She started her job on March 2, 2020. Ten days later, global travel shut down. She turned a pricing tool into a platform - and a crisis into a growth story.
When Julie Brinkman accepted the COO role at Beyond in early 2020, the short-term rental market was booming. Within ten days of her start date, it was frozen. Global travel bans. Airbnb hosts staring at empty calendars. The industry she'd just joined had gone from expansion to survival in a weekend.
Most executives inherit stability. Brinkman inherited a crisis. What she did with it - building the Insights product to give customers visibility into global travel market trends, keeping the team intact, cutting through the noise to maintain customer trust - earned her the CEO role in February 2021.
She describes herself as a pusher: someone who challenges people to reach further than they thought possible. "I got really addicted to growing a business, setting strategies and hitting goals," she says. The addiction started well before Beyond.
Before short-term rentals, Brinkman spent nearly a decade at Deloitte - structured, rigorous, Big Four consulting that sharpened her financial instincts. Then Groupon, where she ran sales teams inside a company scaling at a velocity that made Deloitte look like a slow train. Then Hireology, where as COO she took the customer base from hundreds to thousands. Then Beyond, where she landed in the middle of the worst crisis travel had seen in a generation.
"We are more than a pricing tool - we are a complete revenue management platform. My main goal as CEO will be to make sure that Beyond continues to be the platform of choice for short-term rentals around the globe."- Julie Brinkman, on becoming CEO
Today, Beyond operates across all 50 US states and has expanded into Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The platform manages dynamic pricing, market analytics, and revenue strategy for property managers who previously set prices using instinct and a calendar. Brinkman's team replaced guesswork with data - and built a global company in the process.
Brinkman joined as COO on a Monday. Nine days later, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Global travel collapsed. The short-term rental industry - Beyond's entire market - went into free fall. What happened next defined her tenure: instead of cutting and retreating, she built a data product, held the team together, and positioned Beyond for the recovery that followed.
Consultant, ~10 Years - Built financial acumen and operational discipline at one of the world's largest professional services firms. Described as highly structured and fast-paced - the foundation for everything that followed.
Sales Leadership - Stepped into a company scaling at Groupon's notorious velocity. Managed sales teams and learned how fast a business can move when the brakes are off. Culture shock from Deloitte - and she loved it.
Chief Operating Officer - Led the HR tech company through exponential growth, expanding the customer base from hundreds to thousands. The COO role where she sharpened her instinct for scaling operations.
Joined Beyond as COO - March 2, 2020 - Ten days before COVID-19 travel bans devastated the short-term rental industry. Developed the Insights product to help customers navigate the crisis. Led Beyond through its most challenging period.
Promoted to CEO - February 2021 - Named Chief Executive Officer as founder David Kelso transitioned to Chairman and CTO. Brinkman had earned the role through the pandemic response and operational results that followed.
CEO, Beyond (global scale) - Leading 310 employees across 30 countries. Expanding the platform beyond dynamic pricing into full revenue management, market analytics, and AI-assisted optimization for short-term rental operators worldwide.
"I got really addicted to growing a business, setting strategies and hitting goals."- Julie Brinkman
When asked what it takes to reach the C-suite - and stay there - Brinkman named five things. No motivational fluff. Each one earned from experience.
Essential for enduring the difficult parts of hard work - because there are a lot of them.
The resilience to absorb criticism from every direction - boards, customers, teams - and keep going.
A vital coping mechanism. Given how many hours a CEO spends at work, you'd better be able to laugh.
Doing what you say you will do. Not complicated. Remarkably rare.
Willingness to hear answers and perspectives from others. CEOs who already know everything miss everything.
When Brinkman became CEO, she made one thing clear immediately: Beyond was not a pricing tool. Pricing was table stakes. The real opportunity was the full stack of revenue management - market analytics, demand forecasting, occupancy optimization, and the operational intelligence that lets a property manager stop fiddling with dials and focus on hospitality.
Her argument is direct: short-term rental operators are entrepreneurs who built their businesses property by property. They deserve the same caliber of revenue intelligence that hotel chains have had for decades. OTAs made distribution accessible but didn't solve operations. That's the gap Beyond fills.
She's particularly sharp on pricing behavior that hurts the industry. Last-minute discounts, she argues, don't clear inventory intelligently - they train guests to wait, drive down market rates, and cheapen the product for everyone. The data-driven alternative isn't just better for individual operators. It's better for the market.
On AI, she's cautious without being skeptical. "AI is still got a long way to go," she said at a 2024 industry event, noting that unexpected events - a Taylor Swift concert announcement, a local festival, a sudden weather event - still require human judgment to price correctly. The goal is augmentation, not replacement.
The biggest challenge women face is being liked and respected.
The passion, humor, joy, and collaboration I see and feel every day at Beyond are what I enjoy most.
STR operators are up against Goliath. They need an optimized revenue engine to compete.
Anything is possible. If executive leadership is in someone's heart and spirit, then I believe in them to get there.
I don't think you can run start-ups unless you think anything is possible.
The CEO sets the pace of a company, and people look to them as such.
Julie Brinkman's leadership philosophy didn't arrive in a business school classroom. It came from watching her mother rebuild from scratch.
When her parents separated, Brinkman was nine years old. Her mother earned an associate degree, went back for a bachelor's, then enrolled in law school - and graduated at the top of her class. All of this happened during Brinkman's formative teenage years. The message was absorbed without being spoken: independence is non-negotiable, and possibility is a decision.
"I wanted to make sure that I was always had my independence and always was able to control my own journey," she said. That instinct drove her from consulting to Groupon to Hireology to the CEO chair at a global platform.
Her father, meanwhile, owned a law practice starting the year she was born - an early and constant exposure to what it looks like to build something of your own.
Today, she is a mother of three active children and one large dog. She manages the pace of running a global company through hot yoga and a home spin bike - not because wellness is trendy, but because the job demands it.
She describes company culture in tactile terms. Not "values" as wall art, but as the texture of daily work: "the passion, humor, joy, and collaboration I see and feel every day at Beyond." When the team across 30 countries functions as one, she calls it "a shared obsession of delivering value, caring for each other, and moving fast without fear."