Most jobs Premier Junk Movers shows up for have three or four people on them. Craig, who owns the company, will tell you that is sometimes more hands than the work needs. “Sometimes it’s overkill,” he says.
The crew is Craig and his three sons. When a job is something that takes five seconds to load, they still go out together, and every one of them gets paid for it. That is a choice, not an accident. Craig says he told his sons to “come work with me” because they would “learn both sides of the business, not just working in it but working on it.”
He started the company in 2023. Before that he was a realtor for a big real estate technology company, where he made it through three rounds of layoffs before he was let go anyway. The lesson stuck. “People are like, hey, we’re family,” he says. “You work for these big corporations and that’s what they push. But when push comes to shove you find out very quickly that you’re expendable.”
So he took stock of what he enjoyed, what he was good at and what he wanted to teach his boys. Junk removal fit. He gets to meet people and cover the whole Valley, stay physically active and spend the day with his sons. The problems change from house to house. “No job is ever the same,” he says.
The work runs wider than hauling. Premier clears junk with dump trailers, rents dumpsters and does moving labor, with a moving truck for families who need one. Craig says property cleanouts are a big share of it, often homes that have become too much for the owner or for the property manager responsible for them. He says the crew works with a lot of hoarders, a word he does not like using, though he has not found a better one. The company is based in Litchfield Park, covers Maricopa County and lists crews out every day from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Craig handles the phone himself, from the job. “The only time I don’t answer my phone is if I’ve got a couch in my hands,” he says, and then he calls back. He is just as particular about the stretch between booking and arrival. A customer gets a text confirming the booking within the hour, another the night before asking whether the time still works, and a third when the truck is 30 to 45 minutes out. He has no patience for the vendor who offers an 8-to-noon window and says he never wants to put a customer on the other end of that. “It’s those little soft touches,” he says.
One customer, who had a condo moved and a house cleared of junk on the same Sunday, described the crew introducing themselves and asking for a walk-around first so they knew what mattered to him. It was 114 degrees, he added, and nobody complained.
Craig never wanted the work to feel like a trash run. He picked the name because he did not want to be “the guy that comes and picks up trash.” He calls what they do a luxury service, “a dirty luxury service,” for people who would rather not wrestle a couch through a doorway.
The sons are why the business looks the way it does, and the long-range plan is built around them. Craig wants Premier to be a name that lives on, and he would love for them to want to carry it. He knows the youngest has not felt yet what the oldest-looking, hardest jobs can mean to the people on the other side of them.
“He doesn’t fully understand the gravity of when someone breaks down and cries because they’re overwhelmed with happiness that we helped them clear out their house that they’ve been struggling with for over a decade,” Craig says. “That stuff hits me really hard.”