Pounds of paper expand Puliz

Visionaries periodically predict the advent of the paperless society.

Tim Puliz knows better.

His family owned company, Puliz Moving and Storage, is nearing completion of a 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Panther Valley.

A nearby 50,000-squarefoot facility, after all, is almost filled with boxes of documents from lawyers, doctors, casinos and other businesses.

And the ways things are going, the new warehouse will fill quickly.

The document-storage division has grown by 20 to 30 percent a year for the past 10 years, says Puliz, president of the Reno-based company, and there's no indication the pace will slow any time soon.

While the warehouse is filled from floor to ceiling with about 500,000 boxes of files, the document-storage business is mostly about high tech and customer service.

Puliz Moving and Storage keeps track of each document in every one of those half million boxes, using a system of bar codes to retrieve a document, deliver it to a customer, then return it to the right spot when the customer is done.

Twice a day, couriers head off from the north-Reno warehouse to deliver documents and pick up files for return.

Customers at their desks, meanwhile, can use Puliz' proprietary software to access information about files in the warehouse or tag items for delivery.

For the storage and service, customers pay about 25 cents to 35 cents a month for each box in storage, but the company says its customers save money once they calculate the amount they're paying to lease office space that's used for storage.

A number of the boxes in the Puliz warehouse carry the logo of Iron Mountain Inc., a big national outfit based in Boston that competes directly with Puliz in the Reno market.

"Our customers like our service better," Puliz says, explaining their decision to switch.

The company undertakes customer-satisfaction surveys twice a year.

The results? About 62 percent rank the company's document service as excellent; the remainder rank it good.

Along with document storage, the company's 200-plus customers use Puliz services for document shredding as well as off-site backup of computer data.

The fast-growing documents business has been particularly important to Puliz Moving and Storage because its traditional moving business it's an agent for United Van Lines and Mayflower has been flat for about five years.

Along with household moves, the company handles major corporate moves furniture for renovated hotels, offices moving to new locations.

Company patriarch Al Puliz began his career in the moving business in 1951.

He joined with sons Tim and Allen in 1978 to establish Puliz Moving and Storage, and they were joined a few years later by Al's daughter, Anne Puliz LaVoy, who remains a part-owner although she's not involved with daily management.

In the late 1980s, the company expanded from Reno to Las Vegas, and Allen Puliz these days supervises a 100,000-square-foot southern Nevada operation that includes records management along with moving and storage.

Tim Puliz notes that the company is the largest moving company in the state but he's quick to add that it doesn't register much of a blip among the substantially larger firms elsewhere in the nation.

Ever since the company's youngest days, the Puliz family has looked for opportunities to expand into other markets.

By the 1990s, for instance, they had built a thriving business providing logistical services to exhibitors at trade shows a business they sold to GES Exhibition Services in 1997.

"We were just working ourselves to death," Puliz says in explaining the sale.

"I was on the road 180 days a year, and so was my brother."

Even after the sale, the company's payroll totals about 120.

And how about the threat of the paperless society? Laughs Puliz, "We're not even close."