Shur-Way Moving & Cartage Co.

The Origin Story

In 1955, George Brzezinski had just gotten back from the Korean War when he decided to start a moving company with his wife, Jane. It was the epitome of humble beginnings, no real building, and trucks that were always breaking down. 



Their first storage facility was Jane's garage. One story passed down through the family is that someone from the local military base came to inspect Jane's storage operation, followed her out to the garage, and told her, "We're going to pretend we didn't see this, but you need to get a building." A real building eventually followed. Around the same time, George got his hands on a SCAC code, the authorization that let Shur-Way handle Department of Defense moves, and that government work became the foot in the door for nearly everything the company does today.

George passed away in 1981, handing the business to his son Doug at just 21 years old, along with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and a real risk of losing the buildings, trucks, and homes tied to it. Doug's first fight wasn't with trucks, it was with credibility. People in town would stop him claiming George owed them money, and whether or not it was true, Doug paid it anyway, in good faith. Banks were a harder sell: a 21-year-old asking for a $300,000 loan wasn't exactly a safe bet on paper, and Doug had to win that trust the slow way, by giving his word and then actually making good on it, deal after deal, until people believed him. That habit, of a handshake meaning something, is still how the company operates today.

One trip changed the way Doug thought about the whole business: he visited a competitor's facility in Springfield, Virginia to talk shop, showed up with his shirt untucked, and got called out for it on the spot. He came back to Shur-Way with a new standard for what a professional moving company should look like, clean trucks, sharp uniforms, credibility, and that standard became the foundation of the brand as it exists now. 



The business came close to unraveling a second time in 2008. Lines of credit were maxed out, millions of dollars in truck payments were coming due against a collapsing economy, and Doug’s son Eric who now runs the business, then a graduating senior in high school, remembers it as the one time his father's calm exterior nearly cracked. Doug has since told him it was genuinely scary. Shur-Way made it through, and today, as Doug has put it, George would have been stunned to see in a single week what once took him a full year to earn.

The People

Shur-Way's third generation, Eric, his cousins Scott and Jake, has now been running day-to-day operations for close to ten years, and Eric has been in the business 24 years overall. He wasn't handed the seat; he came up through the trucks. He was still driving the road when a motorcycle accident broke his femur around 2013. Laid up and unable to drive, his father put him on dispatch to keep him busy. He never left, and eventually ended up running the place. He calls the accident a blessing in disguise.


Taking that seat came with similar challenges his father faced a generation earlier. For years after stepping into leadership, Eric found that customers and partners still wanted to talk to Doug, not the new 22-year-old in the chair. Turning that around took showing up, doing the work, and letting people see for themselves that he took the business and its partnerships seriously.


That path shapes how Eric builds his leadership team today. He looks for people who've actually been out on the road, lumpers who worked their way to a CDL and into leadership, over outside hires with a big title and no feel for the business. A sales rep who's never walked a 15,000-square-foot house doesn't know how to quote it accurately, and a bad quote is how a $5,000 estimate turns into a $15,000 invoice and an angry customer. Eric still holds his own CDL and jumps in to drive when the schedule is short.


The family thread runs deep and current: this summer, instead of going to camp, Eric's seven-year-old son is in the warehouse pulling tiers for eight dollars an hour, the same kind of start Eric himself once had, and Eric says watching his son, and his family overall work together, is part of what keeps him going through the brutal summer hours. Beyond family, he points to the people: the employees who've stuck around through slow seasons and worked themselves to the bone in the busy ones are the reason he says he has to keep showing up for them. And underneath all of it is something simpler: a genuine love of trucks, the industry, and the logistics it takes to make a move look effortless to the customer on the other end.

What Makes Them Special

Follow a Shur-Way crew for a day and the first thing you'd notice is how they look: Shur-Way hats, matching shirts, coordinated shorts, clean-cut and camera-ready before they ever ring a doorbell. Eric treats that as the first impression that either earns trust or loses it. Every driver is required to wash their truck before it comes back onto the lot, and any unit out for more than two weeks gets washed on the road. On Saturdays, staff walk the fleet with trash cans, and drivers get a garbage bag with their morning paperwork so cabs don't fill up with wrappers and bottles between washes. It isn't cheap to keep roughly 50 trailers and more than 70 power units looking like they rolled off an assembly line, but Eric treats every truck as a rolling billboard and hears about it from industry friends when one shows up dirty.

Reliability is the other half of the reputation. Shur-Way doesn't push a pickup to "tomorrow" because a driver called in sick. Eric, his father Doug, his cousin Jake, and the office manager all hold CDLs specifically so that someone in the office can climb into a truck and run the shipment themselves if the schedule comes up short. On pricing, the company holds the line on honesty: if an estimate comes in low because the customer forgot to mention a room, that's one conversation, but Shur-Way doesn't pad quotes or surprise customers with fees at delivery.

The Leadership Philosophy

Coleman has delivered thousands of wreaths, 6,000 in one recent year alone, to veterans' graves across three Alabama cemeteries as part of Wreaths Across America, with company leadership personally taking part in the deliveries. Coleman associates are active members of the Dothan Civitan Club, regularly stepping into leadership roles within it, and the company has backed causes across the Wiregrass region including Troy University's Dothan campus, the Wiregrass Museum of Art, the Dothan Area Botanical Gardens, and the Wiregrass United Way.

The Heart of It

Shur-Way's community involvement stays close to home and close to the industry. The company partners with One Warm Coat and Move for Hunger, and works with the Chicago Bears on an annual coat drive, through which Eric donates around 200 coats each year to Jewel-Osco grocery locations across Chicagoland for distribution.

Shur-Way also provides free local Christmas tree pickup and delivery for customers, stores Girl Scout cookie inventory at no cost and helps shuttle it out to distributing troops, and donates moving boxes to local churches. In past hurricane seasons, the company has sent truckloads of water to affected areas.

That same instinct extends inside the building: when an employee is in a tight spot, Shur-Way advances pay against a paycheck rather than making them wait, treating the crew the same way it treats the community.