In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how you can increase profits by managing your labor expenses.
“As a moving company, one of your biggest expenses is labor. So in order to be profitable and make money, you’ve got to get your labor percentage under control.”
“Your labor percentage is directly tied to the amount of money you’re charging for your moves, and the amount of money that you’re paying to your movers. And if you don’t get this number under control… Well, let’s just say, I’ve seen companies go out of business because of this.”
“Or, you may end up in what may be an even worse situation. When you put in years and years of hard work and being in this business, but you’re stuck not making the profits that you should.”
“Start looking at your labor expenses and you’ll see for yourself, week after week, how it all plays out. You can be more profitable and you can get your labor percentage under control.”
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As a moving company, one of your biggest expenses is labor. So in order to be profitable, in order to make money, you’ve got to get your labor percentage under control. And what do I mean by that? I mean, if you’re doing, let’s say 100,00 in business and you’re spending 25,000 on your labor to do the 100,000 in business, you’re paying 25% in labor, right? That’s your labor percentage. Well, your labor percentage is directly tied to the amount of money you’re charging for your moves and the amount of money that you’re paying to your movers. And if you don’t get this number under control, I’ve seen companies go out of business because of this, all right? And the worst is like years and years of doing hard work and being in this business and not making the profit that you should, right?
If you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Louis Massaro. I am founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes to increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life. Recently, I’m working with a private client who, they came in, they’ve got great crews, they’ve got a great reputation, they’ve got a great business, that they’ve been operating great team, but their profit margins are way too low. So I’m working with them on a few things. We’re taking a look at the different areas of their business. One of the things that we were able to identify immediately was the labor percentage being too high, right?
And you might say, “Well, Louis, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just cut my labor cost? Am I supposed to just pay my movers less?” Absolutely not. You definitely don’t want to do that. Number one, these days, it’s hard to find labor, right? I’m advising a lot of companies to pay more for labor than they used to in order to be able to get and keep the good help. So reducing your payroll percentage is not about reducing the amount that you pay your movers. Let me just make that clear.
What it is about is looking at the entire pie, right? There’s only 100% of the pie. And if you’re spending 25, 35, 45% just in labor, that leaves that much less for everything else, right? So now you’ve got your other expenses, your other cost of goods sold. You’ve got your other fixed costs that you need to spend, and you’ve still got to be able to make a profit. So what we need to do is we need to lower the percentage of your payroll in relation to your gross revenue. So I’m going to give you three tips on how you do that today so that you could start making more money in your business without even needing to think about paying your movers less, right?
The first one is, sounds obvious, but raise your rates, all right? This is one of the fastest, quickest ways to get yourself in a position where you’re profitable, where you’re making money. You’re in this business to make money. You’re not in this business to provide free service, right? To go and be stressed out about all the work that you’re doing that to not have the money left over at the end of the day. Costs are going up, right? Everything from insurance, to fuel, to labor, across the board costs are going up. Your costs could go up too in order for your business to be able to thrive. And a lot of people are afraid to do that. That’s why you need a strong sales process to be able to raise your rates and do that strongly. I talked about that in other videos.
The second thing you want to do is every week you want to run your payroll percentage, okay? You want to know what your percentage is on a weekly basis, right? So let’s say you did, for round numbers, again, I’m just going to say 100,000 in the week, right? Good size company, right? Doing 100,000 a week. And you’re spending 25,000 in payroll. That’s 25%, okay? So start tracking that number, whatever it is for you, and establish your benchmark. From there, you want to monitor that every single week, because any dip or any increase in that number tells you that there’s something that’s changed, there’s something that’s different.
Which brings me to the third point, which is you want to monitor your overtime activity, right? You want to monitor overtime, because if you’re sending 60 hours to one crew, 60, 70 hours to one crew and they’re getting burnt out, and meanwhile, you’ve got other crews that are at 20 hours and they want more work, well, if you’re able to spread that out, that’s going to save you on overtime. It’s going to save you from burning out the other crews. But what happens is, typically, dispatchers or even the owner, if you’re the dispatcher, you kind of got your go-to cruise, your favorite cruise, and it’s just easier to give them the jobs. But you’ve got to be able to monitor the overtime and make sure that it’s not excessive.
It happens. Great. Guys are getting overtime. Awesome. But you just want to be able to spread that out. So raise your rates. Every single week, look at your payroll percentage to see where you’re at. This will help you identify all kinds of things. High overtime, theft, people working off the clock. There’s a lot of different things that that’s going to help you to identify. Start tracking it. And you’ll see for yourself week after week how it all plays out, all right? And then of course, monitor the overtime.
So I hope that this was helpful. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it for you. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day. Profit in your business and thrive in your life. I’ll talk to you soon.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how you can increase profits by creating raving fans out of your customers.
“A raving fan customer is someone that’s going to give you five-star reviews across the board, they’re going to use you again in the future when they decide to move, and they’re going to tell all their friends about you and refer you to other people.”
“If you’re spending money on marketing to get moves, and you’re not focused on how to multiply those moves, meaning turn this one move into more moves, it’s only going to dip into your profits and you’re not going to be able to sustain a longterm successful moving company that way.”
“In order to really grow, in order to get to that next level, you’ve got to be able to reduce your marketing cost by getting more repeat customers, more referral customers, more reviews, which help your conversion and booking jobs.”
“In order to create raving fans, in order to keep getting those five star reviews consistently and not all of a sudden get a bomb of that one star comes in, you need to create consistency on the moves. And the best way to do it is create a moving process for your movers to follow.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro : The number one goal of every move should be to create raving fans. This is going to help you increase profits, have happier customers, reduce your stress and quite honestly, live a better quality of life. So what is a raving fan? A raving fan customer is someone that’s going to give you five star reviews across the board, right, all review platforms. They’re going to use you again in the future when they decide to move. They’re going to tell all their friends about you and refer you to other people.
And the reason this is so important is because if you’re going out and you’re spending money on marketing to get moves, to book moves, and you’re not focused on how do I multiply these moves, meaning turn this one move into more moves, it’s only going to dip into your profits and you’re not going to be able to sustain a longterm successful moving company that way.
In order to really grow, in order to get to that next level, you’ve got to be able to reduce your marketing cost by getting more repeat customers, more referral customers, more reviews, which help your conversion and booking jobs.
Now, if you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Louis Massaro. I’m founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business to increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life. And you know, when I first started my moving company, it was yellow pages. Like that was the main thing. It was back in 2000 and put a yellow page ad out and you’d book a move. If the customer had an issue on the job, you’d usually hear about it right then and there. But then after that, you didn’t really hear about it.
So you didn’t see the impact as much as you do, as I started to later on, of if a customer is upset, they’re not a raving fan, right? Or if a customer is a raving fan… Like the word of mouth back then compared to word of mouth today is a whole different ball game. Because word of mouth today, they’re online in two seconds while you’re still at the house, leaving that review, putting that social media post, right? It’s much easier for them to spread the good word or spread the bad word about your business, right?
So with that being the case, we started to look at it. And then when I really started to make the distinction, of course, we all want to go out and do a good job for our customers, right? That’s the intention, is to do that. So we set out to do that. But when it really started to connect, when I really started to see the impact on how it was affecting my business was when two forces came together. One was online reviews, right? When online reviews started coming out, when Yelp started to become a thing, it was like, we saw the impact of what good reviews had on our business and our ability to convert just potential customers into customers and also what bad reviews had on the business and how negatively that impacted our booking percentage, right? Not to mention the people that never call you because they see a negative review.
So once you have those reviews, and then we saw the impact of our marketing ROI report, meaning we were able to track how much money we were making with the marketing, the investment in our marketing and how much we were getting back, when those two things came together, here’s what it looked like. We started to see immediately that the more repeat and referral customers that we had, the less we were spending in marketing in relation to how much we were generating in moves, which increased profit, right? We also started to see that as our ratings went up, and we started to increase our ratings and actively work to get those five stars, that our sales conversion numbers started to go up.
So this really made an impact to the business and went from, “Hey, we should do a good job for our customers,” to the mission being the goal of every single move needs to be creating raving fans.
You might be thinking, “Louis, I want to do a good job. I want to create raving fans. The problem is, it’s hard to get my team on board. It’s hard to get the consistency out there to where we’re doing a good job every single time.” So I want to give you three points that are going to help you today.
The first thing is we’ve really got to look at your sales to service consistency, right? Your sales to service consistency. What does that mean? That means when a customer calls in and they speak to your sales person or your moving consultant or your move coordinator, whatever you call them, they get an expectation set. Whatever’s being said to that customer, and maybe it’s on an onsite estimate, whatever’s being said to that person is setting their expectation.
So when the movers then go out there, if the service is not consistent with the sale, meaning what they were told, there’s a media problem. Okay. And this is where the majority of customer service issues come from, right? So you want to do is you want to take a look at what’s being said on every single call or on every single estimate. And are we doing that? Are we actually doing it? Not like I want to do that. I tell my movers to do that, but is it actually happening? Like if you go and spot check the moves, are they doing the things that you say you’re going to do on the phone? Right? That’s sales to service consistency. That’s one of the first ways to prevent complaints.
The second point, second point, is you want to make sure that you’re training your movers, you’re training your movers. I know this sounds obvious, but it’s not just to train them on how to move, right? How to pad, how to load, how to build tiers in the truck, how to pack, how to strap, how to use the dolly, when to use a four wheeler, when to use a two wheeler. All that’s great and you need to do it, but you’ve got to train them on, number one, like how do you want them to interact with your customer. What does that look like? What’s the customer etiquette? They need to show concern for what the customer shows concern for, right? They need to understand how to deal and resolve conflict that may arise on the job, whether it’s between two movers, whether it’s between the customer and the company, and they’re stuck in the middle. How do they deal with that?
And most importantly, they need to know what your policies and your procedures are, right? What is it that you want from them? So much of the operational issues that I see with moving companies comes from a lack of communicating, with consistency, the policies and procedures that you want your team and your movers to follow. We can’t just send them out there with the move and the truck and some pads and some dollies and say, “Go move these people from point A to point B, right?” Because they’re expecting more than that. And you want consistency.
So even if you’re going out and you’re doing the moves yourself, right… I’m sure you want to grow. I’m sure you want to scale. I’m sure you want to bring more people on, or maybe you’ve got a handful of crews now. Maybe you’ve got a few trucks, but you want to bring on more, how do you create that consistency? You do that by making sure you’re training your movers on more than just how to move furniture, right?
The third point is your moving process. The actual process of moving needs to be documented, needs to have a checklist. You need to train your team on when you show up, here are the first things that you do, right? Here’s what you do when you’re getting loaded up and going to the destination. Once you get to the destination and you unload, here are the steps. Here is the checklist. Otherwise, you won’t have the consistency.
In order to create raving fans, in order to keep getting those five star reviews consistently and not all of a sudden get a bomb of that one star comes in. You’re like, “But we do such a good job. I’m a good person.” I get that. And when that one star comes in, it’s painful. It’s painful.
