We are all used to the hotel concierge as it's been around for decades. The independent concierge industry, however, is only about twenty to twenty-five years old and started with a few brave pioneers who took the hotel concierge idea and decided to offer it to the corporate world. I have been in the field since 1998, and when we started Triangle Concierge, there were perhaps two dozen or so concierge services around the U.S. Today, I suspect there are thousands. You can actually see the phenomenal growth by looking at my company’s numbers. Triangle Concierge began in 1998 with a dozen clients. Today, we have thousands of clients from more than forty countries and every U.S. state.

You can now find concierge services everywhere—in hospitals, malls, corporations, apartment buildings, office buildings, airports, colleges, associations, churches, and on and on. You could sum up the state of the industry in two words: extraordinary growth.

As we began Triangle Concierge, it soon became apparent that there were no resource materials available on the market to help us get started. There were no books on the subject or consultants to approach. Frankly, I was unable to locate any helpful information. We were on our own. It took us approximately a year to teach ourselves and research how to start a concierge service (truly the ultimate of self-taught) before we were ready to open for business.

Almost immediately the telephone started to ring. First one call, then ten. People started calling and e-mailing from all over the world asking me to spare just a moment of my time to tell them how we had started our business. So I told them. I spent hours answering each question as best as I could. Until one day Ron overheard me and asked me what I was doing. When I told him, he said, "Why are you doing it for free?"

Good question! Why indeed was I?

So, based on my expertise in meeting planning, concierge work, and the fact that I had started two successful companies, I decided to write a book on how to start your own concierge business. Just because I learned everything the hard way doesn’t mean that others had to. There was most certainly a huge need for the information because in those early days, there was no information at all. Anywhere.

I spent the next few months writing the first edition of the Concierge Manual. Once the book began to sell, the phone calls increased dramatically in a matter of weeks. I received calls and e-mails from all over the world from people wanting more services and information, asking questions and the like. As a result of all this, we realized that we had to make a decision regarding our company’s focus.

At the time, I was spending 90 percent of my time consulting and 10 percent trying to grow my local concierge business. So, after a long discussion, in 1999, we officially turned Triangle Concierge into a full-time concierge consulting business and let go of our local concierge business.

12 years later, I'm extremely proud to say that Triangle Concierge is the leading concierge consulting firm in the world.