We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nakeya Bennett. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nakeya below.

Hi Nakeya, thanks for joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

As a teenager, my goal was to be a successful business woman. I did not know how, what, or why, but I made a decision that that was the way I wanted to show up in the world and who I wanted to be. This dream was very personal to me to live the life I envisioned in my head. It began with a decision – a decision to live a big life and I created a plan to reach my goals. Good grades, social clubs, honor societies, a dual degree, student leadership positions, vocational business classes, and college. Education was my first key to unlocking the door of success for me. I knew that knowledge would be something no one could ever take from me and the foundation to my journey. I began to read about emerging technologies, high earning careers, occupational outlook handbooks, and books on financial literacy that would help me learn and give me the data I needed to make informed decisions.

Next I focused on resources that would align me to mentors, coaches, and internships. I believe the ability to see others that look like you in those positions of success and power you aspire to are key. Having people that will take you under their wing and teach you and help you learn what you don’t know is important to continued growth. Being apart of programs like InRoads and Future Business Leaders of America truly showed me that my dream was real and attainable. It connected me to opportunities and gave me access that I may not have had otherwise.

My path has had peaks and valleys. I have had to adapt and be flexible with my plans and allow God to work in various ways to help me get to where I wanted to be. I have had many setbacks and failures, but I kept going every step of the way. The decision to be successful and to live the life of my dreams has always kept me persistent, ambitious, and driven. My journey began as a mission to get myself to a certain level in life. It has grown to be a way to inspire, create opportunities, mentor, and coach others on reaching their dreams. It is now bigger than me and something that I want others to experience and feel. Now other’s success adds that much more to my own.

For me, success is a way of being. It is rooted in your thoughts, your desires, the decisions you make, who you hang around, and your actions. To cultivate success you have to first believe that you can and will be a success. You have to live, act, and show up each day in a way that aligns with your hopes and dreams. Then help others do the same.

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

Nakeya Riley Bennett, MBA, PMP, Serial Entrepreneur, Life Coach, Interior Designer, and Corporate Marketing Executive. I have never been one to be placed in anyone’s box or to only do one thing. I believe we are given many talents and passions and should cultivate each as our heart desires.

As Senior Manager, Interactive, I help some of the world’s largest companies use digital tools and technologies to tell the story of their product or service to their target audience. I specialize in brand strategy, content strategy, customer experience, and marketing transformation at one of the top global consulting firms. I have over 20 years of experience delivering leading marketing campaigns, digital platforms, and strategic omni channel programs across many industries. My work has provided me to work with clients such as Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Verizon Wireless, Metaverse (formally known as Facebook), Kimberly-Clark, and many more.

The Riley Method Inc. is my lifestyle brand. Under this umbrella I run my business as a Certified Life Coach, public speaker, panelist, keynote speaker and author influencing others to reclaim their life and live in a way that allows them to thrive. I specialize in fitness, travel, relationships, financial security and wealth building, career growth and development, parenting, and self improvement coaching. Events, podcasts appearances, social media content creation, and more keep me busy.

TRM Designs & Co. is my interior design and home decor brand. I specialize in chic, functional interior design for clients seeking an upscale home design aesthetic for both commercial and residential spaces. Our clients hire us to bring their design vision to life and make their houses homes they love. We handle everything from new construction builds to full scale custom interiors in both homes and businesses. Aside for our design services we also offer curated furniture, home decor, plants and wonderfully scented soy candles. We will soon be expanding into luxury furniture and decor rentals.

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

First and foremost, as a serial entrepreneur, it is important to unlearn being stuck to one way of doing things or one business idea. One of the most important lessons I learned was to allow my business to evolve and grow along with me. Our interests change, our passions change, and the things that we desire change as we go through life. Embracing that change is key and so is being open to discovering how you need to shift or adjust your business to venture into new industries and areas of expertise that align with your journey and path. Being stuck to one thing, one focus, and one area and not allowing change to happen naturally can be detrimental to your entrepreneurial spirit. If you instead allow yourself to adapt, your possibilities for business avenues and income streams are endless.

