Posted on Tuesday, 03-09-2021

Hiring Movers: Qualities and Skills to Look For

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares what qualities and skills to look for when hiring movers.

“When you are looking for movers, you have qualities and skills. Their individual qualities as a person, as an employee, and then you have their skills of moving furniture and things like that. It’s important as we go out and start to do our recruiting efforts that we have a criteria for what we’re looking for, and when you have this criteria, it’s going to basically allow you to just run them through a filter to make the whole process easy. They match the criteria or they don’t match the criteria, they move on to the next step in the hiring process.”
“It all depends on what you’re looking for at the moment, so before you ever go to place an [employment] ad, you want to establish what your criteria is for what you’re looking for now so that you could sift through everything quickly. Movers don’t need all the skills of lumping, packing, padding, crating, etc. to be a good candidate for your team, because you can always train them on what they don’t know how to do. You might be looking for just drivers right now. You might be looking for just helpers or even helpers that don’t even have much experience, that can just lump furniture.”
“You don’t just hire them, throw him a shirt and say, “Either go swim or sink.” You want to be able to coach them on the things that they need improvement with. Let’s say you establish that a particular set of movers are causing a certain type of damage. You want to be able to retrain them and coach them on that. Let’s say you’re getting some feedback from customers on the way that they’re handling certain things. You want to be able to coach them on that, to help them improve. But if they’re just not willing to listen and they know it all, it’s going to be really tough, unless they’re perfect and don’t make mistakes, for you to work with that individual.”
“There are four types of applicants that are going to be coming in. Whoever’s doing your hiring, show them the Mover Applicant Quadrant. Give them this and say, “Look, this is what’s going to come in the door and I want you to establish what type they are so that we can make a decision moving forward and we don’t have to overanalyze each and every person and we don’t end up giving the wrong people an opportunity that’s going to come back and bite us.” We want to understand what our criteria is and the four types of movers that are going to be applying before we make any decisions on hiring.”
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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
When you are looking for movers, you have qualities, right? Their individual qualities as a person, as an employee, and then you have their skills of moving furniture and things like that. So what are the qualities and the skills that we’re looking for because it’s important as we go out and start to do our recruiting efforts that we have a criteria, and when you have this criteria, it’s going to basically allow you to just run them through a filter to make the whole process easy, right? They match the criteria or they don’t match the criteria, they move on to the next step in the hiring process. Makes sense?
Let’s talk about the skills that movers have. Now, they don’t need all these skills, but it’s important that you identify the criteria and your criteria is different at different times. You might be looking for just drivers right now. You might be looking for just helpers and helpers that don’t even have much experience, that just can lump, right?
It depends on what you’re looking for at the moment so before you ever go to place an ad, which we’ll talk about, you want to establish what your criteria is for what you’re looking for now so that you could sift through everything quickly, all right? Lumping, just somebody that could just pick up stuff and move it and there’s nothing wrong with that because if you have a cooperative, helpful lumper with good qualities, which we’ll talk about in a minute, that listens, that’s coachable. You could put two of them with a well qualified driver, crew chief, and you’re good. Right?
Let’s just talk about, I’ll just run through all these different skills. Loading, right? Loading is something totally different. To be able to load a truck is a learned skill. It’s not something that someone just knows how to do naturally. To be able to come into a truck and identify the furniture that you have and come in and start to build out the base. If you have an attic, what to put in the attic. What you can’t stack on top of other things. What to do with the mirrors. What to do with the flat screen TVs, right? Do they put them in between mattresses? How are they strapping it? It’s a learned skill to load a truck, but you really only need one person on a job that’s skilled at loading a truck.
Packing. Packing dishes, packing china, packing stereo equipment, all kinds of packing. An additional skill.
Assembling, disassembly and reassembly, right? The ability to go in and disassemble a bed, reassemble a bed, take the mirror off the dresser, whatever it might be and inventorying, not really a word, but you get it. Inventorying, to be able to go in and do an inventory of the items. So whether it’s a long distance job or a storage job, you’re going to be doing an inventory of everything, right? So whether you’re doing it electronically or whether you’re doing it with a inventory sheet and the roll of stickers to where you’re stickering an item and writing down what it is, and then writing down the condition that it’s in. If it’s worn, if it’s scratched, all of that, that’s a skill and this is obviously stuff that you can teach, but you need to identify what your criteria is going into the hiring process.
Padding. Being able to pad a dresser. Being able to pad a chair. Estimating. If you’re doing any type of flat rate, if you’re doing any type of long distance move. If you’re doing anything that’s not, basically, like an hourly rate, then you need someone on that job that’s going to be able to go out there and estimate how long it’s going to take before they start the job. So let’s say you give somebody a, your inventory list, right? And it needs to be broken down by room for this exact purpose. You’ve done an inventory, whether it was an onsite estimate or whether it was over the phone, and your whole estimate is based off that inventory.
Well, you want someone that’s going to be able to go out there and, basically, walk around the house with your inventory, go to each room and say, “Yeah, this is about right. This is going to take us eight hours.” Otherwise you have no basis for revision. You want someone out there that’s your eyes and ears that could estimate the job.
Crating. Crating’s a whole nother skill. You could have your entire company with nobody that knows how to crate and outsource it every time, which is totally cool. But, it is another skill that if somebody comes to the table and they know how to crate, well, there’s an additional service that you could be charging extra for. So, if you don’t know what crating is, crating is basically taking very fragile items, let’s say a chandelier, and you basically build a whole box for the chandelier to where the chandelier is hanging at the top of the box and it’s boxed in, right? Or you’re crating glass. All done typically with wood. So it’s a very carpenter-type thing to do and we didn’t really have … occasionally we’d have somebody in a city that knew how to do it, or a long distance driver that was good. Otherwise we outsourced that to somebody else, but it is a skill.
Driving. Do they know how to drive the truck? Do they have a clean driving record? And communicating. Somebody, and it doesn’t always have to be the driver, has to be able to communicate with the customer, has to be able to go over the contract, go over the paperwork, collect payment, discuss where do they want things. Somebody needs to have good communication skills.
So these are the skills, and guys, let me know if I missed something, too, down below. If I missed any skills here. But these generally are the skills that we look for in a mover. Doesn’t mean that the people that you hire have to have these skills, we’ll get to that in a minute.
So now we want to look at qualities, right? As an individual, what qualities do they have? And these are really pretty simple, right? I mean, you don’t have too high of expectations, or at least I don’t, and maybe I’ve seen people that do have really, really high expectations, which could be making it much more challenging to find guys and keep them there consistently.
They need to be respectful, to you and the customer. Good hygiene, just good hygiene. You know, some people, I talked to somebody not too long ago says they need to be clean cut, no facial hair, and I can understand the logic there. However, facial hair is kind of like the new men’s, more than half the guys you see, it might even be more, have beards. So to say that your movers can’t have that, you’re just eliminated more possible, good recruits that you could have working for you.
Helpful. Simple. They just need to be helpful, again, to the company and to the customer. Cooperative, with the customer, with their other teammates on the truck, right? With dispatch. Cooperative.
They need to be a team player. They need to, there’s no way one guy could go out and do it all. He’s going to have to have at least one more person, if not two, three, four, five, six, whatever it might be. But typically between two and three per crew, they have to be a team player. They have to know how everyone on that crew is going to play their part to have a successful move for the customer and physically capable. I’m not even going to say strong, just physically capable to, they don’t have to put a dresser on their shoulder and walk down the street with it. Their, have another person to lift that with them. There are hump straps, right? They don’t need to be able to carry all the boxes. There’s dollies for that.
But they need to be physically capable to do their part of it. You don’t need big, jacked guys. You need physically capable, but that are mindful to not bang into walls. That are not dragging stuff on the floor. They’re just physically capable.
They’re reliable. They’re going to show up. I mean, that’s, it’s hard to know that in an interview, but that’s what you’re looking for and they’re coachable, right? The same way that you coach your sales team to improve, those of you and Moving Sales Academy like the process of enhancement training and, and taking them through that process of making them better. You do that with your movers, as well.
You don’t just hire them, throw him a shirt and say, “Either go swim or sink.” You want to be able to coach them on the things that they need improvement with and so, whether that’s … let’s say you establish that a particular set of movers or particular one mover is causing a certain type of damage. You want to be able to retrain them and coach them on that. Let’s say you’re getting some feedback from customers on the way that they’re handling certain things. You want to be able to coach them on that, to help them improve. But if they’re just not willing to listen and they know it all, you know, it’s going to be really tough, unless they’re perfect and don’t make mistakes, for you to work with that individual.
So now, these are the qualities that we’re looking for. We’ve got the skill set and we’ve got the qualities. All right? Let me know down below if there’s more qualities you’re looking for, I’d love to hear about it. Let’s get the discussion going.
But now, as we bring in applicants, this is the mover applicant quadrant. There’s four types of applicants that are going to be coming in and we’re going to talk about getting the applications and running through the whole process in a minute, but I’m just laying the groundwork here to simplify this, right? Because you know, sometimes we, and everybody’s guilty of it. We make things bigger and more complicated in our minds then they need to be and if we’re able to just take things and lay them out, and it’s just step, step, step. One foot in front of the other. If this, then that.
You guys hear me talk so much about process, process, process because when you have that, it takes all the mental trying to figure every little thing out every single day and you just, essentially, hit start on the process and run it step, step, step, step, step. We want to understand what our criteria is and the four types of movers that are going to be applying.
The first type is experienced. They’ve got the skills as a mover and they’ve got good qualities. You’re interviewing them. You determined that they have the skills. They know how to pack. They know how to load a truck. They know how to do it all and their qualities are great, right? They have a great personality. They’ve got good hygiene. They’re reliable. They’re respectful in the interview. That’s type one. We all know, everyone’s like, “Yeah, I want that.” That is, that’s the one you want.
Then you got type two. They are inexperienced, so they don’t have the skills of a mover. They’ve never loaded a truck. They’ve never packed a box. They’ve never padded anything, but they have good qualities as an individual. They’re reliable. They’re coachable. They’re eager to learn. That’s type two.
Then you’ve got type three. They’re experienced, but bad qualities and this is the trap that a lot of companies fall for because they put experience and skills over quality and personality and I say that as doing it myself for years. You get the resume in or application in and they’re like, “Oh, they worked here. They worked there. They worked here. They worked there.” All moving companies. You’re like, “Oh, jackpot.” Right? But just because they have experience at another moving company does not mean they’re a good fit for your business.
You probably have these guys right now, today, out on a job that you really would like to get rid of because they’re the know-it-all. I’ve worked for every major company. I’ve been doing this my whole life. But as an individual, as an employee, the qualities aren’t there.
Then you’ve got inexperienced, no skills. No skills. They don’t have the skills to be a mover, but they have good qualities. They are a good guy or a good person. Wow. This is great for the interview, but you’re like, “Hey, are you willing to learn?” We can train you because in the interview you want to basically, you don’t want to make somebody feel like they have to have the skills, because then they’re going to lie to you about having the skills and then when you put them to the test, they won’t, and then that kind of creates a uncomfortable situation. So you want to make them feel like it’s okay that they don’t have the skills because you’re willing to train them. But if they’re like, “Yeah, nah. This sounds like more work than I really want to put in.”
Okay, so now we’ve got our four types, all right? And you’ve probably guessed it already, but type one, you hire immediately. They come in. They’re an applicant. You do an interview. You establish they’re a type one, hire. Done.
Type two, hire and train. In other words, they’re not experienced with moving. So what? So what? You don’t need them to be a crew chief. You don’t need them to be the foreman. You need them to go out and we’ll talk about how to get them into the rotation, as well. But if they’re eager to learn, and they’re a great individual, they’re respectful. They’re coachable. They’re reliable. They have good hygiene. Hire them and train them.
Type three, they come in, add them to your mover database, okay? We’ll talk about that in a minute. But your mover database is basically a place where you’re going to keep all of the information of all the applicants that come in to where, when you’re in a pinch, when you’re in a situation where you need somebody and you might be willing to put up with the bad qualities, because you just need someone with experience for a busy weekend or for a certain job, that you could call on that person. But that’s not your first pick or second to come in for the company because we all know the bad qualities, that’s what causes more problems with customers than lack of skill. I’ve seen more problems caused by attitudes of movers, then even damage to the furniture.
Type four, keep looking. In other words, type four comes in, maybe you established it there. They’d be a great salesperson or something like that. Don’t force the situation. The idea is to keep the door, keep it revolving. Keep people coming in to where you don’t have to settle and you don’t try to have to force people into certain positions. But if they’re, have great qualities and you’re like, “Hey, I could use you in this other role.” Great. But otherwise, keep looking, all right?
So that’s your quadrant. Whoever’s doing your hiring, show them this. Give them this and say, “Look, this is what’s going to come in the door and I want you to establish what type they are so that we can make a decision moving forward and we don’t have to overanalyze each and every person and we don’t end up giving the wrong people an opportunity that’s going to come back and bite us.”

