Jail changed young Raytown man’s life: He built a successful moving company

Editor’s Note: This interview is part of Voices of Kansas City, a project created in collaboration with KKFI Community Radio and Kansas City GIFT, a nonprofit supporting Black-owned small businesses, to highlight the experiences of Kansas Citians making an impact on the community. Hear the interviews on KKFI 90.1 FM, Fridays at noon, or at KKFI.org. Do you know someone who should be featured in a future “Voices of Kansas City” season? Tell us about them using this form.

Antonio Hatcher, at 32, is the owner of a Kansas City moving company, Haul Pros, that he started in 2019, buying a used truck for $2,500. It’s a business, he says, that not only has taken him and his crews to 40 different states, but on a journey he never expected.

A decade ago, at 21, Hatcher landed in jail. It wasn’t for long: a couple months. But as Hatcher, who goes by Tony, tells it, the experience was more than enough to motivate him not only to make something more of a life that he felt was headed nowhere, but also to support others — hiring felons like himself to help set them on new journeys as well.

Hatcher, in the Prospect Avenue studio at GIFT (Generating Income For Tomorrow), told his story to Star reporter Eric Adler. The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is presented in a question and answer format to share Hatcher’s story in his own words.

Meet Antonio Hatcher

The Star: Let me start this off with the hardest question or the biggest comment. About 10 years or so ago, as I look back, you have a felony record. It’s for three things: a drug charge, a forgery charge and a domestic abuse charge. Now you run a company that hires people who have had past troubles with the law. And somehow you have gotten from there to here, a successful business, leasing numbers of trucks, 19 different employees on rotation. Welcome. Thanks for being here.

Hatcher: Appreciate it. Firstly, I want to thank you for having me on. Yeah, I started this business after I had a different life, I guess you could say. I was just younger and didn’t have too many older people to show me different things. I was just kind of hanging with the crowd, doing what everybody else was doing, and kind of grew up, and had kids, and started to have my own brain and know what I wanted to do.

Let’s talk about that. You are 32. Where did you grow up?

Raytown.

Tell me a little about your journey: where you grew up, how you grew up.

My mother raised me. We was always over my grandmother’s house. My mother had three kids.

It was me and my three brothers — I got a ton of cousins — our whole family over my grandmother’s house. And then she (my mother) ended up having more kids when I was around 10. I had two more brothers. So it was five. I’m the middle.

So what kind of life are we talking about, you middle class, rich kid?

I would say middle. I mean, we didn’t always have everything we wanted or needed at times, but mom always made sure she would eventually get everything we needed. I could probably say, from that, that it made me want to do more, going without sometimes.

You thought that was a motivation?

Oh, definitely. Seeing my mother, you know, provide and taking care of us. I didn’t have my dad around, so she was pretty much doing everything for all of us. So that always motivated me.

You went to Raytown South (high school). How did Raytown affect who you became?

I would say it probably was probably a good thing because it let me meet a lot of different people. It was pretty diverse there.

Did you like school?

Yeah, I liked school. Like I said, when I was younger, I just probably didn’t hang out with the best of crowds.

Tell me about how you got into that world.

I mean, I think it started when I was in middle school. What happened is that our house caught on fire.

No kidding.

Yeah, our house got on fire and we had lost everything we had. So it was just like . . .

Wait, you’ve got to back up. Was this like at night, in the day?

I was in school. So I get a call. My mom comes to school and says, like, “Hey, there was a house fire.” It burnt up like everything. So, I had to leave school, and I come back, and I see the house on fire and I’m like, “Oh, wow.”

Did you literally see it still in flames or smoldering or the fire department there?

The fire department was there. It was in flames. We were just watching all our stuff get burnt. I was just wondering where are we going to sleep, where was we going to go? I was happy no one was there, also. It was an electrical fire. So it was something that could have happened while we were asleep.

What were your mom and brothers saying at that point?

Everyone was just kind of happy knowing no one was there, and just trying to figure out what we was going to do next. That was our house. That was everything we had. I think we ended up staying in hotels for a few weeks. They ended up rebuilding the house, because she had insurance. We had to wait for that. But it only covered the house. So it’s not like we got a ton of new stuff. We had a new house. We had to get all our clothes, all our materials. We still lost all the stuff that had sentimental value.

Was your mom working at that time?

My mom worked for a school. She was a secretary. She did that for decades.

You said that was an influence on you.

We didn’t have a place to go. I didn’t even have transportation to school. At one point, we were outside the district. They had to give us a taxi ride to school. There was just a whole lot of stuff going on. It was more easy at the time to say, “Oh, I’m not going to school.” Just hang out with my friends who don’t go to school. When you’re not doing stuff, you don’t have anything to do, it brings up bad, you know?

