Dynamite Deliveries : Exploding Demand for Variety of Services in the Home Spurs Entrepreneurs to Rush to Fill the Needs
After three years in their demanding line of business, Michele Barkin and Lisa Stewart have come to consider themselves experts at providing whatever it takes to make people happy in their own homes.
Some people have been perfectly satisfied just to have the two women deliver Peruvian llamas to their doorsteps. Others set their sights slightly higher, demanding three-act playlets, complete with script, props and a scenery-chewing troupe of actors. Then there are the perfectionists, who want their 450-pound statues not only whisked through customs, but loaded gingerly onto a truck by a crew of muscle men and taken directly home without a scratch.
“It used to amaze me what people won’t do themselves, but I think I’m coming around to their point of view,” said Stewart, who is Barkin’s partner in Insane Assignments, a two-woman firm that will take on just about any delivery request, provided that the task is legal.
Insane Assignments’ base of operations is Los Angeles’ moneyed Westside, where home-delivery firms have been branching out in recent years from the customary cold pizza and hot strip-o-gram. In wealthy enclaves such as Beverly Hills, Malibu and Bel-Air, it is no longer enough to simply deliver fast food and an occasional bawdy message: To compete, more and more entrepreneurs have come to the conclusion that the home is where the money is.
At any given hour on any given day, legions of home-delivery men and women are on the road, transporting croissant and champagne breakfasts in the morning and sushi at night, portable wardrobes for the fashionably thin and torturous mobile gymnasiums for those trying to get that way.
Abounding in catchy nicknames, home-delivery entrepreneurs cater to nearly every conceiveable whim. The Plant Lady shows up regularly at clients’ doors to water and tend their philodendrons. Crews from Dr. Polish will drop in to perform radical wash-and-buff surgery on their Porsches. Sushi Man ventures out at night, brimming with raw fish, while Lindy of Bel-Air hews to a daytime schedule, touting the nutritional benefits of her special diets and low-calorie banana milkshakes.
Pets, too, can be pampered at home. Animal-oriented firms will arrange visits to cheerfully bathe a client’s dog or cat, take it on walks, train it to respect the rugs or ferry it to the veterinarian. And for the pet lover whose world tends to shatter when the Afghan stays away from home too long, there are vets who make house calls.
“When you first think about it, it sounds so decadent,” said Cindy Appley, the sole owner and staff of Helpmates Specialized Errand Service. Appley will deliver clients’ packages, do their grocery shopping and, if asked nicely, arrive early in the morning to fix their toast and coffee.
“A lot of people have all these guilt feelings when they call up,” she said. “But think about life without ever having to do an errand again. If I weren’t so poor, I’d love to hire people like me.”
Like most of her road-bound competitors, Appley, 30, has a long way to go before she can sit back and summon people to her own home. Instead, she spends her days waiting for the phone to ring in her Santa Monica apartment or cruising Westside streets in her station wagon. As she drives, she glances between the road and crudely drawn maps showing the fastest routes to her clients’ homes.
“I always feel obligated to go fast,” she said one recent morning as she raced toward a Beverly Hills luxury apartment house. “I map out all my directions beforehand. They’re paying me $16 to $20 per trip, so I feel I ought to be on the ball.”
Speed is also integral to her hectic shopping assignments. “You should see me in grocery stores,” she said.
Home-delivery entrepreneurs face the formidable task of letting the world know about their services. When Michele Barkin and Lisa Stewart started Insane Assignments in 1982, they printed up flyers (“We love what you hate to do!”) and began advertising in slick, upscale periodicals with wide readership on the Westside.
For new arrivals to the home-delivery business, it is the only way to drum up clients. “Word of mouth is best,” Barkin said. “But you’ve got to get people’s attention.”
Magazine advertising holds less risk. Hollywood Hills housewife Marilyn Levine found “Home-aerobics by Judy” by casually flipping through a Beverly Hills weekly. Levine had lost 50 pounds by dieting (“Khrushchev and I were the only people who couldn’t get into Disneyland. I was so fat, I would have had to go in a wheelchair. My husband refused to push me”), but she hesitated at the thought of having to tone up in a health club with athletic women whose sleek bodies were in better shape than hers. She brightened when she saw Judy Greenfeld’s ad.
What Levine liked was Greenfeld’s offer of “specialized exercises in the privacy of your own home.” So, several months ago, Greenfeld began showing up at Levine’s doorstep five mornings a week to lead her and a neighbor, Berti Massoth, in an hour of gentle instruction and spine-jarring aerobics.
Low overhead helps keep many home-delivery entrepreneurs in business. Ed Scher the Auto Agent thrives as a consultant to people who want to buy new cars but avoid car salesmen. Scher works out of his apartment, interrupted only by clients’ phone calls.
“All you need is a phone with an answering machine, a car with a full tank of gas and a smile,” Scher said. He meets his clients at their homes, where he provides details about their dream cars and the best deals they can find.
