Growing a business from one simple idea

Growing a business from one simple idea

It’s been said: “Someone who’s never been exposed to it doesn’t really understand that the family business is the moving force in the family.”

In the case of my family, the meaning is both figurative and literal

The direct roots of my company can be traced back to the Great Depression, and my grandmother’s side business of owning and renting apartments in Corona, a borough of Queens in New York City.

When an apartment would be vacated, all the contents would end up in my grandmother’s basement in Elmhurst. When I was a kid, I vividly remember my grandmother’s basement. It was a treasure trove of stuff from floor to ceiling. She was a child of the depression, and proud of it.

In later years, when my grandmother got cancer, my mother moved grandma into our house, then liquidated the home in Elmhurst, where she grew up as a child. Countless weekends were spent renting dumpsters and enlisting the help of all her old friends to help unload grandma’s home. The task was not for the faint of heart, and mom began thinking that there must be a better and easier way to get the job done.

Mom quit her job around 2002, and put an ad in the local paper that read: “Feeling overwhelmed? Old stuff out brings the money in.” She quickly grew a following, and in a short time was hosting two estate / tag sales every weekend. A business was born.

I hung around my mother’s sales, and once in a while my friends and I would help her out by renting dumpsters and cleaning out the houses for extra cash.

By 2006, I was a college kid studying human relations, and bartending and waiting tables at night for extra money. It was during that time I the met the director of an assisted living company. He hated moving companies, but liked me.

He would tell his clients, who, coincidentally, used to my mother’s clients, that I could help them move. He trusted me. Since the clients already had met me, they felt comfortable, as well. I started to realize that my mother’s company – as well as the industry as a whole – was fragmented, and that if I could figure out a better way to operate there’d be no stopping my growth as an entrepreneur. That is what drove me, and in 2008, I bought my first box truck and incorporated Relocators.

I loved relieving people of a huge stress. I loved helping families during a difficult time. And I loved the idea that I could build this into something that no one else has – a business that will clean out your home, help you move, hold estates sales to get rid of the things you no longer need or find storage for the things you do.

The family business truly was the moving force in my family.