82-year-old downtown business anticipates move to new location

by Jill Henry

SBJ Reporter

jhenry@sbj.net

After 82 years in the same location, a Springfield moving service will soon move itself.

Finkbiner Transfer and Storage, which began in 1922 in a then-brand-new building at 512 W. Olive, is scheduled to move to a new facility, with an estimated cost of $550,000 for construction and $200,000 for the property, according to owner Terry Hayes.

Hayes, who has owned the business since 1998, anticipates closing the doors of his leased downtown facility in September, when the new building at 2215 N. Burton, just off of East Kearney, is scheduled to be finished.

Hayes leases the West Olive location from George H. Paul, whose parents were the second owners of both the building and the business. The month-to-month lease is "probably about $3,000 a month," Hayes said.

As for the building's future, prospective owner Craig Wagoner said, "I've just got it under contract right now and we're working on exactly what we're going to do with it." The building could possibly be used for both commercial and residential, he said.

The majority of Hayes' business about 75 percent comes from moving services. "We're a full-service moving company, and we service the entire world," he said. About 10 percent of business comes from renting warehouse space for the storage of clients' goods.

Many of Hayes' storage clients are warehousing their goods while in the process of moving to a new home or business. He also has contracts with the military to store excess supplies and to store the belongings of military personnel. The remainder of Hayes' business comes from other services, such as packing clients' possessions before moving, delivering large items clients purchase and have shipped to the area, and making deliveries within a 100-mile radius of Springfield.

Steady growth of the business led to the move, said Hayes, who co-owns the business with his wife, Judy Hayes. Their daughter, Cherie Zuhlke, is bookkeeper. Terry Hayes was an employee of the business for 25 years before purchasing it for $100,000. "I gave up a good job to be the boss," he said.

Both revenue and staff have grown since Hayes purchased the business.

"Six years ago, we were probably at $400,000 (in annual sales) and now we're at $1 million plus," he said. "We had six employees in 1998 and we have 25 (full-time) employees now, so we're putting a lot more people to work. In our new place, we'll probably be adding some more employees because we hope to double our business by moving."

Hayes said it has been difficult to maintain the older facility. "The cleaning and everything else is a large job around here, just trying to keep the place picked up when the windows fall out and the doors fall off. It's constant replacement and repair, where with the new building we hope to eliminate a lot of that expense."

The layout of the current facility has presented challenges as well. "This is a very old building, and it's not even built on a level ground here. It's built on a hillside. In our business, hills don't work very well. It's just an old building that we've outgrown and couldn't find anything suitable for us, so we've decided to build one," he said.

Although the new building's 16,000 square feet is just 1,000 square feet larger than the original building, Hayes said his usable floor space will double. "(The new building) is all flat and it's much higher, so we can go higher with our product instead of spreading it out on a low-ceiling floor," Hayes said. Items are packed into large wooden boxes, about 7-by-7-by-4 feet, and then the boxes are nailed shut and moved using forklifts.

"It's going to be a nice building," said Suzy Eberle, project manager for Rich Kramer Construction, the project's general contractor. "It's a pre-engineered metal building and there will be two offices in there."

The building will also have three bathrooms, four overhead doors and room for two future overhead doors, Eberle said.

"We have full fire and burglar protection, insect and pest control, everything that's required by the federal government to store government items," Hayes said. "Of course we have that here, too, but it's just harder to maintain in an 82-year-old building than it is in a new building."

Eberle said Chamberlain Architects is the architect for the project. Also working on the project are Meyer Construction as the concrete crew, AC Electric as the electrician, Skaggs Heating and Cooling, and Farr Better Plumbing.

Finkbiner Transfer and Storage represents several carriers, but Hayes said Bekins is its main carrier.

"Anything that we haul with the name of Bekins, we pay them a commission. Anything that we would haul for Bekins would be anything that would go outside of the state of Missouri, but not outside of the country," Hayes said, adding that a shipment from Springfield to Illinois, for example, would be a Bekins-regulated shipment, and a shipment to Germany or the United Kingdom would be an international shipment under one of the international carriers he is affiliated with.

Glenn and Pearl Finkbiner were the original owners of the building and the business, Paul said. Both were later sold to the Paul family, which ran it from about 1940 until Hayes purchased it. "We're actually the third family, but there hasn't been a Finkbiner here for a long time," Hayes said.