"I would say if you're thinking about hiring teammates and building a brand of associate photographers working under you. You need to start that process now, only because it does take a little bit. You can't just hire someone on and be like, okay, let's start booking. You have to touch on training as well as a few other things before they get started." - Grace's advice on when to start building your associate team.
"This is where I preach outsourcing, because you have to have the main checkpoint of where all of the images go through. So what happens after my associates get done shooting a wedding, they do not touch the images. They do not scroll through them. They do not do anything else. They hand the cards over, I go through everything and make sure everything's there. Then what I do is I have an editor that edits everything." - Grace's advice on keeping the editing style the same with an associate team.
"If you can keep your team local, I would honestly recommend that. But if you do have people flying for your weddings, you need to take a look at your contract, especially with your associate on. You have to think, what are they covering? What are you covering? Are all their meals like taking care of like, do you have to cover all of that stuff? Because then obviously your packages need to increase because you still need to profit. They still need to profit it. Especially if you're taking on all of those expenses."- Grace's advice for keeping your associate team local