On a beautiful summer evening in Victoria, BC, the Flytographer team came together for the first annual garden party to celebrate the successes of this year and have a bit of fun while enjoying a lovely dinner al fresco in founder Nicole's garden. Scroll down for all the gorgeous photos and a letter from Nicole below.
Four years ago, I was building Flytographer alone, out of my home office. Between full-time consulting work at Microsoft and raising my two young boys, I was doing it all: customer support; tech; recruitment; marketing; accounting; and operations. It was a crazy chapter, and I was constantly exhausted and feeling overwhelmed. It's a fact that building and scaling a startup is really hard - it's not all Prosecco Fridays and garden parties, despite what it may look like from the outside!
Flytographer has come a long way since these early days, and it is due to the incredible people you see in these photos. Currently, we have 16 full-time employees in our head office in Victoria, BC and over 400 photographers on our global team. Last week, we launched our first booking platform in all of our cities worldwide - more than 200! - and special thanks go to the hard work of our development team.
With all these achievements in mind, I thought: what better way to celebrate the team than with a good old-fashioned summer garden party!
The chilled rosé flowed, we ate a delicious long-table dinner catered by Toque, with our place settings complemented by gorgeous bouquets from The Root Cellar Potting Shed, and unwrapped ice cream sandwiches for dessert. The team played heated games of badminton, hung out in a treehouse and jumped on the trampoline. Mostly, we connected on a personal level, laughed a ton, and shared fond stories of our customers, photographers and how much we all love working together. I know that our culture is incredibly special, and I am so grateful to work with people whose values align with mine. We've purposefully created a culture where diversity, respect, gratitude, and kindness live alongside tenacity, accountability, passion, hard work and big 'take over the world' kind of dreams.
In the end, loving your work and believing in your mission balances out all the hard stuff that inevitably comes along with scaling a start-up. And celebrating the wins, big and little, is a tradition we will passionately continue!
Nicole
Founder & CEO, Flytographer
Flytographer: Stephanie in Victoria
See more: Victoria - Team Flytographer