How to plan your legacy

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Tales from the trenches of the business world

the issueLEGACY

mastering meetings

Creating corporate events with impact

How A 16-YEAr-oLd with gumption turned a onE-truCk opErAtion into an $85 miLLion industry leader

CHuCk kuHnFounder, President and CEO

Jk moving Services

SPEEDmovinG

AT THE

quALitYOF

By mike ungerphotography by mitro Hood

How a kid with a vision forewent college to chase his dreams of building a moving company known for quality, professionalism and always doing the right thing

Chuck kuhnFOundEr, PrESidEnT And CEO

Jk moving Services

SPEEDmovinG

AT THE

quALitYOF

Open the large front door of the modest two-story home or peer through its oval window, and inside you’ll see oak wood floors in the main hallway. Past the kitchen is the living room, decorated with plush taupe carpet, a beige leather couch, dark wood coffee table and a 50-inch Mitsubishi TV. A narrow staircase leads upstairs to the three bedrooms, each of which has a bed, dresser and other furnishings.

Outside, an American flag hangs limp from above the front door. There is no wind.

A 25-foot moving trailer sits where the driveway should be. Boxes, storage vaults and overseas shipping containers are scattered around the area. But no one is moving in or out. The place is not for sale. The house is not a foreclosure, nor is it under water. it’s actually under a 32-foot ceiling in one of JK Moving Services’ warehouses in Sterling, VA.

Moving at the Speed of Quality

on the move: JK Moving employees are screened carefully – undergoing extensive background checks and random drug testing. With one-of-a-kind benefits, profit-sharing and a 401(k), JK Moving is able to retain employees at a rate much higher than the industry standard, which gives employees the opportunity to grow their careers within the company. Photos courtesy of JK Moving Services.

“ It was snowing, [and] the crew showed up late. They got into my parents’ liquor cabinet. Midway through the move, they were all drunk. They got in a snowball fight, which led to a fist fight, which led to the police coming. My dad was upset; mom was in tears.” >> Chuck Kuhn, on the experience that shaped his vision

BOOT CAMPBefore anyone from the country’s third-largest independent moving company sets foot

in a customer’s home or office, they hone their skills here, packing, lifting and removing this furniture — it’s all real and quite heavy — over and over. At JK, no one learns on the job.

“We train in our house before they get into your house,” says Chuck Ware, quality assurance and training manager for the residential division.

Meticulous preparation, dedication to customer service and a professionalism not often seen in the industry has transformed JK from a one-man, one-truck operation started by a high school kid into a multimillion-dollar company whose 350-plus trucks handle roughly 15,000 moves a year.

JK has moved senators, congressmen and civil servants. It’s moved titans of industry and the companies they run. Hand-written notes from Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton thanking JK for jobs well done hang on the wall in the lobby of the corporate office. When President George W. Bush left the White House, JK handled the move back to Texas.

“We put one of our regular crews on it, like we would anybody else’s home,” says Chuck Kuhn, JK’s founder, president and CEO. “All our crews are the A-team. The move went off without a hitch.”

Three years earlier, the president had come to Sterling and held a town hall meeting on the economy in one of JK’s four warehouses. He’s probably not moving back to DC, but if he did, odds are W — like thousands of people throughout the country and the world — would call on JK.

A VISION FOR BETTERHome is the family room where your daughter took her first steps. It’s the nursery

where your son learned to read. It’s the man cave where you and your buddies watched the Redskins win the Super Bowl a long, long time ago.

No one understands the emotional bond people form with their houses like Kuhn. If he’s told this story once, he’s told it a million times.

Twelve-year-old Chuck was about to embark on a great adventure with his family. The Kuhns were going to Iran. His parents, Jim and Shirley, were lifelong Ma Bell employees, and they’d signed up for a three-year stint working for the phone company in the Middle East.

But where were the movers?“It was a stressful and emotional time for my parents,” Kuhn recalls. “It was snowing,

[and] the crew showed up late. They got into my parents’ liquor cabinet. Midway through the move, they were all drunk. They got in a snowball fight, which led to a fist fight, which led to the police coming. It was a disaster. My dad was upset; mom was in tears.”

