How to keep employees productive and happy in their jobs? Give everyone a personal assistant.
That’s, in effect, what Simply Done, a “corporate concierge and lifestyle management” firm in Chanhassen, promises to be for the employees of its client companies. And that’s how Amy Harmer finds herself returning other people’s purchases at Target or waiting in their homes for the cable guy.
Or carrying a mannequin through downtown Minneapolis. (That was actually a corporate, not an employee, errand. And Harmer, cofounder of Simply Done and its executive director, does those, too. “They needed a body and arms,” she says. Something about a Halloween party. We didn’t ask.)
Companies keep Simply Done on retainer and pay roughly $35 an hour for its services. At client Natural Resource Group in the IDS Center, Harmer says 70 percent of the 100 or so employees have called on Simply Done, and not just for errands. Some want research done, she says “restaurants, child care, home repairs. We planned a trip to Kilimanjaro.” One of those people, Sheila Dunn, says the “extra pair of hands and legs” is helping NRG employees sleep better at night. She’s used Simply Done for gift shopping, and has seen colleagues use the service to research landscape designers, get the plants watered at home, and plan a family picnic.
There’s little that Simply Done won’t do. Almost anything that’s “moral, legal, and ethical,” says cofounder Kristina Dustrud. But not transporting people—no schlepping kids, for instance.
With 100 clients and just three assistants of their own, she and Harmer generally have their hands full. Harmer asks, “Do you realize how much space 30 helium balloons take up in an elevator?”
