By the time Garrett Sabatino left his last job — six years running crews for a regional van line out of Fort Worth — he already knew the kind of company he didn’t want to build. He’d watched too many customers get a number on the phone and a different number once the truck was full. In 2015 he started GQS Movers on a single standard instead: quote it once, quote it straight, and the number doesn’t move once the truck is in the driveway.
Why Someone Leaves a Steady Paycheck to Start Over
Starting a company from nothing isn’t the obvious move for someone who already has steady work. What tipped it for Garrett was smaller and more specific than a grand plan: customers he’d moved as someone else’s employee started calling his personal number instead of the office line, asking if he’d handle their next move himself. They weren’t loyal to the logo on the truck. They were loyal to the guy who’d shown up, done the job, and given them a number that actually held. That told him something about where the real trust in this business comes from — and it wasn’t the company name on the door.
What Bait-and-Switch Pricing Usually Looks Like
You don’t need to have moved a dozen times to recognize this pattern. It shows up often enough across the industry that most people who’ve hired movers before have a version of the story:
- A rock-bottom phone quote based on “average” cubic footage nobody actually measured.
- A “binding, not-to-exceed” estimate that gets exceeded anyway, once a stair charge or a long-carry fee shows up after the truck is already loaded.
- A smaller crew than what was quoted, which quietly turns a 4-hour job into a 7-hour bill.
- Storage-in-transit charges that never came up until the shipment was already sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
- A different crew than the one who did the walkthrough, with nobody on-site who actually remembers what was agreed to.
None of that requires anyone to be dishonest in a dramatic sense. It’s usually just an incentive problem: the person who sells the job isn’t the one who has to do it at that price, so there’s no real cost to quoting low and letting the number drift upward later.
How GQS Closes That Gap
The fix Garrett landed on is structural, not just a promise painted on the side of a truck. The estimate and the crew stay connected to the same job from the first walkthrough to the final invoice.
| Common Industry Pattern | How GQS Handles It Instead |
|---|---|
| Phone quote based on rough averages | Dominic walks the home in person or by video before any number gets written down |
| “Not-to-exceed” estimate that gets exceeded anyway | Flat-rate quotes are binding once issued — the invoice matches the number from the walkthrough |
| Fewer movers show up than quoted | Crew size is confirmed in writing and dispatched directly by Dominic, not left to chance |
| Job handed off to day labor or a rented crew | The same nine people on payroll do the estimating, the packing, and the driving — no subcontractors |
| New fees appear once the truck is loaded | Anything that changes the scope — an extra stop, an added room — gets priced and agreed to before it’s loaded, not after |
I’m not trying to be the cheapest number you hear on the phone. I’m trying to be the number you don’t have to think about again after you hang up.
— Garrett Sabatino, Owner
What This Looks Like on an Actual Job
- The person who gives your estimate is the same person who dispatches the crew — usually Dominic, start to finish.
- Flat-rate quotes on full-home moves are binding after the walkthrough, in writing, before anything gets booked.
- Hourly quotes come with the real rate up front, not a “starting at” figure built to look better on a search results page than it is on an invoice.
- If the scope changes mid-move — you decide to add the garage after all — we price it and confirm it before we start loading, not after.
It’s a smaller way to run a moving company than the one Garrett left behind in 2015 — five trucks instead of a regional fleet, nine people instead of a dispatch center serving half the state. But it’s the version where the number Priscilla quotes on the first call, the number Dominic confirms at the walkthrough, and the number on the invoice are the same number, on an easy week and a hard one alike. That’s what “quote it straight” is actually supposed to mean. If you want to see it in practice, call (888) 278-9005 or request a quote through the site — we’ll walk the job before we price it, every time.