How Headband Movers changed my life (and what it cost me to learn)

Starting from zero — like actually zero

In 2015, I drove from Denver to Saint Petersburg, Florida in my best friend's T-top Camaro.

Between the two of us, we had a bag of clothes each, a laptop, and just enough money to split a small apartment near downtown St. Pete. No furniture. No plan beyond "we're going to make this work." For the first month and a half, I slept on a pile of my own clothes on the floor of my bedroom.

That was the start of Headband Movers — what became my first real moving business, my first real education in entrepreneurship, and honestly, one of the most important chapters of my life.

I wasn't thinking about building a company. Honestly, I was thinking about living on vacation. I was fresh out of the military, out-processing into civilian life, and Florida felt like freedom. Late nights, shows, beach parties — that was the lifestyle I was chasing. The business was something I needed to survive while I figured out the rest.

I had no idea that moving would change my life.

How we actually got started

Before the move to Florida, my business partner and I had already been working part-time in the moving industry in Denver. I was selling solar devices full-time and moving people on the side. We'd both seen enough of the business to know there was money in it — and that we could do it ourselves.

So when we landed in St. Pete, we hit the ground running. We picked up small jobs through other local moving companies just to keep the lights on. They were paying us around nine dollars an hour. Nine. For moving heavy furniture in Florida heat.

It wasn't ideal. But it kept us moving — literally and figuratively — and it funded the start of our own operation.

We built our business on MovingHelp, the labor service marketplace, and we went all in on it. We took every job, responded to everything, built our reviews, stayed consistent. It took time. But over about a year, we climbed to the #1 labor service on the platform in our market.

The good days were really good

When it was working, it was working. We had momentum, referrals, and a real reputation in the community. We had connections at retirement communities across the city. We had guys working with us on the beach. We were bringing in solid cash — fast.

We were also both deep in the music scene at the time. Between the shows, the studio sessions, and the concerts, we were surrounded by people who needed work. We gave them work. A lot of our crew were friends we pulled directly from that world, and it felt good to be building something that was also supporting the community around us.

From the outside, it looked like everything was clicking.

What Headband Movers actually taught me

As the business grew, I started to figure things out the hard way — and some of the most important lessons I've ever learned about running a business came directly from Headband Movers.

These weren't things I read in a book. I learned them by doing them wrong first.

Moving literally furnished my life

Here's something I don't talk about enough, but it's one of my favorite parts of this story.

I started Headband Movers sleeping on a pile of clothes on a bare floor.

Over the course of running that business, customers would just give us things. A dresser here. A lamp there. A couch they didn't want to move. Artwork they were leaving behind. Moving is one of those industries where people are constantly looking to unload furniture rather than haul it — and we were always there to take it off their hands.

Piece by piece, over months, our apartment went from completely empty to fully furnished. We're talking real furniture, quality pieces, artwork on the walls — stuff that made the apartment feel like a home. Eventually we made enough money to move out of that apartment and into an actual house, and that house? Also fully furnished. Nice stuff. Things people had given us throughout the entire run of the business.

I went from sleeping on the floor to living in a furnished house, and the moving industry made that possible.

The part I don't talk about enough — but should

Here's the truth: I was making money faster than I could manage it.

I was in my mid-20s, living in one of the best cities in the country, running with a crew, always in the studio or at the bar or on the beach with my girlfriend. Money came in and money went out. I wasn't tracking it. I wasn't saving it. I wasn't reinvesting it strategically.

I was spending it like someone who believed it would always keep coming.

That's the honest answer. And looking back, it's the thing I'd change most about those years — not the lifestyle, because I don't regret who I was — but the financial discipline. Or the complete lack of it.

If I had been more intentional with the money we were making, the story ends differently.

How it fell apart

Around the two-year mark, my partner and I started pulling in different directions. He fell in love and followed a girl back to Colorado. To stay financially stable while he traveled, he started his own small moving operation in Denver and created a new MovingHelp account.

I did the same — created a new account to set myself up for the next chapter as we wound our existing business down together.

What neither of us fully understood at the time: we had just violated MovingHelp's terms of service by operating multiple accounts on their platform.

Our accounts were suspended. Neither was reactivated.

Overnight, our ability to generate leads was essentially gone. The business that had been built entirely on that platform — with no backup lead source, no owned website, no Google presence, no email list — had no way to survive.

Then a hurricane came through. We fell behind on rent. The momentum was dead.

That was the end.

What I took from it

I built my first moving business from a pile of clothes on the floor to the top of a marketplace platform. Then I lost it in a way that was completely preventable.

There are three lessons I carry from that experience into everything I do now at Moving Company Hustle:

Why I'm telling you this

I didn't start Moving Company Hustle as some marketing expert who read a few books and built a course. I started it as someone who built Headband Movers from a bare apartment floor to the #1 labor service in the market — and then watched it collapse because of mistakes I made and systems I never built.

Every moving company owner I work with now, I see myself in them. The hustle is real. The potential is real. And the mistakes are completely avoidable — if someone shows you what to look out for before you make them.

That's why Moving Company Hustle exists. Not to sell marketing. To give moving company owners the infrastructure, the visibility, and the business foundation that I didn't have when I was running Headband Movers.

When I tell you to build a website, get your Google presence locked in, and stop depending on third-party platforms for your leads — I'm not talking theory.

I'm telling you what I wish someone had told me in 2015.