HOME DESIGN : A SPECIAL ISSUE OF ORANGE COUNTY LIFE : Drudgery by Proxy : Can’t Stand Attending to Life’s Little Details? You Can Always Hire Yourself a Stand-In
You’re busy doing what you do best--making and spending money. And you’re bugged by the time you waste on the mundane chores of daily life.
You have already shed the major drudgeries: housecleaning, gardening and pool maintenance. Wouldn’t life be perfect if you could have somebody else take care of the rest?
A small armada of entrepreneurs in Orange County is waiting for your call.
They’ve discovered that the county’s booming economy and surfeit of upscale, bent-on-success professionals have created a demand for people willing--for a fee--to stand in at almost any task.
You can find someone to: iron your shirt, wait in line, feed your dog, choose your clothes, take your film to be developed, plan your wedding, buy your groceries, remind you of your spouse’s birthday, organize your clutter or even wake you up.
“People in Orange County expect to be catered to. They expect the details of life to be handled by someone else,” said Harvana Clark, an Irvine consultant who advises owners of personal-service businesses. “Orange County is the hub, where the action is. There’s not a better market for personal service in the country.”
While there are many people working as stand-ins, locating them can be tough.
Many services are one-person operations that have just started up and can’t afford much advertising. Others suffer the vicissitudes of partnership and dissolve, only to reconstitute a few weeks later under another name.
Some are not listed in the various business phone directories. About half of the specialized personal-service businesses listed in various categories of the current Pacific Bell Yellow Pages, for instance, have disconnected numbers. Some have called it quits, others have new numbers available by dialing 411.
But by spending a little dialing time and by asking around, you can generally find the proxy you need. As in dealing with any contractor, customers should ask for references and inquire about bonding or insurance, depending on the service.
Here are a few of the Orange County people who have found a way to make a living doing for others what most people do for themselves.
Lisa Rogers, 26, was a commodities broker two years ago when her business crashed about the same time as the stock market. Looking for a less-stressful line of work, she seized on a friend’s chance remark about the need for people to take over the chore of ironing.
In November, she started a business called Mobile Ironing, setting up shop in the garage of her Mission Viejo home. She distributed flyers in neighborhoods along the Marguerite Parkway corridor in south Orange County, placed an ad in the phone book and waited.
The calls poured in.
“I was working 15 hours a day, seven days a week at the start. I almost lost my sanity. But the business clicked,” Rogers said. “Now I can catch my breath a little.”
She works eight to 10 hours a day now, spending almost half her time making pick-ups and deliveries at the homes of about 100 regular customers who pay $1.25 per item for personalized ironing. Clothes picked up one day are ironed and returned the next.
“Some clients are professional working couples who have no time and drop off $80 worth of clothes at a shot. But my bread-and-butter customers are upper-middle-income families, mostly women who don’t work but have husbands who can pay for it, so why should they iron?”
Rogers picks up clothes in the morning and brings them to her garage workshop, where three part-time employees help her iron.
The work is hot and messy.
“When I first started, I despised ironing, hated it. I intended never to pick up one of these things,” Rogers said, wielding a starch-encrusted iron in hands scarred by several small burns.
“But I found I need to do it. I need to know exactly how it’s done so I can make sure things are done right and done efficiently. I iron maybe 50 things a day myself.”
Her clients are particular about how their clothes are treated.
“A lot of women’s clothes can’t be pressed, and dry cleaners often don’t catch stains before they’re set in by pressing. My people like the (hand-pressed) look and the attention to stains. We don’t use steam irons. They leave little orange marks on your clothes.”
Some clients have special needs. One woman sends all of her husband’s boxer shorts to be ironed. “Another lady called me on a Saturday and said she was leaving the next day for the French Riviera and wanted all of her clothes ironed and folded. I don’t usually fold, but I did it.”
Kitty Barton of Fullerton charges $50 an hour to go into people’s homes and help them get dressed.
“When we’re growing up, we’re never taught how to dress, only how to shop sales,” Barton said. “So women end up with a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear. That’s where I come in.”
