Moving Company Cash Flow and Employee Problems

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to take control of your moving company.

  • “If you’re low on cash flow and you’ve got a $75,000 employee that’s not doing what they’re supposed to do, that’s an easy target. Send him on his way. It is what it is. It’s part of business.”
  • “Sometimes you’ve got to go back and work IN your business in order to be in a position to successfully work ON your business.”
  • “Never go and work IN your business after you’ve already removed yourself, just to cover somebody, or just until you get somebody new, or until you hire somebody else. Make use of that time. Build that department out the right way… Build the processes.”
  • “Pick five to ten areas where you know you can improve. Take those, put them in order of priority. Which one will make the biggest impact in my business now? And just put them on the calendar and start chipping away one at a time.”
  • “Get the ego out of the way. Stop making excuses. Stop blaming it on other people. Nobody’s coming to rescue you. You’ve got to step up and you’ve got to take the action you need to take.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, and welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. I’ve got my main man Chris here today. What’s up, Chris?

Chris:
Hello.

Louis Massaro:
Listen, the purpose of this podcast is to help you take your moving company to that next level, whatever that is for you. This is for moving company owners. This is for anyone working for a moving company and wants to help take that business to the next level and provide value. I promise you will get practical takeaways that you could apply in your business so that you could start making more money, live a better quality of life, reduce your stress and go make it happen. We’ve been doing these new episodes where Chris is finding questions, either in my social media feed or questions that come in through support and surprising me with them on these episodes. He’s like, look, I think that the best way that you could be serving and helping people is, let me just drop some of these questions on you without you having any time to think them through. Let’s just see what comes out of it.

Chris:
We got to keep you on your toes.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. So, what do you got? A question today or?

Chris:
I do. This one I think you’ll like. Recently, we had a very long email come into our support desk. I read it and …

Louis Massaro:
It’s a customer or a client or?

Chris:
Yes. He’s just a guy who had a question.

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

Chris:
I thought I should maybe give him a call, so I did.

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

Chris:
Okay. He explained his situation. I wanted to see how we could help him. He explained the situation to me. I took some notes here. Basically, he’s got a good size moving company. He’s doing about 1.4 million. He’s having an issue with his sales manager … I’m sorry, ops manager/dispatcher. The guy’s playing dual roles there. The issue he’s having is, he doesn’t feel that the ops manager is pulling his weight and he says this because he feels like he’s paying him too much.

Louis Massaro:
How much?

Chris:
He’s paying him about $75,000 a year. He feels like the ops manager just isn’t pulling his weight. They’re having some issues. They’ve been missing some moves. There’s some issues with not having enough movers to cover the jobs and the ops manager has just been kind of dropping the ball. Aside from that, there have been some cash flow issues. He’s already in the red for his January P&Ls. He said he was about $26,000 in the red.

Louis Massaro:
For the month of January?

Chris:
For the month of January. Yeah. I wanted to just throw this situation at you and ask you what you think. How would you help this guy?

Louis Massaro:
Was the only issue that he expressed was his problem with the ops manager and then cashflow? Is that …?

Chris:
Yeah, pretty much. I think he’s having some issues with the slower months during the winter and just the general cash flow for the business. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But the ops manager’s not doing what he’s supposed to do.

Chris:
That’s a big part of it.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. Okay.

Chris:
What do you think?

Louis Massaro:
Well, obviously I don’t know enough about it. There’s a lot that leads to being $26,000 in the red in January, not just the ops manager. Who else does he have any office? Did you get into that? I’m sure you asked him.

Chris:
He’s got a small sales team, like three salespeople.

Louis Massaro:
So, it’s him, three salespeople and this ops/dispatcher?

Chris:
That’s it.

Louis Massaro:
Doing a million four.

Chris:
1.4.

Louis Massaro:
Okay. There’s not enough information to really dive into why he’s $26K in the red, but right off the bat, I could tell you that if you’ve got an ops manager/dispatcher who’s not doing what they’re supposed to do and they’re making $75K and you’re losing $26,000 a month, it’s time to make some massive changes. The first thing I would do is I would … Listen, it’s not about, you don’t have the money, cut people, but it is about if the guy’s not the right fit and you’re bleeding out money, get rid of him.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Right? It’s a much harder decision when somebody who’s really good and you’re having cash flow issues and you’re concerned what you should do, but if he’s clearly not the right fit, get that money back. Meaning like, cut that salary and go do it yourself. At a million four, go back into the business. There’s a reason that the ops manager’s not doing what the ops manager is supposed to do. It sounds to me like he’s probably just a dispatcher. A lot of people will call a dispatcher an ops manager, but it sounds to me like that’s probably what he is. I don’t know. $75,000, it’s more ops manager pay.

Chris:
Yeah. Well, a lot of those issues were coming from scheduling issues, movers, not having enough movers, jobs getting missed, things like that.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. There’s a bigger issue here at hand. Let’s just say you’ve got some stuff out of control, right? Right now what I would do … here’s the questions that I would want to guide him through to get more information. I would want to understand what it is that the ops manager is not doing, what it is he’s asked him to do that he’s just blatantly not getting done. The best thing you could do in that situation, it’s like, look, if you’re low on cash flow and you’ve got a $75,000 employee that’s not doing what they’re supposed to do, that’s an easy target. Send him on his way. It is what it is. It’s part of business. Send him on his way and go back and sit in that dispatch seat yourself as the owner of the company, and then this time you do it right.

Louis Massaro:
This time you go in, and while you’re sitting in that seat … Look, we talk about you want to work on your business and not in your business, right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
We say that all the time, but sometimes you’ve got to go back and work in your business in order to be in a position to successfully work on your business. I remember, man, what year was it? I had five locations already. I had the call center going. I had stepped into this moving CEO role that we talk about where I was running the business off of meetings and numbers and block time on my calendar. We had a dispatcher in that same location in that South Florida office that was just the same kind of situation. Wasn’t pulling his weight, wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do, had systems, had processes, but just was just … I don’t know, had personal issues. I don’t know what was causing him not to do what he was supposed to do, but it came to the point I was like, you know what? Enough’s enough. He’s got to go.

Louis Massaro:
Luckily, I was in a position at that point where I wasn’t tied to any specific function of the business. I had kind of stepped into a role, the moving CEO role, right?

Chris:
So you weren’t involved in the day-to-day …

Louis Massaro:
The day-to-day could run without me. Everything I was working on projects and building the business and proving things, and I was like, you know what? And I love to dispatch.

Chris:
Really?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. When I first started it was like, man, to sit and have like 50 jobs on the calendar for the day and try to get them all service, it was …

Chris:
That’s kind of fun.

Louis Massaro:
It’s so fun.

Chris:
That’s where all the action is.

Louis Massaro:
And it’s so satisfying to be able to have this schedule that feels like, man, how are we going to get this done and then pull it all together? I enjoyed. I hadn’t done in a long time. So I said, you know what? I’m going to fire him and I’m going to personally go do it. This time I’m going to go in and I’m going to totally make sure that … I’m going to refine tune it. The processes, maybe they were outdated a little bit, maybe they needed to be tightened up, maybe they needed me to come in and look at it and go, “There’s gotta be a better way. There’s gotta be a better way.” So I did it in the middle of the summer and it was two or three full months that I dispatched while running the call center while running for other locations. I went back in and I tightened that up so much that the next guy that came in, I set him up for success.

Louis Massaro:
Not too long ago, I was telling this to a private client and he went and did the same thing. He went in and said, “You know what? I’m sick of this shit. I’m going to go in and I’m just going to clean house and do it myself.” He had been so far removed. You know who I’m talking about. He’s got the franchises.

Chris:
I’m pretty I know who you’re talking about. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So, he went in and cleaned house, sent me a picture of the desk, and was like before and after, and it was like a total disgusting, just gross looking desk, unorganized as could be, and then a nice clean, methodical desk. And he’s like, Look, I did it. It’s on point. I’m training somebody new now and it’s night and day.” The point I’m making is, for this guy, and we won’t say … don’t say his name, whoever he is.

Chris:
No, no, we’ll respect his privacy. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. So, you got to go back in, you got to get in that driver’s seat. There’s a reason you’re losing $26,000 a month and it’s not because your operations manager is not listening to you.

Chris:
Is that a step backwards? Should an owner feel bad about doing that?

Louis Massaro:
No, absolutely not. I think that a lot of times we see company owners that need to make these kind of moves, right? This is probably way overdue, right? The $26,000 in the red on his P&L in January, is that right?

Chris:
That’s what it was. $26K, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
That didn’t happen overnight. There’s a longer issue here of just, probably if I had to guess, things are just not being run tight. So you’ve got somebody making too much money. Okay, you’ve got a department that’s not performing the way it’s supposed to. You’re a smaller company. $1.4, it’s a good size company, but it’s not a huge company where you’re so far removed from the day-to-day. I would fire the guy and go in there and set it up right this time. Go in there and say, what can be done better? How can this be done better? And start laying out processes. if you’re ever going to take … it’s not a step back at all. It’s like, let me go do what’s going to make the biggest impact in my business, and what’s going to make the biggest impact in the business is not just hiring a replacement and bring in that replacement to work with a disorganized department, is what it sounds like. Let’s just call it what it is.

Louis Massaro:
We could put the blame on the ops manager, but part of that might be the ops manager and part of it might be lack of direction as well. Let’s not bring somebody else in to then deal with that mess. Let’s go in and take the time to build that department out the right way. While we’re there, build the processes. I keep saying that because never go and work in your business after you’ve already removed yourself just to cover somebody or just until I get somebody new or until we hire somebody else. Make use of that time.

Chris:
It’s an opportunity.

Louis Massaro:
It’s an opportunity because the only way you can really create a process is by doing it.

Chris:
That’s true. How would you know?

Louis Massaro:
You can’t sit from afar and go, okay, I’m going to … you should do this, this, this, and this. You could start that way, but then it has to be tested to see if it works correctly. That would be the first thing I do. Second thing I would do is I would look at these three salespeople and see how they’re performing. I would look at the three salespeople. I would pick a few calls from each of them to listen to. Hopefully, he’s got a script. Hopefully, there’s some structure there, but he’s got to listen to their calls and see what it is they’re saying. Look for their closing techniques. He might not know what to look for. I think there’s enough free videos on my website.

Chris:
LouisMassaro.com. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, and on this podcast that nobody even has to buy anything to get some little basic tips on things to look for. But you’ve got to make sure your booking percentage is up, because your $26,000 in the hole, it’s because your labor cost is too high, meaning you’re not charging enough for your moves. Let’s say your average move is $1,000 and you’re paying out $400, you’re paying out 40% of every move in labor, it’s either you’re paying your movers too much or you’re not charging enough for your moves. Most times it’s that you’re not charging enough for your moves. Man, sales solves so much. You get the sales process dialed in, it solves so much. You got these three people. If these three people are burning through leads, not following up with leads …

Chris:
You’re losing money.

Louis Massaro:
… not closing at a higher percentage, if he doesn’t know his marketing ROI to understand which lead sources are actually profitable. The $26,000 is going somewhere. The money’s coming in the top. Did you get a gross number for January or no? You just know 1.4 for the year?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
He’s probably … I don’t know. I’d say he’s probably maybe $80,000 or something for January, maybe even less. I don’t know. To be …

Chris:
But just bleeding.

Louis Massaro:
Just bleeding.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
There’s a bigger issue and something led up to that, and we don’t know if his books are accurate either. That $26,000 could be stuff from the previous month that was recorded on this month. He could have like double rent payments on his books if it’s not done right based on just how it’s being recorded. Regardless of all that, we don’t have enough information to fully give this guy a prescription on what to do, but we’ll talk in general, right?

Chris:
Okay.

Louis Massaro:
He’s got to get rid of the sales manager. He’s got to go in and tighten up the sales process. Listen to the calls of each rep, see where there’s opportunities that they’re missing. You want to make sure that they’re going for the sale. You want to make sure that if a customer has any type of, “Hey, I need to check around or whatever,” they don’t just say, “Okay, great. I’ll call you back.” You need to make sure they’re capturing lead data. Somebody calls in for a quote, they’re putting that information into your system. Those are your leads that you’re paying for. I could almost guarantee you that his sales department is needing a revamp.

Chris:
And you think he should raise the rates?

Louis Massaro:
No, I’m not saying he … I don’t know what he should do. I don’t have enough information to really … I don’t want him to listen, “Oh, that’s me,” and go, “This is what I should do.” I’m saying, if anyone’s struggling with cash flow, there’s a bigger issue at hand. You’re either paying too high of labor. Which again, I’m repeating this because I just want … you’re paying too high in labor percentage. Not that your movers are getting too much, you just might not be charging enough. There’s two ways to lower your labor percentage, and it’s either you lower what you’re paying your movers or you increase your price.

Chris:
So it’s more of like a per-job basis than overall.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, overall. well, revenue, I do it on a weekly basis. If you brought in $100,000 in a week, you paid out $25,000 in payroll, it’s 25%. Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Usually, lowering your movers’ pay isn’t going to result in anything good.

Chris:
They won’t be happy about that.

Louis Massaro:
You might have a little mutiny on your hands. So you need to raise the prices, but in order to raise the prices, you’ve got to be able to have a strong sales process. There’s a lot to that. You could go look for all the sales material on my site or this podcast and start listening to that, or you’ve got office staff that’s getting paid too much. For $75,000 in $1.4 million company, you should have been kind of running the day to day of this business.

Chris:
Yeah. He does do a lot of day-to-day stuff. Now, as someone who …

Louis Massaro:
Day-to-day as in like not just operations, not just dispatch because if he doesn’t have a dispatcher, this operations’ manager is probably spending most of his time dispatching trucks, dealing with movers in the morning, dealing with the customers during the day, dealing with the movers when they come back. He’s not running the whole business, I would imagine if there’s not another dispatcher there.

Chris:
For someone who decides, okay, I’m going to go back into the business and I’m going to wear this hat, how long does it take to revamp that position and get everything where you want it to be?

Louis Massaro:
It all depends. You might open up a real Pandora’s box.

Chris:
You might discover some secrets. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. These types of things happen. To me, I see it happen to people, and even with me, in situations where like, you know you should have handled this a long time ago, you know you should have dealt with it a long time ago and you just kind of let it linger to the point where you’re $26,000 in the hole in a month, to the point that the ops manager’s not listening to you and doing the things that you need … You should have handled that a long time ago. The minute you realized he wasn’t the right fit, you should’ve gotten rid of him.

Chris:
It’s just been festering there for a while.

Louis Massaro:
It’s just been festering.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I think that it could take, listen, it could take a few weeks or it could take a few months. The key is not to put yourself … You go in on a mission. Don’t take this, “Ah, honey, you won’t believe it. I’ve got to dispatch trucks again.” Be excited about it. Be like, “I’m going to turn this shit around. I’m going to fix this now.”

Chris:
Right. It’s time.

Louis Massaro:
It’s time. Don’t be afraid of … a lot of times people will be afraid of, “Oh man, my movers are going to …” You feel like you’ve got to be perfect because you’re the owner.

Chris:
Yeah. Everybody’s looking.

Louis Massaro:
Everybody’s looking. The reality is you can call on the people around you for help. You could talk to your movers, “Hey, help me out. How was he doing this before?” That type of stuff. You don’t have to know everything. You just have to be able to get the access to know everything.

Chris:
Let’s just say like in this particular situation, maybe instead he was paying the guy a reasonable salary, but there were still some issues, and he decides as the owner, you know what? I don’t want to get rid of this guy, but I do want to revamp the position. How do you do that without taking over the position yourself?

Louis Massaro:
First of all, you want to always look at … the problems come in one of two ways, right? It’s the people or it’s the process. Every problem you’re having in your business is either the people or the process or the person and the particular process. I always would look at the process first instead of blaming the person. It’s easy to blame the person. The reality is, did you take the time to lay out exactly what they’re supposed to do or did you think that they’re going to read your mind and just do a good job? Work hard, do a good job, hire movers and they’re supposed to figure out how to do it. So, you could go work along … Let’s say, like you said, he’s okay. It’s not that he’s not listening and he wants to keep him around, he just wants to revamp the department.

Louis Massaro:
Go into that department for two weeks. If you’re listening and you have any department sales, your warehouse, storage, movers on the job, doesn’t matter. You go into that department for two weeks and that’s all you do is spend time in there saying there’s got to be a better way, there’s got to be a way to fix all this that’s going on and develop processes that will make it run smooth. Like, oh, wow, we’re dropping the ball here, we’re dropping the ball there. How can we fix that? That’s just a communication issue. The salesperson’s not putting in the proper notes into the CRM, well, the dispatcher’s not able to see exactly what needs to happen on that job. So how is he supposed to tell the movers what to bring? And you follow it. You see what I’m saying?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You just start to identify what the root cause of the issue is. You don’t go in there and just start putting bandaids on a bunch of stuff. You look for the root cause and know that this will be one of the most transformative things you could do for your business. I’ve advised many people to go do this in different departments. You’re having an issue? Good. Go spend the next two weeks in that department and don’t do anything else.

