For Brian Birdy, leadership is a multigenerational endeavor. As the third-generation head of PMI Birdy Properties in San Antonio, Birdy has spent more than two decades professionalizing and scaling the real estate management company his father built from scratch while sticking close to the values that defined it. Now, he’s taking the same intentional, service-oriented mindset and applying it to an entirely new venture: an indoor pickleball franchise called Dill Dinkers.
That spirit of shared responsibility, grounded in trust and communication, has been at the heart of PMI Birdy since the beginning. The business started in 1979 when Brian’s father, then an active-duty member of the U.S. military, began helping friends rent their homes in a tough real estate market. It wasn’t a formal business — at least not at first. It was about service. His motto was simple: I’ll treat your home like it was mine. That phrase still guides the company today. “We never really get away from that,” Birdy says. “I own rental properties that are managed by Birdy Properties and I get treated like an owner. I look at it through their eyes and if I don’t like something, I’m like, ‘Is this how we’re treating all of our owners?’”
When Brian joined the business full-time in the late 1990s after a 13-year career in the Air Force, he brought a new level of operational rigor. Paper files were replaced with Excel spreadsheets. Roles were formalized. And slowly, the company evolved from a hobby-sized side business into a professional property management firm with 50 full-time staff, including Brian’s wife, children, niece and daughter-in-law — all working in leadership or specialized roles.
Still, Birdy never lost sight of his father’s people-first ethos. “In real estate,” he recalls his father telling him, “you can focus on a couple of things: serving your client or making money. But you can’t focus on both. If you focus on making money, you’ll end up not making money and you’ll make a lot of people mad.”
That long-term mindset is one of the key lessons Birdy has brought with him to Dill Dinkers, the new indoor pickleball franchise he launched in 2025 with his wife. After taking a beginner’s course at a local facility and identifying a lack of indoor options in Texas’s heat- and storm-prone climate, the Birdys decided to pursue franchise ownership. They became the first Dill Dinkers regional developer and franchisee in the country, opening the Blanco Market location in San Antonio.
But starting a new business while running an established one hasn’t been without challenges. Birdy credits the systems and leadership culture he’s built at PMI Birdy with giving him the flexibility to take on something new. “I’ve worked hard to try to give every one of my family members a unique role within [PMI Birdy] and then support them to be the best at what they do. Now the business runs because each one of them is great at what they do and, at the same time, they need each other. They all know what their parts of the business are and all those wheels turning makes it all work.”
He’s also adopted a more thoughtful approach to hiring new employees. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Birdy says the labor market shifted dramatically — requiring a new emphasis on attitude and drive over technical experience. “We started hiring based on two things: an overwhelmingly positive attitude and an undeniable desire to work,” he says. “You can’t teach those things.”
Those principles now apply at Dill Dinkers, too. While the company currently runs with just a small group of full- and part-time staff, Birdy says the focus remains the same: invest in people, empower them and build a workplace culture that lasts.
That culture, he notes, includes making space for fun and connection—something he’s long emphasized at PMI Birdy through monthly team-building events. Though he recently handed off responsibility for those gatherings to a staff committee, the tradition lives on. “They came to me and said, ‘We want to keep this going,’” Birdy says. “That was one of the most rewarding moments. It showed they saw the value.”
Now, Birdy is laying the groundwork for a similar values-based culture at Dill Dinkers. And he’s already seeing results. Just nine days after opening, he watched six new players — strangers a week earlier — walk out of the club laughing, talking and taking selfies together under the Dill Dinkers sign. “That sense of community — that’s why pickleball is growing so fast,” he says. “It’s not just a sport. It’s a connection point.”
To hear more from Brian, check out his interview on the Family Business/Business Family podcast. Don’t miss an episode! Follow Family Business/Business Family on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.