Alan Goldstein: E-preneur targets home services

But a Dallas start-up called ServiceLane.com wants to do for household services what Amazon.com did for books, sending us to our keyboards when we have the impulse to get the carpets cleaned or to rent a limousine for a party.

It's an ambitious goal, particularly considering that ServiceLane.com has yet to bring in even a dollar of revenue. But Lee Blaylock, the 34-year-old founder and chief executive, says he is nothing if not determined. His plan has been in the making for years. He says he was practically born to be an entrepreneur.

"It was never a question of if," Mr. Blaylock says. "It was always, 'What's the idea?'"

ServiceLan!
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e.com maintains a database of service providers in different communities. The company says it screens the service providers in various ways, including licenses and credit and legal histories. More important, all listed services also receive ratings from customers, for whom ServiceLane.com is free.

Whether Mr. Blaylock has a winner remains to be seen, but he has convinced a leading Austin-based venture-capital firm and a number of blue chip individual investors that he's onto something. ServiceLane.com has taken in $15 million in financing, and Mr. Blaylock expects to seek an additional $30 million in the next couple of months.

"We were really impressed with the team, for both their technology and business savvy," says Brian Goffman, a principal at Austin Ventures, which along with an arm of Fremont Group, a San Francisco-based investment company, put $7.5 million into ServiceLane.com in November.

Other investors include Andrew Busey, chairman of Living.com Inc. in Aus!
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tin; Ted Enloe, a longtime board member of Compaq Computer Corp.; Michael H. Jordan, the former chairman and chief executive of CBS Corp., now chairman of Luminant Worldwide Corp.; and C. Vin Prothro, chairman and chief executive of Dallas Semiconductor Corp.

The concept of ServiceLane.com didn't come to Mr. Blaylock in a single flash. Instead, it was a process that evolved in three stages.

The first part was that the business would be online. In the early 1990s, when Mr. Blaylock was a product marketing manager for Dell Computer Corp. in Germany, the Dallas native kept up with news from the States by spending hours on CompuServe. He was wowed by how his computer virtually transported him back home.

The second part came a few years later, back in Dallas, once the World Wide Web was capturing everyone's attention. Mr. Blaylock toyed with concepts related to online bill paying. His angle was that banks would use the service to generate leads for commercial accounts.

Th!
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e plan changed direction a third time in August 1998, when Mr. Blaylock's air-conditioning went on the fritz.

"That was a very hot summer," he recalls. "No one in my office had a good recommendation. It took seven or eight calls and three visits before I found somebody."

Initially, Mr. Blaylock called the business fundu.com, a name he thought was playful, cute and easy to type. But with its nationwide launch this month, the company changed the name to ServiceLane.com to reflect the kind of trusted source that consumers in focus groups said they were looking for to select a service provider.

Mr. Blaylock says his opportunity is so big because the services sector is so fragmented and information on individual providers is so scarce. He says customers have been forced to work too hard in selecting service providers. "Everyone we talked to had personal pain in this area," he says.

Moreover, the opportunity to become a market leader is huge because so few small service!
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s businesses have adopted an Internet strategy, says Mr. Goffman of Austin Ventures. Eventually, he says, ServiceLane.com's business model as an intermediary can bring healthy transaction fees. "This is a model that if it works - and we're confident it will - can have high gross margins," he says.

ServiceLane.com also can have lower costs for attracting customers than typical dot.coms, Mr. Goffman says, because it will depend largely on referrals from product-related sites. So far, the company has signed up OurHouse.com and Living.com, which is also an Austin Ventures portfolio company.

"With the right partnerships, you can spend less to build the brand but get just as much bang," Mr. Goffman says.

Mr. Blaylock sees all kinds of opportunities, including expanding into a wider range of services. Also, he expects to benefit from advertising and marketing revenue, directing customers to services that customers didn't know they wanted.

"You come to our site for assist!
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ance on air-conditioning for a 5,000-square-foot home. We also see you've ordered catering and floral services. You're a perfect candidate for high-end kitchen equipment. We can send you service companies that specialize in your kind of house."

Technology editor Alan Goldstein writes about the Internet and electronic commerce for The Dallas Morning News. His e-mail address is agoldstein@dallasnews.com.