The Start-Up Diaries: Three Women and a Kiosk
The founders of 10 Minute Manicure dreamed up the business in just one hour by the pool. Their idea of offering fast manicures in airport kiosks is a simple one, but will it fly?
The business was dreamed up in just one hour by the pool. Ten-minute manicures in airports -- it's an idea so simple that it can't miss. At least that's what the founders hope
Vivian Jimenez knows exactly when the metamorphosis happened: in June, somewhere on the road to the Austin airport. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she'd spent the better part of a decade working her way up the ladder to become vice-president of interactive media services at one of Florida's largest public-relations firms. She'd been the first in her family to graduate from college and had begun to achieve all the dreams her parents could have had for her. But that June day, Jimenez knew that things would never be the same again. Even though she still held her position at the PR firm, in her heart she was no longer a working stiff, hoping for a better raise, a better job, a better work life. She had become something entirely different. "I am," she declared aloud in the car, "an entrepreneur."
Along with her partners -- Karen Janson, a former colleague from the PR firm, and Lorraine Brennan O'Neil, a friend of Janson's -- Jimenez had spent the previous months exploring the idea of starting a business. "It was sort of just fun," Jimenez says, recalling the nights and weekends they'd devoted to sketching out a game plan for the business they called 10 Minute Manicure, which they hoped to open in airports. When Jimenez and Janson called about attending an airline-industry conference in Austin, the organizer was so taken with their idea that she asked if the women would speak on a panel. It was an offer that both scared and excited them. If the organizer was that enthusiastic about their concept, Janson recalls, they figured they might be onto something. By the time they left the conference, they were sure.
But for Jimenez the realization that she, too, could be an entrepreneur was the real revelation of the two-day event. "On our way to the airport afterward, we were rattling off ideas, and I just knew: that's what makes an entrepreneur. Seeing an opportunity and making it happen," she says.
Ten-minute manicures. It doesn't get much simpler than that. It had taken Janson and O'Neil just one hour by a pool while their husbands were playing golf to come up with the idea in the first place. In April, Janson quit her job to pursue the start-up full-time. She recruited Jimenez to help her, in part because O'Neil wasn't in a position to leave her law practice. (She is a name partner in a Miami medical-malpractice defense firm.) While there have been doubts along the way about whether they were doing the right thing, Janson says, the reaction they've gotten has buoyed them daily. "Everybody has said, 'Oh, my god, that's such a simple idea -- that's why it's going to work," she says.
The business model is pretty basic: install relatively inexpensive kiosks near high-traffic areas in airports, hire $7-an-hour "nail technicians," and attract every hour at least five customers who are willing to pay $15 for a fast manicure. By the founders' calculations, just a single airport contract with 3 or 4 kiosks would be profitable. If they manage to get 13 kiosks in four locations, they would reach $3.2 million in annual revenues.
None of the cofounders has serious business-building experience. The women are not particularly well connected, though they've been fearless in networking with whoever they thought could help them. "It's like six degrees of separation," says Jimenez. "You just keep going till you get what you need."
But as businesswomen themselves, they understand the potential market for their service: the exploding number of female business travelers for whom airports historically have offered few services of value. And their simple vision and raw enthusiasm have so far struck a chord with some key people, from the certified public accountant who is informally helping them with their business plan to the licensed nail technician who helped them perfect the 10-minute technique. So far those advisers have all given assistance without ever asking for a cut of the business. "We have been lucky with every person we've talked to," Janson says. "Everybody seems to want the underdog to win."
In mid-August, Janson's persistent E-mail messages to the director of concessions at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport paid off with an invitation to present the start-up's concept. For weeks before the appointment Janson and her colleagues worked around the clock to perfect their presentation. "And even though we were here really long hours, we were working with that fat-Cheshire-cat smile," Janson says. "You know this time it's for you."
The Dallas trip went well from the start. From the moment Janson and Jimenez got off the plane, they noticed how male-oriented the airport's stores and concessions were (from the Tie Rack to the golf store to the barber called Hair Line). That on-site observation nicely segued into their presentation about the increase in the number of female business travelers. By the time they had finished their delivery, Janson recalls, they knew they had scored. "The director even showed us where our kiosks might go," she says.
That their concept had been taken seriously by such a large airport was the validation they needed. And as if it were a final sign, when Janson and Jimenez were waiting for their return flight, "we saw a woman whip out a nail file," Janson says. "It seemed like fate had sealed the deal."
The 10 Minute Manicure founders had told the airport managers that once given a go-ahead, they could be up and running in three months. That was only partly true. To be able to do that, they needed real start-up capital: about half a million dollars. And four days after the Dallas meeting they found themselves asking for just that from a prospective investor lined up by O'Neil, who's in charge of the company's financial dealings.
Glenn Singer had built a successful Inc. 500 employee-leasing company that he and his cofounders sold to Paychex in 1996 for $160 million. Since then Singer has dabbled in investing in other companies, taught aerobics classes -- and watched his stock in Paychex triple. When the cofounders knocked on the door of his stunning Golden Beach, Fla., home, he answered the door in shorts and a T-shirt. Once inside, the startled women began to run through the same presentation they had made to the airport staff. But the genial guy in casual clothes quickly turned into a hard-nosed businessman. "Toward the beginning of my speech," recalls Jimenez, "he goes, 'I don't have to hear any more. I believe in the concept. I want to see the numbers." And that, she says, rattled them further "because we weren't prepared." They had focused on building a concept, not on doing a serious business plan from an investor's perspective.
