How We Built The Sassenachs (A Post for Photographers)

Most of what we write here is for couples planning to elope in Scotland. This one is not. This is for the photographers who email us every few weeks asking the same thing. How did you build a business out of this, and would you do it again.

We get a version of that email a lot. Usually from someone good. Someone whose work is better than ours was at the same stage, who is doing everything they were told to do and still cannot get it to come together. So here is the honest version of how it actually happened for us. No course attached. No clever framework.

We started the way most people start

For years we shot everything. Weddings, families, the odd commercial job, anything that paid. We were busy constantly and still not making proper money. The work was fine. The business was not. Looking back, the problem was never the photography. It was that we were trying to be everything to everyone, and the website said exactly that.

The thing that changed was narrowing down

We stopped chasing every kind of shoot and committed to one. Elopements in the Scottish Highlands. That felt like a risk at the time. It looked like turning work away. What it did was the opposite. When you say one clear thing to one clear person, the right people start to recognise themselves in it and the wrong enquiries stop arriving. Our website went from trying to please everyone to filtering hard, and the enquiries that came through after that were already most of the way to booked.

We also work as two photographers rather than one, which shaped how we priced and what we could offer on the day. Most people in this space work solo, so over time it became part of what made us different rather than just a logistics choice.

What we did not do

This is the part people find hard to believe. We built the business with a small following and a quiet marketing calendar. No paid ads. No TikTok. No Facebook page. We have never asked a client for a referral, and we have never run a discount. We market properly for a few months of the year and then we get on with the actual work.

You will be told that all of those things are essential. They are not. What matters far more is that the right couples can find you through search, and that your website does its job once they land on it. A lot of businesses in this industry are loud because the underlying positioning is weak. Get the positioning right and you can afford to be quiet.

If you want the actual figures behind all of this, the revenue, the follower count, how many enquiries a month it really took, Matt has written them up on Craobh, the consultancy he runs for photographers. They are verified across two booking systems and he is happy to show the numbers.

Why we do not sell a course

Because a course would not have helped us. What we needed back then was someone who had built the kind of business we wanted to sit down, look at ours honestly and tell us what was wrong with it. The pricing, the positioning, the website, the enquiry process. Specifically, not in general terms.

That is what Matt does now through Craobh, which is pronounced Kroov and is the Gaelic word for tree. We named it for where we live, on the edge of the Highlands. It is one to one. He goes through your website, your portfolio, your pricing and your enquiry process before you even speak, then tells you what to change and in what order. If you are a photographer who is doing the work and still not seeing it land, that is the kind of help that actually moves things.

There is also a free pricing calculator on the Craobh site if you just want a useful starting point with nothing attached.

Would we do it again

Yes. But we would narrow down years earlier than we did. The longest part of this was the stretch we spent being a bit of everything before we were willing to be one thing properly.

If you are weighing this up, that is the part worth sitting with. Not the gear. Not the follower count. What you actually want to be known for, and whether your business currently says it clearly. If you would like someone to look at yours and tell you the truth, that is exactly what Matt does over at Craobh.