Day 1 of the Move Mountains Retreat
It’s taken me a long time to write this blog post. The same thing happened after the Fireside Retreat because I had an extremely difficult time putting this experience into words. A few years ago, the thought of hosting retreats was put on my heart and I haven’t been able to shake it since. Hosting retreats is hands down one of my favorite things I do in my business. Seeing people transform their business and lives right before your eyes is an INCREDIBLE thing to witness. The Move Mountains Retreat lived up to every expectation I had for it as 6 incredible attendees sat through nearly 35 hours of content and had ideas bursting through the room every 5 seconds. We kept joking that everyone was having brain explosions every few minutes as we went through the content.
This first Move Mountains Retreat, which is co-hosted with me and my amazing business soul sista, Jordan Jones, was hosted in Windham, NY in a cute little mountain home. The house was filled with light with floor to ceiling windows on every wall, and a cute little fireplace awaited us in the cold winter month of March.
We arrived the day before attendees so we could get the house ready before attendees arrived and we had fun putting together the SWAG bags and placing them on the beds. We got the workbooks ready, the table set, the food and wine purchased, and we were READY. I of course, had a blast taking pictures all around the house!!
Laura Neff Portraits at the Move Mountains Retreat in Windham, NY 
The Heart Behind The Move Mountains Retreat
Around 3, the first attendee arrived and we almost burst out of our skin with excitement. Soon after, all 6 girls had arrived at the cabin and we were ready to kick off with introductions and the welcoming talk!! And, one of our amazing friends and attendees Sara took the amazing photos of Jordan and I! She’s incredibleeeeee go check out her work here!
And that’s when we really got into the heart of The Move Mountains Retreat and why it was created – we believe that there are so many business owners playing small with their businesses and their gifts. Between Jordan and I, we believe we have a proven step-by-step system to growing your business beyond your wildest dreams. Our attendee for this retreat is the multi-passionate go-getter who knows they were made for MORE. They are ready to scale their business, build new revenue streams, pivot into new services, grow a team, and implement systems and marketing funnels that will allow them to scale their business without sacrificing their personal life.
Laura Neff Portraits at the Move Mountains Retreat in Windham, NY 
Laura Neff Portraits at the Move Mountains Retreat in Windham, NY 
Laura Neff Portraits at the Move Mountains Retreat in Windham, NY 
Then, we jumped into our first talk: Mastering Your Mindset!!
Our first talk: Master Your Mindset
This talk was all about shifting the limiting beliefs we have about ourselves and our business so that we could find the success we truly deserve. We’ve seen it time and time again. Business owners playing small because they have self limiting beliefs holding them back. We KNOW these attendees and YOU reading this were meant for big things, and we hope you believe that too. This talk dove into the things actually holding each of us back and then we wrote out paths to overcome those fears, doubts and beliefs. We believe in the power of mastering your mindset and surround yourself with encouraging, high level thinkers that are going to make you realize your own potential and stop shying away from it. During this retreat, we talked about how to shift your mindset to that of a high earner so you can make the influence, the impact, and the income you are worthy of.
Dinner, Games, and Dance Parties
While Jordan and I were teaching, our amazing retreat assistant Jill was making the most delicious dinner of Flank Steak and Ramen Noodle Salad! Complete with warm mulled wine (Gløgg!) We toasted to all our current and future successes as business owners, dug in, and then put on some pajamas and had a game night!! We played Taboo, had a dance party to High School Musical, and laughed out faces off!!
Day 2 Morning Yoga
Our second day kicked off in the best way with morning Yoga! An amazing instructor from the area came to the house and even did modifications for Jordan since she was seven months pregnant at the time!! This was a great way to kick off our day with peace and calm and with intention.
Breakfast Sponsored by Showit!
After yoga, we had an amazing breakfast spread of yogurt and oats and granola and pancakes and it was OH SO delicious and sponsored by our favorite website company in all the land – SHOWIT!!! We seriously love them – I’ve had my websites on their platform for over 5 years and I couldn’t imagine using any other company. Their customer support is amazing, they throw and entire conference every year for photographers and it’s just INCREDIBLE and I have made such a huge group of supportive friends there.
As a design school nerd (yes I went to design school!) having the capability to completely customize my website to my vision was SUPER important. Having a company that cared about my business and my passions and me as a person was a serious cherry on top of choosing my website platform.
Seriously think about this, how many website platforms out there know nearly half their customers by name! And host events and conferences for them and throw galas for them!
Showit Is that company. About 5 years ago I made the switch to using Showit as my website platform of choice so I could make it totally custom (with ease), and then I went to their conference, Showit United where I made lifelong friends in the industry. Now I just go year after year after year to reconnect with my photographer friends from all over the country and I just have to throw two hands up 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻 for this incredible company that cares so dang much about their customers.
I am so grateful for the company that allowed me to make my vision come to life, and am equally grateful that they said YES to supporting me and @peteandjordan at our Move Mountains Retreat. I’m forever in awe of the incredible creative industry I get to be a part of. Thank you @showit.co for leading the way and making the creative community feel like one big ol’ family. And thank you for letting me make my work shine! <3
Day 2 Content: Goal Setting, Workflows, Systems, Scaling without Sacrifice, Growing a Team
Our first full day of content was all my teaching! We pretty much split things up with me teaching one day and Jordan teaching the next. I kicked off with goal setting and what I love love love about this talk is that we actually begin roadmapping out our goals instead of just talking about how to set good goals. The attendees all get an INCREDIBLE workbook if I do say so myself and they get to DO THE WORK while they’re actually at the retreat of setting their goals and figuring out what they want their life and businesses to look like!
