Meet Kelsi Grant

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kelsi Grant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kelsi below.

Kelsi, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I used to think my “purpose” existed in one thing. A specific career, a certain title, the way that I contributed to the world. Now I know, at least for me, my purpose is something that ebbs and flows with each season of life. When I was in college, I was pursuing a degree in Family Studies with the intention to go further into a Master’s program and become a family therapist. After so many of the hard things I had walked through from adolescence into young adulthood, I felt that my purpose on this earth was to help other families and children understand healthy relationships and ultimately, improve the lives of families all around me.
Life happens, and as I got engaged and then married and we began moving all around the country for my husband’s military career, my goal of getting my Master’s degree faded and my dream of becoming a mom came to the forefront. Then I grappled again with what my “purpose” was. Was I only put on this earth to raise my own family? That aligned, but it didn’t feel like that was fully it.
Photography had always been a fun hobby, a creative outlet, and then when our own family went through our own hardship as our first little one was spontaneously born prematurely, on the other side of the country, far from our families back home, right before Covid became rampant, that’s when I started to really learn how my purpose was going to play out in this world.
Combining my undergraduate degree in Child and Family Studies and my own experiences as a mom facing some seriously hard things, I realized that my degree, my creative passion, and my parenting dreams all tied together to create the most incredibly meaningful purpose I had ever felt yet: to love and nurture my family well, while also taking my education, experiences, and creativity and truly *serving* my clients with such a unique approach. It became about so much more than photos. It was about creating legacy and a photo experience that ultimately is about nurturing their own relationships and their family ties.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m Kelsi Grant, a wife, mom of two, and photographer with a unique storytelling approach to photos that allows each image to build into every family’s legacy.
Growing up, some of my favorite memories involved being gathered with my extended family at my grandparent’s house sifting through old photos and documents and hearing my grandparents tell the story of each moment we were reflecting on. After we lost my grandfather, those moments became even more sacred as they were replayed through the perspective of my grandmother. As I became a wife and was beginning to grow my family, my grandmother began declining in her dementia and the recollection was lost – all we had to hold onto was the physical aspects, like the photos, that we were blessed to have of those times.
When I was younger, my own family hit a very hard season right before my teen years, and many of our own family photos, videos, and memories were either lost, spread between homes, or did not carry the same value that they once had. I didn’t think much of that until I had my own children and realized that they would have little to no photos of their mom growing up, or be able to see much of my own background – all they had to rely on was whatever my memory could muster. And if you know much about difficulty and trauma – it can have an impact on the ability to retain memory. So I was not left with much.
And so my desire to make sure families have longevity and legacy linked to each photo was born.
This is why, for me, every. single. photo, session, client, wedding day, etc. is about so much more than a pretty photo. For me, I allow my creativity to act as a tool while I think about what this family, couple, or child will want to look back on in 5, 10, even 20 years down the road.
I am so, so grateful to have built a brand centered around acceptance of families and couples as they are, fostering the relationships between each subject in front of my camera, and creating an experience that allows for a more calm, stress-free photoshoot that results in photos whose value continue to grow over time.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The first and biggest quality that comes to mind is “grit” or resilience. Starting out as a photographer, it was so easy to feel flustered or overwhelmed or “less than”. Having the ability to push through and keep working on finding myself as an artist and finding my groove as a service provider made the biggest difference in my ability to grow in my craft and become an established business owner. This may be a separate quality, but I feel it goes hand in hand with resilience, is the desire to continuously seek out more education in your craft. Never believing that you know everything or are immune to failure breeds a knowledge-seeking mindset that, I believe, is more likely to have stronger problem-solving skills and the ability to push through hard situations as your business continues to grow. The next quality that I feel is especially important and most definitely played an instrumental role in my journey, is the ability to empathize with your clients. In a service as personal as photography, the ability to connect and empathize with your clients is so important. Not only did empathy allow me to create long-lasting connections, which made for amazing friendships AND referrals and returning business, it also allowed me to put myself in my client’s shoes and document their moments from a unique perspective that carries meaning for years to come. Lastly, it’s not as glamorous, but as the daughter of two entrepreneurs who have backgrounds in finance – knowledge of your businesses books and basic budgeting is SO important, especially in the beginning when the foundation is being laid.

For those early in their business, I would say it is so important to focus more on yourself, the education you desire to seek out, and really not to shy away from those areas that you feel may need more improvement in the beginning. We all start somewhere, so there is no shame in getting a few things wrong in the beginning or even “failing” here and there. Build that grit by opening yourself up to new challenges and rather than fearing failure, seek out education from those who have already faced those failures and learned from them. Create a business that makes a positive impact by meeting your clients *where they are* rather than melding them into what you want them to be, understanding that it is your job (photographically speaking) to create art using their authentic moments, not to fabricate a reality that is disingenuous to them. And lastly – budgeting can be fun. Money conversations in the beginning can feel daunting, scary, and honestly – boring. But, they are necessary, and future you will thank you. (A very specific piece of advice, if I could go back I would have read “Profit First” SO much sooner!)

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

“Obstacle” or “challenge” may not necessarily be the words to describe this season of life, as it is a challenging season I have faced before, and will again. But truly, something that I am facing in my business right now is the task of moving my business to a completely new area/region and maintaining my consistent momentum in the process.
As a military family, we have faced, and will continue to face, uprooting our lives and moving to new areas every few years. This year is no different. Thankfully, this is not totally my first rodeo and so I know of a few strategies I can implement now to ease the stressors that challenges like this can bring up. For one, I am forging connections in our new location before we arrive there. Making friends with other vendors, photographers, and transitioning from being known as a Florida photographer to a Virginia photographer. On the backend, working on keywords and SEO to make my work more visible in those areas. For me, that looks like hiring outside help that specializes in those areas so that I can alleviate some of the upfront stress and know that the heavy lifting is being done in a way that I can get my ROI back quicker than if I handled it all by myself. Something else I am doing is getting creative shoots setup there for me to dive in and use them to location scout while also building out a local referral network.
Overall, going back to that “grit” I’ve discussed before, the biggest thing that will “resolve” this challenge is the understanding that obstacles and difficulties are just apart of this journey. And that the way I can stand out and be one of those business owners that perseveres through different obstacles is not by freaking out or freezing and doing nothing – but by opening myself up to more education as we move to a completely new area, stepping out of my introverted comfort zone by networking in a place I’ve never been to before, and understand that this is my dream job, and there will be days like these that I have to fight a little bit harder to truly preserve the life that I have built and love so much.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kelsigrantphotography.com
• Instagram: @kelsigrantphotography

Image Credits

Kelsi Grant Photography (me)