Chicago - Shortly after 9 one recent morning, Cameron Murdoch nosed his green Mercury Mystique into a parking spot outside a market on North Avenue and bounded inside to shop. But he wasn't shopping for himself.

Murdoch is a personal concierge, and he was shopping for one of his clients.

"She likes the freshly squeezed carrot juice," he said as he wheeled a cart over to the refrigerated cases.

"She likes small bananas, not big ones," he said, moving on to produce. "She doesn't like any apples but Fujis."

Concierges once were limited to luxury hotels, where they obtained hard-to-get theater tickets and restaurant reservations or picked up emergency clothing when disaster struck. But now personal concierge services are popping up all over the country for busy people with the income and desire to "outsource" the time-consuming details of living.

These folks may handle everything from waiting for the cable guy to addressing Christmas cards and even shopping for a car or planning a wedding.

For example, Murdoch and Sheryl Wilson, his partner in The Complete Concierge, based in Chicago, will interview and train maids and supervise their work. They find hairdressers and massage therapists willing to make house calls. They program VCRs, customize telephone services, coordinate home maintenance schedules, check personal computers for Y2K compliance and remind clients of anniversaries and other special occasions.

Murdoch, after his shopping expedition at Whole Foods, continued with a round of errands organized geographically for maximum efficiency and, in some cases, timed to avoid long waits in line. He bought birthday presents for a client's cat, picked up photographs from a camera shop, returned some Russian-language tapes to a public library and mailed a computer modem to an out-of-town client.

He selected an ivy plant at a florist shop and delivered it to a client's sick relative in a hospital. He picked up some tuxedo shirts at a dry cleaner for an executive headed out of town on business and got travel information at a United Airlines office for another.

The highlight of the day was locating a hard-to-find battery for a client's outdated cordless phone. Murdoch found it at an obscure suburban shop that did not even have its name on the front. That, he said, "was almost an adrenalin rush, the thrill of success."  

Murdoch and Wilson, who previously worked together in a retirement community as chef and food-and-beverage manager, respectively, started The Complete Concierge less than a year ago. Business was slow in the beginning because potential clients sometimes had to be educated about the concept.

Entrepreneur magazine recently named personal concierge services as one of the hot new businesses for the year. "It's exploding around the country," said Maria Anton, senior managing editor at the magazine.

Former hotel concierge Holly Stiel, who now owns Holly Speaks, a concierge consulting business in Mill Valley, Calif., noted that "the start-up costs for a concierge service are very minimal and the creativity factor is high."

The word "concierge" means keeper of the keys in French, and European hotels started the tradition. Today's personal concierges stake their reputations on having all the right contacts and thus being able to obtain any product or service as long as it's legal, moral and ethical.

Bonnie K. Oleson, owner of Concierges Plus Inc. in Northbrook, Ill., has arranged dance lessons for a bridegroom, located lost items from a taxi, found Scottish bagpipers to entertain at a party and researched the performance schedule for the Paris Opera, to name just a few of the requests she has fielded in a little more than two years in the business.

Oleson says she pulls a lot of her knowledge out of her experience as a wife, homemaker and mother. She charges $50 an hour for her services with a one-hour minimum for research or coordination services, but, she also offers various packages of service time and there's a package fee for event planning.

Fees for personal concierge services vary according to geographic region, but range from $30 to $50 an hour, according to consultant Stiel.

"The big issue right now is paying for it, and that's why concierge services have really flourished in corporations that offer it as a benefit and may pay for most of the cost."

Chicago Tribune News Service May 2, 1999

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