How to Win in the Moving Business

Build A Moving Company Sales Machine

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
All right, my friend. Welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. This is Louis Massaro. I got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s going on?

Chris DeHerrera:
What’s up?

Louis Massaro:
All right. In these episodes, it is all about helping you take your moving company to that next level, eliminate the stress, overcome any challenges, any obstacles that you’re having, make more money, be able to spend more time with your family, create a model business, and just let this business that you’re in be the vehicle to the life that you want to live. All right?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yes.

Louis Massaro:
That’s what we’re trying to do. In these episodes, what we’re doing is we’re taking questions from my social media feed. If you follow me on any platform, it’s at louismassaro.com. That’s L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. If you have any questions, anything you want us to tackle on The Moving Mastery Podcast, just DM me on Instagram. Chris randomly pulls some out. Well, I wouldn’t say randomly. He’s not picking them out of a hat. You’re hand-selecting them because, as the producer of the podcast, essentially, you’re kind of running the show. I’m just here to answer whatever the question.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. I’d like to go through the comments, the questions, the things that come into our support desk and find stuff that I think that, maybe, a lot of people may be wondering about, and stuff that I feel like you can shed some light on and bring some value to these people who are our listeners and stuff.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. What do we got?

Chris DeHerrera:
Today, I’m going to throw a little bit of a curveball at you. I’d mentioned earlier that it’s a comment this time. It’s not necessarily a question, but I wanted to kind of lay this on you and see how you feel about it. I have a feeling that there may be, maybe not a lot, but some people who share this gentleman’s sentiments. Okay?

Louis Massaro:
Mm-hmm.

Chris DeHerrera:
I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t follow up with this. It’s just a comment that was on one of our social media outlets. I’ll read it to you and then I just want to hear how you feel about it. Okay?

Louis Massaro:
All right.

Chris DeHerrera:
The comment is, “I’ve been in the business for 22 years, and I can tell you everything has gone to shit.”

Louis Massaro:
Oh, bad.

Chris DeHerrera:
He says, “Internet marketing is a joke. Guys don’t want to work. Yelp takes down all my good reviews.”

Louis Massaro:
Oh, boy.

Chris DeHerrera:
“I’m not so sure it’s all as easy as you make it out to be. Get real, buddy.” That’s what he said.

Louis Massaro:
Really?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. Hey, listen, there’s some truth behind it. There’s some heartfelt sentiment behind that, I feel like. I don’t want to make fun of the guy. He’s having, maybe, some hard times.

Louis Massaro:
I’m not making fun of the guy. I’m in shock a little bit. I wasn’t expecting that. All right. Hold on, let me just make sure I got this right. 22 years in the business, business has gone to shit, guys don’t want to work, Yelp reviews come down. What else?

Chris DeHerrera:
He says, “I’m not so sure it’s as easy as you make it out to be. Get real, buddy.”

Louis Massaro:
All right. Give me a minute. This is a good one.

Chris DeHerrera:
It’s a good one, right?

Louis Massaro:
You know what? Here’s the deal. I think that 22 years, I would have been, I started 20 years ago. He’s probably in business since ‘98.

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s 22 years, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
’98 to now, things have definitely changed. There’s no doubt about it. ’98 until now. Let’s just say 2000 until now, because that’s when I got in, about two years after he got in. Things have definitely changed. Gone to shit, no. Guys don’t want to work? It’s a challenge, right?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yelp reviews coming in. Yelp didn’t exist 20 years ago. Not so easy. I don’t know that I’ve ever sat here and said that this is easy at all, right?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
All the time, this is not a get rich quick business.

Chris DeHerrera:
Definitely not.

Louis Massaro:
It’s a great business that if you do it right, you can make a lot of money. Here’s the deal, because I do see this a lot with veterans, not veterans of our country, but veterans in the business, people that have been in the business for a long time, is that, there’s a couple of different groups. This guy sounds like he just hasn’t made the shift to the new way of doing things. There’s been a few dramatic shifts. Did he say something about everything on the Internet or Internet marketing or something?

Chris DeHerrera:
He said, “Internet marketing is a joke.”

Louis Massaro:
Let’s just kind of look at that, because in order to win today, in this day and age, in order to win in 2020, we know there’s companies crushing it purely, right?

Chris DeHerrera:
Absolutely, yes, we see them every day.

Louis Massaro:
Then, there’s other people that they believe it’s possible, but they still haven’t found the way to do it. Then, there’s people that have seen it just get, I shouldn’t say harder, but it just has changed the way that it’s adjusted from back then, right?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, when I started, I put the yellow page ad in, set back my feet up on the desk once I had a desk, once I moved out of the yard, and just phone rang and booked moves.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yes, different game back then.

Louis Massaro:
Different game. Then, 2007, 2008, there’s like the perfect storm.

Chris DeHerrera:
The economy-

Louis Massaro:
Yellow pages stops working. No, I shouldn’t say stops. For the money you’re paying, it’s not worth it anymore.

Chris DeHerrera:
For a while, though, just real quick, how many different yellow page books were you in at one time? Didn’t you have a bunch of them?

Louis Massaro:
Man, every city you were in. I had six offices. Every city you were in, there was the main book from the main phone company. Then, there was, I don’t want to name any of them because I don’t…

Chris DeHerrera:
Who knows? Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Then, there was another phone provider and there was another yellow page provider. There was at least two to three major providers in each city. Then, they all started coming out with different, like, “We have this area book for the south side of town,” and the east side, they have an area book.

Louis Massaro:
I’m like, “What, don’t they get the main book?” Yeah, but we also want to give them this little book. It was just a way to get more –

Chris DeHerrera:
I remember I had a stack of them.

Louis Massaro:
It was just the way to get more money out of you. You have a total spending of 250,000 a month on yellow pages at the peak. Anyways, when that stopped working… I’m telling this story because I want to illustrate how to adapt. We’re talking about this guy and I know a lot of people feel that way. Maybe, not with such a negative tone.

Chris DeHerrera:
He’s passionate. He’s passionate, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
They feel like, maybe, it was easier back then. It would’ve been very easy for me to argue, “Man, it’s these Internet leads and this and that, and all this stuff online. It’s whatever,” and just complain about it. But the reality was I saw that that’s where things were going and I had to make that shift and I had to make that adjustment.

Louis Massaro:
Instead of fighting it like a lot of people did, I jumped in and I learned what SEO, pay per click, leads, just Internet marketing in general, all of that. How do I make part of me operating my business as I need phone calls, I need leads, I need people that are moving? How do I continue to get those? You’re talking about that timeframe there, 2007, 2008, and then even before that. Leads were coming out. There was stuff going on, but I didn’t really make that adjustment until around that time.

Louis Massaro:
The reality is that a lot of people that didn’t make it through the recession, it wasn’t that the recession did it to them. It was that they didn’t make the adjustment that they needed to make in the way that they handled marketing, and continued to spend money in areas that were no longer working, and, I shouldn’t say refused, but did not adopt and learn the new ways of generating leads for their business.

Louis Massaro:
Here we are 22 years later, and he says the Internet marketing is terrible. I think the Internet marketing is an amazing thing for companies out there. Your flexibility that you have now compared to then, it was great. You put a yellow page on and it was easy, meaning there was less steps involved, but you also had less control. Where now, you’re able to tweak, you’re able to modify, you’re able to really track everything, and you could make changes quickly. You’re not stuck with something for an entire year. You want to open a new market? You don’t have to wait for the yellow pages to come out. You go open whenever you want to go open and start your marketing.

Louis Massaro:
For me, I had to make that shift or I wouldn’t have been able to stay in business, with the marketing. Then, it was I’m getting all these Internet leads and I was, even stuff, pay per click, whatever, anything that wasn’t a phone call. Phone calls are gold, even today. Your phone rings, don’t ever miss that.

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s right.

Louis Massaro:
Don’t ever miss that. We used to print them off on the printer, right? The leads used to come and walk around and hand out pieces of paper back then. That was when the leads first started. There was no CRM with the leads coming directly into them and all that. It was, “Here’s the leads. Hey, call this,” and they would write on there. They did their whole lead follow-up on the sheet of paper that we printed out.

Louis Massaro:
This was now starting to get out of control. And so, I had to shift again and adapt again to the times. I’m like, “What do I need to do to make sure that these leads aren’t getting lost? What do I need to do?” Or I walk up to moving consultant’s desk and I see a stack of these leads with handwritten notes, coffee stains. It just wasn’t organized at all. That’s when I went from studying marketing and learning that to studying call centers, studying sales, how other industries basically handled this type of stuff.

Louis Massaro:
I didn’t sit there and say, “This is terrible. The good old days, you used to be on the phone.” Believe me, there was part of me that was resistant to it, but I knew I had to adapt and I had to change. I’m saying this because it sounds like, for a long, long time, he’s resisted making the adjustments that need to get made.

Louis Massaro:
It was like, first you got to learn Internet marketing is here to stay, period. When somebody wants a service, they go online, they look for it. You’ve got to learn how to be at the end of every path that they choose, meaning customer goes on computer. They Google, “Movers in my city,” let’s just say. Well, everything that shows up, you want to make sure that you’re on the end of every single one of those paths.

Louis Massaro:
If it’s your site directly, you get the lead. If it’s a lead provider, you get the lead. Then, you need to make sure that it’s all profitable. We won’t necessarily get into that too deep right now.

Louis Massaro:
That was the first piece to marketing. Then, the sales piece. How do you start? For me, the leads came out once I had five offices already. I had a good handful of, I think at first, maybe, 15 reps, approximately, in those early days. How do I make sure that the money that I’m spending on the marketing is not going to waste?

Chris DeHerrera:
Well, first of all, let’s back up. For a guy in this situation, let’s just say he’s never bought leads before, he’s never been in that situation.

Louis Massaro:
Well, just so you know, when I say leads I’m talking about any form of mar… It could be from your website. It could be modern-day. It could be from Yelp.

Chris DeHerrera:
I see.

Louis Massaro:
When I say leads, I don’t necessarily only mean moving leads or moving lead.

Chris DeHerrera:
Got you. Even just going from being an old school phonebook only, maybe, they’ll put out a few little flyers or something, to getting a structured lead management process, or anything like that, how does that even happen? You had to make that transition. Was it something that you were able to do quickly, or is it like a process that takes time? How did it go?

Louis Massaro:
I opened my call center. My office, they all handled their sales individually. One office was doing great and the other office wasn’t. I’m like, “I need a centralized call center.” I opened that in 2004 or ’05. I can’t remember exactly. Then, for 11 years, I built my call center to the point we had 60, 70 reps on the phone to book in nationwide. That 11 years was all perfecting that process.

Louis Massaro:
Lead comes in, how and when do we call it? How many times do we call it back? What’s the approach? What forms of communication do we call them on? If this rep’s not there, what do we do with that lead? If a phone call comes in, how do we route that phone call? What are we saying to every one of the customers, based on if it’s a local or long-distance job? If they say they’re not ready to move, what do we say about that? All of it was all to just increase that booking percentage. You got X amount of leads, how do we book more of them? How do we book more of them?

Chris DeHerrera:
Just incrementally one little decimal point at a time.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I would say, over the course of 11 years, I feel like I came pretty close to perfecting a system for what I call a sales machine for the moving business. That was the second big shift. You got to get the marketing, shift your way from the old ways to the new way. Then, you’ve got to build a sales machine. Anybody that’s been following me for any amount of time knows that’s the main thing that I go after, is you’ve got to build a sales machine. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how good your crews are. It doesn’t matter how great your trucks look. It doesn’t matter how many people you have in your office. If you don’t have consistent moves being put on the board and they’re high paying jobs and you’re not just discounting, you’re going to have a really hard time.

Chris DeHerrera:
Sounds like kind of, maybe, that might be what this guy’s going through. He’s just not having consistency.

Louis Massaro:
Well, it sounds like he hasn’t adapted to the marketing. Listen. I don’t want to out this guy.

Chris DeHerrera:
No.

Louis Massaro:
Because it’s hard to learn all this stuff. I remember, in the moving business, everything is great. I’ve got five offices, making money. I’m not thinking about marketing because the phone just rings from the yellow pages. Back then, it’s like if you had the balls to put the money up for the yellow page ad and you had the ability to sell… See, I had the ability to sell from day one. Those were sales tactics. I just didn’t have the sales systems down.

Louis Massaro:
If you had that ability to do it, then, you were good. Now, when that stops working, it’s panic mode. What a lot of people do in panic mode is they retreat. It’s not a test to anybody’s character or hammer or anybody else, but it could be scary. To be in a business where all this time you’ve known things to work a certain way and all of a sudden they’re totally different, I remembered the feeling.

Louis Massaro:
It wasn’t like at first, I’m like, “Yeah, no problem. I’m going to go learn it.” It wasn’t. It took a while. It took a lot of denial of what was happening, of what was going on, and, “Oh, that’s not going to last,” to finally saying, “If I don’t learn this, if I don’t get on top of this now, I’m going to be in a really, really bad spot.”

Louis Massaro:
It’s true. I mean, if you’re not dialed in on your Internet marketing and your marketing in general, you’re going to be in a really bad position. I tell people all the time, “You, as the moving company owner, need to be the best marketer in your business. Don’t hire an agency and expect them to come in. If you need them to do specific things for you, technical, pay per click, SEO type of things, great. You don’t need some big branding agency to come in and brand your business. You just need to learn what it is about the marketing.” Same thing with the sales. Now, in 2020, we’ve got a new obstacle.

Chris DeHerrera:
What’s that?

Louis Massaro:
There was, “Hey, you’ve got to learn internet marketing. You’ve got to get on top of that. Then, you’ve got to create your sales machine.” Both of these still are true today. Before I get into the challenge today in 2020, you still got to have your marketing on point. You still have to have a strong sales process. Now, there’s another piece, which is your ability to hire and train movers quickly.

Chris DeHerrera:
A lot of what he said there was “guys don’t want to work.”

Louis Massaro:
It’s true. Guys don’t want to work. Listen, I’m not sugarcoating anything. The reality is it’s a different generation. They don’t want to go and move furniture for a living. It’s not. It’s different than it was. There’s a lot of other opportunities or, at least, perceived opportunities in this social media world that we’re in, where everybody’s like, “Hey, do this. You can make a bunch of money online.” Guys could go work for Uber, or whatever the case may be.

Louis Massaro:
There’s no doubt that there is a shortage of drivers, that there is a challenge in getting movers. However, the people that have this process down for hiring are winning and they’re winning big. What I mean by that is it’s easy to sit here and say, “It’s so hard to hire movers these days. They don’t want to work. They go and work here. They want more money. It’s just so hard. It’s so hard.” It’s easy to get caught up in that mindset. It’s easy for an owner to listen to his dispatcher that’s in charge of hiring and bringing movers onboard and getting them into the rotation, telling him how hard it is. It just starts to infect everybody.

Louis Massaro:
I’m not saying that there’s not truth to the fact that it’s harder to do. What I’m saying is this is the reality, so, either get good at it or get out of the business.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. You got to adapt.

Louis Massaro:
You got to adapt. The people that are adapting are crushing it. I talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of people. We hear a lot from what’s going on. I’ve got a good amount of private clients that I work with directly in their business. The ones that they’ve got their marketing on point, they know their numbers in their marketing, they’re testing, they’re tracking, they’re tweaking, they’ve got their sales machine going, and now they’ve added this piece of hiring movers and not complaining about how hard it is but just doing the additional work that it takes to make it happen, they’re winning.

Chris DeHerrera:
They’re winning.

Louis Massaro:
They’re making a lot of money. They’re expanding, they’re opening additional locations, and they’re not worried about that. If we just take a step back and we say, “What’s this all about?” Forget about 22 years ago. Forget about today. It’s a moving business. What do people want? They want to hire a professional moving company.

Louis Massaro:
As a professional moving company, what do I need to do to get that job and be in front of them and be successful? I’ve got to be able to generate leads and book moves.

Chris DeHerrera:
Step one.

Louis Massaro:
Your sales machine. You’ve got to be able to service those moves by hiring movers and, obviously, having trucks and dispatch and all that. You got your sales going and you’re constantly able to book moves and you’ve got your hiring process going for movers and you’ve got that. There’s details in between, but those are the two main things. Book the move, service the move; book the move, service the move.

Louis Massaro:
Yes, it’s different today. Man, anybody who’s sitting and thinking about this, like, “The moving business is tough in 2020,” or, “It’s different than it was 22 years ago.” What we tend to do as humans is, when we don’t understand something, we start to reject it or we start to fear it or we realize that we need to learn more about it and we go right after it.

Louis Massaro:
I think, for the people that want to just say the moving businesses is, like he says, gone to shit or it’s not so easy, guys don’t want to work, there’s all kinds of reasons that people can complain about what it is, but there’s also strategies that aren’t that hard that will solve all these problems. It’s all perception, right?

Chris DeHerrera:
Right.

Louis Massaro:
You get this guy, he comes into the seminar and we sit him next to someone that we know has a totally different perception and they talk for three days, it’s going to be–

Chris DeHerrera:
Change everything.

Louis Massaro:
It will change everything.

Chris DeHerrera:
Perspective.

Louis Massaro:
I’m not selling anybody a dream. This is hard work. Here’s the difference between just doing the work and then trying to go figure out a way. That’s why I’m doing this. I know it’s challenging. I’m saying like, “Hey, let me help you avoid all these rabbit holes that you could go down looking for solutions and just lay out a plan for you.” On a macro-level, this is what’s needed. You’ve got to book moves, you’ve got to service moves. It’s really that simple.

Chris DeHerrera:
The name of the game.

Louis Massaro:
Then, everything else in between is just details that we lay out in courses and seminars and all that.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. Now, there’s nothing wrong with somebody who has gotten to a certain level in their company and they’re cruising along and they’re comfortable and they’re happy with the way things are going. I think, maybe, a guy like this who’s been in the business for 22 years, at some point, he did have to do some work to get off the ground, I would imagine. Then, maybe, he just got to a certain level where he felt like business is good, maybe, didn’t want much more than what they were doing. Does somebody have to have that go get them attitude? Where is his bitterness coming from? That’s what I want to know.

Louis Massaro:
His bitterness is coming because his business is probably going down. I’m not going to say failing, but it’s going down. I could totally understand this and I know quite a few people like this. It’s a natural tendency, too. You build a business, you get it to a certain place, then, you set up everything, so it’s just like you’ve got your little routine going. Jobs are being booked, guys were servicing the moves, everything’s fine.

Louis Massaro:
He probably had a good amount of years where he thought he was done innovating. He thought he was done trying to make things better. He got to a place, I’m assuming. In my mind, I’m thinking of several people that I know that went through the same thing. They get to a place where they’re like, “I’m good. I’m comfortable. I’ve got a business that runs. It makes the money that I wanted to make. Yeah, sure, I could always make more money.” Then, all of a sudden, enemy fire starts coming in at you. It’s like, “Boom, this stops working.”

Louis Massaro:
Now, there’s these lead review sites online. If you don’t have a good review, then, you’re not going to get the business. Then, when you get a good review, they take down your good review. You got to understand, from being in a nice cushy place of things are going good, it’s like enemy fire coming at you. You’re being attacked.

Chris DeHerrera:
You feel threatened.

Louis Massaro:
You feel threatened. Many years of being comfortable, it’s tough to, say, let me go do this all over again, because when you succeed at that first level of saying, “Hey, I just need to get my business off the ground,” and you get to that level where it’s good and it’s stabilized, and then you kind of sit back a little bit. “I don’t have to work like I used to work.” Then, something comes in and kind of challenges you to have do that again. It’s not something’s coming in and saying, “Hey, I’m challenging you to do this.” It’s saying, “Hey, your businesses failing. There’s these things out there that could be the possible culprits of what’s going on. Go figure out what’s happening.”

Chris DeHerrera:
Uh-huh, and you don’t know.

Louis Massaro:
You don’t know. I mean, I get it. What I did, maybe, I don’t get into detail enough about how challenging it was to make those shifts. Not I was like one day I decided I need to learn marketing and I just went and did that. I went through all the same stuff of like, “Man, I was living really, really, really good before that recession came. Then, I had to really change the way I looked at everything.”

Louis Massaro:
Anybody that’s in that position that’s comfortable, right now things have been booming, I think that you’ve always got to be looking for, first of all, do you know your numbers? Do you see things dropping? You got to be able to identify what it is. I know the feeling. When you’ve got a successful business, success can totally be the enemy.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. It makes you relaxed.

Louis Massaro:
It makes you relaxed. It makes you sit back. You don’t need to go, “I’m successful,” or, “I’m stressful.” It doesn’t need to be one or the other.

Chris DeHerrera:
Either one, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You just have to be aware. You’ve got to be aware of what’s going on. In a long run of success for somebody doing something the same way, you have two choices. You could sit and complain and go, “This Internet stuff’s going on and the guys don’t want to work.” You got two ways to do it. You could say, “What can I do about it? How can I step up my game and use this as a challenge to become better? How can I do this?” Because you know what? If you’re struggling with it, other people are struggling with it. He probably has something to say about all the competition, too. If you’re struggling with it, other people are struggling with it. That’s the perfect time for you to step up your game and make sure that you will survive whatever comes your way.

Chris DeHerrera:
If someone has been running a company for 22 years like he has and things have been just on autopilot, basically, how would somebody like that go about creating some sort of contingency plan? Maybe, they don’t want to necessarily grow at scale, but they want to be prepared if something happens.

Louis Massaro:
I don’t think that people don’t want to grow and don’t want to scale. I truly believe that they just feel like it’s going to be more work for them. They look at, “I’m at this level, and at this level I’ve got this much stress, I work this many hours. If I want to go to this level, that means the amount of stress and the amount of hours are also going to go up.” That’s very common and, I think, just natural feeling that’s a misconception.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. It makes sense to think about

Louis Massaro:
It makes sense to think about. I think that a lot of times people will, consciously or unconsciously, say, “I’m good here. I don’t want to go any further,” because they’ve reached a certain comfortable level; but, you’ve got to reach a level that’s beyond comfort, so that you can safeguard yourself against whatever happens. Get beyond so you could weather any storm. Get beyond where you currently are.

Louis Massaro:
Listen. If somebody’s totally happy, they’re totally content, they just need to make sure that they’re watching certain KPIs, certain key performance indicators, or seeing what’s going on in their business, they’re identifying any dips right away and still maintaining it, but there’s maintaining and then there’s building. If you’re just maintaining, it becomes very hard to just do the same amount without it dipping.

Chris DeHerrera:
It just naturally wants to start dipping.

Louis Massaro:
It naturally wants to start dipping. If somebody’s comfortable, they’re making the money they want to make, their business is smooth, their business is running, the question I would ask them is, if you weren’t going to have more stress, you didn’t have to work more hours, you could actually have less stress and work less hours, would you want a bigger business? Would you want more money?