Another important lesson I learned is to think like a business woman and not a person with a hobby. When I first started my interior design business, it was a side hustle fueled by God-given talent and passion. I wanted to help everyone that reached out to me make their home or office space beautiful. No matter what the budget or price point, I would figure out how to make it work. If that meant working myself for 20 hours a day, cutting expenses by only using one contractor and doing a lot of the manual labor myself, spending hours on end finding the lowest priced, highest quality furniture and decor for my clients, I did it. I wanted to help everyone. I learned that was me thinking like someone with a hobby and not someone that wanted to build, grow, and scale a successful business. It also was not sustainable in the long run when I started to look at hours invested versus ROI.

After roughly 2 years in business, I became burned out and knew I needed to make a change to my business strategy in order to work smarter, maximize time, and truly make a profit. Interior design is a luxury service and I needed to treat it as such. I also needed to put parameters in place to weed out clients not aligned to my look, feel, and brand. I wanted to ensure that the clients in the pipeline matched our vision, purpose, and were serious about engaging us to execute their designs. I began to set clear budget minimums, price items fairly yet accurately, increased our design fee to be more in line with the high level of service provided, charge for consultations to compensate for the time spent traveling to client homes and offices, created pricing structures for mood boards and proposals ensuring that the hours of work that went into this phase weren’t wasted on clients that would opt to not move forward, and price add on services to ensure we were not losing hard earned dollars on expenses that should be covered by client requests. I also separated the contractor services and fees to be treated and billed as a separate entity.

7 years later I am proud to say that I let go of the overtly nice side hustle model with few boundaries to create a business with tried and true process, pricing structure, contracts, schedules, and operational tools that ensure my business runs smoothly, is covered from A to Z, and allows me to have balance while being properly compensated for my time and effort. This has brought in better clients, bigger budgets that allow us to make more money while completing less projects annually, and ensured we have proper contractor coverage for the necessary buildout and installation tasks needed for each project. I now have a business model that is scalable and positioned for growth.

How did you build your audience on social media?

It has always been important to me across both my personal (@therileymethod) and business (@trmdesigns_co) social media profiles to be genuine and authentic. I don’t ever want to present or show fake content that is not true nor from the heart. I also don’t subscribe to heavily edited, staged, or templatized posts and feeds. While I want a beautiful and clean look, I do not want to be something so far from real and relatable for my audiences. I am not the woman whose life is falling apart or depressed but on my timeline with a big smile and perfect hair and outfit. No. I stand on and pride myself with being real, honest, and open with my followers.

It has been our strategy to grow our following organically in order to gain an audience that truly aligns to both brands. While it is very easy for me to create and post content on my own personal IG, I decided to hire someone to help create, post, and curate the content for the design page. Social media has brought in 98% of our interior design clients and the remainder come from repeat clients and client referrals so it was important to me for that page to have a clean, beautiful, and consistent presence. With everything else I have going on, I did not have time to own that. Hiring Jecoby & Company to manage our social presence and create the right content was the best decision. Our grid is clean, beautiful, and engaging.

Our growth has been steady and I am proud of our numbers across both pages. We continue to see steady growth. We have been big on cross promotion, shared posts and reels across profiles, and amplifying posts and stories via team members, brands, vendors, and contractors that we work with. We continuously discuss and optimize our strategy as IG functionality changes and new features are added. We expand and test additional channels such as TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube as well. I am excited about the content we will continue to curate and our test and learn approach allows us to continue to understand our audience, what they like and what they do not.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.trmdesigns.co , www.trmdesigns.shop, www.therileymethod.com
• Instagram: @therileymethod, @trmdesigns_co
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/nakeyarileybennett
• Twitter: @therileymethod, @trmdesigns_co
• Youtube: @nakeyar25, @trmdesigns_co

Image Credits
Krystle Chanel Photography Inije Photography