Brent Sheena is having a blast these days. The entrepreneur can barely contain himself as he describes one of his many investments, a restaurant in South Carolina.
“It’s inside a nuclear power plant,” Sheena says with a laugh. “You have to have a psychological test, a drug test, and probably a three-week background investigation to get in there. So our only clients are the people who actually work at the power plant.”
He laughs again, as giddy about the goofiness of the location and clientele of the restaurant as he is over his good fortune and remarkable success.
The journey began on Anne Drive in West Bloomfield Township, where Sheena grew up in the 1980s. “It was a close-knit neighborhood, and we would always be outside playing basketball or street hockey with the neighbors, or riding bikes,” he recalls. “It was a growing neighborhood, and because the area kept overpopulating the schools, they had to build new ones.”
By the time Sheena reached eighth grade, he’d attended three different schools. “I started at Maple Elementary, and then they built a new school called Pleasant Lake Elementary. I was in the first class to go through there, and also in the first class at Walled Lake Middle School.”
Growing up, Sheena had ready role models. His mother was just beginning her long — and still active — career in real estate, while his father owned and operated his own business, Farmington Hills Wine & Liquor. “My dad worked crazy hours, probably 90 to 100 hours a week,” Sheena says. “The only time I could see him was when I was 13 and started working at the party store.”
As he moved on to Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Township, followed by the University of Michigan–Dearborn, where he pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in economics, Sheena continued pitching in at the store.
“There was this one guy who worked at General Motors,” he says. “Well, he came in one day and said, ‘We’re looking for some interns at a new division that we’re starting. Would you like to join?’ And I’m like, ‘Heck, yeah!’ That was my dream, to work for one of the Big Three. I got the internship and I was planning on working there my whole career. I graduated early from college, in three and a half years.”
But Sheena’s timing was terrible: His graduation took place three months after 9/11. “And the auto industry crashed, and GM said ‘You’re not a student anymore and, by the way, we’re laying off like 40,000 people next week and it would look really bad if we hired you.’ So they basically said my internship was over. I couldn’t find a job for over two years.”
Returning to work at his dad’s store, he got creative. “I did odd jobs, like I sold life insurance,” he reveals. “I started a website that sold watches, called TheCheapWatchStore.com. I worked at a restaurant. And I finally said to myself, I can’t keep doing this.”
That was around the time a friend told him about a possible opportunity. “An IT guy was looking for somebody to build a website for him,” Sheena says, “and he actually started giving me a whole bunch of business. That’s what led to me starting Spider Development.”
Why that curious name?
“I was sitting in the house I grew up in thinking about a name for my company, and there’s spiders everywhere, right? I’m building websites, and this spider right in front of me is building a web. Spider Development was named after that. This was back in 2003, right? Websites weren’t even common, and my initial slogan was ‘Building the Web of the Future.’”
Before he knew it, Sheena was doing a lot more than just creating websites for his customers. “Whenever you’re in the technology business, people always want tech support from you. So I also included IT support in Spider Development.”
It turned out Sheena wasn’t just good at building websites; he had a knack for fixing them, too — and that prompted an unsolicited phone call.
“This guy said, ‘Hey Brent, I know you’re an IT guy,’ ” Sheena says. “He tells me he’s opening up two T-Mobile wireless stores, (one each) in St. Louis and Kansas City, and can I help him out with the IT and building a website? I built a website for them and did all their IT, and they started growing like crazy. They went from two locations to about 20 within two years.”
By 2008 there were 60 stores, and Sheena saw an opportunity to expand his responsibilities. “I was working in their office in Bloomfield Hills, off of Woodward and Long Lake. They had a warehouse in Indiana, and one of the owners says, ‘Hey, why don’t we bring the warehouse to Michigan?’ And suddenly, there’s $100,000 worth of cellphones stacked up between the cubicles.”
Soon after, Sheena overheard the owners discussing options for leasing local warehouse space. “And I said, ‘Hey guys, I’m looking for another business,’ ” Sheena says, laughing. “I’d never done distribution in my life before, but within a few weeks I rented a warehouse.
“The place was a dump. I did all the renovations and started operating with probably a million dollars’ worth of cellphones that were shipped to me. Then, I shipped them to T-Mobile stores across the country. I had to carry a gun because I didn’t want to get robbed.”
