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Yesterday
My story begins nearly 6000 thousand miles from where I am today and probably represents an example of traveling a different path than where I expected to go.
I first came to the United States in August 31 1993. Although I never expected to spend more than a few weeks here than for a simple vacation, I quickly gained great appreciation for many aspects of the American life.
My first job here in the United States was working for a moving company as part of their moving staff. Working inside of a quality company, I was able to see how a moving company that really cared about its customers made decisions and handled their operations. Although this was truly back-breaking work and the wages were hardly enough to pay for food and rent, it was a unique window into what later spawned my company that I now run.
I decided that rather than spend 12 hours a day packing and carrying boxes, I would set out on my own and start my own moving company. While probably a crazy idea given the risks and my own experience, it turned into a fortuitous venture for me. I built the business with a nearly manic focus on making our customers happy. I remember in one instance I built a special packing crate in my own garage to transport a chello for one of my moving customers because I was so worried that without the special box, it might be damaged. In my years running a moving company, we never received any customer complaints and built our business from testimonials and referrals. I was our head of sales and personally went on many of our estimates and worked with our customers to handle the planning of their move. In those early days, I would sometimes go out to the house and do the moving estimate, show up a few days later to lead the packing efforts and then hop into the truck and drive it to the new residence where I would do the unpacking.
During this period of trying to build a moving company, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could tell people about what we did and how we were different and special. I did mailings, bought yellow pages ads and followed all the same steps that everyone else did but I realized that just following the crowd was never going to get me ahead. Then one day I discovered the Internet and things started to change for me. In 1998, I bought a computer and started to spend a lot of time discovering the relatively new phenomenon that was the Internet. The more I searched around, the more I realized how powerful this medium was and how useful it could be for consumers. Fortunately, I grossly underestimated how big it would someday become but I was able to early on buy an Internet domain - www.vanlines.com. I liked the domain because I felt that it had the connotation of a big and powerful company. Soon after the website launched, people started to visit the website looking for information on getting moving quotes and finding movers.
I operated the website for 2 years until I realized that by connecting consumers with movers directly, there was a real opportunity to build a business. Soon I was the owner of Vanlines.com, LLC and had my first employees, who came each day to my house where in the cramped surroundings of my basement, we started to pursue my dream of building an Internet company. Some of these employees still work with me today and I have great appreciation for their willingness to endure what was certainly a most challenging time in my company’s history.
I soon acquired some other relevant domains – carmovers.com for consumers looking for auto transport companies, internationalmovers.com focused on people moving from one country to another. After a couple of years in the basement, my little business started to grow and show promise. I took another gamble and decided to rent office space in downtown Manhattan just a few doors down from the New York Stock Exchange. I thought that if I wanted to be a big company, why not go to work each day down the street from the heartbeat of American business.
With my new office in place, I started hiring more employees and brought the employees that had worked with me in my basement office to our new offices. Fortunately, good luck continued on my side, along with an unbelievable growth in the usage of the Internet. Each month, more and more people would visit our sites and the company continued to grow. Moving companies grew more and more excited about our product offerings and our network of movers grew to hundreds in a very short time.
I again felt the time for taking additional risks was right and I decided to expand our business further by purchasing the www.nationalmortgage.com domain and finally after many years of negotiations, I purchased www.relocation.com.
In the past few months, we have moved to bigger offices and added more and more employees. Before long, the company had grown to a point where I was able to bring in accomplished, successful business leaders to help me grow the business. My little Internet business had finally grown up.
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