Let me start TheQwikFix blog by introducing myself and providing some background which I believe is really important to our complete story and how TheQwikFix came into existence. My name is Jeremy Henley and I grew up on a small farm basically in the middle of nowhere on the Eastern side of Washington State. My parents raised me to work hard and gave me the confidence to believe that anything was possible. I grew up working on the farm at a young age, playing sports and riding bikes with my neighborhood buddies. In the summertime it was like a scene from the movie Sandlot both at the pool and on the baseball field. When it was starting to get dark that meant it was time to head home for dinner. We didn't have a lot but I had no idea that I was missing anything. Although I would not want to live there now, I would not trade growing up there for anything.
After graduating with a degree in Marketing from Washington State University I moved to San Francisco which was nearing the at height of the dot com boom and eventual bust. I took a job selling industrial uniforms basically door to door and cold calling for hours every single week to get new business. It was hard but I was successful and relentless with my efforts to advance. I was always aware that something special was happening in the Silicon Valley and kept a close eye on the news of who and what was happening, like someday I would make a transition and be apart of the tech industry there one day.
After proving I was able to sell and lead I was promoted a few times to different management roles and continued to excel. A few years later I was ready to move to something more interesting and began selling medical equipment in the operating room. These were long days of standing in the OR showing doctors how best to use the tools we offered. It was a very exciting and stressful role but I found myself learning more about medicine day in and day out than expanding my business skills so I decided to take a risk and left behind a multi-billion dollar company with great benefits and stock ownership plans where I was climbing the corporate ladder so to speak and began working for a small software company that was an early player in the identity theft protection space. This was 2009, before anyone really knew or understood what a data breach was, like the ones that hit HomeDepot, Neiman Marcus and the US Government.
This was my first experience working for a small company, other than my farming days of course. I loved that I was able to have an impact from day one. I loved that I was involved in the decisions that drove the company forward and really loved closing deals that powered this organization especially when I saw it actually creating work for new employees and new vendors to support us. Plus we were taking on the big companies and still winning just like every startup dreams of doing. I was largely responsible for blazing the trails and closing many of the largest accounts for this company and in the industry.
During this time we relocated to sunny San Diego which will be home base for the rest of my time, you just cannot beat the weather, the people and the laid back lifestyle. From here we built out the identity theft company and this ultimately played out very well for the original investors who exited when a private equity firm stepped in and took control.
After that experience I was recruited to work for two different larger competitors but I only wanted to work for another startup in the tech space. An old friend that knew I was on the lookout for my next thing presented a great offer and I landed at cyber security company where we as a company were blazing trails again to find the right product/market fit for the excellent ideas the founders had developed.
This was also a very interesting time as we continued to iterate on the original plans to find the right place for what we offered. I was again able to grab the attention of some the largest potential clients in the world for this company which helped put it on the map. In fact I spend most of my days still making this happen and then spending my downtime, evenings and weekends on my side hustles, yep two of them. which I believe one of them has something that will change the way residential real estate is transacted with regards to necessary repairs tied to closing the deal.
My next post will speak more about TheQwikFix, how we discovered the opportunity and the problems we are planning to fix for the world of real estate specifically around home inspections and the repairs that are identified by these reports.
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