MIKE HAWKINS

The first time I dealt with movers, it was 2009 and I was the customer. My wife and I were moving into a new house in Orlando, and we hired a moving company to handle it. They showed up late, banged up the furniture, dumped half our boxes in the middle of the living room, and left without putting anything where it belonged. We paid them what felt like a fortune at the time.

After they left, I stood in the wreckage of that move and said something out loud that changed my life: I could do this. Better than this. For real money.

I called a buddy of mine that night. We started a moving company the next week.

It wasn't a real business at first. We had no trucks. No equipment beyond what we could carry. What we had was customer rental trucks and the willingness to show up. People would rent a U-Haul or a Penske, we'd meet them at their house, and we'd do the actual work. We made decent money for what it was. A side hustle that paid better than most side hustles.

Then my buddy lost interest. He was fine making a few extra dollars on weekends but he didn't want to build anything. He wanted to coast. So I shelved the project.

For about two years, I didn't think about moving companies much. We moved back to Colorado for a stretch. I worked other things, tried other things, made a living.

Then in mid-2012, I made a decision. We were planning to move back to Florida and I told my wife: when we get back, I'm starting a moving company. Not as a side hustle this time. Not with a partner who's going to flake. For real. No matter what.

That decision is the actual start of Mike's Moving. Not 2009. 2012. Because that was the moment I committed.

We moved to Florida and I went to work. I bought my first truck by October of that year. Within a couple months I'd already proven the business model. By the end of 2013, I had three trucks running. By the end of 2014, I had six.

Twenty-six months. From no truck to six trucks.

Twenty-six months. From no truck to six trucks. From a guy with a phone to a real operation with crews and dispatchers and overhead and customers calling all day.

Six trucks. $70,000 a month. That was the peak operational state.

What I haven't told you yet is the part that matters most.

Scaling that fast almost killed the business.

From 2014 to about 2016, I was learning everything in real time. How to dispatch six trucks instead of one. How to keep crews showing up. How to handle the customer who lost their mind because their grandmother's china got chipped. How to read a P&L. How to manage a phone that wouldn't stop ringing. How to not let your wife divorce you when you're working 80 hour weeks and your kids barely recognize you.

Those years were the growing pains. Anyone who's scaled a service business knows what I'm talking about. The systems you used at three trucks don't work at six. The hiring process you used at three crews falls apart at six. Everything has to get rebuilt while the business is still running. You're changing the engine of the car while you're driving it.

I held the operation together through 2019. Then I closed the doors.

I'm not going to get into the details of why I closed it. Not on a public website. The short version: it was the right decision at the time, and I'm at peace with it. Mike's Moving had a ten-year run. It made me a real living, taught me everything I needed to know about operating a service business, and gave me the foundation to do what I'm doing now.

After that, I moved back to Colorado and started I Hang Flat Screens. TV mounting business. Different industry, same operator instincts. I built it from scratch using marketing systems I designed myself. It's still running. It's where I test every tactic I sell to HDS clients before I sell it. If a Google Business Profile play doesn't book me real TV mounting jobs in Colorado, I don't sell it to your moving company in Florida.

Then in 2026, I started Hawk Digital Systems. Marketing for moving companies. Built by a former mover. Built for movers who are tired of getting sold to by agencies that have never been in the cab.

The whole reason HDS exists is because when I was running Mike's Moving, the marketing help available to me was terrible. Every agency that pitched me wanted to sell me a website that looked great but didn't book jobs. Every lead service wanted to sell me leads that I was paying for alongside seven of my competitors. Nobody understood that movers have a 20-minute response window or they lose the job.

I lived that frustration for ten years.

Now I build the system I wish I'd had.

That's the founder story. Not glamorous. Not optimized. Not fake. Just what actually happened.

If you're a moving company owner reading this and any of it sounds familiar, we should probably talk.