It’s interesting you say that. So I’m thinking of you as a 10-year-old. Your house is burned down. Your life is in upheaval. I know from my own childhood, a lot of times teachers are like, “Well, where’s your homework?” They don’t realize all that’s happening. Did it give you perspective on what‘s really going on in people’s lives, maybe under the surface?

I mean, it kind of did open up my eyes a little bit. You never know what somebody is going through, because I did kind of try to go back to school, but, you know, I barely had any clothes. I barely had anything. I didn’t feel like I stood in with anything in school. I lost friends. I just didn’t fit in. After a while, I felt like I needed to get money and do things, so I tried to hustle up some money instead.

Where does that lead you?

I mean, it leads to you doing stuff you’re not supposed to be doing. I started off, just started selling weed and stuff. We have like a few buddies we all call each day, “What are we doing today?” And it would always be like something we’re not supposed to be doing.

That probably seems really satisfying, too, because how old are you in this period?

It started around 13 to 14. That’s when it started. But that period lasted for a while. It lasted probably up to the point where I kind of opened up my eyes when I’d gotten into a little bit of trouble.

Tell me about the trouble a little bit.

It started off, I was just hanging out with a family member and he’s like, “Let’s go over and get my stuff from my girlfriend’s house.” I go over there with him. It’s somewhere a couple of hours away in the country. I go out there. He’s drunk. Just getting his stuff. He has a houseful of stuff and a small Caprice Classic. Long story short, the police end up coming. He keeps asking to get all his stuff. There’s no way it’s going to fit into his car.

I hate to say it, but it sort of sounds like a comedy. Probably wasn’t funny then.

I mean, it was funny to the point that the police came and took us all to jail. They said you all need to sober down. I didn’t even have my license at the time. When they take me in, I had some counterfeit money on me. That’s where it all started.

Are you a teen at that point?

No, I was 21.

Oh, you’re 21. So you’re charged with what?

Forgery.

Forgery?

Yeah, just for carrying them around. They gave me shock time (a couple months in jail). When I did the shock time, that’s when I kind of looked (at myself): Man, I’ve just been partying, chasing women, kicking it for years. Didn’t finish school. I really don’t have nothing to show for it. I still live with my mom. I don’t have a car. I hadn’t been anywhere outside of Kansas City. So I was like, I wanted more. I want more out of myself, telling myself I could do better. I knew I could do better. I’ve got to actually do something that makes an impact.

That’s a lot to come out of one charge. It really hit you that hard?

I mean, yeah, because I was just sitting there. It wasn’t for me. I knew just sitting in jail wasn’t for me —going back and forth in jail wasn’t the life for me. I told myself it has to stop now. Got out of jail, then they put me on probation. They charged me for some older stuff. They gave me another felony. I had to deal with that.

You’re 21 at that point. I think everyone knows the whole “check the box” idea, where you check ‘felon” on the application for a job. Did you go through those days? Did you know that was a useless path?

I kind of attempted it. The times I did, it didn’t work. I just said, if I do apply for something, it’s going to a job that I know accepts felons. I was more so trying to stay in the construction field, because that’s something anyone can do.

Did anyone at that time guide you? Was this all self-motivated? Was someone’s voice in your head, or ear, talking to you about how you became successful?

I would say my older brothers — and, of course, my mother. She worked. But then she also had a small business of her own. She had a restaurant. She tried to have different streams of income. My older brothers, they always keep like different streams of income, have their own small businesses. It motivates me. My brothers are doing it. I can do it, too. One of my older brothers, Rico, had a moving company. It was just kind of cool what he was doing. I was just like, “Hey, let me try to do it.”

When you had that thought, did you just think, “I just want something different,” or was there any struggle? You’d been living a faster life for a number of years. Was that easy to turn away from?

It’s easy if you want to do it. It’s hard if you don’t want to do it. It just depends on what you want to do. That’s why I tried to make sure, when I was changing my life around, that I had something positive to do that kept me busy. You can’t just say, I’m changing my life around, and not really be working or doing anything. If you’re sitting around, having an idle mind, nothing probably good is going to come from it.

So how did you do it? You could have just worked for somebody else. Somewhere inside of you, you said, “I want to be the boss.”

I was probably planning this out for a year before I started. I was watching people who was doing it. I’m looking at the market movers. I just kind of planned it. Once it happened, I actually stayed busy and I started liking it. And then once I started traveling, it was just like I really loved it. It was like everything just clicked and happened. I guess I was just focused and put the work in.

