We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tamany Hall a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tamany, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

Prior to starting my business, I taught 8th grade math for 4 years and then transitioned into Coaching Teachers for 2 years. My title was “21st Century Cross Curricular Coach” and I focused on supporting teachers to incorporate growth of the 4 Cs in their lesson plans: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication.

The premise behind my role was that technology and artificial intelligence are developing at such a rapid rate that we have no way of knowing what skills our young learners will need in 5…10…15 years! Therefore, we need to be focusing on developing young adults who can look at a problem and solve it.

I worked with amazing educators who had their students debating, creating in the Maker’s Lab, discovering patterns…rarely did you see the teacher at the front of the room lecturing. Education no longer comes from text books. In fact, there’s significant research around how younger generations approach knowledge differently than we do as adults. They’ve grown up in a world where tons of information is available at the click of a button. Therefore, they don’t need to learn how to find information, rather to decipher what is important information and how to apply it to solve the problem.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi, I’m Tamany Hall. I’m the owner of The Simple Touches and I’ve been surrounded by real estate since I was little. I grew up getting paid $5 an hour to put labels on postcards for my parents’ farm!
My very first (real) job was at the front desk of their market center and I’ve had many roles within RE throughout my life (front desk, agents’ personal assistant, auditor, assistant market center administrator, etc.) In 2001, my parents opened up the first Keller Williams brokerage in Northern California.

After graduating from UC Irvine with a mathematics degree, I was an 8th grade math teacher for 6 years, including a 4 year stint in Bogotá, Colombia.

Though I’ve always had my hands in the real estate world, being an agent has never been on my vision board.

However, I get lost in the creative pieces; I enjoy making things look appealing, consistent and interactive. Pair that with the unlimited potential of social media and my wheels just start turning.

Thus, The Simple Touches was born!

I take my unique background of real estate marketing, teaching and coaching as well as creativity and have combined it to create services to support real estate agents fill their top of funnel via the exponential power of social media marketing. Many agents tell me that my teaching style is unique and that they actually learn from me, which I take so much pride in. Though I’ve grown a following on social media, I’m proudest that I have created a safe space for real estate agents to come and ask questions, because where else are they going to go?

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I was teaching in Bogota, Colombia in 2019 when I got the message that my dad had a probable diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The first thing I did was Google what that was and when I found out it was 100% fatal, my whole world stopped. My dad was my hero; he was the smartest man I’ve ever known.

I returned to California and eventually decided to leave my teaching career to help my mom care for him over the next 2 years of his illness. During that time, I Doordashed, I temped at jobs, I tried to do the 9-5 thing. However, all I knew in those moments is that I wanted to be able to see my father whenever I wanted to and that left me with one choice…entrepreneurship.

I started The Simple Touches with my dad as my unofficial business coach. He’d started, managed and sold several successful real estate businesses in his lifetime and I grew up brainstorming business ideas with him. Every business win, every new sale, every new idea was always a conversation with him. Even when he lost the ability to speak, we would use Siri to communicate and think of new ways to support real estate agents.

My business grew steadily in it’s first two years. My father, Wayne Hall, lost his battle with ALS in February of 2022 and my whole world stopped again. I was so grateful that I didn’t have to call in sick or beg for time off because I needed time with my family and time to grieve.

A few months later, I made a choice to move to Dallas for a fresh start. It was tough for a few months. It was so easy to just close the laptop and be sad. However, I have built this amazing community of learners who happen to be real estate agents on my social media accounts and they fuel me. The inspiration for my business now comes from them and being able to honor my father and what a brilliant man he was via avenues like this article fills my cup and gives me the strength to keep going.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I love this question because social media marketing has changed the game for entrepreneurs. I had $0 to my name when I started my business. I don’t know if you know this, but teachers don’t get paid very much…

The incredible opportunity that social media has given ordinary people like myself to start a business with literally ZERO overhead is out of this world.

When I first started my business, I just needed money. I offered a variety of services, dabbled in Print on Demand, designed business cards, yard signs, etc. I also signed up for all the free business trainings I could find.

The lesson I needed to learn was that niching down would actually make my life easier. I come from a teaching background where it was my literal goal every day to help learners understand. As a business, there’s an additional layer in there of money and what it takes to scale to where you want to be income-wise.

In 2023, I really narrowed down my scope of work to top of funnel lead generation via social media marketing for real estate agents specifically. This allowed me to show up as an expert in that field and now organizations are flying me out to teach huge groups all over the US! My whole life, all I’ve ever wanted to do was teach and travel…it’s funny how the Universe works!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thesimpletouches.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realtorsocialmediamarketing/
• Facebook: facebook.com/thesimpletouches
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD8CjawGqEA4Plsrqw84ecw
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@realtormarketing

Image Credits
Monika Normand