We need to create that consistency. And the best way to do it is create a moving process for them to follow, right? We call it the perfect move. If you want, I’ve got a free training. It’s called The Perfect Move Method. You could go watch it right now at louismassaro.com/theperfectmove. Right? Dive deeper. If you like what we’re talking about today, and this is resonating with you and you’re like, “Yeah, this could help me. I see. But how do I do it specifically?” Go to louismassaro.com/perfectmove. I’ve got a free training there for you for a limited time. Go check that out.
And until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business and thrive in your life. I’ll talk to you soon.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how your movers can make a great first impression for your customers when they arrive at a job.
“As a moving company, the first impression that you make when your crew shows up at the door of the customer’s house can determine the success of the entire move.”
“If when the movers show up, they don’t feel that professionalism, and the expectation that they had is not met, it could start to develop into a problem move.”
“When the crew walks up to the door, how do they introduce themselves? And what are the helpers or the other members of the crew doing at that time? The driver’s got to walk up, introduce himself, introduce the crew. The crew’s got to have pads on their shoulders, shrink wrap under their arm, everything ready to go, looking like they’re there to work.”
“Another thing you want to do is an immediate display of care and concern. What does that mean? Well, the helpers are walking in with pads, right? They’re walking in with door jamb protectors. They’re walking in with floor protectors. They need to start doing that right away.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: As a moving company, the first impression that you make when your crews shows up at the door of the customer’s house can determine the success of the entire move. Think about it, when they show up if the customer has an expectation of how that move’s going to go, and you already sold them on a professional service, otherwise they would have not chose your company they would’ve went with somebody else, right? So they’re expecting professionalism. And if when the movers show up, they don’t feel that, and they don’t experience that, and the expectation that they had is not met, it could start to develop into a problem move right? In the society that we’re and the way that people operate, they’re already thinking about the negative review that they’re going to post online. So, this showing up, the first impression when you get to the job, it plants the seed in the customer’s mind of how that day is going to go. And if it’s not a good first impression, it could shift their entire way of being that day. So if you’ve got movers that are like man, this customer’s just hovering over me, they’re following me everywhere I go. Don’t touch this. Be careful with that. Chances are it’s because they didn’t sense and feel the professionalism from your crew when they showed up. So they don’t have the confidence in their ability to provide the service that you promised them. If you’re joining me for the first time, my name’s Louis Massaro. I’m founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business to create raving fans, increased profits, reduced stress, and live a better quality of life. And I recently went through a move myself. We moved from Arizona back to Florida. And I could tell you from having gone through that experience, I want to kind of share with you what I experienced on the day of the move. First of all, they were late. Okay? So it’s like that’s part of it. That’s understandable. Okay? That’s understandable. But then when the driver showed up, the driver showed up in a rental truck, okay? Not only am rental truck, in a U-Haul rental truck, right? Not even like a nice Penske, it was a U-Haul rental truck. And his helpers weren’t there, right? They showed up a few minutes later separately. They were hired help that he didn’t work with before. He didn’t know, the local agency sent them over. But when I went out to the truck and he opened up the truck, all his pads were just thrown all over the place. The dolly was thrown over there. And for me, I know that’s a huge no-no. No, you’ve got to have your truck on point. Straps holding up the pads, everything nice and neat, swept out. But I’m like, you know what? I get it. I understand it. I see what happened. His tractor and his trailer broke down and went in the shop. Okay. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. I’m playing it out in my head the same way that the customers play it out in their head. Right? But I know how moves are supposed to go, unlike most customers. And so I’m like, okay, he grabbed all the pads and just threw them on the truck. He’s by himself. He just wanted to get here, so he’s not making me wait any longer, making us wait any longer. And that was the start of it. Right? And then the crews, they didn’t really know any…They didn’t know the driver. He didn’t introduce me to the crews. It was just not a good first impression. Right? And so it caused me to kind of, hover over them a little bit, which I normally would not do. I’d normally say, hey, do your thing. I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you how to do your job. But I needed to make sure that they did know how to do their job. That they were the right crew to be there before they loaded up all my stuff. So the point of the story is that that initial first impression wasn’t good. And only because I understood all the variables and the reasons that it was happening was I able to start making sense of it for myself. But most customers will not do that. Right? Most customers, that initial first impression is…they’re going to start…In their mind, they’re already writing out that negative review that they’re going to post. They’re already looking for leverage of how they’re going to ask you for a discount when it comes time to pay the bill. So, you might be thinking Louis, but you know, we want to do a good job for all of our customers. My intention is to do a good job, but how do I get my crews to consistently do a good job? And what about the customers that no matter what you do, they’re unhappy? And I think that, the amount of customers that no matter what you do, they’re unhappy is much smaller than most people, make it out to be. Right? I think it’s an excuse. And I think we need to go into the moves, not looking at, hey, no matter what we do, they’re not going to be happy. But instead, focus on making a great first impression, focus on creating a raving fan customer, and understand that it might not go a hundred percent right every single time. But still not go into it saying, they’re not going to be happy anyways, what’s the point? Right? And then as far as your crew, you just need to be able to train them on what you want them to do. So let me give you three things that will be helpful for creating a great first impression, which will set the tone for the rest of the move. First one is the customer greeting. Right? You want to have a moving process. You want to have a checklist for your movers to go out there. And one of the first things on it is the customer greeting. When they walk up to the door, how do they introduce themselves? And what are the helpers or the other members of the crew doing at that time? Right? So for me, the driver’s got to walk up, introduce himself, introduce the crew. The crew’s got to have pads on their shoulders, shrink wrap under their arm, everything ready to go, looking like they’re there to work. Not over there smoking a cigarette, not messing around in the truck. Customer ordered three movers. They need to see three movers at the door. Right? Then the second thing you want to do is an immediate display of care and concern. An immediate display of care and concern. What does that mean? Well, the helpers are walking in with pads, right? They’re walking in with door jamb protectors. They’re walking in with floor protectors. They need to start doing that right away. Right? Right away for the customer to see. You’re there, you’re not messing around. This puts a wow. The customer all of a sudden is like, okay, they’re here. They care about my stuff. They’re concerned about causing any damage, and they’re getting right to work. They’re not wasting time. You know, especially if you’re paying on a local move, if they’re paying by the hour and they don’t feel like you’re really moving along again, you’re planting the seeds for that bad review later on, or that unsatisfied customer. So that immediate display of care and concern is important. Right? The third thing you want to do is make sure you’ve got a clean and organized truck. Clean and organized truck. And I know it sounds simple. And I know you might intend to do that. And I know you might want your crews to do that, but are you making sure that before that truck shows up at the customer’s house, before the door comes up, or the doors open, whatever type of trucks you’ve got, that the pads are nicely, neatly stacked and folded. The dolly, it’s strapped in, it’s swept out and it looks good. Because you have to realize, the customer doesn’t look at it and just go, oh, it’s a truck. We do this every day. Oh, those are pads. They’re gonna look at it and say, my stuff is going in there. Right? All my belongings are going in that truck. It should not look like an episode of Hoarders in your truck. It should look like a nice clean place where their stuff is going to go. All right? These are three simple tips. If you want to dive deep into what I call creating the perfect move method, I’ve put together a free training. It’s called the perfect move method. I’ll break down for you how to set this up, the three phases that you need to go through. You can get it for free at my website. It’s louismassaro.com/perfectmove. louismassaro.com./perfectmove. Go get that free training and start creating more raving fans, which bring in more profits. They reduce stress. You have happier customers. You’re prouder of the job that you do, which all leads to a better quality of life. So until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. I’ll talk to you soon.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to incentivize your moving crews to help you create raving fans out of your customers.
“We often think that the hourly rate that we pay somebody in their regular pay structure is enough to keep them fired up to do a good job. The reality is, as a moving company, your biggest goal on every move, your number one goal, is to create raving fans. You want to create raving fans so that you get more repeat and referral customers. In order to do that, you’ve got to have everybody on board knowing that that is our number one objective, to create happy customers, raving fans.”
“If you don’t have incentives, if you don’t have a way of keeping your crew focused on that goal and ways for them to earn extra for money, don’t be surprised if they leave and they go work somewhere else. In order to keep quality movers around, they need to see how they can help the company, but also help themselves. What’s in it for them.”
“When I first got in the moving business, when I started my company, I was 19, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just paid the movers their rate. We thought that that was good. Right? We’re paying you to do the job, do the job. When I started to realize how important getting those repeat and referral customers were, and then later on getting the reviews, I was like, “I need to incentivize them to really go out there and do a good job.””
“The number one thing is to make sure we’ve got happy customers. If we’ve got happy customers, then I want to incentivize the movers. If they go out there, and they do a great job, and that customer’s happy, I want to incentivize them.” That was the start of my mover bonus points program. It was a program that I created that essentially was like, “Look, if the customer’s happy, you get points. If the customer’s unhappy, we take away points.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
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Louis Massaro: If you want to keep your great movers working for you, you want to keep the morale high, you’ve got to have a way to incentivize them. What I mean by that is we often think that the hourly rate that we pay somebody in their regular pay structure is enough to keep them fired up to do a good job. The reality is, as a moving company, your biggest goal on every move, your number one goal, is to create raving fans. You want to create raving fans so that you get more repeat and referral customers. In order to do that, you’ve got to have everybody on board knowing that that is our number one objective, to create happy customers, raving fans. If don’t have incentives, if you don’t have a way of keeping your crew focused on that goal and ways for them to earn extra for money, don’t be surprised if they leave and they go work somewhere else. In order to keep quality movers around, they need to see how they can help the company, but also help themselves. What’s in it for them.
If you’re joining us for the first time, my name’s Louis Massaro. I’m founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business so they can increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life. When I first got in the moving business, when I started my company, I was 19, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just paid the movers their rate. We thought that that was good. Right? We’re paying you to do the job, do the job. When I started to realize how important getting those repeat and referral customers were, and then later on getting the reviews, I was like, “I need to incentivize them to really go out there and do a good job.” When we first rolled out the idea of incentivizing them, we had this 12-question call that we did with every customer after the move to find out how everything did. I created this whole big complex structure for how to incentivize the moves. Right? Were they on time? Were they in uniform? Everything from what the customer had to say.
It was 12 different questions, and we based this whole reward program structure on that. It was super complicated to even teach to the movers, like, “Hey, here’s how you’re getting paid.” I explained it all and they’re like, “I don’t get it.” Right? It was complicated to keep track of administratively. One day I was just like, “What are we trying to accomplish here? What are we trying to accomplish with this program? I was like, “The number one thing is to make sure we’ve got happy customers. If we’ve got happy customers, then I want to incentivize the movers. If they go out there, and they do a great job, and that customer’s happy, I want to incentivize them.” That was the start of my mover bonus points program. It was a program that I created that essentially was like, “Look, if the customer’s happy, you get points. If the customer’s unhappy, we take away points.
