Tuesdays with Nate | New Things

This week has marked the beginning of a new chapter in my (and our) life, in several ways, some of which are pretty small and some are huge, and they are all exciting.

First, of all, I’m always a procrastinator. I normally write my Tuesday blog entries at about midnight on Monday, give them to Becka to post up while I’m at work. Today, however, I’m writing this in almost real time (aka I’ve procrastinated even more than normal and am rushing to finish). So what made this week so different? I’ve stepped down from my full time position at the fruit stand (think about it…) after almost two years! The company has been great to me, and I’ve loved just about every day of my job. But alas, it has always been the goal that when Becka and I are busy enough with weddings, I would shift my focus into being Becka’s full time slave/assistant.

Next, we have started to try our hands at a few speaking gigs.  We’ll be traveling to Iowa (in February? I know! WTF?) to speak at the Professional Photographers of Iowa Winter Conference, and we’re giving our talk a trial run at the Pictage User’s Group (PUG) this Thursday here in Orlando. The fantastic people at PPA Magazine featured our work several months ago on the cover of their magazine and in an article about our business, and we’re thrilled that they asked us to speak at one of their conventions. We both feel like we’re in a bit over our heads, but are really excited to share our passion, vision, and goals with the great people of Iowa.

And now… all the info you’ll ever need about our upcoming speaking engagements and how to come say hi to us at them…

This Thursday night (as in, the day after tomorrow) we will be guest speaking at the Orlando PUG. We’d love to have some friends in the audience to start some amazing rumors about us before our talk to get everyone excited. You know, ‘create some buzz’. You could sit in the middle somewhere and right as we’re about to start talking you could whisper to the person next to you, “I heard Nate wrestled a rabid bear to the ground with his bare hands at a wedding last year and saved the adorable flower girl from certain death!” And then another one of you on the other side could chime in with, “Really? Well I heard that Becka has perfect hair at every single wedding. Like movie star hair- even after shooting for 8 hours! No one knows how she does it!” Or, you could just come and smile at us. But not a creepy smile because that would be distracting. In conclusion, we’re going to be talking briefly about “Taking Your Business Personally”, marketing through genuine relationships, how to attract your target clients, and a bit on leveraging social media in your favor. Then after, we’ll all after party somewhere downtown. It starts at 7pm. You can find more details and also let us know you’re coming at the facebook event page here.

Then, this weekend we’ll be speaking at the Professional Photographers of America’s Iowa Winter Convention. They graciously invited us out to talk about our story and our business. We’ll be giving the full length version of our talk from the PUG on Thursday on “Taking Your Business Personally” and going into more depth about building not only relationships with your clients, but friendships. We’ll also touch on leveraging social media to your advantage while avoiding simple pitfalls and giving people some really good action steps to take when they get home. It’s gonna be pretty fun. We’re excited and we can’t wait to meet and get to talk to everyone. We will only be up there for a day and a half because we’ll be coming back here for a wedding on Monday but we’ll be trying to meet as many people as we can while we’re up there. So if you’re in Iowa or somewhere nearby and you’d like to come say hi to us,you can get all the details about the convention at the PPI Winter Convention Website.

Finally, my video game trifecta is now complete. I broke down yesterday and bought a Playstation 3. Although I don’t plan on making it my primary system, I have been really surprised at how much they packed into those things. They have huge hard drives, Blu-Ray Player, built in Wi-Fi, rechargeable controllers are standard, and the graphics!!!! Don’t get me started. There are two other things that are MUST HAVES if you’re a new PS3 owner…

This week, I’m taking suggestions for PS3 games and places to get cheap Blu-Rays.
And for you… Have you ever walked away from a sure thing for a long shot? How did it turn out?

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