Louis Massaro:
The business doesn’t always have to be bigger. I know very big businesses that aren’t making a lot of money. I know mid-sized businesses that are making a ton of money. Would you want to make more money? Who’s going to say “no?” It’s that people are like, “I don’t want to sell my soul to make more money.” Of course not. It’s just a different strategy and it’s just a different approach to doing it. We have to look at happiness, too. People are like, “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” but, one of the main indicators in psychology of happiness is if you’re activating your full potential. It’s directly tied to your happiness.

Chris DeHerrera:
Really?

Louis Massaro:
Really. If you know you could be doing more and you’re not and you feel a little uneasy, you feel like something’s missing, it’s because you’ve got more in you. It doesn’t mean you have more hours in you. It doesn’t mean you have more stress in you. It just means you could use what’s between your ears, what’s in your head, to become more resourceful, to get more creative, and to start saying like, “Is there a better way I could be doing this?” What could I be doing? Maybe, raise your level of ambition to, if you’re like, “Hey, I just want to increase by 10%,” well, how do we increase by 50%? Or, 100%?

Chris DeHerrera:
Mm-hmm. You had mentioned earlier, what did you say, $500,000 mindset versus a $5 million mindset?

Louis Massaro:
Well, a strategy.

Chris DeHerrera:
Strategy, okay.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I mean, it’s like if you’re in a position where you’re trying to get your business to, let’s say, $500,000 a year, you’re going to have one strategy that’s going to help you get there. It’s going to be very short term. It’s going to be very based on next month and next month, and that type of thing. If you lay out, “How do we get the five million?” Even just asking that question and thinking through the answers, you’re going to have a whole different strategy.

Louis Massaro:
What a lot of people do is they go, “No, no, no. That’s too much work. That’s going to take too long.” They don’t even think about how long it’s going to take. They just think about how much work it’s going to take and how much pressure it’s going to feel on them. Short term. They’re like, “I need to get $500,000 this year.” Why couldn’t you get to five million in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years?

Louis Massaro:
What I’m saying is your strategy changes. It doesn’t mean you’re going to go from zero to five million in a year, but what it means is you’ll pass through that milestone of hitting $500,000, of course; but, if your strategy is laid out to go to five million, it’s going to be–

Chris DeHerrera:
You’ll keep going.

Louis Massaro:
It’s a game plan to get there. Otherwise, you get stuck at where your current strategy was and just spin in circles.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. I think, probably a lot of people don’t even have a strategy. They just kind of get to a certain point and then they say, “I guess this is where I’m going to stay. This is where I’m at.”

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I get that. I totally get that, because the initial start of the business is so challenging that when you get to a place of stabilization where you’re stabilized, it’s like, “Ah.” It’s time to take a breath.

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s okay.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to take a breath. Once you stabilize, then you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to optimize. Take your breath. Take your break. Take your time. Reduce your hours that you work. Start to pick up those hobbies that you didn’t have before. Schedule in that time with the family. Great, but use your time now to optimize the business.

Louis Massaro:
Then, once you optimize the business, now, you sit back and you look at it like an amazing piece of work that you created. You design this amazing thing that’s running. It’s optimized. Now, you really feel proud of what you’ve done.

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. It’s okay to hang out there for a little while.

Louis Massaro:
Then, you hang out there for a minute. Then, from there, from an optimized place, you decide, do I want to scale? The first rule of scale is, do I need to scale?

Chris DeHerrera:
What does that mean?

Louis Massaro:
That means, do you need to open more locations? Do you need to get a new division? Do you need to get into commercial and long distance and this and that in order to reach your personal income goals?

Chris DeHerrera:
It’s not always…

Louis Massaro:
It’s not always the case. I see a lot of people that will open an office too soon or open a new division too soon. I shouldn’t even say too soon in a time regard. It’s more like there’s these other fundamentals that aren’t in place first that need to be locked down in an attempt to make more money. I’ll sit with several people like this and say, “Well, how much money do you want to make?” They say that number and I’ll challenge them to compare that to what it’s going to take. Go make a list of everything that you want in your life. What’s it really going to take to live that life?

Louis Massaro:
Go sit with a financial planner. Do it yourself. Whatever you need to do, but everything you want, what’s it going to cost you to do that? That means that this is what you need to make in order to live, invest, save, pay your taxes, do whatever. A lot of times, they could do that with their one office and keep things simple.

Chris DeHerrera:
It can be a recipe for disaster to try to expand like that without being ready for it or having the fundamentals in place.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. What happens is a lot of people will actually jump before they even get stabilized and go right to scale without stabilizing or optimizing.

Chris DeHerrera:
Dangerous.

Louis Massaro:
That’s dangerous. That’s how you take the whole ship down with you.

Chris DeHerrera:
Getting back to the marketing, let’s just, for the sake of argument, call him an old school person, somebody who came from those yellow pages days. What’s a way for them to kind of start learning about the new marketing SEO and pay per click and buying leads and stuff like that?

Louis Massaro:
Honestly, go to louismassaro.com. Go to sales and marketing. Watch all those videos. Go back in the podcast. Listen to anything that has the word, “marketing,” in it. That’s the place to start for free. We’ve got courses. We’ve got seminars. We’ve got coaching. We’ve got all kinds of programs to help with that.

Louis Massaro:
It would be crazy for me to tell somebody to go on the journey I went on when I went and I sought out the information, brought it back. Not like I went and brought some information, I’m just a messenger, and I went, “Hey, guys. I went and studied a bunch of marketing books and let me tell you what I found.” No. I went and learned everything I could. Books, coaches, mentors, consultants, courses, all of it. Still to this day, constantly. Then, came and applied it to the moving business on a high level.

Louis Massaro:
For me, it might sound self-serving to go, “Go listen, go watch my videos,” but I believe that, for anybody in moving, that is the best information out there that they could get, other than, of course, seminars, coaching, courses, and all that with us. It’s so tried and true and proven and tested. That’s where I would start because a lot of books out there, the authors are writing them in… A lot of great ones, but a lot of books are they’re writing these books in a way where it’s just way over people’s heads and it’s totally unnecessary and it’s like to make the author just sound smart. I don’t know what the deal is, but it’s just a lot of fluff.

Louis Massaro:
I tell people all the time, “You’re better off going to the bookstore and going to the personal development section and read that stuff, getting your mind right, getting psychology books.”

Chris DeHerrera:
Rather than business.

Louis Massaro:
Well, especially, if you’re in the moving business. We’ve laid it all out. I’m not saying it’s not good to learn. You could read books and you could do all that, but you ask like, “Where is the best place?” I mean, that’s the best place.

Chris DeHerrera:
Speaking of personal development and stuff, how important is that in being able to evolve and grow and change with a business?

Louis Massaro:
When you look at this gentleman here, it’s a guy?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
This is what would be considered in psychology a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, which is like, this is happening and everything just stays fixed. Whereas, in a growth mindset, you’re looking for the way, you’re adapting and you’re growing as an individual.

Louis Massaro:
If you look at he started two years before I started, I don’t know where he’s at, and it’s not about bigger business or anything like that, but the amount of growth that I have experienced from all of the same challenges that he went through, to me, that’s what life is all about. If you’re not using every single one of these challenges that you face in your business to grow as a business person, as an individual, you’re wasting those opportunities and you’ll stay stuck within those walls that are keeping you confined until you decide to grow, so you can either go over those walls and round those walls or bust straight through them. It’s super important.

Chris DeHerrera:
Let’s talk about Yelp. He’s saying Yelp takes down all of the good reviews. I know Yelp is changing their algorithms frequently.

Louis Massaro:
So we think.

Chris DeHerrera:
So we think.

Louis Massaro:
So we think. That’s what we say, but the truth is we really don’t know what they’re doing. They’re going to do whatever they want to do. It’s their business.

Chris DeHerrera:
What’s a way to ensure that you can always have a good representation of your company on Yelp?

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to just do the best job you can and you’ve got to be proactive with asking for the reviews. It is what it is. Did you get five-star reviews? Did you get a ton of five-star reviews and they filter all of them?

Chris DeHerrera:
No.

Louis Massaro:
What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do with that? Probably, somebody in this guy’s category, if we were to categorize him, would totally disengage from Yelp and stop responding to reviews and stop dealing with it because they get so pissed off that all their good reviews are down that they just totally say, “I’m not dealing with Yelp. Yelp wants me to advertise. I’m not dealing with that. I’m not advertising with them.”

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s not a good idea.

Louis Massaro:
You have to accept the landscape that is out there. You’ve got to accept every single bit of it. I don’t care if you like it. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if you like Yelp. I don’t care if you don’t like Yelp. They’re here and they’re a part of this business right now in 2020. Play the game. That’s it. Do everything you can to get that five-star rating, and that’s what you have to do. I say that, but at the same time, I know the feeling of getting that five-star review and it gets filtered. I know the feeling of getting that one-star review and you can’t even figure out who it is. You’re like, “This isn’t even our customer.” I’ve looked everywhere like, “This doesn’t even make sense. This isn’t even our customer.” I know that.

Louis Massaro:
I don’t know. My thought process is always, “Can I do something about it? If so, let me take action and do something about it. If not, let me just accept it and move on.”

Chris DeHerrera:
Stay stuck in it.

Louis Massaro:
I’m not going to tear myself apart and have a sick stomach because Yelp took my five-star review down. It stings at first. The idea is, with that type of stuff, talking about the mental game for a moving CEO, you get upset about something. Your mover doesn’t show up, one of your sales reps does something wrong, puts the wrong notes in the system, it screws up a job, Yelp takes down your five-star review. You’ll get mad. You’ll feel a burn in your stomach. To whatever level you’re used to feeling that, you’ve got to just start, little by little, closing the gap between the time that the thing happens that you’re pissed off about and the time where you shake it off and let it go.

Chris DeHerrera:
There’s no benefit to just staying.

Louis Massaro:
If you need to feel it for five minutes and get pissed, whatever you got to do, punch the walls, whatever it is, close the gap from the place where you’re pissed to the place where you’re all good again, because that’s where your company needs you to be on point. Not to be upset about little trivial stuff. Again, $500,000 strategy gets mad over a Yelp review? $5 million strategy says that’s part of the game, move up on. You know what I’m saying?

Chris DeHerrera:
Yeah. Either deal with it or accept it.

Louis Massaro:
That’s it.

Chris DeHerrera:
It is what it is.

Louis Massaro:
What can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen again? That’s it. Something happens, what can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen again?

Chris DeHerrera:
You had addressed the last part of his comment, in which he said, “I’m not so sure it’s as easy as you make it out to me. Get real, buddy.” I agree with that. I don’t think you make it seem as easy as he maybe thinks you do, but, I would say, maybe, you could give just a couple of helpful tips or pointers for somebody who may be experiencing some of these same feelings that this guy’s going through.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. Well, I think we kind of sprinkled a bunch of them all throughout this episode. Go back and listen to it again. I would say, to win in 2020 in the moving business, you’ve got to have your marketing on point. You’ve got to know your numbers, your marketing, ROI, report. You’ve got to have that. Smart Moving users, it’s in there. It’s built-in for you. Full disclosure. I’m a co-founder of Smart Moving.

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to know those numbers so that you could test certain things, track them based on what the ROI is, and then tweak them. Your marketing, you got to get on top of that. Then, your sales process has to be more than, “Hey, we call people, we leave them a message, and we move on,” and that’s it. You’ve got to really dial that in. Go to louismassaro.com. Watch all the videos on sales. Click on the sales category. Watch all those videos just to get you started.

Louis Massaro:
Then, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got your mover hiring process down. Yes, it’s hard. Double, triple, quadruple down on the effort that you make to hire movers. Instead of looking at it as just something we do once in a while when we need people and we put an ad and it used to be kind of easy, look at it as something where this needs to be a built-in process that the minute we need somebody, we play on the process, the recruitment effort goes out and we run them through it, and that’s it.

Louis Massaro:
It’s got to be taken more seriously. It can’t be something where your dispatcher says, “Hey, we’re short on guys,” and you’re like, “We’ll run an ad.” You’ve got to step it up. You’ve got to step it up and you got to tackle it, because the companies that are crushing it right now, they’ve got all three of these things lined up solidly. I would say, focus on those three things.

Chris DeHerrera:
Cool. All right. Good. Well, I won’t throw curveballs at you anymore from negative comments, but I thought [crosstalk 00:47:42].

Louis Massaro:
No. I like that. It was good. I think it’s important, Chris, because I know there’s a lot of people that feel that way.

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s what I thought.

Louis Massaro:
There’s nothing wrong with them. It’s just, sometimes, you need someone else to shed light on a different way of looking at it. When you are in a position where you’re a business owner, you own the company, a lot of times, you don’t have people around you that will tell you the tough things that they need to tell you.

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s true.

Louis Massaro:
Because the people that are surrounding you almost every day are your employees. Sometimes, you could get some decent feedback from them and some good feedback from them, from trusted people, but, if you don’t have someone else to share that perspective and say, “Hey, why don’t you look at it like this?” Actually, let’s send him a link to this. Let’s make sure he gets this and listens to this and say, “We made this for you.”

Chris DeHerrera:
Okay, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
I hope that just the change in perspective gets him to look at it, because he can change all this so easily. I say that again. He can change all this so easily. I’m not saying that the business is easy, but he could make the changes. All it is is steps. Do this, do that, do this, do that. Take the steps, but believe that it’s possible.

Louis Massaro:
Anybody that is feeling this way, they don’t believe that it’s possible. They’re like, “The world’s going on and the world’s going to end, tat-tat-tat-tat.” You’ve got to block all that out, ignore that, go for what’s in front of you, because the iron is hot right now and a lot of people are making a lot of money. That’s just the reality of it.

Chris DeHerrera:
That’s true. Well, he was asking for you to get real. I think you just got real.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, probably more than he was expecting from his comment. Listen, guys. Let me know what you think about these episodes. If you are loving this, if you’re liking this, if you’re hating this, if you’re getting some perspective, some motivation, some tips, some strategies, let me know. Just send me a DM at Louis Massaro on Instagram. Send me a picture of you listening to this. I’d love to get the feedback. I’d love to know that we’re not just sitting here talking to each other for no reason. Leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. Let me know what you think about this specific episode.

Louis Massaro:
If you don’t already have your tickets for our upcoming seminar, Moving CEO Live, make sure you go to movingseminar.com. That’s movingseminar.com. For three days, I am going to lay out detailed step-by-step strategies on how to dominate the next 10 years of the moving business. You need to be there. Go to movingseminar.com. All the details are there. Until we see you next time. Go out there every single day, profit in your business, and thrive in your life. I’ll see you later, my friends.

Posted on Wednesday, 03-11-2020

Motivate Your Sales Team

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SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to motivate your sales team to book more moves.

“Your team’s got to be motivated. Because it’s no longer a reactive game. It’s no longer, hey, the phone rings off the hook, and we pick it up and we book moves.”
“The way that you structure your sales process in your organization has to be on point in this modern day of moving, in order for you to be ultra-profitable.”
“When you’re spending money on leads, you need to have a solid sales team and they need to be motivated to go after these leads, because it’s very proactive, what they need to do.”
“I used to make the same mistake, I believed that our employees were just as motivated and excited for the growth of our company as I was. And it’s not the case.“
Watch the video to get full training.

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How To Turn Moving Leads Into Dollars

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
All right, my friend, this is Louis Massaro and welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to help you take your moving company to the next level, reduce stress, increase profits, live a better quality of life. I’ve got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s up, Chris?

Chris:
What’s up? What’s up?

Louis Massaro:
So, these episodes, what we’ve been doing is, we have been taking questions that come in through social media, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channel, or through support. And usually, I don’t know what the question is going to be, ahead of time, but I happen to see just now, two seconds before we went on, the question. So, I have a little bit of a head start today, but not much. But I’ll let you go ahead and ask the question because all I saw was what you put as the title for the video.

Chris:
Okay, all right. Well, yeah, I’ll give you a few more details here then. So, this question came in from one of our followers, and he’s having some issues with his sales team. His first question, his first initial question was, “How do I motivate my sales team? They don’t want to follow up on leads.” So, I commented back with him, I wanted to get some more details. And he wrote back and he says, “Listen, I give them a ton of leads, they don’t seem to want to follow up with them. I have four moving consultants, no sales manager.” All right. “Last year, we did just under $2 million, but I’m trying to get to $3 million.” And he just wants to know, how can he kick his sales team into full gear, into high gear?

Louis Massaro:
Okay. All right. So, for sales consultants, here’s the deal, your team’s got to be motivated, right? Because it’s no longer a reactive game. It’s no longer, hey, the phone rings off the hook, and we pick it up and we book moves. You’ve got to be able to deal with leads, whether you’re buying leads from moving lead providers or they’re just leads coming from your website. There’s outbound calls that need to be made, and you might not always get them on the phone. All right? So, the way that you structure your sales process in your organization and in your call center, whatever you want to call it, has to be on point in this modern day of moving, in order for you to be ultra-profitable.

Louis Massaro:
Because, if not, I would just guess to say that his profits aren’t nearly where he wants them to be either. If he’s got four consultants, they’re doing under $2 million, he’s got nobody managing them, he’s trying to go to three, I mean, because at the end of the day, it’s like, what are the profits? We didn’t get that information. Next time, we’ll dig a little deeper. But, you didn’t get that. Did you?

Chris:
No.

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

Chris:
No. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So, the thing is, when you’re spending money on leads, and when I say leads, I’m talking about any form of advertising, any form of marketing. So, whether it’s pay-per-click, direct mail, billboards, moving lead providers, Yelp, it doesn’t matter, that’s all lead. You need to have a solid sales team and they need to be motivated to go after these leads, because it’s very proactive, what they need to do. Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And, a lot of times, what I see companies do is they cast a vision for the business, “Here’s where we’re going, here’s what we’re trying to do. We’re going to go from $2 million or just under $2 million to $3 million. Guys, come on, this is what we’re going to $3 million.” Which is good. That’s part of the equation.

Chris:
Yeah. Fire them up.

Louis Massaro:
Fire them up, but that’s only part of it. So, the next part is, what’s in it for them? We, because I used to make the same mistake, believed that our employees are just as motivated and excited for the growth of our company as we are. And it’s not the case.

Chris:
Not true. Not true.

Louis Massaro:
They might show it. They might act like, “Yeah, let’s go, we’re going to $3 million.” Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But they’re not that motivated. So, you’ve got, hey, what’s in it for the company? Right?

Chris:
Mm-hmm.

Louis Massaro:
Then you’ve got it, what’s in it for them?

Chris:
Right.

Louis Massaro:
If they book more jobs, if they follow up on those leads, what do they get out of it? And then you also have, what’s in it for the customer? As well. So, if you’re out there, we didn’t find out, that’s everything you’ve got on him, right? I’m not going to…

Chris:
Yeah, I mean, he may have messaged me back before we started filming.

Louis Massaro:
No problem. No problem. So, what’s in it for the company? What’s in it for me, the salesperson? What’s in it for the customer? And what I mean by that is, if the sales reps on the phone, moving consultant, whatever you want to call them, and they’re quoting that customer and trying to book that move, they need to believe in their product. Meaning, they need to believe that they’re going to send crews out, they’re going to do an amazing job for that customer. And if they believe that, it’s your job as the owner or the sales manager, to let those sales reps, those moving consultants know that, “Hey, it is your duty to make sure that we book these jobs because we need to make sure that these customers that come across our path are in good hands.

Louis Massaro:
“We know some of the competition out there, we know some of the horror stories of the things that happen. We do a great job. Not only are you going to make money for you, make money for the company, but you’re also going to save these customers from any potential problems that they might have if they don’t go with us. And I know we’re not the cheapest,” but you need to be able to explain to them why it is that we’re not the cheapest. Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So, they need to see those three dynamics to get the ultimate, not only motivation, but inspiration.

Chris:
To feel like they have more of a purpose than just selling a move. Like they’re actually helping these people, they’re making their lives better.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I mean, even moving company owners, don’t realize that they are really helping people. Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
If you go and you do a good service, you don’t realize it because you don’t get the thank you’s. It’s hard to get the good reviews. Nobody’s sending you a box of chocolate and flowers and saying, “Thanks so much for the great move.” If something goes wrong-

Chris:
You’ll hear from them.

Louis Massaro:
There’re scratches, you’re going to hear from them.

Chris:
You’re going to hear from them.

Louis Massaro:
But if it goes great, you don’t hear from them. But, when you do this so much and you see the difference and you know the stress that people go through when they move, and you’re able to perform a good move for them, you don’t realize what that can do for their stress levels. And then, from that, what that does for their family, what that does for their job, what that does for their health.

Chris:
There’s lasting effects.

Louis Massaro:
There’s lasting effects of it. So, just because you’re not getting the, “Thank you,” and you’re not getting the, “Hey, you’re changing people’s lives,” don’t think that you’re not changing people’s lives.

Chris:
Right. That’s really cool. You don’t think about that very much, but you’re right. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use a moving company to move, but, I mean, I would never not. Moving yourself is rough. It’s hard. And when you have a good company, like you have somebody come in and they do a good job, they’re professional about it, I mean, yeah, that alleviates a lot of stress when you’re moving.

Louis Massaro:
But, you know what? If you had a couple of bad experiences, you’d probably be looking for a U-haul and some friends to do it yourself. Because you’d say, “You know what? I’ve tried that professional mover route, and that’s not good.” So, when you think about it like that, too, it’s like, “Hey, this customer has come across our path, we’ve got to make sure that they get a good move. It’s good for our business, it’s good for the industry as a whole. Because, if they go out there and they get a bad move, they get duped into one of these low prices, and they have a bad experience, well, what happens next time they want to move? And they just want to rent a truck.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, that’s what hurts the industry more than anything. So, again, back to where we saw motivating his salespeople.

Chris:
Right, he wants them to be fired up, not only to be excited about being on the phones or whatever, but he’s got a goal in mind. He wants to reach $3 million.

Louis Massaro:
Okay. Well, each one of those individuals, we’re talking about for individuals, they all have a goal, too. And if they don’t have a goal, it’s his job to give them a goal. A lot of times, first of all, they need to be on commission. Hands down, there’s no doubt about that, they need to be on commission. But they also need goals to reach. At a minimum, they need monthly goals that they’re trying to hit, revenue numbers. I like to do revenue and not amount of jobs booked. Because, I want them focused on what I’m focused on. And what I’m focused on is like, if I’ve got an opportunity to call this little one-bedroom apartment, or I’ve got this opportunity to close this big $5,000 job. As a company, if we’re one collective mind, I want them focused on the $5,000 job.

Louis Massaro:
So, I want their goals to be based off of revenue. And a lot of times, you’ll hear people say like, well, they get a commission, they should be incentivized, they should be focused. That should motivate them enough just to get the commission. But what happens with the commission is, if you’ve ever gotten like, and I know you have recently, if you’ve ever gotten more money or a raise, anybody listening, you had a certain goal in life to make a certain amount of money. Originally, when I first got in the business, I’m like… Before I got in the business, I was like, “I want to be able to make $100,000 a year.” It was like, in my mind, it was actually, I said, “$10,000 a month,” which is $120.

