Accommodating Culture

By: Karen Hill
Published Fall 1999
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine
Original Article

All Andrea Arena knew for sure when she graduated from Georgia Tech was that she wanted to own her own company. She also knew she had liked her part-time job working behind the desk at Atlanta's downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Arena, Mgt 89, accepted a management training position with a bank, figuring it could only help to sharpen her financial skills while she decided what she really wanted to do. Then, in 1991, she gambled her $5,000 savings and set up shop as a personal concierge for individuals too busy to run errands for themselves.

A year later, she found an unfilled market niche for her business, 2 Places At 1 Time.

I did market research to identify my target market, to see who has the greatest need, Arena says. I realized it would be corporations whose employees travel extensively or have long hours. That's management consulting.

She approached Keith Hicks, human resources director for Andersen Consulting in Atlanta.

I said, "You need this." He responded, "I think we do."

Eight years later, Arena is president and owner of a company with 120 employees, working in 58 client offices throughout the United States and eight in Canada. Her employees will run any type of errand, as long as it's legal and moral, for employees of client companies and their significant others. They figure, "As long as you're helping my spouse, you're helping me," Arena explains.

They take shirts to dry cleaners, walk dogs, meet repairmen at people's homes, deliver cars to repair shops, make bank deposits, pick up prescriptions, buy and wrap gifts. One rushed chilled syringes of fertility drugs daily from a doctor's office to a busy executive trying to conceive.

Another fed live mice to a client's boa constrictor.

"Now, I would not feel real comfortable doing that, but he did, so...," Arena says, laughing.

Typically, a client corporation pays a flat monthly fee to have a concierge on location. Employees who use the service then pay an hourly fee, with the money going back to their employer to offset the cost.

No corporate client has made an unreasonable request, she says. The only request she remembers ever turning down came from one of her individual clients, a woman suffering from manic-depression and schizophrenia who wanted Arena to buy her a gun.

The growth of Arena's company has come in a robust economy, with employers offering more and more generous perks to hang onto their workers. With unemployment hovering around 4 percent, it's much easier to give employees what they want than try to find new ones.

And what employees want most is time.

Arena estimates that about 95 percent of corporate employees who use her company's services are mid-level managers, often in dual-career families with young children, who just don't have the time to run their own errands. The other 5 percent?

"That's the small group of people who just don't have the inclination," she says.

It wouldn't be the same, she adds, if employers simply cut work hours so employees could run their own errands. Often, those who use her company's services travel frequently and for extended periods. They're just not home to run errands. In other cases, it makes no sense for someone who could bill $300 for an hour's work to spend that hour in the Jiffy-Lube waiting room.

Even if the economy takes a downturn, Arena believes her company will survive.

"We are still a fairly new offering among employee benefits, but the reaction has been so overwhelming that it's rapidly becoming commonplace. I think concierge service will become as commonplace as a retirement plan," she says. "I haven't met a company out there whose employees don't need more time."

Arena spends most of her time visiting potential clients, most of them national companies, and negotiating contracts. When she wins a new account, five "implementation specialists" swoop in her wake, hiring people to work as on-site concierges, who coordinate requests for help, and runners, those who actually run the errands.

Each concierge hired by 2 Places at 1 Time is from the same geographic area as the office in which he or she will work. About half are women; most are in their late 20s, although ages range from 22 to 58. Most have attended college; all have experience in customer service, but not necessarily as a hotel concierge.

Arena says her company is still too small for her to offer unusual perks to its own employees, but most stay for the excitement of building a new business from the ground up and for the interesting work.

"Every day they get to do something different, face a new challenge," she says. "The culture of our company is one that you either buy into early on or you just don't. It's work that is very autonomous, very creative, fast-paced."

But Arena's own work can come to a screeching halt when she's out of milk. Or needs new car tags.

"Yes, I run my own errands. You know, the cobbler's children have no shoes." GT

Karen Hill is a freelance writer in Atlanta.