Ox Strong Moving

About Ox Strong Moving

Ox Strong Moving is a full-service residential and commercial moving company built around a simple mission: move clients from stressed and unsure to relaxed and happy. The company provides local and long-distance moving, residential and commercial relocation, student moving, and packing and unpacking services, with an emphasis on delivering a premium, highly personal customer experience.

The company was founded in Gainesville, Florida, in 2021 by Zach Kielbasa while he was a business student at the University of Florida. Kielbasa regularly helped friends move into and out of apartments and student housing and saw an opportunity to create a moving company that felt less transactional and more personal. The idea developed around a straightforward question: rather than trusting their belongings to strangers, why shouldn't customers feel as though they were being helped by friends?

That philosophy continues to influence the company's approach to hiring, training, customer service, and operations. Movers are expected to establish a connection with customers while providing professional, reliable service and careful handling of their belongings.

Since its launch, Ox Strong Moving has expanded beyond Gainesville into multiple Florida markets. At the time of the franchise team's discussions with Revolution Franchise Brokers, the system included corporate operations in Gainesville, Tampa Bay, and the Naples/Fort Myers area, operating franchise locations in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, and additional Orlando-area franchise locations in onboarding.

The company has also received national recognition for its growth. Ox Strong Moving appeared on the Inc. 5000 in both 2025 and 2026; Inc. ranked the company No. 240 nationally in 2025 and No. 1,310 in 2026.

A Highly Visible Brand

One of the most recognizable elements of Ox Strong Moving is its signature pink trucks and branding. The color creates a distinctive visual identity in a category where many competitors use relatively traditional branding, helping Ox Strong vehicles stand out while they are traveling, parked at homes and businesses, or operating within neighborhoods.

The pink branding also carries a personal meaning for the company. It honors founder Zach Kielbasa's mother and grandmother, both of whom battled breast cancer.

The brand has built its reputation around customer experience and online reviews. Ox Strong reports thousands of five-star reviews across its markets and positions customer satisfaction and referrals as central components of its growth strategy.

Services

Ox Strong Moving operates as a full-service moving company capable of serving customers through several service categories:

• Residential Moving — Moving customers between homes, apartments, condominiums, and other residential properties.

• Local Moving — Serving customers relocating within the franchisee's local market and surrounding communities.

• Long-Distance Moving — Handling moves that extend beyond the immediate local service area.

• Commercial Moving — Relocating offices, businesses, equipment, furniture, and other commercial customers.

• Student Moving — A service category closely connected to the company's original roots in Gainesville and the University of Florida community.

• Packing and Unpacking — Helping customers organize, protect, pack, transport, unpack, and place their belongings.

This range of services gives owners the ability to develop relationships with individual consumers as well as businesses, real estate professionals, storage facilities, senior living organizations, and other potential referral partners.

Franchise Owner's Role

A major component of the Ox Strong franchise model is the division of responsibilities between the franchise owner and the franchisor.

Rather than expecting individual owners to spend much of their day answering phones, quoting jobs, following up with leads, and managing digital marketing campaigns, Ox Strong centralizes many of these activities.

The franchise owner's primary responsibility is operations.

Owners concentrate on areas such as:

• Recruiting, training, and managing moving crews

• Scheduling and dispatching teams

• Managing trucks and equipment

• Maintaining service and safety standards

• Monitoring the customer experience

• Resolving operational issues

• Developing employees and crew leaders

• Building relationships within the local community

• Establishing local referral partnerships

• Protecting the reputation of the Ox Strong brand

New owners commonly serve as the dispatcher or operational manager of their business during the initial stages, although an owner can eventually build management infrastructure around that role.

Ox Strong is therefore looking for operators who are comfortable leading people and taking responsibility for execution rather than owners whose primary strength is simply selling moving jobs.

Centralized Sales and Call Center

One of the distinguishing components of the Ox Strong franchise system is its centralized sales infrastructure.

Ox Strong's internal team handles inbound leads on behalf of franchise locations. The call center communicates with prospective customers, qualifies opportunities, books moving jobs, collects customer deposits, and places the job into the franchisee's system. Franchisees can then see the customer information, sales notes, job details, and relevant instructions through the company's CRM.

The purpose of this structure is to allow owners to spend more time managing the actual moving operation rather than building and staffing their own sales organization.

The centralized sales team can manage inquiries coming from multiple channels, while the franchisee receives booked work and focuses on successfully completing the move and creating a positive customer experience.

Marketing Support

Ox Strong also takes an active role in digital marketing for franchise locations.

Marketing efforts begin before a location officially opens so the business can start establishing local awareness and generating opportunities ahead of launch. The franchisor manages digital marketing while providing systems and materials designed to support local brand development.

Franchisees are also encouraged to complement centralized digital marketing with grassroots relationship building in their communities.

This combination creates two primary channels:

Centralized marketing and lead generation builds awareness and generates inbound opportunities, while local relationship marketing helps the franchisee develop recurring referral sources within the territory.

Local Referral Marketing

Ox Strong has developed a structured referral strategy around organizations that regularly interact with people preparing to move.

Primary referral targets include:

• Real estate agents and brokerages

• Storage facilities

• Assisted living and senior living communities

• Property-related businesses

• Other organizations that regularly encounter customers going through a relocation

For example, franchisees can visit real estate offices, introduce the company, provide marketing materials, sponsor meetings or lunches, and establish relationships with individual agents. The objective is to become the moving company those professionals recommend when a client needs help relocating.