Posted on Tuesday, 03-02-2021

Top 5 Moving Company Sales Tactics

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares his Top 5 Sales Tactics for moving companies.

“When we talk about sales, when we talk about creating a sales machine, the way that I was able to go from zero to making my first dollar in the moving business was just straight up [sales] tactics.”
“When you speak to somebody on the phone, you’re attempting to book a move and you ask for the business and they say, “No, I need to think about it.” You never want to get off that call without setting up a tentative reservation.”
“No matter what you do, whether it’s digital, whether it’s in a three-ring binder, have rebuttals in front of each and every one of your reps and make sure they’re using it.”
“This is about booking more jobs. Every single person watching books moves, but I want you booking more moves. The time, energy, effort, money that you put into getting the phone to ring, speaking to the customer, giving the estimate, or going out and doing an onsite… You need to raise your booking percentage. That’s where the profits are.”
Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis:
So when we talk about sales, when we talk about creating a sales machine, the way that I was able to go from zero to making my first dollar in the moving business was just straight up tactics, right? Things that you do and say on the phone to close the deal. So let’s start with the tactics. First tactic I’m going to share with you today, tentative reservations. Tentative reservations. So make sure you write this down, tentative reservation. So a tentative reservation is a way to increase your booking percentage tremendously. If anybody’s, by the way, if anybody’s doing tentative reservations now, if you’ve learned this from me in the past, write it in the comments down below. If you’re also slipping in this area and not doing this consistently, let me know too. This is a safe place. It’s confession time, right? Who’s doing it, who’s not doing it. Let me explain what it is for those of you that don’t know.

So when you speak to somebody on the phone, you’re attempting to book a move and you ask for the business and they say, “No, I need to think about it.” What you want to do is you never want to get off that call without setting up a tentative reservation. So you would say something to the customer like this, you would say, “Okay, well I’ll tell you what, why don’t I set you up on a tentative reservation? There’s no obligation. It’s just a courtesy we provide for our customers. If you need to change the time, date, cancel, it’s not a problem at all, but at least I could secure a spot for you with no obligation,” okay? They’re going to say, “Sure, why not?” Right? You’re penciling them in and by doing that, at that point, you would continue to get a little bit more information from them.
“Okay, great. I just need to get the address we’d be starting at, the address we’d be finishing it,” right? You fill in the details of the move estimate and here’s what’s going to happen and you’ll see. And if you’ve experienced it let me know down below.

Here’s what’s going to happen, they’re going to give you that little bit more information and their minds are going to start saying, “You know what? I’m going to have to go through this all over again with another company. Now I’m going to have to call this company back and cancel this tentative reservation.” And they’re going to say, “You know what? I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just set it up?” You’re going to get a lot of those right there on the first call. Then if you don’t get those, they’re going to hang up, they’re going to make some other calls, speak to a few other companies, and they might hear something from somebody else that their service is just as good, their price is comparable.

And they would have normally went ahead and booked with them just because they were on the phone with them but now they remember they have this tentative reservation with you, they’re going to have to call you back to cancel that. So what will happen is they’ll say, “No, you know what?” And they’ll just call you back and say, “Let’s go ahead and firm that up,” right? Tentative reservations are powerful. Don’t get off a call without setting that up, okay? And by the way, you have replays of this. So if you’re like, what did he say? What was the terminology? What was actual script of how you said that, go back and watch the replay of this, which I’m suggesting that you do anyways. Do this with your sales team, do this with your sales manager, go back and watch this stuff.

But the tentative reservations, huge, all right? So make sure that’s the first tactic that you want to make sure you’re doing on every single job. And as far as how long you keep these on your calendar, so let’s say you book it in your CRM and you have it marked or tagged as a tentative reservation, you basically keep that on the calendar until you start to have an issue with capacity. Meaning, that day starts to book up to where you’re like, “Are we going to book more jobs for that day or are we not going to book more jobs for that day?” Otherwise, what you do is if there’s no capacity issue, you have 10 trucks and you have 6 trucks worth of jobs, anyways, you’ve got enough for 6 trucks, right? You’ll just keep it on there and then call like you’re doing a normal confirmation call, right?

But if you book 100% of these, 30% might cancel you end up with 70%. But if you didn’t do this, you’d probably only end up with 30 or 40%, all right? Powerful, powerful. That’s tactic number one. Tactic number two, rebuttals. A rebuttal is a response to why your customer is not ready or prospective customer is not ready to set up their move with you at this point, okay? They have an objection to why they’re not ready to set it up. You want to overcome that objection with a rebuttal. So for example, what are all the reasons? I want you to make a list of all the reasons a customer would not or says no, or says, “We’re not ready to set this up yet,” right? Maybe it’s your price, they need to get other quotes, they need to speak with their husband or wife. They’re not sure about their closing date.

What are all the reasons that somebody would say they’re not ready to set this up today, right now on this call or at this onsite. What are those reasons? You need to have a rebuttal for each and every single one of those for yourself and for your team, okay? These are tactics, but they’re also ways … You’ve got 10 people on the phones, this is how you get all 10 people booking more jobs, right? It’s how you start to scale your business. So, if somebody says a price, you’re a little bit higher, you want to go into that rebuttal for that. You want to be able to say to them, “Listen, when you’re comparing prices for movers, it’s really not apples to apples comparison. And what I mean by that is, if you’re out shopping for a TV, you could price that TV out at Best Buy and then go check out the same TV at Walmart and see which one’s cheaper and buy that.

But with movers, it’s a service. And in order for me to send you quality trained professionals that are going to move all of your belongings without damaging anything and making the day more stressful than it needs to be, we charge a little bit more, right? What is it that you’re actually looking for? Are you looking for the cheapest price, quality movers or both?” You’ve got to be able to have those responses. Listen, the people that are going to dominate are the people that are not taking no for an answer on that first go around. Doesn’t mean that you have to just drill them until they say yes, that’s not what you want to do, okay? But you do want to give one little pushback on that first call, engage them in the conversation. And when you’re overcoming objections, the main thing you’re doing is you’re not being pushy, you’re just making sense of your service. You’re making sense of your point.

Let it make sense to them why you charge more, let it make sense to them why you have binding or non-binding or why you charge hourly or why you do flat rate, whatever it is, let that rebuttal make the way you do things make sense to them, okay? So rebuttals, you’ve got to have strong rebuttals. So make a list. By the way, those of you in Moving Sales Academy, go to the lesson on overcoming objections, in the downloads you have a PDF of all of my rebuttals. So it’s all in there for everything that someone could possibly say why they’re not going to move, why they’re not going to set up their move immediately. You’ve got the rebuttal and the response to give them to make sure your whole sales team has it and have it at their desks, right?

Make sure they have quick access to those rebuttals, that they don’t have to go look for them, they have either a book right here, or those of you that are using smart moving you know you could just write in the estimate screen, on your script, you could just click rebuttals and it’ll say, “Price is too high,” you go price too high and boom, the rebuttal pops up there. So no matter what you do, whether it’s digital, whether it’s in a three ring binder, have it in front of each and every one of your reps and make sure they’re doing it. All right. Tactic number three, roll into the reservation, okay? Roll into the reservation. As you’re giving estimates, you want to assume the sale, right? You want to assume that, hey, this is part of the process. They’re calling, I’m giving them the information that they need, and at the end of this call, I’m going to go ahead and book the move, right?

It’s the same as if you went to the grocery store and you got a cart full of groceries, and you came up to the counter, the cashier assumes that you’re going to be purchasing that stuff, right? So you’ve got to get yourself in that mindset. And then what you want to do is roll right into the reservation. So instead of what most people do, they get to the end of their script, they get to the end of their pitch and they say, “Well, how does that sound for you?” That’s not what you want to do, all right? You want to roll right into the reservation and how you do that is you say things like, you get to the end and you say, “All right, great. You’re all set. I just need to take $100 deposit. Did you want to put that on a Visa or a MasterCard?” So you’re assuming the sale.

You gave them their estimate. You told them the price. You’re like, “Okay, you’re all set.” And now you give them two options. You always want to give two options and both options lead to them booking with you, Visa or MasterCard. Never say, “What type of card would you like to put that on?” Because now you’re making them think, right? You want make from where they are, which is not booked yet to where you want them to be, which is booked, you want to make that path as easy as possible. Would you like to put that on a Visa or a MasterCard? Another one is, “I have two times available on that day. I have a morning and an afternoon, which would you prefer?” Again, two choices, morning or afternoon, which would you prefer? Another one would be, “You’re all set. What’s the best email for me to go ahead and send you your move confirmation email to,” right?

So in other words, you’re sending the confirmation, they’re ready to go. If you don’t take deposits or you know it’s going to be a morning job because of the size of it, that’s how you roll into the reservation, all right? Very, very important. Don’t ask the customer, “How does that sound? And do you want to book the job,” right? And you might say, “Louis, I do that now we book jobs.” This is about booking more jobs. This is about booking more jobs. Every single person watching books moves, I want you booking more moves. The time, energy, effort, money that you put in to getting the phone to ring, getting on there, giving the estimate or going out and doing an onsite, you need to raise your booking percentage. That’s where the profits are, all right? Roll into the reservation. Tactic number four, authority takeover. Authority takeover.

So an authority takeover is when a person of authority, in most cases, a manager or an owner takes over a call from a moving consultant to help close that deal, right? Either takes over the call during the call, or does a call back, authority takeover call back to speak to that customer as another voice. Listen, everybody loves talking to the top dog. Everybody loves talking to the manager. Everybody loves talking to the owner, right? So as a manager, as an owner, you don’t want to spend all this time giving estimates, taking inventory doing that, unless you’re just at that level, which is totally okay, right? I mean, that’s what I did at the beginning. Every single estimate, I did them all. But as you start to scale, you don’t want to be the one taking the time to give an estimate, spend 20 minutes on the phone with the customer. Your sales team does that.

But if you have someone that’s a closer, a sales manager, owner, someone that’s just another sales rep that could call back and say, “Hi, I’m the concierge. We’re just calling to see if there’s anything we can do for you,” and then roll into that. Another voice will help seal the deal. And they know they’re talking to the power to be. So this would be great to do any time where somebody’s maybe asking for a discount and you’ll say, “You know what? If I can take $10 off, is this something you’re ready to do today? Is this something you’re ready to do today? Okay, hold on, let me go speak to my manager,” right? Now, the rep could get back on the phone and say, “You know what? We could go ahead and give you the $10 off or whatever it is,” or the manager could get on the phone and say, “Hi, is this is this Ms. Jones? Hi, John told me that, you had a great conversation and you’re moving from here to there.

What’s it going to take? Is it going to take us taking the $10 off per hour in order to earn your business because what we really want is we want to make you a repeat and referral customer. We know that you’re going to tell all your friends and family about us. So let me know. What’s it going to take?” Yeah, the $10 or maybe not, right? At that point, you might even be able to get it without giving them the discount. Authority takeovers. All right, so the last tactic I have for you today, and remember, these are all go apply these now. Now, right? Don’t wait. Don’t pick and choose. I picked five of the best that you can implement now that it’s not overload. It’s not overwhelming. Tactic number five is called the kitchen table close. The kitchen table close.

When you go out and you do an onsite estimate, you need to go for the close while you’re there. Too many people are going and giving an estimate, leaving, going back to the office, working on the estimate, sending it to the customer. Maybe that day, maybe the next day, maybe within a couple of days and you’re crushing your chances of hitting that high booking percentage. Onsite estimates, if you’re doing them are naturally a higher closing rate, right? You’re now face-to-face with the customer in their home, you’ve got to close the deal there, okay? So you go through the house, you take your inventory, right? Whether you’re doing it on your tablet with your CRM or on a sheet of paper, whatever. You go through the house, ideally you’ll have your nice presentation folder, but maybe you don’t have it yet, right?

