Emma K Adams

I attribute all of my success to being a very determined person. I don't give up on things, so I never gave up on myself, even when times were tough during COVID. I gave myself a lot of encouragement and put myself out there. It's not always fun talking to people or asking people for help, but it's actually how we grow, both professionally and personally. I attribute a lot of my success to my own self-drive and the curiosity that I have. I'm really great at people and relationship management, and every day my clients are able to succeed due to the product that my business sells. Making those little impacts on so many people around the world and hearing their success stories, especially helping women quit their full-time corporate jobs or buy their homes, that impact becomes bigger and watching myself grow within a team has been incredible. When I look back at where I was six years ago, on food stamps as a job benefit, to where I am now, managing 200 to 300 clients and starting to lead a team, it's that determination and never giving up on myself that got me here.

I recently got some advice from a mentor of mine that has been really helpful. I was looking to grow, and she told me to reach out to senior leadership that I might not necessarily chat with every day or at all. She said, how about you start scheduling some meetings with your CEO or your VP to learn from them? Because you want to be a leader like that one day, or you want to see what they're doing. It also gives you a time to shine, especially when you know somebody in leadership who is very approachable. It's a really good opportunity to let yourself shine and also learn from them, enhancing your leadership skills down the road. What I learned is that even though broaching that topic might be intimidating, like thinking you don't want to take your CEO or VP's time because they're so busy, a good leader will be very receptive and want to learn from you as well. They'll be excited. It's a give and take. That was the best advice I've gotten really recently, and on a personal note, it's been very helpful.

I would say that tech is not all the same. There's a lot of stereotypes and stigmas around women in tech. I follow several women in tech subreddit pages, and we need to be the change in this industry. It is male-dominated in a lot of leadership and in a lot of tech companies, we are all aware of that. But women are just as capable. So really just put yourself out there and think like a man. When I'm going through the hiring process or when I have my reviews, I'm thinking like a man. When I got hired at my current job, they gave me a salary range and an offer, and I upped that. Of course, I got a higher offer. A man would never question asking for more. Why do women hold that sense of guilt? So I tell other women to think and act like a man, as weird as that sounds in your career. It's more empowering than you think it is, because at the end of the day, we are afraid to take up space, but it is important that we need to knock that fear aside and take up space, because that's how change happens, and that's how we evolve. Especially when more of us are college educated, we have every right to be in this field and any other field.

The biggest challenges and opportunities in my field are really two sides of the same coin. Things are always changing. I deal with people who are selling themselves and promoting products online through social media, and right now we're in a space where algorithms change and the audience changes. Being super adaptable is a trait I've been lucky to have, but as a company, we've had to have it as well. Meta has completely changed how influencers and their content is seen, so we're navigating those changes. We've hired a whole ads team for our company that we never had before, and now we're running ads and helping our clients run ads, which I think is awesome, but we had to pivot. AI is going into everything, so we're figuring out how to enable AI within our company as a tool internally and how we're going to help our clients with our software. Our company's motto is we're not going to get rid of people and just use AI like a lot of other companies are doing. AI does not replace people. We can use it as a tool, but it does not replace people at all. With my clients, it's constantly being able to adapt. Amazon can change the rules last minute on how they can't promote something, and Amazon doesn't give a lot of direct support to my clients for the things that they need. We do. We're able to actually help them figure a lot of their things out through word of mouth of our network of clients. Social media algorithms and platforms are all changing and evolving, and that's an opportunity. How can we change and evolve with them? How can we really work this for our benefit? We're now running ads for people because Meta and Instagram changed algorithms, so our clients' content wasn't being pushed. That's an example of a pivot. And with AI, we're going to have AI work for our SEO for our clients and make our product better for AIs to pick up our clients' links through better SEO.