In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares three things to help you pivot to the new way of operating in the moving business and help you thrive in 2021.
“2020 has changed the game in the moving industry. And in 2021, things are going to continue to change. Things are going to continue to change to this new way of moving where the old way of doing things is not going to work. We’ve got this major opportunity in front of us. This summer, I don’t know that there’s going to be enough moving companies to service all of the moves that are going to be happening. And if you’re prepared for that, if you’re in a position where you think about it like this big tidal wave that’s coming in and you learn to ride that wave, you’re going to ride that wave all the way to the bank. But if you don’t learn to ride that wave, that wave is going to come crashing down on your head.”
“And there’s really so much that needs to be adjusted and needs to be changed, but I want to give you three things today that I think will really help you to not only thrive this year, but set yourself up for this new world of moving that we’re in. The first one is you’ve got to make sure that your virtual sales game is on point. What do I mean by that? Not only do you need to be able to give estimates virtually, whether that’s over the phone or whether that’s a video estimate, you’ve also got to be able to look at this great opportunity that we have in front of us to hire remote salespeople. A lot of my private clients this year, I had them hiring teams of remote people in different parts of the country that a lot of times they could get for a lot cheaper than they can in their own city.”
“If you want to succeed and you don’t want that wave crashing down on your head, it’s time to step up that mover hiring process and be diligent about it. There’s no simple way about it, keep those ads running. Keep those interviews going, get your hiring process, get your training process dialed in. Or you’re just not going to be able to ride that wave of opportunity all the way to the bank, you’ve got to be able to sell the moves and you’ve got to make sure you’re selling them at a price that is profitable for you. And then you’ve got to make sure you got good quality going out there and doing the job. I know you’re going to say, “Louis, this is nothing new. This is nothing special.” But it is, it’s a matter of how much attention you’re putting to these things, how much focus you’re putting on them. The stuff that we used to take for granted can no longer be taken for granted.”
“The way you build a business is you build your processes. You build your SOPs, that’s building a business, that gives you something that you’re… You’re building something, a set of systems, a set of processes that run your business consistently, predictably without you. If you don’t have that, you’re not building a business, you’re just spinning on the hamster wheel. So as you are building your new virtual sales process, as you’re building your mover hiring and training process, document those processes, build for the future, have your playbook for your business, so that you know this is how we do things. Because if you don’t have that, your people aren’t going to know what to do. You’re not going to be able to pivot and change quickly.”
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Louis Massaro: 2020 has changed the game in the moving industry. And in 2021, things are going to continue to change. Things are going to continue to change to this new way of moving where the old way of doing things is not going to work. We’ve got this major opportunity in front of us. This summer, I don’t know that there’s going to be enough moving companies to service all of the moves that are going to be happening. And if you’re prepared for that, if you’re in a position where you think about it like this big tidal wave that’s coming in and you learn to ride that wave, you’re going to ride that wave all the way to the bank. But if you don’t learn to ride that wave, that wave is going to come crashing down on your head. And I could tell you this from over the past year with the hundreds of moving company owners that we work with and not to mention my private clients that I work with real closely, I’m looking at their financials, I’m reviewing their processes, I’m helping them scale.
I’m helping them grow. I’m helping them franchise. I’m helping them see what works today and kind of sitting there as they make the decisions in their business and helping them guide them. Well, we see what’s working, we see what’s not working. And we see that there’s a pivot that needs to change. And if we don’t do this, I’m concerned that a lot of companies are just going to end up in a really bad position. Last year, I think a lot of companies had moves just falling on their laps. I call it the COVID gift to moving companies. COVID hit, it was like, “Oh, shit, what do we do? We’re going to go out of business.” And then all of a sudden, most companies had the busiest summer they ever had.
And although a lot of them may have put in processes and a lot of them may have done a lot to ramp that up, a lot of it was a gift. A lot of it fell on your lap, I think you could agree on that. And I don’t want you to take that for granted and think that that’s something that’s just going to happen and that that’s even healthy for your business because not all business is good business. We need to make sure it’s profitable business. We need to make sure you’re doing a good job for your customers so that you continue to get raving reviews, you continue to get repeat and referral customers. And you might be thinking, Louis, if it’s going to be so busy, what do I need to change? What do I need to do? And I just want to give you three things that are going to help you in 2021, to really pivot to this new way of thinking, this new way of operating within the moving business.
And there’s really so much that needs to be adjusted and needs to be changed, but I want to give you three things today that I think will really help you to not only thrive this year, but set yourself up for this new world of moving that we’re in. The first one is you’ve got to make sure that your virtual sales game is on point. What do I mean by that? Not only do you need to be able to give estimates virtually, whether that’s over the phone or whether that’s a video estimate, you’ve also got to be able to look at this great opportunity that we have in front of us to hire remote salespeople. A lot of my private clients this year, I had them hiring teams of remote people in different parts of the country that a lot of times they could get for a lot cheaper than they can in their own city.
They could have more coverage at different hours and they could run the entire thing virtually, meet with them, manage them, make sure that everything is used in a central database, in a CRM. I know most of the moving industry now is on SmartMoving, company that I co-founded, but whatever CRM you’re using, you’ve got the tools. We’ve got Zoom, we’ve got the CRM, we’ve got the ability to monitor their phone calls to see what’s going on. And to be able to adjust and pivot, we’ve got to think differently than, “I need salespeople in my office.” We need to think differently than, “I need an estimator to go out and do the estimate in the home.” Those things are still good, but what’s going to really help you adapt is stepping up your virtual sales game. Number two, mover hiring.
And you’re going to say, “Louis, that’s nothing new. That’s something that’s been around forever. We’ve always struggled and needed to hire movers,” but now more than ever, you’ve got to make this a priority. Not just put an ad once in a while when you need some people. Have a continuous process where you’re constantly recruiting, constantly hiring, constantly training and you’ve got somebody managing this process. There’s a shortage of movers. So we’ve got this demand for people moving, we saw it all 2020, the huge demand, everybody’s moving to a new home. They want more space. They want to get out of big cities. There’s a lot happening.
And then we’ve got people that don’t want to work, number one, they’re getting handouts or they’re have an easier job driving for Uber or driving for Amazon Prime, making deliveries. So we’ve got this demand, but in order to fulfill the demand, we need the movers. The companies that I’m working with that are setting up their mover hiring process and running that as if it’s as important as their sales process, are the ones that are winning and that’s what you’re going to need to do to win. You can’t say, “Well, Louis, nobody wants to work. Louis, it’s so hard to find movers. Louis, I can’t find good help in my city. My city is different, you don’t understand.”
I hear you with all those excuses, but if you want to succeed and you don’t want that wave crashing down on your head, it’s time to step up that mover hiring process and be diligent about it. There’s no simple way about it, keep those ads running. Keep those interviews going, get your hiring process, get your training process dialed in. Or you’re just not going to be able to ride that wave of opportunity all the way to the bank, you’ve got to be able to sell the moves and you’ve got to make sure you’re selling them at a price that is profitable for you. And then you’ve got to make sure you got good quality going out there and doing the job. I know you’re going to say, “Louis, this is nothing new. This is nothing special.” But it is, it’s a matter of how much attention you’re putting to these things, how much focus you’re putting on them. The stuff that we used to take for granted can no longer be taken for granted, which brings me to my third point, which is build for the future.
We talk about building our business, “I’m building my business. I’m building my business.” The way you build a business is you build your processes. You build your SOPs, that’s building a business, that gives you something that you’re… You’re building something, a set of systems, a set of processes that run your business consistently, predictably without you. If you don’t have that, you’re not building a business, you’re just spinning on the hamster wheel. So as you are building your new virtual sales process, as you’re building your mover hiring and training process, document those processes, build for the future, have your playbook for your business, so that you know this is how we do things. Because if you don’t have that, your people aren’t going to know what to do. You’re not going to be able to pivot and change quickly. The companies that I work with, they’ve got their processes.
They’ve got them dialed in, or at least they do once we work together for a little while. And when a change needs to happen, like many changes needed to happen last year in order to adjust, in order to pivot, you go to the process, you go to the playbook, you see what’s there. You make the adjustment, you train the team. You let everybody know this is the new way that we do it. And you move forward. You’ve got to be agile. You’ve got to be able to make shifts and pivots quickly. And if you don’t already have everybody on the same page in alignment with how things need to be done, it’s very hard to do that.
When you’ve got the processes in place, that’s building a business for the future. Right now, we’re also facing the possibility of a recession coming, so it’s like, look, we’ve got this major opportunity right now in 2021. And I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I’m not claiming to be an economist, but I can tell you that I lived through the 2008 recession and it was not fun. I had five, six offices at the time and it was not fun. Just to open my long distance division, there was a point there where I thought, man, am I going to go out of business? Why was that? It was because I had built my business to run in a good economy. It wasn’t prepared for the bad economy. Luckily I was able to adapt and adjust and pivot and make the adjustments that I needed right away to not only get things back on track, but then take it to a whole nother level.
I want you to be prepared. I want to make sure that whatever comes… We don’t know. We didn’t know coronavirus was going to come, we had no idea. We don’t know what’s coming next, but you need to be prepared and you need to have your business set up to thrive in a great economy. You need to have your business set up to thrive in a bad economy because the moving business is as close to a recession proof business as you could get. And as we’ve seen it, it was [inaudible 00:09:27] the pandemic pretty well too. But it’s not a matter of surviving, it’s a matter of thriving. It’s not a matter of just making a few bucks over the summer, it’s about consistent profits all year long, while you keep your sanity, while you lower your stress, while you enjoy your life.
This business should be your vehicle to financial freedom and opportunity to provide a great service to your community, to bring up your team, to bring up your crew and help guide everybody to that next level in your business, in your life. Now’s the time, take these three steps. Start there and continuously be thinking about how you need to improve to get to that next level, my friend. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. Make sure you’re prepared for the opportunity that’s in front of us in 2021. I’ll talk to you later.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares 4 things that stop you from delegating in your moving company.
“You shouldn’t pay someone to do something you could do yourself. A lot of people grow up with that mentality. But you want to flip that. I look at it and I say, “Why would I do something myself I could pay somebody else to do?” I don’t want to do it.”
“As a business owner, you have unlimited opportunity that is only capped by your time. You want to be by the pool hanging out while they’re doing all the work? That’s your right. You take on the risk. You get the reward.”
“Freedom doesn’t mean that you don’t work. It means you have the freedom to work on what you want to work on. You have the freedom to go and scale if that’s what you want to do.”
“Even if we didn’t teach or learn any of the moving stuff this weekend, this is the stuff that will help you succeed in your business. This is the stuff that’s really going to help you get where you want to go.”
Watch the video to get full training.
HOT NEWS & DEALS!
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!
Latest Instagram! Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!
All right, delegating. What stops most people from delegating? Fear. They won’t do it right. By the way I suffered from all of these. So I’m not mocking anybody, but this is the voice. They won’t do it right. I tried to delegate. It didn’t work. Every time they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. I’m just going to keep it and do it myself. No one could do it as good as me. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe there was one person in the course of my time that I felt that could be as good as me on the phones booking moves. They didn’t stop me from having 70 people in a call center booking moves. I could have sat there, “No one could do it as good as me,” and sit there and do it forever and have a couple of trucks. But that’s not what I wanted to do.
Also, we talked about sometimes we get lazy as owners. It’s true. Maybe someone can’t do it as good as you, but are you consistent? Even if you want to be consistent, if you’re trying to book moves and nobody does it as good as you, you still have to run the rest of the business. You still have to be in other places. So now we’re losing opportunities. So I’d rather have somebody who’s not as good that’s consistent. But if you’re that good at something, great. Document what you do. Who uses my sales script? Who’s increased sales with it? Okay. I’m like, “Hey, what do I do? Let me just write down what I say and get everybody else to say what I say.” Fine, you don’t have my sales script? Whoever’s the best person in your company, take what they say, write it down and have everybody else say that. Most stuff could be duplicated. You got to be able to delegate.
What if something bad happens? Something bad will happen. They’ll send the wrong truck. They’ll put the driver in the truck that didn’t have a license. Stuff will happen. Less of it will happen if you have the processes. You see how all this starts to tie together? This is the stuff that will, even if we didn’t teach or learn any of the moving stuff this weekend, this is the stuff that will help you succeed in your business more than anything, more than which marketing to use, more than dispatch, all that stuff. This is the stuff that’s really going to help you get where you want to go.
Guilt, right? Guilt. You shouldn’t pay someone to do something you could do yourself. Who grew up with this belief, was told this belief? Even if you don’t believe it now you grew up feeling this way. You got a parent that’s mowing the lawn all day long. I’m not paying somebody to do something I could do myself. I don’t know why that’s the voice, but that’s how I picture it. So what happens is a lot of people grow up with that mentality. They don’t say it. It’s in the back of their mind as guilt. You want to flip that. I look at it and I say, “Why would I do something myself I could pay somebody else to do?” I don’t want to do it.
My wife ordered this laundry basket from Amazon. She said, “Oh, it looks great.” It came in, I don’t know, 8,000 pieces. I’m like, “I’m not doing this.” I could sit and be present and enjoy it, no big deal. I’m busy, man. My time is more valuable than this. So it sat there for months. Then I learned about a service called TaskRabbit. You go on. I need someone to assemble some shit. Boom! 50 bucks an hour. He comes. Grab this, grab that. Here, assemble all that. I’m not going to sit there. We’ll talk about how valuable your time is. Don’t do something that you could pay somebody else to do.
As a business owner you have unlimited opportunity that is only capped by your time. My employees will feel like I don’t do anything. These are real statements. This isn’t me mocking or making fun. My first six hires were friends. I recruited all my friends. I didn’t know how to hire people. I’m like, “I need help.” I called my friends back home, “Listen, come out to Denver, give you a job. Come out to Denver.” So I had all my friends. It was this camaraderie to where now I felt a little bad if I stepped away and let them do everything. And it stayed with me until I had a shift in perspective and looked at it differently to where, you know what? That’s your right.
You want to be by the pool hanging out while they’re doing all the work? That’s your right. You take on the risk. You get the reward. You have months where you don’t make money. You have months where you got to go into savings to cover business bills. Don’t worry about what other people are thinking. It’s really something that you just got to get past. But once you do, you break through that freedom.
I don’t deserve freedom. I need to work hard. Another disbelief that somehow, some way we just picked this up from the time we were born til now. And we feel like, who am I to… The middle of the week I’m going to the beach? Or I’m going to take two weeks off and not do anything. I’m going to let somebody else do stuff when I’m perfectly capable of doing it. I’m going to invite a man that’s almost twice my age to build that laundry basket? I’m a young guy. I should be doing it myself. Fuck that!
If he’s assembling shit for 50 bucks an hour on TaskRabbit, cool. He’s happy. I’m happy. Great guy. I text him direct now. I love him. “Yeah, go ahead. Order whatever you want on Amazon in pieces. There’s no longer a restriction on ordering stuff that needs to be assembled.”
Comfort, losing their sense of purpose within the business. Your business ends up becoming your identity and it’s everything you do. And you find significance from that. And so it’s very uncomfortable to step away and be in a position where you lose your purpose. I’m not needed anymore. I got a great client in the room. Big franchise operation. He’s got amazing franchisees. He’s got amazing employees. He’s got an amazing team. And he was like, “It just feels weird that all of a sudden everything’s being handled and what do I do?”
But that’s the place you want to be. The freedom… I’m not putting a picture up here of a beach chair and an umbrella and a pina colada. Freedom doesn’t mean that you don’t work. It means you have the freedom to work on what you want to work on. You have the freedom to go and scale if that’s what you want to do or sit on the beach, whatever it is. But you’ll find a new sense, but that comfort will keep you there. I don’t mind doing these tasks myself. Got another client, two offices, van line agent, still goes through the mail every day. I’m like, “What are you doing?”
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s no big deal.”
“Yeah, but your time, it’s not a good use of your time.”
No vision for how they’ll use their new free time. A lot of people hesitate to get that freedom because they’re like, “What am I going to do?” For me, my initial desire to get freedom was so that I could actually manage the mess that I created, not to have freedom to enjoy life or anything like that. That was a later progression for me, which I now know is all backwards. But you got to be able to identify what you’re going to do once you do free yourself up. You got to be able to say to yourself right now, “Okay, if I was able to free myself up from the day to day, what would I work on instead? If I’m not dispatching trucks, servicing moves, dealing with customer complaints, whatever it might be, what will I do with my time?” And it doesn’t mean you have to be doing something outside of work.
And then there’s skill, just not knowing how to delegate. If you have to struggle with this, don’t feel bad about it. It’s not like you learn to walk at a certain age, you learn to talk at a certain age, you learn to delegate at a certain age. It just doesn’t work like that. It’s a learned skill. What should I delegate versus do myself? How do I keep track of things I delegated to make sure that they actually get done? It will take longer to show someone to do something than just doing it myself. If you’ve got something that’s a onetime thing, it’s a onetime thing and that’s the case, just do it.
But if it’s repetitive or there’s several occurrences of it and it might take you longer that one time to show them how to do it, you’re going to save that time. You’re going to take that off your plate and move on. So we really got to think about what’s your time worth.
So what are some of the things you could take off your plate? Ongoing repetitive tasks are one of the easiest things to put into a process to teach somebody how to do it. Whatever it might be, confirming moves, opening the mail, bookkeeping. I’ve got a private client. When I first started working with him we got to a certain place and I’m like, “We really got to dig into your P&L to find the answer to what you’re looking for.”
“Okay, yeah. I’m going to get them.” He had an accounting background so he was going to do them himself. A couple months went by and I’m like, “Listen, you can do it, but you’re not. So let’s hire somebody to do it.” We got him a part time bookkeeper, remotely, and got the books done, right away.
And so the point is don’t let something that you’ve been meaning to get to, even if you have the skill to do it, you’ve got to be real with yourself and be like, “I know I’ve been talking about doing this, but am I doing it? No? Let me just hire somebody and get it done.”
Project management. So as you start to scale and you’re working on business development, you’re not just working on the day to day, it’s business development and how to grow and how to scale, there’s going to be a lot of projects going on. A project could be open this new location. A project could be set up training for all our new franchisees, stuff like that.
Operations management. How many of you know you need to hire an operations manager? Okay. Everybody else has one already? Okay.
Sales management. We’ll talk about sales… What’s today, Saturday? Wow, it’s going by quick. We’ll talk about sales tomorrow.
Recruiting and hiring. Who doesn’t enjoy recruiting or hiring? Okay. Nowadays you could find yourself a part time, remote recruiter that works out of the office. That won’t cost you a fortune because it’s as needed. Don’t slow down the process because it’s something you don’t enjoy. We’re in a time now where resources and people are so easy to find and hire at cheap prices and just for what’s needed. You could easily get a virtual assistant or a virtual recruiter for X amount of dollars, X amount of hours per week or whatever it might be.
Basically anything you do, you can get off your plate. You start to make it a game and that carries over into your personal life.
So you’ve got to remove yourself from the drudgery, from the day to day. Not this month, not this week, remember you’re on the road to mastery. There is time to get there. Don’t feel like you have to do it all right away. To build a sustainable, longterm, successful business that’s going to build wealth for you and your family, it’s not done overnight. Make your days mission driven, not hour driven. When you go to work, go there on a specific mission for that day. Go in and execute on that mission. And then you could manage your people, see what’s going on and get out of there.
Don’t just say, ‘I go to work at 8:00 and I leave at 5:00 and whatever falls on my lap in between, that’s what I deal with. Whatever phone calls come in, that’s what I deal with. Whatever people email me, that’s what I deal with.” You go in there on a mission on what you know you’re going to be working on. And when I say go in there, it could be in your spare bedroom. It could be at a coffee shop. It could be at a home office. It could be at a remote office. It doesn’t have to be at your office, but make your days mission driven.
Implement SOPs for each ongoing role that you delegate, standard operating procedures, your processes. It becomes very easy to delegate when all you do is just write out the steps for somebody. Even if you don’t get fancy, bullet point, do this, then do that, then do this, then do that. Always think eliminate, automate or delegate. Whenever you’re doing something yourself… I have this reminder pop up for me every single day so that everything that I’m doing, I’m like, “Can I eliminate this? Does this even need to be done? Is this even necessary?” Sometimes we started doing something years ago and we didn’t really think about it and just kept doing it. And it’s not even really impactful anymore. Can I automate this somehow? So much could be automated these days. Or can I delegate this to somebody else? Decide what to take off your plate, then make sure you decide what to do with your time instead. Remember we got to fill that gap.
If you don’t have the vision for what you’re going to use your time for, you’ll stay comfortable, not realizing it, that you’re staying in your protected shell, because you’re not quite sure. Listen, we all have that little scared kid inside of us. We all have it.
And if we’re afraid of what’s on the other side of something, we’ll stay right where we’re at. Know what you’re going to do with your time and you’re like, “Yeah, get that off my plate. I’m going to go work on that.”
Block time for delegating and follow up. We’ll get to block time, which is a way to manage your days and manage your calendar. But essentially, you’ve got to have time set aside for delegating because otherwise what happens is we just go, “Hey, do this, Hey, do that.” And we don’t really give them proper instruction and then it doesn’t get done right. Then we fall back into, “I’m not doing it because nobody does it right. We tried that it didn’t work.” We’ve got to have the time to actually give them clear instructions and information on what we need done.
And then build a team to run the day to day. Look at it and say, “What are the core functions to run this business?” The fundamentals, not business development and build your team that will run it. And then once you see that it’s running, then you could start working on business development.
Then you got to step into your new role. Remember, I use names to illustrate certain things. It doesn’t mean this is what’s on your business card, but your new role as Moving CEO, that’s what you want to step into. Not small business owner. You want to step into this Moving CEO for yourself. That’s the mindset. That’s the person that’s committed to mastery.
Okay, dabblers don’t have that mindset. Remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business. Again, it doesn’t have to happen overnight, but we all have to have something to shoot for. And if we don’t look further out, it just feels like every day is dreadful, the same stuff, the same stuff. And we’re going to have ups and downs and ups and downs. And we don’t really know where we’re headed. If you’ve got that vision of where you’re going and you know, “Hey, eventually I’m stepping out of the business,” every day will be purposeful. It’s not just going to be another day. You know where you’re headed.
Establish a new set of reports to run your business off of numbers. Think through what do I need to see? What would be nice? This is essentially how I started with the certain reports. Let me not worry about how I’m going to get the numbers. And this is where you separate the manager, the creator and the doer. Because when the creator starts saying, “What reports do I need?” The manager interrupts, rudely and says, “Well, how are we going to get those? I don’t even know how we’re going to go about doing this. Where are we going to pull those numbers from?” Tell him to get outside. Stay there and think about the reports that you need and then say, “Okay, I’m going to step outside now. You figure out how we’re going to get those reports.”
When you’re sitting and running it off your iPad or running it off your phone and you could see and know what’s going on from anywhere, what do you need to see? And then establish a new meeting schedule to manage your team. If you’ve got the reports and you’ve got a set a meetings, daily, weekly, monthly meetings that you have, either in person or over the phone or through Skype or Zoom or FaceTime or whatever, now you’re running your business like a Moving CEO. Now you’ve got the freedom to do whatever you want to do with that time.
So now you have a new set of priorities. The client I was telling you about that goes to Europe now, that’s where they travel for long, extended periods of time with his family and runs everything off his iPad. This was the target. That was it. What do we need to do? He actually said it like, kind of stumping me, which I get a lot. This is what I want. How are we going to get that? And it was, “Listen, we’ve got to remove you from the day-to-day. Get you a set of reports that you could see exactly what’s going on. Establish a meeting schedule so you still feel in control and in the loop. And then we need to get your calendar out and we need to block out times, weekly for the new priorities.”
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to make your moving company recession-proof.
“You’ve got to make a decision right now that says, you know what? I’m not going to cave to the fear, but I’m going to stand up and I’m going to take the action that I need to take that’s not only going to help me thrive in any economy, but is going to just build my business bigger, better, stronger than it was before.”
“Build a strong sales process. If you have up till now been in a position where you just kind of take whatever jobs fall on your lap, you’re like, “Oh, we get some calls, we get some leads, we book whatever we can.” It’s time to focus on your sales process.”
“Fuel your sales with profitable marketing. The sales get you the business, the marketing gets you the opportunities. And the key with all of your marketing is to know your marketing ROI.”
“Get ahead of the curve. Allow yourself to understand that the moving business is as close to recession-proof already as it is, because people will always need to move, no matter what. If they’re downsizing, whatever the case may be, but if you don’t tighten up, it’s going to be a rocky road. Not everybody is going to make it through this. That’s just the reality of the circumstances that we’re in.”
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Louis Massaro: What’s up, everybody? Welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. I’m Louis Massaro and I’m here with my main man, Chris, today, and we are still on lockdown as of the time of this recording. What’s happening, Chris?
Chris: Hey, hey, hey. What’s up?
Louis Massaro: I’m ready to get back to the office. I’m thinking next time we … It might be about the time we get back.
Chris: Yeah, I think we’ll still exercise our social distancing rules.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I’ll let everybody else stay home and you and I could just go there and at least do the podcast.
Chris: I’m looking forward to it. Let’s get to it.
Louis Massaro: So welcome everybody. This podcast is set up to help you as a moving company owner take your business to the next level. Make more money, reduce your stress, live a better quality of life, and we’re doing that every single episode. These newer episodes Chris is coming with the topic, question, and just kind of dropping it on me. I’m not prepared for what, where we’re going and what we’re doing, but he knows to bring the value and to make sure that it’s stuff that will help you get to that next level with your business. So what do you got today, Chris?
Chris: That’s right. I like putting you on the spot and putting you to the test here.
Louis Massaro: It’s fun. It’s fun, I like this.
Chris: For this particular one, this one’s … Normally, usually we’ve been having questions come in on our social media that make good topics, but for this one I thought I would kind of maybe go off on my own on this one. I want you to talk about something that I think is relevant for the time that we’re living in right now. I thought it was appropriate because I know you had just finished filming a new course about this particular topic. So what I thought is you should discuss how a moving company owner should deal with this upcoming recession.
Louis Massaro: Okay, yeah. Yeah, so I did. I just finished, it’s called the Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass, how to thrive in any economy. I did it as part of our Moving CEO Business Program for our members there because I wanted to give them a strategic plan to navigate this recession, right? Recessions here, it’s common, we don’t know how bad it’s going to get. We don’t know how long it’s going to last, we don’t know the effects. Luckily what we know is that we as moving companies we’re able to stay open and stay running, with the whole COVID thing. So it wasn’t as bad as it was for a lot of other business that really are suffering and have closed permanently because of this. But having gone through the 2007, 2008, 2009 recession at a point where my business was already around that eight figure mark and then just getting slammed with that recession, I learned a lot of lessons in that time and what I needed to do to bounce back, and realized that at the time the way my business was set up, it wasn’t recession proof. I had to scramble to put things in place to get it there, and I want people to just get out ahead of this thing, right? Don’t wait until it gets bad.
I want to put together an exact plan of what to do to go out there to recession proof your business, and I’m actually going to … This is for our members, but anybody that wants this course, I’m giving it away for a dollar for a seven day trial. It’s a seven day course. Go in there, check it out, implement everything that I talk about in that course, because it will help you recession proof your business, all right?
So if you want the course, go to LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof. LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof. It’s a dollar for seven days, and then it would actually enroll you into our basic Moving CEO Business program on a monthly basis. But check it out, you can cancel before the seven days. You’re not obligated to stay, but I want you to get this training. I actually filmed it here from home. No TV, no flip chart, just went through and gave you the core, raw, here’s what you need to be working on to recession proof your business so that you will thrive in any economy. So go get that for a dollar. It’s LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof to get the Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass, how to thrive in any economy. But let’s talk about it now. Let’s talk about an overview of what someone needs to do, and the first thing is to realize that a recession is not a death sentence to your business, right?
We’ve seen something with this pandemic that none of us have seen before in our lifetime, and it’s devastated a lot of people, and there’s a lot of negativity. There’s a lot of news that’s just breeding fear, which is understandable, right? There’s a lot of bad stuff going on. There’s people getting sick, there’s people dying, there’s businesses going under, there’s people being laid off from work. We’ve got the highest unemployment rate. I mean, in April alone there was 20 million people lost their jobs just here in the US. Just thinking about that can make somebody … Could really get into your head, it can infect your mind, right? So I’m going to get into some steps that you could take to recession proof your business, but I want to first share what I saw happen in the great recession, right? With the housing market collapse, and everything that happened from 2007 to 2009. At that time I already had, I had just launched my long-distance division. I had six locations. Just launched my long-distance division. For the first seven years of my business I didn’t do any long distance, right? I had six locations, only local, and then decided, you know what? I’m going to go buy a million two worth of trucks, about 12 trucks, it’s like a million two, finance them, and was going to start hauling all the long-distance, we did for several years, but it happened right there, as the recession started, right? At the same time people started to not use the Yellow Pages as much, they started to shop online because the iPhone came out and more and more people looking for services started to go online.
So at the time I was spending $250,000 a month just in Yellow Pages, right? So now that’s going on. The recession hits. I’ve got all these long-distance trucks now. It was kind of like the perfect storm and it made me realize up until that point I was making a ton of money, things were running good, and it made me realize that I wasn’t recession proof, right?
There were things that I needed to tighten up, and that recession came and rubbed them right in my face and showed them to me, in a way where I saw them clearly. It’s like okay, I could see now what I need to do that I’ve been knowing I need to do, or talking about doing, but it’s important to get this stuff in place now so that, at the time it felt like survival, right? It felt like it’s doomsday, and that’s what the media does, and it’s the reality too for a lot of businesses.
So that moment for me, when I decided to take charge and not just sit around and say, “You know what? This is going to pass.” I realized that, you know what? Let me get way ahead of this. Let me improve and let me shore up all these areas that I need to improve in my business so that I can make it through this, and the reality was it actually propelled me right out of the recession. Coming out of the recession I went from 10 million a year to 20 million a year, because everything that I had put into place in that time that felt like it was more of a survival strategy really became that long-term success strategy, right? But I also witnessed and watched companies that didn’t take that action or didn’t know what to do. I don’t know exactly what their scenario was, but I did see businesses, moving companies go out of business, but I also saw my company and I saw several other companies just really take off during that time.
So the main message here is that it’s time to get things tightened up. It’s time to recession proof your business, because this will come and this will go, and it’ll pass, but there’ll be another one at some point, right? It’s like we knew there would be another one when that 2008 period, the so-called 2008, we knew there’d be another one at some point. We didn’t know when, right? So now here we are, what is it? 12 years later, and we’re headed into this recession. So you’ve got to make a decision right now that says, you know what? I’m not going to cave to the fear, but I’m going to stand up and I’m going to take the action that I need to take that’s not only going to help me thrive in any economy, but is going to just build my business bigger, better, stronger than it was before.
Chris: Yeah, okay. So how does somebody go about starting this process?
Louis Massaro: First thing I would say is that before we get into the steps, I’m going to share the steps, but you’ve got to be very, very conscious of how the fear of the recession is affecting you.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right? Because having talked to people that lost their business or that had a really, really hard time in that recession in 2008, the common theme that I saw was that they fed into … I ask the questions, I want to understand what really went on, and the fear was so overwhelming and the fear was directing their actions. Right now the news, people are losing their jobs, restaurants are closing, they’re never going to open again. All these stuff is in your face all day long, so it’s telling your subconscious mind, “What’s the use? Why do all these stuff? We’re not going to make it.” And that’s one of the things that really impacted the businesses that didn’t make it or had a really hard time back then, was that they did allow that fear to get into their minds. We don’t realize it, what we consume kind of subconsciously takes over and helps us, good or bad, go in a direction that we either intend or didn’t intend to go. That makes sense?
Chris: Okay. So even if you’re not aware of it, there is a subconscious influence happening there through the media, and wherever else, that can be really detrimental. Now, how do you know? First of all, how do you know if that’s actually happening to you, and then what do you do about it?
Louis Massaro: Well, first of all, let’s just say that you’ve got to have some kind of faith that it’s not happening to you, right? Because especially back then it was like I had … Everybody would say to me, “Lou,” They knew I was in the moving business, and there was the housing market collapse, right? So everybody’s like, “Oh, man, this must be killing your business.” Everybody you talk to, everywhere you go, right? So your mind will start believing that if you let it, right? So if you don’t know how to take control and what to believe instead, here’s what I’m going to tell you, take it from me and have some faith that don’t buy into that shit. Your business, the moving business, is as close to recession proof as it gets, and even if we don’t implement the stuff that I’m going to talk about, right? Because people will always need to move, okay? People will always need to move.
Was the recession tough? Yes, but for me the toughest part was navigating that all these additional trucks, all these additional advertising expense and everything else that was going on with it at the same time, and right now it’s just a matter of tightening up a few areas in your business to make sure that you’re going to thrive right through this thing and not buy into that fear and just try not to consume it. Try to keep that … That period during that recession, that’s when I started to block out and not listen to the news, and not watch the news. Because every day it was like I’m trying to hold on here. I’m trying to build this thing, and I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t go under, and I’ve got to listen to all day long, businesses are collapsing, this is happening, and that’s happening. It’s just not good.
Chris: Okay. So is that what you recommend? Is everybody just turn off the TV, stop looking at the news? I mean …
Louis Massaro: That’s part of it. Then let’s get into the strategy too for the business, right? That’s part of it. You got to protect yourself and just be aware of what’s affecting you, right? And take it from me that if you focus in right now on your business, and you do the things that maybe you know you need to do, or maybe there are some new things I’m going to share with you on this podcast, and you implement that stuff and you just stay focused on not only survival but thriving, you’re going to be good. You’re going to be good, but if you let the fear overcome, if you let your mind say, “What’s the use? Why put in all this work? I’m not going to make it anyway. Businesses are failing.” Then that’s the action that you’re going to end up taking.
Chris: Okay, okay.
Louis Massaro: So the first … There’s seven steps, okay? The first thing is build a strong sales process.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: All right? Build a strong sales process. If you have up till now been in a position where you just kind of take whatever jobs fall on your lap, you’re like, “Oh, we get some calls, we get some leads, we book whatever we can. We’re not really doing much follow up. We don’t really have a script. Sometimes we miss some calls, we don’t really call them back. If the customer, we give them a quote and they want to book with us, they’ll call us back. We’re not going to follow up with them.” Right? That’s first and foremost, built a strong sales process. I mean, for me that was … I mean, that’s what propelled my business to $20 million and that’s what got me from zero to the first million, second, third, fourth, fifth, was sales, right?
When I went into that first market and every other market after, we blew past everybody quickly because of the strong sales process, right?
Chris: Now, is that just like buying leads, or you’re …
Louis Massaro: Well, buying leads is marketing, right? Marketing doesn’t get you business, marketing just gives you opportunities to sell.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Right? Opportunities to close, and a lot of people have a negative connotation with sales, but in reality in moving all sales is is really good customer service that takes that customer by the hand and leads them to do business with your company. You’re not selling something that people don’t need, right? You’re not cold calling people and trying to sell them a product, or a service. If you were calling people right now, I started off when I was in high school selling vacation packages in a call center. You can’t do that right now, right? You can’t call somebody up out of nowhere and try to sell them a vacation right now, but when people need to move and you get them on the phone, whether it came from a lead, or whether it came from a phone call, it doesn’t matter, your job is to give them really, really good information, guide them through the process, and then close. But part of that is number one, lead management, right? Making sure that you’re managing those leads and you’re managing those phone calls so that you’re getting them in the right hands of the right person at the right time.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Louis Massaro: Right? Then you’ve got to have your follow-up as well. How many times do you call those leads? When do you call them? Should you be calling? Should you be emailing? Should you be texting? Should you be leaving voice mails? All of that stuff seems like it’s common sense, but not many people are making it common practice. So we just assume okay, we got some jobs, we book some moves. Everybody that’s listening I’m sure has done their first move, or does moves, or has been in business for however long. It’s not about do you book moves or do you not book moves, it’s how do you book more moves. How do you book more, right? In a case study that we’ve done just showing the difference between a 5% booking increase. Meaning if you had 100 leads come in, and let’s say you book 12 of those, your booking percentage would be 12%, let’s just say. Then if you go to 17%, you increase by 5%. So now you book 17 jobs instead of 12, right? So with a small company that does approximately $300,000 a year, that 5% increase in booking percentage is about $150,000 additional in revenue.
Chris: Whoa.
Louis Massaro: Just by a 5% booking increase. So I’m not talking about do you book moves or do you not book moves, I’m talking about how do we get you to instead of booking 12 out of every 100, book 17 out of every 100, right? Or instead of booking 20, book 25. It doesn’t matter what your closing ratio is, the point is can we get you to book 5% more, right? That’s just a small company. If you look at a midsize company, a company that let’s say they’re doing a million a year, if you’re able to get a 5% increase in booking percentage, right? You’re talking about 400,000 and change additional in revenue, not spending any more money on marketing, right?
First course I came out with was Moving Sales Academy, right? First seminars we did was Moving Sales Academy, and people were like, “Louis, what about operations?” I’m like, “We’ll get to that later, but let’s get your sales rocking.” Because it’s until you see it, until you’ve seen all the different processes and strategies that you could lay out to be able to increase your sales, it’s hard to fathom, but you don’t need to double, right? You just need to basically look at the leads that are coming in, how do we get a 5% increase? On a large company a two and a half million dollar business with a 5% increase, that’s a million dollars extra a year. A million dollars extra a year in revenue without spending any more money on marketing. So when I say build a strong sales process, your number one goal is to just increase your booking percentage, right? I’m not talking about the amount of people you speak to versus the amount of people you close. I’m talking about the amount of leads you get versus the amount of people that you close, all right.
Chris: That’s based on going from 12% of those leads to 17.
Louis Massaro: It could be 12 to 17, it could be 30 to 35. The illustration is a 5% increase.
Chris: That’s what I was going to say. It seems like, I mean, 12 is a pretty conservative book.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, but the 12 doesn’t matter. It’s just I’m using that as a placeholder.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Right? Don’t worry about the 12. If your current percentage is 30, if you go to 35 you still see that difference.
Chris: Gotcha.
Louis Massaro: Right? The big factor here is the 5% increase.
Chris: And it’s based on the cost of the average move, is that it?
Louis Massaro: No, it’s based on booking more of the opportunities that you have.
Chris: Right, but that revenue is coming from, if your average move is whatever it is, 1,200 bucks or something.
Louis Massaro: You don’t even have to increase the average move. The case study that we have, we’ll put it up somewhere for people to see it, is the same average move. Same average move, right? You’re just booking 5% higher conversions. So if you’re at 20, you go to 25. You’re at 30, you go to 35, right? That’s the only difference, and the average price of the move stays the same. If it’s 800, it’s still 800.
Chris: Yeah, I see.
Louis Massaro: That’s the difference, right?
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: So yeah, it’s powerful. So how do you do that, right? How do you increase the booking percentage? I mean, I’ve got a whole six week online training with this, so we’ll just talk about a few things, but follow-up, right? Making sure that number one, you’re following up with the new leads that you get, to get them on the phone to close the deal, because everything you want to do with your sales, you got two things. Get them on the phone, and close the deal, or book the move, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Get them on the phone, book the move. So having that in place. Then your sales script. Everybody has to have a sales script, doesn’t matter. Whoever is booking the most moves in your company, whoever is doing the best job, take what they say, write it down, and start with that as your sales script, right? Unless you, a lot of people have my sale … Huh?
Chris: For everybody, all the sales team?
Louis Massaro: Well, especially if you have multiple people because if they’re all saying different things, you’re leading people down, you need consistency, right? Part of thriving in any economy, part of recession proofing your business is starting to lock down these processes. Create consistency that’s dependable. Not like, “Hey, we had a good month. Oh, we had a bad month. Hey, we had a good month. Hey, we had a bad month.” No, you’ve got to have consistency, and you do that through process. You do that by giving your people the right tools. When it comes to sales, I don’t believe that great sales people are born, right? There might be some people that are just naturally gifted at speaking, but all sales is, especially with moving, is just know what to say and when to say it, and you can train your team to do that. The biggest success I had in hiring sales people was great customer service people that just sounded really good. We gave them the script, we taught them how to do it, we gave them the tools that they need, and they were off and running, right?
So if you’ve got your script. You’ve got to have objections, rebuttals to objections, right? I’m going to give the real speedy version here of how to build your strong sales process, but everything that a customer would say of why they’re not ready to book with your company, your price is too high, I need to get some quotes, I need to speak with my husband, we don’t have a closing date yet, I saw some bad reviews, whatever it might be, you’ve got to have a scripted response for everybody on your team to be able to reply to them to overcome that objection and get them to book the move, okay? There’s no doubt that it’s competitive out there, and you don’t want to be competing on price. Too many people are competing on price, and when things slow down, they just drop the price, but the price is not the issue. You want to be able to sell at a price that is an hourly rate, or a flat rate, or by cube, or by weight, however you’re charging, that is profitable, right? That is based on job costing, that accounts for all your other costs on the move, right? So in order to be able to sell at a higher price, you need better techniques for selling, right? We talk about this in the course, okay? So for a dollar go to LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof and jump into the Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass, and I’m laying all these out for you.
So for the sake of time let’s move to number two.
Chris: Okay, so we’ve got the scripts and the rebuttals. What’s next?
Louis Massaro: Basically build a strong sales process is number one, right? There’s more that goes into that, but number two is fuel sales with profitable marketing. Fuel your sales with profitable marketing. The sales get you the business, the marketing gets you the opportunities. People often say, “Louis, what should I be doing for marketing? What’s the most impactful? What’s the most lucrative and profitable marketing?” And the answer is run your reports and find out what it is for you.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Right? Determine your marketing ROI. The main number, and in the course I share four metrics in there, but let’s just for the sake of time let’s talk about one of the most important metrics, and that is the percentage. So in other words, how much are you spending versus how much you’re making, right? Your percentage spend. So if I spend $1,000 on a lead source and it brought in $10,000 in moves, I’m spending 10%.
Chris: I see, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right? So the key with your marketing, and look, there’s new stuff coming out every day, right? There’s different strategies, there’s all kinds of different tools and all of that, and this is the stuff I train on and teach every month with our Moving CEO Business Program, but the key is to manage it, because again, it’s always shifting. They’ll always be this new thing, they’ll always be this question of does this marketing source work, should I use it, should I … Try everything, right? Try everything because what you want to do is you want to be able to be in a position where you could test, track and tweak. The way that you do that is you first have to have your marketing ROI report set up, right? To be able to know okay, out of these leads that came in, how much money did we make off of them? Because there’s only a 100% of the pie. If you do a move for $1,000, okay, out of that 1,000 there are certain expenses that come right out, right? You got labor, you’ve got fuel, you’ve got your marketing costs. There are certain percentages that come right out, and if you let your marketing percentage get out of control, that’s eating into your profits right there, right?
So the key with all of your marketing is to know your marketing ROI, right? You guys know I’m co-founder in SmartMoving, you could run this directly in SmartMoving CRM to determine your ROI in all your lead sources. It’s in there, right? But if you don’t have that, just basically look at how much money you’re spending verus how much money you’re making to get your percentage, right? So when you’ve got a-
Chris: Ideal percentage like a target that you should be shooting for?
Louis Massaro: It really depends on the other cost factors you have in your business. Some companies can spend a little bit more because their other overhead is low, right? But I would say a good target is to be in that eight to 12% range.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Okay. So now once you start to see, so let’s say that’s where somebody is at, right? Now they see a certain marketing source. When you’re going the marketing ROI you are running it for each individual lead source, right? So every lead source that you have. You’ve got this lead provider, that lead provider. You’ve got Yelp, you’ve got direct mail, you’ve got Equate Media, you’ve got Quote Runner, you’ve got all these different lead sources in there. So you’re able to track each one. Well, if one of them, let’s say all a sudden it’s costing you 26%, meaning if you’re getting a $1,000 move, you’re basically paying $260 just to get the job. That’s high, right?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: So that’s where you test, track, and tweak. So you test by trying everything out, you track it by running it through your marketing ROI to see if it works and if it’s profitable, and then you tweak it by saying, “Okay, well let me look at this report.” If I’ve got this one is at 26% and there’s other lead sources at 5%, okay, well maybe I’ll take that money and move it to this lead source and spend more with them, right? That’s the type of stuff where you make those adjustments and you see monumental changes. This report that I originally created back in that recession time period was when leads first started coming out, we were running nationwide. I wanted to buy more leads, my sales manager was like, “Hey, there’s more lead. There’s a new lead company, there’s this.” That’s when it all started popping up. I just didn’t feel confident to spend the money, so once I came up with this report I was like, “Okay.” And the whole test, track, and tweak. I’m like, “Okay. I’ve got a system now where I could try this stuff, and if it doesn’t work I could get rid of it or adjust it, and it doesn’t hurt me too badly.” That right there, that’s what helped me scale from 10 to 20 million, right?
A private client of ours came in and when he started with us he was doing three million a year in revenue. He was spending $50,000 a month in marketing, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So that’s 50,000, that’s 600,000 a year, it’s 20% of his overall business was going to marketing. I’m like, “Look, we need to get you down to 25,000 a month.” So we went through, we did his reports, we started making adjustments and allocating money to different places, cut off some sources, move some money from one place to the other, and within that year reduced his marketing from 50 to 25 a month, okay? And he doubled his business from three million to just under six million.
Chris: Wow, wow.
Louis Massaro: It’s powerful. There are so many little intricacies in all of this stuff. I mean, that’s why I put this course together, the Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass. It’s like listen, let’s just cut through all the stuff, let’s just give you the core. All my other courses are six weeks, they’re long, this is seven days of look, let’s get you the core stuff that you need to tighten up and recession proof your business now, and thrive in any economy.
So from there, you’re free to try any and all marketing and make adjustments, and it’s not going to hurt you. I see so many people out there that when we finally get ahold and look at their stuff, and look at their marketing, and run the marketing ROI, they’re just getting buried by some of these different marketing sources that they have. It’s bringing in business but they’re not making any money on it because they’re spending too much to acquire the lead.