At the end of the month, those points convert into dollars, and you get paid a bonus every single month. It became a huge hit in the company because it was like, “Guys go out there and make the customer happy.” Sometimes maybe there’s a scratch on a dresser, but the customer’s still happy. They understand. Right? Things happen. If they’re focused on what you want them to be focused on, which is making that customer happy, and they make that happen, you want to give them an incentive. Right? You might be saying, “Louis, well, why would I incentivize them to do their job? Why would I pay extra to do their job?” The reality is, people need reward and recognition. Right? It’s not just about the incentive every single month. This was a big deal. We had a little, in the morning when the MBPs, as we call it, the mover bonus points were ready, we had a little ceremony. We passed them out. Who was in first place? Who was in second place? They were so excited about it.
The talk was like, “Hey, what did you get for MBPs? What did you get for MBPs?” It created a culture where we were now focused on creating happy customers, raving fans. Now, they’re also getting extra money. I’m sure you’ve got movers that come to you, they want to raise. This an opportunity to give them a raise, but they get to earn it. Right? Instead of you just giving it to them, they get to earn it. You keep it super simple. Right? If you don’t have a way to incentivize your crews and incentivize your movers, start with something super simple.
Let me give you three steps that will really help you. The first thing you’ve got to do in order to do this is you’ve just got to establish your customer rating process. Meaning, how are you going to find out if the customer’s happy or not happy? Right? There’s a few points where you could do this. You could do this on the move itself. Right? If your dispatcher is clocking the crew out, and they’re speaking to the customer, they could find out how the move went. If your CRM, I know a lot of moving companies in the industry are using CRM, which is smart moving software, which will send out immediately a text message and an email with a whole rating process that it takes them through to find out how the movers did, or are you calling the customer after the job?
You’ve got to establish, “How are we going to determine if they were happy or if they weren’t happy? Okay? Once you’ve got that established, create a simple reward program. Right? If you want to learn my mover bonus points, definitely go join our moving CEO business program, movingceo.com. There’s more information down below this video, but create something simple. If you remember, I was saying, we created something really complex. I’ll talk to private clients, or I’ll talk to moving company owners, and I was like, “I’ve got this system, and we give them this many points for this, and this many points for that. We deduct this many points.” I’m like, “Okay, administratively, tell me the process to manage that every week and every month.” They’re like, “Oh, it’s a nightmare.” I’m like, “Exactly.” Keep it simple. For us, there was customer’s happy? You get points. Customer’s unhappy? We take away a certain amount of points.
At the end of the month, those points turn into dollars, they get a bonus check. Easy, simple. Right? Don’t over complicate it. The idea is that you just want to get it going. Third step is introduce it to your crew. Right? Have a meeting and say, “Hey, listen, “We’ve introduced this new program. We want to incentivizing you guys for happy customers and doing a great job. We know you work really hard, and we want to show some appreciation for it.” Right? That’s it. Set up a reward program. Set up some incentives. Show your guys that you care. Let them go out and be focused on what you’re focused on, which is creating happy customers. They’re going to be five-star reviews. Repeat the move with you again and referrals. They refer you to somebody else. Go implement that. Let me know how it works. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. I’ll see you next time.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares what areas you must train your movers on besides simply how to “move”.
“Your movers are the front line. Your movers are the face of your company. Your movers are the ones that are going to spend the most time with your customers so we’ve got to do more than just train them how to pad a chair or train them how to load a truck. They need to know how to deal with every situation that happens on the move. They need to know what you expect them to do with each and every move while they’re there with the customer. They need to be trained in customer service.”
“If you don’t define exactly how you want your movers to behave on the job and the steps that you want them to take from the time that they get there until the time that they’re done and then train them on that, you’re going to have a lot of stress, you’re going to have a hard time growing your company, and you’re going to have movers that are also disgruntled because they don’t have clear direction on what to do.”
“The basics of moving, training them on how to pad, how to load, how to protect floors, how to protect door jams, how to pack, how to inventory, all the stuff that goes along with moving, that’s great… But if you miss the components that I’m about to share with you in this video, you’re not going to have the customer satisfaction and create the raving fans that you want to really build your business, to get those reviews, that long-term sustainable success in moving.”
“When you set up your training program, of course, train them how to pad, train them how to load, train them how to use the dolly. Absolutely. But the three things that will take your company to the next level are training them in customer etiquette, resolving conflict, and training them on your company policies and procedures and how you do things, what the process is for each thing that they do. Put these in place, apply these in your business. That’s how you get to the next level.”
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Properly training your movers is one of the most important things you could do to grow a successful moving company, but you’ve got to do more than just train them how to actually move. Your movers are the front line. Your movers are the face of your company. Your movers are the ones that are going to spend the most time with your customers so we’ve got to do more than just train them how to pat a chair or train them how to load a truck. They need to know how to deal with every situation that happens on the move. They need to know what you expect them to do with each and every move while they’re there with the customer. They need to be trained in customer service.
If you don’t define exactly how you want your movers to behave on the job and the steps that you want them to take from the time that they get there until the time that they’re done and then train them on that, you’re going to have a lot of stress, you’re going to have a hard time growing your company, and you’re going to have movers that are also disgruntled because they don’t have clear direction on what to do. If you’re joining us for the first time, my name’s Louis Massaro. I’m Founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business to increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life.
When I started my moving company, what is it, 20 years ago now, I was a 19 year old kid, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how to move furniture, I didn’t work for a moving company before that, and to try to train my guys was intimidating. And finally, I was like, you know what? I just need to bite the bullet here and go to my best mover and say, “Listen, I need you to show me the ropes. I need you to show me what to do.” And he showed me everything, took me under his wing. Got to work for me, took me under his wing and said, “Let’s start. Here’s how pads are folded. Here’s how we load a truck and build tiers in the truck. Here’s how we pad a dresser and here’s how we pad a chair.” And I learned the basics of how to move. That component can be taught easily once one person in your company knows how to do that.
So whether that’s you or whether you’ve got a mover that is a great mover that can train that to other people that could be taught. But what can’t be taught by other movers or that doesn’t just happen naturally is the intention of how you want those movers to act, behave, and execute on that move. Once I define, “Look, here’s our company policies. Here’s the procedures. Here’s how we do things. Here’s how I want you to show up to the office. Here’s how I want you to show up on the job. If a problem happens, if there’s a damage, here’s what you do next,” once I defined all of that, that really helped me build my company, which I eventually took to a nationwide, eight figure business where we were doing 12,000 moves a year. And I tell you that because, you may say, “Louis, it’s important to train them to be a master mover. They’ve got to know how to do everything before they get out on that truck.”
And after doing 12,000 moves a year, what I can tell you is, if there’s a claim, if there’s a damage, that could be resolved. The problems that can’t be resolved are when you know the mover doesn’t interact well with the customer, the company completely drops the ball, movers get into it on a job in front of the customer, lack of professionalism. Those are the types of jobs where that problem isn’t easily resolved. So the thing that you want to focus on other than, of course, the basics, training them on how to pad, how to load, how to protect floors, how to protect door jams, how to pack, how to inventory, all the stuff that goes along with moving, that’s great, but if you miss the components that I’m about to share with you, you’re not going to have the customer satisfaction and create the raving fans that you want to really build your business, to get those reviews, that longterm sustainable success in moving. You’ve got to make sure that you’re doing these three things.
So the first one is, you’ve got to train your movers in customer etiquette. They need to understand first and foremost where that customer’s coming from. They need to understand that, that customer is uprooting their entire life and moving to a new place, which is stressful by itself, but now they’ve got strange people, movers, coming in. No offense, whoever it is, we’re all strangers. If they don’t know you, you’re a strange person coming in their house. They’ve got strange people coming in their house and touching everything, lifting everything, opening their drawers, going through everything. It’s very invasive. So they need to understand that, you need to train them on that, and train them on how to have customer etiquette while on the job. Give you an example. So let’s say the customer says to your foreman or one of your head guys or your driver and brings them over and says, “This table here, this is an antique. It was from my grandmother. Can you guys be really careful with it?”
What will normally happen is the movers will be like, “Oh yeah, yeah. No problem. Sure.” They might be nice about it. What needs to happen is they need to go above and beyond to show concern for what the customer’s concern is. Meaning, instead of just saying, “Okay, yeah sure, no problem,” the foreman or whoever it is needs to call over the other guys and say, “Hey guys, come over here for a second. Mrs. So-and-so pointed out to me that this piece right here, it’s a really special piece, so let’s all just make sure that we pay really good attention to this and we take extra good care of that.” That little thing, even if it’s unnecessary to just get the job done, will put that customer at ease, let that customer back off the movers, and not be hovering over them in everything they do. If you’ve ever had a customer that just is on your movers for everything they do, it’s because they don’t feel like they have a professional crew there and they feel like they need to be on top of them.
Customer etiquette, if the customer has an issue, the customer has a problem, how do you want them to speak to that customer? This is the type of stuff that needs to be trained. The moving, the carrying, how to use the dolly, train them on that as well, but that will come time of doing it over and over and over again on jobs. Repetition, repetition, repetition. They’ll get better and better at that. All right, so the first thing you want to make sure you train them on is customer etiquette. That also includes, how do they introduce themselves when they get to the job? When they show up, let me ask you how you would want your movers to show up. Would you want them to show up where the drivers here, he rings the doorbell, “Hey, we’re here. I need you to sign this paperwork,” and the other guys are nowhere to be found?
Or does the whole crew show up at the door, the driver’s got the paperwork or his tablet, the helpers got pads and shrink wrap and door jams and everything ready to go, and they introduce themselves to the customer, he introduces the helpers and the rest of the crew? Customer etiquette, make sure that, that’s part of your training program. The second thing you want to make sure is in there is resolving conflict. Resolving conflict, when stuff happens on the job, what do they do? What do they do? Too many times, companies just send guys out, “Hey, go out there,” and they have no clue and what to do when things happen and they wonder why a problem, a damage on the job, or something that the customer thought was going to be one way but was a different way, or maybe the neighbor comes and says, “Hey, you guys need to move your truck,” or whatever it is, who’s training them on how to deal with those situations?
So you want to make sure that part of your training has resolving conflict. “Here’s what happens when the customer’s upset. Here’s what I need you guys to do. Here’s what happens when there’s a damage. Here’s what happens if two movers get in an argument on the job.” Train them on resolving conflict. And the last piece, and really something that will solve most of the problems, are training them on the company policies and procedures, how you want things done. “Here’s our policy on attendance. Here’s our policy on uniform. Here’s our policy on truck inventory. Here’s our policy on your hours, on clocking in and clocking out. Here’s our policy on so on and so on and so on.” You’ve got to train them on what your policies are. I talk to companies all the time and they wonder why their movers just don’t listen and they don’t do things the way that they want them to do it. And I’m like, “Are you training them on these things? Are you repeating those every single day?”
You might have a mover meeting every day or in the morning and people look for fresh topics. Well, maybe you just need to say the same thing every single day until they get it. Repetition, repetition, repetition. So when you set up your training program, of course, train them how to pad, train them how to load, train them how to use the dolly. Absolutely. But the three things that will take your company to the next level are training them in customer etiquette, resolving conflict, and training them on your company policies and procedures and how you do things, what the process is for each thing that they do. Put these in place, apply these in your business. Let me know how it works. And until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. I’ll see you next time.