Chris:
How long did you run dispatch?

Louis Massaro:
It was two or three months. I forget. It was at least two months, but it was the middle of summer.

Chris:
Okay.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I was kind of having fun.

Chris:
And you found somebody to fill the position. You had all the processes laid out for them, so they walked in and were able to be successful right off the bat. Then, what differences did that make in the company? Did you see …?

Louis Massaro:
Oh, it’s huge. There’s my story and then there’s the stories of our clients. I think of so many scenarios where myself or someone else went into a department, and you’re like, “I’m going to fix this department.” Maybe they fixed that and that was the end of it or they fixed that and then they realized that, oh, this other area needs some help.

Chris:
You discovered somewhere else that …

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, it’s like if you go in and remodel a house, you’re like, “Oh, we’re going to get this house. We’ll just remodel the kitchen and the bathrooms,” and then all of a sudden, they look so fantastic, you’re like, “Man, we’ve got to redo the whole house.” That happened to me before. The thing is, it starts you on this path where it seems scary. You don’t want to jump in right away. Everybody resists it. I resisted it. The people that I give this advice to resist it. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to go back to getting on a truck. They don’t want to go back sitting in a dispatch seat and get to the office at 6:30 in the morning. They don’t want to go back to calling leads and having to do all that stuff.

Louis Massaro:
But you’ve got to look at what’s beyond that. It’s either you’re going to always struggle to figure out the same thing over and over and over, or you just take the time right now to go in and not go in with bandaids, but go in and perform surgery, fix that area, and you know what? If that new well-performing area starts to highlight another area that seemed okay before, but now that this one’s so good, this one doesn’t seem as good anymore, great. Go spend a couple of weeks there and work on that. Focus your attention on what’s going to make the biggest impact in your business, but make sure that as you’re doing it, you’re leaving processes behind you, you’re leaving role descriptions behind you.

Louis Massaro:
If he’s sitting in the chair of dispatch and doing that for a few weeks, he needs to be also working on the role description. What is it that I want a dispatcher to do exactly?

Chris:
Laying it out.

Louis Massaro:
Not their processes, because processes and role description are different. Role description’s like, I want them to dispatch the trucks every morning by 6:30 AM. I want them to clock out the crews. They’re writing out a description of what they would do. And then, morning dispatch in and of itself would have its own process. Clocking out the crews would have its own process, but what is it I want from this individual? Then when you go to hire that person, you know exactly what you’re looking for. Instead of just hiring someone where you’re like, “Oh, they seem like a good person,” you’re like, “No, this is exactly what I need.” It becomes essentially also your job description and what you’re able to talk to somebody about with what you’re looking for in the position where … I know from my early days and I know from working with people, a lot of times you’ll sit down to hire somebody and you’re like, “Yeah, we’re looking for somebody. This is kind of what you do and this is kind of what you do and here’s what’s going on.”

Chris:
Sit and watch this guy for a while.

Louis Massaro:
Sit and watch him and you’ll kind of see, and that’s it. If you could be specific, this stuff changes your business. The point I want to make is don’t be afraid to go back into your business. Don’t feel like you’re taking a step back to be able to do it. For me, early on, I opened multiple locations and then I had issues. The guy who was running my main location just wasn’t doing a great job. So, I had to go-

Chris:
And you’re somewhere over here.

Louis Massaro:
Well, I’m somewhere over here, so I had to then go over there and do the same thing. Now that I think about it, I actually had to go back into dispatch several times while I was growing all the locations. I’d have to go and sit at that office for a few weeks to a month. This is early on before I had the set processes that were uniform across the locations. It was a struggle to refigure it out, bring somebody in, retrain them during this whole process of flying back and forth to locations, dealing with this. This is when I’m like, no, no, it’s got to be uniform.

Chris:
Oh, your plate’s spinning. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, it’s got to be uniform across the board. Everybody’s got to do it the same way or I can’t tell if they’re doing it right.

Chris:
Yeah. That’s cool. For somebody who has, let’s say they’ve gone into the business, they’ve re-establish the roles, the processes for that position, they’ve cleaned it up. They’ve cleaned up the mess. They feel confident. They hire somebody else, bring them in and they step away to go back to working on the business.

Louis Massaro:
You’ll be a different person. That process will make you a different person. All the fear, uncertainty and insecurity that you feel in your business is because of your lack of control of what’s going on. When you go back in and you get that control again, you got your hands on it, you’ve got your hands on the steering wheel, like you’ve got it, and then you design it in a way with your current level of knowledge, experience and ability to implement and with this information and then you step away, you’re stepping away knowing that person has a role description, they’ve got processes to do what they need to do. I have ways for checks and balances to know what’s going on. I’ve got time set up to meet with them to make sure that our agenda’s where it needs to be and we’re moving things along. I know my numbers and metrics and all that. You’re a different person. You know what I mean? You come out of it stronger.

Chris:
Yeah. The confidence is there.

Louis Massaro:
The confidence is there. Hopefully, you learn like, okay, I can’t just move so quickly in trying to grow that I sacrifice setting things up the right way in the foundation so that I have something to actually grow on and stack on instead of doing it on quicksand. I think, if you’re in this position, you’re thinking about, okay, I’ve got to go back into the business, or you’re having cash flow issues. You’ve got to look around too and say like, everybody that I’ve got on salary, are they holding their weight? Are they worth that? We’ll see a lot of times, people will have way too much office staff, what do you have going on?

Louis Massaro:
The reason somebody ends up with all that office staff is because of inefficiencies within their processes. If you’re able to go in there and streamline all that and go, “Well, this takes 10 steps. How could we just do it in two steps? Why does all this work have to be done by the bookkeeper when the CRM could just integrate directly with QuickBooks and that eliminates the need for that?” So you start to find all these areas where you could make it more efficient and now you don’t need all these people, which is another cause of why somebody would be $26,000 in the red is that their fixed payroll is way too high.

Chris:
That’s what I was going to ask you, is if, let’s say things are going well and you’re not having issues, but you know there are probably some inefficiencies, there are probably some unnecessary steps and tasks going on within the company. Would you recommend an owner step away from the business to go work on that when things are going well or should they just wait until there’s an issue?

Louis Massaro:
I would say that if you’re looking to optimize your business and you know that you could be doing better in certain areas, analyze what those are, and if you’re unsure, what I used to love to do is I used to like to go sit in a department for a few days or a week.

Chris:
Regularly?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. When I felt that there was something there that could be improved, and I would just sit there and take notes and not say anything to anybody. So I’m just going to hang out [inaudible 00:31:24] like customer service or sales or dispatch and just kind of see how things went. I would never, ever, ever interfere at the moment. If I saw the dispatcher to doing something that was just wrong, I wouldn’t say anything at the moment.

Chris:
You wait.

Louis Massaro:
I’d wait because otherwise now he’s on eggshells and it just creates … and I want him to do his normal thing. I don’t want him to be on his best behavior because I’m there. So I wait and I just make notes and I look for areas that can be optimized. We talk about gaining freedom and be able to work … That’s working on your business. That’s not working in your business. Working in your business would be to be the dispatcher, but to go sit in a department and observe it for ways that you can make it better so your customers get better service and you make more money, that’s working on your business. When you identify like, I’m sure if you’re listening right now, get out a pen, get out a piece of paper, just write down off the top of your head. I bet you you’ve got five to 10 areas where you know you could improve right now.

Louis Massaro:
Five to 10 areas where you know you can improve. Take those, put them in order of priority, which one will make the biggest impact in my business now and just put them on the calendar and start chipping away one at a time.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
Is there a way for an owner to … when they’re in that position, is there a way for them to not let the other responsibilities they have or for them to continue working on growing the business and scaling at the same time or should they just put that on hold and just focus on doing the dispatch for the next two weeks and that’s it?

Louis Massaro:
It depends. A lot of people are trying to scale before they have the foundation under control, which is …

Chris:
Bad idea.

Louis Massaro:
It’s such a bad idea. I did it. The only reason I was able to recover from it is because I was a young kid that didn’t have any responsibilities as far as family or kids or anything like that and I could work all these hours and fly all these places to keep it all under control. But if you start to scale and grow, meaning like open another location or open another division or something like that, when your foundation isn’t on point, you’re always going to end up back in that dispatch seat. You’re always going to end up back on that sales floor.

Louis Massaro:
You’re always going to end up back dealing with your long-distance trucks. You got to be able to look back and go, okay, let me look at the history of my … let’s say you’ve been in business 10 years. How many times did I have to go back to the drawing board? Go back to the drawing board. I was like, and now I got a good ops manager, I got a good sales manager. Oh, it’s cool right now for a few months.

Chris:
Take a break.

Louis Massaro:
Then something happens and then you’re back there. If you take the time, like for me, if young me was listening to this, I’d feel like it was some old dude giving me advice like, “Slow down.” And it’s not that. You can’t build if you don’t have a foundation. You’ve got to take the key areas. You’ve got to make sure you’re generating leads, booking moves, servicing moves, making sure your customers are happy and giving you five-star reviews, and then your accounting, your reports and all that. You’ve got to make sure that that stuff is on point. Once it’s on point, you could build on that. You could build on that, and you’ve got to make sure that your team is pulling their weight, and sometimes we overreach. Sometimes we overstep. Sometimes we hire a big position or we open another location or we get into another division.

Louis Massaro:
We started doing long-distance or we start doing commercial, we get distracted. If you find yourself in a place where you’ve kind of overreached and that one little overreach is causing issues everywhere else, don’t be afraid to pull back on that. Don’t be afraid to let people go. Don’t be afraid if you open an office three years ago and it’s doing nothing but losing money and it’s taking your time and energy away from your breadwinner, your main office. It’s either you’ve got to take enough massive action to go and get that other office under control and profitable now without just assuming that it’ll get profitable, or shut it down and focus on where you make money. We’ve only got so much individual bandwidth and energy.

Louis Massaro:
If you’re being diverted in all these nonproductive ventures or with these non-productive employees, you could streamline, make it easier on yourself and make more money.

Chris:
You’re not failing.

Louis Massaro:
You’re not failing.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You’re not failing.

Chris:
There’s no shame in getting your focus.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. There’s no shame in that. It’s a shame that people will be so afraid to “fail,” that they’ll keep pursuing the wrong thing.

Chris:
What do you mean?

Louis Massaro:
Let’s just say they’ve got … I don’t know. I’ve seen people where they’re so excited to get into military or they’re so excited to get into commercial or they’re so excited to get in the long-distance, and they do it and it’s beyond their current bandwidth of what they can really handle. They underestimated what it was going to take to really take that on and own that. They figured A, I own a moving company. No problem. I could do that too or I could do that too, or opening another office and realize that, no, no, no, no. This thing’s like a whole monster in and of itself. I see it where they’ll let it drag the good part of their company down and drag their energy down.

Louis Massaro:
So you’ve got to be able to look and say, “You know what? This is a division that’s not working. I miscalculated this.” I’m not saying just give up because it’s hard at first. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is you’ve done everything, you’ve taken the action you needed to take. You looked at it and said, “How do we fix this?” And you went and took that action, still not …

Chris:
Still didn’t work.

Louis Massaro:
Still doesn’t work. Meanwhile, other areas are slipping. Your main business where your money’s coming is slipping, your home life, slipping, your health, slipping. But somebody won’t cut off that division and say, “You know what? Let’s go back and let’s just do local moves,” for example. “Let’s just stick with that for now and regroup,” because they’re afraid of being a failure to all these imaginary people they think are watching and caring. Listen, I could say that because I used to feel that way. You know what I mean? I’ve gone through it and I’ve grown and I’ve evolved so I know that nobody’s watching, nobody cares. If there’s an ankle weight that’s holding you back, that’s just not productive, cut it off and focus on the stuff that works and keep it simple. There’s no badge of honor for going down with that sinking ship.

Chris:
Yeah. There’s no shame in admitting that you may have bit off more than you can chew.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
That’s probably a sign of business maturity in that situation when you’re able to admit that to yourself.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, absolutely. You said it perfect, to be able to realize that you bit off more than you could chew, and that’s a consequence of being a go-getter. Sometimes that happens.

Chris:
It’s going to happen.

Louis Massaro:
You know what I mean? If you’re aggressive and you go after things, you may end up in a position where you bite off more than you could chew, but there’s a difference between, hey, I bit off more than I could chew, so for the next few months I’m going to have to make all these adjustments to handle this, and I bit off more than I could chew and now I’m just going to drag myself through the mud and suffer for the next three years.

Chris:
It’s better to just stop the bleeding.

Louis Massaro:
you got to just face facts and have zero attachment to it as a failure.

Chris:
Well, part of that, stepping away or closing down a division that wasn’t working or whatever, inevitably you’re probably gonna have to fire somebody. Right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
That’s never easy.

Louis Massaro:
No.

Chris:
How do you fire somebody? Is there a way to do it?

Louis Massaro:
Listen, the reality is you just have to do it. You just have to do it and you have to go into it knowing that that’s what you’re doing. That your decision is made. There’s many reasons for firing somebody. We’ll do in a whole nother episode on that. There’s many reasons. That you could just not afford them anymore. They’re not the right fit. They blatantly did something that violates company policy. There’s different ways of handling, but the reality is, it’s part of being a business owner. You want to be a business owner, this is the stuff that comes with it. It’s harder to be a business owner than it is to be an employee. There’s a lot of risk and there’s a lot of reward, and there’s a lot of stuff that you have to do and responsibility that you have to take, and you’ve got to be able to accept that and own it and that’s just part of it.

Louis Massaro:
The reality is, we’ll do another episode on it, but if you’ve got to do it, you just have to do it. You’re not doing anybody any favors. If you knew you needed to let somebody go six months ago and you’ve kept them all this time, you’re not helping them. They need to move on. The struggle you have as a business owner and those decisions, and when you stay up late at night like, aw man, they got a family, it’s going to be hard on them. When I brought them in, I told them that there’s unlimited potential here for them. I’ve got to let him go, but he’s such a good guy or such a good girl. You know what? That’s the stress you deal with as a business owner and them saying, “Oh, shit. I just got fired. I need to now go find something else. How am I going to take care of my family?” That’s the stress that an employee deals with.

Louis Massaro:
It’s just part of business. It’s part of how things work. They’ll be okay, they’ll find something else. It’s not the end of the world. You’ve got to be able to tell yourself to do that and you’ve got to really look and say, is this person in this position and what they do hurting me or helping me? Look at it overall, not like, well, they do some things that help. No, no, no, no. The money you’re spending, that needs to be an investment in the value that they bring to the company. If the money you spend, if they don’t bring that value and then some, then there needs to be an adjustment or they need to go.

Chris:
It’s time to go.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. As far as this guy’s concerned, when was this, by the way?

Chris:
Last week.

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
All right. Yeah, I’d love to know more and be able to dive in and give him a direct answer, but overall, that’s what it comes down to. You’ve got cash flow issues, it didn’t just happen. You’ve got to know that December, January, February, it could happen in the moving business. There could be a dip. What you want to do is you want to learn from that. If you’re in a position where you’re struggling with cash flow right now, you’ll get through it. You’ll be okay. Maybe you’ve got to fire some people, maybe you’ve got to sell some trucks. Maybe you’ve got to cut off an unproductive money-losing division. Don’t be afraid to take the massive action to save yourself now. But then, when you’re out of it, don’t forget what happened.

Louis Massaro:
Don’t forget what you went through when summer comes and money’s flying from the ceiling and you’re throwing it up in the air like Scrooge McDuck. You need to remember that and make sure that you put some money away for the offseason. It’s the reality of the business. You’ve got to strategically plan for it and know what’s coming. It all comes back to the basics. I know it sounds like, okay Louis, that’s easy to say, but you’ve got to know your numbers. You’ve got to know where you’re at. Every day you’ve got to just say, you know what? Where do I need to go? What could I do to get myself there? It’s so easy to fall into a dark place and just feel down and out and depressed.

Louis Massaro:
I went through this in the recession. I was juggling money between six offices trying to keep everything afloat. When everything just came crashing, I had way too much money I was spending in yellow pages and I had to deal with this and felt like the whole business was just collapsing on my head. It put me into a very deep depression.

Chris:
Really?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I understand what it’s like to be there and it’s not like, hey, just save some money and you’ll be okay. When you’re there, you don’t want to hear that. When you’re going through it, that’s not helpful. You just have to know that all you could do is the best you could do and make sure that you’re doing the best you could do. Make sure that each day you’re taking good action. Whatever you got to do to snap yourself out of it and make it happen. That’s the only way I got myself out of the mess, was every day I was taking action, taking action, taking action. At first, it didn’t feel like I was making a dent in the whole thing, but I was chipping away, chipping away, reducing expenses, making more money here, becoming more efficient there.

Louis Massaro:
Just consistently making moves, and at the same time, putting things in place so that it would never happen again. So, it’s like if you know you’re at rock bottom, there’s only one way to go, which is up. You just have to literally go and every action you take on a daily basis needs to be leading you in that direction. You can’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself. You can’t talk about how it’s the time of year, it’s the economy, it’s my market, it’s my movers. It’s none of that. Where you’re at today is because of previous actions. I don’t say that to make you feel bad about it. I say it because you’ve got to get real with yourself. You know what I mean?

