Episode 92:

Learning Leadership Skills

What You Will Learn:

How Lamar and his wife Ronnie went into business and created the Black and Married with Kids blog, learning leadership skills and growing it into a powerhouse brand
How, after achieving their first million in revenue, Lamar realized that the next necessary step was to focus on further education and finding the right mentors
Why being a successful entrepreneur isn’t the same as being a great leader, and why the growth of your business depends on learning leadership skills
How Lamar was able to utilize his strong marketing skills to attract talented new team members
What unique considerations Lamar and Ronnie have had to make as first-generation entrepreneurs looking to create generational wealth for their kids
Why Lamar has made what a prospective employee does in their personal time a key consideration in the hiring process
Why building a great team so that your business doesn’t depend entirely on you is crucial for growth
How a strong meeting cadence of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings has been a big component in the success of Lamar’s company
Why a successful business needs both team members with big, bold ideas and with careful planning skills
Why one of the biggest things Lamar sees that slows down entrepreneurs is allowing their focus to be spread too thin

About Lamar Tyler:

Lamar and Ronnie Tyler are the husband-and-wife power pair behind Black and Married with Kids, the largest independent African American marriage and parenting site on the web.

Lamar and Ronnie were so fed up with the pervasive, negative, and distorted images of black marriage that they channeled their frustration into a passion for curating online media properties that celebrated and honored black families.

Armed with this vision and expertise in social media, Lamar and Ronnie have taken Black and Married with Kids from a small personal blog to an international brand under their own Tyler New Media, they now have 7 independently produced films and over 540,000 Facebook fans.

Black and Married with Kids has been recognized and honored by some of America’s most established and respected media outlets. In 2010, Black and Married with Kids was named by Parenting Magazine as one of 2010’s Must-Read Blogs. In the same year, Lamar and Ronnie were inducted into Babble’s Top 100 Bloggers Hall of Fame. In 2012—for the second year in a row—they were included as two of Ebony Magazine’s Power 100, a list of country’s top 100 African-American movers and shakers, keeping company with President Barack Obama, Beyoncé Knowles, and Jay-Z. In 2014, the Tylers were finalists for the Black Enterprise Family Business of the Year Award. And in 2015, the Tylers were also named finalists for Infusionsoft’s Small Business ICON award.

Along with writing for and managing Black and Married With Kids, which now employs more than 40 staff writers, Lamar and Ronnie stay busy running Tyler New Media—producing, directing, and traveling across the country screening Tyler New Media films and speaking on marriage and business-related topics for a variety of churches, organizations and media outlets including ESSENCE Magazine, Parenting Magazine, Ebony Magazine, Sirius/XM, TV One, HLN, NPR, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Washington Post.

Lamar and Ronnie are the happy parents of four children and call Atlanta home.