New York doesn’t do small. So when SmartMoving brought the Movers Inner Circle to Times Square, it had to be big. Big personalities, big ideas, and family-style pasta bowls that could feed a crew.
The IAM Annual Expo was in town, and the best in the business pulled up to Carmine’s, because in a city built on hustle, you don’t talk theory, you trade secrets over red wine.
The table was set and the promise was simple: You’ve scaled the trucks. Hired the crews. Now it’s time to scale profit without the burnout. What followed wasn’t a seminar, it was a two-hour brain trust of people who’ve done exactly that.
Rob Marchese founder of Zippboxx, kicked things off with a story that could power a Netflix docuseries. He didn’t have a safety net. Failure wasn’t romantic—it meant letting his family down. So he built one of Long Island’s biggest moving companies by sheer force of will and a healthy dose of curiosity.
These days, Rob’s weapon of choice is AI. He’s not theorizing about it; he’s using it. He’s got custom AI assistants doing the grunt work he doesn’t have time for. He’s dictating ideas from his truck and watching them turn into action plans before he hits the next stoplight. He even teamed up with his daughter to launch a slime business powered by AI, and she cleared her first thousand bucks at an art market. The man treats innovation like oxygen. When he talks, people stop eating their chicken parm.
Justin Hart from Just-In Time Moving & Storage in Arizona jumped in with a different flavor. His company runs like a Swiss watch because he’s built it on process and people. His point landed hard: you can’t grow a moving business on adrenaline. You grow it on systems that work when you’re not watching.
Then Derrick Potter, founder of Firefighting’s Finest, laid it out: reputation isn’t marketing, it’s the return on giving a damn. His company built trust by showing up in every community they touch, from Fort Worth to Houston. In his words, “Serve where you move.” Simple, strong, and hard to argue with.
The talk kept looping back to one idea: community. The movers who grow fastest aren't hiding playbook. They're swapping them. Names like Arizona Movers Association, Moving Titans, Built to Move, and Southwest Movers Association came up again and again.
The message was clear: get in the room, ask questions, stay humble, and your business will move further than your trucks ever could.
Between the jokes, the pasta, and a few top-secret hints about SmartMoving’s roadmap (we’re not saying what, but it’s good), the night turned into something special. A reminder that success doesn’t come from going it alone. It comes from sitting at the table, fork in hand, surrounded by people who get it.
Want SmartMoving to bring the next Inner Circle to your city?
📩Shoot us an email and tell us where we should head next. We’ll come to you.
