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Gentle Giant: Leaving Your Job Unfinished Is Not An Option

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“No one can stop me when I taste the feeling
Nothing could ever bring me down
No one can stop me when…”

Avicii did his best to wake me up, increasing the volume with each next phrase of his song. It was dark outside and I could only see the lights of cars moving on I-95 out of my window. The clock struck 4:00 am. It took me a colossal amount of effort to lift my head from the pillow.

With Gentle Giant team at the Harvard Stadium. Don’t be lured by the ray of light. Minutes after we took the photo, there was a rainstorm.

I had thirteen days full of exhilarating and inspiring trips and it felt like I was on a roller coaster – jiggling around bus, metro and airport terminals. And I would definitely do it all over again. After a few beautifying rituals to hide the lack-of-sleep marks on my face, I headed to the arranged meeting.

I met with Larry O’Toole during a session at an AMSA event 2 years ago. His words just stood out from the noise that was surrounding me: “We have a “No Negative Emails policy” in our company. If there is an issue with a client, we would resolve it personally or in case it is not possible to be resolved in person, we would discuss it over the phone and not via emails”. Then he told a story about how he had managed to turn a negative online review into a positive one. A man who would pay a personal visit to their client to apologize for making a mistake is a rare find these days.

When I reached the Harvard Stadium – our meeting location, it was a little after 6:00 am. It was not very hard to notice that I didn’t belong at the Stadium. You could see those athletes running the steps at I speed I would not reach even if I was running late for the bus and I was just casually strolling the Stadium while I waited for Larry and his team to come.

A few minutes later they all arrived at the Stadium and just when they began to run the steps with the new recruit, it started raining. It was a such a rainstorm, but training continued and nobody would quit because of the rain. I found a spot to hide myself from that horrible rain.

Impressed is a weak word to describe what I saw. I would only run in conditions like those if I was in a crisis region and I was running for my life. I was so happy, because I did not have to go through that Stadium test to be able to attend an interview with Larry O’Toole. After such an endeavor, it would take Doctor Strange, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and a few more elite specialists to recover the damages I would have endured.

An hour later I found myself at the head office of Gentle Giant, in a cozy meeting room. Here is what happened next.

Hi Larry and thank you for having me at your office. Can you tell us a bit about the history of Gentle Giant? You studied engineering at the University and then how did you make the leap into moving?

Larry O’Toole, Founder of Gentle Giant.

Well, I worked as an engineer during most of the 70s, after I attained my engineering degree and then I left the company I was working for to start a little manufacturing business in 1980. I moved back to Boston and I found a job at the local grocery store in order to cover my living expenses. I also arranged an inexpensive home, because I did not want to use up the funds I had saved to start a business.

My roommate, Hugh was a musician and he would occasionally do moving jobs when he needed money. He was the one who suggested the idea of me becoming a mover. We were at this party together and I was dancing with his girlfriend. When I told her that she should be dancing with Hugh, she admitted that she wanted to dance with him, but she couldn’t get Hugh on the dance floor. “Stay out on the dance floor and he will join you in a minute”, I said. The next moment I went to see Hugh who was sitting at a table and chatting with some folks. I picked him up under his arms to carry him out on the dance floor. I was pretty strong at that time.

The next day he told me: “You know, it is not just that you carried me out to the dance floor, it was so comfortable and I felt like I was paragliding. You know who you are? You are the Gentle Giant! And that is the name of your moving company.” I did not pay much attention to his words at that time. However, he purchased an ad in the local Phoenix newspaper for $ 17 dollars. All it said was “Gentle Giant” and there was the phone number of our apartment. We just bought basically two words in bold print for $17 and put it in the moving section.

This how a Gentle Giant truck used to be some years ago.

My first job that I did was for $25. That woman moved with us six more times. The last time she moved with us was back in 2012 and her seventh move cost $12,500. And so, from day one, when you move someone, you want them to be a customer for life.

During the next two years, I was really more focused on my manufacturing business and then I was a bit lost with the idea of that maybe I should start a moving company instead of a manufacturing business. I decided that I will take two years where I focus 100 percent on the moving company and then, if I do not meet the goals I set out for myself, I will go back to engineering. One of my movers who had graduated with a master’s degree in business from Boston University agreed to become a partner. I gave him 30 percent of the business and we incorporated in the January of 1985. Four and a half years after my first move, the Gentle Giant became a legit company.