Chris: Okay, wow. But you got to know the numbers.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to know the numbers. That’s the number one thing with your marketing.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Right? That marketing ROI report, I would say that’s the second most important report in your business, period. All right. Which brings us to number three, which is know your numbers and act on them.
Chris: Oh, perfect.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, know your numbers and act on them. I had a feeling you were going to ask what the other reports were, so. You’ve got to know your numbers and act on them, and for me this was something that I didn’t learn until the recession came, until I was at that place where I’m like, “Man, I’m spending way too much in yellow pages. I just bought all these trucks with all these payments.” Then I had to learn, wow, you mean all those truck payments are not all getting deducted from the profit? So I’m showing profit but then there’s no cash. There was all of this came together to force me to learn my numbers. The things that you really want to be on top of, number one is your profit and loss and cash flow, right? Just how much money came in, how much money went out, and what’s left over. I mean, that’s the basics of it, right? I go a little deeper in the course, but your profit and loss statement. Run that right out of QuickBooks and which also integrates the at SmartMoving now. Your marketing ROI report, for sure, right? That’s another one that’s really important.
Then you have your certain sales metrics and operations metrics that you need to be able to see to identify what’s going on to help you manage the business on a day-to-day basis. You want reports that help you manage the business and not just keep score. I used to have reports early on, but all it was was I’d look at how much money we did last month. I’m like, “Ugh, great, cool.” Right? Look how much money is in the bank. I’m like, “Okay, great.” After we paid the bills there’s money left over, and that was my reports for the first seven years of being in business, and it wasn’t until the threat of the recession came that it really opened my eyes to what needed to be more of like stepping into that moving CEO mindset. What I need to be focused on daily and what’s going to help me manage my business? Because when you know your numbers, the overwhelm goes away, the stress goes away. You know where to start creating your action plan, right? Where the areas of opportunity are, where the areas of weakness are and concern, and what you could start chipping away at.
So I would say for sales definitely you need to be looking at your booking percentage per moving consultant, right? Booking percentage per moving consultant, meaning we talked about raising the booking percentage by 5% and we saw how that can from 150 to a million dollars a year extra in revenue.
Well, if you look at your sales team, let’s say you have several moving consultants, what we call them, or sales reps, and you look at okay, how many leads they receive versus how many jobs do they book, you’ll see that they’ll be people that are five, seven, 10%, 12% higher than other people, right? So it’s like okay, it’s possible. How do we get them to book at that rate, right? So there’s more that goes into that with managing your sales team, but you want to be looking at your booking percentage per sales rep. How many leads do they receive versus how many they booked.
Chris: That’s how you get the true picture.
Louis Massaro: That’s how you know how each of them are performing individually.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right? Because again, you look at your marketing sources individually. How is this one performing? How is that one performing? How is this one performing? How is that one performing? And you make adjustments accordingly, you do the same thing with your sales team. How is this person performing? How is that person performing, right? And how do I improve that? You could go and work with them, and coach them, and do a process that I train on called enhancement training, where you basically take your current team and make them better, right? But if you’re looking at their numbers individually, you know where to focus. You know where maybe you’ve given somebody too much time and it’s time for them to go, they’re not making it anymore because they’re pulling your overall booking percentage down.
Chris: Yeah, that would be some helpful information to know.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Then operations, something that you’ve got to look at every week is your mover payroll percentage. How much did you pay out in labor versus the amount of money you made? This is a huge profit killer for a lot of people. It shows that compared to the amount of money that they’re bringing in on a move, they’re paying out too much in labor to movers, and it’s not because they’re paying their movers too much, right? Sometimes that’s the case, but most times it’s because they’re not charging enough for the move.
Chris: Are you looking at this per job or?
Louis Massaro: What I would do is on a weekly basis, right? Because you could get real carried away with reports, and you could start drilling into all kinds of stuff, and that’s the beauty of reporting, is that if you started at a higher level and you need to see more data and more information, you could always drill down. But here’s how you run this report, is you basically take your pay period for the week, right? Let’s just say it’s Sunday to Saturday, whatever your pay period is. You take all the moves that were done in that pay period. What’s the revenue? Let’s say the revenue was $100,000, okay? In that week you did $100,000. How much was your payroll for that same period, right? So whatever you paid for those moves, that same period of time, how much did you pay out in payroll? Did you pay 25,000 out in payroll? Okay, if that’s the case … Payroll to your movers, not payroll to your office staff, not payroll to your sales people, just movers pay.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Louis Massaro: So now you’ve got instead of doing on each individual job, which you can drill that down if you want, you take the week. How much did we get and how much did we pay for movers? You’ll have your percentage and you want to use that as your benchmark, right? By monitoring that number, you’re going to be able to see right away if it jumps. I don’t know, let’s say your number is 30%, right? Let’s just pick a number. All of a sudden one week it jumps to 35%, and then maybe you start seeing it go up even more. Why is it going up? The only reason it’s going to go up is that your guys are getting paid more, which means your price is either going down, meaning you’re giving away too many discounts, or your labor cost is going up. Maybe you’re giving away too much overtime, you have too many guys doing overtime. Maybe it happens, it happened to me, I caught a dispatcher in one of my locations that had a little deal going with the movers where he was giving them extra hours and then getting a kickback from them, right?
So the point is there are certain things that you want to watch and be able to identify, and that’s one of the reports and operations, is many more metrics for that, but I would be watching that on a weekly basis as well. Then I’d say those are the core numbers to start with. Are there more? Sure, but if you’re not doing those, start with those.
Chris: Okay, okay. So got your numbers down, you got your reporting in place. What’s next after that?
Louis Massaro: Run a tight dispatch operation. This is something that I instinctually … I did it early on without even realizing it, of just everything had to be tight. Meaning from the minute the movers came in to the office, to the minute I … Dispatching them, getting them to the move, having them come back to the office, all of that in there, there’s so much room to be losing money. One of the quickest ways to plug the hole, like if you’re losing money. If you think about like all your money is coming into a bucket, and that bucket has holes in it, and those holes are all the inefficiencies within the business. You want to start plugging those holes so that you keep more of the money in the bucket, right? One of the biggest areas is a lot of companies will dispatch their crews and send them out for the day and give them the contract, and give them the price, and let them calculate the move themselves. Like, “Okay, you guys are all set. I’ll talk to you later when you’re all done.” And the movers go out, and the movers check in with the customer, and the movers will calculate the price. The problem with that is there’s so much room for error. There’s so much room to be losing money, right?
Let’s just say for example you send a crew out and maybe you charge $150 an hour, I’m going to just write this down so I’m keeping track. Charge $150 an hour. The crew goes out, they get to the job at eight o’clock, but they don’t clock in with the customer for whatever reason until 8:15, right? The reason could be they’re just not paying attention, it’s not that big of a deal, like, “Oh, the clock says, yeah, 8:15 by the time.” They’re just not paying attention, number one. Number two, they’re telling the customer, “You know what? It’s 8:00, I’ll start the clock at 8:15, don’t worry. Take care of us, we’ll take care of you.” Right? Basically looking for an additional tip. Or working off the clock, right? Which basically is stealing from the company, okay?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: But it happens, consistently. If you’re like, “Wait, that doesn’t happen to us.” Check the times that people are clocking in and clocking out on their job and compare that to your GPS to see when they actually got there and when they actually leave, and there’s going to be discrepancy, okay? So if you look at, let’s say you charge $150 an hour. You lose 15 minutes right there on the front end, because they clocked in a little bit late. Now they go to clock out at two o’clock but they don’t leave till let’s just say 2:15 again. I’m being conservative, right? These numbers are much higher usually when we look at them. But let’s say you’ve got 15 minutes on the front end, 15 minutes on the back end that you’re losing.
Chris: Half an hour.
Louis Massaro: Half an hour, so that’s what? 75 bucks.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Okay. So let me get a calculator here, I don’t want to be on the podcast doing my math wrong. So let’s say you do 200 moves a month, right? Times, and whatever your moves are, calculate it by that, and whatever your hourly rate it, calculate it by that. But 700 moves a month times 75 bucks, it’s $15,000 a month, which is $180,000 a year.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: 15 minutes on the front, 15 minutes on the back, 180 grand a year if you’re doing that many moves, right? If that’s where you’re at. So a lot of people, “But Lou, it’s a lot of work. We have to clock the crew.” When I say clock the crews in, here’s how we did it. We sent the crews out, you need to be there at whatever time the job is. When they get there they call in and they say, “I need to start time.” We look at the clock in the office and we give them a start time based on that clock. They call back in, “Hey, we’re going to be done within a half hour.” Okay, great. We’ll look at the clock, we tell them the finish time, we put it in the CRM, we calculate it, and we give them a price, right? Make sure that they’re clocking in and clocking out at that time, and make sure that that truck is there and leaving by that time. You clock out by two o’clock, the truck should be gone, not in the truck folding pads, all of that. Truck should be gone. You’re getting paid by the hour, it should be gone.
Now, that’s only like misting hourly rate, right? People say, “Yeah, but the guys get paid by the hour. Why would they let that happen?” Again, three, they’re just not thinking about it, right? They just don’t realize that it’s taking money away from them, or they know that hey, 15 minutes on their, if they’re making 15, 20 bucks an hour. Maybe they’re making 20 bucks an hour, 15 minutes is what, five bucks an hour? If they can make, get a good thing going with the customer, where they get a $100 tip, you think they care about the five bucks, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So there’s money there, a lot of money there. Then you look at the other questions, that when you clock the crew in and out yourself it’s like, “Okay, was there any additional packing? Did the customer need any pads?” All these extra stuff that the movers may or may not add, that they forgot, was there shrink wrap, stuff that maybe you charge for, maybe you don’t, you start adding that stuff up, right? Let’s say you’ve got another $50 in packing on every move, right? 250 moves, 50, that’s another 10 grand. So another $120,000 a year.
Chris: That adds up.
Louis Massaro: There is so much money to be made in dispatch, the dollars are in dispatch. Yes, you’ve got to book the moves, right? Yeah, I’m saying all this stuff is important because it is. If you want to run this business so that it’s highly profitable, all these areas need to be tightened up. If you want to run this business so that it’s recession proof and can thrive in any economy, all these areas need to be tightened up, all right?
So there’s other things you could do to run a tight dispatch operation, but let’s just start with clock your crews in and out from the office, and start by just looking, comparing their clock in and clock out times with the GPS to see where they’re at.
Chris: That’s huge, wow. Yeah, okay. Really I was thinking, in a recession especially, that money is a big difference in your bottom line there.
Louis Massaro: Any time, any time. I really feel like a lot of companies are going to, like this is going to be a huge benefit to them, this recession. It’s going to light that fire onto them. A little bit of the fear is okay to be like, “All right, let me get it together now.” Let me do these stuff that before I was like, “It’s no big deal.” Let me get it on point. They’re going to be so much better off when this is all over.
Chris: Yeah, those vulnerabilities.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: That’s good, okay.
Louis Massaro: So the next one is, number five is, hire quickly and fire quickly.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: All right. So you’ve got to be able to, there’s two positions that you’ve got to have a system and a process to be able to hire quickly for, and that’s your sales reps and that’s your movers, okay? Both of these positions are either hurting you or they’re helping you, right? If you’ve got sales people that just are burning through your leads and you’ve coached them, and you’ve worked with them, and they’re not working out, you’ve got to be able to fire them quickly, but the reason people don’t fire quickly is because they dread the hiring process.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Louis Massaro: I hated hiring. I did not like the hiring process. When I first, when I opened the call center I hired a bunch of moving consultants. I’m like, “All right. I’m good, we’re done.” And some of them didn’t work out. We had to go back to the drawing board to hire again. It was like, “All right, I need to create a system and I need to create a process so I could teach this to my sales managers so that when we need sales people we could hire them quickly. When they’re not working out, we could fire them quickly.” When I say not working out, we give them an opportunity, we coach them, we work with them, do enhancement training. It’s not like we send them out there to swim or sink, but there comes a time where they’re no longer profitable for the business based on what you’re paying them and versus what they’re booking, they’ve got to go.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Same thing with the movers, right? In both of these positions you need them to be able to scale, right? You can’t grow without more sales people, you can’t grow without movers, and I see companies that will hold themselves back from growing because they don’t have enough movers. Yes, I totally understand it’s hard to hire movers. I understand that this modern day people could go drive for Uber, the younger generation doesn’t want to do the physical work. I get all that, those are all excuses, but if you have a process for hiring movers and you just implement that, and the minute you need movers you just start following step, step, step, step, step, that you could teach to your operations manager, teach to your dispatcher, and you’re able to get them in and get them in the rotation and on the trucks quick.
That’s going to give you a huge competitive advantage to be able to grow your business. It’s the same thing, you’ve got to be able to fire quick too. If they’re going out there and they’re pissing your customers off, they’re causing damage, they’re not showing up on the days where you need them to show up, you don’t have time for that. You’ve got to move on. It’s hurting your business, but again, people will stick with employees that they know are not a good fit for the business because they dread the hiring process, and they only dread the hiring process because they don’t have it documented. They don’t have it laid out in a way to where they could do it quickly.
By the way, I know I’m going through this quick. I laid this out in the course, you can get the course for a dollar. Just go to LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof. LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof. Jump in this course for a dollar and this is, I’m going to lay all this stuff out for you.
Chris: For reference, just this process that you teach of hiring movers quickly, what’s the timeframe from when you get an application till they’re on the truck? How quick is it?
Louis Massaro: It depends, right? But within a two week period you should be able to start your process and have them on the truck, within that two week period.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Right? It’s not about ugh, we need movers, what do we do? It’s about we need movers, okay, whoever is responsible for that, start the process.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So it’s like step, right? Okay, place the ad. Get the résumés or the applications for movers. Get the phone interview, get the in person interview, do the skill assessment, and get them going. If you just have the steps to follow, it makes it so much easier. Where if you don’t have the steps, you procrastinate, right? Because it’s like, where do I start? It seems like this big unmanageable thing, when all it is is a series of steps.
Chris: As the owner you can breathe easier knowing that it’s getting done and it’s getting done the way you want it to be.
Louis Massaro: I mean, we’ve watched, you’ve seen it. So many of our clients that this was a problem for them, hiring movers. Now they’ve implemented our process and it’s like it’s not even an issue. It’s like they get to a place and either them, depending on who it is, them, their ops manager or their dispatcher, just like, “Hey, hire some movers.” Okay. How many do we need? And they know the process, they know what to do. They know exactly the steps to take. I mean, what a weight off your shoulders.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: It’s such a barrier to growth and an excuse why people don’t grow, that once you get that in place, you’re off to the races. You’ve got to be able to hire and fire quickly, sales reps and movers, to be able to thrive in any economy and reach that next level, and recession proof your business.
Chris: Awesome. So is that it or is there more?
Louis Massaro: Two more, two more.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: So number six is cultivate repeat customers, referral customers, and reviews. The three Rs, okay?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: All right. You can’t assume that you’re going to get repeat customers. Somebody that you move that’s going to move with you again, sure. You get them naturally, they fall on your lap. Referrals, they fall on your lap, reviews, they fall on your lap, but you’ve got to be able to cultivate more of those, okay? So you’ve got to be able to get your customers that moved with you once to move with you again, right? I teach all the steps on how to do that in that course. The referrals, right? You want to build yourself a referral program. For me, when I first started, what I did was I went out and I pounded the pavement. I would dispatch the trucks, I didn’t have an office, I worked out of the truck rental yard, and I went apartment complex to apartment complex, to apartment complex. That’s pounding the pavement, right?
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Louis Massaro: And rounded up business, but the minute I got busy and I stopped nurturing those relationships, all those referrals stopped coming in, right? Years later, really right before the recession time period, around that timeframe, I was like, “Look, we maxed out all our other marketing, and let’s get this referral program going again but let’s set it up properly.” Right? Let’s have it formatted, let’s give it a name, let’s give it a … And we came up with what’s called The Moving Points referral program where there was cash prizes, there was also prizes that we gave away. Everything from an iPod to a vacation, and everything in between. The point is that you’ve got to establish your referral program before you try to go out and get referral partners, right? What I did the first go-round is I went out to get, I didn’t call them referral partners at the time, I just was trying to draw my business, but what I was actually doing was I was going to get referral partners without a referral program, right? This person I’d bring them donuts, this person I’d send flowers to the office, this place I’d bring cash. It was all over the place, and when I stopped nurturing it, it fell apart.
So in order to get the referrals, first build the program and decide how you’re going to compensate people, right? I go over The Moving Points referral program in the course, which by the way, it’s a dollar. Go in there, you get it for seven days for a dollar. If you want to continue with us in the Moving CEO Business Program, great, if not, go in there and take this course. It will help you recession proof your business.
So we got repeat customers, referral customers, and reviews, right? In this modern day you’ve got to be cultivating reviews. Reviews are everything. Your customers, if they … However you get them on the phone, however you get the lead, just know that they’re also googling your company, and they’re going to check you out, right? And you’ve got to make sure that you’re cultivating those five star reviews, you’re getting more of them. You have a system for doing it. You don’t just wait for people to leave you the review. You proactively go out there and get them. Again, in the course I teach the safety net review fetcher. It’s a seven day course. I mean, we’re running through it all here. We could’ve broke these up into probably seven different episodes, but.
Chris: It’s a lot of stuff. I mean, over seven days even that’s … I mean, you’re diving through it all in seven days. I mean, I’d probably take some time to implement, right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not like seven days, in seven days you’re recession proof, that’s not the …
Chris: Oh, okay.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, yeah. It’ll take you time to implement it, for sure. I don’t want to mislead anybody. So repeat customers, referral customers, and reviews, right? The seventh and final step to recession proof your business is fine tune your fundamentals before you expand. We’re talking about the recession as if it’s … Getting through it as if it’s like survival, but the reality is that you could still expand during a recession.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got all this stuff in place, you could still grow if you’ve got all this stuff in place. So fine-tuning your fundamentals says let’s take a look at the five fundamentals of a moving business and fine-tune those, and those five fundamentals are lead generation, booking moves, servicing moves, customer service, making sure your customers are happy, and accounting and reporting, right? Everything you do in your business falls under those five categories, everything. One of the things that I see a lot of people fail with, and for me it was a certain sense of failure when I first started to expand and open additional offices, is doing it before they’re ready to do it, right? Going out and opening a second location before you’ve fine-tuned the fundamentals at your first location. When you open more offices, when you go into another division, you’ve got to make sure that your business currently can run without you, and you really want to build yourself a model business, right? Meaning this is exactly what I want, because imagine you could just copy and paste. On the computer you could go and copy something and paste it. Imagine if you were writing a letter and you need to copy and paste it to however many places. You’d want to get that letter written exactly right first before you copy and paste it.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You don’t want to copy and paste it and then go make a bunch of adjustments all over the place in the different letters that you’re sending out, right? It’s the same.
Chris: If you have a second location, you want it to run exactly like the first.
Louis Massaro: If the first one is run right. So in other words, if there’s a lot of stuff that’s not tightened up and a lot of problem areas, you don’t want to duplicate that, because now you’re just going to have a second headache with more problems. You’ve got to fine-tune the fundamentals. You’ve got to get your business so it’s consistently profitable that you can predictably count on that money, you’re able to see this is how the business runs based on process with the people running it, knowing hey, I could hire quickly, I could fire quickly. Everything is on point, my sales is on point, I’m able to track my marketing, I’m running a tight dispatch operation, right? My customers are happy, I know my numbers, I know my reporting. Then take that and duplicate that.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Right? Don’t bring a problem to a new location. A lot of people be like, “Man, I need to make more money. I’m not really making money. Let me go open another office.” No. What you’re doing is you’re just digging a bunch of little shallow holes when you need to dig one deep hole where you’re at, get the money there, establish that model business there, then duplicate, then expand.
Chris: I know you had to learn that lesson the hard way, right? Because I remember you telling stories about flying all over the country to different locations trying to put out fires.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I thought I had stuff in place because my first office ran so well. But what I didn’t see and what I didn’t take into consideration at the time was the fact that it ran well because I was there and I could see it, right? So what wasn’t written down in processes, we didn’t feel it because I was there to give the guidance and give the direction, but when we opened other locations that I wasn’t there to see, and I wasn’t there to be there, and hear it, and feel what’s going on, that’s when I discovered that things weren’t running the same, right? What I copied and pasted I thought was the same, but the missing piece was me, and you can’t copy and paste yourself, right? That’s why I say your business has to be able to run without you before you duplicate it, because you’re that missing link. If you duplicate, you’re like, “No, it runs great.” And you put it somewhere else, you’re not there, right? So if you’re the missing piece, you’ve got to make sure that your current business can run without you. That’s the true test. Once that’s in order, duplicate, open as … I mean, go worldwide, do whatever you want to do, but get that first model business down.
Chris: Awesome.
Louis Massaro: So those are the seven. Build a strong sales process, fuel your sales with profitable marketing, know your numbers and act on them, run a tight dispatch operation, hire quickly and fire quickly, cultivate repeat customers, referral customers, and reviews, and then fine-tune your fundamentals before you expand.
Guys, go and get this Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass. You could try it out for a week for just a dollar. Go to LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof. I’ll put the link down below for you. You’ve got to get in there and put this stuff on your list and start implementing it right away, all right? Don’t be behind the curve on this. Get ahead of the curve. Allow yourself to understand that the moving business is as close to recession proof already as it is, because people will always need to move, no matter what. If they’re downsizing, whatever the case may be, but if you don’t tighten up, it’s going to be a rocky road. Not everybody is going to make it through this. That’s just the reality of the circumstances that we’re in, right? But if you’re here, you’re listening to this, I’m sure you’re committed to mastery. You’ve listened to this whole episode, you’re here with us, so you’re someone that’s committed and dedicated to building your business so that it will strive and succeed over the long-term. Go get that course, LouisMassaro.com/recessionproof for the Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass. I literally shot it from my house because I wanted to get it for our members, right? It’s something that I did just kind of as a gift for our Moving CEO Business program members that they weren’t even expecting, but I wanted to give them a strategic plan to navigate through these times.
Chris: Awesome.
Louis Massaro: Anything else, Chris?
Chris: No, that’s it. Get out there and kick some butt.
Louis Massaro: All right, guys, until I see you next time. Go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. I will see you in the Recession Proof Moving Company Masterclass and I’ll see you on the next episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast.
In this episode, Louis Massaro continues the discussion about adopting a Moving CEO mindset for your moving business.
“Every single time you hit any type of roadblock, any type of challenge, any type of issue, anything you just don’t feel good about, look at it and say, ‘There’s got to be a better way.'”
“You don’t have to want to be in this business forever. But if you look at it and you say, “You know what? This is my vehicle for financial freedom. This is what I’m going to use to set myself and my family up for the longterm,” it changes everything for you.”
“Anytime you make any change at all, you have to have buy-in to what the result is. You have to believe in that end result.”
“Anything that you know you need to skill up on, anything you know you need to become better at, go get at it and do it and be okay with sucking at it.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: Hey, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, and welcome back to another episode of the Moving Mastery Podcast. We are diving in to part two of the Moving CEO Mindset. I’ve got my man Chris here with me today. What’s happening?
Chris: Hey, hey, hey. I’m ready to dive into part two. Part one was really good. So, I’m excited about part two here.
Louis Massaro: All right. Well, we literally just finished, and we’re going back to back recording these, because we just didn’t want to go too long with the episode, but wanted to really finish on this, because I think it’s so important. I know most of these episodes I’m talking about strategies and different processes and specific tactics in the business, but if you don’t get this one right, you’re going to not reach your full potential. So, if you didn’t already catch part one, Moving CEO Mindset part one, go and listen to that so you’re not lost in this one. It’s the episode right before this. Then come back and join us here. If you’ve already listened to us, welcome back. This is part two. We’ve kind of covered a few things here. Chris, what’d we cover in the first one?
Chris: In part one, we talked about the first real step towards adapting that Moving CEO mindset, which is taking responsibility for all of your results, for everything that you’ve achieved and everything that you haven’t achieved so far, being able to say, “Hey, this is all my doing. It wasn’t anybody else’s fault or anybody else’s doing. This was all on me.” And that’s literally the first step. Then the second one was, if they can, I can, which-
Louis Massaro: Yeah. If they can do it, I can do it.
Chris: We’re all human, and we’re all capable of the same level of achievement. So, if you see somebody out there doing something that you feel you would want to be doing, then emulate them, do what they did, and you can. I mean, it’s literally that simple, right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: And then the third part was-
Louis Massaro: If I built a $20 million business and moving business, you could do that. Only if you want that, right? If there’s someone that’s out there that built a successful company in your market, they’re doing a couple million a year, and that’s what you want, you can do it if they could do it.
Chris: Absolutely. Absolutely. Then the third part was adopting the ideal of there’s got to be a better way, taking a look at everything you have going on and, even if it’s working well, looking at it and saying, “How can it be better?”
Louis Massaro: Every single time you hit any type of roadblock, any type of challenge, any type of issue, anything you just don’t feel good about, look at it and say, “There’s got to be a better way.” We talked about in the last episode that I believe single-handedly is what has been my guiding principle to be able to get me to where I am today and be able to develop all of these different processes and all of these different strategies that I teach.
Louis Massaro I know in the last episode I mentioned two books. I just grabbed them off the shelf real quick. During the time where I was going through the transition from just moving company owner to that Moving CEO mindset and that identity that I had to adopt, there was two books that I remember. There was a bunch more that I read that stood out to me. One was Jack Welch, Winning. Jack was the CEO of GE. A great book on strategy and management and what it takes to really step as the leader and CEO. The other one was Jim Collins’ Good to Great. Classic book, explores a lot of different CEOs and why some companies make that leap and some don’t. It has a lot to do with what we’re talking about.
Louis Massaro: So, those are the things that are … Those two books were way beyond kind of what I was doing in moving, and a lot of those principles seem so far out there, but, again, we talked about in the last episode I kind of picked … When I got information from places, I took a little bit and said, “Oh, I could use that,” and I applied it. And “That’s not for me,” and I left it. So, I just wanted to share those with you, because I had them right here behind me. Yeah. Let’s get into this. Part two, Moving CEO Mindset.
Chris: That’s awesome. Those books are good positive input, by the way. We’re all sitting in lockdown right now, and we have a few extra minutes. Rather than scrolling the news and keeping up on the latest COVID headlines, maybe pick up a good book and get some positive input coming in.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. You can’t go to the bookstore. You don’t want to wait for Amazon to deliver it. Get the Kindle app on your phone. You don’t even need a Kindle. And just download it, and you could have it right now.
Chris: Instant.
Louis Massaro: Instant.
Chris: All right. So, let’s get back to this Moving CEO mindset. As we said, we had the “I’m responsible for my own results,” “If they can, I can,” and “There’s got to be a better way.” So, what’s next in the evolution of becoming a Moving CEO?
Louis Massaro: And this conversation started … Let me just go back here. It started because you were asking, “What’s the difference between yourself and other people that have succeeded and are succeeding at high levels at moving business and the people that are struggling?” I started by saying it starts with the mindset. These are the things that I’ve noticed that were traits of mine that I also see those same traits in others that either we work with or I see out there that are performing at high levels.
Louis Massaro: The next one is the understanding that moving is my vehicle to financial freedom. What I mean by that is you don’t have to be passionate about this business. You don’t have to want to be in this business forever. But if you look at it and you say, “You know what? This is my vehicle for financial freedom. This is what I’m going to use to set myself and my family up for the longterm,” it changes everything for you. Because there’s so much talk out there now about finding your purpose or finding something you love to do and you’ll never work another day in your life, and you might not love the moving process.
Louis Massaro: For me, it wasn’t that I loved moving, but I did love the business of moving. I did love all the moving pieces, if you will, of moving, from having to book to move first to then you’ve got to find enough quality movers to get them out there, and then you’ve got to be able to logistically juggle everything and dispatch to get everything serviced. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to have more money that came in than you spent to make it all happen. So, for me, the game of it all, the business of it, is what I really love.
Louis Massaro: But instead of saying, “Oh, I want to do something that …” A lot of people are waiting right now to find something they love or find their passion, or they might be in the business, and they’re constantly looking for something else to do. The people that are succeeding at high levels look at it and say, “You know what? This business is really just my vehicle to financial freedom.” Doesn’t mean it’s all about the money, because you’ve got to be able to do a great job for your customers. You’ve got to be able to take care of your employees in order for it to be lucrative and successful and sustainable over the long term. That’s huge.
Louis Massaro: That’s huge, because it’s a tough business to be in day to day. And if you’re not looking at where is this taking me, what life is this going to let me live, then you’re going to have a really hard time finding the reason why you put up with the stuff that you put up with; the reason why you say, “I’m responsible for my results”; the reason why you’re looking at it saying, “If they can do it, I can do it”; the reason why you sit there and say to yourself, “There’s got to be a better way” and then seek that way out.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you’ve got to know where you’re going.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to know where you’re going. Yeah. The thing is this … And I’m surprised at how many people don’t really know where they want to go. You don’t have to know the exact number immediately, but you have a general idea of the life you want to live, when you want to be done doing all this, but you can’t just dive in without realizing that this is how you’re going to do all the things you want to do for yourself, for your family, buy all the stuff, have all the experiences, take care of all the people you need to take care of, be able to retire and live a good quality of life when you’re all done. It’s huge. One of the first things that we do in some of the workshops that we do or at the seminars is kind of take people through a process of figuring out what it is you want in your life. Right? What do you want?
Chris: It’s a big question. It’s really the key to creating the map on where you want to go. I think another question that sort of goes alongside of that that maybe … You tell me, but it could be helpful in a Moving CEO mindset. But also to question your current beliefs. I don’t mean religious or spiritual. I just mean who you believe you are, rather than who you actually are or who you want to become. Like you saying in the last episode, you had that switch in your mind where you went from being a moving company owner to being a Moving CEO. You had to-
Louis Massaro: It was an identity shift. I had to see myself … I had to look in the mirror and see a different person.
Chris: Yes. Exactly.
Louis Massaro: And it wasn’t being … There was still an authenticity. It was still me, but it was me calling out a higher level of me that I needed to show up and step up at that time.
Chris: Exactly. Exactly. And who you were as opposed to who you became, they’re different people. So, how you were able to accept that about yourself, believe that you could be a Moving CEO and question that.
Louis Massaro: Well, and it wasn’t that I just believed it and I walked out super … I mean, I had doubts. Anytime you step outside of that comfort zone. We all have that comfort zone. No matter where you go, there’s always that next level, and you have doubts. For me, that was probably the second big shift for myself, because just starting the business alone, going from being just a year before I was a high school kid, and then I’m a business owner. That was one identity shift. Then seven, eight years later to be able to see myself differently was huge, but there was times where you doubted it and you didn’t believe it, and you’re like, “Who are you fooling?” And you keep pushing past that to the point where you’re like, “Yeah, that’s me now.”
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. You accept that as your new identity, who you are, and then I decide where you want to go as that person.
Louis Massaro: Well, yeah. You have to understand the importance of that first. You’re not just like, “I’m going to be a moving … I’m Moving CEO now.” Anytime you make any change at all, you’ve always got to be … You have to have buy-in to what the result is. You have to believe in that result. For me, I knew that I had to make a shift in my mind. CEO is just the label that I put on it for myself. Right? And maybe for you, it’s something different, but I had to put some label for me to step up to. You know what I mean? It’s like you go from being a college ballplayer to a pro ballplayer. It’s like, “Hey, I’m a pro now.” You know what I mean? You’ve got to act differently, and you’ve got to conduct yourself differently. It’s just a shift in your identity.
Louis Massaro: So, when we talk about financial freedom, what’s it really all about? I mean, I don’t really know anybody that would want to just move people for a living if there was no financial reward for it. You want to volunteer and help somebody that can’t afford to move, and you want to do it as a goodwill gesture and help somebody? Great. But other than that, you’re doing it to make money. So, don’t shortchange yourself and just make a living. This is a business where you can make a fortune. If you look at it that way, it will inspire you to do the things that might seem challenging or outside of your comfort zone, knowing of where it’s going to lead you.
Louis Massaro: If you really sit down and identify what do I want in my life, what things do I want, what experiences do I want to have, who do I want to share this stuff with, who do I want to be able to take care of, how do I want to be in the world, it starts to crystallize like, “Okay, what’s that going to take?” A powerful exercise for me was to sit down at some point … It really took a financial planner to really kind of sit and do it for me of like, “Okay, what do you want? What do you want in your life?” “Okay, I want this. I want that. I want this.” “Okay. What’s it all going to cost you to get it?”
Louis Massaro: So, figure out everything you want. Okay, I want this house. I want this car. I want to send my kids to these schools. I want to retire by this age. I want to be able to take four short trips every year, and then I want to take two long, two-week trips, or I want to take the whole summer and go spend it somewhere else. Whatever you want, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s another limiting belief that a lot of people have. I think most people grow up with a skewed outlook on money. The money’s bad. Money doesn’t grow on trees. You can’t just have everything you want. People that have money, they must be doing something wrong. The more money you make, the more taxes you’ve got to make. More money, more problems. There’s this stigma behind it.
Louis Massaro: But I believe that, if you’re going to go out there and you provide a great service, and you build a business that allows you to provide that great service to a lot of people, you’re providing … You go out there, and you do a move for 10 people a month. Well, then, you should be compensated for that. But you go out there, and you do moves for 1,000 people a month, then you should be compensated for that. And you have the ability to run that business well, and you have the responsibility of all those employees and all those customers and all that liability. Then you should be compensated for that.
Louis Massaro: I believe that if there’s desires in your heart for things that you want in life, that that’s your truth, that’s who you are, and you should go after those things. Whether they’re just time off, whether you want to spend half the year just chilling, or whether it’s just financial stuff, you should go after that, once you get past the point where you know it’s really what you want and it’s not ego, it’s not like, “Oh, I should have this car. I should have this,” or “I need to keep up with this,” and you’re able to get to a place, which I believe that comes with time and maturity. I feel like I’m much more grounded and simpler in what it is I want from a material standpoint than I was in my twenties. But you’ve got to know that, and you’ve got to know that this business is your way to get it.
Louis Massaro: I had a good friend of mine in the business that was … He was like, “I don’t want to do this. I want to go start something else.” He wanted to go start a vineyard. He was passionate about making wine and wanted to start a vineyard. I’m like, “All right. So, get it up and running, get it going, and then either sell it or keep it running as a passive means. Get your systems in place. Get your processes in place and keep it running as a passive means of income. And then go do whatever you want.” Within a few years, he built a successful business. This was actually a partner of mine in one of my locations. Built a very successful business, made himself a ton of money. Now he was like, “Okay, you’re right. I’m looking at it differently now.”
Louis Massaro: Because at first you’re dealing with all the stress, the problems. You don’t really have everything smooth. You don’t have your rhythm of how you handle things. There’s more burden than there is reward. You’re dealing with more stuff, and you’re making less money. Then as you build the business, a model business, you start to make more money, and you start to deal with less stuff. So, now you’re looking at it from a different vantage point, and now you’re like, “Okay. Even though I’m not passionate about this, if I want to go start a vineyard, I’ve got the money now. I’ll go do that. I’ve got the people in place, the systems in place, the processes in place. I don’t have to be there every day. I could go do it and still keep the business going.”
Louis Massaro: That’s why I say moving is a vehicle to your financial freedom, and that’s part of the mindset. Instead of looking at it as like “This is me. This is who I am. This is what I’m about,” it’s like, “Look, this is what I do every day in order to take care of living in this room.” I mean, we need money to live in this world, and we need money to have the freedom that we want. That’s really, ultimately what it’s all about. It’s not like moving’s my vehicle to get rich, because you could get rich and not have the freedom. But you could also set up a business that generates predictably the money that you wanted to make and go and enjoy your life.
Louis Massaro: This business set me up for life. I mean, this business put me in a position that I’m so grateful for it. You know what I mean? And I want to see that happen for so many other people, because the flip side of that is torture. The flip side is all the burden, all the stress, all the worry without the money. No. You can’t do that. You don’t want to do that. But you don’t need to go get in a different business. You don’t need to go find a passion and do all that. If you want to find a passion, great, but it doesn’t have to be your business. It doesn’t have to be your job. Be passionate about something you just do because you love doing it.
Louis Massaro: Then when it switches from a lot of burden, a lot of stress, a lot of worry and a little money, and it switches to, okay, the burden, the stress, the worry’s going down, because all my systems, processes, everything’s in order, but the money starts to rise. You’re like, “Oh. Doing business is my vehicle for financial freedom. I see that now. I can now take part of that money, live the live I want to live; take part of that money, give it to charity; take part of that money, invest for the future; take part of that money, start another business if I want to start another business.” That’s part of the mindset.
Chris: Yeah. I think for anybody that may be struggling right now with a business and it feels like it’s a big beast weighing down on them, it can only get better. You’ll find the more you put into it, the more work you sink into it and the more effort you put into it, the more you give to it, the more it gives back. You’ll probably change your attitude about it after a while when that money starts coming in, right?
Louis Massaro: It’s funny. I see it happen. You know. We hear from people. We get the testimonials. I could think of several right now of people who were like, “I was thinking about closing my business. Then we started working with you, or we started going to seminars and your programs or whatever and totally …” It was that scenario, right? A lot of burden, a lot of stress, a lot of worry, uncertainty, very little money, and then it’s like the whole thing just shifted like a seesaw and went the other direction. Now it’s like, “Oh, no, no. This business is great.” That love/hate starts to become more love than it does hate.
Chris: Yeah. And you love what you give your energy to. So, it’s worth the investment.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. And it’s important that … A lot of people feel uncomfortable talking about money. They’re like, “I don’t really know what I want. I want to live a simple life.” Okay. Well, what is that? Now, the best thing you could do is get clear on it. The best thing you could do is just take a day on the weekend and just start looking at it and say, “Okay, what do I want? What do I want to have, and what do I want to experience? And who do I want to become?” Because that’s another really big part of this. If you set big goals for yourself on what you want to achieve, even if you don’t hit those goals, you’re going to become a better, stronger, more grounded, wiser, happier person. Period.
Chris: It’s only going to help. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. It’s just like building muscle. If you have a goal, a physical goal, a health goal, and you go and you start working out and you start eating good, you might not hit that goal if you’ve set it really high, but you’re still going to be a healthier, stronger, more energetic person because of it. Well, you set yourself high financial goals, you’re going to end up with more money. You’re going to end up just … Even if just ended up being able to manage your business in a way that didn’t stress you out the way that it does now, right?
Chris: It’s step by step, right? So, the burden lightens incrementally, and it gets easier as you go.
Louis Massaro: It gets easier. I mean, you’ve worked with one of our groups for a year, it’s just kind of wrapping up, and see the progression that people make when they adopt this mindset, this whole Moving CEO mindset, and they start to look at their business differently. Honestly, I love watching it. I love seeing it.
Chris: Me too.
Louis Massaro: For me, that’s why I do this. I love that more than I love doing it for myself now. Was it 20 years ago I started the business, and now I could never get as much … Having already done it, I couldn’t get the joy anymore from doing it for me. You know what I mean? But to see other people do it and just to kind of help in whatever way I can. They’re the ones doing the work. They’re the ones putting in the time. They’re the ones shifting their mindset, and they’re the ones making it happen. But it’s amazing to watch.
Chris: It is. And it’s about the journey, the destination. Once you get there, it can get boring real quick, but it’s about building it. That’s the fun part. Seeing these things you put in place, and you see them start working and become successful, and you just see the companies start running smoother, that’s rewarding. It’s exciting when that happens.
Louis Massaro: Well, and there’s so much you’ve got to deal with along the way. And I try to say it as much as possible. This is not a get-rich-quick business. I’m not out there saying to people, “Hey, you want to make money? Get in the moving business.” I’m really talking to people that are in the business.” You’re already in it. You’re in? You’ve decided to do it? Okay, great. Now, let’s step this up, because you’ve got to start looking at it differently. Embrace this mindset here, because day to day you’re going to be tested. Day-to-day, you’re going to be challenged. Day-to-day, you’re going to have difficult situations with customers, difficult situations with your employees, difficult situations with your trucks. Listen, it is what it is.
Louis Massaro: But when you adopt this mindset and you say, “I’m responsible for the results. If they can do it, I can do it. There’s got to be a better way,” and you’re like, “You know what? I’m doing this, because this is the vehicle. This is what I’m choosing to go out there in the world, provide service …” So, you’re doing something of value to your community. And because I’m going to do a good job, this is what’s going to give me that financial freedom to do whatever I want, because that’s … I mean, what do we really want? We want freedom. We want the money, because we feel that it’s going to give us the freedom that we need.
Chris: Somebody has accepted that the moving business, that’s it for them. That’s what they’re going to create their freedom with. That’s what they’re going to create their life with. And they’ve decided where they want to go. What’s next? What else can they have in their mindset to help them get there?
Louis Massaro: One of the other pieces that for me was very big, again … And there’s a lot of stuff that I believe is helpful for success, but these are the things that I saw in myself, and I also see them in other high-achieving moving company owners that have stepped into that Moving CEO mindset. When I improve, my business improves. When I improve, my business improves. And what that means is a lot of times people will say, “Louis, what are the best business books?”, and things like that, and I’m like, “You know what? You’ve got to first start with you. You’ve got to dive into the personal development books. You’ve got to figure out how your mind works and be able to improve that. Then, also, on top of that, learn about business. Develop new skills. Look at it constantly and say, ‘What do I need to learn how to do in order for my business to grow?'” What skills do you need to develop?
Louis Massaro: So, it’s just that mindset of understanding that … I think it’s like some people look at everything as … It’s the opposite of not taking responsibility for your results. They look at it, and they’re like, “Everything is outside of me.” Coming back to the first point, once you’ve realized that you’re responsible for your own results, it’s like, “Okay. So, when I improve, my business improves. When I get better, when I absorb knowledge, when I take courses, when I read books, when I go to seminars, when I get coaching, when I take care of my health and take care of my energy, when I learn new skills in my business, my business is going to improve.” Adopting that is part of the Moving CEO mindset.
Chris: I see. Okay. So, now when you were coming up, how did you get into that side of it? Did you find some books? Give us an example.
Louis Massaro: It all stems from there’s got to be a better way. It all stems from that little black book of me writing down what all the issues were and looking for that better way and going to the bookstore and grabbing … I mean, you can see all … You can’t even see them all up there, but it’s searching for knowledge. Once I realized, “Oh my god …” By the way, I hated to read in high school. I didn’t do my book reports. I would get a girl that I … I’d get somebody to do them for me. I hated, hated reading.
Chris: You delegated your homework.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. That’s funny. Even when I started to read, and I was a very slow reader … I’d say even today I’m slower than average when I read. But once you start to realize that there’s answers out there, that you’re not the first person to have gone through what it is that you’re going through, even if there was … At the time for me, there was no answers in moving specifically. It’s like, okay, I saw that business is business. So, I just gathered what I could from wherever I could. Back then, if there was some kind of tape on a course, I would take it. Read a lot of books. If there was seminars … I started the call center, for example, and I didn’t know anything about call centers. Okay. So, I started going to the call center conventions to learn and understand how that whole thing works.
Louis Massaro: I realized that the marketing was shifting away from yellow pages, and it was moving towards online marketing. Okay, I had to dive into that. I had to learn SEO. I had to learn pay-per-click. I had to learn digital marketing and how all of that started to work. Now, whether it’s what we’re doing here today … I started doing all this with a camera, learned how to do it, learned how to edit the videos, not because I couldn’t afford to hire somebody to do it, but because I knew, when I improved, the business improves. When I skill up, when I get more skills, then the business improves. When someone learns how to understand and manage their profit and loss statement and their cashflow, their business is going to improve.
Louis Massaro: Once you accept the fact that, wow, the more skill I develop, the better I’m going to get; and when I get better, my business gets better.
Chris: Yeah. Do you remember a particular skill that was the most challenging for you that you struggled with the most coming up?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Learning how to estimate moves.
Chris: Oh really?
Louis Massaro: That was one of the first ones. We talked about that in the last episode how I just … I was “Yeah, okay, sure. Three men, 75 and …” It didn’t matter what size move you got. It was very intimidating to me, and it was one of those things that was like, “How do I … Cube sheet? What? I’ve got to add this. There’s weight. And translate it from cube to weight.” But I knew it was something that I had to get good at.
Louis Massaro: Same thing with the call center stuff. We started getting leads, and it was like, okay, we were getting leads and printing them off on the printer and handing them out to people. Here, here, here. It’s like, “Call them.” It’s like, “Now what?” “I don’t know. Call them back again.” “Well, what do we do now?” “I don’t know. Write on the sheet of paper when you last time you called them was and just keep up with it.” So, that was the start. A lot of our listeners, they’re in Moving Sales Academy or in our programs, and they know the followup system. They know the scripts. They know the rebuttals. They know all the processes. Now I teach how to estimate moves in one of our programs.
Louis Massaro: It’s just a constant … You can never stop. You never want to stop improving. You want to constantly improve, and when you do, your business will improve. It’s simple as that.
Chris: What’s the skill that you’ve acquired over the years that’s made the biggest difference for you?
Louis Massaro: Oh, man. Wow. Let me just spit out some. I don’t know which one would be the biggest. Just ability to talk to people, ability to deal with customer service, to deal with any issues that come up. Reading, understanding, and managing my business off a profit and loss statement. Understanding online marketing. I mean, that was big, because I was spending … The first time I did SEO, the company charged me $30 grand up front. I was like, “Okay.” But I got a really … Luckily, I learned a lot from them. I spent time in there and made them teach me as they were doing it. Yeah. There’s so many, so many.
Louis Massaro: Just the sales. Sales. To be able to learn … I learned that before I really need it. I learned the sales before I got into the business, working at a call center selling vacation packages, and the importance of scripts and rebuttals and overcoming objections, and then being able to translate that and refine that with moving, understanding … Man, CRMs. Everything that we did, I wanted to learn, because it was just … I don’t know. Some people argue, “Just hire somebody that knows it.” And I just don’t believe that. I believe that you first need to learn it yourself. Then you hire somebody that knows it, or you hire somebody that knows it, and you learn it with them once you hire them. It kind of depends on the level.
