History
In 2002, Furniture Installation Transportation Company (FITCO) surprised its rivals and vaulted into the top tier of metro region furniture installation companies when it won the Oppenheimer/Mass Mutual operations merger account at 2 World Financial Center. This was a massive, half million dollar project requiring over 100 personnel to install over 800 workstations and offices on 5 floors. In 2003, FITCO began a joint venture partnership with Advance, bolstering its exposure and greatly expanding its resources.
These two singular events form the symbolic and financial core of a business conceived and engineered by one of today’s respected entrepreneurs, Shamus Barnes. It is the story of a simple but focused beginning and a future without limits.
The FITCO story is the story of Shamus Barnes, FITCO President and founder. Shamus’ formation as a future business executive began at a very fundamental level with Structure Tone, a worldwide construction services leader. After graduating from Marist College with a BA in 1991, and until 1996, Shamus worked through key positions at Structure Tone including purchasing, estimating, and field project management. His experience with architects, engineers, furniture dealers, building management, and subcontractors to complete tenant fit outs for Fortune 500 clients would lay the foundation for his well-rounded management style.
Structure Tone also helped Shamus develop an appreciation for quality. This appreciation was critical in forming his FITCO business concept; Shamus noted that the high quality delivered by Structure Tone was often marred, literally, by later vendors who would not protect the work that had been done. To a businessman with a keen eye for opportunity, this was the just the signal that Shamus needed to push out on his own to fill the niche for sophisticated, high quality furniture installation services.
The original FITCO began as a 3-person furniture installation company in 1996, combining Shamus’ project management experience with relocation consulting expertise and a strong association with the Carpenter’s Union. FITCO was well positioned to ride the Internet bubble, managing installations for iVillage, Double Click, and other companies that would come to define that era. This fast-tracked FITCO to larger projects, including a project for the global reinsurer Swiss Re at 230 Park Avenue in a 6-floor move.
FITCO has long been a recognized leader in the application of technology. Bar code asset management and digital inventory management, buzz words of earlier times, though important still, are being eclipsed by the trend toward integrating furniture with technology that is actually being built into the furniture. This is an opportunity for FITCO, which retains a motivated staff and management team, invests in manufacturer training, and maintains extensive harmonious relationships with 18 special trades.
A new business opportunity presented itself to FITCO in 2003 when T. James Molloy saw the need to expand his Advance Commercial Mover’s foothold in the New York City commercial market. As CEO, Jim formed a joint venture partnership in that year with Shamus, who added his leading Queens-based furniture installation and warehousing company to an already impressive roster of services and resources.
The future for FITCO is bright and is two-pronged. First, FITCO is expanding and diversifying its services into such growing areas as furniture liquidation and architectural walls. An uncanny trend watcher, Shamus also sees enormous opportunity in the trend toward open landscape, where more people are being moved into less space.
The second prong is leveraging the industry-leading resources of Jim Molloy’s The Advance Group, which is the new corporate name under which the unique contributions of FITCO, together with commercial and residential moving, distribution, storage, and document management services are being harnessed. What Shamus is doing with furniture installation through expanding services, Jim Molloy is doing with the moving business overall, making the Molloy-Barnes combination a unique force in the industry. The largest and most complicated projects with the most sophisticated clients are well within the capabilities of these combined resources.