From that moment, Kuhn knew he could do better.After the Iranian Shah was overthrown, Kuhn and his brother, Steven, were shipped

back to the U.S., where they stayed with relatives in Maryland. Kuhn began working for his uncle, Tom Shioutakon, who owned a small moving company.

“We would work in the warehouse, on the back of his moving trucks, and we learned the trade,” Kuhn says. “It was just manual labor, and it kept us out of trouble.”

Kuhn was born with an entrepreneurial bent that manifested at an early age.“He would go to school with a pocket full of bubble gum, which he paid like 25 cents

for,” says his father, Jim (who like Shirley worked for JK after “retirement”). “He’d sell it for 50 cents apiece. So I knew he had the urge.”

Kuhn couldn’t contain himself for long. He borrowed $5,000 from Shioutakon and bought a 26-foot 1978 Ford moving van. In May 1982, JK Moving and Storage, named for his father’s initials, was born.

Its sole employee was 16 years old.JK’s first client was an attorney for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who was

moving from Arlington to Alexandria.“I was dating a girl at the time who was doing an internship there,” Kuhn says. “He

was talking about moving. She told him what I was doing, we went out and gave him an estimate, and he gave us the job. It went great, and for the next three or four years, I was repeatedly doing work for the Patent and Trademark Office.”

After school, Kuhn would drive around Northern Virginia, looking for homes with “for sale” signs in the yard. He dropped his business cards in apartment building laundry rooms and posted them in elevators.

“I would do the marketing during the week, then typically we’d do the moves on Saturday and Sunday,” he says. “I put together a crew. The business started to grow. By the end of the summer, I had saved up enough money to buy a second truck.”

When Kuhn graduated from high school, he unloaded a bit of startling news on his parents: He was forgoing college to concentrate on JK.

“I had mixed emotions,” Jim says. “I did want him to go, but he said ‘Please give me a year, and if it doesn’t work out then I’ll go to college.’”

At a time when many boys his age worry about which campus boasts the most blondes, Kuhn was wrestling with payroll, taxes and insurance.

“My parents certainly had the goal for me to go on to college,” Kuhn says. “They were nervous. Their dreams and aspirations for me were taking a left and I was taking a right. It’s kind of odd. When I decided to go this route, I decided to go this route. I didn’t go into it wondering if I was going to make it, wondering how long I was going to do it. I decided this was the career path I was going to take. I was going to build this company and work this company until retirement, and this was my future.”

The future was now.

A JK MOVING SUCCESS STORYJK Moving Services was built on handling people’s most prized possessions —

and all the emotions and memories that go with them. When JK Moving moves

a client, the items are only part of the weight that gets carried.

There’s not much Barry Morris loves more than cars. So when he bought a mint

condition 1989 Mercedes 560 SL in California, he was paranoid about who

was going to bring it back east for him.

“I’m a car nut,” Morris says. “JK located the transportation, loaded the car up

and got it back to me in a timely manner. It came without a scratch. For me,

that’s a big deal.”

Still, it was not quite as important as another move the company did for him.

After more than two decades in the same house, Morris and his wife decided

to move from Oakton, VA, to Annapolis, MD.

“When you’ve lived in the same house for 21 years and that’s the only house

your kids know, you wouldn’t believe the emotions that go along with that,”

says Morris, who also used JK when the company he works for, Polycom,

relocated to the Dulles Tech Center. About 40 percent of JK’s business is com-

mercial; the rest is residential.

“They were true professionals and really worked with my wife,” he says. “They

were very sensitive to her emotions and did whatever she needed them to do.

They made a very emotional move palatable.”

BUILDING A REPUTATIONIn 1985, Kuhn employed a strategy that has helped propel his company’s growth

throughout the years. He acquired a rival. JK bought an Oakton, VA-based moving company with a solid reputation and

deep client list. It was one of at least 10 acquisitions of local and long-distance moving companies and storage companies that JK has undertaken.