Louis Massaro: Some people could argue that fact, but that’s just how I like to do it, because that’s how I started the business. When I started the moving business, I dispatched the trucks. I called to confirm. I dealt with storage billing. I was in the warehouse moving vaults, checking off stuff that was coming in, doing the sales, doing the bookkeeping. So, it just puts you in a position to where, later on, you could do everything, and you don’t have somebody coming in telling you how things are done.
Louis Massaro: You came in. You kind of took over the whole, the camera, the editing, all that stuff. Now we’ve got other people that do the editing and everything. But if I had to at some point, I could jump back in it and do it. I don’t want to, but I know that I can. I knew that I could jump back in at any point and dispatch trucks if I needed to dispatch trucks. I could jump back in and book moves if I needed to book moves. And for me, I like that feeling of knowing that I don’t have someone in my business that can do something that I can’t do. That’s just me. So, you’ve got to be able to develop different skills.
Louis Massaro: I think right now some of the skills Moving CEOs need are delegating … Delegating’s a skill. It’s not something that you’re just born with the ability to do. Creating processes. Be able to actually create formalized processes for your business and role descriptions so that you can start to really build a model business. Running your business off of numbers. Right? Certain KPIs, certain key performance indicators, and certain metrics that will allow you to view your business and run it differently. Marketing. Understanding how marketing works and understanding how to manage marketing by testing, tracking, tweaking. And sales process. They don’t necessarily need to be the best salesperson, but they need the skill of learning how to develop the sales process for their business. These are skills that they should develop.
Louis Massaro: And investing as well, because once you get this money … Remember, moving is the vehicle to financial freedom. I’m not saying to manage all your own money and go invest it, but you should have some idea what’s happening with your money if you’re turning it over to someone to manage for you. Or, if you’re going to invest in real estate, understand that and know that.
Louis Massaro: It’s just looking at, what don’t I feel confident with? What do I do when my … Because what happens is, without the awareness of realizing that you have skills that you need to develop, what’s hard in your business is only hard because you haven’t developed that skill. So, as you start to run into certain things and they’re a challenge to you, then you’re like, “You know what? I’ve got to work on this. I’ve got to develop this skill. I’ve got to get better at this.” Right now, I’m actually writing a book.
Chris: Yeah. Cool.
Louis Massaro: It slipped out. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it came out.
Chris: That’s cool.
Louis Massaro: So, I’m learning. I’ve got a coach specifically for that. I’m diving in. I’m reading about it. I’m learning about it. I’m developing the skill. And anytime you’re developing a skill, when you start, you suck. That’s where most people give up, especially people that are just kind of naturally talented at certain things. They try stuff, and if it’s outside of their comfort zone, they’re not comfortable being outside of the comfort zone, because they’re so used to just being good at everything. That’s one of the biggest things that you can overcome is saying, “You know what? That’s keeping me in a fixed mindset. I need to be in a growth mindset, and I need to be okay being an amateur again. I need to be okay being a beginner again. I need to be okay learning something and not being good at it so that I could suck my way through it and then become overly competent with that and become skillful with that.”
Louis Massaro: Because, and I talk about it before, in psychology there’s the competence-confidence loop. The more competent you get in something, the more confident you get in doing it. So, let’s say we’re talking about managing your business off of numbers. At first, you’re going to be like, “Oh my god. I feel stupid. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.” And I remember. I went through this. You just have to push through that and realize it’s because I’m a beginner. Of course. Why would I be good at this? I’ve never done this before. But as you get better at it, you become more confident. As you become more confident, you’re less hesitant to go towards it, and so you do it more. As you do it more, you become more competent. Mastery takes time. It takes 10,000 hours of something to become a master at doing it. You’ve got to do it over and over. So, as you do it over and over, your confidence is going to grow, and that’s how you get that confidence-competence loop going.
Louis Massaro: Whoever’s listening, anything that you know you need to skill up on, anything you know you need to become better at, go get at it and do it and be okay sucking at it. I’m dealing with it. I’m going through my own private struggles right now, learning how to write a book. I’ll figure it out, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take. But I’ll figure it out.
Chris: That’s cool. What’s the best part about being a Moving CEO?
Louis Massaro: Man, it’s like a whole different place. I don’t know. It’s like you live in a different place. Normally just as a moving company owner, you live here, and all your problems are here. They’re here.
Chris: On your shoulders. Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: They’re here. They’re here. Right? Once you step up … And I say this because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it and felt it with me, and I’ve seen it and felt it with others. Instead of all that stuff being on top of you, it’s like you rise above all of it, and you’re standing on the top, planting your flag like, “I’m here.” Everything you see becomes different. All the possibilities of what is truly possible become different to you. All the little problems that used to consume you day and night are just, listen, parts of the business.
Louis Massaro: There are certain things that you’re resolved, and there’s other parts that you’ve just accepted and just made sure that … Claims, for example, you’re going to have some claims. But in the role of Moving CEO, you’ve established what’s an acceptable threshold, what’s the acceptable percentage of claims. You’re managing the numbers. You’re looking at things. It just becomes a much simpler way to run you’re business, where right now it feels like you’ve got so much coming at you, so much flying at you. You’re just in, I don’t know, like a rave or a crazy nightclub where it’s just loud, and there’s people, and there’s this craziness going on. Right? You’re trying to concentrate, and all this is happening.
Louis Massaro: Then all of a sudden, now you’re in this slow dance of this everything is just moving, and you can see everything happening kind of before it’s happening. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve been there. All of a sudden, the business goes from “Man, this used to be hard, and it used to suck” to “Man, I could open up … I could just keep doing this.” Or, “Great, I could go live my life now. I don’t need to …”
Louis Massaro: Most people aren’t looking to be billionaires in this business. To be able to make the money and enjoy the life that you want to live and look at moving as what these people on the internet are selling like, oh, just passive incomes or side hustles, and all that … When you get to a place where you’re just controlling the dials, you’re just looking at your business, you’re watching the numbers, you’re meeting with your key people, you have clarity to see what’s going on, and you just make some adjustments here and there and then watch how that impacts the business, it’s a beautiful thing.
Louis Massaro: To be able to go away, to be able to spend time for weeks or months on end out of town, away from your business, and be able to afford it, be able to know that your business is running smoothly, because it’s like it’s on tracks. Imagine a train just running through the desert, and it’s not on tracks. I mean, what’s going to happen to that train? There’s no tracks. It’s not going to get far. It’s going to flip, or it’s going to be a really bumpy, miserable road. Right? But now imagine you’ve got tracks, and those tracks are leading you … The destination is where you want to go that you’ve already decided you want to go there. And once you get there, if you want to go further, you know the process now of just laying down more tracks to get you where you want to go. Does that make sense?
Chris: That is cool. I like that analogy. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: I know you’re a big proponent of personal development. How much of that plays a part in being a Moving CEO?
Louis Massaro: A big part. I mean, what we’re talking about right now is we’re talking about mindset. Mindset is personal development. Business is out here. Mindset is here. So, you could work on this; but if you’re not working on this, you’re just going to make a mess out of that. Just being able to kind of understand how your mind works, understand why you do the things you do, and there’s so much to that. We did a couple episodes, a few episodes back, of just wellness, talking about morning routine and meditation and visualization and gratitude and just how you fire off certain neurons in the brain and certain chemicals are released with exercise that help you maintain energy. It all goes back to, when I improve, my business improves. It all goes back to that.
Louis Massaro: People are like, “Where do I start?” You start by just starting. You start by saying, “There’s got to be a better way.” You start by saying, “You know what? Maybe there’s some things that I need to understand about me. There’s some things I need to understand about my mindset and why I do the things I do, and I’ll be able to make some adjustments and make some shifts.” Listen to good people that have good, positive input for you. You’re not a good book reader? Fine. Find someone that’s got a great podcast or some great videos or a great audiobook that you could listen to and start to just kind of explore different possibilities of what’s out there. And be open. Be open to realizing that you can improve. You can get better. And when you improve, when you get better, your business is going to get better. When your business gets better, your life gets better.
Chris: That sounds good. Are there any obstacles that could prevent somebody from adopting this mindset of being a CEO? I don’t know. Is it easy to do? What’s the journey of it?
Louis Massaro: The journey of it is, first, you’ve got to … Anything you want to do, you’ve got to first believe in the outcome. So, my goal of this podcast, these two episodes that we’ve done, is to paint the picture of the outcome to shed light on something that maybe someone listening wasn’t looking at before. They’re looking for, okay, maybe it’s this marketing source or that marketing source. Maybe I need this kind of truck or that kind of stuff, or maybe I should pay my guys this way or that way. And they’re not even looking over here to the mindset piece. So, I want to show, look, there’s this piece here, and some people will go, “Nah, I’m not into that.” But someone that’s like, “Man, that totally makes sense. I could see how that could make a major impact in my business,” they buy in to the outcome.
Louis Massaro: We listen to all kinds of stuff. We watch TV. We read books. We listen to people on podcasts. We listen to people on social media. It’s a matter of having your own filter to take it in and go, “Yeah, that makes sense,” or “Yeah, that guy’s full of shit.” You’ve got to be able to have that filter. But once you do, and you buy into something, you say, “Yeah, I could see that. I could see, if I eat better and I work out, that I’ll be healthier, and I’ll be in better shape,” but that alone might not motivate somebody. You’ve got to really want something, or you’ve got to really be afraid of something else. And that’s what I believe this COVID opportunity … Let’s call this a COVID opportunity.
Chris: I like that. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Has done for us is it’s shown us what we don’t want and what we’re afraid of. Every single person listening had either a moment or has had a couple months of feeling like the worst is going to happen. They’re going to go out of business, and it’s going to be the end, and it’s going to be over. Good. Feel that feeling. Then think about what you want. Think about what you want in your life. So, now you’ve got two ends of the spectrum. You’ve got what you want in your life. If I had everything the way I want it, what would I have? If I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I want? And then there’s this possibility like, “Oh my god, I could go out of business.” Because sometimes people aren’t motivated by what they want, but they’re motivated to get away from the bad thing.
Chris: Yeah, I see.
Louis Massaro: You see what I’m saying?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: If you put yourself in between the worst case and the best case, and then every day you just go, “What steps do I need to take to go that way?” Because this is what’s over here, right? What happens is people make good effort, but they don’t have this. They don’t have these two extremes. So, they kind of take a few steps … You hear it all the time. They’re like, “Louis, I feel like I just take a few steps forward and a few steps back, a few steps forward and a few steps back.” It’s because this, what you want, isn’t compelling enough and it’s not pulling you to go do what you need to do, and this isn’t scaring you enough to say, “I’m not taking a step back. I need to keep marching in that direction.”
Louis Massaro: So, I feel like this is a great thing that’s happening right now. Of course, not … My heart goes out to people that are suffering with COVID and people that are losing people. I know there’s a lot of bad stuff happening in the world, and I know business, especially outside of moving, are closing or are already closed. But even for those people that their business doesn’t make it, I hope that they take it as an opportunity to look at this what they don’t want and move away from it. I always say, even when we talk about … I talk about putting money away in the summer, a cash reserve fund, to get through the offseason. That’s kind of what was really bad about this virus is this whole pandemic happened coming out of the slow season, too, so it just kind of makes it worse. But, again, if you’re a Moving CEO, it’s like, look. I’m responsible for my results. This is happening, but what can I do about it?
Louis Massaro: But when we talk about the cash reserve, if you ever are in a position where things are so bad, feel that pain. Remember that pain. If things are bad for you right now, things are slow for you right now, even though it’s because of COVID, even though it’s because of all that that’s happening, remember that pain and use it as a tool to pop up here when you’re like, “Hey, I’ve got a decision every moment of every day of which way I’m going to go and what I’m going to do. And I’m either going towards that life …” So, having this vision of the life you want and saying, “I’m going to go towards that. Yeah. I can’t go that way.” Sometimes you’re like, “Eh, I don’t need to have all of this. I’m good where I’m at.” No. You’re never staying still. You’re moving one way, or you’re moving the other way. So, to have that reminder there of where you don’t want to go, it’s powerful. It’s powerful.
Chris: If someone maybe that fear is too much, what’s something they can do to kind of overcome and get the momentum moving right now?
Louis Massaro: The fear of what’s going on with their business?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. It’s like, look, what’s your fear? You’re going to go out of business? Okay. All right. So, what are you going to do? If you do go out of business, then what? Then what do you do? You’re either going to have to go start new business, whether it’s a moving business or whether it’s something different, or you’re going to have to go get a job. So, why not take the action right now to head in this direction?
Louis Massaro: Use the acronym for FEAR of face everything and rise. Not forget everything and run. Face everything and rise. When you’re feeling that fear, know it’s time to rise up and go towards what you want. That’s it. Now is the time.
Louis Massaro: I see people putting in the work now. We see the progress in the courses. People are diving in, doing the work, going through. The people we had at the seminar … Not everybody, but the people that are going to be good through this. Any business that’s lost in this springtime here, I feel confident will be made up later in the year. You know what I mean?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: I feel confident that it’ll be made up later in the year by the people that take the action to actually go forth and make that happen. I just released the Moving CEO Business Program as my way of saying, “Hey, this is something that can …” When I improve, my business improves. I’m responsible for my results. If they can, I can. There’s go to be a better way. I’m putting it out there, the Moving CEO Business Program, which is basically everything that I’ve got. It’s such a reduced price. The price of one of my courses, you get …
Louis Massaro: I’m saying this. I don’t like to plug stuff in the podcast, but it’s value. Yeah, it’s something to buy, but I’ve created a program that’s such value and gives someone everything they need to go from that place where they are to that next level, to step into that Moving CEO. I mean, there’s my Moving Sales Academy Program in there, the New Moving CEO Blueprint, the New Movers Marketing Accelerator’s in there, plus, working with me every single month for the next year is part of it, all for the price of what one of those courses are. So, if somebody’s interested in that, just go to movingceo.com, movingceo.com. That’s the Moving CEO Business Program. That’s my plug for it. That’s all I’m going to do.
Louis Massaro: My concern is I want to see as many people through this as possible. You can’t get stuck right now. You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to work. Even me, I know that right now it’s so … I mean, I spent the last two days, you know, back to back to back to back to back on calls with private clients strategizing, going through all this. Not fear, not “Oh my god. What are we going to do?” No. Taking action. So, anyone that’s got fear right now, it’s like, look, take action. Run towards the fear, and look at it like, “Okay, what’s the worst that could happen?” You go out of business? I’d rather go out of business trying and developing new skills than just sitting there waiting for it to happen.
Louis Massaro: What I’ve seen in the past is most people that are in the moving business, even if they have a rough time and end up having to close down, they end up opening another moving company … It’s like, skill up right now. Learn how to do it the right way. Use this COVID opportunity to say, “All right. No, no, no.” That’s what happened to me when the recession came. The recession came and pointed out all my inefficiencies. I was good, la de da, making money until then, and then it was like, “Oh, wait.” It’s different. There’s an opportunity right now to learn how to surf.
Louis Massaro: So, let me explain. Right now, there are giant waves crashing. There’s giant waves. It’s like if somebody called you like, “Chris, there’s giant surf out there, man. You’ve got to go out there.” And you’re like, “Oh my god. I can’t handle that.” That’s what operating in a recession or something like this feels like. It feels like it’s so much more intense. It’s so much harder. But, the people that learn how to surf, the people that learn how to ride that wave right now, that wave is going to take them so far that they’re going to be so far beyond the competition, so far beyond the fear and the problems. Now’s the time to really learn whatever skills you need to learn.
Louis Massaro: Let this be the thing that points out to you the things that it’s time to sharpen. It’s time to sharpen to not only help you thrive through this, but then when you come out on the other side you’re even better. When I came out on the other side of the recession, I was better, stronger, making more money. Things were smoother. I was really fully embracing and living and being that Moving CEO, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Chris: Wow. That’s cool. Let’s recap. We’ve got “I’m responsible for my own results,” “If they can, I can,” “There’s got to be a better way,” “Moving is my vehicle to financial freedom,” and “When I improve, my business improves.” Now, is that the order? I mean, is there a beginning and an end to becoming-
Louis Massaro: No. And listen, there’s more to it, but these are the things that were clear to me when I sat down and I was like, “Look, what is it that … I feel like I know what made me successful, but what can I match between … What are the same characteristics, what are the same mindsets, that I had and that the people that I see that are achieving at high levels in the business?” And these were the ones that were clear. Okay, we all share these values. We all share this mindset. So, you started the question of, are there certain … I think it was certain personality traits or something like that.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: It’s really the mindset stuff that is the common denominator.
Chris: Okay. Okay. Well, if you adopt these philosophies and become that Moving CEO, you’re in good company, right? There’s lots of very successful and innovative people that all think this way.
Louis Massaro: That’s it. Take those. Listen, if you didn’t listen to part one, go listen to part one. If you’re new to the Moving Mastery Podcast, if this is maybe one of the first episodes you’re catching, go back and listen. There is so much content there, so much training, so much information, so much perspective on just different ways to look at this business. If you want to take it to that next level, join the Moving CEO Business Program. Let’s do this together for the next year. Just go to www.movingceo.com.
Louis Massaro: Just go out there. Believe you can do it. Know you’re responsible for your results. Say to yourself every day “There’s got to be a better way.” Know that moving is your vehicle to financial freedom, and believe that, when you improve, your business improves. Adopt that mindset, and I promise you things will start to unfold for you the way that you want them to. Until we see you next time, my friend, go out there every single day. Profit in your business. Thrive in your life. We’ll see you next time.
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to adopt a Moving CEO mindset for your moving business.
“The difference between a moving company owner and a moving CEO is mindset. That to me is the differentiator. That’s what helped separate myself to be able to get to the levels I did.”
“I think the hard times make you ask the questions. There’s got to be a better way. Like how do I do this? How do I run all of this and then keep growing?”
“If you’re stuck at a certain level and you feel like I don’t know what to do and maybe you’re trying some different strategies, you’re trying some different approaches, you’re doing a lot of trial and error, your mindset could very, very well be the thing that’s stopping you.”
“Mindset is the one obvious quality that I see not only in the people that I work with, but in all the other moving company owners who are succeeding at high levels in the industry.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: Hi my friend, welcome back to another episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast. My name is Louis Massaro. I’ve got my main man, Chris, with me today. And we’re going to be diving into strategies on how you could take your moving company to that next level. What’s up Chris?
Chris: Hey, hey, hey. Here we are. What is this, day 22 of quarantine?
Louis Massaro: Oh, it’s got to be longer than that. It’s got to be longer than that. It feels like we’re on lockdown for quite a while now, but we’re in the house. I see you there. I miss you, man. I haven’t seen you in a while. It’s been a while since we’ve been together. It’s probably been what, three weeks at least?
Chris: At least, yeah. You know what though, it’s an amazing time we live in. We get to still do this. We get to share the podcast with these people and it’s still an amazing time to be alive. It’s different, but we’re making the best out of it.
Louis Massaro: That’s it. It’s different. And you know what? Fortunately we all have access to tools, the internet, video conferencing that we could still operate and manage our day to day. Hopefully we’ll be past this soon, but we got to keep it going because you know what, business doesn’t stop. This will end, COVID will be over. We’ve got to make sure that you’re still marching forward with your plans, executing on your priorities and building your moving company and taking it to the next level. So in these episodes we’ve been letting Chris take the lead, either with some questions or pulling stuff from different areas. What do you got today, Chris?
Chris: This one, I think we’ll do a little differently. I just had a general question. I’ve heard a few people ask about this and talk about this. For me, I think it’s something that I’m curious about and I think it’ll be something that you’ll bite into and enjoy talking about. What I’ve noticed is, obviously I think everyone in the audience knows that you were a very successful fixture in the moving industry. I feel like it’s important to figure out why, why that is. So my question to you and I wrote it down, so I’m just going to read it to you here. My question to you is, what is the main difference that you see in yourself and other people that have succeeded at high levels in the moving industry? Is there any common personality traits or skills that you all have?
Louis Massaro: Okay. All right. No, I like this one a lot. You’re good, man. You’ve been picking the good questions. What happened? You want to go with your own this time, you didn’t find anything that excited you or what?
Chris: No, I think I’m I am personally curious about this one. I know just from my perspective, I get a chance to work with you closely, so I observe a lot and I can definitely say that there are some big differences that I see in you as a company owner and a leader and something that I feel like should be shared with the rest of the world. It’s maybe a little bit of a selfish thing on my part to ask this question, but I think [crosstalk 00:03:13].
Louis Massaro: No, I think it’s good. I think it’s good. Really what it all boils down to, there’s of course the process, there’s strategy, there’s leadership, but it all really starts with mindset. And I think you’ve heard me talk about the moving CEO mindset.
Chris: Sure, yeah.
Louis Massaro: The difference between a moving company owner and a moving CEO. That to me is the differentiator. That’s what helped separate myself to be able to get to the levels I did. That’s what I see those same qualities in people that I work with and other people succeeding at very high levels in the moving industry. And it’s really that mindset. It all starts with the mindset and the mindset you could have before you even get started. For me when I first got started, it was, I’m going to make a million dollars in this business. I’m going to become a millionaire in this business. That was my mindset at 19 years old. That’s what I thought about. You can have some strategies. You could have some processes, you could have some things in place, but if you don’t have the right mindset going into it, then it’s going to be hard to sustain that because it’s not an easy business.
Louis Massaro: This is by no way a get rich quick business, but it is a solid business. It is a business that if you do it the right way, can take care of you for your life. So to answer your question, I’m thinking through it as you’re saying it, but it’s definitely mindset. There are certain things… Let me first, before I get into the mindset of it, talk about when I say moving company owner and I say moving CEO, for me, I ran my business. I started in 2000. It wasn’t until I hit the recession period about 2008 that I had to completely shift the way that I handled and ran my business. The first shift basically was when I opened up multiple offices, I needed to find a way to manage those differently than I managed the one office.
Louis Massaro: That was a little bit of an adjustment. I changed the way I looked at things a little bit. But I was still operating from that original mindset, that moving company owner mindset. I don’t in any way, shape or form say that as a derogatory, it’s a progression. It’s a progression from going from moving company owner to moving CEO. You I know what I mean?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So I’m not saying moving company owners like a bad term by any means. But for me that was the mindset that I had for eight years until I was forced to come face to face with the recession, come face to face with my business being bigger than it had ever been at that point and just went under a major expansion period. Then all of a sudden things shift in the economy, things shift in the way marketing happens. It really required me to look at things differently. That’s when I started looking at, I said, you know what? I need to handle my business like a CEO. I need to look at this differently. Because even though at that point I was, I think I hit the eight figure mark already at that point. I could look at that success and say, okay, I’m already where I want to be, but I knew I wanted to go further. But what got me to that level, I knew I needed a different mindset. I needed a different set of tools. I needed a different strategy. I needed a different approach to be able to go further.
Chris: Did you know that or were you forced into that because of the recession and all of that? Do you think you would have found that mindset otherwise?
Louis Massaro: I don’t know that I would have. I think the hard times bring out, they make you ask the questions. There’s got to be a better way. Like how do I do this? How do I run all of this and then keep growing? So it was more of looking at it and saying, okay, the way that I run my day to day has to change. It has to be different. In order for me to grow, I need new systems, I need new meetings, I need new reports that I’m going to look at. I need a new way to be able to essentially manage my business. My day needs to be different and so-
Chris: It has to be.
Louis Massaro: Has to be. Has to be.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Anybody, if you’re stuck at a certain level and you feel like I don’t know what to do and maybe you’re trying some different strategies, you’re trying some different approaches, you’re doing a lot of trial and error, your mindset could very, very well be the thing that’s stopping you. It doesn’t mean that when I say your mindset, that that’s something that’s fixed, that that’s something that is just part of who you are. That’s just where you are right there in your evolution as a business owner, as a leader.
Louis Massaro: So it’s taking a step back and saying, okay, who do I need to be today? Because here I was seven, eight years into the business, I started as a 19-year-old kid and sure, I am matured a little bit and my business acumen got better along the way, but I was still operating from that place. That initial place. I needed to really have a mindset shift and an identity shift to be able to view myself differently, to be able to step up into the role that was necessary at that time. Not even to grow, but where my business currently was, I needed to adjust and think about things differently. Does that make sense?
Chris: Now, you say mindset, is it about your attitude or your discipline? What’s really the foundation of it?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. With myself, I look back and I’m like, okay, what was it that allowed me to get to the level that I got to and what is allowing the companies that I see or the companies I work with that are performing at high levels, what’s allowing them to get there? One of the first things that stood out to me the most was essentially them saying, I’m responsible for my results. I am responsible for my results. The reason that’s so important is because, again, I talk to a lot of people. It’s great because my experience now of the moving business has been broadened so much because it’s not just my experience that I had in the year, was it 20 years since I started? It’s not just that now, it’s all the companies I’ve been working with. I get to see so many different perspectives, so many different personality types, so many different skill levels, so many different mindsets.
Louis Massaro: The thing that I could say that everyone has that’s succeeding at a high level is that they take responsibility for the results they’re getting. Meaning, they know first and foremost, everything is on them. Their employees mess up, it’s on them. Their marketing’s not working, it’s on them. Their sales people aren’t closing at the rate they want them to close, it’s on them. If they pick the web marketing company to handle their web marketing and they’re not doing a good job, it’s on them. It’s a trait that I had. It’s a trait that I see that they have. It’s like, look, ultimately, I can’t blame anyone for anything. I need to take ultimate responsibility for everything that happens. Not only in my business, but in my life.
Chris: What about a situation we’re in now where, God forbid, the economy is so bad or whatever? How do you take that on?
Louis Massaro: When I went through the recession, it’s like I had to tell myself, look, you got yourself here. In other words, I could have said, Oh, the recession, it’s not my fault. I was running my business great. Everything was good. It’s the recession. That’s what messed me up. But in reality, had I been looking, it’s easy to look back and say, I should have been doing all this stuff. But the only thing you could do is change it moving forward. But I looked at it and said, listen, I’m in the position I’m in today because of the decisions that I made.
Louis Massaro: For me, I was in a tough spot when the recession hit because I’ve just bought a whole fleet of long distance trucks, brand new. Financed a million too in trucks. My yellow page bill was 250,000 a month and it was starting to not work anymore. I had all these offices I was running. At that point I was over committed, over extended. I took a big leap in a big reach at a time when then all of a sudden the recession came. Like you’re asking right now, we’ve got the COVID thing going on. The difference is the people that understand that they’re responsible for all their results, they know that where they are today is a result of the actions they’ve been taking for the last six months, the actions they’ve been taking for the last year. And they know that if they’re in a bad position right now, they’re able to totally look and go, yup. It’s because I didn’t do the stuff that I knew I needed to do six months ago.
Louis Massaro: My focus wasn’t where it needed to be. My priorities weren’t where they needed to be. That’s why I’m in this position now. The people that are responsible, the people that look at it and say, I’m responsible for my results are going, okay, what can I do now? I can’t control whether they open up, what stages they’re going to open up the economy back up and let people get back, when restaurants are going to open. I can’t control that. What can I control? I am responsible for my results. I am responsible for what my company’s producing, my employees, how I get them to contribute to my business in these times. A lot of people were like, Hey, I’ve got people there at home. Okay, what can they be doing to help you in your business right now? You’re responsible for that, not them.
Chris: So whether you’re owning up, whether it was actual result of your actions, or even if it wasn’t, it’s like humility, you’re just accepting what it is as it is. And you’re saying, okay, rather than dwelling on whatever is wrong or whatever’s happening, you’re saying, all right, let’s fix this. What can I do? Where am I going to go? Where do I want to go and how do I get there?
Louis Massaro: Listen, you’ve got to accept the fact that in business stuff’s going to happen. A downturn in the economy is going to happen. You’re going to hire a mover who’s going to end up causing you a lawsuit. There’s going to be a bad review because of something that happened or there’s going to be great reviews and those reviews get taken down. There’s going to be things that are outside of your control, but if you start to blame them for anything, it takes away from your personal power of what you could really do to move forward. Because all that mental energy that you’re wasting going, Oh, they did this, or it should have been that way, or poor me, this happened to me right now. Instead of saying, what can I do to determine what my results are going to be right now?
Louis Massaro: We’ve talked about this before, the people that are going to thrive through this COVID situation are the people that are looking beyond it. That are taking action every single day today and looking and saying, where am I going to be six months from now? I’m looking past this. I’m doing what I need to do today. I’m making sure my crews, we’re practicing safety, we’re communicating it to the customers, but I’m looking past it. I’m implementing the processes that I know I need to implement. If they’re listening to this podcast, they’re somehow in our world of either just listening to this podcast or they’ve been to events or they’re in programs of ours and there’s a lot there. You could dissect this whole podcast alone and make yourself a checklist of things to go start implementing. It’s a way to look at it and not say I’m to blame, but it’s to say, I’m responsible.
Louis Massaro: I’m responsible for the results that I get in my business. I’m responsible for the life that me and my family get to live. I’m responsible for the employees that I hire on with the expectation of, this is the type of position and this is the job that I’m offering you and this is where you can go. I’m responsible for supplying them leads so that my salespeople could book moves. I’m responsible for supplying my movers with the proper equipment so that they could go out there and safely do a good job and not hurt themselves and not damage any furniture. Listen, this business, there is so much responsibility and so much liability that if you don’t have that mindset that you just come in and say, I’m accepting it all, then you’re going to waste a tremendous amount of energy on, poor me, this happened to me. There’s countless scenarios and situations. And not to say that you don’t feel it and it doesn’t suck when it happens, but it’s just like, okay, great. What do I do about it now? How could I change this?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. It can’t be just the mindset though. What are the other elements of that CEO position?
Louis Massaro: There’s still more to the mindset.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: It’s not just about responsibility. One of the other things is a lot of people don’t have the belief in themselves. I’ll hear from people in different formats, whether it’s social media, whether they come to an event, whether they come in a program, whether I get to speak to them personally, whatever it might be, were asking, what separates the people that are succeeding at a high level versus the people that are struggling? Another thing is that the people that are struggling don’t believe that they could get to that level. They look at it and say, they’re at that level, they built that big company. But that’s not something that I could do. So the difference in the people that do for myself and for the people that are succeeding at high levels, and when we talk about succeeding at high levels, it doesn’t mean they’ve got offices all around the country. There’s people that have, they’re like a hometown dominator. They’re just in one city, but they’re just crushing it and they’re profitable.
Louis Massaro: To me, that’s succeeding at a high level. You don’t have to have 10 offices to be succeeding at a high level. You’ve got to have your one business and that business runs smoothly. It runs efficiently. It takes care of your customers, you get good reviews and it generates the money that you want for yourself and for your family. To me, that’s succeeding at a high level.
Chris: Yes, sounds great.
Louis Massaro: The people that are doing that, they look at it and they say, you know what? If they could do it, I could do it. If Louis could do it, I could do it. If that company can do it, I could do it. And that’s something that was in line with my thinking early on. I started to two rental trucks out of a truck rental yard. I just, I don’t know, maybe it came naturally, but I think it’s something that can be learned. Not even learned, it’s more of having an awareness of it. Like, Oh man, yeah, I see the way that I think about this and if I think about it differently, it could allow me to really unblock some of the stuff that’s holding me back.
Louis Massaro: From that truck rental yard, I’m like, I’m seeing these big companies and I’m like, you know what? If they could do it, I could do it. They started somewhere small too. They didn’t just start where they’re at. I might not get there tomorrow. I might not get there next year. But what why is it that that company can do it and I can’t? There’s no college degree necessary to build a successful moving company.
Chris: Yeah. Put your pants on just like everybody else.
Louis Massaro: That’s it. I think that’s another one. Either you take responsibility, and you just have to believe at each and every step of the way that you can do it. Know that the people you see with the big companies, it didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen without struggle. It didn’t happen without hardship. It didn’t happen without all the same problems that you’re facing today that they overcame, found a better way and were able to reach that higher level.
Chris: What is it that would make someone believe that they couldn’t do it? Or why do you think somebody would feel like they can’t do what those big companies were doing?
Louis Massaro: It’s was a few things. I think number one is just programming. Childhood programming and just the way that each and every single one of us was brought up differently and dealt with things differently. I’m not an expert on parenting and how those mindsets were formed and how they were developed, but it could be that first failure in the business. You tried something and you fail. And then that self-talk starts to tell you, you’re not good enough for this. You can’t do this. You don’t have the education, you don’t have the background, you don’t have the experience. You’re also at your, just how you view yourself. If you view yourself as a mover who starts their own business just so they could work for themselves, if that’s your mindset, if you’re just looking at it and saying, Hey, I just want to work for myself and start my own business and if I could make a living, great. Versus, no, I’m going to build a company to where the business and the company runs without me and pays me, it’s just a different mindset.
Louis Massaro: In other words, some people believe in themselves and some people don’t. It doesn’t mean that you can’t believe in yourself. What it means is you’ve got a first see it and you’ve got to first be able to see somebody doing it and then also have it somehow demystify it for you. Meaning, that’s what I’m hoping to do right now. I’m hoping to say, look, it’s not that big of a mystery. You can do it. The level that you want to get to, you can do it. I barely graduated high school. I threw a yellow page ad into rental trucks and just went at it. What really allowed me to keep moving forward was this constantly looking for the things that were wrong and then looking for the solutions.
Chris: Yeah, you want it to get better. You wanted to be better.
Louis Massaro: I wanted to get better and it was just because I felt so lost, because I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, I knew that I had to work extra hard to figure it out. And because I believed that number one, I was responsible for my results, but number two, if they could do it, I could do it. I started, I had this little black book, I talk about it sometimes, I kept in my back pocket that I just kept notes in. And every time I ran across a problem, that’s an issue. I’ve got to fix that. I don’t know how to fix it right now, but let me write it down so I could figure out how to fix it later on. I didn’t allow problems to just happen and happen and happen and happen. I stopped, I identified what the problem was. I wrote it down and then I obsessed about fixing that issue so that it no longer happened because at first it was just everything was an issue. Every day there was this massive issues.
Louis Massaro: The difference between being able to scale your business and just struggling is getting the problems sorted out so that you could just figure out the right way to do it and do it over and over and over the right way. Instead of every day struggling doing the same thing and trying to figure out the same problem, is taking a step back to figure out what that is. For me, there was nobody in moving, showing you how to do it. So I studied other businesses. I talked to other successful business owners that I knew, figured out what they were doing. I’m like, okay, how could I apply this here?
Louis Massaro: I would take bits and pieces and just start putting it all together. And I didn’t take everything. I listened, I absorbed, but some stuff made sense for me and for my business and some stuff didn’t make sense for me and my business. I just knew that it was not possible. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. It shouldn’t have been that hard. I’m like, it was a rude awakening because I didn’t think it was going to be that hard. But then I’m like, okay, it is that hard. But then I just went back to, okay, if they did it, I could do it.
Chris: Did you start with problems that just happened over and over again, the obvious ones, you start with that and then start whittling it down from there or did you do it all at once? What’s the process there?
Louis Massaro: It was just every day, whatever the problem was, I just added it to the list and then would start to see a pattern of problems that stemmed from the same place. So you’re like, okay, if you’ve got five problems written down that you’re trying to deal with and you could identify a common theme across them and then you’re like, okay, well, what can I do that will help all of these? That’s compound problem solving right there. You come up with a solution that doesn’t just solve one problem, it solves multiple problems and then you make sure that that stays in place and it continues to happen that way. That’s how you start to get out of the hole. That’s how you start to get out of that place where you just feel like, man, this is never going to end.
Chris: That’s what the bigger companies were good at. Right?
Louis Massaro: I don’t know what they were good at. I just know this stuff that they didn’t accept. I think that when you don’t know any better, I didn’t know any better. It’s like, it’s easy to accept things. And I don’t mean accept them like I’m responsible because it’s the opposite. If you’re going, Oh, that’s just the way it is. People don’t want to book with me. I’m like, no, I’m responsible for my results. Why is it that they don’t want to book with me? What could I say to them to make them want to book with me? When I first started, every single person that called up for a quote was like, yeah, sure, we’ll send you a three men a truck and all the equipment, $75 an hour. That was it. Didn’t matter if it was a studio apartment, didn’t matter if it was 12,000 square foot house, it was a mansion, it was three men at 75 bucks. Because I had no idea what I was doing. So it was like, okay, this seems to be working. This is great. People are booking, people are booking.
Louis Massaro: Then all of a sudden, you get the chirp chirp on the Nextel walkie talkie and it’s one of your movers. And he’s like, “Hey, I think one of my helpers is drunk and I just confronted him and he blew up me and he walked away and I don’t know where he’s at.” So you’ve got to deal with the problem at hand, you’ve got to deal with the problem at hand, but then you’ve got to be able to go, okay, how do I make sure this doesn’t happen again? And that scenario was like, okay, now I’ve got to go out to this job. I’ve got to get on this particular job, the one I’m thinking about was, I went out there, first of all, it was three and a half truck loads-
Chris: Wow, that’s a big [crosstalk 00:30:12].
Louis Massaro: … and I sent three guys at 75 bucks. I had no idea how to estimate. I had no idea how long something should take. I had no idea how much fits on a truck. So I’d go out there and come to find out it’s an NBA player, highly known Olympic, all star champion, world champion. I’m not going to say his name because I don’t want to get involved with that. But-
Chris: What happened? Was he so mad?
Louis Massaro: He wasn’t there, his dad was there.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: His dad was fortunately a cool guy. Was just being cool about it. So now I jump in as a mover, his dad jumps in as a mover. I’ve got my two guys there and then me and the dad are moving for two days. Just moving stuff, getting through it. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know how to resolve it. I didn’t know how to fix it. I just tried to make it right. That problem presents opportunity to create better processes and create better systems to say, okay, how do we make sure this doesn’t happen? Because what was the problem there? The problem was number one, didn’t do a great job of hiring. Because I was just, Hey, you want to work? Sure. Here’s a shirt, get on the truck. No problem. This is very early on, this is when in the first few months and had no idea how to estimate a move.
Louis Massaro: I realized very quickly that day and I think the pain of having to go out there and face the customer. Especially his son was someone that I looked up to, and having to be there, it’s like the guy who just ruined their move. It just made the pain of it. That’s why I always say when bad stuff happens, feel the pain, take care of the customer, feel the pain. But then go fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s actually pretty funny. A couple of years later I ran into the father at a car wash and he came up and I had a nice car at the time and he walked up. He’s like, “Man, that’s nice.” I turned around and I was like, I saw him and I’m like, Oh.
Chris: You knew who he was right away.
Louis Massaro: Right away I knew who he was. I didn’t know what to say. I was like, “You remember me by any chance?” He’s like, “Yeah, that’s why I came up to you.” I’m like, “Man, I still feel so bad about that. If you ever need anything, I was just getting started.” He’s like, “I know, I see your trucks all the time now.” Ended up hitting it off with him, ended up meeting his son. So it all worked out. But the point was that things sometimes have to go wrong for you to realize that it’s not right. Sometimes you don’t know what’s right until you know what’s wrong.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: I knew just blanketly, just sending out three men at 75 bucks an hour to anybody that called was not right.
Chris: You figured that out. Really, what you realize is that CEO mindset is about not just accepting, living with that like, Oh well, stuff like that’s going to happen. It’s like taking the initiative to say, okay, what can I do to make sure this will not happen again?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. One of the things that just stuck in my head and really became the prompting point for what I wrote down in that little black book was saying to myself, there’s got to be a better way. And it was like sitting there on that job just dealing with all that, I’m like, there’s gotta be a better way. Because I don’t believe that the owner’s position is to be out on the move. You know what I mean? You can’t run your business and you can’t grow your business if you’re out on the truck. If that’s the way you start, great. But you got to get off that truck as soon as possible because you’ll never be able to work on the business. You’ll never be able to grow the business.
Louis Massaro: There’s got to be a better way. That was another major point that I saw that with myself. That was my main theme. I could credit that statement to helping me build everything that I’ve ever built. Just looking at it and saying, all right, there’s got to be a better way than this. Even if there’s not, you’re going to go on a search for it. You’ll go on a search, you’ll try to find what that better way is, and then if you can’t find it, it’s like, okay, I guess there’s not a better way, but at least I went. And then you accept it, you accept responsibility for your results, but you went and you looked for that better way. You go and you learn, okay, how do I learn how to estimate? You go and you learn, okay, how do I screen movers to make sure that they’re not showing up drunk and walking off the job and all of that?
Louis Massaro: I noticed that with the people that are succeeding in high levels, especially the people that I work with. The people that either are at the seminars, people that are in our courses, private clients that I work with one-on-one, it’s like they’re looking for the better way. That’s all I hope to shed light on. That’s why we’re doing this podcast. There is a better way. You know what I mean? It doesn’t have to be so challenging. It doesn’t have to be so hard. And that’s why it’s mindset. We’re only talking about mindset right now.
Louis Massaro: Take responsibility for it and know that you’re strong enough to bear that burden and know that Hey, if somebody else out there did it, so can you. Doesn’t mean you want that. Just because someone opened up 50 franchises doesn’t mean that’s what you want. Because if it’s not something that you want, if it’s not something that is truly in line with what you and your heart desires, then you’re not going to have that sustained momentum to go after. But if it is something you want and it’s in line with your life goals and your vision and everything you want for yourself, you’ve got to know that you can do it.
Chris: Even if it’s a process or something you’ve been doing for years a certain way and it works, you should still look at it and say, okay, how can we make this better? Even though it’s working, it’s not causing us any trouble, there still could be a better way to do.
Louis Massaro: Unless you’re 100% where you want to be. In other words, you’re enjoying the quality of life from a financial standpoint, you’re good, you’re not worried about money, you’re taking time to spend however you choose. You’re not stuck at your office. You’re not dealing with stress and losing sleep over the business. Unless that’s your scenario. You should look at every single thing that you’re doing and say, there’s got to be a better way. How could this be done better? That starts to just open up the… That gets the wheels turning. That gets the wheels turning it. Once you start to discover those things and once you start to implement those things, then you start to build that confidence like, okay, all right. Well, maybe Louis is right. If they can, I can.
Louis Massaro: I took responsibility and I started to look at it all and say, okay, if something’s happening I’m responsible for those results. I looked for a better way, I found a better way, implemented the better way, maybe I can do it. And what happens there is that your perception of who you are and what you’re capable of opens up. That for me was the metamorphosis from moving company owner to moving CEO.
Chris: That’s cool.
Louis Massaro: It took me seven, eight years to be able to have enough confidence in myself and feel that I had enough experience in myself to say, you know what, I’m going to shift this and I’m going to take a whole new approach and I’m going to, to me, it was a CEO thing, not because that’s what was on my business card. It wasn’t about that. It was like, what identity can I give myself that’s going to allow me to see myself differently than that 19-year-old kid that started and didn’t know anything except I’ve been working hard for a few years?
Louis Massaro: I needed to shift. I changed the way I was dressing going to the office. I started wearing slacks and dress shirts. I had my office and my team, at that point I had a call center and corporate office. I had them do the same and I started to shift the way that my day to day was run. I had a whole new set of reports that I was looking at because I would sit back, there’s got to be a better way. That was the start of all the conversations, was looking for that better way. And I’m like, okay, what am I trying to accomplish here? What do I need to see? What do I need to know? What is the ultimate goal of what we’re trying to do with this company and how can I feel a sense of control over all of that? Because I think that’s what happens for a lot of people is that as it grows, it just feels like a wild beast that needs to be tamed.
Louis Massaro: That’s what happens when your ambition too is moving faster than your, I don’t know, you got your foot too much on the gas and not enough on the brake. You know what I mean? You’re going way too fast because you’re thinking about stuff. Then there’s the opposite. You’ve got this vision. I started and I’m like, Hey, I’m going to be a millionaire in his business. So it was like, put the gas down and go for it. But then you find yourself in a position where you’ve got to backtrack to get things in place.
Louis Massaro: At that point, I didn’t feel that I had the ultimate control over all my locations. I didn’t feel like everything was running exactly the way that it needed to be in each office. I didn’t feel like I had the clarity to be able to see what was going on, to be able to see the numbers and be able to run my business off of those numbers. I didn’t have the structure to be able to have certain meetings with my team so that they could fill me in with what was happening because I was in a different place. It’s like I got promoted. It was my business, but I got promoted. It was like the job that I had at the beginning was essentially a dispatcher. Then I got promoted to an operations manager. Then maybe a vice president of some sort. And then it was like, no man, I need to promote myself here to CEO.
Chris: Yeah. It’s that mentality. You have to have that CEO mentally, it’s the only place you can… You had to go through all of that to get there.
Louis Massaro: Unless somebody came along and told me this sooner.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: That’s what I’m hoping to share is, look, I don’t care where you are. I don’t care if you’re that 19-year-old kid like I was in the truck rental yard, adopt that CEO mindset.
Chris: From the get go.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, right off the bat. You’ll still have to do what you need to do. You might be wearing the CEO hat and also wearing the dispatcher hat and also wearing a moving consultant hat and also wearing all the hats, but you’ve got to be able to get that as soon as possible because it’ll save you so much just torture. And it’s different. I remember having people in my office, caught somebody talking behind my back. Like, Oh, he thinks he’s running a Fortune 500 company. This is a moving company. Somebody that had experience in the business that I brought in to help run long distance.
Louis Massaro: It didn’t bother me because not everybody’s going to get it. Not everybody’s going to understand, but if you’ve got the vision of what you want to do with your company, you’ve got to be able to just step into that different way of looking at it and embrace that CEO and say, okay, I’m a moving CEO. What do I need to do to be able to run that business from that place? Because it’s a whole different, if we split the screen down in the middle right now, we did a little documentary of like, okay, here’s somebody that’s been in business 10 years, that’s just been with the moving company owner mindset and these characteristics and here’s somebody that made the shift to moving CEO, you’d see a totally different story.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You know what I mean? A totally different outcome. Totally different quality of life. Totally different quality of business. It’s just night and day.
Chris: It’s a different life. A different reality.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Wow. Did you literally make this decision to become the moving CEO in a day? Is it just you had a problem and you said, okay, this is it. Now I need to change and it was just like that?
