1974 – 2000
My First Business
I made a desk out of two orange crates and a sheet of plywood, with an Indian bedspread draped over the top. I had one chair for “the customer.” My office was my bedroom in a shared, four-bedroom, second-floor flat on an innocuous, six-block long side street that no-one had ever heard of, in San Francisco’s Mission District.
As luck would have it, my bedroom was the first one you’d come to at the top of the stairs. At the last minute, I decided to get a business phone installed, instead of using our home phone, which I shared with my three roommates. I had just turned 25; I’d never before even considered starting a business – and it showed. The year was 1974.
I was working a morning part-time job as a runner for a customs house broker at the San Francisco airport, and had inherited a few thousand dollars from my grandmother; I took a few hundred dollars of that and started my business.
I had spent three months looking for a share rental situation with my dog, Witch. At that time, in late 1973, such a search involved going around to all the bulletin boards in the city’s laundromats and coffeehouses, copying down the names, details, and phone numbers of available shares posted on 3×5 index cards and such, going home, calling them, making an appointment, and going to check out the place and the people. Often, I’d find myself taking one look once I got to the place and realizing it wasn’t going to work – sometimes for me, and other times for my dog. I eventually had to give the dog to my ex-girlfriend’s parents and found a spot in the Mission District flat.
I struck up a friendship with another guy in the four-flat building, and he and I used to walk around the city at night, brainstorming about ways we could make money. I got to thinking about one of the ‘alternative’ culture’s services at the time – the Ride Board, which matched people who were driving somewhere, with riders who would share the cost of gas. I thought that was a good idea, and I wondered what people needed besides rides.
The answer was, roommates.
During my search for a roommate situation for myself, I’d developed a brief questionnaire so that I could find out a little about the people and the situation before taking the time and trouble to drive there and interview with them. I thought having a centralized database of available share rentals might save others in similar situations a lot of time and aggravation – there was no such database of which I was aware at the time.
I expanded my questionnaire to a letter-sized sheet, including the rent, deposit, utilities, etc., neighborhood, street/cross street, gender, sexual orientation, and pets present and considered, a brief description of the place, the available room, who lived there now, and what sort of person they were looking for. I set my business hours from 2-7pm so I could keep my morning job, and also to give customers who were working 9 to 5 the ability to patronize my business after their workday.
I picked a target opening date on a Monday, and arranged for advertisements in a wide variety of local newspapers to come out on that day. No research, no test marketing, no calling people offering places for rent, nor people looking – I just figured it was a good idea that was worth a try.
On the Saturday prior to the Monday opening, I went around to most of the bulletin boards in the city and copied down the names and numbers of everyone who was offering a share rental. On Sunday, the day we were closed, I put up my flyers as I made my rounds, collecting phone numbers of available shares. On those two weekend evenings after my rounds, I called the numbers and asked them if they’d like to list their place with my new service for free – as I suspected, most of them thought, “Why not?” and by Monday, I had 60 share rentals in a looseleaf notebook, for my clients to peruse.
I charged $5 for people looking for a place, for as long as they needed to find a place. People who had a room to rent could list for free. (The decision of which party, or both parties, to charge was a crucial one – I figured, correctly, as it turned out, that people who had a room to rent may be pressed to come up with the extra rent for the vacant room, but they’d still have a roof over their heads, while those looking for a place usually needed to be out of the current situation at a pre-determined date – so they were the ones in the most pain, risking being out on the street with nowhere to go; hence they were the parties that I decided to charge.)
As it turned out, there was actually another roommate service at the time that charged $25 to BOTH sides; I’d never heard of them, so they weren’t doing a very good job of promoting themselves, and, soon after my business opened, they were out of business.) Five dollars was cheap, even then – only five times the price of an ice cream cone – and the kicker was you could use the service until you found a place to live, so there was pretty much a guarantee included. (Another key to the success of the business – lowering the risk to the purchasing party.)
