Should I open or buy an All My Sons Moving & Storage franchise in 2027?

Two paths, one brand, and a third option most buyers ignore

Before you weigh "open versus buy," you have to settle a question that sits upstream of both: is All My Sons Moving & Storage selling franchises at all in your target market in 2027? This brand is not like a fast-casual concept with a permanent sales desk and a glossy territory map. All My Sons operates a large number of company-run branches, and brands with heavy corporate footprints frequently pause, restrict, or geographically limit franchise sales — sometimes for years at a stretch. Every number, timeline, and plan below is conditional on that answer. Call the franchise development line, ask for a current Franchise Disclosure Document, and ask directly: how many units have you awarded in the past 24 months, and in which states? If the answer is "we're not currently awarding," you have your answer and you should stop paying consultants to model a deal that does not exist.

Assume for now that franchising is open. You then have three real options, not two.

Option one: open a new unit. You get a virgin territory, no inherited baggage, and full control over your hiring, your fleet spec, and your storage strategy. You also get a revenue line that starts at zero on day one while your fixed costs — truck payments, insurance, warehouse lease, a dispatcher's salary — start at full freight. In moving, the ramp is unusually brutal because the business is seasonal *and* referral-driven. A mover who opens in October faces the winter trough with no reputation, no repeat customers, and no realtor relationships. The same mover opening in March catches the May-through-September wave and can bank cash before the slow months. Timing your open is not a detail; it is arguably the single largest variable in whether year one is survivable.

Option two: buy an existing unit. Resales in franchise systems come to market for predictable reasons: burnout, health, divorce, retirement, a partner dispute, or genuine underperformance. You inherit trucks with known mileage, a crew with known reliability, a phone number that already rings, and a customer list with a documented repeat rate. You also inherit the seller's problems — deferred maintenance on a 2019 26-footer with 240,000 miles, an open damage claim, a warehouse lease with three years left at above-market rent, a lead reviewer's one-star pile on Google. You pay a premium over startup cost for the revenue that already exists, and whether that premium is a bargain depends entirely on the quality of the revenue.

Option three: skip the franchise and build independent. This is the option nobody selling you a franchise will raise, and it deserves honest weight. Moving is one of the few home-service categories where brand equity matters less than you would expect. Customers find movers through Google Local, Yelp, Thumbtack, realtor referrals, apartment-complex preferred-vendor lists, and Angi. None of those channels care whose logo is on the truck; they care about star ratings, response speed, and whether you show up. An independent operator with a clean five-star profile and a good realtor network can outcompete a franchised unit in the same ZIP code while paying zero royalty. What you give up is the operating playbook, the national call center, the group insurance and equipment purchasing, and the credibility that a recognized name buys you with corporate relocation accounts.

The honest framing is this: the franchise fee and royalty buy you a *system* and *procurement leverage*, not customers. If you already know how to dispatch crews and price a move, that system is worth less to you than it is to a career banker leaving finance. Price the royalty accordingly — at a 5% royalty on $2.5M of gross revenue you are writing a $125,000 check every year, forever, for a brand that your customers largely discovered through a Google Maps search.

Choosing between opening, buying, and going independent

Run the decision as a sequence of gates rather than a gut call. Each gate below has a specific artifact you should have in hand before moving forward, and each one can end the process cleanly and cheaply.

Gate one — availability. Get the FDD. Item 1 tells you the corporate structure and history. Item 20 gives you the unit counts: how many franchised, how many company-owned, how many opened, closed, transferred, or terminated in each of the last three years. A brand where company-owned units vastly outnumber franchised ones, and where the "openings" column is near zero, is not selling. That single table answers your availability question more honestly than any development rep will.

Gate two — economics disclosure. Item 19 is the Financial Performance Representation. Franchisors are not required to publish one. If Item 19 is blank or extremely thin, you cannot model this business from franchisor data and must rely entirely on franchisee interviews and, for a resale, the seller's tax returns. A blank Item 19 is not automatically a red flag — plenty of solid brands omit it — but it shifts the entire burden of diligence onto you.

Gate three — validation calls. Item 20 includes contact information for current and former franchisees. Call a minimum of ten current owners and, critically, every former owner you can reach. Former owners tell you what the exit really looked like. Ask specific questions: what was your gross last year, what was your labor cost as a percentage of revenue, what did your insurance renewal do this year, how many damage claims did you pay, how long did it take you to reach positive cash flow, and would you do it again.

