Episode 53: Vision, Legacy, and Photography W/ William Leaton

What does financial planning and photography have in common? More than I thought before this episode. Welcome to the Self-Employment Success Podcast. My guest on today’s podcast is William Leaton. William is the founder of William Sumner Photography, a wedding photography business located in Virginia. What’s unique about William is that he is only 3 months into running his business full time. In this episode you can sense the freshness, vibrance, and vitality that William has for his business, along with his honesty in the challenges and what he is learning. William shares how he thinks about wedding photography as more than merely cute pictures for instagram, but as a way to capture this incredibly powerful moment in a couple’s life where they start their life together and how that isn’t a one and done thing. He talks about how they will see these photos for the rest of their lives and even beyond their lives, their kids and grandkids will see them. Photographs are a way to transport us back to our heritage and remind us of what we’re doing in our family and with our spouse. We talk alot about vision and legacy in this episode and how if you can get clear on that, and can communicate the deep value you provide, then what you do is priceless for people. So with that introduction I hope you enjoy this episode of the Self-Employment Success Podcast with William Leaton.

https://williamsumnerphoto.com/

Instagram williamsumnerphoto

Transcript:

All right. Welcome, William, to the Self -Employment Success podcast. Thanks. Glad to be here. Of course. I'm excited to have William on the podcast today for a couple of reasons. One, he's just a dear friend personally. Like we just me and my wife love William and his wife and his daughter, his beautiful daughter. And he's he'll get to tell a story, but he's relatively new into his business. And I feel like in this podcast, we have all ranges of the self -employment journey. People.

launching people brand new people who are selling their businesses people who've been in it forever I mean I think like you know five or six episodes ago there was a guy he's like 80 and it was telling like his whole his self -employment journey was like literally his whole life just guys just telling us his life story and so just fun to get all kind of paradigms of it but William tell us about yourself personally professionally what do you do yeah so glad to be here

Yeah, my name's William. I'm married, so I'm two and a half or so years married. I'm 24 right now. My wife and I have a almost eight month old daughter. So we are really kind of in the swing of just being new parents and figuring out what it means to have a little family, figuring out what it means to be a married couple. We moved to Virginia Beach, which is where we live now.

Right. Like we moved the day after we got married. So I think we spent maybe actually we spent like two days at a little cabin in Virginia and then we moved down here. So we've been it was kind of like a brand new journey, brand new moment for us. And we've been here since and it's been a really, really sweet, really sweet and beautiful time for us with all its own kind of heartaches and challenges. But yeah, so that's that's where me and my wife are. We I am only only a couple of months into for the first time ever doing this full time.

is running a wedding photography business. That's right now it's just me and my wife kind of making it work. And I've been a portrait and wedding photographer. I shot my first wedding back in 2017. So seven years ago, I actually just saw a Facebook post from that bride and she was posting about her seventh anniversary, which was really, really fun to look back. And I remember when I got that message about shooting a wedding for the first time as a high school kid in high school, I'm just being over the moon about that. So anyway, yeah, I'm seven years into.

photographing weddings, but this is my first year kind of bringing just giving put all my eggs in this basket and so it's kind of a fun moment for us to I've always had part -time jobs or no job mostly mostly no job with little side things but since being married I've had a couple different part -time work and yeah it's a fun moment we're going full full send on this right now. That's awesome.