Benzion Aboud saw the opportunity. It was staring him right in the face. The shopping habits of the American consumer were changing, and Saveology.com LLC had a chance to capitalize on it in a big way.
“We’re very much like Expedia for home services,” says Aboud, the company’s founder and CEO. “So our goal was very clear. We wanted to be the biggest distributor of home services in America. We don’t really care what you buy, but we want to educate you. And after we educate you, we want to transact a sale just like Expedia would with hotels and flights. They’ll educate you on the time and prices and then you buy the product or service.”
The opportunity came about due in large part to the economic recession of 2008. Consumers were being much more selective about how they spent money, including expenses such as TV, phone and Internet services. The good news for Aboud was that consumers weren’t ready to abandon these services completely. They just didn’t want to spend as much on them.
And that’s where Aboud hoped to cash in.
“You may stop going to dinner two or three times a week or not take two vacations a year,” Aboud says. “But one thing you’re not canceling if you lose your job or if things get tough is your entertainment and your communications. We actually grew during those times because people did want to look at different options to make their dollar go a long way.”
Aboud wanted to be the one to provide those options, but there was one big problem: Saveology wasn’t ready to do it. He didn’t have enough people, and he didn’t have the right technology to capitalize on the increased demand.
“My challenge was to build the proper technology to sustain the volume we were going to be generating and also bring in the right leadership that we as a company would need to get us there,” Aboud says. “With the volume of people hitting my website and the volume of people calling our call center, our infrastructure was on toothpicks. We were really not servicing the consumers the way I envisioned.
“There was not one leader in this industry and not one company that dominated this space. We as a company knew that we needed to build a business that would be the biggest home service provider in the U.S. and would have the scalability to service millions of people. So we had to build the team, the technology and the marketing effort to do that.”
