I’m Jeremy Rivera, and on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast I talked with Rachel Eisaman, who runs Joli Residential. She has been in business almost seventeen years in a category most people have never heard of — move management — and she opened with the stat that makes the case better than any pitch: sixty percent of her work year over year is referral or repeat business, in an industry where the customer supposedly only buys once a decade.
It Was Never About the Truck
People hear “move” and picture boxes and furniture going up a ramp. Rachel’s point is that the ramp is a sliver of the actual life cycle. The reason people hate moving is that it starts months before move day and does not end for months after it.
Joli Residential comes in as project managers — holding a client’s hand from the first conversation with a realtor about getting the house ready for market, through packing, through unpacking and setting up systems in the new house. Her team is made up of professional organizers and interior designers, so the questions are different from the ones a moving crew asks. What systems do you need so your life actually flows on the other side? You have three kids to get out the door in the morning — where do the water bottles and backpacks go?
The Design Conversation Nobody Else Has
Rachel is an interior designer by trade, and that is what clients get here that they would otherwise have to hire separately. Space planning, functional planning, and how it all flows together drive the whole process.
“Rarely do you translate A to A in the other house,” she said. The rooms are different sizes, the spaces work differently, so the conversation becomes what you want, what you need, and how to make it optimal. She has kept her trade accounts, so if the new place needs a rug or storage furniture, she can source it. She is careful to say they are not taking on full interior design projects, which is a different animal — but she has lost count of how many times a client had a furniture plan, and putting it on an actual floor plan revealed the pieces technically fit and the door will not open.
The Silence After the Truck Pulls Out
Asked about the joy in the niche, Rachel went to the client reaction first, because the category is new enough that people did not know this was an option.
“At the end of the project, they’re just like, that was the best move of my life. I had no idea it could be that way.” — Rachel Eisaman
Then she described the thing she loves that nobody else gets to see. Move day is eight men lifting furniture and boxes, a symphony of sound and bodies. And when the truck finally pulls out of the driveway, the house has an incredible silence to it — a stillness right after all that energy that most people never experience.
Three Businesses in One Trench Coat
Joli is technically Rachel’s first business, but it is on its third iteration. It started as interior design. Clients kept calling after the job was done asking for maintenance help, so fractional home management became a large part of the work. Then one of those home management clients was moving and asked her to just handle it — she was going skiing in Europe — and Rachel found it hit everything she loves at once: logistics, planning, creativity, working with a team, and a project that wraps up in a tidy bow.
The other formative experience was owning her first home in her twenties and dealing with home service providers. There is a lot of anxiety around that relationship and a lot of bad press, mostly from a small number of bad actors. Her business removes it by converting what is historically B2C into something closer to B2B: the painter talks to her, the landscaper talks to her, and she is the homeowner’s representative in every one of those conversations.
Lifestyle Business, But Not Forever
Rachel calls Joli a lifestyle business and then immediately complicates it. “It would feel selfish to hold it just for ourselves once I know how much we really help people in one of the most stressful periods of their life.” She does not need it to be the next Apple. She does think there is room to help more people, and that matters to her.
Take Care of Your Vendors Like They’re Clients
On networking, her advice is to use your network and trust your instincts — you get a read on people the first time you meet them, and the ones who register highly are worth pursuing, checking out, and asking around about. What she screens for is people who are good at the job and good people, the ones who will flag something outside their scope because it needs flagging. She has no problem interviewing electricians or plumbers long before she has work for them.
The reciprocal half matters as much: she takes care of vendors with the same intentionality she brings to clients and teammates, because when people know you care about them they want to do better for you, and that lands on the client’s side as a better outcome.
Rest Is Productivity
January and February are her slow months, which used to be distracting and is now the planning window — wrap the previous year, plan the next, and take the vacation while flights are cheap and nowhere is crowded. From March through December they stay busy.
On balance she is honest: she is often on her computer at 8:30 at night, and mostly it does not feel like a slog. But she has learned that rest is as productive as anything else, which is a hard lesson inside hustle culture. She was sick for three weeks in January and spent it fighting herself to allow rest. Her conclusion — if she does not schedule it, her body will schedule it for her, and on worse terms.
What Actually Markets a Referral Business
I asked what is working in marketing versus what is hustle-culture fluff, and Rachel gave the most useful kind of answer, which is the one with the failures in it. Almost all of fifteen-plus years of growth has been word of mouth. That model starts you eighty percent sold — and it also keeps the pipeline nearly fixed.
She tried Google Ads and the results came back extraordinarily low, because people are not searching for this service the way she assumed. She tried paid magazine ads with QR codes and got no clicks, though she conceded she does not scan QR codes in magazines either. “The thing that’s been best for us is really doing good work and having clients want to refer us. But that’s not a marketing strategy.” It is an honest place to be, and it is where a lot of excellent service businesses sit.
The Soapbox: It’s Not the Furniture
Her soapbox started with a client she thinks she lost. The estimate came back and the client said it was more than they needed to spend, because they were not moving that much furniture.
“It’s not the furniture that’s the hard part in a move. It’s the 300 plus hours you spend packing boxes.” — Rachel Eisaman
The furniture wraps, rides, and unloads in a single day. What consumes a household is the thousand decisions, the realtor coordination on the sale, the contractors, the repairs, the large outlay of cash — and the boxes. A standard kitchen alone runs fifty to seventy-five of them.
That led to a second soapbox about pricing. There is a history in the moving industry of undercutting the quote because once they have you, they have you. Rachel quotes high on purpose, because unknown things happen.
“I would always rather come in under budget and say, my gosh, we saved you $3,000, than come in and have to say I need more.” — Rachel Eisaman
And a third: be nice to people. Homeowners in a move are stressed, everything they own is being physically handled by strangers, and even the happiest reason for moving is still a huge transition. Taking the worry about the people away is the entire point of the service.
Connect with Rachel
Rachel Eisaman runs Joli Residential at joliresidential.com, covering the full life cycle of a residential move — pre-listing preparation through unpacking and organizing the new home.