Mother for hire: Start-up takes care of 'personal chores' for young professionals, students

In a typical week, Ilene Scoratow does 30 loads of laundry, cleans two to four apartments and delivers groceries to at least four regular customers.

She has three children of her own, including an infant. But in her free time after her day job, Ms. Scoratow runs a service called Another Mother, where she performs some of the basic tasks one might expect of a parent.

I was reading a book on entrepreneurship because I wanted to start my own business, Ms. Scoratow said. All the advice she read suggested sticking with something youre good at. So I thought about it: I like to teach and I like being a mom.

She started about a year ago and sticks primarily to the East End, where she lives. From 6:30 a.m to 3 p.m., she goes to her day job as a Spanish teacher at Colfax Elemetary.

At 3 p.m., she takes whatever appointments she has that afternoon from her business. Shes not working entirely alone; her husband helps with the day-to-day business and at home, and she has brought two other teachers on as independent contractors.

Currently she has a clientele of about 40 people, including younger working professionals and university students. Its pretty evenly split among Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne and Chatham, she said.

While shes done some modest local advertising, Ms. Scoratow says most of her referrals are via word-of-mouth. She charges an $8 delivery fee for groceries, and $1.50 per pound of laundry. New customers, most of whom come to her via her website, pay a $20 deposit via Paypal, then she invoices them for the balance after shes finished the job.

The personal chore business is no longer just the domain of professional maid services, but has become a fast-growing part of the so-called sharing economy.

For instance, San Francisco-based Taskrabbit lets users outsource small jobs and errands like food deliveries and furniture assembly via a smartphone app. Homejoy, also based in San Francisco, offers home cleaning services. Neither one offers its services yet in Pittsburgh.

Another Mothers true target audience, whether students or young professionals, is millennials, a generation that gets a lot of bad press for the perception that theyre too dependent on their parents and may be taking a long time to transition into adulthood successfully. A 2012 Clark University study found some 30 percent of the parents of millennials, loosely defined as 18- to 29-year-olds, provide at least occasional financial support to their children.

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Mother for hire: Start-up takes care of 'personal chores' for young professionals, students