Chip Gaines – Your Network Is Everything

What’s an entrepreneur’s most important resource? Chip Gaines (of Fixer Upper fame) says it’s your network—and building a good one requires true, challenging work.

- By Jason Feifer

Chip Gaines loves people who say yes. “People who say yes to life, yes to hard work, and yes to risk, but who aren’t yes-people,” he writes in his new memoir, called No Pain, No Gaines. But he also knows how to say no, to great effect. He and his wife, Joanna, once ran a sometimes-struggling real estate company in Waco, Texas, and then transformed into the stars of HGTV’s reality show Fixer Upper—until they burned out and declined to continue. Instead, they shifted focus onto building their network—in many senses of the word—with the aim of creating jobs and opportunity in Waco. Under the brand name Magnolia, they’ve built a shopping district, a regional real estate company, vacation rentals, product partnerships with Target and others, and debuting later in 2021, an actual TV network called Magnolia Network (a joint venture with Discovery that rebrands its DIY Network). In this conversation, Chip explains how he built his personal network—and how it became a guiding force as he evolved as an entrepreneur.

In your book, you describe building a network as “lots of very hard work,” which is a useful way of thinking about it. Great networks don’t just happen—they require work! What does that mean for you?