Don’t wait to do this until you get all the nice presentation, folders until you get the CRM or whatever it might be. And you say, “Okay, I have all this information, can we go ahead and sit here at the kitchen table and just go over this together?” Right? Now that’s when you break out the estimate. And ideally, ideally, what you want to do is have a portable printer to where you’re printing out the estimate right there on the spot. I know that you can email it to them. I know that, right? You’re going to do that as well, but you want to print it out so that they have something tangible to look at right there on the spot. So you get a portable printer, you hook it up to your CRM, you print it and now you go over to the information and you take these same tactics, right? You roll right into the reservation.

You use your rebuttals. I have three more estimates, right? What’s your response to that? I need to have a response for that. I have three more people coming. All else fails, you do the tentative reservation, right? And you also now can do the authority takeover. What’s it going to take to go ahead and get this booked? You know what? Let me call my manager. Let me call my owner. Let me call whoever and find out what we could do to make that happen for you, right? If you’re doing onsite estimates, please don’t waste your gas, time, money, energy walking through somebody’s house and not go for the close while you’re there. This is a game changer, game changer. I had a client that had three, at the time I think it was three and then he went to four onsite estimators. They were all going to the house to do a walkthrough, do a survey, right?

You got to get away from that, we’re doing a survey. We’re not doing a survey, we’re going to come do an estimate and when we’re done, you booked the job. But he had three, possibly four onsite estimators going out and just doing a survey and coming back to the office, going over the estimate for hours with the sales manager, and then getting back to the customer with the price. When they switched this to the kitchen table close, dramatic difference in their closing rate. Dramatic difference.

I can’t remember the exact percentage, but I want to say it doubled, okay? I want to say doubled. So those are the five tactics. Let me go through them again just in case you didn’t write them down. Number one, tentative reservations. Number two, rebuttals. Number three, roll into the reservation. Number four, authority takeover and number five, the kitchen table close, all right? So now, this is stuff you could start immediately. It doesn’t matter what size your business is, it doesn’t matter how many people you have working for you. You’ve got to get this going immediately.

Posted on Thursday, 11-05-2020

Should You Scale Your Moving Company?

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares why you must know if you actually need to scale, and how you’re going to do it before you start to grow your moving company.

“Scaling your moving company is one of the best ways for you to build wealth and create freedom so that you can enjoy your life and not be stuck working in the business all the time.”
“Scaling prematurely or scaling when you’re not ready, or scaling when you don’t have the model business set up, could really cause a lot of stress, really cause a lot of aggravation, and put a strain on your existing business.”
“Let’s make more with what we have. Let’s make the day-to-day more efficient. Let’s find those profits because most times it feels like there’s just money laying all over the floor and it’s just a matter of tightening a few things up, right? So you want to start there.'”
“Now you ask yourself the question, do I need the scale? We talk about scale and growth and getting to the next level and that’s all great, but do you need to? And so for me, when I work with clients, the first thing I want to know is, where do you want to get to in your life? How much money do you want to make? What’s it going to take to live the life you want to live? You might not need to open more offices based on what you want.”
Watch the video to get full training.

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Get Freedom from Your Moving Business

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:

Scaling your moving company is one of the best ways for you to build wealth and create freedom so that you can enjoy your life and not be stuck working in the business all the time. But what does it mean to scale your moving company?

Scaling a business basically means taking a model that works and that has all the systems and the processes and everything is just in order, ready to go, right? It’s a model business and then scaling it, growing it, duplicating it, expanding it. That’s scaling a business. And even though it’s one of the best ways for you to create more abundance and more financial freedom for yourself, it’s also one of the ways that if it’s not done correctly or it’s done prematurely, can cause you the most stress, the most overwhelmed. Costs you a ton of money and put a ton of strain on your current business.

If you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Louis Massaro, Founder and CEO of Moving Mastery, where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes in their business, to increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life.
When I started my first moving company, I was 19 years old. I had no idea what I was doing and I worked out of a truck rental yard. I’ve rented two trucks and over a period of a couple of years, I was able to build a really strong local moving business that I thought was a solid model that I would then be able to scale.

So I started opening additional locations. My first year that I decided to scale and open additional locations, I opened an additional three locations, right? So now here I am, I went from one office, one moving company. Now I had four moving companies and what I realized really quick was that the way that I ran one, was totally different than the way I needed to be running multiple locations, right? The way that the consistency and the predictability of that one did not translate to these other offices.

So now I found myself having to kind of reign them all back in, fly from city to city, and something that I wouldn’t have been able to do had I not been a young 22, 23 year old guy that was just getting started. I didn’t have a family and obligations and things holding me back, but it was one of the most stressful times to build something that created, like a monster, that I had to reign.

in. Right? So that’s when I say, scaling prematurely or scaling when you’re not ready, or scaling when you don’t have the model business set up, could really cause a lot of stress, really caused a lot of aggravation, and put strain on your existing business, which is what it did. Because now, when I had to go be at these other locations, I wasn’t at my original office, right? So after a ton of flights back and forth, in time going here and there, I was able to develop processes and systems that allowed me to get it all under control. That allowed me to have consistency and predictability across all those locations and then grow.

Nationwide, we went to $20 million year and so I’m sharing this story because people will say, but Louis, I want to grow. I want to make more money. I want to scale. I want to get to that next level. I’ve got my friend or my dispatcher or my brother, they’re ready to open up another location. Or they say, I’m doing local moves and I’m turning down so much long distance, I need to get into long distance.

What I would tell you, and what I tell my clients is that look, before you scale, you’ve got to get your model business on point. You’ve got to have something that is set up in a way to where if you’re going to duplicate it or you’re going to do more of it, that it’s not just creating more problems and more issues, but that it’s a nice, smooth operation that you’re growing and you’re scaling. ,I’m all about growth. I’m all about scaling, but you’ve got to do it the right way.

So I want to give you three tips that you can take and really start laying the foundation for what you need to do to go and scale your business. Because like I said, it is the best way for you to really create that financial freedom, that personal freedom and that longterm wealth. And so I want to give you three things.

The first one is you want to fine tune your fundamentals. Okay? Fine tune your fundamentals and what that means is in the moving business, there are five fundamentals. In everything that you do in your moving business, is in one of these five categories. Okay?

The first one is lead generation or marketing. The second one is booking moves or sales. The third one is servicing moves or operations. The fourth one is creating raving fans or customer service. And the fifth one is accounting and knowing your numbers.

These five areas, time and time again, companies that I work with, if we dive in to these five areas and look for areas that can be fine tuned and you know right now there’s things that you’re thinking about, as we mentioned these five areas, where you’re like, yeah, I need to tighten that up. I need to tighten that up. What we found time and time again, is there so much profit sitting in those fundamentals and so before we go and expand and create more complexity in our day-to-day, in our life, in our business, let’s fine tune what we have. Right? Let’s make more with what we have. Let’s make the day-to-day more efficient. Let’s find those profits because most times it feels like there’s just money laying all over the floor of the companies that we work with and it’s just a matter of tightening a few things up, right? So you want to start there.

Second thing you want to do to prepare yourself to really scale, is become a process driven company. You know, you’re either a process-driven company, or you’re a people driven company. Most companies are people driven and what that means is they bring, they look for the best person they could find for the position. They hire somebody. They bring them in and let’s say it’s a salesperson. They’ll train a sales person and they’ll do it one way. They’ll train another sales person. They’ll do it a little bit differently. Or their movers, one crew will go out. They’ll address the customer when they come to the door in one way, and another crew will address the customer, not even address the customer in a totally different way, right? There’s no consistency because it’s people driven.
When you have people driven companies, there’s no way that you could scale that because you can’t duplicate people. You can’t clone people. So even if you’ve got great people, in order to scale, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a process driven company.

What that means is everything that gets done in your business is done the exact same way, right? The way your movers handle pick up. The way they handle delivery. The way your sales team gives estimates. The way close out jobs and handle customer service and do your books. Everything is done, the exact same way, regardless of the person. Because what you want is, you want the processes to run the business and then you want the people to run those processes and until your company’s process driven, you’re going to have a really, really, really, really hard time scaling with a people driven company.

So listen, if this all makes sense to you and you want to go deeper, I suggest you take a look at my Moving CEO Business Program. There’s a link down below. I’m about to get to the third point here too. I want to make sure I give you the tools and set you up in a way where you’ve got everything you need. So go check that out. It’s called the Moving CEO Business Program. There’s a link down below for you.

The third step of what you need to do to prepare yourself for scale, now you’ve got your fundamentals, fine tuned. Right? You’ve kind of gone through and this an ever, you know, you want to be doing this all the time. You always want to be fine tuning the fundamentals, always be looking at the five areas and say, how can we improve this? How can we make it more efficient? How can we make it more profitable? Once you’ve got that going and like a nice rhythm and rotation of that happening consistently, then you’ve built your processes and become a process driven company, now you’re in a position where you can sit back and you’re going to look at your business in a whole different way; whole different way that you’re going to see it.

Now you ask yourself the question, do I need the scale? Right? No, we talk about scale and growth and getting to the next level and that’s all great, but the need to? And so for me, when I work with clients, the first thing I want to know is like, where do you want to get to in your life? How much money do you want to make? What’s it going to take to live the life you want to live because you know what? You might not need to open more offices based on what you want.

Maybe you want to make a certain amount of money, be able to live a nice lifestyle, right? Get things in order, so you’re not stressing out about is this happening? Is that happening? And you know everything’s running smooth. Maybe that’s where you want to be. You know, you don’t always have to scale and grow and open more, to live the life that you want to live. There’s a lot of money and profits right under your feet, where you are at. But, you may look at it and say, “Louis, I’ve got everything dialed in. You know, we’re operating at maximum efficiency and profitability and in order for me to live the life that I want to live for me and my family and do the things that we want to do, I need to be here and we can’t do that with this one location.” Then, you know, you need to scale, right? But you want to scale based on what you want to do in the way of how you want to live your life, right?

Don’t scale just for the sake of scaling. Because as much as it’s an entrepreneurial, like fire in you, to grow, it’s also something that you build that you also then have to maintain, that you also have to manage and if you’re not truly committed to it for a higher purpose and a higher reason, it can become very overwhelming.

So the last thing you want to do is just ask, do I need the scale? Where do I need to be, to be able to reach my personal financial goals? Because the number one thing you want to remember with all of this, whether you love the moving business, whether you hate the moving business. If you’re in the moving business, this business is your way to financial freedom and building wealth for yourself, but you’ve got to do it strategically and you don’t want to scale before you’re ready to scale.

Once you’ve got this setup, your fundamentals are fine-tuned, your processes are there, then you’re ready to go. Go crush it. Make it happen. I’ll see you guys next time.

Posted on Thursday, 09-03-2020

Commit to Mastery in Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode, Louis Massaro shares why you need to commit to mastery to take your moving company to the next level.

“I kept this little black book in my pocket and I would write down whatever I needed to research, whatever I needed to look into. And I would always say to myself, “There’s got to be a better way.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but that one statement was leading me down the road to mastery.”
“Mastery is not a destination. It’s not a place that you get to. Mastery is a journey and it’s a mindset. This is the right business to be in if you want to make money. It just takes that commitment to mastery.”
“Dabblers are people that look for the quick hack. They want a quick little fix. They try this business, “Ah, it didn’t really work out. Let me try that business. Let me try five different businesses, see which one works out.” But it’s that commitment to saying there’s got to be a better way. That’s how you get better. Once you adopt that mindset and you incorporate it into your day to day, that’s when you reach your goals.”
“Mastery’s not perfection. I know a lot of people who are really hard on themselves. They’ve got a great business, but they’re really hard on themselves because they’re striving for perfection, which is no such thing. You can’t get there. The whole mindset of like, if I’m satisfied I’m not going to work hard, is bullshit too. You should have a sense of satisfaction and know I’m on the right path. I’m on this road to mastery.”
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!

