I have a very vivid memory. It was actually a Facebook post created to commemorate my “achievement” of leasing our first physical location for Caring Transitions of Little Rock Metro. I was standing in our newly leased warehouse space in the winter of 2017. I had my black wool overcoat on, it was frigid in that warehouse and I looked around at the huge, empty space thinking…. how will I ever grow into this space? To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement. Since then, I started lightheartedly referring to that space as our “corporate office”.
Seven years, hundreds of clients, and thousands of shoppers/bidders later we have officially outgrown our space and our territory boundaries. Our journey has been remarkable! We filled the warehouse within a matter of months, our calendars filled up with projects, our team grew to accommodate the demand for service, and I added a business partner, my son, Andy, to help determine the future of our company. His energy and vision has led us to an exciting new venture.
Several months ago, in the fall of 2023, we officially expanded our service area and changed our name to Caring Transitions of Central Arkansas, as this better reflects the full geographic region of our state that is now included in our territory. Our new territory includes Conway, Greenbrier, Vilonia, Heber Springs, Beebe, Searcy, Cabot, Jacksonville, and Sherwood. We opened our first satellite location in Conway, Arkansas and will be looking to recruit and hire local talent to build relationships and to serve those local communities.
Like before, I’m looking at this new “territory” and wondering how we will grow in this new space. This time I’m referring to our new full geographic territory – so much bigger than an empty warehouse. That might make this a bit scary, if we weren’t fully prepared! News Flash: WE ARE PREPARED! We have the experience, the talent, and the resources to immediately respond to our clients, to achieve the best outcomes possible for our clients, and to maintain our standards of service that helped build our reputation in our industry and franchise family.
It seems so appropriate to kickstart our new territory with the new year, just like we did back in Dec of 2017. We started with estate sales only, thinking we needed to master one service at a time. Since then we’ve probably served close to a thousand clients (if not more). We opened warehouse sales and online auctions, using our CTBids selling platform, in 2018. This method of selling on online auctions has a huge learning curve due to all the moving pieces and the actual technology involved. Thanks to our leadership and talent in our workforce, we have achieved a solid level of proficiency in online selling. In 2019, we added our relocation (moving) service line. This was a big lift as well. Our early partnership was with my son’s moving company, but we finally found the right man to facilitate this and as such did a phenomenal level of business during that first year. I believe we owe it all to having the right people at the right time, to roll out each service line. We hired people with the same mission-minded, work ethic, and goals that Andy and I share.
We are looking forward to developing new relationships in our surrounding communities. Our services are needed in every town, and we are so excited to start the next part of our journey.