Meet Lily & David McGregor of Lily McGregor Photography

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lily & David McGregor.

Lily & David, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
David and I met while working at a photography studio in Johns Creek. The owner mismanaged his business, and we were subsequently laid off right shortly after we got married in 2009. It was a devastating blow, but David and I have never been the type to take defeat. After freelancing for a while, we decided to start our own business. It was super scary and a big risk to take. We were living week-to-week, job-to-job in those days. However, we both felt that we had already seen what NOT to do and we had faith in ourselves.

Our company really took off in fall of 2009. We got the opportunity to be the official sports photographer for North Forsyth High School in Cumming. This opportunity was the result of relationships that we had built previously in our careers, which made us thankful that we never burned any bridges. We continued to build the portrait and event photography parts of our business for the next few years – entirely from referrals from our awesome clients. We took on every job we could, both in photography and graphic design; basically, anything to get our name out there. Every year, we photographed more weddings, more events, more portraits. We were slowly growing.

2012 was the next big year for us. We continued to book weddings, events, and portraits at a steady pace. However, that year, we gained the full photography contract for North Forsyth High School (which included not only the sports, but all of the yearbook portraits as well). As a result of this growth, we moved into our downtown Cumming studio. We also received the opportunity to become Buford High School’s official sports photographer that year, which quickly became the full photography contract after the previous photographer could not fulfill their obligations. These two contracts provided an exponential boost to our business’ visibility, and confirmed that personal, consistent customer service is an invaluable asset.

Fast forward to last year: We have grown enough as a business that we have hired a complete staff to assist us in servicing our clients. However, David and I still work full-time and interact with our clients on a daily basis to ensure that we maintain the relationships that allow our business to thrive. We won “Best of Forsyth” the last two years, which has been incredibly rewarding considering it is an award that is voted on by the public. We continue to grow in our community, establishing relationships with other schools, businesses, and event venues, as well as contributing as often as we can to scholarships and charities. The fact that this business has grown to this level over a short period of time has been such a blessing. We never could have predicted that we would be where we are now back in 2009.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has definitely not been a smooth road! We started this business with nothing, just what we had when we were laid off: one lens, one flash, one camera, one computer. We worked out of our living room. People talk about living paycheck-to-paycheck – I don’t think we were even doing that! We were living job-to-job. We went months eating mostly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ramen noodles, just saving up as much as we could while still paying our bills.

Also, one thing that people often overlook when considering life as a small business owner is the amount of personal time that you have to invest. We consistently work 70 hour weeks on average, even today. We have one day off a week, normally Sundays. We take very few vacations, as most vacation times are during busy parts of our year. When you are starting out, there isn’t a budget for extra employees to help you, so you have no other option than to do it yourself – no matter how much time that takes. As we have grown, we have been blessed to be able to have a staff to delegate tasks, but we still invest in incredible amount of time servicing our customers personally because that is what sets us apart of other companies.

Please tell us about Lily McGregor Photography.
We specialize in portraiture and events: weddings, parties, sports, the full spectrum of portraiture from children to seniors to families. We are known for providing photography that reflects our client’s personality, as well as event coverage that captures each moment in unexpected ways. We also work with several schools, so we also have a reputation for providing affordable school photography with integrated sports and event coverage that celebrates all aspects of school life.

We are proud of being a small business that is involved with our community. Our clients get to know us over years of photographing their lives. We treat our clients like family, so when a big moment happens, we get excited to be a part of it. For example: when a person we photographed all through high school gets engaged as a young adult and we get to photograph their wedding….it is really special.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
This is a great question. Even though David and I had several years of experience in photography before we started our business, building a business from nothing is hard! We learned a lot of hard lessons over the years. If we could go back in time, I would hope that we would create a better plan on how to function as a business in a way that was more conducive to having a family.

I would say that we didn’t really learn what efficiency meant until our son was born in 2014. David and I did not have a game plan for what would happen when I became pregnant and our doctor told me that I was not allowed to photograph any sporting events. One of the things that differentiated us early on in our business’ life (and still today) is exceptional sports coverage. David then had to take one our whole sports schedule himself – which was a daunting task. Also, our son was born just before the busiest part of our year – the summer. I was on maternity leave for the first month of that season and we had never allowed anyone else to photograph portraits for us before! Now that our son is almost three years old, we are constantly making adjustments to how we do things to accommodate our family life.

The birth of our amazing son forced us to not only schedule ourselves more efficiently, but also has made us reexamine our workflows so that I can be finished with work at a consistent time each day so that I can pick our son up from school. In the past, we just worked until it was done – it didn’t matter how long that took. As you can imagine, that approach does not coexist well with needing to pick your child up no later than 6:30pm.

Contact Info:

• Address: 205 Pilgrim Mill Road
  Cumming, GA 30040
• Website: lilymcgregorphotography.com
• Phone: 7703175599
• Email: lilymcgphoto@gmail.com
• Facebook: @LilyMcGregorPhotography
• Twitter: @lilymcgphoto

Image Credit:
Our family portrait was taken by Austyn Burke/Captured Forever.