Donna Quinn Robbins, a senior move coordinator, put her arm around the frail woman's shoulders. "You have some homework. You need to go into the bathroom and put in a box the things you want," she said.

Robbins conceived of her company, Ultimate Moves, after a client of her interior-design business had a stroke and asked for her help in finding an assisted living facility.

With her design background, upbeat personality and take-charge attitude, she realized that she could offer similar assistance to other elders facing the daunting task of downsizing from a home of many years to a small senior residence.

She offers emotional and organizational support, as well as hands-on help with deciding what furniture to take and where to place it, sorting through belongings, hiring a moving company and overseeing the move.

Robbins' business and other senior-move consultants are part of what Time magazine recently called "the Great Midlife Lemonade Stand." The next gold rush lies in "taking the bitter taste of aging and making it sweet," Time wrote.

"The most agile group of entrepreneurs are developing products and services aimed at" Boomers and their parents, said Mary Furlong, executive professor of entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University.

She thinks senior move consultants are a great idea. "You're not just talking about cleaning a closet. You're talking about assembling the treasures of a lifetime and figuring out what goes from a house someone's been in for 57 years to a small apartment. It's a perfect business for someone to take on. Even if you have a son or daughter to help, it's overwhelming."

Furlong likes the idea so much that the Boomer Business Summit, which she sponsors, picked Moving Solutions, a Pennsylvania company that manages senior moves, as a finalist for its $10,000 Boomer Business Plan competition. The contest is designed to recognize enterprises with the best chance for success in the over-50 market.

Margit Novack founded Moving Solutions in 1996 because she wanted to work in geriatrics and was smitten with the concept of helping seniors move. She's had thousands of clients since then and has 30 employees, both full and part time, to handle about five moves a week. Her rates are $33 to $43 an hour depending upon the complexity of the move.

"I was an orphan at 26," she said. "One reason I get so much gratification out of doing this is it is good to feel like a daughter again. But we're as effective as we are because we're not the children. We are outside professionals who can be objective."

Novack started hearing from others who were in the senior move business or wanted to be, so she set up the National Association of Senior Move Managers in 2002. It now has 100 members. In addition to networking and education, it is tackling issues such as finding an insurance company to write policies specifically for senior movers.

While many senior-move consultants are small proprietorships, bigger companies are also getting into the act. MovingStation, a Chicago firm that started 10 years ago as a corporate relocation service, soon realized that assisting seniors moving to retirement communities was a growing market niche, said Joy Loverde, senior director.

"We are well aware that the population is aging, and we saw that our model fit that population perfectly," she said.

Contracting with facilities

The company's senior-move division, Moving Made Easy, contracts directly with retirement communities around the country to handle move-ins and also will work for individual seniors. Moving Made Easy is assisting the recently opened Classic Residence by Hyatt in Palo Alto with move-ins to 388 senior apartments.

For a brand-new community, the challenge is to get people in quickly.

"You don't want it to be a ghost town. You want a happy, thriving place that feels like home," Loverde said. "We can fill communities fast, turning it into a home in less than one month."

Novack from Moving Solutions has heard from so many people who hope to start a similar business that she recently started franchising. For a $16,500 franchising fee, she provides the business model, two weeks' initial training; ongoing support and coaching; and seminars on finance management, marketing and other issues.

The franchise is available in 35 states. Because California has stricter regulations for franchises, it won't be available here until next year, she said.

Robbins also is branching out into education. She offers seminars at retirement communities for prospective residents and their families, discussing downsizing and the emotional issues of moving. She also lectures at corporations. "Companies lose $20 billion a year in productivity for employees dealing with parent issues," she said.

She has trained two local moving companies, Shamrock Moving and Storage and Cummings Moving Co., to work with seniors. The co-author of a book, "Moving Mom & Dad," Robbins has a workbook due out in the spring for families to use in discussing elder-care options with their parents.

She has an arrangement to help move in new residents at San Francisco retirement communities Rhoda Goldman Plaza, Bridgepoint and San Francisco Towers. Other clients hear about her by word of mouth. She's helped more than 3,000 elders move over the past 16 years.

Moving sometimes unearths serious problems that have gone undetected. Some seniors turn out to be hoarders, with decades' worth of newspapers, rooms full of unopened purchases or hundreds of pairs of shoes.

Simple, but firm approach

Robbins said she takes a simple approach, telling them, "You hired me to help you. The only way I can help you is to be a little bit firm. You can't keep all of this."

John Milford, executive director of the San Francisco Towers retirement community, said Robbins organized the move-ins for 250 apartments when it opened in 1997. The work involved visiting each tenant's old residence, reviewing the new floor plan, helping select the furniture to keep, advising how to dispose of extra possessions and supervising the actual moves.

"I'm sure there are people who would have canceled the move if they'd had to do it on their own," he said. "She walked them through it step by step, did a marvelous job. She's always optimistic and looks at what's best for them."

Robbins spends five to eight hours on a typical move. She charges $65 an hour for her services of organizing and supervising the move, drawing floor plans, arranging disposal of surplus items.

She has staffers available at $35 an hour to help with other tasks. Interior design runs $100 an hour. A one-time consultation for families wondering where their parents should move is $195.

A big part of her job is hand holding. "I acknowledge their fear," she said of her clients. "I say, 'I know this is not going to be easy but there are ways to make it easier.' It's a very poignant and sensitive situation. You have to walk a fine line."