1. the
LEisGsAuCeY
Tales from the trenches
of the business world
How to plan your legacy
leave
a mark
August/September 2013
challenge
accepted
Creating corporate
events with impact
mastering
meetings
How a 16-year-old
with gumption
turned a one-truck
operation into an
$85 million
industry leader
Chuck Kuhn
Founder, President and CEO
JK Moving Services
Moving AT
SPEED
THE OFquality

2. Moving AT
How a kid with a vision forewent college
to chase his dreams of building
a moving company known for quality,
always doing the right thing
By Mike Unger
professionalism and
Photography by Mitro Hood
Chuck Kuhn
Founder, President and CEO
JK Moving Services
SPEED
THE OFquality

3. Moving at the
Speed of Q uality
Open the large front door of the modest two-story home or peer
through its oval window, and inside you’ll see oak wood floors in the main hallway.
Past the kitchen is the living room, decorated with plush taupe carpet, a beige
leather couch, dark wood coffee table and a 50-inch Mitsubishi TV. A narrow
staircase leads upstairs to the three bedrooms, each of which has a bed, dresser
and other furnishings.
Outside, an American flag hangs limp from above the front door. There is no wind.
A 25-foot moving trailer sits where the driveway should be. Boxes, storage vaults
and overseas shipping containers are scattered around the area. But no one is
moving in or out. The place is not for sale. The house is not a foreclosure, nor is
it under water. It’s actually under a 32-foot ceiling in one of JK Moving Services’
warehouses in Sterling, VA.
On the move: JK Moving employees are screened carefully – undergoing extensive background checks and
random drug testing. With one-of-a-kind benefits, profit-sharing and a 401(k), JK Moving is able to retain
employees at a rate much higher than the industry standard, which gives employees the opportunity to grow
their careers within the company. Photos courtesy of JK Moving Services.

4. “ It was snowing, [and] the crew showed up late.
They got into my parents’ liquor cabinet. Midway
through the move, they were all drunk. They got
in a snowball fight, which led to a fist fight, which
led to the police coming. My dad was upset; mom
was in tears.” >> Chuck Kuhn, on the experience that shaped his vision
BOOT CAMP
Before anyone from the country’s third-largest independent moving company sets foot
in a customer’s home or office, they hone their skills here, packing, lifting and removing
this furniture — it’s all real and quite heavy — over and over. At JK, no one learns on the
job.
“We train in our house before they get into your house,” says Chuck Ware, quality
assurance and training manager for the residential division.
Meticulous preparation, dedication to customer service and a professionalism not often
seen in the industry has transformed JK from a one-man, one-truck operation started by a
high school kid into a multimillion-dollar company whose 350-plus trucks handle roughly
15,000 moves a year.
JK has moved senators, congressmen and civil servants. It’s moved titans of industry
and the companies they run. Hand-written notes from Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton
thanking JK for jobs well done hang on the wall in the lobby of the corporate office. When
President George W. Bush left the White House, JK handled the move back to Texas.
“We put one of our regular crews on it, like we would anybody else’s home,” says
Chuck Kuhn, JK’s founder, president and CEO. “All our crews are the A-team. The move
went off without a hitch.”
Three years earlier, the president had come to Sterling and held a town hall meeting on
the economy in one of JK’s four warehouses. He’s probably not moving back to DC, but if
he did, odds are W — like thousands of people throughout the country and the world —
would call on JK.
A VISION FOR BETTER
Home is the family room where your daughter took her first steps. It’s the nursery
where your son learned to read. It’s the man cave where you and your buddies watched the
Redskins win the Super Bowl a long, long time ago.
No one understands the emotional bond people form with their houses like Kuhn. If
he’s told this story once, he’s told it a million times.
Twelve-year-old Chuck was about to embark on a great adventure with his family. The
Kuhns were going to Iran. His parents, Jim and Shirley, were lifelong Ma Bell employees,
and they’d signed up for a three-year stint working for the phone company in the Middle
East.
But where were the movers?
“It was a stressful and emotional time for my parents,” Kuhn recalls. “It was snowing,
[and] the crew showed up late. They got into my parents’ liquor cabinet. Midway through
the move, they were all drunk. They got in a snowball fight, which led to a fist fight, which
led to the police coming. It was a disaster. My dad was upset; mom was in tears.”
