As we look back on 2012, we can’t help smiling to ourselves. This was a good year. A very good year.
(Big thanks to Rachel Kim — Danny’s cousin — for sharing the awesome New Year’s banner she designed!)

We’ve got this crazy idea that 2013 is going to be the best. year. ever. So we’ve been working on making some changes in our personal life as well as in our business’s structure and setup. Maybe we’ll talk about those personal changes another time, but today I want to address the business changes, and what they will mean for our couples.

1.) We will be keeping regular office hours.
Since Laura Yang Photography began, we’ve had haphazard work hours. Frequently, we would work until the wee hours of the morning. We would be on the phone with clients at 9:30 p.m. We would meet prospective clients on Sunday afternoons after we rushed home from church. All of this made for an unpredictable schedule for us, and we realized we were headed down the path to a burnout. Setting actual work hours — like any other business — was going to be the most definitive way to curtail that.

So in 2013, outside of weddings and shoots, we will only be working normal business hours, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday-Friday. Those are the hours when we will meet with couples, return emails, coordinate with other vendors, and discuss wedding details with our brides. We will still respond promptly and work closely with our couples; we just won’t be doing it at midnight. That way we can all get some sleep.

2.) We will schedule all portrait sessions on weekdays.
In keeping with the whole building-our-own-relationship and spending-time-with-family thing, we realized we were dedicating too many weekends to our work. Weddings inevitably happen on weekends — and that’s great. But in 2013, we will no longer be scheduling portrait sessions on Saturdays or Sundays. There are a limited number of weekends each year — 52, to be exact. A good third or more of them will be taken up with weddings. When I looked back at our calendar from 2012, I realized we spent almost every weekend working, whether we were shooting or editing. And that’s on top of working a full, often 60+ hour work week. In order to stay fresh and keep providing top quality service to all of our couples, we simply need more time away from our work. That means reserving all non-wedding weekends to ourselves so we can concentrate on our own relationship, and on our family and friends.

3.) We will not be booking any weekend weddings between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
This is one we contemplated and discussed for some time. This year, we had only one December wedding. We had had inquiries for a handful of others, and even contracts drawn up for two of them, but they all fell through. I took that as a sign that maybe December really wasn’t our month for weddings. With all the busyness of the holidays, it’s hard to dedicate as much mental energy to a wedding as it deserves, and with all the work that goes into a wedding, it’s hard to focus on the holiday celebrations with church and family that are so important to us. So in 2013, we will not shoot any weekend weddings between Thanksgiving and New Years — which will give us a chance to unwind for a bit, really savor the holidays, and focus on fine-tuning our business for the next year.

4.) We will be doing even more to develop our skills and hone our craft.
Last year, we headed to Imaging USA in New Orleans, watched numerous creativeLive workshops online, learned a lot from Zach & Jody’s Harvest DVD workshop, I attended the first-ever Pursuit 31 Conference, and we read as much as we could get our hands on — all of which really helped us shore up our photography and business skills. This year, we plan to do even more to learn and grow. This month, we’ve got tickets for the Orlando stop on Justin and Mary’s “What’s Next” tour. Then in February, we’re off to Santa Barbara for Showit United, where we’ll learn from some of the best in the industry; in April we’re going to Connect, a marriage retreat for photographers; and I’ll be headed back to the second Pursuit 31 Conference again in October. It’s going to be a year filled with learning — lots of learning.

5.) We’re revamping out packages to be as simple as possible and give our couples exactly what they want.
We’ve been working hard to retool our wedding packages so they’ll provide our couples with what they want and need for the best wedding experience and coverage possible.

We have big plans for 2013! And we can’t wait to share all of them with you right here as the adventure unfolds.

~ Laura