I blew all of my goals out of the water. In that first five years, we made it to the 500 fastest-growing companies in America and it was all word of mouth. I would occasionally do a research on moving companies. I would stop and observe the movers and take notes of what company they represented, and then I would compare companies. I would interview the owners of moving companies and I found out that the number one complaint was that they really could not find good help. There were a lot of examples of movers who had fired people, but they ended up hiring them back in the busy season, because they could not find anyone else.

Gentle Giant on a job at the Boston Ballet.

Everyone seemed to be missing the point that the reason you could not find good people is because you do not bring them into a really good environment. And so, starting my business, I decided that I would only hire great people. And this hearkens back to something my grandfather used to tell me – the most important person you are going to hire is the first person you hire. That person must meet a very high standard and then everybody else has to live up to it. It was kind of a crude phrase he used to say: If you piss in your soup, you cannot get it out. If you get the wrong people into your company, you will never be able to really get it right.

Even now, when we are a 40-million dollar company, I am still trying to meet with all of the new employees who come in. I spend a lot of time travelling all over our branches and offices. I think it is important to meet the people when they come in and Tom Gorman, our Vice President of Sales who is going to take over from me in two years from today, he will continue doing the same thing. He will make sure we have the right people on board.

And so, after that first five years we had to make a decision of whether we want to stay а small local company with a nice margin and a really fun culture, or to grow the business. That was a very difficult decision. My partner at the time did not want to grow the business. He wanted to keep it small size, because he thought that we were going to wind up losing money and everything would go upside down if we decided to expand.

The next 10 years were very difficult with him. He was not on board with the direction the company was taking, therefore after 10 years I bought him out and I hired a professional CFO. He did not leave the company and he is still an important part of the company. He is just not involved in ownership decisions. You need a CFO who you can bat ideas around with, not a CFO who is going to tell you everything you think of is crazy, wild-eyed nonsense and that it is going to sink the ship.

I want to try this time, seriously. Would you?

Of course, some of the ideas are going to be crazy, wild-eyed nonsense that will sink the ship, but you need to be able to discern what risks are worth taking and what risks to avoid. There is no way to run a business and not to take a risk. There have to be sensible risks.

Part of your company policy is to make every customer a customer for life. How do you do that?

First of all, you really have to care about your customers and you have to hire people who have a passion for service. There are people who have a passion for service in every walk of life and you know who they are when you stop and ask them for directions. They will really, really try very hard to give you very good directions and make certain that you do not make a mistake. And then, there are people who will say: “Oh, it’s that way”. You do not want to hire them. They are fine people, but they just do not belong in the service industry. You want your people to act like an owner and to make decisions that they think are in the best interest of the customer.

When you evaluate potential employees, how do you make the right decision that this person is a fit, besides the Stadium test?

Yes, it is a good test. Sometimes people do not show at all. And those people would have showed up if they were simply told to show up for work at 7:00 am on Thursday. They would have been there, but they are told to show up at 6:15 and they are going around the stadium. They are going to wake up in the morning and think of other things they would rather do. The person who we did hire this morning, Owen, he was recommended by a friend of his who has already worked here and knows what we are all about.

When I interview someone, I could tell within a couple of minutes whether they are absolutely the right person or whether they are absolutely the wrong person. That just leaves the people you are not sure about – them you might have to talk to for a lot longer and sometimes I even take them out on the truck to see how they manage.

You never know what strange item you will have to move on a job. Challenge accepted!

Sometimes, it could take a couple of weeks to make a decision. In the end, you need to make sure that it does not take more than three months to decide whether someone is a fit or not. When you ask: “How is the new guy doing?” and the person says: “Well I am not sure, I will give him a bit more time”, well, that is a red flag. Generally speaking, you know. You have spent a day working with somebody, you well know whether they are the right person. Now, it is true that somebody could come around in time, but you do not want to be throwing those dice. You are going to end up with people who would be better off somewhere else. It could really damage your culture if they are not suited.

