Concierge Confidential

by Fazio, Michael

  “How funny. I listen to her show all the time. You’re that concierge guy?”

  “Yes,” I replied. I made it clear to her that it wasn’t for Whoopi herself. But for the first time, I was acting like a “celebrity concierge” who can make things happen—rather than pleading for a client because my ass was on the line. “It’s not like you need extra exposure, but it would be such good radio if I could announce to somebody that I got them a PlayStation. And it’s a nice message for Sony, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” the publicist said. “I’d have to get clearance. Let me see what I can do.”

  “Thanks. This would mean so much.”

  I still kept uncovering and reaching out to every contact I could. If you enlist twenty people, four of them will actually try to help you. In the rare event that two of them come through, you might be left with egg on your face—but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Rarely, it does happen.

  A few days later, the radio station called to tell me that I had a box there. I had it messengered to my office—and opened it up to find a PlayStation and half a dozen games with it. That same day, my Sony contact called to let me know that he had scored a PlayStation for me as well.

  I took one of them and gave it away on the air, for free, to one lucky listener and made his day. I took the other one of them and gave it to Adam, for a lot of money, and made his son’s day. True to his word, he ended up signing Abigail Michaels for his buildings. I considered it my reward for having done what concierges live for: helping the wealthy get things they don’t really deserve.

  * * *

  CUTTING THE VELVET ROPE

  I never did get a call from Tiffany in Las Vegas, dying to go to Pure and asking for my tips on how to get in. But if I had, I would have told her my plan that almost always pays off and yet no one ever thinks to try.

  After September 11, Homeland Security agents were staked out in all the New York hotels. They were mostly undercover, but after seeing the same guy for two weeks in the lobby you could put two and two together. The agent heard all my exchanges with guests, and eventually he approached me and broke the ice. “Wow, where did they end up going?” he wanted to know. “What’s that place like?”

  We got to talking, and he became intrigued by what I did and how I did it. Then he gave me a “cop’s friend” card. “My buddy’s in the Nineteenth Precinct,” he told me. “If you ever need something at the clubs over there, I can hook you up.”

  Ding! The lightbulb went off in my head: Cops. Nightclubs. Liquor licenses. Legal issues. I bet the cops know everything about the clubs. Of course the cops know all the doormen to the clubs. The doorman’s outside all night, while the cop is casing the place to make sure that he’s carding people. If a cop sent you to a club, the doorman can’t let you inside fast enough.

  The other thing people might not realize is that the police really are fraternal—if you knew one, you knew them all. Once I was in with my guy, I could call any precinct. Yes, it took nerve, but I could still pull it off. “I’m the concierge for the InterContinental Hotel,” I’d tell them. “Who’s working tonight in this area?”

  Granted, the reaction was never friendly. They always vetted me. “You’re the what? Hold on. Wait. What are you looking for?”

  At that point I’d play dumb—and name-drop. “Oh, I’m sorry. Officer Lucas always helps me out on 54th Street. I thought somebody who did 14th Street could help me.”

  Instantly, the tone changed. “Well, what do you need?”

  “Do you guys know the people over at Lotus? Because I’m really having a tough time getting in there, and I just wanted to know if someone could help me. I know this is crazy.” If I were doing this now, I’d throw in an aside that this was a one-time thing, and I’m doing someone else a favor. “My friend is having her birthday and she’s been dying to go there. She’s a really sweet girl and it would mean so much to her.”

  Let them take down your number. Never pressure them. “Here’s what I need. Ask around. Think about it. If you think that you can help me, here’s how to get in touch with me.”

  If it’s a club you want to frequent regularly, make sure you go back to the precinct and thank them. Bring them cookies or some treat. Yes, they’ll think you’re crazy. But they’ll also think of you as this crazy—but sweet—person, and they’ll remember you and take your call. Then they can show off their power by getting you into the place.

  If the cops are a dead end, find out the managing company that owns the property. Chances are no one asks them to show off, either, and this is their opportunity to be a big shot as well.

  Just don’t tell them Michael sent you!

  * * *

  19.

  Get Up and Go

  There was a wave of development, when big companies bought up every piece of land they could and then built brand-new structures. The next wave was of people buying historical sites and converting them into landmark buildings. That’s when the unbelievable happened: The Plaza Hotel was going to turn condo. It’s everyone’s fantasy of romanticized New York. Located right on Central Park, staffed by doormen in top hats and surrounded by horse-and-carriages, it is elegance straight out of a movie. The Plaza was where Barbra played with Robert Redford’s hair in The Way We Were.

  Servicing the Plaza would be the absolute pinnacle. Thankfully Abigail Michaels had built up our brand enough that we were known in Manhattan real estate circles. With some of our first buildings, what we couldn’t get in dollars we bartered for in publicity. We conceded pretty significantly on money, but our contract stated that the developers must use our name in all of their ads.

  This was a time when the Sunday New York Times real estate section was around forty-five pages long. It was to New York what the Sunday L.A. Times movie section is to Los Angeles. But instead of there being a two-page ad for a movie, developers were taking a two-page spread for their new projects. There would be full-color photos of the building with a list of all the included features: billiard room, indoor pools, Pilates, closets—and Abigail Michaels Concierge.