You use that word, “focus.” If you’re talking to 14-year-old you and you said, “OK, little me. I have something to tell you and I have some advice for you on what it takes to become something more than you are right now,” what would you say?

Probably just, gotta trust in myself, you know. Don’t follow the crowd. I used to hang out with a lot of different people. I feel like if I’d just stuck to myself a lot more, I probably would have been a little less in trouble, a lot more less in trouble.

So why hire people with past records?

Because I was somebody with a past record and I was looking for a chance. I feel like, for me, not to give somebody a chance when I was in that same boat before, wouldn’t be right. I still do my research, but, you know, I want to make sure that anybody who is going to want to work, they can do it and do the right thing.

If someone wanted to be you, and do what you do, what would you tell them the key is?

You just got to be focused and determined, because everything’s not always going to go the way you plan it. It could go bad a lot of times, but all it takes is one or two good times for it to really bounce back in your favor. Don’t give up. Keep working.

How important do you think that is, just hanging in there?

You’ve got to make good decisions, so when the bad decisions happen, you kind of got something to fall on. If you come in with good character and do good decisions, at least when something bad happens, people know that they still have someone who is honest. You still have your reputation. That’s key in any business. You’ve got to have your reputation and make sure that you leave a good image and people can trust you. With me being a mover, they’re trusting me in their house and with all their life items, everything they got. You’ve got to build a lot of trust with people.

I don’t want to make too big a deal of the difficulties you had way back when. Although that was an instrumental part of your life, it’s not your whole life. Does it in some ways seem like that was just a different you, a different time, a different person?

I like to keep it close to me because it allows me to be who I am today. I don’t ever want to forget where I came from. My mistakes I try not to ever run from, because I try not to do anything that I might regret. You can’t just say, “Oh, it never happened.” You’ve got to be a man or woman about whatever you did.

Let’s talk about your business. To be the boss, to start your own business: How did you get your own thing going?

Well, I mean, I got a really good deal ($2,500) on a truck. So I started off getting a small midsize truck. That truck took me a lot of different places. I was already saving and scouting where I should market. I started out on Craigslist. I think I advertised as pretty much a new company, always trying to keep it transparent, just a new company trying to get work. We advertise that we do junk, demolition, pretty much anything that could go in a truck.

Do you remember getting that first job that wasn’t a relative?

It was actually a military guy. He was, I think, just getting rid of some beds and moving some stuff. It was for like $180.

Do you remember how you felt after you got done with that job?

I just saw it as I’m ready for another one. That’s just the way I approached it. Get more booked.

Do you ask people, “Hey, can you give us a review? How did I do?” How do you handle customers?

At first I didn’t really know much about reviews, but the more I got into it, I definitely started. I ask for reviews every time now. That helps you build trust when they see people who have been there, and they like it. Reviews are big. Even I look at reviews, myself.

Did things start rolling slowly?

It was pretty consistent. We would always run into pretty good clients. They’d have us . . . booked up for maybe a week, or three days, then we would get out-of-state moves, out-of-state projects. That’s really where it started rolling.

How much homework do you do to know what the best pricing is? Do you feel like you’re bidding for jobs?

At first I would just look at the other moving companies and kind of like, their prices are so high. I can definitely underbid this. So, it wasn’t too hard. So I would always just kind of see what the price was and try to stay somewhere around there.

Where’s the place you’ve been that’s the furthest away or maybe most interesting?

The furthest we’ve been is probably Washington (state). It was like an island outside of Washington. That was like 30 hours away. I’ve probably been to at least 40 states, just from this, just from work. And it’s amazing. I love it. I mean it’s basically paid vacation until you have to work.

Do you enjoy seeing all this stuff?

Yeah, the thing that I love more is that most people who come with me — because it’s always a crew —they have not traveled. I would say 90% of the people really have not been outside of Kansas City. You’re hiring people who have things going on, or you’re hiring people who, like you said, may have been a felon— it’s taking them out of a bad environment, and putting them in a different place.

I can tell you, like a lot of times when people come and work for me, they want more. Or they want to get a job. Sometimes it’s people who have never had a job. They want to do more, just because you’re coming in. You’re meeting successful people. You’re going into people’s houses who might have a $1 million, $2 million home. Or just traveling, giving people the opportunity to go to different places. They see that, and they like it.

Where do you want to go with the business?

Right now we’re trying to focus on interstate moving. We want to stay doing local moves, but I want to do more interstate moves.

I think your journey and what you have accomplished is impressive and inspiring.

Thank you.