Getting ready for commencement season

Every year, millions of students walk across a stage to receive their diplomas at colleges and universities across the country. Behind every one of those moments is a small dedicated team of photographers, coordinators, and operations staff making sure the images from that day are keepsakes graduates and their families will treasure. For The Grad Team, the work that goes into those six weeks between May and mid-June happens year-round.

I like to describe the ebbs-and-flows of our business as a shark fin. There's no gradual bell curve. Our ramp-up is two days. Our peak is a string of labor intensive, back-to-back ceremonies. Our ramp-down is two days. Straight up, straight down. That kind of compressed intensity means we can't afford to figure things out on the fly.

Here's how we make sure we are prepared to deliver for our clients and their graduates during the craziness and joy of commencement season.

‍Preparation starts at the previous ceremony‍

People sometimes ask when we begin planning for commencement season. The honest answer is: at last year's commencement. Our team takes notes at every event: what went well, what surprised us, what could be improved. After the season wraps, we meet with many of our clients to review and plan ahead.

By early November, we're actively building the spring schedule. By the time the holiday break is over, we're full throttle. That means staffing up part-time local help, reviewing needs based on the previous year, and making sure all our staff across the country is aligned. 

The number one challenge, year in and year out, is staffing for a seasonal business. For example, College A has always held their graduation the first week in May. College B has always been the second week. And then, inevitably, one of them shifts. Suddenly they're on the same weekend! Our full-time staff spends the entire year preparing for exactly those scenarios.

‍You can’t shake hands and build trust on Zoom

A few weeks ago, we brought 75 members of our team leaders to The Grad Team headquarters in Ypsilanti, Michigan, for a weekend of training, planning, and relationship-building. It's a significant investment for us, but we do it because you can't shake hands over a telephone. You can’t cultivate culture on Zoom. 

The weekend covered field operations handoffs, standards for how we photograph and lead on campus, and, critically, culture building. We purposely mix people from different regions so a photographer from Montana is sitting with someone from Florida, comparing notes with a Regional Manager from Iowa. The best learning often happens on breaks between sessions, when people trade war stories about how they approached a tricky ceremony or handled a last-minute curveball. 

We could send a beautifully designed manual to every regional manager and field lead, but the personal connection is far more effective and instructive. There's no substitute for being in the same room.

One of my favorite moments from this year’s leadership weekend came from a text message. A few of our employees, all from different regions, went to workout together one morning. They sent me a text with a selfie ribbing me for not joining them. Three people from three different states, building the kind of camaraderie that makes a team a team. I put that picture up on a slide at our closing session and told the group: this is what we're about.

Everyone owns the culture

The most meaningful part of the weekend is cultural reinforcement, something we could never recreate on a Zoom call. The Grad Team has grown through the merging of several organizations, each with its own way of doing business. One of the things I emphasized during our session is that we are all adapting together and shaping the next iteration of The Grad Team. We are not The Grad Team of five years ago, we are the new Grad Team, and that means building a shared culture that everyone owns, from top to bottom.

That ownership matters because when a lead photographer is running a ceremony in a small town in Alabama, that person is The Grad Team in that moment. If they know our culture, they don't need a playbook to handle the unexpected. They just know.

Growth and change take work, and they must be purposeful. We are intentionally making sure that as the industry evolves, we're leading, not reacting. Our people show up to events with what we call The Grad Team swagger: the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you're an expert at something your clients only do once a year. That swagger shows up in the consistency of our product, the smoothness of our workflows, and the way our clients describe working with us. We handle the logistics, so our clients don’t have to; and our confidence shows in the way we do our business.

That's what a weekend in Ypsilanti buys us. Not a binder that collects dust, but a team that shows up ready. I'm looking forward to a tremendous commencement season this spring.