Louis Massaro:
Once I got in the business, I was like, “Okay, I want to make $400,000 a year.” And so, now, I look at $100,000 a year and I’m like, I can’t-

Chris:
You’re not motivated, you’re not pumped up about that.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. And so, the point is that, it’s the same thing when you get a pay raise. It’s like you’re all excited you got this raise. Or, as an owner, you’re making more profit, but then you get accustomed to that amount, and then you’re no longer motivated. Now it just becomes the norm. That’s your baseline.

Chris:
Right. The excitement wears off.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, it wears off. So, by having goals that they could hit every single month, and then tying those goals to bonuses that you pay them, it changes it up every month. The number that they need to hit is different. The number that they get is different. They need to know what’s in it for them.

Chris:
When it comes to those kind of bonuses, I mean, what did you pay your salespeople as far as bonuses go?

Louis Massaro:
It would be something that was basically, I would sit them down and look at what they did the month before. I would look at where we are currently. Like, okay, we’re coming out of slow season, we’re going in the busy season, things are going to naturally pick up anyways. So, let’s say you did 60,000 last month, and I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Okay, the lead volume’s up, you’re closing your leads at this percentage, you should be able to book $72,000 this next month.”

Chris:
Okay. So, you give them a goal.

Louis Massaro:
What I would do is I would sit down with them, and then, later on, I taught this to my sales managers and they would do it. But, I would sit down with them and say, “Look, here’s what you did last month,” talk about it a little bit. There’s a whole process for this that we teach in Moving Sales Academy. For the one on one goal setting meeting, there’s a whole framework for it. But essentially, we sit down and go over where they are, and say like, “What do you think you could hit this month?” So, instead of me giving it to them, I’ll be like, “Chris, what do you think you could hit this month? You hit $60,000 last month, what do you think you could do?”

Louis Massaro:
And depending on what you say, if I think what you say is out of reach, or I think it’s too low, I’m going to challenge you one way or the other.

Chris:
I see.

Louis Massaro:
You see what I’m saying?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So, if you’re like, “Hey, I think I can go to $62.” I’m going to be like, “$62? You did $60 last month. Every month, you’ve been getting better since you got here. And we’ve got season coming up. The lead, you can see the leads are coming in. There’s more leads coming in. I think you’ll do $72. And I’ll tell you what, if you hit $72, I’ll give you $350 extra this month.” And you’re like, “I don’t know.” “Okay, I’ll tell you what, how about $70, I’ll give you $200 extra.”

Chris:
I see.

Louis Massaro:
Don’t get caught up on the percentage and the amount, it’s just, it’s something that’s significant enough to make them move. You’re talking about $350, that’s a car payment. That’s a significant amount of extra money for a sales rep to make that month, that they wouldn’t normally make. And so, once you have that agreed-upon amount, and the goal is that, the key to the goal is that it needs to be attainable. Don’t dangle some carrot out in front of their face that they’re never going to get, because then it loses its effect.

Chris:
Yeah, they lose their motivation.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, you go a few months and you keep setting these goals that are way too high…

Chris:
They won’t care anymore.

Louis Massaro:
They won’t care anymore. So, don’t be cheap. You’ve got to be able to say like, “I’m willing to spend some money, to get them to move, to get them to do the things that I need them to do.” But now, you do that every month, they get used to that, too. So, it becomes, okay, they’ve gotten accustomed to the commission, that’s just part of their pay. They’re just, they’re used to it. Because, typically, people will kind of level out at a certain amount. You’ll have somebody there, this guy, he’s a $40,000 a month type of guy. Then you’ve got somebody else, she’s $120,000 a month type of girl. You know what I’m trying to say?

Louis Massaro:
They could get better and they could grow, but they’re usually like, will hit, become who they’re going to be within that first six months. If you’re coaching them and you’re working with them and you’re guiding them through the process, they’ll get to that point.

Chris:
That’s helpful. I mean, they can become predictable, so, you know what you can rely on.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I mean, because, ideally, you don’t want to just hire somebody, train them and then send them off to swim or sink. You want to have what we call a Moving Sales Academy Enhancement Training. You want to have the process of taking them through and making the existing reps you have better, but there are certain key points that you focus on to make them better. But, after six months of doing that, it’s like, okay, we know where they’re at. However, if there’s somebody that, let’s say, they’re in that $60, they’re kind of like $60,000 a month type person.

Chris:
Consistent.

Louis Massaro:
It doesn’t mean you can’t push them to go to $70. You take four reps and you push each one of them to do an extra $10,000, that’s $40,000. That’s what? $400 and… what is that? $480,000 a year.

Chris:
Half a million, almost.

Louis Massaro:
Almost half a million dollars by getting those reps to book an extra $10,000. When you talk about an extra $10,000, I mean, what are we really talking about? So, let’s say you’ve got…

Chris:
Maybe like an extra seven moves each or something.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I mean, let’s say if $1,000 average move to an extra 10 moves a month, a month. So, you’re talking about like an extra two and a half moves a week. So, you’re telling me that if you had them motivated, you gave them the coaching, you gave them what they needed and the incentive to hit it, they couldn’t book an extra two and a half moves a week?

Chris:
Yeah, that’s attainable.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, if you asked all of your sales reps. If you’re listening, just to go ask all your sales reps, “Hey, you think you could book an extra two jobs or three jobs a week? If you just focused a little bit more, if you try to…” Without even giving them tools, and without even giving them motivation, they could do it. You give them the tools, you give them the motivation, you give them the coaching, and manage the sales process, I mean, that easily could double.

Chris:
Do you feel like, in this guy’s situation, that jumped from just under $2 million to $3 million in revenue? Is that something that you think could be done with those same four salespeople, and just by incentivizing and motivating that team? I mean, is that something that’s possible?

Louis Massaro:
I mean, look, you might need another one or two salespeople. I don’t know how these particular salespeople are performing. I don’t know what his lead volume looks like. But, yeah, it’s totally attainable. I mean, to go up from two to $3 million, it’s just in the tightening up of the sales… I mean, you’ve seen it. I mean, all that, we get the success stories, we hear them, “I doubled. I went up from $3 million to $6 million. I went from $2 million to $4 million. It’s…

Chris:
Yeah, it’s doable.

Louis Massaro:
It’s doable, for sure.

Chris:
Yeah, that’s good. What else would you do to motivate them? Just day-to-day, I know you had talked about having meetings every day, right? Like sales meetings?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
What does that look like?

Louis Massaro:
Well, we call it the morning huddle. And basically, you start off by, essentially, it’s just a meeting in the morning to get them going, to get them fired up, to get their head in the right place. If you’re listening, you think about your team, your sales team in the morning in the office. And without anybody guiding them, they’re at the coffee machine making their third cup of coffee. They’re a little slow to sit down, they’re putting on their headset or whatever the situation is.

Chris:
Yeah, they’re hungover.

Louis Massaro:
Well, yeah, whatever. Most people don’t do the work to get their mind in the right place every morning, every day. You know how important, I mean, for me, that’s my whole morning setup on getting my mind right. Most people don’t do that. You can’t expect your team to do that. You’ve got to come in and help them get their mind right on the mission for the day. And the mission for the day is to book the move of every call that you speak to, every person you speak to. So, it’s basically a little pump up session, to get them committed to what the day is going to look like. What their goal is for the day. And also acknowledge some of the successes from the day before and encourage them. Basically, fire them up, and get them on the phones.

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to think about it. And I didn’t want to do this back in the day. Like, you see me, I’m on camera or on stage and doing what I do because I have a mission right now. When I had my business, I didn’t want to come give a big pep rally. I wanted to come in and go to my office and not say hi to anybody and close the door, and do my own thing. It’s what I wanted to do, but I knew what was necessary. I knew there was a whole day ahead of the team, and somebody had to set them off in the right trajectory. Somebody had to get their mind going towards booking moves.

Chris:
I know you had talked about before, setting the mood in the office, not just with the morning huddle, but also, I remember you used to talk about you played music. What are some more things like that that can help fire them up?

Louis Massaro:
The tone of the office is so important. For me, one of the rules of setting up your sales department is have it as far away from dispatch as possible. Right?

Chris:
Uh-huh.

Louis Massaro:
If you think about what goes on in dispatch, they’re dealing with the day-to-day of the business. This guy didn’t show up, somebody’s calling your truck, cut them off in traffic. This customer is calling, they’ve got an issue with some damage, whatever. The piano fell off the 10th floor, whatever it might be. Sales doesn’t need to hear that. Sales needs to be in positivity, like, “Everything’s all good. I believe in my product. I’m selling my product.” If they’re constantly hearing about all these little things that happen, it’s part of the logistical thing. I don’t care how good your company is, there are things that happen in dispatch that makes that a stressful position. Don’t put that stress on the people that you want to be out there fishing for customers. Right?

Chris:
Right.

Louis Massaro:
So, that’s number one. Next thing is, keep it upbeat. Play some music lightly. Like, we had speakers installed in the ceiling. You don’t have to get fancy with it, you can get a couple wireless speakers, and you put them in the office. And played music to where it was loud enough that they could hear it, but low enough that the customer couldn’t hear it on the phone. And it just helped with the energy in the office. And so, different days, we’d play different types of music. It could be, one day, it’d be dance music, and other days it would be old school, Motown R&B. Another day, it’d be hip hop, whatever it might be.

Chris:
Mix it up.

Louis Massaro:
And then, if it’s the afternoon time and everybody’s dragging, you might have to turn it up a little bit, it gets more BPMs going in there and really turn it up to get them fired up for the day. Another thing that we did was, every day, we did a two o’clock stretch. And so, at two o’clock, I played a song, and when that song went on, everybody in my office had to get up. If you were on the phone with the customer, it didn’t matter. You had to stand up from your desk, and I came out of my office too, you had to stand up. And if you didn’t want to stretch, you didn’t have to stretch, but you had to move around, move your body. Because when you sit all day, by two o’clock, you’re just like…

Chris:
Oh, yeah, that afternoon lull kicks in.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. So, we would do that. And then, spiffs.

Chris:
Spiffs.

Louis Massaro:
Spiffs. A spiff is an incentive that you just arbitrarily come up with, whatever it’s going to be. I’ll give an example. A spiff would be, “Hey, guys, whoever books 10 jobs today, you’re going to get $20 bucks. Hey, guys, if we book 100 jobs together as a team for the week, I’m going to buy everybody lunch on Friday from your favorite restaurant. While I’d walk in, take $100 bill out of my pocket, tape it on the wall, and be like, “Hey, listen up, whoever books the first five jobs, go grab that $100, that’s yours.

Chris:
Nice.

Louis Massaro:
So, the thing would spiffs though, is that, you can’t use them every day. That’s your secret weapon. They expect the commission. They expect the monthly goals. If they expect the spiffs, they lose their effectiveness.

Chris:
I see. Okay.

Louis Massaro:
So, the spiffs are like, “Okay, I see, the energy’s low, everybody’s been like they’re not seeming motivated. I need to come in and give them that shock factor, and get them motivated again.” Whether that’s like, first thing Monday morning, you just want to get the momentum going, or whether it’s like by Thursday, everybody’s just kind of dying off and you need to get them excited again. It’s got to motivate them, it can’t be expected, and you’ve got to be able to change it up. Make it fun. We used to put a wheel of fortune in the office, whoever books the next whatever, you get to go spin the wheel. And I’d have all kinds of prizes on there, whether it was 20 bucks, 100 bucks.

Louis Massaro:
I had tickets to the Dolphins, season tickets, where I had club level seats. I’ll be like, you get two club-level seats to the next game. You’ve got to keep the excitement up. And it doesn’t always flow over to the other departments, but your sales is different. You’ve got to keep them fired up and you’ve got to keep them wanting to go out there and chase down these leads and get these jobs booked.

Chris:
What’s an ideal schedule for a salesperson that’s going to get them to perform at their most? Because I can see how they could get burnt out.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
Do you want to only work them certain time of the day, certain hours, anything like that?

Louis Massaro:
No, I mean, it all depends on where you’re located, how many offices you have. Like, for me, we had, our call center was on the East Coast, but we had offices on the West Coast and all in between. So, I had to have two shifts going on, so that we could be open from 8:00 to 8:00, or 9:00 to 9:00 at one point. So, I don’t think that necessarily matters, but it is important that they have certain criteria. You’ve got to have certain… we’re getting into managing them now, which is a little bit different than keeping them motivated. But, the idea is, with their goals, you want to make sure, with those goals, they know where they’re at.

Louis Massaro:
So, whether you send out a weekly progress report email to everybody, that says, “Here’s where you’re at in relation to your goal.” Or, if somebody’s using SmartMoving, I’m co-founder in SmartMoving, if you’re using that as your CRM, then you could have that all on your dashboard right there. Or, you have a whiteboard in your office and you could show the progress of everybody where they’re at and turn it into more of a competition. There’s a lot of other things you could do with challenges and face-offs. You’ve got to keep it exciting. We had all kinds of what I call carnival games going on in the office too. We would do the wheel of fortune, we would do a little basketball hoop, I’d had a putting green in the office, and I’m like, “Look, first person to book,” whatever it might be, whatever it is, if it’s 10 jobs, “You get the putt for $100.”

Chris:
Nice.

Louis Massaro:
And so, they would go, and I’d say, “Listen, I’ll give you $10 bucks right now. Or, you could putt and get $100 if you make it in, or zero if you don’t make it.” But the whole office would gather around, nobody was going to take the $10. And it just created excitement for everybody. So, even if the person that was doing it, didn’t make it or the other people weren’t involved, they were still involved. There was still excitement. It’s not a boring like… job. So, that’s the natural state of what will happen with your moving consultants. What he’s expecting is the natural state of what will happen if you sit somebody down at a computer with a phone, say, “Here are some leads, call them, talk to them about their move, listen to everything they have in their house, and then guide them through the process of booking with our company. Oh, and when they say that your price is too high, then you’ve got to come back and you’ve got to say this to them.”

Louis Massaro:
If you just leave them alone, and let them just do that, their natural state is going to be… I mean, they’re not going to want to do it, you’ve got to cultivate that environment.

Chris:
Are there signs that can let you know ahead of time when the morale is getting low? Or, I mean, besides the numbers, obviously, but, I mean, is there something you could look at a salesperson and just see in them that they need some incentive, some motivation?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, well, obviously, you have the numbers. You’re tracking how many calls they’re making and how much talk time they have. But, you could tell just by their demeanor. And, if you don’t have… like, this guy doesn’t have a sales manager, someone has to wear the sales manager’s hat. Because, there are certain things that need to happen in order to keep them running and keep them fired up, keep them on point. But, if you’ve got to grab one person and pull them aside, “Hey, what’s going on? What’s up? I see you’re not quite into it.” And just talk to them like a person, to find out what’s going on. Give them some encouragement, and then send them back out on the field. You’ve got to give them some encouragement, talk to them, see what their issue is. And make sure that there’s nothing going on in their head, that makes them not motivated anymore.

Chris:
Well, and that can be contagious. They can infect the rest of your team.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, absolutely. You can’t let it linger. You’ve got to be able to identify it. You don’t identify it one day, okay. You don’t identify it after three or four days, you let somebody go a week, fine. You let it go longer than that, it affects the people around you. And it affects them if they’re just minding their business, and they’re just like… But if they start talking negatively, they start complaining, now they’re an infection. And infection will take down your whole company, from the inside out. So, you’ve got to be able to talk to them and see what’s going on. And if you can’t reverse the infection, then they’ve got to go.

Chris:
Yeah. I wonder, in this guy’s situation, his initial comment was saying, “They don’t want to follow up on leads.” Is there something that he can do just… Maybe they’re making their initial dials and stuff, but when it comes to the follow-up, maybe it’s… Could it be something in his process with it that’s keeping the salespeople down? I don’t know.

Louis Massaro:
Well, what I’m thinking when you say that is probably there is no process. He’s probably barking orders and saying, “Hey, follow up with them, follow up with them, follow up with them.” But, that doesn’t work. Because I’ve been where he is. I’ve been at four consultants with no sales manager, asking them to follow up. And then I’ve been at 60, 70 consultants with four sales managers, and they’re all doing it. So, if you can’t get four people to do it, but you could get 60, 70 people to do it, what’s the difference there? The difference is, you’ve laid out something that is systematic that they just have to follow. They know what’s next. They get off the phone with one customer, they know what to do next. They know what the priority is, they know which lead they should call, they know when they should call that customer back, when they get off the phone with them.

Louis Massaro:
When you have all that lined up, they’ll do it. And all you need is just somebody to just make sure that they do it. You pull up, you could see it all in your CRM. You pull up SmartMoving or whatever you use, you can see what they’re doing and you can identify it and have a talk with them right away, and coach them right away. But, typically, what I see is that people don’t have a follow-up process. So, they bark the order, and then the reps just don’t know what to do, or when to do it, or how to prioritize what’s in their lead inbox.

Chris:
Yeah. One of the other aspects of this is he was saying, “I give them a ton of leads.” And with the leads, obviously, if they’re not following up, they’re burning through his leads. Right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. Costing him a ton of money.

Chris:
Costing him a ton of money. With those leads, do you want to… Obviously, there’s going to be some salespeople who are better than others, right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
So, do you reward the people who are doing well with good leads? Or, do you give the good leads to the guys who are struggling to make them maybe have an easier job booking the move?

Louis Massaro:
Which one of those options, I’m going to ask you, which one of those options lead to the company making more money?

Chris:
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you’re just going to give the good leads to the good salespeople and get them booked. Right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I mean, you don’t want to starve out somebody new and not give them a shot, but, we teach at Moving Sales Academy, it’s called skill-based routing. And with phone calls and with leads, it’s about getting the lead to the person that’s got the skill to be able to handle that lead. So, whether it’s a bigger job, or whether it’s a job with packing, or whether it’s local versus long-distance, or a hot lead source versus one of the ones that doesn’t convert high, you want to be able to route those, based on that information.

Chris:
Now, let’s say he decided to get a sales manager, what are the qualities of a good sales manager? And how can a sales manager step into this situation and make a difference?

Louis Massaro:
Like, for me, when I first set up the call center, when I realized like, “Okay, I’ve got four offices, everybody’s booking themselves, each office, they’re handling their own calls. Some were crushing it, some were struggling. I said, “All right, I need to set up a central place to handle all of the calls.” So, I opened it up. I opened another office there, too. So, I made it the fifth office plus the call center. And went out and looked for a call center manager. I hired a recruiter, I looked for a call center manager, brought somebody in, highly qualified, they came in, and it wasn’t impactful.

Chris:
Why not? Right?

Louis Massaro:
He said, he was like, a great guy, by the way, but I didn’t have it set up for him properly. So, he came in, he’s like, “I need an assistant manager.” I said, “Okay.” I didn’t know anything at the time about call centers. This was me learning it. And so, I hired another assistant manager to help him. I was expecting him to develop and put all the processes in place.

Chris:
You would think he would know how to do that. I mean, that’s, he’s a…

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, but it’s not the case. It’s not the case. So, what I say now, what I decided to do after I let him go, was, I developed all the processes myself. I started really studying, I started learning sales psychology. I started going to call center conventions and learning all the different tools and everything like that, and put all the processes together myself, hired, took one of my moving consultants, who was awesome on the phone, made him my sales manager, and then mentored him and guided him on implementing those processes. So, now, I was like, “Here’s what needs to get done. Manager, here’s what needs to get done. Here, go make sure it gets done.”

Chris:
I see.

Louis Massaro:
Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So, the key is, and that’s what a lot of people do, they get like the Moving Sales Academy online course, for example. And what they’ll do is, they’ll give it to their sales manager and say, “Go implement this.” I mean, you know I can name a few. You know a few people out, their story. “I didn’t want to be bothered, I got it for the sales manager, he took it and ran with it and we had great results.” So, the idea is, when you bring a manager in, that manager’s role is to manage the processes. If the manager is managing processes, and managing people as an afterthought, they’re more effective and their job becomes easier. If you bring somebody in and manage these people, and they’re unruly, and they’re not doing what… It’s not even that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, they don’t know exactly what to do. You’ve got to give them instruction.

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to tell them, “Here’s what needs to get done, here’s when it needs to get done.” And then a sales manager just needs the ability to make sure all that stuff’s getting done. To show up every day, pull up the CRM, see who is following up with their leads, who’s not. Asking them about it. Blocking time on their calendar for enhancement training, to listen to calls from reps and take them through, we had the moving consultant evaluation guide, take them through that. See where they’re lacking, is it in their intro? Is it in going through the script and painting the picture? Or, is it going for the close and asking for the business? Find out where they need some help, coach them, work with them, make them better. Put them back on the phone, see the improvement.

Chris:
Along the same lines as you were talking about hiring the call center manager, is it better to, I know the answer, but I wanted to just talk about this, sometimes it’s better to hire somebody without experience than it is to hire somebody who’s got 20 years of sales experience, to come in and start selling for you. Right? I mean, I don’t know, talk about that a little bit. I know the answer, but I feel like it’s never too late to… I mean, would you recommend he start over?

Louis Massaro:
I would recommend, if he wants to go to $3 million, that he gets himself a sales manager. Whether it’s, he goes out and gets it, or makes one of his moving consultants the sales manager, or he becomes a sales manager. Okay?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Because part of that too, is the hiring, the training. You can’t let your sales machine break down. If you’re trying to get somewhere, your marketing is the fuel that goes into the vehicle, the vehicle is the sales machine, that’s what’s going to get you there. So, you need the fuel. But, if the sales machine breaks down, or slows down, you’re not going to get to where you need to be. So, that needs to be a focus. They need to be managed. You need to be able to hire quickly, you need to be able to fire quickly. You hire, you train, you get them in the seat, you bring them through both phases of training, then you continue to do enhancement training to make sure they’re good. You invested in this person, you took the time. Nobody likes hiring.

Louis Massaro:
Nobody likes having to put an ad and bring people in or ask somebody if they know somebody and it’s someone new, are they going to work out or they’re not going to work out? So, once you do that and you’ve invested in them, let that first phase of training and the second phase be like, they’ve got the training wheels on, and then you finally take the training wheels off. But that doesn’t mean, if they’re a little kid, you don’t say, “Go ride around the neighborhood instead of big major streets and do what you want.” You still guide them and show them how to do things, and you want to do that with your sales team to build them up. But I missed, what was the original question? We went off.

Chris:
Yeah, I was just thinking…

Louis Massaro:
You were saying that do they need experience?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Do they need experience coming in? If they got a bunch of sales experience, is that good or not good?

Chris:
Right.

