It started because he needed the money. Ross Sapir had come to America after serving in the Israeli military and bartending for one of Israel’s biggest hotel chains. Then September 11th happened. New York was emptying out. People were fleeing Manhattan. The moving industry was rough, unregulated, and nobody’s dream job. There was more work than it could handle. Sapir took a job as a foreman. He needed to eat.
What he found on those first jobs was an industry with a terrible reputation and a broken approach to customers. “Back then, moving was rough, man,” he’d later recall. But Sapir had a knack for it. He added sales to his resume, grew a company he worked for to double its size, and was eventually offered 50% ownership. He turned it down. He wasn’t in charge of the culture. He couldn’t change the thing that actually needed changing.
In 2008, with a single truck and no outside money, Sapir started Roadway Moving out of New York City. The country was heading into the Great Recession. The timing, by any conventional measure, was terrible. But Sapir had a different playbook. He had been reading Delivering Happiness—the story of how Zappos built an empire on culture instead of marketing—and decided a moving company could be run the same way. Not as a moving company. As a hospitality company that happened to own trucks.
Roadway is Ross Sapir’s company, but Roadway’s reputation is built by the 700+ people behind him.
The team speaks more than fifteen languages and has expanded into every borough of New York. Diversity isn’t a slogan; it’s a hiring advantage in a city where a mover might pack a Park Avenue penthouse in the morning and a Queens walk-up in the afternoon.
Before any customer ever sees them, new movers train inside a one-bedroom apartment Roadway built inside its warehouse—a full training set, not someone else’s couch. Every move is assigned a dedicated coordinator who stays in touch before, during, and after the move, so customers always know where their crew and belongings are.
In July 2025, EY named Ross Sapir Entrepreneur Of The Year for New York, joining a roster that includes Howard Schultz, Eric Yuan, and Kendra Scott. His acceptance speech was just two lines: “This award isn’t mine alone. It belongs to all of us.”
Sapir doesn't talk about work-life balance. He talks about work-life integration - bring your kids on the trip, take them to a museum for half the day, work the other half, and let the two lives braid together. He runs Roadway the same way: people, business, and pride in the craft, all integrated into a single thing.
He is blunt about what separates winners from losers. "Winners want to be held accountable. They want to score high. They want to be measured. Losers don't." Roadway measures everything - KPIs, on-time rates, review scores, P&L - and the people who thrive are the ones who want the scoreboard lit up. The result is visible on the front page of the website: 99.3% on-time delivery and a 4.9-star Google rating from 2,000+ reviews.
The operating philosophy comes from a line Sapir repeats often: "If you are blessed, be a blessing," It runs through the company in how crews are paid and trained, in how customers are treated, and in what happens when the trucks aren't booked. Early on, with no mentor in the industry, he joined YPO and learned how other CEOs think. Today he treats Roadway like Zappos with trucks: a hospitality company where the product happens to be a moving crew.
FOUNDED
2008 (one truck, self-funded)
Headquarters
Headquarters 845 3rd Avenue, New York, NY
Founder & CEO
Ross Sapir
Locations
10 states: NY, NJ, CT, PA, FL, GA, IL, TX, CO, CA
Fleet
200+ trucks, trailers, vans
Team
700+ employees, 15+ languages
Moves / Year
30,000+
On-Time Delivery
99.3%
Google Rating
4.9 from 2,000+ reviews
Yankees Partner
Official Moving & Storage Par tner since 2023
Roadway Gives Back is not a polished philanthropy program. It’s closer to a neighborhood response team. Trucks haul donations for churches. Crews move survivors of sex trafficking into new homes, free of charge. When a family needs to get out of a bad situation fast, Roadway shows up the way they would for a paying job—the same uniforms, the same care, and the same blue trucks.
Sapir frames it simply: he uses Roadway’s success to take care of the team first, their families next, and the communities Roadway operates in as the circle widens. In 2023, Roadway became the Official Moving and Storage Partner of the New York Yankees—the first moving company ever to hold a Major League Baseball partnership. A New York–born company giving back, visibly, to the city that made it. That partnership didn’t buy customer acquisition. It bought cultural permission to be seen as part of the fabric of New York.
The community work extends into hiring. More than 700 employees speak 15+ languages, drawn largely from New York’s immigrant communities—many of them, like Ross himself, building a new life through hard work. Moving, done well, is a ladder. Roadway treats it like one.
