Courtney N. Williams joined the Mompreneurs podcast to discuss the unexpected journey of becoming a full-time social media influencer and how she made the business work for her and her family. Once a single mom-of-one, she and husband Bryan Williams have nurtured a beautiful blended family with six children and a thriving family enterprise. The Houston mother sat down with Mompreneurs host Nancy Redd to discuss taking risks, multitasking, and advice for aspiring content creators.

As a family, Courtney and Bryan have figured out how to make the business of social media influencing work for them, and their success has afforded this family not only financial freedom but so much more. With brand partnerships driving the bulk of their income, the couple has built a sustainable enterprise complete with a management agency that helps the family pitch, negotiate, and handle contracting and invoicing.

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Courtney and Bryan were both single parents when they first met on Instagram.

The couple’s partnership provided a solid foundation for their success today. They first met as single parents-of-one from previous relationships. “I had a daughter when I met my husband, and my husband had a son when we met, and since then we’ve added four little ones to our crew making it eight of us,” Courtney said.

The Houston mom was working in marketing when Bryan slid into her DMs. “For some reason, I entertained it,” she laughed, “and here we are, almost 10 years later.”

With sacrifice, the couple stuck it out at their 9-5 jobs for several years before content creation became a full-time business. “When we first met, I didn’t consider myself an influencer. I never even heard of the word and didn’t know that you could make a career out of it,” said Courtney. “I was just your average person sharing updates on Instagram.”

Their blended family went viral and Courtney realized that this could become something more.

Early in their relationship, Courtney never imagined that her content could become a successful business until she posted an engagement photo that captured the happy couple with their two children. “That was the first time that I ever had a post go viral,” she said. “From that point on, I started to be more intentional about sharing that side of my journey and that’s truly what built this whole platform that we have now.”

Her husband Bryan encouraged her to go full-time with content creation.

Bryan encouraged the busy mom to step out in faith and go full-time with creating and sharing content. His support made all the difference, she said. “It’s so worth it to support your spouse and show up for them and go all in 100 percent,” said the now mother-of-six. “Never in a million years would I have thought that I would be running this type of business full time.”

Success meant finding a balance and making the business work for them.

With a lot of time and patience, Courtney and Bryan have perfected their work flow. Even with six children between them, the couple found a way to balance the workload and avoid burnout. “I try to be mindful of him and the kids,” Courtney said. “This started out because of me and my love for family matching, taking pictures and posting content. I had to remind myself that they didn’t sign up for this.”

With a lot of prep and planning, Courtney is able to balance the time in which the family is creating content without making it feel like they’re always on for the camera. “We have it down to a science,” she said. “That’s allowed me to put some structure around it and not have my family feeling like they have to shoot content seven days a week.”

Courtney perfected her craft through trial and error.

Building her brand has been a learning experience. “It was a lot of trial and error when I first started,” she said. “I cringe thinking back to how I worked with brands, what I was charging, all of that in the beginning years, because I just had no clue what I was doing. I was trying to figure it out all by myself. But now I feel like there’s so many resources out there.”

Courtney encourages aspiring influencers to seek out the information they need to pursue their own vision. “Do as much research as you can and take advantage of all those resources that are out there now that I didn’t have when I first started out,” she said.

No matter where she was in life, she always believed in her worth. “We’re all worthy of our dream lives, whatever that looks like,” said the entrepreneur. “No matter what path, twists and turns, mistakes you’ve made, you’re still worthy of the dream life that you envision for yourself. So with hard work, faith and just believing in yourself, you can definitely get there.”

Every week, we celebrate beautiful Black entrepreneurs who are simultaneously amazing business moguls and awesome moms. We listen to their life stories and inspiring advice. Catch new episodes of Mompreneurs every Monday on MADAMENOIRE’s YouTube channel. Or listen to the podcast online at Urban1Podcasts.com.

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