Considering Christine Soave Crum’s high-energy approach to work and life, it’s fitting that she owns a moving company.
After all, she’s accustomed to putting things in motion in more ways than one, whether its relocating contents of a house or advancing her education, company or career.
A friend once put it to Crum this way: “If you are sitting still, something is wrong.”
Indeed, Crum’s career trajectory has shown she is unafraid to fully commit to goals and get to work planning the tasks needed to accomplish them. She is highly motivated and knows what it’s like to have to switch course when circumstances dictate, even if that means switching careers entirely. Her past is also a lesson in the importance of diversifying, whether that be in terms of entrepreneurial ventures or offerings within those ventures.
Crum is the owner of Cranston’s Gentry Moving & Storage. With 25 employees, it’s a $2 million to $3 million company in a male-dominated industry.
But Crum’s path to leading the company full time took some twists and turns. She began in a different field, as an educator. Crum has a bachelor’s degree in public health and school health education from Rhode Island College, which she earned in 1998. She completed a master’s program in school health education at Cambridge College in Massachusetts in 2003.
The following year, she founded the moving company with a partner.
The master’s degree was earned in a year and a half over nights and weekends while she worked teaching in Taunton public schools, taking her own classes while teaching classes – with frequent commutes to and from Boston – but it was necessary to achieve her goal.
‘I went from managing little people to managing big people.’
CHRISTINE SOAVE CRUM, Gentry Moving & Storage owner
“I was not married at that time, with no children,” she recalled. “I knew I wanted to complete my degree and that was my goal. I said to myself, ‘I have to do it now.’ ”
After obtaining her master’s degree, teaching continued.
Meanwhile, the moving company continued to thrive, with a vice president handling day-to-day operations and Crum handling tasks such as scheduling and the banking. “Afternoons, nights, weekends … somehow the little administrative pieces got taken care of,” she said.
In the classroom for over 14 years, she found her niche at the middle school level. She taught in Central Falls schools for several years and was happy teaching subjects such as nutrition, dating violence, human body systems, fire safety and bike safety.
But then, Crum said, job requirements for health educators changed. Health educators were told they would need to also be physical educators, too, certified in health and adaptive physical education.
“Essentially they were asking for three teachers in one,” Crum said of the new standards. “I didn’t have the right certifications for the new position. People ask why I didn’t go back to college. Well, because you wouldn’t want me teaching anything about sports,” she said. The subject was not in her area of interest and she wasn’t knowledgeable about it.
In 2013, she said, four health educators at her school, all without the proper certifications, lost their positions.
So Crum turned her full attention to the moving company, which had been growing in the background. She went from working in public education to overseeing property relocations.
“I say that I went from managing little people to managing big people,” she said with a laugh. “I prefer little people. They are more malleable.”
However, Crum has a track record of finding malleability anywhere, managing whatever people or circumstances come her way. COVID-19’s arrival – and having to find safe business solutions such as doing virtual visual inspections for packing and moving estimates, for example – tested this skill further.
She called Gentry Moving a “gift, a blessing” to her family, a vehicle by which to diversify and a business that she could then commit to fully when it became necessary. Beyond having a woman at the helm, Crum found other ways to distinguish Gentry from its competitors.
In 2007, the company created specialty division Seniors on the Move, which she calls her passion project. The service helps older residents who need help downsizing, moving into assisted living communities, transitioning into other units within those communities or relocating to other states.
Not everyone has family members nearby who can assist in those types of moves. “We work hand in hand with [the seniors], helping them navigate,” Crum said.
Tied into this market niche, Gentry’s company culture involves charity work benefiting elders as well. “We are all about the giveback,” said Crum.
Crum feels that Gentry’s handling of all its clients is buoyed by its female staff members. Customers who call to request moving services are not always calling for happy reasons. People move due to the death of a loved one, divorce, job loss and other sad circumstances, Crum pointed out.
“I feel we give more [of] an empathetic, caring approach to those phone calls,” she said. “My staff takes the time to listen – and it’s often a female who is calling.”