From that moment, Kuhn knew he could do better.
After the Iranian Shah was overthrown, Kuhn and his brother, Steven, were shipped
back to the U.S., where they stayed with relatives in Maryland. Kuhn began working for
his uncle, Tom Shioutakon, who owned a small moving company.
“We would work in the warehouse, on the back of his moving trucks, and we learned the
trade,” Kuhn says. “It was just manual labor, and it kept us out of trouble.”
Kuhn was born with an entrepreneurial bent that manifested at an early age.
“He would go to school with a pocket full of bubble gum, which he paid like 25 cents
for,” says his father, Jim (who like Shirley worked for JK after “retirement”). “He’d sell it
for 50 cents apiece. So I knew he had the urge.”
Kuhn couldn’t contain himself for long. He borrowed $5,000 from Shioutakon and
bought a 26-foot 1978 Ford moving van. In May 1982, JK Moving and Storage, named
for his father’s initials, was born.
Its sole employee was 16 years old.
JK’s first client was an attorney for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who was
moving from Arlington to Alexandria.
“I was dating a girl at the time who was doing an internship there,” Kuhn says. “He
was talking about moving. She told him what I was doing, we went out and gave him an
estimate, and he gave us the job. It went great, and for the next three or four years, I was
repeatedly doing work for the Patent and Trademark Office.”
After school, Kuhn would drive around Northern Virginia, looking for homes with
“for sale” signs in the yard. He dropped his business cards in apartment building laundry
rooms and posted them in elevators.
“I would do the marketing during the week, then typically we’d do the moves on
Saturday and Sunday,” he says. “I put together a crew. The business started to grow. By the
end of the summer, I had saved up enough money to buy a second truck.”
A JK MOVIN G SUCCESS STOR Y
people’s most prized possessions —
JK Moving Services was built on handling When JK Moving moves
and all the emotions and memories that go with them. part of the weight that gets carried.
a client, the items are only when he bought a mint
There’s not much Barry Morris loves more than cars. So about who
condition 1989 Mercedes 560 SL in California, he was paranoid was going to bring it back east for him.
transportation, loaded the car up
nut,” Morris says. “JK located the “I’m a car back to me in a timely manner. It came without a scratch. For me,
and got it that’s a big deal.”
as another move the company did for him.
Still, it was not quite as important decided
After more than two decades in the same house, Morris and his wife from Oakton, VA, to Annapolis, MD.
to move that’s the only house
“When you’ve lived in the same house for 21 years and know, you wouldn’t believe the emotions that go along with that,”
your kids says com-mercial;
Morris, who also used JK when the company he works for, Polycom,
relocated to the Dulles Tech Center. About 40 percent of JK’s business is the rest is residential.
“They were true professionals and really worked with my wife,” he says. “They
were very sensitive to her emotions and did whatever she needed them to do.
They made a very emotional move palatable.”
When Kuhn graduated from high school, he unloaded a bit of startling news on his
parents: He was forgoing college to concentrate on JK.
“I had mixed emotions,” Jim says. “I did want him to go, but he said ‘Please give me a
year, and if it doesn’t work out then I’ll go to college.’”
At a time when many boys his age worry about which campus boasts the most blondes,
Kuhn was wrestling with payroll, taxes and insurance.
“My parents certainly had the goal for me to go on to college,” Kuhn says. “They were
nervous. Their dreams and aspirations for me were taking a left and I was taking a right. It’s
kind of odd. When I decided to go this route, I decided to go this route. I didn’t go into it
wondering if I was going to make it, wondering how long I was going to do it. I decided this
was the career path I was going to take. I was going to build this company and work this
company until retirement, and this was my future.”
The future was now.

5. BUILDING A REPUTATION
In 1985, Kuhn employed a strategy that has helped propel his company’s growth
throughout the years. He acquired a rival.
JK bought an Oakton, VA-based moving company with a solid reputation and
deep client list. It was one of at least 10 acquisitions of local and long-distance moving
companies and storage companies that JK has undertaken.
This is one reason Kuhn says the company roughly doubles in size every four years.
