Lexington-based HelpAroundTown enters new phase
Heather Beasley Doyle
Jun 22, 2018 at 6:45 AM Jun 25, 2018 at 10:30 AM
Seven years after its 2011 launch at Discovery Day in Lexington, HelpAroundTown is segueing into a new phase, according to the website's founder and CEO Reem Yared.
"This was our infancy and our childhood," the 52-year-old Lexington resident said of her online service marketplace. "Now we're entering our teen years."
The idea of HelpAroundTown came to Yared in 2010, as the Great Recession raged.
"I kept hearing about all these kids who couldn't find jobs at all," Yared said. "Everyone was desperate for work and companies weren't hiring," which bumped up the unemployment rate not only for adults, but for teenagers as well.
"Where would the jobs come from?" Yared wondered. "It was clear they wouldn't come from businesses; businesses were just not hiring."
Accountability through community
A Lebanon native, Yared moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard. She lived there for years, with a break to attend the Wharton School in Philadelphia, but the city never provided the kind of community she would later experience in Lexington (the family moved here 15 years ago), or in her home country.
"It's a really warm and gregarious society. People are always talking to each other and are welcoming," she said.
Equipped with an MBA from Wharton, a notion of community and experience building online marketplaces, it occurred to Yared everyone's around-the-house to-do list made for a great opportunity with so many people ready, willing and able to earn money. Yared knew from her past work what it would take for people to feel comfortable letting their kids find work through a website.
"But I think my biggest insight was because Lexington has such strong communities," she explained, with neighbors walking through each other's homes and people living in town for years on end, "there's a pressure of belonging to the same community that's good, and that I wanted to bring to bear," she said.
She filed the concept into her folder of possible business ideas, begun during her business school days. Although Yared had stepped away from the professional world to focus on raising sons Alexander and Dominic (now grown), she, too, was looking for full-time work when the idea struck. So she let it simmer.
"I gave myself six months, because I knew it would be a big commitment," she said. "There aren't many things that are worth many years of your life."
In that time, Yared looked at different online platforms for the site, and decided to have it custom built to her specific requirements; it had to be safe enough for minors, with specific rules and parental engagement. People would be able to post the kind of help they needed, while those needing work could respond to posted requests.
A budding new phase
The day of HelpAroundTown's May 28, 2011 Discovery Day roll-out, 35 people signed up for the site and five posted jobs, according to Yared. From there, the site grew. It became a way for people of all ages — not just teens — to find gigs. Now, 25 percent of Lexington households have signed up for the site, which has registered users in 172 Massachusetts towns, most of them in the greater Boston area, according to Yared. Word of mouth, including via the Lexington List, has grown the site: "We've never paid for advertising," she said.
HelpAroundTown's budding adolescence aims to move forward in a fresh way. Working with developer Monte Brown, Yared wants to "restructure the website in ways that make it even more valuable to users," she said. For example, "people cheat," Yared said wryly, by adding their services to the site, rather than simply replying to suitable job posts. But she understands that the "cheating" represents a need — and she hopes to add a providers section to the site, where people can list their services in a dedicated space, taking away the need to work around the system.
Importantly, this new phase will offer a bridge between youth and seniors, Yared explained. "A lot of the demand for services is coming from older people," she said. "I get calls every day." Phone calls, that is. That's not really the idea, but it's what happens; senior organizations and service agencies around Massachusetts list HelpAroundTown as a resource — be it for help with yard work, rides, or tasks such as installing a window air conditioning unit.
Students, young, able-bodied and eager to help and to make money, can do just that.
"It enables them to supplement their income, especially if their internship doesn't pay enough, so they can do what they love and still make money," Yared explained.
Helping the business, and herself
As for her own income, it hasn't changed since she first envisioned HelpAroundTown in 2010.
"It's been a labor of love," Yared said. "I have not paid myself a dollar since I started it." This year, for the first time, the website will break even.
Devising and growing HelpAroundTown has taught the entrepreneur money isn't what motivates her. At the same time, the work has deeply convinced her of the need to turn a profit to allow the service to reach its full potential. For this year's Discovery Day, Yared sought out sponsorship for the first time, and TD Bank agreed. It's a partnership that went well, she said.
"So it has to become a sustainable, profitable business to survive," Yared said, adding that her site has reached a new level. "I want to see how far I can take it."
Looking back at HelpAroundTown's nascent seven years, Yared notes that she has used technology to connect people, amplifying a sense of community — and perhaps underscoring a value brought with her from Lebanon.
And while she has goals yet to reach: "I feel that I'm in a good place, because I set out to solve a particular problem, and we've done that very successfully."