When to Expand Your Moving Company

How to Build a $10 Million Moving Company from Scratch

Build Trust and Capture Leads in Your Moving Company

Resolving Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:

When I started, I was 19 years old. I rented two trucks. I put a Yellow Page ad in and that’s how I started. I had no idea if it was going to work, but I knew, hey look, there’s people making money in this business, if they could do it, I could do it. And every day things would come up, problems would come up. I kept this little black book in my pocket and I would write down whatever it is, whatever I needed to research, whatever I needed to look into. And I would always say to myself, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way.” I didn’t learn that. It was just something that naturally like this doesn’t seem to be working. There’s got to be a better way to do this. Right? Companies are succeeding at high levels, things are running smooth, if I’m having these troubles, there’s got to be a better way. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that one statement was leading me down the road to mastery.

Mastery is not a destination. It’s not a place that you get to. Mastery is a journey and it’s a mindset. There’s people that are committed to mastery. People that come to stuff like this that say, “There’s got to be a better way. I’ve got a good business, but you know what, maybe there’s one thing. Maybe there’s something better. Maybe I could tweak this or tweak that.” And then, there’s dabblers. Right? People that look for the quick hack. They want a quick little fix. They try this business, “Ah, it didn’t really work out. Let me try that business. Let me try five different businesses, see which one works out.” I can tell you, and you’ll hear from other people this weekend, too, this is the right business to be in if you want to make money. It just takes that commitment to mastery.

You’re going to learn a lot this weekend. I promise you that. I didn’t learn it all in a weekend. I’m going on my 20th year since I started my first moving company and I’m still on the road to mastery. I know probably 90% of you in the room are on the road to mastery. I know a lot of you personally in the room, you’re on the road to mastery. You understand that it’s not a what’s the lead source we need to get? What’s this little quick hack and that’s going to fix everything in my business? It’s that commitment to saying there’s got to be a better way. Right? And that’s how you continue to improve. That’s how you get better. And you never get to this ultimate place of mastery, but once you adopt that mindset and you incorporate it into your day to day, that’s when you reach your goals.

That’s when you have a fulfilling life. Where dabblers, that’s no fulfillment, no achievement, always blaming, always looking for the quick fix. I realize there might be a few dabblers sprinkled in the room today and that’s okay. Nobody’s a born dabbler. It was just a strategy that got picked up along the way. Somehow, some way, you learned it or just seeing people tell you, “Oh, an entrepreneur, you got to try five businesses and then see which one works.” That’s bullshit. You try them until you see yeah, there’s opportunity there down that road. Then go down that road. When you know you’re standing on top of the gold, you get the shovel out and you fucking dig deep. Okay? You don’t scatter yourself all over the place. So, if you know you want to be in this business, and this is for anything, you’ve got to commit to mastery.

I hear the struggles. I hear what people are going through in the moving business, and a commitment to mastery will solve a lot of that. Mastery’s not perfection. Let’s get that straight because I know a lot of people too, who are really hard on themselves. They’ve got a great business, but they’re really hard on themselves because they’re striving for perfection, which is no such thing. You can’t get there. And the whole mindset of like, if I’m satisfied I’m not going to work hard, is bullshit too. You should have a sense of satisfaction and know I’m on the right path. I’m on this road to mastery.

So, I’m not trying to change you. I’m not trying to get all in your head and make you think all kinds of stuff. And I’m not trying to get you to make a commitment to change anything in your life right now. All I ask, can you commit to mastery until Sunday? Let’s try it on. Let’s see how it fits. Let’s see how it feels. Let’s see what it does to the mindset of what we feel we can achieve, how much clearer you see things. When you focus on mastery, all the bullshit comes right out of your view, right out of your sight. All the stuff, the 9 million things that you’ve got going on, I get it, and it’s crystal clear what’s important.

This is the environment to be in to do it, because I know at least 90% of you are already committed to mastery. So, anybody that’s on the fence, there’s no better support network than this room. Who’s been to one of my events before? Okay. You guys know, I don’t believe in competition. You might be sitting next to somebody that’s in your own market. So what? There is enough business to go around and I know that’s hard to hear and I know everybody wants all of it. I get it. I totally get it. But there’s nothing better than having a friend in your market, especially, that you could talk to, that’s doing what you do. So, this weekend you’re going to meet a lot of amazing people and I say that from the people that I already know that are in the room. And I say that just from the first time I did an event and didn’t know anybody and just know chances are there’s a lot of amazing people in the room.

So, it’s not just about what I’m going to give you from the stage. It’s about the people you’re going to meet. I’m going to help create those situations where you’re going to be able to get up and network and share some stuff, share some ideas. And you’re going to gain a lot from that. But, when we focus on competition, we have a scarcity mindset. It’s abundant out there. There’s enough money for all of you to go get it, and to the level that you are willing to go get it. Maybe you say, “Louis, I want to make a hundred grand a year.” Cool. It’s there for you. “Louis, I want to make a million dollars a year personally in my pocket.” Cool. Do the work, it’s there for you. Right? This is not a get rich quick seminar. Everything that we’re going to go over will require work. But, it’s okay because if you’re committed to mastery and you believe in where you can go, it’s just part of the journey. Right?

The thing about mastery is that when you’re on that road, it’s like the HOV lane. All right? Everybody else is sitting there beep, beep, beep, stuck in traffic, stressed out, and you’re like, “Whew.” Right? The people that commit to mastery soar past everybody. The people that stay dabbling, it’s a tough life. The second theme for the weekend is not just building a business, but building a life for yourself. For me, it took me a long time to learn this and I learned it the hard way, and I hope that I could save anybody in the room from going through what I went through. I started the company… there’s got to be a better way, there’s got to be a better way, there’s got to be a better way… but only focused about the business. I wasn’t focused on my life. I was focused on make the money and everything else will fall into place.

I watched the movies and the TV shows about the businessman who his whole life falls apart and his family leaves him, and I’m like, “The people that wrote that, they just don’t have any ambition.” Right? That’s how I felt at 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. I put my focus in there’s got to be a better way, there’s got to be a better way. Built the business, by 23 was a millionaire from scratch, and things didn’t fall into place. Life didn’t just become great. When they say money doesn’t buy you happiness, it’s true. It makes it a lot better, don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely a component. You need the money. Right? But it’s not everything. And it really took me seven, eight years of being in business to realize this doesn’t work. Again, there’s got to be a better way, but now I’m like I’ve been saying this shit all along but I’m not applying it to my life. And that’s when I started to focus on life as a whole.

And from that point, things really came into place. Not only did I become happy, because really what do we all want, right? I mean, you’re chasing the money because we feel it’s going to make you happy or you feel it’s going to buy you things that are going to make you happy, but without everything else it’s empty. Right? It really is empty. And so, I started to learn how to build my life. It’s really, listen, you come up with a business plan, right, I don’t mean big, long in depth ones that banks want for loans and shit like that. That stuff’s useless. I mean your real plan of what you’re going to do. You need the same thing for your life. Right? Because I believe that if you have the right plan and you put in the work, you work the plan, you could really get wherever you want to go. Right? It’s about finding the stuff that’s holding you back and eliminating that or working your way around it.

I can tell you, by not focusing on my whole life, it was holding me back. Once I started to do that, once I started to focus on me, my health… I remember early on when I started, a couple years into the business, end of the month, I forget how many trucks were out, but I’m on the floor in a ball almost crying with ulcers in my stomach. Clocking crews out on the Nextel walkie talkie. Who’s allowed the business to affect their health in here in some kind of way? Whether it’s just not eating right… Okay. That’s everything. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. And I’m not going to teach you workout routines this weekend. Don’t worry. But it’s about understanding that it all connects. Most of you are probably like me, where you’re like, “I want to build this business.” But in order to build the business, you build the whole life. And it’s not like it takes away from your time to build the business, it actually makes you better. It makes you stronger. It makes you more efficient.

Posted on Wednesday, 08-26-2020

4 Things that Stop You from Delegating

SUMMARY

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!

RELATED POSTS

When to Expand Your Moving Company

How to Build a $10 Million Moving Company from Scratch

Build Trust and Capture Leads in Your Moving Company

Resolving Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

Preventing Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:

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.

Marketing management, customer support, report generation.

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.”

Posted on Thursday, 08-20-2020

When to Expand Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode, Louis Massaro shares when to expand your moving company.

“Not only did I open up additional locations prematurely, I’m seeing people do it constantly left and right. And I’m all about growth, I’m all about expansion, but you need to have a little bit of a plan.”
“The first thing that I would ask yourself is, “Can my current business run without me?” Because it’s going to require a lot of work for you to go spend time there and deal with the unexpected.”
“We can all make a plan for what we’re going to do and think that it’s going to go a certain way, however, when the unexpected happens and you’re so stuck working in your current business, that you can’t go spend time in the new business, it’s going to create problems.”
“Do you have these things in place? Because if you don’t, you will either fail or you will be on a scramble to put these things in place like I did after the fact, and that’s not fun.”
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!

Build Trust and Capture Leads in Your Moving Company

Resolving Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

Preventing Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

How to Hire Movers for Your Moving Company

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:

All right. First one here is Steven. What’s up, Steven? When do you think the best time is to open a second location? I’m doing about 1.5 million at my first location, when should I open up another? Great question. Okay. In order to, really… I could tell you that, not only did I open up additional locations prematurely, I’m seeing people do it constantly left and right, okay. And I’m all about growth, I’m all about expansion, but you need to have a little bit of a plan, right?

Look, the first thing that I would ask yourself really, really simple is, can my current business run without me? Okay. Can my current business run without me? Because it’s going to require a lot of work for you to go spend time there, deal with the unexpected, right? We can all make a plan for what we’re going to do and think that it’s going to go a certain way, however, when the unexpected happens and you’re so stuck working in your current business, that you can’t go spend time in the new business, it’s going to create problems, not only for the new company, not only for the old company, but it’s also going to create those problems for you as an individual, because it’s going to totally throw your whole lifestyle in chaos, right? So you need to ask yourself, is that part of my plan also, right? So can it run without me? Is it really part of my plan? Is it part of my blueprint?

I don’t have a flip chart with me today, so I’m going to draw some stuff out on paper for you guys, hopefully you could see it. But basically what we need to do, is we need to start with a blueprint, okay. When you just start with a blueprint, you see that all right, can you see that in the monitor? Cool.

So the blueprint basically is like, hey, what specifically do I want to do, what is my plan? Meaning, if you’re asking about opening up a second location, that’s cool, but what’s your long-term plan? 20 years from now, where do you want to be? 10 years from now, five years from now and then back that in, because more is not always better. The last thing you want to be doing, is spending time, money, and energy climbing a ladder that’s leaning on the wrong wall, right? You’re going to get to the top of the place where you weren’t even trying to get to, you want to make sure that you have that figured out ahead of time.

So, if your long-term plan has opening additional locations in it, okay. Great. Right. So what would that mean? So you might say, I want to open 50 offices throughout the US, will opening a second location would be one of the first steps that you would need to do. Or you might say, no, you know what? Maybe I make 200, $300,000 a year personally, in this one location. And I’ve kind of figured out what my lifestyle needs are, and I need to make 500, $600,000 a year, one more location will take care of that and that’s what I want, right?

I think that, especially nowadays with social media and everybody out there just, I’m doing this and I’m doing that, it can make people feel as if they’re not doing enough, when the reality is you need to get very clear on your particular blueprint, right? Because there’s a lot of paths to make money in the Moving business. Sometimes it doesn’t require opening an additional location, I know people making a lot more money, take home money in one location than people that have several locations and vice versa.

So to answer your question, Steven, first thing you need to do is come up with a blueprint to understand why you’re actually opening that additional office, okay. Then ask yourself, are the fundamentals at my current location on point? Because if they’re not, you’re just now going to expand the problem, right? Every problem you have at your current location is also going to end up in the new location. All right. So go in and make it your mission to come up with the second step here, after your blueprint is to create systems, okay, processes. Because running one location and running multiple locations is a totally different ball game, totally different ball game. Anybody that has multiple locations, let me know down in the Chatroll down below, if you were in for a rude awakening when you opened that second location, it’s different.

When I opened my first remote location, I was like, “Oh, my current office is rocking, we’re doing great, I’ve got systems,” at least what I thought were systems in place, okay. And I’m going to go ahead and duplicate that. Well, those systems worked in the location I was at in my Denver office because I was there, right? The systems needed to be much more fine tuned and much more black and white to be able to run a remote location.