Louis Massaro: No, it was a lot of different things happened. It was having to dig myself out of the mess in the recession. Realize that I started, I was like, okay, I didn’t do long distance for eight years and all of a sudden I’m like, okay, get 12 trucks and let’s haul everything we could book from all the locations. And it was a whole different… Then I went back, it was basically I put myself back in the position of a long distance dispatcher, if you will, to learn that whole thing because it was a totally new business. Then just realizing, Oh my God, you don’t realize when you can’t see it and you haven’t been there before and you haven’t tested your own bandwidth and your own capabilities, sometimes it seems like, you know what? Yeah, that’s okay. No problem. We’ll get some trucks and we’ll just haul the furniture. We’ll haul the shipments and it’ll be no problem. I didn’t see everything else that was going to come with that at the time.
Louis Massaro: It was like I was running all the offices, the call center, the long distance piece, bringing on a team to help run the long distance stuff. Looking at it like, I can’t be in the business again trying to run all of this right. Not because I didn’t want to, it’s not that it bothered me, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, it’s that I knew there was nobody at the helm. There was nobody running the whole thing. If I’m sitting there worried about long distance shipments and this and that and the call center, I knew that I needed to step back and take a different approach.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t about the micro, it was about the macro. Wasn’t about every little thing that was happening day to day. That was the part that I had to start unwinding. I had to start looking at it and going, okay, look, I’ve got to simplify this and put myself back in a position where I could be at the helm, back in a position where I could lead the company, the whole company, not just little sections of the company. There’s always got to be somebody at the helm.
Chris: Yeah. Okay. So it’s about deciding to take charge, to take control?
Louis Massaro: In a different way. Yeah. It’s playing a different position. You’re giving yourself a promotion or you’re on a basketball team and you’re like, okay, I’m much better off as the point guard than I am playing forward or you’re playing far much better off being the quarterback. In other words, you have to decide where you are better off. Again, it all comes down to mindset. Somebody could come in and go, Hey, you should be in this position. But it’s really just the mindset of first understanding that’s where I need to be, that’s where I need to go.
Louis Massaro: At the time I’m reading books on great CEOs Jack Welch from GE and different business books. Good to Great, talking about different businesses and what it took for those leaders. Businesses that were much bigger then moving. It put me in a mindset that was like, okay, that seems so far beyond where I’m at, but I think I could take a lot of this and shrink it down into this moving business and still apply it to here. So to answer your question, this is the type of stuff that was going on. Another part of it, if you look at how it all came together, my CPA, sitting down and had a mentor relationship with him where he was just telling me straight up, look, you’ve got to run this thing differently. You’ve got to know these numbers. Well, years prior before that time period I was like, yeah, okay, whatever, whatever. I’m making money, no problem. Yeah, I will, I will. It finally just clicked one day with all of that coming together.
Chris: Okay. Let me see if I can remember where we’re at here. You’ve got, there’s got to be a better way.
Louis Massaro: There’s got to be a better way. That’s one of them.
Chris: And then, if they can, I can.
Louis Massaro: Yup. If they can, I can.
Chris: Then what was the first part? You take responsibility?
Louis Massaro: I am responsible for my results.
Chris: Yeah, okay.
Louis Massaro: I’m responsible for my results. And that’s in life. You know what I mean? That’s an all around mindset because I truly believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. So it’s like, look, if you’re going to be on point in your business, be on point in your personal life. If you’re going to be on point in your personal life, be on point in your business. Just easier to just be on point. Now you’re responsible for all your results. You might go make a bunch of money and you might say, Hey, I’m going to make a ton of money in my business because I’m responsible for that. But then you go and you blow it and you don’t set up your financial security for the future. You’re responsible for that too.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Listen, there’s a lot of responsibility in owning a business in general. There’s a lot of responsibilities just in operating as an adult in society. Now you take on owning a business, you’ve got yourself, you’ve got your family, you’ve got your customers, you’ve got your employees, you’ve got to take care of all of that and you’re responsible for it.
Chris: Yeah. Okay.
Louis Massaro: And the results that each and every one of them get.
Chris: Yeah, that’s a different attitude. That’s a lot of humility and humbleness going on there to get to that place. Like you were saying before, you didn’t have anybody to tell you about this or show you this, but do you feel like, do you have to go through all of those experiences though? It feels like there’s part of it that hardship is good sometimes.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Listen, put it this way. If you aren’t feeling any hardship at all, you’re not going to seek out the answers. In other words, if you’re listening to this right now, it’s because there’s something in your business that you feel can be improved upon or you feel like there’s got to be a better way. So you don’t have to go through massive hardships to be able to do it. Everybody gets on their path in a different way. Everybody gets there in a different way. Like things now, I’ve shifted in certain areas where it’s like all I did was hear somebody say something on a podcast or whatever and I’m like, click. I just clicked.
Louis Massaro: My hope is that this helps it click for somebody. This helps it like, okay, yeah. Maybe instead of just looking at how everything’s wrong with all of that, let me just shift the way. Let me look at it from this way. I’ve been looking at it like this, let me try on for size how Louis is looking at it and see, okay, I could see how that might impact my business and my life.
Chris: Being open to that.
Louis Massaro: Well, yeah, you got to be open. You’ve got to always be open to new ideas but with a filter. You’ve got to be open with a filter. Don’t just take anything I say and run with it. You’ve got to put it through your own filter of like, do I see that that can make sense? Because otherwise, there’s so many people given so much information talking about so much stuff out there. These days that you could end up going down so many different rabbit holes trying to find a solution. Like I said earlier, when I was taking bits and pieces of information from mentors and different business owners that I knew and books, I would take some and leave some. It wasn’t all for me. The same way if you get one thing out of this episode, great. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to take all of it and adopt all of it. I think that’s important to distinguish there.
Chris: It’s important to take chances too. You got to gamble a little bit, see what works for you and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.
Louis Massaro: That’s all about entrepreneurship.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Another thing is, you look at it and you say, what’s the worst that could happen? Anything you were ever afraid of doing, say what’s the worst that could happen? Can I live with that if that were to happen? A lot of times when I’m teaching people delegation it’s like, okay, well you’re afraid, you’re fearful of giving that over to that person. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe you’re handing over the reigns for dispatch. Well, they could put a guy in the truck that doesn’t have a license and, okay, well what could happen? I don’t know, he could run right through a school. That could happen with a guy with a license too. You’ve got to just be able to go to the worst case, see how likely that is and then bring it back and be like, okay, now let’s look at what’s the best case scenario.
Louis Massaro: The best case scenario is now you’ve removed yourself from this batch. You’ve put somebody in that position, you’ve given them the processes, you’ve given them the role description, they know exactly what to do. You’ve done the best you can to train them and now you freed yourself up to work on your business and enjoy your life and not be stuck there all day dealing with it. Getting out of your comfort zone, I think is exploring the worst case and the best case scenario. And it’s all about your actions, the actions that you take. Every single day, if you know where you want to go, you know where you want… It’s like, what I’m doing today, is that taking me towards where I want to go or is it not taking me towards where I want to go? You’ve got to make the decision to go towards where you want to go and you’ve got to make the decision to…
Louis Massaro: Obviously when you think about worst case scenario, we were talking about the dispatcher and delegating that roll out to somebody. You think through obviously what the worst case scenarios are and you put checks and balances in place to do your best to ensure that those things don’t happen and then move forward. When we talk about getting out of your comfort zone, you’re going to have to go towards that imaginary wall and step outside of it and see how that feels and then take another step outside. You might feel a little nervous, but you’ve got to just keep going. Whatever you’re afraid of, you really need to go at that. What you’re afraid of, you need to go towards because as humans we were afraid of so much stuff that’s just not necessary to be afraid of.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And it’s really that wall, that invisible wall, that comfort zone. So if you start taking some of these principles, and we’ve got, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to even get through all of the moving CEO mindset today, but we might have to do-
Chris: Oh, there’s more?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. We’ve expanded upon this, so we might have to do a part two of this.
Chris: Oh, okay. I’m up for that.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: That’d be great.
Louis Massaro: I don’t want to make the episode too long. But if you’re taking on the responsibility, I’m responsible for my results. I realize how many times I’ve said that, it’s just so important to adopt this mindset. That you’re responsible for it because so many people want to blame other people and you’ll never get what you want by doing that.
Chris: No.
Louis Massaro: You’ll never get it. Where you are today is because of everything you’ve done up until this point. That’s it. That’s it. The decisions you’ve made, the actions you took or did not take, that’s why you are where you are today. And there’s nothing to be overly excited about. There’s nothing to be upset about it. It’s like, okay, here’s where I’m at. I’m responsible for these results. Good or bad. Okay, well where do I want to go next? Okay, well I’m responsible for those results, let me start taking the actions and implementing the things that I need to do to get there. And then believe in yourself.
Louis Massaro: To me, the easiest way to believe in yourself is to look at it and say, if they did it, I can do it. I’m not talking about if you’re five foot two, and you’re looking at LeBron James like, if he could do it, I could do it. You might have a difficult time doing that. But if we’re talking about building a very successful moving business, if they did it, you could do it. If I did it, you could do it. And if you just make it your daily mantra, if you will, there’s got to be a better way, there’s got to be a better way. And it doesn’t mean you’re dissatisfied with each and everything. You’re just exploring, how could I make it better? Then it becomes a game. Then you start to have fun with that game, and then you just start to tweak and modify. With that, you gain confidence, which helps you break out of the comfort zone you were talking about. And then you start crushing it.
Chris: Yeah. Wow. Cool. Well, I’m looking forward to continuing this conversation, but that’s powerful stuff. And really, it’s just a slight shift in your mind, your attitude, whatever it is. It’s this much, you’re just turning the dial that much in and it can make all the difference.
Louis Massaro: How you look at things. If you shift that, it’ll shift your whole world for you.
Chris: Yeah. Cool.
Louis Massaro: So let’s do this. I think we’re getting close on time here?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Let’s keep going, but let’s do it as a part two.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Because I want to finish this because this is strong and this is like, I could teach all the strategies and all the tools and processes. All that stuff, but if the mindset is not there and cultivated, it’s going to be a hard time. You’re going to have a hard time really implementing it all. Because there are so many roadblocks, there are so many challenges. But most of the challenges are all mental challenges.
Chris: Right. That’s the foundation.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Most of the obstacles that you run into are all mental. You take two people and put them in the same problem, the same predicament. It’s the mindset of how they deal with it, how they approach it, that’s going to get them out of it. You think about one moving company owner gets a bad review online, or has a good review that’s filtered and you get another one that had the same scenario. One person could sit there for two days obsessing about it while the other one dealt with it, accepted it as part of the business, understands that they’re responsible for their results and moves on and says, there’s got to be a better way. What could I do to fix it and uses that time productively to come up with solutions to fix whatever the problem was.
Chris: That’s the difference.
Louis Massaro: That’s the difference.
Chris: Cool.
Louis Massaro: Listen, if you’re out there, you’re listening to this right now and you feel like that’s not your current mindset, just know you could adjust that. Just know that you’re not stuck, you’re not fixed where you are. Every mindset, every view of the world can all be shifted. It could all be changed. And if you heard anything today that you feel would serve you in your life and your business, allow yourself the opportunity to start looking at it differently. Allow yourself the opportunity to say every morning, I am responsible for the results that I get today. I know that if they did it, I could do it too. It might be hard work, I might hit a lot of roadblocks along the way, but if I keep saying every day there’s got to be a better way, then I will find that better way. I’ll find a way around those roadblocks and I’ll get to that level that I want to get at.
Louis Massaro: Hope this helped you. We’re going to do a part two of this. We’ll put it up there soon. Until then, go out there every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. If you like this podcast, if you like this episode, if you want to keep hearing stuff like this, do me a favor. Head over to iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Leave me a review, let me know what you think. If you’ve got any questions or anything that you want me to address directly, send me a DM on Instagram. Just go to @LouisMassaro on Instagram. Send me a DM, we’ll go through them. We’ll check them out and then we’ll possibly bring it on The Moving Mastery podcast to do an episode. And listen, keep going, keep pushing.
Louis Massaro: I know we’re in uncertain times right now, but just know the COVID stuff’s going to pass. Even if we go into a recession, this business, this moving business is as close to a recession-proof business as it gets. People need to move. They always need the move, whether they’re moving from their big mansion because maybe their restaurant didn’t make it and now they need to move into a townhouse. Either way, you’re there to help them. You’re there to serve them. People will continue to move. Don’t let the news, don’t let the media, don’t let all the doomsday stuff gets you down and think that there’s no future here. Keep pushing, my friend. We’ll see you at the next episode.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to maintain your wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I wouldn’t say that I am a health nut, but what I am is someone who takes life and their business and their daily experience seriously, so I want to experience it in the best way that I possibly can.”
“For me, the motivating factor was really when I realized the impact of my personal wellbeing, mind, body, spirit, all of that, and how much impact that had on my business.”
“Once I started to see the impact of small things that I was doing, I was like, “Man, I need to go all in.” And I’ve since become a student of how the mind works, how the body works. Being a whole human and how that helps my business and helps my quality of life.”
“Ask yourself, ‘What can I do to feel more energy, have more clarity, have more stamina to be able to go longer when I need to work hard and do what needs to get done?’”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: Hey, my friends. Welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. My name is Louis Massaro. I got my main man, Chris. We are virtual in quarantine lockdown. Chris is at home. I’m at home. I’m looking at him I’m right now. We’re on Zoom, just kind of hanging out, doing the podcast as we normally would, but doing it virtually. What’s up, Chris?
Chris: Hey, how’s it going? I’m here. I’m holding it down. It’s a pleasure we still get to do this.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, we got to keep it moving. We can’t let this thing stop us. You guys shouldn’t be letting this stop you as well. We’ve been doing a new format with the podcast to where we’re taking questions from either the audience, people on social media, emails that come in, maybe clients that we have that have something they’ve asked that we could use. I’m letting Chris pick the questions, surprise me with them, and we go from there. So, what do we got today, Chris?
Chris: So, today I had a question come in on Instagram recently, and I think it’s appropriate just because of the last episode we did about the COVID-19 pandemic and how that affects your moving business. A lot of that message in that episode was you telling people, “Hey, listen, the fear can, you can lock up, you can freeze up because of all the fear that’s going on out there.” And it’s important to mitigate that fear and make sure you’re still pressing forward with your business. I think that’s been very helpful, but I also realized that maybe there’s more to it. And when this question came in, it was the perfect question and it made me realize, yes, we got to continue sort of a part two of the COVID-19 episodes here.
Chris: So, this question came in on Instagram and I’ll just read it to you here and then we can go from there. The question is, I’ve seen a lot of your videos and listen to your COVID-19 podcast and I really appreciate your insight on not letting the stress and the fear of this pandemic bring our businesses down. I’d like to ask you specifically what you are doing in your daily health and wellness routines to help mitigate that stress.
Louis Massaro: Okay. That’s a good one.
Chris: Yeah, and I know for you that’s something you take very seriously. So, I think we’ll be able to help a lot of people.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, definitely. So, if you haven’t already listened to, I believe it’s called COVID-19 and Your Moving Business, it’s the previous episode. Go listen to that. Some powerful stuff in there. You got to listen to that one. But yeah, as far as my routine, I do take it seriously. There was a point where I made a decision that after learning and understanding, right? First, you’ve got to be able to get things in perspective. So, it wasn’t that I’ve just always been a health nut. I’m not. I wouldn’t say that I am a health nut, but what I am is someone who takes life and their business and their daily experience in life seriously, that I want to experience it in the best way that I possibly can.
Louis Massaro: For me, the motivating factor was really when I realized the impact of my personal wellbeing, mind, body, spirit, all of that, and how much impact that had on my business, right? That’s how it became a motivating factor for me. So, I started dabbling with a little bit of this routine and a little bit of that routine, and once I started to see the impact of small things that I was doing, I was like, “Man, I need to go all in.” And I’ve since become a student of the mind, right? How the mind works, how the body works, spirit and connection, and just overall, right? Being a whole human and how that helps my business, right? And helps my quality of life.
Louis Massaro: So, I’ll share with you what I do and it’s kind of years of just trying stuff, seeing what works for me, seeing what fits, right? It’s all about you got to be able to try stuff on for size, right? When you hear something, like you read something in a book or you hear something on a podcast or wherever you get it from, right? You have a mentor that tells you something, you got to be able to try it on for size. See if it works for you, and then make adjustments from there. Right? Does that make sense?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, it’s got to be your own thing. You’re not living somebody else’s life. This is your life, so however you can make it fit for you that’s really the key. Right?
Louis Massaro: That’s the key. And so, I’ll share kind of my routines, but know that this is … I spend a lot of time in the morning. My morning routines really long. We’ll talk about that. But it became as long as it did, over three hours in the morning, a morning routine because I saw the value in first taking 20 minutes, and then 30 minutes, and then an hour. Right? And I started to see the effectiveness of what it did for me as a businessperson. Right? It all came around this time where I opened in 2000. I’m just giving you a little backstory here so you could kind of understand where this came from and it didn’t just start [crosstalk 00:05:48]
Chris: It developed over time, right? This isn’t-
Louis Massaro: It developed over time out of a need and the need was really first and foremost for my business and to mitigate the stress that I was allowing the business to cause me. I shouldn’t say that the business was causing me, but I was allowing the business to cause me. And so, it really came to a head when the recession came and that’s the time where I decided to get a coach. That’s the time where I started to, in that couple year period, shift my mindset from, “Hey, I’m a moving company owner,” to like, “No, I need to conduct myself as a CEO. I need to be at a different level.” Right? We’ve got to be able to solve problems from a different place. I think it was Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems with the same way of thinking about things as when we created them.” That’s not the exact quote. I’m butchering it, but the point is that you’ve got to shift your perspective.
Louis Massaro: So, that’s when it started for me. And then again, as I started to see the results in my performance, in my business, and my quality of life, it was like, “All right, I’m all in.” Tell me what I need to do. What can I do to feel more energy, have more clarity, have more stamina to be able to go longer when I need to work hard and do what needs to get done? How do I manage my emotions, so I’m not losing control and flipping out? Somebody pisses me off in the office and I’m not like flying off the handle like I did in the early days. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And so, when you start to see all this come together, it was like, “Wow, okay.” I put this correlation in my mind of pro athletes. What separates a pro athlete from somebody playing a pickup game at the park, right? A NBA player versus somebody who just shoots some hoops on the weekends? And it’s that they’re professional and they treat themselves as professionals. They take care of themselves as professionals. And so, I think it’s the same thing as a business owner. If you want a high performing business, you’ve got to look at yourself like you are the prize racehorse. You know what I mean?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: You are your business. When you’re on, your business goes, right? I mean, everybody’s had the days. We all have the days where we feel super on it, right? And we’re just dialed in and we’re focused, and we’re just getting things done that matter. And then we’ve had the days where we’re like, “Ugh.” Physically you’re just depleted and physically you’re just exhausted. And so, when you start to see that you can have some control over that, you could feel better, perform better, and also not be exhausted and worn out when it comes time to enjoy your life, you go all in and you commit to being that professional and that’s basically what I did.
Louis Massaro: It was just like this has to be a part of my life. Because when you start a new routine, what happens is you fall. We’re going to get to it in a minute. I just want to give a little context here. When you start a new routine, you could start something and stop. I’ll talk to people and they’ll be like, “Yeah, I used to do that, but I fell off.” And, “I used to do that, and I fell off.” And what I say is, “Well, okay, but keep getting back on.” Right? You used to work out, cool. You used to eat healthy, you used to meditate, you used to do these things, start doing them again. But what happens is people lose confidence in themselves because they tried something, and they failed. In their mind they failed, right? But they just fell off is what happened.
Louis Massaro: And so, if you could just close the gap between the time that you fall off and the time that you get back on, and just keep going and keep going. If you believe in the outcome, right? You have to first believe in the outcome, then it just becomes a new habit. Then it’s part of your life. Then you start to feel the results and then when you fall off, you feel the negative consequences of falling off from whatever that positive habit or that positive routine is. Does that make sense?
Chris: So, it’s not about not falling off. It’s about once you do, you need to be able to get back on the horse as soon as possible.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, because that’s probably a lot of the battle right there. Because a lot of times, you start a new routine, let’s say you start a new diet or you start a new exercise program or whatever, and if you don’t stick with it, if it doesn’t stick, you end up beating yourself up saying, “Oh my God, I can’t even make this work. How am I going to have a successful business? I can’t even work out every day or whatever.” But it’s not about that. It’s about being able to, once you do fall off, because you’re going to fall off, right? Everybody falls off.
Louis Massaro: You’re going to fall off, because what you’re doing is you’re going against your natural tendencies. Right? My natural tendency is to be lazy. I say that to people, and they laugh, but I’m like, “No, for real.” If I didn’t have the will and the discipline to do the things that I know are going to make me and my life better, it’s so easy to just be like, “Man, I just want to chill.” Right? I just want to hang out, go by the pool, whatever. But lay on the couch, watch TV, that’s our default, so anytime we go against what our natural tendencies are, and we try something new, you can’t just expect to stay on track. You’ve got to first have that vision of what you hope to gain from doing it.
Louis Massaro: For me, anytime that I’m willing to try something, it’s because someone or some circumstance convinced me that the result I’m looking for is on the other end of that new habit or it’s on the other end of that new routine. So, you’re willing to suffer through it to get to the other side. Right? Who wants to eat-
Chris: You have a reason why.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Who wants to eat vegetables when you could eat a cheeseburger, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But you have to believe in the results on the other end and you have to kind of integrate that feeling of what it’s going to feel like. And so, yeah, the whole falling off and getting back on, anything you do … Everybody listen. Anything you do in your business because same thing with the business. People are like, “I used to look at my P&L’s and I used to look at my numbers, but then I kind of fell off. I started doing follow ups and then we kind of stopped doing that.” Okay, start again. Start again. Start again. Never be afraid to start again. Right?
Louis Massaro: Just think about like, okay, the last time you went for a run was two years ago. Okay, well, start today. All right, or whatever it might be. And if you fall off after a few weeks, okay. And you realize like, “Man, it’s been a week and I haven’t got to it.” Good. Get back on it. Close the gap of time from when you fell off to when you get back on and all of a sudden you just, there’s a lot of physical and mental and emotional muscles that get built with all of that, that just make you stronger as a person.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a lot of it too, is that boost you get from when you do go back to it. Even though it’s been two years, or it’s been two weeks, whatever, when you go back to it, there’s that little extra boost of self-confidence that says, “Yeah, I did it. I got back on the horse.” That’s valuable. Okay.
Louis Massaro: All right, so let’s talk about the routines. Let’s see what’s helpful. I mean, for me, my morning is everything, right? The way that I set up my morning is just from my own experience makes the difference of my day, makes the difference of my week, makes a difference of my month, makes a difference in my year, basically it makes the difference in my life, how my day starts.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: So, to start the day, everybody’s heard of morning routine, and it’s important to have one, have some consistency. Just having consistency alone in the way that you start each and every day, right? Or at least each and every weekday, right? You want to take the weekends off? Fine. But the way you start those days to have consistency, it creates a place for your ever-racing mind to settle around. Right? And have that place of kind of certainty to start the morning. Right? I used to wake up and it was like the minute I woke up it was like the mind was just causing havoc. Right? Just you go into the kitchen to get a drink, and the minds just like, “Oh my God, Oh my God, what about this? What about that? Oh my God, what about this? What about that? What about this? What about that?” And so, the way you start off is so important.
Louis Massaro: Basically, I get up at 5:00 AM and not because I necessarily enjoy being up so early, but because there’s a lot that I want to get done in the morning before I start my day. Right? And so, the waking up part has to do with the going to sleep part. People think that the waking up part, and this is something I know you recently started. I kind of got on you about this because your whole lifestyle used to be different. You used to be more nightlife and night scene and music. And so, now you’re getting up at 5:00 and it’s a whole different ballgame, right?
Chris: It is completely different. It’s a completely different reality, but I can definitely vouch and say those hours in the morning, you’re more creative, you’re more productive, you’re more present and conscious, and it’s been a game changer. It really has been, and I never thought I would be that kind of person. I was always a nighttime person. I always worked at night. I always was a night owl. The last few weeks of changing it up, it’s been amazing. It’s really been life changing. It has.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Yeah. So, that’s awesome. But the part of that, that people don’t think about is it’s not okay, waking up. It’s when you go to sleep.
Chris: That’s the key.
Louis Massaro: Right? That’s the key. So, people are like, “I have a hard time.” “What time you going to bed?” “Oh, sometimes 9:00, sometimes 11:00, sometimes midnight.” I’m very strict during the week on when I go to bed. You know what I mean? Even if I am watching very little TV, I’ll talk to you about that, very little TV. But even if I am watching something, it’s like, “All right, it’s time. I’m going to bed.” The TV’s off. I’m going to bed. Right? Almost like a child has a bedtime, I’ve given myself that bedtime.
Louis Massaro: Because if I don’t and I allow my lower self, I look at it all like there’s my lower self that’s like, “Hey, man. I just want to hang out. I just want to lay on the couch. Let’s just watch some stuff. Let’s watch another episode.” Right? If I let that person, that version of me, win the conversation, then guess what happens when I get up at five o’clock? I’m going to be miserable because I didn’t get any sleep. Right? Or I’m going to be tempted to hit the snooze.
Louis Massaro: So, I go to bed by nine o’clock so that I get my seven or eight hours in there, and that’s been scientifically proven to raise your cognitive function and ability. I know a lot of people that are like, “Man, I’m good. Louis, I get five hours of sleep. I’m good.” Right? And yeah, okay, you’re good. You can function absolutely, and I know that’s what you’ve been doing all the years, but if you were to get seven hours, I bet you’d be like a whole new person and all. Because listen, as a business owner, your job is to think, strategize, implement.
Louis Massaro: Listen, if you’re a mover and you’re on the trucks, it’s like, “Okay, if I’m tired can I still do the job?” Sure, right? But if your job is to really strategically guide the business, you need that cognitive function, and so very important. So, I would say you’ve got to try to get your seven to eight hours of sleep and that doesn’t mean what time do I … When I first learned that, I remember back in the day I was like, okay, whatever time I was going to bed, right? Whatever time I went to bed, I just looked at the clock. I was like, “All right, what’s eight hours from now?” So, if it was 11:00, I’d be like, “All right, seven o’clock.” And I got up at seven, so that was like I first learned to get to sleep. Now I’m like, “Wait, wait. No, no. I got to get to sleep, but I also got to be up at 5:00 because I got a lot of stuff I need to do before I start my day.”
Chris: Yeah, so that bedtime is more important than what time you wake up really, to get that full eight hours. Another thing for me that I’ve noticed is the consistency, because this new routine I’m doing, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Saturday morning, Sunday morning, Wednesday morning, I’m getting up at 5:00 every day. And that consistency and that regular schedule makes all the difference too. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Absolutely because it’s just easier. It just doesn’t become anything you think about when you’re just used to it. Right?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: So, wake up at 5:00 for years I’ve been. I’ve learned that I had flexibility issues years ago, right? So, I’m like, “Okay, stretching is [crosstalk 00:19:50] just I wasn’t very flexible. Right?
Chris: Like physically?
Louis Massaro: Like physically, right? There was certain workouts that I’d struggle with. I would go get a massage and they’d be like, “Ah, you need to really, you need to stretch.” So, I became committed to that, so I started doing that first thing in the morning. So, right now what I’m doing currently, in general, right? I think massages are a very important part of your health, your wellbeing, and your stress. Like deep tissue, myofascial release massages? The ones that hurt.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right. So, on a regular basis when we’re out of quarantine, if you could be getting massages once a week, once every other week, it’s so worth the money to do it, right? Because it just opens your whole body up, and we start to learn and see how the physical body connects with the mental mind, right? And that’s not just like, “Oh, I get a massage. I’m getting pampered.” It’s like, “No, I’m taking care of myself like a pro athlete would take care of themselves.” And when you treat yourself with that level of respect for yourself and your body, it’s going to show in your business. So, now in the morning-
Louis Massaro: It’s going to show in your business. So now in the mornings what I’m doing is I’m waking up and I’m doing the foam roller. You’ve seen those like little?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So it’s basically got some kind of like little knobs on it and stuff and it’s not fun to do.
Chris: It hurts.
Louis Massaro: And then you kind of roll on it. Yeah. If you look up trigger release foam roller, you guys will see what I’m talking about. If you don’t know, but I roll out for probably 15 minutes, like my IT bands, my quads, the inside of my… The hamstring, my back. Right. And starts to break down all those knots. So I’m kind of like giving myself a massage with that. And later in the day, I don’t do it in the morning, but later in the day I’ll get a lacrosse ball or something and I’ll put it on my back where I’ve got those knots and I’ll kind of get them out, I’ll roll it on the wall.
Chris: Oh, just dig in there, man, that hurts so bad. But it’s worth it.
Louis Massaro: It hurts so bad. But you get that knot and you’re like, “Oh my God. That’s why I felt so tense this whole time.” You feel loose, right?
Chris: You feel a release.
Louis Massaro: You feel a released. And so these are the types of things that at first you’re like, this sucks. But then when you start to see the results, you’re like, “Man, I can’t imagine not feeling loose and mobile.” So anyways, I roll out, then I stretch for like 20 minutes. Just stretch out. So then my body’s open that just allows more blood flow and you need the blood flow to get oxygen to the brain.
Louis Massaro: You need oxygen to the brain, to feel energy throughout the day. This is all stuff that’s going to make you a better anything you’re doing. I don’t care what it is. You’re a business owner, you’re a mover, you’re a housewife, you’re an employee somewhere. You are a person. The better you feel physically. And it’s not just about working out, it’s about these other things too. You’re just going to perform better day to day. You’re going to have more energy. You’re going to feel better. You’ll be a better person.
Chris: Sure. Who doesn’t feel better after a good massage?
Louis Massaro: Exactly.
Chris: And life just seems better if you get done with that massage. I’m like, “Wow, things were okay.”
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So definitely when you could get back out there, schedule some deep tissue massages. And then from there I meditate. I’ll sit and I’ll meditate for 20 to 25 minutes. I’ll start off really by just sitting there for a few minutes and just thinking about everything that I’m grateful for my in life and I’ll allow myself to feel that. Right? So instead of and this is something, again, that developed over time, people are like, “You need a gratitude and you need a gratitude journal and you need all this stuff.” And it’s like, okay, you try it. And what I’ve found that what works best is when you actually can feel it, right? So if you think about you’re grateful for where you live, right? You’re grateful for the safety of your home, you’re grateful for your wife, you’re grateful for the joy that your baby brings to you. And you think about that and you kind of allow yourself to just feel what it is, right?
Louis Massaro: You’re grateful for the business you have, whether it’s where you want it to be or where you’re still growing in it or whatever. Chances are no matter where you’re at, like even if you just started be grateful that you just started, like, “Wow, I’m so glad that I found this business, this moving business that I could be in that’s going to be able to provide a future for myself and a future for my family and be able to take care of all my financial responsibilities and my financial freedom.” I’ll get into being grateful for mentors and people, my coaches and people that have guided me along the way. And I just allow myself to feel that gratitude because otherwise, especially that early in the morning, it’s so easy to just start thinking about all this stuff that sucks.
Louis Massaro: It’s like again, by default your mind doesn’t want to think… I mean, maybe some people do. I don’t have that default where I wake up and I skip around the house. I’ve got to intentionally get myself into that place.
Chris: That’s interesting. I never thought about it that way. I used to say that a lot, like I’m just not a morning person.
Louis Massaro: Well, anybody that says I’m just not a whatever person It’s really the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset, which can be changed from fixed to growth. Because you can become any type of person you want to be.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t that you weren’t a morning person, it’s just that you didn’t set up everything around you to be a morning person and you had no interest in becoming a morning person because you didn’t see any value in it. It probably wasn’t until… I’m not taking credit, but it probably wasn’t until I came along was like, chris, talk to me about it, and talking to you about and talking to you about it and finally gave you, kind of challenged you a little bit and kind of pushed you to where you tried it. Probably like, “Hey, [inaudible 00:26:18] I have faith that he’s on this something.” And I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s how it happens. Like you’ve got to hear it from somebody and go, “You know what, let me try that. Let me see if he’s on to something.”
Chris: Well, like you were saying earlier, I saw the why, I saw the end goal and I realized, oh, that’s the benefit that’s on the other side of this is worth the pain of changing my constitution, Who I thought I was.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: But if I didn’t see that, if I didn’t see the benefit and that is so much easier to just got to, “Screw it, I’m not going to do it.”
Louis Massaro: You could become any type of person you want to become. I mean, I believe that with all my heart. I believe it with anybody. I think it’s just a matter of being able to remove some of the things in your life that are causing you to stay stuck in that position. Build up some new things in your life that will help you to move forward. So if you ever find yourself saying, “I’m just not that type of person.” You should know that you can become that type of person if you want to, right?
Chris: And it’s important to question those beliefs, right? Like you find yourself saying things that like, “I’ve always been this way, or I’m like this, or I’m like that.” You’re the only person who believes that. So why not look at it and challenge yourself. And this I feel like is the beginning for me of a whole new reality for me because it made me confident in the fact that, “Hey, I can do this. What else can I do?”
Louis Massaro: And that’s the thing, right? You start building that. And so what happens is we’ll continue with the routines. But what happens is as you start to do this stuff, and as you start to see the results, you become a better person. You become more skilled, you have the energy, you experience the confidence, competence loop, right? In psychology it’s like if you can gain confidence in something, become better at it, then you will become more confident at doing it. And if you become more confident in doing it, you’ll want to do it more so you’ll get more competence, which will give you more confidence. And it’s just like that cycle that just keeps going. But if you stop and go, “I’m not good at that, so I’m not going to do it.” Then you’re never going to be able to pass that uncomfortable zone.
Louis Massaro: You just have to know that as you get better at it, you’ll get more confident at it, all right? But a lot of people become so good at one thing, right? And or they’re good to a certain level in certain areas of their life that they’re afraid to be a beginner again at something. That’s what holds a lot of people back is that they become successful in business or in certain areas of their life. And they have this certain image of themselves and they say, “I’m not that type of person.” You could become that type of person if you want to be. The thing is what people fear is they fear being a beginner again, sucking at it, not being good at it. And so with all this stuff, if you don’t do it, you’re going to have to learn how to do it. I mean, you recently started working out, you really never worked out. It was something you had to learn to do, right?
Chris: Yeah. I mean in this structured way I always was athletic and I played sports and stuff, but I never took it seriously as like, “I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to get a routine down and I’m going to do sets and reps of this or that.” And yeah, that’s been one of the benefits. And one of the results of just sort of taking control of my myself. That morning routine is part of it, getting up in the morning and I know you do this too, like meditating and just taking that extra time to take care of yourself and getting yourself in the right state of mind, in the right physical place to be ready for your day.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So, all right, so back to routine. So I’m waking up, I’m rolling out, I’m stretching, doing some gratitude before I get into meditation and then I meditate for 20, 25 minutes. I started, I’ve learned many different techniques over time because I just see the value in being able to slow the mind, calm the mind. Because I think a lot of people deal with this, but my mind naturally will kind of be thinking about a lot that I have going on. And as you have more going on in your life and you have more responsibilities like a business, you’re kind of consistently thinking about different scenarios and what’s going on. So to be able to hit that reset button and quiet the mind it’s kind of like if you think about your mind like it’s the ocean, right?
Louis Massaro: As it’s wavy, there’s waves, you see the white caps, all that and then meditation then turns it into more of like a lake that nobody’s touched or been in and it’s just super flat and super clear. Right. Does that makes sense? It takes all of that noise and just quiets it, and there’s so much that comes from that. I mean it just your ability to just have more clarity and to just be able to react in your day better with everything. Whether it’s a reaction to a customer that’s giving you a hard time or a reaction to an employee that’s not doing what they’re supposed to do or decisions on what to eat. Right? You’re not coming from a place of so much turbulence going on.
Louis Massaro: And so I would say, to learn. If you haven’t learned how to meditate first Google it, right? Start by Googling it. Right? But there’s all kinds of in with guided meditation on an app then I learned meditation from an expert meditation person and I’ve tried some other stuff. I recently even started a new how to meditate course. Just because I like to learn different ways of doing it. And I’ve started to introduce dirt break, like straight up during this whole COVID thing. It increased my stress too. It’s not like I don’t get stressed at all. So I added another meditation later in the day, right? So I wanted to kind of change it up so I learn like a new way of doing it. So meditation is huge. It doesn’t have any type of anything you want to add to it. You want to add some prayer, you want to add some chance, you want to add like, that’s all on you. It has no religious or any specific type of relation like that. It’s really just to help you quiet the mind.
Chris: Okay. Now, I know recently we did our virtual seminar and during the virtual seminar you had walked three people through what you called a visualization. So what’s the difference? Is that like a meditation or is that something different and maybe talk a little bit about that. What was the visualization?
Louis Massaro: Sure. So my set that I do is kind of like, I start with a gratitude, right? All in the sitting down in the same spot. Start with the gratitude, going to the meditation, the meditation is to quiet the mind, to not think, right. To allow thoughts. They’re going to come no matter what. Everybody thinks like if they have thoughts, they’re not doing it right. The thoughts come, you just don’t want to attach to them and you want to let them just kind of drift away.
Louis Massaro: And just kind of focus on your breath or some people will use a mantra and just focus on that centering point and just try to let your thought attach yourself to any of the thoughts. They’re going to come, but let them be. And one of the things that really helped me over the years was, if it’s important, I’ll think of it later again. You feel like, “Oh, I got to write that down. I got to write that down. I got to write that down. Oh, I got to do this. I got to do that.” Because all this stuff’s popping in your head. So I let that go.
Louis Massaro: So anyways, the meditation is just to quiet the mind. Then I go into visualization and we do this always at the seminars, right? Like when we do it, we did it-
Chris: It’s always a big hit. Yeah. People really like it.
Louis Massaro: And so what it is, is it’s like it’s visualizing your future as if it’s a reality. So it’s meditative. It’s not meditation. It’s meditative, but it’s more of an act of now you’re wanting to think, right? So now you’re thinking about your future results. So you can be thinking 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you can be thinking for the day ahead. And so I’ll actually think about future results of goals that I have and where I want to go. And having already achieved them, right? Like I run through a scenario in my mind like kind of take myself through visualizing like waking up in this new place that I want to be living in and going on this new trip in the way.
Louis Massaro: And just everything that I want in my life that it’s already done. And I go there. I imagine that I’m there. I allow myself to feel it again like it’s not just in the mind, it’s in the body. Like, “Wow, this feels great.” Like imagine-
Chris: Like it already happened, it’s in the past?
Louis Massaro: I know for certain that it’s coming and that I’m just visiting there at the moment. You know what I mean? In other words, it’s like you’ve got to be able to visualize what you want. Again, this is a lot of athletes do this. You talk about, you look at LeBron sitting on the sidelines or you look at a top golfer and they’ve kind of visualized that shot. They’ve visualized that happening. They’ve played it over and over and over in their head so that when the time comes, they’re prepared for it. So for me, and I’ve done this and it’s worked for me to where… And I didn’t realize that I was doing this early on. When I first started I was visualizing all my trucks and my locations in the houses and the cars.
Louis Massaro: I wasn’t doing it. I wasn’t sitting down and making it formal. I was just kind of like what was playing in my head as I was doing whatever it is I was doing. Right? And so you kind of, first, what’s important is you first have to know what you want, right? Knowing what you want in your life is huge. And it will reduce your stress tremendously. But I have no attachment to it. So I’m thinking about this future scenario, right? I’m imagining the people that I love are with me. I’m imagining that I’m doing all that I want to do. I’m imagining that it’s not, there’s zero stress, zero burden, zero like, “Oh my God, what’s that going to cost me?” It’s just everything’s flowing perfectly, right?
Louis Massaro: I mean, you’ve heard me kind of guide people through it at the seminars. And so what that does is it starts to feel real, right? And so people will talk about the law of attraction, and that is essentially what it is, right? You can’t just sit and visualize. You’ve got to do the work, right? So if you could visualize what you want, when you come out of that you’re like, “All right.” You feel like you just experienced it. And so now you’re like, “I want that. What do I do to get that?” And now your actions, your day to day becomes more purposeful because you’ve got this vision of where you want to with your life. And when I say vision, it doesn’t have to be all materialistic stuff. I mean it could totally be you’re sitting on a rocking chair with your spouse looking at it whatever grass field and just feeling zero kind of stress or burden actually because you know everything’s all good.
Louis Massaro: Your family’s all good. You’ve donated a bunch of money to your church or you built some schools. So it’s not all about like, “I want this car, I want this thing.” And so when you experience it in a way where it feels real, now you want to go do the work. And so, does that make sense so far?
Chris: Yeah. It’s almost like I heard somebody say this once too, that the law of attraction would be better suited if it was called the law of creation because it’s about, like you said, doing the work, because it’s one thing to visualize it and see it, but it’s another thing to actually make it happen.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Yeah. I mean there’s like, I’m not just doing that, I’ve got maybe another episode we’ll talk about like planning out your life and planning out your decade and planning out your year and planning out your quarters to lead you to that place. But yeah, it is, and it’s true. You could create and you could be calm and you could craft your life the way you want to craft your life, period. And so and as you start to see it develop, I have the confidence to teach it now. I’m like, “Oh some people might think I’m crazy.” I do it right at the seminar. Hundreds of people are sitting there, I’m like, “Close your eyes. Let’s go through this visualization.”
Louis Massaro: And I have the confidence because I’ve done it so long and I’ve seen it come to fruition so many times. And so you start to believe in it. And so what I’ll do is I’ll kind of go to this future and then I’ll bring it back to the day and I’ll visualize my day. I’ll start to think about kind of like what I’ve got coming up for the day and just imagine everything going well. Just go in the way that I wanted to go. And yeah, I mean that’s the visualization part.
Chris: Now, aside from the obvious benefits of you using those tools, the meditation, the visualization of being able to… It sort of forces you to ask yourself, what do I want? Right? So you decide what you want. You use those tools to sort of bring yourself there. But what other kind of benefit does that have? I mean, to me it feels like I’ve meditated for a long time too, but I feel like the biggest benefit for it is just learning how to calm yourself down and just stop all the madness. And in this time that we’re in right now with this pandemic and everything, the stress levels are high and it’s even if you’re not sitting there visualizing your future and trying to create this great reality for yourself, if you’re taking time to be quiet and just sit there and allow yourself to be calm and let the stress kind of roll away. That’s a huge benefit in and of itself.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, absolutely. But I do think that now it actually is important to think about the future…
Louis Massaro: I think that [inaudible 00:42:01] now it actually is important to think about the future. And I think it’s really important to get connected to that, right? Because the immediate, right now today, there’s so much uncertainty that you’ve got to be able to look past that. And you’ve got to be able to, because you need to be working hard right now. Now’s the time. The people that are going at it right now and staying focused and staying on top of their business, they’re going to come out stronger and better than they possibly would have ever been had they not gone through this. And the people that aren’t paying attention, the people that are like deer in a headlight and they’re just kind of, I don’t know what to do. I’m going to sit at home and I’m going to have a virtual happy hour with people and just kind of mess around. They’re going to be in a bad shape after all this.
Louis Massaro: Because we’re heading into a place where it’s most, we’re heading into a recession, right? Which is okay as a moving company. People still need to move. That’s what you got to remember. But you’ve got to rise to the occasion. And the important part, let me just, I want to make sure I get to the proper context on the visualization. I’ve been able to look at, and I think this is the key to setting goals, because a lot of times people will set big goals or they’ll visualize stuff and then they’re just so stressed out because they want that. Give me that, right? They’re not there yet, so they’re stressed until they get there. You’ve got to be able to accept and appreciate where you are now.
Louis Massaro: Right?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: When I’m coming back from the visualization, I’ll just look around a room and just start to feel gratitude again for where I am, knowing that it’s just part of the journey, knowing that, Hey, I’m going to get to that place. I might not know exactly how. I might not know exactly when. But I’m going to get to that place. But I’m also going to live fully today and be present today. And I look at everything now like, I’m good. I could be, and I don’t mean that like I’m good financially for life. I mean most people, they’re afraid to let… it’s like there’s that balance between being satisfied and having ambition. Right? And you want to be able to strive but strive while you’re satisfied.
Louis Massaro: So to me, I look at it and I’m like, I’m good today. If somebody was to say, Hey look, you’re good, you’re done, you can’t do any more. This is what it is. I could be like, okay, I could settle into this. And I could do that even if I had less money, if I lived in a different place. It’s not about that. It’s about, you’ve got to be able to appreciate, except, and enjoy where you are today and then know, hey, this is just part of my journey that I’m going to get there. I say it all the time, I’m good. Everything else from here is a bonus in life. And you want to be able to get to that place where you could have complete satisfaction for where you are. Right?
Louis Massaro: And it’s hard when you’re someone who’s like, my whole thing forever was there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way. And always looking for a better way to grow the business, but then balancing that with like, hey, but I could also be happy today knowing that I’m also working on ways to make the business better, knowing that I’m also shooting for this high goal and I’m going to get there at some point. But being able to be satisfied today. Like, look, I’m good. Everything else from here on out is a bonus.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Does that make sense?
Chris: How can you expect yourself to be happy in the future if you’re not happy now or at least content, right?
Louis Massaro: It’s the same with everything, right? How could you expect like, I’m going to work on this and my business in the future. When I get bigger I’m going to do this or I’m going to do… You’ve got to do all the stuff now. Get everything in order now. Right?
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Louis Massaro: And then carry that with you.
Chris: Yeah. Okay.
Louis Massaro: So yeah, that’s essentially the visualization part.
Chris: That’s pretty good stuff. So this is still part of your routine. You’ve done your meditation, you’ve worked out, you’ve stretched. What else goes on in the mornings before you even start your work day?
Louis Massaro: Oh man. So from there what I’ll do then is I’ll drink some powdered greens. They’re just powder organic, basically a green juice, but in a powder. I just mix it with some water. Helps the alkalinity in your body. I won’t get into all this scientific stuff about that if you want to look it up. But just it helps a lot with your body, your energy levels, everything else. And then now I’m feeding my daughter, right? So make her a bottle and I’ll go wake her up, which is one of my favorite things to do now in the morning. Spend a little time with her. Get her up, get her going. And then from there I’ll make myself a cup of coffee.