Gate four — market reality. Moving demand tracks housing turnover, job relocation, apartment lease churn, and university calendars. A metro with flat home sales, aging demographics, and no major employers relocating is a hard market regardless of whose brand you carry. Pull existing-home-sales data for your county, look at multifamily unit counts and vacancy, and check whether the metro is a net in-migration or out-migration market. Sun Belt metros with heavy apartment construction generate a steady base of small, high-frequency local moves; that is often better business than a market with a few large, high-ticket long-distance jobs.

Gate five — self-assessment. This business is fleet management, labor management, and claims management wearing a customer-service costume. If you have never run a payroll for hourly crews, never dealt with a DOT inspection, never priced a job that ran four hours over estimate, you are buying a steep education. That is fine — plenty of people learn it — but it argues strongly for buying an existing unit with a working crew lead rather than opening cold.

One structural note on the decision: do not let a franchise broker frame it for you. Brokers are paid a commission by the franchisor when you sign, which means they are structurally uninterested in the independent option and only mildly interested in resales. Their input is useful for logistics and introductions. It is not advice.

What each path actually costs

Treat published ranges as starting points and build your own budget from local quotes. The line items below reflect the real cost structure of a full-service moving-and-storage operation; your actual figures depend heavily on your metro's wage rates, warehouse rents, and insurance market. Confirm every number in the current FDD before you commit capital.

Opening a new unit — build your budget from these buckets:

• Initial franchise fee. For established home-service and moving brands this commonly lands in the tens of thousands of dollars for a single territory. It is disclosed in Item 5 of the FDD and is generally not negotiable for a first unit.
• Fleet. This is the dominant cost. A used 26-foot box truck in serviceable condition typically runs into the tens of thousands; new units cost multiples of that. A viable starting fleet is three to five trucks, which is why fleet alone often exceeds every other startup line combined. Leasing lowers the entry number and raises the monthly nut — the right choice depends on whether your constraint is cash or cash flow.
• Storage facility. Whether you lease warehouse space and build out vaults or partner with an existing self-storage operator changes this number enormously. A leased warehouse with racking, vaults, security, and climate control is a substantial capital and monthly-lease commitment. Storage is also your best margin, so treat this as an investment rather than an expense.
• Equipment and packing inventory. Dollies, straps, blankets, shrink wrap, boxes, tools, ramps. Individually cheap, collectively meaningful, and consumed continuously.
• Insurance and authority. General liability, commercial auto, cargo, workers' comp, and the appropriate state and interstate operating authority. Workers' comp for moving crews is expensive because the injury rate is high. Get real quotes before you model this; the difference between a good and bad comp rate can swing your P&L by a full percentage point of revenue.
• Branding and truck wraps. Wrapping a fleet is a real line item and worth doing — a wrapped truck sitting outside a job is genuinely effective local advertising.
• Initial marketing. Google Local Services, Google Ads, review-generation tooling, realtor and property-manager outreach, and a launch push. Underfunding this in a cold start is the most common way new units stall.
• Working capital. The single most underestimated bucket. You pay crews weekly and get paid at job completion, which is manageable, but you also carry fixed costs through a winter trough with a fraction of summer revenue. Budget at least six to twelve months of full fixed costs — payroll for a skeleton crew, truck notes, warehouse lease, insurance premiums — as untouched reserve.

Because these buckets vary so widely by market and by fleet decisions, do not anchor on a single "total investment" figure from a listing site. Sum your own quotes. A conservative operator leasing trucks and subleasing storage lands dramatically lower than one buying five trucks and building out a warehouse, and both are legitimate versions of the same business.

Buying an existing unit — what you are actually paying for:

Resale pricing in service businesses is typically expressed as a multiple of seller's discretionary earnings or EBITDA. Small owner-operated service companies commonly transact in the low-single-digit multiple range, with the multiple rising for larger, better-documented, less owner-dependent businesses. A unit where the owner personally sells every job, dispatches every crew, and holds every relationship is worth less than one with a general manager, documented SOPs, and diversified lead sources — because the first one loses much of its value the day the owner leaves.

