Where Movers South Shore comes from
I grew up in Wollaston, three streets back from the beach, in a three-decker my grandfather rented the bottom floor of. By the time I was in high school I was spending summers humping furniture up and down those triple staircases for every neighbor and cousin who was moving in or out — and on the South Shore, somebody is always moving in or out. I learned early that a Quincy move is not about how strong you are. It is about whether you know the stairs, the streets, and the rules before you show up.
I started Movers South Shore in 2009 with one truck, parked behind a friend’s lot off Hancock Street. The reason was simple, and it still makes me a little hot under the collar. I kept watching South Shore families get a cheap phone quote from some outfit with no real address, then get handed a bill twice that size once the truck was loaded and there was no way to back out. Stairs were extra. Heavy items were extra. The drive was extra. It was a racket dressed up as a low price, and good people got taken every week.
The way we do it
So I built this company around the opposite of that. One flat rate, in writing, before a single box gets carried. If we underestimate the job, that is our problem, not yours. We run our own trucks — eight of them now — and every mover on the crew is a W-2 employee we train, not day-labor scraped together the morning of. Once you have watched two strangers who met that day try to walk a baby grand down a Wollaston walk-up, you understand why that matters.
The other thing the cheap outfits skip is the boring paperwork that actually makes a South Shore move go smooth. Half of Quincy is resident-permit parking, and there is no room to double-park on Sea Street or up around Quincy Center, so we pull the parking permit a week ahead and reserve the spot for the truck. Boston condo buildings will not let you near the freight elevator without a Certificate of Insurance on file, so my office manager Colleen handles that before the date is even confirmed. The hard part of a move is rarely the lifting. It is the logistics, and we own them.
The crew
Colleen Hayes has run the office since 2011 — she writes every flat-rate quote, files the COIs, and pulls the Quincy permits. Brendan Walsh maps every day around the Southeast Expressway, the Red Line work, and the no-parking blocks so the crew is never circling. Marcus Reilly leads the Wollaston, Quincy Center, and Hingham crews, and Wade Antonelli is the man you want when there is a piano or a gun safe and three flights of three-decker stairs between it and the truck. Deirdre Brennan coordinates the COI timing, the Boston freight-elevator windows, and the between-sale storage South Shore families always seem to need.
I still run the bigger Hingham and Boston condo jobs myself. I live in Braintree now, but I know which Quincy streets need a permit pulled a week ahead, and I will tell you the real number for your move and then stand behind it. That is the whole company, and it has been since 2009.
— Sean Donovan, owner, Movers South Shore