Louis Massaro:
Sales experience can be good. Now, if they’ve sold for another moving company, you want to be, it doesn’t mean they’re bad, but it does not mean they’re good either. A lot of people will be like, “Oh, yeah, look, no, they did it, they have experience with the CRM, they know that, they know how to do an inventory. They must be good.” But the reality is, most people aren’t doing it the right way. And so, you might have to retrain somebody. So, for example, that sales manager that hired and didn’t work out, it wasn’t his fault. I was just expecting him to build my processes and build my business the way that I wanted it to be built. Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So, had I brought him in after I established, built my moving sales machine, if you will. And said, “Here’s what it is, here’s the processes, here’s what you need to do on a daily, go and run it,” he would have done a fantastic job. So, I just want to make that distinction that to where it’s not that he was experienced, he wasn’t good, it was that he came in, there was nothing for him to manage except people. And those people had no processes to follow. So, they became very hard to manage. When people have a process to follow, all you need to do is guide them back to the process. What is that person supposed to be doing right now? You know, guide them back to that. Does that make sense?

Chris:
Yeah. Is that the route that you recommend for a moving company once they get to a certain size that they should, if you have multiple locations, should you have a call center?

Louis Massaro:
If you have multiple locations, and they’re all owned by you, I would definitely have a call center. Because it gives you more… And when I say a call center, let’s say he has one office, and then, this guy, he’s got four consultants. He’s doing $2 million, approximately. Let’s say he opens another office. Maybe he needs to add another consultant for that. But he’s already got this, sound like he doesn’t have them yet. But, once you get the systems and the processes going, it’s easier to control at one location than it is at multiple locations. So, you don’t need to have people on the phones in another location. You might need an on-site estimator, and that’s okay, that you could book appointments for out of the main location. But what do you need there? You need trucks, you need movers, you need somebody to control and operate the movers and the trucks. But, keep your sales centralized.

Chris:
Yeah. I’m thinking back to, well, I’m not thinking back, but I want you to think back to some of your biggest sales days, coming up. Do you remember any of those days where, I mean, was there excitement in the air, people jumping up and down where you were having big days?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, there were days, I mean, we definitely had like $100,000 days.

Chris:
Wow. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But, you’re talking about multiple locations, you’re talking about local and long-distance. There was a time period there where we were hitting that on a pretty regular… Not every day, but it was definitely a big deal. And it was super fun to sit there, and just hit refresh on the CRM. And just watch that, and watch that number just climb, and climb, and hear the excitement and just go out and rally everybody up. But that was a result of a well-orchestrated sales process. That’s it. It’s not that I have any type of superpower or anything like that, it was, from early on, it was like, all right, things need to be done a certain way. If you’re going to grow and you’re going to scale, you can’t expect every person to figure it out. You’ve got a small shop, it’s you and a couple people and you all sit around and you dispatch and we both do sales and you handle customer service and we’re all just doing a little bit of this, and that’s where we’re at. Okay, you could get away with, I do it my way, you do it your way.

Louis Massaro:
But you start wanting to build a business and grow, it’s got to be uniform. It’s got to be the same. And when the stakes are high, like for me, you’re spending a lot of money on marketing, you’re spending a lot of money to hire and train salespeople, and then pay them to be there. Plus, phones, plus managers, plus directors, plus everybody that’s in there, plus, you’re there to make a profit, the stakes are high. So, for me, it became, every little micro-adjustment meant a significant amount of money. Every little improvement we can see. So, you look at all these processes. And then, a lot of people have been to either Moving Sales Academy seminars or even at the current seminars, Moving Mastery Summit, Moving CEO Live, we teach sales too, in addition to everything else.

Louis Massaro:
But, all those processes were all developed out of the realization that little micro-improvements make a big difference. We show the example sometimes of like, what a 5% booking increase can do to the bottom line. And we show the example, and it’s like, for a small moving company like a $300,000 moving company, I believe this number’s like $156,000 more for the year, if you increase your booking percentage by 5%. For a midsize company that’s doing like a million, I believe the number was like $450,000 more a year, by increasing your booking percentage by 5%.

Chris:
Yeah, now you’re getting bigger.

Louis Massaro:
For a large company, like I think it’s a $2 million company in the example we use, $2.5, which is a good size, local only, 5% booking increase, it’s a million dollars more a year. So, when the question comes like, “Louis, where should I put my focus?” Or, “Louis, how did you build a $20 million company? Sales. Because, it’s not what we, leads, leads, leads. Listen, take the same leads and book them at a 5% higher. If you’re booking at 12%, get it to 17%. Do the math for yourself. Run those numbers for yourself and be like, “Okay, instead of booking it wherever you book at, if we went from 25… 12 to 17 doesn’t matter.

Louis Massaro:
If it’s 20 to 25, or if it’s 30 to 35, wherever you’re at, wherever your booking percentage is, run the math on what it would be if you increased it by 5%.

Chris:
Big difference.

Louis Massaro:
And then just look and go, “Yeah, I can see that there’re some inefficiencies here, and I can see it’s possible.” I use that small example because it’s a small example. People are like, “Well, how did you help that company double their sales? How did they go from three to $6 million?” It’s not that hard once you realize all the little loose screws in the sales. And when you tighten that up, it’s a whole different business. It’s a whole different business.

Chris:
So, for this guy, we know you recommend, for him to get to $3 million, you said, he’s going to need a sales manager for sure.

Louis Massaro:
Whether he hires somebody or whether he steps into that role. He’s at that point where he could do it himself or somebody, somebody has to wear that hat. If you’re a little bit smaller, you can wear the hat part-time. At his level, wanting to go to three, you can’t just wish your way to three. And don’t buy more leads just to get to three. You might need more, I don’t know. But, the key is, tightening up that sales process. So, yeah, I would say, he’s going to probably need another, at least, another rep and somebody to be the sales manager.

Chris:
Yeah. And that’s talking about upping his revenue to the goals that he has. As far as his specific question about incentivizing and motivating his salespeople, what are some specific things he can do?

Louis Massaro:
Specifically, I mean, basically, make sure they’re all on commission, because we don’t know that they are. Make sure that they’re all on commission. Give them a weekly check, either hourly or salary as a draw, then give them a commission on the moves that they book. Keep them incentivized, but also keep them with some weekly pay, so they’re not waiting till the end of the month. That’s number one. Number two is, set monthly goals, and tie those to bonuses every single month, individually, for each rep. They don’t have to be the same. So, like, if I’m setting your goal for $75,000 because you’re currently at $68, but Susie over here is at $42, and I’m setting her for $50, it’s not about fairness.

Louis Massaro:
It’s not about like, “Oh, why does she only have to hit this goal, and I have to hit that goal?” Because, I’m pushing you to be better, and reach more from where you’re at.

Chris:
It’s an individual thing.

Louis Massaro:
It’s an individual thing. So, set those goals every month. And then, when you feel the energy lacking, do the spiffs. Right?

Chris:
Yeah, throw those in there.

Louis Massaro:
Do the spiffs. Walk-in, “Hey, whoever books five jobs today, the first person to book X amount of jobs.” So, it’s like, “Whoever books X amount of jobs today, gets this thing.” Meaning, anybody that does it, gets whatever that thing is.

Chris:
Whatever it is. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
“The first person to book this many jobs gets this thing.” That sets them off to the races. You want to get somebody going quick in the morning, the first person to get there, that’s what they get.

Chris:
What’s the biggest spiff you ever gave out?

Louis Massaro:
Well, I’ve done a few yearly spiffs. One of the things we did was, we called… and I always tried to have a theme around it too, just to make it exciting. Something new, something they’re talking about, something to break up the stagnant energy. Right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
We did the Rolex 500. And the thing was, it was like, “The first person to hit $500,000 in sales,” it was going to take them a few months to do it, “the first person to hit $500,000 in sales, I’m buying you a Rolex.”

Chris:
Damn, that’s awesome.

Louis Massaro:
And so, yeah, that you want to talk about getting them fired up. It depends where you are. Like I was in South Florida, I had a bunch of hungry guys that that motivated them. And so, we probably gave away, I forget, at least, two or three, we did that.

Chris:
That’s cool.

Louis Massaro:
We did, whoever books the most this year, at least, a million dollars for the year, gets a trip to Vegas, all expenses paid, plus $5,000 in spending money.

Chris:
Awesome.

Louis Massaro:
Second prize gets $2,500, no trip. Third prize gets… No way, second prize I think got $5,000 also.

Chris:
Okay, but no trip.

Louis Massaro:
But no trip. And then third prize got $2,500, no trip. If you ever do like a winner gets this, do a second and third place. Because, what will happen is, even at that time, everybody knew who was going to win. Because one guy was just crushing it. So, if you put out this, “Hey, whoever hits, the number one person gets this.” And everybody goes, “We know it’s going to be this person.” Give them something to shoot for a little bit, “Man, well, I might be able to get second place. I might be able to get third place.” It’s not about the destination, it’s not about the amount, and it’s not about them, you want them self-driven going after something. And if they don’t feel like they can get it, they’re not going to go after it. So, that’s what I would do.

Chris:
Do the rockstars that you had in the past, did you promote them? I mean, at some point, do they just keep being awesome salespeople or do you bring them up at some point?

Louis Massaro:
Well, it depends. I mean, if you take somebody from sales to management, typically, they’re going to take a step back in pay.

Chris:
Oh, yeah. If they’re a rockstar, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. So, the people that I did, one sales manager that I mentored and brought up. I mean, he went from being a salesperson to being a sales manager, took a little step back, but then, went beyond where he could have went.

Chris:
Oh, cool.

Louis Massaro:
So, he’s a sales manager and moved into director of sales, who’s making over $200,000 a year. Wasn’t going to be able to do that booking moves, but, even the other four sales managers that I had had during that timeframe at the same time, because all those people require quite a bit of sales management, they had to take a step back in order to first step in that position with the hopes of growing with the company. So, if somebody is like an ultimate, ultimate, management, just because you’re great at sales, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be great at management. And just because you’re terrible at sales, it doesn’t mean you’ll be bad at management.

Louis Massaro:
You might have somebody that’s really organized, and they’re really good with people, and they’ve got some management experience, but they’re just not a closer, that might be able to run your processes.

Chris:
I see.

Louis Massaro:
And then if you have someone that’s just a rock star on the phone, and now you take them off the phone, and you’re having them just do a lot of administrative stuff, it could hurt your sales.

Chris:
This is a good question, just being able to recognize those abilities in people like, if he’s going to go to $3 million and he’s going to hire some more salespeople, what should you look for in salespeople?

Louis Massaro:
Well, first thing is, they need to sound good on the phone. So, before you even, during a phone interview, if they sound like they just crawled out of a dumpster, they’re not for you.

Chris:
It’s not the guy.

Louis Massaro:
Because that’s the first perception that your customers hear. So, they need to sound good. They need to be hungry, they need to want to make money. They need to be coachable. They need to be resourceful. They need to be someone, because you’re also helping these customers, the way that we teach to sell, is to provide excellent customer service, but then lead the customer to booking with our company, and enrolling into that reservation asking for the business. So, it’s not salesy, salesy, salesy, salesy, it’s not that at all. Anybody listening that knows our processes and using our products, they know, it’s not, the customer doesn’t feel like they’re being sold, the customer feels like they’re getting excellent customer service, and just, the person on the phone knows, like, “I’m now leading them to book the move with our company.”

Louis Massaro:
So, those are some of the characteristics that they want to look for.

Chris:
That’s cool. That’s good. I think we’re going to really help this guy out.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I think if he does that, he’ll be right on track. And, I mean, not to put a plug in there, but I would highly, highly recommend that he enrolls in our Moving Sales Academy online course, or join us at Moving CEO Live coming up.

Chris:
I tell you what, if he just applied a small fraction of some of the stuff in Moving Sales Academy, that 5% increase is done deal.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
I mean, that’s very, very easy and attainable to do.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I mean, we tell people when they look into it, it’s like, “Look, you try it, you don’t see the results in 30 days, I’ll give you your money back.” No big deal. And when I say that, Chris, it’s, I’m thinking, how could I help? I’m not thinking, how could I sell him something?

Chris:
Of course.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, you know that, but I’m just saying, I know, it’s like, there’s only so much that we could talk about in a podcast episode. But to get to step by step processes, there’s a place where I have that.

Chris:
It’s all laid out.

Louis Massaro:
It’s all laid out. And it’s just crucial that people have that sales process.

Chris:
But that’s what’s great about Moving Sales Academy, and in here, I am plugging away, too. But it’s the program that we offer that you just see instant results. I mean, it’s immediate, as soon as you start implementing stuff.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. It’s cool to hear the comments about it. If anybody wants to learn more, you can just go to louismassaro.com. There’s probably a link on there somewhere.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
They’ll put a link. But, yeah, I mean, that’s how you take what took me 16 years to develop, on a high level, and apply it to any size company. You’ve got, you’re booking moves yourself, what you need is there for you. You’ve already got a call center, we’ve got a lot of bigger clients as well. Everything you need is there.

Chris:
It’s the same.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. And you start dialing it in and you start taking a step by step, we call it learn and implement style, just learn it and implement it, you’ll see the results. But, for the sake of the podcast, make sure you’re paying them a commission, set up those goals every month, get some exciting spiffs, and make sure someone steps up into that role of sales manager, even if it’s the owner.

Chris:
It’s a perfect time right now, we’re coming out of winter, getting ready to go into moving season, you could implement a few of these things and have a really great spring.

Louis Massaro:
Well, and not assume, see, this big mistake people make is they assume, “Summer is coming. I’m going to make money. It’s all good.” But, the reality is, can you waste less leads? Can you raise your price, and book more jobs, so that at the end of the summer, there’s more left, there’s more money for you, so that you’ve got that money to get you through whatever you need. So, yeah, you’ve got to go out there, you’ve got to focus on building that sales machine for sure.

Chris:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks for helping this guy. I’m sure he’s going to be happy.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. All right, guys, well, thanks for being here. Listen, if you like this episode, do me a favor, go to iTunes, Moving Mastery Podcast, and just leave me a review. Let me know what you thought, let me know what you think. If you have any questions at all, just hit me up on Instagram, it’s Louis Massaro, or @louismassaro, @ L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. Shoot me a DM, ask me a question and we’ll try to get it here on the podcast to answer for you. And until I see you next time, till I talk to you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, and thrive in your life, my friend.

Posted on Wednesday, 03-04-2020

My First Moving Company Failed

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SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how his first moving company was a failure.

“Man, it was scary, I didn’t know anything. I just knew that there was money to be made in the moving business.”
“I had all the pads and dollies in my apartment and I rented two trucks.”
“I put an ad out, I hired some movers, I started booking some moves and I meet them all at the truck rental yard. They, of course, thought it was a joke. I mean, I was there in my car, a 19-year-old kid and I looked young too.”
“I had all this equipment, I had all these pads, I had all these dollies. I was talking to the people at CDS and saying like, “How many do I need on the truck? How many of these should I use?” And, “How many of those should I use? What other equipment should I use?”
“My movers, right away, I mean, they knew. They knew I didn’t know what I was doing. They knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. And it just felt like, “Am I ever going to be able to get the respect of these guys when they know I don’t know shit?“
Watch the video to get full training.

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Take Control Of Your Moving Company

How To Open Moving Companies In Multiple Locations

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
All right, my friend, it’s Louis Massaro, welcome to The Moving Mastery Podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to help you take your moving company to that next level by setting up proven systems and processes to increase profits, reduce stress, live a better quality of life. I got my main man Chris with me today. What’s up, Chris?

Chris:
Hey, hey.

Louis Massaro:
So what we’re doing is in these episodes, Chris has been going through the social media feed, through our support inbox and coming up with some questions that people in the audience or customers or whoever they are, there’s people sending in questions from social media have about their moving business or have for me directly and I don’t know what these questions are going to be until he asks them. So it’s Chris’s job to make sure we’ve got some good starting points.

Chris:
We do. We do.

Louis Massaro:
What have you got today Chris?

Chris:
This one I really like. This one comes in from a guy who I believe is a younger guy. I think he’s probably just starting his business.

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

Chris:
And his question is he says, “I know you started your first moving company at 19 years old, how were you able to have so much success at such a young age?”

Louis Massaro:
I wasn’t.

Chris:
You weren’t?

Louis Massaro:
No.

Chris:
What do you mean? What happened?

Louis Massaro:
So initially, my first moving company failed.

Chris:
Oh, that’s right. Okay.

Louis Massaro:
You know that story.

Chris:
Yeah. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But I haven’t talked about it a lot, I’ve…

Chris:
Let’s hear about it. I would love to hear that.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. So essentially when I was 19, I went to Las Vegas to open up my first office, okay? It was the millennium. I went to Las Vegas with some family and friends for the ’99 to 2000 New Year’s Eve.

Chris:
Right. Yup. I was there and then also.

Louis Massaro:
And I, that’s right, you were probably playing music or something.

Chris:
I sure was. Yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And flew over, and I’m looking out the window, I’m like, “People live in Las Vegas?” I’ve been there once before when I was a little bit younger and I’m like, “People actually live here?” It’s not just this trip. I see houses and I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to come out here and I’m going to open a moving company out there.”

Louis Massaro:
So went to Vegas, rented two trucks. At the time, it was called Rollins Truck Rental, Penske bought them out later, went down there, rented two trucks. I had a fake ID at the time. Hopefully, it’s all good now, but I had a fake ID at the time and that’s the only way I was able to with my name on it was able to actually rent trucks at that age.

Louis Massaro:
And man, it was scary, I didn’t know anything and I just knew that there was money to be made in the moving business and went partners with a friend that already had a moving company in Florida, went out to Vegas, started there, I was like, “I’m going to show you the way. I’m going to show you the way.” And went out there and was essentially on my own to figure it out.

Louis Massaro:
Other than the occasional phone call of like, “Wake up, what are you doing? Get out there, go see some apartment complexes. Go do something.” I’m like, “Oh.” I didn’t know what to do, right? I was just … I had a yellow page ad, phones are going to my … The calls were going to my cell phone.

Louis Massaro:
I had all the pads and dollies in my apartment that I got and yeah, rented two trucks. The first day I had to go rent those two trucks. I went, I had to go get moving equipment. So at the time, it was I believe it was CDS Moving Equipment and had to drive the stick shift truck which is totally different by the way than a stick shift car.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And so it’s Las Vegas, it’s the summer of 2000 and it’s hot in Vegas, right?

Chris:
It’s hot.

Louis Massaro:
So I get in the truck and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, no, I know how to drive it, I know how to drive it.” I get there and I’m clank, clank, clank, clank, clank. The truck’s stalling and I’m just sweating. I just know, “Man, they’re going to see me, they’re going to figure it out. They’re going to know that I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Chris:
They’re watching you.

Louis Massaro:
They’re not going to rent me trucks and it’s going to be all over. So the guy comes up to the truck and he comes up to the window and I rolled the window down and he’s like, “Having a little trouble?” I’m like, I didn’t know what to say, “I got it.” He’s like, “You know what? Let me … You mind if I jump in with you? I’ll give you a little … I’ll show you a little bit.”

Chris:
Oh, that’s nice.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, he was the head mechanic there and he took mercy on me. I mean, he saw what was happening.

Chris:
He saw you struggling.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, he jumped in and we did a few … He basically taught me how to drive a manual truck right there on the spot and I forgot exactly how long we drove around and he was giving me a lesson. A super cool guy and if you’re listening, by the way, I totally forgot your name, but thank you so much.

Chris:
Wow, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
I appreciate that. Yeah. And I had to go to CDS and on the way out of Rollins to CDS was like an uphill and so now, I’m driving the truck and I’m going uphill and it’s rolling back as I’m getting the clutch down. I made it to CDS, I got the equipment, I went and dropped it off the apartment. I made it back.

Louis Massaro:
So that was like before I even got started out there. So now, I put an ad out, I hire some movers, I started booking some moves and I meet them all at the truck rental yard. They, of course, thought it was a joke. I mean, I was there in my car and, a 19-year-old kid and I looked young too.

Louis Massaro:
It wasn’t like I was just 19, I look, I don’t know, probably 16 and I didn’t know what I was doing. I had all this equipment, I had all these pads, I had all these dollies. I was talking to the people at CDS and saying like, “How many do I need on the truck? How many of these should I use?” And, “How many of those should I use? What other equipment should I use?”

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So my movers right away, I mean, they knew. They knew I didn’t know what I was doing. They knew I didn’t know what I was talking about and luckily, I was able to learn from them how a truck should be set up. How the pad should be folded, how the dollies should be put with the pads and strapped in and how many should be on the truck and sweeping it out after the move and all that. I learned that directly from the movers.

Chris:
How fortunate.

Louis Massaro:
In Vegas.

Chris:
Wow.

Louis Massaro:
Now, it didn’t feel fortunate at the time, it was embarrassing.

Chris:
It was embarrassing I’m sure, but yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And it just felt like am I ever going to be able to get the respect of these guys when they know I don’t know shit.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Right? And so, I kind of got past that part, but now the challenge was when I went out there, the expectation was all men apply for a license, I’m going to get a license, it won’t be an issue, but at the time, it was very, very hard to get a license in Las Vegas.

Louis Massaro:
It was like a good old boy network. You had to know somebody, it wasn’t … You just filled out your application and got a license. So what I was doing was I was … I had two contracts going. I had one contract for labor. So it was a labor service and another contract for truck rental.

Chris:
Okay.

Louis Massaro:
So I technically wasn’t a moving company.

Chris:
I see.

Louis Massaro:
And this was my workaround until I got the license, but one month goes by, two months go by, three months go by, I’m not able to get this license and it starts looking like it’s not going to happen and for me, it was demoralizing.

Chris:
Were you making money?

Louis Massaro:
No.

Chris:
No?

Louis Massaro:
No. I wasn’t making any money. It’s a good thing because a young guy in Vegas making money, it could have turned out bad.

Chris:
Yeah. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But I wasn’t making any money. I was basically making … I wasn’t even making, I should even say that between the … Everything I was putting on my credit cards and taking a little bit of money to pay for the apartment, and the truck rentals and food and stuff like that, that was it and what happened was … I mean, I remember being on the phone with a family member and just talking about the whole thing and just started crying.

Chris:
Really?

Louis Massaro:
It was so … Laying on my couch like, “What am I doing out here?” This is ridiculous I came out here to open a moving company and I’m basically running like this half-ass truck rental labor service. I had this vision of my name on the truck’s storage, a big warehouse, a big facility like that.

Louis Massaro:
At the time, I’d wanted one really good office. That was my goal and it was never going to be able to happen because if I’m a truck rental company, I can’t put the name of the moving company on the side of the truck, I couldn’t do storage, so after six months, I’m like, “Look, I can’t spend any more time here with these workarounds. If I can’t get the license, then I need to go somewhere where I can get a license or I don’t need a license.”

