Photo by Arica Lipp
Hustle, Heart & Healing
How Nicole King built a life of purpose
Nicole King walks with a purpose. You’ll typically find two cell phones on her. She jokes, but the tattoo she sports on the back of her neck is a coin slot.
“Just stick another quarter in me and I'll keep going,” she says with a smirk. The “ink” is a testimony to her intense drive, a drive that has helped both her and her community in immeasurable ways.
She talks easily about her career path and the winding line that seems to flow through it — from paralegal to childcare owner and early childhood educator to house flipper to, now, real estate broker and exotic pet store co-owner, a business she runs with her husband and daughter. She passionately shares the details of all her projects and what fuels her love of community.
When you talk about her early years, however, she becomes a little more guarded. She shares bits and pieces because she understands it’s a critical piece of her story.
Nicole came into the world 42 years ago on somewhat rocky ground.
“My mom, being an unwed mother fresh out of Carroll College, there was a stigma associated with that,” Nicole says. “The boy that she got pregnant with faked his own death to not be a dad. We thought he was dead until I was about 8 years old, which was crazy.”
During those early years, it was Nicole and her mother against the world. Her mom, Lisa, raised her all over Western Montana. They loved hiking together. Nicole learned to swim in Flathead Lake. The two spent time in Kalispell before they moved to Missoula so Lisa could earn her degree in physical therapy at the University of Montana.
“She took me with her to every class,” Nicole says. “If you walk the halls of Missoula, there are still plenty of plaques with her name on them, awards that she won. There are also pictures of me with her in the classroom, which is bizarre.” Nicole adds, “She was taking care of me full time, working as a waitress and she still managed to succeed like that in PT school.”
Nicole remembers tagging along at the hospital, scooting around on a wheelchair or sitting bedside as her mom cared for patients. She never realized how unique that was or that these were the lean years.
“She tells me stories about how roach-infested our apartments were,” Nicole says. “I remember going to Dairy Queen and McDonald’s. My mom told me, ‘Oh yeah, you were fed.’ But then, she would just eat whatever I didn’t eat. I didn’t know it was that hard for her.”
When her mom met her stepdad and later got married when Nicole was 9, it shook her world. She says her stepdad had a problem with alcohol and pain killers. Nicole responded by rebelling and running away. When her family moved to Eureka, California, in her teenage years, she says, “I got mixed up immediately with all the wrong people.”
Eureka is located in Humbolt County. Known for its statuesque redwoods and jaw-dropping coastlines, the city was also at the epicenter of a $7-billion-dollar marijuana industry. “Everybody there was either using it, growing it or selling it,” Nicole says. The rugged, lush terrain was prime for growing. A criminal element moved in, and understaffed law enforcement agencies started to look the other way.
“I was a gang member,” Nicole says. She adds, “At one point, I asked my probation officer if he could show me my file. He opened one of those file cabinet drawers and said, this is the part that I have.”
Nicole didn’t want to get into the particulars of why her rap sheet took up an entire file cabinet drawer, but she did say as a petite blonde teen, it made her nearly invisible to law enforcement.
“There are not many police officers or others who would expect a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old little strawberry blonde, white girl to be the one who is running your drugs for you,” Nicole says. “Also, little strawberry blonde girls are very appealing sexually.”
Photo by Arica Lipp
Her past is one of the main reasons why she devotes time and money to the HER Campaign, a Billings nonprofit aimed at providing safe spaces and shelter for human trafficking survivors.
“You just don’t know when things will come back to you,” she says, reflecting on the memories that are still etched in her mind. “I would disappear for days and my mom would drive around town trying to find me,” Nicole says. “I have asked her several times, how did you find me in these places? They were flop houses, drug houses. She would just say, ‘God would tell me. God would tell me that you were in the building.’”
At 16, Nicole took her family to court and was legally emancipated. By that time, her mom had two children with her stepfather.
“I felt like an outsider in my own home. I didn’t feel like I belonged there, and my presence just created more and more strife,” she says. She started dating a man who had just been released from a youth correctional facility on attempted murder charges. “When he got out, we moved in together. Imagine that he turned out to be a violent person. So crazy,” she says, shaking her head.
To escape, late one night she showed up on her mother’s doorstep. Within a few days she had a bus ticket to Helena and $67 in her pocket.
“I didn’t know anyone there. My mom told me later that she felt like she was saying goodbye, that she would never see me alive again,” Nicole says. She was 17 years old.
When she got to Helena in the early morning hours, a hotel let crash in one of their rooms. After paying for the next night, she had $20 left and knew she needed a plan. She slept for a couple of hours, and then, she says, “I called both of the Assembly of God churches.” Only one answered, Neighborhood Assembly of God.
“They picked me up, brought me to church and literally my whole world, my whole world, changed. Everything changed,” Nicole says with emotion.
Eric Hutch, the church’s pastor at the time still vividly remembers Nicole walking through the doors.
“I was actually leading worship at the time,” he says. “Shari, my wife was nowhere to be found but my infant child was there in the pew. I remember walking up to Nicole and saying, ‘Hey would you be able to take care of my baby?’” Looking back, he says, “She needed someone to believe in her and that happened to be the moment.”
Nicole admits that when she walked into that church, she witnessed something she’d been longing for. “The community that I saw when I walked into that church, it was pure,” she says. “I told myself, this is what I want. This is the life I want to live.”
At Bible study that night, she ended up sitting right next to Josh King, the man she would eventually marry. “Everything fell into place,” she says. The two ended up dating for two years before getting married. Eric officiated.
Eric and his wife, Sherry, Hutch
“It brings me a lot of joy knowing that whatever we had done, if it was simply answering the phone or entrusting her with a child or taking her under our wing and mentoring her, that can bring this lasting change and transformation,” Eric says. With Eric now in Billings working as a marriage and family pastor at Harvest Church, the two have kept in touch.
