Courtesy of Arnoff Logistics
By Susan Elise Campbell
Arnoff Moving & Storage achieves another milestone this spring with its 100-year anniversary as a family corporation. What was started in 1924 by generations one and two with Abraham Arnoff and his son Louis is now under the management of generations three, four and five.
How future generations will impact the growth of the company when they come on board, time will tell, if they first follow one family rule.
“My grandmother Phyllis had the idea, I was told, that any family member has the opportunity to join the business but must have worked for at least a year at another company,” said Dan Arnoff, chief relationship manager and company spokesperson who oversees sales, marketing and human resources. “She is the one who enforced the rule.”
Phyllis Arnoff has passed away, but her husband Richard, generation three, is the firm’s CEO. The president is their son Michael and his wife Lisa is executive vice president and corporate counsel. Their sons Dan and Craig, the latter a CPA and the company’s chief operating officer, are also operating the firm alongside their cousin Nick, vice president of fleet and safety, and uncle Mark, who manages a separate moving company in southern Florida.
The family is preparing a ribbon cutting May 1st to celebrate their golden milestone.
“The event will be open to the whole community,” said Dan Arnoff. “We want as many people there a possible.”
The Arnoffs plan to open their doors for “tours, snacks, and fun things,” said Arnoff. “We will also host another event specific to real estate agents in the fall.”
There will be a similar spring celebratory event in Poughkeepsie, which became home to Arnoff Moving in 1960 and where the company continues to maintain a strong presence, Arnoff said.
“My great-great grandfather and my great grandfather started as dairy farmers in Lakeville, Connecticut,” Arnoff said. “They didn’t like farming much, but they had a truck and started moving the furniture or items purchased on the travels of wealthy families living there.”
“Their clients trusted them to move items of great value, whether monetarily or sentimentally,” he said. “They got a knack for taking good care of the things they moved or stored.”
This reputation followed the family business into Poughkeepsie when Richard moved his growing family there. Arnoff said IBM was taking off then, and there was an influx of people needing residential moving services.
At that time, all of the Arnoff’s neighbors were IBM families who were telling Richard and Phyllis that there would be demand for setting up offices and bringing in equipment for manufacturing IBM’s mainframe computers. And employees were coming from all around the world to populate the factories, Arnoff said.
“From that moment my grandfather realized what a benefit it would be to diversify the company to provide other services in addition to residential moving, making it more financially sound and stable for not only his family, but also the families of those who worked for him,” Arnoff said.
One truck became two, and two employees became 20 as the family business owners learned how to move equipment and office furniture safely while expanding their client base.
“IBM was our largest customer for many years and while that business has shrunk down, that experience was a jumping off point for the company to determine what we could do with the resources we had,” he said.
It was also their entreé into serving the technology industry. Continuing to look for ways to grow the business more into the commercial market, Arnoff Moving made the move to expand into another branch in Albany in the early 1980s.
The Arnoffs opened a small warehouse off Broadway and later purchased the RCA building in Albany, when the iconic “Nipper became the company’s mascot for a time,” Arnoff said.
“He is still on top of that building,” Arnoff said. “But the building has four floors and one freight elevator and it was not efficient” for the storing and warehousing services that had been flourishing.
But Malta was fast becoming another of the state’s technology manufacturing centers by the early 2000s and a long search for expansion space lead the Arnoffs to 10 Stonebreak Road and the former Racemark building in 2016.
“We sold all our Albany properties and significantly renovated the original building on Stonebreak Road, turning 100,000 square feet into 200,000,” Arnoff said. “We added to our state-of-the-art logistics campus when we built another 120,000 square feet on the premises a year ago”
Logistics is the process of getting goods from one location to another, and Arnoff staff helps their customers determine “how to make their supply chain resilient and robust,” he said.
Customers may require transportation, long-term storage, or just-in-time warehousing, where Arnoff holds inventory until the customer’s need is determined and a delivery is arranged. There is both staff and a specialty trucking fleet to handle high-value freight, Arnoff said.
“This area of the company focuses on customers with sensitive or very expensive equipment,” he said. “An example is one shipment worth $12 million shipped to support a client’s manufacturing process at their facility.”
Looking back on a 100-year history, Arnoff said the company has come from two employees with one truck to more than 200 employees and 200 trucks. The family attributes their growth to “a strong group of customers across diversified business lines,” he said.
Arnoff said the family feels “fortunate” to get to this milestone through the employment pool in Malta and the “really great group of employees” that the Arnoffs call family.
“We try to embody the multi-generational family business aspect of the company, and that means all of our employees are part of our family, all of our customers are part of our family, and the community at large is part of our family,” Arnoff said.
“Not every day is the greatest day, but in our company culture we try to make every day better than yesterday,” he said. “If there’s an issue and we can make something better for an employee or a customer, that becomes our focus and mission for that day.”
Arnoff said that family also feels fortunate to have developed good relationships with the Town of Malta.
“It’s not always easy to do large commercial development projects but Malta has been very welcoming to us,” he said. “This makes the Arnoff family more confident about continuing to invest in this property.”
That support is focused not only on Arnoff Moving & Storage but also across Saratoga County, Arnoff said.
“We know the growth in the entire county isn’t going to stop,” he said. “We want to be a part of it and be a supporting player here.”
“We feel very proud and extremely optimistic for the short- and long-term where our business is going,” Arnoff said. “We think this 100th year is going to be a milestone on the way to a 200- or 500-year-old company.”
Visit www.arnoff.com for more information.