As job prospects dwindle in labor markets around the country, plucky entrepreneurs don’t appear to be waiting as long for the sound of opportunity’s knock. A headline in The New York Times over the weekend read: “Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own.”

And so it is that a husband and wife team in Memphis, along with a third partner, have started a business venture for anyone who finds themselves with new chores that come with odd jobs they’ve picked up to get by.

That venture is Bizfruits.com, and it is the brainchild of Ludovic and Katie Bruneau, who – with help from partner Harish Dahima – have spent more than a year fleshing out the concept. They started with a simple idea: Build a Web-based business management resource that’s easy to use and that centralizes and streamlines a variety of the day-to-day tasks of running a business.

The how-to go-to’s

They had firsthand experience in realizing the concept filled a local void. The Bruneaus founded The Bruneau Academy, a foreign language instruction business they started in Memphis in 2005. The academy offers private and group foreign language classes for children and adults as well as corporate clients.

While they offer second-language classes for clients, the foreign language academy has, in a way, also enrolled the Bruneaus in a master class of their own. That class is in how to build a business from scratch, keep it running and help it grow.

“A lot of our teachers were coming to us because they had tried to run services on their own, and then managing the whole process was a part they didn’t like at all,” said Ludovic Bruneau.

Managing the process involves things such as producing and keeping track of invoices. Creating a Web presence. Spending an appropriate amount of time getting the word out about whatever service is being offered.

Depending on the size and scale, spending time and money on those tasks for a business venture might appear to be more trouble than it’s worth. Bruneau, for example, is a foreign language teacher at White Station High School, and he’s encountered several teachers in that position.

“I know a lot of teachers who part time will go cut people’s grass, they do home rehab, or they tutor kids in math just to get extra money,” he said. “But they don’t want to pay for a Web site. They don’t want to pay for accounting software. They’re doing it five to 10 hours a week, and the last thing they want to do is spend money on a Web site, accounting, all that stuff. So we created this software.”

One-stop shop

It was a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention. By signing up for Bizfruit’s free services, users get a basic Internet presence with a Web page, invoice creation and tracking services and payment management features for clients.

Since the program is Web-based, part-time entrepreneurs can handle the accounting and managerial features Bizfruits provides them using cell phones and the Internet.

The site also allows users to send out invoices to customers that show up as coming from Bizfruits, which the partners have found carries extra weight. If customers see that an invoice came from a company like Bizfruits, they’re inclined to think the service provider uses a third party to handle their billing and may be quicker to pay.

“We wanted to give something very simple, like Google, to people,” Dahima said. “Nothing complicated. It should be intuitive to use, (serve) a purpose, and I think to some degree we’ve achieved that.”