From Larry to You

Larry O'Toole is Founder and CEO of the 30 Year Old Gentle Giant Moving Company, which is based in Massachusetts, has 17 branches in 8 states, and has won dozens of awards for the quality of its service, employees, and workplace practices.



Thursday, July 29, 2010

GG Culture and Company Growth


This photo shows me with three great Giants (from Left to Right) Eric Ragland, Pat Inman, and Nick Temme (far right), marking the opening of our latest and greatest new facility, GG Seattle! You can see this and many other photos of Gentle Giant employees on and off the job at our Flickr page.

Visiting employees at our 17 different locations, especially ones in locations in our newer regions like Seattle, New York, Charlotte, and DC, is a great reminder of what our company stands for. Part of our mission is to create great opportunities for smart, hardworking people. The fact that we can launch in markets like Seattle and allow our people to have the opportunity to step into leadership roles and use that opportunity to personal and professional growth gives me great pride.
Congratulations to all of our leaders at Gentle Giant, especially our employees in Seattle who are celebrating the opening of our newest warehouse and office facility!

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Giants are Glad to Give


Last week the Somerville Journal, the weekly newspaper in the city where Gentle Giant Moving Company is headquartered, published an article about a very special charitable giving project in which we participated (clicking on this image will allow you to view the article full-size).
The short version of the story is this: A nearby realtor named Kathy Irving from Hammond Realty in Cambridge, Mass., who knows Gentle Giant well, wanted to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti. She got people to donate a variety of badly needed items, including crutches, walkers, beds, and other items used to help injured people, and Gentle Giant collected, stored, packed and transported these items to an agency in New York City, which shipped them to Haiti for use by Partners in Health and other emergency relief organizations.
However, there's a much bigger story, one that I'm both proud of and humbled by. Gentle Giant Moving Company, now in its 30 year, has a long-standing commitment to charitable giving and philanthropic activity, and the company even has its own charitable foundation to help direct these efforts effectively. Fortunately, we've been recognized for this commitment with awards and praise. However, our most important rewards are the constant willingness of people like Kathy Irving to work with us on community involvements, including serving our customers. Furthermore, because supporting youth development is a core part of our philanthropy, in some way we benefit from that, since we rely on smart, responsible, strong, educated, professional, kind young people to join us year after year as part of our fantastic moving team.
I want to personally thank our employees for their constant commitment to working together for the good of our community, each other, and Gentle Giant!

Congrats to a Growing Giant Family

Just 2 days ago, a married couple who work together here in the office at Gentle Giant had their second child together. Congratulations to Tom and Carolyn on the birth of their son William, who joins his older sister Ava among the ranks of the luckiest babies on Earth because of who they have as parents!

I'm personally quite overjoyed about this news, and it reminds of what a unique work environment Gentle Giant has, which really focuses on the development of great personal and professional relationships. In our company we have countless couples, who met on the job, in long-term committed relationships. Many of these couples now have children (affectionately referred to as our littlest Giants). We espouse to have a very family-like atmosphere here, and I think the fact that so many actual families exist here is proof positive of that.

At Gentle Giant we value relationships above almost everything else, and I don't mean romantic, intimate relationships. I'm talking about relationships with customers, coworkers, employees, managers, vendors, neighbors, community leaders, and virtually anyone with whom we share resources, time or space (even other drivers on roads where we take our trucks!). As a result, naturally we have as many quirks as a real giant family, but we also have a tremendous feeling of loyalty and security. Whatever tensions or conflicts arise, we know that our colleagues support us at the end of the day, and that feeling of safety allows us to focus on our jobs and our goal of helping our customers, and not focus on internal politics or selfish interests.

Congrats again to Tom and Carolyn and all of Gentle Giant on our growing happy family.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Running The Stadium


That's me, second from the left, with a group of great employees from Gentle Giant, running the stadium at 6:30 am one day recently. Why do we do this, you might wonder? What is "running the stadium?" It's a very beloved, though often hated, important tradition at Gentle Giant Moving Company that helps us build the character and teamwork we need to be a great moving company.

As a college rower in Boston, I was introduced to running the stadium, which involves climbing up the stands in each of the 37 sections of the coliseum style Harvard Stadium. Although the goal is to do it as quickly as you can (and hopefully improve each time), the purpose when movers from Gentle Giant movers do it is not to see who is the fastest.

Running the stadium for us is a way our movers demonstrate that they are willing to focus on a challenge and complete a job no matter how difficult, because there is always someone counting on you. We celebrate when someone is fast and strong, but if someone is slow and struggles through it, we don't give them a hard time. We cheer them on and encourage them to do their best. We're happy they push through the sweat and exhaustion to reach the top of the last section and congratulate them heartily.

At Gentle Giant, we have a set of values that are represented by something called the Giant HEART (Honesty, Enthusiasm, Above-and-beyond effort, Respect, and Teamwork). The stadium teaches a lot about ourselves and each other. The stadium has a great deal of symbolic and practical meaning to us, so it's a tradition we uphold, and it's an activity I plan to keep doing for as long as humanly possible.



Monday, July 12, 2010

Employee Longevity = Help in the Trenches

It was quite apparent today what some of the benefits having loyal, long-term employees are. Today is a Monday in July. Mondays are always extremely hectic for our sales team at Gentle Giant because so many people contact us for information or an estimate over the weekend, leading to a longer-than usual call-back list and busy start to the work week on Monday. July happens to be one of our busiest months of the year, so it's no surprising why today was demanding for our sales team.