When we talk about our core values – honesty, enthusiasm, willingness to go above and beyond, respect, teamwork, we are not kidding around. We want enthusiastic people, because they are the people who greet the customer with a big smile and a warm handshake. They are the kind of people who up their game and they will make it fun when they are faced up with a challenge. I will give you an example.

I remember being on a job where we had to move a couple of hundred book boxes. That family wanted to build a library in the attic. And so, we brought all this books to the attic, just me and one other guy. Then the husband came and said to his wife: “I thought I told you, I want them in the basement”! And the wife said: “But we are going to have the library on the third floor.” And he said: “Yes, but I need to build the shelves first and I need all these boxes away.”

Just when we thought the job was over, they told us that we had to bring the boxes down in the basement. I was not happy, because I was seeing with somebody and I had a date that night, and so I became a little bit grumpy. The guy who was with me, he started cracking jokes and he made it fun. We just ran our legs off and ran all those boxes down to the first floor. We did it on a short order and we had actually fun. He had me laughing and he had the customers laughing.

Look, if you have to move 200 boxes down three flights of stairs at 8 o’clock, you might as well have a little fun, as opposed to whining and fussing about it. I will never forget that when we finished the job, he said to the customer: “Okay, we are ready!” and the customer then answered: “What do you mean ready, what are you ready for?” Then my fellow mover at that night said: “We are ready to take them all back up to the third floor! Isn’t that what we have to do next?”

It was a joke of course and it is an example of how you can make the most out of a situation. We are in a business where it is not over until it is over. You do not have the option of leaving.

Gentle Giant deliver food to the local food bank.

One of my top people now was head hunted by another company to go work for them years ago. And he worked for them for a while. He had been given a big job to run operations and he was being paid a lot more money. And so, one day he got a call from a customer that the guy who was on the job has only half unloaded the truck and when his girlfriend came with a car, they left the house and they told the customer they would come back tomorrow. However, the customer was flying to Dallas the next morning and they needed all of the items to be in the house. And so my guy, who was in tie and suit, and dress shoes, he jumped in his car, he drove to the customer’s home and he offloaded the rest of the truck. After that night, he decided to go back to Gentle Giant.

Another unpleasant experience he had with that company was, he made a list of all the people that he had to dismiss, because he wanted to create a good culture. The management told him that they needed those people to make sales calls and he could let go those people only after he hire new replacements. However, if you have to take the rotten apples out of a barrel and you take out only 2 a day, all of the other apples will become rotten eventually.

And so, although we could not afford to hire him at the position he used to work at, he was willing to be a mover. That happened twenty years ago and he now manages our outside sales team. He did not want to belong in a company where bottom line is the only important thing. You are running a business for profit, still one shall never compromise with quality.

You need to be accountable for your mistakes and you need to be willing to do whatever it takes to fix errors. One time a person here misplaced a breakfront that cost $27,000 and we told the customer that we would buy them a new one. We ordered it from a place in Ohio, but then we found out that it had been brought to the wrong warehouse, I called the company to tell them that we found the breakfront. Luckily, the company had another order that they filled with the one they built for us. If I had called one day later, they would have applied the paint I told them to apply and we would have paid $19,000 – that was the wholesale price. Still, if that happened or happens again, we would not going to shirk our responsibilities.

And what are the most challenging moving jobs that you have ever done?

We moved a few abstract art pieces up to the top floor of an industrial building years ago. Those were massive art sculptures that could not fit through the stairwell, or in the elevator, or through a window. Using a big crane was not an option as well. And so, we had to lower the elevator all the way down to the basement, and then we had the elevator doors opened on the first floor to fit the artwork on top of the elevator. It barely fit inside the shaft and we had to keep it steady while it was going up. The elevator had to stop just below the floor it was going to be unloaded. We opened the doors and it was very difficult to get the artwork to turn and come out of the elevator doors. It was about seven huge pieces and each one was more ridiculous than the next. Artists do not really think about structural integrity, and so sculptures can break so easily.

Gentle Giant team in action on this challenging job that requires using a big crane.

Another interesting job I remember now goes back to the 80s. It was a piano job in Bay Village. A couple wanted to move a piano into their home and the only way to get the piano in, was to crane it up onto the roof. They had stairs up to their roof deck where the piano could fit through. I needed a much bigger crane than a normal one we use for that kind of work. I would have to rent a huge crane and it would have been $450 just for the crane.