This is one reason Kuhn says the company roughly doubles in size every four years. Another is its rigorous recruitment and training of quality people. Staffing is

“absolutely the biggest challenge I’ve had for 32 years,” he says.“In the early days, finding the guys to do the move the way you wanted to do it, guys

who would show up on time and care, it was difficult to find two. Today, with more than 600 employees, it’s still absolutely the biggest challenge we have.”

Much of that burden falls on the shoulders of JK’s six-person human resources team. The group uses an array of tools, including a behavioral test, to hire and place adequate candidates. Unlike many of its competitors, all of JK’s movers, even the seasonal hires, are full-time employees.

“The majority of our industry is set up in more or less a franchise model,” Kuhn says. “North American, Mayflower, Allied, Atlas, those franchises are all headquartered somewhere in the Midwest. Throughout the country, they have agents or franchises. It breeds a total lack of accountability in the system.

“We’re fortunate to work in an industry that has earned a bit of a bad reputation over time. A lot of the customers we deal with already have had bad moves with some of the major franchises. We do everything possible to train our teams [on] how to handle items properly, how to wrap them properly, how to move them properly. All of our tractor trailers have an air ride suspension. So instead of traveling on a spring suspension, they’re riding on air bags. We’re 100 percent accountable for everything we do.”

Each JK moving hire undergoes an extensive background check, is subject to random drug testing (as is everyone at the company, including Kuhn), and takes the three-day, basic training course that includes classroom work and hands-on practice in the training house.

“This isn’t your buddies, a six pack, pizza and a U-Haul truck,” Ware says. “If there was one particular thing that was going to make someone a successful mover, I would say it in the first 15 minutes of class, and we’d be done. We try to pay attention to the little things, like asking permission to put your drink in the customer’s refrigerator. You can be a great mover, but if you don’t have people skills, you won’t be successful here.”

The class covers everything from how to ask a client to use their bathroom (the master bath is off-limits) to techniques for properly wrapping and lifting furniture. Make no mistake about it — moving is difficult manual labor. Not everyone’s cut out for it.

“We just had a young fella that during the first day of basic training, which is the classroom portion, didn’t come back after lunch,” Ware says, chuckling. “Just us talking about it, he figured ‘this probably isn’t for me.’ That’s fine, because I want them to figure out that they don’t want to be a mover in my house as opposed to the customer’s house.”

“ In the early days, finding the guys to do the move the way you wanted to do it, guys who would show up on time and care, it was difficult to find two. Today, with more than 600 employees, it’s still absolutely the biggest challenge we have.”

>> Chuck Kuhn

LEAVING A MARKThough JK Moving founder, president and CEO Chuck Kuhn would rather play a supportive, lead-from-the-trenches role instead of one in the spotlight, he and JK Moving, through his vision and dedication to quality service, have racked up some prestigious awards and affiliations, locally and nationally.

>> Chamber of Commerce Blue Diamond Excellence Award for Quality

>> Blue Chip Enterprise Award>> The Better Business Bureau National Torch Award for Market-place Ethics

>> Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce Small Business Award

>> Ernst & Young Greater Washington Entrepreneur of the Year

>> Board of directors of the American Moving and Storage Association

>> Active member of the International Facility Managers Association

A vision realized: After an unpleasant experience with a moving company when he was a child, Chuck Kuhn, pictured with residential division warehouse manager Steve Long, left, knew he could do better. At the age of 16, Kuhn bought his first moving truck and turned JK Moving Services (named for his father’s initials) into a multimillion dollar moving and storage company with more than 350 trucks and 600 employees. Photos by Mitro Hood.

A CAREER, NOT A JOBJK offers opportunities for advancement even for entry-level movers hired with no

experience. People like Kris Smurda.“I saw a career path in front of me,” says Smurda, 49, who joined JK as a mover 16

years ago. “I became a Class A driver for about three years, then I was offered a position in the operations department as a dispatch assistant. I eventually worked my way into the commercial division, where today I’m the operations manager. I have 126 [people] that work for me. I would have never in a million years seen myself in the position that I’m in today.”

