NC PANDEMIC PROFILE: Cara Powell

CARA POWELL (F8 Photo Studios, The Upchurch)

Owner, Photographer

I’m Cara Powell. I’m the owner and photographer at F8 Photo Studios, and I have been a photographer for the last 17 years. I’m currently working on restoring a historic home and 6 acres of land into an event and wedding venue. It is called, The Upchurch Venue, and it’s on Roberts Road in Apex.

The Upchurch was supposed to break ground in October, and we’re still going through a bunch of red tape and waiting for groundbreaking to be any day now, actually.* I think that everything has its divine timing and I have faith that this is all playing out the way it is for a reason and it will all make sense to me and be worth it, eventually. But it’s been pretty stressful up and until this point. But it’ll happen.

*Groundbreaking has now been scheduled to happen on April 1, 2021!

Cara, tell me what it’s been like to be a business owner in the events industry during COVID? I feel like I’ve been very blessed compared to so many others because I was already involved in a pivot process starting in January of last year, if not before. [Pivoting from professional photography into venue ownership] January is when we closed on the property for The Upchurch.

I guess something that has come out COVID is that it has allowed me to - hopefully - be a support system for others that are in a difficult situation. If we were all down in the dumps it definitely wouldn’t be good. I hope I’ve been a light to some people.

For me, I was struggling with my identity and the idea of transitioning from something that I know and love so much into unchartered territory. I mean, obviously, it’s exciting but the COVID shutdown gave me a forced stillness to see that I have more value than what I do for a living and I was able to reflect. A forced reflection. Definitely, a FORCED reflection. (laughter)

I started to slow down somewhat - if you consider it slowing down – in 2019, but prior to that my company was shooting 60-70 weddings a year, which is insane. So, transitioning from that to almost nothing was hard. The last wedding I shot was March 20, 2020 and then I didn’t do anything wedding-wise until the end of July and even after that work was really sparse. I feel like for me the forced stillness - if I hadn’t had that - it definitely would have been challenging to push myself [to slow down].

The other way it helped me – and, again, divine timing – if I would’ve been opening the venue last year, then I would’ve been in a lot of trouble. It’s much more of a risk to own a venue than a photography business, and I think that I’ve learned so much during this time. My venue contracts look much different now, and then, there’s all the other things that we never would’ve considered prior to COVID.

I feel really, really fortunate. But I struggle watching a lot of my friends in the industry who are in a lot of trouble with the loss of income, dealing with difficult clients, and I’ve been trying to be as supportive as possible with people throughout that process.

I was kind of geared for it already, even financially. Yes, I took a HUGE financial hit, but I was prepared on the savings end because I knew that I wouldn’t be photographing as much and had saved accordingly since I was planning on opening the venue.

What’s been the hardest part of running your business during the last year and during a pandemic? All these people wanting refunds. I always knew to say ‘non-refundable retainer’, but people still don’t get it. They don’t understand that it’s non-refundable. Do we need to go back into our contracts and specifically say the reason that we take a non-refundable retainer is that we’re reserving your date, and the reason that we do this is mutually beneficial, symbiotic. I don’t think people think about it that way – mutually beneficial - they think about it only protecting them.

As a photographer, we only have so many spots per year. We’re not like a caterer who can do 16 events a Saturday. We set a goal for ourselves: I’m going to book 25 weddings; and it’s those 25 spots however they fall. The actual work to get one client is costing a certain amount of marketing dollars, a certain amount of effort, a certain amount of referral power. And people have to understand, the folks that are even canceling full out, they’re holding one of those photographer’s spots instead of somebody who may have chosen to reschedule instead so now we’re going to have to do the extra work to secure a new client to compensate for that lost work.

As photographers, we have to work from a profit first mentality to set our goals for how many weddings we’re going to do a year and the margins are tight because a) there’s a drastic ceiling [on how many weddings we can book], especially if it’s a one-person shop and b) there’s only so much we can charge in this particular market, or any market for that matter, and c) there’s only so many lines of referral sources that we have.

