By Sandi Tomlin-Sutker

“Great captains aren’t made from calm seas.”  Proverb

Terri King had the words of this proverb sitting on her desk; after the 2008 recession hit and the real estate market crashed, she realized it was true. “I knew the experience was bound to make me better, and it did.” The road to her current life as owner of Coldwell Banker King in Western North Carolina was a winding one; very much like the roads of her native Leicester, NC, community. Terri comes from many generations of tough mountain people and a long line of entrepreneurs. Her first year of college was spent at UNC Chapel Hill’s dental school; realizing she didn’t want to “be in people’s mouths” all her life, she heard that she could get a college degree riding horses (her first love) so she pursued that route. After gaining her degree in Animal Science at NC State, she worked first as an agricultural extension agent in Clay County, NC. Her next job gave her a pioneering opportunity: she became the first female tobacco extension agent in the largest Burley tobacco producing county in the state… Madison.

By the early 2000’s Burley production was dwindling and Terri realized two things: “I thought it was time for me to figure out what I wanted to do in my life, and I realized it was time for me to get a master’s degree.”  Following the entrepreneurial call, she was in the first cohort graduating with a degree in Entrepreneurship from Western Carolina University. Given that her family are all in some kind of housing, mortgage, or construction business, real estate was an easy decision. She was the first in her family to break into the brokerage area of the business, getting her license in 2003.

“It’s been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in terms of professional and personal growth. I like to be right in the middle of things that matter. The land is where it all starts, it’s how we exist and live. Wars are fought over land. It is the most powerful asset class in the world, and I enjoy having that as my area of expertise.”

Because Coldwell Banker had a stellar reputation for their real estate training, she started her career there. “In those days you didn’t have the rule where you had to work for two years under another broker, so within a year I was operating a little boutique real estate company.  Like most of us at that time I thought it was never going to end. I did a lot of risky things, bought a lot of “toys” … I’d never really had anything growing up so to be able to buy a motorcycle, a fast car, and a house with a million-dollar view, I was eating that up!”

But things did end, with a crash. So, she fell back on the master’s project she had created: a business plan for New Leaf Historical Woodworking. “Tobacco barns were just sitting or being torn or burned down. They had so much history and I thought of taking them down to salvage the wood. Because I’m a writer, I gathered oral history around each barn with the idea of creating ‘mint coin’ furniture pieces that would come with a certificate of authenticity, a photo of the barn and its story. That idea landed me in articles in Sophie magazine and Southern Living.”

Since she didn’t have the skills or equipment to build the furniture, she brought in a Madison County craftsman who did. Doing that work kept her spirits up to some extent but still, she had lost everything she’d worked so hard for in the worst recession since the Great Depression. “I’ll never forget every time I’d lay down at night, I’d get this pain… it’s called anxiety. I sort of got aggravated about it! One of the things I learned is that you have to act, you can’t just wallow in it. One night in January, at 1:00 a.m., aggravated with that pain in my chest, I got up and made ‘hot laps’ in the neighborhood in nothing but my robe. By the time I got that worked out I knew what I was going to do. I went back to the house, laid down, and never had that pain again.” What she did was something called “strategic default” where she made a decision: this investment is going to be underwater for as long as I’m alive. As difficult as it was it proved to be a good thing in the end. “With what reserves I had I was able to move forward in a different direction. I got rid of my toys, let the house go, moved with my kid into a 700 square foot apartment and just tried to beat the pavement from there.  I never gave up.”

And then she got “lucky”! She invested $170 in a sign to sell a farm near Marshall on the 25-70 Bypass. A woman from New Orleans wanted to buy land where she could have a business. The agent on the first place she looked into couldn’t get it rezoned commercial. Partly because of her determination, and the fact that she was a well-known local, she was able to get three acres rezoned and the result was the location for a new rafting company. “She paid cash and I had both sides of the deal which gave me the ability to negotiate my debt on my two mortgages since I now had cash, and with what was left I went after a Coldwell Banker franchise.” If she had given up and gone bankrupt that would have killed any chance of getting the franchise.

“I gambled every penny I had and still needed to have a partner, so I got the experience of going after capital.” Coldwell Banker corporate turned her down twice; she just didn’t ‘fit the bill’ for them. But back 16 years ago, when she decided to go into real estate, she knew she wanted to be a major player in the industry. “I love the business and the game of business; it’s fun. I kinda forgot about that earlier vision, but the subconscious doesn’t forget.”

“I told Coldwell Banker corporate ‘you have a problem with your brand in my market and I think I can help you.’ I built an unconventional business plan with very little money put into brick and mortar fixed costs. I coined the phrase ‘facilitating the mobility of the agent’: keeping a small footprint, outsourcing and automating anything we could, meant we could ebb and flow with the market.”

For the past 18 years Terri has studied Science of Mind ideas, learning from writers like Napoleon Hill who said, if the answer is “No,” it just means your plans aren’t sound. “Finally, after another franchise sales person from corporate met with me he went back to the office and told them: ‘If you don’t give this girl a franchise, someone else will and you don’t want her on the other side.’” Her financial partner helped her meet those money requirements and she was able to pick up the franchise. “I had decided I was comfortable with failure as long as I tried my best. We bootstrapped what corporate said would take about half a million dollars with about $140,000.”

Terri asked Bridget Adams, who was with the former franchisee, to come on with her to help manage the business. About five or six agents who were committed to the brand came over as well. It has grown from that level in 2011 to its current 100 agents. 

As much as business has been Terri’s passion and focus, she actually credits being a single mother as the thing that made her, as she says, “a far better person that I ever wanted to be.” She came about having a daughter, Jewelian, now just turning 15, in a very unconventional way. “She was actually my niece. My older brother and his girlfriend had her and when she was eight months old, she came to me. During that time, I was supposed to show this 100-acre farm (priced at $10,000 per acre) in Big Pine to a man on a Saturday. I’d just suddenly become a single mom and didn’t have resources yet, like a babysitter. So, I bought a Kelty backpack, put her in it and when I got out of my truck to greet the buyer, I introduced him to her and said she was my helper today. By the time we got back down the mountain he was giving her the sippy cup and wiping her nose. I’d had this kid for barely two weeks and still managed to put a deal together and sold the property. By the way, that was almost my first million-dollar land sale, except the survey came in just under 100 acres!”

What the Future Holds

“There’s a lot of room in this industry as a whole to innovate, create and disrupt. We hope that our little nucleus at Coldwell Banker King can be positive disrupters. Our industry has been plagued with competency issues with agents coming from certain business models that have evolved over time. Our goal is to affect the reputation and quality of service by being a part of the transaction every time. We can illustrate how it can be by growing good agents who do the right things every time. We’re dealing with what is usually a person’s largest asset and they are counting on us. We take that seriously.”

Finally, it’s important to look at the full person, not just the business person. Two years ago, Terri introduced her team to her #FitForBusiness initiative. It is open to all agents although they are not required to participate. Recently she and some team members participated in the Spartan Races, one in Charlotte, NC, (three mile race with 20 obstacles) and she and one other agent did the Black Mountain Super Race of nine miles with 31 obstacles… think Mud Runs, lifting and rolling huge truck tires over, and keep in mind, Black Mountain is IN the mountains, so what goes down must come up again. 

On the white board in Terri King’s home garage gym are written the words of her life philosophy: LIVE WELL – DIE STRONG. “My hope is that all women can live in those words,” she says, and that “women helping women will play a huge roll in future success for all.”

Sandi Tomlin-Sutker is a freelance writer and editor. Contact her at [email protected]