The Mirror: How Move Solutions Won the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve Bank, 11th District, had put a major project out to bid. Nine downtown buildings, consolidating into one beautiful Camelot. This was a project of a lifetime, service to our country; kind of move that takes a serious office moving company significant time to plan and price.

Move Solutions was a year old. Seven people. No trucks of their own. We led with truth, commitment, sincerity. We followed with detail, hard work, persistence, and unbending refusal to fail. 

By any reasonable measure, the company had no business bidding on the job. The competitors were an established firm with decades of fleet, crews, and balance sheet behind them. The Fed knew it. Everyone in the industry knew it.

Relationships matter; Michael Monette had one with the fed from serving them in a different industry. Michael, Bob Howes walked into the lobby of the Federal Reserve building with notepads and pens and “want to”.

What Michael did:

Michal didn’t bring a team; he brought his best, only salesperson. He didn’t bring a binder. After two days of “walking,” counting nine buildings, He sat down in the lobby and worked on the numbers in his head, longhand, on a single sheet of paper. Thirty seconds later, he had a bid. His sales guy, the smarter one, worked on the bid for four days. 

Michael’s number came in within one hundred dollars of Bob’s number. Bob grinned and hated it. 

The Fed selected Move Solutions. Not because the bid was lower, the numbers were essentially identical, but because of the way it was given. Michael and Bob presented and proposed and listened, asked questions. No layered approval chain. No estimator standing between the question and the answer. A small company can do that. A large company has stopped being able to. The Fed wanted someone who could move at the pace the work demanded.

The story could end there. A young company beat a much larger one on the strength of a single sheet of paper. A founder trusted his instincts and they were right. But the most important moment in the whole project was still ahead.

A few days after the project was awarded to Move Solutions, the Federal Reserve received an anonymous letter. The letter questioned Move Solutions’ qualifications. It pointed out the obvious: a one-year-old company with no trucks and seven employees should not be moving the Federal Reserve Bank. The letter asked, in so many words, what the Fed thought it was doing.

A competitor had sent it.

The Fed called Michael in. They didn’t fire him. They didn’t pause the contract. They handed him the letter and asked what he wanted to do about it.

He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t attack the competitor. He made his case by what he didn’t do. He didn’t argue the facts in the letter, because every fact in it was true. He didn’t ask the Fed to overlook them. He gently reminded Jack, the big guy, that Jack had hired Michael, not the letter writer. He didn’t ask for a second chance. He owned the change he already had. Jack asked Michael, “do you know who wrote the letter”, Michael said “yes”. Will you tell us? Michael said no. He simply went back to work and let the work answer the letter.

He finished the project on time, on budget, with the same seven people, the same borrowed trucks, the same notepad-grade math. The project went so well, it was shown on TV. 

What it revealed

There are two kinds of confidence. There’s confidence that comes from being big enough to win on size. And there’s the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what something is worth, even if you’re the smallest one in the room.

The anonymous letter revealed something different. It revealed that Move Solutions had already become a serious enough threat that someone bigger felt the need to write it. And it revealed that the Federal Reserve, having looked closely at the work, had already made up its mind.

Why it matters now

Forty years later, Move Solutions still operates on earned instinct. Quotes that come back fast because the people writing them know exactly what each piece of the work costs. Project managers who can walk a building once and tell you what the move will take, because they’ve walked a thousand buildings before yours. Bid numbers that hold up because they’re built on the kind of hands-on knowledge that doesn’t get faked in a spreadsheet.

The company that started with seven people and a notepad has scaled into something much larger. But the principle that got Move Solutions, the Federal Reserve job is the same one it runs on today. Know your work. Bid it honestly. Trust the math your hands did before your spreadsheet caught up.

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The Mirror is a personal series from Michael Monette, CEO of Move Solutions. These are the stories that built the company, told the way he remembers living through them, the wins, the close calls, and the people who shaped what Move Solutions is today.