Huntsville Hub owner Kellie Andrews always wanted to be in business. Prior to launching the Hub, she tried out a number of different roles while looking for her niche. The breakthrough came while reading a book entitled “101 Best Businesses to Start”–one of the case studies, ‘Shared Tenant Services,’ featured a secretary who launched her own secretarial business in a couple of rented rooms and, after finding that the income she made from renting unused office space surpassed that of her secretarial business, she expanded her space further to create an executive suite.

Grasping the business potential of this venture, Andrews and her husband began searching for their own space and ultimately settled on Building 600 at Office Park South, a building owner-owned facility. Andrews saw this as a viable option because she wanted a first class facility and there weren’t many available at the time, especially on their budget. She and her husband approached the then-owner, the late Jerome Averbush, who sold them the facility in 1994.

During our conversation in the conference room of The Hub, Andrews noted that she doesn’t own the property, but instead has a master lease, giving her the right to sublease.

“I bought all of his pieces and parts, I bought all of the contents of the business, and just picked it up where it was,” said Andrews.

She noted that The Hub encompasses roughly 18,000 square feet of office space, including the building’s first floor and about a third of the third floor.

How long have you lived in the Huntsville area?

I moved here in 1986 to go to UAH. I came from Birmingham…I wanted to get an MIS degree and at the time it was UAH or Tuscaloosa. It was one of those schools and I didn’t want to move somewhere that I’d move from again shortly thereafter, ‘cause people don’t usually stay in Tuscaloosa. I moved here so I could stay.

Did you encounter any significant obstacles starting out?

Right after we took over there was a big dip in the real estate market and I very quickly lost my largest client. I don’t remember, to be honest, whether they broke their lease…I think they moved out two months after we started and we were horrified. My husband and I were in this together–he quit his job and came in and ran with me, which was really foolish because he actually made money and so then we were both depending on this and we didn’t really know what we were doing.

Real estate just tanked so we spent several years paying rent with our credit cards. Not all of it, but supplementing so we didn’t have to go to [our landlord] and say ‘hey, we need a break or an extension or something.’ It probably took 20 years to get that paid off…I will never go back and try to figure out how much interest that cost me, but it was a terrible decision in retrospect. But you just know what you know at the time. So that was my first big obstacle, just keeping the business alive long enough to get through it.

My second biggest obstacle was that I worked with my husband (laughs)–you don’t know these

things until you test them out, right? We’re both pretty low key, easy going people but we think differently and we act differently and we went from having regular jobs with a decent income to being together 24 hours a day and having no income and huge amounts of stress. We came down to the point of ‘we can work together or we could be married but not both of those things.’

He took a job driving a truck cross-country, so we went from 24 hours a day to [seeing each other] three days a month. That was it for a year or more, and then I got pregnant purely by the grace of God, because when you’re only in town for three days it’s hard to make that work…he came back temporarily when it was time for me to have the baby and after that I’m like ‘okay, I can’t do newborn, toddler, and business by myself’ so we made this decision that we would both go look for another job and whoever found one would take it and the other person would stay here. When you look at it hard, you go ‘who’s the person best able?’ and I don’t really know. He’s the best at operations and I’m better at the outward-facing stuff.

Anyway, we made this decision and then he sat back down and kept answering phones because I was on maternity leave. We sat at the front desk at that time–there were only one to two of us here at any one time, and I ran into my boss that I’d worked for before I started the business. He hired me right back again…the guy that I worked for knew exactly what I was doing, knew that I had this business, and had faith in my work ethic and that I wasn’t going to try to sneak and do other work all day long.

It was a really good thing for a while–I was able to work really hard for weeks on end and then take several days off and come here and help out if there was an emergency…it was a gift. I did that for eight years until I took back over.

How do you balance your personal and professional life?

I don’t think there’s any difference. I’m very serious–it might have been different at one time. My kids are grown and gone. They’re not actually gone–one of them is at the front desk there, she met you when you came in. She’s our first born…she grew up in these hallways. I’ve had to repaper her crayon on the wall.

At one point there was a difference but now it’s a lifestyle. I don’t necessarily work 8-5 but I am very likely to have a call with a client at 6 AM or 8 PM. Not often, I don’t have to anymore, and I’m mixing up what I’m doing personally and what I’m doing [for] work. It all flows together.

What’s your favorite thing about being a business owner?

I am responsible for my own success or failure.

What would you consider to be the greatest challenge of owning a business and how do you manage that?

Knowing what you don’t know. It’s easy to manage what you’re aware of but when there are big holes and you don’t know they’re there, they can break you. We had, and this is just a teeny,

tiny little example, but we had some misconceptions about how payroll tax went, and so for some long period of time we weren’t paying separate payroll taxes. The tax man didn’t like that, you know, but we didn’t know we were doing it wrong. So it came out of nowhere when we figured it out…it’s making sure that you’re connected to the right people that are going to help you make sure you’ve got all the pieces covered. To me that’s the biggest challenge–every time I turn around it’s like we have to learn something new or I have to go find someone else to teach me something new.

Did the pandemic impact your business? If so, how, and how did you overcome it?

Yes. Because we receive mail for our customers, we were considered essential, so we were quasi-open. We have about 50-something private offices and we have meeting rooms and a coworking lounge. We’d have people that would come in every day and do their work, we’d have people that would just come in and have meetings, we’d have people that would come in and hang out in our lounge and grab a desk and just sit and work for a while.

We shut the lounge and the public meeting [spaces], but everyone that had an office had the ability to social distance and continue to work. All of our public rentals shut down.

We had three people at the front desk and what we had them do was work a long day. One person would come in…they’d work like a 10 hour day. They’d come early and stay late and I’d pay for food delivery for that person that day, then they’d go home. The cleaning people would sanitize that area and someone else would come the next day. So they worked half to a third of the days that they were working and then they would be at home and if there was stuff they could do at home on the computer they would do it, but other than that they were at home, and I stayed at home. So that’s how we managed the shutdown time, but after that…we only had a couple of clients who claimed that their business ended because of the Covid impact.

Since then we’ve had a lot of desk rental use…a lot of people are home working longer than they wanted to be or their company is never going to have them work on site again or whatever and they need a place to work elsewhere some of the time.

We do a lot of desk rentals now where we didn’t do that before. It opened us up to another area.

It was tough–it will take a long time to recover from the lack of revenue from that time, but we had more than half of our normal revenue coming in. That was a big thing–because we’ve been around for so long we were operating more as an old-style executive suite where people would come in and they’d stay for a year. That’s the standard contract agreement that we have.

We’ll do any term people want, but that was just kind of the norm. So the vast majority of our customers were on that kind of term. A lot of the newer co-working kind of facilities are proud to spout that they’re month to month. Well, when you’re month to month, you’re vulnerable to anything, and so they had tons of their clients go ‘oh, we’re not going to be here this month. We’ll come back when it’s over,’ not realizing that they were essentially assisting the demise of that business because there was no income all of a sudden. Our clients were still committed, still able to work.

What advice would you give to someone considering starting their own business?

Ask a million questions. Find people, hang around people that are successful and learn everything you can from them. Get ALL the advice–don’t assume that you know.

What would you say is the secret to your success?

I’m a redhead…I’m very stubborn. People have said ‘you’ve been in business so long,’ because we’re in the middle of our 28th year now…and I’m like ‘I’m just super stubborn–I have not failed because I have not quit yet.’ So that’s kind of it–there’s always a way out, there’s always a way forward if you just don’t give up. But really, it’s God. God is the real reason for our ‘success.’ We do our best to focus on serving Him day after day, and He honors our efforts.