At your service
Posted on Tuesday, July 17, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/195957/
Sure, modern conveniences have made
them easier, but we still can’t escape
those human drudgeries like doing laundry, scrubbing floors and mowing lawns. And even if you like doing that stuff, you might be just too darn busy to do it. Help is here. The complexity of modern times has spawned the rise of the concierge service. It isn’t cheap — $ 25 an hour is the going rate — but you don’t have to be wealthy, a celebrity or both to have a personal assistant at your beck and call. Like the concierge at a fancy hotel, a concierge service will also get you tickets to shows and book travel arrangements, as well as pick up dry cleaning, do your shopping, get your lawn mowed and / or the pets cared for and even make sure somebody will be at your home to let in the cable guy.
The Little Rock Yellow Pages lists four such services. (Northwest Arkansas directories don’t list any. ) There’s also one on the Internet that will help outsource your tasks, DoMyStuff. com.
“We run errands,” says Keisha Burton, co-owner of Errands With Class, based in downtown Little Rock. “We’re basically a personal assistant to people who need us, who don’t have time to do a lot of things, like grocery shopping, going to pay bills, dropping off dry cleaning and picking it up.”
The idea is to get as much done in a $ 25 hour as possible, which means consolidating trips whenever possible. Going outside of the Little Rock area costs extra.
Burton, co-owner Ronda Lewis and their two part-time staff members have been in business for about a year and a half, and “business is booming,” she says.
The type of service varies by the needs of the client. “We do a lot of little things, like run to the grocery store, or to Wal-Mart. We also do gift shopping. We occasionally get the ‘flower thing’ from our male clients for the other half or the girlfriend” — in other words, when you don’t have time to say the very best.
Burton’s clients also include businesses; for example she occasionally distributes coupons and brochures for the Little Rock Zoo.
She’s even taken care of the 88-year-old parent of a client on a trip to town.
“She wanted us to look after her mother while she was here — make sure she got off the airplane, got checked into the hotel, keep a check on her the whole time,” Burton says.
Her most unusual assignment was an unplanned visitation. “I had to take flowers to a funeral home,” she says. “I didn’t plan on seeing someone dead, but they wanted me to put [the arrangement ] in there with the person.” TO THE DEGREE NECESSARY
Stefany Knight, owner of SoS Time-Saving Services, was a social worker for more than a dozen years before she decided to strike out on her own.
“I was a happily divorced woman with one child, and resentful that I was having to divide between folding the laundry or playing with my child, which was really unfair,” she says. “And when my son was at his dad’s, I spent all of my time helping friends out with chores.
“ I sat down a little over a year ago with pen and paper and totaled up my strengths and my needs, and what I was providing for friends. And what I ended up with was this business.”
Among Knight’s specialties “is being a personal assistant to a busy individual,” taking care of day-to-day tasks like housecleaning, getting the landscaping done or the lawn maintenance.
“Do you need a master’s degree like I have to do this stuff ? No, but I’m able to provide them assistance and they can gain more time simply because they don’t have to lose the rhythm at work and they don’t have to use vacation time.”
Knight charges either by the hour — $ 25 — or on a per-service basis.
“If it’s a job where I’m providing multiple services at one time, there’s no upcharges,” she says. “If I’m acting as a personal assistant, I charge $ 30 an hour because I get everything done in the time that I have.”
Knight’s brochure lists a range of professional and personal concierge services and errands — in the former category, appointment reminders, meal delivery, corporate gifts, office supplies, invoicing and notary services; in the latter, grocery shopping, courier and messenger services, personal and gift shopping, car registration renewal, vehicle maintenance, banking, supervising home repairs, taking your pet to the vet, library and movie-rental drop-off and pharmacy pick-up.
In addition, “SoS will care competently for your belongings while you’re away from home,” and Knight will also help you organize your home office, closets and address book.
Knight also downsizes homes — helping people move from large houses to smaller quarters, like the client who’s going back to college and selling her four-bedroom, two-bath house to move into a 500-square-foot dorm room.
Knight doesn’t consider any of her assignments too far off the beaten track, but “the fullest hour I ever had as far as multitasking, I was providing housecleaning and had arranged for the heatand-air guys to come and change the [thermostats ] for the client... and I was getting three landscaping companies coming to provide estimates, along with the cable guys.
“ It was a very productive hour,” she says.
Knight usually does all this by herself out of an office on North University Avenue in Little Rock, but “I have a couple of people I hire on days when I cannot handle all of the scheduling.”
Knight says that she’s bonded and insured, “which provides confidence to the client — I wouldn’t let anybody into my house unless they were bonded and insured.”
“Basically I provide the services I would expect if I were to hire me.”
LAW AND ORDER Knight and Burton agree there are limits to the types of services they will agree to provide. “Anything is up for discussion,” Knight says carefully. “Anybody who’s reached the point of being overwhelmed or just simply wants to add quality to their lives, I will consider anything. “ But I draw the line at ‘legal’ and ‘ethical. ’” “ If we can do it, we’ll do it, as long as it’s legal, ” Burton says. Knight’s and Burton’s clients are mostly in their 30 s to 50 s, and the majority are professionals. By the time they’re in their 30 s, Knight says, they’ve started their careers, and “they’ve got a lot more things to manage.” Knight and Burton also belong to the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and other civic and neighborhood organizations that they credit for networking help in getting clients.
