Women Who Lead – Kavell Taylor, CEO HomeOwnersHub

I’m not the first American born to Jamaican parents who was raised to believe that the way to success in this country was to get a degree, then get a good job. However, I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I put myself through undergraduate and graduate school – I don’t come from money so I hustled to pay for tuition, room & board, books, etc. One of my first endeavors was in landscaping. We focused on trimming hedges on Long Island’s gold coast. That helped pay for some expenses while earning my BA. After graduating I pursued an MBA and my partner went to get a JD so the company just fizzled. While earning my MBA I started another company, but it never took off. After earning my 2nd degree, I landed a job at a Wall Street consulting firm that assisted banks and brokerages through acquisitions, downsizing, re-engineering initiatives, and company-wide system conversions. I was promoted within 12 months and took the opportunity to grow a division where I ran a recruiting department in support of financial services product lines with a focus on operations improvement. I supplied back office professionals to assist banks and brokerage firms with a wide range of services including research and recovery, regulatory compliance, internal auditing, accounting, and reconciliation. I was successfully doing what I was raised to do – get a degree and land a well-paying job. Things were pretty good for me financially, but after a while, it wasn’t much fun. I wasn’t creating anything and I felt empty.

I took $8,000 of my own money and bought my first building – it needed work. I had called my landlord and asked him to sell me the building, I was just kidding, but he said yes and I had to figure things out very quickly. That’s when I found my passion for real estate, construction, strategy, and finance. I enjoyed taking an old, poorly performing asset and turning it into a profitable holding. I loved the whole deal-making process, from searching and identifying a property that was ripe for acquisition, to financing it and running the numbers to make sure the deal would work in my favor. I was having a blast! After I closed a deal, I’d come home from work and change out of my suit and into jeans and boots — I got my hands dirty renovating my property. Then I’d rent it, and start searching for the next acquisition. The real estate market was on a rise so I was able to leverage my equity for the next deal. The skills I honed translated smoothly into growing Homeowners Hub. I joined Homeowners Hub back in mid-2015 as a consultant. I was made partner 6 months later and then named CEO shortly thereafter.

COMPANY

Homeowners Hub is a home maintenance, repair, and renovation platform. Homeowners receive concierge services via subscription (this includes freebies & discounts) or a-la-carte (no freebies & discounts). We screen contractors, provide scheduling, facilitate payment and built a satisfaction guarantee into the process. We assist contractors with estimates, customer service, billing & collections. We identified a real problem in the market. Homeowners don’t have the background to efficiently manage homeownership and don’t want to spend time dealing with it. On the other side of the transaction, contractors need help with operations that reduce service delivery capacity and existing platforms charge lead fees for homeowner information and advertising fees to increase visibility. Those fees can be high and yield low or no ROI (return on investment) for a huge pool of talent, thus locking them out of the game.

We enhance both the consumer and supply side experience beyond facilitating an introduction. We manage the valuable activity that occurs during the client/contractor relationship from initial engagement to final payment. The transaction life-cycle is automated and complemented by a customer service support component. Our website integrates with a CRM (customer relationship management), invoicing, payables, receivables, and accounting system.

Our team has deep domain expertise with 50+ years of combined entrepreneurial accomplishments. We love creating positive results where there’s typically mistrust. Our success is underscored by a 99% customer satisfaction rate after processing over 2500 transactions and earning $1.2M while validating this solution in our test market. We got the right contractor for the right job, satisfied the customer and did that very efficiently. We’re currently moving from validation to thinking about this pragmatically. We’re ready to expand into more homes in New Jersey where we currently operate and New York City (the 5 boroughs). Right in our backyard, there are 3 million opportunities. We want to take what we’ve learned and grow this nationally because the total addressable market is, at minimum, $600 billion dollars.

For more information visit www.hubyourhome.com or call (844) HUB-7272.