Angi co-founder Angie Hicks on why the right people make the best businesses

Angie Hicks didn’t set out to become a name-brand entrepreneur.

In 1995, she was a recent DePauw University graduate with an economics degree and a job offer from her boss at a former internship, Bill Oesterle: to help him create a resource for homeowners in Columbus, Ohio, to find local contractors.

“I knew nothing about starting a business,” Hicks told Founder Brew.

Hicks took the lead in creating the B2B directory, tackling every task from building the database to door-to-door sales.

“Knocking on doors was the hardest thing I’ve probably done in my career,” she said.

Those tasks made Hicks the main point of contact for the small businesses listed on the platform. Oesterle suggested renaming what was originally called Columbus Neighbors to Angie’s List. Angie’s List eventually went public in 2011 and merged with IAC’s HomeAdvisor in 2017.

The company is now known as Angi, keeping the most distinctive part of its identity. It also kept Hicks, who today serves as chief customer officer and continues to be the face—and name—of the company.

In conversation with Founder Brew, Hicks spoke about her 30-year entrepreneurial journey, and why best businesses are built from the right people.

“I would take an A team with a B idea over a B team with an A idea anytime,” she said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At Angi, you have one component, homeowners, but you also have a B2B component aimed at other entrepreneurs. As the name and face of the company, how are you talking to those looking to grow their own businesses on your platform?

We have hundreds of thousands of pros that are on the platform that are building their own businesses. These are small businesses in every city around the US, and I get a chance to talk to them about what they’re working on, the struggles. One of the biggest decisions for companies in our industry is: Do I stay a sole proprietor, or do I hire people and run multiple trucks? How do I control the quality?

And those are all issues that you faced building Angi…

How are we going to run this? How are we going to have a unified experience, and make sure that you know quality stays high? Same types of questions.

I still talk to pros all the time. I have office hours today where pros can sign up, and we’ll talk about whatever. We’ll talk about how to expand their business. We’ll talk about how the product’s working for them. They’ll have suggestions. They might have a frustration or two.

That human interaction can be incredibly valuable. In a technological world, we sometimes rely too much on tech, and we forget that sometimes just a quick conversation can make all the difference in the world.

Over your 30 years of dealing with helping founders, what are some of the commonalities that you’ve seen in people who have been really successful?

People are way too quick to hire and way too slow to fire. You need to be super picky. Sometimes we’re like, “Hey, we should all just be co-founders, and we’re all going to be happy forever, and we’re all going to love this.” That may not be the case.

How do you make sure that you’ve got the right people that complement you and complement your skills? Let’s be a little slower. Let’s figure out and make sure that we are ready and not just love at first sight when it comes to hiring.

You built Angi in the Midwest. How did your Ohio and Indiana foundations shape the company?

We were very fortunate to have had a group of initial investors that were friends of Bill’s that he’d gone to business school with that carried the business for a long time.

Do not go out and raise money when you absolutely need it, because you want flexibility. Because if you need to be picky about who you hire, you also need to be super picky about who you take money from, because they too will set your culture and set your chart, and you want to make sure they’re going to be a good partner. If you’re up against the situation where you don’t have money, you might make a foolish decision.

We would incrementally raise money as we needed, and a lot of the time, once we got some venture capital money, we were able to raise it from local venture capitalists in the Midwest. But then coastal venture capital firms came knocking, and we started talking to them.

We were at term sheet with one on the East Coast, and they were the ones that said, “Hey, one more term, you have to move your headquarters to the East Coast because there aren’t enough smart people in Indiana.” Luckily we didn’t need the money, and we could say, “We’re not going to do that.”

That became a rally cry for the organization. It was just like, “We’re going to show you what we can do in Indiana.”

It’s very rare nowadays to have somebody who’s been at the same company for 30+ years. The company is named after you. You’re a co-founder. But you’re not the CEO. What is it like to let someone else make decisions?

You want to have a leadership team that you respect and work really well with. That relationship, I had that with my co-founder. I have a great relationship with our CEO that we have today. Those things are actually what make it work. It allows me to focus on the things that I’m excited about, things that can drive and build that authenticity and trust in the brand, which is the area that I enjoy doing the most. There’s always plenty of work to go around.

I’ve been around the business for so long that, in some ways, I’ve become a consultant inside the business. It’s like, “Hey, let’s see what Angie thinks on this or that.” It’s fun to have people come up with new ideas and be able to coach and hear how it’s going to work differently this time, because it probably will. Maybe it didn’t work 10 years ago, but now is the time for it.

Probably one of the things I get asked the most is: “Why are you still there?” Most founders are like, “I get it off the ground, like you’ve had multiple exit events. Why are you still here?” One, I love home improvement. I am addicted to having projects done…I just love the industry, and I think there’s a lot to be solved in it.

How did you know to trust your co-founder Bill who brought you in in the first place?

We had worked together through an internship. I had gotten to know him, I’d gotten to know his family, and, and it was one of those where it felt right. I value people a lot. I value relationships.

Sometimes when people are thinking about their career, they think about: “What is the brand name of the company? What is this that I’m going after? How much responsibility am I going to have?” For me, it comes down to: Who’s going to take an interest in me and who’s going to help me?”

I was heavily a marketer, and I could do marketing anywhere, but where do I have people that are cheering for me? That’s what I would advise young people, or people in their career in general—that’s what makes the difference. People don’t leave companies, they leave people, so find a boss, find a group of people that you can learn from and be excited to work with.

What are some of the things that founders should be looking for when they’re looking to bring someone on to join their team?

Especially when we were smaller, I would take a raw, smart talent than someone that was experienced in a specific skill, because I knew that the business was going to change a lot. It was like, “I need people that are going to be able to adapt and can be able, smart, and keep up, and I can throw things at them, so that we can keep running and changing.”

What advice would you give to founders who are at that crossroads trying to find the right people to bring on, trying to settle on the idea that they’re so passionate about?

It really starts with you and an assessment of what you’re good at and what you’re not. You have to be super honest. A lot of times founders want to say they’re really great at everything. They’re not.

You need to make sure that you can bring people in that can complement you. Like, me? I wasn’t the salesperson. I knew we were absolutely going to have to have people that had that skill, that could bring that skill to the table.

It’s your baby, and it’s hard to let people do the things that they need to do. Delegation becomes hard. How are you giving them that space? Because if you can’t be honest about what you need and give them the space to be successful, it’s never going to work. I would encourage them to do some soul-searching and figure out what that is.

Culture actually makes or breaks the company. A CEO or a founder who says they don’t have time to dedicate to building the culture will have a bad culture, and that bad culture will take care of the company for you. This is not about building a culture deck. This is not about bells and whistles. This is about: How do you walk the walk and talk the talk everyday? So, what things are you doing?

I do these chats with the pros that I mentioned. Not only is that set the culture externally, but it also does internally, because there’s an accessibility. If I take a challenging call, well, Angie will take that challenging call. We’re all here together, let’s just figure this out…Your people leaders and your culture really are going to drive people to want to be a part of the organization.