Louis Massaro:
I had to look myself in the mirror and be like, all right, enough it is. You got to step up, put your big boy pants on and do what you need to do, enough whining about this, you put yourself here, you opened up all these offices, you were overextended in this stuff, now get yourself out of it. You could do it, and then once you do it, once … I almost feel like … Everybody goes through it at some level. Everybody has those hard times. Having them over and over and over again is strictly due to the lack of commitment and decision to say like, “This isn’t going to happen again. Let me get this in order. Let me do it right this time.”

Louis Massaro:
If you’re down right now, if you’re just … Listen, you don’t have to be going through a depression. You could just be having a bad month financially. You just have to know it’s time to really get serious about it. For me, I didn’t get serious about it until that happened. I didn’t really start diving in on my numbers, diving in on my processes, all that until I had to go through those hard times because before that, I was making so much money, I was like, whatever. My accountant would be like, “You have to review your P&Ls.” “Yeah. Okay, whatever. Here they are. You review them. I got money. I’m good.”

Louis Massaro:
Listen, if this is helpful, if this information is helping you right now, listen, go back, listen to all … go back to the beginning of this podcast and listen to every single one of them. If you get tips, great. If you get inspiration, great. If you help shake off some of the fear and the uncertainty, great. You’ve got to get little bits and pieces. As you rebuild your business, you’ve got to realize that you’ve got fear of uncertainty. What will happen? I get it. What’s going to happen with my family? What’s going to happen with my business? What’s going to happen if I can’t pay these bills? What’s going to happen if I can’t pay my employees? All that stuff.

Chris:
Yeah, it can be scary.

Louis Massaro:
It could be scary, but you got to know that you could get through it. You can’t sit around and wallow in it. You’ve got to take action. Literally, if taking action means going back and spending … turn Netflix off. Listen to all of these episodes. If there’s other stuff out there, great. It’s not about that, but I know what I have to be able to help you with and it’s there, free. Go to the website, watch all those videos, go to YouTube, watch all those videos and do what you need to do to get yourself in a position where you’ll just say like, “Never again, this isn’t going to happen again.”

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
That’s it.

Chris:
That’s great. I think a lot of people are going to find that helpful.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. Listen, it happens to everybody. The same way that I give these pep talks, I give those to myself. I have bad days. I have a bad few days. I don’t usually let it go past a few days, but you’ve got to keep yourself on point. That’s it. Then you’ve got to be able to be real and go, yeah, I’m in this position today because I wasn’t really that on point before.

Chris:
Get the ego out of the way.

Louis Massaro:
Get the ego out of the way. Stop making excuses. Stop blaming it on other people. Nobody’s coming to rescue you. You’ve got to step up and you’ve got to take the action you need to take.

Chris:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Good, well …

Louis Massaro:
Listen, if you guys liked this episode, if it was helpful, do me a favor. Go on Instagram and take a snapshot of you watching this, you listening to this, DM it to me. I just want to know that you got some value out of it. Let me know what points, in particular, were helpful and what you’re going to apply and what you’re going to commit to. I love seeing that stuff. It’s not just about me putting information out there. I want to see the information applied. I want to see it help you. Again, profit in your business and also thrive in your life. You’ve got to have both. You’ve got to constantly be raising up both.

Louis Massaro:
Until I see you next time, go out there, profit in your business, thrive in your life. If you’ve got any other questions, send them to me at Louis Massaro on Instagram. All my social media is @Louis Massaro and we’ll try to get it in on an episode for you. We’ll see you next time.

Build A Moving Company Sales Machine

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SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to build a ”Moving Sales Machine” in your moving company.

  • “Lead Management” Make sure that when a lead comes in (phone call lead, web lead, third-party provider lead, referral, etc.) that you’ve got your processes in place to manage them.
  • “Sales Framework” This is setting up your sales scripts and establishing when you are going to go do an onsite, versus when are you going to do an estimate over the phone.
  • “Sales Acceleration” For every single objection that the customer has as to why they’re not ready to move now (why your price might be too high, why they need to speak to their husband, etc.) …how to get them to book their move now.
  • “Sales Control” Someone needs to wear the sales manager’s hat to ensure that the systems are running, things are smooth, nobody’s missing anything they shouldn’t miss, and the deals are consistently being closed.
  • “Power Team” List out all the steps that you’re going to take when hiring, from placing an ad, to doing a phone interview, to doing an in-person interview, to checking their references to… all the stuff that you’re going to do to hire your sales team.
  • “Move Multiplier” It’s taking all these moves that you booked and getting a review from this customer, getting repeat business from this customer, and getting a referral from this customer. Then upselling additional services that those customers are already in need of to increase your profit per job.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend. It’s Louis Massaro, 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. Clients will often come to me because they want to create a consistent, predictable money-making machine with their moving company, and the way that they do that is with sales. And they’re just frustrated because they don’t have the consistency of jobs being booked the way that they want. They’re doing all the marketing. They’ve got the salespeople there, but they just can’t seem to keep the trucks rolling on a consistent basis. They’re busy in the summer. They’re busy at the end of the month. They’re busy on the weekend. But then there’s just these gaps of inconsistency. So they’ve got everything they need, but it’s like, “How do I fill up the schedule? How do I make more money in my business and make sure that I’m more profitable?”

And the way that you do that is by building a sales machine for your business, period. This is the number one thing. If you want to make more money in your moving company, you need to build a sales machine. People will ask me a lot like, “Louis, how did you build a $20 million business?” And when I think about it, it’s sales. From day one, it was sell, sell, sell. That was me by myself in a truck rental yard with my Nextel walkie-talkie/flip phone and driving around booking moves, all the way to having my call center with 60 plus sales reps on the phone booking moves for all my offices. It was sales, sales, sales.

No matter what business you’re in, all businesses require strong sales in order to thrive. It’s not enough just to go out and do good moves. It’s not enough. You’ve got to have the sales, and it doesn’t have to be that hard. Alumni of our Moving Sales Academy program, I mean, I get testimonial videos on a daily basis or emails from them telling me the results that they’ve seen, and it’s all because they implemented a sales machine. They just put the steps in place one at a time and put it all together.

And it just turns your whole business around. All of the stuff that you could be struggling with, even finding quality movers. A lot of people struggle with finding quality movers. Well, it’s hard to go out and find movers if you don’t have the work for them. If you’ve ever experienced, when you do put an ad, and you do get movers in the door, but then you’re like, “Okay, well we don’t have enough moves to get them all in the rotation.” Booking the moves and then getting the help helps to really bring that all into balance.

So it’s crucial to have a sales machine in your business in this modern-day of the moving business. I mean, it’s really easier than ever with the way you can access leads, the way that you can access all the marketing, the way that you can network online and through social media, to be able to generate the opportunities. But once you get those opportunities, once you get those leads, once you get those phone calls, what happens from there? And what happens from there really is what makes the difference between the companies that are doing okay and the companies that are thriving and crushing it and making a lot of money.

So we know you need to build a sales machine. How do you go about doing that? And you do it in six steps. So the first step in order to create your sales machine for your moving business, and I don’t care what level you’re at, if you’re just starting out, you need to do this. If you’ve got 10 locations, if you’re doing $15 million a year, you need to do this. First thing you need to take care of is lead management. You need to make sure that when a lead comes in, phone call lead, web lead, third-party provider lead, referral, anything, that you’ve got your processes in place to manage that, that you get it loaded into your CRM so that you have that lead capture so that you could actually do follow-up. You can actually reach out to that customer. You could call them. You could leave a message. You can email. You can text. You can mark it for follow-up so that you follow up with them days later.

You want to make sure that you’ve got email automation through your system as well to where lead comes in, you start dropping value-building emails to that customer that’s helpful stuff for them. Not like, “I’m the greatest. Buy now. I’m the greatest. Buy now,” but value that the customer will really appreciate. You need all this stuff in order as part of your lead management process to help make things smooth and efficient. You don’t want to have poor lead management be the reason that you’re booking less moves. If you need a system that could do all that, of course, I’m co-founder in SmartMoving software. You could do it all in there, but really, you could probably do it in most CRMs, but you just want to make sure that you have a system for doing that.

The second thing that you want to focus on is what I call your sales framework. This is setting up your sales scripts. You may hear me talk about this a lot, but it’s because I really attribute it to my success and the reason that we were able to book so many moves without spending extraordinary amounts of money on marketing and be able to get that in line, to where we’re profitable. You also need to establish when are you going to go do an onsite versus when are you going to do it over the phone. Having that laid out, so nobody has to think about it. Call comes in. It’s three bedrooms. It’s 60 miles from the office. Do it over the phone. Call comes in, four bedrooms right up the street. Send somebody out there to do an onsite.

And I’m just giving examples, but you’ve got to be able to set that up so where people know, and it flows. The thing about a machine, and the reason I call it a sales machine is because a machine just flows. It doesn’t have to stop, get up, go ask somebody what to do. All this stuff is in place, and that’s really part of setting up your sales framework.

And then once you’ve got that framework set up, once you’ve got all your stuff in place, you want to move on and set up what I call sales acceleration. Sales acceleration is, okay, what do we say to the customer to get them to book now? When the customer says, “Your price is too high,” okay, does my sales team have a rebuttal for that? For every single objection that the customer has as to why they’re not ready to move now, why your price might be too high, why they need to speak to their husband, what can you say to get them to book their move now.

What’s the psychology? You’ve got to train your reps. They have to understand where your customer’s coming from. You can’t just sit them in a seat and expect them to talk to somebody without realizing that, hey, look, all of our customers, they’re coming to us. They’re kind of stressed out. They’ve got a lot going on. They’re moving. Not only are they moving their furniture, they’re moving their life. They’re probably putting their kids in new schools. They’ve got to go to a new grocery store. They’ve got to set up the cable. There’s all these things that they have to do. They have to understand the psychology of the customer, and they also have to know how to take that customer by the hand and lead them to the sale. This is a huge component of sales acceleration, how to be able to do that.

Then once you’ve got all that going, now, you need sales control. Sales control’s basically your sales management. Because the machine, it’s going to run. It’s going to produce a lot of moves, but you need to manage it. So whether you have a sales manager, or maybe you don’t have a sales manager, but someone needs to wear the sales manager’s hat to ensure that the systems are running, things are smooth, nobody’s missing anything they shouldn’t miss, and the deals are consistently being closed.

Fifth thing that you want to do is you want to set up your power team. So you’ve already established who your moving consultants are, who your sales team is, who your onsite estimators are, but now you want to bring in additional help. You’ve got to have a process to hire quickly. I can’t stress that enough. It’s not hard to hire quality moving consultants to get on the phone and book moves if you have a step-by-step process to hire and train. So just list out all the steps that you’re going to take from placing an ad to doing a phone interview to doing an in-person interview to checking their references to, all the stuff that you’re going to do to hire. And when you establish that you need somebody, that’s it. Start the steps. Place the ad. Go from there. Then once they’re hired, you have a set training program. And then you get your power team in place.

And then part of that too is establishing your commission and your pay structure to make sure that your sales team is incentivized. You’ve got to make sure they’re incentivized, not only your sales team but your sales manager. So they’ve got their commissions. They’ve got spiffs, and a spiff is something that’s just kind of like, “Hey, guys, whoever books the next five jobs, I’m going to give you 20 bucks. Hey, guys, if you book 50 jobs this week as a company, I’m going to buy lunch for everybody on Friday.” That’s a spiff. So you want to have this type of stuff structured and laid out, and again, I’m going fast here. There’s a lot but one step at a time. It’s not hard to implement all of this at all.

The sixth and final step is move multiplier. It’s taking all these moves that you booked and saying, “Hey, let’s make sure this doesn’t stop here. Let’s get a review from this customer. Let’s get repeat business from this customer. Let’s get a referral from this customer. Let’s multiply this. Not only that, let’s take the jobs that we are already booking, and let’s look for ways that we could upsell additional services that those customers are already in need of to increase our profit per job.”

So when you look at it, and you look at it as a whole, it’s like, “Okay, it’s really just a bunch of little steps, that when we put all these little steps in place, we now have a sales machine.” This is basically exactly what Moving Sales Academy consists of. Those of you who have heard of or are in my Moving Sales Academy online course, this is what it is. It walks you through this step by step how to do this. But I wanted to give you the layout of what you need to do so that you could just do it on your own. You got to set up your lead management, your sales framework, your sales acceleration, your sales control, which is your sales management, then your power team, then your move multiplier.

This stuff here, I know from my own company and going from working out of a truck rental yard to $20 million a year and I know from all the people that have gone through our online program or seminars and all the testimonials that we receive from them, it works. So you can’t look at it and say, “I’m just a moving company. I don’t want to deal with all that. I just want to do moves and do a good job.” And my answer to that is, if you have enough moves, and you’re happy with the amount of moves that you have, great. Keep doing what you’re doing. Nobody says that you have to have a sales machine in place or sales processes in place. But if you want more moves, if you want to make more money, if you want things to be consistent, these are the steps that you need to take, and you take them one at a time. That’s all. Anything that’s a big task, that’s a big project, no problem. Just break it down, step one, step two, step three, and you build it.

My advice to you is that as you start to do this, go in this exact order, okay, lead management, sales framework, sales acceleration, sales control, power team, move multiplier. If you need help with it, definitely email us and ask about Moving Sales Academy. It’ll walk you through step-by-step how to do it.

I hope this was helpful. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. If you found what we talked about today helpful, please share this with somebody out there on social media or with a friend that it might help them. And if you liked this video, I’d appreciate if you liked it as well. I’ll see you next time, my friend.

The Role Of A Moving Company’s Operations Manager

  ► Get This Episode On iTunes

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares exactly what the role of an Operations Manager should look like in your moving company.

  • “Manage Process Over People” The Operations Manager’s role is to understand the processes that are laid out throughout the company and make sure that people are in line with those processes.
  • “Who Reports To Manager” The Ops Manager is overseeing dispatch, the movers, the warehouse, and customer service.
  • “Who Does Manager Report To” Clearly define for the ops manager and the person they report to what the relationship is, what the hierarchy is, and who reports to who.
  • “Reports & KPI’s” Make sure that whatever the Operations Manager is responsible for, there’s a number associated with it.
  • “Quarterly Objectives” You don’t want them just maintaining, you want your Ops Manager helping you grow the business. Always have three big quarterly objectives for them.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

Increase Profits: Tighten Up Your Moving Operations

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Why Your Moving Company Is Losing Money

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend. It’s Louis Massaro, 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. Clients will often come to me when it’s time for them to make their next big hire, who they’re going to bring into their company to help run the business. They either know that they need an operations manager or they have an operations manager but don’t really have their role clearly-defined.

What happens is it creates this frustration of having somebody else in charge of things and they’re not getting done the way that the owner of the business would normally do them. Which is super frustrating because you’re trying to grow, you’re trying to scale. You want to step away from the day-to-day and have your operations manager handle all that stuff. But what happens is if the role isn’t clearly-defined to where they know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, it just kind of creates chaos and confusion. What happens is you typically end up with an operations manager now who’s stressed and overwhelmed.

What I tell people is this. In order to scale your business, in order to step away from the day-to-day, you’ve got to have an operations manager. But you need them to have a clearly-defined role as to what they do. Because I know a lot of people use the term operations manager differently. Some people, it’s more of a dispatcher where with larger companies, they oversee the whole operation. With private clients that come to my office and we work together, one of the things that we’ll do as I listen to the scenarios as we’re going over maybe any trouble they’re having with current operations managers, I’ll listen, ask some questions so I have a full understanding of the relationship and the tools that the operations manager actually has to do the job that the owner wants them to do. https://betsforcrypto.com/bitcoin-casino/

Typically, once in a while, we’ll find that they have the wrong person in the seat. But most of the time, we find out that the role is just not clearly-defined. In order to clearly define the role, you need to first decide what it is that you really want this person to be doing, this operations manager. I want to give you five areas where you can start to establish a clear defined role for your operations manager that you either have or that you’re thinking about bringing in. Because here’s the deal. If you’re going to scale, you have to step away from the day-to-day. You have to have a point person that’s in charge so that you could step back. But I want you to set this person up with all the tools they need to be successful.

Here’s some things that you need to consider when dealing with your current operations manager or hiring a new operations manager. First thing is they need to manage processes over people. Let me say that again. They need to manage processes over people. What do I mean by that? What I mean is a lot of these scenarios that I was telling you that I was going through with my private clients and I was like, “All right, tell me about that. How did they handle that situation? What did they do there? What did they say?” We find out that they’re trying to manage people as opposed to managing the processes.

What I want you to do is I want you to think about your operations manager, not in a traditional sense of what people think of a manager to be, which is managing people. Their role is to understand the processes that are laid out throughout the company and make sure that the people are in line with those processes. That’s it. If you’re trying to manage people and you’re trying to manage personalities and you don’t have that guiding light of a process to bring them back to, you’re going to have chaos. You’re going to have problems. You’re going to have people quitting, people getting fired. It’s going to be chaotic. Right? You want to manage processes. Your operations manager, that’s their role. Manage processes.