I could pivot to headshots or portraits or whatever, but I’m not built as a portrait business, so I don’t even have the sales structure in place to be able to push that much business to take the place of a wedding. How many portrait sessions do I have to do to equal a $4,000 wedding that I’m booking? If you choose to dedicate yourself – and that’s what I’ve emphasized with my clients – although I do a ton of commercial, headshots and portraits – basically, if you looked at my website, prior to December, even though I was doing those other things, it’s full of weddings. Because that’s my bread and butter. I emphasize to my clients that I’ve dedicated myself to weddings, so even though I have the ability to pivot [to a different area of photography], I don’t have the same systems in place that a portrait photographer would have to generate the same number of sales, if that makes sense.

How many of your weddings canceled entirely? It was a really small amount. I had purposefully started to back off weddings, so we only had 40 wedding booked last year and maybe only 5 or 6 of them have canceled full out.

I would’ve killed it in the fall and been able to pay off all my debt if I hadn’t broken my leg and had to hire people to shoot the weddings for me. Falling off the venue stairs – that should’ve been a huge sign. (laughter)

It was interesting, actually. I got my taxes back and I was like, I probably didn’t make any money in 2020. I actually made money, but I was still down $200,000.

That’s what people don’t get. For my particular business model, I’m employing multiple shooters so that was really challenging especially from a marketing perspective because for me to be able to generate enough business to support those other shooters, I have to have a certain level of marketing and support systems to create that workflow and make it so that we’re turn-key. And, I didn’t ever ask for people to give me money back for marketing or anything. I kept up with The Knot, even knowing that I wasn’t going to book weddings. I’ve been paying for advertising and two editors for an entire year because I knew they were hurting too. I wasn’t going to go to those companies and say, hey, can you stop my service? I have a contract with them. Covering all of that in a really down year was really challenging – it’s all going on a credit card. I haven’t paid myself since March of 2020, not a dollar. I’m just paying bills; keeping my bills at bay.

How many of the 35 weddings that you had on the calendar in 2020 actually went forward in 2020? A lot of my fall 2020 weddings still happened. They were just abbreviated numbers and/or “illegal” weddings of course.

The majority of our weddings take place in summer and in the fall, and every wedding from March 20 – July 25 either canceled or rescheduled, and that was a lot of weddings. My plan was to retire from photographing weddings in 2021 and I’d have to count, but because of the pandemic and the postponements, I will still have 16 weddings in 2021.

How did you feel about working those illegal weddings in 2020? Terrified. Especially with the first one. I felt like I didn’t matter. I felt like my health and safety didn’t matter. And, I honestly felt like, other vendors were pushing us to do it and even though they say that they’d be okay if you said you couldn’t do it – you knew it wasn’t true. It would affect your referral sources, like 100%. And at that point, I didn’t know for sure what was happening, and I didn’t want to burn bridges so I worked.

But I also became an advocate for other vendors, and I butted heads with many people because I stuck up for other people. I will say one thing: I made a lot of enemies, really deepened a lot of friendships, and completely out-of-the-blue made new friendships with people I’d never met before during the pandemic. It’s crazy. This sort of like-mindedness started to surface, and people that I love dearly, I feel really differently about now. But it was really good because I developed a thicker skin which I really needed. I’ve walked around with this mentality of wanting to please everybody pretty much my whole career, and said ‘yes’ a lot a) because I wanted to, but b) because people-pleasing is engrained in me.

I think that now, more than ever, I have lived my truth and I’m okay with that. If somebody chooses not to work with me because of my political views or because I choose to stand up for people, then so be it. But I know that everyone isn’t in that position. Maybe I feel that way because I’m getting older and crotchety. (laughter) Or maybe because my husband has a stable job. I think we always have to take a moment and stand in somebody else’s shoes and realize that their situation might not be like my situation.

Any changes to your business practices – besides contracts – that you have made during the pandemic? Setting expectations and policies are extremely important. Also, I feel like, now more than ever, though I’ve always done it, but uplifting other vendors is extremely important and although the client is extremely important, obviously, I feel like the camaraderie between vendors needs to be really tight. We need to have each other’s backs more. I feel like a lot of the time that doesn’t exist, and yes, we’re client-focused but we need to be vendor-focused as well.