So once you’ve got your blueprint and you know, hey, this is where I’m headed. Listen, this whole game of business becomes a lot easier when you know where you’re headed, right? It’s when we get lost and it’s like, “Ooh, I could do this, there’s an opportunity.” Or, “Oh, I got this guy, he says he wants to open an office, so I guess I could open them up in an office.” When you know what your path is, it becomes easy. Then you lay out the system so that your current business can run without you, okay, which is the next step, which is freedom, okay. Some of you that are in my flagship program you know this whole process already, but I’m kind of sharing it, so people get it.

The next step is freedom. Before you can go and spend time doing business development, you need to be able to push away from the day-to-day work, right? Close down all the day-to-day stuff, the dispatching, the sales, the this, whatever you’re doing now currently, right? And you need to be able to have time specifically set aside for business development, okay. So you get your blueprint in place, you create your systems for your current location that are set up in a way that could be modeled and duplicated at the new location, whether that’s one additional or 49 additional, right? Then you create that freedom by bringing in people to handle everything that you don’t want to handle.

If we think about our businesses, right? At the beginning, you have to do a lot of stuff because you just have to do it, you don’t think about it. When I started my Moving company, I did everything, a lot of you do everything, right? I didn’t think about, oh, what do I like to do? What do I not like to do? What brings me joy and happiness in my day? And what’s like, ah, I don’t want to do this, right?

Well, when you start to get to a certain level, and Tommy you’re at… I’m sorry, Tommy. Steven you’re at 1.5 million, you’re at that level. When you’re at that level, it’s time to say, okay, let me back up here. What am I doing on a day-to-day basis that’s either not a good use of my time or I don’t enjoy doing, and let me bring somebody in to take care of those things, so that I could have the freedom, right? Let me bring in possibly an operations manager that can now run these systems. You could have somebody, their whole job is to make ensure that all your standard of operating procedures, all your systems, are being adhered to and run. Think about the peace of mind that you would have, knowing that things are getting run exactly the way that you want them to run, so you’ve got to create the freedom for yourself. After that, the next step is scale, right?

Now, it’s you’ve created the blueprint, you know what it is, you’re doing, okay. You’ve created the systems, they’re in writing, you have them, they work. You’ve created freedom for yourself to step away and not working on your business. Okay, I’m sorry, in your business. And now you have the time to work on business development and overseeing remote locations.

This is how you scale. No matter what it is you want to do, no matter if you want the franchise, right? I have a private coach and clients that are franchising, and this is what you need to do. If you want to open up one, two, five, 10, whatever it is, locations, or if your idea of scale is to say, you know what? I don’t need more, I just need this one to continue to run this way, continue to produce this money for me, but I don’t want to do anything, right? I want to take a step back and run it from a high level, these are the steps that you need to take.

Again, Steven, that’s my answer to, when is the time to open up a second location? Has nothing to do with money, other than do you have the money to… It’s not once you hit 1.5, open up another office, once you have 3 million open up two offices, that’s not what it’s about. What it’s about is, do you have these things in place? Because if you don’t, you will either fail or you will be on a scramble to put these things in place like I did after the fact and that’s not fun. I started to open additional locations without all this in place and then realized it was the only way to save what I had built and had to go in and implement it after the fact, you don’t want to do that.

Posted on Wednesday, 08-12-2020

How to Build a $10 Million Moving Company from Scratch

SUMMARY

In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to build a $10 million dollar moving company from scratch.

“One of the first questions I ask people that I work with privately is, how much money you want to make? That’s going to determine how we need to structure your path of where you’re going.”
“If I was starting all over today, I would start with a local moving company, two trucks, short term lease. I’d keep it real simple.”
“I would hire and train a dispatcher and a moving consultant right away. Now you might say, “Louis, I don’t have the money to do that,” It’s going to be different for everybody. For me, I’d keep it simple. Local moves, couple of trucks, get started, keep the overhead low, hire and train a dispatcher and a moving consultant because I don’t want to do it.”
“I’m not hiring a manager to just go figure it out. No. I’ve already figured it out when I fine-tuned the processes. I handed this person those processes, those roles, those metrics like this is how you run the business, and now I watch, just like, okay, that person could do it. Cool. Let’s do three more locations. I’ll open up three more. I’ll spend the next two years bringing all five locations to $10 million total.”
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!

Resolving Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

Preventing Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

How to Hire Movers for Your Moving Company

Moving Season Targets

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis:

Let me tell you what I would do if I started all over today. If I went from scratch and I started all over, what I would do. Doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. Remember, everybody’s different. It’s all about like, yeah, I’m willing to deal with that. I’m willing to put in that extra work. Nah, I don’t really want to be bothered with that. I’ll do it this way. I’m happy with making that kind of money.

One of the first questions I ask people that I work with privately is, how much money you want to make? That’s going to determine how we need to structure your path of where you’re going, and so if I was starting all over again, first of all, this is my first warehouse. I don’t have a picture of the truck rental yard that I worked in, but this is my first warehouse that I got maybe three or four months after I started off working in the Penske truck rental yard, dispatched my trucks there, rented two trucks.

I finally was able to go and negotiate this deal on this warehouse. That’s not mine by the way. It’s basically from here, and then right over here there’s a door, and that was it. I want to say it was maybe 3,000 square feet, but like 1,200 of it was office. Had way too much office, but I got a good deal on it. All the carpet was ripped up. There was no carpet in the office. It was all like cement with glue from the carpet that was there, and that was where I started.

That’s me in the office. I was probably 20 years old, Yellow Pages, eating fast food. That was like three times a day I was eating fast food back then. No more. I haven’t touched Wendy’s in years, but had a CRM by the way. Early on, there was a DOS program that a guy made for the moving industry. I don’t even remember the name of it, but printed my contracts. Did all that. Had all my movers. That’s all the movers. They’re what I call now the mover database that we turn into electronic, which we’ll talk about later. That’s my mover database sitting there when I needed guys. You’ll see this book right here. The three-ring binder that had my script in it, that had my rebuttals in it, that had all the information that I needed to be able to book jobs. All my contracts. Here’s two file cabinets. Four more. I kept six months worth of contracts right there next to me, and that was it.

I started off. My first office was in Las Vegas for six months. Never got an office. Worked out of my apartment and rented two trucks there, and that office, I couldn’t get a license so I was renting. I was renting. I was doing a labor service with one contract and renting trucks with another contract, and so I was like, “There’s got to be a better way. Right?” Like, I want storage. I want names on my trucks. I want to build a real business. I don’t want to be out here doing this half way of doing it. I want to do it for real.

So I went to Denver, Colorado, right six months later, so my first moving company failed. Just open it up, spent six months there, and then left. Went to Denver, and that’s really where it all started for me. Had storage here. That’s me on the forklift. When I first got the warehouse, really what I first did was when I was working out of the truck rental yard, I already put in the Yellow Pages moving and storage so we were getting storage customers and I was putting them in a self storage unit, and then by the time I got the warehouse, I had a bunch of storage already and we brought it all over and just had it floor loaded with tape. I don’t recommend this by the way. This is just like learning. You know, just figuring out how to do it.

Then I would order 20 of these vaults at a time when I had money. They were about $200 a piece. I got them from Contain in North Carolina. They’d come out. I’d have to build them in the warehouse with these little clamps. You guys probably know if you do storage. And that was it. We ended up taking over the space next door. We ended up moving into a bigger warehouse, and the Denver office alone I think we got up to at 5 or 600 vaults. Other offices the same, but that was me at the very, very beginning.

I literally was there. You saw me in the office on the phone when a storage shipment came in or was going out. Either way. I forwarded the phone. There was a code that you put in the phone to my cell phone, my Nextel walkie talkie. Went out to the warehouse and there was not one. We talked about liability for storage. I was so tight with the security. There was not one crew that was ever allowed in this warehouse without me or in the future with somebody else. Had our inventory sheets that were done for storage, and every single item had to be checked off as it came in. Every single. I was on the phone. If a call came in for me to book a move, the movers had to sit there and wait. I paid them for the time, but they had to sit there and wait. Okay, I’m done. Alright, let’s go. You’ve got to run it tight with storage. You can’t let people in and out of there. You’ve got to make sure it’s on point.

So if I was starting all over today, I would start with a local moving company, two trucks, short term lease. I’d keep it real simple with local. The two trucks based on my budget of how I would start would either be rental trucks, I would purchase them, I would lease them. We’ll talk about the scaling matrix and how to decide what to do with what, but at the end of the day you could start with two rental trucks. I started with two rental trucks.

I would do a short term office lease, and the reason you want to do a short term office lease is because you want to be in a position. When I say short term, a year, two years. As low as you could get them. All the landlords, they’re going to want three years. They’re going to want five years. But the thing is, if you’re going to commit to that kind of time, you need something bigger to grow into, but you don’t want to pay that upfront. Always try to negotiate some upfront free rent, but it’s harder to get upfront free rent on a year lease, right? The more years that you’re willing to give them the more you can actually negotiate longterm.

So for me, I would want something that’s ideally a year just to get situated, just to get going, just to prove out the concept, make some money, and then I would move into more of a longterm facility that I’d be willing to commit to a longer term and negotiate some free upfront. I would also start this based on where I live. If I live somewhere good and it’s a good market and I feel comfortable there. If I live in this little small town and I feel like I need to go somewhere bigger, I would go somewhere bigger. For me, I left where I grew up just because I was 19 and it was just better to … You know, your friends aren’t really doing much. They’re either in college or they’re messing around and not doing anything, and I went somewhere else, right? And I ended up recruiting a bunch of them anyways to work for me, but I would start either where you are or identify a market that you want to move to and go there.

I would hire and train a dispatcher and a moving consultant right away. Now you might say, “Louis, if I don’t have the money to do that,” and by the way, as I’m going through this I want you to think about most of you have companies. A lot of you have multiple companies. This could be for your second location as well, right? This is me. By the way, this is not my advice for you. This is just what I would do. We talked about the five models to scale. It’s going to be different for everybody. For me, I’d keep it simple. Local moves, couple of trucks, get started, keep the overhead low, hire and train a dispatcher and a moving consultant because I don’t want to do it.

I might dispatch one day just for the fun of it, just to show the dispatcher how it’s done, or I might jump on a call just for the fun of it or show them how it’s done the same way that I’ll go to my friend’s pizza place and make pizza for the fun of it, because that’s what I did before I wasn’t moving. But I don’t want to start by being in that position, so I would hire and train a dispatcher and a moving consultant. I would start with direct mail. As for marketing, I would start with direct mail postcards. Pay per click. I would do Google. I would do Bing. I would buy moving leads, probably Equate Media, Quote Runner, maybe Moving.com, and I would start my referral program and all of it would be tracked.

Everything would be tracked. Tracking numbers to make sure that the stuff’s working. So that postcard goes out. It has a unique phone number on it that when that call comes in, it says “postcard” and we’re able to put it right in the CRM so that we’re able to track it and know exactly what’s going on. Because then from there, at the beginning stages, I’ve got to be able to see what’s working. Especially at the beginning. My marketing budget, I’m putting it out there. It’s all I have.

I don’t have any repeat customers. I don’t have any referral customers. I need to make sure that this stuff’s working, so I need to track it from day one and I know a lot of you don’t track it now 10 years later, right? We’re going to talk about how to do that, but I would make sure all that stuff is tracked. I would develop roles and processes for a model business right away from day one.

What that means is, and this is really important for you guys that are already established if you don’t have your roles and processes, which we’ll talk more about, so we’ll get to that but that means, okay, this dispatcher, this moving consultant, I’ve already got my roles and processes established for both of them. So if I’m starting today, I’m ahead of the game. It’s like, “Here. This is what you do. This is what you do.” But if I didn’t have that, I would spend a little time in that position and develop what those roles are. Like, what do I want a dispatcher to do? What do I want a sales person to do? What are the step-by-step processes of how they dispatch the crew, how they take in storage, how they follow up with a customer?

I need all that down, because remember, in order to thrive in any economy, you need to be able to hire quick and you need to be able to fire quick, and part of that is having the roles down and having the processes down. You’re not working out? See you. Bring somebody in, because I’m hiring quickly. Sit them down. Here’s your role. Here’s the processes. Train them. I’m back up and running. So, so important. We’ll talk more about that.
Once I had a profitable model business with all my foundations down, all the foundation is there. We talked about that before. We’ve got lead generation, booking moves, servicing moves, making sure we’ve got happy customers and accounting. I’ve got all that dialed in. I’m not jumping the gun and opening up another location before I have that. Once I do, I’ll open a second location, then develop and fine tune the processes for managing multiple locations.

