Office Hours: Business Edition

Angi founder Angie Hicks returns to Office Hours: Business Edition to talk with Monica Langley about where the housing market sits in the summer of 2026. Higher rates have homeowners locked into the houses they already own, and Angi's own survey found people staying put about five years longer than they expected to.

Hicks explains what that does to home improvement spending, why 2008 and Covid both reset her thinking on the category, and why she predicts this will be the summer of the air conditioner. She also walks through the mechanics of the business: how pros pay for leads, how many get matched to a single homeowner, what happened to the old Angie's List penalty box, and why she still runs her own one-on-one office hours with contractors.

Monica brings her own case study, a cracked driveway she could not get anyone to look at until she went on the platform.

Angi founder Angie Hicks joins Monica Langley for the second part of their conversation on Office Hours: Business Edition.

Hicks explains why Angi's Q1 2026 revenue declined 3% after the company walked away from lower-quality traffic, how the leadership team thinks about stock volatility and analyst noise, and why building the company in Indianapolis shaped that approach.

She also details the Pro CRO, a set of AI agents that will call homeowners back, set appointments, and eventually help with estimating, plus Angi's app inside ChatGPT, an Amazon Alexa integration due later this year, and what the trades labor shortage means for people considering a career in skilled work.

Angie Hicks founded Angi and became the face of it to answer to the question her own marketing team kept hearing, which was whether there's a real Angie at all. She sits down with Monica Langley to talk about the decision to put her family off-limits while putting herself on television, scaling from 30 markets to 100 in 18 months, going public, merging with her largest competitor under IAC, and dropping the "List" from Angie's List.

She also gets into what it means to compete in a $700 billion home improvement industry where the biggest competitor is still a homeowner asking a neighbor for a recommendation and why the ads are playful but the message underneath them never changes.

In this episode of Office Hours: Business Edition, host Monica Langley, Haslam College of Business professor of practice, sits down with Angie Hicks, founder of Angi (formerly known as Angie’s List) for a discussion on entrepreneurship, trust, and the long work of building a brand that homeowners rely on.Hicks describes herself as addicted to home improvement. What she took longer to call herself was an entrepreneur. She tells Langley it was years before she gave herself credit for what she had built, even as the company that carried her name became one of the most recognized names in home services.Hicks walks through her founding story, from a hand-built list of local reviews to a national platform, and reflects on what she learned along the way about reputation, customer trust, and growing at a pace the business could sustain.

In this episode, Monica sits down with John Fieldly, CEO of Celsius Holdings. They get into the turnaround story, the pivot into better-for-you energy, and the distribution partnerships that changed the company’s trajectory. Fieldly shares his thinking on where the category is heading, how he approaches leadership and decision making, and the early-career advice that still guides how he runs the business today.