One of the few downsides of being a single girl in the city is when you need an extra pair of hands to help you put together that IKEA thingamajig or hang some blinds. Just the other day this author had to turn to Twitter with a desperate plea for help in hanging up a pot rack (a winged plastic wall anchor was involved, it wasn’t going to be easy). On that night, Twitter was sort of like our very own “The Secret,” and a friend ended up coming over to help (and voila: success!) But what if Twitter failed us? WHAT THEN? Enter: Rent-A-Gent.
34-year-old single man Ian Zelesko is offering up his services to the women of New York. He’ll paint your walls, help you move, install your air conditioner… and he’ll even accompany you to a couples get together if you don’t want to be The Single One (which sort of starts getting into Loverboy territory). You can check out his Tumblr for some documentation of is handy work, and this week we asked Zelesko some questions about his business, which, by the way, makes no money—he works only for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. And even though his “business” revolves around single women, working up a sweat, and alcohol, he swears it never gets physical in that way… okay, maybe just that once.
Will you also do odd jobs for men if they contact you? I have turned down jobs for guys, it’s not the intent of the service. I’ve also had to turn down jobs for women who had husbands that rather buy a case of beer than deal with IKEA furniture. It’s not meant to be cheap labor.
Will you do a job for a girl with a boyfriend? Any boyfriend or husband worth his salt should be able to do this type of work, so I would probably turn it down if he was just lazy or couldn’t be bothered by physical labor. Now if the job required two sets of hands (a big move or an installment, etc) I would probably help out.
Is there any request you’ll have to turn down because of lack of knowledge/tools/etc? As you’ll see from the blog, I’ve done a flat screen mount on a wall so that’s fairly involved (that was a two man job so i brought a friend of mine). I generally won’t mess around with electricity jobs, I am not that experienced and I don’t want to short out an apartment building or anything. It’s mostly assembly, moving, drilling, hanging, painting, driving rented vans, etc. I am by no means a contractor or anything, I am just crafty enough for most jobs in NYC.
What prompted you to start this? This all started when I helped some friends out with some jobs and they would take me out for beer as thanks. During one beer session we realized there are most likely a lot of women in NYC that need something like this. The insight was genius, so we decided, let’s do it and see what happens. I work in advertising and love experimenting to see what takes off and what doesn’t. It kind of took off a bit when i launched it and made some rounds on Twitter and Tumblr, but it never really seeded it beyond that, it was all word of mouth. The main issue to overcome is how to get people to feel comfortable employing me given all the sketchiness on Craigslist (enter the blog with the photos and the testimonials). There’s a certain level of comfort and humor seeing all the jobs on the blog. I would say a majority of my jobs still come from some degree of friends-of-friends-of-friends.
You will eventually be flooded with requests, if you aren’t already, what then? How will you choose which jobs to do? Like i said, I have a full time job and seeing as i get paid in beer I am obviously not in this for monetary reasons. For me, this is more of a fun social experiment based off a great insight. But as you can see I’ve had a good amount of work since the summer. If it really got going I would need to figure out how to manage/decide on the jobs or bring in some trusted/skilled friends to help out.
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