Louis Massaro:
So after six months, I decided to go to Denver, Colorado. At the time, you didn’t need a license, it seemed like a good market and I went, and basically, that’s when … For me, that’s when it really all started, right? There is that six months in Vegas that failed.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, I basically shut it down, I wasn’t able to make it, I never made any money, couldn’t get a license. It was a half-ass operation and then I go to Vegas and go to Denver. You lived in Denver too, right?

Chris:
I love it. Yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
I grew up 90 miles north of there too.

Louis Massaro:
So I get to Denver, it’s now February. I land, it’s nothing but snow everywhere and at the time, DIA airport was, I mean, still way out.

Chris:
Oh yeah, you’re out in the prairie?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, there was nothing out there with it. So I landed, I get in the rental car, I’m in the snow driving around. I’m from Florida, I’m not used to driving around in the snow and I go to a hotel, it’s late, I go to sleep, I wake up and I look out and all I see is snow.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Right? Snow and I’m like, “Who am I going to move out here? Did I make another bad decision? Am I just … What’s happening here? Am I going to be able to actually do this?”

Chris:
Why? Why Denver?

Louis Massaro:
What happened was the guy who I was partners with at the time was trying to open another office in Denver with somebody else and then they backed out.

Chris:
Oh, okay.

Louis Massaro:
And when they backed out, there was an opportunity there, there was already a yellow page ad placed. So it was like I didn’t have to wait. It was either I go there or I go back to Florida, go back to the drawing board, try to figure out my next move and I was already, I was in. I already made up my mind I was going to succeed in this business and I was in.

Chris:
Even after Vegas failing?

Louis Massaro:
Even after Vegas failing.

Chris:
It didn’t have an effect on your spirit and your motivation?

Louis Massaro:
It did, but I moved past it. I was like, “What else …” I didn’t have family money to fall back on. I didn’t have … I didn’t go to college. I didn’t have anything to fall back on and I told myself that I’m going to go make … I’m going to go become a millionaire in the moving business before I went to Vegas.

Louis Massaro:
And so for me, I was like, “All right, Vegas is … The way that I have to operate here is broken. Let me go somewhere else.” Which could seem like a cop-out. Why don’t you just try to make it where you are? But I’m like, “You know what? I’m at the beginning stages right now. Let me go somewhere where it’s going to be a little more friendly for me to be able to operate.”

Chris:
Yeah, better to do it now than when you’re established and you’ve got a whole business going and you’re still struggling. I mean, six months in Vegas is it’s enough time to know whether it’s going to work or not, but when you look back at it now, do you say, “Oh, I could have done this.” Or, “I could have done that and I could have made it work somehow.”

Louis Massaro:
No.

Chris:
No?

Louis Massaro:
No. Because I needed the license. It was either … There was a ton of companies out there operating with no license making money, getting fined, paying the fine, but that wasn’t …

Chris:
You don’t want to be that … Yeah. Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
That’s not what I wanted to do. So but now, I went just did the same exact thing. But it was as if I felt the failure of that office and carried that with me. So when I went to Denver, it was a whole different level of focus and intensity on the way that I went about the business.

Chris:
This time …

Louis Massaro:
This time it was not … There was no one needing to call me to tell me to get up in the morning to go see real estate offices. I was in and I went and I found an apartment and I went and found Penske there and went and negotiated, “Hey, I’m going to rent two trucks, can I keep them here and work that whole thing out?” And started all over again. Recruited some movers, had them come meet me at the clubhouse of my clubhouse. It was the little apartment complex.

Chris:
Little office?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, we were the leasing office.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
It wasn’t like fancy like that and had to meet me there, hired them, I had them all meet me at the truck rental yard in the morning and started all over again in Denver after six months. So to answer the question, it didn’t just like come easy. That six months, there was a lot of schooling that went on in that six months.

Chris:
Yeah, it was like a bootcamp kind of.

Louis Massaro:
It was like a bootcamp.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And there was a lot of pressure because I didn’t know, I felt so self-conscious, I didn’t have the discipline, not the discipline. I didn’t have the … I didn’t have the confidence to be able to speak to the customers and know what I’m talking about, I didn’t know how to estimate a move.

Louis Massaro:
Everybody, anybody and everybody that called, it didn’t matter what size it could have been a studio apartment or a 12,000 square foot mansion. “Okay, sure. We’ll send you three guys in a truck.”

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
That was it. Everybody got the same thing. So that six months was schooling and then when I got to Denver, it was also schooling, but it was like I graduated to a certain level. I could fake it enough at that point to where my movers are like, “Okay, he knows what he’s talking about.”

Chris:
Okay, did you start making money right away in Denver?

Louis Massaro:
Denver was great. I opened up in February 2001 and yeah, I mean, it took me, the Yellow Pages was about four months until I could start paying them, right?

Chris:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Louis Massaro:
So immediately, I wasn’t making any money, but about four months until I could start paying that ad that had been out previously, Penske, almost every day was coming outside like, “Hey, we need some money. We need some money.” I’m like, “Okay, here, here. I’ll give you a little money, here.” But that first year, really things started to really take off at that point.

Chris:
Okay. When you first were getting established in Denver, did you … When did all of the getting the processes in place and when did it all really start become like a real company?

Louis Massaro:
Not for a while because I had to figure out what those processes were, but in my mind, at the time, it wasn’t like, I need to figure out processes. I was like, “I need to figure out how to do this stuff.” Right? And every day, there was issues, every day there was problems, every day I was running into something that just really could crush your self-confidence, right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You feel like you’re doing something good and just some over … Whether it’s movers twice your size, getting in your face, wanting to fight you, whether it’s Penske coming outside and saying, “You need to pay us or we’re not … We’re taking these trucks back.” Right?

Louis Massaro:
Whether it’s a move that is just going so terribly wrong and you don’t really even know where to begin to resolve the issue.

Chris:
You’ve got customers screaming at you.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, and it’s … I just had no idea what I was … Everything felt way over my head and I just, every day, I had this little black book I kept in my back pocket like a little address book which is blank and I would just write down all the things.

Louis Massaro:
I was like, “I need to figure out a solution for this. There’s got to be a better way for this, there’s got to be a better way for that. This can’t be.” And that became my guiding light to figure out how to make it better and it was almost like an obsession, right?

Louis Massaro:
There’s got to be a better way. Every time something happened, I’m like, “No, no, no.” There’s companies out there that operate smoothly, profitably that aren’t dealing with this. Whereas now I see, I’ll hear from companies and it’s like, “Man, I got this up against me and I got that up against me in my market and the leads and the movers.” And it’s like everything’s against them, right?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
I’ll hear that a lot.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
It’s kind of like victim mentality.

Chris:
It can be, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And I didn’t look at it that way, I looked at it like there’s companies out there that run smooth, there’s companies out that are run efficient. What can I do to make this better?

Chris:
Were you reaching out to companies?

Louis Massaro:
Not moving companies, but I was talking to anybody and everybody I could. I was talking to my CPA at the time. I was talking to it was probably three or four months after I was in the truck rental yard, maybe five months, I forgot exactly that I went at leased my first office space.

Chris:
Wow.

Louis Massaro:
And the owner was a successful businessman that now he’s just invested in real estate and I would talk to him and get advice from him. So I had all these unofficial mentors where I was just getting information and they were just helping me with bits and pieces of whatever they could.

Louis Massaro:
I found an attorney in Denver to help with my contracts and stuff like that and she would guide me and help me with certain things. So I was like I’d go look for the answers to them, I’d go look for books that I could read and find information on whatever I was struggling with and try to overcome it and then try to apply that the next day.

Chris:
Yeah, the podcast we did I guess last week or two weeks ago was about how you built this $20 million empire. Was the climate different back then? Did you feel like you … Did it feel like you couldn’t fail just because with things going in the economy and stuff like that or how was it?

Louis Massaro:
Well, you just had the dot-com bubble, right? That all happened right then and there, right? A few months after what I’m talking about, a couple of months after I moved into my office, 9/11 happened.

Chris:
Yes.

Louis Massaro:
Right? So the whole world is in fear and there’s a lot going on. Then we go to war. There’s a lot going on and I just didn’t pay attention to it.

Chris:
And it didn’t affect the business?

Louis Massaro:
It didn’t affect the business.

Chris:
Wow.

Louis Massaro:
And maybe it did, but I didn’t know … Maybe it did. Maybe it would have been twice as successful if that didn’t happen, but I didn’t look at it like that and I think that that was a real advantage for me that I wasn’t caught up in, “Oh, the economy.”

Louis Massaro:
“Oh man, what’s going to happen to the market? And what’s going to happen if this happens?” Or, “What’s going to happen if that happens?”

Chris:
Is that something that you think you should worry about or that you’re worried about later?

Louis Massaro:
I think you just need to focus on having your business so on point, that you’re just in the best position that you could be in for whatever happens. You know what I mean? Storms are going to come. You need to be able to weather those storms.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But I think a lot of people, look at what’s going on and listen, you watch the news, it just breeds fear in people. In tune, it’s good to know what’s happening, but don’t … Not follow your dreams and your business and don’t sit there and go, “Oh, the economy is messed up.”

Louis Massaro:
Because if that’s all you’re hearing all day, that’s what you’re going to believe and for me, it was like, I just had my head down. I didn’t look at competition other than to check their prices.

Louis Massaro:
I just had my head down and just focused on booking as many moves as I could possibly book and then figuring out how to service them.

Chris:
Yeah. Yeah. You started in the dead of winter in Denver.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
In February.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
I guess if you are in that situation, that’s when you start. You don’t know any different, right? You don’t … Did you know that there was going to be a moving season? Did you know that you are going to have money falling out of the sky during the summer or …

Louis Massaro:
No. I mean, I had an idea, but it’s actually not … I was going to say it’s a funny story, it’s not a funny story, but that first year, I think I did approximately from February to the end of the year, I think I did about 600,000 gross in revenue and got … And didn’t feel any slowdown.

Louis Massaro:
Didn’t feel any slow down because the trajectory of where I was going up, I mean, I was selling. That was my big thing. Sales was what got me there, period. So I’m selling and I’m selling and I come out of summer, and I go into winter, and I’m still doing well, I’m still making money.

Louis Massaro:
I come back around into the new year. So what is that now? 2002 I come into the new year and hit summer again and now it’s like, right? Really crushed it that summer and so now I’m not prepared for winter because I’m like, “No big deal.”

Louis Massaro:
That’s when I learned the hard way, that summer, I bought a house. Got myself a nice car and …

Chris:
Life was good.

Louis Massaro:
Life was good, but then that winter came and I wasn’t prepared for it because I kept going up the winter before because I had so much momentum and this time, I felt it and it was tight. Cash flow was tight, money was tight because I was young, I started spending it.

Louis Massaro:
I was conscious enough to set up an investment account, but still, I wasn’t prepared to weather the storm of that first … That second winter where it really impacted me, and it hurt and it was a lot of juggling to get out of it, and then make my way back to the summer and then say like, “Never again.”

Louis Massaro:
It goes back to, “There’s got to be a better way.” There’s got to be a better way. So it’s like, “How can I make sure I’ve got consistent moves all year?” Okay?

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And how do I make sure I’ve got money next year so that when things do slow down, I’m okay I’m not stressing all winter long and that’s when I started to create a separate account and put money to the side during the summer months when it was raining money to be able to handle that and survive the winter if I needed it and if I didn’t need it, then I knew by springtime, I could do what I wanted to do with the money.

Chris:
That’s kind of nice. Yeah, now how efficiently was the business running at that point?

Louis Massaro:
It was starting … It was like I had the screwdriver and starting to tighten it down a little bit and just everything … I just wanted everything to be on point and even back then, if something was sloppy or something was out of order everything had to be in order, everything had to be neat and on point and it had to be done the same way every time.

Louis Massaro:
We used to have the movers fill out … When they came back, they had to fill out a time card for their hours plus a sheet for every single one of the moves that they had to staple to the back of the contract before they gave it to us with the money.

Louis Massaro:
Little thing, but it was like it had to happen every single time and so by putting these little things into place, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. However, when you put it in place, and then you make sure it stays in place, now you could build on that and now you can stack on that and that little thing is a little process. Hey guys, when you come in and we used to literally take long sheets of paper, print out these things, get the slicer.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
I bought a little slicer at Home Depot, it was pretty fun to slice all the things and put them out for the movers with a pen and it was just a little thing, but all those little things when you start to do them well and you start to not accept when a guy comes in and just doesn’t do it that day, that’s the thing. When you start to put processes in place, that was a process.

Louis Massaro:
It wasn’t in writing, it wasn’t a standard operating procedure, it wasn’t official, but it was like, “Hey, we need to do this.” And I know, where people can struggle is one guy doesn’t do it. Then the next day another guy doesn’t do it and then they’re like, “You know what? It’s not that important that we have the sheets. Whatever.” And they let that go.

Louis Massaro:
So it was running pretty efficient, but it was me and one other guy at first, my best friend who came to just hang for the summer. Come work with me for the summer, I could use the help, it will be fun and then he ended up staying with me for six years. Then we hired some other people after that, but yeah, I guess it was a natural desire for order.

Chris:
A necessary desire.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I recognized early on when things weren’t in order, there was chaos. It was either their structure in order where there’s chaos and the chaos didn’t feel good, it gave you a lot of anxiety and you saw a mistake … You saw bad stuff happen in the business because of it.

Louis Massaro:
You saw the ball get dropped because of it. So it’s just like everything’s got to be on point. Everything across the board in the business. It was just everything from … If I had to … We started doing direct mail and we got the labels and we put the labels on these little ugly postcards that we had at the beginning and then the stamps.

Louis Massaro:
So when I got somebody to do that in the office, it was just very meticulous. Look, here’s exactly how you need to do it. If there was a label put on that was crooked, no, you need to do that again. It’s got to be on point. It’s got to be straight. Right? Same thing with the paperwork.

Louis Massaro:
Movers came back missing signatures, there was consequences for that. You can’t just come back … Everything’s got to be on point.

Chris:
You’re setting a standard.

Louis Massaro:
Exactly.

Chris:
For everything. Now, for a guy … This guy in this situation, I assume he’s kind of just getting started. Do you remember your first process, or what would you tell him to kind of get in place first?

Louis Massaro:
The moving parts, right? I mean, so to me, morning dispatch was the biggest event.

Chris:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Louis Massaro:
6:30 in the morning, we got to the office. Movers were all there waiting outside. We let the drivers inside the building.

Chris:
But the movers had to stay out?

Louis Massaro:
The helpers had to stay out. I mean, if there was a blizzard, we could squeeze them all in, but other than that, I … Because otherwise, it’s …

Chris:
Chaos.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, it’s chaos, right? We needed order. But just the way that … I think if, I don’t remember exactly what the first process was, but getting those … The timesheets and the job description stapled to the contract, that was big.

Louis Massaro:
Making sure that I had the moves written up on contracts the night before by three o’clock, that was a process that I did for me, right? I’m like, “I’ve got to create order for me. Otherwise, I’m going to be here all night. I’m not going to know …”

Louis Massaro:
There’s always reaction. There’s always something you could be doing. If you don’t take the things that must get done and say, “I’m going to do them by this time in this particular way, you’re just going to have chaos.”

Louis Massaro:
So the contracts had to be done by three o’clock for the next day which meant the confirmation calls to the customer, had to be done. Then the contract had to be written up, then, back then, there was no GPS.

Louis Massaro:
There was I think MapQuest or something just started coming out, but before that, it was just, we had map books. So you would go to the back to the index, look up the address, flip to the page where it was, right?

Chris:
Yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Make a copy of that page and then highlight the route for the driver off the highway to get there …

Chris:
Wow, even that’s …

Louis Massaro:
Staple that to the back of the contract.

Chris:
Wow.

Louis Massaro:
So why? Because I can’t have guys getting lost and that’s stemmed from guys getting lost. I don’t know where I’m going. All right, well now, that’s not happening anymore. You’re going to know exactly where you’re going. I’m going to make sure you know exactly where you’re going.

Louis Massaro:
I don’t push, I didn’t push that off on them and say, “You guys figure it out.” No, we made the copy the night before, highlighted the route, they knew exactly where they needed to go. So the whole, and they knew that the minute, I had the Nextel walkie-talkies at the time where it was like chirp chirp.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And they all got one of those when they went out, and they had to … First of all, they had to be gone out of the office by seven o’clock. So it was like 6:30, we dispatch. You had to be gone by seven.

Louis Massaro:
Meaning, seven o’clock, I was out in the yard and I’m thinking now I want some in my office, right? We had a lot more time in the office than I did in the truck rental yard.

Louis Massaro:
I’d come out, “What’s up? What’s going on? Well, let’s go. What else do you guys need? Do you need some boxes? Do you need tape? You need directions? All right, come on. Let’s go.”

Chris:
Let’s go.

Louis Massaro:
Get them out of the yard because start times were eight o’clock.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You have to get to the job by eight o’clock. So eight o’clock comes which is another little process. These are just like little things that if you could just make these little things on point, keep them on point and just keep stacking more of them, that’s when you start to have a great business, but eight o’clock, by 8:05, if I didn’t hear from them, chirp chirp, “Where are you guys at?”

Louis Massaro:
“Oh, we’re here.” “Oh, okay. What’s your start time then?” “Oh, we’ve been here since 8:00.” “Okay, great. Thanks.” I made sure that I got the start time from each and every one of them. I want to know when you’re loading, I want to know when you’re 30 minutes to an hour before unloading, so there was really a process for everything because, for me, it was the … I don’t know how I knew to do that, but it was the only way I knew how to keep everything from just feeling like it was so overwhelming and chaotic. I had to kind of pin it down and make it more predictable.

Chris:
When you found something that wasn’t working, before you were able to create a process or get a handle on it, did you feel like a failure? Did you feel like you weren’t running your business the way you should be? And how did you deal with that just personally, as the owner, were people looking at you going, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” That kind of stuff?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. I mean, there was times where we had … When I did the office, I had the dispatch office, I got this first office, it was no carpet in the whole thing, but what I did was I first worked out of the front room, then I moved into a different room and cut a window out so that the movers would come into the lobby and come up to the window like a bank teller and I would deal with them through the window and past contracts and money and all that through the window.

Louis Massaro:
But there was times where something would happen and they’re all standing there just staring at you and you know that they’re thinking, “Oh, this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.” This and that. It was stressful, man. It was stressful.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, and at the time, I was eating fast food three times a day. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I was working seven days a week, Sunday was my kind of off day, but we ran jobs on Sundays, I booked moves on Sundays, I just basically forwarded the phones to my cell phone and like went and did whatever.

Chris:
Worked from a different location.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, yeah. Went to lunch and went to the mall and bought some new sneakers, that was the extent of my fun and excitement.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
So no, I mean, I remember a time vividly, it was the end of the month, it was super busy and I was there by myself. My friend didn’t come yet. So it was within the first six months of being in business.

Louis Massaro:
I’m in the office on the floor in a ball waiting for trucks with such excruciating pain in my stomach where it felt like there was a knife, somebody was stabbing me in my stomach and I’m on the floor like, “All right, what’s your finish time? Do you have any packing?”

Louis Massaro:
Just trying to hold it together and it was so bad I never experienced anything like that and found out it was an ulcer from the food, the stress, it was just combined and so I needed to deal with that which at first was through medicine and then just kind of changing some of my habits, but I think the stress was mostly probably like, “I’m not good enough.” “Can I do this? Am I fooling myself? Can I really run a big …”

Louis Massaro:
I was pushing to grow it while at the same time, I believe that I could do it, but I also doubted I could do it.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You know what I mean?

Chris:
The voice in the back of your head.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. There was that one on each shoulder. “Go get it. You can’t do this. Go get it. You can’t do this.”

Chris:
Oh, man. Now, would you say that failure is necessary? It’s a crucial part of it or is it possible to … I mean, now I know it is because of what we do. There’s a way to avoid a lot of these mistakes, but do you recommend that people, especially when they’re first starting out, do they accept a failure? Get used to failure? Or how do you deal with the failure in the beginning as opposed to how you dealt with it 10 years into it?

Louis Massaro:
Failure sucks, right? And it can happen on a daily basis. You might fail to book a move, you might book a move and then fail to service to move because somebody doesn’t show up. It’s like your company could fail. You could fail. You could fail to pay your bills that month.

Louis Massaro:
So because you have had failures doesn’t make you a failure. You’ve had failures and you’ll continue to have failures, but it doesn’t define you as a failure and …

Chris:
Did you always believe that?

Louis Massaro:
Apparently. I mean, I kept going. In my mind, I had this … In my mind, I’m like, “I know I’m going to make money, I’m going to make a million dollars in this business, I’m going to become a millionaire, I’m going to get this type of house, I’m going to have these type of cars, I’m going to live this type of life.”

Louis Massaro:
That was in my mind and everything else was kind of an obstacle in the way that just needed to be overcome and it started to become a game. It started to become a sport if you will that you get beat down and you’re not good at it at first.

Louis Massaro:
You’re like a little skinny kid and you try to start playing tackle football, you’re going to get beat down pretty hard and that’s how it was at the beginning, but as you keep going, you build strength, you learn techniques, you start to understand the rules of the game.

Louis Massaro:
Then you start to see exactly what it’s going to take to win the game and even though you know, “Okay, I need to do this, this, this and this.” You can’t physically get it all done right away.

Louis Massaro:
So a lot of my stress came from, I could see where I wanted to go, but then it was like, “There’s all this shit in my way that I need to deal with and you could only …” So it was like learning how to deal with that and learning how to manage yourself became the biggest ticket to moving on.

Louis Massaro:
And again, I really believe that having everything in order, structured processes, I mean, they were processes, right? I mean, they weren’t in writing yet, I didn’t call them standard operating procedures yet. I mean, I didn’t make up that term I mean, that’s what they’re called.

Louis Massaro:
And I didn’t formalize it, but there was still structure, there was still a way that things needed to be handled and I made sure of that.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah. Our guy, his question was about, “How were you able to have so much success at such a young age?” For someone in his position, what’s the advice you would give them as far as like where they should start? Should they start creating processes? Should they work on their personal organization and attitude and stuff like that? Where do they begin to find the success?

Louis Massaro:
Well, it really is a mindset first, right? And so for me, now I call, I say the millionaire … I had a millionaire mover mindset. I wasn’t necessarily calling it the millionaire mover mindset. I’ve kind of labeled that sense after looking at like, “What was the mindset that I had?”

Louis Massaro:
And I got that from looking at it and seeing people making millions of dollars in this business and believing that if they could do it, I could do it. So you’ve got to be able to believe that it’s possible, right?

Louis Massaro:
So like if you’re listening to this, if you’re watching this, it’s possible, right? I mean, the moving business is a great business. It’s possible to make that money, you just have to believe it and then you have to do what it takes and like now there’s I mean, listen … Somebody who’s listening to this podcast could take, going back and listen to all the episodes can take so much away from it.