It was a great arrangement until T-Mobile changed its business model for selling phones. “They began distributing the cellphones directly to their stores,” Sheena says. “They didn’t need a middleman like me and my warehouse.”
But Sheena was ready with a contingency plan.
“What I identified was that they needed a system to run their stores,” he says. “Over the years I wasn’t only building websites, I was already working on a system for retail store owners to manage their locations. I called it Viva Tracker, and it was kind of like my baby. I started building systems for T-Mobile store owners across the country, so I could not only track inventory, but also sales, commissions, timekeeping, scheduling, and communication in all their stores.”
As Sheena’s business grew, so did his family, and in 2013 he and his wife relocated to South Carolina to be closer to her parents.
“I had two children when we moved, and there are four now,” he says. “I had five employees based out of Waterford Township when I left. I would fly, or drive for 12 hours, up there every month so that I could manage everything correctly.”
All the hard work paid off. After starting Viva Tracker from scratch, and with no outside capital, Sheena’s “baby” recorded more than $2 million in annual revenue by its fifth year of operation.
From there, the business took a sharp turn.
“T-Mobile did something no other company has done in the history of the world,” Sheena maintains. “They opened up 1,500 locations in six months, so they went from around 1,000 locations to around 2,500 within a year, and I had a majority of the market already. It exploded my business overnight. My revenue tripled, for nothing that I did, and along with the jobs Viva Tracker was doing for other companies, that’s really when I hit it.”
In November 2021, iQmetrix, a leading provider of telecom retail management software, acquired Viva Tracker for an undisclosed sum.
“I sold it so I can spend more time with my family,” Sheena says, “but also to diversify into other businesses. Between January and June of 2022, I opened or bought six companies.
“Have you heard of Jamba Juice?” he wonders. “I have two North Carolina locations, in Charlotte and Boone. I acquired a gym in Fort Mill, S.C., called Snap Fitness, and I also bought The Big Salad.”
The Big Salad, an eatery in the “fast casual” restaurant niche, was launched by John Bornoty in Grosse Pointe Woods in 2008. Today, there are nine locations in five states, including South Carolina, where Sheena also owns the Canteen at Catawba, the restaurant in the nuclear power plant.
Following up on another idea to better share profits, the entrepreneur launched Infinity Venture Partners. “I put $250,000 into it, and I gave every single one of my 10 original employees a piece of it. We’re building a scheduling system for logistic companies, like for Amazon and its drivers. I own 18 percent of it right now. The rest of the team puts their faith in me, and it means a lot to me. My goal is to make them millionaires one day.”
Sheena also owns a company, hatched years before online food delivery became a global phenomenon, that he presciently dubbed Snappy Eats.
“We started working on Snappy Eats in 2003,” he says, “and launched it in 2005. We only did online ordering back then, and we started doing delivery in 2019. We stopped our delivery in 2020, due to COVID-19 and all the restrictions and labor issues.”
When the pandemic hit, Sheena was in Charlotte, N.C., and stayed there.
“Working from home was cool,” he says. “But then it got really secluded and boring, and you just want to talk to somebody. My highlight of the day was going to get lunch. I just wanted to leave this office in my house, right?”
Sheena pauses here, unleashing another laugh. “I bought an office building and started working from the office, which is where I am right now.”
But he readily admits he’s homesick.
“I love Michigan,” he says. “There’s definitely a culture in Michigan of working hard and growing. We’re very down to earth, we work hard, we create, and we make a difference for people. No offense to Michigan, but the weather isn’t great. So the people there are true hustlers, true go-getters, who put up with all that snow. That shows dedication, humbleness, and grit. And that’s what I love about Michigan. I wish I could move back.”
For now, though, the 42-year-old Sheena says he’s happily settled in Charlotte. “I have a lot of people down here, and I still have a team in Michigan, at my office in Waterford Township.”
And there’s one particular member of that Michigan team who keeps a particularly attentive eye on a vital part of Sheena’s businesses.
“My father is still in Michigan,” he says. “He takes care of all my accounting, paying all the bills, the payroll, and so forth. He loves working.”
