Haynes Dallas

What we talked about

An attorney who ended up owning a moving company

Haynes Dallas is a lawyer by training. He was associate general counsel at a large national staffing company, and before that a partner at a litigation and transactional firm and an associate at a commercial real estate firm handling purchases and leases for Fortune 500 tenants. None of that is the obvious runway to commercial moving, and he says so plainly: not a traditional path.

The connection was that his staffing company was a partner of Moving Solutions, the business that Managed Facility Solutions was created to acquire. He got to know the people. He saw the client list. What struck him was less the industry than what was possible inside it.

Forty-two years of company, a handful of years of ownership

The business dates to 1984, when it operated as Moving Solutions. MFS was formed in 2016 to acquire it and widen the coverage area. Haynes joined the leadership as Chief Operating Officer, became Chief Executive Officer in 2019, and took ownership of the company in 2021.

Today MFS does commercial moving and storage first, and then logistics, IT work and facility management, for clients that range from startups to some of the largest companies in the world. The company runs out of Silicon Valley and Austin, with the Austin location on Denton Drive.

The core values are on the wall behind him, and he uses them as the answer

Asked what actually makes for good customer service in a service business, he turns around and points at the wall: excellence, diversity, teamwork, integrity. Then he makes the case that they are operating instructions rather than decoration.

The version he describes is unglamorous and specific. Do what you said you would do. Take the feedback and change the thing. Have each other’s back internally and the customer’s back externally. Fulfill the last-minute request and the impossible timeline anyway, because the person on the other end is having a bad week and the whole job is making that week easier.

It lands because of the stakes underneath it. Moving out of a dorm room is annoying. Moving a business means millions of dollars of equipment on a deadline, and somebody has to be calm about it.

How a stadium going up across the parking lot picked the warehouse

This is the best story in the episode. In September 2020, with the pandemic still heavy and Austin quiet, he came to town for the first time as MFS ownership. They had been reading the Austin and Silicon Valley business journals, watching Oracle and Tesla move, and wanted to see it themselves.

They toured seven or eight warehouses across Austin and the surrounding area. Pulling into the parking lot of what is now the MFS Austin location, he looked up, saw the top of a large stadium being finished, and asked his broker what it was. It was Q2 Stadium, being topped out for Austin FC’s first season.

A year earlier, MFS had become the official moving partner of the San Jose Earthquakes, roughly five minutes from its own headquarters. Landing across from another club’s new stadium felt like the location choosing itself. MFS has been the official moving partner of Austin FC since 2022.

A sponsorship where the sponsor is also the vendor

The part that makes both MLS partnerships more than a logo is that MFS does the work. Every event at the Lexus Club at Q2 Stadium, the furniture comes out, goes to the MFS warehouse, and comes back before Saturday’s match. For the Earthquakes, MFS trucks the club’s equipment down to preseason in the Coachella Valley — the same polo grounds the festival uses — and hauls it back two weeks later.

So the club experiences the service on a weekly basis instead of seeing an invoice once a year. That is a durable partnership structure, and it is a useful thing for any business weighing a sports sponsorship to look at.

The nonprofit arms, and the one that is his favorite

Both clubs have charitable arms, and MFS works with both: the 4ATX Foundation in Austin and Pledge 74 in San Jose, named for the Earthquakes’ founding year.

The 4ATX Foundation, run by Kaitlin Mauro, is the one he calls a favorite of all time. His description of it is not about soccer: kids get a safe place to go after school, and alongside the game they get leadership, public speaking, and the habits of being a good citizen. It primarily serves families with the fewest options, and he is blunt that the alternative to a field is worse.

His proof is a scholarship recipient MFS helped fund in 2022 who went on to play college soccer in Texas and now plays professionally. What he emphasizes is not the trajectory but the return: she came back to lead at one of the foundation’s summer camps.

In San Jose the work is more direct. The team spends a few hours every couple of months at the Second Harvest food bank up the road, packing produce by the ton for a region with serious food insecurity.

The Foundation for Better Business, and why small business is the actual story

Haynes is vice chair of the Foundation for Better Business, a young Austin 501(c)(3) that went from an idea in early 2024 to launch in February 2025. Its chair is Bobby Jenkins, who is also a guest in this series. At least once a month it puts on a seminar where successful Austin owners teach small business owners something concrete — reading a P&L, building a marketing strategy, running operations — and the money raised goes straight into the survival rate of those businesses.

Underneath that volunteering is an argument. MFS sits inside an ecosystem of vendors and subcontractors that large organizations depend on, and the overwhelming majority of that ecosystem is small businesses. If it thins out, the growth story slows down regardless of how many headquarters relocate. He is also a lead investor in Opportunity Austin and a long-time chamber member, which is the same argument expressed with money.

One degree of separation

His read on Austin is that the support network between business owners is unusually short, and that shortening it further is worth doing deliberately. Everyone he meets, he says, is passionate about making Austin a better place to run a company and raise a family, and he treats that as a common thread rather than a coincidence.

The credibility for it comes from the fact that his team lives here. Not a satellite office with a sign on it — families, schools, and a reason to care how the place turns out.