Another is its rigorous recruitment and training of quality people. Staffing is
“absolutely the biggest challenge I’ve had for 32 years,” he says.
“In the early days, finding the guys to do the move the way you wanted to do it, guys
who would show up on time and care, it was difficult to find two. Today, with more than
600 employees, it’s still absolutely the biggest challenge we have.”
Much of that burden falls on the shoulders of JK’s six-person human resources team.
The group uses an array of tools, including a behavioral test, to hire and place adequate
candidates. Unlike many of its competitors, all of JK’s movers, even the seasonal hires, are
full-time employees.
“The majority of our industry is set up in more or less a franchise model,” Kuhn
says. “North American, Mayflower, Allied, Atlas, those franchises are all headquartered
somewhere in the Midwest. Throughout the country, they have agents or franchises. It
breeds a total lack of accountability in the system.
“We’re fortunate to work in an industry that has earned a bit of a bad reputation over
time. A lot of the customers we deal with already have had bad moves with some of the
major franchises. We do everything possible to train our teams [on] how to handle items
properly, how to wrap them properly, how to move them properly. All of our tractor trailers
have an air ride suspension. So instead of traveling on a spring suspension, they’re riding on
air bags. We’re 100 percent accountable for everything we do.”
Each JK moving hire undergoes an extensive background check, is subject to random
drug testing (as is everyone at the company, including Kuhn), and takes the three-day, basic
training course that includes classroom work and hands-on practice in the training house.
“This isn’t your buddies, a six pack, pizza and a U-Haul truck,” Ware says. “If there was
one particular thing that was going to make someone a successful mover, I would say it in the
first 15 minutes of class, and we’d be done. We try to pay attention to the little things, like
asking permission to put your drink in the customer’s refrigerator. You can be a great mover,
but if you don’t have people skills, you won’t be successful here.”
The class covers everything from how to ask a client to use their bathroom (the master
bath is off-limits) to techniques for properly wrapping and lifting furniture. Make no
mistake about it — moving is difficult manual labor. Not everyone’s cut out for it.
“We just had a young fella that during the first day of basic training, which is the
classroom portion, didn’t come back after lunch,” Ware says, chuckling. “Just us talking
about it, he figured ‘this probably isn’t for me.’ That’s fine, because I want them to figure
out that they don’t want to be a mover in my house as opposed to the customer’s house.”
A vision realized: After an unpleasant experience with a moving company when he was a child, Chuck Kuhn,
pictured with residential division warehouse manager Steve Long, left, knew he could do better. At the age of
16, Kuhn bought his first moving truck and turned JK Moving Services (named for his father’s initials) into a
multimillion dollar moving and storage company with more than 350 trucks and 600 employees.
Photos by Mitro Hood.
“ In the early days, finding the guys to do the move
the way you wanted to do it, guys who would
show up on time and care, it was difficult to find
two. Today, with more than 600 employees, it’s
still absolutely the biggest challenge we have.”
>> Chuck Kuhn
LEAVIN G A MA RK
Though JK Moving founder, president and CEO Chuck Kuhn would
rather play a supportive, lead-from-the-trenches role instead of one
in the spotlight, he and JK Moving, through his vision and dedication
to quality service, have racked up some prestigious awards and
affiliations, locally and nationally.
>> Chamber of Commerce Blue Diamond Excellence
Award for Quality
>> Blue Chip Enterprise Award
>> The Better Business Bureau National Torch Award for Market-place
Ethics
>> Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce Small
Business Award
>> Ernst & Young Greater Washington Entrepreneur
of the Year
>> Board of directors of the American Moving
and Storage Association
>> Active member of the International Facility
Managers Association

6. A CAREER, NOT A JOB
JK offers opportunities for advancement even for entry-level movers hired with no
experience. People like Kris Smurda.
“I saw a career path in front of me,” says Smurda, 49, who joined JK as a mover 16
years ago. “I became a Class A driver for about three years, then I was offered a position
in the operations department as a dispatch assistant. I eventually worked my way into the
commercial division, where today I’m the operations manager. I have 126 [people] that
work for me. I would have never in a million years seen myself in the position that I’m in
today.”
