How to Start a Concierge Service with Reservety

We live in busy times. Our schedules are packed with time-consuming tasks such as planning, organizing, and arranging things.

Some people can afford to hire personal assistance or an agency to have them do those tasks on behalf of them. It is a win-win situation for both sides. As a concierge business owner, you make money using your outstanding time-management skills, while your clients enjoy the freedom and abundance of time by assigning time-consuming tasks to you.

Required Skills.

Before starting a concierge service, you need to make sure you have the skills to deliver exceptional concierge service to your clients. Those include but are not limited to:

• Time Management Skills – It is essential to remember that clients use your service to manage their time effectively. So, they may have specific deadlines for each task and expect you to complete them within that time frame. If you do not have time management skills, challenges may overwhelm you. As a result, poor time management upsets your clients and keeps your business from growing.
• Customer Service Skills. This skill is essential while completing the assigned tasks and growing your customer base. If you fail to convince the clients that you are a better match for their demands, they may take their business elsewhere. 
• Flexibility. The nature of concierge service is unique and changes per client. And you need to be flexible to mend yourself to suit the client’s requirements. Only that way you can overcome the possible challenges. For example, a client may want you to book a flight for a weekend, ask you to arrange transportation to a hotel, or participate in a meeting as a trusted agent. As long as tasks are within the legal boundaries, you may be required to complete various tasks, which you need to be flexible to handle. 
• Communication and Listening Skills. To complete any assignment, we need to understand its purpose and what clients want it for so we can do our job above and beyond. All these require good communication and listening skills to avoid missing crucial details.
• Problem Solving Skills and Independence. Concierge service is about helping customers solve their problems and efficiently manage their time. So, you should have what it takes to solve problems independently. In most cases, clients assign tasks to concierge service providers and expect them to be done within a certain time frame. It is your duty to develop a strategy to accomplish those goals and provide them in time without nagging the clients at every step. 
• Technical Knowledge. We have already mentioned that concierge businesses do a wide range of work. Some of those tasks require technical knowledge such as computer skills, programming knowledge, ability to operate certain types of transportation, handling sensitive documents, etc. Be prepared to have the technical expertise to provide the utmost service.
• Empathy, dependability, and integrity. It would help if you had all these qualities in your business as people outsource their essential work to you, putting their complete trust in you. It means you must be dependable and work with integrity to fulfill their needs. Another essential quality is the feeling of empathy, as it helps you to look at your clients as decent human beings to build a warm interaction with them.

Select a Niche for Concierge Business.

We should note that your concierge business may not master all of the fields. It means you must focus on specific areas to provide quality and targeted services. For example, some concierge services only concentrate on hotel guests, while others focus on international tourists. And some aid wealthy clients to manage their lifestyle.

To give you a general idea about the niches of concierge services, we made the following list:

1. Hotel Concierge – Helping hotel guests to make their stay convenient. These tasks include helping guests to make reservations, arranging transportation, keeping their rooms in order, organizing meetings, keeping them safe, assisting with their unique needs, and more.
2. Personal Concierge – As its name suggests, personal concierge services assist individual clients. For example, helping with housekeeping, making reservations at restaurants and hotels, assisting with moving processes, shopping, and driving clients to places are some tasks encompassed in the Personal Concierge services.
3. Lifestyle Concierge – This service is mainly focused on assisting wealthy clients to balance their work with their personal life. Some busy CEOs, celebrities, and wealthy individuals are always busy and have less time to focus on their health and families. Here, Lifestyle Concierge plays a crucial role by guiding them to lifestyle changes.
4. Residential Concierge – It involves organizing home events, greeting and attending guests, providing directions, doing household chores, and assisting with any tasks that may arise in the residential buildings.
5. Corporate Concierge – You may have already guessed what the corporate concierge is about. It primarily revolves around corporate tasks such as booking conference halls, organizing social events, assisting business clients, hiring temporary staff, organizing office spaces, arranging translators for the company, fixing the company computers or outsourcing them, etc.
6. Travel Concierge – This category is pretty much similar to personal concierge services. But in this specific category, you need to provide travel assistance to your clients. For example, if you are a local travel guide, it would involve picking your clients up from the airport, housing them in safe and convenient places, creating a travel checklist, and assisting visitors in adapting to local norms and helping them 24/7 to make them feel comfortable.  
7. Concierge Medicine – This niche primarily focuses on connecting patients with good doctors. For example, a doctor can provide concierge medicine by providing additional or personalized care to patients. This category is also known as cash-only practice, direct care, and member medicine.
8. Digital Concierge – it is a new but highly growing category. These tasks usually involve transforming old analog systems to new digital ones to increase the efficiency of hotels and other operational tasks. Creating websites and apps are some examples.