On one recent afternoon, Barton was at work “dressing” Dolly Kaplan, an Irvine psychologist.
“Kitty had dressed someone I’ve been working with and she looks fabulous. I decided I want to do that for myself, so I hired Kitty,” Kaplan explained.
Kaplan set up a full-length mirror in her living room and laid out the contents of her wardrobe. Barton proceeded to tell her what to trash, what to keep, and what to buy to create the aura of self-assurance and accessibility needed in the counseling business.
She even showed Kaplan how to look at herself in a mirror.
“You must look from the top of your head all the way down. You are an artist, you’ve got the brush, you’re painting the picture and you have to like what you see.”
As Kaplan tried on one of her outfits, Barton offered her a typically honest, if brutal, assessment: “Wear this to the market, maybe, but not in your business. Wear this and you look poor. You’re rich; look it.”
Some clients hire Barton to “do their closets.” She codes and tags their clothes so that they can tell at a glance how to mix and match.
Other clients give her information about important events coming up, such as presentations or speaking engagements, and she prepares a calendar that tells them what to wear on the day of the event.
Others hire her to do their clothes shopping for them.
“Many of my clients are shy or just hate to shop. I only buy things that I would feel like a ‘10’ in. But I advise my clients--I don’t mandate.”
In addition to her occasional clients, Barton has about 25 who keep her on a $2,500-per-year retainer to provide consulting or help them with their shopping once a month.
Barton spent 14 years working as an administrative assistant for government officials in New York City before coming to Orange County in 1978. Then she worked for a plumbing contractor until she was laid off.
“I had to go out and look for another job, but at first I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
When Barton was growing up, her mother owned a clothing store and taught Barton how to size up people and their clothes.
“I would be on a bus in New York City, and my mother would have to tell me to stop staring because I was looking at people up and down, from head to toe.”
So when she was out of work, she fell back on that experience and began selling clothes out of her home. She briefly operated a clothing store that also offered counseling on how to dress for success. But, she said, she had no taste for management and in 1980 decided to pursue the “personal dressing” business on her own.
“I love this work. It’s so exciting; I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world. When I die, I want people to say Kitty was here and she did good.”
One man was so overwhelmed by clutter that he drained his swimming pool and started filling it up with junk. Then he called Pat Burris.
So did a woman who was facing eviction unless she cleared out the years of accumulated stuff in her home.
Most of Burris’ clients are not in such dire straits as these two pack rats, but still “they find themselves with too many things (getting) in the way of their functioning effectively,” said the owner of Busy Bee Enterprises.
Burris, 50, who works out of her home in Orange, is in the business of keeping people’s lives in order when they are too busy or too disorganized to do it themselves.
“Clutter creates negative feelings in people. They become anxious, out of sync, even claustrophobic. Once things become orderly, people feel calmer and more in control of their lives,” she said.
Chaos can strike surprising victims, she noted. “I have some women clients who hold positions of high responsibility in an office, and they are totally together on the job. But at home, they shift gears and let down and it’s a mess.”
Teachers, who are prone to saving everything as a possible classroom resource, and creative people, such as writers and artists, are especially vulnerable to the clutter bug, Burris said.
Large families also are at risk.
One mother of seven children hired Burris to rescue her kitchen.
“She was always looking for things and couldn’t get anything done efficiently. She couldn’t find something so she’d go out and buy another one. She ended up with three of everything.
“So I pretty much moved her out of the kitchen to see what was there. I looked at the kitchen as a clear canvas as I put each piece back in and made a diagram of where everything was.”
Burris said she traces her own passion for organization to domestic trauma.
In 1970, as a single parent with three children, she married a man with three children of his own.
“I suddenly had six children, ages 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. I was forced to become very organized. Just to keep track of whose underwear was whose, I used color-coded tags,” said Burris, who worked as an executive secretary until she formed her company in 1979.
“I’ve always had a gift for organization. But I think it’s something that can be learned if people take it a step at a time.”
