Meet Monica D. Higgins of Garagify in View Park-Windsor Hills

Today we’d like to introduce you to Monica D. Higgins.

Monica, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
While I didn’t know it at the time, my path to entrepreneurship started the year my father died. When I was growing up, I helped my parents manage and renovate distressed properties. After my father passed away, my mother got ripped off big time by a shady contractor. Based on my mother’s experience, I didn’t just want to make a difference I wanted to be the difference. Right then and there, I made it my life’s mission to help people confidently transform their house into a home, working on behalf of homeowners as an advocate, mentor and renovation expert.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road has definitely not been smooth, with plenty of struggles along the way.

Imagine launching a construction management firm in July 2006, the Great Recession taking hold two years later and watching your company’s revenue decline rapidly since many banks had closed home equity lines of credits or had stopped equity lending all together since home values were dropping so quickly. As a result, homeowners were unable to access their home equity to make the home improvements they desired.

Instead of shutting down the business, we put it in hibernation mode. Around the same time, I was offered a VP job for a startup poised to close on investment financing. That job offer was ultimately rescinded as a result of investors pulling their term sheet. To make ends meet, I worked as an in-store promoter for a cabinet refacing company within Home Depot, then got laid off about two months in. Eventually, I landed at a non-profit, then at a successful beauty startup. Yet, the desire to help homeowners avoid my mother’s fate kept nagging at me. That’s when the idea for a book hatched and started to take shape, which ultimately led me to write ‘Remodel Success’, which has since become an international bestseller.

Ultimately, I returned to the construction industry full-time. When the laws changed in 2017, in response to the housing crisis, partly due to decades of underbuilding, it made sense to pivot and focus on backyard homes (formally known as accessory dwelling units or ADUs). Garagify successfully launched earlier this year.

One of the most important lessons I learned is to never lose sight of your vision and how important it is to pivot to possibilities.

Please tell us about Garagify.
Garagify is a one-stop-shop for homeowners giving them the power to turn their home equity into garage-converted apartments or backyard homes built from the ground up, infuse cash into the household and add much-needed space.

We are known for simplifying the process of building a backyard home. We take care of everything at a fixed all-inclusive price. Personal project managers work closely with homeowners every step of the way, saving them up to 30% in design fees and up to 50% in construction costs, as well as countless hours, compared to them going it alone.

What we’re most proud of is giving homeowners the confidence and certainty of knowing what they can legally build on their property, how much their project will cost and how to best finance it. As a result, any risks of running out of money are radically reduced.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
One of my favorite childhood memories is the Bicentennial road trip my parents and I, along with my aunt and uncle and our German Shepard, Rex, we took across country. We got to experience the sights, sounds and celebration of the creation of the United States of America as an independent republic.

Having the third row of the station wagon all to myself (Rex came back to join me on may occasions) was a big deal. I remember listening to mystery theater and music countdown radio shows, as well as playing car games, plus a bunch of songs over and over and over on an 8-track player in the car. I’m sure my singing drove my family nuts.

We were on the road for three months. By the time we returned, we had checked off the remaining states on our bucket list that we hadn’t been to before, with the exception of Alaska. It was so exciting to know that I had visited 49 of 50 states.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.GaragifyNow.com

Image Credit:
Credit for headshot is Steve Briggs

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