A milestone celebration
Here’s a number worth sitting with for a moment.
After five years, nearly half of all small businesses close their doors. After ten years, about two-thirds are no longer operating. Two out of three. Gone.
I’m writing this post from the other side of that statistic — and I don’t say that to brag. I say it because I want you to understand what ten years of full-time business actually looks like. It doesn’t look like a straight line. It doesn’t look like a hustle culture highlight reel. It looks like grief and growth stacked right on top of each other, sometimes in the same week.
This is that story.
Where It Started
I photographed my first wedding fifteen years ago. I was still figuring out who I was — a college student who would go on to earn a degree in integrated social studies and spend three years in front of a high school classroom. Teaching wasn’t the wrong path. But it wasn’t the only one.
Shortly after becoming a wife in 2014, while I was just getting started in the classroom, I was quietly building something. I created evergreen content — blog posts, resources, pages that were designed to do the work of finding people even when I wasn’t actively looking for them.
When I stepped away from teaching and went full-time in 2016, that content had already been doing the work. It propelled my business in ways I wasn’t fully prepared for. It put me on page one of Google and let me focus on what mattered most without the constant scramble for the next booking. That early investment in showing up online bought me something you can’t purchase: time.
I want every photographer reading this to understand how significant that was — and still is. [Read more about Consistent Marketing through Consistent Blogging]
Building a Business and Building a Family
2016 became the year I stepped fully into entrepreneurship, and it opened the door to the rest of my life along with it.
On December 1, 2017, Charlotte was born. New motherhood and a growing business in the same season — I’d be lying if I said I had it all figured out. But momentum was building. The work I’d put in was compounding.
Then, in November 2019, I found out I was pregnant again. And on December 31, 2019, we lost that baby.
I’ve written about that loss more openly – because it deserved more than silence. What I’ll say here is this: grief doesn’t pause your business. It sits next to it, in every email and every session and every late night edit, until slowly, slowly, it starts to soften.
The world shut down two months later. The pandemic reordered everything for everyone. And in the middle of all of that, we found out we were expecting again.
Our rainbow baby, Caroline, was born at home on January 19, 2021.
In a crazy turn of events, Caroline, just six weeks old, Josh, and I signed with a builder to build our forever home. One of our biggest life dreams was going to happen.
Five Acres and a Dream List
In May 2021, we closed on five acres. Five acres that held more hopes and dreams than I had words for at the time. A forever home. A property where my work and my life could grow together. And written somewhere on the dream list that came with that land: a greenhouse and cows.
(More on that in a minute.)
We moved into the house in April 2022. By September 2022, we broke ground on the studio.
Boudoir by Loren
In November 2021, before the studio walls even existed, Boudoir by Loren was born.
It wasn’t just a second brand. It was a declaration. An invitation for women to come find their spark again — to let their fire burn bright. Helping women reconnect with their self-worth became some of the most meaningful work of my career. [Read more about how Boudoir by Loren got started]
The studio construction that followed was my largest business investment to date. In February 2023, the first boudoir session took place in the nearly-finished space — and everything I’d envisioned for that room started to come to life.
The Greenhouse
Remember that dream list?
The greenhouse made it onto Joshua’s honey-do list the day we bought the property. And for years, other projects bumped it. Life had a habit of doing that.
In May 2026, it finally happened. My second-largest business investment — second only to the studio build — and worth every year of waiting. The greenhouse is now part of the property I shoot on, and it’s become exactly what I knew it could be.
The Numbers, Because They’re Worth Celebrating
Over ten years full-time, here’s what this business has held:
150+ weddings. 300+ portrait sessions. Hundreds of thousands of photographs taken. Hundreds of galleries delivered. Dozens upon dozens of heirloom albums — tangible, lasting things that will outlive both me and the couples who hold them.
The Education That Made It Possible
None of this happened in isolation. Ten years of investing in my craft — Showit United, The Reset Conference, Abundance, Booked Solid, Rise in Rankings, and nearly everything KJ Education offers — shaped not just my skill set but my perspective on what building a sustainable business actually means.
The clients who became friends. The peers who became family. That’s the part the business statistics don’t measure.
What Ten Years Actually Means
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, about 65.3% of businesses fail within their first ten years. In the creative industry — where so many talented people start, and so few sustain — that number likely stings even more.
I’m not standing here ten years in because everything was easy. I’m here because I invested in content before I needed it, because I kept showing up through grief, and newborns, and a global pandemic, and a construction site in my backyard, and because I built something that was always meant to be more than a job.
It was always meant to be a life.
Here’s to the next ten. 🤍
Ready to become part of this story? Whether you’re a bride planning the wedding of your dreams or a woman ready to reclaim her spark — I’d love to be your photographer.
