I have called out many winning bids from intimate stages to huge sound stages over the past nine years.

“Going once, going twice, sold!”

But, none of that prepared me for opening Tribeza’s July/August issue and finding two full pages with my own face looking back at me, wearing the cream cowboy hat and Pecos Jane Vintage blue fringe vest from the EASB Gala.

Most nights, I’m the person standing at the microphone raising money as an extension somebody else’s mission & cause. Never the subject itself. Seeing my name attached to Tibeza’s story, instead of tucked in an event program, ironically made me think less about myself and more about the sheer number of missions that the ‘Biddy Up’ name has now stood in front of.

Nine years and more than $30 million later, it is easy to forget how many of those nights happened quietly, one gala at a time, in front of a few hundred people who never had reason to connect my name to a running total.

Seeing it gathered onto two pages on Austin’s most iconic style magazine gave me a strong sense of accomplishment. The fact that I have now partnered with more than 100 nonprofits, across causes I care about deeply, is less about anything I personally did and more about how many organizations have been willing to hand me the mic at their biggest night of the year. Then, trust that I would treat it like it mattered to me as much as it mattered to them. That trust is the part of this work that still humbles me.

From Software Sales to a Stage I Didn’t Know I Wanted

I trained as a computer science engineer and spent the first stretch of my career in software sales, the kind of job that rewards precision and a thick skin. The turn came through the invitation to participate in Leadership Austin, which connects and develops people already working for the good of this city.

Sitting with new classmates in my cohort who had built their careers around impactful missions made me look at my own career differently. I had spent years perfecting a selling methodology. Yet, I hadn’t spent any of that time asking what those same skills could transfer to a higher good.

My sister was the one who floated the idea of auction school, but I tossed off almost as a joke, the kind of suggestion a sibling makes without expecting you to actually go for it. We went and really enjoyed the learning and the process, and I called live bids at our first event within a few months of finishing. I remember standing at the microphone waiting for that first bid to land and feeling something I had never once felt closing a software deal. It was a physical, immediate proof that the work in front of me mattered to the people who were watching it happen.

That feeling is what turned my side passion project into the only job I ever wanted. 

Since 2017, Biddy Up has raised more than $30 million and partnered with over 100 nonprofits across Austin and beyond, and every dollar traces back to that same feeling in a room.

A Different Kind of Voice on This Stage

Women make up roughly 16% of professional auctioneers, and I came up watching a stage that mostly rewarded a booming, unbothered kind of confidence I never felt any real pull to fake. I built my own style instead, which I describe as ‘aggressive sales with the spirit of cheerleading’ – all the energy and charm – built around actually reading a room rather than overpowering it.

Over time I have found myself gravitating toward organizations serving women, children, pets, and the arts, the missions where I can feel a room lean in, and where that particular mix of energy and warmth tends to raise the most money.

What One Room Can Do in One Night

I tell every audience some version of the same thing before the paddles go up, that we cannot change the world from this room tonight, but we can make a huge difference right now, in this moment, together. I say it because it carries the actual premise the whole job runs on.

A single gala will never fix what is broken out there, but it can fund the people and projects with the visible support of everyone in the room. All of them deciding together, paddle by paddle, to push the donations higher.

What Comes Next

There are already multiple auctions on the 2026 calendar, some local and some taking me further from Austin than this work has taken me before – including Mexico and beyond. And real momentum is building behind each one.

None of that depends on whether a magazine ran my photo. What the Tribeza feature does open up is a wider door into the Biddy Up story I have mostly told one gala at a time, one paddle at a time, for nine years.

If a friend forwarded you the Tribeza piece, or you picked up a copy at a coffee shop and landed here, welcome. I would love to talk about what your next fundraiser could do right with this Austin auctioneer.

Read the full Tribeza feature, “Going Once, Going Twice” by Avery Toomes.