Packing, Crating & Driving Services
The industry — Other support activities for transportation
Base industry report for 4889 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,208
- Under 10 employeesA
- 85%
- Establishments · USA
- 2,290
- Employment · USA
- 27,005
- Payroll · USA
- $1.6B
Of 1,208 Canadian establishments with employees, 85% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Execution decidesThe hurdles here are ones a better operator clears. That is not a promise of success — it is the absence of a structural reason you cannot win.
Find something that compounds. Entry is achievable and so is the first customer; what is missing is a reason the next entrant cannot repeat it as easily as you did.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 3
The binding constraint — defensibility
A residual, and the pre-screen was right that freight brokerage and forwarding do not live here — they are at 4885. What Statistics Canada does list under this code is an odd set: driving services for auto and truck delivery, packing and crating of goods for transport, livestock feeding stations for animals in transit, and independently operated pipeline terminals [A]. These share nothing but a filing category, so the screen looks at the two a person could actually start. Packing and crating — building export crates and preparing machinery or artwork for shipment — needs a shop, lumber and a few skilled hands, and sells to manufacturers and movers by the job. Driving services sell a licensed driver's time to a carrier or a dealer who owns the vehicle. Both are reachable within weeks, which is the problem: nothing is sunk, nothing is licensed beyond the individual's own credentials, and the customer can replace the supplier with an employee. The business counts carry a signal of their own. Canada has 1,208 establishments, 874 of them with one to four employees and 608 in Ontario, against only 2,290 in the whole United States, where the average establishment has about twelve staff [A]. A Canadian count more than half the American one, made almost entirely of micro-firms and concentrated in one province, looks less like an industry than like drivers incorporating themselves — a reading this screen could not confirm. Either way the entrant would be selling labour by the hour with no asset to defend it. The livestock, pipeline-terminal and remaining activities were not examined.
Crating is done near the shipper's dock and driving services are supplied to carriers and dealers in a commuting area, so both compete within a freight cluster rather than nationally. The code's other contents have no shared geography, and the label is a description of the two niches screened, not of the residual as a whole.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 4 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Craters & FreightersC | not disclosed | — | US specialty crating, packaging and shipping franchise; more than 65 locations by its own count, franchise fee $35,000–$45,000 on initial capital of $207,000–$390,000. Neither system-wide nor franchisee revenue is published. The '$8.2 billion crating and shipping market' it advertises is attributed to commercial research firms and is not used on this record. |
| Moving companies and van-line agentsC | not disclosed | — | Crate and pack as part of a move they already hold. Not researched for this record; named because they reach the same customer first, and no figure is offered. |
| Driveaway and vehicle-delivery carriersC | not disclosed | — | Buy driving services or employ the drivers directly. No operator in this niche was opened for this record and none is named or sized. |
| Single-shop independents and self-incorporated driversA | not disclosed | — | 874 of Canada's 1,208 establishments employ one to four people and none employs 200 or more (Statistics Canada, December 2023). On this code that is not a long tail, it is the whole industry. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. UNVERIFIED. The only tier-A material is the two business counts and Statistics Canada's own list of what the class contains, read on the agency's classification page [A]; those establish what is filed here and how many, not whether any of it earns a return. No industry anchor exists at this scale and none was padded in. The suggestion that the Ontario-heavy micro-firm count reflects self-incorporated drivers is an inference from the shape of the data and the presence of 'driving service' in the class; it was not tested, and the count covers only businesses with employees, which cuts against it as much as for it. Packing and crating and driving services were screened by reasoning alone; livestock feeding stations, independent pipeline terminals and anything else in the residual were not examined. The cut factor is analyst judgment. Competitive field added 2026-09-20. No tier-A source exists for who competes here, and none was manufactured: the franchise terms and location count are Craters & Freighters' own recruitment page, which is a vendor claim and tiered C, not its Franchise Disclosure Document, which was not obtained. That same page advertises an '$8.2 billion' market sourced to two commercial research firms; it is recorded here as an example of what this industry's published sizing looks like and is deliberately not used as a figure. The van-line agents and the driveaway carriers are named as categories an entrant would meet, with no company opened and no revenue attached. UNVERIFIED stands.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National trade association for movers, van lines and suppliers; its own membership text names 'packing services' as a member category. No member count stated.
Association for pallet and crate makers; runs the ISPM 15 heat-treatment certification program that export crating shops need. cwpca.ca did not resolve; this is the live domain.
'Over 2,220 companies across more than 170 countries' per its homepage: movers, forwarders and packing/crating suppliers. Holds an annual conference.
Registered forum members per the board's own statistics (posts dated 22 Sep 2026). General trucking board; driveaway and contract-driver threads sit inside it, there is no dedicated subforum.
Nothing exists for this code as a whole; crating shops talk through the wood-packaging and moving associations, and contract drivers on general trucking boards. The US pallet association site (palletcentral.com) blocked automated access and is not listed.