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My name is George Burns. I own Short Moves, Inc. Prior to starting Short Moves I worked with the competition from 1984 – 1990. Short Moves was born in my garage in 1989. Back then I would sit around in my garage with my brother-in-law Charlie Dean, who also worked in the industry, and we would talk about how successful some of the local moving companies in our area were, even though they did bad things. One of the most widespread practices was purposely low balling estimates. Imagine purposely lying to all of your customers, in my opinion not a good way to establish good customer relations.

Other practices we were aware of were companies hiding damages, overbooking their schedules and canceling the least profitable jobs or hiring temporary labor and spreading out their talent. I can’t imagine sending someone I have no knowledge about into my customers’ homes. Some companies would load their trucks, then inflate the bill and demand payment in cash before they would unload. Companies would charge customers for packing supplies not requested or needed as well as a host of other bad business practices too lengthy to list here. You get the idea.

In December of 1989 I went out and bought an old 1975 ex U-Haul truck, a stack of moving pads, 3 dollies, 4 company shirts, 2 company hats and insurance. That was the whole of the company. We had $1,500 left in the bank. It was sink or swim for sure.