We recently connected with Amerika Young and have shared our conversation below.

Amerika, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back at the decisions you made early in your career, particularly whether to join a firm or start your own, do you feel you made the right choice for that stage of your career?

Getting started as a real estate agent I had a million different options of brokerages to sign up with. You have to sign on with someone else’s brokerage until you have a certain amount of years and higher credentials to become your own broker and branch off on your own. Within all those options, you can sign on with a broker who spoon feeds you leads and clients but they take up to 50% of your commission and provides tons of hands-on in-class training or you can join a broker who charges minimal fees, no hand holding, and no leads but allows you to take your own career and run with it.

So where did I fit in with all this? I joined a brokerage that gave me best of both of those worlds called EXP Realty. Yes, all of my branding has an EXP logo on it, but I can create my own branding in conjunction with it. Now my own branding is The Royal Collective (brokered by EXP).

I do have a group above me to help provide zoom trainings and a mentor to ask any kind of questions I have along the way, but I’m pretty much left alone to drive my success and career in anyway I want to. As long as I am following all legal state and national regulations, of course.

A few months into this, I was asking myself “What on earth am I doing with this? I feel so alone. Maybe I should switch to a company that will hold my hand until I better know what I’m doing.”

I’ve spent my career trying to form my own company so I don’t have to form my life entirely around a boss and when I should be in the office or not and how many hours a week. I had to have a stern talking with myself and put aside my excuses and a little self pity. I had a major mind shift. I have a support system in the brokerage if I need it, but instead of trying to mold into someone else’s team, I needed to turn around and create a team of my own and hire the people who are good at what they do.

Earlier when I was questioning what on earth am I doing, I was focused on the “how” and not the “who”. As an entrepreneur I had always been focused on wearing every hat and doing every aspect of the business on my own. I was operating at an “okay” level with every item instead of finding the people who are excellent at the things that I am not. Finding and forming my team has been a game changer and forced me to think more like a leader than a follower.

Looking back, going the route I have has been longer to get clients, create income and feel like I’m getting somewhere, but the experience has been priceless. I could have gone the route of having someone hand me the leads and taking care of the details, but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to force myself into building a team, letting go of the things I’m not strong at and build my own reputation.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I come from many generations of engineers, carpenters, contractors and “do-it yourself” people. I have also been obsessed with houses and architecture since I was little. For fun, I’d roll out giant pieces of butcher paper and draw out blueprints of houses I made up in my mind. In college, I majored in architecture and drafting. I graduated just as the housing and building market crashed in 2008 and no architects were hiring so I worked for an engineer for 5 years and grew to dislike it more and more everyday. I had a very entrepreneurial heart, but didn’t know what to branch off and do on my own yet.

I sold everything and moved across the country from Colorado to North Carolina to become a flight attendant, first for the airlines and then on private jets. I loved the flying but I knew I didn’t want it to be forever. I started writing and publishing books and coaching people how to start their career in private aviation. My mind still wandered over to the housing market almost daily, but it took me years to take the leap into real estate.

Over the last 10 years of marketing my own books, launching three different youtube channels, video editing and social media content creation, I felt like I pretty good understanding of everything I needed to do to put myself out there. I was still lacking a vision for my future, the aviation part still didn’t feel long term to me.

I got my real estate license and knew I was moving in a direction where my passion of houses and love for video and content creation could intersect. Of course we all wish we had arrived to certain things sooner, but I’m so grateful for my years of experience figuring out how to connect with people through long and short videos and reaching the needs of people in different niches.

Creating real estate videos is far more than posting videos of homes I am listing for my clients, it’s creating value and educational videos for current and future clients who are interested in moving to the West Palm Beach area or who are looking for a new neighborhood to suite their growing needs. Video has been the perfect way to build relationships with people on their own terms and begin the know, like and trust process with them. I’ve been out in public and had strangers come up to me and ask if I was the lady in the videos they’ve been watching. It warms my heart so much to connect with people. They get to know me even before I get to know them

We all have our phones in hand most hours of the day, so my goal is to meet people where they are.

How did you build your audience on social media?

The number one piece of advice I have for those who are getting started with social media is to grab your phone, a $10 table tripod from amazon and make a list of 5-10 things you want to share with your clients and GET STARTED.

When I first got married, my husband traveled for days at a time for work and I had gobs of time to figure out a hobby. I had already published 2 books, but I was super curious about video. My brother had gone to film school and had all the fancy equipment and editing skills. I wasn’t trying to mimic his level of production, I just wanted to put out a few videos and talk about things that were on my heart. I got my iphone, bought a $15 floor tripod with a little phone holder, set up a chair and hit record. I was SO awkward at first and it took my at least 5 times to make it through the introduction.

I posted a new video a week on my personal Youtube and not many people outside of my parents actually watched the videos. This was years before TikTok, Youtube Shorts and Instagram Reels which are maximum 60 seconds usually.

I started recording my travels and putting together fun videos on iMovie on my phone or laptop. Eventually, I upgraded my video equipment and eventually hired a video editor to professionally edit my videos. Then the world of 7-60 second videos emerged and realized that my shorter videos were gaining more attention than the videos that previously took me days to film and at least 4 to 6 hours to edit or I had been paying good money to have edited. This changed everything for my social media.

Having the ability to film 5 or 6 short clip videos in one sitting, edit them right away and schedule them on each social media platform was the biggest change I made that lead to the biggest follower growth and engagement. It also meant that I could focus once a week to have a whole week’s worth of content done instead of everyday needing to sit down to think about what I was going to record. I could now be in front of my audience every single day, but still have free time every day to focus on major money making tasks or tend to the clients I was currently working with.

My advice to those getting started in 2024 or down the road is to not worry about long form video and don’t worry about being perfect. Like I said earlier, grab your phone and get started. By an inexpensive tripod off Amazon and hit record. People don’t want to see perfection, they want to see YOU. Your audience likes what you do or sell, but they ultimately like “who” you are.

If you’re familiar at all with blogs, it’s usually a series of stories about a particular topic. Best advice I recently heard was “blog through stories on your social media”. In other words, create short clips or photos of your day and your business on your stories. People love having a story they can follow. If your Shorts or Reels follow a time line, your audience will continue to come back because they want to know what you’re doing next.

Steps:
1. Film all your video on your phone (vertically or tall)
2. Download the app CapCut
3. Load and edit your videos in CapCut
4. Add text with autotext option
5. Don’t add music in the CapCut app
6. Post your video to each app and use music from inside each app to avoid copyright issues.
7. Upload multiple videos at one time to each app and schedule them for the next few days.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I previously mentioned how I came from a family of “do it yourself” people, which was awesome and taught me how to do so many amazing things for myself, but it was also the biggest thing that I had to unlearn.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none?” It took me a long time to learn that I didn’t have to do everything myself. It’s also a poverty versus prosperity kind of thing. I know that people don’t always have money to spend on services or hiring out right away, but I highly recommend it becoming a goal.

I really held myself back in business trying to be the website developer, video editor, writer, publisher, content creator, realtor, tax accountant, etc. I found myself spinning my wheels and really getting down on myself for not being “productive”. I’d sit down at my desk and feel paralyzed because I had so many things to work on but didn’t know where to start.

Learning that spending money on quality things and services paid in the long run instead of trying to save a buck and do it all myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: erikayoung.exprealty.com
• Instagram: @amerikayoung
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550796393387
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amerika-young/