It Can’t All Be
About the Money.

Josh Redpath joined the call from his truck, parked outside the casino resort project in Vancouver that he says first put Redpath on the map. It was the day after the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a provincial holiday in British Columbia, and a heavy one for him: his grandparents were among those who lived through the residential school system.

The first two episodes of Open Operator dealt with labor, technology and culture. This one is about something underneath all three. Josh has built one of the most diversified commercial moving operations in Western Canada, and he talks about it almost entirely in terms of the people it is for: his crews, his family, his nation, and the generation coming next.

Raised in the back of a moving truck

Josh’s father was a long-haul driver for United Van Lines. Time with his dad usually meant time around the truck: fixing it, folding pads in the back, getting it ready for the next trip. When his father moved into commercial sales, Josh followed him onto job sites. He was 12.

What kept him there was the team. Josh grew up playing football, and commercial moving felt the same: a crew going into battle together and coming out the other side. “You were never alone,” he says. “You’re always working as a team.”

He graduated high school early and went straight into the industry. At 19 he bought his own truck, hired a crew and became an owner-operator contracting for Williams Moving and Storage, then the largest mover in Canada. By 24 he was their largest contractor, with 20 staff and 10 trucks. His father was their largest commercial salesperson. So the two of them asked the obvious question: why don’t we just own this?

They bought the commercial franchise. Eleven months later, the parent company’s household division collapsed and the business closed. Redpath’s accounts were frozen along with everything else, and the family came close to bankruptcy. Six months later they had kept about 90% of their clients, recovered their money and, almost overnight, renamed the company Redpath Relocations. That was 2013.

You cannot do one thing

Josh built Redpath the way you build a sports team, and that meant cutting the bad seeds. The old mover mentality, the one most people in the industry can picture, had no place in it. In its place came crews who look after their health and think about their future, with the company helping them on financial planning and personal goals. Retention followed, and so did growth.

The business itself had to change early. Redpath once ran national home delivery for a major furniture retailer, with roughly 30,000 square feet, trucks and crews dedicated to the account. Then Amazon, Wayfair and others drove prices down until the margin was gone. Redpath walked away. Residential moving, never more than 5% of the business, is now close to zero.

COVID taught the lesson that has driven Redpath ever since: diversity. Medical moves stopped. Home deliveries stopped. But construction and disaster restoration were essential services, and those projects kept Redpath’s crews working.

Today Redpath is a one-stop shop, with multiple locations across British Columbia and Alberta, its own repair shop, and partners for another 50,000 to 100,000 square feet of warehousing when a project calls for it. Crews carry specialized equipment for buildings without elevators.

The backpack of being first

The Squamish Nation is one of the largest developing nations in Canada. Its own Sen̓áḵw project is putting up 11 rental towers in Vancouver, and Josh looked at it the way an operator does: what can we do here? Redpath pushed further into industrial moving, receiving the buildings’ exterior glazing from overseas and delivering it to site.

When Josh started, only a handful of Indigenous businesses had real capacity in commercial moving, construction, warehousing or logistics. He is quick to say there are many successful Indigenous companies and that he is not the most successful of them. But being one of the first in his corner of the industry comes with weight.

That means donating to community events. It means sitting down with people starting their own businesses, sometimes with advice and sometimes with money to help them open their doors. And it means competing, every time. Many projects carry an Indigenous Participation Plan (IPP), and Josh says people often assume the work is simply handed over because of it. It is not. Redpath bids on price, quality and service against companies with 50 years of relationships behind them.

He learned that from the leaders he grew up watching: chiefs and community members who fought for years, including land claims against the federal government, and did not give up. “Great role models,” he says. “In my position, I have the opportunity to maybe do something as great as what they have.”

Put good things out there

Josh had a hard childhood, and he does not dress it up. What carried him through was family who showed up when he needed them, and adults who had no obligation to. Coaches and friends’ parents from his football teams took him places and treated him like their own. “They didn’t have to,” he says. “I was just another kid.”

One of those coaches gave him the best career advice he ever got. At 19 he was fast, but at 5’9″ and 170 pounds he was not going pro. Go open your business, the coach told him.

So Josh gives back the same way, quietly. He has coached youth football. Every year he funds kids whose families cannot afford to play, and local coaches know they can simply send him names. “We don’t need any publicity or social media presence,” he says. “We just do it because it’s a good cause.” He is also putting time into an organization working to protect Indigenous children in Canada from trafficking and exploitation, an issue he says is far bigger than most people realize.

Not every year is the best year financially, and he admits not everyone around him agrees with every dollar he gives away. “It can’t all be about the money,” he says. “We have to work harder now, because we have to come up with a few extra thousand dollars here and there. That’s something we can deal with. It makes a difference in some other kid’s childhood. I don’t think that even needs to be questioned.”

If we can’t be friends

Redpath works with partners across Canada and North America, and Josh chooses them the same way he chooses friends. Many of those relationships come through United Van Lines Canada, where Redpath is a United and Mayflower agent among 129 family-oriented members, and through CRN, where Josh sits on the board and leads education, including several years of teaching members about AI. These are groups, he says, that tend to let only good people in, and where you learn who is real.

The line he won’t cross

Asked what he will refuse to compromise on as Redpath grows, Josh did not hesitate. It is the paper partnership.

On projects with an Indigenous Participation Plan, a joint venture is supposed to be majority owned by the Indigenous business, 51% to 49%, with profits shared on the same split.

Even if the Indigenous partner performs 10% of the work, it is meant to be a real partnership that builds real capacity. Instead, Josh says, some large firms offer an Indigenous business a one-time payment, around $100,000, to sign on paper and step aside. The contract is won on an Indigenous commitment that never materializes.

The damage goes beyond the deal. That contract could have gone to another Indigenous company that would have hired more staff, invested in growth and put a major project on its resume.

Everybody is family

For Josh, community starts at home, and at Redpath that is literal. His father, stepmother, brothers, sisters, wife’s family, cousins and best friends all work for the company. Of roughly 50 staff, he estimates 30 are family or close friends.

So the last question was a simple one. Twenty years from now, will he be prouder of howbig Redpath grew, or of what he did for his community?

The projects coming Redpath’s way are rarely general storage. On one large Vancouver development, a two-year build, Redpath runs the warehouse for the construction company. It receives prefabricated patio units and their glass panels, then delivers them right up to the floor, so the contractor’s team only has to install. Every piece is tracked in Glimpse, and the client sees it all.