By Naomi Powell, The Hamilton Spectator
Jul 25, 2006

They’ll score a table at the hottest New York restaurant on a moment’s notice.

They’ll unearth a vintage designer gown and deliver it to your hotel via limousine.

And should disaster strike, they will even commandeer a helicopter to pluck your oxygen-deprived relative off a peak in the Himalayas.

Extravagant services to be sure, but all just a phone call away thanks to the army of employees at Circles, a Boston-based concierge service that has established its nerve centre in Burlington.

Huddled in cubicles on the fourth floor of a nondescript office complex on South Service Road, more than 300 Circles employees cater to every whim, every fancy of its A-list clients.

Think of them as invisible hotel concierges with the kind of influence that stretches into every city, every hotel in North America.

“Just name anything on your to-do list and we’ll get it done,” said Circles CFO Hugh Merryweather. “Vacation planning, dog walking, literally anything.”

The personal concierge industry emerged in the mid-1990s along with the explosion of the Internet and time pressures on North American professionals. Initially a favoured perk of the dot-com crowd, concierge services such as Circles eventually found its best clients in credit card and financial services companies anxious to keep their top customers happy.

Today, nearly every credit card company offers a concierge service to its top customers,
Merryweather said.

Merryweather wouldn’t disclose the company’s fees. But the balance sheet shows it’s lucrative. “It’s absolutely a growth business,” he said. Circles opened its Burlington office in late 2004. Revenue hit $24.5 million US that year and then grew to $34 million in 2005. This year, Merryweather expects revenue to clear $40 million US.

That’s serious money for fetching dry cleaning and booking babysitters. But then, Circles performs these seemingly mindless tasks for more than 250,000 people.

Affluent customers of financial institutions comprise 80 per cent of its business. The rest are employees of companies that offer concierge services as part of their benefits packages.

“There is a fancy side to our business, but we do lots of other things,” said Elizabeth Gross, public relations manager. “It’s a wonderful service in terms of saving time for people.”

Still, when a certain VIP needs Circles to go the extra mile, she need only call.

There was the time a particularly important client lost contact with his son, who was travelling in Indonesia during the 2004 tsunami. In the midst of the confusion, the Circles crew located the missing son in only 24 hours -- on a remote island in the Philippines.

On another occasion, a VIP’s brother called from a climbing trip in the Himalayas complaining of altitude sickness. Circles arranged for a mountain rescue outfit to dispatch a helicopter to fly him back to safety.

That kind of service requires a database of thousands of companies specializing in every possible field -- florists, caterers and stylists as well as airports, security and embassies. It also demands a crack support staff.

Circles employs two types of workers: “service professionals” who field 90 per cent of calls and “research assistants,” who handle the particularly tricky requests. All are carefully recruited and put through four to six weeks of training before they even touch a telephone.

“We might ask them to plan a weekend trip to Las Vegas and see how they do,” said Dee Tobin, manager of facilities and risk for the Burlington operation. “We look for people who think outside the box, who ask the right questions.”

Burlington’s proximity to Boston, as well as the high level of education among its residents made it a perfect place to expand Circles’ operations, Merryweather said.

Not that you’d ever know who was inhabiting that unremarkable office tower on South Service Road. All signs bearing the company name are tucked inside the building and employees are sworn to strict confidentiality agreements. Merryweather refuses to release the names of the company’s clients and a visiting reporter is barred from certain areas of the office for security reasons.

“We’ve promised our clients total confidentiality so we don’t go out of our way to advertise what we do,” Tobin said. “Still if (a client) gets stuck on the side of the road they’ll call us before they call the auto club. They know we’ll take care of them.”