That’s a familiar sentiment among JK employees. When Kuhn was just starting the
business, he’d occasionally pick up work from other moving companies on weekends he
didn’t have a gig.
“Some of the guys I was working with were 60, 70, 75 years old out moving furniture
with me,” he says. “I remember asking my dad, ‘Why are these guys moving furniture at
75? It’s killing them.’ He explained that they may not be able to financially retire. They
might have to work until life’s over for them. I kept that in the back of my mind. As we
were building JK, I did not ever want that to happen to anyone who worked for our
organization.”
More than 20 years ago, Kuhn instituted a profit-sharing plan in which a percentage of
the company’s profits (when it hits its pre-determined goal), is set aside for employees. To
date, more than $17 million has been deposited into the plan, Kuhn says.
“It makes our employees partners in the company,” he says. “They have a vested
interest in serving the client and seeing that the company is profitable.”
In addition to the profit-sharing plan, the company offers a 401(k) plan that guarantees
a 3 percent contribution, regardless of what the employee puts in. The two retirement
vehicles have helped JK immensely with recruiting and retention.
“Last year, I got a really nice letter and a picture from a woman from Costa Rica who
worked for us as a packer,” Kuhn says. “She came to the United States, got her work
permits and worked here for seven or eight years. At the end, she had enough money in her
profit-sharing plan that she resigned from JK, withdrew her money, went back to Costa
Rica and paid cash for a home. Now she’s living with her family in her dream home.”
MOVING WITH HEART
Chuck Kuhn has implicitly understood the moving business — it’s about people,
not objects; heart, not heft — since before he could drive. Now 48, married with seven
children, he gets the same satisfaction from moving people from point A to point B as he
did when he was a teenager. He still arrives at the office each morning at 6:30 to check in
on dispatch, still walks through the warehouses in Sterling, where the smell of fresh-cut
lumber wafts throughout. JK employs craftsmen to construct a new wooden storage vault
for each client, because Kuhn knows people’s stuff is more than just stuff.
In those boxes rest wedding dresses, prom tuxedos, a baby’s first onesie. They contain
treasured photos, beloved books, a CD that played during a first kiss.
These are items JK moves every day. Taken together, material possessions make up the
fabric of people’s lives.
“When I started the business in 1982, interest rates were almost 20 percent,” Kuhn
says. “I was very fortunate at the time not to realize the effect interest rates can have on the
housing market and how that would affect the moving business. And no one told me. So
we created our own economy. I didn’t know any better. I’ve kind of kept that mindset ever
since then. I can’t control the economy, [but] I can control how I respond to the economy.
“Typically, people are moving when their family is expanding, when they have a job
promotion,” he says. “It’s a great feeling of accomplishment to take the stress out of moving
day and get them successfully into their new home. I enjoy working with our employees, I
enjoy the customers and the challenge.”
Chuck Kuhn has been moving virtually his entire life. But he’s not going anywhere.
CEO
Mike Unger is a freelance writer based in Baltimore, MD. Contact us at
editorial@smartceo.com
A BREED A PART
JK Moving’s business mantra is to always do the right thing. As such, the company
invests heavily in finding the right people for the job and then takes good care to
make sure those stellar employees stick around for the long haul. Several factors
make JK an attractive employer:
>> The company has experienced year-over-year, double-digit growth over the
last 30 years.
>> JK Moving’s training processes and procedures have been adopted by the
American Moving & Storage Association, for its new RAMP program.
>> JK established a safe-harbor 401(k) and profit-sharing program for em-ployees
— a one-of-a-kind benefit in the industry.
>> Employees go through a multi-day training program (three days of class-room
and five days of hands-on) before they work in the field.
>> JK has a model two-story house in its warehouse for employee training.
>> Employee retention at JK is eight years, nearly double the industry average.
>> JK is the mover of choice for Fortune 100 and 500 companies.
Moving at the
Speed of Q uality
Quality above all else: JK
Moving Services’ employees
spend the first eight days of
their employment in “basic
training,” a combined classroom
setting and hands-on training
in the two-story JK model home,
where they pack, move and
rehearse the right techniques
and communication expected of
them before they ever set foot
in a client’s home. Photos by
Mitro Hood.