The Bitter and The Sweet.

//The Bitter.

Paul and I..or I guess you could say 618studios, had a perfect record up until about 3 weeks ago. Up until then we had a perfect record of booking each couple we met with in person. We get numerous inquiries throughout the month, mainly through emails, sometimes through phone calls, but when couples are really serious about wedding cinema for their big day they set up a time to meet with us in person. We hold all our client meetings, or about 90% of them at a small Starbucks just a couple blocks from our apartment.

Well, a few weeks ago we got an email from a coordinator explaining that she had two couples interested in our services for their big day...the whole she-bang. But, she wanted us to meet them in San Diego. Long story short, we explained that we are located in Orange County and hold all our client meetings up here. In the meantime we were planning our 1 year anniversary trip to good 'ol SD and figured we could squeeze one 45 min client meeting into the mix, why not? Again long story short, contacted the coordinator, set a time/location and met up. It went great, or so we thought..a couple weeks later we received word that the couple had decided to book a different videographer for their big day.

say what?!?!?

I was super bummed, at first I blamed the couple, "don't they know we took time out of OUR anniversary weekend to meet with them?!" "we basically drove over at hour to meet them, that's like $20 in gas?!" Then I blamed myself, "what did we do differently?" "Is it because of how our new packages are set up?" It went on and on and finally Paul stepped in, "Kelley, did you honestly think that we would book every couple we met with?"

//The Sweet

I felt like saying yes, but eventually I came to my senses and realized that we wouldn't. Needless to say, I received a large slice of humble pie that afternoon and learned a great lesson.

#1. From now on 100% of client meetings will be in Orange County (business lesson learned).
#2. I shouldn't expect that every couple we meet with will be the right fit for us.

We've been super blessed with booking the amount of weddings we have in just our first year, this turn down was exactly what I needed to keep me in line.