Our Mission
At A Move to Remember, we make moving a safer and affirming, and safe process. Moving can be intimate, and we’re here to serve our clients as if we were “their friends who know what there is to know about moving”. Each transition comes involves change, its own set of challenges (good or bad) and for some can be stressful. Each day our trucks go out is another experience we get to notch on our tire treads. From this, we’re happy to offer our expertise and knowledge to our clients as necessary. A third of our clients hire us as their first-time moving company, and we pride ourselves in making it an enjoyable experience in which they wouldn’t do their moves on their own again. Moving doesn’t have to be difficult, and moving doesn’t have to feel lonely.
We’re a moving company that is socially driven to support our clients. We believe that moving should only be as stressful as the situation calls for, and not because of the company someone hires. We believe that regardless of a client’s gender, race, religion or spirituality, sexual orientation, or accessibility to moving services, their experience should leave them feeling relief throughout their entire moving process. Even in what we call “learning moments”, or instances in which a move doesn’t go as planned and mistakes were made, we aim to make it right by the client and to take what we’ve learned as a small business and apply it with forward-thinking and resilience in improving our operations to ensure second-chances aren’t taken for granted, and that the next customer’s experience is made all the better.
WE MAKE MOVING
AN AFFIRMING AND SAFER PROCESS
The vision for A Move to Remember was first just a concept in 2017, at the stories clients have shared of their previous experiences over end-of-move beers and pizza. We established in 2020 to answer the call in providing supportive moving services for trans/non-binary folks, same-sex couples, polyamorous relationships, and the subcultures that exist in or collaborate with queer spaces. Since then we’ve acquired two company trucks, moved over a thousand people, partnered with several housing programs, moved dozens of folks out of unsafe living environments, and are driving forward in improving our services to make each move an even easier experience. For all the right reasons, we truly aim to make each client’s move A Move to Remember.
Our VALUes
We’re an LGBT-owned moving company, and honor that queer people support queer companies. We believe that there should be no limitation in access to services rendered or employment due to someone’s gender-identity or sexual orientation. We believe services should be affirming, and that equal-oppurtunity employment truly should mean equal-access. We embrace this, because as members of the community we’ve experienced for ourselves, or bore witness to the ineqaulities and barriers that trans-folks face.
Our clients are the center of our business. Our clients keep our trucks moving, our employees staffed, and are the top of our analytics on how folks find us. We find it important to make our clients feel valued. After all, we’re getting the oppurtunity of being a part of people’s personal lives, moving their belongings, and often experiencing a lot of their transition alongside with them. That’s why our leadership team has a saying that the “client is king”. We aim to provide an excellent service to our clients and do our best to fufill the duties of each assignment. Moving is a vice, and while no company is perfect, in the event of mistakes, we still aim to keep our client’s needs in mind.
There are a limitless amount of variables when it comes to an indivudal client’s move. Between the degree of weather, complexity of entrances/exits, rules and regulations of HOAs, nuances of furniture, and dynamics between clients and family members, no move is exactly like the other. That’s why at the core of each experience, our team is trained to focus on safety. Form, lifiting techniques communication, and attention to detail is our team’s investment in making sure moves go smoothly, and any limitations are communicated upfront to keep our team and our clients safe.
As a company that does moves for participants in housing-relocation programs, or for clients transitioning away from spaces of violence, we are focused on making sure we are trained and informed on the best decision-making practices to provide on each move. We are focused on partnering with programs in Chicago that can be a resource to our clients in need. We actively participate in trainings to improve our skills and language around our specialized moves.
We want clients to know what to expect from our services each time they use us. We’ve grown a lot over the last two years, and our consistent focus amongst each milestone has been, “how do we improve the communcation with the client from the moment they’re on our webpage, through when the team unloads their final box into their new home, and even beyond when our trucks return to the warehouse and our clients are settled into their new home.” We have come to learn that the biggest stress in a move for folks can revolve around how a company communicates with it’s client, and so we aim to make sure our client is in the know throughout the whole process. Client communication should be affirming, and we love to expand on how the moving process works, how we differ from other moving companies, and provide communication that is either educational or supportive.