Burris charges about $20 per hour, more if a big job requires her to hire an assistant. Frequently, she said, clients call her back two or three times as they suffer relapses.
“It really is like an addiction. A possession obsession.”
Jan Gregory let herself into a home in a gated community in the hills above Orange. The carpet was immaculate white, the furnishings elegant. She walked down a hall to the laundry room and opened the door.
“Hi there! How is everybody? We’re lonely, aren’t we?”
Four tiny dogs--Tinker, Taffy, Terry and Tiffany--skittered and bounced on their individual brass beds at the sight of Gregory.
“Is everybody hungry? Yes? Good. Let’s go pee-pee first.”
Gregory, 47, of Garden Grove, is the In-Home Pet Sitter. When pet owners travel or are just too busy at work to get home, they call her and she goes to their home to provide food, cleanup and a hefty dose of TLC.
As her four charges scampered for the kitchen, Gregory said, “Everybody is working so much these days, somebody else has to do this.”
Gregory has been doing it for about a year and, without advertising, has seen her business grow steadly to about 25 regular clients in central Orange County. She is booked solid at Christmas and Thanksgiving.
She charges $13 for a daily, 90-minute visit, with a $5 surcharge for an additional check-in on the same day. “Cat people are crazier about wanting visits twice a day,” she said.
Gregory, who does not groom or bathe her charges, has her clients give her a veterinary-care authorization in case a pet becomes ill while in her care.
“I do with my clients’ pet what I’d want done with mine if I wasn’t there,” said Gregory, who has five dogs and a cat of her own.
“I feed them and change their bedding and clean up after them, but mostly I just get down on the floor and play with them. Clients want to know their pets are getting the attention they need.”
Gregory holds a full-time job as an inspector in a machine-parts factory, but caring for pets is her first love. She keeps a photo scrapbook of dogs she cares for. “I guess they’re all pretty special,” she said as she leafed through the pages.
Gregory will care for pit bulls but charges extra. “You have to watch what you’re doing every minute of the time.”
And there are some critters she won’t go near.
“I refuse to take care of anything that eats anything else alive.”
When it comes to running errands, Rena Puebla, 35, of Tustin will do it all. No request is too challenging or too boring.
“In Orange County, there are a lot of younger, successful people who don’t want to spend time running errands. They want to make money and spend time with their friends in this great weather. So once they get me, they can’t do without me.”
Puebla came to Orange County from Philadelphia in 1973 with her husband, a Marine. She worked as a receptionist and secretary and realized that she could use her contacts and coordinating skills to make a go of her own business.
She says her Coast Concierge service firm has about 50 regular clients, most concentrated in the Irvine-Newport Beach area. They include men and women, usually upper-management types in their late 20s and early 30s, very few over 50.
“Older people, especially veterans of the Depression, want to do things for themselves.”
Her clients need a host of small things handled or arranged--and she does their errands for a fee of 25% of the cost of the transaction she is handling for them.
She waits in line for theater tickets. Runs to the post office for a roll of stamps or to the grocery store for emergency rations (up to 10 items). Takes film to be developed. Gets shoes shined. Has the car washed and detailed. Picks up the dry cleaning. Buys and wraps a birthday present.
Puebla also takes on big jobs.
“I’ve done a wedding, arranged for everything for about 60 people--chapel, photographer, music, flowers and food. And then while the couple was on their honeymoon, I had their place cleaned up and left balloons, fruits and flowers for them on their return.”
What she likes doing most is setting up homes for people, especially single men.
“Who wants to take off time from work to unpack boxes?”
Those who don’t want to do it themselves pay Puebla--$300 per 1,000 square feet--to handle everything related to moving in, right down to stocking the refrigerator and deciding where to hang artworks.
And talk about tough jobs--she’ll even teach single men who want to improve their social lives how to act properly on a date.
“I’ll go out to a restaurant with them and coach them on clothes, opening doors and other really basic etiquette things. Some of these guys you wonder what planet they’ve been on.
“But I enjoy a challenge, whatever it is.”
