Upstarts

A look at how Kelley Dunn launched her corporate concierge service, Consider It Dunn; plus, several shorter articles about the outlook of the corporate concierge industry.

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Concierge makes hay in corporate fields

Ex-secretary launches company in new market. Much popcorn later, she's glad she did

By Marc Ballon

Kelley Dunn, founder of Consider It Dunn Inc., a corporate concierge service, was just settling into her new office on the 31st floor of the marble-and-glass Pillsbury Co. skyscraper, in Minneapolis, when the phone rang. A Pillsbury vice-president was on the other end: Could Dunn round up 21 gifts with an Einstein theme by 2 p.m.? Rattled only for a moment, she started calling stores, located one with mugs and pencils bearing Einstein's likeness, placed an order, and had the gifts delivered by courier. Elapsed time: 90 minutes.

Consider It Dunn is one of several upstarts across the country providing concierge services to the employees of big corporations. "Concierge companies are suddenly springing up all over the place," says Sara-ann Kasner, president of the National Concierge Association, a new, 100-member trade association that, like Consider It Dunn, is based in Minneapolis. Because Americans are ever more strapped for time--reflecting longer hours at work and the proliferation of two-career couples--the demand for concierge services is "way, way up," explains Kasner. That's good news for Dunn, whose motto is Low prices for highly personalized service.

The strategy seems to be clicking. Dunn's two-year-old company is taking off. She recently landed as customers the Minneapolis offices of two blue-chip accounting firms, Ernst & Young and Grant Thornton. By the end of the year, Dunn expects to expand her workforce from 10 to 13. She's projecting a gross profit for the year of $80,000 on revenues of $237,000, up from sales of $41,000 in 1997. And she's talking, earnestly, about going national.

If Dunn's future looks assured, it has not always been so. In the winter of 1996, she was a single mother and a Pillsbury secretary. She scoured Minneapolis for a concierge that might relieve her of household chores. After attending a one-day seminar on the concierge business (see "Schooling at Concierge U," below), she quit her job and started her own concierge company. A college dropout with $10,000 in the bank, Dunn had no experience running a business or working as a concierge--and she had a four-year-old daughter to support.

She knocked on doors for months at downtown office buildings, asking if they needed a concierge. Nobody did. As her bank account dwindled, Dunn canceled her cable TV and lived on popcorn, shedding 30 pounds. On July 29, her birthday, Dunn recounts, she cried. "I was unemployed, turning 30, and my hot water had been cut off."

Meanwhile, she was combing Minneapolis for topflight vendors--shoe-repair shops, jewelers, and so on--comparing prices, quality, and speed. "I would put ketchup on white shirts," Dunn recalls, "and send the identical stains out to different dry cleaners to see how well they got it out." Her big break came in October 1996, when Pillsbury hired her as its first concierge. "We looked at it as a good opportunity to help our employees balance their work with their home lives," explains Mike Nordstrom, a Pillsbury vice-president.

Once in business for herself, Dunn learned everything she could about her customers. Her first week at Pillsbury's headquarters, she sent out an extensive questionnaire, asking the 2,500 employees about their hobbies and for the birthdays of loved ones. The responses she compiled in a database, which prompts her to call employees on occasions when they might want her services. Keeping her prices low is a top priority. Consider It Dunn charges corporations $45,600 a year to station a full-time concierge on-site, a rate that Dunn says is 30% cheaper than her competition.

Dunn's company looks pint-sized compared with her crosstown rival, BurCorp At Your Service. The Cincinnati-based company has 60 employees around the United States and counts Andersen Consulting in Minneapolis among its customers. "We have top-quality concierges and a better support staff and resources than they do," says Dave Lima, CEO of BurCorp At Your Service.

Dunn disagrees. She does acknowledge, however, that she has had to learn on the job about accounting, marketing, and finance. She puts in long hours, occasionally working on her home computer until midnight.

Sometimes Dunn is so busy that she needs someone to run her errands. Now she knows where to turn for help: to her coworkers.

Factors at work

As corporate concierge enters the lexicon as a new job description, the question arises: Is it here to stay? Yes, concludes Juliet Schor, a Harvard economist and leading expert on Americans' work and consumption habits.

Schor focuses on two factors--work hours and corporate interest. In her best-selling book, The Overworked American, published in 1991, Schor estimated that the average employed person spent an additional 163 hours on the job, or the equivalent of an extra month a year, in 1987 compared with 1969. In a recent interview with Inc., Schor says her research suggests that work time has only increased since 1987, although she has yet to calculate an updated figure.

The extra time that Americans spend on the job, Schor observes, is expanding the market for professional scouts and schleppers like wardrobe consultants, personal shoppers, and corporate concierges.

Typically, corporations subsidize the cost of a concierge. The cost to employers who provide the benefit is minuscule compared with many other perks they offer--for a potentially large gain. Making long hours more tenable in the workplace is critical to employers, Schor says, because "corporate America is still vested in the model that minimizes the number of people you hire."

The face of an emerging industry

Accomplishing any personal service that's legal and ethical is a point of pride for many corporate concierges. For a while, the corporate concierges at 2 Places at 1 Time, based in Atlanta, periodically picked up chilled fertility injections from a doctor's office for delivery to a patient at work in an office building. "We become an intimate part of these people's lives," says Andrea Arena, CEO and founder of 2 Places at 1 Time, who is helping to add a new dimension to the term "personal service."

Arena is a leader in the nascent corporate-concierge industry. Rooted in the hotel-concierge business, the industry emerged in the 1980s as a fee-based service for wealthy individuals. But the concierge companies quickly diversified into other markets. Landlords hired them to set up shop in office-building lobbies to serve tenants. By the early 1990s, large corporations were negotiating deals to extend concierge services to their employees. Arena claims to have been the first to land such a contract, with the local office of Andersen Consulting, in 1993.

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