Louis Massaro:
Somebody’s going to one of our seminars twice a year I mean. There’s tools to not have to go through it all again, right? But you first have to believe it because if you don’t believe it and you don’t have this vision beyond the obstacles, some reason for doing what you’re doing and it doesn’t really matter what that reason is.

Louis Massaro:
You don’t have to have some big purpose, “I’m doing this to save the world or whatever …” Your reason could be like, “Hey, I want to drive nice cars and impress some girls.” You know what I mean? I want a nice house, right?

Louis Massaro:
Whatever it is, you’ve got to see why you’re doing it so that you can move past all the obstacles in the way. That’s the first step. The next step is you’ve got to just … You’ve got to have a certain level of standard that things have to be, right? And realize that if you are the owner of the company and you’re the boss, you have to be that person that sets that tone that keeps that rigidity that says, “This is, it’s got to be this way.” Where everyone is going to want to fight you. All your employees are going to want to knock …

Chris:
Yeah, resist.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, they want to resist, they don’t want to do it like that. They want to do it their way. They want to do it their way, but if you have a bunch of people doing everything their way, even if they have the best intentions, they’re all still going in different ways.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
The best way to go is everybody in line going the same way. So other than that, how do you …

Chris:
How do you get everybody to fall in line?

Louis Massaro:
Well, let me just hit on this point.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Because he was asking what it takes how to be successful. The other thing is you’ve got to realize the critical components that go into running a moving company, and you have to get good at them. Lead generation starts there.

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to be able to have the phone ring or people request an estimate or you don’t have any business, right? So you’ve got to get good at that. You can’t say, “I just want to run a moving company. I don’t want to deal with marketing. I don’t want to learn marketing, but the truth is, you’ve got to learn marketing.”

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to be the best marketer in your company, right? You can’t, “I’m going to get a marketing company to do this and do that.” No, you’ve got to learn it yourself, right? Then once you generate the leads, you need to book moves.

Louis Massaro:
It’s a whole different ballgame now than it was when I first started. So there’s some pros and cons for each. When I first started, putting … Add the Yellow Pages and I sat back and answered the phone and just booked moves, I didn’t ask anybody for their information. I didn’t follow up with anybody.

Louis Massaro:
But there was just a lot of calls coming in. Now, it’s different. You get a lead from your website, you get a lead from a lead provider, they’re going and they’re talking to five different companies.

Louis Massaro:
You’ve got to have your sales process down. So my sales process at the beginning when I first started when I’m driving around, no office at the beginning, I would dispatch the trucks in the morning, then I would drive around from apartment complex to apartment complex just walking in at first with a company sweatshirt and an ugly ass business card, talking to them, giving it to them, “Hey, if you send me some moves, I’ll give you this or give you that.”

Louis Massaro:
I refined it later on, but at first, it was very basic. In between, driving around, my phone would ring. I’d pick up, somebody would want a quote for a move. Sure. I’d pull over to the side, I had my little three-ring binder where I have my script in there that I wrote out for myself.

Chris:
Wow.

Louis Massaro:
I would fine-tune the script. I would find myself going off the script because I’m reading it, but I felt like there was something better to say right there and I would fine-tune that script which I did for years until I finally came up with the script now that we have in our Moving Sales Academy Program and I had all … I started to write down all the objections that customers would have, all the reasons that they said they want to book with me now.

Louis Massaro:
I started to write those down and then I would write down what I’m going to say next time. All right, next time they say that, I’m going to say this, right? And I’m like, “Wow, they’re booking with me.” So my sales always was strong right from the beginning.

Louis Massaro:
You cannot build a successful moving company unless you’ve got a strong sales process period. Period. People say, “Louis, you came out with Moving Sales Academy, why not operations stuff? Why not all the other stuff that you now have?”

Louis Massaro:
I said, “Because the number one thing that would impact moving companies the most is setting up their sales process upfront.” Because otherwise, the lead generation that you do, it’s a total waste.

Louis Massaro:
If it comes in and you don’t have your follow up in order, you don’t have your script in order, you don’t have your rebuttals in order, you don’t have the way that you’re going to manage all of that lined up, you’re just going to be losing money.

Chris:
Yeah, down the drain.

Louis Massaro:
And then after that, it’s servicing moves, right? So these are the fundamentals. I mean, there’s really five fundamental areas of the business. You’ve got lead generation, booking moves, servicing move, so the ability to hire and get movers at your office to be able to put them on a truck to get them to the customer’s house.

Louis Massaro:
I know it sounds basic, but this is just a critical component at the beginning, then in this modern-day, you’ve got … The next step is create raving fans. Okay? Because if you don’t start, if you don’t have five-star reviews, if you don’t have a great online presence in 2020, you’re done.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You’re done. You’re spending a lot of money on marketing to get leads that are converting lower because when they check you out, you don’t have a good reputation and the fifth step is accounting and reporting.

Louis Massaro:
So for someone that is like, “Hey, I’m, anybody, I don’t …” What I’ve realized in the few years of doing this and working with companies is that everybody at every level has areas that they can improve. We’ve got areas we could improve from the business. It’s not…

Chris:
Yeah, definitely.

Louis Massaro:
We’re not immune to it. I mean, everybody and I always had areas I can improve in the moving company too. But if you take a look at just the five fundamentals of lead generation, booking move, servicing moves, create raving fans and then your accounting and reporting piece and you say, “Okay, how can I just tighten that up? How could I get that all in order and on point?”

Louis Massaro:
You’ll start to see your profits go up at whatever level you’re at in the business and you just keep repeating that, you’ll get the success you’re looking for.

Chris:
That’s great. That’s awesome. Well, yeah, I think we sort of answered this question. I mean, we got to it in a roundabout way, but …

Louis Massaro:
Did we not answer it? What’s the question exactly?

Chris:
Well, no. I guess he said, “How did you have so much success at such a young age?” I think maybe that’s where his…

Louis Massaro:
I was just young when I started.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
That’s it. I mean, it’s not …

Chris:
But I mean, maybe he’s asking like … Maybe he’s 19 right now. Maybe he’s starting to rent a couple trucks or whatever. Is it an age thing? I mean, can anybody at any age become successful in the business or is there something special you did at 19 that you can’t do at 35?

Louis Massaro:
I mean, look, I didn’t have a family. Meaning, I didn’t have like a wife and kids like I do now. I don’t know that I could have put in those hours. The way I work then and the way I work now is completely different, but if I didn’t have the tools and have learned the lessons that I had learned between 19 and I’m 39, and I’m in a place where I’m very happy with my work-life situation because I’ve cultivated that over the years.

Louis Massaro:
But if I didn’t have those tools, and I was 39, and I had a wife and a young baby, and I needed to go make it happen. I will go make it happen again, period because you need to do what you need to do.

Louis Massaro:
So it’s like I could look at it and go, “Oh, I’ve got to work hard because I didn’t have anybody at home.” Okay, well, you know what? Even if I had somebody at home then, the first year and a half to two years that I really went hard, built momentum for a long time that lasted and I’m just, I’m not a believer.

Louis Massaro:
I’m too old, I’m too young. I come from this community, I come from this background, I come from this country. Everybody can have an excuse, I could have had an excuse. I was too young. I was too skinny.

Louis Massaro:
I think if we look at our perceived shortcomings, we could always find an excuse why not to start? But unless you’re 13 years old or you’re 85 years old, it might be challenging those two extremes to start.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
But if you’re in your working years, I mean, you could start. I mean, and not even start. It’s more about go further. So right now, I’m thinking about him, let’s assume he’s 19. Next time let’s ask. Let’s get some more data next time. When they ask a question, just respond and say, “Hey, this is Chris.”

Chris:
Yeah, I’ll follow up, maybe get a little detail.

Louis Massaro:
Get some more details because I’d love to find out and be able to help them directly, but I think about somebody that’s 19 and I think about somebody that’s maybe like 55 that owns a moving company, that’s just kind of, they’re like, “Man, I’m just going to coast.”

Louis Massaro:
I’ve had this company for 30 years and things are so different now and things are so challenging now and I’m just going to coast. All it takes is a few good years to get yourself on track to significantly make more money, reduce your stress, create yourself a model business that if you’re at that later stage of your career, “It’s time to set that shit up.”

Louis Massaro:
Don’t wait until you’re in a position where you just can’t work anymore and you have a business now that’s worth nothing, right? Tell yourself I’m going to spend the next three to five years getting this thing so in order that when I’m done, I could sell it and I could walk away.

Louis Massaro:
There’s no excuse. Our own worst enemy is us. If you want to know your own worst enemy, just look in the mirror, right? It’s all perceived things that we tell ourselves, “I can’t do this. What about that?” It’s all fear.

Louis Massaro:
And learning how to overcome that is something that everybody should be on that journey too. Don’t just master your business, master your mind.

Chris:
Right.

Louis Massaro:
Right? Which again, mastery is not … It’s a journey. Right? I haven’t mastered my business, I haven’t mastered my mind, but I’m a lot further than I was if I didn’t make that decision to do so.

Louis Massaro:
So wherever he’s at. you’ve got to take the steps, right? People want the success, but they don’t want to do the work.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
They don’t want to do the work or they want the shortcut, right? The shortcut is finding out information of someone that’s been there before, has done it and be able to at least have the map of where to go, but you still got to do the miles, you’ve still got to put in the work no matter what.

Louis Massaro:
So and there will be times where it’s challenging. There will be times where you want to quit. There will be times where it doesn’t seem like you’re going to get out of whatever predicament you’re in and you’ve just got to believe that you will and just keep going.

Chris:
Yeah, you have that same unstoppable drive that whether you’re 19 or you’re 55, like you said, that’s it.

Louis Massaro:
That’s it. Every problem is a solvable problem.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Every obstacle can be overcome and it’s that … I think what trips a lot of people up is they want it to be a certain way, they want it to be perfect and when it’s not perfect or when the employee doesn’t do it exactly how they want to do it or when the move goes not as planned, or the customer is a pain in the ass, or whatever, you just got to know that stuff is going to happen.

Louis Massaro:
Every time something bad happened in my company, and somebody would freak out and this was first me having to tell myself this. It’s like, “It’s going to happen again.” Truck blows over on the highway, ruins the whole shipment. I’m like, “You know what? It will probably happen again someday. So let me not be surprised.”

Louis Massaro:
You just got to … There’s things that are going to happen in business. They’re not going to always be good, right? And you just got to move past them. That’s it, fix it and move on.

Chris:
Yeah. Fail forward.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
Yeah, awesome, good. Well, I hope that helps. Young guys out there, that’s how you do it.

Louis Massaro:
And old guys and young ladies and old ladies and everybody in between.

Chris:
That’s right. That’s great. Well, thanks for filling us in on that. I mean, I feel like there’s so much to learn about the moving business and about the processes and everything that you … The journey you’ve been on, but in the end, you end up learning about yourself.

Louis Massaro:
I think this is the best business for that. I think if you … I know just coming up in the business, just people that I knew that had other companies or partners, I’m going to get out of this business someday, I’m going to do something else. Great.

Louis Massaro:
This will prepare you for something else. Everybody is always looking for that glamorous thing to do. A moving business isn’t glamorous. There’s nothing glamorous about it, but it’s a way for you to provide a service to the community and make money, what’s wrong with that?

Louis Massaro:
And if it’s something that you have a … You want to go be an architect one day or you want to open up a bar, you want to be a musician or whatever and something else that you have, this is what’s in front of you right now, go make money with this, set up a model business and sell it.

Louis Massaro:
I mean, give yourself that head start, spend the next three years, five years just really putting it in, really dialing it in and then sell the thing, cash out, and go do whatever it is you want to do, but don’t waste the precious time that’s in front of you with something that is essentially such a great business because no matter what happens, people always need to move.

Chris:
Yeah, right. It’s part of life.

Louis Massaro:
It’s part of life.

Chris:
And we’re happy to help them out.

Louis Massaro:
Yup.

Chris:
Good. Well, anything else you’d like to add?

Louis Massaro:
That’s it. So we will … We’ll see you on the next episode. Listen, do me a favor, if you like this podcast, if you like this particular episode, go to iTunes, iTunes podcast. Give me a rating on there, give me a comment, let me know what you think, let me know what you like about it.

Louis Massaro:
If you didn’t like something about it, let me know as well and go find me on Instagram. It’s @louismassaro, that’s @L-O-U-I-S M-A-S-S-A-R-O. Take a screenshot of you listening to this, take a picture of you watching the video, send it to me, if you’ve got questions that you want us to feature on the podcast, just DM me in Instagram and we’ll try to get it in as soon as possible.

Louis Massaro:
My goal is to help each and every person in this business get away from the struggle, be able to scale their business without the uncertainty, without the stress, be able to make more money, have a smoother running business and live a better quality of life. So I hope that I was able to do that for you in this episode. My friend Chris, thanks for being here.

Chris:
Yeah, my pleasure.

Louis Massaro:
And we will see you guys next time, go out there every single day profiting your business and thriving your life.

Posted on Thursday, 02-27-2020

Building a $20 Million Dollar Moving Company

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SUMMARY

In this video, Louis Massaro shares how to build a $20 million dollar moving company.

“What I did was not anything extraordinarily special. I just did it and did it with excellence, and had the desire to grow and scale.”
“One of the things that I see a lot of people have challenges within their moving companies is they try to go too wide.”
“You don’t have to take over the world business-wise, but no matter what, you’ve got to get yourself to the point where you’ve got some freedom.”
“To be able to scale you’ve got to be able to market, you’ve got to be able to spend money on advertising and you have to know your numbers.”
“Don’t get stressed that you’re at the level you’re at now and you want to get to this other level and you’re not there yet today. Just turn in the direction that you know you need to go and start taking one step at a time. That’s it.“
Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
Hey my friends, welcome to the Moving Mastery podcast. My name is Louis Massaro. The purpose of this podcast is strictly to help you take your moving company to the next level, set up system, set up processes, increase profits, reduce stress, live a better quality of life. And today we’re going to do something a little bit different, we’re going to try something new. I got my main man, Chris, with me today. What’s up, Chris?

Chris:
Hey, what’s up?

Louis Massaro:
Today’s Chris’s birthday, he just got back from lunch, I had to call him out real quick. I won’t sing you happy birthday here in front of everybody, but happy birthday man.

Chris:
Thank you. Thank you very much.

Louis Massaro:
So what we’re doing today is I told Chris to go through the emails that we received, the comments on social media, my DMs and find a question that we could just start the episode off. I don’t know what question he picked. I said, listen, pick something that will be impactful for whoever’s listening, right? And then I’m just going to, I don’t know what the question is, but we’re just going to answer it, I guess, and kind of expand upon whatever the idea and the concept is. So what do you got?

Chris:
Yeah, I think it’s a good question for today and it’s something that I think you’ll have a really profound answer to. So I’m curious to see what you say.

Louis Massaro:
Oh boy.

Chris:
So we had one of our followers slide into our DMs with this question and the question is, first of all, they said, “What you did with Neighbors was amazing and do you think it’s possible to do the same thing today?”

Louis Massaro:
As in?

Chris:
Like, you build a $20 million company previously.

Louis Massaro:
In other words, is the good old days of moving gone and can it be done today? Is that how you took it?

Chris:
That’s pretty much how I took it. I think it’s about, was there a hay day and is it still possible to build a $20 million company now?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I mean, listen, not only is it possible, I believe it’s actually easier now than it used to be. There’s … So many people want to complain about the competition and new disruptors popping up in the industry and there’s going to be self-driving trucks and people are trying to Uberise the moving industry and all that. And I’ll tell you not only is it possible, but people are doing it every day. I mean, we work with people that are on their way to building really even bigger than 20 million. And so yes, to answer the question straight up, it’s definitely possible to do it today.

Louis Massaro:
What I did was not anything extraordinarily special, I just did it and did it with excellence and had the desire to grow and scale. And at an early age, right? So I started at 19, I won’t go into the story of how I started, but my desire to grow, I wanted to open 50 locations. Right? I wanted to get much bigger than I actually did. And there were reasons that I got derailed and didn’t end up doing that. But to do it today, absolutely. 100%, somebody could do that. You probably want to know-how.

Chris:
I mean, how, maybe not how you did it then, but how would you do it now if you were going to do the same thing again?

Louis Massaro:
Okay. How would I build a $20 million moving company?

Chris:
You’re saying it’s possible.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
Nothing’s really changed in the industry or in the market, so how would you do it now?

Louis Massaro:
I like these episodes. I don’t know, it is like challenging, pretty good.

Chris:
That’s right, we got to keep you on your toes, right?

Louis Massaro:
So today, what would I do? Well, let’s just say starting from scratch, right? Let’s start there because regardless of where anybody is, as they’re listening, there’s a component of starting from scratch that they might need to add, whether it’s an additional office or another division or whatever it might be. So if I was starting from scratch, I would pick a good market to start in probably where I already live just because it would be convenient. When I was young I didn’t have anything holding me down, so I went out to a market that I thought was good. But I would pick a market and I would start with local moves, right? I would start with local moves and I would keep it really simple.

Louis Massaro:
One of the things that I see a lot of people have challenges with in their moving companies is they try to go too wide, right? And what I like to say is go deep and then go wide. What that means is, people get into local moves and they’ll only get to a certain level in their market and they’re going to say, I need to get into long-distance. I need to get into commercial, I need to start doing junk removal too. And they look for all these fillers to help supplement and make more money but in reality, if they just go deeper into the local moves, deeper into their market, like know that there’s a lot of money to be made in local. Like I know that today, like that’s where I would start hands down today.

Louis Massaro:
I would get one office, local moves and start there and just dig deep. And what I mean by that is, I would probably start, I don’t know, I started with two rental trucks. Now I could get some trucks, it’s not a big deal, but even if I started with two rental trucks again. I rent two trucks, I’d put some direct mail postcards out there, I would start a paper click campaign on Adwords, make sure that that’s optimized, make sure that my landing page is on point, make sure that the conversion is set up correctly. I would buy some leads and I would hire one person to start to, let’s see, either be my dispatcher and handle the operations or handle the sales. I don’t know, it depends on how I’m feeling.

Louis Massaro:
And what I say that if I’m speaking for somebody else, let me not talk about what I would do, what somebody else should do is they should decide, would they rather be selling and booking moves all day and giving estimates and speaking to customers, or would they rather be dealing with the logistics of dispatch operations, the movers, dealing with customers on the day of the move?

Chris:
So either way, they probably should pick one of those two routes.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, if you’re going to hire one person right away to get started, I would pick one. What happens is if there’s too many chefs in the kitchen trying to do the same thing, there’s a lot of room for error. You want to have designated roles within the company of who does what and at the beginning, if there’s two people that’s going to be, they’re going to have a lot of different hats that they wear. They’re going to be helping out with this, helping out with that. But I would try to have it as separate as possible. Right? One person handling sales, one person handling operations. And that’s true for any size organization. If you got 20 people in your office booking moves, you have a big call center, have multiple locations, you need to keep your sales and your dispatch completely separate, right?

Louis Massaro:
You want your salespeople to be in like happy-go-lucky, positive land, right? Everything’s great and we know the stuff that dispatch and operations has to deal with, you don’t want the possibility of that negativity coming into sales, right? Because as a salesperson, if you start to hear about some of the issues that go on day to day with the moves, whether it’s their late, whether it’s they got there and they realize they need an additional person or they’re not going to be able to be out of the building in time. All the little things that go into the day to day that can make dispatching and the business in general stressful, you don’t want that getting over to sales because if you’re selling a product, you need to believe in your product. And if all day long you’re hearing about just these little operational things that most times they get worked out and everything’s fine at the end of the day, you don’t want that leaking over to sales. So I would want that to be completely separate.

Chris:
Okay.

Louis Massaro:
Right? And I would start right away with, your sales process has to be on point, that’s number one. No matter where you are, you’ve got to look at your sales process first and foremost. As I got into this space to go on this mission of helping as many moving company owners as I can, relieve the stress, make more money, right? Have a better quality of life, I asked myself like, what’s the thing that would have the biggest impact to teach them right away? And it’s sales, without sales, you’ve got nothing.

Chris:
In the beginning, especially, right? But what does that look like? Especially if you’re a one-man or a two-man show and you’re wearing all the hats, like how do you implement that kind of sales process with just one or two people? Is it possible?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, absolutely. You get yourself a CRM, I’m not pushing any CRMs. I mean, we know I’m partners with SmartMoving, but get yourself any CRM, moving CRM that’s capable of managing leads. You get yourself tracking phone numbers, okay? You make sure that all your phone numbers are trackable because from day one, day one, you don’t want to wait for this. You’ve got to track all your marketing and test it, test it, track it, tweak it. And you want to make sure that the ROI, the return on investment on all your marketing is lining up, right? That’s how you’re going to be able to start modifying things and start scaling and making sure that you maximize your marketing dollars. So you’ve got everything coming into a CRM, you’ve got the phone calls coming in, you’ve got the leads automatically going into the CRM, and then the phone calls you enter them in. You figure out where they heard about you from.

Louis Massaro:
So if I’ve got, let’s say postcards, I’ve got a unique tracking number on those postcards that are going, when the phone rings, it says postcard. I know it’s coming from a postcard, I don’t have to sit there and ask the customer, well, where’d you hear about us? I know for sure that’s where it came from. If I’ve got a Google Adwords campaign, there’s a tracking number on that, right? So I’ve got all that tracked from day one. I won’t jump in and then figure that stuff out later, I didn’t do this obviously from day one.

Chris:
I was going to ask you.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I didn’t know better, right?

Chris:
How long did it take to figure out?

Louis Massaro:
A lot of time. A lot of years.

Chris:
A long time, right?

Louis Massaro:
A lot of years. But now, starting now and this is stuff like even if you’re not just starting, but you just want to like totally optimize your business. It’s about setting up that foundation. So you’ve got the leads coming in, you’ve got the phone numbers being tracked, you’ve got a script for yourself, right? Sit down and write out a script for yourself on what you are going to say or your sales person’s going to say to every single customer. And then in the early stages, like for me in the early stages, I wrote a script immediately, right? In high school I worked at a call center selling vacation packages, the one thing that I walked away from that with was, hey, you’ve got to have a script in front of you and you’ve got to have a book of rebuttals. Things that you say to somebody when they’re like, hey, I’m not ready to set up this move yet. Hey, I need to speak to my husband. Hey, we don’t know our closing date yet, we’re going to have to call you back, right?

Louis Massaro:
So you’ve got your leads coming in, you’ve got your CRM tracking everything. You’ve got your script, and then you also start to establish your rebuttals. So every time you speak to somebody on the phone, they’re going to tell you … Most people listening right now they have moving companies, they are already operating, they’re already doing pretty well. And you’re going to want to make a list, like what are all the things people say of why they’re not ready to move and then what’s your response to those? And this is especially important at the beginning because a lot of times it’s you, the owner, making these calls and feeling out the situation with the customers, but you’re not going to be able to scale until you could duplicate that with more people.

