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“We’re strongly recession-proof; we are in a success bubble right now,” confidently declared 31-year-old Genevieve Thiers, founder and chief executive of Chicago-based online caregiver matching service Sittercity Inc.

Ranked last year  by Inc. magazine as one of America’s 500 fastest-growing private companies, Sittercity expanded this February into new, larger quarters in the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. The company currently has 32 employees including two part-time and is hiring more hands to accommodate its growing list of caregivers, now exceeding 1 million in 33 cities nationwide. It plans to expand next year to such countries as Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Started eight years ago as a babysitter matching service, Sittercity later expanded its reach to petsitters, housesitters, senior caregivers and tutors.

“We had desperately been seeking child care, with no luck,” wrote Karen Roslindale of Massachusetts in a testimonial posted on Sittercity.com. “Within three days of posting, we had over 30 responses and within two weeks, had hired three wonderful babysitters for periodic babysitting.”

Another woman wrote that she found a caregiver for an autistic child and saved her marriage.

To assure security, Sittercity.com works this way:  For a fee of $9.99, sitters upload their profiles for a background check, including criminal records and traffic violations, by LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group Inc. Once approved, the sitters' profiles are posted on Sittercity's Web site.

Meanwhile families join the site to find sitters, paying a signup fee of $39.99 plus $9.99 a month or $95.88 for an annual membership. Once they post the jobs and describe what they look for in a sitter, Sittercity e-mails the possible matches to both parties. After each engagement the parents are asked to rate the sitter, and sitters' profiles are ranked by order based on those reviews.

In addition to the family membership fees, Sittercity gains revenues from corporate clients, which include Northwestern University, Monster Worldwide Inc. and MasterCard Inc. They pay a corporate fee to give all their employees access to Sittercity's service. Thiers said lead generation fees and ad sales produce additional revnues.

At the outset Thiers worked full-time at IBM Corp. and funded her startup from her own pay of $40,000 a year. Now Thiers is not only one of a few women entrepreneurs who've passed the million-dollar revenue mark, she is a professional opera singer and runs a non-profit Chicago opera group called Opera Moda. Her second book, "Something for Nothing," is about to be published.

“It’s an art if you can manage the balance,” Thiers said, referring to her professional careers and a personal life with her husband, the chief operating officer of Sittercity, whom she met, appropriately enough, on the Internet. 

“I have found a way to merge three worlds, you can’t do it if you keep them separate,” she said.

Thiers has appeared on CNN, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, The View, the Donny Deutsch Show and the Today show, where she opened her segment with song.