Today we’d like to introduce you to Hunter Munroe.
Hi Hunter, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Top Dawg Moving started in March of 2019 with one truck parked in a recycle center parking lot. As a way to supplement my income, I joined the company as a mover that May, balancing one or two move days a week with my full-time job as a technician at an addiction treatment facility. Joe Lewis, the founder and managing partner, worked hands-on as a driver for every move that spring & summer, giving us new hires hands-on training and he often talked about his vision of what he believed Top Dawg Moving could evolve into. By October, a second truck had been added to the fleet and the company had begun to gain traction in the competitive Atlanta market. At this crucial point, Joe needed two weeks to get married and enjoy his honeymoon, leaving him no time to continue the momentum Top Dawg was gaining. Since my first move, I had always advocated for myself, sharing that I believed that I could provide administrative assistance whenever the time was right. Personally, I was hungry for an opportunity to break out in my career path and felt that Top Dawg Moving had the potential to provide this. Myself and four others were invited by Joe to his house to learn how to book moving appointments, talk with customers on the phone and schedule moving teams. To my surprise, I was the only one that showed up for what I saw as a golden opportunity to showcase my skill set. After an eight-hour day of taking practice phone calls, walking through the booking/scheduling process, and talking about all the ins & outs of what situations I could run into, I was given the title of General Manager. The next day, Joe was on a flight and I was left with this 8-month-old company, feeling an equal mixture of excitement and fear towards what I just signed up for.
In that two-week window, while working my full-time job, Top Dawg Moving completed a record amount of jobs, surpassing all the goals that were laid out for me to achieve in that brief time frame. Joe and I debriefed when he returned about what went well, areas to improve on, and what it would look like to bring me on full time. After a couple of weeks of taking time to carve out the responsibilities of the new role, I started full-time as the General Manager of Top Dawg Moving January of 2020. Since then, we’ve grown to having a fleet of nine trucks, averaging a staff of 40 employees, consistently ranked top 3 on Yelp, and receiving multiple awards and recognitions, including most recently Best of Georgina Nominee by the Georgia Business Journal. Above all of the mistakes & milestones, I’m thankful we’re still here despite how harsh these seasons have been for small businesses and grateful for the trust that’s been given to me by everyone at this company to help us keep moving forward.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Being someone who was diagnosed with depression halfway through college, I’ve spent a lot of energy on coping with the effects of depression and learning how to live a healthy life. After graduating in the spring of 2017 from the University of Mount Union in my home state of Ohio, life hit me pretty hard later that year when my soon to be fiance & I broke up and shortly after, I was fired from my dream job with no sense of what the hell I was going to do next. In this directionless vacuum, my mental health took a severe turn for the worst. For weeks at a time, I struggled to get out of bed, shut out those closest to me, and struggled to even articulate what I was experiencing because I was never taught the tools to do so. With my situation getting more dire by the day, I checked into a residential treatment center at the beginning of 2018 for three months. This experience was invaluable for me, as I learned a great amount about emotional intimacy, the psychology behind depression/anxiety, and was surrounded by people who were in a similar place who I could share within a safe space. Leaving there, I felt immensely hopeful that I had a fresh start in front of me and felt confident that I would be free of any more depressive episodes.
To help with this new start, I packed all of my bags and moved to Atlanta, eager to get to work on rebuilding my life in a new city. All the eagerness in the world could not prepare me for the wave of growing pains that come from moving away from anyone & anything you’re familiar with. Completely overwhelmed, my depression snuffed out any optimism I had built within myself and three months after moving to Atlanta, I attempted to take my own life and was rushed to the hospital, where medical professionals were able to stabilize me with no ill side effects from the attempt.
A lot of questions were running through my mind while laying in that hospital bed. “Am I ever going to get well? Am I defective? Would anyone have cared if I succeeded?” were some of the few. I felt completely alone and incapable of getting my life figured out, but I knew I’d never try this again or visit the hospital again. So now what? I was cleared from the hospital a week later and sat on my bed, still lost as ever. The one tiny positive spark of motivation that I could summon was a simple thought, “what’s the next healthy thing I can do for myself?” At that time, it was to take a shower. And that’s how I decided to take life at that point. I would get frozen in my tracks if I started thinking too far ahead, so I grounded myself by asking myself what’s the next healthy thing I can do in this moment that I have now. Of course, this is an oversimplification and doesn’t dive into the hundreds of hours of counseling I’ve had, the thousands of phone calls, coffee hangouts and hiking trails taken with trusted friends who were patient enough to give me space and consistent enough to stick with me as a relearned how to relate to people. By the time the opportunity with Top Dawg Moving came around, I had been laboring to build myself back up emotionally, professionally, and mentally, so once that window of opportunity opened up, I didn’t hesitate to seize it and make the most of it.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As the General Manager, I’m in charge of the company’s day to day processes & operations. I organize our worker’s schedules, spearhead our hiring/training process, manage payroll, create & maintain our scheduling system, take customers through our booking process as well as work with customers when it comes to after movers issues such as damage claims. I’m most proud of the data analysis I provide for the company. By identifying patterns on our schedule and how many movers are needed weekly, I’m able to create a formula that can project how many jobs/revenue we could anticipate the following month. Being able to project cash flow accurately is huge for a small business as we have to make every penny count. Using this system I’ve created, these projections have been 98% accurate and this has been useful for us so we can scale our business.
Top Dawg Moving is a licensed and insured residential moving company that operates within a 50-mile straight line radius from our truck lot in Alpharetta, GA, roughly 25 miles north of Atlanta. We specialize in moving standard household goods, ranging from moving studio apartments to 12,000 square foot mansions and every home in between. What sets us apart is Top Dawg Moving’s continued commitment to going above & beyond for our customers, by creating a company culture where it’s standard for moving teams to communicate and represent themselves in a way that is hospitable, courteous, and treats our customers and their furniture with the utmost respect.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
Dream. And dream big! Every goal we’ve set for ourselves at Top Dawg Moving has scared us and seemed borderline inconceivable that we’d achieve it. But, that drove us to stay motivated to hustle, challenged us to think of ideas to sharpen our systems and think outside of the box when we saw ourselves lagging behind. Because of this, even when we miss a goal, we’ve missed high and can still look back at the tremendous amount of growth we were able to sustain along the way.
Contact Info:
- Email: topdawgatlanta@gmail.com
- Website: topdawgmoving.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/topdawgmoving/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/topdawgmoving