Louis Massaro:
So you’re going to need to have something that you could pass on to that next salesperson and that next one, and that next one, and that next one, because you’re going to need some more salespeople. Remember we’re going to 20 million. Like, I’m telling you where we’re starting, I’ll take, I don’t know how much time we have, but I’ll take this thing to 20 million by the time we’re off this podcast.

Chris:
Now, when you’re first starting out, I mean, what do you do, like you just write down the objections that customers give you and then build the rebuttals from that?

Louis Massaro:
Yes. I mean, I don’t want to make this like a self-serving thing. Like, hey but I teach this stuff, in our programs we have all the rebuttals, we have the scripts, we have all that stuff, and even the frameworks of how to build your own so it’s not the same as everybody else’s. But essentially the point of this podcast is free content. To take it, apply it, see that it’s valuable. You basically, anytime someone says no to you, what’s the reason and what can you say to help make sense of your service? A lot of times people will, I don’t know, price, your price is too high. You need to be able to make the customer understand why your price is higher than other companies. If you can’t do that, then you’re going to be forced to compete on price and you’re not going to build a thriving, profitable business competing on price.

Chris:
So you’re telling people don’t strive to be the most affordable moving company in town.

Louis Massaro:
Definitely not.

Chris:
And the reasoning behind that is what? Because-

Louis Massaro:
Well, you need to make money, right? You need to make money. And I see it and before I used to see companies pop up and I’m like, they’re not … I give them six months, I give them a year. And what happens is they’re not in tune with their numbers. They’re not in tune with their profit and loss, they’re not in tune with their cash flow. They’re not in tune with their forecasting and they don’t realize that they’re slowly putting themselves out of business with these low rates. And so what happens is they get excited, hey, we’re booking moves, we’re booking moves, money’s coming in. But between the money coming in, the money they’re putting on the credit cards, the bills that need to get paid, the payroll that’s coming in, all of a sudden, one day they wake up and are like, oh, there’s no money in the account what do we do now? Right?

Louis Massaro:
So you’ve got to be able to set your prices based on job costing. There’s only a hundred percent of the pie, so you get a move, the moves $1,000, let’s say. Well, that money has to be allocated somewhere. You’ve got, I don’t know, let’s just call it, to be really broad, like 25 to 35% go on the labor right away, just to pay the movers right away. Now you’ve got your trucks, now you’ve got your material, fuel. You’ve got your marketing costs, right? You have your certain cost of goods sold, your certain operational costs right off the bat before you, that comes right off the top with every move before you even have to worry about expenses like office rent and additional employees and things like that. And that’s why I say sales, right? Sales is what overcomes price objections. Your price is too high rebuttal. Somebody like, your price is too … You have to make them understand why your price is more high, it’s higher.

Chris:
What do you say?

Louis Massaro:
Listen, what do you say? When comparing movers you’re not comparing apples to apples, right? Let me give you an example. If you were to go to Costco and you were to look at a big screen TV and then you would go to Best Buy and look at that same big screen TV, you could say, oh, this one’s $400 less, it’s the same TV, let me go with that one. With movers, you have to understand that this is a service and in order for me to provide highly trained movers that are going to come out there and move your furniture, not only with care but with the proper skill, not to damage everything, I need to pay them a little bit more. Right? So anyone charging less than this, I’d be really concerned about the quality of movers they’re going to send out there. And so let me ask you like, what are you looking for? Are you looking for the cheapest movers in town, quality, both? And-

Chris:
What are they going to say?

Louis Massaro:
They’re going to typically say, well, I just don’t want to pay more than I need to. And that’s when you keep going, right? That’s when you … And you’re not pushy, so many people have this stigma about sales that you’re being pushy, right? People don’t like to be pushed, they don’t like to be pressured, but they do like to be sold. They do want you to tell them why they should pay more for your service, you can’t back off from that.

Chris:
Okay.

Louis Massaro:
Does that make sense?

Chris:
That’s great. And then once you address that rebuttal, then it’s just right back to the script, right?

Louis Massaro:
Exactly, it’s right back to the script.

Chris:
Right back to the script. So you’re making it sound easy, all of this. How was it for you, I know you struggled for a while, in the beginning, to put all of this stuff in place. Like, I don’t know, did you have mentors? Did you have somebody to learn from that taught you this kind of stuff? Or how did it all come to be?

Louis Massaro:
I had a lot of people that I learned different things from, I wouldn’t say there was like one person that I was able to gather all this. I mean, I went on a search, right? Every day it was like every problem that came up, my mind was always like, there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way. And I just, I had a little black book, I kept it in my back pocket, before there was like a phone you could write your notes in and I would just write down what I needed to go figure out and then I would go figure it out, whether it was reading a book, whether it was like talking to the mechanic and asking them how they handle certain things, whether it was talking to my CPA and asking him questions. Right?

Louis Massaro:
I went and sought the information, I went and found the information and then I applied it and I was always making adjustments, always trying to make it better. Yeah, I mean that was the early days. Right? So I’m taking this, we’re kind of just at the beginning stages now, we’re going to take this to the whole how to get to 20 million.

Chris:
Yeah. I mean basically this is the foundation. You get the sales process going and you have money coming in now, so what’s the next step once you’re kind of ready to start growing.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. Well, and the other thing is two movers, right? You got to have a team.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
And that process, I think a lot of people make it harder than it needs to be. And I totally get that this modern-day, what are we, 2020, that it’s more challenging because there’s other opportunities out there for drivers and for helpers, there’s other things they could be doing.

Chris:
It’s definitely one of the most common complaints that I’ve heard from moving company owners is that it’s just, they say it’s hard to find good help, it’s hard to find good help.

Louis Massaro:
But then we hear from clients who implement the process that we give them, and it’s like, they’re like, hey, we haven’t had to worry about movers in months. And so what it’s … First of all, we kind of skipped over the whole mindset piece of, when you go into it, you’ve got to go into it like I’m going to make this work. I’m committed to mastery, as opposed to being a dabbler and saying, aw man, it’s hard to find movers and leads aren’t that good. Right? And I get that. I totally, totally get where people are coming from, but the reality is you’ve got to know that it’s not only possible, but it’s super achievable if you just commit yourself to it and take the steps. And so you’ve got your movers coming in, so everything’s a process, right? That’s really all it is.

Louis Massaro:
You shouldn’t have to … The difference between struggling and scaling is that the people that are struggling are trying to figure out the same thing over and over and over and over and over. Like they’ve been in business a long time and they’re still trying to figure out how do we get movers, this is a big deal. How do we handle our leads? How do we make sure that people are following up? Like that’s struggling, right?

Chris:
It’s like a perpetual obstacle, always there.

Louis Massaro:
And scaling, which is the opposite because it’s very hard to just kind of stay in the middle because once you know you’re doing it right and once you’re on point, you’re like, oh, I might as well grow this thing. So it’s like struggling and then there’s scaling and it’s-

Chris:
Does that-

Louis Massaro:
It’s identifying, like when I used to say there’s got to be a better way, right? So you’ve got to be able to identify like there’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way to hire movers instead of just saying, hey, this is tough. I’m going to stay with my four trucks or whatever somebody has because it’s too hard to get eight trucks, or whatever the case may be. No, you have to identify that problem and then go after that problem and solve it. Then identify the next problem, go after that problem and solve it. Right? Instead of letting it linger and trying to build the business with that quicksand underneath you, you’ve got to start … The beginning stages, Chris, it’s all about setting the foundation. It’s all about setting the foundation.

Chris:
So you’ve got your sales process, you’ve hired your movers and you’ve got a hiring process.

Louis Massaro:
Yep. So meaning like you lose some movers, you just essentially start the process.

Chris:
Okay.

Louis Massaro:
That’s it, you start it.

Chris:
What’s that look like? I mean, is it an easy thing to …

Louis Massaro:
Well at first you just need to … You have to look at that like leads as well. You kind of run them through like a mover hiring funnel we call it, to where you can, let’s say you get a hundred applications in the top. Like first, you’ve got to generate the applications. Then after you generate the applications, now you’ve got to get people on the phone and do a phone interview with them. Now, from those people, you’ve got to get some of them, because let’s say you get a hundred applications in, you might get 70 of them on the phone. Out of the 70 you get on the phone, you might invite 30 in for an in-person interview after you speak to them. Out of those 30, maybe you hire seven. Out of those seven, after you put them through your training process and your onboarding, you get them into the rotation, meaning you get them on the trucks and get them going. Maybe you’ve got four left, and out of those four, maybe one becomes an 18 player.

Louis Massaro:
And you’re like, that’s a lot of work. Okay, but if you know what it is, and you say, okay, in order for us to get four movers and one as an 18 player, we’ve got to get a hundred applications, okay, well what do I need to do to get more applications? And that’s it. And you start that process from the beginning and you just make it systematic, you don’t make it like reinventing the wheel every time you have to try to hire movers.

Chris:
So we’ve hired movers, we’ve got our sales process, what’s next?

Louis Massaro:
Now you need to fine-tune the machine. You’ve got to basically just look for each and every area that you can improve upon, right? So it’s like, you’ve got to … There’s really five key areas with a moving company. There’s five key areas that have to be handled in order for that business to be successful. And when I say successful, I don’t mean scaling the 20 million. We’ll talk about getting there. What I mean is just being able to be a moving company that makes money, right? First area, you’ve got to have lead generation, you’ve got to be able to generate leads. Second thing is you’ve got to be able to book moves, then you’ve got to be able to service the moves. Then you’ve got to be able to make sure you’ve got raving fans and happy customers that are out there giving you five-star reviews online. And then you’ve got to have your reporting and your accounting on point. If you could just cycle through those five things consistently until you can’t find any more screws to be tightened, then you’re ready for the next step.

Chris:
So that’s how you know, that’s how you know you’re ready to-

Louis Massaro:
Well, and you need to be turning a profit. Right? I mean, I wouldn’t start trying to scale until you have a business that’s netting 20%, right? I mean, I wouldn’t be trying to duplicate something that’s not ready to be duplicated. Essentially what you’re doing is on a small scale, you’re creating a model, right? No matter what you do or decide to do in the future for your business, you’ve got to create a model business. So whether you want to sell your company, right? The only way you’re going to sell your company for top dollars, if it’s a model, somebody could walk in and go, wow, this thing runs. It runs without the owner. It’s truly turnkey, you know? I’d rather put money into this business and I see the returns that I would get, which is more than I will get in the stock market, more than I’ll get in investing in real estate. That’s when you get top dollar for your business. Nobody wants to come in and buy a mess, they don’t want to buy something that requires you to be there.

Louis Massaro:
So you have to build a model business if you want to sell, you’ve got to build a model business if you want a franchise, because in order to franchise, you are basically selling somebody the model, you’re saying, hey, you could go out there and start a moving company on your own. However, I’ve got this proven model, pay me and use my model and I’ll give you the support. If you don’t have the model why would somebody pay you? If you want to open multiple locations, you’ve got to have a model. You’ve got to have this thing set up to where it’s like this works like a machine, predictable moneymaking machine. And even if you want to pass it down to your kids. Some people are like, I don’t have big dreams, which is … Listen, first of all, there’s no such thing as not having big dreams. Whatever your heart desires is your big dream, don’t compare your dreams to somebody else’s dreams.

Louis Massaro:
Let’s circle back to that because I think it’s important that people don’t rush out try to build a $20 million business if that’s not really what they want to do or need to do. But if you want to, coming back to this, if you want to pass it down to your kids, you also want a model business. If you think about the stress and uncertainty that goes on in your business today, do you really want to pass that down to your kids and let them deal with that? Perfect it now and then give them a model to run with.

Chris:
So if somebody, and let’s just say somebody is just starting out and they’re going through this journey and they’ve built up their sales process, they’re hiring people, they’ve got a profit coming in. I mean, is it ever … Should they start thinking about selling the company when they’re just in the middle of building it?

Louis Massaro:
It should be in the back of their mind, they should have an exit strategy loosely forming in the back of their mind.

Chris:
Sure.

Louis Massaro:
And you don’t want, when I say loosely forming, it’s because I think in order to see clearly what that next level looks like, you’ve got to get to that next level, right? Like, so you’ve got to reach one mountaintop to be able to kind of look out and see what’s actually beyond that mountain top. So sometimes people will say, yeah I don’t want to be doing this, I just want to build it up and then I want to sell it. But then they get it to a place where it’s like, wow, this is like a predictable moneymaking machine. I don’t have to work that hard and I’m making good money, why would I sell this? What would I do? Well, when you’re just starting, you’re like, oh, this sucks. I don’t want to do this anymore. When things run smooth and you make money, it sucks a lot less. Right? So, yeah.

Chris:
Does it always have to suck to start a company?

Louis Massaro:
No, it doesn’t.

Chris:
I know, right?

Louis Massaro:
What’d you say? To sell your company or-

Chris:
To start a company or to grow a company.

Louis Massaro:
To start a company, no, it’s tough and there’s uncertainty, right? So uncertainty breeds fear. Fear is essentially stress. And when you have that uncertainty and you don’t know that it’s going to work, it’s hard, that’s where the sleepless nights come from. That’s where the stress comes from, that’s where feeling like the answer is to work harder comes from.

Chris:
Oh, okay. So I remember you telling me about this before, like early on in your company that was your MO, you were a hustler. You were somebody who just was putting in the hours and doing whatever it took to make the company run. I mean, how do you deal with that? If somebody is in the middle of that, they’re going through this stressful time and they’re really overworking themselves, like what do they do? What should they do?

Louis Massaro:
I mean, it’s really part of what we call stepping into that moving CEO role is there’s that beginning phase where you’ve got to hustle. You’ve got to put in the work to get the momentum to get it off the ground. It’s the same thing, like if a car was broke down and you are in the car steering it, and I’m behind pushing, until we get it going, I’ve got to really push to get that thing going. But once it gets going, I don’t have to keep pushing. I have to reevaluate my strategy. At that point, I’d probably, it’s like, hey, why don’t you stop, I’ll come get in the front seat and we can just cruise with the AC on. Like, I don’t need to stay back here pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. In business, what happens is that worked for us, right? It got us to our first level of success and our second and maybe our third level of success, just pushing.

Louis Massaro:
And so, it’s kind of like that fight or flight instinct, right? You’re like, for me, I had no choice. I had no other options, I had to make it work. So it was that hustle and it was that grind. And for me, the wake-up call was being on the floor curled over waiting on trucks, dispatching crews and it was excruciating pain in my stomach with stomach ulcers and more stress and just deteriorating health over the amount of grind that I was putting in. And that’s when the whole shift came and that’s when I really, what I call now stepping into that moving CEO role and just taking a different approach to it. So going back to building a $20 million business, right? Because you’ve got your foundation, you’ve got your model business. You should be able to, if you’re a brand new company, you should be able to have a model business within a couple of years. If you’re an existing company and you want to turn your company into a model business, you should be able to do that in six months to a year.

Louis Massaro:
And I’m saying that, like I totally understand what I’m saying when I’m saying that, but I’m challenging people because people think it’s going to take so long to do and it’s not. It’s a matter of deciding like, okay, I want to go this way. I don’t want to go that way. In every moment just making decisions that lead you in that direction instead of that direction and doing the stuff that’s hard, and I think where a lot of people get stuck is, existing companies, they’ve done things the same way for so long that they feel stuck.

Louis Massaro:
They’re like, if I start making changes, my people aren’t going to embrace it and it’s going to be challenging. And I know I’ve got this person and they’re overpaid and they’re not really delivering the value that they need to deliver and I need to get rid of them, but what’s going to happen? They’re the only person that knows how to do this and they’re the only person who knows how to do that. And so they feel trapped. So I want to keep it on like this journey to 20 million. I could go on about the existing business, we’ll do another episode on that one. Lets …

Chris:
So now that you’re past the hustling hump, let’s call it, right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
Like you’ve put in the effort, you’ve got your foundations in place, the company’s become a model business and it’s time to, as you say, step into that role of the moving CEO. How does an owner go about doing that?

Louis Massaro:
Well, what is the role of moving CEO, as opposed to the way you own the business now? And I’ll look at the two versions of myself in the business. There was, early me, moving business owner, moving company owner that was just grinding and working and trying to figure things out and making money. But just figuring it out along the way, building some processes, just not really taking it that seriously. And for me, it was because I was fortunate to be making money. So it massed a lot of the inefficiencies, which I think a lot of people know that and they know like, hey, I’m doing good but I could be doing a lot better. So there was that me, I didn’t take time to really reflect, it was just action, action, action, action and that action got me up and off the ground and got the momentum, but then I hit the wall. Right?

Louis Massaro:
So then when I made the transition to moving CEO, it was just the realization that I had to take a different approach to the way that I ran my business. I had to take a different approach to the way that I ran my life, the way that I ran my days, the way that I took care of myself. And I started to study and understand like how do people run big companies, right? Because you think you have this big company because you have a few million dollar business, but there’s big companies out there, right? And there’s people that have many, many more employees, much more responsibility, much more regulation to deal with than we do as moving company owners. And I was like, all right, so how do they deal with all this? If I’m stressing and I’m struggling, like how do they do it? So started looking into that and basically just started down the road of approaching my time, my day and my priorities differently.

Louis Massaro:
And said, you know what? How could I run this business so that I’m able to know exactly what’s going on and be on top of everything with reports to be able to see exactly what I needed because I had this feeling at the time of like, man, there’s so much invisible stuff that I feel like I need to see that I can’t see. And this happened to me after I had five locations. Right? Because when you have one office, you could see everything. Walk around and you’re like, okay, I see what’s going on. I see what’s going on. But now I have multiple locations and I couldn’t see, so I felt like there was information that I needed in order to be able to really have the reins and control everything. And I knew that I needed certain reports to be able to do that. Right?

Louis Massaro:
So I identified the reports, I knew that I had to have certain meetings in place on the calendar, on the schedule, on a regular basis so that I can meet with my managers, I can meet with my team, I can meet with my account and I could go through the stuff that I knew was important. And then I’m like, okay, so how do I get this all done? And I came across the concept of putting things on your calendar, right? Instead of just showing up every day and being reactive. And I said, okay, I’m going to take blocks of time and I’m going to start blocking out all my schedule, the things that really matter for the business. And it’s a scary thing because you have to step away from the day to day, you might miss a phone call that might lead to a move being booked.

Louis Massaro:
You might not be there to handle some customer service issue that might require your attention, right? Like you have to slowly start pulling yourself away. And so what I did is I made Friday’s my day for that, to start. That was like my lever, if you will, to just give me some leverage to be able to move away. So I blocked out that time on Fridays to start working on what I call CEO stuff.

Chris:
And what’s that?

Louis Massaro:
The meetings, the reports, the block time, being able to strategize over what the next move is and then delegate, right? Instead of doing everything myself, so kind of jumping into it, it was all right, we need to set up systems and processes. Like there’s no question about it. Why are things in the Denver office being are totally different in Orlando? Why is Seattle totally different than Boston? Like why are these offices not operating the same exact way, they need to be? And so that was, when you talk about stepping into the moving CEO role, it’s like first getting yourself there and then saying, all right, what needs to happen in my business for this to really be able to scale.

Louis Massaro:
You can’t scale without the processes, then you’ve got your people, you’ve got to be able to delegate to your people, but they have to be very clear on what their roles are. Like when somebody first came in and I hired an outside consultant to come in and teach me the corporate stuff that I felt I needed to know. And he told me, where’s your organizational chart? And I was like is this a joke? Like I’m a moving company, what do you mean organizational chart? And after he left, it started to make a lot of sense on why I needed that. And I started to create it and I started to build roles and role descriptions behind each one of those positions.

Louis Massaro:
So I didn’t have all the people in place yet, but I said, okay, what is it going to take for me to run this business the way that I want to run it and get it to the level that I want to get it. What does that game plan look like? I’m going to need this person, I’m going to need that person, I’m going to need this person. And then I’m like, okay, now what are the role descriptions for each one of those? And I drilled down and I wrote out exactly what I would have those people do.

Chris:
At this point how far into the journey were you? Like how big was the company when you started implementing this stuff?

Louis Massaro:
After three and a half years of the first day that I opened, I had five locations and a call center.

Chris:
Wow, okay.

Louis Massaro:
And it was not fun because I would fix something in one location and then something would happen in another location. And I was on the plane going there and going there, and I literally was on planes writing out processes, trying to say like, this has to be done the same way. Like I can’t manage five locations that are doing things five different ways, right? It’s not like I have five different types of businesses, this is the same business, it should be done the same exact way. And so I would say it was probably about five years after that I started to realize that I needed to see certain numbers from certain locations. And then probably a couple of years after that, I was really like, got really, really … I made the processes as a priority, right? Because it was just, it was too much to deal with without that.

Chris:
So you adopt a moving CEO mindset, right?

Louis Massaro:
And skills and habits.

Chris:
Skills and habits, what’s that mean? Like in your personal life?

Louis Massaro:
Well, the habit of blocking your time to do the important stuff, to view your reports, to have your meetings, to not dive in immediately first thing in the morning to your email and get swamped and inundated with stuff that’s not really, doesn’t matter to your bigger mission. Right? You’ve got to be able to kind of be the general in the tent, you’ve got to be able to see things from a higher viewpoint and if you just dive in day-to-day, I’ll handle that. I’ll do that, I’ll do this, I’ll do that, you’re not going to be able to have those skills that you need. When I say skills that you’ve got to learn how to read your financials, then you’ve got to have the habit of doing it every month. Right?

Chris:
So if a moving company was, an owner was at the point where they’re ready to step away and start working on scaling and business development, where do they start with that?

Louis Massaro:
Where they need to start is, first of all, I think everyone needs to think about what they want, number one, right? Because I know for me it was like, I was like, I’m going to scale 100 million, but there was no real reason for that. It just seemed like something to do. And I was young, there was like ego involved. I was like, I want to be the biggest and it’s really unnecessary, right? Figure out like where you want to be, how much money you want to make and what’s it going to take to get there. Because then you can figure out what your game plan is. You could determine what model, we’ve established there’s five successful models to scale a moving business. Which model are you going to choose?

Louis Massaro:
And then you’ve got to look at getting the foundation set up, right? So you’ve got a first look at it and go, okay, we’ve got a lead generation, we’ve got booking moves, we’ve got servicing moves, we’ve got making sure that our customers are raving fans, and then we’ve got our accounting and our reporting. That’s the foundation of the moving business. Everybody’s dealing with those things, you just keep doing those well over and over and over, you’re going to do good, right? So you’ve got to say, okay, before I, let’s just use the example of opening another office.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Okay? Because that would be my path to hit 20 million, which we’re going to, we’ll get there by the end of this episode. So you’ve got to set all that stuff up and make sure that it’s running without you. Right? The fundamental’s day to day business needs to be running without you. How do you make that happen? Well, first you need to make sure that you’ve got your processes in place. And what I mean by that is something as simple as how do we call to confirm moves? What exactly do you need to say? What exactly do you need to put into the CRM? Right? What do we need our movers to do the minute they get to the house, right? What do they need to do before they leave to clock out, right? All these little things need to be defined and put in writing so that people know what to do, you can’t delegate loose commands to people, you’ve got to give them something that they could actually look at and do it exactly this way.