We aim to provide moving services that are accessible. Accessibility means a variety of factors for everyone. In this context, we hope that our services are financially accessible to the general public, and that our tarrif-reduced prices provided to folks escaping spaces of violence, and our non-profits, allow for our services to be accessible to folks who are in-need of our services. We aim to provide services that are accessible in various languges, including English, Spanish and American Sign-Language. We’re focused in providing services that are accomodating to folks who are neurodivergent. Moving can be extremely stressful, especially for neurodivergent folks, and is a part of why we we value communication and why we put ourselves alongside our clients through the moving process. We work with other non-profits to provide accomodations for folks that may physical disabilties, need accomodations of ride-shares or transportation, and may need additional logistical support when it comes to key pick-ups, moving-related errands, etc.
We don’t mean that we’re focused on hiring folks who lift 100s of lbs in their off-time. (Although, if that’s your passion and you’d like moving, hit us up!). By being fitness fitness we mean focused on our employee’s overall personal fitness. We are driven to provide a space that is phyiscally healthy, mentally healthy, and emotionally healthy. Small businesses go through a lot of change in their beginning stage. We can attest to that being true, and can attest to making mistakes of being overbooked, some longer than necessary days, and some trips and aches. Every time we go back to the drawing board, we are dedicated in making sure we curating a space where we create a balance that’s harmonious to the life of our employees, that our employees feel supported with resources for any ailments, and that we provide a space where employees can openly communicate their needs.
It’s 2022. We’ve seen a huge shift in what business models work, and what business models no longer serve society and the greater good. We’re consistently looking to creating a business model that helps bring the businesses that exist in 2035 closer to our reality today. We support our local communities by keeping a part of our focus of expanding on our investment in the non-profits we partner with. We aim to be a service to our communities that we are a part of as a company. When we think of social impact, we think of the inovlvment that mutal aid groups have in their communities, the importance of protests and lifting either your own voice or the voices of others to empower those who have something important to say.
We value diversity in the workplace and in our client experience. Wether that’s skillsets, education, ethnicity, gender-identity, social backgrounds or the way someone’s brain guides them through life on a daily basis. We like to view each move almost like a live-action puzzle. If our team was made up of the same exact people, with similar minds there’s no way we would have accomplished the coolest and most challenging moves we now have in our repritoire. We wouldn’t have connected so deeply with our clients like we’ve gotten the oppurtunity to, and we wouldn’t be as innovative today without the diverse team that helped create this company.
Company Vision
Company Vision
We’re constantly looking towards the future. We aim to scale in 2022 to where we can provide reduced-rate services to more under-represented communities – specifically the BIPOC community, and to trans and queer individuals by 2023.
We hope to work with mutual aid and volunteer groups to be able to provide greater support in emergency moves, and to reduce the cost overall for clients transitioning out of situations of violence.
We aim to commit to building our professional-based network, our queer-based network and our emergency network. We are proud members of BNI, a professional networking group of entrepreneurs and business owners, and we’re committed to growing with the folks in our chapter. We’re proud members of the queer community, and are consistently seeking partnerships that put money into the pockets of queer individuals. Lastly, we’re a company doing important work that has a lot of high-risk and high-stakes. We want to ensure we’re doing our part as a company in connecting our clients with services that are better suited to take care of their needs. We’re skilled in moving, and believe that there are professionals or trained-advocates who can support our clients in other ways before, during and after their move is completed.
We hope to expand our services to provide storage opportunities for our clients by 2025. We aim by then to have a larger warehouse space that we can call our own (instead of just a portion of a warehouse as we currently share). This would lend us to provide more support to our residential clients and commercial partnerships.
Finally, we aim to be true to who we are. We’ve grown rapidly since 2020, but have made sure that at the end of each month, when we go back to the drawing board that the people who are central and our focus when discussing our goals are our employees and our customers. We couldn’t do the work we do, without the support we receive from our peers and community.
