life for anything… even if it takes a little while to figure it out! If you work with your spouse on a daily basis also, we want to encourage you through this post today and share a bit about how we work together!
First, a little back story. For those of you who don’t know our business’ story, I started my business when I was a sophomore in high school, never once thinking I’d want to shoot weddings. After I was given the opportunity to second shoot a wedding, I fell in love with this industry, and I have never looked back!
Fast forward to a few years later, and you’d find Luke and I sitting at a bonfire in October of 2014 having our first “real” conversation about… you guessed it… photography! When he casually said something during that conversation about how he was most content as a photographer when he was photographing a couple in a field during golden hour, I knew I had found someone pretty special! Ha ????
After we started dating at the end of 2014, it totally made sense to have Luke second-shoot for my 2015 weddings. Later on, it fell into place to have him officially join the business once we were engaged! Since then, we’ve learned a ton about being teachable and humble, leveraging our strengths and weaknesses, and more. Here are some of the things that have worked best for us so far!
1. Second Shooter vs. Teammate
First, we had to make the distinction between Luke being a second-shooter and a teammate. It did not work whatsoever for us to have Luke be the primary leader in other aspects of our relationship, yet have me lead EVERY aspect of our business. This totally threw us off during the first wedding we ever shot together… I felt like I was bossing him around, and we both knew something had to change! That’s the beauty of running a business together: we can adjust when we need to, and making sure that we both had equal responsibility and “power” on a wedding day helped us. No longer is Luke a “second-shooter”… he’s an equally vital part of our business, and we wouldn’t have it any other way!
2. Strengths & Weaknesses
Luke and I are very similar overall, but we have varying strengths and weaknesses that make our business better in lots of ways! For example, I LOVE handling all the communication about wedding day details and timelines with my sweet brides. Luke would much rather handle reminders about contracts, retainers, payment, and other business-related communication! That works perfectly!! I’ll keep handling the details and girly communication, and he’s a happy camper working on the more technical tasks. Along the way, we can humble ourselves enough to ask questions and grow with each other.
3. Defining Roles
We decided we didn’t each have to do it all. Our business roles have evolved over time, but we’ve found it so helpful to divide up responsibilities so that we each know what we’re responsible for. If one of us is more busy than the other, we (of course) pick up the slack and share responsibilities. For the day to day work, we each know what our jobs are. Mine include blogging, some social media work, writing, scheduling and communication with brides, and Luke’s include editing, record keeping, mileage tracking, and a whole lot of crazy vital things that his brain is WAY better at than mine! (We also split up work based on our strengths on wedding days, too… you can read about that HERE!) We each couldn’t do what we do without the other consistently fulfilling their responsibilities.
4. Turning It Off
One thing we will most likely ALWAYS have to actively work on is turning work off sometimes. We are entrepreneurs… it’s natural to want to keep pushing and work all. the. time. We’ve found that it’s important to set aside time to just focus on the two of us and our relationship and NOT work. It’s amazing and a blessing to have jobs we are both so passionate about, but we do better work when we have margin in our lives! For more on this, read THIS POST.
These are just a few of the most helpful things we’ve done since we started working together! Do you work with your spouse too?! We’d love to hear what works for you guys! Have a happy weekend everyone!