And so, I told them that I could do the job for $500. I had explored out the whole place and I found a building next to their building that was ten stories high and I could access the roof of that building. I brought the piano up on the roof of the next building. Then, I strung a cable from the one roof to the other and I secured the piano with 10,000 lbs. tow straps on a metal ring and then I lowered the piano off the one roof to the other. Finally, we took the piano down the stairs.

That was an example of “Hey, I am an engineer. I can figure this out. There is no need to spend $450 on renting a crane”. This is also an example of finding a creative solution. We really encourage creativity.

Now I also remember that we also had a very challenging piano job right in the heart of the city, it was on Boylston Street. The piano had to go on a high floor of a building and in most cases, you could use a very large crane for that kind of a logistic operation. You would be able to block and tackle it from the street up to the floor. The problem was that on the first floor of that building, there was a restaurant that was built out into the street and it had a glass roof. You could not block and tackle over that glass roof, because it came out about 15 feet from the building. There was no way you could keep the piano back from the restaurant as you lifted it up – it would be in danger of hitting the glass.
What we did instead, we lowered the block and tackle from a window in the next building. We swung the block and tackle in that near building and I had a guy in the window who caught the hook on it and brought it in that window. We lifted the piano until it was hanging right outside that window and then we hooked the block and tackle onto the piano, tightened it up and finally we let the piano slowly over until it reached the customer’s flat.

And of course we did this really early in the morning, before the restaurant opened up. We did not want to have a crowd of people in the restaurant. Obviously it was not going to fall, but you always have to be prepared for the worst.

No job is too hard for the Gentle Giant.

Another crazy job that we did in the past involved the moving of an office with about 140 workstations. When you move an office with that many workstations, you have to break them all down and then you have to reconfigure them in the new place. There is a computer program that you can use to figure out the new office layout, it is like a blueprint. You enter that whole office layout in the program and then with the software, you decide how to position those workstations based on the space and its specifications. The company that hired us to move those workstations wanted to use this software and so we did it the way the client wanted us to do it.

What we did not know was that the company we had to use to do the blueprint, they were actually a broker for those partitions – they sold the workstations to the company that hired us to move them. And that broker company had also bid for the move as well.

And so, the broker ran the layout on the computer and they removed some of the upright pillars that were in the new location. Then, the computer did not know that there were upright pillars and my partner J.P., he was looking at it the night before the move and he knew something looked wrong there.

Sure enough, he figured out that the pillars were not in the blueprint. If we had started putting up the partitions by the blueprint, there would have been a pillar right in the middle of somebody’s office cube. And so J.P. stayed up all night and manually worked out a different layer.

In the end, we put in the partitions and they were perfect! We never said anything to the other company. They were probably waiting to have a good laugh.

J.P. has tremendous attention to detail. He double checks everything. When you are a person like me, who is kind of a free form, it makes the best team when you pair up with people who are much more process oriented, who are in the compliant area and look at the small details. You create the perfect balance. People who are entrepreneurial and can really fire up your business are as much critical to the success of your company as people who are fastidious – those who would ensure everything will be very neat, accurate, and ethical. You have to appreciate each other’s strengths and be respectful, accept that everybody has weaknesses and they can make a mistake.

Earlier when we were in training room, there is this quote written on the board: “Failure is a great teacher”. So what are some failures that you are thankful for, because of the lessons learned?

Well, I probably have to write a book about that. It is going to be a long list.
As a matter of fact, there are two kinds of mistakes one can make. There is sometimes the failure of not sticking to your guns. You could have the right idea and you could let somebody talk you out of that idea. When I started this business, I did not have any background in moving, I just tried doing things differently and kind of innovate. That is where a lot of our success came from.

And I had some ideas that other people talked me out of that I wish they hadn’t. I would certainly stick to my guns more if I had to start over. Giving employees more responsibility and paying them more is something I wanted to do. When you start breaking down people’s remuneration – here is what you do and here is what you get paid for it, it does not get you quite the same results as opposed to you pay people a lot to begin with and let them take responsibility.