Storage facilities represent another natural referral channel because their customers frequently need moving assistance before or after renting a unit.

Ox Strong provides processes for tracking referral relationships, customer offers, referral codes, and resulting bookings so owners can develop these relationships systematically rather than relying solely on informal networking.

Staffing and Crew Management

Moving is fundamentally a people-driven business, making recruiting and crew leadership important responsibilities for franchise owners.

Ox Strong emphasizes using trained employees rather than relying heavily on outsourced labor. The corporate organization primarily uses W-2 movers and recommends that approach because it allows operators to train employees consistently and maintain control over the customer experience.

New franchise locations are generally expected to begin with enough movers to rotate crews rather than sending the same employees on every job. In the discussions with Ox Strong's franchise development team, the company described an initial recommendation of approximately six to twelve employees depending on how the owner structures the operation and whether the owner personally handles dispatch.

As volume increases, owners can add additional movers, crew leaders, dispatch personnel, management staff, and trucks.

Trucks and Equipment

Ox Strong is a mobile service business centered around branded moving trucks rather than a traditional customer-facing retail location.

Franchisees launch with a branded Ox Strong truck and expand their fleet as demand requires. The company works with preferred vendors and provides guidance related to truck selection, purchasing, leasing, financing options, and vehicle wrapping.

The bright pink trucks function as both operating equipment and mobile advertising. As an owner adds trucks, the growing fleet increases the brand's physical presence throughout the territory.

Owners can supplement owned vehicles with leased or rented trucks when demand requires additional capacity, then add permanent vehicles as the operation scales.

Technology and CRM

Franchisees receive access to technology designed to connect sales, scheduling, customer information, and operations.

Because the centralized sales team handles incoming opportunities, information gathered during the sales process can be entered into the system and passed directly to the local operator. Owners can review customer details, job information, sales notes, and instructions that crews need to know before arriving at the job.

This creates a more coordinated handoff between the people who sell the move and the crews responsible for completing it.

Training

New franchise owners receive structured training covering the primary functions required to operate an Ox Strong location.

Training includes areas such as:

• Moving operations

• Hiring and employee management

• Crew management

• Truck management

• Dispatching

• Safety

• Customer service

• Marketing and branding

• Local relationship development

• Accounting and business administration

• Client success

Public franchise materials describe an intensive week of on-site training at a corporate location, supplemented by virtual resources and an extensive training library containing more than 800 training videos.

The objective is to teach franchisees each major role within the operation so they understand how the business functions before they begin managing employees to perform those roles.

Ongoing Coaching and Support

Training continues beyond the initial launch.

Franchise owners receive ongoing coaching designed to help them navigate staffing, dispatch, customer experience, sales coordination, marketing, and operational growth. Ox Strong also promotes direct access to founder and CEO Zach Kielbasa as part of the support structure for franchisees.

Additional support includes centralized marketing and booking, technology, branding resources, preferred vendor relationships, bookkeeping and accounting support, and guidance as franchisees add crews and vehicles.

Protected Territories

Ox Strong awards franchisees protected geographic territories designed to provide owners with a defined local market in which to build their business.

Public franchise materials describe territories as being data-driven and generally structured around populations of approximately 300,000 to 450,000 residents. The protected territory allows the owner to build brand awareness, referral relationships, commercial accounts, moving crews, and local marketing infrastructure without another Ox Strong franchise being placed within the same protected market.

The model also provides a pathway for operators who want to expand beyond their original territory and develop a larger multi-territory organization.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is at the center of the Ox Strong operating philosophy.

The company was created around the idea that customers should not feel as though they are allowing strangers into their homes to handle their possessions. Instead, Ox Strong trains its teams to create a connection with customers while combining that personal approach with professional moving standards.

That philosophy is summarized by the company's mission of moving customers from "stressed and unsure to relaxed and happy."

The emphasis on customer experience affects recruiting, training, crew management, communication, reviews, referrals, and the expectations placed on franchise owners.

Growth Model

Ox Strong is designed to scale primarily by adding people, crews, and trucks as demand increases.

An owner can begin with a relatively focused operation consisting of a branded truck, moving crews, and the owner overseeing dispatch and daily operations. As booked jobs increase, additional employees and vehicles can be added to increase capacity.

Over time, an owner can develop crew leaders, dispatchers, and operational management, allowing the owner to move from performing many of the day-to-day management functions personally toward leading a larger organization.

Because the franchisor handles significant portions of lead generation, digital marketing, sales, and booking, the local franchisee's ability to scale is closely tied to building operational capacity and consistently delivering the customer experience that drives reviews, repeat business, and referrals.

The Ox Strong Franchise System

The Ox Strong Moving franchise brings together a recognizable consumer brand, centralized sales and marketing infrastructure, local relationship marketing, protected territories, operating technology, structured training, and ongoing coaching.

The division of responsibilities is straightforward: the franchisor helps create and convert demand, while the franchise owner builds and manages the operation capable of fulfilling it.

The centralized team supports marketing, lead handling, sales, booking, technology, and brand development. The franchise owner focuses primarily on people, trucks, crews, dispatch, local relationships, execution, and customer satisfaction.

This structure gives franchisees the opportunity to build a local moving company under the Ox Strong brand while using systems developed through the company's corporate locations and thousands of completed moves.