I hope this blog will become more than just wedding videography but also a place to save stories from myself and Sue’s journey with Hitched Films as a business.
Today is one of those days. Today I resigned from my job of 6 years to work full time on Hitched Films.
For the past 6 and bit years, I have been working in a full time marketing job with an American multinational in their Dublin sub. It was my first ‘real job’, straight out of college. The pay and benefits were decent with some good craic with some awesome colleagues, but something was missing for me. I guess I never felt like I was actually creating anything of value (unless you count email campaigns and adverts as valuable). Around late 2014, I was starting to lose interest in the day job. Sue wasn’t exactly overly enthused about her full time job either, and over Christmas 2014 and 2015 New Year’s we chatted about what we wanted to be doing. Sue wanted to get into filming and editing, more than her current job allowed, so we started looking at the types of videographer jobs out there.
I’m not a fan of unjustified risk when you’re still paying rent and bills, so I reckoned the safest option was for Sue to get a job somewhere else, doing what she wanted - as in filming and editing. I’d plug away in my current marketing role, maybe look for something else later, resigned to the fact that I’d have to wait it out.
Back to looking for a job for Sue. To my surprise, when you google just “videographer”, the results overwhelmingly return wedding videographers. Wedding videos… yuck I thought. Hours of boring footage that someone will watch once a year, every other year. But then we found some wedding videos from across the pond, and it changed what I thought a wedding video could be. They were emotional, beautiful and engaging. Needless to say, right then our focus shifted to starting a wedding video business in Ireland. Easy we said. Ha, I say now.
Our first three cameras, three Lumix G6’s. Great workhorses and very reliable. We still use the same bodies, but all the lenses have been upgraded.
Skip forward a couple of months, it’s July 2015 and we have our first wedding to film which we ran as a competition on Facebook. We were doing this first one for free. This was a good marketing tactic, it created a lead list, and got us our first portfolio work. Nobody will (or should) book a wedding videographer without seeing previous work. We spent so long on that wedding edit, some because we made mistakes during filming that needed correction, the rest because this was going to be our showcase. It turned out to be really great. We got a couple more bookings. Slowly the enquiries came in and we tried to close as many as possible. We hit up the lead list from the competition with offers to drive bookings for imminent weddings.
One of our first custom USBs with the Hitched Films logo. We deliver all our wedding videos now on USB & Dropbox.
And from then to now is a great story about how the business grew legs of it’s own, with Sue leaving her job in November 2015 to work on the business full time, which again deserves a post of it’s own. But getting back to the main crux of this post….
... all that has now put me in a privileged position where today I have been able to hand in my notice at my full time, 9-5, office job and begin work on Hitched Films full time with Sue. This is a real milestone for myself and for the business, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a bit scary but I know it’s the right thing to do. We’ve had lots of highs and lows already with Hitched Films, so I know that this is a super high. But we’ll enjoy it while it lasts. And I’d like to thank the couples so far who have trusted Sue and I to deliver the goods. It’s you who really have made all this possible.
So as we take Hitched Films up a gear, here’s to new clients, new wedding videos and new adventures!
P.S. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking of starting a business, Hitched Films isn’t the first business I’ve started. The first one failed with a capital F. It took all my savings. I wasn’t rich. Still am not. That’s a different blog post again. But seriously, there are very few people who will look you in the eye and say, that idea is terrible, don’t do it. But then again, even if there were, would you listen? Should you? Some of the best advice for starting a business I read was from Cork man Damien Mulley (I’m actually assuming he’s from Cork, I’ve never met the man, but he’s based there). He’s got a couple of other links at the bottom of his article that are good too. So before you start, read that and this.