After my goal setting talk, I dove into workflows, systems, and efficiency! This is obviously my JAM and I love teaching how people can get MORE results in their business while working LESS. We made workflows for different areas of our business, talked all about how to make things more efficient, and I geeked out the WHOLE TIME.
After this talk, I jumped into scaling your business without sacrificing your life and we talked about growing a team, your zone of genius and how to concentrate your work on this “zone”. We talked all about what this means, and did a lot of work in our workbooks to make our dream businesses a reality!
Lunch with Greetabl
After a morning full of content, we had a build your own sandwich day and did a raffle with one of our favorite gifting companies – Greetabl! We pulled a name out of a hat for who won a gift card for them and I’m so excited for one of the girls to get to love on her clients using this incredible company! We are so excited to have them as a sponsor for our fall retreat as well!!
Masterminding!!
Once all of Day 2’s content was finished, we jumped into literally my favorite part of the retreat – the mastermind time! Masterminding has got to be the most impactful thing I’ve done for my own business. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it essentially means that you get together with a group of people in a similar industry to you (creatives in this case!) and you get to talk about a problem or area of your business you’d like help or guidance with and collectively as a group we brainstorm and “mastermind” solutions to your problem, or help you outwardly process an idea.
This was THE BEST. Literally I cannot tell you how many brilliant ideas came out of the mastermind time. From mini courses to travel print shop to new services, these women were absolutely brilliant in their ideas and each and every attendee had so much to offer when it came to ideas on how to launch the person’s dream into action.
Each attendee had a 30-40 minute hot seat where we got to strictly focus on their business, and I’m pretty sure every person had pages and pages full of notes from every person’s hotseat! The beauty of this is that you can gain just as much from other people’s hot seats as you do your own!
We plan to do this for an entire day at the fall move mountains retreat and I could not be more excited about it!!
It’s such a POWERFUL thing having people speak into your business.
Dinner at Rock’n Mexicana with Margaritas
After all the girls had a hot seat, we got ready for dinner in town at Rock’N Mexicana!! We cheersed to successful businesses and new friends over margs and tacos and I couldn’t imagine a better way to kick off out first full day at the retreat!
Day 3 Recap!
The third day of the Move Mountains Retreat kicked off in the best way! Breakfast sponsored by my favorite company for Photographers – Photographers Edit!! They’re a company that specializes in wedding and portrait photography editing so that photographer’s can stop spending all their time in front of their computers and actually get their life back!!
As a business owner, I truly believe 100% in the importance of outsourcing – we were not MEANT to be everything in our business. We don’t HAVE to be great at every single thing that comes along with being an entrepreneur – different people have different skills and that’s the beauty of the world!! We raffled off a winner for a Photographer’s Edit gift card (two of them actually) and one of the girls who most desperately needed it won!! We are so happy to have had Photographer’s Edit’s support for our attendees at the retreat!!
For any photographer’s on here reading: Use code Ref869uT8Li on the Photographer’s Edit to get 50% off your first order of $20 or more, and it’s solely benefitting you!
Jordan’s Content
After breakfast, Jordan kicked off with teaching her content! She literally taught for 17 hours straight. You better believe we had essential oils going all day so everyone still had some brain power left!! Every one joked this entire day that their brains were literally exploding in the best of ways with ideas and information.
Jordan talked about: how to infuse your marketing with authentic branding, growing your email list and your influence, putting marketing strategies on autopilot, how to create multiple revenue streams, how to income plan, how to fill your client calendar with Facebook ads, marketing and sales funnels, and all the tech you need to figure all this out. She literally taught content until 11PM and then the girls still wanted to mastermind until 1 AM. There were so many good ideas and I think by this time we were all on our third wind.
We had a make your own pizza night sponsored by HoneyBook and we ate pizza while Jordan blew everyone’s minds.
A Huge Shoutout to HoneyBook
We are so unbelievably thankful to HoneyBook for sponsoring this retreat!! Jordan and I both use HoneyBook as our CRM (and freakin’ love them!)
Here’s a few reasons why I love them so much:
- I can have all my contracts, questionnaires, email templates, workflows, and tasks for my client projects ALL IN ONE PLACE.
- It has streamlined my business more than I can put into words!
- The HoneyBook team aka fam is the BEST and has such incredible customer support!!!
- They care so much about their clients!
- All my workflows and tasks are in an automated system so I don’t have to think about what to do for my clients and when.
- They have a new FB lead tool!!
All in all, HoneyBook is amazing and we’re so thankful they supported us at this retreat!! Day 3 was a long long day followed by an early morning on the last day!
Our Final Day
Our final day was filled with tech talks from Jordan, Headshots for all the attendees by me, breakout one-on-one sessions for each of the attendees with me and Jordan, and lots of hugs. We talked about our favorite tech tools like Leadpages, HoneyBook, Zapier, Convertkit, Drip, and more that we use to run our businesses. And then the attendees were awesome enough to be willing to share testimonials with us and we videoed all of them about their experience at the retreat! It made my heart melt!!
THANK YOU!!!
And to take it straight from Jordan because I couldn’t have said it better myself— A big big THANK you to Sam, Bri, Sara, Kristen, Stacey, and Rosemary for joining us! Not only does it mean the world to know you showed up to invest in yourself and your business, but to know you trusted us to help you make that happen, to walk alongside you, mentor you, teach you, and love on you during this retreat,
And a HUGE thank you to our amazing assistants, Jill + Bridget, who we seriously could not have hosted this retreat without. You guys may be behind the scenes, but you are such a huge part of the success of this retreat – and we’re SO stinking grateful for you!
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