Louis Massaro: Now one of my favorite 10 minutes that I have is just kind of sitting with my wife and the dog and our daughter in the living room drinking coffee. Just because she’s at her happiest at that point. She’s lit up. She’s excited. She’s playing every day, she’s new. You guys have kids you know. She’s going to be nine months. And so that’s one of my favorite 10 minutes. So I take that 10 minutes and kind of slow it down and I just sit there. And then from there I’m either going to read or I’m going to journal.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: And it used to be both, right? It used to be both, but based on your circumstances. So now I’m spending time with my daughter in the morning, so I’ve kind of made it a one or the other thing.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: And so, I’ll go sit in my office here. We’ve got some chairs. I’ll either come sit in here and journal or read or I’ll sit out back. It’s very peaceful out there and just do that. And so I’ll read anything that’s going to help make me better as a person, as a business person. So it’s all nonfiction either business, self-help, spiritual, anything that’s going to help mind, body, spirit, anything that’s going to help that and learn that.
Louis Massaro: And I’ll literally set the timer on my phone for 30 minutes and just start reading. And when it goes off, I’m done. And this way, I know I got that in for the day. And journaling is something that I learned that years ago and people when you say it are like, oh, what do you got a diary or something?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: But it’s Chris, it’s one of the most powerful things that I’ve ever learned to do because it becomes a way to record what’s good, what’s bad and self-diagnose things that you’re trying to improve upon, right? My whole thing has always been from early on, there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way. So every time I come across something in business or personal or just an inner personal struggle that I might be dealing with, I want to overcome that. I want to learn about it.
Louis Massaro: And we’ve got so much information inside of us in our own mind and a lot of our own answers, if we allow ourselves a platform to be able to get that stuff out. And so for me, that’s my thinking time is my journaling time. I’m not describing my day and what I had to eat and all that. If that’s what somebody does, fine. But what I’m doing is I’m diving into either challenges that I’m trying to overcome or things that are working really well. I want to kind of plant those deeper, right?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: So it becomes a self-coaching session. It becomes where I’m just going through and I’m figuring stuff out. And that too, I’ll set the timer and I’ll go for 30 minutes and just write and write and write. And the key is to not filter anything that you are thinking. You know what I mean? Just kind of let your intuition flow, because there’s no wrong answer. Nobody’s reading this. It’s not going to be in some memoir one day. They’re not going to publish it. And if they do, it’s because you are a genius and the stuff you wrote in there was a genius. So don’t worry about it. Right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Otherwise, make sure you either have an app that you use that is safe and nobody else could get into it. If that’s what your concern is. Or you’re writing it and putting it somewhere where nobody could get to it. But you want to just let the ideas and the thoughts flow without concern of like, “hmm, should I write that down?” My hand can’t keep up with my mind. And this is everybody if they really do it. If you just let all those thoughts that are going and going and going, if you just try to keep up and just write all that stuff, but what about this? What about that? Right? Okay, so how do I solve that? Okay, there’s this option, and this option, and this option. Okay, but what about if I… And it’s just-
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: … you’re getting it all out of your head on paper and the worst result you’re going to have is at the end of it, you’re like, okay, at least I vented. But for me, more times than not, I’ve got a solution or I’ve got a next step that I need to take in figuring out whatever it is.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: That’s very powerful. So how do you recommend somebody go about it? They should just download one of these apps and just started writing? And I mean, because for me, I sit down and I think, okay, if I’m going to write, what would I even write about? How do you get started? To me, I go, “I feel stupid.” I don’t want-
Louis Massaro: Oh, yeah.
Chris: You know what I mean?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So you know what, if that’s the case, that’s the case.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Sometimes you’ve got something where I’m already thinking about it as I’m having my coffee, I’m already like, all right, I got to figure this out.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: And you can’t figure things out. The same way people are like, Hey, I could, I could get away with five hours of sleep. Yeah, but you’d be better with seven or eight hours of sleep. The same way people say, I could figure it all out while I’m driving or while I’m in the shower. Yeah, but can you really sort out complex ideas all in your mind? If you can, you’re blessed, you’re a genius and that’s amazing. But for me, I’ve got to be able to put it on paper. Paper or literally I could write it in the notes in my phone or in an app on my phone. It doesn’t matter, whatever platform works best. You’ve got a… Maybe there’s something powerful about pen to paper, but if it’s typing, if it’s on your phone, it doesn’t matter. But it could literally be, you could start off like, I feel stupid. This is dumb. Why am I doing this?
Louis Massaro: I can’t [inaudible 00:53:24]. I feel ridiculous, but maybe this could be something that helps me. So why not give it a shot? Every little thought that’s coming to your mind, you put it on paper. And what happens is, and I’ve been doing this a long time, still to this day, sometimes that’s how it starts for me.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: What’s up buddy? How you feeling today? I’m talking to myself. Right?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: That’s not how I start all of them, but you could start some of them with a problem that you’re trying to solve. What do I do about this? You could start some of it with like, man, I feel so grateful for this, this, this, this, this, and this. And it’s almost like you’re just warming yourself up, right?
Louis Massaro: And a lot of times the first few paragraphs will be total nonsense and then all of a sudden it starts flowing.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: I’ll come to you with ideas all the time and I’ll say, Chris, I was writing about this, this morning.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it’s powerful.
Chris: Okay. So at this point in your morning, how many hours are we into the day?
Louis Massaro: We’re at about 7:30 AM at this point.
Chris: Okay. You’re up at 5:00 AM. You’re at 7:30 AM at this point.
Louis Massaro: At this point.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: And so now I work out.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: Physically workout for an hour. And right now we’re talking about how to do this during co… I mean I have an elliptical machine in the house. And then I have just basic stuff that I’m using, some bands, some dumbbells, and just making use of what I have. Before I would go to a gym and workout at a gym, but now I’m just making use of whatever I could do, right? And since we don’t have a bench I’m doing push ups, just a mix of cardio and some weights. The key is you’ve got to break a sweat. It’s so important to break a sweat. And if that means that you’re doing some circuit training and it’s all weights, but you’re just going high intensity and you’re able to break that sweat. Okay. For me, I need to get a little cardio going first. If you’re weight lifting, a lot of people say you got to do your cardio after. And I’m not a fitness expert by any means, but I’m not so concerned about building mass.
Louis Massaro: I like to get the blood flowing and the sweat going first and then keep it going during the workout. So it’s like the whole time. Because what that does, number one, it’s great for your physical body. But it’s amazing for your mind. It releases chemicals in your mind. Neurotransmitters start to fire off. You’ve got BDNF, you’ve got dopamine, you’ve got your cortisol, which is your stress hormone starts to go down. That stuff doesn’t happen if you’re just going and doing a few sets and not really breaking a sweat, not really get into the heart rate up. Right?
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: So you want to get a good sweat going.
Chris: Okay. So how long do you work out? An hour?
Louis Massaro: At the most.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: At the most.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: You know what I mean? 40 minutes to an hour. I’ve definitely cut it short and more like maintain. But yeah, that’s it. So now we’re 8:30 AM. 8:30 AM, my breakfast every day is a shake. It’s a protein shake every day.
Chris: Every day?
Louis Massaro: Every day. Maybe every once in a while on the weekends we’ll go to breakfast or make breakfast at home or something. But it’s just the routine of the consistency, right? It makes it easy. Instead of thinking about, okay, what do I eat today? Or what do I do? It’s just it’s the same thing. It’s not even a question. And I know it’s giving me everything I need to fuel my body. So I’m using it in a, I’m not vegan, but I use a vegan protein. Some avocados, some blueberries, a bunch of spinach, some coconut milk, some flax seed, just, stuff that’s really giving me the nutrients for my body and for my mind that I need that’s also not going to weigh me down. It’s not going to give me any digestive issues.
Louis Massaro: And so I’ll take the shake and then I’ll sit down and I’ll plan my day for 20 minutes. I set the timer again and I’ll just start thinking through my day. What projects I’ve got going on. What people I need to talk to or I’m waiting to hear from. What my priorities are. And I also plan my week, once a week. So it’s not like I’m just… I’m kind of going into it with a little bit of, I already know what I’m doing for the day, but I’m thinking through it. What could I do to make this day excellent? What could I do to make this day better? Oh wow, I’ve got to do that?
Louis Massaro: You know what? I’m going to do that sitting out here by the pool. Because if it’s nice out, I’ll go out back and I’ll plan my day with the shake and kind of look and see the mountains and just have just the peacefulness out there.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And if there’s something I can do in my day to make it part of that or sometimes you don’t even realize, but I’ll be like, all right, well I got to meet with Chris today or I got to meet with whoever, you know what, I’m going to do that over lunch. We’ll go to this place. And I’m kind of thinking through how we could just execute the day in a way that is enjoyable and is impactful.
Chris: Now are you physically or actually writing out, blocking time on your calendar or are you just kind of saying loosely, yeah, I’ll do that at lunch? Are you literally going into your calendar and saying, meeting with Chris 12:00?
Louis Massaro: My block time that I do Sunday nights where I kind of put blocks of time on the calendar for what I’m going to do for that upcoming week is already set. It’s kind of like I set the trajectory at the beginning of the week, but each day brings new stuff. Each day new things happen and you might have to slightly recalibrate a little bit.
Chris: Yeah. Okay.
Louis Massaro: And a lot of times I’m just, again, I’m writing through stuff and thinking through things that I have going on so that when it’s time to do it I’ve kind of thought through the best way to do it. So I might write the same stuff over and over. Or I might’ve already really planned it out, but I just kind of want to think through it again.
Chris: Okay. So this is every morning.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Is there-
Louis Massaro: I’ll take a weekend day off.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: But yeah.
Chris: And are we through the morning? Are you off to work now at this point? Or are you, where are we?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, now I’m getting ready and-
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: … going to work. Yeah. I’m getting ready and going to work. And by the way, another thing is that my phone has been on do not disturb until this point. So now we’re approaching 9:00 AM. And by the way, this wasn’t always this way. So I started off with 20 minutes in the morning and I went to 30. It just as I started to see the value in my effectiveness and what… Because I had it ingrained in my head that I got to be at work. I got to stay at work. I got to stay work. I got to be there seven days a week. That was my early programming and I had to reprogram myself to see it differently. And when I started to realize that the more I took care of me and the more I structured things, even if I took all that time in the morning to do it, my impact is bigger. Right?
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: So if you’re like, wow, that’s a lot of time. I don’t have that kind of time. Start with an hour in the morning, your first hour. But the key is during that time, you’re not checking in on anything. You’re checking in with yourself. So if you notice the pattern, right, it’s I kind of start off with the gratitude and the meditation, the visualization. Right? Then I’m either absorbing good information that I had advanced. A book that I’ve already chose in advance that I want that knowledge, or I’m putting my thoughts on the paper and getting that out. And then I’ll take [inaudible 01:01:50], my body. And by the way, when I’m working out, I’m listening to an audio book at that point too. And so it’s kind of almost double reading.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And so, but the key is you keep your phone in do not disturb. And it depends on what your situation is and what you have going on at your business. But you can’t start your day off reacting. And a lot of people start it off, they pull this up, but it’s like…
Chris: Right. Right. And how does that set the proper mood for your day?
Louis Massaro: Hey, you know what, some days it’s good, some days it’s bad, right? But who knows? But it’s not under your control. Right? And so once you start to realize that you know what, if once a week you’re getting a text first thing in the morning or you’re seeing an email first thing in the morning, that’s just pissing you off and setting you off in a bad direction for the day.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Why let that ruin your day? Take care of you. Decide before I check in on the world, before I check in on emails, social media, texts, missed phone calls, any of that, I’m checking in on me. I’m checking in on what I want to do, what my plan is for the-
Louis: Checking in on me. I’m checking in on what I want to do, what my plan is for the day. Right? Then when I do start working, before I even look at any emails, I’m already decided who I need to reach out to and I’m doing that outbound first, right? Before I start to go, “Okay, who wants something from me,” I’m like, “What do I need to do first?” Then the work day starts. Then I literally only spot check the email at that point, just to make sure there’s nothing that I could forward on or that needs immediate attention. Then I really don’t process or check email until after lunch. Which is a game changer. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: I’ve heard you say that before. What did you say? The inbox is a nice place for other people’s priorities. Something like that?
Louis: Yeah. Yeah. It becomes the business owner’s and the business person’s … like a lot of people have got social media addiction or they have a problem putting it down and for … if you’re like, “Oh no, but this is business. It’s email, it’s email, it’s email.” But it’s like, “Yeah, but are you moving towards really building your business? Are you moving towards …” You want to have blocks of time on your calendar that as much time as you can in the week, you want to be working on your objectives that are leading you towards the life you want. Right? We’ll do another episode on that, but figuring out what you want in your life and then reverse engineering that into a weekly plan, you want to make sure you have as much time on objectives as possible. If you’re just constantly reacting, reacting, reacting, right? Ding, ding, ding, and you’re like, email, text, this, that, this, that, there’s no way you could have the proper focus to be able to work on what really matters.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, I see that. That’s your morning routine now. Is there anything else you do the rest of the day that helps mitigate any stress, or keep you sane in this crazy time we’re living in?
Louis: Yeah, I think a lot of it’s perspective, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: How you choose to handle information as it comes your way, and how you choose to look at it. I think one of the things that’s just really simple and it’s helped me a lot over the years is, is there anything I could do about it? If there is, what is it? let me start doing it. If there’s not, then I just accept it as what it is. You know what I mean? I’m not getting outraged over stuff I have no control over.
Chris: I see, yeah.
Louis: Or fearing things and worrying about things that haven’t happened yet. It’s like, okay, it’s smart to anticipate what might happen, right? But there’s always the what-ifs, the what-ifs, the what-ifs. It’s like, “What if I get an accident in my car?” Okay, what could I do about that? Ensure you have proper insurance, right? Go check your insurance, make sure you have proper … If you’re good there, then you’re good, but you can’t allow yourself to get caught up in the fear and the what-ifs. Ask yourself two questions. Is there something I could do about it? If there is, what is it? Then if there’s nothing you can do about it, just accept it. Just accept it. I don’t get outraged at stuff that goes on in the world, whether I agree or disagree, because it’s not productive to me and it’s not productive to my life, and it’s not productive to my business and it’s not productive to my family.
Chris: Yeah, you’re either dealing with it or are you accept it? Really, I think that’s the point, is if you’re standing still, you’re not taking action or you’re not accepting it, that’s what’s stressful, is you’re not doing anything.
Louis: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: Right?
Louis: Exactly. Exactly. So a lot of people take the information from the news and wherever else and they just … it builds on them. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: I had a family member that’s over the weekend was telling [inaudible 01:07:06] conspiracy theories going on. I’m like, “Okay, so?” “That doesn’t piss you off?” I’m like, “Listen. If it’s true, then what could I do about it? I can’t think of anything at the moment. Do you know something I could do about it?” “Well, no, but like what if the …” “Okay, then that’s the way it’s going to be.” Right? Then that’s what it is. If there’s nothing I could do about it, why resist it? You know? It’s so much easier to just kind of flow with things that you can’t change. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: But if you could change it, great. Do something about it.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: Do something about it. So, yeah. If I get stressed throughout the day, I’ll stop, I’ll take some breaths. Just like that one breath, I just felt kind of-
Chris: There’s a lot of relief in that.
Louis: Yeah, there’s a lot of relief in that.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: You take a few minutes and just breathe. We’re talking about meditation. Even if you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know how to meditate. I feel funny.” Just breathe. You don’t have to close your eyes. Just …
Chris: Yeah, be still for a minute.
Louis: Be still. If I get stressed out, I’ll go for a walk. Right? Go for a quick walk. If I get stuck. I kind of set my time in one hour blocks, I’ll take one hour, I’ll work for a little bit. I’ll work for one hour, because I know I could go for three or four hours, but I’ll step away. I’ll do a little routine where I kind of pat my back and do some deep breaths just to get the blood flowing. People that have been at a seminar-
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: … know what I’m talking about. I’m not going to [crosstalk 01:08:45]-
Chris: The seminar people know what’s up with that.
Louis: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: I’m not going to try to demonstrate it now, but just maintain that, maintain that focus. Right? If I’m working on something important, I’ll put my phone on ‘do not disturb’. Eat a good lunch, right? Eat a healthy launch that’s not going to weigh me down. Take breaks, make sure those breaks are powerful. Even if you’re working on one thing and then you move to something else. You’re working on your numbers, right? You’re deep into spreadsheets, you’re doing this, you’re doing that. Then it’s like the next thing you need to do is work on the design of your website. Give yourself five minutes to just step away and re-focus on what you’re working on new. Otherwise, you’re just frantic all day working through stuff.
Chris: Yeah. Sometimes it’s tough to change directions, after you’ve been working on something for an extended period of time and then all of a sudden there’s a new thing that you’ve got to do. It takes a minute to shift your mindset, to be able to think of it in a different way. Right?
Louis: Yeah, I call it switching gears, right?
Chris: Switching gears. Right.
Louis: Yeah, it’s like I’ve started to realize over the years, I think everybody does it, but they don’t realize the impact. I think meditation helps with this a lot. Once you become more self-aware, you start to see how things impact you. So if I’m going in one direction and then somebody wants to come knock on my door or my office, or call me and bring me in another direction, I could do it but it’s like shifting gears, right? You want to put the clutch down, you want to shift properly. Sometimes it’s just too abrupt. There’s like no clutch. It’s like krg-krg-krg-krg!
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: That transition from one thing to another. Give yourself a couple of minutes to just allow yourself to mentally shift, right? Because it’s a whole different energy, mindset, skillset that you bring to the table if you need to sit and confirm all your moves for tomorrow, and then work on the design of your new postcard. It’s different and you’ve got to allow your mind to shift gears. That’s what happens, is people get … all the cylinders get like krg-krg-krg and they get caught, and then you’re like, “Argh, I’m just done for the day.”
Chris: You locked up the engine. Yeah.
Louis: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: Kind of sticking to the routines here … Am I going too deep into this, or is this good?
Chris: I think it’s great. I think a lot of people will like it. You take it to a whole another level. I feel like if people out there can do one-tenth of this, you’re going to breathe easier and sleep better at night, you know?
Louis: Yeah. if you just make it a goal to say, “You know what, the first hour of my day, right, I’m going to get some exercise in, I’m going to get some positive input into my mind.”
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: Right?
Chris: That’s a big part of it.
Louis: If you’re not a reader, get an audio book or listen to a podcast, or something that’s positive into your mind, and meditate during that time. If you could just start with that, that’s huge. Take bits and pieces of this, and realize you got to try it on. You got to see what works for you and adjust it. But just adopting the mindset of, “Man, I could … there’s things I could do to make life flow better?” If you’re a hardcore like, “I’m out to make money in business and that’s what it’s all about for me,” just know you’ll make more money that way and you’ll be less stressed. If you’re just like, “Hey, I just want to live a good quality of life,” you’ll be able to get super-clear on what that is for you, and decide the path on how to get there.
Chris: That’s powerful.
Louis: Yeah. that’s it. The end of the day now, end of my work day, I’m just doing a quick like 10-minute meditation just to kind of transition. We talked about the shifting of the gears.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: If I’m in work mode all day, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: For me, work mode could be this or I could be on the phone all day with private clients. All the stuff you guys are dealing with, from your trucks to your movers, to your expansion of new locations, to rebranding, to lawsuits, payroll issues, what to do now, I’m dealing with all that same stuff.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: It’s not like, “Oh, I used to be in the moving business and now I do a podcast.” No, I’m actively every day working with moving companies. Almost partnering with them, if you will, and helping them navigate through issues. I only get the call with the issues, right? So you’ve got to be able to … Imagine at the end of a day where I might talk to a handful of clients, working through their issues with them, or opportunities. It’s not always the issues. I need to kind of … I want to release that, right? Before I go into family mode. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: Before I go into husband and father mode. Now, during this pandemic, we’ve been trying to get out for a walk at the end of the day. My wife, my daughter, the dog, and just take a stroll around the neighborhood, and just allow that to kind of decompress and settle into the family time. Yeah. That’s kind of very, very … I’m not a big social media consumer. We use it for the business, to communicate. Obviously, I respond to people that are communicating with me, but I’m not really consuming, or news either.
Louis: We talked about, in the last episode I talked about I was checking the news twice today. I’ve reduced that back now to like once every other day. I know that that, for some people that are like, “Whoa, there’s so much going on, there’s so much can change,” I’ve got people that are letting me know if there’s anything super-important, but I’ve gone back to once every other day. That’s only because where we’re at with COVID and everything that’s going on. Before that, very seldom am I watching like the news and absorbing that information.
Chris: I think this has been very helpful. Is there anything else you can think of?
Louis: As far as the food stuff, I’m eating healthy, right? I really just try to cut out the carbs, cut out the sugar, cut out the dairy, and try to eat some real whole foods, organic, most of the time. Then I give myself that cheat day on the weekend to just go get whatever I want. That’s what allows me the discipline. Right? I know some people get to just be like, “Nope, I’m fully on all the time. No issues for me.” It makes it harder to stay on there because I love pasta, pizza, burgers, all of that type of stuff. If I know I’ve got a day where I could go have one of those meals, it just makes trying to stay on track so much easier.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: That helps a lot. I would just say that you got to get in the habit of just treat yourself like you’re worth being treated, like you’re that prize racehorse. You know what I mean? Because your business will be as successful as you are. If you say, “Well, Louis, I’m out of shape, I never [inaudible 01:17:49] took care of myself and my business is doing great,” it can do a lot better. It can do a lot better.
Chris: [crosstalk 00:01:17:54].
Louis: Just know that through this whole thing, you’re in a business right now that is as close to recession-proof as you can get. There’s a lot of people in the restaurant business right now having a really hard time, and other businesses, right? The recession is not by any means a death sentence for a moving company. People still need to move. Now’s the time for you to really step up in all areas, personal, business. All this stuff that you’ve been needing to do in your business, start doing it now.
Louis: Because the people that aren’t taking action, the people that are allowing themselves to fall into a slump, the people that are turning to alcohol or other bad habits during this time and aren’t focusing in on their business and what’s important, they’re going to have a really hard time as things get a little shaky. So the people that are focused, the people that are on it, the people that are implementing the things that matter, they are going to get through this, they’re going to be stronger, have a better business and might see some of their competition drop off completely. So take this as an opportunity to build that [inaudible 01:19:05] as a leader, as a business owner, as a moving CEO, and go out there and just make it happen.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis: That’s it. That’s all I got. Chris, you got anything?
Chris: I got nothing else. Thanks a lot for sharing all of that. I think if people have any questions, feel free to write us in and ask ask away.
Louis: Yeah, definitely. So guys, thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, do me a favor. If you’re watching this, leave me a comment down below. Let me know what you thought. If you’re listening on iTunes, leave me a comment. Leave me a review. thumbs up, thumbs down, whatever you think. If you’ve got any questions at all that you want me to address on this podcast, just go to Instagram and DM me. It’s at louismassaro dot com so it’s at L-O-U-I-S-M-A-S-S-A-R-O dot … no, not dot com. Just Louis Massaro.
Chris: @louismassaro, yeah.
Louis: @louismassaro. The website’s louismassaro.com. We’re here to help you. We want to help you get through this situation. Just know, be on top of your game and you’ve got nothing to worry about. Keep pushing forward. Keep moving forward. Go out there every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. I’ll see you guys next time.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how the coronavirus pandemic will affect your moving business.
“Use this as a time to get stronger. Use this as a time to build your ability as a leader, as a CEO to do the things in your business that before maybe you were putting off.”
“You are where you are today based on the decisions you made in the past, period.”
“Things happen in the world that could affect your business. Don’t let your business be vulnerable and so fragile that one little tick in the stock market puts you under. You’ve got to be strong and you’ve got to have that long-term plan. And if you’ve got that long-term plan and you’ve got that vision for your business of where you’re going to go, just know, we will get past this, you will still be able to do that.”
“You’re in as close to a recession-proof business as you could possibly be in if you’re in the moving business.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: Hey, my friend. Welcome to the Moving Mastery podcast. My name is Louis Massaro and today, we’ve got a special episode talking about the coronavirus and how it’s going to impact your business and what you need to be doing moving forward. This is something that we’re all dealing with as a global community, but as business owners, it’s really important that right now, we really focus in on what’s important and take care of certain things to make sure that we are in the best position that we could possibly be in when this thing passes because it will pass. We will get through this and the decisions you make today and the actions you take today will determine where you end up on the other side of this coronavirus.
Louis Massaro: I’ve got my main man Chris here with me today. What’s up, Chris?
Chris: What’s up?
Louis Massaro: We are six feet apart.
Chris: At least.
Chris: At least, and against my wife’s recommendation, I’m here at the office recording this for you guys, because I felt that it’s really important to get this out there because there’s a lot of fear going on out there right now. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Listen, there’s people getting sick. There’s people dying. There’s businesses closing. I don’t have to tell you everything that’s going on. You know what’s going on, you see what’s going on out there, and everybody’s dealing with it in their own way.
Chris: I just got done with one of my Moving Mastery coaching groups where we went through a strategy on the steps that they need to take in order to maximize this time, again, to come out on the other side of this, knowing that we will get through it, it will pass and that’s what we’re talking about today. How are you feeling about all this, Chris?
Chris: I’m trying to make sure that I’m not buying too much into the fear, but also getting the facts and making sure I’m aware and up to date as to what’s happening and taking the proper precautions. Making sure I’m washing my hands and avoiding being in public and being around people and trying to do my best to create that personal space around myself, so I’m not only keeping myself safe, but not freaking anybody else out. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it’s important. Right now, it’s like you might not feel as if it might not worry you. There might be people, “I’m not worried about the coronavirus. It’s no big deal. I’m going to go out in public. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that.” But you know what? You’re putting other people at risk.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Because if you catch it, and now somebody that’s in a compromised immune system category if they catch it, you’re just putting everybody in harm’s way, so do the responsible thing right now. Listen to your local health officials and government and whatever they’re suggesting you do, please do it. We could all do our part in minimizing the spread.
Louis Massaro: Don’t think that you don’t have the ability to make a difference. Just by, again, washing your hands taking those actions, you could help the spread. But I think one of the biggest things right now that I’m concerned about when I look out and I see the public and I see everybody how they’re reacting and I hear from clients and members of our programs, is the fear.
Louis Massaro: The fear is more crippling than the virus can be. I mean, listen, I don’t want to downplay the virus. It’s a real thing. People are getting sick people are dying. It’s scary, right?
Chris: Sure.
Louis Massaro: I mean, it perpetuates that evil nightmare that we have that the world’s coming to an end and we start thinking about all the movies that we’ve seen that remind us of that and the fear starts to just run rampant.
Louis Massaro: And I think that what’s causing a lot of the hysteria and all of that. And as a business owner, it’s really important right now that we step up as leaders. Leaders with not only our team and our employees, but also our family, our kids, our spouse, distant relatives, with people in our community. We need leadership right now.
Louis Massaro: There’s too many people that are just reading basic headlines of rumors and spreading that information, which just perpetuates the fear. We need people to be calm amidst the chaos.
Louis Massaro: And as a business owner, you’re naturally a leader. You’re naturally somebody or at least you’ve elected to be in that position. You’ve stepped up and said, “I want to be a leader.” Even if you might look in the mirror and say, “I’m not a leader. I don’t demonstrate the qualities of a leader.” But you know what? As a business owner, you’ve stepped up and you’ve said, “I’m going to elect to be a leader.” Now’s, the time where you need to lead.
Louis Massaro: And so, it’s tough because we’re going to talk about what you could be doing in your business right now, what you need to be doing in your business right now to make sure that you thrive and you get through this and you come out on the other side of it in good shape. But the best thing that you could be doing right now is managing your stress, managing your fear, and being very, very, very proactive about that.
Louis Massaro: And I know we’ve talked about that. What are you doing right now to help with your stress?
Chris: I think it’s important to, first of all, educate yourself and then look at everything realistically and find your trusted sources and really, if you know the proper precautions to take and you know how to handle this just within your day-to-day that helps alleviate some of the stress because you’re not going to sit there and be worried and fearful about this virus coming to get you. If you understand it, you have trusted sources that can guide you that will help a lot of it.
Chris: And then in the meantime, double down on your working out, exercise, make sure you’re taking care of yourself, eat right, don’t let the diet slip when you’re sitting at home, and make sure that you’re also not only staying up-to-date on what’s happening currently out there with it with the virus, but also, surround yourself with some positive input as well. Read a good book, make sure you’re spending time with the people in your house, your family. You’re all in that together, make sure there’s a community there. I think that helps a lot with stress.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, as a business owner because that’s who mostly that we’re talking to.
Louis Massaro: I mean, I know there’s some people that work for another company or they’re thinking about starting a company, but let’s just say as a leader, stress management is always important. For me, that was one of the things that really helped me perpetuate my business and really helped me grow was once I learned how to start managing stress. And right now I’m going one step further because I’m not downplaying what’s going on. Stress can creep up for me, just as everybody else, but I put it in its place right away.
Louis Massaro: Like you said, I’ve got trusted sources. World Health Organization, CDC, local health officials and what the State is saying and now I’m paying attention as well to what’s coming out of the White House, but that’s it, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And I’m only allowing myself two times max per day, max, okay, to check in on the news to see what’s going on.
Chris: That’s smart.
Louis Massaro: And I won’t do before lunch any day.
Chris: Oh, okay?
Louis Massaro: Because things aren’t developing that quickly that we need to be tied-into our phones to where we’re like scroll, scroll, scroll. Right now, the last thing you should be doing is scrolling the news all day long, scrolling social media all day long, going back and forth with people talking about how it’s the end of the world all day long. All this stuff, all it’s going to do is just breed more fear, and when you’ve got that fear, it just cripples you to be able to actually take positive actions towards building your business.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Right? So for me… Meditate every day.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right?
Chris: Yep.
Louis Massaro: Now, I’ve added in a second meditation throughout the day.
Chris: Twice a day now?
Louis Massaro: Twice a day.
Louis Massaro: Not that that’s going to be a permanent situation, but you’ve got to adapt to what’s going on, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And the reality is this has been stressful for everybody.
Louis Massaro: We had a big event coming up, moving CEO Live, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: We had hundreds of people, tickets to come out here and be with us in Phoenix and had to make the decision to call that off. Not call it off, but switch it to a virtual event.
Louis Massaro: And that wasn’t hard. And I found myself for a day or two getting stressed out and watching the news because I needed to understand exactly what was going on, so I could make the decision. Now, I don’t think we’d even have a choice.
Chris: Yeah, no.
Louis Massaro: I think, they wouldn’t have allowed us to have it now, but when we made the decision last week, I was heavily into watching the news, seeing what’s going on, reading everything. I want to make sure I was educated before I pulled the trigger and made the call to move it online.
Chris: Sure.
Louis Massaro: And I could just feel the negative energy just zapping me.
Louis Massaro: And so I allowed that for a day and a half and I snapped out of it.
Louis Massaro: Because you have to be able to snap yourself out of it because what happens is the media, whether it’s traditional or social media, their business is to keep your attention.
Chris: Oh, yeah. They’re thriving right now, yeah.
Louis Massaro: They’re thriving right now. Besides our TVs and our computers, but these devices, you get the alerts. I mean, I don’t get them, but you get the alerts. It’s wanting your attention. These companies, social media, the news, they have people on board called Attention Engineers.
Chris: Really?
Louis Massaro: Their whole job is to make the screen, all of it to just keep you locked in.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: And our primal instincts right now were out of this fear, we have this sense of needing to be in control.
Louis Massaro: So when we watch the news, it helps us to feel a little bit in control, but at the same time, it’s feeding the fear and feeding the anxiety.
Louis Massaro: When we go stock up on food and when we go stock up on toilet paper. It helps give us a little bit of a sense of control, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, the point is that you can’t be scrolling right now.
Louis Massaro: You can’t be on the news all day right now. If you’ve got a business right now, the way you show up today will predict how you make it through this situation.
Chris: It’s a crucial time.
Louis Massaro: It’s a crucial time.
Louis Massaro: This is not the time to sit at home and watch the news all day and stress out or say, “Oh, yeah, you’re right, Louis, I’m not going to watch the news and stress out. I’m going to sit at home. I’m just going to watch Netflix and eat potato chips.”
Chris: No, take advantage of the time.
Louis Massaro: Well-
Chris: You know?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Well, nobody wants this to happen right now.
Louis Massaro: But the reality is if you’re scrolling, what are you really learning every day that relates to you? Yes, there’s bad stuff going on in the world. Yes, there’s another story of this. There’s another case here. There’s another case there. Now, they’re saying it could be spread through the air. There’s going to be developing information. So on a daily basis, you see what’s new and you revisit your plan on how you’re going to address it.
Chris: Check-in.
Louis Massaro: Check-in, review what’s going on and revisit your plan.
Chris: And then leave it.
Louis Massaro: And then leave it.
Louis Massaro: Because if you don’t, it will drag you down and if it drags you down, it will drag your business down.
Louis Massaro: And I say this from a place of having gone through the recession at a time where, not only that, I opened my business and a few months later 9/11 happened.
Louis Massaro: Went through that. Felt like the end of the world, made it through. Recession came, one of the hardest things I had to do, not only because it was the recession, but at that time, I had five or six offices at that time, just bought a bunch of long-distance trucks, buy yellow pages. I was paying through the roof for yellow pages and they weren’t working as well, so it was like the perfect storm.
Chris: There was a lot on the line.
Louis Massaro: There was a lot on the line.
Louis Massaro: And you know what? That time was one of the hardest times I went through, however, it made me the person I am today and it made my business what it actually was, because when the recession came, it pointed out all the flaws. It pointed out all the inefficiencies, all the things that I was looking over, because it was like, “Oh, money’s coming in, everything’s good.” You had to tighten up.
Chris: Blessing in disguise.
Louis Massaro: It was a disguise. So, you’ve got to look at this time and say, and believe, that it will make you stronger.
Louis Massaro: Anybody going through this right now, take this as an opportunity instead of saying, “Poor me. Why does this have to be going on right now? I just started my business or I just got to a level where I’m where I want to be or I just opened that additional office or I just opened 10 franchises.” Wherever you’re at, you’ve got to look at it and say, “This will make me stronger.” It will.
Chris: No doubt.
Louis Massaro: We’ve got to believe that.
Louis Massaro: Just take this opportunity right now to say, “What can I work on right now?” So, I’ll give you an example. So instead of scrolling all day, there’s no doubt that things are messed up, there’s no doubt that things are weird.
Louis Massaro: Every day, it’s a new normal.
Chris: I mean, it’s weird for everybody.
Louis Massaro: Everybody.
Louis Massaro: As a human.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. So that’s a little bit of some solace there is, hey, we’re all having to deal with this. Everybody has different levels of it. If you’re a moving company owner or a business owner, you have one way of dealing with it. If you’re an employee, you have a whole another way of dealing with it, so we’re all in this together and that’s something, it’s a bit comforting. At least we can all look at each other and go, “Wow, isn’t this crazy?” This is something we haven’t seen before and help each other through it.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I think right now we’ve got to be able to identify when we’re letting fear take control. We’ve got to go extra on all of the steps that we do to manage our stress.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And to handle that. That’s everybody. That’s everybody because it’s like, the quickest way to compromise your immune system is to be stressed out.
Chris: Right. That has a huge effect.
Louis Massaro: So if you’re stressed out and you’re not sleeping, and you’re not eating right, you’re not exercising and you’re not practicing some breathing or meditation or something to calm you down, you’re putting yourself in a position where you’re going to compromise your immune system. Right now, you’ve got to build your immune system.
Louis Massaro: So if you think about all the time that you’re spending possibly, listen, if you’re sitting there and you’re scrolling and you’re scrolling and you’re looking for new news articles and you’re saying coronavirus, update, refresh, refresh, refresh. It’s understandable. I mean, you’ve got major, major, major, major companies and corporations that know how to keep your attention based on factory-installed human emotions.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: That we just all have. And you’ve got to look at that time and say, “How could I be using this time differently?”
Louis Massaro: Instead of consuming, maybe I need to be learning.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Whether it’s learning something for your business, learning how to boost your immune system, maybe. Look, I don’t know how to boost my immune system. I don’t know how to exercise. I don’t know how to meditate. Well, you know what? Get your news once or twice a day. Check-in on what new updates there are. Put that down and then pick up a book, pick up a course, pick up a video, pick up something that’s going to teach you how to do something to not only handle this situation, but then grow moving forward.
Louis Massaro: We were looking at the possibility of a recession. Stock markets had a rough time. Maybe you’ve lost some money and you’ve really taken a hit, but you weren’t really aware of where your money even was. You know what I mean?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You had somebody managing it, “I don’t even know where it was, but I know my portfolio number is a lot lower.” And it’s not a laughing matter, but the point is now could be the time to learn more about that.
Chris: Yeah. You have the opportunity to look into it and educate yourself about it and take control of it. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. And during the downtimes, that’s when a lot of money could be made.
Louis Massaro: If you know how to go about that, so maybe it’s time to learn that. So, maybe shift and say, “Okay, I’m consuming too much, what could I consume that I’m learning?”
Louis Massaro: Where I’m absorbing positivity.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Because the fear is just toxic. What could I bring in that is beneficial.
Chris: Yeah. You can balance that out and it will open your eyes to how much the outside media and social and everything influences you on a day-to-day basis. Maybe before all of this, you’re scrolling a lot and you’re just picking up little bits of negativity or drama on Facebook or whatever and it has an effect on you, subconsciously.
Chris: Now, you can actually see it happening and shine the light on that and maybe in the end, be thankful that you discovered that because we all have that addiction to the phone. If you’re curating your feed with negativity, you’re going to have a negative bias. If you’re curating your feed with positive and good inspirational things, it may have a different effect.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, each moment we get to choose right now.
Louis Massaro: We could choose the tone of this conversation. We get to choose the tone of the conversation with our loved ones, with our employees and is that conversation in fear or are we going in faith that it will all work out. Whatever your faith is, whatever you believe in, in God and all that.
Chris: Sure.
Louis Massaro: But to look at it and say, “It will work out. It will pass.” I truly, 100%, believe that this will pass and I mean, it’s going to, right?
Chris: Of course.
Louis Massaro: But there’s times where it doesn’t feel. There were times when 9/11 happened, it didn’t feel like it was going to pass, it was the end of the world. There were times when the recession came, it didn’t feel like it was going to pass like it was the end of the world.
Louis Massaro: So, maybe for me, being able to look back and having gone through all that in business like I know a lot of our listeners have, it gives you a little assurance that, “Man, this sucks. It’s inconvenient. People are dying. It’s scary, but we will get through it and my business will get through it.” And the takeaway is like if something like this, like the fear and possibility of recession, a lot of people worry about recession and think that it’s like instant death for their business.
Chris: Not necessarily.
Louis Massaro: It’s not. That’s not the case.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: What happens is this, in moments like we’re going through right now, okay? You’ve got one person that will be so overtaken by the fear that they’re like a deer in headlights and they’re paralyzed to where they don’t know what to do. They’re stuck.
Chris: They’re frozen.
Louis Massaro: I can’t even say the words. They’re frozen.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Then you’ve got somebody else, which I recommend everybody models this person, that says, “You know what? I need to charge forward.”
Louis Massaro: I need to realize that every action that I’m taking today is what will predict my future, not the stock market, not a virus, not any of that because none of that is in your control. You’ve got to control what it is you can control.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: So, during this time, hey, listen, and we’ve talked to people this past week. We’ve clients in certain cities that are on lockdown, certain cities look like they’re going to be going towards lockdown and there’s the possibility of not being able to perform moves for however long it’s going to be.
Chris: Who knows, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Same thing with other businesses, any business. Everyone, it’s tough right now, but if you sit back and either get frozen or feel sorry for yourself and what was me, “This is terrible. I’ve got this going on or that going on. This isn’t a good time.” Then you might not make it through this business-wise. My advice is take this time and keep moving forward.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Keep pushing on everything that you had planned, everything that you were going, keep doing it.
Chris: Keep stepping towards it.
Louis Massaro: Keep stepping towards it. Don’t take a step back because you know what? This will pass and think about where you want to be six months from now.
Louis Massaro: If you take a hit this month, if you take a hit next month, if this summer is weird, and it’s like, man, maybe we weren’t able to do some moves and all those people had to move to the summer and it’s going to be different. We don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but it’s going to be different.
Louis Massaro: But it will pass. And if today, you’re not taking actions that move the needle forward in your business, you’re going to be sitting here in October in a really, really bad spot.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Really bad spot.
Louis Massaro: So, that’s why we’re talking you got to manage the stress, you’ve got to manage the fear and then you’ve got to step up and be a leader and take the actions that you need to take right now. You need to be on the offense, instead of back on your heels on the defense.
Chris: Proactive.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to be proactive.
Louis Massaro: It’s so important right now.
Chris: Yeah. If you’re paying attention to the media, if you’re managing that fear, and you’re not managing your stress, and you’re just high strung, and you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do?” Now’s the time to just recognize that and realize how susceptible you are to that outside influence that’s coming in, that you’re allowing in, get pissed off, take advantage of it, say, “Hey, listen, I’m not going to allow this in my life anymore. I’m taking control of who I am, where I’m going to go with this business, what I’m going to do. I’m not going to let all of that in anymore.”
Chris: Build a force field around yourself and decide to say, “Okay, every single day, I’m going to take one little step forward.” It doesn’t have to be a big company changing step, it could be just one little personal thing or one little process you implement into the company, but one little incremental step every single day, so that every day, you’re making a little bit of an increase. By the time you’re saying October rolls around, if you did that every day, what kind of difference would it make in your company, in your life, in your business? I mean, one little step. That’s it.
Louis Massaro: You’ll be much better off than if you didn’t do that.
Louis Massaro: You’ll be much better off than if you just sat on the sidelines. And I’m saying this, I look at this, the closest thing that I could think of is the recession or growing up in Florida, preparing for hurricanes and the devastation that happens with hurricanes and things like that and when I’ve dealt with both of those in my business. And you’ve got to just keep moving forward.
Louis Massaro: So for me, it hit me for a day and a half, two days, where it knocked me off, man. It did.
Chris: Okay. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And the big part about it was how much I was consuming.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: It was how much I was consuming, how much I was consuming, how much I was consuming. And it’s like, if you look at your brain and it’s a sponge, and you’re just absorbing all the fear, you’re not going to be able to take action, so it would paralyze you.
Chris: It would be like an involuntary bias.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: You’re conditioned.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, I see it just going through when I process my email in the mornings, my inbox. Every email list and every person that I receive emails from, it’s all coronavirus this and coronavirus that and you have to just realize like I need a few trusted sources, and then the rest of it, I got to get rid of.
Louis Massaro: You got to get rid of all of it.
Louis Massaro: And that includes anyone that’s around wants to talk to you about how the world’s coming to an end.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You can’t listen to that.
Chris: No.
Louis Massaro: The world’s not coming to an end.
Chris: Definitely not.
Louis Massaro: This is tough. I’m not going to pretend to be a medical expert. I’m not going to pretend to have predictions and be an economist and how this is going to affect our global economy, but it will impact everybody’s business.
Chris: Everybody.
Louis Massaro: Everybody.
Louis Massaro: And it will then start to subside and then we’ll all deal with a new normal.
Chris: A new normal.
Louis Massaro: Whatever that’s going to be, we don’t know yet, but you’ve got a choice. There’s the pandemic, there’s the coronavirus, and then there’s the fear. You do what you can to avoid the virus, but the fear-
Chris: You can control…
Louis Massaro: Will cripple you.
Louis Massaro: I don’t want to make anybody feel like they’re doing something wrong if they’ve been watching the news or if they’ve been scrolling social media or if they’ve been staying in touch with people talking about how things are, because that’s just the majority of what everybody is doing and it’s what major media is pushing on us.
Louis Massaro: We’ve got to be super, super proactive about it. I mean, I caught myself this morning. I told myself I’m not watching the news before noon, came in, my wife had President was on talking.
Chris: You got sucked in.
Louis Massaro: And I got sucked in for 20 minutes or so, then realized, okay, the main points are done. They’re saying the same stuff. I got it. I got my update a little earlier than I wanted to today, but I’m out. I need to detach and break myself away from this and I don’t want to look at it again the rest of the day.
Louis Massaro: I think we all have that piece of us, we all have that little piece that wants it, that feeds off of it.
Chris: Yeah. You enjoy it a little bit.
Louis Massaro: You enjoy it a little bit. “Oh, yeah. Give me the goods of what’s going on.” But you’ve got to fight that because you got to know that that’s damaging for you, it’s damaging for your immune system. It’s damaging for your health. And guess what? You’ve got kids at home, you’ve got family at home, how do you want them to see you responding to this right now?
Chris: Yeah. You got people dependent on you.
Louis Massaro: There’s people looking at you. You need to be a role model. You need to be a leader. You need to be calm in these situations and guide people.
Louis Massaro: Because you might have people in your household, you might have people in your family, you might have people in your neighborhood that aren’t calm, that are freaking out.
Chris: Sure.
Louis Massaro: They could really use somebody to come in and give them some perspective on everything that’s going on-
Chris: From a safe distance.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, keep your distance. I mean, for real.
Chris: For real.
Louis Massaro: We went for a walk in the neighborhood yesterday and there was somebody coming on the sidewalk this way, we just went out in the street.
Louis Massaro: Listen, why take chances?
Chris: Hey, listen. Like you were saying, it’s about just making them feel comfortable, like yeah, you don’t know what they’ve been watching on the news today and how long they’ve been feeding the fear into their brain. It’s respect.
Louis Massaro: It is. It’s respect to do the right thing and take it seriously. Have you noticed though, I mean, I noticed it myself and I had to catch myself to where I see somebody coming and there’s like an adversarial-
Chris: Oh, like a territorial kind of thing?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Because I’m walking with my wife, the baby, the dog.