They need to have a full understanding of how this works, how this works, how this works. Anything that they are in charge of within the business, they need to know from you how it should be going down step by step. You don’t just want somebody to be there just to oversee things and make sure that the building doesn’t blow up. To just be someone that employees have to turn to for questions. You want to make sure that they are managing processes.

I know I’m drilling down on this, but so many people miss this. They either end up firing an operations manager as they’re like, “You know what? I tried to hire somebody to run the business and it doesn’t work. They don’t listen. They don’t do what I need them to do. The people don’t listen to them.” That’s all because that person is trying to manage people. The people become very easy to manage when all you need to do is guide them back to the process. That’s the first thing.

Second thing, who reports to the manager? I see a lot of companies. They’ll have an operations manager, or a sales manager, or both. The employees don’t know exactly who it is they report to. If your operations manager is going to oversee the operations aspect… Maybe they’re not involved in sales, maybe they’re not involved in finance, but they’re overseeing, let’s say, dispatch, the movers, the warehouse, customer service. Let’s just say that that’s what your operations manager oversees. Then everyone that is in those departments needs to know that they report to that manager. It just needs to be very clear. What’s the hierarchy? A lot of companies, there’s a lot of people that are managers and the employees don’t know who to listen to.

The third thing you want to do is you want to know who does the manager, the ops manager, who do they report to? It depends. I mean, if it’s you, the owner, that makes it very simple, but maybe you have a partner. Maybe there’s two of you. Well, it makes it very challenging if that manager has to report to two people. If you do have a manager or if you have, let’s say, somebody above your operations manager, a different position, a vice president, something like that, and then there’s you, you have to clearly define for the ops manager and the person they report to what the relationship is, what the hierarchy is, and who reports to who. Very important. Again, we’re clearly defining their role. We’re clearly defining where they fit in within the company.

Fourth thing is you want to make sure that they have a set of reports and KPIs, KPIs are key performance indicators, that they are responsible for. Let’s say your operations manager, to use the same example, only handles the operations and not any of the sales, and not any of the finance, and any of the marketing or anything like that. But they’re on top of dispatch, movers, trucks, warehouse, customer service. What are the numbers that they need to be reporting on that basically, they’ll be meeting with either you or whoever they report to to discuss? You’ll have a set of KPIs for operations. Things like average move, current storage being billed, claims ratio, claims spent, payroll percentage, things like that. It goes on and on.

You want to make sure that they have whatever they’re responsible for, there’s a number associated with that. That you could clearly see those numbers in your CRM or they’re running it in a spreadsheet so that when you meet with them ideally at least once a week… If you’re not having daily interaction with them, you need to meet with them at least once a week. Have that meeting and have it with numbers. Have it with processes. Otherwise, the meeting becomes about people. This person’s not doing what they’re supposed to do. That person’s not doing what they’re supposed to do. It just becomes this ongoing rollercoaster of people’s problems.

Numbers, processes, and then of course you still have to manage people because people are a big part of the business. But you want to make sure that those weekly meetings are revolving around the numbers and revolving around any adjustments that need to be made to the processes.

The fifth thing that you need to do to help clearly define the role of your operations manager and set them up for success is give them quarterly objectives. Their main function, their main function is to run the day-to-day of the business. Here’s everything that needs to happen for our business to run smoothly, the fundamentals. They’re making sure all of that is happening. But then you want to give them a set of objectives quarterly that will help you move your mission forward of growing your business. You don’t want them just maintaining, you want to have them helping you grow the business. I recommend for yourself always having three big quarterly objectives.

We did this with our private clients and they actually turned around and said, “You know what? We’re going to do this with our managers as well. It’s working great for them.” An objective is basically a goal. It’s a mission that you’re on for that 90-day period, for that quarter, of accomplishing something big that will help you move your business forward.

Let’s say the operations manager wants to increase the monthly recurring revenue of storage to 35,000 a month. That would be one big objective. Then he’ll then have milestones and action steps that will help break that down in order to reach that. But it’s something big that he or she is working towards. You want to give them three of those. Maybe you want to get a mover training program in place. You give that to them as a big quarterly objective. This way, in between the stuff that they need to do on a day-to-day regular basis, they’re also working towards the advancement of the business.

If you’ve got an operations manager, if you’re thinking about hiring an operations manager, first thing you want to do, make sure they understand that they need to manage processes over the people. If you don’t have processes in writing, start with the stuff that you’re going to train your operations manager to do. Words can be taken out of context. I could say one thing, you could hear something totally different. I could say something to my operations manager, they could hear something totally different. You put it in writing and show them, “Here’s the steps of what needs to happen. Go make sure that that’s happening.” It’s black and white, there’s no misunderstanding.

Even if you don’t have all your processes in place, no problem. Start with the ones that you’re delegating to the operations managers to get them to oversee. It could literally just be bullet points of the steps of what needs to happen so they have a reference point to go check in. Second, make sure you know who reports to that manager. Third, who does that manager report to? Fourth, make sure that they have a set of reports and KPIs that they are responsible for those numbers to where you could actually track and see if they are doing a good job. Fifth, give them some quarterly objectives so that they’re helping you go out there and crush your goals and bring your moving company to the next level.

You don’t want them there to just help you maintain. You want them there to make sure that the fundamentals of the day-to-day operation are running so you could sit back, see things more clearly. Work on your business and not in your business because you have them to work in your business and now you can start your plans to scale.

I hope that was helpful, my friend. If so, do me a favor. Share this with somebody that might find what we’re talking about today helpful. If you could, hit the like button for me as well. 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.

How To Create Processes In Your Moving Company

  ► Get This Episode On iTunes

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to create processes in your moving company.

  • “Identify” Identify the areas where having a written process would really benefit your company.
  • “Clarify” List out the steps of the process.
  • “Formalize” Create an actual SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, for the process.
  • “Organize” Create the original document in Word, or on Google Docs, to have those documents put away for administrative use only and have PDF versions available for the whole company.
  • “Implement” It becomes a lot easier to find someone who can follow instructions, as opposed to finding someone who’s going to create and establish a new path that happens to also be in line with your vision and your goals.
  • “Improve” You want to be able to tweak this process, you want to be able to ask for feedback from people that are involved.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

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TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, CEO of Moving Mastery where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes, so they can increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life. I have clients come to me often with the same concern as most businesses, that they want to have a smooth-running, predictable, money-making machine. And, have employees, and staff, and team that do things consistently without them having to be there all the time on top of it.

But, what they find is that as they start to grow, as they start to take that next step to the next level, and grow a little bit, bring on additional staff, things start falling between the cracks. People don’t do things exactly how they’re supposed to be doing them. Which is super frustrating, because even though you’ve set up this really great business, you’ve got your leads coming in, you’ve got your calls, you’re booking moves, you’re going out, you’re servicing them, you’re doing a great job for your customers. Now you want to grow, now you want to scale. But, what happens is the bigger you get, creates room for error, and for people to drop the ball. Which, just causes you to feel like, “You know what? Maybe I shouldn’t grow. Maybe I shouldn’t expand. Let me just jump back in and do everything myself.”

What I tell people is that if you want to do one thing that’s going to help you scale, that’s going to help you grow, that’s going to help you get to that next level without distress, without the overwhelm, and with the consistency you need to set up systems and processes in your business that are consistent so people know exactly what to do.

I have this small group of private clients that, they come to my office, and we actually spend a full day, eight hours, going through the process of learning the process of process management. Let me say that again. It’s the process of process management. How to set up the processes, how to manage the processes, how to make sure they’re being implemented and adhered to. And, it’s one of those things that once they are able to establish that, which is a fundamental piece if you want to scale and you want to grow your business, without the headache, without the stress, without feeling like you’ve taken three steps forward and one step back. And, you’re constantly kind of doing that front and back motion, where you just want to go straight up. You need to set up these processes, and it all starts with the process of process management.

Like I said, they come and we spend a full day going through this. There’s so much to it, but I wanted to give you the key elements here, because a lot of people have been asking, “Louis, how do you set up processes? What are the steps so that we could have a consistent, smooth-running business?” I’m going to lay them out for you right now, okay?

First thing you need to do in order to set up your processes is, it’s called identify. You need to identify the processes that you’re going to need. In the group that comes to my office, I take them through this process and give them a sheet called the Process Identifier when we go through it. But, essentially what you want to do is you want to look at what new initiatives you have going on. Maybe you are going to start doing box deliveries, let’s just say. Or, maybe you’re going to start doing upsells on your confirmation call. Anything new that you want to do is a perfect opportunity to start writing out a process for it.

If there’s maybe any repetitive tasks, things that happen over, and over, and over, and over again that need to be done consistently. I’m thinking maybe your confirmation call would be a great … a few days out before the move if you’re calling to do a confirmation, having that process written down, having your morning dispatch process all written out. You want to be able to identify because what stops a lot of people when it comes to creating processes for their business is that they think they need to have a complete book of processes for every single action that happens within the company.
Although that’s an admiral goal to get to, it starts with one process. Then, another process, and then another process. What you want to do is you want to identify where would having a … Because remember, you don’t want to have a process just for the sake of having them. But, where would you benefit the most by having a document that’s written, that shows step by step how to do something in your business? If you think about maybe where people drop the ball, or where somebody needs to … maybe you’re doing something for storage billing, and the way that, that’s handled. The exact steps. If you take the time to list those out and write those out, and then you could hand that off to somebody, and they do it the same way every time. That’s how you grow without going three steps forward, one step back.

But, what happens is, if we don’t identify these processes and start putting them in place, you might have people and you’re like, “No, but they know how to do it, Louis. Don’t worry, they’ve been doing it forever.” But, what happens if they leave? What happens if you need to fire that person, and you are nervous to do it because you’re like, “They’re the only ones that know how to do what they do.” Right? Or, you try to roll out some new initiative and it just goes wrong, and causes maybe some customer service issues. Identify the areas where having a written process would really benefit your company.

The second thing you want to do, is you want to clarify those. With my group that comes here, we take them through a process, and with a sheet called a Process Clarifier. Once they’ve identified the processes that are going to be the most impactful to their business. Not just processes for the sake of having processes, but which ones would be the most impactful, now we need to clarify those. When you clarify those, basically what you’re doing is you’re laying out the steps. You’re either doing bullet points, or you’re doing a visual flowchart or some type of mind map, or you’re drawing it out on a whiteboard. Whatever it is, you’ve got to be able to clarify exactly what that process is. Just list the steps. That’s the easiest thing you can do, is just list them out. Step one, they do this. Step two, this.

If this, then that. And, you just list it all out without trying to make some kind of fancy formalized document. You keep it very simple. When I run them through the process, we do it pen and paper. We don’t even do it on the computer. Pen and paper, just list out the processes. List out the steps of the process.

The third thing, once you have that. You’ve identified them, you’ve gotten clarity on each individual process, which you’ll do one at a time. The next step is, you formalize that process. You create an actual SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, for that. I give them a template that they go through, and they have it all standardized so that they’re exactly the same. What you want to do is you just want to have your own template, have some consistency in the way that you create these SOP’s. Let’s say somebody … the clarifier, you could have people in different departments write those out.

Let’s say you need help and you want your dispatcher to write out the process that they go through in the morning to send out the crews. What would happen is you’d take that, and you really want one person that will then take those and put them into a formalized SOP. This way they’re just all consistent. They read the same way, they’re laid out the same way, so whoever’s using them can totally understand what’s going on. Because, once you have them it’s not just to store them away, it’s there to be used daily for the function of your business.

Somebody’s unsure about how something works, they look up the SOP. They look up the process. They come to … a sales person goes to the sales manager and says, “Hey, how do I do this?” The sales manager knows, “Hey, we have a process for that. Hey, I’m going to send you this process.” Or, “Go in the repository, find it, it’s all there.” This way you’re not constantly having to tell people how to do things over and over. You’re showing them how to do it, and it’s exactly how you want it done.

When it comes to managing people, you really … Managing people’s the after thought. What you really want to do is manage the process, and you just want to have the people, and get them back in line with the process. That’s how you really manage the people. By having it all in writing makes it much, much easier to do.

Fourth step what you want to do, is you want to organize these processes. You want to have a place, they call it a repository, where it’s just a filing system of where you keep all of these. For me, we kept it in something similar to a Dropbox, or a Google Drive. With a folder that says, “SOP’s.” You double click on that folder, it opens up, and then it’s got sales SOP’s, dispatch SOP’s, customer service SOP’s, accounting SOP’s. You double click those, the SOP’s are in there. There’s also softwares and things like that, that you could use. But, you want to have a repository, you want to have a place where all of these processes are easy to find.

One of the biggest wastes of time would be to go out and create a bunch of processes, put them in a filing system, and then nobody uses them because nobody could find them. You want to have them organized in a way where people could easily find them as they need them. Of course, you could print them out and put them in a binder as well, where people can find them. But, nowadays it’s much easier just to be able to find them with a few clicks and pull up a PDF of that. My recommendation is if you create the original document in Word, or on Google Docs, to have those documents put away for administrative use only, so they can’t be modified by anyone. Then, have PDF versions available for the whole company. Make sense?

You want to then after that, fifth step is you want to implement. You have to now take this and implement it. You want to get anybody that’s involved in this new process that you’re rolling out, and you want to sit them down, and talk to them. And say, “Well, here’s what’s going on, here’s what the steps.” You want to pick the start date, you want to train your team, but you also want to set clear expectations so that they know what’s expected, and that they understand the process. If they have questions, if they start to poke holes in the process and you’re like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. We didn’t account for that.” Then, you make some adjustments.

But, if you just roll it out and don’t tell anybody about it, nobody can implement it, you can’t get any feedback from them to be able to help you improve the process. Because remember, it’s all about making your business run smoothly and efficiently like a machine. If you think about McDonald’s for example. The reason McDonald’s is so successful and has so many locations across the world is not because of the people that are working there, it’s because of their processes. Their managers, all they need to do is get people back in line with those processes. The better that you have these laid out, you don’t have to go search for these, the staff that you need. It becomes a lot easier to staff your business. Let’s put it that way.

It becomes a lot easier to find someone who can follow instructions, as opposed to find someone whose going to create and establish a new path that happens to also be in line with your vision and your goals. It never works out.

The sixth step once you get all this in place, you get all this going, is you want to improve. You want to always improve these processes. Here’s the thing, you want to be able to tweak this process, you want to be able to ask for feedback from people that are involved. And, you need to make sure that people are following the processes, and if they’re not …

Let’s say you roll out a process, and people start doing it a different way. They skip a few steps, or they find some other work around. This is really where you would want the person who’s in charge of your processes, your process manager, your operations manager, to come in and find where this stuff’s happening, is to … Maybe the way that you originally wrote it needs an adjustment. Maybe somebody in the company found a better way of doing it. Okay, great. But, update the process so that you can manage your business, so that you could look and say, “Here’s how things are supposed to be getting done, and here’s how everybody’s doing them. Is it like this, or is it something different?”
When you have the processes in black and white, things will completely change for your business. Here’s what I want you to do, because a lot of people get overwhelmed with the idea of, “I need to create these processes,” and all this. It can be as simple as getting out a sheet of paper, and just writing down the steps of how you want something to happen. You’re not good on computers? No problem. Write it on the back of a napkin if you have to, and hand it to the person who needs to be fulfilling that task, and tell them, “These are the steps, exactly how I need you to do it.”

I’m just trying to illustrate a point, that it doesn’t have to be so hard. It doesn’t have to be so challenging, but you need this reference point. To be able to come back to make sure that things are getting done the way you want them done. This is the only way you’re going to be able to scale. If you’re in a position where you’re like, “Hey Louis, it sounds like a lot of work. I’m happy, I don’t want to scale, I don’t want to grow. I don’t want any more employees, everybody’s doing things just fine. If there’s a problem, they come to me. I’m good with that.” Cool, no problem.

But, if you’re like, “Hey Louis, every time I try to take a few steps forward I end up getting knocked back because people aren’t doing things the right way. I’m having a tough time managing people. I’m having a tough time getting them to do what I want. There’s inconsistent service happening across the board. We don’t do things the same way all the time.” If that’s you and you want to make it better, this is the one thing you could do, is implement processes into your business. Those are the steps. Again, identify, clarify, formalize, organize, implement, and improve.

I hope that was helpful my friend. If so, do me a favor. Share this with someone out there in any business that you think might find this helpful, or useful. I’d really appreciate it if you’d like this video as well. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life, I’ll see you later my friend.

Why Your Moving Company Is Losing Money

  ► Get This Episode On iTunes

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares five areas where you might be losing profits in your moving company and how to start keeping more money for yourself.