  We got an appointment with the Plaza, and we pitched to them that we’d be perfect because of our hotel background. We knew everything there was to know, and we could anticipate requests. The meeting went well, and we waited to hear back. Then we waited, and then we waited some more. Finally, Abbie and I found out that they gave the account to a company called Concierge Direct.

  I was devastated. The worst part was that I’d never even heard of the firm. Where the hell did they come from? I wondered. I thought back to my days with Glennis, how she’s instilled in me the need to dissect every possible opportunity. I started looking around online, and I learned that Concierge Direct was basically a function on a Crestron screen. The Crestron was a little device that you could carry around your house to perform many functions, like turning your stereo on or adjusting the lights. It happened to have a button on it for restaurant reservations. I bet that button doesn’t go anywhere, I thought. They may have built the technology, but they aren’t really a concierge service. Where did this come from and who answers those requests?

  Trying to track down Concierge Direct really meant tracking down the company that invented the technology. I wound up calling Crestron in Stockholm. “What’s your company?” the Crestron sales rep said. “What’s your business? What are you doing?”

  “I want to get to the people who are fulfilling the actual concierge request in this Concierge Direct model.”

  “I don’t know who that is, but let me get you in touch.”

  Now I got a call from Steve from Concierge Direct. I think he realized that we could potentially be the source to fulfill that concierge button. I also think he realized I knew that button was presently empty, that it would be like dialing 911 but getting a dial tone. While we were feeling each other out, he must have recommended us to the developers, because Peter, a partner in a big conglomerate that owns Cooper Square Realty, gave me a call soon thereafter.
/>   “I’m somewhat familiar with Cooper Square,” I said carefully, “but can you tell me more?”

  “Oh, we’re going to be managing the Plaza. We’re interested in talking to your company. You’re very intriguing and we’d like to speak with you about providing service across our brand.”

  I did my homework before the meeting—and found out that Cooper Square managed around 250,000 apartments in New York. “This is crazy,” I told Abbie. “We don’t want the Plaza; we want Cooper Square. We want every single one of those apartments.”

  Instead of thinking of each building as an individual project, I started working out a whole model for a community of apartment complexes. I did a very detailed spreadsheet and got ready to present this big dissertation about how Abigail Michaels could upgrade Cooper Square’s offerings.

  We met in their conference room, with that classic long business table. Everything in the room was very fancy, all mahogany and gold leaf. The owner of Cooper Square kept challenging us on our business model. “Other than a fee,” he wanted to know, “how do you make your money?”

  “We get commissions from people,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can simplify things. Do you handle dry cleaning? Can you pick it up and deliver?”

  “Of course,” I told him. “We do that all the time.”

  “Do you book massages?”

  “Of course we book massages!” Abbie said.

  “Well, do they pay you a commission?”

  “It depends on if you get a happy ending or not,” she quipped. There was something about her timing and her brassy personality that melted all the ice in the room. Everyone started cracking up, and it went from a formal business meeting to a sense of camaraderie.

  They had us put together proposed models based on different scenarios, like whether we’d be more cost effective at 250,000 units or at 500,000. I bought beginner business books so I could really give him the information he wanted, in the format that he was used to. “It works at twenty dollars a unit,” he told me, after looking over the numbers. “So really, it is scalable.”

  “Great!” I said. “What’s the next step?”

  “Would you be interested in being bought?”

  “What?” Being bought? I understood what it meant when Delta airlines got bought by Northwest. But what that meant for us, I had no idea.

  “Cooper Square is owned by a larger entity,” he explained. “We love your concept and we think that this is scalable in a much larger fashion than what you’re trying to do. Why don’t you think about putting together a proposal for how you could service a million units? We’d like you to come to present that in Florida on Monday. Get it together and then call us. What’s your EBITDA, by the way?”

  I had no idea of what to tell him. Our EBITDA is great. On a scale of one to ten, it’s a ten! “Let me first think about all of the other things we discussed, and then I’ll let you know what our EBITDA is.” And what an EBITDA is to begin with.

  On the plane ride to Florida, Abbie and I rehearsed all my newfound business jargon. “Okay, EBITDA is Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. What’s our cost per unit? What’s our retail price per unit? What’s our payroll expense? How do we derive our gross revenue?”

  When we got to the Florida offices, I felt like an actor feels when going for a screen test at 20th Century Fox. It wasn’t exactly a glamorous place, but it was buzzing. The office in Florida was one story, but it was expansive—about two blocks long. When we walked in past the reception area, there was pool after pool of people. In 20th Century Fox you’d walk past all the movie posters; here, it was poster after poster of beautiful buildings. Oh my God, I thought, we’ve arrived.

  “This is what we want to do with you,” they told us after our presentation. “We think that you’re super-creative, but you don’t know how to grow your business and we do. We employ twenty-five thousand people and we’re almost a three-billion-dollar company.”

