Retro-Relocation
Walk a mile in our shoes to find out why you should use a Mover directly for lump sum moves.
If you trace your family history, I am sure all of us have had, or still have, men and woman in our family that earned their wages by the sweat of their brow. Manual labour built this country, from factories to farms; honest hard work is something that was prized by our forefathers as the stuff you were made of. We were judged to be either worth, or not worth our salt by how hard we worked. Moving is still the same hard work that it was back in the time of the horse and buggy. Technology has not made a grand piano lighter, or 500 hundred miles shorter.
The Moving industry developed with the migration of folks seeking a better life in a new country. Networks or Van Lines developed to provide return weight to movers that found themselves on the other side of the country with no paying load to get back home. Movers were the evolution of the voyageurs in Canada, or covered wagons in the U.S, with long hours of back breaking work followed by days of traveling. Not a lot has changed in 100 years; the hard work, manual labour and long hauls are still the way our people make their honest living. A living built on hard work, the kind of work I am sure you can trace back to many men and woman in your own lineage.
Today everyone wants to be a manager, a middleman or a broker, and take a scrape off the folks that are doing the heavy lifting. Professional Movers have lost the ability to build brand equity and value, as we are lumped into generic supplier stables on the corporate side, and tarnished by rogue movers on the private transfer end of the business. We have been labeled as a bunch of scallywags that can’t be trusted, and are incompetent in providing service directly to corporations because, well, we are just movers. When in reality, we are hardworking, honest folks trying to earn a living in a very labour-intense service, like your great grandparents did.
When I first came into the business (30 plus year ago), corporations would deal directly with the Mover; there were no relocation companies or online brokers. Back then we had (and still have) professional sales people that would work directly with corporations. We would design moving policies and manage the entire process. We became a trusted partner and valuable information resource for corporations. Although relocation management is certainly needed and valued on complicated or international relocations, I question if it has a place in a simple lump sum or reimbursed move.
Today there are a swarm of managers telling us how to move people, (something we have done millions of times over decades), resulting in up to 8 handoffs of information on a simple domestic move. This was a concern loudly voiced by corporations, and referenced as a deciding factor in a major relocation company’s decision to actually become a Mover, in order to simplify the process by eliminating the middleman.
With the vast majority of millennials being renters, the only real core service you need is moving. If you offer, or are thinking of offering, a lump sum move option or a simple reimbursed program, perhaps you should speak to a Mover directly. We know our business a lot better than anyone outside our industry, and by going direct to a professional corporate mover, or asking for what is referred to as a flow through program, you add a great deal of transparency and cost savings to the process .
By using a “Preferred Mover” you also provide a professional starting block for your employee, a gold standard if you will, to compare other estimates. You should look for Movers that have a full time corporate division, many of whom can be easily found in organizations like the ERC or CERC. We can set up a moving policy, benchmark industry standards, provide reports, and manage your business direct. No handoffs, no confusion, just like it used to be done back in the day.
We know our business, and all we ask is to be considered as a very viable option when offering a reimbursed or lump sum relocation program. We are not a bunch of scallywags that need constant supervision. Our people and our brands deserve the respect that comes to professionals that take pride in providing an honest day’s work; just like the respect we all extend to the hard working people from our collective heritage that walked in the same shoes and manually built our country.