Nashua company promises to make moving easier, less costly

From aching backs to busted lamps, moving is hard. It’s taxing on the mind, the body and most of the time, the wallet.

But about a year ago, Easy Days LLC, a Nashua-based moving company, came up with an unconventional way to lighten all three loads.

The company, founded by Jeffrey Paquin and Robert Merrill, is like your average moving company in many respects. What makes the company unique, however, is that they don’t own any trucks and never step foot behind the wheel of one.

“We never drive the trucks,” said Paquin, of Nashua. “We can’t ever enter the cab of the truck so we don’t need truck driver’s insurance or cargo insurance, and that’s basically all the expensive stuff.”

In fact, Easy Days doesn’t even rent the trucks. You do. By avoiding the overhead of owning and insuring trucks, the owners say it’s possible for them to charge far less than their competitors.

The system is actually very simple. The customer rents and drives the truck, and Paquin and his team will do the rest – for an hourly fee. Paquin said his business is predicated on one simple principle: all folks need some help moving.

“For instance, some big houses where the owners went out and bought themselves a big fancy bedroom set,” Paquin said. “The husband and wife can take everything except the big, huge bedroom set.”

That’s where Paquin and Merrill come in. They’ll show up, carry the heavy stuff, follow the rented, customer-driven truck to the new house in their personal car, then unload it. Even though they’re not licensed to drive moving the trucks, the business itself is licensed and insured.

If customers decide to hire Easy Days, they must do so for a minimum time slot of two hours. During that time, the team will do as much or as little as needed. Instead of paying often quadruple-digit price tags that come with other moving companies, Paquin said, many of Easy Days’ customers pay just $200; $60 for the truck and $140 for the two-hour move.

Paquin said when he tells people about how much money they can save by using Easy Days, the response is always the same: “You’re joking.”

Easy Days began as a the duo’s brainchild when they were working full-time as professional movers at Brooks Moving and Storage.

“We always said to each other, we could just find the work, we could make it work,” said Paquin. “So we thought we were going to buzz all our friends and say like, ‘Hey, when you want to move, call us and we’ll help you out.’ ”

After having just three jobs in their first week of operation in August of last year, business began to grow. The first week of September they had 11, then nine the next week and 10 the week after that.

“We blew up instantly,” Paquin said. “We came into it completely backwards. We didn’t even know it was going to be a business until it just sort of happened underneath us.”

Although 14 months of lifting and carrying might not seem like fun to some people, Paquin said he is having a ball.

“We’ve been just jumping up and down every day,” he said. “We’re booking jobs out of Boston, Keene. I’ve even been in the Prudential Center moving people. It’s been extraordinary.”

“People try to give us extra money because they think we’re too cheap.”

Easy Days’ range extends to Keene, Boston, Portsmouth, Maine and everywhere in between. Further expansion is in the works, Paquin said, but his main goal right now is just to get his message out.

“There is a cheap way to move, and it’s pretty easy,” he said. “You’re not stuck between having a moving company and having to move everything yourself. We’re the in-between option.”