  I was as excited as somebody can get about business. Then the negotiations started. A business’s purchase price is based on multiplying the EBITDA by whatever multiple is an industry standard. I looked online about purchasing real estate companies, and the standard multiple was anywhere between eight and twelve. Granted, our accountant was me and Microsoft Excel, but it still seemed like an amazing amount of money—too amazing.

  Whenever any of our clients called for service, I looked up their email addresses. If they were @GoldmanSachs.com, I started asking them questions. “Hi! How was dinner last night? That’s great. Listen, I’ve got a crazy question about EBITDA for you.”

  It became another form of promoting Abigail Michaels. Clients in the financial industry were impressed that we were getting an offer from a public company. They weren’t as impressed, however, with my research skills. “A multiple of ten?” one client said. “Or even a multiple of eight? Forget it!”

  “But I asked Jeeves.” (Further confirmation that the site is useless.)

  “That was like ten years ago! A multiple of around four is good.”

  It came down to the back and forth negotiating, and I got us a little bit more than they originally offered. They gave us a big, fat check and officially bought Abigail Michaels. I took the money and paid off every debt that the business had incurred. I stopped wearing the same suit all the time and bought myself another one. Finally, I bought a house in the Hamptons. It seemed like a really great place to network, since it was full of the kind of people that would be my clients—or that I would aspire to have as my clients, at least.

  “We don’t understand your business,” our new owners told us after looking over our information, “but clearly you do. So what do you need from us?”

  We went ahead and hired a slew of people. We got a new office space, and we got a website—not a homemade Michael website, but a real one that cost real money. Abigail Michaels started getting more and more accounts. It was full steam ahead, all luxury all the way.

  Just like the Titanic.

  The housing market crashed, and kept crashing. All of a sudden, new development stopped. There were no more projects, no more holes in the ground that were going to be luxury apartments. Nobody was buying landmark buildings and turning them into anything. Everything started to become sad and scary, and we had to start laying people off.

  I got a sense of creativity through desperation. I started reinventing our business model. Where is the next opportunity? I wondered. I knew that people were always going to need service. I’d learned that, ever since Pharaoh, rich people stayed rich; they just had different levels of rich. They might cut back on how many necklaces they bought, but they wouldn’t cut back on how many people were stroking them and helping them. They can do with one less pair of shoes, but not one less pair of hands.

  I knew that Goldman Sachs wasn’t going to be as frivolous, sending fifteen executives and fifty clients to see Beyoncé in the front row. That was definitely not a priority. But New York is a global destination. It’s all about people coming here from other countries, especially while we had the weakest dollar ever. For foreign tourists, luxuries were now affordable. How could I reach those people? I could reach them in a hotel. I’d been reaching them since 1994, so I guessed I needed to reach back.

  The Clefs d’Or had lost its luster and the usual players didn’t seem to be keeping current. Maybe I needed to bring sexy back to the hospitality industry. I knew that the hotels were underestimating the value of what we provided. From a purely accounting standpoint, it was like having a thousand rooms—yet only thirty-five people using the concierge. I got that they wanted to save money and didn’t want to have a full-fledged concierge. But it’s part of the fabric that makes the thing work. How many people use the bathrobe? They put two of them in every room, which cost a fortune to clean. I suspected they wouldn’t mind having a call center in midtown Manhattan that was staffed by concierges.

  As these ideas were percolatin
g in my head, I went to a dinner party in the Hamptons. When I got to the house, the weather turned to a torrential rain. The plan had been for everyone to eat outdoors, but now we had to bring everything inside. There really wasn’t room to seat all fifty of us. We started putting trays and temporary tables up all over the place. One of these tables went upstairs into a bedroom, so I went up there to eat by myself.

  Two minutes later, a guy named Rob walked into the room. He was around fifty years old, with salt-and-pepper hair and nice-looking glasses. He was clearly a Wall Street type. I might have been intimidated if I ran into him downtown, but here he just had a fun vibe about him.

  We introduced ourselves and made small talk, and soon I was telling him what it was that I did. “How did you come up with that?” he asked me.

  “Well, I worked at the InterContinental for a hundred years. So what do you do?”

  “I build hotels.”

  “Oh, wow! That’s crazy. Any hotel that I would know?” I asked, thinking he was going to tell me about some new Marriott Courtyard off Exit 26.

  “The InterContinental.”

  “You work with InterContinental?”

  “No, I work with Tishman Hotel Group. We’re the developer of hotels, and we’re partners with them on the brand-new InterContinental in Times Square.”

  One of the things I learned from Dolores was to keep things from getting intense. After it was clear that we had something in common—he worked in hotels, and I wanted to return to hotels—I changed the subject to something frivolous. I emailed Rob when I came back to the city on Monday, hoping to explore what we talked about.

  I went to his office, and we had a meeting about the new InterContinental. It was going to be a complete departure from their usual model: They’re almost always in business districts and Times Square is touristy. But their vision was basically that, even if you stay at the InterContinental, you wind up doing half of what you do near Times Square anyway. So why not bring the InterContinental to Times Square? They even brought in Jeffrey Beers, an architect known for designing cool, trendy places. They were branching out of their comfort zone—and thinking that it’s hard to figure out the concierge piece.