6 Steps to Start Your Personal Concierge Business.

1. Develop a business plan. 

In your plan, you need to consider the following:

A.     Budget. Decide how much everything would require, from registering your business as a legal entity to serving your first batch of customers. For example, business registration fees may vary depending on the countries and states.

B. Business Model. Before registering your business, you need to select a business structure from one of the following:

• A sole Proprietorship is preferable for small businesses, and a single person will be responsible for all business debts and profits. The only downside of this model is that you are liable for all damages or debts incurred by your business. 

• Limited Liability Company (LLC). It is also a convenient structure for small businesses because a business owner is not responsible for business debts and damages, which removes the risk of being sued personally.

• A partnership. You can register your business as a partnership if you offer your concierge service in collaboration with other individuals or agencies. In this case, you will share businesses all profits and debts with other individuals. 

• Corporation. This structure may not apply to most small businesses because in order to form a corporation, your business needs to be owned by shareholders and managed by the board. 

C. Recognize your target audience. It is another essential thing to consider in your business plan. When you recognize whom you should target, you will be able to develop a suitable package of concierge services and effective marketing campaigns. For example, some of the potential concierge customers may include:

• Wealthy people with tight schedules
• Business executives who need assistance to keep their personal life in order.
• Busy parents with multiple children
• Tourists and event attendants
• Families who are taking care of physically disabled individuals or physically disabled people.
• Corporate clients
• Anybody in need of some knowledge-based assistance.

D.   Choose your office location. You should also consider where you want to base your office building. An office near highly populated areas or closer to your target population is preferable. For instance, if your business is providing hotel concierge service, you should either get office space within the hotel premises or at least at a closer distance. It is a crucial tactic because when a hotel visitor searches for nearby concierge services, your business will show up at the nearest distance. 

E. Sketch your business website’s design and consider its primary features. Having a professional website is crucial for concierge businesses in all aspects. Simply put, a website helps you connect your business with thousands of potential customers who mostly search online to find new services and products. We recommend using Reservety for your concierge service because it has a ready template and over 200 features to make a professional website with a 24/7 booking system. You can look at the complete list of features here. 

2. Register Your Business.

Registering your business as a legal entity is important because some countries impose strict penalties for those operating without a license. Plus, having a registered business gives you peace of mind and the ability to partner with other businesses. Also, customers prefer to work with registered businesses as unregistered businesses are considered unreliable in some countries.

We already discussed that you have four options to register your business. These are Sole Proprietorship, Limited Liability Company (LLC), Corporation, and Partnership. Please, keep in mind those categories are valid for US residents. The licenses and registration processes may vary depending on your country.

3. Get Insurance. 

You will never know what will happen during your business journey, so it is vital always to have protection. One of the protection measures you can take is reliable insurance. It will protect your costly assets such as computers, office equipment, and vehicles and avoid expensive lawsuits when something goes wrong with customers. Concisely insuring your concierge business will protect you and your clients.

4. Open a business account.

To take full advantage of the modern financial system, you need to open a business account in a reliable bank. It has three advantages:

–      High protection. People like to pay to only trusted sources for fear of getting scammed or hacked. When you open a business account, your money and people’s payments will be protected with utmost security.