In those early days, Nicole earned her degree to become a paralegal. She always had her sights set on becoming a lawyer. Josh paved his own way with a career as a software developer.
“We just had a normal life,” Nicole says. She and Josh became parents when Nicole turned 20 with their daughter, Taylor. Three and a half years later, came their son, Dylan.
When their daughter was just nine months old, Josh’s job brought them to Billings. One act would spark a new side hustle for Nicole. They bought a fixer-upper, sight unseen.
“We had been looking at houses and I knew exactly the moment I saw it. This was a huge house, but it just needed some love,” she says. After sprucing the place up in a short amount of time, the couple sold it for $115,000 more than what they paid.
“I thought, you know, that wasn’t that hard. We should do this again,” she says. “We’ve now owned 17 houses in Billings. Our poor kids didn’t know if they were coming or going.”
While the Kings were flipping houses, the Koubas, a family of real-estate agents they knew from Harvest Church, became their partners. It wasn’t long before they were urging Nicole to quit her day job. At the time she was working in early childhood education after going back to school and earning her second degree. The Koubas thought she belonged in real estate.
“More than that, we helped her get her brokerage license,” says Lance Kouba of Heavenly Homes. “She is just equipped for that, and we saw that early on. She didn’t need to work for us. She could go and run her own company.”
Today, Nicole is at the helm of 41 Realty Group, an agency named after the fact that Montana is the 41st state. She’s been on her own for six years and oversees a handful of agents in her brokerage. As an agent, she vowed to donate 10% of her gross income to charity. When she opened her brokerage, she added 10% of her brokerage’s gross income. Over 10 years, it’s meant a nearly half-million dollar infusion of charitable giving into the community. She doesn’t just give money, however; she uses her real estate prowess to help impact our community as well.
She helped negotiate a lease for Adaptive Performance Center, a veteran-based fitness and wellness center. She helped the HER Campaign buy their safe houses in town. Her office has done a lot of work with the Yellowstone Boys and Girls Ranch’s real estate donations. And when the Billings Community Foundation needed a new home, she says, “I helped them buy that building downtown, which is a huge resource for our community.”
In 2021, Veterans Navigation Network got a large cash donation. At the time, it was a volunteer led organization that helped connect veterans with the resources they needed —help with navigating benefits, finding housing, mental health assistance, peer support and more.
Nicole remembers meeting with all the non-profits who supported veterans and asking them a simple question. What is the gap in veteran’s care in Billings?
“Unanimously, they all said, ‘If you can get Blake’s idea off the ground, then all of us will benefit,’” she says.
Veteran’s Navigation Network (VNN) was Blake Fuhriman’s baby. As a former Army Ranger, he knew how complicated services geared toward vets could be. Every organization needed a form and when they referred you to another agency for help, there was more lag time and even more forms to fill out. VNN wanted to change that and be a one-stop resource for vets.
“Nicole didn’t just say thanks for your service. She actually put the money behind it,” Blake says. “She helped kick start us and we’ve helped hundreds of veterans since then.”
With 41 Realty Group’s nearly $50,000 donation, VNN was able to hire their first part-time employee. That employee, Mike McManus, is now the full-time program manager and has helped the nonprofit flourish.
“If you take a minute to think about it, we definitely wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t taken a chance on us,” Blake says. Today, four short years later, the group has six employees and is serving upwards of 700 vets annually with its intense case management. Blake is being urged to take the program statewide, even nationwide.
“We just need to find five more Nicoles who can fund us,” he says. “But there’s only one and we are lucky enough to have her in our community.”
“I wholeheartedly believe that we can all make the most difference right where we are,” Nicole says. “If my neighbors suffer, I suffer. If my neighbors prosper, I prosper. I am blessed to be a blessing not so that I can be self-serving.”
At the time this article went to press, Nicole was tying up loose ends for a new project in Billings called Sky Oro. The group operates a community co-working space in Bozeman and is a way for women to expand their personal and professional network. When a woman becomes a member, she will not only get access to the co-working space, she can network among the group’s 500-plus statewide members. Nicole thought 41 Realty Group’s offices would be a great landing spot for the group’s expansion and so, this is where the project will incubate its newest location come July while they look for a permanent home.
“I think my passion is being the inviter, building the larger table, being the one to say, ‘Come and be a part of a healthy community,’” she says. “I really enjoy connecting people.”
That love of connection is why close to nine years ago, she started hosting Community Nights to bring people together to learn about all the projects, organizations and activities that are making positive impacts on our city. She makes it a point to send birthday cards to everyone in her contact list. That equates to up to 30 handwritten cards every week. She’s gathered women monthly for ladies’ nights not for her sake, she says. “I genuinely want people to feel seen, valued and invited, truly. It’s not for me to be the center of it. It’s for all of them to find their people.”
Photo by Jackie Acosta
Photo by Jackie Acosta
Recently, she bought the domain billingshood.com. She’s already dreaming up ways to encourage the city’s residents to be better neighbors and more deeply explore the place where we live.
“Why are you in Billings? How did you get here? What do you love about Billings? What do you wish Billings would do a little differently?” Nicole says about the website’s mission. “I want people to stay and fall in love with life here.”
As Nicole reflects on the whirlwind of projects and professions she’s dabbled in, she’s reminded of the lost teen who had to walk through fire to get here.
“I’m the same person,” she says, “but I just have a way better purpose.”
As she looks to the future, she knows her passion for making others feel included won’t fade.
“I hope that when my funeral eventually happens that there are people from every walk of life that you could think of and that every one of them shows up and says, ‘I knew she wanted me in the room.’”