In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares what qualities and skills to look for when hiring movers.
“When you are looking for movers, you have qualities and skills. Their individual qualities as a person, as an employee, and then you have their skills of moving furniture and things like that. It’s important as we go out and start to do our recruiting efforts that we have a criteria for what we’re looking for, and when you have this criteria, it’s going to basically allow you to just run them through a filter to make the whole process easy. They match the criteria or they don’t match the criteria, they move on to the next step in the hiring process.”
“It all depends on what you’re looking for at the moment, so before you ever go to place an [employment] ad, you want to establish what your criteria is for what you’re looking for now so that you could sift through everything quickly. Movers don’t need all the skills of lumping, packing, padding, crating, etc. to be a good candidate for your team, because you can always train them on what they don’t know how to do. You might be looking for just drivers right now. You might be looking for just helpers or even helpers that don’t even have much experience, that can just lump furniture.”
“You don’t just hire them, throw him a shirt and say, “Either go swim or sink.” You want to be able to coach them on the things that they need improvement with. Let’s say you establish that a particular set of movers are causing a certain type of damage. You want to be able to retrain them and coach them on that. Let’s say you’re getting some feedback from customers on the way that they’re handling certain things. You want to be able to coach them on that, to help them improve. But if they’re just not willing to listen and they know it all, it’s going to be really tough, unless they’re perfect and don’t make mistakes, for you to work with that individual.”
“There are four types of applicants that are going to be coming in. Whoever’s doing your hiring, show them the Mover Applicant Quadrant. Give them this and say, “Look, this is what’s going to come in the door and I want you to establish what type they are so that we can make a decision moving forward and we don’t have to overanalyze each and every person and we don’t end up giving the wrong people an opportunity that’s going to come back and bite us.” We want to understand what our criteria is and the four types of movers that are going to be applying before we make any decisions on hiring.”
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Louis Massaro: When you are looking for movers, you have qualities, right? Their individual qualities as a person, as an employee, and then you have their skills of moving furniture and things like that. So what are the qualities and the skills that we’re looking for because it’s important as we go out and start to do our recruiting efforts that we have a criteria, and when you have this criteria, it’s going to basically allow you to just run them through a filter to make the whole process easy, right? They match the criteria or they don’t match the criteria, they move on to the next step in the hiring process. Makes sense? Let’s talk about the skills that movers have. Now, they don’t need all these skills, but it’s important that you identify the criteria and your criteria is different at different times. You might be looking for just drivers right now. You might be looking for just helpers and helpers that don’t even have much experience, that just can lump, right? It depends on what you’re looking for at the moment so before you ever go to place an ad, which we’ll talk about, you want to establish what your criteria is for what you’re looking for now so that you could sift through everything quickly, all right? Lumping, just somebody that could just pick up stuff and move it and there’s nothing wrong with that because if you have a cooperative, helpful lumper with good qualities, which we’ll talk about in a minute, that listens, that’s coachable. You could put two of them with a well qualified driver, crew chief, and you’re good. Right? Let’s just talk about, I’ll just run through all these different skills. Loading, right? Loading is something totally different. To be able to load a truck is a learned skill. It’s not something that someone just knows how to do naturally. To be able to come into a truck and identify the furniture that you have and come in and start to build out the base. If you have an attic, what to put in the attic. What you can’t stack on top of other things. What to do with the mirrors. What to do with the flat screen TVs, right? Do they put them in between mattresses? How are they strapping it? It’s a learned skill to load a truck, but you really only need one person on a job that’s skilled at loading a truck. Packing. Packing dishes, packing china, packing stereo equipment, all kinds of packing. An additional skill. Assembling, disassembly and reassembly, right? The ability to go in and disassemble a bed, reassemble a bed, take the mirror off the dresser, whatever it might be and inventorying, not really a word, but you get it. Inventorying, to be able to go in and do an inventory of the items. So whether it’s a long distance job or a storage job, you’re going to be doing an inventory of everything, right? So whether you’re doing it electronically or whether you’re doing it with a inventory sheet and the roll of stickers to where you’re stickering an item and writing down what it is, and then writing down the condition that it’s in. If it’s worn, if it’s scratched, all of that, that’s a skill and this is obviously stuff that you can teach, but you need to identify what your criteria is going into the hiring process. Padding. Being able to pad a dresser. Being able to pad a chair. Estimating. If you’re doing any type of flat rate, if you’re doing any type of long distance move. If you’re doing anything that’s not, basically, like an hourly rate, then you need someone on that job that’s going to be able to go out there and estimate how long it’s going to take before they start the job. So let’s say you give somebody a, your inventory list, right? And it needs to be broken down by room for this exact purpose. You’ve done an inventory, whether it was an onsite estimate or whether it was over the phone, and your whole estimate is based off that inventory. Well, you want someone that’s going to be able to go out there and, basically, walk around the house with your inventory, go to each room and say, “Yeah, this is about right. This is going to take us eight hours.” Otherwise you have no basis for revision. You want someone out there that’s your eyes and ears that could estimate the job. Crating. Crating’s a whole nother skill. You could have your entire company with nobody that knows how to crate and outsource it every time, which is totally cool. But, it is another skill that if somebody comes to the table and they know how to crate, well, there’s an additional service that you could be charging extra for. So, if you don’t know what crating is, crating is basically taking very fragile items, let’s say a chandelier, and you basically build a whole box for the chandelier to where the chandelier is hanging at the top of the box and it’s boxed in, right? Or you’re crating glass. All done typically with wood. So it’s a very carpenter-type thing to do and we didn’t really have … occasionally we’d have somebody in a city that knew how to do it, or a long distance driver that was good. Otherwise we outsourced that to somebody else, but it is a skill. Driving. Do they know how to drive the truck? Do they have a clean driving record? And communicating. Somebody, and it doesn’t always have to be the driver, has to be able to communicate with the customer, has to be able to go over the contract, go over the paperwork, collect payment, discuss where do they want things. Somebody needs to have good communication skills. So these are the skills, and guys, let me know if I missed something, too, down below. If I missed any skills here. But these generally are the skills that we look for in a mover. Doesn’t mean that the people that you hire have to have these skills, we’ll get to that in a minute. So now we want to look at qualities, right? As an individual, what qualities do they have? And these are really pretty simple, right? I mean, you don’t have too high of expectations, or at least I don’t, and maybe I’ve seen people that do have really, really high expectations, which could be making it much more challenging to find guys and keep them there consistently. They need to be respectful, to you and the customer. Good hygiene, just good hygiene. You know, some people, I talked to somebody not too long ago says they need to be clean cut, no facial hair, and I can understand the logic there. However, facial hair is kind of like the new men’s, more than half the guys you see, it might even be more, have beards. So to say that your movers can’t have that, you’re just eliminated more possible, good recruits that you could have working for you. Helpful. Simple. They just need to be helpful, again, to the company and to the customer. Cooperative, with the customer, with their other teammates on the truck, right? With dispatch. Cooperative. They need to be a team player. They need to, there’s no way one guy could go out and do it all. He’s going to have to have at least one more person, if not two, three, four, five, six, whatever it might be. But typically between two and three per crew, they have to be a team player. They have to know how everyone on that crew is going to play their part to have a successful move for the customer and physically capable. I’m not even going to say strong, just physically capable to, they don’t have to put a dresser on their shoulder and walk down the street with it. Their, have another person to lift that with them. There are hump straps, right? They don’t need to be able to carry all the boxes. There’s dollies for that. But they need to be physically capable to do their part of it. You don’t need big, jacked guys. You need physically capable, but that are mindful to not bang into walls. That are not dragging stuff on the floor. They’re just physically capable. They’re reliable. They’re going to show up. I mean, that’s, it’s hard to know that in an interview, but that’s what you’re looking for and they’re coachable, right? The same way that you coach your sales team to improve, those of you and Moving Sales Academy like the process of enhancement training and, and taking them through that process of making them better. You do that with your movers, as well. You don’t just hire them, throw him a shirt and say, “Either go swim or sink.” You want to be able to coach them on the things that they need improvement with and so, whether that’s … let’s say you establish that a particular set of movers or particular one mover is causing a certain type of damage. You want to be able to retrain them and coach them on that. Let’s say you’re getting some feedback from customers on the way that they’re handling certain things. You want to be able to coach them on that, to help them improve. But if they’re just not willing to listen and they know it all, you know, it’s going to be really tough, unless they’re perfect and don’t make mistakes, for you to work with that individual. So now, these are the qualities that we’re looking for. We’ve got the skill set and we’ve got the qualities. All right? Let me know down below if there’s more qualities you’re looking for, I’d love to hear about it. Let’s get the discussion going. But now, as we bring in applicants, this is the mover applicant quadrant. There’s four types of applicants that are going to be coming in and we’re going to talk about getting the applications and running through the whole process in a minute, but I’m just laying the groundwork here to simplify this, right? Because you know, sometimes we, and everybody’s guilty of it. We make things bigger and more complicated in our minds then they need to be and if we’re able to just take things and lay them out, and it’s just step, step, step. One foot in front of the other. If this, then that. You guys hear me talk so much about process, process, process because when you have that, it takes all the mental trying to figure every little thing out every single day and you just, essentially, hit start on the process and run it step, step, step, step, step. We want to understand what our criteria is and the four types of movers that are going to be applying. The first type is experienced. They’ve got the skills as a mover and they’ve got good qualities. You’re interviewing them. You determined that they have the skills. They know how to pack. They know how to load a truck. They know how to do it all and their qualities are great, right? They have a great personality. They’ve got good hygiene. They’re reliable. They’re respectful in the interview. That’s type one. We all know, everyone’s like, “Yeah, I want that.” That is, that’s the one you want. Then you got type two. They are inexperienced, so they don’t have the skills of a mover. They’ve never loaded a truck. They’ve never packed a box. They’ve never padded anything, but they have good qualities as an individual. They’re reliable. They’re coachable. They’re eager to learn. That’s type two. Then you’ve got type three. They’re experienced, but bad qualities and this is the trap that a lot of companies fall for because they put experience and skills over quality and personality and I say that as doing it myself for years. You get the resume in or application in and they’re like, “Oh, they worked here. They worked there. They worked here. They worked there.” All moving companies. You’re like, “Oh, jackpot.” Right? But just because they have experience at another moving company does not mean they’re a good fit for your business. You probably have these guys right now, today, out on a job that you really would like to get rid of because they’re the know-it-all. I’ve worked for every major company. I’ve been doing this my whole life. But as an individual, as an employee, the qualities aren’t there. Then you’ve got inexperienced, no skills. No skills. They don’t have the skills to be a mover, but they have good qualities. They are a good guy or a good person. Wow. This is great for the interview, but you’re like, “Hey, are you willing to learn?” We can train you because in the interview you want to basically, you don’t want to make somebody feel like they have to have the skills, because then they’re going to lie to you about having the skills and then when you put them to the test, they won’t, and then that kind of creates a uncomfortable situation. So you want to make them feel like it’s okay that they don’t have the skills because you’re willing to train them. But if they’re like, “Yeah, nah. This sounds like more work than I really want to put in.” Okay, so now we’ve got our four types, all right? And you’ve probably guessed it already, but type one, you hire immediately. They come in. They’re an applicant. You do an interview. You establish they’re a type one, hire. Done. Type two, hire and train. In other words, they’re not experienced with moving. So what? So what? You don’t need them to be a crew chief. You don’t need them to be the foreman. You need them to go out and we’ll talk about how to get them into the rotation, as well. But if they’re eager to learn, and they’re a great individual, they’re respectful. They’re coachable. They’re reliable. They have good hygiene. Hire them and train them. Type three, they come in, add them to your mover database, okay? We’ll talk about that in a minute. But your mover database is basically a place where you’re going to keep all of the information of all the applicants that come in to where, when you’re in a pinch, when you’re in a situation where you need somebody and you might be willing to put up with the bad qualities, because you just need someone with experience for a busy weekend or for a certain job, that you could call on that person. But that’s not your first pick or second to come in for the company because we all know the bad qualities, that’s what causes more problems with customers than lack of skill. I’ve seen more problems caused by attitudes of movers, then even damage to the furniture. Type four, keep looking. In other words, type four comes in, maybe you established it there. They’d be a great salesperson or something like that. Don’t force the situation. The idea is to keep the door, keep it revolving. Keep people coming in to where you don’t have to settle and you don’t try to have to force people into certain positions. But if they’re, have great qualities and you’re like, “Hey, I could use you in this other role.” Great. But otherwise, keep looking, all right? So that’s your quadrant. Whoever’s doing your hiring, show them this. Give them this and say, “Look, this is what’s going to come in the door and I want you to establish what type they are so that we can make a decision moving forward and we don’t have to overanalyze each and every person and we don’t end up giving the wrong people an opportunity that’s going to come back and bite us.”