For instance, I would have people make mistakes and they would go and fix it without even telling me. They broke a piece of glass they go to the glass shop replace it and bring it back to the customer. They wouldn’t even tell me and they wouldn’t put in to get paid to do that. They were paid so well that they didn’t care. Part of what I was being told is the way I was doing payroll, it was not scalable, but I think that culture is very powerful.

Taking care of the client from start to end.

As for bona fide mistakes, that is where you write the book. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not to cut your losses. I had a situation that ended up with me paying those developers $400,000 to write a particular program for us and they did not deliver. It is a long story about why I hired them and it was a mistake nevertheless, but it was not a mistake that I could entirely be blamed for. I was given bad information. I was told that the system we were using back then must be replaced and it is the same system we use now.

And so, it all happened back in 2000, during the dot-com boom. There was a shortage of really qualified programmers, because if you knew how to change a box of matches with another box of matches, you could get a job as a programmer during that time. Those developers started to prolong and delay the deadline anticipated for completing the job and the bill just spiraled out of control.

It is really hard to back off and admit that you have made a wrong choice and you have to live with it. I could have sued them, but I didn’t want to get involved in a lawsuit and so I had to walk right off. And at that time the company wasn’t that big – it was less than 10 million dollars and I had to write off a half a million bucks. It was really painful. However, admitting you made a big mistake is important step to move on and go beyond it.

Another weakness I should have tried to improve more in the past is, I should write things down more often. I was able to build this company easily to five or ten million dollars without writing details down, because I could keep everything in my head. Now that the company has grown so big, it is very hard to suddenly start doing writing details down if you haven’t developed that habit earlier. It so silly and there is nothing difficult about it. I think that if I had worked on disciplining myself to be more organized, it would have made a big difference.

What are some of the greatest challenges that our industry is now being faced up with?

Well the driver shortage is really a difficult problem to talk about and it reminds me of The Dust Bowl. Do you know what The Dust Bowl is? Well, Oklahoma was a prairie land where there was a very shallow topsoil. They started farming it, but after a number of years all the soil blew away, because there was nothing holding it down. Everybody had to leave, the whole place became barren and you can read about this in John Steinbeck’s book called The Grapes of Wrath.

Packing with the proper materials is a must for the professionals at Gentle Giant.

And so, the driver shortage is exactly the same thing. It is like somebody spending all their money on crap and then wondering why they have no savings in the bank. The reason for the driver shortage is because they went to a subcontractor model where all the drivers are independent contractors. There is no way to develop drivers. There is no pipeline, because the drivers you have are random people out there.
The only time movers develop a driver, is when they have a child, a nephew or somebody traveling with them who is learning the business on the go. Companies decided that it was a better model to completely cheat the consumer. In other words, you have 95 percent of the interstate moving in this country being done by cash labor if you hire a van line. Now, there are great professionals out there and that is undisputable. I have some good friends who are independent contractors. It is just the way this business model works, it allows for all kind of cash laborers to hop in people’s home. And those people might even be criminals.

The way it is now is that drivers have a network of people they can call and ask for help on moving jobs in different locations. And it is whoever they can get a hold of for the particular job. In most cases, those workers do not have any insurance, they do not pay taxes and they have no expertise.

Do you seriously believe that they are trying to develop those random guys into drivers? Some of these extra people are just in-between jobs and some of them are just in need of some more cash in the short term, because they may have been laid off, or they might be collecting unemployment. It is a good gig if you are collecting unemployment and you get a few hundred bucks for helping a road driver.
In end, this is how the whole industry is based. And when President Obama wanted to stop this nonsense, they wanted to hang him from a tree and set him on fire.

If the industry didn’t operate on this model, people would just have to pay more for their move. They would have to pay what it actually costs. Because what did they do. Today, companies give the independent contractor a percentage of the job, usually about 55 percent. Some guys can get 60 percent, because they are so amazing. And when you work that way, you cannot lose money. It is impossible to lose money, because you have always got a healthy gross margin. You have always got your 45 percent gross margin and you have very little infrastructure that you have to pay for. You do not have any full time employees and so, you don’t have payroll.

Spotted on a job.

Finally, you create this system, because it works and you can make money. You can go around the place and fly on vacations and you can even say “I’m a really good business person”. Then you go around “We cannot find any drivers”.

