There’s a prevalent misconception when it comes to man-and-van services; they’re rough round the edges and unreliable and you should count yourself lucky if they’re only 45 minutes late and manage to do 75% of what you asked them to do. It’s insidious ideas like this that mean people often tolerate sub-standard service in the belief that they’re fortunate to have found anyone at all. They suppress their complaints and just put up with being taken advantage of, convinced that things can’t be any better. But they can and they are. Gentleman & A Van came into being precisely to bring stringent standards to an industry that sorely needed them. Mark Godman, Gentleman & A Van founder, was burned by a moving experience nearly 18 years ago. He’d taken considerable trouble to mitigate problems in advance, hiring the company thought to be London’s pre-eminent moving service, under the assumption that their reputation had to count for something. He was mistaken, suffering an ordeal so excruciating it prompted him to do something about it. And so Gentleman & A Van removals and storage was born, bringing an array of high-quality services to the capital, including home removals, office moves, storage and, for smaller jobs, a man-and-van service.
Removals and Storage with a Difference
The company’s founding principles are still in place today. Gentleman & A Van is not some dodgy bloke with a poorly-maintained white banger whose overriding principle is to part you from your money as quickly as possible and then get the hell out. Nor is it one of those ropey van-hire outfits. It uses trained, uniformed movers, drivers and packers and maintains constant staff capacity so that it can respond quickly to demand and emergency. Gentleman & A Van understands that hiring a moving company is an act of trust, and it seeks not only to justify that trust but also to repay it at every juncture of a job, from the initial consultation through to the goodbyes. Gentleman & A Van knows that one of the most sensitive aspects of any move is the entrusting of your personal possessions to a third party. Your belongings may only be with us for 12 hours, but they’re with you for a lifetime and we treat them with appropriate diligence and respect. If you use our full packing/unpacking service, we’ll package everything correctly using branded boxes and we won’t break or damage your belongings. We know which items require white-glove treatment. We make sure the right number of people are assigned to a job and we have experts at hand, and the right kind of equipment, for any difficult items, whether they be grand pianos or the kind of paintings that need temperature-controlled transit. We turn up and we turn up on time, using our fleet of sleek, branded, up-to-date trucks, lorries and vans.
Pale Imitations of Gentleman & A Van
Unfortunately, though we’ve always rejected the shoddy standards encountered by our founder in 2004, that doesn’t mean other companies have followed suit, and a number of fly-by-night outfits have attempted to piggy-back on GAV’s success by using deceptively similar company names while offering a service a million miles away from ours. They sound a bit like us and their online presence is designed to mimic ours. That’s where the similarity ends, because nine times out of ten, these are sub-standard cowboy outfits, just like in the bad old days – the kind of services where you’re charged for a professional job, even though the movers turn up an hour late and break your possessions. Gentleman & A Van is and always will be different. From the very outset of a move we keep in communication. We listen keenly to the details of a move because we know they’re all different and a one-size-fits-all approach is a short-cut to a bad outcome. We extend all the care and consideration to our clients that we’d want ourselves in the even that we were moving. Our reputation matters to us because we’ve built it painstakingly, making client satisfaction our absolute priority. We know that, in the wrong hands, moving can feel like having your whole world upended and we take every step necessary to diminish client stress. From the moment of your first in-person contact with us, when one of our surveyors visits your property to make an assessment of your moving requirements, you’ll be treated with the utmost courtesy, including that most basic of courtesies – punctuality. You’ll notice the clarity and transparency of our fixed-price quotations. You’ll see that we don’t forget niggling details or expect you to look after them, such as arranging parking suspensions for moving day. Our professional packers come to you one day in advance of your move and treat your home respectfully. In fact, at every stage, right through to when we leave you happily in your new home, Gentleman & A Van goes to any lengths necessary to make sure you’re pleased and satisfied.
The same standards apply to our office moves. Our fully-trained staff, have turned efficiency into an art-form. They will assess in minute detail how your company operates so that a move can be devised which causes it the least possible disruption.
Our home removals, office moves and man-and-van services dovetail neatly with our storage facilities in Wimbledon & Tolworth. For office moves, we can provide business/document storage and for home moves, we can provide on-the-spot storage that’s especially useful for people who are downsizing and need time and space to work out what to do with excess belongings. And just as our moving team does, our facility treats your goods with total care, discretion and respect.
There’s Only One Gentleman & A Van
The respect the company engenders not only within its sector but also with its client base and the public at large is evidenced in outstanding Google reviews and a glowing Google Review rating of 4.9/5. The same cannot be said of the sound-a-like companies which, in the wake of our success, have popped up (and then sometimes quickly disappeared) in and around Greater London and beyond. There’s only one Gentleman & A Van and only one company that will come through for you, every time, without fail. It’s the reason we set up shop in the first place. You can be sure you’ve found the right company and not one of the imitators by looking out for our logo and royal-blue branding and the fact that we’re part of the British Association of Removers, the governing body holding all member companies to extremely stringent standards. Londoners deserve exceptional-quality storage and removals and that’s where Gentleman & A Van comes in.
