Interview with One Hour Parties!
I get a lot of e-mails from people asking me if I would be interested in working with them or hearing about their products. And honestly, I receive so many that I don't always have time to respond. But last week, I received one of the rare great e-mails about a company out there that is providing a great service, and a great opportunity for moms; Our specialty! I was really excited to get to talk to Leanne Mumm Padro (pictured below with her business partner, Christopher), of One Hour Parties.
One Hour Parties is a fantastic concept for women and moms who love to party plan. They do corporate parties, kid's parties, at home parties, you name it. And, they've been working with some fabulous companies across the country — Google, Amazon, Sony Online and Microsoft (just to name a few).
But here's the real kicker for our Better Way Moms: They are also franchisors and have a great franchising program where franchisees can own their own One Hour Parties business! They currently have four franchises: Seattle, Bellevue, San Diego and Orlando.
The company was started in Leanne's basement, she's a fabulous mompreneur and she was able to sit down with me and talk about what it's like running a business and now a successful franchise, across the country, while being a mom!
In addition, One Hour Parties is having a give away just for Better Way Moms! A One Hour Parties FREE logo tattoo!
Subscribe to the "Party Time" e-mail newsletter and receive a cute One Hour Parties temporary tattoo. Offer expires January 29th, 2010.
1. Subscribe on the main page of their Web site, www.onehourparties.com.
2. E-mail service@onehourparties.com to let them know where to mail your tattoo!
My interview with Leanne:
Sarah: How was the idea for One Hour Parties created?
Leanne: Well, Christopher and I actually worked together at another job, where we were both marketing and PR professionals. I had left the company, which was a boutique design firm here in Seattle, and decided to work as a freelancer. We had gotten together for lunch and started toying with the idea of a business, and we had even started to play around with a business plan. We decided that we'd made such a good team previously that why not do it again as team-mates doing something we really enjoy doing. I was really looking at that time for the flexibility I thought I would want. The flexibility of being a business owner or working independently for when I wanted started a family.
Sarah: How long ago was that?
Leanne: We started our business in July of 2001. The company we had started had an aspect of what we're doing now, but we kind of spun off the concept of One Hour Parties from the original concept.
Sarah: I see. So were you two already into party planning?
Leanne: We were, and we both enjoyed that kind of thing. We're both passionate and we love being creative, but I would say that the drive came from the fact that we're marketing people. And we had been working on a lot of other peoples' brands. We decided that we wanted to create our own brand. We're actually brand nerds. We both very much enjoy branding and the whole concept of what makes a brand work on a national level. We actually decided that we wanted to build a national brand, and then we had to decide what brand we wanted to build.
Sarah: I have to be honest, that's not the usual story.
Leanne: Yeah, we went about this a little bit differently. And of course, you end up being drawn to things you're passionate about. But we really did begin to look at strategically, which I think a lot of women don't do enough of. You need to look at what you're passionate about, but you really need to combine that with what the right industry and you need to figure out what the world will welcome. Because, in our case, we wanted to look at a fragmented industry that we could change. It took us a while to figure that out, and figure out what would we enjoy. We ended up looking at this super fragmented party and event planning industry. Then through our experience working with businesses as customers and as clients, we learned that there was a niche in the corporate world where HR managers couldn't find unique fun, quick, affordable employee events very easily. They were left with caterers. And that's where the concept of One Hour Parties came up, at the corporate level. We asked, "What can we do to solve the problem for HR and creative managers who want to reward their employees at large corporations?" So if we go way back, that's actually where the name came from.
Sarah: That's really cool.
Leanne: Yes, so as much as we were trying to have fun, and we had passion and wanted to be creative, we knew we needed to find a market that would support a national brand, wasn't too crowded and one we could afford to market. That's where we came up with this "redefining" of the world of event planning; which has typically always been a little mysterious and consultation-oriented rather than off the shelf. We felt there was another way to offer party planning that would be more approachable and more mainstream.
Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. So how do you structure the business for yourself now that you're a mom? You said that you started the company with the idea that you wanted to create (Continued...)