  • “Unprofitable Marketing Sources” Wherever you’re spending dollars to get a return on your investment, if each individual marketing source is not profitable, it’s taking down your entire net profit for your whole business.
  • “Low Booking Percentages” If you’ve got low booking percentages, meaning the leads that come in, you’re not booking enough of them, money is just being wasted.
  • “High Labor Payroll Percentage” Having a high labor payroll percentage is another area where a lot of companies are losing money.
  • “Lack of Crew Management” Running a tight dispatch operation is one of the best ways to keep all the money in-house.
  • “Not Multiplying Moves” You want to be able to multiply every single move that you have by turning each customer into a repeat customer.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

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How Much Should Moving Companies Profit?

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Charge More Money for Your Moving Services

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, CEO 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. I often have clients come to me that are already running successful moving companies. And when I say successful, I mean, they’re doing big numbers, they are already seven-figure companies, doing a million, two, even up to 5 million, sometimes even 15 million a year, but the profits aren’t what they want them to be. In other words, they’ve got this great business, they’ve got the trucks, they’ve got the office, they’ve got the staff, the sales team, everything’s in place, but what happens after all the bills are paid is they don’t have the money that they want to make and it’s super frustrating for them. And it can be very overwhelming to go and put in the work, and put in the time, and put in the effort to run these businesses that require a lot of effort to not get the profits and the take-home compensation that they deserve. official zlibrary domain lib-z . Find free books

So, what I tell them is, look, think of your company like a bucket. If you think about just a bucket, and you have all these opportunities going into the bucket. So, new leads are going into the bucket, all your gross revenue is going into the bucket, basically, you’re creating this stew, if you will, of all these opportunities and everything that comes into your business. But what happens is, most companies have holes in that bucket. So I want to consider your typical expenses to be a hole, but holes or areas of inefficiency or areas where you’re losing money that when plugged will allow your profits to be there at the end of the day.

So, what we want to do is, we want to start looking at where we can plug the holes and how we could take this bucket and not let the money that comes in the top, no matter where you are, if you’re just starting out or you’re doing $15 million a year, whatever the case may be, when money comes in, you want to keep as much of it as possible. So I want to talk to you about where you could be losing money in your business and how to start plugging those holes because it’s super, super important. It’s not about gross revenue. It’s about your profitability, it’s about your compensation as the owner of the business and how much you’re actually able to take home, that’s why you go do what you do every day.

So how do you go about plugging the holes? How do you go about finding the areas where you’re losing money? And after working with hundreds, if you include seminars, courses, everything, newsletters, thousands of moving companies, I can tell you that there’s five areas that typically we find the holes that we’re able to plug.

So I want to tell you what those five areas are so that you could go find them, plug the holes, and start keeping more of the money for yourself. All right, so the first area that is a huge way for you to be losing money, it’s unprofitable marketing sources. And so what do I mean by that? Unprofitable marketing sources could be anything. It could be anywhere. So you spend your money on marketing, whether you’re doing let’s say SEO, pay-per-click, direct mail, moving leads, Angie’s list, home advisor, whatever it might be. Wherever you’re spending dollars to get return on your investment, if each individual marketing source is not profitable, it’s taking down your entire net profit for your whole business, right?

So, the way that you establish this, is you start doing a marketing ROI report. And what that means is you take each individual source every single month and you look at all the leads that you received for that source, you look at all the jobs that you booked, you look at your booking percentage, you look at the amount that you spent versus the amount that you actually received so that you could see where you are as far as profits go.

You don’t want to be spending more than 10% of a job on marketing. So, for example, if a job is $1,000 you don’t want to be spending more than a $100 on that marketing wherever it came from. So, you don’t necessarily need to do it on a job-by-job basis, but you want to do it on a monthly basis to where you’re able to see, okay, if we brought in $100,000 from lead source A, how much did we spend? If you spent $8,000 to bring in $100,000 that’s 8% which is good. But if you spent, let’s say you spent $15,000 to bring in the $100,000 you’re at 15% which is getting up there, it’s getting a little too high.

So, as you start to look at the profitability of each marketing source using a marketing ROI report, you’re going to be able to determine, okay, where can I take some of this money that I’m spending and reallocate it to a different source that’s more profitable? This is besides your P&L, besides your financials for your business, your marketing ROI report is one of the most important reports you can be looking at on a monthly basis. It’s what allowed me to really get from a certain, let’s say I was already at maybe $10 million and I went to $20 million after I established this. Because once you’re able to spend money on marketing without concern, without fear, without worry of is it working or not working because you have a report to be able to do this, it makes things so much smoother, so much easier.

You can either do this in an excel spreadsheet, you could do this in your moving CRM. Those of you know I’m a co-founder of SmartMoving software, you could do it in there as well, but you want to make sure that you’re tracking your marketing and that you’re getting rid of any unprofitable marketing sources. That’s a huge hole in your bucket and an area where you’re losing money.

The second area is low booking percentages. And what does this mean? AKA this means wasting leads. So if you get 100 leads that come in, okay, when I say leads, that could be phone calls, that could be leads from a lead provider, those could be leads from your website, those could be somebody called in from direct mail, or placed a request for a quote online, or a realtor sent you a referral, anything, any lead. The amount of leads you get versus the jobs you book will give you your booking percentage.

So, if you have 100 leads come in and you book 10 of those, your booking percentage is 10%. So what do you need to do to increase your booking percentage? And it’s really those of you who know I have Moving Sales Academy online course, I have the three-day live event and the whole purpose of that is to build a sales machine to increase your booking percentage. So, instead of spending more money on marketing, you take the same amount of leads or less and you increase the amount of jobs that you book.

And so, you do this by setting up your lead management to make sure that you’re not wasting leads, that you’re getting to them quick. That you’re calling them, you’re leaving them a message, you’re emailing them, you’re texting them, you’re having them set up in your CRM for follow up so that you don’t just talk to somebody once and then wait for them to call you back. You’ve got your sales scripts in place, you’ve got your email automation in place. These are things that you could watch my other videos I talk about it a lot because that’s really one of the things that allowed me to grow a $20 million business which was sales.

If you’ve got low booking percentages, meaning the leads that come in, you’re not booking enough of them, money is just being wasted. I’ll use the analogy with somebody, if I go to their office, and I listened to their sales floor, and I see what’s going on, I’ve said it several times, I see hundred dollar bills all over the floor as if they’re falling between the cracks of the desk. So when you are able to increase your booking percentage, everything changes.

Companies will often be so frustrated, look, I’m doing all the marketing, I’m placing it here. I’ll say, okay, well are you tracking the profitability? No, but my sales reps say they’re working or my sales reps say they’re not working, you need to track the profitability. We’re calling them and we’re giving them a quote. Okay, are you doing this? Are you calling them this quickly? Are you calling them this many times? Are you doing this follow-up? What about when they say, your price is too high, do you have a rebuttal for that objection? You’ve got to be able to increase your booking percentage. There’s other videos on that you could watch.

The third reason that you’re losing money is a high labor payroll percentage. So, if you look at each job that you do as a pie, there’s only a hundred percent of that pie, certain percentage has to be allocated to certain things. So, you’ve got your marketing. If you’re paying sales commission, you’ve got that. But one of the biggest areas is the labor percentage. How much of the whole job, again, let’s say we’re talking about $1,000 job, how much of that job are you paying out to the movers? And so, when I see companies with high labor percentages, the answer is not reduce their pay, because that doesn’t ever turn out good. When you bring your guys in and say, hey, look, I know you’re getting this amount, but we’re going to lower your pay because we need to straighten out our labor payroll percentage, that doesn’t work.

Typically what you’re going to need to do is raise your rates and get more money per move. You need to get a higher average dollar amount for each move in order to balance that out. So, what I would do is every single week, I want you to take the payroll that you paid for that period, and divide that into the amount of revenue that was brought in that week. So let’s say you brought in $100,000 in that pay period, in that week. Well, the same amount of pay that you paid out for those same jobs that brought in $100,000, let’s say that was $25,000. Well, then your labor percentage is 25%.

And so you want to make sure that you’re on top of this and that you set a benchmark for yourself of what your labor percentage is because this is another huge area where you can find things going on in the company. I’ve found dispatchers before they were in cahoots with the movers paying them extra hours and getting a kickback. If you’re not looking at your labor percentage, things could get out of control really quick. So to be able to look at that every week, it’d be like, all right, I’m at 29%, I’m at 29.5% and see why is it higher? Why is it lower? This is part of knowing your numbers. This is something you want to look at every single week.

Typically the payroll percentages are anywhere between 25% to 35% and a lot of that has to do, like I can’t just tell you what it should be, a lot of it has to do the way your business is structured. Because when we look at the job and some people could afford to pay a little bit more because their fixed costs are lower. Their rent for their office, or their trucks, or their staff and things like that. So it’s typically between 25-35%. Check where you are now. With all numbers, you want to be able to set a benchmark for yourself. Which means, let me look at what it is and then let’s look for ways to improve it and make it better. All right. So having a high labor payroll percentage is another area where a lot of companies are losing money.

Number four, lack of crew management. And this is basically the opposite of running a tight dispatch operation, this is running a loose dispatch operation. Meaning, are we on top of the inventory, on the trucks, all the equipment, the dollies, the pads, the straps, all of that? Boxes, are they getting lost, or stolen, or left at jobs and nobody’s accountable for that and you’re just purchasing more or you’re on top of that? What about your crews? Are they clocking themselves in and out? Are you giving them the paperwork and sending them out for the day and saying, hey, okay, here’s the hourly rate, go ahead and calculate it when you’re done or long distance job, here’s the charges, let me know if you need anything, or are you having them check in with you where you’re clocking them in, you’re clocking them out, you’re telling them how much to collect and you’re making sure that if they clock out at three o’clock you’re looking at your GPS and you’re seeing, okay, they left at three o’clock.

Tight crew management will save you a ton of money. Same thing with claims and damage. If you’ve got claims, and you’ve got damage, and you’ve got complaints and you’re not keeping track of this, you’re not able to tell, okay, we’re having issues with… I’ll give you a perfect example, for me, I saw on my P&L at one point that we had very high claims in one office and after drilling down we found that it was a small group of guys and they were damaging glass tabletops, marble tabletops, and flat-screen TVs, that was like the extent of all the damage that was happening. So, we were able to identify that right away, train those guys on how to move with those items and solve the issue, and now I’m not spending the money on claims. Which is a hole in the bucket. So make sure you’re on top of your crews. Running a tight dispatch operation is one of the best ways to keep all the money in house.

The fifth way that you’re losing money is that you’re not multiplying moves. And what do I mean by multiplying moves? Well, the moves that you book, you spend money to acquire those moves, or you get a referral from those moves to be able to get those moves, you want to be able to multiply those. You want to turn that customer into a repeat customer, into a referral customer, and into a review customer. So don’t look at the job when it’s done and say, it’s done, we took care of them, no. You need to get yourself a five-star review from that customer, you need to get a referral, and you need to make sure that they’re a repeat customer the next time that they go to move.

So, you do this by requesting reviews on the job site when you’re finished. Having automatic texts from your CRM go out, automatic emails going out, requesting that. Having a database of these customers and reengaging them at a later date to be able to bring them back in and also enrolling them in your referral program. You can check, there’s been another episode on the referral program, go and watch that. You want to be able to multiply every single move that you have.

So, just to recap, five areas that you could be losing money that you need to go check right away and start tightening it up and plugging the holes, unprofitable marketing sources, low booking percentages, high labor payroll percentages, lack of crew management, and not multiplying moves. I hope this was helpful my friends, if so, do me a favor, share this out on social media with somebody or a friend that might find what we talked about today helpful. Hit the like button if you could, I’d really appreciate it. 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.

How To Open Moving Companies In Multiple Locations

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SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares what you need to do in order to successfully open up additional locations in your moving business.

  • “Create a Model Business” If you want to sell your business down the road, if you want to franchise your business, anything you want to do, you’ve got to create a model. From the model, you could duplicate, but in the process of creating the model, your business just becomes better, more efficient, more profitable.
  • “Remove Yourself From Day-To-Day” If you’re stuck in one place dispatching trucks or booking moves, or whatever it might be, and you’re also trying to have business development going on in new locations, it’s not going to happen.
  • “Establish Baseline Metrics” Baseline metrics means take a look at your P&L. You need to know what percentage do you spend in fuel? What percentage do you spend on labor? What percentage are you spending on truck insurance? In other words, you need to have a baseline percentage of what it is you spend.
  • “Create a Financial Forecast” You have a game plan, you need to have the financial staying power to be able to muscle through any unforeseen circumstances, any slower than usual times.
  • “Open a Separate Entity” If you are cross mingling funds, if there happens to be a big lawsuit or happens to be something that goes down, they could tie it back to your original company and now you put your original company at risk. So, obviously, talk to a lawyer, talk to your CPA.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
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TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, 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. I speak to moving company owners literally every single day. Our clients, our private clients, people that are interested in becoming clients, and one thing is kind of, pretty consistent across the board, is people want to open additional locations. They look at it and they say, “Okay, I’ve got this business, it’s running good and I want to duplicate it. Because I’m, I’m doing really well here, but then if I expand, I could do double the business.” And I also have clients that have done that and felt the frustration of not feeling everything grow doubly, or the new business actually hurts their existing business, and it’s one of the most frustrating things that someone could go through.

I went through it myself personally, and have seen people in the business in the last few years go through it as well, to be able to expand, open an additional location, and not only does it not bring in the additional money that you’d thought it would, but it creates more complexity, more work, and it actually starts draining the main business. Now, this doesn’t happen all the time, so I want to prepare you for what to do when it’s time to open an additional location. But this is something that people deal with and it’s a real thing. If you expand too quickly, it could create a lot of problems for what you have going on.

So what I tell people is this, if you’re going to open up additional locations, whether it’s one, whether it’s 50, whatever it might be, you have to establish a new blueprint for yourself in the way that you run your business day-to-day. Because now, you’re not just running one location where you’re there, where you’re seeing it, you’re running multiple locations where you’re not there, so your way of managing it becomes totally different.

I have this private client that, I met him, I don’t know, whenever it was, at one of my events, he wasn’t a client at the time. And he started telling me his scenario, and he was looking to open an additional location somewhere else, and he was going to buy out this company because they were a van line agent and he wanted to be part of the van line and this whole thing.

He explained his whole scenario to me and I said, “You’re not ready to do it. You know, you’re not ready. You need to do this, this, this, and this first, then you’ll be ready to do it.” Maybe a year later, 18 months later, he becomes a private client. He says, “Louis, I did it, and I should’ve listened to you. It’s been the worst year of my life. I’ve been traveling. This business is just costing me a fortune to keep it going. It’s distracting the people in my main office, and I need to figure out a way out of this.” So luckily, as a private client, we were able to kind of help him figure his way out of it to where, you know, shut down that other location gracefully, to where he came back to one location and started making more money with the one than he was even coming close to with the two.

And I’m not saying that as a way of saying don’t open up, or if you have a second, shut it down. But in his scenario, based upon his lifestyle choices and the way that he wanted to spend his time, the way that he wanted to… How many days a week he wanted to work, his traveling, all that, and how much money he wanted to make, we said, “You could do that in the one office. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to deal with all these extra people. You don’t have to have all this extra aggravation, but you still get what you want.” So, it just really comes down to, more locations and more business does not always equal more money.

So, if you’re going to open up additional locations, which again, I encourage you to do that, but the timing has to be right and you have to go into it with the right approach. So I want to give you some ways to do that, to create a new blueprint for yourself for expansion. Remember, the way you run one business is totally different than the way you’ll run multiple businesses. I learned the same thing that my client learned the hard way when I had my one office and I started to open up additional locations. At first, I didn’t have that blueprint to run multiple offices. I went through the same thing. It was stressful, problems everywhere, on the plane, flying here, flying there, until I finally got it under control by realizing I had to approach it differently. Because I was no longer just running one business, I now had multiple businesses.

So let me give you the steps that you need to take in order to create that new blueprint for yourself if you’re going to open additional locations. And the first thing that you need to do is create a model business. And what is a model business? A model business is, if you’re going to duplicate something, if you’re going to clone something, if you’re going to duplicate something, you want to make sure that it’s exactly how you want it to be before you duplicate it, or you’re just going to duplicate a half-assed version of what you really want.

You want to create a model business, and what does that mean? That means that you’ve got your processes in place, that means that you know your numbers, you know where you’re at. That means that everything that you do could be duplicated exactly somewhere else. And a lot of that really is your processes, knowing your numbers, and being able to look at it, and if there is a problem, identify it quickly and resolve it. So no matter how you want to grow, right, no matter what you want to do with your business, even if you don’t want to open multiple locations, you’ve got to create a model business. If you want to sell your business down the road, if you want to franchise your business, anything you want to do, you’ve got to create a model. From the model, you could duplicate, but in the process of creating the model, your business just becomes better, more efficient, more profitable. You could see things clearly and you know how to maneuver day-to-day.

Second thing you need to do before you start going out and open additional locations, is you need to be able to remove yourself from the day-to-day. So if you’re involved day-to-day, meaning you’re dispatching trucks, you’re booking moves, you’re part of the main function of the business. You can’t go open another office. And, I know a lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this right now. They’re going to want to stop this video and say, “Louis, I could do it. I could run this, and I can run that.” We, as humans, we really underestimate sometimes what it takes to pull something off. And if you are stuck in the day-to-day of your current office, you won’t have the freedom or flexibility to run what needs to be run in the new office.

