TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – While 2020 has been hard on all of us, especially small businesses, Peter Warhurst took a leap of faith and started a new company this year.
As the current pandemic continues to force people from their homes, moving companies are adapting to meet their needs. Warhurst, the former owner of a Clearwater storage company, is using special containers to do so.
Typically, you’ll find one door on the back of a moving truck, but Warhurst’s patent-pending ramp system, Red Rover, allows for doors from a variety of containers to be on any side of a moving truck. Those containers can be filled, stored and delivered to your next home.
“So this ramp system will travel the entire perimeter of the truck bed. It can stop it anywhere,” said Warhurst, the CEO of Red Rover Fetchable Storage.
Warhurst has had this idea for years and is hoping to start a new industry.
“There’s good and bad to the portable storage and the truck rental business. We tried to sort of drop in between them,” said Warhurst.
Warhurst knows quite a bit about the moving business. He previously launched PODS, which provides portable on-demand storage. In 2007, he sold the business and went into retirement, but he couldn’t stay retired. He started Red Rover in February
“We’re about six months old in a COVID environment,” said Warhurst. “I had a lot of sleepless nights. I still have a lot of sleepless nights.”
Since nearly 1,000 people are moving to Florida each day, mostly from places like New York and the surrounding area, Red Rover now has a facility in Long Island and some satellite locations.
“We’re servicing all of Florida from Tampa for inbound moves. We’re servicing all of Long Island, soon to be Manhattan, on top of Brooklyn and Queens,” said Warhurst.
Warhurst originally planned on having his company primarily focus on the I-4 corridor from Tampa to Orlando for all their moves, but now with a location in Long Island and Tampa, he plans to move into Charlotte and the Carolinas and create the Red Rover Corridor along the East Coast.
“Things will change and so we’ll capture the people moving out, and we’ll help them move back,” he said.
