Yes, we bought a moving company! Odd right? As we worked on this venture over the past couple of months, Anthony commented one night, “we bought a zoo!” He was referencing the 2011 Cameron Crowe movie of course, not the fact that the business we bought was a zoo. That comment stuck with me, so we cued up the movie recently on family movie night and low and behold there were definitely some things there that I found ironically relevant. See, when you sum it up, WE BOUGHT A ZOO is a hopeful message about taking chances, finding 20 seconds of insane courage, loving people, and adventurous, unadulterated joy. All elements of the exciting new adventure our family has just embarked on.
In keeping with the zoo theme, let’s talk about the elephant in the room now shall we? Why a moving company? Yes, this announcement has garnered some inquisitive, perhaps puzzled, looks followed by that very question. Honestly put, Anthony and I are entrepreneurial geeks. An exciting evening at home often includes a nice bottle of wine and multiple episodes of Shark Tank, The Profit, or both. We enjoy brainstorming, debating, and picking matters of business apart. We have both had our hands in business ventures of varying levels of complexity over the years, but we have never before ventured into business as partners. When the brainstorming, debating, and picking apart was turned on our dear friend’s business that was for sale, we stumbled upon our first opportunity to explore this unchartered territory.
We have already learned quite a bit about working together, and are confident that those lessons will continue. But, one of the most interesting lessons to date came during a brainstorming meeting with a marketing firm. Going into that meeting we both thought we were at opposite ends of the spectrum with regard to how we planned to approach the business. We both have a solid basis in business with years of great experience in operations, sales, management, negotiations and more to draw on. But, when you boil it down Anthony is the engineer and I am the creative…different, right? What we learned during that meeting is that we are actually more similar than different from a marketing perspective. Of the twelve different marketing archetypes, we are the same, not different at all! We are both caregivers. As the highly esteemed, marketing guru we were meeting with pointed this out, it was as if the windows and doors were blown open and a beautiful bath of sunshine illuminated this whole idea. We were onto something and we didn’t even realize up to that point how in sync our ideas and motivations for pursuing this together were. But, what we did agree on is that we wanted to make a difference with this business and having the caregiver mentality at the heart of our plans was definitely in line with doing just that.
So, having brainstormed, debated, picked apart, researched, consulted, vetted with other business professionals and mentors we harnessed our sense of adventure, acted on our 20 seconds of insane courage and set off with great plans and hopefulness in our hearts to embark on the first family business for our little clan of Mutos. Yes, we have included our budding entrepreneurs Sophia and Dante in the process. They have had the opportunity to weigh in on planning, rebranding, and messaging. They are as excited as we are to see where this adventure will take us. To sum it all up, this business does come back to loving people both in that we are running a family business together with those we love the most, and in that we get to care for our customers and their personal belongings at pivotal points in their lives when this matters most. Certainly, these are very different types of love, or care if you will in the case of our clients, but being caregivers by nature we see this as the perfect fit for our family. This business offers us the opportunity to blend our entrepreneurial nature, business experience, and passion for making others feel valued and cared for with a little dash of Southern hospitality and make a difference both in our community and in our industry as we collectively create something GREATER together. And, you can trust that although we know there will be challenges, as long as we are in this together there will most certainly be adventurous, unadulterated joy too. Welcome to our zoo!