You now need to step into a new role, where you now can run everything from afar. You could be at a home office and run this location, this location, this location. But if you’re stuck in one place dispatching trucks, or booking moves, or whatever it might be, and you’re also trying to have business development going on in new locations, it’s not going to happen. So you need to be able to remove yourself from the day-to-day.

Third thing you want to do, is you want to establish baseline metrics. Baseline metrics means take a look at your P&L. You need to know what percentage do you spend in fuel? What percentage do you spend on labor? What percentage are you spending on truck insurance? In other words, you need to be able to look at boxes, all your cost of goods sold, all of that. You need to have a baseline percentage of what it is you spend. This is part of your model. This is knowing your numbers, what they are, so that when you go to duplicate it, you could see, am I on track or am I not on track? If you don’t know where your numbers should be, if you say, okay, hypothetically you spend 7% of your gross revenue on fuel, I’m just picking a number out of a hat, then, chances are it’s going to be similar where you go, right, with the fluctuation and price, but you want to have all those different metrics so that you can see how you’re doing.

Too many times people open up another location and they don’t know how well they’re doing until they have extra money in the bank account. That’s kind of the way of being able to tell that. So you want to have your baseline metrics so that you could set up your P&Ls and your cash flow statement, and you can know exactly what’s going on. Same thing with your marketing ROI, so all the key metrics that you need to know in your current office. Figure out what the baseline is, like where you’re at. Maybe you can improve them, whatever it might be, but then, this way you can carry them over to the new office.

Fourth thing you need to do is create a financial forecast. People ask me all the time, “Louis, how much does it take to open up a moving company, an additional moving company? How much money should I have?” Well, the answer really depends, people go about it very differently. I mean, you could do a shoestring budget, and rent two trucks, and have one mover go there and work out of a truck rental yard, and dispatch the jobs. And then, go and be one of the movers, and do all the administrative stuff from your current office. And it can be very inexpensive.

For me, I never open an additional location with less than… At least $75,000 to $100,000 in capital to put into an account to go open that office, because we got an office, trucks, marketing. And if you really want to go in strong you could spend $200,000 to go open up an additional location. When I opened up my South Florida office, where my call center was going to be, I spent about $500,000 opening that office, and it’s just because I wanted everything done immediately. It was like, we got this big warehouse, give me 600 vaults, brand new. Give me all the equipment, give me… And it was just, get everything out of the way that we need to purchase, get it done. So it’s a big variance.

So you want to create a financial forecast, so that you can see, okay, if we’re going to open up in, let’s say January, what do we anticipate our expenses to be, February, March, April, May? What are we anticipating our income to be in these months as well, based upon your level of how you’re going to open up? Remember, you could bootstrap it or you could just throw a ton of money at it and go that route. But you want to be able to have that financial forecast that you can see, so you’re not just tossing it out there to see if it works.

You have a game plan, and you know that you’re going to have the money to stick in there and make it happen because it might not take off as quick as you think it might. So you need to have the financial staying power to be able to muscle through any unforeseen circumstances, any slower than usual times. Now, maybe you need to adjust and adapt to the market and the way the competition prices, there’s a lot of things that could go on. You don’t want to be strapped for cash in that situation.

Next thing you want to do, number five, is you want to open a separate entity. So now, if you decide I’m going to go open another office, do not run it under the same corporation or the same LLC. Open a brand new corporation or a brand new LLC for that location. It could be the same name as yours, like Your Moving Company of this city, LLC, Your Moving Company of this city Inc. Open a separate one. You’re going to want to talk to your lawyer, talk to your accountant, I’m neither one of those things, but you’re going to want to fund that account from your personal account, put the money there, then from there, the new entity’s bank account, then you can now make all the purchases you need for that business.

You don’t want to cross mingle funds, you don’t want to take your new office, and then take your old office and start cutting checks for the new office. Because what happens is, you want to be in a position to protect yourself from anything that might happen. You’ve got to think about the liability that’s there, you want to think about your own asset protection. You know, you open up an additional location that you’re not there. Somebody who’s out there running it and they run a truck off a cliff, they go into your warehouse and steal everything from all of your customers, whatever it might be. Let’s just imagine the worst thing happens in that new location, you want to be able to have your legal liability separate from your existing location.

And if you are cross mingling funds, even though you have separate entities, if there happens to be a big lawsuit or happens to be something that goes down, they could tie it back to your original company and now you put your original company at risk. So, obviously, talk to a lawyer, talk to your CPA. There’s also tax implications for all this as well, but you want to make sure, open a separate entity.

And the last and final thing, commit and GO HARD. Don’t dabble. Don’t just say, “Let me roll the dice in this location and let me see if it works.” If you’re going to do it, do it because you’re basing it off of good information that you feel you can go into that market and go strong. You’ve created your model, you’ve removed yourself from your day-to-day. You’ve established your baseline metrics. You’ve created a financial forecast. You’ve opened your separate entity, don’t just like try to see if it works. GO HARD! Make it work. Put somebody there that you know is going to kick ass. Put somebody there that you know is going to take your processes and run with them.

A lot of times, when I see people that have additional locations and they fail, it’s because they think it’s as simple as sending a few trucks and a few guys over there, and everything else will be okay, and it rarely turns out that way. It’s when you send somebody there that’s trained, they know what they’re doing, they’re strong, they have a vested interest. Maybe they’re a partner, or they’re some kind of GM that has, they’re tied in the profits. That’s when the location is strong. That’s when you go into it and you make money, and then you could build upon that because now you have your new blueprint for the way you manage all of it. And I hope you go on to open 50 offices around the country, or whatever your goal is, but just know if you’re going to do it, commit and go hard, and wait until the time is right.

I hope this was helpful. If so, do me a favor, share this with somebody out there on social media or in one of the groups, that might find this helpful, what we talked about today. And if you could like this video too, I’d really appreciate it. 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.

How To Turn Moving Leads Into Dollars

  ► Get This Episode On iTunes

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares his process for successfully managing moving leads.

  • “3-Point Lead Management” Look at your lead management process. Make sure it’s on point before you give up a potentially lucrative lead source just because there’s a lot of inefficiencies going on within the sales department.
  • “Lead Capture” Make sure your web forms are set up to get all the customer’s information, make sure that on phone calls your team is getting that information before they even move forward.
  • “Lead Distribution” It’s all about getting the right lead into the right hands of the right person that’s going to be able to get that job closed.
  • “Lead Follow-up” Making sure that your sales team is actually calling leads as many times as you want them to call them.
  • “Maximize Your Leads” Implement this process and turn your leads into dollars.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

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Why Moving Companies Are Failing In Marketing

Transcription

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, CEO, 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. You know, one of the things I hear from clients all the time is the frustration when it comes to spending money on marketing, right? Buying leads from either a lead provider or maybe some Google AdWords or even direct mail, you know, any type of marketing that they’re doing for their moving company, the actual management of those leads. Meaning once their sales team gets those leads, they feel uncertain about what’s happening with them. Are they calling them quickly? Are they calling them enough? What’s the contact method that they’re using, and they’re not quite sure, like how many leads should each person have, right? How many follow-ups should they be doing? What should we do when the phone rings and someone calls in?

It’s a deep level of frustration for a lot of people because they spend a lot of money on marketing. They know that their movers are out there doing a great job for their customers and they’re just kind of confused as to what they should be doing with all of these leads. Because as we know from just statistics of, you know, me running my call center and clients of mine, if you’re working the leads, they turn into money, right? But if they’re coming in and you’re maybe making a call or two and some get followed up with and some don’t, and your sales team doesn’t really have any accountability, you’re going to struggle to turn the leads into dollars.

When I say leads, it’s really any type of an opportunity that you have, right? So that could be a phone call coming in from a referral. It could be an actual lead from a moving company lead provider. It could be from your website, it could be from a pay-per-click campaign, it could be direct mail, it could be from anywhere. That’s a lead, right? So what I tell people is in order to get this under control, you need to set up lead management. In particular, you need to set up what I call three-point lead management.

You know, when I first started in the moving business, there was really nothing but YellowPages. We had YellowPages, I was out pounding the pavement, going to some apartment complexes, and then I got into some direct mail. But there was no leads, there was nothing coming into my CRM where I had their name, their phone number, their email address. It was just all phone calls. Back then they called, we tried to book it, we didn’t book it, we kind of moved on, right? Nowadays we have really such a golden opportunity with the amount of data that we have coming in from these different leads and all the information and all the technology and all this stuff that we could do to follow up with them to book more. So even though it’s more complex than the simplicity of just the phone rings from YellowPages and you book moves, there’s more opportunity now than ever.

But how do you do that? How do you set up three-point lead management? Well, the first step, the first thing you need to do … it’s broken up into three different phases, and it’s important not to just look at lead management as one thing, but to break it up into these three components.

The first component is called lead capture. What is lead capture? Lead capture is basically making sure that you get all of the information that you need from every single opportunity. Whether it’s coming in off a web form from your website or a phone call, you need to make sure that you’re capturing their name, their phone number, their email address, the date they’re looking to move, where they’re looking to move from, and where they’re looking to move to. Every single time. Where I see a lot of companies fail with this is on incoming phone calls. Someone will call in, “Hey, I’m looking for an estimate.” “Okay, great. I could help you.” And they just start going into the estimate. You must start capturing that information.

Let me tell you why that’s so important. You know, with the modern technology that we have these days, you have things like email automation, where you could be automatically emailing customers, not only on the front end but on the back end, to re-engage them years, years, and years later, to be able to get them back as a customer. You’ve got text messages, you’ve got the ability to send out mail pieces to them as well. But if you don’t have their information, especially their phone number, to be able to follow back up with them if you don’t book it on the first job, on the first call, you’re done. You’re done.

What happens is, even if … you know, I see this struggle with moving company owners all the time. Like I tell my team, they have to get the info, but they don’t really tell them how to go about getting the info. It has to be done in a very strategic way and it has to … there’s certain things that you have to say in order to be able to capture that information from a customer.

When a customer calls in and they want a quote, “Oh, no problem, what’s your name by the way?” You know? “Oh, John, hi John, my name’s Louis. Nice to meet you. Listen, just in case we get disconnected today, what’s the best phone number to call you back at? Okay.” If you have caller ID, you could just pull it off the caller ID and then you tell them, “At the end of this call, I’m going to go ahead and send you out an email with all the information we discussed along with an accurate estimate for your move. What’s the best email address to send that to?” Done. You’ve got their name, email, phone number, and then you’re going to of course get where they’re moving from and where they’re moving to because that’s part of the estimate, but make sure you always give them a reason why you’re asking for their email address. People are fed up with spam. They don’t want to give out their email address unless there’s a reason for it. So if you’re letting them know they’re going to get all the information you discussed plus an accurate estimate at the end, they’ll give you the correct email address, right? Now you have that information to be used later on for things like email automation, for things like after the move, making sure that you can get reviews as well.

It’s so important that you capture that data. Even certain ad campaigns and things that you could do with Facebook, that’s a whole nother topic, right? If you have that data, you could target certain people directly. So the first thing is lead capture. Make sure your web forms are set up to get that information, make sure that your phone calls, your team is getting that before they even move forward.

Second part of the three-point lead management system is called lead distribution. When a new call comes in, when a new lead comes directly into your CRM, to where, you know, you get it from a lead provider, comes from your website. That should go directly into your CRM, your customer relation management system. Those of you who don’t know, I’m co-founder in SmartMoving CRM. You could check that out, but any CRM should be able to do this, to where it imports directly from your website into your software, directly from lead providers into your software.

But now, once you have that information, remember there’s two types of leads. You’ve got the lead that’s a web lead where they’re just submitting information, and then you’ve got the phone call. You typically won’t have someone coming and knocking on the door of your moving company asking for a quote, unless you’ve got great exposure and visibility somewhere and, you know, occasionally you get a walk-in, but typically it’s a web lead or it’s a phone call.

Once you get those, it’s important that you establish a system of how you’re going to distribute those leads amongst your team. So here’s some things you want to consider. Not all leads are equal. You’ve got your hot leads, you’ve got your not-so-hot leads, and then you kind of got your eh leads. So who do you want to get the hot leads? You know, there’s nothing wrong with allowing your top people to get the good leads and allowing your new people that are still in training, or are still in their first couple of weeks, to get some of the leads that don’t perform as well. Then you might have certain people that handle local moves and other people to handle long distance moves. Lead distribution also means how quick you are getting those leads into someone’s hands so that they can call them. Lead distribution’s all about getting the right lead into the right hands of the right person that’s going to be able to get that job closed.

Then you have to decide how many leads each moving consultant in your company should have each and every day. It’s important to know so that you know how many they could work, you know what’s too much and what’s too little. There is such a thing as having too many leads. I know it’s hard to believe that. A lot of people say, “Louis, you can never have too many leads,” but you can because if you have a full-on sales process, like we teach at Moving Sales Academy, if you have everything in place and you have too many leads, you could be choking on those leads. Those leads could be congesting the whole system. You want to make sure that you have the right amount of leads per rep so that it flows evenly, so you have to decide on that.

You also want to make sure that you’re deciding, you know, what the accountability is for your team, right? You need a certain amount of dials. If you have leads, you need a certain amount of dials, so you want to be able to track that in your phone system. How many outbound calls are they making a day? They might sit in the seat for eight hours, but what are they really doing? The only way you can know if your sales team is actually working is how many phone calls they’re making or how many hours of talk time they have on the phone. How many dials they’re making to new leads and followup of people that they’ve already spoken to, and how much talk time. Talk time is important, because if they’re not actually talking to people and they’re just making dials and not getting anyone on the phone, they’re not going to be able to book any jobs. So you want to have a minimum amount of dials and a minimum amount of talk time that they have to hit one or two of those. So that’s lead distribution, making sure you get the right lead in the right hands of the right person who’s going to be able to book that job.

The third part of the three-point lead management system is lead follow up. What is lead follow up? Lead follow up is how many times are you going to call that lead? You want to try to get them on the phone as soon as possible, as a new web lead comes in, let’s say it’s not a phone call, let’s say it’s a web lead off your website. You want to get them on the phone as soon as possible.

You want to also determine how many times you’re going to actually reach out to them before you say, you know what, we haven’t been able to get ahold of them, let’s move on. Because I’m sure you’ve gotten leads before that you were never able to get ahold of the people, right? You’ve called, you’ve emailed, you’ve text, but they never call you back. Well, there comes a point where you have to move on and so you have to decide, all right … And this is part of your system. This is part of your structure. If you don’t have the structure in place, the process in place, and you’ve got everybody just doing what they want to do, then your company is basically a accumulation of just this person, what they think is best and what that person thinks best, and typically not even what they think is best, but just in the mood that they’re in that day. This person’s having a bad day, they don’t feel like making calls, your leads aren’t being called. If you determine, hey, you need to call the leads this many times on the first day, this many times on the second day, then it’s done, and you could track in your CRM if they’ve actually made those calls or not.

That’s lead follow up. Making sure that they’re actually calling them as many times as you want them to call them. Remember, if you have systems in place where everybody does things the same way, that’s how you could scale. That’s how your company becomes much easier to manage. That’s how you close the holes in the bucket where the money’s fallen through, because as leads come in, think about a bucket, right? Leads are coming in, phone calls are coming in, they’re coming into the bucket, and you’ve got a bunch of holes at the bottom, which pretty much is, you know, when I see it in companies it’s in lead capture, lead distribution, and lead follow up.

When there’s holes there, the money’s following through and you’re not keeping it, so you want to plug those holes with the lead capture. You want to plug those holes with determining your lead distribution policy. You want to plug those holes with setting up the lead follow up to where everyone is doing it the same way. That’s how you maximize your marketing spend. That’s how you stop getting so frustrating and saying that lead provider doesn’t work … which could be true, right? It could be true. However, before you ever, ever, ever say this lead provider is not working, you first need to look at your sales process. You first need to look at your lead management process. Make sure that’s on point before you give up a potentially really, really lucrative lead source just because there’s a lot of inefficiencies going on within the sales department.

Three-point lead management, that’s how you maximize your leads. That’s how you turn leads into dollars. I hope that was helpful, my friend. If so, do me a favor. Make sure you share this with somebody out on social media or a friend who might find this valuable. If you could hit the like button, I’d really appreciate it. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. Thanks so much. I’ll see you later.

How To Provide Accurate Moving Estimates

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SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares his formula for giving accurate moving estimates.

  • “Gather the Customer’s Inventory” Go room-by-room with your customer and guide them through the process asking them specific questions about the contents of each room.

  • “Determine the Boxes” To determine the number of boxes you need for the move take the weight of the customer’s items and divide it by 100.

  • “Add Any Additional Charges” Assess the additional fees and things you charge extra for like bulky items, pianos, safes, hot tubs, extra stops, long carries, packing, fuel, etc.

  • “Calculate and Present the Price” Determine how long the move will take, how many trucks and movers you need, any variances that need to be considered, and book the move!

