Sabrina Jones grew up bucking bales and driving a wheat truck on her parents’ farm south of Spokane. She thinks that’s what gave her the chutzpah to open a different kind of moving business four years ago in Spokane—a moving company that caters to women, graced with a woman’s touch. 

Jones started the company, Movher LLC, with the objective of putting the fun back into moving, she says, which is assuming that fun has ever been a part of anyone’s moving project. 

In 2010, Jones was recently divorced and working full time for Gonzaga University as a marketing specialist, while also working toward a master’s degree in business through the university. 

She started her business slowly, taking only moving gigs on weekends and renting a moving truck to do the jobs. 

Meantime, she continued to work full time, researched the business, wrote a business plan and was on hand in person for packing and moves on weekends. She purchased her first Movher truck in 2011. 

By 2012, the business was doing about 40 moves a month, and Jones took out a small business loan to buy her second truck. By then, she decided it was time to quit her full-time job and jump feet first into the moving business, she says.

“I had not paid myself during those first two years,” Jones says. “I had just put the money back into the business because I wanted to make this fly.”

Today Jones has four trucks with distinctive pink-and-black Movher logos on the side.  The company, which occupies  about 400 square feet of office space in the Storage Solutions building at 4200 S. Cheney Spokane Roads, handles a combination of packing, moving, and cleaning for 70 to 80 households per month. 

Her moving trucks include one 16-foot truck and three 24-foot trucks, plus one cargo van. She says she plans to add another 24-foot truck and another cargo van in 2015. 

The company charges $125 an hour for two movers and a truck. 

Although Jones declines to disclose revenue figures, she contends she has yet to plateau. 

“I make enough to make a living and help others do the same,” she says. “Our revenue has consistently grown every month and every year since I started in 2010. We have yet to do less business in the same month as the year before.”

Jones has 12 to 25 employees depending on the time of year, three of them working full time and the remainder part time and seasonal. January and February are the slowest months in the moving business, she says. 

Summers on the other hand make up for the winter slowdown.

 “We’ve had the busiest summer ever,” she says. “Every month we were busier, and not just by a little, but by a lot.” 

Jones is busy enough that she plans to open a small office in the Tri-Cities and add about 10 part-time employees there starting in February, if everything goes as planned. 

Movher is a licensed interstate and intrastate mover, so technically the company could travel to just about any state, but moving people across the country makes Jones nervous, she says. 

“We only go in-state and to neighboring states,” she says. “Long distance moves make me nervous. Boise even makes me nervous. If we blow a tire or something else, there’s no office to go to out there. It’s just a lot easier if it’s closer.”  

Jones says one of the things that she believes sets her business apart is her “hand-selected” employees. 

She says none of her crew are daily laborers, and she has designed and developed a three-month training program that includes both in-house and on-the-job instruction.  

“New employees are partnered with our more veteran employees to put their training to work on real jobs. We look for teamwork, responsiveness, and care and concern towards our customers, their goods, and their homes,” she says. 

“I hire guys from local colleges who are already athletes and like to work out,” she say, calling it the perfect solution. 

Most of Jones’ moving crew members are under 25 years old, and are male college students. She and several part-time female staff members do most of the packing and cleaning. “Obviously because women are better at that part of it,” she says with a laugh. 

She says she trains staff with the goal of providing extreme customer service.

 “You have to lift and move stuff, and do it with a smile on your face,” she says she tells her movers. “There is no texting, no smoking, no music in ears … you’re in the moment. You’re there for the customer.”

“We train our guys that if they break something, or knock a hole in something that you go and talk to the customer right then and there. We don’t hide from anything, and we’ll make it good, and nine times out of 10, people are understanding.”

And, a sense of humor goes a long way, she says. 

“People ask me if I charge more on weekends and I say … no, we overcharge all the time,” she says with a laugh.  

She says having a consistent crew is important to the business.

“Whoever loads it is the same crew that travels and unloads it. Which means that things don’t get lost or broken as easily,” she says. “We try to minimize, to a huge extent, any loss and damage. We put down floor protectors and such. All the preparatory work you do makes a difference. We do screw things up sometimes but if we do, we go back and fix it.” 

 “We follow through. We say please and thank you. We care about people,” she says.

Jones forms close bonds with the people she works with, she says. One of her oldest employees is a 60-year-old woman who can pack anything and runs circles around her.

“She’s become like a mother to me,” she says.

Jones says some people want to pack their own boxes but want Movher to load the boxes and furniture. Others want Movher to pack and move all the boxes and furniture, and still others want to do all the moving themselves but don’t have the energy to clean the place they’re leaving. “So Movher comes in with our environmentally-friendly cleaning products. Then there are clients who want Movher to do it all: packing, moving and cleaning,” she says. 

She says she does understand people have a budget.  She advises people to lower the cost of a move by doing some of the work themselves. 

“We tell people that if they have a big-screen TV that they don’t have a box for, we suggest they put it in our van, or move it in their own car,” she says, adding that she advises clients to do the same with artwork and lamps. “We’re just trying to get things from point A to point B in the same shape it was in. I want people to like me. I want people to know that we’ve treated them fairly,” she says.  

People want to take shortcuts, she says, especially those who are moving within town. “So we tell them they can save money by moving little stuff in their car. And they can disassemble their own bed. Some people want to do that to save money and others want us to do everything,” she says.

Jones says one of her long-term goals is to someday have her own storage-and-moving facility, where she can have a gym for employees, complete with massage. She says she truly cares about her employees and goes the extra mile for them. 

“We have barbecues and parties. These guys are so fun to be around because at this age they have the world by the tail,” she says. “They become like family. We know its hard work and it’s hard to work 10 hour days. We appreciate that.” 

Jones says she did a lot of research on moving companies before she founded the business. She contacted companies in California and Ohio that were “doing really really well” and had discussions with their owners. She realizes now she was looking for mentorship.

“That was the girl in me,” she says, laughing again.

She did find that person at a local company, and gained a lot from that relationship, she says. Jones says giving back to the community is also important to the company.

Movher helps support Transitions, a local nonprofit that aims to end homelessness and poverty for women and children in Spokane, with donations, and contributes moving services as well, for some of Transitions clients. 

Jones says she’s proud to say that Movher has won what’s called the Super Service Award from Angie’s List, the online referral company, for two years in a row. She says the award is based on online reviews of the company who maintain an A rating with Angie’s List.