- 1 April, 2004 -

It's perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime event your daughter's marrying a doctor, in your backyard on the hottest day of the year, and 250 guests dressed to the nines are going to descend upon your sepctic system. Please don't tell us you're going to make your guests use the same restroom facilities as a construction worker. Trust us, you're going to want a portable restroom with air conditioning, piped-in music complimenting the wedding's theme, individual tissue wipes and seat cleaners, fresh flowers, a mirror with purse shelf, motion-detection lighting and appropriate air freshners. And a real sink with soap and paper towels no more mistaking the urinal for the sink. It's the biggest event of your life, the most important people in your life, and then you send them into a stinky, little plastic unit? Asks Liza Kendall, the founder of ElizaJ, an upscale portable restroom company located on Cape Cod that is now getting into franchising. The only thing worse than a stinky, plastic unit is 250 people drinking champagne all day and then sneaking into your house to use the indoor plumbing, or, in the case of gentlemen, watering the bushes behind the house. Telling people you're in the portable restroom business does draw a laugh, Kendall admits. "It is funny," she says. "I suppose funeral directors get the same thing." But Kendall's laughing all the way from the bathroom to the bank she counts IBM, General Motors, Microsoft, GE and the Kennedy family among her clients. ElizaJ grew out of Kendall's corporate event planning business in tony Cape Cod. A fall from a horse in 1990 had left her with some free time while she recuperated, and with a computer borrowed from her sister, Kendall started taking online college courses ("You can imagine how slow that was," she says, about the now obsolete technology of 1990). "I thought it would be great to be a freelance concierge," Kendall says. As a self-described corporate brat, she knew her parents' experience that one always needs services when escaping to Cape Cod. Kendall named her business Leave It To Liza (dropping the "E" in her name for alliteration's sake). Most of her requests were to find rentals and plan weddings. A friend who worked for a hotel on the Cape recommended Kendall for a corporate event for ESPN and her reputation was born. While planning corporate events is lucrative and exciting, it's also exhausting, Kendall says. "Looking at the future (in the mid-90s), I saw that this corporate boom couldn't go on forever," she says. "We needed a back-up plan." Plan B was to become the supplier of upscale, portable restrooms for special events a need she saw first hand in her own business. Through her contacts, Kendall has been able to secure corporate accounts. That's when the idea of setting up a national network of suppliers entered into the business plan. She read the book "Franchising for Dummies," by Michael Seid and the late Dave Thomas, and contacted Novidian Corporation, a management and technical consulting firm that helps companies decide whether franchising is viable for their concept. Ed Matthews, CEO of Novidian, says that when the proposal for ElizaJ came across his desk, he said, "no way." "And then I met Eliza," he says. "She's the perfect client. She's good at what she does, she's open minded and she's exceptional at execution." ElizaJ is not your average franchise. A good chunk of the business will be national accounts. "Eliza wanted to be the go-to person," Matthew says. That means franchisees will have some accounts handed to them. Since many of the companies she's already working with have events nationwide, headquarters will handle the reservations and customer service and the franchisees will hand the local end: delivering and picking up the units and making sure that everything runs smoothly on site. Kendall already has an "in" with the equestrian community to supply her self-contained units for competitions and is working on signing up with NASCAR to supply the portable restrooms for its VIP events. Not only does ElizaJ have the contracts, they also have the expertise. Kendall's husband quit his job with the family business to help her with hers. He handles operations, while she deals with the contracts and the costumer service. And believe it or not there are some logistics people need to know about placing portable restrooms that can make or break an event. Kendall remembers attending one anniversary party as a guest and watching an elderly woman searching for her husband half the evening. Seems he had tried to go behind the portable restroom to relieve himself in the bushes and fell down a hill. The woman finally spotted him slowly making his way back up the hill. That's something that would never happen at an ElizaJ function. Eliza Kendall is president of ElizaJ. Her company provides fine rest rooms for outdoor events. A former event planner, she has more than 12 years experience in the special event business. She founded ElizaJ in 1997, after realizing that there was a need for attractive, impeccable, upscale deliverable rest rooms. Focused entirely on quality products and first-rate customer service, ElizaJ has a lengthy client list of caterers, party rental companies and outdoor organizers. ElizaJ is headquartered in Harwich, Massachusetts. As the largest provider of practical, elegant restrooms for catered outdoor events, ElizaJ is granting independent contracts and franchises throughout the U.S. ElizaJ currently serves clients throughout the East Coast. For more information call (800) 437-1139; e-mail info@Elizaj.com, or visit the company's Web site at www.Elizaj.com.

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