Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jonah Hoffmaister. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Jonah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

Why does the moving industry make you feel so uneasy? Maybe it’s the stereotypes that are there for good reason! The horror stories are rampant and often true. From crews showing up hours late, or worse, not even showing up at all. Lots and lots of damages due to inexperienced crews and then receiving little to no compensation or resolution. Crew members that are clearly not background checked making you feel nervous in your own home. Difficulty getting a company representative on the phone or respond to an email. Or maybe you have been one of the many who received a quote and were charged 3 times more than expected!

In more recent years, moving companies have turned to online marketing and pretty websites that look nice, but hide the fact that little has been done to improve the actual operations. Much like the modern social media phenomenon where your life looks fantastic online, but not so much in reality. It’s a good trick, but unfortunately the horror stories are still happening! At Jonah’s Movers, we always had a vision to be different than most companies by elevating the standard to a new level. Not just by how we look online, but in identifying and solving some of the more systemic problems. We thank Voyager for allowing us a space to outline some of those areas in which we have separated ourselves from the industry. Hopefully this helps to inspire other companies to do the same so that the stereotypical image of ‘the moving business’ can be repaired.

Retention, Retention, Retention
Everyone knows that if you have a great employee, you do everything you can to keep them happy and on your payroll. In our industry though, very little is done to curb turnover and boost morale. How do you solve this? By making the work environment, pay, and benefits better than anywhere else. We are the highest paying moving company to work for in North Houston. Our employees have an excellent benefits package with Health insurance, vision, dental, life insurance, disability and paid time off, which is unheard of in our industry. We listen to employee feedback. We think it is crucial to treat our employees like responsible adults and empower them to make good decisions. Lastly, our employees have the option to work 4, 5, or 6 days a week with a predictable work schedule based on their personal goals. Some employees preference is to work as many hours as possible to meet their financial needs. We never discourage overtime pay for these team members. Others choose to work less days to have work life balance or to go to school and we respect those personal choices as well. We also close every Sunday to be sure all of our employees have at least one day to relax and rest from the physical demands of their job. I can’t say it enough, retention is key!

Top down and bottom up
We have always noticed that our employees wanted to contribute more to our company’s success on a higher level. They have great ideas and have a deep understanding of the day to day challenges in a move. We have also never been fond of a constant top down approach to company rules, procedures, and enforcement. Trying to get employee ‘buy-in’ is very challenging, and has been a key focus for our company. We did something unique, bold, and frankly a little scary. We gave our employees power and a vote.
Our first ‘Republic Meeting’ was 3 years ago and has been a quarterly event ever since. They are a highlight of our company culture. In these meetings, we cover hand book policies, moving procedures, systems we are thinking of implementing, etc, and give our employees the chance to give input, brainstorm, and ultimately vote on changes. Typically we have 5-6 employees to each table with a scribe who takes notes for their team, and a spokesperson who will present. The teams then have around 10 minutes to talk through the policy, procedure, or challenge we are trying to solve. Like Jonah the owner says, “It’s weird, sometimes the ideas I have get or what I want gets voted down, but we believe ‘buy-in’ has a greater long term value than managerial tyranny.” Best of all, every republic meeting comes with a simple breakfast, an epic lunch of BBQ on our smoker, and sports at the end of the day! Not only do the Republic meetings help with retention and employee satisfaction, we legitimately receive extraordinary ideas from our movers and are able to get the entire team united toward common goals.

Software and Systems
The moving industry has largely lagged behind in the area of software and integrated systems. This is a major pain point that leads to large amounts of disorganization and administrative work. The out-of-the-box softwares “made for moving companies” are not very robust and have significant limitations for customization and data analysis. Few moving companies are large enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build custom software and afford the ongoing maintenance needed in that endeavor. We were one such company that could not afford to develop custom software from scratch, but were also not willing to continue using the out-of-the-box softwares available. Instead, we took a little known alternate route and use multiple high quality existing softwares and integrated them to give us the customization we wanted at a fraction of the cost of building something from the ground up. Adam, a marketing major from Sam Houston, has tackled this project over the last couple years and continually builds upon our systems. The result has been nothing short of one of the most robust and organized implementations of technology in the industry.

Quality work, Training, Equipment
We have always had a strong focus of tailoring our service toward serving quality minded people. We want our team to have everything they need to accomplish a successful move. We buy the highest quality dollies, premium blankets, there are lift gates and ramps on every truck, an exhaustive tool box, plenty of shrink wrap and tape, uniformed employees, and many other small details to ensure we can deliver a high quality service. In the moving industry, a typical hiring process is: an interview and on-the-job training that clients are billed for. At Jonah’s Movers, we conduct a high quality background check and do our training in our facility for three full days before they ever step into a client’s home. Trainees learn how to wrap, blanket, use dollies, load a truck, unload, disassemble, reassemble, and how to pack boxes. After that, they trainee will shadow one of our senior crew skippers. We don’t even charge the client while they are still in this phase of training! After all this, the new employee will receive a final assessment to see if they are up to speed and officially join the Jonah’s Movers team.

We have never wanted our workplace to be a typical “Corporation”. Rather, it has been our goal to be sure we don’t get caught up in corporate type things like Organizational Charts, Core Values, Mission Statements, Vision Statements etc. At the same time and as our company has grown, I realize it’s harder to keep a team of 30 employees focused and sharing the company purpose than it was when I was on a truck starting this company while working part time at Home Depot! We have evolved to documenting our beliefs and the keys to our success and I’m proud to share them with you in closing.

We are Servants to our clients, each other and our community. We are masters of our trade yet down to earth people. We keep standards high and waves low to provide the same high quality work started yesterday, continuing today and guaranteed for the future. We strive to make every move unique and special. We hire, train and retain only the best in the industry and everyone has a say in how we work and conduct ourselves: both our clients and our team. We will continue to grow but always responsibly, and always placing our clients’ satisfaction and our team’s welfare ahead of profits. That folks is the Jonah’s Movers Way!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Jonah’s Movers was started in 2014 by Jonah who was in college. We have grown over the years to operate 7 to 9 trucks throughout the year and have around 25 full time employees. We specialize in higher quality moving services. (Most of the info for this is in the 1st section)

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

(I wrote about this in the section about retention, as well as some throughout the submission)

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

(Also already in the submission of page one on this website)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jonahsmovers.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonahsmovers/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/jonahs-movers-tomball