Louis Massaro: You have this thing. You’re coming at me. And I noticed that everyone’s not as friendly. You know what I mean? Like even going to the store, it’s like, everybody’s in there like this. “Are you the one that’s going to give it to me? Are you the one that’s going to give it to me?”
Chris: On the way in this morning, our office is located near Costco.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: And you can imagine the lines of people waiting for that place to open up, on my way in and you see everybody standing in line. Some people are respecting the social distance thing and pulling themselves out of the line a little bit, some people aren’t, but everybody is just looking down at their phone and not really talking to each other or being social. Everybody is in their own little bubble and it’s the slightest little thing, people are a little jittery. If somebody bumps their cart into the other person, “Oh.” There’s a little bit of tension there.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, it’s understandable.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: It’s understandable. I mean, I know. When I catch myself doing something, I try to break down why am I doing that.
Louis Massaro: And I realized, a neighbor walked by and wants to talk and I was like real short with him.
Louis Massaro: And I realized, I was like, okay, because in my mind, subconsciously, I’m thinking if I engage them in conversation, he’s going to come closer.
Louis Massaro: And I don’t want him to come closer.
Louis Massaro: Anyways, it’s crazy times that we’re dealing with and it’s an opportunity to grow.
Louis Massaro: Period, the end. Learn right now. Learn better hygiene. Learn how to take care of your immune system. Learn how to manage stress. Learn how to make your business unbreakable so that when something like this happens… look, because we deal with a lot of people at a lot of different levels in business and some, they’re in good shape. They’re like, “You know what? This sucks,” but they’ve got the money to weather the storm and some people don’t.
Louis Massaro: And you could sit and panic or you could say, “You know what? This is the wakeup call. This is it.” Now’s the time. All that stuff that I’ve been saying I needed to do, but there was this and there was that. It cuts through all the BS and it’s like, let me move forward. And that’s what I suggest everybody does right now. I mean, even if you can’t do moves, if you’re on a lockdown, be in touch with your customers.
Louis Massaro: Manage that process of rescheduling them, getting them on the books for a later date, keeping in constant contact with them to make sure that they are… because they’re dealing with it, too and if you’re their company, let them know you’re still there. And also don’t lose those moves.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Don’t let them call. We don’t know what we’re doing. They’re going to be like, “Oh, let me call somebody else because I need to move as soon as this thing is lifted and we’re able to.” I know, that’s not the case right now, still people moving right now today, but if that’s where it goes, you’ve just got to be on top of managing that. You’ve got salespeople, let them work from home, keep getting the leads, keep booking moves, keep moving forward.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to stay on point with your five fundamentals of the business, which are lead generation, booking moves, servicing moves, making sure you have happy customers and you’re reporting and you’re accounting. You’ve got to stay moving forward with all of that stuff right now.
Chris: Yeah. Keep the machine going and reassure people. Retain them. I mean, that’s the name of the game. Don’t let the fear clear your calendar.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. They need to move. If you’re not allowed to go move them that means they’re not allowed to go move.
Louis Massaro: Which means that it will be postponed and you want to make sure that you still gather that.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: So, let’s say you take a hit right now. It’s going to affect everybody.
Louis Massaro: Hopefully less than more, but right now is the time where you’ve got to say, “All right, every single day, I need to be taking action towards moving my business forward.” Because, if you’re listening to this, if you’re watching this, you’re not someone that’s just sitting back, happy with where your business is and like, “I’m good.” You’re trying to make it better, you’re trying to improve, you’re trying to make more money, you’re trying to grow, you’re trying to make it run smoother. Okay. You could be working on all that stuff now.
Louis Massaro: And put yourself six months from now. Think about six months from now, what actions do I need to take, to where the end of the year where maybe it’s normally slow, I’m able to double business. I’m able to really increase my business, so that if I had a couple of bad months because of the coronavirus, I made up for it at the end of the year.
Louis Massaro: We’ve got a long way until December 31st. Don’t look at this year and think, “Oh, it’s done. My year is over. I’m not on track to hit my targets or hit my numbers.” We’re all dealing with this. Whatever you’re going through if you’re having cash flow issues, if you’re having problems, people get that. People understand that. It’s going to affect everybody. You might have to make hard decisions when it comes to employees. You might have to decide that maybe you want to be extra giving with them, but maybe you can’t.
Louis Massaro: Maybe you can’t pay the rent if it comes to that. The point is everybody’s going through it and I believe it will all work itself out.
Chris: It is. If that’s the situation for you and you’re having to make those kind of difficult decisions, now’s the time to put your foot down and say, “I’m never going to want to make these decisions again. I’m not going to have to worry about this ever again. I’m going to change the company. I’m going to put things in place. I’m going to make sure that whether it’s a virus, whether it’s a recession, whether it’s a natural disaster, or some kind of thing that happens, you’re going to be able to weather the storm. Never again.” That’s, put your foot down.
Louis Massaro: That’s it.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: That’s it, like let this be a wakeup call.
Chris: Yea. It’s an opportunity.
Louis Massaro: It’s an opportunity. And you know what? Again, I’ll say it again, going through the recession, lost a ton.
Louis Massaro: Was on my heels, it was tough, but every day I kept moving forward, every day I kept taking action. And you know what? The setback that I had at that time, the person that I became from that and the lessons that I learned, and the action that I took, propelled me way further than I would have had I not gone through that and everything was just easy and cushy and all of that. So, look at the long term. Don’t look at the next week, the next 30 days. Yes, there’s real stuff happening and you have to address it, you’ve got to minimize your downside, but at the same time, you’ve got to say, I just can’t say it enough, take action every day that’s moving you towards building the business that you want, period, regardless of what’s going on.
Louis Massaro: Otherwise, you’re going to sit back six months from now and you’d be like, “Man, you know what? I let that time go by. I sat at home. I sat on the sidelines, waiting to see what was going to happen.” And it’s the worst thing you could be doing for your business right now, the worst thing.
Chris: You don’t want to sit there eating a big bowl of regret a year from now.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: It’s a perfect time right now. It’s a solemn time and it’s a serious time, so be serious. Be serious about your business, about what kind life you want.
Louis Massaro: And you don’t have to run off of stress and adrenaline.
Chris: No.
Louis Massaro: You know what I mean? A lot of people resist stress management because they feel that stress is what helps fuel them to take action in their business and I just challenge you, if that’s you to take a different approach to it, and calm yourself a little bit. And charge this thing with intention of where you’re going. And it might shift every day.
Louis Massaro: If everything single day, you’ve got to get a pen and paper and say, “Okay, this is my plan. This is where I’m going. This right now, is there any way I could keep moving this forward? I could do that. I could do that. Okay, I’ll keep those things moving. All right. This, that I can’t move that project forward, but I can move this forward, I can move that forward. I could have this person working from home on this, that person working from home on that.”
Chris: You could feel the stress melting away, just come up with a plan.
Louis Massaro: And your plan might be shit by the end of the day. I’m just saying.
Chris: Yeah, true.
Louis Massaro: You might come up with a plan and then they’re like, “Hey, no. Can’t do anything for the next month.”
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: And then you readjust.
Chris: Just keep…
Louis Massaro: So, you go and review what’s new and revisit your plan. Review and revisit.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: That’s it.
Louis Massaro: But keep moving forward and I’m saying it because so many people right now are in a fork in the road with their business and I’m speaking to business owners because that’s who I could relate to the most, that’s who we work with the most and the decision you make today and every day moving forward until we get out of this crisis here, that’s going to predict your future. Not what the stock market does, not what the coronavirus does. It’s the actions that you take every day because we will make it out of this. And no matter what, people always need to move. Remember that.
Louis Massaro: You’re in as close to a recession-proof business as you could possibly be in if you’re in the moving business.
Louis Massaro: When the recession hit, it wasn’t that there were no moves, it’s just the whole dynamic of things changed. For me, it was the perfect storm, which is everything that was going on, but people will always need to move.
Louis Massaro: So don’t think that an epidemic or a pandemic comes or recession comes and it’s like instant death to your business. It’s not the case. It will filter out the weak though, the people that aren’t taking the action, the people that are sitting back, they’re not going to be in a good position if a recession comes or anything like that. So, you just got to keep pushing forward.
Chris: It’s actually the choice you need to make is you need to decide what kind of business am I going to have? Am I going to have a business that gets tossed and turned with every little wave and storm that comes along or am I going to have a business that’s adaptable, that I can easily change because I’ve got all of my fundamentals and foundation in place? I’ve got all my processes in place. I’m able to just turn on a dime if I need to.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: And it’s a choice.
Louis Massaro: It’s a choice and it’s the reason we’re moving forward with moving CEO virtual.
Chris: We’ve got to keep the company…
Louis Massaro: I mean, we’ve got to do this three-day live event virtually because I know that people need this now. We were like, “Okay, we’ll postpone it.” We’ll do it in the fall, which we’re going to do also. I’m like, I’m not going to hold back. I know, people need this information now regardless of what’s going on how to safeguard your business, so that it will thrive in any economy.
Chris: It’s possible.
Louis Massaro: And that’s what we’re doing. I mean, those of you, by the way, if you haven’t already gotten your virtual ticket for Moving CEO, we’re doing the event, we’re still doing it. We’re going to be broadcasting the event live for three full days, April 2nd through the 4th, go to movingseminar.com, movingseminar.com. Get your seat. I’m going to be laying out a plan for you to get through this, thrive in any economy, build the business that you’ve always wanted to build and comments and get focused on learning about possibilities and how to get there.
Chris: Yeah, I’m really excited. I like this opportunity we’ve had to really focus on the online virtual seminar and making it as good as we can and now that I’ve seen the framework for it and we’re working on ironing out all the details on how we’re going to present it, I think it’s better than ever. I think it’s better than it could have been.
Louis Massaro: It’s going to be the best event we’ve ever done and even out of the live in-person events.
Chris: I agree.
Louis Massaro: And so, make sure you are there. I mean, there’s no reason not to be. This is my mission. My mission is to help people profit in business and thrive in life and you know what? Shit happens.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And stuff comes along and the economy will get rocky and a pandemic will come along and like you said, natural disaster. Things happen in the world that could affect your business. Don’t let your business be vulnerable and so fragile that one little tick in the stock market puts you under. You’ve got to be strong and you’ve got to have that long-term plan. And if you’ve got that long-term plan and you’ve got that vision for your business of where you’re going to go, just know, we will get past this, you will still be able to do that.
Louis Massaro: Use this as a time to get stronger. Use this as a time to build your ability as a leader, as a CEO to do the things in your business that before maybe you were putting off, but now you’re like, “You know what? Had I been in a position where I did these things previously and I set myself up, I’d be in a much better position right now.” Well, you know what? You are where you are today based on decisions you made in the past, period.
Chris: Period.
Louis Massaro: The people that are like, “This sucks, but I’m going to weather this storm in the moving business,” are able to say that because of the decisions they made previously and the actions that they took and the people that are in a very, very, very vulnerable position right now.
Louis Massaro: And my heart goes out to them, are there because they didn’t take the action and it doesn’t mean they didn’t take action, I mean, they didn’t work hard. So, we see a lot of people work really hard, but have not taken the right action to win the game of business. So think about that today and say, “You know what? Where do I want to be six months from now? Where do I want to be six years from now?” All that we could predict where you’re going to be six years, six months, all based on the actions you’re taking every day, moving forward.
Louis Massaro: So listen, guys, stay strong, stay safe, stay informed, and stay focused and hungry and keep moving forward. Don’t let this be a time where you lose your momentum, you lose what you have going on, keep pushing in every area that you possibly can, and you will come out stronger on the other end of this. You will make it through, you will be stronger for it and you will build a bigger business becoming the person that you will become having gone through something like this.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Listen, until we see you next time. Chris, you got anything to add?
Chris: Just a couple of things I want to also give a shout out to all of our members and community of company owners out there who have taken the initiative to implement a lot of the things that you teach and they’ve either been a part of your programs or have been private clients and stuff like that, those people who are still crushing it right now and just getting through this, barely sweating.
Louis Massaro: And to them as well, the amount of love and just camaraderie that they’ve shown within our community, within our group and I mean, it’s like you would think that they’re all the same company, that they’re like we’re in this together.
Chris: Everybody’s on the same team.
Louis Massaro: Just reading the comments and we were just live with them a couple of hours ago, and yeah. So, right now just do what you can to be supportive of anybody and everybody that you’ve got going on.
Chris: We appreciate it. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Anything you could do in the community, too. If there’s some way you could help, do what you could do.
Louis Massaro: So listen, guys, stay strong, stay safe. Make sure you go and sign up for Moving CEO Live and I’m saying that to you and I know you’re like, “Louis, we’re going through a lot of stuff.” I know we’re going through a lot of stuff. I’m here at the office right now for you guys to put this message out there because we still need to move forward. We can’t be on pause. Make sure you get your tickets Moving CEO. Go to moving seminar.com. That’s movingseminar.com. We’re doing this virtually. You could watch it from your home. You could watch it with your team.
Louis Massaro: It’s already laid out. I’ve got it all laid out and you don’t want to miss this. If you’ve been to one of my past events, this is going to be totally different, totally new, and we’re coming straight at all the big obstacles that you face in order to set up a smooth-running business and then to scale that smooth-running business, we’re going to knock down all those obstacles and give you a plan on how to do it. And until I see you then, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life, wash your hands, stay away from people. Stay safe, my friends. I’ll see you next time.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to win big in the moving business in 2020.
“With internet marketing, you’re able to tweak, you’re able to modify, you’re able to really track everything, and you could make changes quickly. You’re not stuck with something for an entire year. You want to open a new market? You don’t have to wait for the yellow pages to come out. You go open whenever you want to go open and start your marketing.”
“ I would say, over the course of 11 years, I feel like I came pretty close to perfecting a system for what I call a sales machine for the moving business.”
“There’s no doubt that there is a shortage of drivers, that there is a challenge in getting movers nowadays. However, the people that have this process down for hiring are winning and they’re winning big.”
“I’m not saying that the moving business is easy, but it can be easy to make changes… Take the steps, and believe that it’s possible.”
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: All right, my friend. Welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. This is Louis Massaro. I got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s going on?
Chris DeHerrera: What’s up?
Louis Massaro: All right. In these episodes, it is all about helping you take your moving company to that next level, eliminate the stress, overcome any challenges, any obstacles that you’re having, make more money, be able to spend more time with your family, create a model business, and just let this business that you’re in be the vehicle to the life that you want to live. All right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yes.
Louis Massaro: That’s what we’re trying to do. In these episodes, what we’re doing is we’re taking questions from my social media feed. If you follow me on any platform, it’s at louismassaro.com. That’s L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. If you have any questions, anything you want us to tackle on The Moving Mastery Podcast, just DM me on Instagram. Chris randomly pulls some out. Well, I wouldn’t say randomly. He’s not picking them out of a hat. You’re hand-selecting them because, as the producer of the podcast, essentially, you’re kind of running the show. I’m just here to answer whatever the question.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. I’d like to go through the comments, the questions, the things that come into our support desk and find stuff that I think that, maybe, a lot of people may be wondering about, and stuff that I feel like you can shed some light on and bring some value to these people who are our listeners and stuff.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. What do we got?
Chris DeHerrera: Today, I’m going to throw a little bit of a curveball at you. I’d mentioned earlier that it’s a comment this time. It’s not necessarily a question, but I wanted to kind of lay this on you and see how you feel about it. I have a feeling that there may be, maybe not a lot, but some people who share this gentleman’s sentiments. Okay?
Louis Massaro: Mm-hmm.
Chris DeHerrera: I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t follow up with this. It’s just a comment that was on one of our social media outlets. I’ll read it to you and then I just want to hear how you feel about it. Okay?
Louis Massaro: All right.
Chris DeHerrera: The comment is, “I’ve been in the business for 22 years, and I can tell you everything has gone to shit.”
Louis Massaro: Oh, bad.
Chris DeHerrera: He says, “Internet marketing is a joke. Guys don’t want to work. Yelp takes down all my good reviews.”
Louis Massaro: Oh, boy.
Chris DeHerrera: “I’m not so sure it’s all as easy as you make it out to be. Get real, buddy.” That’s what he said.
Louis Massaro: Really?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. Hey, listen, there’s some truth behind it. There’s some heartfelt sentiment behind that, I feel like. I don’t want to make fun of the guy. He’s having, maybe, some hard times.
Louis Massaro: I’m not making fun of the guy. I’m in shock a little bit. I wasn’t expecting that. All right. Hold on, let me just make sure I got this right. 22 years in the business, business has gone to shit, guys don’t want to work, Yelp reviews come down. What else?
Chris DeHerrera: He says, “I’m not so sure it’s as easy as you make it out to be. Get real, buddy.”
Louis Massaro: All right. Give me a minute. This is a good one.
Chris DeHerrera: It’s a good one, right?
Louis Massaro: You know what? Here’s the deal. I think that 22 years, I would have been, I started 20 years ago. He’s probably in business since ‘98.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s 22 years, yeah.
Louis Massaro: ’98 to now, things have definitely changed. There’s no doubt about it. ’98 until now. Let’s just say 2000 until now, because that’s when I got in, about two years after he got in. Things have definitely changed. Gone to shit, no. Guys don’t want to work? It’s a challenge, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yelp reviews coming in. Yelp didn’t exist 20 years ago. Not so easy. I don’t know that I’ve ever sat here and said that this is easy at all, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: All the time, this is not a get rich quick business.
Chris DeHerrera: Definitely not.
Louis Massaro: It’s a great business that if you do it right, you can make a lot of money. Here’s the deal, because I do see this a lot with veterans, not veterans of our country, but veterans in the business, people that have been in the business for a long time, is that, there’s a couple of different groups. This guy sounds like he just hasn’t made the shift to the new way of doing things. There’s been a few dramatic shifts. Did he say something about everything on the Internet or Internet marketing or something?
Chris DeHerrera: He said, “Internet marketing is a joke.”
Louis Massaro: Let’s just kind of look at that, because in order to win today, in this day and age, in order to win in 2020, we know there’s companies crushing it purely, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Absolutely, yes, we see them every day.
Louis Massaro: Then, there’s other people that they believe it’s possible, but they still haven’t found the way to do it. Then, there’s people that have seen it just get, I shouldn’t say harder, but it just has changed the way that it’s adjusted from back then, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: I mean, when I started, I put the yellow page ad in, set back my feet up on the desk once I had a desk, once I moved out of the yard, and just phone rang and booked moves.
Chris DeHerrera: Yes, different game back then.
Louis Massaro: Different game. Then, 2007, 2008, there’s like the perfect storm.
Chris DeHerrera: The economy-
Louis Massaro: Yellow pages stops working. No, I shouldn’t say stops. For the money you’re paying, it’s not worth it anymore.
Chris DeHerrera: For a while, though, just real quick, how many different yellow page books were you in at one time? Didn’t you have a bunch of them?
Louis Massaro: Man, every city you were in. I had six offices. Every city you were in, there was the main book from the main phone company. Then, there was, I don’t want to name any of them because I don’t…
Chris DeHerrera: Who knows? Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Then, there was another phone provider and there was another yellow page provider. There was at least two to three major providers in each city. Then, they all started coming out with different, like, “We have this area book for the south side of town,” and the east side, they have an area book.
Louis Massaro: I’m like, “What, don’t they get the main book?” Yeah, but we also want to give them this little book. It was just a way to get more –
Chris DeHerrera: I remember I had a stack of them.
Louis Massaro: It was just the way to get more money out of you. You have a total spending of 250,000 a month on yellow pages at the peak. Anyways, when that stopped working… I’m telling this story because I want to illustrate how to adapt. We’re talking about this guy and I know a lot of people feel that way. Maybe, not with such a negative tone.
Chris DeHerrera: He’s passionate. He’s passionate, yeah.
Louis Massaro: They feel like, maybe, it was easier back then. It would’ve been very easy for me to argue, “Man, it’s these Internet leads and this and that, and all this stuff online. It’s whatever,” and just complain about it. But the reality was I saw that that’s where things were going and I had to make that shift and I had to make that adjustment.
Louis Massaro: Instead of fighting it like a lot of people did, I jumped in and I learned what SEO, pay per click, leads, just Internet marketing in general, all of that. How do I make part of me operating my business as I need phone calls, I need leads, I need people that are moving? How do I continue to get those? You’re talking about that timeframe there, 2007, 2008, and then even before that. Leads were coming out. There was stuff going on, but I didn’t really make that adjustment until around that time.
Louis Massaro: The reality is that a lot of people that didn’t make it through the recession, it wasn’t that the recession did it to them. It was that they didn’t make the adjustment that they needed to make in the way that they handled marketing, and continued to spend money in areas that were no longer working, and, I shouldn’t say refused, but did not adopt and learn the new ways of generating leads for their business.
Louis Massaro: Here we are 22 years later, and he says the Internet marketing is terrible. I think the Internet marketing is an amazing thing for companies out there. Your flexibility that you have now compared to then, it was great. You put a yellow page on and it was easy, meaning there was less steps involved, but you also had less control. Where now, you’re able to tweak, you’re able to modify, you’re able to really track everything, and you could make changes quickly. You’re not stuck with something for an entire year. You want to open a new market? You don’t have to wait for the yellow pages to come out. You go open whenever you want to go open and start your marketing.
Louis Massaro: For me, I had to make that shift or I wouldn’t have been able to stay in business, with the marketing. Then, it was I’m getting all these Internet leads and I was, even stuff, pay per click, whatever, anything that wasn’t a phone call. Phone calls are gold, even today. Your phone rings, don’t ever miss that.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s right.
Louis Massaro: Don’t ever miss that. We used to print them off on the printer, right? The leads used to come and walk around and hand out pieces of paper back then. That was when the leads first started. There was no CRM with the leads coming directly into them and all that. It was, “Here’s the leads. Hey, call this,” and they would write on there. They did their whole lead follow-up on the sheet of paper that we printed out.
Louis Massaro: This was now starting to get out of control. And so, I had to shift again and adapt again to the times. I’m like, “What do I need to do to make sure that these leads aren’t getting lost? What do I need to do?” Or I walk up to moving consultant’s desk and I see a stack of these leads with handwritten notes, coffee stains. It just wasn’t organized at all. That’s when I went from studying marketing and learning that to studying call centers, studying sales, how other industries basically handled this type of stuff.
Louis Massaro: I didn’t sit there and say, “This is terrible. The good old days, you used to be on the phone.” Believe me, there was part of me that was resistant to it, but I knew I had to adapt and I had to change. I’m saying this because it sounds like, for a long, long time, he’s resisted making the adjustments that need to get made.
Louis Massaro: It was like, first you got to learn Internet marketing is here to stay, period. When somebody wants a service, they go online, they look for it. You’ve got to learn how to be at the end of every path that they choose, meaning customer goes on computer. They Google, “Movers in my city,” let’s just say. Well, everything that shows up, you want to make sure that you’re on the end of every single one of those paths.
Louis Massaro: If it’s your site directly, you get the lead. If it’s a lead provider, you get the lead. Then, you need to make sure that it’s all profitable. We won’t necessarily get into that too deep right now.
Louis Massaro: That was the first piece to marketing. Then, the sales piece. How do you start? For me, the leads came out once I had five offices already. I had a good handful of, I think at first, maybe, 15 reps, approximately, in those early days. How do I make sure that the money that I’m spending on the marketing is not going to waste?
Chris DeHerrera: Well, first of all, let’s back up. For a guy in this situation, let’s just say he’s never bought leads before, he’s never been in that situation.
Louis Massaro: Well, just so you know, when I say leads I’m talking about any form of mar… It could be from your website. It could be modern-day. It could be from Yelp.
Chris DeHerrera: I see.
Louis Massaro: When I say leads, I don’t necessarily only mean moving leads or moving lead.
Chris DeHerrera: Got you. Even just going from being an old school phonebook only, maybe, they’ll put out a few little flyers or something, to getting a structured lead management process, or anything like that, how does that even happen? You had to make that transition. Was it something that you were able to do quickly, or is it like a process that takes time? How did it go?
Louis Massaro: I opened my call center. My office, they all handled their sales individually. One office was doing great and the other office wasn’t. I’m like, “I need a centralized call center.” I opened that in 2004 or ’05. I can’t remember exactly. Then, for 11 years, I built my call center to the point we had 60, 70 reps on the phone to book in nationwide. That 11 years was all perfecting that process.
Louis Massaro: Lead comes in, how and when do we call it? How many times do we call it back? What’s the approach? What forms of communication do we call them on? If this rep’s not there, what do we do with that lead? If a phone call comes in, how do we route that phone call? What are we saying to every one of the customers, based on if it’s a local or long-distance job? If they say they’re not ready to move, what do we say about that? All of it was all to just increase that booking percentage. You got X amount of leads, how do we book more of them? How do we book more of them?
Chris DeHerrera: Just incrementally one little decimal point at a time.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I would say, over the course of 11 years, I feel like I came pretty close to perfecting a system for what I call a sales machine for the moving business. That was the second big shift. You got to get the marketing, shift your way from the old ways to the new way. Then, you’ve got to build a sales machine. Anybody that’s been following me for any amount of time knows that’s the main thing that I go after, is you’ve got to build a sales machine. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how good your crews are. It doesn’t matter how great your trucks look. It doesn’t matter how many people you have in your office. If you don’t have consistent moves being put on the board and they’re high paying jobs and you’re not just discounting, you’re going to have a really hard time.
Chris DeHerrera: Sounds like kind of, maybe, that might be what this guy’s going through. He’s just not having consistency.
Louis Massaro: Well, it sounds like he hasn’t adapted to the marketing. Listen. I don’t want to out this guy.
Chris DeHerrera: No.
Louis Massaro: Because it’s hard to learn all this stuff. I remember, in the moving business, everything is great. I’ve got five offices, making money. I’m not thinking about marketing because the phone just rings from the yellow pages. Back then, it’s like if you had the balls to put the money up for the yellow page ad and you had the ability to sell… See, I had the ability to sell from day one. Those were sales tactics. I just didn’t have the sales systems down.
Louis Massaro: If you had that ability to do it, then, you were good. Now, when that stops working, it’s panic mode. What a lot of people do in panic mode is they retreat. It’s not a test to anybody’s character or hammer or anybody else, but it could be scary. To be in a business where all this time you’ve known things to work a certain way and all of a sudden they’re totally different, I remembered the feeling.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t like at first, I’m like, “Yeah, no problem. I’m going to go learn it.” It wasn’t. It took a while. It took a lot of denial of what was happening, of what was going on, and, “Oh, that’s not going to last,” to finally saying, “If I don’t learn this, if I don’t get on top of this now, I’m going to be in a really, really bad spot.”
Louis Massaro: It’s true. I mean, if you’re not dialed in on your Internet marketing and your marketing in general, you’re going to be in a really bad position. I tell people all the time, “You, as the moving company owner, need to be the best marketer in your business. Don’t hire an agency and expect them to come in. If you need them to do specific things for you, technical, pay per click, SEO type of things, great. You don’t need some big branding agency to come in and brand your business. You just need to learn what it is about the marketing.” Same thing with the sales. Now, in 2020, we’ve got a new obstacle.
Chris DeHerrera: What’s that?
Louis Massaro: There was, “Hey, you’ve got to learn internet marketing. You’ve got to get on top of that. Then, you’ve got to create your sales machine.” Both of these still are true today. Before I get into the challenge today in 2020, you still got to have your marketing on point. You still have to have a strong sales process. Now, there’s another piece, which is your ability to hire and train movers quickly.
Chris DeHerrera: A lot of what he said there was “guys don’t want to work.”
Louis Massaro: It’s true. Guys don’t want to work. Listen, I’m not sugarcoating anything. The reality is it’s a different generation. They don’t want to go and move furniture for a living. It’s not. It’s different than it was. There’s a lot of other opportunities or, at least, perceived opportunities in this social media world that we’re in, where everybody’s like, “Hey, do this. You can make a bunch of money online.” Guys could go work for Uber, or whatever the case may be.
Louis Massaro: There’s no doubt that there is a shortage of drivers, that there is a challenge in getting movers. However, the people that have this process down for hiring are winning and they’re winning big. What I mean by that is it’s easy to sit here and say, “It’s so hard to hire movers these days. They don’t want to work. They go and work here. They want more money. It’s just so hard. It’s so hard.” It’s easy to get caught up in that mindset. It’s easy for an owner to listen to his dispatcher that’s in charge of hiring and bringing movers onboard and getting them into the rotation, telling him how hard it is. It just starts to infect everybody.
Louis Massaro: I’m not saying that there’s not truth to the fact that it’s harder to do. What I’m saying is this is the reality, so, either get good at it or get out of the business.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. You got to adapt.
Louis Massaro: You got to adapt. The people that are adapting are crushing it. I talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of people. We hear a lot from what’s going on. I’ve got a good amount of private clients that I work with directly in their business. The ones that they’ve got their marketing on point, they know their numbers in their marketing, they’re testing, they’re tracking, they’re tweaking, they’ve got their sales machine going, and now they’ve added this piece of hiring movers and not complaining about how hard it is but just doing the additional work that it takes to make it happen, they’re winning.
Chris DeHerrera: They’re winning.
Louis Massaro: They’re making a lot of money. They’re expanding, they’re opening additional locations, and they’re not worried about that. If we just take a step back and we say, “What’s this all about?” Forget about 22 years ago. Forget about today. It’s a moving business. What do people want? They want to hire a professional moving company.
Louis Massaro: As a professional moving company, what do I need to do to get that job and be in front of them and be successful? I’ve got to be able to generate leads and book moves.
Chris DeHerrera: Step one.
Louis Massaro: Your sales machine. You’ve got to be able to service those moves by hiring movers and, obviously, having trucks and dispatch and all that. You got your sales going and you’re constantly able to book moves and you’ve got your hiring process going for movers and you’ve got that. There’s details in between, but those are the two main things. Book the move, service the move; book the move, service the move.
Louis Massaro: Yes, it’s different today. Man, anybody who’s sitting and thinking about this, like, “The moving business is tough in 2020,” or, “It’s different than it was 22 years ago.” What we tend to do as humans is, when we don’t understand something, we start to reject it or we start to fear it or we realize that we need to learn more about it and we go right after it.
Louis Massaro: I think, for the people that want to just say the moving businesses is, like he says, gone to shit or it’s not so easy, guys don’t want to work, there’s all kinds of reasons that people can complain about what it is, but there’s also strategies that aren’t that hard that will solve all these problems. It’s all perception, right?
Chris DeHerrera: Right.
Louis Massaro: You get this guy, he comes into the seminar and we sit him next to someone that we know has a totally different perception and they talk for three days, it’s going to be–
Chris DeHerrera: Change everything.
Louis Massaro: It will change everything.
Chris DeHerrera: Perspective.
Louis Massaro: I’m not selling anybody a dream. This is hard work. Here’s the difference between just doing the work and then trying to go figure out a way. That’s why I’m doing this. I know it’s challenging. I’m saying like, “Hey, let me help you avoid all these rabbit holes that you could go down looking for solutions and just lay out a plan for you.” On a macro-level, this is what’s needed. You’ve got to book moves, you’ve got to service moves. It’s really that simple.
Chris DeHerrera: The name of the game.
Louis Massaro: Then, everything else in between is just details that we lay out in courses and seminars and all that.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. Now, there’s nothing wrong with somebody who has gotten to a certain level in their company and they’re cruising along and they’re comfortable and they’re happy with the way things are going. I think, maybe, a guy like this who’s been in the business for 22 years, at some point, he did have to do some work to get off the ground, I would imagine. Then, maybe, he just got to a certain level where he felt like business is good, maybe, didn’t want much more than what they were doing. Does somebody have to have that go get them attitude? Where is his bitterness coming from? That’s what I want to know.
Louis Massaro: His bitterness is coming because his business is probably going down. I’m not going to say failing, but it’s going down. I could totally understand this and I know quite a few people like this. It’s a natural tendency, too. You build a business, you get it to a certain place, then, you set up everything, so it’s just like you’ve got your little routine going. Jobs are being booked, guys were servicing the moves, everything’s fine.
Louis Massaro: He probably had a good amount of years where he thought he was done innovating. He thought he was done trying to make things better. He got to a place, I’m assuming. In my mind, I’m thinking of several people that I know that went through the same thing. They get to a place where they’re like, “I’m good. I’m comfortable. I’ve got a business that runs. It makes the money that I wanted to make. Yeah, sure, I could always make more money.” Then, all of a sudden, enemy fire starts coming in at you. It’s like, “Boom, this stops working.”
Louis Massaro: Now, there’s these lead review sites online. If you don’t have a good review, then, you’re not going to get the business. Then, when you get a good review, they take down your good review. You got to understand, from being in a nice cushy place of things are going good, it’s like enemy fire coming at you. You’re being attacked.
Chris DeHerrera: You feel threatened.
Louis Massaro: You feel threatened. Many years of being comfortable, it’s tough to, say, let me go do this all over again, because when you succeed at that first level of saying, “Hey, I just need to get my business off the ground,” and you get to that level where it’s good and it’s stabilized, and then you kind of sit back a little bit. “I don’t have to work like I used to work.” Then, something comes in and kind of challenges you to have do that again. It’s not something’s coming in and saying, “Hey, I’m challenging you to do this.” It’s saying, “Hey, your businesses failing. There’s these things out there that could be the possible culprits of what’s going on. Go figure out what’s happening.”
Chris DeHerrera: Uh-huh, and you don’t know.
Louis Massaro: You don’t know. I mean, I get it. What I did, maybe, I don’t get into detail enough about how challenging it was to make those shifts. Not I was like one day I decided I need to learn marketing and I just went and did that. I went through all the same stuff of like, “Man, I was living really, really, really good before that recession came. Then, I had to really change the way I looked at everything.”
Louis Massaro: Anybody that’s in that position that’s comfortable, right now things have been booming, I think that you’ve always got to be looking for, first of all, do you know your numbers? Do you see things dropping? You got to be able to identify what it is. I know the feeling. When you’ve got a successful business, success can totally be the enemy.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. It makes you relaxed.
Louis Massaro: It makes you relaxed. It makes you sit back. You don’t need to go, “I’m successful,” or, “I’m stressful.” It doesn’t need to be one or the other.
Chris DeHerrera: Either one, yeah.
Louis Massaro: You just have to be aware. You’ve got to be aware of what’s going on. In a long run of success for somebody doing something the same way, you have two choices. You could sit and complain and go, “This Internet stuff’s going on and the guys don’t want to work.” You got two ways to do it. You could say, “What can I do about it? How can I step up my game and use this as a challenge to become better? How can I do this?” Because you know what? If you’re struggling with it, other people are struggling with it. He probably has something to say about all the competition, too. If you’re struggling with it, other people are struggling with it. That’s the perfect time for you to step up your game and make sure that you will survive whatever comes your way.
Chris DeHerrera: If someone has been running a company for 22 years like he has and things have been just on autopilot, basically, how would somebody like that go about creating some sort of contingency plan? Maybe, they don’t want to necessarily grow at scale, but they want to be prepared if something happens.
Louis Massaro: I don’t think that people don’t want to grow and don’t want to scale. I truly believe that they just feel like it’s going to be more work for them. They look at, “I’m at this level, and at this level I’ve got this much stress, I work this many hours. If I want to go to this level, that means the amount of stress and the amount of hours are also going to go up.” That’s very common and, I think, just natural feeling that’s a misconception.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. It makes sense to think about
Louis Massaro: It makes sense to think about. I think that a lot of times people will, consciously or unconsciously, say, “I’m good here. I don’t want to go any further,” because they’ve reached a certain comfortable level; but, you’ve got to reach a level that’s beyond comfort, so that you can safeguard yourself against whatever happens. Get beyond so you could weather any storm. Get beyond where you currently are.
Louis Massaro: Listen. If somebody’s totally happy, they’re totally content, they just need to make sure that they’re watching certain KPIs, certain key performance indicators, or seeing what’s going on in their business, they’re identifying any dips right away and still maintaining it, but there’s maintaining and then there’s building. If you’re just maintaining, it becomes very hard to just do the same amount without it dipping.
Chris DeHerrera: It just naturally wants to start dipping.
Louis Massaro: It naturally wants to start dipping. If somebody’s comfortable, they’re making the money they want to make, their business is smooth, their business is running, the question I would ask them is, if you weren’t going to have more stress, you didn’t have to work more hours, you could actually have less stress and work less hours, would you want a bigger business? Would you want more money?
Louis Massaro: The business doesn’t always have to be bigger. I know very big businesses that aren’t making a lot of money. I know mid-sized businesses that are making a ton of money. Would you want to make more money? Who’s going to say “no?” It’s that people are like, “I don’t want to sell my soul to make more money.” Of course not. It’s just a different strategy and it’s just a different approach to doing it. We have to look at happiness, too. People are like, “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” but, one of the main indicators in psychology of happiness is if you’re activating your full potential. It’s directly tied to your happiness.
Chris DeHerrera: Really?
Louis Massaro: Really. If you know you could be doing more and you’re not and you feel a little uneasy, you feel like something’s missing, it’s because you’ve got more in you. It doesn’t mean you have more hours in you. It doesn’t mean you have more stress in you. It just means you could use what’s between your ears, what’s in your head, to become more resourceful, to get more creative, and to start saying like, “Is there a better way I could be doing this?” What could I be doing? Maybe, raise your level of ambition to, if you’re like, “Hey, I just want to increase by 10%,” well, how do we increase by 50%? Or, 100%?
Chris DeHerrera: Mm-hmm. You had mentioned earlier, what did you say, $500,000 mindset versus a $5 million mindset?
Louis Massaro: Well, a strategy.
Chris DeHerrera: Strategy, okay.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, it’s like if you’re in a position where you’re trying to get your business to, let’s say, $500,000 a year, you’re going to have one strategy that’s going to help you get there. It’s going to be very short term. It’s going to be very based on next month and next month, and that type of thing. If you lay out, “How do we get the five million?” Even just asking that question and thinking through the answers, you’re going to have a whole different strategy.
Louis Massaro: What a lot of people do is they go, “No, no, no. That’s too much work. That’s going to take too long.” They don’t even think about how long it’s going to take. They just think about how much work it’s going to take and how much pressure it’s going to feel on them. Short term. They’re like, “I need to get $500,000 this year.” Why couldn’t you get to five million in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years?
Louis Massaro: What I’m saying is your strategy changes. It doesn’t mean you’re going to go from zero to five million in a year, but what it means is you’ll pass through that milestone of hitting $500,000, of course; but, if your strategy is laid out to go to five million, it’s going to be–
Chris DeHerrera: You’ll keep going.
Louis Massaro: It’s a game plan to get there. Otherwise, you get stuck at where your current strategy was and just spin in circles.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. I think, probably a lot of people don’t even have a strategy. They just kind of get to a certain point and then they say, “I guess this is where I’m going to stay. This is where I’m at.”
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I get that. I totally get that, because the initial start of the business is so challenging that when you get to a place of stabilization where you’re stabilized, it’s like, “Ah.” It’s time to take a breath.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s okay.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to take a breath. Once you stabilize, then you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to optimize. Take your breath. Take your break. Take your time. Reduce your hours that you work. Start to pick up those hobbies that you didn’t have before. Schedule in that time with the family. Great, but use your time now to optimize the business.
Louis Massaro: Then, once you optimize the business, now, you sit back and you look at it like an amazing piece of work that you created. You design this amazing thing that’s running. It’s optimized. Now, you really feel proud of what you’ve done.
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. It’s okay to hang out there for a little while.
Louis Massaro: Then, you hang out there for a minute. Then, from there, from an optimized place, you decide, do I want to scale? The first rule of scale is, do I need to scale?
Chris DeHerrera: What does that mean?
Louis Massaro: That means, do you need to open more locations? Do you need to get a new division? Do you need to get into commercial and long distance and this and that in order to reach your personal income goals?
Chris DeHerrera: It’s not always…
Louis Massaro: It’s not always the case. I see a lot of people that will open an office too soon or open a new division too soon. I shouldn’t even say too soon in a time regard. It’s more like there’s these other fundamentals that aren’t in place first that need to be locked down in an attempt to make more money. I’ll sit with several people like this and say, “Well, how much money do you want to make?” They say that number and I’ll challenge them to compare that to what it’s going to take. Go make a list of everything that you want in your life. What’s it really going to take to live that life?
Louis Massaro: Go sit with a financial planner. Do it yourself. Whatever you need to do, but everything you want, what’s it going to cost you to do that? That means that this is what you need to make in order to live, invest, save, pay your taxes, do whatever. A lot of times, they could do that with their one office and keep things simple.
Chris DeHerrera: It can be a recipe for disaster to try to expand like that without being ready for it or having the fundamentals in place.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. What happens is a lot of people will actually jump before they even get stabilized and go right to scale without stabilizing or optimizing.
Chris DeHerrera: Dangerous.
Louis Massaro: That’s dangerous. That’s how you take the whole ship down with you.
Chris DeHerrera: Getting back to the marketing, let’s just, for the sake of argument, call him an old school person, somebody who came from those yellow pages days. What’s a way for them to kind of start learning about the new marketing SEO and pay per click and buying leads and stuff like that?
Louis Massaro: Honestly, go to louismassaro.com. Go to sales and marketing. Watch all those videos. Go back in the podcast. Listen to anything that has the word, “marketing,” in it. That’s the place to start for free. We’ve got courses. We’ve got seminars. We’ve got coaching. We’ve got all kinds of programs to help with that.
Louis Massaro: It would be crazy for me to tell somebody to go on the journey I went on when I went and I sought out the information, brought it back. Not like I went and brought some information, I’m just a messenger, and I went, “Hey, guys. I went and studied a bunch of marketing books and let me tell you what I found.” No. I went and learned everything I could. Books, coaches, mentors, consultants, courses, all of it. Still to this day, constantly. Then, came and applied it to the moving business on a high level.
Louis Massaro: For me, it might sound self-serving to go, “Go listen, go watch my videos,” but I believe that, for anybody in moving, that is the best information out there that they could get, other than, of course, seminars, coaching, courses, and all that with us. It’s so tried and true and proven and tested. That’s where I would start because a lot of books out there, the authors are writing them in… A lot of great ones, but a lot of books are they’re writing these books in a way where it’s just way over people’s heads and it’s totally unnecessary and it’s like to make the author just sound smart. I don’t know what the deal is, but it’s just a lot of fluff.
Louis Massaro: I tell people all the time, “You’re better off going to the bookstore and going to the personal development section and read that stuff, getting your mind right, getting psychology books.”
Chris DeHerrera: Rather than business.
Louis Massaro: Well, especially, if you’re in the moving business. We’ve laid it all out. I’m not saying it’s not good to learn. You could read books and you could do all that, but you ask like, “Where is the best place?” I mean, that’s the best place.
Chris DeHerrera: Speaking of personal development and stuff, how important is that in being able to evolve and grow and change with a business?
Louis Massaro: When you look at this gentleman here, it’s a guy?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: This is what would be considered in psychology a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, which is like, this is happening and everything just stays fixed. Whereas, in a growth mindset, you’re looking for the way, you’re adapting and you’re growing as an individual.
Louis Massaro: If you look at he started two years before I started, I don’t know where he’s at, and it’s not about bigger business or anything like that, but the amount of growth that I have experienced from all of the same challenges that he went through, to me, that’s what life is all about. If you’re not using every single one of these challenges that you face in your business to grow as a business person, as an individual, you’re wasting those opportunities and you’ll stay stuck within those walls that are keeping you confined until you decide to grow, so you can either go over those walls and round those walls or bust straight through them. It’s super important.
Chris DeHerrera: Let’s talk about Yelp. He’s saying Yelp takes down all of the good reviews. I know Yelp is changing their algorithms frequently.
Louis Massaro: So we think.
Chris DeHerrera: So we think.
Louis Massaro: So we think. That’s what we say, but the truth is we really don’t know what they’re doing. They’re going to do whatever they want to do. It’s their business.
Chris DeHerrera: What’s a way to ensure that you can always have a good representation of your company on Yelp?
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to just do the best job you can and you’ve got to be proactive with asking for the reviews. It is what it is. Did you get five-star reviews? Did you get a ton of five-star reviews and they filter all of them?
Chris DeHerrera: No.
Louis Massaro: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do with that? Probably, somebody in this guy’s category, if we were to categorize him, would totally disengage from Yelp and stop responding to reviews and stop dealing with it because they get so pissed off that all their good reviews are down that they just totally say, “I’m not dealing with Yelp. Yelp wants me to advertise. I’m not dealing with that. I’m not advertising with them.”
Chris DeHerrera: That’s not a good idea.
Louis Massaro: You have to accept the landscape that is out there. You’ve got to accept every single bit of it. I don’t care if you like it. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if you like Yelp. I don’t care if you don’t like Yelp. They’re here and they’re a part of this business right now in 2020. Play the game. That’s it. Do everything you can to get that five-star rating, and that’s what you have to do. I say that, but at the same time, I know the feeling of getting that five-star review and it gets filtered. I know the feeling of getting that one-star review and you can’t even figure out who it is. You’re like, “This isn’t even our customer.” I’ve looked everywhere like, “This doesn’t even make sense. This isn’t even our customer.” I know that.
Louis Massaro: I don’t know. My thought process is always, “Can I do something about it? If so, let me take action and do something about it. If not, let me just accept it and move on.”
Chris DeHerrera: Stay stuck in it.
Louis Massaro: I’m not going to tear myself apart and have a sick stomach because Yelp took my five-star review down. It stings at first. The idea is, with that type of stuff, talking about the mental game for a moving CEO, you get upset about something. Your mover doesn’t show up, one of your sales reps does something wrong, puts the wrong notes in the system, it screws up a job, Yelp takes down your five-star review. You’ll get mad. You’ll feel a burn in your stomach. To whatever level you’re used to feeling that, you’ve got to just start, little by little, closing the gap between the time that the thing happens that you’re pissed off about and the time where you shake it off and let it go.
Chris DeHerrera: There’s no benefit to just staying.
Louis Massaro: If you need to feel it for five minutes and get pissed, whatever you got to do, punch the walls, whatever it is, close the gap from the place where you’re pissed to the place where you’re all good again, because that’s where your company needs you to be on point. Not to be upset about little trivial stuff. Again, $500,000 strategy gets mad over a Yelp review? $5 million strategy says that’s part of the game, move up on. You know what I’m saying?