Gentle Giant attracts many talented, hard-working people who are looking to learn new skills and advance their careers, and many of them have moved from one position to the next, often starting on the trucks or the reception desk, moving into sales support, sales, and other roles in marketing, HR, and customer support. Naturally, this benefits these employees because they can develop new skills within the same company and not have to leave a job they like. It benefits Gentle Giant in a number of ways, not the least of which was something that happened today. Our sales director Tom made a couple of quick calls internally to see if any former sales team members might be able to spare some time to call people back, and he instantly got the help he needed... from veteran, highly-trained former sales team members!

Of course, there's still a mountain of work to get through (a problem we are glad to have), but now more prospective GG customers will be able to book with us today, and our sales force will be able to get home to their families or go do their activity of choice earlier than they might otherwise. After 30 years it can be easy at times to take what we have for granted. I'm grateful for moments like these when such shining examples of the benefits of our outstanding workplace practices take center stage and allow to me feel this proud of what we have made here at Gentle Giant!

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Good Press about Good Company Culture

Check out this great article on Portfolio.com that features Gentle Giant Moving Company as an example of a business with a company culture that really benefits the organization!

Apparently author Jon Katzenback was in the middle of writing a book about business leadership when he underwent a move. It just so happens he hired Gentle Giant. Fortunately, he was so pleased with the work of our outstanding employees, he decided to include Gentle Giant in his book called Leading Outside the Lines.

In the Portfolio.com article, I love the account of the move in which the movers from Gentle Giant do all of the things that we actually say that they do when they're serving customers. Unbelievable as it may seem, it's all true. They are fun, friendly, educated, hardworking people. They literally run when it is safe to do so while on the job, so as not to waste customer's money on inefficiencies. They are honest and service oriented.

Thank you, Mr. Katzenback, for sharing a piece of our story with your readers!

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

How do you define success?

The month of June has just ended, which means the year is officially more than half over, and the numbers are in. Unlike the past two years, business is going well! Gentle Giant is exceeding reasonably aggressive revenue targets, thanks in large part to changes in the housing market and improvements in the broader economy, and of course the reputation of the company based on the teriffic work, attitude, and professionalism of the Giants themselves. People happily ask about my feelings on the "success" of the company so far this year, and I'm certainly pleased that we now have more money with which to reward our employees and invest in the business. However, I don't like the implication that during periods of time over the last 30 years when the company was not bringing in a good amount of money that we were not being "successful."

Here's why: Whether the company was doing a lot of work or a little, or whether we were to hire, train and develop many new people each year, or zero new employees, we have been successful at achieving what we need to do to pursue our mission, which is to create opportunities for great people, and change what people expect from a moving company. Even on slow days, Gentle Giant is serving customers, which means we have Giants working hard, in stressful, challenging situations, with the goal of making those customers "customers for life." At the same time, those employees are developing skills, knowledge about how to communicate under pressure, and work as a team with crew members. They're creating memories for customers who are undergoing major life transitions, and we're a part of that. In turn, those customers tell others about Gentle Giant, and those employees have had an experience that will hopefully propel them forward (either at Gentle Giant or in a different line of work in the future). Then later, at times when market factors are better, like they are now, we become flush with work and have even more opportunities to pursue our mission.

So, how you define success has a lot to do with what you select as your driving force for your business. Is it just to make money? Well, in the long run, of course that is essential for a successful business, and in general if you work hard you will eventually make profit. But if success is defined in terms of what you can control, and to push yourself to do well every single day no mater what happens with the "uncontrollables," making money will be a pleasant byproduct of your success, and it very well may happen to an even greater degree than if it was your central focus to begin with.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Why Movers (or other service providers you use) Should Have Fun

In companies where employees are responsible for the care and satisfaction of customers, it's logical that happy workers equates to happy customers and a successful business. Would you ever want an disgruntled, unhappy, or otherwise disengaged service provider doing important work in your home? I wouldn't. At minimum, you run the risk of having a person who isn't going to do the best possible job they know how. At worst, they could take out their deep seeded frustrations on your home or your belongings, even in ways that might be unvisible to you (would you know how to judge good electrical wiring, plumging, or whether your mover wrapped and lifted your furniture "correctly"). You have to depend on the person doing the work to use their own judgement and discipline to do right by you.

That's why it helps to know something about a company's workplace and whether people are happy, loyal, well paid, well trained, and intellectually challenged. If they are, you're more likely to get good services. I am of course extremely proud of the great people and culture at Gentle Giant, which has led the company to win recognition as a Top Small Workplace and a Best Place to Work. I think the reasons we won those awards are the same reason we've received so many "Best of" awards. WE HAVE FUN, even while we're working. What made me think of this is the fact that I'm helping organize the company's annual summer party, where it's all about getting together to relax and have a good time and bond over good food, games, laughs, and doing a whole lot of well-deserved-nothing together. That camaraderie matters on the job and off the job and creates a positive feeling for our company, coworkers, and the custoemrs who hire us and allow us to have these great experiences working and playing together.

But what if you're not hiring a mover? Or what if you happen not to live in an area where you can hire Gentle Giant for your move? Talk to the people who answer the phone and guage how long they've worked there. See if the president or owner of the company has his own face on the company's website. Ask for references from other people who have used a company. Were the employees friendly? Did they seem like they'd worked there long enough to really know what they were talking about?

My philosophy is this: Treat your people well, and they'll treat your customers well. And hopefully those well-treated, happy employees will stick around long enough to pass those cultural values to the next generation of employees that you hire, so you can build and maintain your reputation for excellence, decade after decade.