Your diligence list for a resale is concrete:

• Three years of tax returns, reconciled against the P&L the seller hands you. Not QuickBooks exports — returns.
• A fleet inspection by an independent commercial truck mechanic. Mileage, transmission condition, DOT inspection history, remaining tire and brake life. A single transmission replacement on a box truck can erase a quarter's profit.
• The claims log. Every damage claim filed in the past three years, what was paid, and whether the insurer non-renewed or repriced afterward.
• The lease. Remaining term, escalators, assignability, and whether the landlord consents to the transfer.
• Crew retention. Which crew leads have been there more than two years, and will they stay post-close? Ask to meet them before closing, with the seller's consent.
• Lead source breakdown. What share comes from Google organic and Local Services, what share from the franchisor's national line, what share from repeat and referral. A unit fed mainly by paid ads has thinner, more fragile revenue than one fed by realtor referrals.
• Review profile. Pull the Google, Yelp, and BBB history. A unit with a two-star average is buying you a marketing problem that takes eighteen months of flawless service to repair.

The operating cost structure either way. Moving is a labor-heavy business — direct crew labor is the largest single operating expense and it scales with revenue. Fleet costs (fuel, maintenance, tires, truck payments) are the second bucket. Insurance and claims come next and are lumpier than owners expect. Royalty and brand-fund contributions on a franchised unit typically run in the mid-single-digit percentages of gross revenue combined; the exact figures are in FDD Item 6. Storage revenue, once your facility is filled, carries a meaningfully better margin than moving revenue because the marginal cost of an occupied vault is close to zero.

That last point deserves emphasis. Moving revenue is transactional and seasonal. Storage revenue is recurring and flat across the year. An operator who treats storage as an afterthought has built a business that makes most of its money in four months. An operator who deliberately converts moving customers into storage customers — offering a storage-in-transit option on every estimate, pricing the first month attractively, and following up on every home-sale timing gap — builds a base of monthly revenue that pays the winter fixed costs. Over a five-year hold, that difference shows up in both your stress level and your exit multiple.

Building the operation and sequencing the first year

Whichever path you take, the first twelve months follow a recognizable arc. Sequencing matters more than speed.

Months one through three — legal, authority, and insurance. Form the entity, secure your state intrastate moving authority and, if you intend to run interstate, your USDOT number and FMCSA operating authority. Bind insurance before you touch a truck. This phase is unglamorous and non-negotiable; operating without proper authority is how a promising business gets shut down by a state regulator in year one. If you are buying an existing unit, this phase is about transferring authority and getting the insurer to write you rather than the seller — do not assume the seller's rate carries over.

Months two through four — facility and fleet. Sign the warehouse lease, build out or verify the storage buildout, and take delivery of trucks. Get the wraps done before launch; an unwrapped truck is a wasted billboard. Set up your maintenance program on day one with a local commercial shop — scheduled preventive maintenance is far cheaper than roadside failures during peak season, and a truck down in July costs you a full day of crew revenue plus the customer.

Months three through five — hiring and training. This is the real bottleneck. You need a dispatcher, crew leads, and movers. Crew leads are the scarce resource: a good one prices a job accurately on site, keeps the crew moving, protects the customer's floors and doorframes, and generates five-star reviews without being asked. Pay above the local market for crew leads specifically and accept market rate below them. Build a retention structure — performance bonuses tied to review scores and claim-free jobs, a clear path from mover to lead to dispatcher. Turnover in physical labor roles is high across the industry, and every departure costs you training time and service quality.

Months four through six — systems and demand. Get your dispatch and estimating software live before your first job, not after your fiftieth. Set up call tracking so you know which lead sources actually convert. Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile — for local moving this is the highest-leverage single asset you own. Enroll in Google Local Services if available in your market. Then work the referral channels in person: real estate brokerages, apartment complexes and their preferred-vendor lists, senior-living communities and downsizing specialists, corporate HR departments handling relocations, and storage facilities that do not offer moving. Each of those is a repeatable channel rather than a one-time ad spend.

Months six through twelve — pricing discipline and claims control. Two things kill margin in year one. The first is underestimating jobs — quoting four hours on a job that takes seven, then eating the difference to avoid an argument. Fix this by having crew leads walk the job or by using video surveys, and by building a written change-order process the customer signs. The second is damage claims. Every claim costs you the repair, the goodwill, and eventually your insurance rate. Mandate floor runners, door jamb protectors, and blanket-wrap on every item, and inspect crews' work randomly.

The adjacent plays worth considering. If All My Sons is closed to new franchisees, the surrounding category is not. Other moving franchise systems sell territories actively. Junk-removal-plus-moving hybrids attack the same customer with a lower asset load and better margins per truck hour. Portable-container and self-storage models trade the labor headache for a real estate problem. Labor-only moving — supplying crews to load customer-rented trucks and containers — requires almost no fleet capital and is a genuine business in dense metros. And commercial office moving, IT relocation, and lab or medical equipment moving are lower-volume, higher-ticket niches with far less price competition than residential.