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares his thoughts on whether you should buy or lease moving trucks.
“You could do everything by the book of what’s the right financial decision, but then there’s also convenience when acquiring trucks.”
“What’s nice about some of these leasing programs that some of the Penske’s, and the Ryders, and these companies provide is that you get that new truck. You can wear and tear. If it breaks down, they give you a new one and the whole truck payment is the deductible.”
“When you own the truck, you also have to take care of that truck. So, you have to think about, ‘Do I have a mechanic that I can rely on? Do I have a mechanic that I can trust? Do I know anything about trucks.'”
“With moving trucks, it’s hard to find them slightly used. They’re usually pretty worn out. So, we would buy them new and finance them, make the payments on them for five years and then run them for another three years after with no payments and then sell them after that.”
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Janysh, “Financing versus leasing trucks? What do you prefer and why?” Great question. So, there’s no right or wrong answer. Let’s just start with that. It’s totally a preference thing. Now, you could do everything by the book of what’s the right financial decision, but then there’s also convenience, right? On a personal level, I like to lease my vehicles, because I want a brand new vehicle, and I want to give it back, and get another brand new vehicle in a few years, and I don’t want to take care of it. If anything’s wrong, I bring it in and they deal with it. Is that the smart financial play? No. The smart financial play on a personal level would be to buy a car that’s a few years old with a few thousand miles on it, buy it after it’s already taken the depreciation and drive it until it breaks down, right?
That’s the smart financial decision. So, from a trucks standpoint, I always bought trucks. Okay? And I bought them brand new, right? Which technically, when you buy, if you buy it used you, it depreciates right away, as soon as it comes off the lot. But the problem is with moving trucks, it’s hard to find them slightly used, right? They’re usually pretty worn out. So, we would buy them new and finance them, make the payments on them for five years and then run them for another three years after with no payments and then sell them after that. And that financially will be, over the longterm, your better move from strictly financial. But you can’t … You guys don’t just take the best financial decision into account, right?
Because when you own the truck, you also have to take care of that truck. So, you have to think about, do I have a mechanic that I can rely on? Do I have a mechanic that I can trust? Do I know anything about trucks, right? I mean, I had to learn the hard way when the diesel on one of my trucks froze up or jelled up, I should say, and I had to go prime the truck, and let the little air valve out, and it sprayed all in my face. I had to learn that stuff the hard way. And I didn’t want to deal with that, but I happened to have good mechanics everywhere that I went. Could I trust them? Eh. Were they padding the bill? Probably. Right? Were they charging me for stuff that I really couldn’t argue, because I didn’t know enough about the trucks? I’d say so.
Now with leasing, what’s nice about some of these leasing programs that some of the Penske’s, and the Ryders, and these companies provide is that you get that new truck. You can wear and tear. If it breaks down, they give you a new one and the whole truck payment is the deductible, right? So, when you buy a truck, every payment that you make, right? Only the interest and the taxes on that payment come off your P&L, right? And the rest is paying down your balance sheet. So, at the end of the year, when you buy trucks, it can make your P&L look like you’ve got all a lot of profit, but you don’t have the money. In other words, you’re like, “Oh, it looks like we’re profitable.” But yet, the bank account doesn’t show that.
Whereas with a lease, you’ve got every payment that you pay comes off your profit, right? So, it reduces your tax exposure. Now, I know I’m getting technical here, but I’m answering the question, right? This is the stuff you got to think about. With the truck that you buy, you do get to depreciate that which helps reduce your tax exposure. That’s all based on how you and your CPA choose to do it. So, I would say that, today, if I was starting over, I would explore both options. I would talk to my CPA. I would … At the time of when it comes to buy a new truck, look at where you’re at and see what you need from a tax standpoint, what your mechanic situation is, and then make the decision from there.
So, I like both ways. I’m not against either one. And that’s kind of my scoop, right? My reason why. You said, “What do you prefer and why?” That’s the reason why, but we did buy trucks, brand new, and there are trucks that you can get a brand new body with a used chassis. Go to my website, louismassaro.com. Search … Put trucks. It’s like movers guide to trucks, something like that. Just put trucks in the search bar. There’s a blog post there with my connections for buying a new truck, buying a new box with a used chassis and some leasing information as well. I hope that helps you guys.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to resolve customer complaints in your moving company.
“You want to have full awareness of what’s going on with any customer that’s not 100% happy, right? So, I told my sales team. I told my customer service. I told dispatch, if you’re aware of a customer that’s not 100% happy, they need to go on the awareness board, which at first was a spreadsheet that we put up on the TV, so we could see what was going on. And then later, we built it into the CRM.”
“We need to talk to the customer to find out their side of the story, which is always the case. Maybe we need to talk to dispatch. Maybe we need to talk to the movers. Maybe we need to talk to the salesperson, or maybe we need to look at the process. Anytime mistakes happen in your company, it’s one of two things, people or process. That’s it, that’s the cause of every single problem in your company, people or process. And before you go blaming the person, look at the process to see if there’s something that needs to be adjusted, something that needs to be fixed.”
“A lot of times you could resolve the complaint, because usually it’s not a big thing and you can make them happy. They just, they were heard, you dealt with it. Reasonable people understand that things happen. They just want the company to stand behind their word.”
“It’s not personal. It’s part of business. And the bigger you get, there’ll be more things that happen. And the quicker you could just let it go, remove the emotion and deal with it, the better it will be, right? It’s all part of business. Focus on the customer’s needs. Too often we start defending, but if they have a legitimate reason, right, they have a reason for the complaint, listen to them and focus on their needs, as opposed to trying to defend yourself in this situation.”
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All complaints come in, right? This could mean anything, damage, just the complaint, a bad review, a credit card chargeback, a BBB, a cancellation, an attorney letter, right? Anything that’s in the category of a complaint, goes to the awareness board. Okay. So, when I set up customer service in my main office, it was really not until I sold my long distance trucks, and I became a broker for a short period of time. And the amount of complaints that were coming from the carriers that we were giving the work to, they weren’t responding to them, right?
In other words, I thought, hey, being a broker will be easy. We’ll book the jobs and we’ll service them. We’ve already got the call center going. I’ll tell you the whole story tomorrow, but it wasn’t, because we would say, “Oh, no problem. You just need to call the carrier.” They’d call the carrier, carrier didn’t want to deal with it, right? So, I went from not thinking I needed customer service, to building out a whole wing of 10 customer service people and a customer service manager. And I said, “You know what? I want to know everything that’s happening. And I want to know every customer that’s unhappy at any given time. Not even a complaint, if they’re not 100% happy, I want it up on the TV screen and I want everybody to see it, so it’s on our, we’re aware of it, and we know that we could, we’re working to resolve that.” Because otherwise, it’s too easy for it to get swept under the rug, right?
If the customer’s not, what a lot of people do, if the customer’s not calling and calling and calling, you’re like, “All right, they’re not calling. Everything must be fine.” One star Yelp review pops up, right? Everything’s not fine. Other stuff happens. Everything’s not fine. You want to have full awareness of what’s going on with any customer that’s not 100% happy, right? So, I told my sales team. I told my customer service. I told dispatch, if you’re aware of a customer that’s not 100% happy, they need to go on the awareness board, which at first was a spreadsheet that we put up on the TV, so we could see what was going on. And then later, we built it into the CRM. But would that be helpful for you guys? Yeah. So, you just want to be aware, right? So, literally, if you had a whiteboard, okay, I’m assuming you guys, we were doing 12,000 moves at this point.
So, even if it wasn’t a lot of complaints, there was enough to have a board for them, right? But even if you have one or two complaints here and there, or customers that you know aren’t 100% happy, put them up on a whiteboard, right? Just be aware of it.
So, essentially, we’d open a ticket, we’d open the complaint resolution form that we had them go through. I know a lot of you have that from Moving Sales Academy. Review, categorize it, and prioritize it, right? So, we would know how did it come in?
Did it come in because the mover told us about it? Did it come in because we found the bad review online? And then we put it in priority on how we’re going to address it and how we’re going to deal with it. And then we do an investigation, right? What happened with this complaint? Complaints, you don’t want to just deal with them and then move on. You want to improve upon that. I mean, already today, I’ve probably marked down, or gave Chris, five or six different things to improve upon for next time, right? Not necessarily any complaints, but when you get a complaint, you want to be able to make sure you make those improvements, but you want to look into what actually happened. So, depending on the complaint, we would take them through this complaint resolution form that we filled out. Who has the complaint resolution form in here, that’s using it?
Okay. So, and it’s like, maybe we need to talk to the customer to find out their side of the story, which is always the case. Maybe we need to talk to dispatch. Maybe we need to talk to the movers. Maybe we need to talk to the sales person, or maybe we need to look at the process. Anytime mistakes happen in your company, it’s one of two things, people or process. That’s it, that’s the cause of every single problem in your company, people or process. And before you go blaming the person, look at the process to see if there’s something that needs to be adjusted, something that needs to be fixed, right? So, you do the investigation, and now you need a resolution. You listen to the customer and empathize with them, apologize if necessary. I have a private client in the room that was at my office, I don’t know, a month ago, and had a customer that… I’m trying to remember exactly what the scenario was.
