Every Creative Needs Someone Who Loves Excel

Over the past couple of years, the number of event photography sessions has grown by about 100% year over year. That's the kind of number that sounds great in a sentence and feels like drowning in practice.

Every new booking meant more coordination, more follow-up, more back-end work that had nothing to do with a camera. I'm a photographer, and I don't love an Excel spreadsheet the way some people do. Organizing shoots, managing communication, keeping the details straight across a growing calendar, that's not where my strengths are, and it was starting to show.

Nataly isn't the first person I've brought on to help carry that. Each time I tried, I learned a little more about what I actually needed, not just someone who could execute a spreadsheet, but someone who believed in what this business is actually for, who genuinely loves people, and who'd push back on me instead of just doing what I said. I'd been running this alone for a long time. Another real voice in the room mattered more than I expected.

Nataly is my executive assistant, and she's often the first point of contact for the business. If you email us, there's a good chance her name is the one that answers. On the event side, she coordinates the logistics that make every shoot possible: communicating with your team, connecting with partner photographers, managing schedules, and making sure every person on the shoot knows exactly where to be and what to bring.

She once described her own job simply: to anticipate by reading the other person's mind. That's about right. She has a way of making clients feel taken care of before they even realize they needed something.

Nataly grew up in Queens, New York, studied communications, and spent years crafting creative ways to communicate human rights to underprivileged communities in Colombia as part of the UN. She now lives there with her family, working with us remotely. When she joined Three Circles Studio, she connected immediately with the mission: using photography to serve people who don't always get to feel seen.

I taught for thirteen years before this. I had coworkers, a breakroom, people to talk to between classes. When I went out on my own, I lost all of that without quite noticing until Nataly joined. Now there's someone to check in with, not just about the work. Some days we spend an hour on a call just catching up before we get to anything on the list. It turns out having a colleague again, after years of not having one, is its own kind of good.

She's internalized this business in a way that's rare. She cares about where it's going, not just what's on her task list. My peers in this industry have told me, half joking, that they like her more than they like me.

That freed up mental space to spend on the parts of this job only I can do. Shooting. Building relationships. Sitting with an event's actual purpose before the day starts. Writing, thinking, mentoring other photographers coming up.

More capacity means I can serve more people. I can mentor more photographers. I can work with organizations that need more than a transaction.

It's also made me a better father and a better husband. Less administrative stress to carry home means more of me left over for my son and my wife at the end of the day, not just whatever energy the business didn't use up.

Nataly took work off my plate that I didn't know how to put down myself. She's made me a better business owner and a better community leader.