Personal

It happened two weeks ago late on a Thursday night.  I was designing in Photoshop and went into “My Documents”  on my Macbook to pull in my logo and….nothing.  It wasn’t there.  Not only was my logo not there but NOTHING was there.  I mean the entire folder was EMPTY.  I tried not to panic.  I checked the trash bin….nothing. My hopeful self immediately reached out to Apple gurus but NOBODY knew what happened. Michael and I spent hours trying everything we could possibly think of to try and figure out why all my files just mysteriously disappeared but to no avail.  Somewhere between 1 and 2am,  I had to accept the sad fate that a huge portion of our business had been lost.

The good news is that this didn’t affect our clients at all so our JK Brides have no need to worry.  All of our clients RAW files and final edits are stored on multiple hard drives so losing photos wasn’t an issue at all.  What WAS an issue is exactly WHAT we lost and the toll it would take on us and our business.  So what exactly did we lose?? We lost all of our contracts, invoices, mileage logs, business expense spreadsheets, tax spreadsheets, website design files, our bridal guide magazine and design template, our pricing guide template,  email templates, all of the educational recourses I’ve purchased over the years, logos and other things I’ve probably not even realized yet.  Just typing that out makes me die a little inside.

I’m so thankful that God has blessed me with a love to design and create because redesigning things was actually enjoyable. I was already in the middle of rebranding our business as Joanna Krueger Photography so redesigning things wasn’t that bad. For the past two weeks I stayed up WAY too late every night to re-make our logo,  contracts, invoices and spreadsheets to look and function even better (gotta stay positive!).  I sent emails to Katelyn James and Jasmine Star and they quickly resent ALL the design templates and educational recourses I’ve bought from them.  What?! They are seriously the best! The worst part of this whole mess was recreating the massive expense and tax spreadsheets.  It’s been two weeks since the initial disaster and we JUST finished the tax spreadsheet YESTERDAY.  It was the biggest headache and everything else in the business got put on hold while we conducted our crisis management but it had to happen. And I’m glad to say our business is officially back on track and our taxes have been filed.  So, what have I learned from all of this??

1. Stay Positive No Matter What

The only way I could get through recreating everything was staying positive and reminding myself that I was making our business BETTER.  I was redesigning invoices and contracts to be BETTER. We’ve overhauled our expense and tax spreadsheets to be BETTER.  This disaster caused us to completely re-evaluate our business and make things better to ensure this never happens again.

2. Backup the backups of your backups

It’s not enough to backup only your RAW files – the documents are just as important! As a photographer, I admit that I only thought about preserving our clients photos and memories and never once thought about our spreadsheets.  That part of our business is vital to its survival so you can bet we now have MULTIPLE backups of all our recreated documents.  The more backups, the better! Now we’re in the market for an additional (and possibly magical) hard drive to ensure the safety of our business.

3. Michael and I really work awesome as a team

It would be a lie to say that this disaster didn’t test us.  There were many tears shed on my behalf from frustration, desperation, and down right embarrassment. When we told this story to our friends and family, I was embarrassed with myself for not taking the precautionary measures to back things up.  After all, that was always their first question. But Michael stepped in to explain things and support me.  I love working with Michael.  I really don’t think I could work with anyone else! Sometimes it takes something big like this to make you realize just how good you have it.  He helped me go through an entire years worth of bank records to help recreate the spreadsheets and never once expressed frustration with me for not backing things up.  How loving is that? He gave up hours (if not days) of his own time to help me and our business because he believes in it and he believes in me. That is what makes the perfect business partner.  And the best thing is- I get to be married to him.  I’m starting to think this whole disaster was really a blessing in disguise.