This is something that caught me totally off guard. I had what I felt like were good processes and good roles in place with my first location, and the way that I managed it, but I managed it being there, seeing what’s going on, being able to see and feel and watch. When I opened more locations, I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t watch, and the technology back then was not like the technology now.

Sure, I had cameras in those offices and I could log in to those cameras and see what was happening. It wasn’t like I was pulling them up on my phone, but I need to now establish, and I have all this now, but if I didn’t I would say, “Okay, the second location is open. Let me really fine tune how I’m going to run that office just as good as I run this office without being there. What reports do I need to see? What meetings do I need to have? What do I need to check in on? What are my metrics in my key performance indicators that I say, ‘Oh, that happened with the number. That number reached above this threshold. I need to take this action.'”

I would start dialing that in. I would then hire a manager/COO to run the day-to-day, the operations. It’s a little too early right now to decide what caliber I would want. Sometimes you can’t have it totally planned out. You’ve kind of get to a place, see where you’re at, see how it’s going, and then decide but I want someone that’s going to run the day-to-day of not only the existing company, but the new offices.

Now, I already have it, but if I didn’t, I would want to establish what that is, but what that would be, that role, would be a role that I would be establishing here in number six. Because I would personally go, “Okay, this is how I’m managing this. This needs to be done everyday. This needs to be checked. I need to look at these reports. I need to go in the CRM and do that. I need to make sure this is happening,” and then I would hire somebody to replace me to do that day-to-day. Because again, if I do this again, I’m not doing this to have a job for myself. I’m doing this to set it up, make some money. I’m not doing it to get in there everyday and run it.

Then I would open three more locations over the next 18 months. I’d open three more locations over the next 18 months, so now I’ve got five locations. Because once you’ve got the model business, now you could open a second location no problem. You just duplicate it. Then you develop and fine tune the processes, so it’s like, okay, this is how I’m managing it. If this happens, I handle it this way. I feel in control. It’s a control thing. Like I feel in control. It’s thousands of miles away, but I feel in control. I don’t have to be there. I’m hiring somebody. I got them in place. They’re running the day-to-day while I’m sitting back and I watch them. I’m watching them. They’re on it. They’re running the day-to-day. They’re not running the business. They’re running the processes.

So they’re not just trying to figure it out. I’m not hiring a manager to just go figure it out. No. I’ve already figured it out when I fine tune the processes. I handed this person those processes, those roles, those metrics like this is how you run the business, and now I watch, just like, okay, that person could do it. Cool. Let’s do three more locations. I’ll open up three more. I’ll spend the next two years bringing all five locations to 10 million total.

Now of course, this is my projection. And I say it with confidence, but who knows? Maybe in two years, maybe this number is 8 million. Maybe it’s 12. But my intention going into it would be like, alright, I’m going to spend the next two years working on fundamentals. Right now I’ve got five. It’s different than one. I’ve got five. It’s different than two. It’s a whole different ball game. When I went from one to open my second one, okay. I had a licensee partner in that one office so it was easier. Then all of a sudden I had five. It became a lot more to manage. It’s a different thing. You’ve got to be that moving CEO. You’ve got to be managing your day-to-day on a whole different level.

Then I would just continue to develop processes, people, and profits. Continuously. If it’s me today, I’d open five locations. I’d do 10 million. I’d want to set a target to profit 2 million a year, and run that profitably for, you know, either run it for five years and then sell it or just keep it going. Or, maybe I get another gust of motivation. Maybe I go back to my workbook here to what do I want my life, and all of a sudden I’m like, “You know what? I got all this already. Hmm. That worked out pretty good.” I wrote it down, figured out what I want, I came up with a plan, I went and got it. Let me open 20 more offices. Right? At that point, who knows?

But I feel like for me at this stage of my life, it’s yeah, I did 20 million. I don’t need to do it again. I would be very content here with it just running smooth, consistent, smooth, consistent, smooth, consistent, easy. Like, not this weight that I’m … You know what I mean? Like it’s not stressful. To be able to bring in 10 million, put 2 million a year in your pocket with not a lot of stress. I mean, that’s good, right? So, that’s what I would do if I started all over.

Posted on Wednesday, 07-22-2020

Build Trust and Capture Leads in Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to build trust and capture leads in your moving company.

“Building a brand is expensive and takes a lot of time. Just focus on building trust and capturing leads. With all your marketing, that’s all you need to do.”
“Explain in detail all of your services and the areas that you service. A lot of times we take for granted that the customer just knows because we’re a moving company, we do this, this, this, and this. Or that because we have this area code that we service all these areas. Make it clear in your marketing.”
“I’m not saying you have to be on social media, posting, but there’s people out there that, one Thanksgiving, maybe you had a nephew over and it’s like, “Hey, you got to be on Facebook. I’ll set you up with a page. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll set it up.” They set it up with some old picture that they found with your old address. And if someone goes there, it just looks like a ghost town, like you’re out of business.”
“Going from Neighbors Moving and Storage, it has that very down-home feel. It doesn’t sound corporate at all. If you see the trucks, it looks like the circus is coming to town. Right? So I could tell you, for local moves especially, the down-home feel wins all the time.”
Watch the video to get full training.

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Preventing Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

How to Hire Movers for Your Moving Company

Moving Season Targets

Recession-Proof Your Moving Company Now!

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
Two things to focus on, building trust and capturing leads. With all your marketing, that’s all you need to do. Okay? Building a brand is expensive and takes a lot of time. Just focus on building trust and capturing leads, building trust and capturing leads. So how do we do that?

Building trust, use real pictures of your mover staff and trucks. Even if you had to go take it on your iPhone and upload it, that’s fine. It’s better than stock photography. The stock photography worked 10 years ago when websites were new, right, and people didn’t really know how easy it was to just go find a fake image. But everybody’s onto that shit now. You’re not fooling anybody. They don’t think that that’s your, whatever it is, on the picture. https://mostbet-games.net/hu/

Explain in detail all of your services and the areas that you service. A lot of times we take for granted that the customer just knows because we’re a moving company, we do this, this, this, and this. Or that because we have this area code that we service all these areas. For example, if you’re in, let’s say, you service LA, Orange County and San Diego, you would want to make sure that that’s on there. Right? If you do local, long distance, storage, you want to make sure all that’s on there. When I say on there, that’s any marketing material you have, website, postcards, brochures, emails, whatever it might be.

Show off your awards and affiliations. People love logos. Any logo you could get, get it. Legitimate logos, don’t make shit up. Right? We had a company come in and they’re like, “Hey, we want to award you mover of the year,” this and that. I’m like, “Yeah?” They’re like, “Yeah, we got a logo. We’ll give you a plaque, but it’s X amount to do it.” Yeah, sign me. Right?Legitimately, that consumer business review named us mover the year. Guess what? I resign that every year and it was on every piece of marketing that we had. Real logo, real company that named us in their newspaper, mover the year. Wherever you could get logos from, get them, put them on there. People love them.

Display all of your license numbers everywhere. By the way, when it comes back to affiliations and awards, if you’ve got an A rating or an A-plus rating with the BBB, put that on there. BBB is real. Okay? Everybody thinks that, no, that’s old school. Listen, it’s not old school. If you Google the name of your company and they show up on the first page with a listing for you, it’s not old school. Right? Customer puts your name in and they have a listing, they’re going to go look at it. And even if they don’t go look at it, if you’ve got a good rating, put it on the side of your trucks, put it on your website. All right? It builds trust.

Use social proof like testimonials with real pictures and videos. I’ll show you my postcards. We had a testimonial on there, on the website, pictures, videos. Provide free valuable content, such as packing guides. You can have this that you just sent to your customers. We’ll talk about a value building sequence at some point this weekend. I had the curriculum down after the last four seminars, but now I’ve changed everything, so I don’t know when stuff’s coming, but it’s common this weekend. You give them a packing guide. That’s something they could download off your website or you send it out once you get their email. Just something super simple that provides value to them. It helps to build trust and establish you as an authority.

Have good reviews and show them off. Show them off, put them right on your website where they could see them, right? You don’t want to link over to Yelp, where you could put that this review is from Yelp. All right? We had all the reviews on there, actually created a whole other site, which I want to recommend called Neighbors Moving Reviews. And we linked to that site and I had somebody that every review that went out there, we put it on that site and actually did link to it at the time. It was some SEO strategy that really didn’t end up working anyways, so you don’t need to do that. Just put them all on your site.

Show off your years of experience in the business. You don’t have to say, listen, we’ve been in business since 1982 if you haven’t been in business since 1982. But, if the last 10 years, you worked for another moving company and now you own your own moving company, you could say, 12 years of experience. It’s a real statement. And if you’ve been in business for 10 years, 20 years, put that on everything. Right? Put that on everything.

Keep all your social platforms updated. I’m not saying you have to be on social media, posting, but there’s people out there that, one Thanksgiving, maybe you had a nephew over and it’s like, “Hey, you got to be on Facebook. I’ll set you up with a page. Don’t worry about it. I’ll do it for you. I’ll set it up.” They set it up with some old picture that they found with your old address. And if someone goes there, it just looks like a ghost town, like you’re out of business. Right? At least just get it updated. Make sure that the phone number is correct. Make sure the address is correct. All the data, all the link to the website, make sure that’s correct. Get some decent pictures on there. You don’t have to keep up with it. But again, anything that shows up on that page of Google, you want to be aware of all those listings and know that if customers are looking at it, are we putting our best foot forward to help build trust?

And then, have a consistent message in your marketing and sales. We talked about this for resolving customer complaints. I mean, you’ll start to see how all this stuff ties together. And it seems like so much stuff, but it’s like if you dial in just a few things, it all comes together. But if what’s in your marketing material is also what gets said by the salesperson, that builds trust. When your marketing material says one thing, they call in, your salesperson says something else, you lose trust, right?

Then, capture leads. Have calls to action leading the customer to call you or request a quote. So on your website, you want to have your phone number there at the top on a landing page, on a postcard, on your truck. Our trucks had the phone number and it said, call for a free, friendly estimate. On the website, it said, call now for free, friendly estimate and advice. Right? Calls to action. Just because the number’s there doesn’t mean anything. These are all just little cues that are going to help generate more calls. Remember, we got to capture leads. Having a beautiful website doesn’t mean anything. People landing on it doesn’t mean anything. Hey, we pay this much per click. I don’t care how much you pay per click. When the people landed on your site, how many of them turned into a lead?

Place your phone numbers in easy to spot areas in all your marketing, right? Don’t let them search for that. All these new modern looking websites with a phone number really small, forget that. Make the number big, not extremely big, but big enough that no one’s going to miss it, right? Big enough that if your grandma goes on there, she’s not going to miss the phone number. Right?

Have click to call set up on mobile version of your website. Okay? So either you should have a mobile version of your website, which we’ll go over, or responsive website. When they go to it, the phone number, when they see it, if they click on it, the little thing pops up. On an iPhone, at least, it says, call this number? Yes. If that feature doesn’t work, don’t think someone’s going to pull up their phone, find a pen, write down your number, go close the Google search, go to the phone number, type it in. No, they’re not. They’re just going to move on. The attention span is not there.

Easy to use quote forms to capture leads with a two-part web form. We’ll go over that. I won’t get into it now. I’ll show you an example. Offer coupons. Always offer coupons, even if you don’t want to have them in plain view on your website. It’s a closing tactic for your salesperson, instead of giving a discount, sounding like you’re wheeling. And you’re like, well, you know what? If you actually, here, let me send you a link to the website, you could actually get 10 boxes for free. Or you could actually get X amount of dollars off your move.

On my postcards, I always had, I used to do percentage off a move. I did 10% off a move for postcards. Free boxes. One month free storage. When long distance was with the 400N tariff years ago, before 2008, we had 70% off long distance moves on there, because that was how you did the tariff back then. I mean, everybody was offering 70, 75%. That’s just how it was. But then later on, we did $125 off long distance moves, 35 maybe off of local moves. I’ve found that people like the dollar amount more than the percentage. So you just figure out what you’re comfortable with, but offer coupons.

Put an explainer video on your home page. I’ll show you an example what that is. Use landing pages instead of your website for Paper Click marketing. We’ll get to that as well. Offer free downloads in exchange for email addresses. So we were talking about that packing guide. You could have that on your website. Maybe they don’t want to request a quote right away, but they’re like, you know what? I need to start thinking about packing. If you ever go to my website, you can get the ebook, but you put your email address in. You could do the same thing with moving checklists, packing guides. And now you have them in your database to email them.

