Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
When my grandfather came over from Russia, he couldn't speak English and couldn't read and write.
He learned all of that. He was pretty entrepreneurial and had his three sons, so he started delivering
ice, in the south end of Boston, Harrison Avenue, because that is where they lived.
And on horse and buggy. What ended up happening is people over time would say, "Mr. Goldman,
while you are moving that ice, could you take some furniture for me?" It morphed into
a moving and storage company. They went through a couple of different places.
Where the Herald is right now - one herald square - was our first location, next to a
taxi company and then they moved to Humboldt Avenue, which in the Thirties and Forties
was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and so the name Humboldt was taken up. It used
to be H. Goldman Inc. because my grandfather was Harry Goldman and when they got to Humboldt
Ave people associated them with Humboldt... Humboldt Avenue and that's where the name
came from. Growing Up in the Business - A Lifetime
of Experience One interesting thing about my father my father
was a Depression baby. My grandfather almost lost everything in the Depression like everybody
else, so my father grew up working seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year;
in fact, as I grew up, I never saw my father - even on weekends he was working and as soon
as I was old enough I became another piece of equipment for my father. He would
literally come in at five thirty every morning pull down my covers pull up my shades and
pull me out of bed and tell me we were going to work and literally when I wasn't in school
I was working seven days a week because that's how we did it because my father had me doing
everything. I swept floors. I checked in furniture. I worked in the warehouse. I packed. I loaded.
I drove a truck and eventually I came into the office and did sales. I dispatched. I
did the long-distance and local dispatching and eventually went out and did some selling
and then took over and was actually running the company but it was a day that even when I
was running the company that my father (who at the time was seventy-five and still on the
trucks) wouldn't say let's go, your on the trucks, let's get the job done.
Even though we've been in business for a hundred and four years, one of the things we make sure
we don't become a victim of is complacency -- you know just because we've been around a
long time and we are a third generation family business doesn't mean that we don't think
that we can do it better and our people are trained to fight complacency. We don't take
anything for granted. I saythis before I tell our people all the time that our last move;
could literally be our last move just because we did a great job in the past doesn't mean
that going forward we're guaranteed, and so all our employees understand the importance
of servicing the customers and making sure that we take care of their every need. We live
the brand. It took us a couple years to come up with the "relax and get moving" and
the whole idea about taking out stress and our whole employee team has bought into that
concept. They understand that our job is to make it easy for the customer and make sure that
they don't have stress. So whether it's our receptionist answering the phone within
three rings and making sure that somebody on the phone doesn't have to wait, to getting
a call over to our customer service team or our sales team, they make sure they get back
to the customer. Then, once we promise to do the service, we show up on time, we do
like we promised, we are within the pricing that we told and when we deliver it we make
sure all the pieces go back together and I think that we do that really well.