A former technology consultant opened her own franchise of Computer moms after downsizing left her looking for work.
By MELIA BOWIE
Published September 21, 2003
NEW PORT RICHEY - Jo Keniry had two options. Take a demotion or take a severance package. Her Minnesota company was downsizing.
Keniry, a senior consultant in voice and data convergence, had her own plan.
With her severance pay in the bank, she and her husband, Bo, moved to Florida. They had planned on moving there someday anyway.
She would look for work in the Sunshine State.
But timing can be everything.
"We came down here in the summer," she said. "Right before 9/11."
With few job prospects, Keniry joined Pro-Net - a networking group for unemployed professionals. There she was steered toward a new career path: her own business.
Called Computer moms - an acronym for "mentors on the move" - and launched this summer, the business caters to the computer-challenged, offering house calls of a different sort.
"I think everybody has gone through computer training in a big group at work," she said. "But it doesn't look the same when they get back to their PC."
Keniry, 53, recently finished training a part-time staff of six and said the market is out there for her help.
"Technology is coming down in price, and everybody is touched by technology, she said.
But not everyone is trained to handle it.
That's where Keniry comes in. Her Computer moms franchise is the only one in Florida so far, according to the Austin, Texas-based company.
Keniry runs it as a home-based business from her New Port Richey address. Sessions run from about $60 to $65 an hour.
"You could call us, and we'd develop a program that helps you," she said. "We'd move through the basics that you know very quickly and then concentrate on the things you might be having trouble with.
"We call it learning at your pace at your place," she said.
Keniry's Pasco franchise of Computer moms is launching during a national trend that is seeing a wave of female-owned businesses riding high, according to the Small Business Administration.
Such businesses are growing at twice the rate of all U.S. businesses and number more than 9-million nationally. In Pasco, such businesses generated more than $416,400 in sales and numbered 6,256.
Founded in 1994 in Austin by Georgia Jones, then a stay-at-home mom, Computer moms now has locations in 21 states. Franchising began in 1997 and expanded from Texas in 2000.
International expansion is expected to begin in phases in the next 12 to 24 months. Independently owned franchises can cost from $28,000 to $35,000.
Residential clients - primarily stay-at-home moms - and small businesses were the initial target groups but now at least 50 percent of their business is IT outsourcing, said Jones, 52. Firms cutting back on benefits or annual salaries are frequent customers.
"We're finding that a lot of companies are downsizing," she said. "They want someone on call but they don't need a full-time person so they outsource to us."
In Pasco, Keniry is working to grow Computer moms via senior citizens and small businesses, which she hopes will ultimately make up 70 percent of her clientele. Residential clients would make up the rest of her customer base.
Spring Hill resident Donald Marcum, 75, heard about the group in August through a direct mailing.
"I have a Web site called the Greater Southern Country Music Association," Marcum said. The site at gscma.com is about nine years old.
"I had a girl doing it for me, but when she left I was stranded," he said. "The site kind of went dead. It just hung there" for more than 18 months. Annual maintenance was about $1,000 a year.
Now Marcum is learning to add to the site himself.
The night of his first one-hour session he was able to add a link and plans to schedule more lessons.
"I'm not computer illiterate now," he said. "I'm what you'd call mediocre. I sell on eBay, and I play games on it."
But the same cannot be said for some of his peers.
"I figure old people are afraid of computers, and that's so wrong," he said. "If we can break them out of thinking old they can do research, they can do genealogy. There's so much out there."