That’s a familiar sentiment among JK employees. When Kuhn was just starting the business, he’d occasionally pick up work from other moving companies on weekends he didn’t have a gig.

“Some of the guys I was working with were 60, 70, 75 years old out moving furniture with me,” he says. “I remember asking my dad, ‘Why are these guys moving furniture at 75? It’s killing them.’ He explained that they may not be able to financially retire. They might have to work until life’s over for them. I kept that in the back of my mind. As we were building JK, I did not ever want that to happen to anyone who worked for our organization.”

More than 20 years ago, Kuhn instituted a profit-sharing plan in which a percentage of the company’s profits (when it hits its pre-determined goal), is set aside for employees. To date, more than $17 million has been deposited into the plan, Kuhn says.

“It makes our employees partners in the company,” he says. “They have a vested interest in serving the client and seeing that the company is profitable.”

In addition to the profit-sharing plan, the company offers a 401(k) plan that guarantees a 3 percent contribution, regardless of what the employee puts in. The two retirement vehicles have helped JK immensely with recruiting and retention.

“Last year, I got a really nice letter and a picture from a woman from Costa Rica who worked for us as a packer,” Kuhn says. “She came to the United States, got her work permits and worked here for seven or eight years. At the end, she had enough money in her profit-sharing plan that she resigned from JK, withdrew her money, went back to Costa Rica and paid cash for a home. Now she’s living with her family in her dream home.”

MOVING WITH HEARTChuck Kuhn has implicitly understood the moving business — it’s about people,

not objects; heart, not heft — since before he could drive. Now 48, married with seven children, he gets the same satisfaction from moving people from point A to point B as he did when he was a teenager. He still arrives at the office each morning at 6:30 to check in on dispatch, still walks through the warehouses in Sterling, where the smell of fresh-cut lumber wafts throughout. JK employs craftsmen to construct a new wooden storage vault for each client, because Kuhn knows people’s stuff is more than just stuff.

In those boxes rest wedding dresses, prom tuxedos, a baby’s first onesie. They contain treasured photos, beloved books, a CD that played during a first kiss.

These are items JK moves every day. Taken together, material possessions make up the fabric of people’s lives.

A BREED APARTJK Moving’s business mantra is to always do the right thing. As such, the company invests heavily in finding the right people for the job and then takes good care to make sure those stellar employees stick around for the long haul. Several factors make JK an attractive employer:

>> The company has experienced year-over-year, double-digit growth over the last 30 years.

>> JK Moving’s training processes and procedures have been adopted by the American Moving & Storage Association, for its new RAMP program. >> JK established a safe-harbor 401(k) and profit-sharing program for em-ployees — a one-of-a-kind benefit in the industry. >> Employees go through a multi-day training program (three days of class-room and five days of hands-on) before they work in the field. >> JK has a model two-story house in its warehouse for employee training. >> Employee retention at JK is eight years, nearly double the industry average. >> JK is the mover of choice for Fortune 100 and 500 companies.

“When I started the business in 1982, interest rates were almost 20 percent,” Kuhn says. “I was very fortunate at the time not to realize the effect interest rates can have on the housing market and how that would affect the moving business. And no one told me. So we created our own economy. I didn’t know any better. I’ve kind of kept that mindset ever since then. I can’t control the economy, [but] I can control how I respond to the economy.

“Typically, people are moving when their family is expanding, when they have a job promotion,” he says. “It’s a great feeling of accomplishment to take the stress out of moving day and get them successfully into their new home. I enjoy working with our employees, I enjoy the customers and the challenge.”

Chuck Kuhn has been moving virtually his entire life. But he’s not going anywhere. CEo

Mike unger is a freelance writer based in Baltimore, Md. Contact us at editorial@smartceo.com

Moving at the Speed of Quality

quality above all else: JK Moving Services’ employees spend the first eight days of their employment in “basic training,” a combined classroom setting and hands-on training in the two-story JK model home, where they pack, move and rehearse the right techniques and communication expected of them before they ever set foot in a client’s home. Photos by Mitro Hood.