Where do I get my drivers? We hire young people like Owen, who have just graduated school or they have started college and they learn the business from the ground up. And the guy you just met earlier, he was getting trained out there to drive a tractor trailer. He is already is a top flight mover who has already been running complicated difficult local jobs. He could handle that thirty thousand dollar local job. And now he is learning how to drive a tractor trailer. So when he goes on the long road, he would have the needed expertise on the hazards of the job.
And what does some independent contractors do? They go out there and they try to find Class A drivers. There is no Class A driver who wants to do this job, because it involves hard work. People who do moving, they do real hard work – they are Salt of the Earth people.

I am not saying anything against these independent contractors, because it is not their fault. I mean a lot of my best friends are independent contractors. They are not the problem, because they would be doing this job regardless of the system. It shouldn’t really be on their shoulders. What is happening, is that you are not developing new drivers who are coming up and starting from the ground up. If all your drivers are 55 to 60 years old, how do you have a pipeline that has a lot of good drivers?

And you heard them talking about allowing people under 21 years of age to drive interstate at the AMSA conference. That is just mad. First of all, there is a reason why those kind of people shouldn’t drive interstate.

You could probably find in the entire country at most a dozen people who could drive a tractor trailer that are under 21 years old and also be a first class mover. It takes a few years to get that good. Some people are faster than others but it generally takes you quite a few years to be good enough to load a thirty thousand pound shipment that is valued at $300,000 or more. If you were a consumer, would you want to have a twenty years old kid coming into your house supervising a crew of guys and loading up your prized possessions?

Job done professionally.

Would you really want that? It is mad. These people need to be nurtured along. And by the time they are twenty four or five, they would be able to make really good decisions and be responsible for their actions. They would be trustworthy and sensible, really good drivers. Like I said, some people learn faster and it could take them less time. However, you cannot put a kid in a truck and send him off.
I have heard this story where some guys picked up a woman in Chicago and drove her to Dallas, whereas they had to go in Philadelphia. And so, you shouldn’t have immature and irresponsible people behind the wheels of machines that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It does not make sense.

That is just ridiculous to hear people complaining about drivers. You could have predicted this problem 25 years ago. Generally, if you can see an issue coming, you should do something about it. They did nothing about it and there was nobody doing the math. You could tell years ago that we were having more and more difficulty finding drivers. Industry has been complaining about this problem now for about 15 years. The problem was already critical and they changed nothing.

Stakeholders and the Government wanted to get drivers out of the military as a fast resolution to the problem. However, these guys who might be coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq, many of them failed drug and their driving test. And once they have got them their driving license, those military veterans, they didn’t really know how to move furniture. It takes quite a while to get good at that. What the Government should have done with those 2000 people they recruited was, they should have had them working in local moving companies to learn the art of the business. Then they should be allowed to drive big trucks.

The biggest challenge that the moving industry is facing now is venture capitalists who are investing money in these moving apps. And the latter are going to destroy the industry. Some very good, trained movers would decide now that they could just go and answer an app. They can get a truck. It could be their truck or they could rent it and they could get bids via those apps. They would pay a few of their friends some cash to help on the job and they will make a big chunk of change.

The future is bright.

It would be great for those laborers. Guess what happens if there is a damage. Well, they have this five star system. So if the customer gives five stars, they will use the person again, and if that person fails, they simply won’t hire them back the next time. So they think they have a foolproof system.

What will happen is that the movers will feed this model themselves. And moving companies will start using those apps. I even have some guys who use various apps, like for storage. The downside of this model is that anyone who can drive and load can use those apps to make money, but then that endangers the quality for the customer. For us, it is very important for our consumers to recognize that Gentle Giant guarantees state of the art quality.

When you leave a review in Uber, you are actually reviewing the driver and not the company. And you have heard drivers complaining about what they make. Those apps can easily squeeze the people who do the work to receive the minimum and push the price for the customer as much as they can. If this happens, then the focus will no longer be on the quality of the service. Customers will become just marks.

And what is down the road for Gentle Giant? How would you like to see the company evolving in the future?

We want to be recognized for being safe and reliable in the whole US. We have grown so very well so far and our local communities appreciate us and they trust us. And we have excellent talents in our senior management who are very capable to lead the company with integrity in the future. I am confident about our future.

THANK YOU!


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