World's Most Unusual Moving Company

Distance Education Helps You Get Ahead

CanadianMedsWorld.com

Shawn Lyons Story

http://www.rabbitmovers.com/

Rabbit markets itself as an anomaly in an industry with a bad rep, capitalizing on a staff of artistic types, word-of-mouth referrals, and a Web site that posts positive customer testimonials and descriptions of extra services traditional moving companies don't usually offer.

So far, Rabbit's bare-bones sales and marketing strategy—except for maintaining its site, the company spends no money on advertising—is working. Rabbit's founder, former itinerant writer Shawn Lyons, who started the moving company in 2004 for $1,500—the cost of a 1981 Dodge Ram cargo van—estimates revenues will be around $300,000 in 2006. This is up one-third from a year ago. "Originally, I was just going to do the 'man with a van' thing and have time to write," Lyons says.

But about nine months into helping friends move their furniture in his spare time, Lyons decided he was onto something because demand kept increasing. So he pursued the licensing and insurance required by New York City and State and started to build Rabbit into more than just a traditional moving company, carving out a niche with young urban dwellers.

Today Rabbit, apart from making residential and commercial moves within the New York metro area and renting storage space, also offers massages ($80 per hour) and feng shui ($200). Clients normally take advantage of these extras after the move. Moving prices range from $100 an hour to a flat $1,500 for a complicated, labor-intensive move that includes packing.

Toby MacPhearson, a 31-year-old information-technology worker in Manhattan, paid Rabbit about $650 to move from the neighborhood of Chelsea to Hell's Kitchen, and is glad he took advantage of the feng shui service. "I was mostly in it for the practical aspect: It helped me reduce my stress by helping me set up the apartment in a logical manner," says MacPhearson, who has since referred two friends to Rabbit.

Still, Rabbit is a tiny presence in an industry that generates approximately $7 billion a year in revenues and employs an estimated 450,000 workers. David Sparkman, a spokesperson for the American Moving and Storage Assn. (AMSA), an industry advocacy group with 3,400 members, estimates that there are 5,000 to 6,000 mostly small, family-owned moving companies, with just a handful of large van lines.

With so much competition out there, concentrating on a unique group of customers has helped Rabbit establish a strong reputation. Apart from Rabbit's positive plugs in its Web site's testimonials section, sites like Apartmenttherapy.com and Brooklynian.com include posts such as: "Rabbit Movers are awesome. I've used them and passed them on to friends as highly highly recommended."

That seal of approval lends multiple benefits to Rabbit. "The notion of community in an urban setting leads to positive word of mouth, customer loyalty, and branding, and it seems like Rabbit has all of those," says Heidi Neck, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College.

Those who hire Rabbit to help them move shouldn't expect stereotypical movers. "Most of our guys are artists or in some creative field; they're just a really creative bunch," says Lyons, who counts chefs, painters, musicians, and writers ranging in age from 23 to 43 as his employees. "We're trying to move away from the perception of movers being supermacho creeps. Movers kind of have a bad rep in New York, and for good reason. There are a lot of scams, so we try to combat that," he says.

Aside from wanting to work with people whom he liked on a personal level, Lyons says it was easier to communicate the tone he's trying to create for the company to people who already intuitively understood it through their own experience. Trying to nurture friendly interactions with clients further sets Rabbit apart from the competition.

Since good employees are the key to creating a good moving experience, Rabbit pays fair wages across the board. Lyons says most of his movers make between $13 and $15 an hour, while many other companies pay workers under the table or at minimum wage. Keeping morale up, he says, is a necessity when your primary selling point is alleviating stress for the customer.

Also atypical of a moving company: Rabbit's community of young movers and customers is forming around the Brooklyn art scene. Lyons studied literature and writing at Temple University in Philadelphia and wanted to have his career fit with his creative background. So he recently bought and renovated a space in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood (Dumbo stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge), where he now rents space for artists to display their work.

Not directly related to Rabbit's moving business but intimately connected with its people and its style, the studio will host exhibitions at this year's Dumbo Arts Festival, and some of the artists will be Rabbit's own movers. Lyons says most of the people he expects to attend the exhibition are former customers who asked to be added to the Rabbit mailing list.

The company also specializes in moving art for galleries. Lyons says the movers' appreciation for the work establishes a trust between them and the client. "What's really great is that they're not just movers, they're really smart guys. In a business you need things that are malleable—people who are quick and able to adjust to what you need," says Priyanka Mathew, gallery director for Gallery Arts India, one of Rabbit's clients, and a former banker at Goldman Sachs. Mathew says Rabbit has moved scores of contemporary Indian paintings and sculptures without damaging a thing.

The company also employs a design aesthetic on its Web site, trucks, and T-shirts that appeals to its target demographic of young urbanites. "I just went along with what I would want in the aesthetic of the designs, the character, and quality of the movers. So far it's working, I think," says Lyons.

