Rising Stars: Meet Nick & Lexie Penichet

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick & Lexie Penichet.

Hi Nick & Lexie, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

Nick and I (Lexie) are a husband and wife photo and video team in Kansas City. We both grew up here and love living life and raising our family in the midwest.

I started my photography business in 2015 after being a hobbyist since high school. Before that, I had worked in the hospitality industry since I was 15, and I fell in love with weddings after managing a full-service event venue downtown. I considered becoming a wedding planner but discovered wedding photography and decided to pursue that. I quickly fell in love with it and put all my time and effort into becoming a wedding photographer and getting my business up and running. I went full-time in 2017.

Nick is a musician (drummer, piano player, bassist, and composer) and graduated in 2019 with a music education degree from Ottawa University. He wasn’t sure he wanted to teach, so he started exploring different ways to make money as a musician. In early 2020, Nick attended a business conference for wedding professionals with me and decided to try his hand at videography. He loves writing music, specifically cinematic, and quickly realized music and creating videos went hand in hand. When quarantine hit because of COVID-19, Nick spent that time learning how to film and edit. I changed our brand from “Lexie Penichet Photography” to “Nick & Lexie Photo + Film,” and we started offering videography as a service. Nick turned out to be a fantastic videographer, editor, and storyteller. From there, we started doing weddings full-time and grew our brand to document luxury weddings in Kansas City and around the world.

What sets us apart as wedding photo/video professionals is that we are a husband and wife team who place a very high value on marriage, so we understand how important wedding days are to our couples. We also collaborate as a team instead of operating as two separate vendors to provide an excellent experience and unique, high-quality photos and films. Nick even writes some of the music in the wedding films.

Aside from being photographers and videographers, we’re in the process of launching another business this year called PRENUP. PRENUP is an online premarital course designed to demolish the divorce rate. After working in the wedding industry for many years, we noticed couples spent hundreds of hours planning their wedding, and most spent no time preparing for marriage. As a married couple with 4 children who are in business and work alongside each other 24/7, we know how important it is to be aligned in every area of our marriage. Statistics show couples who take a proactive approach to marriage through premarital counseling have an 80% success rate at weddings versus a 50% divorce rate for those who don’t attend premarital counseling. At the same time, premarital counseling through a church leader or therapist can feel awkward, so we decided to create an online course that is fun, exciting, and bold that you can complete in just 48 hours or at your own pace in the privacy of your home. The course will launch this summer. Check us out at nickandlexiephotofilm.com/prenup or on IG at @prenup_

Outside of work, we’re the parents to 4 exceptional children and enjoy spending time with our families, and are very active in our church.

Has it been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s been smooth at times, but very bumpy at others. Balancing our creative projects and entrepreneurship while growing our family and raising our children has definitely been challenging, but also incredibly rewarding. COVID-19, college graduation, a home renovation, parenting four children, and starting multiple businesses are all challenges we’ve faced in the last 5 years, but we embrace challenge and have learned to persevere through every situation knowing great reward follows hard work and a few risks. We work really well as a team and use each other’s strengths and weaknesses to the benefit of ourselves and our clients.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

As multi passionate business owners, we’re focused on both our photo & video work and building our new brand, PRENUP. We love documenting weddings and creating films that tell love stories, but we’re excited to make an even bigger impact on marriages through PRENUP.

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those just starting.
Our advice for those starting is to go for it and pour everything you have into building your brand and perfecting your craft. Learn everything you can. Invest in business education along with education regarding your craft. It will be hard at first, and you must make sacrifices, but it will ultimately pay off.

Here are a few of our favorite quotes for when things get hard or scary:

• “The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.”
• “You can either build your dreams or work for someone who is building their’s.”
• “Everything is hard. Owning your business is hard, but slaving away at a 9-5 is hard. Being rich is hard (work), but being broke is hard. Choose your hard.”

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nickandlexiephotofilm.com
• Instagram: @nickandlexiephotofilm @prenup_