Louis Massaro:
So you work on getting your processes in place and the best place to start with that is really on the stuff that you’re having issues with now, or that you’re going to need to train someone to do so that you could step away, right? Then you’ve got to define the roles and responsibilities of people that you’re going to need in your company and not by the person. Like I don’t look at you and go, Chris, I’m going to define your roles and responsibilities. No, let’s say we had a moving company, I’d say, well, okay, I need to define what the dispatcher’s roles and responsibilities are, right? What the customer service manager, what their roles and responsibilities are.

Louis Massaro:
The final of those, and there’s probably 15 different roles within the company when you start thinking about it, you’ve got movers, you’ve got sales consultants, you’ve got warehouseman, you’ve got customer service reps, customer service managers, onsite estimator, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got onsite sales, you’ve got accounting, you’ve got payroll, you’ve got all these different things. And it all might get done by two people right now, but you’ve got to define what those roles are for each one of those people and then assign them to them. Hey Chris, you’re responsible for these three things and be clear on what those three things are. Then start delegating and then, start your plan to scale.

Chris:
Okay. So you’ve got your roles worked out, there’s a specific position that needs to be filled. Do you … If you don’t have the team in place, you haven’t hired the people how do you know when it’s time to hire somebody to fill this position or that position?

Louis Massaro:
So for me, what I do is I know when it’s time to hire, when I look at it and say, okay, there’s too much to get done for the amount of people we have. If I were to take this, this, this, and this off my plate and give it to somebody else, what can I go do to make sure that I increased the value and the profit of the business to be able to pay that person’s salary.

Chris:
Makes it worth it.

Louis Massaro:
At a minimum. And a lot of people get stuck because they feel like, I can’t afford somebody, I can’t afford somebody. And they think they need to be at some certain ratio to be able to actually hire. And I look at it and say, look, if you can bring somebody on to free you up to do more important stuff, trust in yourself, believe in yourself, have a plan for what you’re going to do with your time instead, hire that person and get yourself out of this jam that you’re in. Because a lot of people will be stuck where they’re at, at different levels. They’re like, they feel stuck because they don’t want to hire, they don’t want to release control. What I tell everybody is, you know what? Take your yearly salary, or your ideal yearly compensation, your entire compensation and divide that up by the amount of weeks and the amount of hours you work and see what your hourly rate is. And if you’re not already at the level that you want to be at, use your ideal income.

Louis Massaro:
If you’re like, hey, I want to personally make $800,000 a year, whatever it is, right? Divide that by 52 weeks, divide that by the hours you work and see what your effective hourly rate is and then look at all the stuff you’re doing and go, would I pay somebody that much an hour to do that? I could get somebody for $12 an hour, $15 an hour, 20, whatever it might be. To do that let me free myself up to work on other stuff. A big reason why people fail to delegate or don’t start delegating is because they’re uncertain of what they’re going to do with their time. They feel like if I delegate all this stuff, then what? I’m not going to have anything to do and that’s the perfect point to step into that CEO role. So there will be that. I talk to clients all the time that we take through this process and they’re like, yeah at first you’re kind of like, oh man, like what do I do?

Chris:
It’s a little scary, yeah.

Louis Massaro:
This is my baby, I built this thing and now I don’t really have a … I don’t feel needed at the office anymore, like they’re doing it without me. So you kind of float around for a quick minute, like what do I do next? So by developing that plan to scale or that plan to go fishing and hang out, like-

Chris:
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that, right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. You don’t have to take over the world business-wise, but you no matter what, like you’ve got to get yourself to the point where you’ve got some freedom. You’re never going to scale until you have the freedom. Working hard, it seems counterintuitive, but like just working hard is not going to get you to that level that you want to get to. And when I say working hard, I just mean putting your head down and doing the work without strategizing, thinking about it. Giving yourself time to rest, reflect and that’s where you make that leap. Like, you know what I’m saying? Like, that’s that sweet spot right there where you go, okay, like I’m truly ready. The business is running day to day without me now I just work on the stuff that’s going to help improve the business, the stuff that’s going to help grow the business. I work on that next level of the plan, at that point you’re moving CEO.

Chris:
That’s it.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, that’s it.

Chris:
So how long into your journey would you say you finally were able to say, I’m the moving CEO of Neighbors?

Louis Massaro:
I’d say it took … I thought early … Like you think you have it all under control. I mean, even now I’m still growing, you’re still growing. Hopefully, everybody’s listening, still growing and won’t stop growing. I love to grow and get better constantly, so I probably thought I was there seven years into it, but it probably took me like 10 years into the business where I, I had it in my eyes now to a place where it was like, I didn’t have to do anything, my best years, like I was gone. I had years where, one month we think we did like a million nine in a month, almost hit like two million in the month, I was gone almost a whole month in Europe hanging out. And coming back fresh full of ideas, full of-

Chris:
Like inspired.

Louis Massaro:
Inspired, like ready to continue to go. As opposed to being there every day, draining myself, not having a chance to zoom out and see the bigger picture. I would say it probably took 10 years to get to that point, but I think where I was five years in is still a great, it’s still considered moving CEO level for sure.

Chris:
So you were 10 years into the business and for the next what, six, seven years, you just continued to focus on scaling and growing and just solely worked in a CEO type capacity, right or?

Louis Massaro:
That was it.

Chris:
That was it.

Louis Massaro:
That was it, whenever I was working it was like self-imposed, right? It was not like, hey, the business needs me. I need to go in there to answer phones and I need to go in there to manage people and I need to go in there for this. It was no, I want to do this new initiative, I want to roll this out. So then I would go in and roll that out with the team and whatever else. So it was like when I worked, I was working on growing up or improving or you know, it’s not always about growing. It’s like, how do we tackle this problem, how do we deal with this? And so there were more like priorities based around certain objectives that we’re going to help get where we want to.

Chris:
At that point, would you say it was fun?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, I mean it’s … Yeah, right? I mean, business is a game. It doesn’t feel like a game when you’re struggling to make ends meet and you’re totally uncertain if it’s going to work. But when you’ve defined the game, when you’ve been able to not only understands the rules of the game, but know how to win the game and you do it consistently, right? And you get better, and that’s why I talk about skillset. There’s something in psychology called the confidence competence loop, right? And what happens is the more competent you get at something, the more confident you get and the more confident you get, the more you’re ready to go out and gain more competence. You know what I mean?

Chris:
It just feeds itself.

Louis Massaro:
Now I’m at a point that I know I will go to the seminars, I will get on the phone with my coach, I will do the things I need to do because I know that I will gain more competence, it’s going to allow me to grow and expand and make my life easier. And once you kind of get in that loop-

Chris:
Sky’s the limit.

Louis Massaro:
Sky’s the limit.

Chris:
So if somebody is at that place now, they’ve embraced the role of the CEO and the company’s successful and they’re doing well, what’s the path to get to 20 million from there?

Louis Massaro:
Well first again, you establish the model that you’re going to use to scale, and that’s different for everybody. There’s five paths really to get to, to scale your business. Somebody could just decide to open multiple locations, franchise their business, have partners in certain offices, just do long distance. There’s people out there just doing long-distance business and making a ton of money. Right? For me, we are talking about like we kind of started off like how I would do it all over again. I would open locations again, I would open local moving locations. I probably wouldn’t even mess with long-distance and I would just get my model, like were talking about at the beginning, get my processes down, build out those roles, start to delegate, get my foundations in order. Make sure everything could run without me, then I would run all of my sales out of one location. I would have all the sales centralized so that I could control it better and I would open remote locations in other cities that I felt would be really good markets to open up.

Louis Massaro:
And I would say to get to 20 million you could open 10 offices that are making two million a piece, right? You pick the right market, it’s not really that hard to get to $2 million if you’re scaling properly. And remember we started off talking about sales. We started off talking about your tracking numbers so that you can understand what your marketing ROI is. Some people would be like, what do you mean Louis? It’s not that easy to get to $2 million, right? And part of that is because they don’t have the sales process and they don’t have the confidence in their numbers for marketing to say, you know what? Ramp that up. Like what took me from 10 to 20 million was when I created the marketing ROI report. When I was like, okay, I’m buying all these different leads from all these different places, I don’t have the confidence to invest more money. It just feels like a crapshoot.

Louis Massaro:
How do I make it more strategic and less of a crapshoot and more of a strategic approach? I need to know these numbers on an individual basis. So in a spreadsheet broke down each individual marketing source to where I knew what the ROI was on it, and now I could adjust and now I could take something that wasn’t working that well, I could take all that money and I could move it to something that is working well. Remember I talked about at the beginning how it’s easier now than it was 20 years … I mean, it’s 20 years ago that I opened my first company because you are stuck in your advertising back then. You run the yellow pages, you were stuck for a year. You couldn’t take that money and reallocate it somewhere else once you saw that things weren’t working the way that they should.

Louis Massaro:
So to be able to scale you’ve got to be able to market, you’ve got to be able to spend money on advertising and you have to know your numbers. And a lot of people have great, great businesses out there and they get… Like almost all their business comes from repeat and referral customers. I’m like, listen, if you start spending some money on marketing and then you also go out there and do a great job like you’re doing now and you get more repeat and referral customers from that, it’s just going to really start to expand. So to get to two million in a reasonable size market is not hard, right? And so … Or let’s just say a million. To get to $1 million in business, you should be able to get to $1 million in gross revenue if you have a … Not if you’re like one truck and that’s respectable. Like you’re going out with your one truck, you do the moves yourself. That’s kind of your thing, you’re happy, you’ve got a nice business there, great.

Louis Massaro:
But if you’re like, look, I want to step into this moving CEO role, I want to have a business that runs without me so I could go enjoy time with my family, so I could step away and like live life and not just be stuck there, you’ve got to be able to build yourself up a million-dollar business, right? So now if you’ve got a bunch of million dollars, you open $20 million businesses, right? That would be the path. Or you become the hometown dominator, as we call it, in let’s just call it five markets. You do four million a piece in five markets, you’re at 20 million. That’s how I would go about doing it. There’s a few paths to get there, but that’s how I would do it today. And people probably say, Louis, like why don’t you do that?

Chris:
Yeah, why don’t you?

Louis Massaro:
And you know the answer to this. I mean, I get so much more satisfaction over helping others do that than doing it myself because I did already. So for me to do it again and feel that, like I’m able to watch that happen, it’s not about the money for me now. When I was young, I was like, I got to make all the money, going to make all the money. That’s why everyone, you need to know your number, you need to know how much money you need to be at, how much money you need to have in the bank, how much money you need to have active in investments so that you could feel comfortable living your life and you don’t need to make your decisions off of money, that’s something to strive for. So jot that down, let me say that again, because I know everybody’s listening to how to get to 20 million. It’s make sure you know your number, not the business numbers. That’s important too, but your number, what’s it going to take for you to retire?

Louis Massaro:
What’s it going to take for you to be able to live the life you want to live without having to actually work anymore? Know that number, because when you don’t have to make every decision based on money, life becomes much less stressful. So for me, like my biggest joy is the fact that I’ve got I would say, I’m involved in so many moving companies, not ownership, but with our private clients and being able to watch and execute the plans and letting them go, like reap the rewards-

Chris:
It’s a lot of fun.

Louis Massaro:
It’s so satisfying to me because you’re taking them from struggle to scale. And I shouldn’t say taking them, you’re just kind of guiding them a little bit because they’re doing the work, it’s just, they’re not going through all the unnecessary challenges, that’s why I don’t do it again.

Chris:
Yeah. And I know you, I know the type of person you are and the fun is in the actual building of the thing. Like once you’ve got it built and it’s running, you want that challenge, you want that strategy, play the game, that’s what it’s about.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah, definitely, so that’s how you get to 20 million today.

Chris:
Yeah. I mean, is there a limit nowadays in the markets out there? Like could everybody have a $20 million company?

Louis Massaro:
No, the only reason is not everybody will do what they need to do. That’s the reality of it, right? That’s the reality of it. And people will see my videos for hey, come to this seminar, hey, check out my course. Man, that guy might be … This is salesy. And it’s because I know the value and I know what’s on the other end of that for you.

Chris:
Well, at this point it’s been three years of helping people, we’ve seen the results.

Louis Massaro:
Oh yeah. I mean, it’s, hands down. We see it not only in the businesses but in their lives and their income. So will everybody do it? No. Everybody won’t do it. And it’s because, I truly believe that people will say, Louis what are the best … What books should I read? And I’m like, go to the bookstore, go to the personal development section and just start grabbing stuff that talks to you. I think that’s what blocks more people. For me, I love that type of stuff. I love trying to figure out what’s in my mind and how to operate this more efficiently. If you could operate this more efficiently, the business stuff becomes-

Chris:
It’s all interconnected.

Louis Massaro:
It becomes much easier. So I think the people that say, hey, you know what, like they’re really committed to mastery and they’re not … There’s people, and I’ll get messages like, hey, I know, I’m thinking about trying and moving out, like that, you’re going to fail right then and there. You’ve got to go into it like, I’m doing this. Or even people … Listen, I know people that are still in the business that wanted to sell their business because they were just so fed up with it and once they got it operating to a place where it was making money, it was no longer stressful. It was fun and felt such a sense of satisfaction to like sit back and look at what they’ve built, their whole perception on it, it just changes.

Louis Massaro:
So if you’re listening and you are, listen, you’re either getting started or you’ve been in the business for a while and you’re hitting some kind of challenge, you’re no longer into it anymore. Or you feel like growth equals problems, and a lot of people feel that, I totally understand that. But if you feel like growth equals problems, I’m just challenged you to look at it differently and just ask yourself like, if I was to take a different approach to the way that I run my business, is it possible that I could make more money, be less stressed, have more freedom, and have a whole new perception of what I have going on, especially the people that are already successful, especially the people that already have seven, eight-figure businesses that are already making anywhere … whatever they’re making, right? They’re making a good living. I really want to challenge you to say like, could you go to that next level?

Louis Massaro:
And without bringing all the BS with you, right? People think next level requires that you bring all … That like you got to bring all this hard work that you did and all that stuff and then add more to it and carry all of that, the burden lightens as you go up. So I challenge you to be there because it’s a lovely place and that’s my mission, that’s my goal.

Chris:
And there’s never been a better time.

Louis Massaro:
There’s never been a better time.

Chris:
Right?

Louis Massaro:
Never been a better time, economy is booming, it’s a new decade. It’s 2020, and think about things in longterm, right? Everybody, I used to be guilty of this too, I’m like, oh yeah, well what could I accomplish this month? What could I accomplish this year? Look at what can you really accomplish in 10 years if you really put your mind to it, if you really got focused, you really made the decisions you needed to make, you really cut out all the stuff that you know is not helping you in your business and in your personal life.

Louis Massaro:
And just literally, if you were walking down the street and you know you’re just heading in the wrong direction, if you just turn around and go the other way, that’s it, right? You won’t get there right away, but it’s like one step at a time, one step at a time. Like, don’t get stressed that you’re at the level you’re at now and you want to get to this other level and you’re not there yet today. Just turn in the direction that you know you need to go and start taking one step at a time. That’s it.

Chris:
Instead, you’re doing the right things in the right order, right? I mean, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, there you go, there’s the path to 20 million. I wish I would’ve written down who asked that question, but there’s your answer.

Louis Massaro:
We won’t call them out anyways, but yeah, so there’s your answer. That’s how you do it. It is possible, my friends, and one last thought is don’t feel that you have to go to that level. Don’t feel … We live in this world of comparison right now where people are on social media and their bragging and a lot of times about stuff that’s not even real and it’s not even accurate and it makes other people feel like they need to be doing these big, big things. And it’s when you could start to establish what you want in your life in certain key areas of your life, like in your business, right? Your finances, your relationship, personal growth, contribution, health. When you could identify like what you really want, you’ll realize that it’s probably not a $20 million business, right? That’s just, you’re like, oh, it sounds good. It sounds like all my problems will be solved at that point, right? Like, let’s just go to 20 million.

Louis Massaro:
But you’ve got to be able to look back in every stage of where you’re at, like wherever you are now, you probably have a certain level of success that at some point in your life, if you were to look back at yourself 10 years ago and talk to 10 year old, younger you, right? And say, “Hey, look what we got now.” They’d be like, “Oh man, we made it.”

Chris:
Wow, we did this.

Louis Massaro:
Right? So like along the path, strive to get to where you want to go, but be satisfied where you’re at, because you could always, always be looking for that next thing. Looking for that next thing, looking for that next thing and that’s good. However, look at what you’ve got now and be grateful for that. And know there was a time in your life when you didn’t have that and all you wanted was that. Like maybe you’ve got a couple offices now, you’ve got three offices and your goal is to go to 50, I bet you there was a time where all you wanted to do was open one office and make some money. For me all I wanted to do was open one office, right? I was like, hey, I could open one-off … If I can make $100,000 that would be awesome.

Louis Massaro:
And then it was like, I got there and I’m like, okay, if I can make $400, if I could … And just kept growing and growing. And I didn’t learn this lesson early on. So I was striving and striving and striving, but now to be able to strive and be satisfied with where you’re at, don’t think you’re going to lose your hunger. Don’t think you’re going to lose your edge. The only thing you’re going to lose is your stress, your anxiety, your ulcers, your early dying, like all of that. Let that go and just, if you look in the mirror and you know that each day you’re taking the right action to go in the direction you want to go in, then just do what you need to do, have faith, know that it’s all going to happen and always look back at where you used to be to have appreciation for where you are now.

Chris:
And don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
Right?

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
We’re here, we’re here.

Louis Massaro:
Great question.

Chris:
Yeah, that was awesome.

Louis Massaro:
All right guys, listen, if you liked that episode, we’re trying different things. I want to deliver more value, I want to be able to not only give videos on here’s how to do this, but just give some perspective on my journey, my clients’ journeys, things that are going on that we see in the industry. So if you like this type of episode, go give me a rating for this episode specifically on iTunes, I’d really appreciate it. If you know someone that needs to hear this or that would benefit from this, go on the link, send them a text message, put it on Facebook, email them, whatever it might be. Listen to it with them, spread the message. It’s all about abundance. The best way to grow your business is to not deal in scarcity, but to deal in abundance. There is enough out there for everybody, just the people that are actually going to make the moves, go get it. So we’ll see you next time on the Moving Mastery podcast.

Posted on Saturday, 02-22-2020

Moving Company Cash Flow and Employee Problems

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SUMMARY

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

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

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How Your Identity Is Preventing Your Success

Should You Diversify Your Moving Business?

TRANSCRIPTION

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

Chris:
Hello.

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

Chris:
We got to keep you on your toes.

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

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

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

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

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

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

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

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

Louis Massaro:
How much?

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

Louis Massaro:
For the month of January?

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

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

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

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

Chris:
That’s a big part of it.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah. Okay.

Chris:
What do you think?

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

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

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

Chris:
That’s it.

Louis Massaro:
Doing a million four.

Chris:
1.4.

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

Chris:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Chris:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Chris:
Really?

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

Chris:
That’s kind of fun.

Louis Massaro:
It’s so fun.

Chris:
That’s where all the action is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris:
It’s an opportunity.

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

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

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

Chris:
LouisMassaro.com. Yeah.

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

Chris:
You’re losing money.

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

Chris:
Yeah.

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

Chris:
But just bleeding.

Louis Massaro:
Just bleeding.

Chris:
Yeah.

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

Chris:
Okay.

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

Chris:
And you think he should raise the rates?

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

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

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

Chris:
Yeah.

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

Chris:
They won’t be happy about that.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris:
You might discover some secrets. Yeah.

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

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

Louis Massaro:
It’s just been festering.

Chris:
Yeah.

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

Chris:
Right. It’s time.

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

Chris:
Yeah. Everybody’s looking.

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

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

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

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

Chris:
Yeah.

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

Chris:
How long did you run dispatch?

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

Chris:
Okay.

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

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

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

Chris:
You discovered somewhere else that …

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

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

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

Chris:
Laying it out.

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

Chris:
Sit and watch this guy for a while.

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

Chris:
And you’re somewhere over here.

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

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

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

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

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

Chris:
Yeah. The confidence is there.

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

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

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

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

Chris:
Regularly?

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

Chris:
You wait.

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

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

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

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

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

Chris:
Bad idea.

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

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

Chris:
Take a break.

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

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

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

Chris:
You’re not failing.

Louis Massaro:
You’re not failing.

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
You’re not failing.

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

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

Chris:
What do you mean?

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

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

Chris:
Still didn’t work.

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

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

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

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

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

Chris:
It’s going to happen.

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

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

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

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

Louis Massaro:
Yeah.

Chris:
That’s never easy.

Louis Massaro:
No.

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

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

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

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

Chris:
It’s time to go.

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

Chris:
Last week.

Louis Massaro:
Okay.

Chris:
Yeah.

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

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

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

Chris:
Really?

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

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

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

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

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

Chris:
Yeah, it can be scary.

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

Chris:
Yeah.

Louis Massaro:
That’s it.

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

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

Chris:
Get the ego out of the way.

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

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

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

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

Posted on Tuesday, 09-10-2019

Build A Moving Company Sales Machine

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SUMMARY

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

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

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TRANSCRIPTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on Tuesday, 09-03-2019

The Role Of A Moving Company’s Operations Manager

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SUMMARY

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

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

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

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!

Are You Spot Checking Moves?

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TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, my friend. It’s Louis Massaro, CEO of Moving Mastery where we help moving company owners set up proven systems and processes to increase profits, reduce stress, and live a better quality of life. Clients will often come to me when it’s time for them to make their next big hire, who they’re going to bring into their company to help run the business. They either know that they need an operations manager or they have an operations manager but don’t really have their role clearly-defined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope that was helpful, my friend. If so, do me a favor. Share this with somebody that might find what we’re talking about today helpful. If you could, hit the like button for me as well. Until I see you next time, go out there every single day, profit in your business, thrive in your life. I’ll see you next time.

Posted on Tuesday, 08-27-2019

How To Create Processes In Your Moving Company

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SUMMARY

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

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

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TRANSCRIPTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on Tuesday, 08-20-2019

Why Your Moving Company Is Losing Money

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SUMMARY

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

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

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

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!

Your Moving Company’s Profit and Loss Statement

Increase Profits: Tighten Up Your Moving Operations

Run a Tight Local Moving Operation

Charge More Money for Your Moving Services

TRANSCRIPTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on Tuesday, 08-13-2019

How To Open Moving Companies In Multiple Locations

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SUMMARY

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

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

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