How a box-truck driver from Old Brooklyn built McClain Trucking
I am Russ McClain, and I grew up on the West Side in Old Brooklyn, in one of those tidy brick bungalows with a steep basement and a furnace older than I was. Right out of high school I went to work driving a box truck for a Cleveland mover, hauling sofas up Lakewood double staircases and dollying refrigerators across icy tree-lawns all over the West Side. I learned the trade the way you should — on the truck, in the snow, with a furniture pad over my shoulder.
What I could not stomach was the way some of those outfits did business. A family would call, get quoted one friendly number over the phone, and then watch that number balloon once their whole life was loaded in the truck and there was nothing they could do about it. I saw crews show up two hours late, or not at all, on the coldest morning of the year. I saw a no-show leave a young couple sitting on the curb in Tremont with a U-Haul they could not load themselves. That was the part that stuck with me.
So in 2006 I bought one truck, kept a flip phone in my pocket, and started McClain Trucking on a couple of stubborn rules. Rule one: we put the price in writing as one fair flat rate, and we honor it. If I quote it, that is the bill — even if the job runs longer than I figured, even if your Shaker colonial has more stairs than I counted. That is on me, not on you. Rule two: we show up on time. Lake-effect snow burying the West Side off Lake Erie is not your problem to solve. We salt the lot, plow the trucks out, and pull into your driveway when we said we would.
Twenty years on, we run nine trucks and a crew of movers who have been with me long enough to know every steep basement on the West Side and every tight driveway off Detroit Avenue. Sharon Kovacs has run my office and written every flat-rate quote since 2010. Tom Brennan dispatches around the snow and the Cuyahoga bridges. Marcus Delgado leads the Shaker and Cleveland Heights crews, and Wayne Petrauskas can get a baby grand up out of a Cleveland basement and into a Lakewood double without leaving a mark. These are not temps. They are my people, W-2 and trained on our own trucks, and they treat your grandmother’s china the way they would want somebody to treat their own.
I still run the bigger Shaker and downtown jobs myself, I still live a few miles west in Rocky River, and I still keep the trucks plowed out and salted all winter so move day happens on schedule. We are a Cleveland family doing honest work for Cleveland families. One fair flat rate, our own crew, and we show up. That has carried us for twenty years, and it is not changing.