This year, Bellhop was named by Inc. as one of America’s fastest growing companies, appearing as number 2,781 on the annual Inc. 5000 list – alongside 14 other Chattanooga-based companies including Text Request, Steam Logistics and Trident Transport.
Founded by millennials Cam Doody and Stephen Vlahnos in 2011, Bellhop offers custom-tailored moving solutions across 25 states.
What started as a simple solution for college students moving in and out of dorms grew to become a nationwide company servicing customers of any sized home.
To date, the company has acquired more than $50 million in venture capital from firms such as Advanced Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Lowercase Capital and Initialized Capital while completing over 300,000 moves.
“The most exciting thing to me is that we continue to find ways to revolutionize and modernize moving,” Bill Chase, Chief Marketing Officer, Bellhop, says.
“At Bellhop, we continue to add new innovations to our workforce experience to provide a better customer experience and reduce stress on moving day.”
Trend spoke with Chase to learn more about the company and what this recognition means to their team:
Trend: How does it feel to be named one of America’s fastest growing private companies?
Chase: It’s a great accomplishment for our team. We have a really energetic staff that works [incredibly] hard every day behind the scenes.
The moving industry is not an easy industry. There are a lot of moving parts behind the scenes on every move and no two moves are the same.
Even though we have all this technology that really builds the experience up, there is still a lot of human intervention where you need it. So this is a great accomplishment for our team.
We all feel very proud and celebrated last week as a team in the office. We were definitely honored to be on the list.
Trend: Bellhop joined 14 other Chattanooga businesses on the Inc. 5000 list. What makes Chattanooga a great place for businesses to grow?
Chase: A few things. A lot of companies on that list are transportation logistic businesses, which means that we have been able to build unique set of talents in the city.
Even the businesses that are not in the logistics or transportation space are all heavy technology companies.
Chattanooga is starting to become a tech hub… I think that the level of tech talent here is only growing.
There have been a lot of stories written about movement post COVID. People want to go to places that are just more enjoyable to live and more cost effective to live, and that’s certainly Chattanooga.
I moved here about a year and a half ago. I could have lived other places and still worked at Bellhop.
I chose to come to Chattanooga because of all the things I just talked about. It’s a great outdoor city with a great cost of living city. And the talent just continues to improve.
There’s enough talent to go around to support 15 businesses on the Inc. 5000 list. That’s that’s a pretty cool honor for our market.
Trend: What’s next for Bellhop?
Chase: We’re certainly continuing to to look at other services around the moving industry – for example, junk removal.
That’s something that a lot of people that are moving need help with. So whether we build that service ourselves or whether we partner with somebody, we’d love to able to offer more of those types of services to our customers.
We’ll certainly continue to think about service area expansion to serve more markets across the U.S.
We’re pretty much in all of the major metros, but we want to be able to service some of the smaller secondary cities as well.
Those two things, along with being able to continue to scale our brand and build new partnerships. We we think that the path ahead is is really, really bright for the company.
Trend: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
Chase: Our company and our employees really are proud to be part of the Chattanooga community.
Yes, we’re a national business and yes, we like to be involved in every market that we’re involved in. But Chattanooga is still our home town and we’re proud to be Chattanoogans.
Read another Bellhop Q&A, here.
Learn more about Bellhop, here.
