How We Move the Rodeo's First Sit-Down Restaurant Every Year?
Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is a very big event of its kind in the whole world. It runs for about three weeks during the spring season at NRG Park in Houston, and it has been hosting this event since 2003; according to the official statistics on the Wikipedia page, it has brought in around 2.5 – 2.7 million people in recent years.
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Houston Restaurant Moving Project
The show is also a registered nonprofit, one of the largest charities in Houston by Better Business Bureau standing, and a 2010 economic impact study put its contribution to the local economy at more than $200 million a year, driven mostly by visitors from outside Houston filling hotels and restaurants for three weeks straight.
None of that is what makes our job hard. What makes it hard is what happens the day it all ends.
When the rodeo closes, every vendor operating inside NRG gets the same short window to clear out, all at once.
That includes the more than 250 teams competing in the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, the exhibitors running the livestock and horse shows, and everyone else who spent three weeks setting up shop across NRG Stadium, NRG Center, and NRG Arena.
For the past four years, one of those vendors has been ours to move: the rodeo’s first sit-down restaurant, packed up and hauled out along with its full kitchen, every year on the last day of the show, in March.
Project Details
This is a commercial restaurant move. A restaurant and its kitchen, roughly 10,000 square feet of furniture and equipment, moving from the rodeo grounds at NRG to an offsite warehouse elsewhere in Houston. It’s local, not long-distance, and no storage is needed along the way. Everything goes straight from NRG to the warehouse.
We send a 15-person crew and eight moving trucks. The whole job runs across two days, with multiple trips back and forth between NRG and the warehouse to get everything out in time. Any job with a crew larger than eight people gets a dedicated move manager on site to run it, and this one is no exception.
How we actually pack it
Full packing service, materials included:
- Cardboard boxes
- Reusable plastic totes
- Packing paper
- Tape
The restaurant furniture and kitchen equipment are the specialty, high-value part of this job, so they get boxed and loaded onto wooden pallets rather than carried out piece by piece, then moved with pallet jacks and dollies. There are no stairs or tight, multi-story spaces to deal with at NRG, which helps. But the reason pallets and dollies matter here isn’t the building. It’s the clock.
Challenges
Kitchen equipment is heavy and awkward on a good day. That part is normal for a restaurant move.
What makes this one genuinely difficult is that every other vendor at NRG, all of them, is working against the same two-business-day deadline, trying to get trucks through the same gates during the same hours.
The equipment doesn’t change much year to year. The traffic does, and it’s the traffic, not the furniture, that decides whether the two days go smoothly or turn into a standstill.
That’s the part a lot of restaurant movers underestimate about a job like this. It’s not hard because the equipment is heavy, though it is.
It’s hard because a few hundred other trucks want the same exit at the same time you do, and the whole operation has to be planned around that reality instead of against it.
The Houston Rodeo is the biggest annual event in the city, and being part of it, even in a role most of the 2.6 million people walking through the gates every year never think about, matters to our crew. This job was also a genuine first. Power Movers handled the move for the rodeo’s first sit-down restaurant.
Results
The client was happy enough with the work that they started using Power Movers throughout the rest of the year, not just for the rodeo. They’ve come back for the rodeo move every year since, four years running now, and no move day has looked exactly like the one before it. The trucks, the crew size, and the two-day window stay the same. The exact bottlenecks around NRG on any given March afternoon do not.
That’s really what being Houston Rodeo movers means to us. It isn’t a single event we handle once and forget about. It’s a relationship that gets renewed every March, on a deadline that never moves an inch, no matter how many other trucks are trying to use the same gate at the same hour.
Article written by
Gary founded Power Movers in 2007 after watching too many moving companies damage or steal from customers with no consequences. The company runs on one rule: every crew member gets background-checked, trained, and held to the same standard Gary was held to as a police officer. Over 9 years in, Power Movers handles local and long-distance moves, specialty items, and corporate relocations for Houston businesses including Tesla and Airgas.