Rhea Fix, president of Red Pepper Consulting, a Little Rockbased training consulting firm, initially hired Knight, whom she met through the Chamber, a few months ago to help her organize some closet space in her home office.
“She got the materials, came back with power tools and rebuilt the closet,” Fix says.
Since then, Knight has helped Fix, also a new mother, find furniture movers, do errands and helped her with home management.
“It’s not just about doing the work; it’s about solving problems, too,” Fix says. “I can focus my attention on my business. As a consultant, I bill my time hourly. So every minute I save is worth money. Four hours of errands [I don’t have to do ] — that’s four hours I can bill.”
Knight provides cleaning services for Sherwood-based business coach Marcia Cook of Pinnacle Performance Solutions, who also operates out of a home office.
“She’s a good organizer as well,” Cook says. “She saves me four, five hours a week, minimum. That’s in actual hours, but she saves me more than that because I don’t have to write out a schedule. She knows what to do.”
IT’S A START Rick McDaniel is in the startup phase for his Timekeepers Concierge Services, which he will operate out of his downtown apartment. He’s a graduate of Arkansas State University in Jonesboro with a degree in marketing who’s striking out on his own after working for several years in the telecommunications industry. He describes himself as “very resourceful” and also good at finding particular things, organizing and time management. He plans to start out providing primarily errand services for individuals and businesses, and will charge on a case-by-case basis, he says. Nobody returned a phone call to Times 2 Concierge and Errand Services in west Little Rock, but the phone message offers an intriguing promise: “We help you be in two places at once.”
TASK MASTERS Meanwhile, in Beverly Hills, Calif., which has to be the center of the universe when it comes to personal assistants, Darren Berkovitz, 23, and three 20-something friends have put together DoMyStuff. com.
“It solves two of the biggest problems we have today: 1 ) ‘ I don’t make enough money,’ and 2 ) ‘I don’t have enough free time, ’” Berkovitz says.
In the case of 1 ), “you can go and do people’s odd jobs,” he says. And if 2 ) applies, “you can go and post things for people to do.”
The site is like a bulletin board onto which Berkovitz and his partners have grafted an eBay-like bidding process.
You post a task you need done on the Web site; potential “assistants” post eBay-like bids. You pick the one you think will best fit your needs at the price that fits your budget.
“People have labeled us ‘ Craig’s List on steroids, ’” Berkovitz says. “The bidding aspect gives the person posting the ask so many choices. If he posts ‘ I need someone to come and mow my lawn,’ a local high school student will go on and post for $ 7 an hour, and a professional gardener will post for $ 15 an hour. Any time you bring in bidding and competition, it’s better for the person — he’ll be able to get the best price.”
Like eBay, DoMyStuff. com also has a feedback feature.
“If you’re going to invite someone over to mow the lawn, you want to be sure they’re trustworthy,” Berkovitz says. “It’s the same as eBay — you go on there and see, ‘Hey, this guy has mowed 100 lawns, and 99 out of 100 [customers ] give him an Aplus.’ I’d trust him.”
You can limit bidding to “assistants” who live nearby. The site also has a “global” section for people seeking help with Web marketing or computer programming.
“Most of the tasks are domestic and very mundane,” Berkovitz says, such as mowing lawns, doing laundry or painting fences.
“But we’ve had a few funny tasks as well. Someone in New York posted, ‘Help me clean my ears.’ We thought it was a joke when he posted it, but he was dead serious.
“ We had a person in Atlanta post, ‘Teach me to be girly.’ I guess she grew up a tomboy and needed a kind of real girl’s girl to teach her about makeup and all that stuff.”
An “employer” recently seeking an “assistant” to wait in line for him to buy an iPhone got the site a mention on CNN.
“We see ourselves as almost a bridge between the Internet and the real world,” Berkovitz says. “We get a lot of e-mails thanking us, saying, ‘ I outsourced this task and had two hours of extra free time this weekend to spend time with my family and friends. ’”
So far, nobody from Arkansas has either posted a task or put his services up for bid. Berkovitz says that rather than traditional Arkansas self-reliance, the explanation is more likely that the word on his site hasn’t yet gotten out.
Initially, the site charged a fee of between 7 percent and 10 percent of the price of the job — out of the money the assistant got paid for the job, but “we just made the site completely free, so there’s no fees,” Berkovitz says.
The site features no advertising, and Berkovitz says they’re absorbing any losses while concentrating for the next six months to a year “on getting as many customers as possible.”
That, in addition to being of value in itself in the Internet universe, could serve to attract advertisers in the future if Berkovitz and his partners decide to go in that direction, he says.
Berkovitz says the site’s concept really does make sense.
“You think of personal assistants as only for the extremely wealthy or celebrities. Now you can have a personal assistant for the weekend then it’s over. You don’t need to pay them a fulltime salary.
“ You can be Paris Hilton for a day.”