The Household Moving Company was founded in Dublin by Brian Carroll in 2004.
-with-colleague-paul-niedzwiecki.jpeg?sfvrsn=63579d7b_0 "Brian Carroll (R) with colleague Paul Niedzwiecki")
Brian has over 30 years' freight forwarding and moving experience and previously worked as a corporate accounts manager for Dublin-based Nat Ross.
“I enjoyed my time at Nat Ross very much and liked the industry,” said Brian. “However I really wanted to run my own business and do things the way I thought they should be done, so in 2004 I re-mortgaged my house and set myself up as a move manager working from home, I guess I was what they call a bedroom broker.”
The business flourished and in 2007 the company moved into new warehouse and office premises on an industrial park just outside Dublin. “I wanted to expand our services and the time had come to invest in our own warehouse and office facilities rather than working off site,” said Brian. “It enabled us to offer storage facilities and our own transport, so it really increased the level of services we could offer our customers and allowed us to attract staff.”
The Household Moving Company focusses primarily on providing origin and destination services for the international corporate market, rather than private domestic moves within Ireland. The company is also equipped to provide services for office moves. “There are lots of small man-and-van operations in Ireland aggressively cutting service levels and rates and to a large extent private customers are happy to use them,” said Brian. “We prefer to concentrate on the higher level services required by the international corporate customer.”
The company has a small staff but it is agile and customer focussed. “With large organisations the knowledge base is often diluted and doesn’t always trickle down to the less experienced people in the business. With us the customer works with people who have an end to end perspective of the service being provided. It enables us to remain focussed and ensures we are giving the customer exactly what they want. I guess we don’t drop the ball as often,” said Brian.
In 2014 The Household Moving Company was awarded FIDI status and is Ireland’s newest member. “From my time back at Nat Ross I knew the value of being a part of FIDI and had always set my sights on achieving that standard,” said Brian. “This is a rigorous process so we developed a project plan to transform our methodologies to meet the criteria for membership. FIDI accreditation is a fundamental prerequisite for many agents and is reassuring to customers. This is a great benefit to a small company with a limited marketing budget so it’s been very worthwhile making the effort to meet their entry standards. There hasn’t been a new member in Ireland for a long time and we can now offer a credible alternative to the long established companies over here.”
Looking to the future, Brian plans to extend the warehouse early in 2016 with possible bonded facilities and in the longer term to introduce relocation services for those moving to the Emerald Isle.