How Mr Nelson Movers got its start
The Northwest Side raised me, in a brick two-flat just off Milwaukee Avenue where my uncle held the first-floor lease. Long before I was old enough to legally pilot a moving truck, I was already hauling couches up and down those rear porches — for relatives, for neighbors, for anyone on the block swapping apartments, and on the Northwest Side that is pretty much constant. The lesson that stuck with me as a kid was this: a Chicago move barely depends on muscle at all. The whole thing hinges on whether you read the stairs, the alley, and the building’s rulebook before you ever pressed the buzzer.
Mr Nelson Movers opened in 2008, a single truck working out of a friend’s parking lot near Belmont and Kedzie. What drove me to do it still irritates me. Over and over I watched Chicago renters and owners accept a sunny lowball over the phone from some outfit with a made-up address, then find themselves trapped at the curb staring at an invoice twice the quote, no way out once the whole apartment was already aboard the truck. Stairs got charged on top. So did anything heavy. So did the mileage. The cheerful price tag was a con, and good people kept getting fleeced by it.
How we run things instead
I built this outfit to do the precise opposite. There is one flat figure, written down, before a single carton clears the apartment doorway. Misjudge the job and let it run long, and that cost is mine to absorb, never yours. Every rig in our lot we own free and clear — a handful of them in rotation now — and each crew member earns a W-2 paycheck, hired and trained by me, never a body scooped off a corner at sunrise. Watch a couple of guys who met for the first time at eight in the morning attempt to ease a baby grand down a Logan Square back staircase and the reason that distinction matters lands on you immediately.
What the cut-rate crews never touch is the tedious paperwork that genuinely keeps a Chicago move from going sideways. A huge share of the city is permit-only parking, the plowed-out spaces get claimed with dibs furniture all winter, and you simply cannot leave a 26-footer double-parked on Damen at rush hour. That is why the parking and the alley loading get squared away in advance. Towers downtown and in River North refuse to raise the freight-elevator gate without a certificate of insurance on file, so my operations lead has it lodged before your date is even pinned down. The lifting almost never turns out to be the hard part. The logistics are, and those are ours to shoulder.
The people here
The front office has been Yolanda Pierce’s domain since 2012 — every written quote, every COI filing, every parking arrangement runs through her. Routing the day around the Kennedy, the Dan Ryan, the Eisenhower, and whatever the city has dug up that week is Tomasz Wojcik’s job, which keeps the crew from idling in loops. Out in the field, DeShawn Carter heads the Logan Square, Avondale, and Lakeview crews, while Sal Romano is the one you want aboard when an upright piano or a gun safe has to meet a flight of greystone back stairs. The COI timing, the downtown freight-elevator windows, and the holdover storage those Chicago closings keep imposing all fall to Bridget Kowalski.
To this day the heavier downtown high-rise jobs and the piano work I take on myself. Portage Park is home for me these days, and I can rattle off which blocks need parking locked down days early and which alleys a truck can truly back into. I will quote you the honest figure for your move, then I will hold to it. Eighteen years on, that is still the entire company, top to bottom.
— Marcus Nelson, owner, Mr Nelson Movers