2015 started out as a great year and no different than any other year.  We were experiencing a great deal of growth in our business.  Our reputation continued to propel our business faster and faster.

The work we had done for Families, led to High School Senior Pictures which led to Engagement Shots, Weddings, Maternity and Newborn back to Young Families.

It was everything we dreamed for our business to be.  Teresa's passion for our clients, her love for the craft and her artistic flair made us one of the top photography studios in the country, shooting over 80 weddings per year, 500 portrait shoots and commercial clients from New York to California, including college, olympic and professional athletes.

Backtracking for a moment, in 2013 we started hiring and training employees to help us with the volume of clients, both with the creative photography side and the back end processing side.  Everything seemed to be going our way.  

Our clients were happy, our employees learning and growing.  We had not raised prices in over 4 years and were fine with that due to the volume of clients we were working with.

By mid year, we hired even more staff as the volume was still increasing.

Here comes the hard part for us and the reason behind the title "lessons learned in 2015".....

As a company that went from Teresa working alone with one computer in 2001, to a staff of 7, we had patchworked together a network of hard drives and put in a redundancy system for backing up images.

Our team was taking somewhere close to 10,000 images per week.  Our professional Nikon Gear, shooting in RAW mode made each file somewhere between 30-50mb per file.  Our team was processing close to 500GB of RAW data per week.

An relatively new and inexperienced editor, without understanding that she could pull images from our hard drives from any computer, unplugged a back up hard drive and moved it to another machine without us knowing to transfer files, then moved it back but did not reset it so that it would continue to back up files.

Later, the same employee took the drive that had all of the working images on it and tried to move it again.  In doing so, she dropped the drive. First lesson learned, we needed to do a better job in communicating with our employees about how to handle hard drives and that while we appreciate initiative, they need to ask permission before moving equipment or unplugging anything.

The next day she came to us and let us know that the drive was not working.  We were not panicked as we thought we had them backed up.  It was only then that we discovered what she had done months earlier.  We had no back up.

We had Geek Squad Coverage for our technical support (who I still recommend even though this situation worsens).  I took the hard drive in to them and they said no problem we can recover the data and put it over to another drive and back everything up.  We were quoted that it would be just a few days.  So, no need to panic or panic our customers.

A week went by and I called to check and was told that had been escalated and may take another 2 weeks.  I still wasn't panicked, just knew that we would need to put in some long hours to get caught up when the drive got back to our studio.

This drive contained over 40 weddings and portrait shoots that we were actively working on and our clients had an expectation of when the images should be complete.  This drive had over 151,000 images stored.

Now, three weeks after the "drop", The Geek Squad informed us that they needed to send the hard drive out for a "level 3" repair.....meaning clean room and disassembly of the drive.  We had to pay thousands of dollars at this point to have it sent off.

At this time, we were unsure of the status of the images.  It had gone from "no problem" to 50/50.  We were told that we would know in a week and that we would have the drive back in 3 weeks.

To be very raw and honest, we failed in our communication with customers at this point.  We didn't want to panic them with incomplete information, but still should have found a way to communicate better.  Second lesson learned.

7 weeks later (10 weeks post "drop) after numerous escalations with the Geek Squad and a lot more money spent, we had a hard drive back.  They were able to recover almost every image.

Almost is a very difficult word.  What it really means is that there were some images missing from a handful of the 40 weddings and sessions.  We were not able to identify what was missing until we were deep in to the editing process for each wedding.

At this point, some of our wedding clients had been waiting for 4 months for their wedding images.  What we received back were RAW unedited files, so the process had to start all over again, which meant they would have to wait another 6-8 weeks.

During this point in the process, Teresa did send out an email to the 40 clients impacted giving them more specific details and offering print credits for the delay.  Third lesson learned, we really should have picked up the phone and called the clients personally to let them know what their individual status was.

Teresa and team began working 12-14 hour days to get thru the images as quickly as possible.  Fourth lesson learned, never sacrifice our quality and reputation to get something out quickly.  Some of the images that were sent were not indicative of the quality of our high standards.

Today, almost 9 months into this process we are pulling up to the light at the end of the tunnel with many battle scars, hurt feelings and a damaged reputation. We had 4 clients that we let down that did not recover all of their images.  Compensation was made to the clients, but relationships severed.  Relationships that helped us to build our brand and business. Fifth lesson learned, relationships are the key to success in any business and we must do whatever it takes to keep those in order even during a crisis.

We will be forever thankful for the many clients that were impacted by this crisis that brought food, flowers and cards to our studio when they knew we were working long hours.  Most of our clients, while upset, knew that we were doing everything in our power to make things right for them.  Only one client chose to make it her personal mission to destroy us.  A couple of others still left negative reviews even after meeting with us and understanding that we were doing everything we could to make it better.

As of today, we have restructured our business, increased prices to reduce volume which means we can provide a better quality of product and better customer services.  We have done a better job training and have more safeguards in place to protect our images.

We accept full responsibility for the crisis of 2015 and are working hard to reestablish the trust of our community and clients moving forward.

For those of you that helped us thru the dark times, we are forever grateful.  For those that do not know us and are reading this post, we hope you read the human aspect an appreciate our sincerity.  Our customers and reputation are the foundation of our business.  We hope to earn your trust and loyalty thru the years.

With love and respect, 

Robert & Teresa Lee