Business View Magazine | December 2018

236 237 staunchly independent - not affil- iated with any national van line. Primarily focusing on interstate moving across the U.S. and Cana- da, the company has expanded into warehousing, including warehousing household goods, general storage, and office moving,while still offering local moving in the Racine area. “Our ‘why’ is that we are help- ing people during a very stressful transition in their life,” Eastman explains. “Emotions are high and it’s overwhelming.We move your goods from A to B. There’s no detour for us.We’ve packed and loaded at MERCHANTS MOVING AND STORAGE the house, and we’re driving it to the next destina- tion. There are times we’ll actually get there before the family will.” “We’re always looking at ways to do things better,” she adds. “Innovation—especially in this industry that is very, very old— is something we’re all look- ing at. How do we keep high-quality, high-touch customer service, while keeping the costs down, dealing with regulations and new electronic logs laws, and truck driver shortages? One of the bene- fits of being a smaller company is that once you’ve identified those things, you can move faster than a large corporation. For example, a couple of years ago we invested in a good website.We really want- ed to make sure we had a good web presence out there and that’s been very helpful for us. “This is a relationship business that we’re in, so a lot of our marketing is face-to-face, meeting people, belonging to organizations. So, we’re very involved JENNIFER EASTMAN PRESIDENT