By Jenny Callison
Enquirer contributor

Richard Nonelle is always on the lookout for a good business concept that can be franchised. He has taken his company Window Genie into 49 locations in a very few years. Now he is tackling institutional restrooms with a new venture, Sparkling Image.

Julie Hagenmaier is the founder and president of My Girl Friday, a concierge service that provides an array of services to clients, including delivering groceries. (Enquirer photo/MEGGAN BOOKER)

Julie Hagenmaier is new to franchising. Her upstart microbusiness, My Girl Friday, offering concierge-type services - picking up dry cleaning, meeting the cable guy, etc. - has blossomed over the past five years, and she's ready to spread its wealth.

Both entrepreneurs are following the lead of many small companies whose owners find the fastest way to grow without making a huge investment is by selling franchising rights. Franchises, they say, provide the benefits of a large organization with the personal service of a mom-and-pop operation. They allow franchisees to have much more stake in the success of the company than a regional manager might.

"Our ultimate goal is market domination and raising the bar for restroom cleanliness," Nonelle says.

Clean restrooms

Nonelle's idea for Sparkling Image was born when Nonelle read of research conducted by Restaurants and Institutions magazine. A survey of restaurant patrons concluded that most folks who dine out base their impression of the eatery partly on the cleanliness of its restrooms. And many restrooms leave much to be desired.

Nonelle, 41, did a little research of his own, checking out typical cleaning efforts at area restaurants.

"A lot of places will have a $6 or $8 hourly employee go in with a bucket and swirl around a mop," he says. "Most commercial restaurants have tile and grout floors. If day after day you just rub the dirt and grime back into the floor, you get a bacteria breeding ground."

He developed a three-part program for commercial restrooms: weekly sanitizing, monthly deep-cleaning, and paper products management. Instead of relying on the traditional bucket, mop and toilet brush, Nonelle developed the Sparkilizer 4000, a machine that deep-cleans toilets, sinks, floors, air ducts, vents, baby-changing stations and ceilings.

After testing his Sparkling Image concept in Dallas and Cincinnati, Nonelle began franchising in March and already has 12 locations operating across the country. Projections call for 10 more locations to be added by year's end. In 2005, Sparkling Image plans to add 30 franchises.

Having developed Window Genie as a franchise, Nonelle had a blueprint to follow in designing and launching his new venture.

"It helped in every single way, from the structured legal part of getting Sparkling Image going to how we approached the operation of the service side, what the role of the owner is, how we select our owners and go about finding them," he said.

Restaurants account for more than 80 percent of Sparkling Image's customer base, but the company also services restrooms in office buildings, movie theaters, shopping malls, grocery stores and gas stations.

"They do an absolutely wonderful job," said Brad Kaemmer, owner/operator of P.F. Chang's China Bistro in Norwood. "They originally proposed doing a deep-clean of my restrooms once a month, but I value their services so much that I have them do it once a week. I don't think there is any price you can put on a clean restroom."

Nonelle said every potential franchisee who has attended Sparkling Image's discovery sessions has chosen to purchase a territory. Some buy entire metropolitan markets.

"Either they get it right away or they don't," he explained. "If you need an image business that you can flaunt at a cocktail party, you're probably not our person. ... But everyone realizes the problems with restrooms. Now they're seeing a solution to the problem."

Personal services

Julie Hagenmaier started her personal concierge service in November 1999 to provide more flexibility than her previous responsibilities as a pharmaceutical sales representative offered.

As a working mother and partner in a dual-income household, she knew only too well how difficult it is to juggle career, family, household tasks and errands.

Hagenmaier started small, gradually adding services as her expanding client base needed them. From basics such as grocery shopping and cleaning pickup, My Girl Friday grew to offering more complex services such as special event support, house-sitting and meal preparation.

Hagenmaier started as a one-woman operation and now has 78 people in her network, including more than 20 who report to her directly. She runs the whole Cincinnati territory, and she recommends franchisees start the way she did - small.

Peggy Maxwell of Loveland says she called Hagenmaier after seeing a media report about how she taught people how to use computers.

"We had just gotten a computer and were completely illiterate, so she came and gave my husband lessons."

Since then, both Maxwell and her husband have had catastrophic illnesses. Hagenmaier and her staff have helped in numerous ways.

"My Girl Friday prepared food that we could put in the freezer, ran errands, helped us move our business, packed up our house and unpacked us in the new house," Maxwell said. "Julie has the knack of finding the most wonderful people to work for her. All of them are wonderful to have in your house; we have never had a problem."

Hagenmaier has expanded her customer base by offering concierge services to travel agents and corporations, which add value to customers and employees by offering My Girl Friday's services to travelers and the recently relocated.

Requests to perform tasks in other locations led Hagenmaier to build a network of similar personal concierges throughout the country.

"We created an umbrella of 'mom and pop' service providers, a sort of consortium, in order to create a national network," explained Hagenmaier. "It allowed us to expand.

"For example, a woman in New York called us to move her mother from Phoenix to Chicago. We partnered with a personal concierge service in Phoenix to help the mother dispose of her excess belongings, organize and pack the rest, ship her car and do final cleaning when her home was sold."

Hagenmaier has made some changes to the design of her Web site, both to better showcase her company's services and to promote the franchise opportunities she will offer soon.

"Those changes have increased our visibility, especially with corporate clients," she explained. "It used to be too 'girlie' and probably alienated male customers."

The new brand image and design have helped My Girl Friday establish its identity and have spurred requests for franchise information, many from men.

"Changing our 'brand,'" says Hagenmaier, "was a brilliant idea."

---

E-mail jcallison@zoomtown.com