Working at Homes
Need for Services Expands With Number of Two-Earner Households
Wendy Poole gets ready for work while Argelio Garcia, the owner of A+ Cleaner, vacuums in the bathroom of Poole's Leesburg home.
(By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)
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Monday, September 19, 2005
It takes a heap of living, a poet once said, to make a house a home. How last-century that seems today, when it requires a veritable business park to keep many a modern household humming.
Wendy Poole uses so many services at her Leesburg home that she has to rely on a Treo 600 PalmOne to track them all. Poole works as an assistant to Cindy McCain, wife of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); her husband, Dave Boice, runs two companies. Their house has four bedrooms, two offices, 3 acres -- and the attentions of nearly a dozen businesses.
On a Friday morning, Poole stands in front of the bathroom mirror putting the finishing touches on her makeup while Yolanda and Argelio Garcia, who own A+ Cleaner, start work around her, emptying wastebaskets, sweeping and scrubbing.
Outside, DoodyCalls is cleaning up the lawn after the family Labrador, Deshka, who gets groomed by Aussie Pet Mobile, which makes house calls. When the couple travels, a pet sitter stays overnight to keep an eye on Deshka and the cat, Beacon.
Twice a week, Carrie Lyons of Executive Cleaners picks up and delivers the dry cleaning. A team from A-1 Lawn Care Services LLC mows the grass. Summit Horticultural Services keeps the plants and flowers flourishing.
A college student spent the summer running errands and shuttling Boice's daughters to the mall and their mother's home in Herndon. Personal chef Stacey Leggat was recently retained to prepare many of the family's meals.
Whew!
The kinds of businesses that help the Poole-Boice home operate smoothly are growing around the nation and especially in areas such as Washington, said Gregory B. Fairchild, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. And as more and more two-career families move in to Virginia suburbs like Loudon and Prince William, a variety of services rapidly follow.
Though the very wealthy have always paid for such services, Fairchild said, today these businesses are expanding around cities on both coasts, supported by clusters of educated career men and women who devote long hours to work.
In Washington, he said, large numbers of two-career couples with more money than time are finding a steady supply of willing workers. Big, new houses have Viking stoves and Sub-Zero refrigerators, but the occupants hardly have the time to use them. Vast expanses of lawn await manicure, but families are too busy taking the kids to the next game to mow or even sit.
"People want Martha Stewart meals and homes, and they don't have the time to create those great meals and beautiful houses," Fairchild said. "But they can hire people to create it for them."
The small businesses they call upon are scattered across a number of categories in the U.S. Economic Census, so it is difficult to come up with one figure that represents them all.
