The Eras Tour of Brenda Hicks

Brenda Hicks’s career and expertise are the sum of many components collected from many different contexts. A natural storyteller, Brenda took me through these experiences narratively. Don’t blink while reading this. You might just miss an era.

According to Brenda, the most efficient way to talk about how she got into sales is this: “I think I just always really liked people.” She adds, “And I also always felt a great need to want to fit in, so I was naturally chatty.” Those, and her natural curiosity, have continued to serve her throughout her career. “That’s been my whole life. I was always curious, got bored easily.”

Her energy, what she calls her “fuel,” was hard won. Childhood was tough for Brenda. Both her father and stepfather experienced alcohol addictions, “so I kind of ran away from home and got married at the ripe age of seventeen years…” For Brenda, running away still left room for finishing high school—as the editor of the yearbook. But don’t take this to mean she was a goodie two-shoes. “I got great grades, but here I am, a married lady, and riding…my little Suzuki motorcycle sixteen miles to go to school and getting in trouble…”—every once in a while, she missed school, which didn’t go unnoticed. “The teacher at that point would say, ‘Brenda, you missed school yesterday.’” To which she’d respond: “What do you want? A note from my husband?”

THE RESTAURANT/DANCE ERA

When Brenda graduated from high school, her first husband had already launched several restaurants. Brenda joined him, and they expanded their territory, first in Michigan and then in Florida. During this time, Brenda gave birth to her son at nineteen. She remembers they had “a great time, stayed married…About eight years after my first baby, decided to do another one…” She remained in the restaurant world but also picked up another gig alongside it. “I became a dance instructor. So I taught  jazz, tap, ballet, all of that sort of traditional stuff…”

The great time didn’t last very long after her second child, though. Alcohol addiction had followed Brenda once again. “You marry an alcoholic…you just follow these patterns.” Brenda moved on.

THE REAL-ESTATE ERA

Real estate entered the picture after Brenda divorced her husband. It was a steadier way to provide for her family. “I had an opportunity to start appraising real estate, and after a couple of years of that, started my first real estate-appraisal company.” It was during her real-estate era that Brenda met her now husband, Jeff, whom she calls the love of her life. He also happens to be her business partner and has been for years. In fact, while we spoke, Brenda coined a new term for Jeff, PIE (partner in everything). She wrote that down.

In 1998, the two began to take an interest in what they felt was an important part of the real-estate arsenal: digital photos that could help people in the industry accurately compare properties. “Real estate’s really physical, and what we needed to do a lot of times was to have imagery…just being able to have photographs on computers was a big deal. So, we started and built our first software, which was a database of comparable real-estate data.”

<Please hold for a quick detour to…>

THE DOTCOM ERA

“Then,” says Brenda, “we got mixed up in the dotcom world…got almost to the finish line. We were negotiating a 15-million dollar capital raise when the bubble burst”. In a way, though, it was this plummet that led Brenda and Jeff to where they are today. Why? Because, “we were able to keep our IP [intellectual property], even though we didn’t know what we were going to do with that IP…”

<Follow said IP to…>

THE BANKIING-SOFTWARE ERA

Brenda and Jeff, along with their programmers, had built software whose goal was to function as a digital toolbox for commercial real estate transactions. One day, Brenda got a call from a friend of hers who worked at a bank. This friend “knew I had that IP for collaboration software and asked us: could it become their in-house bank-appraisal software? And that’s how our most successful product was born.” YouConnect.

The vision of the program fed off Brenda’s experiences in real estate. “I know what people need. I know how they need to work. I know what they want, and so by mimicking that…it’s easy.” Things were going well. There was a nagging problem, though. “What scared me the most about software was, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m gonna have salespeople.”

THE SALES ERA

“Guess what? I hate sales, because—don’t you?” People, Brenda observed, don’t generally make a habit of looking into a baby carriage and imagining a salesperson. “And so, I was literally scared to death to have salespeople in my organization.” What Brenda realizes now is that, actually, she’d kind of been a salesperson already, as an owner of her commercial real-estate appraisal company and in raising capital. “But I never looked at it as sales. It was easy to me… [At the appraisal company] I just talked to people, and they asked me to do work for them…”

It was when Brenda was out of town and her software company was functioning independently that things really became…real…or unreal. She’d always associated real estate with having to be there, on the ground. “It’s so physical…” But now, the machine was functioning without her physical presence. “Other people were building my software and selling my software. And money was coming in from the software. And I didn’t have to be there…” Brenda speaks a lot about her team, which she called incredible more than once, and which she credits with being able to step away—like away, away. Like on a boat -because Brenda Hicks also sails. (Being in the middle of the ocean, though, is one of the few scenarios in which she is not reachable.)

By now, Brenda and Jeff’s company, Realwired, has produced multiple software products in the appraisal-management space. But to Brenda, the vestige of her restaurant era is never too far away. She sees it as one of the origins of her work ethic. “I’ve often said that if I lost every single thing I had, no worries—I could always wait tables. I’m getting a little older now; now, I say, I could just be a barkeep.”

You can learn more about Brenda here. Be sure to congratulate her while you’re there!