  • “Review the Actual vs Estimate Report” Look at your track record to help optimize and fine-tune your estimate process over time.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, 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. I hear from clients of all sizes and experience in the business, the trouble they have when it comes to estimating moves. So whether they’re starting off, or whether they’ve got multiple locations, part of this business, the moving business, is giving estimates of how long the move’s going to take or how much it’s going to cost, or the wait or from long distance to time from pickup to delivery and all of that. And as we hire more people and train more people, sometimes it becomes a big, big area of frustration, concern. Some bad estimates could really cause some major customer service issues, which could result in loss of revenue, which could result in poor reputation. So there’s a lot of frustration that goes into estimating moves, and if they’re not done correctly.

So how you resolve this is, you just have to have a system that’s based on a formula to estimate moves. And when I first started, it was… I had no idea how to estimate moves. Every single person that called, I was like, “Three men and a truck. Three men and a truck.” We were just doing hourly rate. Right? So I’d tell them three men and a truck no matter if it was a studio apartment or a 12,000 square foot home.

And as you know, that could create some issues and create some problems. So I learned pretty quick that I couldn’t just offer everybody three men and a truck, regardless of the size. And it really took me several years, almost seven years, until I started doing long-distance and also opened up in markets that required actual estimates and not just giving hourly rates, that I actually had to really learn how to give estimates so that my team could give accurate estimates to my customers.

And here’s what I could tell you: It’s one of those things that… You know, it’s super frustrating when you know how to give an estimate, but maybe somebody on your team doesn’t follow all the correct steps. Or, like me when I first started, first several years, almost seven years in business, I didn’t know how to give an actual estimate.

So whether you’re doing it over the phone, whether you’re doing it in person as an onsite estimate; either way, there’s a formula that you need to follow in order to get accurate estimates. So let’s talk about how you go about doing that.

The first thing that you need to do in order to get an accurate moving estimate for your customers is you need to gather the customer’s inventory. What does that mean? You need to… And this can be done over the phone, and this could be done through an onsite. At our height, we were booking 12,000 moves a year. Most of them were done over the phone, and we were going through the same process.

So as you… You know, you need to get the customer’s inventory, and you need to enter it into your CRM. You need to make sure… I mean, if you want to be old school about it, you could have a cube sheet and you can just kind of write down all the cubes and go through that whole process. But in this modern day of the moving business, you need to have a CRM. By the way, I’m co-founder in SmartMoving Software. Check that out if you don’t have something. But otherwise, any CRM that allows you to enter your customer’s inventory should do. You want to enter that it. You want to go room by room with your customer. What does that mean?

So you want to make it easy on them. Because especially… Let’s talk about doing this over the phone. Because that’s more complex than it is doing it onsite. An onsite, it’s typically the same thing, just a little bit easier to do since you’re there and you can actually see the stuff. So let’s say you’re talking to the customer. First thing you wanna do is let them know where to start.

So at this point in your sales script, as you’re talking to them, you’ll let them know, “Let’s go ahead and get an inventory of everything that you’ll be moving. We usually like to start in the master bedroom. Does that work for you?” Lead them where you want them to start, otherwise, they have no idea what to do.

Remember, if you’ve seen my other videos, you know a customer wants a professional to take them by the hand and lead them where they need to go. And that’s what you wanna do here. So you start them off in a particular room. Also, when you’re entering it into your CRM you want to make sure that you’re putting it in per room, and that your CRM allows you to then have that printed out per room. And what does that mean?

So there’s two ways to do it. When you’re looking at an inventory, you could either have an inventory that’s in alphabetical order. Armoire, boxes, credenza. Like that: A, B, C. Or, you have one that’s separated by room. So you’ve got master bedroom, second room, living room, family room, garage. Separated out by room. It’s so important that when you’re gathering the inventory, that you separate it out by room. And let me tell you why.

Number one, you’re going to need to send this to your customer if you’re going to actually give them an estimate based off the inventory. And you might say, “Hey, look, I’m just doing hourly rates. I don’t want to give an estimate,” cool. If you’re allowed to do that in your market and you don’t need to and your business is good and you don’t have any upset customers, keep doing what you’re doing. But, if you want to give your customers an accurate estimate, you need to get the inventory. And in order to make it a two-way street, they have to agree upon the estimate that you’re giving them.

So what you’re going to do after you get their inventory, is you’re going to send it to them for them to review. And by the way, when we talk about inventory, if you’re just possibly getting into this business, it’s going through the home and saying, “Okay, tell me what’s in the master bedroom.” And they’ll be like, “Well, there’s a bed.” “Well, what size is the bed?” Okay. “Is there a headboard? is there a footboard?” You’ve got to be able to dig a little bit. “How about under the bed? Is there anything under the bed?” They’re talking about everything else in the room. “There’s a dresser, there’s two nightstands, there’s a TV, and that’s about it.” “Oh, okay. Well, is there a closet in there?” “Oh, yeah. There’s a closet.” “Okay, what’s in the closet? What about a rug? Is there a rug? How about on the nightstands, are there lamps on the nightstands? Do you have any pictures on the wall?” You have to dig.

A lot of people will start and say, “I got an inventory,” but they’re not digging. You have to make sure you get everything. Because remember, there’s a big difference between doing it over the phone and doing it in person, and you can successfully do it over the phone if you dig and if you have your team trained to know the questions to ask to make sure that everything is on there. And you also want to make sure that anything that’s not being moved is on that list, also. They might say, “Well, there’s a sofa in here, too, but we’re giving that away,” mark that down at the time that’s not going.

So now, let’s get back to reviewing the inventory with the customer. We’re still on step one, which is gather the customer’s inventory. So once you get it all entered into your CRM, you’re going to want to email them out the inventory so that they could agree upon it. Say, “Listen, we need you to take a look at this and make sure this is everything that you’re moving, because your price is based on this inventory. So if there’s more items that aren’t on here, your price could go up on the day of the move.” So you want them to review that.

Now, let’s come back to why that needs to be by room and not alphabetical order. If you send the customer an inventory list and it’s in alphabetical order, and they look at it and they’re like, “Three armoires,” and they need to go through the house and check them off and make sure that’s accurate… Well, one might be in the living room. Another one might be upstairs. Another might be in the garage. It’s not possible to actually go through and verify a list that’s in alphabetical order. So if your CRM has those two options, switch it so that it’s by room. If you’re in Smart Moving, you’re good. You don’t need to worry about it. But make sure it’s by room so that they can verify it.

So another reason why you need it by room is when the movers go out, if you’re giving… And this might be for a flat rate move. This might be for a binding or non-binding long-distance move. This might be for an hourly not to exceed move. Depending on how you give the estimate is not really important right now when we’re gathering inventory. You’re trying to figure out how long this is going to take so that you can build the pricing.

But when your movers go out there, let’s say it is a flat rate or let’s say it is a binding move, they also need to now take that inventory list and verify everything that’s on it. And if it’s in alphabetical order, imagine them trying to go and look for three armoires in the house that they have no idea where they are. No. Master bedroom, living room, kitchen. They go in the master bedroom, and they’ve got a list of everything that’s in there. They check all that stuff off. They make sure it’s accurate, and they can move on.

So I want to stress this, just because it’s so important for the whole cycle of being able to give an estimate, make sure it’s accurate, and go from there.

So when you’re entering an inventory into your CRM, basically what it’s doing is it’s calculating cubes and weights. And a lot of people can do their estimates based off cube, and some will do it based off weight. Even if you are charging by the hour for a local move, those two numbers are what’s going to determine how many hours you need to send. For me, we did it by weight. We would take the cube, whatever the cube was, multiply that by seven, which would give you the weight. Software CRMs, they’ll do this automatically for you. But this kind of goes back, if you’ve been in this business long enough, to a cube sheet, which is pretty much a legal-size sheet that had mostly every item that would be in somebody’s home, and it would list the cubes, how many cubic feet the item was. And then you would take that, and you would calculate it by six, six and a half, seven. For me, I like to go by seven. So you want to make sure that you gather everything that the customer has. It’s there, you want to make sure that they look at it, that they agree on it, and that you’re on the same page.

Second step in giving an accurate estimate is you need to determine the boxes that they’re going to have. And this is something that’s really challenging. It’s hard to get this perfect, because typically, when you go out to the home, or do it over the phone, either way, the customer’s going to be getting rid of stuff. Those closets that are packed, that garage that is packed, they’re going to throw a lot of stuff out. Moving naturally creates some spring cleaning, right? You start going through, “We don’t need this. We don’t need that.” So the best way to determine how many boxes you’re going to need for the move, whether you’re going to be doing the packing or they’re gonna be doing the packing, you still have to take the boxes into account. Because as part of the inventory, you have all the furniture. But now you’ve got a bunch of little loose items. All these little figurines and the plates. You’re not going to go put 20 plates on the inventory. That’s part of determining the boxes.

So a really, really simple, simple formula for determining the boxes is to take the weight and divide that by 100. And that’ll give you a rough idea of how many boxes. And how do you get the weight? You get the weight when you gather the inventory, step one. So take the weight, let’s say its 6,000. Divide that by 100, so you’ll have 60 boxes. And that’s give or take. But that’s really a solid formula for being able to figure it out, and you could break it down even further, of what percentage will be … 1.5 book boxes. What will be 3.0s? What will be 4.5s? What are going to be dish packs and wardrobes? You could break it down even further, but for simplicity sake and time sake today, take the total weight, divide it by 100. That’ll give you your box count.

Next thing you wanna do is you want to establish your additional charges and accessorial fees. So these are things like anything that you’re going to charge extra for. Bulky items, pianos, safes, hot tubs, extra stops, long carries, packing, fuel, additional valuation, storage; all your additional services, all your additional charges. And they’re called, traditionally, accessorial fees. Then you’ll add that on. So what we’re doing right now is we’re building out an estimate. We’re starting by gathering their inventory, then we’re figuring out the boxes, then we’re going to add on all the additional charges, and whatever it is you charge for that.

And depending on if you’re doing local or long-distance, if you’re doing long-distance, all these charges need to be part of your tariff. A lot of states, for local moves, you also have to have a tariff where you basically say, “This is what we charge for these items.” So you just want to make sure that whatever you’re doing as you’re estimating, that it is in compliance with your local county, city, state governing regulation entity, whoever that is, and with the federal motor carrier and DOT, if you’re doing long distance.

So fourth thing you want to do is calculate the price. Now, you have all the information you need. Now, you have all the data. Remember, we need a formula. So this is the formula. We’re gathering information, we’re determining the boxes, we’re adding any additional charges, and part of those additional charges, it’s asking the customer for other … what they have. How far is it from where the truck’s going to be able to be parked to the entrance? Are there stairs? Are there elevators? Things like that. You have to … It’s more of a discovery call. You have to ask questions to find out all this information. Now, of course, if you do an onsite estimate, you’ll be able to find out by seeing it yourself. But you can do more over the phone, and this could be done over the phone very easily. You just need to make sure your team is trained to do all this. Share this video with them. Let them watch this, okay?

So calculating the price. So for local moves, you take the weight and you’re going to want to determine… If it’s 6,000 pounds, to use the same example, how long is it going to take? How many movers are you going to send out there to do it? How many trucks do you need? And how long is it going to take? And then, you want to add variances for, if there are stairs, if there are elevators, anything like that, if there is a long carry. In my Moving Sales Academy program, we give you the entire chart on how to price this out. But take a look at, historically, what you have, how long it’s taken you to do certain moves.

And the easiest way to start doing this is to do the estimate, even if you maybe don’t want to give it to the customer right away. Maybe you don’t want to do a flat rate price, or maybe you don’t want to give a binding price right away. But at least track it all so that you can determine for yourself how fast your team moves. How fast are your movers moving? A lot of cities… There’s definitely cities that are different, right? A move in suburban Phoenix area is going to be much different than New York City.
So you wanna determine how long it’s going to take, based on certain weights, for certain movers, to get the job done, and build yourself out a little pricing chart. This way, you’ll be able to take that number, the weight, look at the chart, see what it is. In moving CRMs like SmartMoving, once the weight’s in there, it could calculate that for you based off your numbers.

Then, the fifth and final thing that you wanna do is you want to… Because now you’re done. So now it’s like you’ve gathered the customer’s inventory, you’ve determined the boxes, you’ve added the additional charges, you’ve calculated the price, you’ve presented it to them, and hopefully you’ve booked the move. Because the number one purpose of every call is to book the move. Remember that.

So now, after the fact, you want to make sure … This is very, very important … that you start running an estimate versus actual report. In order to tweak this process, in order to avoid the frustrations of a customer being upset because the estimate wasn’t… It turned out to be longer than it should have been, or it cost more than they were told. You’ve got to be able to look at your track record. So what is an estimate versus actual report? That’s basically numbers showing this is what the estimate was. And then if the price goes up, whether you charge them or not, kind of depends on your contract, kind of depends on your business process, if you’re going to honor the original price or not, you still know what it should have been. So you have an estimate versus actual. How far off are you? This is how you can identify and start adjusting so that you can get it to where those numbers start to really match up.

So you wanna do this on a company-wide level, and you also want to do this on an individual moving consultant level. Because you’ll find, especially as you grow, that you’ll have… This person over here, they’re super diligent. They get the customer on the phone and they’re like, “Okay, what about the lamps? What’s under the bed? Is there an attic? What about a shed out back? Is there a garage? What about the closets? What about pictures on the wall? Rugs?” They dig. And then you may have other reps who are just like, “Okay, there’s a bed. Okay. Couple nightstands? Okay. What else? That’s it? Okay, let’s move to the next room.” And what you’ll find is the estimate versus the actual is going to be way off.

So for training purposes and constantly improving your business and being able to identify exactly where the problems are coming from, you run this report and you can clearly see who’s not giving the accurate estimates. And you know where there’s additional training needed.

So I hope this was helpful, my friend. If so, do me a favor: Share this with somebody out there on social media or in one of the groups or a friend who might find this valuable. And make sure you like this for me, I’d really appreciate it. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. I’ll see you later.

How Much Should Moving Companies Profit?

  ► Get This Episode On iTunes

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how much money a moving company should profit.

  • “Know your numbers.” Review your Profit & Loss statements, review your cash flow reports, review your Marketing ROI and know that the money your spending is actually profitable for each individual source.

  • “How much money do you want to make?” Take some time and figure out what it’s going to cost for you to live the life you want to live.

  • “Build your business with a specific number in mind.” Determine the outcome you want and make sure the business is able to provide that amount of money.

  • “Don’t assume that more business equals more money.” Don’t think that you have to reach outside of the amount of business you have now in order to make more money.

  • “Don’t just focus on the money, focus on your lifestyle as well.” You have to profit in business AND thrive in life.
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

Your Moving Company’s Profit and Loss Statement

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Should You Diversify Your Moving Business?

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes so they can increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life.

You know, I get the question a lot on how much money should moving companies make? How much money should moving company owners be able to take home? And it’s one of those things that typically comes with some frustration, right? Maybe you’re putting in a ton of work. You’re working really hard. You’ve maybe even got a ton of gross revenue. Your gross revenue is really high. But at the end of the day, where’s the profit? Where’s the money that you’re able to take home? And it creates a lot of frustration.

We know that there’s a lot of liability in the moving business. There’s a lot of responsibility. You’re responsible for your movers. You’re responsible for your customers. You’re responsible for your equipment. You’re responsible for, and accountable for, and liable for those trucks that you put out on the road every single day for the safety of everyone else that’s out there. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of pressure to put on somebody and you want to be able to have the rewards, you want to be able to make the money that you deserve if you’re running a solid business. But how much is that?

I’ll get the question about, you know, “Louis, what are, what’s the average percentage of net profit for a moving company?” And here’s what I can tell you. You know, the first thing you need to know is that you should not be looking at average ever. Okay? Average is made up of people doing very low numbers and people doing very high numbers. All right? So you don’t want to strive to be average. You want to strive to be extraordinary. And the number that I would say you want to shoot for as a net profit in your moving company, after all your expenses, is 20%. Now there’s companies that are doing more than 20% and if you’re there great, however, if you’re on industry average, which I think is like nine or 10%, which isn’t good, you want to start getting it up higher. Okay. And you want to know for the work that you put in how much you’re going to be able to make. You want to know that this endeavor, this business, these hours that you’re putting in is worth your time. It’s worth your effort. Right?

So, for me, when I started in the moving business. And I was a 19-year-old kid and I was really just looking for a way at the time to make 10,000 bucks a month, like that was my goal. I’m like, “How can I make 10,000 bucks a month as a 19-year-old kid?” Then I got into the business and I’m like, “Okay, I see people are making the money, making money. I could do that.” I had a mentor say to me, he said, “Louis, make yourself $400,000 a year.” Okay, yourself. That’s what we’re talking about right now. We’re not talking about how much gross revenue your business should have because that’s kind of irrelevant, right? It is a certain number and a point that you should look at, but then the gross number is only set so that you can then have your expenses and then have your net profit at the end.