There is also the reverse move: buy an existing independent mover rather than a franchise. Small independents with an aging owner and a solid book of realtor referrals sell at lower multiples than franchised units, come with no royalty, and can be rebranded or professionalized. If your edge is operations rather than marketing, that is frequently the best risk-adjusted entry into this industry — and it is available in 2027 in essentially every metro, regardless of what any franchisor decides about awarding territories.

Related questions

Is moving a recession-resistant business?

Partially. Discretionary upgrade moves fall in downturns, but job-loss relocations, downsizing, and lease-driven apartment moves continue. Storage often holds up better than moving during housing slowdowns because people delay decisions and need somewhere to put their belongings. Diversified revenue across residential, commercial, and storage cushions the cycle.

How much does seasonality really affect revenue?

Substantially. Residential moving concentrates in late spring through early fall, driven by school calendars and lease turnover. Winter months can run at a fraction of peak volume. Plan staffing, truck payments, and personal draw around the trough, not the peak — and use storage and commercial work to flatten the curve.

Can I run this semi-absentee?

Realistically, no, at least not in the first two years. Dispatch decisions, claim resolution, and crew retention all require an owner present. Semi-absentee becomes plausible only after you have a general manager who can price jobs and manage crew leads, which typically means year three at the earliest.

What licensing do I actually need?

Intrastate moving is regulated at the state level, with requirements that vary widely — some states require a household goods carrier permit and tariff filing, others are light. Interstate moving requires a USDOT number and FMCSA operating authority. Verify both with your state regulator and FMCSA before quoting a single job.

Should I lease or buy trucks?

Leasing preserves cash and often bundles maintenance, which matters when a breakdown in July costs you a day of revenue. Buying used lowers lifetime cost if you have a reliable mechanic and can absorb downtime. Most first-year operators are cash-constrained, which argues for leasing at least part of the fleet.

FAQ

How do I confirm whether All My Sons is awarding franchises in 2027?

Contact the franchisor's franchise development team directly and request the current Franchise Disclosure Document. Item 20 shows unit counts and the number of franchises opened, transferred, closed, or terminated over the prior three years. If the openings column is empty and company-owned units dominate, the brand is effectively not selling, whatever a broker tells you.

Is buying an existing unit safer than opening a new one?

Usually, yes — you buy verified revenue instead of a projection, and you inherit a working crew. But the safety is only as good as your diligence. A resale with unverifiable books, a worn-out fleet, an above-market lease, or a poor review profile is riskier than a well-capitalized cold start. Reconcile tax returns, inspect trucks independently, and read the claims log.

How long before the business generates real cash?

A cold start typically spends its first season building reputation and referral channels, with meaningful owner income arriving later than most projections assume. A resale can pay the owner from month one if the revenue is genuine and the transition retains the crew. Either way, budget conservatively and hold enough working capital to clear at least one full winter.

What is the biggest hidden cost in moving and storage?

Insurance and claims, in combination. Workers' compensation for moving crews is expensive because injury rates are high, and a run of damage claims can trigger a premium increase that persists for years. The second hidden cost is truck downtime during peak season — an idle truck in July is lost revenue you cannot recover in November.

Does the franchise brand actually bring me customers?

Some, through national call routing and name recognition, particularly with relocation and corporate accounts. But the majority of local residential leads come from Google Business Profile rankings, Local Services ads, review sites, and realtor referrals — channels you have to build yourself either way. Value the royalty against the system, purchasing leverage, and training, not against promised lead flow.

What if I want the industry but not the franchise commitment?

Buy an existing independent mover or build one. Independents transact at lower multiples, carry no royalty, and let you brand and price freely. You give up the playbook and group purchasing, which matters most if you have never managed crews or fleets. For an experienced operator, independent ownership is often the better risk-adjusted entry into moving and storage.

Sources

• https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/franchise-rule-compliance-guide
• https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/plan-your-business/buy-existing-business-or-franchise
• https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/registration/get-mc-number-authority-operate
• https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/protect-your-move
• https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537062.htm
• https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration.html
• https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics
• https://www.franchise.org/
• https://www.bbb.org/
• https://www.osha.gov/warehousing

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