Honoree: Laura McHolm

Co-Founder & Marketing Director
NorthStar Moving Company

One of the few women at the helm of a moving company, Laura McHolm’s NorthStar Moving is the go-to mover for A-List celebrities, The Getty and other movers and shakers. She has single-handedly crushed the dim view consumers once held about the moving industry. McHolm coined the phrase “eco-luxury moving services” and is changing the way people move by offering the red carpet treatment.

Honored with more awards for service than any other moving company, she is breaking the long-held notion of moving and storage as burly men doing one job. McHolm began university at the age of 16. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she taught basic programming on Apple computers, then worked in marketing for Atari while the company was still in its infancy, and after law school worked as a corporate intellectual property lawyer. In the mid- 1990s, she moved away from the Fortune 500 to fulfill her more creative, entrepreneurial spirit and co-founded NorthStar Moving Company in Los Angeles.

McHolm firmly believes that running a moving business means a lot more than lifting things - it’s about lifting up the community. She has built a company upon a sincere dedication to meeting the highest standards for service and integrity in her relationships with customers, employees and the community at large.

NorthStar Moving contributes time, services and financial support to over two dozen community-focused charities and socially conscious organizations including Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, E-Cycle Environmental, Global Green USA, Goodwill of Southern California, Habitat for Humanity, Lou Parker Project, Make-A-Wish LA and the Women In Green Forum.

An example of McHolm and her company’s philanthropic focus is the work done with the nonprofit organization Miry’s List, which crowdsources supply requests for vetted refugee families. The supplies help refugees rebuild their lives as they settle in the United States. She and her team at NorthStar Moving provide free services to store essential household items and deliver them to the new homes of the resettling families.