In what way do you think live event vendors can speak in a more unified voice? It comes down to speaking as a team. There’s a photographer that felt uncomfortable showing up at a 90-person wedding when the governor just said that it could only be 10 people, and if that person has questions, that’s okay and I feel like the vendors could’ve done a better job of backing that photographer. Even if he didn’t want to do the wedding, giving him an easy out instead of allowing a client to fire them. I feel like that support is just so necessary because everything we’re doing is so vulnerable.

I feel like this has solidified my reasoning behind how I pitch [other vendors] to clients. I’m not “selling” them to clients, I really do want to help them, so I listen to them, I ask a lot of questions to see what they’re looking for, who’s the best fit, and utilize the info from each conversation as a way to bring other people with me, so my marketing dollars can help them, and it helps create a better vendor team. I push other vendors all the time. I spent an hour today trying to find a venue in October for a bride. I wanted to help her and gave her a list of options. It helps my vendor people and helps my client. I did it just to help. That sort of pay it forward mentality just really helps a lot. Not that you’re doing it to get something back, it’s just the right thing to do.  

Let’s talk about The Upchurch for a second. You’ve had some challenges in the last couple of months. How much of it is COVID-related? A lot of it is COVID-related because so much stuff was put on hold, especially government-wise. I submitted our minor site plan on April 1 of last year, but no one was in the office.

I was getting answers slowly back from people where normally it would be fast. Also, we didn’t expect for people to be spending a ton of money or investing a ton of money into their homes [during a pandemic] but they did, and it created a shortage of building supplies, which we thought would go down by the end of the year, but it’s gone up again. It’s adding so much [to the project cost]. I can’t change anything; there’s nothing I can scale back on. I just have to deal with it. The additive costs have been exorbitant.

COVID has also affected peoples’ decision-making. You would think people would be more likely to help, but it was almost like people are less likely to help because COVID has affected their budgets – especially from a government perspective. People are hiking prices in the construction world, it is insane. Our budget had to double.

Any regrets about opening a venue during a pandemic? No. It’ll be lucrative. The product that we’re offering, I think, is exceptional and special so I think it’ll be profitable. Physically, after my car accident, I can’t work the way I was so opening the venue is a way for me to pivot and utilize and leverage my knowledge of the industry but not be so physical about it. I’ll always shoot. I love photography. I physically can’t do weddings anymore.

Are you already booking for The Upchurch? Not until I break ground.

The cool thing is that I’m hiring someone for a venue management and sales. I have to it’s totally worth it to bring someone along with me during that process too.

What’s one thing that you want the general public to know about the events industry? I want clients to trust us. I want them to trust the process. The bad press that’s going out is just BS it’s not representative of who we are. It’s half-truths. I can’t stand the half-truths.

Of course, the business side of it is so important because you need to go into a business partnership between vendor/client with the integrity of the business being intact, but it’s also important to remember that we’re people.

We’re not Target, we’re small business owners and we have families to feed. That story really needs to be told. Our plight has not been told. It’s so hard for us. We want to say ‘yes.’ We’re service-industry people. We’re programmed to say ‘yes’. It’s been mentally challenging on our whole industry, disappointing people. We want happy people. We’re not robots. We’re actually caring, loving individuals who were built to serve. I want clients to continue to instill their trust in us but keep in mind that, at the end of the day, it is a balance between business and personal. I think that’s so important.

Also, why is it that the general public thinks wedding vendors are all ballin’? (laughter) It’s not true. Usually, we’re paycheck to paycheck, but they assume we’re ballin’. They look at it like their wedding photographer is getting $4,000 to work their 8-hour wedding, but it’s so much more time than that, and we’ve got to talk about how many weddings you can physically do and still be a good businessperson and photographer. You don’t want to be so burned out that your work is showing it. We’re not a factory – we’re small business owners. I don’t think that clients realize everything involved with it. We have to think about second shooters, keeping gear up to date, double cameras, multiple lenses, flashes, education. It’s not a profit only business. There’s so much involved.

I rebranded my website in December, and it’s really hard because it’s not showing weddings anymore. When I shoot my last wedding, it’s going to be so hard. My website has been changed to be headshot-based, and I’ll always do portraiture and commercial. Maybe I’ll get filthy rich and just do wedding photography for free: you get a wedding, and you get a wedding! (laughter) That’s my secret dream. All the philanthropy.