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History of the Company
by Katharine C.
Giovanni, CCS
The hotel concierge has 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.
When we
started Triangle Concierge in 1998, 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 with a
dozen clients. Today, we have thousands
of clients from more than forty
countries and every U.S. state.
Concierge can now be
found 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.
It all
started in 1995 when we opened up a
little company called Meeting Planning
Plus. As the years went by,
we began to realize that we were
doing more concierge-type work than
meeting planning. We also learned that
the concierge services industry had the
potential for taking off and was fast
becoming the wave of the future. So
after a few modifications, we changed
our company name and targeted concierge
services. Triangle Concierge was born in
the fall of 1998.
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. So, after a
long discussion, we
turned Triangle Concierge into a
full-time concierge consulting business
and let go of our local concierge
business.
Over a dozen years later, I'm
extremely proud to say that Triangle
Concierge is the leading concierge
consulting firm in the world.
What is the key to our success? It’s a
mixture of extraordinary honesty,
fairness, respect, trustworthiness,
integrity, determination and
over-the-top customer service.
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