Built From the Floor Up

I come from three generations of furniture retail. I grew up delivering furniture for my grandfather’s store. At 25, my wife and I had the chance to take it over — it was doing about $600K a year. We borrowed $17K from my parents, started with promotional furniture, and grew it to $1.4 million within two years.

One day a customer asked me to move him. Offered $80 an hour. I said no at first, but he kept pushing. I sent a guy out, and six hours later they brought me a check for $480. In 2005, I put a business card–sized ad in the Yellow Pages: Krupp Moving Services — 2 movers and a truck, $80/hr. When that book dropped, people thought we were a moving company. The phones started ringing, and they never stopped.

Then the Floor Fell Out.

The 2007–2008 crash destroyed the furniture business. During the good years we’d bought a house, the store property, a warehouse, two moving trucks — all of it leveraged. After a couple years of bleeding, we were done. In 2010, we filed bankruptcy and lost almost everything. The store, the real estate, our cars. We kept our home and one beat-up moving truck that ran about half the time. My son Jonah was one year old. It was the hardest thing my wife and I have ever been through — and it became my greatest teacher.

The Grind

The moving company wasn’t making enough to support us yet, so I got a job selling cars at Montrose Ford in Akron. No high school diploma, but I had a knack for sales. For five years I sold cars while my wife answered phones for the moving company — booking jobs and scheduling on-sites on my days off, often with crying babies in the background. It was a grind, but the company kept growing.

By 2015, I was juggling both and doing neither well. One July day, pacing in front of the dealership, I decided to quit and go all in on the moving company. Driving home that day was the freest I’d ever felt. The sales training I got selling cars — leading the customer, controlling the sale — became my secret weapon. I started getting in front of every moving customer I could and closing them on the spot. That first year, I doubled the company.

Building the Machine

By 2017, we hit $1 million — just me and the movers. I handled dispatch, phones, on-sites, payroll, everything. I lived in my truck. In 2018 I started handwriting mailers at 5am every morning and saw a 40% jump in revenue. I got serious about finance, started running my P&L monthly, and co-founded ProMover Accounting with my friend Brock Hartzler — which now does the books, taxes, and CFO work for over 100 moving companies.

In 2020, I acquired Summit Moving & Storage in Akron. It was in bad shape — 4.3 on Google, constant call-offs, no systems. I ran it myself for three months, cleaned house, implemented a CRM, rebuilt the marketing. Doubled sales in year one. In 2021, I opened a Krupp branch in Columbus from scratch and hit $1 million in seven months. By 2022, we did $10 million across three companies. From 2017 to 2022 we 10x’d — going from $1 million to $10 million in revenue.

At the end of 2021, I launched Movebees — a centralized call center built on the same model that powered my own companies. Today Movebees services 50+ companies with sales, CSR, claims, and hiring. It’s become the premier call center in the moving and storage industry.

Why I Consult

As I fixed my own business, other owners kept reaching out for help. At first I gave my time for free. Then I started charging $300 a call, then $500 — but the calls kept coming. I consulted for a $20M+ company and found $650K on their P&L in five months. Over time I developed a repeatable process for auditing a company, making quick fixes, finding hidden money, and creating a plan to execute.

Serving other company owners and watching them succeed has become my favorite thing I get to do. I love to mentor, to dig into someone’s business, and to build deep relationships with my clients. It’s not just consulting — it’s personal.

I’m not a retired operator telling war stories. I’m still in it — still running companies, still solving problems, still building. I help other owners compress the learning curve so they don’t have to go through what I did. The bankruptcy. The burnout. The years of figuring it out alone. There’s a faster path — and I’ve already walked it.