Concierge Service Business Plan

GCS will be focusing on two distinct groups that utilize the concierge market: companies or corporations, and individuals.  Both groups, for different reasons, use concierge services. A company will hire concierges and offer them as a perk for its employees. It is attractive to employees because it allows them to have some personal maintenance taken care of during normal business hours. The company also benefits by keeping the employee happy, and by having the employee at work during the day, which develops value for the company.

Currently in Eugene there are two concierge style companies, both primarily servicing individuals. GCS will be targeting companies because the market has been overlooked, and it provides larger volume, and more consistent work.

Market Segmentation

Our customers can be divided into two general groups, corporate/company customers, and individuals.

The corporate customer is a company that contracts with GCS to perform services for it’s employees. Presumably the corporation has a policy with its organizational members that provides guidelines for usage. When employees are in need of GCS, they contact us directly and we bill the company.

We will be soliciting contracts from large corporations as well as medium-size businesses. Some of the large corporations that we will target in Eugene are Hyundai, Sony Disc Manufacturing, Levi Strauss, etc. Medium-size companies will be from 15-40 employees. Examples of these are Burley, Palo Alto Software, Bike Friday, larger law firms and medical offices, etc. Dividing the companies into smaller subgroups is not required, as the needs of the employees are fairly similar between dissimilar companies.

The tasks for the employees will range considerably; however, the underlying need will be for services/errands made during normal business hours, hours the employees are at work and the company would rather have the employee at work being productive instead of running an errand.

The second group of customers are individuals. This group has similar needs to the employees of companies, however, we will be contracting with them directly. This group can be further broken down into three subgroups: those who are at work and do not have the ability to accomplish the needed tasks, those that have done a cost benefit analysis and decided it is a worthy, timesaving service, choose not to for a multitude of reasons, and people who are not from Eugene but need something done in Eugene.

Target Market Segment Strategy

GCS intends to target people who need service during the day but do not have the time to perform necessary tasks. We are focusing on corporations/companies because they have a large number of employees who would find a concierge service attractive as a part of their compensation package, and the employer would prefer to pay our service to perform the employee’s task, allowing the employee to stay at work and remain productive. Even though we will offer the companies a discount over our standard hourly rate, our revenue will continue to increase because we will see an increase in usage without the normal costs of attracting the individual customers. We would bill the corporation monthly, decreasing the labor costs for processing the invoices.

We will also be targeting individual clients. This targeted group will be a much smaller percentage of our business but will be charged a higher hourly rate. This group will be targeted to provide us with work when we have vacancies in our schedule from the corporations.

Service Business Analysis

The concierge industry in Eugene is relatively small. It is currently serviced by two different companies that cater primarily to individual clients. Medium to large-size companies that offer a concierge service to their employees typically create an in-house solution. Companies are struggling with ways in which they can they can offer perks to employees at reasonable costs. Additionally, there is the ever-present pressure from stakeholders to become more efficient. This pressure will fuel company’s use of concierges as efficiencies can be accomplished by having the employees present at work, developing value instead of out of the office pursuing personal maintenance.

Competition and Buying Patterns

Currently, there are two competitors in the concierge service space. These services are listed under “errands & miscellaneous service” headings of the yellow pages and they target individuals as opposed to corporations.

While some of corporations already offer a concierge service for their employees, they typically do this through an in-house employee who does the errands. In the eyes of the employee, having the concierge in house is as much of a perk, but it is less efficient for the company. GCS can provide concierge services to companies at a lower rate because this is our core competency and we have worked hard to become as efficient as possible.