Whenever I had time and my business wasn’t open, I’d go around the city, collect more numbers of available share rentals, and put up my flyers; Phone booths (this was 1974, remember) had slots at the top of the phones where a business card could fit perfectly – I figured those out looking for a place to live would be likely to be using the phone to call prospective roommates. I also passed out my cards to the people in the long lines for Bud’s Ice Cream in Noe Valley – I wouldn’t say anything to them, just hand them my card; until they read the card, I’m sure some of them probably thought I was deaf and trying to raise money.
Soon, I’d come home from my part-time gig and there would be a line of customers on the stairs up to my front door, waiting to get in. I had to run upstairs and make my bed before I could open for business. I’d open my doors and there would soon be a customer in “the chair,” two or three sitting on my bed, and another one or two on my coffee table. I had to make additional copies of the notebooks with the rentals in them, and soon had over a hundred listings; I started dividing the books by rent amount, so there could be more copies for people to look at.
I started getting calls (on my business phone – thank god!) at all hours of the day and night, so quickly invested in the newest technology of the day – an answering machine. If I recall they were about $250 – not an inexpensive investment at the time.
I was often getting six or more customers a day – sometimes ten, fifteen, or twenty. My rent at the time was $65 a month (and I had the best room, so the others were cheaper!). I kept track of where people heard about my service, so quickly cut back on the advertising that wasn’t yielding results, and narrowed it to a few papers that were getting the word out. So even with advertising, with my rent being what it was, the overhead was very low. I’d never even had a lemonade stand before, and all of a sudden I was making enough money to cover my monthly rent – often more, pretty much every day.
I quit my morning job, and, taking stock of my roommate situation, realized it was not to be relied on as a business location. I met Gary Warne, who was running Communiversity – a free, ‘alternative’ university, that offered classes in a wide variety of topics (from the mainstream to the arcane and offbeat), taught by local amateurs, as well as some professionals in their fields. I signed up to teach a jitterbug class in the cement backyard of my flat, and, in the course of my association with Gary and Communiversity, discovered that he was looking for a space to open a used bookstore; we decided to share the rent on a space he found in the Inner Sunset District. (The jitterbug class was the beginnings of my second business, The Avenue Ballroom).
I expanded the hours and raised the price a dollar to cover my increased expenses.
The drawing is of the Mission District, four-flat Victorian where I lived, that included the bedroom that, once my bed was made each early afternoon, served as my original business premises.
It was a great match for a year or so – as Gary said, he used the walls for his books, and I used the couches for my customers. He and I were in the store together every day, six days a week, after which we’d typically be at a Communiversity event or rehearsing with one or the other of the two bands we were in – “Crawfish Pie,” a bluegrass band, or a fifties band – the “Hubcaps.”
Most married people don’t spend that much time together, and after awhile, things became tense between us – Gary took the bluegrass band and I took the fifties band, and eventually he and I split up our shared business venture and went our separate ways.
I moved my roommate service to a residential location in the same Inner Sunset neighborhood for six months or a year, and then, ultimately to a storefront in the Haight-Ashbury, just a few blocks from that famous intersection.
I found a storefront on Cole Street, at the corner of Haight. At the time, as I had had very little experience situating a business, I had no idea what an ideal location it would turn out to be. Cole Street was a connector between two neighborhoods – “Cole Valley” and the Haight, so there was a lot of foot traffic that went right by my storefront. There was a bus line that stopped right across the street, and many bus lines that stopped on the corner of Haight; it was just a few blocks from a streetcar line that made it a quick hop to downtown San Francisco from Cole Valley.
That was the only other location I ever had for that business – I was there for almost 25 years. As other roommate services popped up, copying my service, mine was known as “the one on Cole Street.” One of my favorite stories is the time a guy from Europe came in with a guidebook that told how to find a place to live in San Francisco – it was in German! Through a promotion campaign I ran one year, we were voted “Best Way to Find a Roommate,” by readers of the local alternative weekly newspaper, The SF Bay Guardian.
