Rachel Eisaman: It's Not the Furniture - What a Move Actually Costs You

Rachel Eisaman owns Joli Residential, an Atlanta-based concierge move management company she has run for almost 17 years, where roughly 60% of the work year over year comes from repeat clients and referrals. The most interesting thing in this episode is her pricing stance: she quotes deliberately high, on purpose, as a direct reaction to movers who lowball an estimate and then raise the price once your furniture is already on the truck.

In this episode

• What move management actually covers - the months before and the months after move day, not just the truck
• Why her team is staffed with professional organizers and interior designers, and why the furniture floor plan conversation has to happen before move day, not on it
• The three-iteration path of one business: interior design, then fractional home management, then full-lifecycle move management
• Turning a homeowner's B2C mess into B2B - the painter, landscaper and movers talk to her team instead of the stressed homeowner
• Vetting vendors: interviewing electricians, plumbers and moving companies long before she plans to use them
• Quoting high with intention, and why undercut moving estimates are predatory
• Seasonality (January and February are the slow months) and what she has learned burning money on Google Ads and local magazine placements

"It's not the furniture that's the hard part in a move, right? I mean, that wraps up, gets on a truck and comes off all in the same day. It's the 300 plus hours you spend packing boxes, right?" - Rachel Eisaman

"I actually quote high and I do that with intention." - Rachel Eisaman on refusing to surprise clients with a bill at the worst possible moment

"I think the thing that's been best for us is really doing good work and having our clients want to refer us. But that's not a marketing strategy. So let's talk again in three more years and see if I have a better answer." - Rachel Eisaman on her marketing experiments so far

Connect with Rachel: Joli Residential is at joliresidential.com, on Instagram as Joli Residential, and Rachel Eisaman is on LinkedIn.