I won’t call them out. So, no, the scenario was, they put a one star review. They want to take it down. They tried to resolve it, tried everything, tried everything to resolve the issue. I said, “You know what? Write an apology letter, sincere, from the heart, to the customer, from you and your wife, to say, ‘Look.'” Because he was, he’s like, “I’m stressed out. I’m losing sleep over this at night.” I said, “Tell the customer this.” I’m a small business owner. My business means everything. I take pride in what we do, right? I know probably six of you probably have the video of this, because I know, as I was telling them in my office, you guys were breaking out your phones and video of me saying it. But this is my business, is my livelihood. I take it very seriously.
I take pride in what I do. And it’s been keeping me up at night that you had the experience that you did, and I just want you to know that I’m deeply sorry about it. And if there’s anything that I could do at all to help make this better, we’re here. I don’t remember exactly what it was and those weren’t exactly, that was the tone of the letter, and it worked. And it worked. Took the review down, right? It worked. Might not work every time, but make the effort, never let a one star review just sit up there and don’t make an effort to get it down, pay that customer, kiss their ass, do what you got to do, but get it down. That’s like having a retail store with spray paint on it, right? You have a, I don’t know, donut shop, and somebody comes and writes, “These donuts suck.” And you just come into work every day and you’re like, that’s unfortunate, right? Get it down.
All right. So, if the customer’s happy, right, because a lot of times you could resolve the complaint, because usually it’s not a big thing and you can make them happy. They just, they were heard, you dealt with it. Reasonable people understand that things happen. They just want the company to stand behind their word, ask them for a review. Only if their face looks like that though, right? Only if their face looks like that. If their face looks like this, yeah, if their face looks like that, just don’t ask them for anything. Just be glad that you resolved it. They’re like, yeah, all right, that’s fine, but they’re not a raving fan. And if their face looks like that, that gets escalated to the owner. If my customer service team couldn’t resolve any complaints, they would come to me with the complaint resolution form filled out completely with all the investigations done, so I had all the information that I needed.
So, in other words, here’s what the sales person said. Here’s what the mover said. Here’s what the customer said. Everything was smooth in the process, and then I would call the customer, make that final attempt to resolve that issue. So, complaint resolution, all right. As far as the complaint itself, I know this is tough, but don’t take it personal, all right. Don’t take it personal. You got to understand this is part of the business, all right. It’s all part of the business.
You’ve got to remove your emotion from the situation. When I started the business, I was a 19 year old, hot headed kid. Complaints came in, I wanted to fight the customer. You know what I mean? I was so offended and so like, then you grow up. What are you going to do? As a grown man, or a grown woman, going to fight? First of all, you’re fighting people as a grown person, it’s ridiculous, right? That’s high school stuff. When I was 19, I was all hotheaded about it. I never fought a customer, by the way. But what I’m getting at is, I feel the pain, and I know that when you get these issues and they happen, I know there’s a fire in your chest, but you got to let it go.
It’s not personal. It’s part of business. And the bigger you get, there’ll be more things that happen. And the quicker you could just let it go, remove the emotion and deal with it, the better it will be, right? It’s all part of business. Focus on the customer’s needs. Too often we start defending, but if they have a legitimate reason, right, they have a reason for the complaint, listen to them and focus on their needs, as opposed to trying to defend yourself in this situation.
Seek to understand, okay. what we’re going through right now is basically anyone that you have dealing with customers on the phone that might have an issue, or might have a problem, whether they’re dispatch, operations, customer service, these are the steps that they need to follow, okay. First, don’t take it personal. Then seek to understand moving is stressful, right?
You’ve had a customer call you screaming, stressed out. Once you listen to them for a minute, and you don’t defend or block the complaint, you’re able to find the real reason for their frustration. When someone has a complaint, a lot of times it’s something really small, like they’re so emotionally invested in it, it just set them off because they’re moving and they’ve got all this stress going on. And they know that their real complaint is so small that they just start stacking shit to make it sound like they are justified for calling you. You know what I’m saying? And it’s like, you start to really seek what was going on, all to find out that they’re really just pissed because they missed the DirecTV guy, and now they got to wait another day to get TV and they’re going to miss their show.
You know what I’m saying? If you realize where they’re coming from and know, look, they’re stressed. Instead of saying, “I’m not somebody’s punching bag. I’m not going to let them just talk to me like that.” Okay. Let them get the air pressure out, right? Listen, listen, listen, listen. When you have a customer service team with the customer complaint resolution form, this is what they’re doing. So, by the time, if I had to get the call, they’ve already let the air out of them, right? They’ve let them talk. But when you don’t and you block it, you’re like, no, no, and you start defending yourself, you don’t let that process happen. That process needs to happen. And once it does, then you can figure out what their real frustration is and focus on that.
What I used to do is just look at it as a third party mediator. I used to say, you know what, it’s my company, they’re yelling about stuff that we’re doing, but let me take a step back and let me not have any type of investment, emotionally or anything like that. And just look at it and go, you know what? My company did make a mistake here. You know what? They’re being unreasonable with that. And yeah, we could have done better. And I looked at it like that to come up with a solution, as opposed to being in it. It sounds like something small, but a lot of times I feel that we have to play games with our mind, to be able to see things from a different perspective. And if you just step back like that and look at it out here, as opposed to looking at it here and here, it’s a whole different ball game.
What is the right thing to do? The right thing often costs money. But if we look to resolve the issue and then we go make sure that that issue doesn’t happen again and use it as an opportunity to improve, right? We learned our lesson, we paid whatever it’s going to take to do the right thing, and then we move on. Be timely and responsive, right? Acknowledge their complaint. Just the acknowledgement alone helps to let the steam out a little bit. Communicate the process, okay. “All right. Well, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m actually going to need to talk to my movers and I’m going to talk to my sales sales team. This might take a day or two, but here’s what I’m going to do by Thursday. I’m going to send you an email or I’m going to give you a call back and we’re going to get this resolved for you.” Right? Communicate the process, so they know what’s going on. Instead of just saying, “All right, I’ll get back to you.” And then follow up when you said you would follow up.
If you say, “I’m going to call you back Thursday.” And by Thursday, you haven’t had a chance to interview your salesperson or your mover, and you don’t have an answer for them, or you’re in customer service in here, right, and the owner of your company is like, “I don’t want to be bothered with it.” And you haven’t been able to get in touch with them and they’re on vacation or whatever, still call that customer back and let them know, “Hey, I just want you to know I’m still working on it.” And resolve the complaint. You’ve got to resolve it, right? Don’t let it linger. Don’t let it sit out there. Don’t think that it’s just going to go away. This was the reason for the awareness board, because they don’t just go away, right? They don’t go away.
What’s it going to take to make them happy? I mean, that’s the final question, right? After you’ve looked at the whole thing, like, what’s it going to take to make them happy? Give them money or buy a new whatever it is. My customer service team had authorization up to $1,000 per customer to give money back. It sounds like a lot of money, but how much is it hurting you when you get that one star review online? And I know that I would pay, without blinking an eye all day long, $1,000 to get it down, at least. So, you got your $0.60 per pound, or whatever you’ve got. Most people, that’s what it is. But what’s it going to take to make them happy? And then you got to say, well, I got to just stop this from happening, right?
I’ve got to improve some processes, so it doesn’t continue to happen, or I’m just going to be out of business. But it’s one of two ways. If the service isn’t going good and you have unhappy customers, you’re either going to tell them, “Yeah, sorry, $0.60 cents per pound, screw you.” And you’re going to go out of business that way, or you’re going to keep paying them, because you’re like, let me do the right thing and not go fix the core issue of the problem, and you’ll be out of business that way. So, the answer is to resolve the core fundamental issue of why the problem is happening. And never throw money at the customer. What I mean by that is this, my team had that authorization to pay money, but only if it was going to make the customer smile, right?
Otherwise, if they’re still like, “Screw you, you’re the worst. I’m putting reviews. I’m telling everybody I know.” You know what? Keep the money, give them what we’re liable for, and we’ll use that for somebody else who we can make happy. That’s my personal belief, doesn’t mean you have to follow that, right? But I’m not going to, a lot of people would just say, “You know what, here. Here’s $200. You happy?” And almost slap them in the face with $200. Save the 200 bucks. You’re not doing anybody any good. It’s not about the money.
Small gestures go a long way. I told you about that apology letter, sincere apology letters work. This is your business you’re protecting. This isn’t a personal dispute with a family member, or something. You’re like, “I’m not going to say I’m sorry. They got to say they’re sorry.” Right? You got a business that that’s your livelihood, and any type of bad review or bad word of mouth out there is just hurting your livelihood, hurting your family’s future. Do what you got to do to resolve the complaint. Even if you can’t make them happy, decide how you’re going to proceed and close the file. Don’t let it linger, decide how you’re going to proceed and close the file. If it’s got a close out, closed, unsatisfactory, then it is what it is, but you made that decision consciously. And then correct it internally, never leave the scene of a complaint without asking how you can make corrections internally so that it doesn’t happen again. Okay.
Complaints are valuable, if they’re used for corrections. Listen to them. Don’t defend them. Don’t block them. Listen to them. There’s truth in all of it. There’s truth in all of it. Identify the cause. What process can be improved? Who needs more training? Remember, all these issues are either people are process, one of the two. Have a meeting with staff to show the cause, right? You want them to see, you want everybody involved to see how this happened. It’s not necessarily to call somebody out and tell them they did something wrong, unless you have a clear, specific process on how to do something that they’re not following. But if not, let everybody be a part of the solution. Say, “Guys, we’re going to have to do something here. We’re going to have to correct and adjust this process. Who has some ideas on what we could do?” Always call on your team, by the way, right?
Always ask them, I’m bouncing ideas off my team left and right, every single day, always. They’ve got a different perspective than you do, right? And they’re sitting in a different, they’re in your business with you, but sitting in a different angle, sitting in a different seat. They see things differently, right? And then create, or update, your standard operating procedure, your process. We’re going to talk about that tomorrow, but one of the best places to start with creating processes is areas where you’re having problems, right? Areas where you’re having issues.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to prevent customer complaints in your moving company.
“Many of the complaints and problems that happen are because sales is telling the customer one thing and the service is different. What’s said in your marketing, whatever’s on your website, whatever promises you’re making, whatever your salesperson says, whatever happens with the dispatcher and whatever the movers do. If that’s consistent from top to bottom, 95% of your problems will go away.”
“Maybe you do some incredible stuff on the moves. Maybe you’re laying floor runners down. Maybe you’re putting the door jambs up. Maybe you’re protecting the stairways. Is that in your marketing material? Is that in your sales script? I don’t believe in under-sell and over-deliver, I believe in over-sell and over-deliver.”
“Walk yourself through your customer’s journey. What happens when they book their move? Are they informed about the next steps? What happens next? Are your movers making a good impression? And then pick some customers to call personally to see how their experience was start to finish. You might be doing surveys, you might have your CRM sending out information. Call some customers once in a while and hear from them. Ask them some more questions. What did you like? What did you not like?”
