By Anelia K. Dimitrova
Life, they say, is a mountain.
Some love to marvel at its magnificence from afar.
Others can’t wait to lace up their hiking shoes and hop on the steep path, to trek upward and upward, one toehold at a time, until they get to a ridge where they find their happy place and stay.
Still others see climbing as a way of being, so they keep climbing and climbing and climbing until they reach the very top and when there’s no more height to draw them in, they look around for the next challenge.
For Amy Wienands, that next challenge, after conquering the Everest of her real estate business bearing her name, is helping others do the same.
She calls this “pouring into people,” and as a leader and as a mom, she does just that.
“It’s a faith-based thing, but I pour into people and just tell them how great they are, that they’re on this earth for a purpose, and that’s really my passion. And so I’m really locked into that.”
Elevating those around her to achieve what matters to them has become Amy’s new quest.
Easier said than done.
But who better to share that message than the person who lives it?
For at least a solid decade, Amy’s business savvy has set the bar high. Her bold signature pink real estate billboards around the Cedar Valley kept intriguing me for years, so I finally reached out to meet the real person behind the ads.
In short order, I was sitting in the guest area at her office at 1730 W Ridgeway Ave. Suite 1. With its high ceilings and spacious interior, the building, designed by Invision Architecture, says a lot about who she is. At the time she planned it, the project exceeded her budget by “a lot,” but to this day it conveys her vision – think and act boldly.
“It was all very intentional,” she says. “I built this building because I didn’t want my daughter to think small,” she says. “I wanted to demonstrate that you can pursue your dreams. I didn’t want limitations to be all over her life and it seems like men have a little bit easier time with that than women.”
Up close and personal, Amy exudes charisma that cannot be conveyed by the pixels of a television screen.
As we sit in her office to chat, the space speaks, too. The interior walls, where they exist, are mostly glass and the shared commons are inviting. A podcast studio is tucked in one of the areas where commercials and photoshoots take place.
“I like to have creative space,” she says. “And I like to create stuff that doesn’t exist in this market. To be creative, there has to be something that stimulates you.”
She cuts to the chase during the interview with disarming candor, leaving the listener to make sense of her chiseled words. Her voice is deep, her pace is staccato, and her gaze is penetrating–no room for veneer here, just substance.
“I don’t like surface relationships, I don’t like surface conversations,” she quips.
Throughout her quest, she told me, she’s felt the “inner whisper” that she was created for something more, as she says in her book.
Today, “more” may sound to others like a hefty lift or a frenetic treadmill, but that seems to be the right pace for her.
She rises before 5 a.m., relishes reflecting on life and faith, goes for a walk or does Pilates and listens to inspirational messages.
That sets her routine for the day.
At night, she thinks with gratitude of “all the great things that happened that day,” and intentionally takes stock of whose life she impacted that day and how. If a thorny issue stands in front of her during the day, she knows how to “bench” it at night and trusts that in the morning, she will know “exactly what to do.”
It has worked well for her so far.
She’s the CEO of a thriving real estate agency bearing her name, Amy Wienands Real Estate (AWRE) which has been ranked for excellence nationally and statewide. But her purpose extends beyond her bread-and-butter business.
She is also a restless spirit that continues to explore the purpose of her life in creative endeavors, like the book she wrote and published called, “Make It Count! Live your Life on Purpose!”
The 185-page introspection into her journey, self published in 2024 by You Are More Publishing, which Amy launched, makes for an uplifting read. In essence, it tells personal stories which resonate with one elevating message she aims at her readers: You are more than you think you are, so find yourself, invest in bettering yourself and live out your potential for the benefit of others. She also launched a podcast fittingly called “YOU ARE MORE.”
Beyond that, she is the mother of two kids, a wife, the mentor of young talent and who knows how many more “mores” we didn’t touch on in our interview.
Put otherwise, she’s a dreamer and a doer.
Her duties in all these commitments define who she is and explain the urgency with which she lives them.
She’s in a hurry to keep doing and keep searching.
After 20 years of working in real estate, she started her company about decade ago, built a team, rose to prominence, became a standard setter in her field, earned the admiration of Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran, and of the many clients she has worked with over the years.
Living up to her motto, Obsessively working for you
How she came up with and lives up to her working motto, “Obsessively working for you,” is a vignette in Amy’s real life story arc, and an anecdote worth retelling. A client once asked her what makes her different from other agents.
“I will obsessively work for you,” she told the client. “And I won’t quit until we find your solution.”
The words just rolled off her tongue spontaneously in the moment, but she immediately recognized their power and her stake in them.
“That’s my slogan,” she thought at the time.