I worked there six days a week, myself, eventually hired an employee when I got busy with my new business, Kicks Magazine, and then the Avenue Ballroom. Eventually I expanded to seven days a week, noon-8pm most days, and had about a half dozen part-time employees, working in shifts of two to accommodate the demand. By this time, I’d had to tear down a wall that originally separated the space into two rooms, and the resulting large room was filled with chairs and couches along the walls and a bookcase full of triplicate binders of the share rental listings – three copies of each rent range – from 100 to 300 listings, depending on the time of year.
As time went on, and parking in The City became increasingly difficult, I began to look around the office and think to myself that this situation would one day become untenable. (This was in the mid-to-late 1990’s. I had moved to this space around 1976, and stayed there until I sold the business to a national concern in 2000.)
Around this time, through a mutual friend, I had met someone in the telephony industry, and, with his assistance, I designed a call-in roommate service that allowed people to either list their place, or find a place, over the phone, without coming into the office. Clients on both sides of the equation used a touch-tone phone to select from a pre-determined menu of options to describe the existing household and residents and the household (or roommate) for which, or whom, they were looking; people looking for a place to live could enter their credit card number and make payment over the phone. This was essentially a pre-internet solution that allowed anyone to find a roommate in San Francisco from anywhere in the world.
I set it up to be what, from our advertising, looked to be a new, separate company, called “Roommates Now!” I doubled the size of our main ad in the local alternative weekly and used half the allotted space for our original ad for “San Francisco Roommate Referral Service,” and half the space for “Roommates Now!” So, out of four ads, for instance, two of them would be for my company, increasing my chances from 33% to 50%, all other things being equal – which, of course, they were not! No other roommate service (and by this time, there were a few) offered a call-in service.
Walk-in clients were given the option to upgrade to the call-in for an additional ten bucks – a no-brainer for most, just for the convenience; people who came into the office to list their vacancy were given an option to add it to the call-in service (no charge, as before); if they didn’t add it, we would add it for them at the end of the day. (Each listing included a short recording of the description of the place available, as well as the matching demographic info collected by touch-tone – potential roommates were matched with available shares based on the expressed preferences of both parties, along a handful of demographic choices – house/flat/apt, men/women/gay/straight roommates, smoking/non-smoking, etc.; this was when you were still allowed to specify your desires in those regards – legally, you can no longer specify preferences for gender or sexual orientation.)
One of the items on the decision tree I had to decide about was whether to include race as a preference option. Was it better for people to have to take the chance of facing racial discrimination to their face, after having gone to the trouble of going out to an interview, or better for them just to be able to avoid that by seeing a preference spelled out in black and white, so to speak, on a form, or verbally in a recording? I couldn’t bring myself to be a part of that sort of behavior, so decided to omit the question and let the chips fall where they may – a decision subsequently confirmed with a small sampling of opinions from people of color.
It was an interesting process having to decide what are the most salient points of a roommate/roommate situation, for purposes of matching, while keeping the recording, in this case, to a reasonable length. Had to go through that same process when designing the paper forms in the early incarnations of the business – even more challenging when designing for people who may be listening to descriptions of ten or twenty listings over the phone! What to include; what to leave out?
Ultimately, we had two phone lines coming into the office, connected to answering machines, a direct line on each of the desks for the two employees usually there, and I think it was six lines coming into the phone-in system, connected, of course, to a computer, leading renters and prospective roommates, through a phone tree to enter their profile information and hear matches played back to them – all while the walk-in clients filled out descriptions of their available roommate situations or browsed the listings of available shares, or the profiles of available roommates.
That year, a year I’d spent freaking out about either the Internet or Craigslist making my business obsolete, I banked five times my usual annual net income – enough to put down payments on three rental properties that eventually served as a significant portion of my retirement income – income I currently enjoy. My worries were prescient, however, and that was next to my last in that business. I made multiple stabs at transmuting the service to the Internet, without much success – very complicated. The Internet allowed anyone in the world to run a roommate service in San Francisco; while Craigslist provided all the information about available share rentals for free, and eventually put all the existing roommate services out of business – I was lucky to sell to a national concern for one final payday, at the end, after 26 years – and, while I’d expected it to continue to support me, with things changing so fast in this day and age, in retrospect, a good run!
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