“You’ve got to get your employees to buy-in. They should know your number one goal is raving fans. That’s it. You don’t want satisfied customers. You want fans. You want raving fans. They’re quick to go give you the five star review. Maybe even in two places. They hear about anyone that’s moving, they’re like, you’ve got to use my guys. Those are the customers you want to create.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
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Louis Massaro: Preventing customer complaints. We want to be proactive with this because there’s a lot of little stuff that happens that doesn’t need to happen. Number one is sales and service consistency. Many of the complaints and problems that happen are because sales is telling the customer one thing and the service is different. 95% of your complaints will go away if what’s said in your marketing, whatever’s on your website, whatever promises you’re making, whatever your salesperson says, whatever happens with the dispatcher and whatever the movers do. If that’s consistent from top to bottom, 95% of your problems will go away.
So review all your marketing. Take a look at everything. What are you saying? What are you promising? What are you telling people that you’re going to offer them? Because if you’re saying it in your marketing, it needs to get delivered. Listen to your sales team quoting customers, whether it’s live or whether it’s recordings. Review your sales scripts. We’ll talk about sales scripts on Sunday, but sales scripts will help keep you out of trouble with complaints. Because if the people that you have on the phones are saying the same thing consistently, over and over and over, you can control what’s being said, and they’re not saying random stuff. They’re not promising random stuff.
Listen to your dispatcher confirm moves. Remember, that’s a great opportunity to take anything that happened in sales and smooth it over. And spot check moves. So basically what you want to do is you want to take a look at your marketing, take a look at what’s being done in sales, take a look at what’s being done in operations. Is it consistent? From sales to dispatch will help with complaints, but if you go from dispatch back up to sales, that’ll help with sales. Let me explain what I mean.
So maybe you do some incredible stuff on the moves. Maybe you’re laying floor runners down. Maybe you’re putting the door jams up. Maybe you’re protecting the stairways. Is that in your marketing material? Is that in your sales script? I don’t believe in undersell and over deliver, I believe in oversell and over deliver. Who was skeptical about coming here? That thought this is probably bullshit, let me go check it out. Be honest. I won’t get offended. I’m selling hard and I’m delivering hard. Period! You guys got to do the same. Don’t downplay the sales piece and then say, we’ll just surprise them on the other end, because that’s less customers.
Customer journey. Walk yourself through their journey. What happens when they book their move? Are they informed about the next steps? What happens next? Are your movers making a good impression? And then pick some customers to call personally to see how their experience was start to finish. You might be doing surveys, you might have your CRM sending out information. Call some customers once in a while and hear from them. Ask them some more questions. What did you like? What did you not like?
When these events are over, I’m always talking to my private clients that are in the room, and I’m like, what was good about it? What was bad about it? I do your whole customer journey. I do that whole walk-through, everything from registration to when you signed up to the emails. And if it’s not perfect, then we’re trying to make it better every time. So you’ve got to walk through the customer’s journey and see what they’re experiencing. Internal communication. Most information is given to the moving consultant, you know that. Customer does not care about your departments. You ever have an issue with a company, and they’re like, oh no, well, that’s operations, you need to talk to them. Or that was sales, you need to talk to them. Don’t let that be your company. When the customer sees your company, all they see is the logo. All they see is the logo. All they see is your company. They’re dealing with one entity. They don’t want to hear that, oh well, I know you told the salesperson but we didn’t know about that on the operations end. They don’t care about your departments. It’s all one.
Make sure you got detailed notes in your software. Of course, I think you guys should definitely check out SmartMoving. But any software you’re using, use it and put the notes in there. I don’t care if it’s the most old school system, there’s a little note field in everything that’s out there. Put the notes in it so that everyone knows what’s going on and what the customer gave to the salesperson.
And then set your dispatcher up for success. Give them the tools they need. We talked about, who walked away with some good stuff for dispatch earlier? Some good ideas? Okay. All right, good. Set them up for success. They’re the quarterback of the day-to-day operation. And send movers out with a move detail sheet. So move detail sheets, basically all the notes, all the specifics on what’s going on with that job. If you don’t have a CRM, if you are operating off of paper, stick a Post-it note on the contract with the unique something. If that’s your move detail sheet, then that’s your move detail sheet. But you’ve got to send them out with information so that they know what is unique about this specific job.
And then you got to get employee buy-in. You’ve got to get your employees to buy in. They should know your number one goal is raving fans. That’s it. You don’t want satisfied customers. You want fans. You want raving fans. They’re quick to go give you the five star review. Maybe even in two places. They hear about anyone that’s moving, they’re like, you’ve got to use my guys. Those are the customers you want to create.
Each department should know what the other departments do and the importance of them. So we talked earlier, keep sales over here and la-la positivity book moves land. And let this batch be over here, dealing with the stuff. But maybe you got to take somebody from there and let them sit in dispatch for the day. Take dispatch, let them sit in sales for the day. Part of the employee buy-in is getting them to understand that every position is crucial to make the business run.
There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of people that it takes to orchestrate a successful moving business. Make sure that they all respect the other positions, which, if they don’t experience it even for a minute, typically they don’t. Typically, sales thinks dispatch has the easy job. Dispatch thinks sales has the easy job. The movers think everybody else has the easiest job in the world. Teamwork, basic teamwork. And the buy-in starts with you.
If your attitude towards the customers is screw them, that’s how your employees are going to act. But if you’re taking a proactive approach to preventing complaints and letting them know that it’s not acceptable, even if before it was and now you want to make a shift, that buy-in starts with you. They follow you. It took me, I don’t know, seven, eight years of being in business to realize that it wasn’t what I was telling them to do, it was what they were seeing me do, and how they were seeing me act that they followed. So set that example.
Mover support. Train them how to be a mover. Make sure they know what they’re doing. Train them how to interact with your customers. This is part of the perfect move checklist. How to interact with your customers. A lot of people get the first part but they forget about the second part. Make sure they have all the equipment they need, and be available when they need help. They have some issues, be available. If they’re calling in for support to the office during a job and they’re getting brushed off, that’s not good. That’s going to show you don’t care, they’re not going to care.
Accept responsibility. Accept your role as a business owner. There’s a lot you’ve got to put on your shoulders and realize that you are responsible for. You’re responsible for your employees and what they do. You’re responsible for your customers and the service they receive. You’re responsible for your family and taking care of them financially. You’ve got a lot of responsibility. With that comes the rewards, and if you’re not seeing the rewards by the end of the week I’m going to show you how to find the rewards. But you’ve got to just say, you know what, it’s my responsibility to prevent these complaints. I know better than the customer.
We think that the customer knows. They should know that. The customer might move every seven or eight years. You’re moving seven or eight people a day or more. Take on that role and say, you know what? I am the leader here in this situation. Let me guide the customer on the right thing to do. You know better than the customer. I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I mean that like, if the customer is… You say, give me your inventory, and they just rattle off 10 things. You can’t just say, oh, okay. Cool. Thanks. You know there’s more than that. Take the lead, you know better. Let them start digging for more information.
And tell the customer everything they need to know. Again, this goes back to their journey. What do they need to know from the time they booked the move to help make it a successful move for them and for you?
Anticipate all potential problems. Anticipate all potential problems.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares his process for how to hire movers for your moving company.
“What we’re doing right now is we’re taking hiring movers, something that seems so complex and so challenging and so tough, and we’re just breaking it down to a process, that once you set it up, just runs, in your company, and makes it easier.”
“The better the mover hiring process, the less decision-making needs to happen every single step of the way. And who makes the decisions? You make the decisions. When everything that happens in the company requires a decision that has to come to you? Handcuffs. You’re not going anywhere. No free time, no fun. The mover hiring process sets you free.”
“When I was still in the truck rental yard, I had such a problem with movers. I mean, part of it was, they showed up, they saw this young kid working out of his car and it was like a joke. Back then I had a Mercury Mountaineer SUV, drove down to Graebel, “Go get them.” I said. He came out with more guys than we could even fit in the car.”
“Does everybody see how this can be helpful for hiring movers, to just run them through this process? Okay. No more just placing an ad and going, “It didn’t work.” You need to get these movers because when you start to increase your sales, if you have no movers, the sales are useless.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: Who’s got problems hiring movers right now, or this summer? Okay.
First of all, we need to talk about the qualities and skills that we’re looking for, movers skills. Lumping, right? Almost anybody could do that. Right? They just have the skill to lump.
Loading; it’s a different skillset. It takes a little more experience. Packing. Assembling, disassembling, reassembling. Inventorying; I know that’s not a word, but I had to keep with the theme, right? They know how to go in and do an inventory, for storage jobs or for long distance jobs.
Padding; wrapping furniture. Estimating, that’s another skillset. If you’re given any type of flat rates or any type of binding estimates or anything like that, you need to be able to have movers that go out there and look at the inventory that you have, either on your tablet, or on your bill of lading or your sheet, whatever you’re giving them with the inventory, and before they start the job, take a look at what the body of work is and make sure it matches so that if there needs to be a revision to the job, it’s done ahead of time. But if they don’t know how to estimate, they can’t do that.
Now, if you’re just doing hourly-rated moves, you don’t need somebody with that skillset. But if you’re doing flat rates, if you’re doing binding, you need somebody with that skillset. Crating; are they able to take this chandelier down and crate it? For us, we outsource that. I don’t think I ever… In all my offices, I had one person that was good at that. But it’s a skillset. Driving, and communicating. Other than blatantly damaging stuff, the biggest customer service problems come from just pure… I forgot the word I’m looking for.
Crowd: Poor.
Louis Massaro: Poor communication. It’s like I’m trying to communicate and it’s not coming out, poor communication. I just manifested poor communication by saying that.
Those are skills, right? Those are skills. But we also have qualities, because just because they have the skills doesn’t mean you want them working for you. They’re respectful, good hygiene, right? Helpful, cooperative, team player; nobody’s sending out one-man crews, right, to do moves. So, team player. Physically capable; they don’t have to be jacked. They just have to be physically capable to move stuff. As long as they’re able-bodied they could do it, they’re physically capable. They make the cut.
Reliable; I’m not even going to ask for a show of hands, because I’m not going to waste them on something like this. How many people have movers not show up in the morning? I know it’s everybody in the room. I’ll save your shoulder. And they’re coachable. A lot of movers, they know it all. If you can’t coach them and you can’t work with them, you kind of know, you step off, and then you can’t make any corrections that you need.
So you’ve got qualities and you’ve got skills. What we’re doing right now is we’re taking something that seems so complex and so challenging and so tough, and we’re just breaking it down to a process, that once you set it up, just runs, in your company, and makes it easier. The better the process, the less decision-making needs to happen every single step of the way. And who makes the decisions? You make the decisions. When everything that happens in the company requires a decision that has to come to you? Handcuffs. You’re not going anywhere. No free time, no fun. The processes set you free.
Type one. These are the four types of movers, the four types of applicants you’re going to get. They’re experienced, they’ve got the skills and they’ve got good qualities. You know they can load, they can pack. They’re respectful, they’ve got good hygiene, they’re coachable.
Type two; inexperienced. Good qualities, but they’re eager to learn. They’ve never moved before. They’ve got good qualities: they’re physically capable, they’re respectful, they’re coachable, and they’re eager to learn.
