ROLLING ALONG
THE GROWING TREND of mobile companies helps start-ups save on overhead costs and bring their service directly to their customers’ doors
Ally Zwonok gives people tans where they live. Vanessa Strzelecki brings staff to parties and events. Serge Butman serves coffee from a tricycle trolley.
Mobility — that’s what keeps their businesses rolling.
The Montreal entrepreneurs are part of a growing North American trend of companies on wheels — mobile start-ups whose services come to people, not the other way around.
They work out of home offices and spend most of their time on the road, transporting themselves and their staff and equipment wherever they’ve landed a contract.
Being mobile saves them the high overhead of a corporate office or storefront, and allows them to know their clients better by serving them in their own environment.
And delivering the goods keeps them on the ball — with very little downtime.
Six days a week, Zwonok drives from client to client, bringing her makeup, Norvell organic tanning spray, airbrush gun, mini-compressor and pop-up tanning tent.
“I offer a sort of elite mobile service, pretty much from Monday to Sunday,” said Zwonok, 25, a makeup artist who started Alter Ego Cosmetics in 2009.
“I bring all my equipment to the client’s house or the hotel where they’re staying, and make everything very comfortable for them,” the LaSalle College graduate said.
“Monday I could be doing a photo shoot, Tuesday a spray-can party, Wednesday another party — it’s crazy, I’m always on the road, always somewhere new.”
Zwonok charges $60 for a “sunless tan” that takes 20 minutes to apply and lasts a week. For $70, you can get one that takes an hour to apply and can be rinsed off the same day.
She has done celebrities like actor Martin Sheen, singer Nikki Yanofsky and rock groups like Simple Plan.
She could have chosen to work a regular job at a beauty salon or a gym. But she found her niche with clients who prefer the privacy of a one-on-one treatment, right where they live.
“Spray tanning is very personal,” said Zwonok, who grew up in Pierrefonds.
“I mean, you’re almost taking it all off to get a tan, right? Some people just feel a little easier doing that at home.”
Another 25-year-old on the go is Strzelecki.
When she started VS Event Staffing in the fall of 2011 after graduating in arts and commerce from Concordia University, she had only four “girls,” as she calls them, on contract.
Now she has 165.
They work as waitresses, bartenders, promotional models, security guards, sample-sales staff, kitchen staff — wherever there’s a big demand for temporary staff.
She has had clients big (L’Oréal, which distributed samples at the Rogers Cup tennis tournament in Toronto) and small (Traiteur Bon Appétit, catering at the Dix30 shopping complex in Brossard).
“Basically, I run my business from home,” said Strzelecki, who grew up in Greenfield Park and whose business is registered there.
“Beyond that, I’m always on the road. My company is open 24 hours, seven days a week.”
She puts a lot of young people to work.
Most of her staff are students earning their way through university.
If they don’t drive, they carpool; sometimes Strzelecki takes them to events herself.
She does about 35 events a month, with a client list of more than 35 companies. On a recent Monday, she sent five of her staff to serve at a sports event in Laval attended by 600 people.
In the slow months — like now, post-Christmas — she freelances as an event co-ordinator, helping companies organize their events and working out of office space they provide her. But her real love is to be mobile. “I don’t see this company being in one place, at least not at the moment,” she said. “It really demands being on the road all the time.”
Mobile-service businesses are a North American trend.
Last September, Time magazine profiled 10 of the more offbeat ones in the U.S., from a pet groomer and a cigar lounge to a DNA testing truck labelled “Who’s Your Daddy?”
The U.S. National Federation of Independent Business says “businesses-on-wheels have come to encompass hair salons, high-tech repair shops, and even makers of artificial limbs.”
They “have a particular allure for millennials, who are embracing non-traditional work environments and are used to operating pretty much anywhere with a smartphone and Wi-Fi connection.”
Here in Canada, entrepreneurs are also going mobile.
In Toronto, Canadian Passport Photos will take your picture at home or at the office — it’s expensive, but handy in an emergency for the sick, babies and busy executives.
In Windsor, Ont., a small startup called iPhone Repair Express makes house calls. A technician will fix your broken smartphone wherever you are, “within 30 minutes or less.”
In Calgary, a two-truck outfit called Canada Tire Doctors sells and installs tires in people’s driveways and takes the old tires away at no charge.
And, since it’s that time of year again, let’s not forget tax advisers.
In Vancouver, for example, there’s a one-woman consultancy called OLY Mobile Tax Services that helps the homebound get their returns filed on time.
Here in Quebec, Butman found a ready market for good coffee on the go.
The 45-year-old got the idea for Aroma Express, his mobile espresso company, two years ago. With 15 baristas on contract, he now travels outside Quebec to other provinces, as well.
He loads up a rented U-Haul van with his professional-model Rancilio Epoca espresso machine, a grinder, a supply of milk for lattes, and a special tricycle trolley he uses as his serving station.
“Basically, I’ve got my little coffee house in this Econoline,” Butman said while driving along the Décarie Expressway to a gig in Joliette a few weeks ago.
It was the last day of a three-week contract with Astral Media, which was visiting cable TV companies in Montreal and several other Quebec cities to sell its channels.
“They usually have an attention-grabber for these things,” Butman explained. “Last time it was a chocolate fountain, this time it was us.”
But mangets his coffee from Virgin Hill Coffee Roasters in the Eastern Townships town of Brome Lake. With a hired barista, he makes all kinds of espresso, just no filtered coffee.
After registering his business in December, Butman saw things perk up right away. In January, Aroma Express was invited to — of all places — Tim Hortons head office in Hamilton.
“This is our claim to fame: we were hired to service Tim Hortons at their annual gala appreciation event,” said Butman, 45, a native of Côte St. Luc.
“I didn’t want our company to be just a prop-rental company, so I told them: ‘If you want our tricycle, you also have to take our coffee.’
“We agreed that we’d use their coffee but our blend. We told them the countries our coffee comes from, they put it together and we tasted it. Everything worked perfectly.
“We’re going to Banff in a couple of months, too. We’re really trying to be coast-tocoast. We have another 30 or 40 events booked for the next three months — we’re really growing.”
Mobile espresso may seem like a new idea here, but it’s all the rage in the U.S., said Butman, who saw a lot of them while living in Florida and New Jersey for 15 years with his wife, Shireen Deen.
It was Shireen who gave him the idea.
Two years ago, when Deen was principal of a Jewish day school in Montreal, she mentioned to her husband how nice it would be to get coffee served for teacher-appreciation day.
“I didn’t want to disappoint her so I decided to do it myself,” he recalled. “I rented a machine, found a barista on Craigslist and basically the rest is history — people loved it.
“For four hours we served over 400 cups of coffee in her school. And afterward I said, ‘Honey, thank you, I have a new company.’ And since then, we’ve just gotten bigger.”
There’s a lot of bad coffee out there, but Butman learned a thing or two living down south.
“It’s rare here in Montreal and most of Canada, but you Google ‘espresso bar catering’ and you’ll find 100 to 200 companies in every major city down south,” he said.
“If Montreal changes its food-vending laws, you’ll see these tricycles on the streets of this city everywhere,” he added hopefully.
“And if we get the OK, several will be ours.”