Some of his friends thought he was nuts when Kirk Layton pumped most of his money into an on-line venture.
The dot-com boom was waning at the time, but Mr. Layton, 41, was intent on surfing the wave. He had "an idea that just made sense," and to get it off the ground, the president and founder of Toronto-based Eservus.com Online Services Ltd. invested heavily in his privately held company, including "every single cent in my RSP plan."
After five years in operation, the company has weathered the dot-com bust and has grown from an idea into an on-line concierge service that employs nine people in Toronto and Calgary, has operations in Ontario, Alberta and B.C. and generates annual revenue of close to $3-million.
The Eservus on-line system caters to tenants in offices, apartment buildings and condominiums, providing discounted sports, theatre and movie tickets, flower services, travel services and a variety of other things usually associated with traditional in-house concierges at high-end properties.
Kirk Layton, shown at BCE Place in Toronto, runs an on-line concierge service of Eservus which provides discounted sports, theatre and movie tickets, flower services, in many of the large office towers in downtown Toronto. (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)
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The company offers services on an exclusive basis to tenants through property managers such as Brookfield Properties Corp., Cadillac Fairview Corp. and GWL Realty Advisors Inc.
Eservus is available in more than 400 buildings, including TD Centre, Commerce Court and BCE Place in Toronto, Bankers Hall and Fifth Avenue Place in Calgary, the Pacific Centre, the Bentall Centre in Vancouver. [Editor's note: Incorrect information appeared in the original version of this story. Frist Canadian Place is no longer a customer of eServus.]
The key to the on-line service is that Eservus orders tickets, products and other services in bulk and sells most at a discount rate. And it keeps overhead low by using the Internet to handle sales and bookings.
"We saved our clients over $700,000 on their purchases last year," says Mr. Layton, who often lands those hard-to-get tickets -- such as Calgary Stampede infield passes, Vancouver Canucks playoff seats and tickets for Wicked, the sold-out musical that recently played in Toronto.
Mr. Layton previously worked in commercial real estate marketing and he knows the importance property managers place on maintaining positive relations with tenants.
"We provide our property manager clients with a tenant retention tool and a way to keep their tenants happy. Tenants looking for new office space have asked some of our current property manager clients if they have Eservus, so we're becoming better-known to companies looking for space."
Clients are taking notice, too. For example, Mr. Layton received a personal note of appreciation from a father who had not been able to obtain tickets for a WrestleMania show through traditional means, but scored a pair through Eservus. "He became a hero in the eyes of his son, and we made it happen."
Eservus works with property managers to promote the company's services within buildings on signage, newsletters and advertising on screens in elevators.
However, the company's most effective method of marketing is to get tenants to register with Eservus on-line.
"We capture their interest categories, such as golf, baseball or classical music, and send out weekly permission-based e-mails to our registered clients." Currently, 22,000 people in the buildings serviced by Eservus subscribe to the company's weekly permission-based e-mail newsletter.
Eservus uses an e-mail program from ThinData Inc., an e-mail marketing company based in Toronto, that lets Mr. Layton track click-through rates of e-mails so he knows how effective each mailing is. "We can strategically use e-mail as a tool to help build our registered client database through contests, such as our Frequent Forwarder Program -- if you forward our e-mails to your co-workers you're eligible for prizes -- and our Register a Co-Worker and Win contest," he says.
Eservus relies heavily on repeat business, and the permission-based e-mail newsletter is the main way the company generates it.
"Our main objective for 2005 is to increase the number of registered [newsletter] clients we have, to increase the number of repeat purchasers," Mr. Layton says.
While the company is basking in a two-year growth of 458 per cent, Mr. Layton knows the dot-com heyday is long gone. Like most small businesses, he doesn't see a lucrative IPO anywhere in the immediate future and there are no venture capitalists banging on his door with bags full of cash offering to buy him out. But he isn't concerned. Unlike the early dot-com entrepreneurs, he didn't get into it for the quick hit, he says.
"This is my business. This is what I do. It's my second baby, after my seven-month-old daughter, Sophie," Mr. Layton says.
Special to The Globe and Mail