Type three; they’re experienced, but bad qualities. They are the master mover, but as a person they’re a scumbag. Anybody got some of those, or been around? Okay. We stay with them because we’re like, oh, we need them, they know how to do it. Type four; inexperienced. They’ve got good qualities; you interview them. They’re like, “I don’t know how to move”. They seemed like a good person, but they’re like, “I don’t really want to learn how to do this.” They’re not eager to learn.
So those, as you get applicants, really, the first step is you want to determine, which bucket do they fall in? They’re one of these four. If they’re one, hire them. That’s what you want, all day. Type one, all day.
If they’re two, hire them and train them. It’s going to be very, very difficult to broaden your labor pool if you’re only looking for movers that have moving experience. It’s going to be very challenging.
What you’re going to end up with is a lot of type threes, which, you know what? Add them to your mover database. You should keep a mover database of all the applicants that ever apply for your company and anybody that’s ever worked for your company. You could do it as simple as having a spreadsheet, or you could do it in your CRM. As simple as having a spreadsheet where you have a column, they’re a driver. What type are they? They can only work weekends. This is how much money they need to get paid minimum. Maybe you don’t hire them, is what I’m getting at. People come across.
But summertime, it’s the end of the month, it’s busy. You were like, “Man, we’re turning down business.” You go in the database, which you connect to your email, you connect to text messages, and you blast out emails and texts: looking for guys for this weekend, we’ll pay at the end of the weekend; whatever your incentive is to get them to come work. When you have that database, you can treat that… Those are leads. Remember, you need leads to book moves, opportunities to book moves, but then you also have to pull this other piece together where you’ve got to get guys on a truck to go service the move. So if we’re nurturing leads that come in, let’s nurture the applicants that come in as well. Let’s keep them in a mover database.
Even if you don’t use it for the next year, until next summer. How nice would it be next summer when you’re in a jam, if you’ve got a few hundred people on a sheet that you could upload into something and text message all of them: hey, we’re looking for guys. If you can work, we’re paying $250 referral fee, call me at this number or send an email. It’s powerful, mover database.
Inexperienced, good qualities, not eager to learn? Keep looking. Don’t waste your time. Whoever’s doing this, the filtration here, it becomes very easy for them, right? You’re not telling your team or your dispatch or your ops manager, “Hey, if they’re a good guy and they got experience…” It’s too vague. Put them in one of these buckets, and then make the decision accordingly.
So then we have to mover hiring process. How does it start, how does it finish? You’ve got recruiting, application, interview, rotation. Recruiting, application, interview, rotation.
Recruiting; an employment ad, still the best way to do it. You’re going to have to place a lot of them. Somebody’s like, “I put an ad on Craigslist.” “How many?” “One.” We really need movers. Okay, try five. When you place an ad on Craigslist, you guys probably know this already, but when you place the ad and someone else places an ad, it pushes yours down and just keeps going down like that. When you’re in hiring mode and you need people, get aggressive with that. I know it costs money, but what costs more money? That, or losing jobs that you could book? Or paying for leads to book moves, to then be told by operations, no more moves. You want this thing flowing. You never want to stop booking moves, never. We’ll talk about that Sunday.
Referrals. Your mover database. People that work for you already, offer some money: if they refer someone to you, it stays for 90 days. What’s that worth to you? A hundred bucks, $500? Community outreach. Colleges, churches or wherever you worship. They’ve always got somebody there, the pastor or whoever, has got somebody that is down on their luck. “I’ll do anything, I’m willing to work. I’m a good person.” Talk to them. See who they have.
Application. So you get your recruiting going. And by the way, with recruiting, you could also do social media, you could also run ads, like on Facebook and stuff like that, and target a certain demographic. However, to me, that’s either an add-on that you add on to a strong process, or it’s a hack. It’s a dabbler tool. It’s the person that says, “No, it doesn’t work to put an ad, because I put one and nobody showed up.” Let me try this, I got to be in social media, let me try this. Not to say it’s bad, but that’s the type of thing that you add on top of an existing process just to enhance it. It doesn’t replace a real, proven process.
Have all these people go to an application on your website. So if you have a web form that is, get a free estimate type of thing, think about that. But on a page where they’re just filling out their application, on the website, it comes directly into your CRM, it comes directly into an email. This way you have that. Now if you guys have been in Moving Sales Academy and you know I’m like, no, no applications, have them call? This is different. A mover is different; you want to see the application. It’s not about how they sound on the phone, it doesn’t matter how they sound on the phone. Get the application.
Then have somebody qualify the application. You’ll try to determine which type of mover and the quadrant they are. You’re not going to be able to fully know, but you could probably eliminate some applications right off the bat and then put them in your mover database. Whether you’re hiring them or you’re not hiring them, get them in the mover database. It’s a powerful tool when you’re ready for it, which is in those moments where you’re like, “I need movers.” You send out a text, send out an email, or start calling people down the list.
My mover database started off as a piece of paper with coffee stains and fingerprints and dirt all over it, taped to the side of the dispatch desk, years ago. Right, who has that? All right, well, it’d be nice to sort, do certain things and be able to actually use some technology to make it a little bit easier. You need the mover database.
Then, interview. Call them up, do a phone interview. If they sound promising, bring them in for an in-person interview.
And then, skill evaluation. What this means is, you’ve interviewed them over the phone. You’ve brought them in, you’ve done an interview, you’ve gone through your interview questions. You’re asking them about their experience. If they’re like, “Yeah, I’m this and I’m that, and I worked here and I did that. Yeah, I could load, yeah, I could crate. Yeah, I could do all this.” Okay, cool. Interview, right.
Then you grab a chair, you grab a pad, right there on the spot in your office, so have them pad the chair. If they take the pad and throw it over the chair, and they told you they were “like an expert mover”, and they didn’t lay the pad down and then put the chair on it? You know. It doesn’t mean you don’t hire them, but now you’re going to have to train this person. There’s a difference. You have a credenza or whatever’s in the office. Right? You don’t need to bring in a whole big mock home, but put a dresser there, or even a piece of your desk; have them pad that.
What questions are they asking? Are they saying, “Do you have any tape or rubber bands? Do you want me to shrink wrap this?” Right? How are they folding it? That way you know what you’re working with, right, because some people you don’t have to waste any time training them. But other people, they’re a good person, they’re eager to work, and they’re eager to learn, but they’re also in a job interview. People lie in job interviews: they need a job. Don’t look at anybody and go, “They lie”, they’re dead to me. They’re going to steal; they’re going to be the worst person. If they were like, “Yeah, I got experience.” It’s just that they’re thinking, how hard is it, moving furniture? I’ve moved before. Right? It just puts you in a position to know what you’re working with. Do I need to get them in training or can they go right out on the truck?
Now you want to get them in the rotation. Because what’s another big concern? You hire too many movers, and how do you get them in the rotation when you have other guys that want the hours?
Well, first, assign a mover mentor. Even if you can start with one, if that one has to be you, okay, but eventually you’ll have multiple mover mentors. Instead of making them a trainer, or let’s say you don’t have a full-on training program and you don’t want to do this whole week-long thing and you’re ready to get them out there. You take one of your best guys and say, “Listen. I’d really like your help to help me bring on and mentor new movers.” Not train; when you give somebody the mentor label, it feels a little, “Oh yeah, I’m a mentor”, right? It’s different than, “I’m a trainer.” They feel a different level of significance. Now, when this new person goes with the mentor, it’s established, this is your mentor. They’re going to show you the ropes, they’re going to show you how things are done. The mentor knows what they need to show the trainee.
Now, even in the truck, on the drive to the job, the mentor is like, “This is what we do, this is how we do it”, kind of laying the groundwork. The mentee knows that they need to “pass this test”, if you will, in order to get hired on. Now, know that, when you first try, you might give somebody such a big head that they’re just like an asshole, right? They’re a mentor all of a sudden and now they’re just like, “Do this, do that. Shine my shoes.” Right? You just might have to reel them in a little bit. You start giving people a position of power that have never been in a position of power, and they might not take it gracefully. But again, don’t rule them out. Mentor them. Coach them. I built my entire business on taking people that had a certain basic skillset, and coaching them and mentoring them to keep rising up within the company. Keep rising up within the company.
Then, on-the-job training. I know some of you might disagree with this, but I’m sending someone on a job, I’m never sending an extra person. If it’s a three-man job, I’m not sending the customer four. Maybe if it’s a flat rate, maybe, but I’m not sending the customer four on an hourly-rated job and saying, “They’re in training, we’re giving them to you for free.” Doesn’t take much to lump, right? You don’t have to do a full-on training, but send three; let the trainee be one of the three, and collect for three men. Even your experienced guys break shit. You don’t not charge for them.
I know some people disagree and they’re like, no, if they’re training, I want to be… The customer doesn’t need to know it’s their first day on the job. They want people to move them, and as long as there’s somebody there that’s loading and packing and doing all the padding, you could get somebody up to speed really quick that’s eager to learn. Remember, they’re eager to learn. You didn’t just pick them up in the Home Depot parking lot, like “Hey, you want to work today? Get in.” Right?
There’s nothing wrong with that, if it comes down to it. When I first, when I was still in the truck rental yard, I had such a problem with movers. I mean, part of it was, they showed up, they saw this young kid working out of his car and it was like a joke. One of them was like, “Hey man, I know Graebel. They got all these…” Their headquarters was in Denver. “They got a whole cafeteria where all the lumpers just hang out.” “Yeah? Let’s go. Get in.” Had a Mercury Mountaineer SUV, drove down to Graebel, “Go get them.” Went inside, came out with more guys than we could even fit in the car; they were in the cargo area. I don’t know how many were in there, but if we got pulled over, it was going to look like I was smuggling people into the country. So you do what you have to do, but if you know they’re eager to learn, I would get paid while they’re on the job.
Then, you rotate out your C team, right? You want to establish an A team, a B team and a C team. You don’t have to tell them, like, “You’re a C team, you’re a B team, you’re an A team.” It’s an internal thing. Unless, you have a really good succession plan where you clearly lay out how you move from C to B to A. If you have that laid out, then I think it is good for someone to know where they stand, but they need to know, how do I move up, specifically? What do I need to do? Unless you have that, A team, B team, C team is internal.
A team, those are the guys you wish you could have them on every single job. B team? Yeah, okay. C team, you’re nervous when they go out. You’re waiting for a phone call, right? It’s like extreme measures that you’re sending them out. What you do is, you just start rotating them out. You don’t have to fire them. “No, I don’t need you today. I don’t need you.” You’ve got to get them in the rotation. I know it’s one of the toughest things to do when you’ve got… If any of you’ve ever had grown men crying to you that they need hours, who’s ever had that? It’s tough. Don’t drag somebody through the mud, but you also can’t take people with you that aren’t helping your company. Rotate out the C team.
Does everybody see how this can be helpful to our movers, to just run them through this process? Okay. No more just placing an ad and going, “It didn’t work.” You need to get these movers because we’re also going to increase your sales this weekend. No movers, the sales are useless.
