McKenna has been involved in photography for a long time. I’ve always been impressed with the skill that she has developed over the time that she’s been doing wedding photography. I remember when she first started this adventure.
We were living out in the Chicago area for a summer, selling pest control. I was out knocking on doors, while she was working in the office, setting up appointments and taking care of customers. She found some of our photography mentors, Amy and Jordan, and she was hooked. She found someone selling a Canon 5D Mark III camera, and we drove like 2 hours north of where we lived to pick it up. Who knew, sitting in that Panera Bread restaurant, buying that camera, we would ever be doing this together?
McKenna has been trying to get me to do this with her for a long time. While I have always been supportive of her, and I’ve even been her second shooter at several weddings, I wanted to go off and do my own thing. Photography was her thing, and I wanted to find MY thing.
I got my Bachelor’s degree in Marriage and Family Studies at Brigham Young University – Idaho. The original plan was to become a Marriage and Family Therapist, but, plans change, and In my experience, they change a lot!
I caught the entrepreneur spirit early 2020 and that’s when my adventure really began. I had so many ideas of things I could do, and it quickly became clear to me that I didn’t want to work for someone else. But I really wanted to work with couples.
So, I went and became a certified relationship coach, and after reading my favorite book, The Power of Starting Something Stupid, by Richie Norton, we went and started our stupid idea.
I started coaching, it was MY thing. It was hard to pay the bills with it though, and so I branched out and got involved in financial services. It still wasn’t quite paying the bills, and I had to go and get a regular job again.
That’s kind of what brought us to where we are now. My goal has been to get to a point where I work less, make more money, and have more time with my family. What I was doing wasn’t getting me there. McKenna and I talked and we realized that if there was one industry that we knew about, it was wedding photography.
We’ve done a lot of education courses on it, and even though it was always McKenna’s thing, I watched most of the videos with her. So, we decided that I would finally make the jump into the business and we’d do photography together!
Then, we had an idea.
Our goal with photography is to elevate the wedding day experience for brides and grooms. Make it the best day ever and one they won’t forget. How could we do that even better? By adding wedding videography as a service we provide them. We get to work together and serve couples and make their wedding day a memory they’ll never forget!
I’m excited to start this new journey with my wife!
-Clayton
Like Clayton said, I have been trying to convince him to do this with me for what feels like FOREVER. Working with my best friend just sounded so great! The question was, how could we do that without him living in “my shadow”. And boom! Videography was born.
Now we’re desperately getting our hands on all education for videography starting with Parker Walbeck’s full time filmmaker course! And every evening once we put Joyce to bed, it is instant work mode.
It’s definitely hard since Clayton has a day job now, and we have a newborn still. However, this season of life is so fun and exciting to grow with Clayton. Not only as a parent of two kids, but as business partners determined to make a profitable and impactful business together!
So, here we go!