Chris DeHerrera: Yeah. Either deal with it or accept it.
Louis Massaro: That’s it.
Chris DeHerrera: It is what it is.
Louis Massaro: What can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen again? That’s it. Something happens, what can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen again?
Chris DeHerrera: You had addressed the last part of his comment, in which he said, “I’m not so sure it’s as easy as you make it out to me. Get real, buddy.” I agree with that. I don’t think you make it seem as easy as he maybe thinks you do, but, I would say, maybe, you could give just a couple of helpful tips or pointers for somebody who may be experiencing some of these same feelings that this guy’s going through.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Well, I think we kind of sprinkled a bunch of them all throughout this episode. Go back and listen to it again. I would say, to win in 2020 in the moving business, you’ve got to have your marketing on point. You’ve got to know your numbers, your marketing, ROI, report. You’ve got to have that. Smart Moving users, it’s in there. It’s built-in for you. Full disclosure. I’m a co-founder of Smart Moving.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to know those numbers so that you could test certain things, track them based on what the ROI is, and then tweak them. Your marketing, you got to get on top of that. Then, your sales process has to be more than, “Hey, we call people, we leave them a message, and we move on,” and that’s it. You’ve got to really dial that in. Go to louismassaro.com. Watch all the videos on sales. Click on the sales category. Watch all those videos just to get you started.
Louis Massaro: Then, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got your mover hiring process down. Yes, it’s hard. Double, triple, quadruple down on the effort that you make to hire movers. Instead of looking at it as just something we do once in a while when we need people and we put an ad and it used to be kind of easy, look at it as something where this needs to be a built-in process that the minute we need somebody, we play on the process, the recruitment effort goes out and we run them through it, and that’s it.
Louis Massaro: It’s got to be taken more seriously. It can’t be something where your dispatcher says, “Hey, we’re short on guys,” and you’re like, “We’ll run an ad.” You’ve got to step it up. You’ve got to step it up and you got to tackle it, because the companies that are crushing it right now, they’ve got all three of these things lined up solidly. I would say, focus on those three things.
Chris DeHerrera: Cool. All right. Good. Well, I won’t throw curveballs at you anymore from negative comments, but I thought [crosstalk 00:47:42].
Louis Massaro: No. I like that. It was good. I think it’s important, Chris, because I know there’s a lot of people that feel that way.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s what I thought.
Louis Massaro: There’s nothing wrong with them. It’s just, sometimes, you need someone else to shed light on a different way of looking at it. When you are in a position where you’re a business owner, you own the company, a lot of times, you don’t have people around you that will tell you the tough things that they need to tell you.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s true.
Louis Massaro: Because the people that are surrounding you almost every day are your employees. Sometimes, you could get some decent feedback from them and some good feedback from them, from trusted people, but, if you don’t have someone else to share that perspective and say, “Hey, why don’t you look at it like this?” Actually, let’s send him a link to this. Let’s make sure he gets this and listens to this and say, “We made this for you.”
Chris DeHerrera: Okay, yeah.
Louis Massaro: I hope that just the change in perspective gets him to look at it, because he can change all this so easily. I say that again. He can change all this so easily. I’m not saying that the business is easy, but he could make the changes. All it is is steps. Do this, do that, do this, do that. Take the steps, but believe that it’s possible.
Louis Massaro: Anybody that is feeling this way, they don’t believe that it’s possible. They’re like, “The world’s going on and the world’s going to end, tat-tat-tat-tat.” You’ve got to block all that out, ignore that, go for what’s in front of you, because the iron is hot right now and a lot of people are making a lot of money. That’s just the reality of it.
Chris DeHerrera: That’s true. Well, he was asking for you to get real. I think you just got real.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, probably more than he was expecting from his comment. Listen, guys. Let me know what you think about these episodes. If you are loving this, if you’re liking this, if you’re hating this, if you’re getting some perspective, some motivation, some tips, some strategies, let me know. Just send me a DM at Louis Massaro on Instagram. Send me a picture of you listening to this. I’d love to get the feedback. I’d love to know that we’re not just sitting here talking to each other for no reason. Leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. Let me know what you think about this specific episode.
Louis Massaro: If you don’t already have your tickets for our upcoming seminar, Moving CEO Live, make sure you go to movingseminar.com. That’s movingseminar.com. For three days, I am going to lay out detailed step-by-step strategies on how to dominate the next 10 years of the moving business. You need to be there. Go to movingseminar.com. All the details are there. Until we see you next time. Go out there every single day, profit in your business, and thrive in your life. I’ll see you later, my friends.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to motivate your sales team to book more moves.
“Your team’s got to be motivated. Because it’s no longer a reactive game. It’s no longer, hey, the phone rings off the hook, and we pick it up and we book moves.”
“The way that you structure your sales process in your organization has to be on point in this modern day of moving, in order for you to be ultra-profitable.”
“When you’re spending money on leads, you need to have a solid sales team and they need to be motivated to go after these leads, because it’s very proactive, what they need to do.”
“I used to make the same mistake, I believed that our employees were just as motivated and excited for the growth of our company as I was. And it’s not the case.“
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: All right, my friend, this is Louis Massaro and welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to help you take your moving company to the next level, reduce stress, increase profits, live a better quality of life. I’ve got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s up, Chris?
Chris: What’s up? What’s up?
Louis Massaro: So, these episodes, what we’ve been doing is, we have been taking questions that come in through social media, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channel, or through support. And usually, I don’t know what the question is going to be, ahead of time, but I happen to see just now, two seconds before we went on, the question. So, I have a little bit of a head start today, but not much. But I’ll let you go ahead and ask the question because all I saw was what you put as the title for the video.
Chris: Okay, all right. Well, yeah, I’ll give you a few more details here then. So, this question came in from one of our followers, and he’s having some issues with his sales team. His first question, his first initial question was, “How do I motivate my sales team? They don’t want to follow up on leads.” So, I commented back with him, I wanted to get some more details. And he wrote back and he says, “Listen, I give them a ton of leads, they don’t seem to want to follow up with them. I have four moving consultants, no sales manager.” All right. “Last year, we did just under $2 million, but I’m trying to get to $3 million.” And he just wants to know, how can he kick his sales team into full gear, into high gear?
Louis Massaro: Okay. All right. So, for sales consultants, here’s the deal, your team’s got to be motivated, right? Because it’s no longer a reactive game. It’s no longer, hey, the phone rings off the hook, and we pick it up and we book moves. You’ve got to be able to deal with leads, whether you’re buying leads from moving lead providers or they’re just leads coming from your website. There’s outbound calls that need to be made, and you might not always get them on the phone. All right? So, the way that you structure your sales process in your organization and in your call center, whatever you want to call it, has to be on point in this modern day of moving, in order for you to be ultra-profitable.
Louis Massaro: Because, if not, I would just guess to say that his profits aren’t nearly where he wants them to be either. If he’s got four consultants, they’re doing under $2 million, he’s got nobody managing them, he’s trying to go to three, I mean, because at the end of the day, it’s like, what are the profits? We didn’t get that information. Next time, we’ll dig a little deeper. But, you didn’t get that. Did you?
Chris: No.
Louis Massaro: Okay.
Chris: No. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, the thing is, when you’re spending money on leads, and when I say leads, I’m talking about any form of advertising, any form of marketing. So, whether it’s pay-per-click, direct mail, billboards, moving lead providers, Yelp, it doesn’t matter, that’s all lead. You need to have a solid sales team and they need to be motivated to go after these leads, because it’s very proactive, what they need to do. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And, a lot of times, what I see companies do is they cast a vision for the business, “Here’s where we’re going, here’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going to go from $2 million or just under $2 million to $3 million. Guys, come on, this is what we’re going to $3 million.” Which is good. That’s part of the equation.
Chris: Yeah. Fire them up.
Louis Massaro: Fire them up, but that’s only part of it. So, the next part is, what’s in it for them? We, because I used to make the same mistake, believed that our employees are just as motivated and excited for the growth of our company as we are. And it’s not the case.
Chris: Not true. Not true.
Louis Massaro: They might show it. They might act like, “Yeah, let’s go, we’re going to $3 million.” Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But they’re not that motivated. So, you’ve got, hey, what’s in it for the company? Right?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Louis Massaro: Then you’ve got it, what’s in it for them?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: If they book more jobs, if they follow up on those leads, what do they get out of it? And then you also have, what’s in it for the customer? As well. So, if you’re out there, we didn’t find out, that’s everything you’ve got on him, right? I’m not going to…
Chris: Yeah, I mean, he may have messaged me back before we started filming.
Louis Massaro: No problem. No problem. So, what’s in it for the company? What’s in it for me, the salesperson? What’s in it for the customer? And what I mean by that is, if the sales reps on the phone, moving consultant, whatever you want to call them, and they’re quoting that customer and trying to book that move, they need to believe in their product. Meaning, they need to believe that they’re going to send crews out, they’re going to do an amazing job for that customer. And if they believe that, it’s your job as the owner or the sales manager, to let those sales reps, those moving consultants know that, “Hey, it is your duty to make sure that we book these jobs because we need to make sure that these customers that come across our path are in good hands.
Louis Massaro: “We know some of the competition out there, we know some of the horror stories of the things that happen. We do a great job. Not only are you going to make money for you, make money for the company, but you’re also going to save these customers from any potential problems that they might have if they don’t go with us. And I know we’re not the cheapest,” but you need to be able to explain to them why it is that we’re not the cheapest. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, they need to see those three dynamics to get the ultimate, not only motivation, but inspiration.
Chris: To feel like they have more of a purpose than just selling a move. Like they’re actually helping these people, they’re making their lives better.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, even moving company owners, don’t realize that they are really helping people. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: If you go and you do a good service, you don’t realize it because you don’t get the thank you’s. It’s hard to get the good reviews. Nobody’s sending you a box of chocolate and flowers and saying, “Thanks so much for the great move.” If something goes wrong-
Chris: You’ll hear from them.
Louis Massaro: There’re scratches, you’re going to hear from them.
Chris: You’re going to hear from them.
Louis Massaro: But if it goes great, you don’t hear from them. But, when you do this so much and you see the difference and you know the stress that people go through when they move, and you’re able to perform a good move for them, you don’t realize what that can do for their stress levels. And then, from that, what that does for their family, what that does for their job, what that does for their health.
Chris: There’s lasting effects.
Louis Massaro: There’s lasting effects of it. So, just because you’re not getting the, “Thank you,” and you’re not getting the, “Hey, you’re changing people’s lives,” don’t think that you’re not changing people’s lives.
Chris: Right. That’s really cool. You don’t think about that very much, but you’re right. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use a moving company to move, but, I mean, I would never not. Moving yourself is rough. It’s hard. And when you have a good company, like you have somebody come in and they do a good job, they’re professional about it, I mean, yeah, that alleviates a lot of stress when you’re moving.
Louis Massaro: But, you know what? If you had a couple of bad experiences, you’d probably be looking for a U-haul and some friends to do it yourself. Because you’d say, “You know what? I’ve tried that professional mover route, and that’s not good.” So, when you think about it like that, too, it’s like, “Hey, this customer has come across our path, we’ve got to make sure that they get a good move. It’s good for our business, it’s good for the industry as a whole. Because, if they go out there and they get a bad move, they get duped into one of these low prices, and they have a bad experience, well, what happens next time they want to move? And they just want to rent a truck.
Louis Massaro: I mean, that’s what hurts the industry more than anything. So, again, back to where we saw motivating his salespeople.
Chris: Right, he wants them to be fired up, not only to be excited about being on the phones or whatever, but he’s got a goal in mind. He wants to reach $3 million.
Louis Massaro: Okay. Well, each one of those individuals, we’re talking about for individuals, they all have a goal, too. And if they don’t have a goal, it’s his job to give them a goal. A lot of times, first of all, they need to be on commission. Hands down, there’s no doubt about that, they need to be on commission. But they also need goals to reach. At a minimum, they need monthly goals that they’re trying to hit, revenue numbers. I like to do revenue and not amount of jobs booked. Because, I want them focused on what I’m focused on. And what I’m focused on is like, if I’ve got an opportunity to call this little one-bedroom apartment, or I’ve got this opportunity to close this big $5,000 job. As a company, if we’re one collective mind, I want them focused on the $5,000 job.
Louis Massaro: So, I want their goals to be based off of revenue. And a lot of times, you’ll hear people say like, well, they get a commission, they should be incentivized, they should be focused. That should motivate them enough just to get the commission. But what happens with the commission is, if you’ve ever gotten like, and I know you have recently, if you’ve ever gotten more money or a raise, anybody listening, you had a certain goal in life to make a certain amount of money. Originally, when I first got in the business, I’m like… Before I got in the business, I was like, “I want to be able to make $100,000 a year.” It was like, in my mind, it was actually, I said, “$10,000 a month,” which is $120.
Louis Massaro: Once I got in the business, I was like, “Okay, I want to make $400,000 a year.” And so, now, I look at $100,000 a year and I’m like, I can’t-
Chris: You’re not motivated, you’re not pumped up about that.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. And so, the point is that, it’s the same thing when you get a pay raise. It’s like you’re all excited you got this raise. Or, as an owner, you’re making more profit, but then you get accustomed to that amount, and then you’re no longer motivated. Now it just becomes the norm. That’s your baseline.
Chris: Right. The excitement wears off.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it wears off. So, by having goals that they could hit every single month, and then tying those goals to bonuses that you pay them, it changes it up every month. The number that they need to hit is different. The number that they get is different. They need to know what’s in it for them.
Chris: When it comes to those kind of bonuses, I mean, what did you pay your salespeople as far as bonuses go?
Louis Massaro: It would be something that was basically, I would sit them down and look at what they did the month before. I would look at where we are currently. Like, okay, we’re coming out of slow season, we’re going in the busy season, things are going to naturally pick up anyways. So, let’s say you did 60,000 last month, and I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Okay, the lead volume’s up, you’re closing your leads at this percentage, you should be able to book $72,000 this next month.”
Chris: Okay. So, you give them a goal.
Louis Massaro: What I would do is I would sit down with them, and then, later on, I taught this to my sales managers and they would do it. But, I would sit down with them and say, “Look, here’s what you did last month,” talk about it a little bit. There’s a whole process for this that we teach in Moving Sales Academy. For the one on one goal setting meeting, there’s a whole framework for it. But essentially, we sit down and go over where they are, and say like, “What do you think you could hit this month?” So, instead of me giving it to them, I’ll be like, “Chris, what do you think you could hit this month? You hit $60,000 last month, what do you think you could do?”
Louis Massaro: And depending on what you say, if I think what you say is out of reach, or I think it’s too low, I’m going to challenge you one way or the other.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: You see what I’m saying?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, if you’re like, “Hey, I think I can go to $62.” I’m going to be like, “$62? You did $60 last month. Every month, you’ve been getting better since you got here. And we’ve got season coming up. The lead, you can see the leads are coming in. There’s more leads coming in. I think you’ll do $72. And I’ll tell you what, if you hit $72, I’ll give you $350 extra this month.” And you’re like, “I don’t know.” “Okay, I’ll tell you what, how about $70, I’ll give you $200 extra.”
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Don’t get caught up on the percentage and the amount, it’s just, it’s something that’s significant enough to make them move. You’re talking about $350, that’s a car payment. That’s a significant amount of extra money for a sales rep to make that month, that they wouldn’t normally make. And so, once you have that agreed-upon amount, and the goal is that, the key to the goal is that it needs to be attainable. Don’t dangle some carrot out in front of their face that they’re never going to get, because then it loses its effect.
Chris: Yeah, they lose their motivation.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, you go a few months and you keep setting these goals that are way too high…
Chris: They won’t care anymore.
Louis Massaro: They won’t care anymore. So, don’t be cheap. You’ve got to be able to say like, “I’m willing to spend some money, to get them to move, to get them to do the things that I need them to do.” But now, you do that every month, they get used to that, too. So, it becomes, okay, they’ve gotten accustomed to the commission, that’s just part of their pay. They’re just, they’re used to it. Because, typically, people will kind of level out at a certain amount. You’ll have somebody there, this guy, he’s a $40,000 a month type of guy. Then you’ve got somebody else, she’s $120,000 a month type of girl. You know what I’m trying to say?
Louis Massaro: They could get better and they could grow, but they’re usually like, will hit, become who they’re going to be within that first six months. If you’re coaching them and you’re working with them and you’re guiding them through the process, they’ll get to that point.
Chris: That’s helpful. I mean, they can become predictable, so, you know what you can rely on.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, because, ideally, you don’t want to just hire somebody, train them and then send them off to swim or sink. You want to have what we call a Moving Sales Academy Enhancement Training. You want to have the process of taking them through and making the existing reps you have better, but there are certain key points that you focus on to make them better. But, after six months of doing that, it’s like, okay, we know where they’re at. However, if there’s somebody that, let’s say, they’re in that $60, they’re kind of like $60,000 a month type person.
Chris: Consistent.
Louis Massaro: It doesn’t mean you can’t push them to go to $70. You take four reps and you push each one of them to do an extra $10,000, that’s $40,000. That’s what? $400 and… what is that? $480,000 a year.
Chris: Half a million, almost.
Louis Massaro: Almost half a million dollars by getting those reps to book an extra $10,000. When you talk about an extra $10,000, I mean, what are we really talking about? So, let’s say you’ve got…
Chris: Maybe like an extra seven moves each or something.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, let’s say if $1,000 average move to an extra 10 moves a month, a month. So, you’re talking about like an extra two and a half moves a week. So, you’re telling me that if you had them motivated, you gave them the coaching, you gave them what they needed and the incentive to hit it, they couldn’t book an extra two and a half moves a week?
Chris: Yeah, that’s attainable.
Louis Massaro: I mean, if you asked all of your sales reps. If you’re listening, just to go ask all your sales reps, “Hey, you think you could book an extra two jobs or three jobs a week? If you just focused a little bit more, if you try to…” Without even giving them tools, and without even giving them motivation, they could do it. You give them the tools, you give them the motivation, you give them the coaching, and manage the sales process, I mean, that easily could double.
Chris: Do you feel like, in this guy’s situation, that jumped from just under $2 million to $3 million in revenue? Is that something that you think could be done with those same four salespeople, and just by incentivizing and motivating that team? I mean, is that something that’s possible?
Louis Massaro: I mean, look, you might need another one or two salespeople. I don’t know how these particular salespeople are performing. I don’t know what his lead volume looks like. But, yeah, it’s totally attainable. I mean, to go up from two to $3 million, it’s just in the tightening up of the sales… I mean, you’ve seen it. I mean, all that, we get the success stories, we hear them, “I doubled. I went up from $3 million to $6 million. I went from $2 million to $4 million. It’s…
Chris: Yeah, it’s doable.
Louis Massaro: It’s doable, for sure.
Chris: Yeah, that’s good. What else would you do to motivate them? Just day-to-day, I know you had talked about having meetings every day, right? Like sales meetings?
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: What does that look like?
Louis Massaro: Well, we call it the morning huddle. And basically, you start off by, essentially, it’s just a meeting in the morning to get them going, to get them fired up, to get their head in the right place. If you’re listening, you think about your team, your sales team in the morning in the office. And without anybody guiding them, they’re at the coffee machine making their third cup of coffee. They’re a little slow to sit down, they’re putting on their headset or whatever the situation is.
Chris: Yeah, they’re hungover.
Louis Massaro: Well, yeah, whatever. Most people don’t do the work to get their mind in the right place every morning, every day. You know how important, I mean, for me, that’s my whole morning setup on getting my mind right. Most people don’t do that. You can’t expect your team to do that. You’ve got to come in and help them get their mind right on the mission for the day. And the mission for the day is to book the move of every call that you speak to, every person you speak to. So, it’s basically a little pump up session, to get them committed to what the day is going to look like. What their goal is for the day. And also acknowledge some of the successes from the day before and encourage them. Basically, fire them up, and get them on the phones.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to think about it. And I didn’t want to do this back in the day. Like, you see me, I’m on camera or on stage and doing what I do because I have a mission right now. When I had my business, I didn’t want to come give a big pep rally. I wanted to come in and go to my office and not say hi to anybody and close the door, and do my own thing. It’s what I wanted to do, but I knew what was necessary. I knew there was a whole day ahead of the team, and somebody had to set them off in the right trajectory. Somebody had to get their mind going towards booking moves.
Chris: I know you had talked about before, setting the mood in the office, not just with the morning huddle, but also, I remember you used to talk about you played music. What are some more things like that that can help fire them up?
Louis Massaro: The tone of the office is so important. For me, one of the rules of setting up your sales department is have it as far away from dispatch as possible. Right?
Chris: Uh-huh.
Louis Massaro: If you think about what goes on in dispatch, they’re dealing with the day-to-day of the business. This guy didn’t show up, somebody’s calling your truck, cut them off in traffic. This customer is calling, they’ve got an issue with some damage, whatever. The piano fell off the 10th floor, whatever it might be. Sales doesn’t need to hear that. Sales needs to be in positivity, like, “Everything’s all good. I believe in my product. I’m selling my product.” If they’re constantly hearing about all these little things that happen, it’s part of the logistical thing. I don’t care how good your company is, there are things that happen in dispatch that makes that a stressful position. Don’t put that stress on the people that you want to be out there fishing for customers. Right?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: So, that’s number one. Next thing is, keep it upbeat. Play some music lightly. Like, we had speakers installed in the ceiling. You don’t have to get fancy with it, you can get a couple wireless speakers, and you put them in the office. And played music to where it was loud enough that they could hear it, but low enough that the customer couldn’t hear it on the phone. And it just helped with the energy in the office. And so, different days, we’d play different types of music. It could be, one day, it’d be dance music, and other days it would be old school, Motown R&B. Another day, it’d be hip hop, whatever it might be.
Chris: Mix it up.
Louis Massaro: And then, if it’s the afternoon time and everybody’s dragging, you might have to turn it up a little bit, it gets more BPMs going in there and really turn it up to get them fired up for the day. Another thing that we did was, every day, we did a two o’clock stretch. And so, at two o’clock, I played a song, and when that song went on, everybody in my office had to get up. If you were on the phone with the customer, it didn’t matter. You had to stand up from your desk, and I came out of my office too, you had to stand up. And if you didn’t want to stretch, you didn’t have to stretch, but you had to move around, move your body. Because when you sit all day, by two o’clock, you’re just like…
Chris: Oh, yeah, that afternoon lull kicks in.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So, we would do that. And then, spiffs.
Chris: Spiffs.
Louis Massaro: Spiffs. A spiff is an incentive that you just arbitrarily come up with, whatever it’s going to be. I’ll give an example. A spiff would be, “Hey, guys, whoever books 10 jobs today, you’re going to get $20 bucks. Hey, guys, if we book 100 jobs together as a team for the week, I’m going to buy everybody lunch on Friday from your favorite restaurant. While I’d walk in, take $100 bill out of my pocket, tape it on the wall, and be like, “Hey, listen up, whoever books the first five jobs, go grab that $100, that’s yours.
Chris: Nice.
Louis Massaro: So, the thing would spiffs though, is that, you can’t use them every day. That’s your secret weapon. They expect the commission. They expect the monthly goals. If they expect the spiffs, they lose their effectiveness.
Chris: I see. Okay.
Louis Massaro: So, the spiffs are like, “Okay, I see, the energy’s low, everybody’s been like they’re not seeming motivated. I need to come in and give them that shock factor, and get them motivated again.” Whether that’s like, first thing Monday morning, you just want to get the momentum going, or whether it’s like by Thursday, everybody’s just kind of dying off and you need to get them excited again. It’s got to motivate them, it can’t be expected, and you’ve got to be able to change it up. Make it fun. We used to put a wheel of fortune in the office, whoever books the next whatever, you get to go spin the wheel. And I’d have all kinds of prizes on there, whether it was 20 bucks, 100 bucks.
Louis Massaro: I had tickets to the Dolphins, season tickets, where I had club level seats. I’ll be like, you get two club-level seats to the next game. You’ve got to keep the excitement up. And it doesn’t always flow over to the other departments, but your sales is different. You’ve got to keep them fired up and you’ve got to keep them wanting to go out there and chase down these leads and get these jobs booked.
Chris: What’s an ideal schedule for a salesperson that’s going to get them to perform at their most? Because I can see how they could get burnt out.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Do you want to only work them certain time of the day, certain hours, anything like that?
Louis Massaro: No, I mean, it all depends on where you’re located, how many offices you have. Like, for me, we had, our call center was on the East Coast, but we had offices on the West Coast and all in between. So, I had to have two shifts going on, so that we could be open from 8:00 to 8:00, or 9:00 to 9:00 at one point. So, I don’t think that necessarily matters, but it is important that they have certain criteria. You’ve got to have certain… we’re getting into managing them now, which is a little bit different than keeping them motivated. But, the idea is, with their goals, you want to make sure, with those goals, they know where they’re at.
Louis Massaro: So, whether you send out a weekly progress report email to everybody, that says, “Here’s where you’re at in relation to your goal.” Or, if somebody’s using SmartMoving, I’m co-founder in SmartMoving, if you’re using that as your CRM, then you could have that all on your dashboard right there. Or, you have a whiteboard in your office and you could show the progress of everybody where they’re at and turn it into more of a competition. There’s a lot of other things you could do with challenges and face-offs. You’ve got to keep it exciting. We had all kinds of what I call carnival games going on in the office too. We would do the wheel of fortune, we would do a little basketball hoop, I’d had a putting green in the office, and I’m like, “Look, first person to book,” whatever it might be, whatever it is, if it’s 10 jobs, “You get the putt for $100.”
Chris: Nice.
Louis Massaro: And so, they would go, and I’d say, “Listen, I’ll give you $10 bucks right now. Or, you could putt and get $100 if you make it in, or zero if you don’t make it.” But the whole office would gather around, nobody was going to take the $10. And it just created excitement for everybody. So, even if the person that was doing it, didn’t make it or the other people weren’t involved, they were still involved. There was still excitement. It’s not a boring like… job. So, that’s the natural state of what will happen with your moving consultants. What he’s expecting is the natural state of what will happen if you sit somebody down at a computer with a phone, say, “Here are some leads, call them, talk to them about their move, listen to everything they have in their house, and then guide them through the process of booking with our company. Oh, and when they say that your price is too high, then you’ve got to come back and you’ve got to say this to them.”
Louis Massaro: If you just leave them alone, and let them just do that, their natural state is going to be… I mean, they’re not going to want to do it, you’ve got to cultivate that environment.
Chris: Are there signs that can let you know ahead of time when the morale is getting low? Or, I mean, besides the numbers, obviously, but, I mean, is there something you could look at a salesperson and just see in them that they need some incentive, some motivation?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, well, obviously, you have the numbers. You’re tracking how many calls they’re making and how much talk time they have. But, you could tell just by their demeanor. And, if you don’t have… like, this guy doesn’t have a sales manager, someone has to wear the sales manager’s hat. Because, there are certain things that need to happen in order to keep them running and keep them fired up, keep them on point. But, if you’ve got to grab one person and pull them aside, “Hey, what’s going on? What’s up? I see you’re not quite into it.” And just talk to them like a person, to find out what’s going on. Give them some encouragement, and then send them back out on the field. You’ve got to give them some encouragement, talk to them, see what their issue is. And make sure that there’s nothing going on in their head, that makes them not motivated anymore.
Chris: Well, and that can be contagious. They can infect the rest of your team.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, absolutely. You can’t let it linger. You’ve got to be able to identify it. You don’t identify it one day, okay. You don’t identify it after three or four days, you let somebody go a week, fine. You let it go longer than that, it affects the people around you. And it affects them if they’re just minding their business, and they’re just like… But if they start talking negatively, they start complaining, now they’re an infection. And infection will take down your whole company, from the inside out. So, you’ve got to be able to talk to them and see what’s going on. And if you can’t reverse the infection, then they’ve got to go.
Chris: Yeah. I wonder, in this guy’s situation, his initial comment was saying, “They don’t want to follow up on leads.” Is there something that he can do just… Maybe they’re making their initial dials and stuff, but when it comes to the follow-up, maybe it’s… Could it be something in his process with it that’s keeping the salespeople down? I don’t know.
Louis Massaro: Well, what I’m thinking when you say that is probably there is no process. He’s probably barking orders and saying, “Hey, follow up with them, follow up with them, follow up with them.” But, that doesn’t work. Because I’ve been where he is. I’ve been at four consultants with no sales manager, asking them to follow up. And then I’ve been at 60, 70 consultants with four sales managers, and they’re all doing it. So, if you can’t get four people to do it, but you could get 60, 70 people to do it, what’s the difference there? The difference is, you’ve laid out something that is systematic that they just have to follow. They know what’s next. They get off the phone with one customer, they know what to do next. They know what the priority is, they know which lead they should call, they know when they should call that customer back, when they get off the phone with them.
Louis Massaro: When you have all that lined up, they’ll do it. And all you need is just somebody to just make sure that they do it. You pull up, you could see it all in your CRM. You pull up SmartMoving or whatever you use, you can see what they’re doing and you can identify it and have a talk with them right away, and coach them right away. But, typically, what I see is that people don’t have a follow-up process. So, they bark the order, and then the reps just don’t know what to do, or when to do it, or how to prioritize what’s in their lead inbox.
Chris: Yeah. One of the other aspects of this is he was saying, “I give them a ton of leads.” And with the leads, obviously, if they’re not following up, they’re burning through his leads. Right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. Costing him a ton of money.
Chris: Costing him a ton of money. With those leads, do you want to… Obviously, there’s going to be some salespeople who are better than others, right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: So, do you reward the people who are doing well with good leads? Or, do you give the good leads to the guys who are struggling to make them maybe have an easier job booking the move?
Louis Massaro: Which one of those options, I’m going to ask you, which one of those options lead to the company making more money?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, obviously, you’re just going to give the good leads to the good salespeople and get them booked. Right?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to starve out somebody new and not give them a shot, but, we teach at Moving Sales Academy, it’s called skill-based routing. And with phone calls and with leads, it’s about getting the lead to the person that’s got the skill to be able to handle that lead. So, whether it’s a bigger job, or whether it’s a job with packing, or whether it’s local versus long-distance, or a hot lead source versus one of the ones that doesn’t convert high, you want to be able to route those, based on that information.
Chris: Now, let’s say he decided to get a sales manager, what are the qualities of a good sales manager? And how can a sales manager step into this situation and make a difference?
Louis Massaro: Like, for me, when I first set up the call center, when I realized like, “Okay, I’ve got four offices, everybody’s booking themselves, each office, they’re handling their own calls. Some were crushing it, some were struggling. I said, “All right, I need to set up a central place to handle all of the calls.” So, I opened it up. I opened another office there, too. So, I made it the fifth office plus the call center. And went out and looked for a call center manager. I hired a recruiter, I looked for a call center manager, brought somebody in, highly qualified, they came in, and it wasn’t impactful.
Chris: Why not? Right?
Louis Massaro: He said, he was like, a great guy, by the way, but I didn’t have it set up for him properly. So, he came in, he’s like, “I need an assistant manager.” I said, “Okay.” I didn’t know anything at the time about call centers. This was me learning it. And so, I hired another assistant manager to help him. I was expecting him to develop and put all the processes in place.
Chris: You would think he would know how to do that. I mean, that’s, he’s a…
Louis Massaro: Yeah, but it’s not the case. It’s not the case. So, what I say now, what I decided to do after I let him go, was, I developed all the processes myself. I started really studying, I started learning sales psychology. I started going to call center conventions and learning all the different tools and everything like that, and put all the processes together myself, hired, took one of my moving consultants, who was awesome on the phone, made him my sales manager, and then mentored him and guided him on implementing those processes. So, now, I was like, “Here’s what needs to get done. Manager, here’s what needs to get done. Here, go make sure it gets done.”
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, the key is, and that’s what a lot of people do, they get like the Moving Sales Academy online course, for example. And what they’ll do is, they’ll give it to their sales manager and say, “Go implement this.” I mean, you know I can name a few. You know a few people out, their story. “I didn’t want to be bothered, I got it for the sales manager, he took it and ran with it and we had great results.” So, the idea is, when you bring a manager in, that manager’s role is to manage the processes. If the manager is managing processes, and managing people as an afterthought, they’re more effective and their job becomes easier. If you bring somebody in and manage these people, and they’re unruly, and they’re not doing what… It’s not even that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, they don’t know exactly what to do. You’ve got to give them instruction.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to tell them, “Here’s what needs to get done, here’s when it needs to get done.” And then a sales manager just needs the ability to make sure all that stuff’s getting done. To show up every day, pull up the CRM, see who is following up with their leads, who’s not. Asking them about it. Blocking time on their calendar for enhancement training, to listen to calls from reps and take them through, we had the moving consultant evaluation guide, take them through that. See where they’re lacking, is it in their intro? Is it in going through the script and painting the picture? Or, is it going for the close and asking for the business? Find out where they need some help, coach them, work with them, make them better. Put them back on the phone, see the improvement.
Chris: Along the same lines as you were talking about hiring the call center manager, is it better to, I know the answer, but I wanted to just talk about this, sometimes it’s better to hire somebody without experience than it is to hire somebody who’s got 20 years of sales experience, to come in and start selling for you. Right? I mean, I don’t know, talk about that a little bit. I know the answer, but I feel like it’s never too late to… I mean, would you recommend he start over?
Louis Massaro: I would recommend, if he wants to go to $3 million, that he gets himself a sales manager. Whether it’s, he goes out and gets it, or makes one of his moving consultants the sales manager, or he becomes a sales manager. Okay?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Because part of that too, is the hiring, the training. You can’t let your sales machine break down. If you’re trying to get somewhere, your marketing is the fuel that goes into the vehicle, the vehicle is the sales machine, that’s what’s going to get you there. So, you need the fuel. But, if the sales machine breaks down, or slows down, you’re not going to get to where you need to be. So, that needs to be a focus. They need to be managed. You need to be able to hire quickly, you need to be able to fire quickly. You hire, you train, you get them in the seat, you bring them through both phases of training, then you continue to do enhancement training to make sure they’re good. You invested in this person, you took the time. Nobody likes hiring.
Louis Massaro: Nobody likes having to put an ad and bring people in or ask somebody if they know somebody and it’s someone new, are they going to work out or they’re not going to work out? So, once you do that and you’ve invested in them, let that first phase of training and the second phase be like, they’ve got the training wheels on, and then you finally take the training wheels off. But that doesn’t mean, if they’re a little kid, you don’t say, “Go ride around the neighborhood instead of big major streets and do what you want.” You still guide them and show them how to do things, and you want to do that with your sales team to build them up. But I missed, what was the original question? We went off.
Chris: Yeah, I was just thinking…
Louis Massaro: You were saying that do they need experience?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Do they need experience coming in? If they got a bunch of sales experience, is that good or not good?
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Sales experience can be good. Now, if they’ve sold for another moving company, you want to be, it doesn’t mean they’re bad, but it does not mean they’re good either. A lot of people will be like, “Oh, yeah, look, no, they did it, they have experience with the CRM, they know that, they know how to do an inventory. They must be good.” But the reality is, most people aren’t doing it the right way. And so, you might have to retrain somebody. So, for example, that sales manager that hired and didn’t work out, it wasn’t his fault. I was just expecting him to build my processes and build my business the way that I wanted it to be built. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So, had I brought him in after I established, built my moving sales machine, if you will. And said, “Here’s what it is, here’s the processes, here’s what you need to do on a daily, go and run it,” he would have done a fantastic job. So, I just want to make that distinction that to where it’s not that he was experienced, he wasn’t good, it was that he came in, there was nothing for him to manage except people. And those people had no processes to follow. So, they became very hard to manage. When people have a process to follow, all you need to do is guide them back to the process. What is that person supposed to be doing right now? You know, guide them back to that. Does that make sense?
Chris: Yeah. Is that the route that you recommend for a moving company once they get to a certain size that they should, if you have multiple locations, should you have a call center?
Louis Massaro: If you have multiple locations, and they’re all owned by you, I would definitely have a call center. Because it gives you more… And when I say a call center, let’s say he has one office, and then, this guy, he’s got four consultants. He’s doing $2 million, approximately. Let’s say he opens another office. Maybe he needs to add another consultant for that. But he’s already got this, sound like he doesn’t have them yet. But, once you get the systems and the processes going, it’s easier to control at one location than it is at multiple locations. So, you don’t need to have people on the phones in another location. You might need an on-site estimator, and that’s okay, that you could book appointments for out of the main location. But what do you need there? You need trucks, you need movers, you need somebody to control and operate the movers and the trucks. But, keep your sales centralized.
Chris: Yeah. I’m thinking back to, well, I’m not thinking back, but I want you to think back to some of your biggest sales days, coming up. Do you remember any of those days where, I mean, was there excitement in the air, people jumping up and down where you were having big days?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, there were days, I mean, we definitely had like $100,000 days.
Chris: Wow. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But, you’re talking about multiple locations, you’re talking about local and long-distance. There was a time period there where we were hitting that on a pretty regular… Not every day, but it was definitely a big deal. And it was super fun to sit there, and just hit refresh on the CRM. And just watch that, and watch that number just climb, and climb, and hear the excitement and just go out and rally everybody up. But that was a result of a well-orchestrated sales process. That’s it. It’s not that I have any type of superpower or anything like that, it was, from early on, it was like, all right, things need to be done a certain way. If you’re going to grow and you’re going to scale, you can’t expect every person to figure it out. You’ve got a small shop, it’s you and a couple people and you all sit around and you dispatch and we both do sales and you handle customer service and we’re all just doing a little bit of this, and that’s where we’re at. Okay, you could get away with, I do it my way, you do it your way.
Louis Massaro: But you start wanting to build a business and grow, it’s got to be uniform. It’s got to be the same. And when the stakes are high, like for me, you’re spending a lot of money on marketing, you’re spending a lot of money to hire and train salespeople, and then pay them to be there. Plus, phones, plus managers, plus directors, plus everybody that’s in there, plus, you’re there to make a profit, the stakes are high. So, for me, it became, every little micro-adjustment meant a significant amount of money. Every little improvement we can see. So, you look at all these processes. And then, a lot of people have been to either Moving Sales Academy seminars or even at the current seminars, Moving Mastery Summit, Moving CEO Live, we teach sales too, in addition to everything else.
Louis Massaro: But, all those processes were all developed out of the realization that little micro-improvements make a big difference. We show the example sometimes of like, what a 5% booking increase can do to the bottom line. And we show the example, and it’s like, for a small moving company like a $300,000 moving company, I believe this number’s like $156,000 more for the year, if you increase your booking percentage by 5%. For a midsize company that’s doing like a million, I believe the number was like $450,000 more a year, by increasing your booking percentage by 5%.
Chris: Yeah, now you’re getting bigger.
Louis Massaro: For a large company, like I think it’s a $2 million company in the example we use, $2.5, which is a good size, local only, 5% booking increase, it’s a million dollars more a year. So, when the question comes like, “Louis, where should I put my focus?” Or, “Louis, how did you build a $20 million company? Sales. Because, it’s not what we, leads, leads, leads. Listen, take the same leads and book them at a 5% higher. If you’re booking at 12%, get it to 17%. Do the math for yourself. Run those numbers for yourself and be like, “Okay, instead of booking it wherever you book at, if we went from 25… 12 to 17 doesn’t matter.
Louis Massaro: If it’s 20 to 25, or if it’s 30 to 35, wherever you’re at, wherever your booking percentage is, run the math on what it would be if you increased it by 5%.
Chris: Big difference.
Louis Massaro: And then just look and go, “Yeah, I can see that there’re some inefficiencies here, and I can see it’s possible.” I use that small example because it’s a small example. People are like, “Well, how did you help that company double their sales? How did they go from three to $6 million?” It’s not that hard once you realize all the little loose screws in the sales. And when you tighten that up, it’s a whole different business. It’s a whole different business.
Chris: So, for this guy, we know you recommend, for him to get to $3 million, you said, he’s going to need a sales manager for sure.
Louis Massaro: Whether he hires somebody or whether he steps into that role. He’s at that point where he could do it himself or somebody, somebody has to wear that hat. If you’re a little bit smaller, you can wear the hat part-time. At his level, wanting to go to three, you can’t just wish your way to three. And don’t buy more leads just to get to three. You might need more, I don’t know. But, the key is, tightening up that sales process. So, yeah, I would say, he’s going to probably need another, at least, another rep and somebody to be the sales manager.
Chris: Yeah. And that’s talking about upping his revenue to the goals that he has. As far as his specific question about incentivizing and motivating his salespeople, what are some specific things he can do?
Louis Massaro: Specifically, I mean, basically, make sure they’re all on commission, because we don’t know that they are. Make sure that they’re all on commission. Give them a weekly check, either hourly or salary as a draw, then give them a commission on the moves that they book. Keep them incentivized, but also keep them with some weekly pay, so they’re not waiting till the end of the month. That’s number one. Number two is, set monthly goals, and tie those to bonuses every single month, individually, for each rep. They don’t have to be the same. So, like, if I’m setting your goal for $75,000 because you’re currently at $68, but Susie over here is at $42, and I’m setting her for $50, it’s not about fairness.
Louis Massaro: It’s not about like, “Oh, why does she only have to hit this goal, and I have to hit that goal?” Because, I’m pushing you to be better, and reach more from where you’re at.
Chris: It’s an individual thing.
Louis Massaro: It’s an individual thing. So, set those goals every month. And then, when you feel the energy lacking, do the spiffs. Right?
Chris: Yeah, throw those in there.
Louis Massaro: Do the spiffs. Walk-in, “Hey, whoever books five jobs today, the first person to book X amount of jobs.” So, it’s like, “Whoever books X amount of jobs today, gets this thing.” Meaning, anybody that does it, gets whatever that thing is.
Chris: Whatever it is. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: “The first person to book this many jobs gets this thing.” That sets them off to the races. You want to get somebody going quick in the morning, the first person to get there, that’s what they get.
Chris: What’s the biggest spiff you ever gave out?
Louis Massaro: Well, I’ve done a few yearly spiffs. One of the things we did was, we called… and I always tried to have a theme around it too, just to make it exciting. Something new, something they’re talking about, something to break up the stagnant energy. Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: We did the Rolex 500. And the thing was, it was like, “The first person to hit $500,000 in sales,” it was going to take them a few months to do it, “the first person to hit $500,000 in sales, I’m buying you a Rolex.”
Chris: Damn, that’s awesome.
Louis Massaro: And so, yeah, that you want to talk about getting them fired up. It depends where you are. Like I was in South Florida, I had a bunch of hungry guys that that motivated them. And so, we probably gave away, I forget, at least, two or three, we did that.
Chris: That’s cool.
Louis Massaro: We did, whoever books the most this year, at least, a million dollars for the year, gets a trip to Vegas, all expenses paid, plus $5,000 in spending money.
Chris: Awesome.
Louis Massaro: Second prize gets $2,500, no trip. Third prize gets… No way, second prize I think got $5,000 also.
Chris: Okay, but no trip.
Louis Massaro: But no trip. And then third prize got $2,500, no trip. If you ever do like a winner gets this, do a second and third place. Because, what will happen is, even at that time, everybody knew who was going to win. Because one guy was just crushing it. So, if you put out this, “Hey, whoever hits, the number one person gets this.” And everybody goes, “We know it’s going to be this person.” Give them something to shoot for a little bit, “Man, well, I might be able to get second place. I might be able to get third place.” It’s not about the destination, it’s not about the amount, and it’s not about them, you want them self-driven going after something. And if they don’t feel like they can get it, they’re not going to go after it. So, that’s what I would do.
Chris: Do the rockstars that you had in the past, did you promote them? I mean, at some point, do they just keep being awesome salespeople or do you bring them up at some point?
Louis Massaro: Well, it depends. I mean, if you take somebody from sales to management, typically, they’re going to take a step back in pay.
Chris: Oh, yeah. If they’re a rockstar, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So, the people that I did, one sales manager that I mentored and brought up. I mean, he went from being a salesperson to being a sales manager, took a little step back, but then, went beyond where he could have went.
Chris: Oh, cool.
Louis Massaro: So, he’s a sales manager and moved into director of sales, who’s making over $200,000 a year. Wasn’t going to be able to do that booking moves, but, even the other four sales managers that I had had during that timeframe at the same time, because all those people require quite a bit of sales management, they had to take a step back in order to first step in that position with the hopes of growing with the company. So, if somebody is like an ultimate, ultimate, management, just because you’re great at sales, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be great at management. And just because you’re terrible at sales, it doesn’t mean you’ll be bad at management.
Louis Massaro: You might have somebody that’s really organized, and they’re really good with people, and they’ve got some management experience, but they’re just not a closer, that might be able to run your processes.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: And then if you have someone that’s just a rock star on the phone, and now you take them off the phone, and you’re having them just do a lot of administrative stuff, it could hurt your sales.
Chris: This is a good question, just being able to recognize those abilities in people like, if he’s going to go to $3 million and he’s going to hire some more salespeople, what should you look for in salespeople?
Louis Massaro: Well, first thing is, they need to sound good on the phone. So, before you even, during a phone interview, if they sound like they just crawled out of a dumpster, they’re not for you.
Chris: It’s not the guy.
Louis Massaro: Because that’s the first perception that your customers hear. So, they need to sound good. They need to be hungry, they need to want to make money. They need to be coachable. They need to be resourceful. They need to be someone, because you’re also helping these customers, the way that we teach to sell, is to provide excellent customer service, but then lead the customer to booking with our company, and enrolling into that reservation asking for the business. So, it’s not salesy, salesy, salesy, salesy, it’s not that at all. Anybody listening that knows our processes and using our products, they know, it’s not, the customer doesn’t feel like they’re being sold, the customer feels like they’re getting excellent customer service, and just, the person on the phone knows, like, “I’m now leading them to book the move with our company.”
Louis Massaro: So, those are some of the characteristics that they want to look for.
Chris: That’s cool. That’s good. I think we’re going to really help this guy out.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I think if he does that, he’ll be right on track. And, I mean, not to put a plug in there, but I would highly, highly recommend that he enrolls in our Moving Sales Academy online course, or join us at Moving CEO Live coming up.
