Case Study · Compressed Relocation

I Had Seventy-Two Hours.
Your Move Isn't Much Different.

Service members do this every day. I did it several times — the last one with a wife and a daughter. Here is how it actually gets done, and why a physician’s start date is the same problem wearing different clothes.

Jeff Stutzman
Jeff Stutzman
Movers and Makers

I left the Navy on a Friday afternoon at three o’clock. I was a lieutenant at the Office of Naval Intelligence, working the kind of hours where dress whites and nonstop action were just Tuesday. Right up until the last minute. No coasting to the finish, no long goodbye.

Monday morning, 9:00 a.m. Pacific, I had to be in San Jose, California, ready to work at Cisco Systems. Three days. Coast to coast. New job, new life.

Here’s the part that made it survivable. We didn’t try to solve it in that seventy-two hours. We solved it over the year before.

We built our house in New Hampshire remotely. I flew up from Washington nearly every weekend to walk inspections. We picked out appliances down south and worked an arrangement with our general contractor to have them drop-shipped and installed before we ever arrived. By the time the clock ran out, the house was ready. We just had to show up.

The house under construction in winter — roofed and sheathed, porch still open framing, snow to the treeline.
New Year’s Day inspection, 2001, four months before move-in.
The seventy-two hours were never the problem. The seventy-two hours were the deadline. The work happened in the year in front of them.

Military families do a version of this constantly. Orders come, the report date does not move, and you go. I had done it before on my own. Doing it with a wife and a daughter is a different exercise entirely — you are not just relocating yourself to a job, you are landing three people into a life.

Why we work with physicians and healthcare workers

You are not a Navy intelligence officer moving out of D.C., but you are on the same kind of clock. You are coming out of a residency where you have been a transient renter, into your first attending job. You are going to work a lot of hours. You need to be close to the hospital. And your move has to be timed impeccably, because your start date does not move.

More than that, it has to be easy. You will not have the bandwidth to project-manage a relocation on top of credentialing, orientation, and your first weeks on service.

What that means we actually do

  1. Sequence the purchase around your start date. We work backward from the day you report, not forward from the day a listing appears.
  2. Stand in for you at the house. Walkthroughs and inspections you cannot attend, covered and documented, so a compressed visit is not your only look at it.
  3. Open the door for the people you hire. Access for the vendors and deliveries you have arranged, and introductions to local trades if you need them. We are not general contractors or project managers and do not manage the work — but you should not have to fly in to let someone in.
  4. Know the drive. Which neighborhoods actually put you inside a reasonable commute of your hospital — measured at the hours you will genuinely be driving, not at noon on a Sunday.

We can help with the relocation. What we are really after is that you land well.

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