Anyone who owns their own business knows how time consuming it is – if you aren’t actually working, you’re thinking/planning/worrying about working. If you’re a list-maker like Ashley is, you’re constantly adding to the ginormous To Do list (and getting secret satisfaction at those beautiful check marks!). Being a business owner is not easy, and it’s not for the faint of heart – there’s a lot of responsibility, stress and time involved.

But what if – and stay with us here, because this is sorta crazy – what if you could actually take something off your list? As in – get a free checkmark?

Wouldn’t you do it?

For the last almost-6-years in business, we’ve always heard of fellow-photographer colleagues who outsourced their editing and for the longest time, we made a face about it. We couldn’t fathom handing over something so integral to our business to someone, when we were perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. We doubted that it would ever become necessary for us to do it.

Remember – we even wrote a blog about our workflow a few months ago!

But then … one day about three months ago, we realized that even with our awesome workflow – other areas of our lives were being neglected. Sure, we still had family time after the kids got out of school and sure, we took a couple days off a month to not do anything but veg. But what about keeping up with housework? Or going to the gym? Or making time to spend with friends?

Couldn’t we be doing something else to better ourselves or our business?

And that day, we decided something had to change because we wanted to have a little extra freedom. As passionate as we are about our work, our couples and our business – we need to be equally passionate about each other and ourselves. Something had to change – because we were slowly getting sucked into the never-ending abyss that is being Workaholics.

We came to 3 very important realizations:

1.) NOT having a blog come out for a session or a wedding within a couple of days will not break our business. Just because someone else does it that fast, does not mean that we have to.

2.) NOT editing our own photos will not break our business. Just because someone else does all their own editing, does not mean that we have to.

3.) Overworking ourselves and not devoting enough time to our health and relationship WILL break our business.

Whoa. Re-read those realizations. 

After doing a lot of research on various companies and doing some time-cost analyzations, we decided to test the waters of outsourcing. First, just a couple sessions. Then, some weddings.

And guess what? Y’all never knew the difference!

You see – we found our editing soul mates over at The Find Lab. Not only do they use the same editing techniques that we were already using, but their edits + style were damn-near exactly how we would have been editing. Our personal editor (hey Brandi!!) took the time to research our shooting and editing style, and completely matched our look straight from the get-go.

We absolutely ADORE this entire company. We had the chance to hang out with them in-person for a little while at WPPI, and they are just as rad in-person as they were over email.

Sessions still have a lightning fast turn-around of 3 business days, and weddings? A turnaround of about 10 business days.

Literally – this is our new workflow:

• Cull + sort wedding
• Post a couple peeks
• Send to the Find Lab

… And that’s it.

We don’t spend the next week straight on the computer, we don’t stress over finishing anything in a rush, and we don’t worry about our clients because we know they’re being well-served. We know when the images get back to us, they’re going to be ready to deliver. We know that they are going to look polished and exactly the way we envisioned them to be for our clients.

Outsourcing edits has not only been the best business choice for us, but also a phenomenal personal choice.

We’ve gone to the gym more in the last two months than we have in our entire lives (except when Randy was active duty).

We’ve gone out on dates.

We’ve worked on our house.

We’ve Randy built a chicken coop.

We’ve networked with local businesses at events and lunch dates.

We’ve worked on our new website.

We’ve put laundry away the same day it was washed.

Outsourcing edits has changed our lives so much – and all for the better.