How to approach a concierge firm and what to ask first

Three things make the first conversation productive: an honest estimate of how many requests a month you will generate, the two or three categories most of them will fall into, and the markets you actually operate in.

Providers quote against volume and scope. Without those numbers the quote is a guess, and a guess that is too low is the more common and more expensive outcome.

Ask about a specific request in a specific market in a specific month: the one you actually care about. The quality of that answer says more than any capability document, because it is the only question that cannot be prepared in advance.

Then ask three operational ones: who covers your named contact when they are away and whether that person holds any of your history; what the escalation path is outside working hours; and which costs are passed through at cost and which carry a margin.

Which engagement model is being proposed and why, what is inside the fee and what is not, and what the notice period is for the things you most want. If those three are not clear at the end, the conversation has not finished.

It should also settle what happens when the answer is no. Firms with a real process describe a fallback; firms without one describe successes.

The firms named across these pages are indexed from their own published material. Presence in a market is taken from the firm’s own page for that market, a fee figure is recorded only with the source that published it, and the methodology sets out both rules in full. The index exists to make the market legible before the first conversation, which is when the useful questions are cheapest to ask.

What follows is between you and the firm. There is no arrangement with any of them and no commission on anything that comes of it, which is why the pages here compare published terms rather than recommend a provider.

That is also the boundary of what this research can settle. It can tell you which firms publish a presence in a market, what the four engagement models cost as published bands, and how far ahead requests around a local fixture have to be placed. It cannot tell you which firm will answer the phone at midnight in a city where you have never used one, and any page that claims otherwise is describing an intention.

The questions run in the other direction too, and a firm that asks none of them is quoting blind. Expect to be asked how many requests a month you expect and how that number moves across the year, because a household that generates two requests in eleven months and forty in December is a different commitment from one that generates four every month.

Expect to be asked which markets you move between, since coverage claims are the part of this business most likely to be a relationship somewhere else rather than an office. The city pages show which firms publish a presence where, and the answer you get should be reconcilable with what the firm publishes about itself.

Expect a question about authority: whether the provider may commit your money without asking each time, and up to what limit. That single answer decides most of how the arrangement will feel, and it is worth deciding before the call rather than during it.

Write down the fee, the model and the notice period immediately after each conversation, in the same three fields for every firm. Quotes in this category are rarely comparable as given, since one arrives as an annual membership and the next as an hourly rate with a minimum, and the comparison only becomes possible once both are converted to the same monthly footing. The rate estimator does that conversion from a published band and a monthly volume.

Then check the quote against the volume you actually estimated. A membership bought for a handful of requests a year costs many times what the same requests would cost individually, and it is the most common expensive mistake in this category. The arithmetic that decides it is a division, not a judgement.