She has owned it since.
In fact, that dedication to work discipline and accountability goes back to Amy’s early years. Her dad worked in the foundry at John Deere, and after his regular shift, he would go home and work endless hours at his own rental business. In the summer, the family would sell donuts at area fairs, but the parents knew how to make work fun.
“I had no idea that we needed the money,” she says. “I always thought my mom and dad made a lot of money because they never ever talked about it to us.”
She graduated from West High School in Waterloo and enrolled at Northwestern College, a small private Christian university in Orange City, to study psychology. In her first professional job she taught employability skills to inmates at a county jail. But after a two-year stint there, she moved on.
Real estate became her next venture. It suited her personality, her sales skills, her ambition and it put her degree to work.
“I knew realtors aren’t ranked much higher than car salesmen, but I thought at least that’s something to do that’s exciting,” she says.
She dreamed of having her sign on every property in the Cedar Valley and then, having visualized that success in her mind’s eye, she rolled up her sleeves to make that happen, knocking on doors tirelessly.
As a freshly minted saleswoman, Amy loved to find first-time buyers their dream home, then quickly realized that life’s hurdles – divorce, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one and other challenges–are just as much a part of the equation as the blissful moments. That’s when it dawned on her that she was not really in the business of transacting property, but rather, in the business of helping people navigate various stages in their lives.
“It’s never just a house. It never is,” she says. “We literally sit in the seat of a counselor and I thought it was a great honor and privilege to walk through situations with so many of my clients.
“It’s always an honor for me to help them navigate through difficulties and challenges. I always teach my team, it’s an honor, when someone takes you into their most private spaces. You know their story in minutes. What other industry, what other career can you do that? I get excited about that.”
The challenges: And there have been many
Amy is vocal about the challenges she’s encountered so far, which taken together, or one at a time, appear daunting, but she is quick to note that she “intuitively” believes that ultimately, everything is going to be good.
“It’s not that my life has not had challenges. It has, but by the grace of God, it’s shifted me,” she says. “If you’re in a hard spot, put a picture of you in a good spot in front of you, because what you stare at, you become.”
Each challenge toughened her, and also made her more reflective.
When she drew backstabs from gossipers early on in her career as a single successful businesswoman, she brushed past their envy and kept going. When later on, she and her husband, Steve, encountered fertility issues she kept going despite the fact that it was a “big, huge mountain to climb.”
A place of gratitude: Pouring into people
Recounting how she can put all those lessons to work in enhancing her impact, Amy goes back and forth between her team and her family. For both, her goal is to keep reinforcing that they have the power to “create the life that they want to create.”
She’s tested that tenet many times and can passionately attest that it works.
She walks alongside her team members when they encounter challenges and says it’s an honor when she is called to help. Amy says she no longer talks to her team about real estate but rather, focuses on affirming who they are as humans, helping lift them through difficult times and encouraging them to continue to seek self development.
“Confidence is the greatest predictor of success,” she says.
What matters, she believes, is “life’s foundational principles,” and she built her entire career on them.
“My team doesn’t have to start where I started,” she says. “I knocked on doors all the time. I worked 18-hour days, all the time. They don’t have to do that because they can stand on my shoulders and get a completely different perspective.”
On occasion, she takes her daughter, Faith, to open houses, in an effort to role model positivity, gratitude and appreciation.
“I’m always talking to my kids about the fact that they are world changers,” she says.
She turned gratitude giving into a game, and asks her kids to come up with five things they are grateful for every day.
“At first, they hated it, and now they’re kind of starting to like it, they’re kind of thinking about it during the day, what they’re thankful for to tell me the next morning,” she says. “But I noticed as I’m reprogramming their brains to think that way.”
Recharging for leadership, dreaming and doing
Several groups of like-minded friends, who are focused on intentional self-improvement, help Amy stay connected to her inner compass.
They hold day-long intense sessions where they dive into leadership issues and have frank discussions. This is one of the ways Amy recharges herself.
“That’s been amazing, we grow each other,” she says. “We just build each other up, support each other and I’m so grateful for those groups of people. They’ve changed my world. Otherwise, it can be really lonely.”
What keeps fueling her passion is her faith, so she keeps on dreaming and doing.
“I’ve always had extreme accountability in my life, mostly to myself. I talk to my team about it all the time – you compete against no one but yourself. You gotta love the person in the mirror. And if you love the person in the mirror, you’re gonna respond to every challenge differently. When you hate the person in the mirror, nothing goes very well.
What’s her goal for the future?
“I would like to impact as many lives as I possibly can for the better,” she says. “And that’s my mission.”