Use a live chat popup. A lot of people will have live chat, but if they’re on the page for a certain amount of time and they’re scrolling, you could set it to pop up and say, is there anything we could help you with? Right? Just make sure if you have live chat, there’s somebody on the other end to have the chat. There’s nothing worse than, we’re not available right now, but we’ll get back to you. Right? If there’s no one available, just disable it during that time. If you’re going to do live chat, commit to it and set it up correctly, or just don’t put it on your website.

And use local phone numbers instead of 800 numbers. People want to do business with a local company. They don’t want to call a call center. An 800 number makes them feel like they’re calling a call center. So unless you have some kind of nationwide operation and you’ve got one website and you’re not going to list all these different phone numbers on there, have local numbers. It does not make you look bigger. Everybody wants to say, I want to look bigger for the customer. The customer doesn’t care how big you are. They care about the quality of your service.

And I can tell you, going from Neighbors Moving and Storage, it has that very down home feel. It doesn’t sound corporate at all. If you see the trucks, it looks like the circus is coming to town. Right? So I could tell you, people, for local moves especially, the down home feel wins all the time.

Posted on Wednesday, 07-08-2020

Resolving Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to resolve customer complaints in your moving company.

“You want to have full awareness of what’s going on with any customer that’s not 100% happy, right? So, I told my sales team. I told my customer service. I told dispatch, if you’re aware of a customer that’s not 100% happy, they need to go on the awareness board, which at first was a spreadsheet that we put up on the TV, so we could see what was going on. And then later, we built it into the CRM.”
“We need to talk to the customer to find out their side of the story, which is always the case. Maybe we need to talk to dispatch. Maybe we need to talk to the movers. Maybe we need to talk to the salesperson, or maybe we need to look at the process. Anytime mistakes happen in your company, it’s one of two things, people or process. That’s it, that’s the cause of every single problem in your company, people or process. And before you go blaming the person, look at the process to see if there’s something that needs to be adjusted, something that needs to be fixed.”
“A lot of times you could resolve the complaint, because usually it’s not a big thing and you can make them happy. They just, they were heard, you dealt with it. Reasonable people understand that things happen. They just want the company to stand behind their word.”
“It’s not personal. It’s part of business. And the bigger you get, there’ll be more things that happen. And the quicker you could just let it go, remove the emotion and deal with it, the better it will be, right? It’s all part of business. Focus on the customer’s needs. Too often we start defending, but if they have a legitimate reason, right, they have a reason for the complaint, listen to them and focus on their needs, as opposed to trying to defend yourself in this situation.”
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!

How to Hire Movers for Your Moving Company

Moving Season Targets

Recession-Proof Your Moving Company Now!

How to Deal with Overwhelm

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:

All complaints come in, right? This could mean anything, damage, just the complaint, a bad review, a credit card chargeback, a BBB, a cancellation, an attorney letter, right? Anything that’s in the category of a complaint, goes to the awareness board. Okay. So, when I set up customer service in my main office, it was really not until I sold my long distance trucks, and I became a broker for a short period of time. And the amount of complaints that were coming from the carriers that we were giving the work to, they weren’t responding to them, right?

In other words, I thought, hey, being a broker will be easy. We’ll book the jobs and we’ll service them. We’ve already got the call center going. I’ll tell you the whole story tomorrow, but it wasn’t, because we would say, “Oh, no problem. You just need to call the carrier.” They’d call the carrier, carrier didn’t want to deal with it, right? So, I went from not thinking I needed customer service, to building out a whole wing of 10 customer service people and a customer service manager. And I said, “You know what? I want to know everything that’s happening. And I want to know every customer that’s unhappy at any given time. Not even a complaint, if they’re not 100% happy, I want it up on the TV screen and I want everybody to see it, so it’s on our, we’re aware of it, and we know that we could, we’re working to resolve that.” Because otherwise, it’s too easy for it to get swept under the rug, right?

If the customer’s not, what a lot of people do, if the customer’s not calling and calling and calling, you’re like, “All right, they’re not calling. Everything must be fine.” One star Yelp review pops up, right? Everything’s not fine. Other stuff happens. Everything’s not fine. You want to have full awareness of what’s going on with any customer that’s not 100% happy, right? So, I told my sales team. I told my customer service. I told dispatch, if you’re aware of a customer that’s not 100% happy, they need to go on the awareness board, which at first was a spreadsheet that we put up on the TV, so we could see what was going on. And then later, we built it into the CRM. But would that be helpful for you guys? Yeah. So, you just want to be aware, right? So, literally, if you had a whiteboard, okay, I’m assuming you guys, we were doing 12,000 moves at this point.

So, even if it wasn’t a lot of complaints, there was enough to have a board for them, right? But even if you have one or two complaints here and there, or customers that you know aren’t 100% happy, put them up on a whiteboard, right? Just be aware of it.

So, essentially, we’d open a ticket, we’d open the complaint resolution form that we had them go through. I know a lot of you have that from Moving Sales Academy. Review, categorize it, and prioritize it, right? So, we would know how did it come in?

Did it come in because the mover told us about it? Did it come in because we found the bad review online? And then we put it in priority on how we’re going to address it and how we’re going to deal with it. And then we do an investigation, right? What happened with this complaint? Complaints, you don’t want to just deal with them and then move on. You want to improve upon that. I mean, already today, I’ve probably marked down, or gave Chris, five or six different things to improve upon for next time, right? Not necessarily any complaints, but when you get a complaint, you want to be able to make sure you make those improvements, but you want to look into what actually happened. So, depending on the complaint, we would take them through this complaint resolution form that we filled out. Who has the complaint resolution form in here, that’s using it?

Okay. So, and it’s like, maybe we need to talk to the customer to find out their side of the story, which is always the case. Maybe we need to talk to dispatch. Maybe we need to talk to the movers. Maybe we need to talk to the sales person, or maybe we need to look at the process. Anytime mistakes happen in your company, it’s one of two things, people or process. That’s it, that’s the cause of every single problem in your company, people or process. And before you go blaming the person, look at the process to see if there’s something that needs to be adjusted, something that needs to be fixed, right? So, you do the investigation, and now you need a resolution. You listen to the customer and empathize with them, apologize if necessary. I have a private client in the room that was at my office, I don’t know, a month ago, and had a customer that… I’m trying to remember exactly what the scenario was.

I won’t call them out. So, no, the scenario was, they put a one star review. They want to take it down. They tried to resolve it, tried everything, tried everything to resolve the issue. I said, “You know what? Write an apology letter, sincere, from the heart, to the customer, from you and your wife, to say, ‘Look.'” Because he was, he’s like, “I’m stressed out. I’m losing sleep over this at night.” I said, “Tell the customer this.” I’m a small business owner. My business means everything. I take pride in what we do, right? I know probably six of you probably have the video of this, because I know, as I was telling them in my office, you guys were breaking out your phones and video of me saying it. But this is my business, is my livelihood. I take it very seriously.

I take pride in what I do. And it’s been keeping me up at night that you had the experience that you did, and I just want you to know that I’m deeply sorry about it. And if there’s anything that I could do at all to help make this better, we’re here. I don’t remember exactly what it was and those weren’t exactly, that was the tone of the letter, and it worked. And it worked. Took the review down, right? It worked. Might not work every time, but make the effort, never let a one star review just sit up there and don’t make an effort to get it down, pay that customer, kiss their ass, do what you got to do, but get it down. That’s like having a retail store with spray paint on it, right? You have a, I don’t know, donut shop, and somebody comes and writes, “These donuts suck.” And you just come into work every day and you’re like, that’s unfortunate, right? Get it down.

All right. So, if the customer’s happy, right, because a lot of times you could resolve the complaint, because usually it’s not a big thing and you can make them happy. They just, they were heard, you dealt with it. Reasonable people understand that things happen. They just want the company to stand behind their word, ask them for a review. Only if their face looks like that though, right? Only if their face looks like that. If their face looks like this, yeah, if their face looks like that, just don’t ask them for anything. Just be glad that you resolved it. They’re like, yeah, all right, that’s fine, but they’re not a raving fan. And if their face looks like that, that gets escalated to the owner. If my customer service team couldn’t resolve any complaints, they would come to me with the complaint resolution form filled out completely with all the investigations done, so I had all the information that I needed.

So, in other words, here’s what the sales person said. Here’s what the mover said. Here’s what the customer said. Everything was smooth in the process, and then I would call the customer, make that final attempt to resolve that issue. So, complaint resolution, all right. As far as the complaint itself, I know this is tough, but don’t take it personal, all right. Don’t take it personal. You got to understand this is part of the business, all right. It’s all part of the business.

You’ve got to remove your emotion from the situation. When I started the business, I was a 19 year old, hot headed kid. Complaints came in, I wanted to fight the customer. You know what I mean? I was so offended and so like, then you grow up. What are you going to do? As a grown man, or a grown woman, going to fight? First of all, you’re fighting people as a grown person, it’s ridiculous, right? That’s high school stuff. When I was 19, I was all hotheaded about it. I never fought a customer, by the way. But what I’m getting at is, I feel the pain, and I know that when you get these issues and they happen, I know there’s a fire in your chest, but you got to let it go.

It’s not personal. It’s part of business. And the bigger you get, there’ll be more things that happen. And the quicker you could just let it go, remove the emotion and deal with it, the better it will be, right? It’s all part of business. Focus on the customer’s needs. Too often we start defending, but if they have a legitimate reason, right, they have a reason for the complaint, listen to them and focus on their needs, as opposed to trying to defend yourself in this situation.

Seek to understand, okay. what we’re going through right now is basically anyone that you have dealing with customers on the phone that might have an issue, or might have a problem, whether they’re dispatch, operations, customer service, these are the steps that they need to follow, okay. First, don’t take it personal. Then seek to understand moving is stressful, right?

You’ve had a customer call you screaming, stressed out. Once you listen to them for a minute, and you don’t defend or block the complaint, you’re able to find the real reason for their frustration. When someone has a complaint, a lot of times it’s something really small, like they’re so emotionally invested in it, it just set them off because they’re moving and they’ve got all this stress going on. And they know that their real complaint is so small that they just start stacking shit to make it sound like they are justified for calling you. You know what I’m saying? And it’s like, you start to really seek what was going on, all to find out that they’re really just pissed because they missed the DirecTV guy, and now they got to wait another day to get TV and they’re going to miss their show.

You know what I’m saying? If you realize where they’re coming from and know, look, they’re stressed. Instead of saying, “I’m not somebody’s punching bag. I’m not going to let them just talk to me like that.” Okay. Let them get the air pressure out, right? Listen, listen, listen, listen. When you have a customer service team with the customer complaint resolution form, this is what they’re doing. So, by the time, if I had to get the call, they’ve already let the air out of them, right? They’ve let them talk. But when you don’t and you block it, you’re like, no, no, and you start defending yourself, you don’t let that process happen. That process needs to happen. And once it does, then you can figure out what their real frustration is and focus on that.

What I used to do is just look at it as a third party mediator. I used to say, you know what, it’s my company, they’re yelling about stuff that we’re doing, but let me take a step back and let me not have any type of investment, emotionally or anything like that. And just look at it and go, you know what? My company did make a mistake here. You know what? They’re being unreasonable with that. And yeah, we could have done better. And I looked at it like that to come up with a solution, as opposed to being in it. It sounds like something small, but a lot of times I feel that we have to play games with our mind, to be able to see things from a different perspective. And if you just step back like that and look at it out here, as opposed to looking at it here and here, it’s a whole different ball game.

What is the right thing to do? The right thing often costs money. But if we look to resolve the issue and then we go make sure that that issue doesn’t happen again and use it as an opportunity to improve, right? We learned our lesson, we paid whatever it’s going to take to do the right thing, and then we move on. Be timely and responsive, right? Acknowledge their complaint. Just the acknowledgement alone helps to let the steam out a little bit. Communicate the process, okay. “All right. Well, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m actually going to need to talk to my movers and I’m going to talk to my sales sales team. This might take a day or two, but here’s what I’m going to do by Thursday. I’m going to send you an email or I’m going to give you a call back and we’re going to get this resolved for you.” Right? Communicate the process, so they know what’s going on. Instead of just saying, “All right, I’ll get back to you.” And then follow up when you said you would follow up.

