Jim Molloy keeps business moving with Advance:.

Moving is in Jim Molloy's blood. Having worked for his father's moving business as a teenager, Molloy decided to re-energize the company when he grew up and helped expand it into several business lines and a few new locations.

"My family's firm was mostly a residential moving and storage company in Long Island. I worked for them when I was in high school and college, but they sold the business and I went to work for North American Bank," Molloy recalls.

He reached quite an impressive position at the Bank as a national account sales representative, but the family business was always at the back of Molloy's mind. He left banking in 1979 and decided to open his own firm--Advance Relocation & Storage. Unlike his father's firm, Molloy Brothers, Advance Relocation concentrated on helping businesses move from one office building to another, but Molloy's ambition did not end there. In 1990, he bought back the original Molloy Brothers and made it the residential arm of Advance Relocation.

"I missed the nuts and bolts part of the moving business," Molloy explains. "I reacquired Molloy Brothers because I wanted to put the family business back in the family."

Today, the renamed Advance Commercial Movers / Molloy Brothers is one of the major moving companies in the New York region. In addition to handling out-of-state relocations for its residential clients, the company has served as the mover of choice for such commercial powerhouses as Deutsche Bank, Bayer and Canon USA. It owns 123 tractor-trailers and employs more than 130 people. Being so diversified requires a kind of manpower and expertise not often found in the moving business.

"With residential moving, we deal primarily with the family, with moving them from one house to the next. Commercial moving requires a different kind of skill," Molloy says.

"You need a large number of people and specialized equipment, you need project management skills. Not many companies can handle moving multiple jobs or really large projects. We certainly have that capability."

According to Molloy, a big part of Advance's success comes from the company's ability to keep its employees happy. Usually in the moving business, the turnover is very high and it's hard to keep experienced employees.

"It's a people business and turnover is one of the biggest problems. We have a history of keeping our employees for a long time--the average time people stay with us is 13.5 years, which is pretty good," says Molloy.

"And we are doing whatever we can to make ourselves user-friendly--we put our customers' needs first, we diversify our services for them, we try to be technologically sophisticated. We are very advanced for a moving company."

One of the features Advance offers is the ability to track orders through email--customers can get their own email accounts and send requests through the Internet, which cuts order execution time from several days to a few hours. And Molloy is always thinking about how he can improve the company--recently, he bought a major installation and commercial moving business in the hopes of making his operations run even more efficiently.

"Fitco is a major company in Queens and they install the modular systems furniture for most of the major furniture manufacturers. It's been a big addition to Advance," Molloy says.

"Now that we have Fitco there is a tremendous amount of synergy between our two companies--we will be doing asset management, record storage, maybe even employee moves. I expect that business volume will be in excess of $20 million this year."