We recently connected with Steven & Kimberly McRoyal and have shared our conversation below.

Steven & Kimberly, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

Bright-eyed and ready to conquer anything, we actually took our biggest risk moving to Atlanta. We moved seven hundred miles away from our hometown of Chicago, away from any family with 3 kids under 8 years old, no jobs, and some savings which was a little crazy but it was what kick-started life as we now know it.

After some growing pains, Steve started life coaching school and at his graduation he knew that after the last 4 years of being in ATL we should start coaching relationships together sharing how we overcame being two black teenage parents surrounded by family members deep-rooted in toxic and dysfunctional relationships.

To fuel our crazy entrepreneur spirit we even lived in the country in a 4 bedroom-trailer that gave our children the space they needed but it would not have a fully functional kitchen sink, clean drinking water, a terrible internet connection and 20 minutes from your nearest Walmart. Dream chasers right lol. But as the saying goes, do it scared!

Coming up with the idea of the concept of Millennial Married came at a time when no one could grasp the concept and honestly, there was a shortage of images that we could use to bring millennial marriages to the forefront so we started creating some of those images and concepts using ourselves, friends, and family. Putting ourselves out there to the world was a foreign concept but after 9 months we had reached 25,000 followers and then I knew we had something. Just two months after that we reached 50,000 and then I realized we had “made it” as creators.

We had tapped into something people were missing and the idea of showcasing not only love but marriage would not only be beneficial to us but to a growing community as a whole as they realize they don’t have to go through all the growing pains that we did and if they do they’ll have some sorts of a blueprint or friendships built through their community to help them figure it out.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We had always known from our coaching business that we’d wanted to work with couples and after all we’d been through were sure other people would want a how-to on what not to do and just a place to feel like they are not alone in this rollercoaster that is marriage.

We knew we’d love a community like that when we were first trying to figure out what it meant to be married. Then Steve had an amazing idea … let’s create the space we would have wanted. And after throwing out tons of names or searching tons of Instagram user names to see which ones were taken… Millennial Married was born. I mean what did Nike sound like before it was Nike?

We used our time as relationship coaches to provide sound advice, ask questions, and harness the power of community to what was at the time not seen on the internet. Black Love wasn’t even really a hashtag! So we created a place for the culture! A space to inspire, entertain, empower and educate one another to change the narrative on how we view, create and maintain our relationships.

With the growth of the community we have been able to become mores of an infotainment media space. Offering blogs, long and short form video content, courses, create our own podcast which is coming back in a bigger and better way, sell merch, and the opportunity to be involved in campaigns for other companies.

What we are most proud of is having a major part in spreading positive images of the Black family. We are letting the world to know that there are healthy relationships that can withstand some of the worst of times. There isn’t always infidelity and drama in black marriages, and marriage isn’t the “life sentence” that people want to make it out to be. It’s partnering and building with your best friend and biggest supporter if you allow it.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Relationship content can be tricky, we realized pretty early on that people don’t necessarily want to be told what to do. So we decide to start storytelling through content. We started asking questions to see what people thought about certain topics. We also started to share things that were funny, informative & relatable.This grew our audience pretty quickly. We also made sure we posted X amount of times a day and the best possible times. We saw that social media stars and influencers alike were replacing traditional television, and we knew that what people look at on their phones would be their main source of entertainment very soon. So we hopped on it right before the term influencer really took off.

Steve read a book called The Blue Ocean Theory and the book was basically about instead of competing in a crowded market, take a concept carve it down and make a new market. Thats basically what we did with MM, instead of posting content around religion and advising people what they should do in their relationship/marriage we took another route a route that no one at the time was taking. we decided to make marriage cool, fun and describable.This alone put us in a category all by ourselves so we weren’t competing.

So our advice would be to just be yourself but focus on a niche where you can be first in that category. This is just another way of saying scale your niche down really small.

Have you ever had to pivot?

After starting the couples coaching business we also dabbled a bit in coaching wives we realized we didn’t want to make everything about us. It was our calling to make it more about the people. The power of community and marriage as a whole. This way it was unlimited growth, and the business/idea wouldn’t be depend on us or people liking us.

After about a year time and money spent, that pivot was a risk, we were embarking on something that we didn’t have much expertise in. We just needed to do something that felt authentic to us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.millennialmarried.com
• Instagram: Millennialmarried
• Other: @iamstevemac @hellokimmysue

Image Credits
@iamstevemac @hellokimmysue