Rabbit's faithful clients—Mathew included—agree that the company's got staying power. "I really think this is the way that business is going to be moving—especially small business. You have to be sound fundamentally, but to create a niche and an edge, you've got to try and differentiate yourself, and that's what Rabbit does very well," says Mathew.
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We are often asked, and frequently see the question come up in various discussion groups, Which is the best tool for closing more sales and connecting with the right people online? Is it blogging, interacting with millions of bloggers sharing their business knowledge, industry commentary, and occasional pictures of their cat? Or one of the many business networks, such as openBC or Ecademy, which offer group interaction and private messaging as well as searchable profiles? Or LinkedIn, the trusted referral system that has attracted some five million professionals?

Asking which of these is "better" is like asking which is better: a hammer, a wrench, or a screwdriver? They are all tools, and best suited to particular tasks. A wrench can be used as a hammer in a pinch, and a hammer can force a screw into a two-by-four, but it's a lot harder and riskier. A master craftsman has a full toolbox, and unless your job is to drive nails all day, you'll be far more effective if you know the right tool to use for the task at hand.

Blogging is a way of building visibility, demonstrating your expertise, and engaging with people interested in the same topics as you. One of its greatest advantages is that it is completely open -- no membership required! Anyone on the Web can potentially find you in a search engine or a link from another blog, learn more about you, and contact you if you share some common interests or they want to learn more about your products or services. On the downside, while blogs are searchable by topic, it's very difficult to search for people in a structured way, e.g., former co-workers at a particular company, people in a certain industry in a certain city, or even people with a particular skill set.

Online communities offer a group interaction space (or multiple spaces) in conjunction with searchable, customizable personal profiles. They represent a convergence of identity (think personal Web pages), community (membership in self-organizing groups), and communication (discussion forums and private messaging). They offering varying degrees of open interaction, depending on the site and the preferences of the user, but only minimal interaction with non-members. The ability to easily learn more about a person and connect with them individually to follow up on the group interaction is compelling. One of the downsides is that they can be a little too enjoyable, and many people find themselves spending too much time in these sites when they should be focused on other aspects of their business. We are firm believers in closing more deals, not just in chatting with more people.

LinkedIn was primarily designed as a tool to help you leverage your existing network to meet specific people for a specific purpose. People are using it for more general-purpose networking, but communicating with specific people is the task for which it is optimized. There is no group interaction per se. LinkedIn also offers minimal ability to communicate within the platform, and the system encourages people to connect for a specific purpose, not just randomly or out of curiosity. These are major reasons why the site has created an attractive platform for senior executives, hiring managers, entrepreneurs, and other extremely busy people. They can leverage and be of service to their existing contacts with a minimal time investment and not a lot of unfocused interaction.

In our book, The Virtual Handshake, we introduce the Seven Keys to a Powerful Network, a framework for assessing your personal network and aligning your activities with your objectives. Comparing these tools in terms of the Seven Keys shows how each can serve your relationship-building activities in its own way:

Key	Blogging	LinkedIn	Online Networks
Character	Demonstrated over time through how you speak of others, what you write about ethical issues, etc.	Demonstrated by some endorsements.	Demonstrated strongly by your public interaction with others, your willingness to be of service, etc.
Competence	Demonstrated through in-depth writing about your topics of expertise.	Demonstrated minimally by endorsements, though multiple endorsements add up.	Demonstrated through writing about your topics of expertise, often in response to specific questions.
Relevance	Attract and connect with people interested in the same topics as you.	Ability to focus tightly on meeting people for specific purposes, and hopefully attract like-minded people.	Ability to focus on meeting people for specific purposes and to connect with like-minded individuals in a group setting.
Strength	Strengthen relationships through sustained dialog with readers and other bloggers on your topic.	Strengthen relationships by being of service, making referrals and endorsements.	Strengthen relationships through sustained public and private dialog with other members.
Information	Great source of information about someone's expertise and interest. Minimal information about relationships, contact info, etc.	Great source of information about your immediate contacts. Unique source of information about the relationships in your second and third degree.	Great source of information about your immediate contacts, though profiles are often fairly static compared to blogs. Information about relationships varies greatly by site and personal practices.
Number	Tremendous tool for building the number of people you know - probably the best (short of major media coverage).	Can be used to build large networks, but not optimized for it, as each connection requires manual intervention, and there is no way to engage people within the system.	Group interacting supports connecting with a large number of people, though the potential pool is limited to members of the site.
Diversity	Not really a tool for building diversity, except that you will often attract readers who have the opposite view on your topic as you, e.g., conservative and liberal political bloggers read each others' blogs and comment on them.	Excellent tool for purposefully finding diverse contacts, e.g., experts in a field you're considering moving into, a country you're planning to visit, etc.	Build diversity through group interaction. For example, a group focused on a particular business interest will likely include people of different political and religious affiliations.

So it's impossible to say that one or the other is best overall, and difficult to say that any one is best even for one person. Really, each is best suited for certain tasks. Because most people's business needs are many and diverse, and we're never certain what those needs may be in the future, the master salesperson, like the master carpenter, keeps a full toolbox and knows both which tool to use for the job and how to use it most effectively.

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