If you say, “I’m going to call you back Thursday.” And by Thursday, you haven’t had a chance to interview your salesperson or your mover, and you don’t have an answer for them, or you’re in customer service in here, right, and the owner of your company is like, “I don’t want to be bothered with it.” And you haven’t been able to get in touch with them and they’re on vacation or whatever, still call that customer back and let them know, “Hey, I just want you to know I’m still working on it.” And resolve the complaint. You’ve got to resolve it, right? Don’t let it linger. Don’t let it sit out there. Don’t think that it’s just going to go away. This was the reason for the awareness board, because they don’t just go away, right? They don’t go away.

What’s it going to take to make them happy? I mean, that’s the final question, right? After you’ve looked at the whole thing, like, what’s it going to take to make them happy? Give them money or buy a new whatever it is. My customer service team had authorization up to $1,000 per customer to give money back. It sounds like a lot of money, but how much is it hurting you when you get that one star review online? And I know that I would pay, without blinking an eye all day long, $1,000 to get it down, at least. So, you got your $0.60 per pound, or whatever you’ve got. Most people, that’s what it is. But what’s it going to take to make them happy? And then you got to say, well, I got to just stop this from happening, right?

I’ve got to improve some processes, so it doesn’t continue to happen, or I’m just going to be out of business. But it’s one of two ways. If the service isn’t going good and you have unhappy customers, you’re either going to tell them, “Yeah, sorry, $0.60 cents per pound, screw you.” And you’re going to go out of business that way, or you’re going to keep paying them, because you’re like, let me do the right thing and not go fix the core issue of the problem, and you’ll be out of business that way. So, the answer is to resolve the core fundamental issue of why the problem is happening. And never throw money at the customer. What I mean by that is this, my team had that authorization to pay money, but only if it was going to make the customer smile, right?

Otherwise, if they’re still like, “Screw you, you’re the worst. I’m putting reviews. I’m telling everybody I know.” You know what? Keep the money, give them what we’re liable for, and we’ll use that for somebody else who we can make happy. That’s my personal belief, doesn’t mean you have to follow that, right? But I’m not going to, a lot of people would just say, “You know what, here. Here’s $200. You happy?” And almost slap them in the face with $200. Save the 200 bucks. You’re not doing anybody any good. It’s not about the money.

Small gestures go a long way. I told you about that apology letter, sincere apology letters work. This is your business you’re protecting. This isn’t a personal dispute with a family member, or something. You’re like, “I’m not going to say I’m sorry. They got to say they’re sorry.” Right? You got a business that that’s your livelihood, and any type of bad review or bad word of mouth out there is just hurting your livelihood, hurting your family’s future. Do what you got to do to resolve the complaint. Even if you can’t make them happy, decide how you’re going to proceed and close the file. Don’t let it linger, decide how you’re going to proceed and close the file. If it’s got a close out, closed, unsatisfactory, then it is what it is, but you made that decision consciously. And then correct it internally, never leave the scene of a complaint without asking how you can make corrections internally so that it doesn’t happen again. Okay.

Complaints are valuable, if they’re used for corrections. Listen to them. Don’t defend them. Don’t block them. Listen to them. There’s truth in all of it. There’s truth in all of it. Identify the cause. What process can be improved? Who needs more training? Remember, all these issues are either people are process, one of the two. Have a meeting with staff to show the cause, right? You want them to see, you want everybody involved to see how this happened. It’s not necessarily to call somebody out and tell them they did something wrong, unless you have a clear, specific process on how to do something that they’re not following. But if not, let everybody be a part of the solution. Say, “Guys, we’re going to have to do something here. We’re going to have to correct and adjust this process. Who has some ideas on what we could do?” Always call on your team, by the way, right?

Always ask them, I’m bouncing ideas off my team left and right, every single day, always. They’ve got a different perspective than you do, right? And they’re sitting in a different, they’re in your business with you, but sitting in a different angle, sitting in a different seat. They see things differently, right? And then create, or update, your standard operating procedure, your process. We’re going to talk about that tomorrow, but one of the best places to start with creating processes is areas where you’re having problems, right? Areas where you’re having issues.

Posted on Wednesday, 07-01-2020

Preventing Customer Complaints in Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode, Louis Massaro shares how to prevent customer complaints in your moving company.

“Many of the complaints and problems that happen are because sales is telling the customer one thing and the service is different. What’s said in your marketing, whatever’s on your website, whatever promises you’re making, whatever your salesperson says, whatever happens with the dispatcher and whatever the movers do. If that’s consistent from top to bottom, 95% of your problems will go away.”
“Maybe you do some incredible stuff on the moves. Maybe you’re laying floor runners down. Maybe you’re putting the door jambs up. Maybe you’re protecting the stairways. Is that in your marketing material? Is that in your sales script? I don’t believe in under-sell and over-deliver, I believe in over-sell and over-deliver.”
“Walk yourself through your customer’s journey. What happens when they book their move? Are they informed about the next steps? What happens next? Are your movers making a good impression? And then pick some customers to call personally to see how their experience was start to finish. You might be doing surveys, you might have your CRM sending out information. Call some customers once in a while and hear from them. Ask them some more questions. What did you like? What did you not like?”
“You’ve got to get your employees to buy-in. They should know your number one goal is raving fans. That’s it. You don’t want satisfied customers. You want fans. You want raving fans. They’re quick to go give you the five star review. Maybe even in two places. They hear about anyone that’s moving, they’re like, you’ve got to use my guys. Those are the customers you want to create.”
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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro: Preventing customer complaints. We want to be proactive with this because there’s a lot of little stuff that happens that doesn’t need to happen. Number one is sales and service consistency. Many of the complaints and problems that happen are because sales is telling the customer one thing and the service is different. 95% of your complaints will go away if what’s said in your marketing, whatever’s on your website, whatever promises you’re making, whatever your salesperson says, whatever happens with the dispatcher and whatever the movers do. If that’s consistent from top to bottom, 95% of your problems will go away.

So review all your marketing. Take a look at everything. What are you saying? What are you promising? What are you telling people that you’re going to offer them? Because if you’re saying it in your marketing, it needs to get delivered. Listen to your sales team quoting customers, whether it’s live or whether it’s recordings. Review your sales scripts. We’ll talk about sales scripts on Sunday, but sales scripts will help keep you out of trouble with complaints. Because if the people that you have on the phones are saying the same thing consistently, over and over and over, you can control what’s being said, and they’re not saying random stuff. They’re not promising random stuff.

Listen to your dispatcher confirm moves. Remember, that’s a great opportunity to take anything that happened in sales and smooth it over. And spot check moves. So basically what you want to do is you want to take a look at your marketing, take a look at what’s being done in sales, take a look at what’s being done in operations. Is it consistent? From sales to dispatch will help with complaints, but if you go from dispatch back up to sales, that’ll help with sales. Let me explain what I mean.

So maybe you do some incredible stuff on the moves. Maybe you’re laying floor runners down. Maybe you’re putting the door jams up. Maybe you’re protecting the stairways. Is that in your marketing material? Is that in your sales script? I don’t believe in undersell and over deliver, I believe in oversell and over deliver. Who was skeptical about coming here? That thought this is probably bullshit, let me go check it out. Be honest. I won’t get offended. I’m selling hard and I’m delivering hard. Period! You guys got to do the same. Don’t downplay the sales piece and then say, we’ll just surprise them on the other end, because that’s less customers.

Customer journey. Walk yourself through their journey. What happens when they book their move? Are they informed about the next steps? What happens next? Are your movers making a good impression? And then pick some customers to call personally to see how their experience was start to finish. You might be doing surveys, you might have your CRM sending out information. Call some customers once in a while and hear from them. Ask them some more questions. What did you like? What did you not like?

When these events are over, I’m always talking to my private clients that are in the room, and I’m like, what was good about it? What was bad about it? I do your whole customer journey. I do that whole walk-through, everything from registration to when you signed up to the emails. And if it’s not perfect, then we’re trying to make it better every time. So you’ve got to walk through the customer’s journey and see what they’re experiencing.
Internal communication. Most information is given to the moving consultant, you know that. Customer does not care about your departments. You ever have an issue with a company, and they’re like, oh no, well, that’s operations, you need to talk to them. Or that was sales, you need to talk to them. Don’t let that be your company. When the customer sees your company, all they see is the logo. All they see is the logo. All they see is your company. They’re dealing with one entity. They don’t want to hear that, oh well, I know you told the salesperson but we didn’t know about that on the operations end. They don’t care about your departments. It’s all one.

Make sure you got detailed notes in your software. Of course, I think you guys should definitely check out SmartMoving. But any software you’re using, use it and put the notes in there. I don’t care if it’s the most old school system, there’s a little note field in everything that’s out there. Put the notes in it so that everyone knows what’s going on and what the customer gave to the salesperson.

And then set your dispatcher up for success. Give them the tools they need. We talked about, who walked away with some good stuff for dispatch earlier? Some good ideas? Okay. All right, good. Set them up for success. They’re the quarterback of the day-to-day operation. And send movers out with a move detail sheet. So move detail sheets, basically all the notes, all the specifics on what’s going on with that job. If you don’t have a CRM, if you are operating off of paper, stick a Post-it note on the contract with the unique something. If that’s your move detail sheet, then that’s your move detail sheet. But you’ve got to send them out with information so that they know what is unique about this specific job.

And then you got to get employee buy-in. You’ve got to get your employees to buy in. They should know your number one goal is raving fans. That’s it. You don’t want satisfied customers. You want fans. You want raving fans. They’re quick to go give you the five star review. Maybe even in two places. They hear about anyone that’s moving, they’re like, you’ve got to use my guys. Those are the customers you want to create.

Each department should know what the other departments do and the importance of them. So we talked earlier, keep sales over here and la-la positivity book moves land. And let this batch be over here, dealing with the stuff. But maybe you got to take somebody from there and let them sit in dispatch for the day. Take dispatch, let them sit in sales for the day. Part of the employee buy-in is getting them to understand that every position is crucial to make the business run.

There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of people that it takes to orchestrate a successful moving business. Make sure that they all respect the other positions, which, if they don’t experience it even for a minute, typically they don’t. Typically, sales thinks dispatch has the easy job. Dispatch thinks sales has the easy job. The movers think everybody else has the easiest job in the world. Teamwork, basic teamwork. And the buy-in starts with you.

If your attitude towards the customers is screw them, that’s how your employees are going to act. But if you’re taking a proactive approach to preventing complaints and letting them know that it’s not acceptable, even if before it was and now you want to make a shift, that buy-in starts with you. They follow you. It took me, I don’t know, seven, eight years of being in business to realize that it wasn’t what I was telling them to do, it was what they were seeing me do, and how they were seeing me act that they followed. So set that example.

Mover support. Train them how to be a mover. Make sure they know what they’re doing. Train them how to interact with your customers. This is part of the perfect move checklist. How to interact with your customers. A lot of people get the first part but they forget about the second part. Make sure they have all the equipment they need, and be available when they need help. They have some issues, be available. If they’re calling in for support to the office during a job and they’re getting brushed off, that’s not good. That’s going to show you don’t care, they’re not going to care.

Accept responsibility. Accept your role as a business owner. There’s a lot you’ve got to put on your shoulders and realize that you are responsible for. You’re responsible for your employees and what they do. You’re responsible for your customers and the service they receive. You’re responsible for your family and taking care of them financially. You’ve got a lot of responsibility. With that comes the rewards, and if you’re not seeing the rewards by the end of the week I’m going to show you how to find the rewards. But you’ve got to just say, you know what, it’s my responsibility to prevent these complaints. I know better than the customer.

We think that the customer knows. They should know that. The customer might move every seven or eight years. You’re moving seven or eight people a day or more. Take on that role and say, you know what? I am the leader here in this situation. Let me guide the customer on the right thing to do. You know better than the customer. I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I mean that like, if the customer is… You say, give me your inventory, and they just rattle off 10 things. You can’t just say, oh, okay. Cool. Thanks. You know there’s more than that. Take the lead, you know better. Let them start digging for more information.

And tell the customer everything they need to know. Again, this goes back to their journey. What do they need to know from the time they booked the move to help make it a successful move for them and for you?

Anticipate all potential problems. Anticipate all potential problems.