Founded in 2004 by Experienced Consultants
The principals who founded Waverly Hicks began their careers in the web marketing and web software industries at the very beginning of the web, developing sites in 1995 for the Netscape 1.1 browser. Over the course of the following decade and a half, they have had exposure to all of the trends and fads of web marketing – push applications, all-flash sites, enterprise portals, dot-com applications, web 2.0, video streaming, mobile apps, blogs, and social networks. The lesson of this long experience – while technology changes all the time, the underlying relationship between business and customer does not – is reflected in every Waverly Hicks project, with a down-to-earth emphasis on message, product, and audience.
A Practical and Simple Design Approach
Prior to Waverly Hicks, the founders worked together implementing complex systems for middle market companies and business units. Repeatedly, they watched as businesses spent millions of dollars and years of time on software packages that promised to “change the game” only to find that customers and employees resisted adoption of overly complex new systems. In reaction, Waverly Hicks was founded with a mandate of simplicity: all projects – and later, the software package Equinox Server – would be built as quickly and simply as possible, emphasizing usability and incremental benefits. This belief in taking the complexity – the over-engineering – out of web software has led to an excellent success rate, and moreover, anticipated the current state of the web, which rewards ease-of-use and content portability.
Doing Business in the Middle Market
A majority of the founders’ experience, and most of Waverly Hicks’s clients, have been in the middle market. Across industries such as real estate, finance, professional services, manufacturing, technology, and large non-profits, Waverly Hicks’s clients have often had similar relationships to their customers, partners, and employees. Often fighting for market share and attention in a small universe of customers, with limited marketing and advertising budgets and small staffs, but with a critical need to share reams of information over the web, Waverly Hicks’s clients have required low cost campaigns and adaptable tools across many channels. Though repeated middle market projects, Waverly Hicks has learned how to avoid issues like training, consensus building, budget management, and resource availability becoming barriers to a projects success.
Equinox Portal – Complete Digital Engagement
In early 2008 Waverly Hicks committed to becoming a software company, packaging the best of a code base developed over the previous few years into a server that could be deployed and customized for an individual customer over a course of weeks, as opposed to what had previously been months-long projects. The theory behind this was simple: rather than build a hodge-podge of functionality for individual customers, uniting all development efforts into a single product – with simple but broad functionality – could benefit every customer. In practice, this has proved enormously successful, with most Equinox Portal customers making use of a far broader range of tools than ever before.
In 2010 Waverly Hicks began to exclusively focus on the residential real estate industry. With dynamic banner ads, landing pages, mobile sites, video jukeboxes, secure customer portals, tenant marketplaces, quote and proposal generators, and dozens of other features, Equinox Server owner/management companies are experiencing “complete digital engagement” with their prospects, brokers, and tenants.