So I had a mentor say to me, he said, “Louis, make yourself $400,000 a year. Save 200. Spend 200. You’ll live a good lifestyle.” So I said, “Okay.” So that was my goal, right? I didn’t know any better. And within my second year in business, I went to like $300,000, net on my tax return, personal income. Okay. I think it was my third or fourth year in business, went to $800,000 personal net income and then after that it went to seven figures and up. But the thing is, you’ve got to be able to know what’s possible. And I’m not saying this in any type of way to, you know, claim that you are going to be able to make that money because I don’t know you. I don’t know your work ethic. I don’t know your focus. I don’t know your situation, right? So I’m just telling you what you know was reality for me in this business and what the possibilities are to be able to make money in the moving business. And it’s important that you establish what that is for you. All right?

So here’s the deal. If you want to get to a point where you’re making the amount of money you want to make in the moving business, here’s what you got to do. The first thing you need to do is you need to know your numbers, okay? We can’t just kind of shoot in the dark, and go and hustle, and get a bunch of moves, and try this and try that, and not really know how it’s all working out, right? You need to review your profit and loss statements. You need to be able to review your cash flow reports. You need to take a look at your marketing ROI to know that the money you’re spending on marketing is actually profitable for each individual source. You have to know your numbers. If you are going to be revenue income minded to where you’re focused on how much income you’re going to be able to make, right?

And you might say, “Louis, but it’s not all about that.” Well, it kind of is. Because you got into business to make money, right? Otherwise, if it was just something you enjoy doing, then volunteer and do it for free, right? Be one of those services that says, “You know what, we’ll move people for free, not for profit.” And if that’s you, cool. More power to you, all right? But most people are in this business because they saw the opportunity to make money and they want to be able to do that. But if you don’t know your numbers, it’s going to be very, very hard to get to where you want to go. Because when you have a benchmark, right? When you have a starting point of what your numbers are, you can start to make adjustments. How do we raise the gross revenue? How do we reduce the expenses to increase the profit?

Second thing you want to do, figure out how much money you want to make personally. Like how much money is it going to take to live the life you want to live? All the expenses that you have. All the expenses you want to have, all the investments, the savings, the charity. The emergency fund. What is it going to take to live the life that you want to live? That number could be different for everybody. It’s definitely different for everybody. You know, somebody might say, “Louis, I just want to make six figures. I want to get to $100,000 and I’m good.” Other people might say, “Listen, if I’m not making a half a million dollars a year, I don’t even know how I’m going to eat.”

So it’s different for everybody. Take some time, figure out what it’s going to cost to live the life that you want to live. Literally, get out a sheet of paper. What’s the mortgage going to be on your house that you want? What are the car payments, schools for your kids, insurance, investments, savings, anything else, charity, what is all that going to cost you?

And then the third thing you need to do is build your business with that number in mind. Instead of just saying, “Let me run this business and see what happens.” You’ve got to determine the outcome. And the outcome is income, right? So you want to make sure that you’re in a business that’s going to be able to provide the money that you want. And if you’re in the moving business, I’m here to tell you that chances are unless you’ve got very, very, very, very high aspirations, you can make the money in this business. You could personally make seven figures a year in this business and it’s just, you have to know that that’s where you want to go. And then build the business around that.

But it’s very important to understand truly what you want. So when we talk about figure out how much money you want, think about what you want from your heart. Because we could all set these big goals like, yeah, I want to make $10 million a year. Do you need $10 million a year? To live the life you want to live. It’s amazing. I take clients through this process all the time where it’s like, let’s figure out what it’s going to cost for you to get everything you want. And usually, the number is significantly less than they think it is. They get everything they want. They’ve got their savings, they could retire at the age they want to retire at. It’s usually significantly less than just a number they pick out of a hat.

And why is that important? Well, it’s important because you’re going to build your business around that goal. And if your goal is way too high and you start trying to make moves in your business that are unnecessary, you’re just bringing on more work, more responsibility, and for what? You’re just adding complexity. What you want to do is you don’t want to create this monster that just consumes your whole life. So figure out how much you want to make. Figure out what it’s going to take to live the life you want to live. Then you build the business around that.

Number four. Don’t assume that more business equals more money. I see this happen all the time and I feel fortunate when I’m able to get in with somebody, when somebody becomes a client, when they’re thinking about maybe opening another location or they’re thinking about expanding, and I’m able to see where they’re at currently and stop them from doing that. I’m all for expansion. I’m all for growth. You want to open 50 locations around the US? You want to do $100 million a year? Great.

However, just because you open another office does not mean you’re going to make more money. A lot of times you’re going to make less money and you’re going to introduce more complexity into your life and into your business. So don’t just assume that you have to go do all these different things to make money, right? I personally made $800,000 a year off one office. That was before I even opened up my six locations. So don’t think that you have to go reaching outside of what you have right now to make that money. I tell people all the time, don’t go dig a bunch of shallow holes. Find the one hole that has the oil and the gold under it and dig a deep hole there.

And typically a lot of people do local moving. By the way, I made all that money doing nothing but local moves. I didn’t even start doing long distance moves until I was in business for seven years. So I’m saying this as like a cautionary word of advice, that to go out and just do more does not equal more money. All right? If you want to scale, if you want to grow, set up your model business first. Set up one business that runs, it’s efficient, your profit margins are at 20% and above, and your cash flow is strong. You’re making money. Then you’ve got a model, then you could take that and then you can expand on that. So don’t assume that more business equals more money.

The next thing you want to focus on is you want to make sure that you are not just focused on the money, but you focus on your lifestyle as well. I mean, look, if you’re so focused on the money that you let your relationship suffer, your health suffer, your personal mental health suffer, you’re not going to live a good life. I don’t care how much money you have. I learned this the hard way. When I first started my business, it was money, money, money, money, right? But I was a young kid, single, no family. Could go out and that was all I did. However, once I made all the money that I, more than I ever thought that I would, I realized that that didn’t bring me the happiness that I thought it would. It wasn’t until I got to a point where I’m like, “You know what? I need to incorporate my whole lifestyle into this. I need to figure out how I can profit in my business and thrive in my life.”

So don’t make the mistake of just chasing down money. Build your business to get the income goal that you want, but build it in a way that requires as little effort as possible. And when I say that as little effort as possible could mean 50 hours a week, right? Could mean 40 hours a week. The point is, don’t give it everything you’ve got working 24/7, seven days a week, to get it going and sacrifice all that. Because what will happen is your mental capacity will start to diminish and the business will suffer from it as well. And at the end of the day, that’s not really the goal.

Now you might be in a position like, “Louis, I don’t care. I’ll do what I need to do. I need to get money now.” Cool, right? Like do what you need to do to get momentum, but as soon as you get momentum, you have to introduce the lifestyle. The same way that you’re going to do the exercise on how much money do you need to specifically live the life you want to live? You also need to say, what do I want to do in my life? What experiences do I want? How many days a week do I want to work? When I’m working what am I actually going to be doing during those days? Am I going to be dispatching trucks or am I going to be reviewing some reports, having a few meetings, checking in on my investments? You’ve got to be able to define all that for yourself and don’t make it all about money. Make it about lifestyle.

So number one, if you want to start getting to that level in your business where you’re making good money, number one is know your numbers. All right?

Number two, figure out actually how much money you personally want to make. You personally. Remember, your business is there as a means to financial freedom for you and your family.

Number three, build your business based on that number.

Number four, don’t assume that more business equals more money. Build a tight, tight foundation that’s profitable and then you could grow and build upon that.

And number five, don’t just focus on the money, but focus on the lifestyle as well. That’s why you’ll hear me say all the time, profit in your business, thrive in your life.

My friend, I hope that was helpful. If so, do me a favor. Share this video with somebody out there on social media or a friend that you think might find what we talked about today valuable. And if you could hit the light button for me too, I’d really appreciate it. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’ll see you next time and remember, go out there every single day, profit in your business and thrive in your life. I’ll see you later.

Your Moving Company’s Online Reputation

  ► Get This Episode On iTunes

SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro explains how to effectively improve your moving company’s online reputation.

  • “Treat the first page of Google like a garden.” Whatever shows up on that first page, you’ve got to cultivate it like a garden.

  • “Identify what areas need some fertilizer.” You want to identify the areas that need some work, either weeds that need to be pulled, or things that need to be fertilized or things that are already flourishing that you need to make sure continue to flourish.

  • “Nurture each of your Google listings individually.” Understand how each individual one operates and then work to make them each look good.

  • “Make sure you’re monitoring the progress of every listing, every month.” Keep a checklist. Keep an accounting of what you’re working on and what the improvements are.

  • “Get more 5-star reviews.” Your online reputation today in this modern day of moving is crucial.

  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. 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!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

How To Deal With Negative Online Reviews

BBB Accreditation For Moving Companies?

Positive Reviews, “Cheap Customers” & Charging Movers For Damage?

Diversify Your Moving Company’s Marketing

Top Moving Lead Providers for Moving Companies

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, 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. If you own a moving company these days, you know how important it is to have a solid online reputation. We know that our customers are going to go, they’re going to Google the name of the company and they’re going to check you out.

What do you do about it when you’ve got this amazing… You put in all this work, you put in all this effort, you get to train your movers, you’re doing a good job, you set up your whole business, and now maybe you get a bad review. Maybe you get a great review, but sites like Yelp don’t list it, or maybe you get no reviews at all. It’s really impacting your business. I know that could be frustrating, I hear it from clients all the time.

When you set out to run a successful business, you’re just thinking about I want to do a good job, and as long as I do a good job, that should be enough. In today’s modern-day of living in a fishbowl to where everybody could see everything, you’ve got to have a solid online reputation, because let’s face it, when a customer goes to move with you, they’re going to Google the name of your company. If they don’t like what they see, they’ll choose somebody elsewhere that’s a better presentation.

The reason this gets so frustrating is because there are some really, really good companies that I know do a great job, but they pay very little attention to their online reputation and they’re suffering for it. They’re losing business for it. They’re not getting all of the jobs that they could. Here is what you need to do.

In order to make sure that your online reputation allows you to book more customers, because remember, when you spend money on marketing, you need to convert them into a customer. When you get repeat and referral business, you need to convert them into a customer, and you want to make sure that your online reputation is solid. How do you do that? The one thing that you can do to make sure that your online reputation starts to become impeccable, is to treat the first page of Google like a garden.

What do I mean by that? If you type in the name of your moving company, and you see what shows up on that first page, that’s what customers are seeing. Typically, what will happen when we do this is we’ll start to see some good stuff, we’ll start to see some bad stuff. Maybe the first listing will be the name of your own personal website, then maybe Yelp, BBB may have a listing, some moving lead providers. The list goes on of different stuff that shows up on that first page. Whatever shows up on that first page, you’ve got to cultivate it like a garden.

What does that mean? The stuff that needs some work, you’ve got to put some fertilizer on it. The weeds, you’ve got to get rid of the weeds. The stuff that’s already flourishing, you got to make sure that it continues to flourish. When was it? About two years ago now, I taught this to our Moving Mastery members. We talked about cultivating the first page of Google as if it’s a garden. The results that they’ve seen are incredible because they put in the work and they put in the time.

In order to really make sure that your online reputation is on point, I just need you to think about the very simple thing that you need to do, and that’s cultivate the first page of Google like it’s a garden. How do you go about doing that? The first thing you need to do is you need to just type in the name of your company into Google. This isn’t a matter of typing in movers in your city, this is the name of your company specifically, type it in. See what shows up on that first page.

What you want to do next is you want to identify what areas need some fertilizer. Let’s say the first listing is your page, your website, and the second listing is Yelp. How many stars does Yelp show? If you do a search, you’ll have Yelp and you’ll have other review sites that will actually show the stars right there on the page, and you want to make sure that what is front-facing to the customer when they Google it is looking good. You want to identify the areas that need some work, either weeds that need to be pulled, or things that need to be fertilized or things that are already flourishing that you need to make sure continue to flourish.

The next thing you want to do is you want to nurture each of these listings that Google has on there. You want to nurture each of them individually. What does that mean? Yelp, for example, you may have good reviews, bad reviews, whatever it is, but the way that you handle Yelp is going to be much different than the way that you handle, let’s say the BBB for example, or Google maps, Google business listing to where they’re showing stars as well.

You want to understand how each individual one operates and then work to make it look good. People don’t really go past the first page of Google typically, so you want to make sure that first page looks solid. I hear from a lot of companies, and it’s unfortunate when they say it, they’ll say things like, “The BBB is old school. It doesn’t matter anymore.” Well, if it shows up on the first page when someone Googles the name of your company, it does matter. I see companies that are 5-stars across the board with everything. You click on their BBB link and they have an F. You look at the reason why, they didn’t respond to a few complaints.

Something as simple as going in and actually just responding to those complaints doesn’t mean you have to pay them out, it doesn’t mean you have to acknowledge that it’s true, but just to respond to them, will keep your score up. Don’t think that the BBB is old school and it doesn’t matter, if it’s showing up on that first page of Google for your company, it matters. Anything that shows up on that first page matters. That’s what customers are seeing.

You want to make sure that you take a look at each one and handle them all individually. You want this to be a beautiful picture, that first page of Google with your name at the top. When somebody scrolls, anything that has stars, it’s got four to five stars in it. Anything that has some kind of information about your company, it says something good, this is all stuff that could be nurtured and improved if you put your attention on it.

Like I said, I taught this two years ago to are Moving Mastery members, and they’ve all seen the results. It’s not something that happens overnight, you need to continually work on it. But if you’re in this business for the long run and you don’t want to continue to spend money on marketing to have a customer Google you and then go, “Yeah, no, they only have 1-star on Yelp.” You could explain it all day long, and you could talk about, “Yeah, but there are some good reviews, and Google and Yelp hides them, right? We’ve got all these good reviews, but they don’t show them, they only show the bad reviews.”

We could complain about that all day long, but it’s just the reality that we live in. You have to play the game the way that the game is set up, and we can’t dictate what’s on that first page. Actually, we can dictate what’s on that first page, but what’s there today you can’t go remove this, remove that. With some cleanup, with some nurturing, with some SEO work, you can start to dictate what’s on that first page, but it’s something that you have to nurture.

The fourth thing you want to do is you want to make sure you’re monitoring the progress every month. Again, this isn’t something that you’re going to go and take care of a few things and it’s going to instantly resolve the issue. It’s something that you need to monitor and work on monthly. What can we do? BBB shows a score we shouldn’t have, call them. They are somebody that you could speak to. Call them, speak to them, ask them, “What can we do to improve our score? What can we do to approve our grade?” Go down the list. Check them all. Keep a checklist. Keep an accounting of what you’re working on and what the improvements are.

When you start to put your attention on something, that’s when it improves. When you neglect an area of your business, it’s just going to naturally decay. Same thing with the garden, you can’t just plant the garden and then leave it there. You’ve got to nurture it. It’s the same thing with the first page of Google which is your online reputation. That’s what your online reputation is, is that first page of Google and whatever shows up there.

The fifth thing you want to do is get more 5-star reviews. I know you might say, “Louis, we try, you know, Yelp takes them down, customers don’t want to give them”, whatever the case may be, and the reality is you can. If you put in a diligent effort to go out there and get more 5-star reviews and you have a program for doing it… In my Moving Sales Academy program, we teach the Safety Net Review Fetcher.

That same system we also put in my software SmartMoving, so that after the move, automatically customer gets an email, customer gets a text message, they click on it, they rate you based on the rating that they give you. It either takes them to here, rate us on one of these sites, or… For example, if it’s 4 or 5-stars, it’ll then prompt them to go to any site of your choice whether it’s Google, Yelp, whatever it might be, Facebook, and give you the review. Let’s say it’s 3-stars and under, it’ll have them fill out what’s wrong so that it’ll actually come directly to your customer service so you’re not sending somebody to put a review that is not going to put a good review.

You’ve got to make that diligent effort. Your online reputation today in this modern day of moving is crucial. It’s so important that you cultivate that and it has to be front of mind in what you do with your business. If you’re just starting out and you don’t have much there, you want to start saying, “What can we get to show up on that first page of Google so that we could help decide what’s there?”

If you’ve been in business a long time, there’s a bunch of listings that are probably showing up for a lot of different things, make sure they’re all accurate, make sure they’re all updated. If you’ve got social media platforms that maybe you’re not active on, that’s okay, but make sure the information is updated. Make sure the information is relevant to where they’re not clicking on some Facebook page that maybe you had a nephew or a friend set up for you at some point that has the wrong address, and has no pictures, and looks like a ghost town like you’re out of business. It’s very simple.

Type the name of your company into Google, identify the areas that need some help, that need some fertilizer. Nurture each one of those listings individually, monitor the progress monthly, and then go out there and get more 5-star reviews using SmartMoving or some other type of platform that will make this whole process easier. If you don’t ask for the review, you won’t get the review. It’s a numbers game. We know that sites like Yelp are not going to post all of them. That’s okay, get more of them and they will show up.

I hope this was helpful. Like always, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. If you found this helpful today, please share this with a friend that might find it valuable in their business. Hit the like button for me, I’d really appreciate it. I’ll see you later.