Chris: I tell you what, if he just applied a small fraction of some of the stuff in Moving Sales Academy, that 5% increase is done deal.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, that’s very, very easy and attainable to do.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, I mean, we tell people when they look into it, it’s like, “Look, you try it, you don’t see the results in 30 days, I’ll give you your money back.” No big deal. And when I say that, Chris, it’s, I’m thinking, how could I help? I’m not thinking, how could I sell him something?
Chris: Of course.
Louis Massaro: I mean, you know that, but I’m just saying, I know, it’s like, there’s only so much that we could talk about in a podcast episode. But to get to step by step processes, there’s a place where I have that.
Chris: It’s all laid out.
Louis Massaro: It’s all laid out. And it’s just crucial that people have that sales process.
Chris: But that’s what’s great about Moving Sales Academy, and in here, I am plugging away, too. But it’s the program that we offer that you just see instant results. I mean, it’s immediate, as soon as you start implementing stuff.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. It’s cool to hear the comments about it. If anybody wants to learn more, you can just go to louismassaro.com. There’s probably a link on there somewhere.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: They’ll put a link. But, yeah, I mean, that’s how you take what took me 16 years to develop, on a high level, and apply it to any size company. You’ve got, you’re booking moves yourself, what you need is there for you. You’ve already got a call center, we’ve got a lot of bigger clients as well. Everything you need is there.
Chris: It’s the same.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. And you start dialing it in and you start taking a step by step, we call it learn and implement style, just learn it and implement it, you’ll see the results. But, for the sake of the podcast, make sure you’re paying them a commission, set up those goals every month, get some exciting spiffs, and make sure someone steps up into that role of sales manager, even if it’s the owner.
Chris: It’s a perfect time right now, we’re coming out of winter, getting ready to go into moving season, you could implement a few of these things and have a really great spring.
Louis Massaro: Well, and not assume, see, this big mistake people make is they assume, “Summer is coming. I’m going to make money. It’s all good.” But, the reality is, can you waste less leads? Can you raise your price, and book more jobs, so that at the end of the summer, there’s more left, there’s more money for you, so that you’ve got that money to get you through whatever you need. So, yeah, you’ve got to go out there, you’ve got to focus on building that sales machine for sure.
Chris: Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks for helping this guy. I’m sure he’s going to be happy.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. All right, guys, well, thanks for being here. Listen, if you like this episode, do me a favor, go to iTunes, Moving Mastery Podcast, and just leave me a review. Let me know what you thought, let me know what you think. If you have any questions at all, just hit me up on Instagram, it’s Louis Massaro, or @louismassaro, @ L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. Shoot me a DM, ask me a question and we’ll try to get it here on the podcast to answer for you. And until I see you next time, till I talk to you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, and thrive in your life, my friend.
In this video, Louis Massaro shares how his first moving company was a failure.
“Man, it was scary, I didn’t know anything. I just knew that there was money to be made in the moving business.”
“I had all the pads and dollies in my apartment and I rented two trucks.”
“I put an ad out, I hired some movers, I started booking some moves and I meet them all at the truck rental yard. They, of course, thought it was a joke. I mean, I was there in my car, a 19-year-old kid and I looked young too.”
“I had all this equipment, I had all these pads, I had all these dollies. I was talking to the people at CDS and saying like, “How many do I need on the truck? How many of these should I use?” And, “How many of those should I use? What other equipment should I use?”
“My movers, right away, I mean, they knew. They knew I didn’t know what I was doing. They knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. And it just felt like, “Am I ever going to be able to get the respect of these guys when they know I don’t know shit?“
Watch the video to get full training.
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Louis Massaro: All right, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to help you take your moving company to that next level by setting up proven systems and processes to increase profits, reduce stress, live a better quality of life. I got my main man Chris with me today. What’s up, Chris?
Chris: Hey, hey.
Louis Massaro: So what we’re doing is in these episodes, Chris has been going through the social media feed, through our support inbox and coming up with some questions that people in the audience or customers or whoever they are, there’s people sending in questions from social media have about their moving business or have for me directly and I don’t know what these questions are going to be until he asks them. So it’s Chris’s job to make sure we’ve got some good starting points.
Chris: We do. We do.
Louis Massaro: What have you got today Chris?
Chris: This one I really like. This one comes in from a guy who I believe is a younger guy. I think he’s probably just starting his business.
Louis Massaro: Okay.
Chris: And his question is he says, “I know you started your first moving company at 19 years old, how were you able to have so much success at such a young age?”
Louis Massaro: I wasn’t.
Chris: You weren’t?
Louis Massaro: No.
Chris: What do you mean? What happened?
Louis Massaro: So initially, my first moving company failed.
Chris: Oh, that’s right. Okay.
Louis Massaro: You know that story.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But I haven’t talked about it a lot, I’ve…
Chris: Let’s hear about it. I would love to hear that.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. So essentially when I was 19, I went to Las Vegas to open up my first office, okay? It was the millennium. I went to Las Vegas with some family and friends for the ’99 to 2000 New Year’s Eve.
Chris: Right. Yup. I was there and then also.
Louis Massaro: And I, that’s right, you were probably playing music or something.
Chris: I sure was. Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: And flew over, and I’m looking out the window, I’m like, “People live in Las Vegas?” I’ve been there once before when I was a little bit younger and I’m like, “People actually live here?” It’s not just this trip. I see houses and I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to come out here and I’m going to open a moving company out there.”
Louis Massaro: So went to Vegas, rented two trucks. At the time, it was called Rollins Truck Rental, Penske bought them out later, went down there, rented two trucks. I had a fake ID at the time. Hopefully, it’s all good now, but I had a fake ID at the time and that’s the only way I was able to with my name on it was able to actually rent trucks at that age.
Louis Massaro: And man, it was scary, I didn’t know anything and I just knew that there was money to be made in the moving business and went partners with a friend that already had a moving company in Florida, went out to Vegas, started there, I was like, “I’m going to show you the way. I’m going to show you the way.” And went out there and was essentially on my own to figure it out.
Louis Massaro: Other than the occasional phone call of like, “Wake up, what are you doing? Get out there, go see some apartment complexes. Go do something.” I’m like, “Oh.” I didn’t know what to do, right? I was just … I had a yellow page ad, phones are going to my … The calls were going to my cell phone.
Louis Massaro: I had all the pads and dollies in my apartment that I got and yeah, rented two trucks. The first day I had to go rent those two trucks. I went, I had to go get moving equipment. So at the time, it was I believe it was CDS Moving Equipment and had to drive the stick shift truck which is totally different by the way than a stick shift car.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: And so it’s Las Vegas, it’s the summer of 2000 and it’s hot in Vegas, right?
Chris: It’s hot.
Louis Massaro: So I get in the truck and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, no, I know how to drive it, I know how to drive it.” I get there and I’m clank, clank, clank, clank, clank. The truck’s stalling and I’m just sweating. I just know, “Man, they’re going to see me, they’re going to figure it out. They’re going to know that I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Chris: They’re watching you.
Louis Massaro: They’re not going to rent me trucks and it’s going to be all over. So the guy comes up to the truck and he comes up to the window and I rolled the window down and he’s like, “Having a little trouble?” I’m like, I didn’t know what to say, “I got it.” He’s like, “You know what? Let me … You mind if I jump in with you? I’ll give you a little … I’ll show you a little bit.”
Chris: Oh, that’s nice.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, he was the head mechanic there and he took mercy on me. I mean, he saw what was happening.
Chris: He saw you struggling.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, he jumped in and we did a few … He basically taught me how to drive a manual truck right there on the spot and I forgot exactly how long we drove around and he was giving me a lesson. A super cool guy and if you’re listening, by the way, I totally forgot your name, but thank you so much.
Chris: Wow, yeah.
Louis Massaro: I appreciate that. Yeah. And I had to go to CDS and on the way out of Rollins to CDS was like an uphill and so now, I’m driving the truck and I’m going uphill and it’s rolling back as I’m getting the clutch down. I made it to CDS, I got the equipment, I went and dropped it off the apartment. I made it back.
Louis Massaro: So that was like before I even got started out there. So now, I put an ad out, I hire some movers, I started booking some moves and I meet them all at the truck rental yard. They, of course, thought it was a joke. I mean, I was there in my car and, a 19-year-old kid and I looked young too.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t like I was just 19, I look, I don’t know, probably 16 and I didn’t know what I was doing. I had all this equipment, I had all these pads, I had all these dollies. I was talking to the people at CDS and saying like, “How many do I need on the truck? How many of these should I use?” And, “How many of those should I use? What other equipment should I use?”
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So my movers right away, I mean, they knew. They knew I didn’t know what I was doing. They knew I didn’t know what I was talking about and luckily, I was able to learn from them how a truck should be set up. How the pad should be folded, how the dollies should be put with the pads and strapped in and how many should be on the truck and sweeping it out after the move and all that. I learned that directly from the movers.
Chris: How fortunate.
Louis Massaro: In Vegas.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: Now, it didn’t feel fortunate at the time, it was embarrassing.
Chris: It was embarrassing I’m sure, but yeah.
Louis Massaro: And it just felt like am I ever going to be able to get the respect of these guys when they know I don’t know shit.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right? And so, I kind of got past that part, but now the challenge was when I went out there, the expectation was all men apply for a license, I’m going to get a license, it won’t be an issue, but at the time, it was very, very hard to get a license in Las Vegas.
Louis Massaro: It was like a good old boy network. You had to know somebody, it wasn’t … You just filled out your application and got a license. So what I was doing was I was … I had two contracts going. I had one contract for labor. So it was a labor service and another contract for truck rental.
Chris: Okay.
Louis Massaro: So I technically wasn’t a moving company.
Chris: I see.
Louis Massaro: And this was my workaround until I got the license, but one month goes by, two months go by, three months go by, I’m not able to get this license and it starts looking like it’s not going to happen and for me, it was demoralizing.
Chris: Were you making money?
Louis Massaro: No.
Chris: No?
Louis Massaro: No. I wasn’t making any money. It’s a good thing because a young guy in Vegas making money, it could have turned out bad.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But I wasn’t making any money. I was basically making … I wasn’t even making, I should even say that between the … Everything I was putting on my credit cards and taking a little bit of money to pay for the apartment, and the truck rentals and food and stuff like that, that was it and what happened was … I mean, I remember being on the phone with a family member and just talking about the whole thing and just started crying.
Chris: Really?
Louis Massaro: It was so … Laying on my couch like, “What am I doing out here?” This is ridiculous I came out here to open a moving company and I’m basically running like this half-ass truck rental labor service. I had this vision of my name on the truck’s storage, a big warehouse, a big facility like that.
Louis Massaro: At the time, I’d wanted one really good office. That was my goal and it was never going to be able to happen because if I’m a truck rental company, I can’t put the name of the moving company on the side of the truck, I couldn’t do storage, so after six months, I’m like, “Look, I can’t spend any more time here with these workarounds. If I can’t get the license, then I need to go somewhere where I can get a license or I don’t need a license.”
Louis Massaro: So after six months, I decided to go to Denver, Colorado. At the time, you didn’t need a license, it seemed like a good market and I went, and basically, that’s when … For me, that’s when it really all started, right? There is that six months in Vegas that failed.
Louis Massaro: I mean, I basically shut it down, I wasn’t able to make it, I never made any money, couldn’t get a license. It was a half-ass operation and then I go to Vegas and go to Denver. You lived in Denver too, right?
Chris: I love it. Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: I grew up 90 miles north of there too.
Louis Massaro: So I get to Denver, it’s now February. I land, it’s nothing but snow everywhere and at the time, DIA airport was, I mean, still way out.
Chris: Oh yeah, you’re out in the prairie?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, there was nothing out there with it. So I landed, I get in the rental car, I’m in the snow driving around. I’m from Florida, I’m not used to driving around in the snow and I go to a hotel, it’s late, I go to sleep, I wake up and I look out and all I see is snow.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Right? Snow and I’m like, “Who am I going to move out here? Did I make another bad decision? Am I just … What’s happening here? Am I going to be able to actually do this?”
Chris: Why? Why Denver?
Louis Massaro: What happened was the guy who I was partners with at the time was trying to open another office in Denver with somebody else and then they backed out.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Louis Massaro: And when they backed out, there was an opportunity there, there was already a yellow page ad placed. So it was like I didn’t have to wait. It was either I go there or I go back to Florida, go back to the drawing board, try to figure out my next move and I was already, I was in. I already made up my mind I was going to succeed in this business and I was in.
Chris: Even after Vegas failing?
Louis Massaro: Even after Vegas failing.
Chris: It didn’t have an effect on your spirit and your motivation?
Louis Massaro: It did, but I moved past it. I was like, “What else …” I didn’t have family money to fall back on. I didn’t have … I didn’t go to college. I didn’t have anything to fall back on and I told myself that I’m going to go make … I’m going to go become a millionaire in the moving business before I went to Vegas.
Louis Massaro: And so for me, I was like, “All right, Vegas is … The way that I have to operate here is broken. Let me go somewhere else.” Which could seem like a cop-out. Why don’t you just try to make it where you are? But I’m like, “You know what? I’m at the beginning stages right now. Let me go somewhere where it’s going to be a little more friendly for me to be able to operate.”
Chris: Yeah, better to do it now than when you’re established and you’ve got a whole business going and you’re still struggling. I mean, six months in Vegas is it’s enough time to know whether it’s going to work or not, but when you look back at it now, do you say, “Oh, I could have done this.” Or, “I could have done that and I could have made it work somehow.”
Louis Massaro: No.
Chris: No?
Louis Massaro: No. Because I needed the license. It was either … There was a ton of companies out there operating with no license making money, getting fined, paying the fine, but that wasn’t …
Chris: You don’t want to be that … Yeah. Yeah.
Louis Massaro: That’s not what I wanted to do. So but now, I went just did the same exact thing. But it was as if I felt the failure of that office and carried that with me. So when I went to Denver, it was a whole different level of focus and intensity on the way that I went about the business.
Chris: This time …
Louis Massaro: This time it was not … There was no one needing to call me to tell me to get up in the morning to go see real estate offices. I was in and I went and I found an apartment and I went and found Penske there and went and negotiated, “Hey, I’m going to rent two trucks, can I keep them here and work that whole thing out?” And started all over again. Recruited some movers, had them come meet me at the clubhouse of my clubhouse. It was the little apartment complex.
Chris: Little office?
Louis Massaro: Yeah, we were the leasing office.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t like fancy like that and had to meet me there, hired them, I had them all meet me at the truck rental yard in the morning and started all over again in Denver after six months. So to answer the question, it didn’t just like come easy. That six months, there was a lot of schooling that went on in that six months.
Chris: Yeah, it was like a bootcamp kind of.
Louis Massaro: It was like a bootcamp.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And there was a lot of pressure because I didn’t know, I felt so self-conscious, I didn’t have the discipline, not the discipline. I didn’t have the … I didn’t have the confidence to be able to speak to the customers and know what I’m talking about, I didn’t know how to estimate a move.
Louis Massaro: Everybody, anybody and everybody that called, it didn’t matter what size it could have been a studio apartment or a 12,000 square foot mansion. “Okay, sure. We’ll send you three guys in a truck.”
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: That was it. Everybody got the same thing. So that six months was schooling and then when I got to Denver, it was also schooling, but it was like I graduated to a certain level. I could fake it enough at that point to where my movers are like, “Okay, he knows what he’s talking about.”
Chris: Okay, did you start making money right away in Denver?
Louis Massaro: Denver was great. I opened up in February 2001 and yeah, I mean, it took me, the Yellow Pages was about four months until I could start paying them, right?
Chris: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Louis Massaro: So immediately, I wasn’t making any money, but about four months until I could start paying that ad that had been out previously, Penske, almost every day was coming outside like, “Hey, we need some money. We need some money.” I’m like, “Okay, here, here. I’ll give you a little money, here.” But that first year, really things started to really take off at that point.
Chris: Okay. When you first were getting established in Denver, did you … When did all of the getting the processes in place and when did it all really start become like a real company?
Louis Massaro: Not for a while because I had to figure out what those processes were, but in my mind, at the time, it wasn’t like, I need to figure out processes. I was like, “I need to figure out how to do this stuff.” Right? And every day, there was issues, every day there was problems, every day I was running into something that just really could crush your self-confidence, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You feel like you’re doing something good and just some over … Whether it’s movers twice your size, getting in your face, wanting to fight you, whether it’s Penske coming outside and saying, “You need to pay us or we’re not … We’re taking these trucks back.” Right?
Louis Massaro: Whether it’s a move that is just going so terribly wrong and you don’t really even know where to begin to resolve the issue.
Chris: You’ve got customers screaming at you.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, and it’s … I just had no idea what I was … Everything felt way over my head and I just, every day, I had this little black book I kept in my back pocket like a little address book which is blank and I would just write down all the things.
Louis Massaro: I was like, “I need to figure out a solution for this. There’s got to be a better way for this, there’s got to be a better way for that. This can’t be.” And that became my guiding light to figure out how to make it better and it was almost like an obsession, right?
Louis Massaro: There’s got to be a better way. Every time something happened, I’m like, “No, no, no.” There’s companies out there that operate smoothly, profitably that aren’t dealing with this. Whereas now I see, I’ll hear from companies and it’s like, “Man, I got this up against me and I got that up against me in my market and the leads and the movers.” And it’s like everything’s against them, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: I’ll hear that a lot.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: It’s kind of like victim mentality.
Chris: It can be, yeah.
Louis Massaro: And I didn’t look at it that way, I looked at it like there’s companies out there that run smooth, there’s companies out that are run efficient. What can I do to make this better?
Chris: Were you reaching out to companies?
Louis Massaro: Not moving companies, but I was talking to anybody and everybody I could. I was talking to my CPA at the time. I was talking to it was probably three or four months after I was in the truck rental yard, maybe five months, I forgot exactly that I went at leased my first office space.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: And the owner was a successful businessman that now he’s just invested in real estate and I would talk to him and get advice from him. So I had all these unofficial mentors where I was just getting information and they were just helping me with bits and pieces of whatever they could.
Louis Massaro: I found an attorney in Denver to help with my contracts and stuff like that and she would guide me and help me with certain things. So I was like I’d go look for the answers to them, I’d go look for books that I could read and find information on whatever I was struggling with and try to overcome it and then try to apply that the next day.
Chris: Yeah, the podcast we did I guess last week or two weeks ago was about how you built this $20 million empire. Was the climate different back then? Did you feel like you … Did it feel like you couldn’t fail just because with things going in the economy and stuff like that or how was it?
Louis Massaro: Well, you just had the dot-com bubble, right? That all happened right then and there, right? A few months after what I’m talking about, a couple of months after I moved into my office, 9/11 happened.
Chris: Yes.
Louis Massaro: Right? So the whole world is in fear and there’s a lot going on. Then we go to war. There’s a lot going on and I just didn’t pay attention to it.
Chris: And it didn’t affect the business?
Louis Massaro: It didn’t affect the business.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: And maybe it did, but I didn’t know … Maybe it did. Maybe it would have been twice as successful if that didn’t happen, but I didn’t look at it like that and I think that that was a real advantage for me that I wasn’t caught up in, “Oh, the economy.”
Louis Massaro: “Oh man, what’s going to happen to the market? And what’s going to happen if this happens?” Or, “What’s going to happen if that happens?”
Chris: Is that something that you think you should worry about or that you’re worried about later?
Louis Massaro: I think you just need to focus on having your business so on point, that you’re just in the best position that you could be in for whatever happens. You know what I mean? Storms are going to come. You need to be able to weather those storms.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But I think a lot of people, look at what’s going on and listen, you watch the news, it just breeds fear in people. In tune, it’s good to know what’s happening, but don’t … Not follow your dreams and your business and don’t sit there and go, “Oh, the economy is messed up.”
Louis Massaro: Because if that’s all you’re hearing all day, that’s what you’re going to believe and for me, it was like, I just had my head down. I didn’t look at competition other than to check their prices.
Louis Massaro: I just had my head down and just focused on booking as many moves as I could possibly book and then figuring out how to service them.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. You started in the dead of winter in Denver.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: In February.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: I guess if you are in that situation, that’s when you start. You don’t know any different, right? You don’t … Did you know that there was going to be a moving season? Did you know that you are going to have money falling out of the sky during the summer or …
Louis Massaro: No. I mean, I had an idea, but it’s actually not … I was going to say it’s a funny story, it’s not a funny story, but that first year, I think I did approximately from February to the end of the year, I think I did about 600,000 gross in revenue and got … And didn’t feel any slowdown.
Louis Massaro: Didn’t feel any slow down because the trajectory of where I was going up, I mean, I was selling. That was my big thing. Sales was what got me there, period. So I’m selling and I’m selling and I come out of summer, and I go into winter, and I’m still doing well, I’m still making money.
Louis Massaro: I come back around into the new year. So what is that now? 2002 I come into the new year and hit summer again and now it’s like, right? Really crushed it that summer and so now I’m not prepared for winter because I’m like, “No big deal.”
Louis Massaro: That’s when I learned the hard way, that summer, I bought a house. Got myself a nice car and …
Chris: Life was good.
Louis Massaro: Life was good, but then that winter came and I wasn’t prepared for it because I kept going up the winter before because I had so much momentum and this time, I felt it and it was tight. Cash flow was tight, money was tight because I was young, I started spending it.
Louis Massaro: I was conscious enough to set up an investment account, but still, I wasn’t prepared to weather the storm of that first … That second winter where it really impacted me, and it hurt and it was a lot of juggling to get out of it, and then make my way back to the summer and then say like, “Never again.”
Louis Massaro: It goes back to, “There’s got to be a better way.” There’s got to be a better way. So it’s like, “How can I make sure I’ve got consistent moves all year?” Okay?
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: And how do I make sure I’ve got money next year so that when things do slow down, I’m okay I’m not stressing all winter long and that’s when I started to create a separate account and put money to the side during the summer months when it was raining money to be able to handle that and survive the winter if I needed it and if I didn’t need it, then I knew by springtime, I could do what I wanted to do with the money.
Chris: That’s kind of nice. Yeah, now how efficiently was the business running at that point?
Louis Massaro: It was starting … It was like I had the screwdriver and starting to tighten it down a little bit and just everything … I just wanted everything to be on point and even back then, if something was sloppy or something was out of order everything had to be in order, everything had to be neat and on point and it had to be done the same way every time.
Louis Massaro: We used to have the movers fill out … When they came back, they had to fill out a time card for their hours plus a sheet for every single one of the moves that they had to staple to the back of the contract before they gave it to us with the money.
Louis Massaro: Little thing, but it was like it had to happen every single time and so by putting these little things into place, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. However, when you put it in place, and then you make sure it stays in place, now you could build on that and now you can stack on that and that little thing is a little process. Hey guys, when you come in and we used to literally take long sheets of paper, print out these things, get the slicer.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: I bought a little slicer at Home Depot, it was pretty fun to slice all the things and put them out for the movers with a pen and it was just a little thing, but all those little things when you start to do them well and you start to not accept when a guy comes in and just doesn’t do it that day, that’s the thing. When you start to put processes in place, that was a process.
Louis Massaro: It wasn’t in writing, it wasn’t a standard operating procedure, it wasn’t official, but it was like, “Hey, we need to do this.” And I know, where people can struggle is one guy doesn’t do it. Then the next day another guy doesn’t do it and then they’re like, “You know what? It’s not that important that we have the sheets. Whatever.” And they let that go.
Louis Massaro: So it was running pretty efficient, but it was me and one other guy at first, my best friend who came to just hang for the summer. Come work with me for the summer, I could use the help, it will be fun and then he ended up staying with me for six years. Then we hired some other people after that, but yeah, I guess it was a natural desire for order.
Chris: A necessary desire.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I recognized early on when things weren’t in order, there was chaos. It was either their structure in order where there’s chaos and the chaos didn’t feel good, it gave you a lot of anxiety and you saw a mistake … You saw bad stuff happen in the business because of it.
Louis Massaro: You saw the ball get dropped because of it. So it’s just like everything’s got to be on point. Everything across the board in the business. It was just everything from … If I had to … We started doing direct mail and we got the labels and we put the labels on these little ugly postcards that we had at the beginning and then the stamps.
Louis Massaro: So when I got somebody to do that in the office, it was just very meticulous. Look, here’s exactly how you need to do it. If there was a label put on that was crooked, no, you need to do that again. It’s got to be on point. It’s got to be straight. Right? Same thing with the paperwork.
Louis Massaro: Movers came back missing signatures, there was consequences for that. You can’t just come back … Everything’s got to be on point.
Chris: You’re setting a standard.
Louis Massaro: Exactly.
Chris: For everything. Now, for a guy … This guy in this situation, I assume he’s kind of just getting started. Do you remember your first process, or what would you tell him to kind of get in place first?
Louis Massaro: The moving parts, right? I mean, so to me, morning dispatch was the biggest event.
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Louis Massaro: 6:30 in the morning, we got to the office. Movers were all there waiting outside. We let the drivers inside the building.
Chris: But the movers had to stay out?
Louis Massaro: The helpers had to stay out. I mean, if there was a blizzard, we could squeeze them all in, but other than that, I … Because otherwise, it’s …
Chris: Chaos.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, it’s chaos, right? We needed order. But just the way that … I think if, I don’t remember exactly what the first process was, but getting those … The timesheets and the job description stapled to the contract, that was big.
Louis Massaro: Making sure that I had the moves written up on contracts the night before by three o’clock, that was a process that I did for me, right? I’m like, “I’ve got to create order for me. Otherwise, I’m going to be here all night. I’m not going to know …”
Louis Massaro: There’s always reaction. There’s always something you could be doing. If you don’t take the things that must get done and say, “I’m going to do them by this time in this particular way, you’re just going to have chaos.”
Louis Massaro: So the contracts had to be done by three o’clock for the next day which meant the confirmation calls to the customer, had to be done. Then the contract had to be written up, then, back then, there was no GPS.
Louis Massaro: There was I think MapQuest or something just started coming out, but before that, it was just, we had map books. So you would go to the back to the index, look up the address, flip to the page where it was, right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Make a copy of that page and then highlight the route for the driver off the highway to get there …
Chris: Wow, even that’s …
Louis Massaro: Staple that to the back of the contract.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: So why? Because I can’t have guys getting lost and that’s stemmed from guys getting lost. I don’t know where I’m going. All right, well now, that’s not happening anymore. You’re going to know exactly where you’re going. I’m going to make sure you know exactly where you’re going.
Louis Massaro: I don’t push, I didn’t push that off on them and say, “You guys figure it out.” No, we made the copy the night before, highlighted the route, they knew exactly where they needed to go. So the whole, and they knew that the minute, I had the Nextel walkie-talkies at the time where it was like chirp chirp.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: And they all got one of those when they went out, and they had to … First of all, they had to be gone out of the office by seven o’clock. So it was like 6:30, we dispatch. You had to be gone by seven.
Louis Massaro: Meaning, seven o’clock, I was out in the yard and I’m thinking now I want some in my office, right? We had a lot more time in the office than I did in the truck rental yard.
Louis Massaro: I’d come out, “What’s up? What’s going on? Well, let’s go. What else do you guys need? Do you need some boxes? Do you need tape? You need directions? All right, come on. Let’s go.”
Chris: Let’s go.
Louis Massaro: Get them out of the yard because start times were eight o’clock.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You have to get to the job by eight o’clock. So eight o’clock comes which is another little process. These are just like little things that if you could just make these little things on point, keep them on point and just keep stacking more of them, that’s when you start to have a great business, but eight o’clock, by 8:05, if I didn’t hear from them, chirp chirp, “Where are you guys at?”
Louis Massaro: “Oh, we’re here.” “Oh, okay. What’s your start time then?” “Oh, we’ve been here since 8:00.” “Okay, great. Thanks.” I made sure that I got the start time from each and every one of them. I want to know when you’re loading, I want to know when you’re 30 minutes to an hour before unloading, so there was really a process for everything because, for me, it was the … I don’t know how I knew to do that, but it was the only way I knew how to keep everything from just feeling like it was so overwhelming and chaotic. I had to kind of pin it down and make it more predictable.
Chris: When you found something that wasn’t working, before you were able to create a process or get a handle on it, did you feel like a failure? Did you feel like you weren’t running your business the way you should be? And how did you deal with that just personally, as the owner, were people looking at you going, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” That kind of stuff?
Louis Massaro: Yeah. I mean, there was times where we had … When I did the office, I had the dispatch office, I got this first office, it was no carpet in the whole thing, but what I did was I first worked out of the front room, then I moved into a different room and cut a window out so that the movers would come into the lobby and come up to the window like a bank teller and I would deal with them through the window and past contracts and money and all that through the window.
Louis Massaro: But there was times where something would happen and they’re all standing there just staring at you and you know that they’re thinking, “Oh, this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.” This and that. It was stressful, man. It was stressful.
Louis Massaro: I mean, and at the time, I was eating fast food three times a day. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was working seven days a week, Sunday was my kind of off day, but we ran jobs on Sundays, I booked moves on Sundays, I just basically forwarded the phones to my cell phone and like went and did whatever.
Chris: Worked from a different location.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, yeah. Went to lunch and went to the mall and bought some new sneakers, that was the extent of my fun and excitement.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: So no, I mean, I remember a time vividly, it was the end of the month, it was super busy and I was there by myself. My friend didn’t come yet. So it was within the first six months of being in business.
Louis Massaro: I’m in the office on the floor in a ball waiting for trucks with such excruciating pain in my stomach where it felt like there was a knife, somebody was stabbing me in my stomach and I’m on the floor like, “All right, what’s your finish time? Do you have any packing?”
Louis Massaro: Just trying to hold it together and it was so bad I never experienced anything like that and found out it was an ulcer from the food, the stress, it was just combined and so I needed to deal with that which at first was through medicine and then just kind of changing some of my habits, but I think the stress was mostly probably like, “I’m not good enough.” “Can I do this? Am I fooling myself? Can I really run a big …”
Louis Massaro: I was pushing to grow it while at the same time, I believe that I could do it, but I also doubted I could do it.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You know what I mean?
Chris: The voice in the back of your head.
Louis Massaro: Yeah. There was that one on each shoulder. “Go get it. You can’t do this. Go get it. You can’t do this.”
Chris: Oh, man. Now, would you say that failure is necessary? It’s a crucial part of it or is it possible to … I mean, now I know it is because of what we do. There’s a way to avoid a lot of these mistakes, but do you recommend that people, especially when they’re first starting out, do they accept a failure? Get used to failure? Or how do you deal with the failure in the beginning as opposed to how you dealt with it 10 years into it?
Louis Massaro: Failure sucks, right? And it can happen on a daily basis. You might fail to book a move, you might book a move and then fail to service to move because somebody doesn’t show up. It’s like your company could fail. You could fail. You could fail to pay your bills that month.
Louis Massaro: So because you have had failures doesn’t make you a failure. You’ve had failures and you’ll continue to have failures, but it doesn’t define you as a failure and …
Chris: Did you always believe that?
Louis Massaro: Apparently. I mean, I kept going. In my mind, I had this … In my mind, I’m like, “I know I’m going to make money, I’m going to make a million dollars in this business, I’m going to become a millionaire, I’m going to get this type of house, I’m going to have these type of cars, I’m going to live this type of life.”
Louis Massaro: That was in my mind and everything else was kind of an obstacle in the way that just needed to be overcome and it started to become a game. It started to become a sport if you will that you get beat down and you’re not good at it at first.
Louis Massaro: You’re like a little skinny kid and you try to start playing tackle football, you’re going to get beat down pretty hard and that’s how it was at the beginning, but as you keep going, you build strength, you learn techniques, you start to understand the rules of the game.
Louis Massaro: Then you start to see exactly what it’s going to take to win the game and even though you know, “Okay, I need to do this, this, this and this.” You can’t physically get it all done right away.
Louis Massaro: So a lot of my stress came from, I could see where I wanted to go, but then it was like, “There’s all this shit in my way that I need to deal with and you could only …” So it was like learning how to deal with that and learning how to manage yourself became the biggest ticket to moving on.
Louis Massaro: And again, I really believe that having everything in order, structured processes, I mean, they were processes, right? I mean, they weren’t in writing yet, I didn’t call them standard operating procedures yet. I mean, I didn’t make up that term I mean, that’s what they’re called.
Louis Massaro: And I didn’t formalize it, but there was still structure, there was still a way that things needed to be handled and I made sure of that.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Our guy, his question was about, “How were you able to have so much success at such a young age?” For someone in his position, what’s the advice you would give them as far as like where they should start? Should they start creating processes? Should they work on their personal organization and attitude and stuff like that? Where do they begin to find the success?
Louis Massaro: Well, it really is a mindset first, right? And so for me, now I call, I say the millionaire … I had a millionaire mover mindset. I wasn’t necessarily calling it the millionaire mover mindset. I’ve kind of labeled that sense after looking at like, “What was the mindset that I had?”
Louis Massaro: And I got that from looking at it and seeing people making millions of dollars in this business and believing that if they could do it, I could do it. So you’ve got to be able to believe that it’s possible, right?
Louis Massaro: So like if you’re listening to this, if you’re watching this, it’s possible, right? I mean, the moving business is a great business. It’s possible to make that money, you just have to believe it and then you have to do what it takes and like now there’s I mean, listen … Somebody who’s listening to this podcast could take, going back and listen to all the episodes can take so much away from it.
Louis Massaro: Somebody’s going to one of our seminars twice a year I mean. There’s tools to not have to go through it all again, right? But you first have to believe it because if you don’t believe it and you don’t have this vision beyond the obstacles, some reason for doing what you’re doing and it doesn’t really matter what that reason is.
Louis Massaro: You don’t have to have some big purpose, “I’m doing this to save the world or whatever …” Your reason could be like, “Hey, I want to drive nice cars and impress some girls.” You know what I mean? I want a nice house, right?
Louis Massaro: Whatever it is, you’ve got to see why you’re doing it so that you can move past all the obstacles in the way. That’s the first step. The next step is you’ve got to just … You’ve got to have a certain level of standard that things have to be, right? And realize that if you are the owner of the company and you’re the boss, you have to be that person that sets that tone that keeps that rigidity that says, “This is, it’s got to be this way.” Where everyone is going to want to fight you. All your employees are going to want to knock …
Chris: Yeah, resist.
Louis Massaro: Yeah, they want to resist, they don’t want to do it like that. They want to do it their way. They want to do it their way, but if you have a bunch of people doing everything their way, even if they have the best intentions, they’re all still going in different ways.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: The best way to go is everybody in line going the same way. So other than that, how do you …
Chris: How do you get everybody to fall in line?
Louis Massaro: Well, let me just hit on this point.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Massaro: Because he was asking what it takes how to be successful. The other thing is you’ve got to realize the critical components that go into running a moving company, and you have to get good at them. Lead generation starts there.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to be able to have the phone ring or people request an estimate or you don’t have any business, right? So you’ve got to get good at that. You can’t say, “I just want to run a moving company. I don’t want to deal with marketing. I don’t want to learn marketing, but the truth is, you’ve got to learn marketing.”
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to be the best marketer in your company, right? You can’t, “I’m going to get a marketing company to do this and do that.” No, you’ve got to learn it yourself, right? Then once you generate the leads, you need to book moves.
Louis Massaro: It’s a whole different ballgame now than it was when I first started. So there’s some pros and cons for each. When I first started, putting … Add the Yellow Pages and I sat back and answered the phone and just booked moves, I didn’t ask anybody for their information. I didn’t follow up with anybody.
Louis Massaro: But there was just a lot of calls coming in. Now, it’s different. You get a lead from your website, you get a lead from a lead provider, they’re going and they’re talking to five different companies.
Louis Massaro: You’ve got to have your sales process down. So my sales process at the beginning when I first started when I’m driving around, no office at the beginning, I would dispatch the trucks in the morning, then I would drive around from apartment complex to apartment complex just walking in at first with a company sweatshirt and an ugly ass business card, talking to them, giving it to them, “Hey, if you send me some moves, I’ll give you this or give you that.”
Louis Massaro: I refined it later on, but at first, it was very basic. In between, driving around, my phone would ring. I’d pick up, somebody would want a quote for a move. Sure. I’d pull over to the side, I had my little three-ring binder where I have my script in there that I wrote out for myself.
Chris: Wow.
Louis Massaro: I would fine-tune the script. I would find myself going off the script because I’m reading it, but I felt like there was something better to say right there and I would fine-tune that script which I did for years until I finally came up with the script now that we have in our Moving Sales Academy Program and I had all … I started to write down all the objections that customers would have, all the reasons that they said they want to book with me now.
Louis Massaro: I started to write those down and then I would write down what I’m going to say next time. All right, next time they say that, I’m going to say this, right? And I’m like, “Wow, they’re booking with me.” So my sales always was strong right from the beginning.
Louis Massaro: You cannot build a successful moving company unless you’ve got a strong sales process period. Period. People say, “Louis, you came out with Moving Sales Academy, why not operations stuff? Why not all the other stuff that you now have?”
Louis Massaro: I said, “Because the number one thing that would impact moving companies the most is setting up their sales process upfront.” Because otherwise, the lead generation that you do, it’s a total waste.
Louis Massaro: If it comes in and you don’t have your follow up in order, you don’t have your script in order, you don’t have your rebuttals in order, you don’t have the way that you’re going to manage all of that lined up, you’re just going to be losing money.
Chris: Yeah, down the drain.
Louis Massaro: And then after that, it’s servicing moves, right? So these are the fundamentals. I mean, there’s really five fundamental areas of the business. You’ve got lead generation, booking moves, servicing move, so the ability to hire and get movers at your office to be able to put them on a truck to get them to the customer’s house.
Louis Massaro: I know it sounds basic, but this is just a critical component at the beginning, then in this modern-day, you’ve got … The next step is create raving fans. Okay? Because if you don’t start, if you don’t have five-star reviews, if you don’t have a great online presence in 2020, you’re done.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: You’re done. You’re spending a lot of money on marketing to get leads that are converting lower because when they check you out, you don’t have a good reputation and the fifth step is accounting and reporting.
Louis Massaro: So for someone that is like, “Hey, I’m, anybody, I don’t …” What I’ve realized in the few years of doing this and working with companies is that everybody at every level has areas that they can improve. We’ve got areas we could improve from the business. It’s not…
Chris: Yeah, definitely.
Louis Massaro: We’re not immune to it. I mean, everybody and I always had areas I can improve in the moving company too. But if you take a look at just the five fundamentals of lead generation, booking move, servicing moves, create raving fans and then your accounting and reporting piece and you say, “Okay, how can I just tighten that up? How could I get that all in order and on point?”
Louis Massaro: You’ll start to see your profits go up at whatever level you’re at in the business and you just keep repeating that, you’ll get the success you’re looking for.
Chris: That’s great. That’s awesome. Well, yeah, I think we sort of answered this question. I mean, we got to it in a roundabout way, but …
Louis Massaro: Did we not answer it? What’s the question exactly?
Chris: Well, no. I guess he said, “How did you have so much success at such a young age?” I think maybe that’s where his…
Louis Massaro: I was just young when I started.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: That’s it. I mean, it’s not …
Chris: But I mean, maybe he’s asking like … Maybe he’s 19 right now. Maybe he’s starting to rent a couple trucks or whatever. Is it an age thing? I mean, can anybody at any age become successful in the business or is there something special you did at 19 that you can’t do at 35?
Louis Massaro: I mean, look, I didn’t have a family. Meaning, I didn’t have like a wife and kids like I do now. I don’t know that I could have put in those hours. The way I work then and the way I work now is completely different, but if I didn’t have the tools and have learned the lessons that I had learned between 19 and I’m 39, and I’m in a place where I’m very happy with my work-life situation because I’ve cultivated that over the years.
Louis Massaro: But if I didn’t have those tools, and I was 39, and I had a wife and a young baby, and I needed to go make it happen. I will go make it happen again, period because you need to do what you need to do.
Louis Massaro: So it’s like I could look at it and go, “Oh, I’ve got to work hard because I didn’t have anybody at home.” Okay, well, you know what? Even if I had somebody at home then, the first year and a half to two years that I really went hard, built momentum for a long time that lasted and I’m just, I’m not a believer.
Louis Massaro: I’m too old, I’m too young. I come from this community, I come from this background, I come from this country. Everybody can have an excuse, I could have had an excuse. I was too young. I was too skinny.
Louis Massaro: I think if we look at our perceived shortcomings, we could always find an excuse why not to start? But unless you’re 13 years old or you’re 85 years old, it might be challenging those two extremes to start.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: But if you’re in your working years, I mean, you could start. I mean, and not even start. It’s more about go further. So right now, I’m thinking about him, let’s assume he’s 19. Next time let’s ask. Let’s get some more data next time. When they ask a question, just respond and say, “Hey, this is Chris.”
Chris: Yeah, I’ll follow up, maybe get a little detail.
Louis Massaro: Get some more details because I’d love to find out and be able to help them directly, but I think about somebody that’s 19 and I think about somebody that’s maybe like 55 that owns a moving company, that’s just kind of, they’re like, “Man, I’m just going to coast.”
Louis Massaro: I’ve had this company for 30 years and things are so different now and things are so challenging now and I’m just going to coast. All it takes is a few good years to get yourself on track to significantly make more money, reduce your stress, create yourself a model business that if you’re at that later stage of your career, “It’s time to set that shit up.”
Louis Massaro: Don’t wait until you’re in a position where you just can’t work anymore and you have a business now that’s worth nothing, right? Tell yourself I’m going to spend the next three to five years getting this thing so in order that when I’m done, I could sell it and I could walk away.
Louis Massaro: There’s no excuse. Our own worst enemy is us. If you want to know your own worst enemy, just look in the mirror, right? It’s all perceived things that we tell ourselves, “I can’t do this. What about that?” It’s all fear.
Louis Massaro: And learning how to overcome that is something that everybody should be on that journey too. Don’t just master your business, master your mind.
Chris: Right.
Louis Massaro: Right? Which again, mastery is not … It’s a journey. Right? I haven’t mastered my business, I haven’t mastered my mind, but I’m a lot further than I was if I didn’t make that decision to do so.
Louis Massaro: So wherever he’s at. you’ve got to take the steps, right? People want the success, but they don’t want to do the work.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: They don’t want to do the work or they want the shortcut, right? The shortcut is finding out information of someone that’s been there before, has done it and be able to at least have the map of where to go, but you still got to do the miles, you’ve still got to put in the work no matter what.
Louis Massaro: So and there will be times where it’s challenging. There will be times where you want to quit. There will be times where it doesn’t seem like you’re going to get out of whatever predicament you’re in and you’ve just got to believe that you will and just keep going.
Chris: Yeah, you have that same unstoppable drive that whether you’re 19 or you’re 55, like you said, that’s it.
Louis Massaro: That’s it. Every problem is a solvable problem.
Chris: Yeah.
Louis Massaro: Every obstacle can be overcome and it’s that … I think what trips a lot of people up is they want it to be a certain way, they want it to be perfect and when it’s not perfect or when the employee doesn’t do it exactly how they want to do it or when the move goes not as planned, or the customer is a pain in the ass, or whatever, you just got to know that stuff is going to happen.
Louis Massaro: Every time something bad happened in my company, and somebody would freak out and this was first me having to tell myself this. It’s like, “It’s going to happen again.” Truck blows over on the highway, ruins the whole shipment. I’m like, “You know what? It will probably happen again someday. So let me not be surprised.”
Louis Massaro: You just got to … There’s things that are going to happen in business. They’re not going to always be good, right? And you just got to move past them. That’s it, fix it and move on.
Chris: Yeah. Fail forward.
Louis Massaro: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, awesome, good. Well, I hope that helps. Young guys out there, that’s how you do it.
Louis Massaro: And old guys and young ladies and old ladies and everybody in between.
Chris: That’s right. That’s great. Well, thanks for filling us in on that. I mean, I feel like there’s so much to learn about the moving business and about the processes and everything that you … The journey you’ve been on, but in the end, you end up learning about yourself.
Louis Massaro: I think this is the best business for that. I think if you … I know just coming up in the business, just people that I knew that had other companies or partners, I’m going to get out of this business someday, I’m going to do something else. Great.
Louis Massaro: This will prepare you for something else. Everybody is always looking for that glamorous thing to do. A moving business isn’t glamorous. There’s nothing glamorous about it, but it’s a way for you to provide a service to the community and make money, what’s wrong with that?
Louis Massaro: And if it’s something that you have a … You want to go be an architect one day or you want to open up a bar, you want to be a musician or whatever and something else that you have, this is what’s in front of you right now, go make money with this, set up a model business and sell it.
Louis Massaro: I mean, give yourself that head start, spend the next three years, five years just really putting it in, really dialing it in and then sell the thing, cash out, and go do whatever it is you want to do, but don’t waste the precious time that’s in front of you with something that is essentially such a great business because no matter what happens, people always need to move.
Chris: Yeah, right. It’s part of life.
Louis Massaro: It’s part of life.
Chris: And we’re happy to help them out.
Louis Massaro: Yup.
Chris: Good. Well, anything else you’d like to add?
Louis Massaro: That’s it. So we will … We’ll see you on the next episode. Listen, do me a favor, if you like this podcast, if you like this particular episode, go to iTunes, iTunes podcast. Give me a rating on there, give me a comment, let me know what you think, let me know what you like about it.
Louis Massaro: If you didn’t like something about it, let me know as well and go find me on Instagram. It’s @louismassaro, that’s @L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. Take a screenshot of you listening to this, take a picture of you watching the video, send it to me, if you’ve got questions that you want us to feature on the podcast, just DM me in Instagram and we’ll try to get it in as soon as possible.
Louis Massaro: My goal is to help each and every person in this business get away from the struggle, be able to scale their business without the uncertainty, without the stress, be able to make more money, have a smoother running business and live a better quality of life. So I hope that I was able to do that for you in this episode. My friend Chris, thanks for being here.
Chris: Yeah, my pleasure.
Louis Massaro: And we will see you guys next time, go out there every single day profiting your business and thriving your life.