–      Ability to process online payments. Most banks process a wide range of payment options. For example, payment from credit and debit cards such as VISA, MasterCard, American Express, etc., and e-wallets such as PayPal, Square, Stripe, etc.

–      Professionalism. Accepting cash-only payments is not professional anymore neither do asking customers to come to the office to make a payment. Nowadays, people prefer to pay online in the comfort of their homes.

Please note: only opening a business account in a bank does not mean you are ready to accept online payments on your website because you need a third-party mediator to connect your clients with a bank. Here, Reservety plays a crucial role. When you use Reservety, you can accept payments from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, Square, Stripe, and others and record their transactions in your business system. In other words, Reservety helps you track and manage your payments through a single dashboard.

5. Create a Website

You will lack internet visibility if you do not have a website. Think this way. Whenever we need a service or product, we first search them online. Let’s assume someone needs a travel concierge service provider. Your chances will be limited if your website does not appear on Google search results when people search for a relevant keyword.

6. Focus on the Growth.

It is a vast section because growing your business from scratch is not easy. Growth depends on several factors, such as how well you use marketing campaigns, what strategies you use to beat your competitors, and what innovative solutions you utilize to attract customers. Those are just a few points.

We recommend using Reservety for your concierge business for optimal growth because of the following reasons:

• It equips your business with a reliable website.

You need a website to connect with potential customers online, and Reservety has all the tools to create a professional website and abundant features to automate them.

• Schedules your task conveniently and displays your available hours.

You can see how many orders you received and bookings for each date and hour at the backend. Customers can see your open dates and hours in the front end to book your services accordingly. When your business is organized, the growth is on your side.

• Connect your business with external platforms to increase your online visibility.

Reservety offers perfect integration options with social media platforms and directories. For example, Reservety lets you integrate your business with the following:

– Facebook

– Twitter

– Pinterest

– Instagram

– Google Maps

– Google AdWords

– And several other sites.

Once you integrate your concierge website with Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, everything you post on your website will be readily visible to the visitors of those sites. In turn, this action will help boost your traffic as millions of people use those sites regularly to get updates. Concisely speaking, being present on the sites that are visited by millions of internet users is a free way of getting an abundant number of visitors to your website.

• Allows you to create service packages with customizable pricing.

It is easy to create concierge service packages with Reservety and customize their prices automatically and manually. For instance, once your services are ready, your customers can select the services they need from your website and get instant quotes automatically.

• Makes it easier to manage orders and generate reports.

Let’s assume that a client ordered your Travel Concierge service package from your website and booked it for a specific date and hour. In that case, as a business owner, you will get a notification about the order, which you can view on your dashboard. Plus, you can modify those orders at the backend, create special notes, add or reduce costs, cancel or approve orders, and much more.

Key Takeaways

A. To start a concierge service, you must have good communication, customer service, flexibility, problem-solving, independence, technical knowledge, time management, and personal qualities such as empathy, integrity, and dependability.

B. Selecting a niche for your concierge service is crucial as it is a vast industry encompassing several components. You may not master them all, so you need to cover only fields you are comfortable with. Some niches are Hotel Concierge, Travel Concierge, Concierge Medicine, Corporate Concierge, Residential Concierge, Personal Concierge, Digital Concierge, and Lifestyle Concierge.

C. There are six basic steps to start a concierge business:

• Develop a business plan considering the following categories: budget, business model, target population, office location, and web design with essential features.
• Register your business as a sole proprietorship, Limited Liability Company (LLC), Corporation, or Partnership to receive a permit or license to operate legally in your country or state.
• Get insurance to avoid losses and liability issues.
• Register a business account in a reliable bank to take advantage of the modern banking system and process a wide range of payment options.
• Create a website to attract thousands of online visitors and increase your business visibility and customer base. We recommend Reservety.
• Focus on the Growth. It involves several creative and innovative approaches, and Reservety has tools and features to implement all. For example, Reservety helps you to link your website with social media platforms and other external tools, allows you to create service packages and customize their pricings, schedules bookings and orders on a centralized calendar to make it convenient for you to manage your business, and remove the instance of double bookings.