Selling Time
Janet Kraus and Circles.com are helping busy professionals order their errands online.
Janet Kraus sells time. Or, more precisely, her Boston-based company helps harried professionals cope with what Kraus calls "time starvation."
By logging onto a site called Circles.com, Kraus's corporate clients tap into a nationwide, Internet-based clearinghouse for "life concierge" services such as travel planning, party planning, pet care, car care, theater or restaurant reservations, even laundry service. Facing a huge crunching deadline, but your suits need dry cleaning and your 6-year-old has his heart set on a Pokemon-themed birthday bash? Log on and order up.
Kraus, 34, along with co-founder and fellow Stanford graduate Kathy Sherbrooke, started the company in February 1997 when, after a stint as a management consultant, she found she was absolutely unable to keep her life going in addition to working the long hours her job demanded. In her scarce time off, the last thing Kraus wanted to do was boring errands and she knew she was not alone.
Within a year, the duo landed their first corporate client. Now, they offer services to 50 corporations and, by extension, nearly 280,000 people.
A company contracts with Circles to provide services for, say, its prized employees or most valuable clients. A set rate is charged per person for services on an annual basis; the rate varies from $30-$80 depending on the kinds of services included and the amount the corporation will underwrite. Members log on and type in their requests, which are then fielded by the some 100 Circles staffers in a Boston service center.
Kraus credits her parents with the original idea of her company. Raised in a home with both parents working full time -- her mother is a bank executive and her father is an entrepreneur -- such necessities as nightly dinner were often a logistical challenge. During one particularly busy time, her father tried to contract with an airline to deliver cooked dinners to the house: "It didn't work out," Kraus says, "plus I convinced him that Swanson's frozen dinners were actually better than airline food." Kraus remembers her mother complaining that she wished she had someone -- and not her secretary -- to whom she could assign household and family errands.
Today, Kraus' company does just that. For someone in the position Kraus' mother was, for example, the company might arrange delivered meals or a family chef. "We're putting value on a set of activities that for a long time were undervalued and considered women's work," Kraus says. "It's profound, really."
It's also a perk that corporations can extend to keep employees happily working even through longer hours.
What do Circles clients need? The most common requests are for travel ideas -- for instance, where to go for a weekend with the kids for a certain budget -- and for reservations of all kinds.
Requests for gift ideas are also common. "If you knew what you wanted to give someone it wouldn't be hard to go get it," says Kraus, "but people don't know what to get, so we're often asked for suggestions."
While requests currently are handled by the staff at the Boston service center, eventually Kraus hopes all the connections will be made on the Net.
Having recently secured a second round of venture capital worth $15 million, the company has moved into new offices, and Kraus predicts it could grow seven-fold in the next year. Currently, the service staff works the phones and a continually-growing, in-house database to get answers and make connections for clients. But in the next few months, Circles expects to strike partnerships with other businesses so more of its services can be provided through near-instantaneous "B-to-B" connections.
Mary Muller, an employee of management consulting firm Ernst & Young in Irving, Texas, is a frequent Circles.com user. "Anytime I have to spend time on the phone to find anything or get information," she says, "I log on and let them do it." A Christmas request from her 4-year-old for a "real-life" tuxedo brought 3 choices flying into her e-mail within several days. "I wanted to pick it up myself," she said. "But if I had wanted, I could have had it gift wrapped and delivered."
Though Kraus herself uses her company's services "as much as I can," her mom still isn't online with the company: "Her employer is not yet a client," Kraus laments, "and she doesn't believe in nepotism."
Kraus has heard the criticism of such errand-for-hire enterprises: "People say that these services will cause us to lose touch with our lives, but I don't think that is true. I stay connected to the things that I enjoy doing. And the stuff that I am going to stress about? I assign that to somebody else."
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