Optimizing Your Moving Company’s Systems

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to optimize your moving company’s systems.

  • “We’ll never have the true freedom we want to express ourselves in business and do the things that we want to do in life if we don’t set up the core foundations of the business.”
  • “Wherever your business is today, and whatever big plans you have for the future, you’ve got to remember to tame your entrepreneur mind that always wants to move on to what’s new and what’s next.”
  • “Shortly after you get something new set up in your business it can be very tempting to want to move on to the next new objective without completing the processes for the thing you were just working on.”
  • “It’s not always about doing more, opening more locations, bringing in other lines of business, etc… It’s about optimizing what you have now, and feeling really good about it because you have a sense of control over your business. That’s when you have good profitability, and you know things are getting done the way you want them to be done.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

Stabilize Your Moving Company’s People and Processes

Gain More Time to Scale Your Moving Company

5 Processes to Systematize Your Moving Company’s Operation

My Secret to How I Win Each Year

How to Make Your Moving Company Process-Driven

Stepping Into Your New Role as Moving CEO

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to step into your new role as a Moving CEO.

  • “When I started my moving company as a 19-year old kid, I was working out of a truck rental yard. There was no CEO talk. It was just hustle and grind, hustle and grind. But when I started to realize that I was building an empire, I needed to take a different approach.”
  • “The person that I was, the leader that I was, the business owner that I was, that got me to that level, wasn’t the person that I needed to be to manage the business that I had built and manage the business moving forward, and to be able to scale. And so I adopted the identity and the mindset of being a Moving CEO.”
  • “Even if you go 24/7, even if you go 25/8, the reservoir of hustle and grind runs dry. It’s not scalable. So you need to shift the way that you run your business.”
  • “In order to shift and scale, you’ve got to set yourself up by stepping into this new role as Moving CEO, to be able to handle things differently.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

Moving CEO Skill Development

Moving CEO Mindset – Part 1

Moving CEO Mindset – Part 2

Decisions to Make Before Scaling Your Moving Company

How to Gain Freedom to Scale Your Moving Company

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:

All right guys, welcome back. We are on our final day, final episode, of the Moving CEO Scaling Series. And I got to tell you, this has been a fun 14 days being here with you guys, going through this stuff, and really just bringing myself through this place of growth and expansion. It gets me thinking about what I have going on in my different businesses. These principles are really universal. And when we talk about scaling or moving company, it’s so important that we lay down some of these fundamental truths about what it’s actually going to take to make that happen.

So those of you that maybe are just joining us for the first time, we started off, the overall theme of this series is stabilize, systematize, then scale. Because what happens is too many people rush off and try to grow and try to scale, but they haven’t stabilized their current business, they haven’t systematized their current business.

Today, it’s important that we talk about your new role as moving CEO. The reason is, because I want you to realize, that in order to scale, in order to grow, in order to get to that next level, we’ve got to shift our mindset and we’ve got to shift how we perceive ourselves into that role of moving CEO.

For me, when I started, I was a 19 year old kid, I was working at a truck rental yard. There was no CEO talk. It was this hustle, grind, hustle, grind, hustle, grind. And when I started to realize that I was building an empire and I needed to take a different approach. Because the person that I was, the leader that I was, the business owner that I was, that got me to that level, wasn’t the person that I needed to be to manage the business that I had built and manage the business moving forward, and to be able to scale.

And so I adopted this identity and this mindset of being a moving CEO. And literally changed, started going to the office and slacks and button downs. And I had my whole team in the corporate office there, wearing ties. The whole call center, everybody’s wearing ties. Dispatchers had to be in their polos. And we just really stepped up the level of the business.

And it wasn’t because what everybody wore made such a difference, or what I wore made such a difference. For me, it just signified that switch of, “Okay, I’m a business owner. I own a few businesses,” to, “No, I need to start running my business like a CEO.” Why is it that these major companies can handle so much and have so many employees and so many moving parts and be so profitable? And it’s just a different way of approaching it.

And so what we want to do, is we want to be able to run our business differently. If you’ve ever heard the expression, “What got you here, won’t get you there”. I had to realize that the hustle and the hard work got me to a certain level, and then it was … I was stuck. You run out of hustle and hard work. You only have so much hustle and hard work to tap into, that reservoir runs dry. Even if you go 24/7, even if you go 25/8, the reservoir of hustle and grind runs dry. It’s not scalable. So we need to shift the way that we run our business. And in order to do that, and in order to scale, we’ve got to set ourselves up and we’ve got to step into this new role as moving CEO, to be able to just handle things differently.

And it’s a transition. And you’ve been through transitions before. I mean, throughout your life you’ve always been who you are and true to you, but you’ve had different identities and different transitions. When you went from middle school to high school, you changed a little bit. I didn’t go to college. But if you went to college, you might have stepped up a little bit into that more grown up role. And then you go out in the workforce. And then maybe when you started your own business, you’re like, “I’m a business owner now.”

What I’m saying to you is let’s take it beyond the business owner, to this moving CEO mindset and this moving CEO role. Because it’s not just a mindset, it’s a role. It’s a new function, it’s a new job description, it’s a new set of priorities that you focus on day-to-day in your business. It becomes totally different. Business owner, hustle and grind Louis, was working on much different stuff than moving CEO Louis.

And that evolution, it’s there. So I just want to push you to step into that role. I want to push you to get into that role and start embracing it. And it’s not something that you could watch this video and then all of a sudden you’re, “Hey, I’m a moving CEO,” but you start thinking that way. You start thinking that that’s what I need to step into. And you start to recognize the actions that you take day-to-day.

And after you take that action, you’re like, “Wait, is that how a moving CEO would handle that situation?” And now you start to monitor yourself and you start to watch things through a different lens. You see things differently. You see things more as part of the bigger picture, as opposed to being lost in all the day-to-day details. The dollars are in the details. But it’s a matter of getting those details on point, stabilizing them, systematizing them, and then starting to zoom out.

And the first thing you’re going to want to do, once you get it stabilized, once you’ve got it systematized, you’ve got to start working towards … not abruptly just do it … but working towards removing yourself from the day-to-day, removing yourself from the day-to-day operations.

And now this doesn’t mean that you’re going to stop going to work, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to just go on vacation, it doesn’t mean that you’re just going to start sleeping in late and hanging out. It means that you’ve got to start looking at each function of the business that you’re involved in and start to, little by little, established ways to remove yourself from those processes and those functions.

And you’re going to do that through processes and through people. Through setting up delegation practices. You need to set up your processes and how to establish those. We’re going to talk about that as well. And, little by little, start removing yourself from the day-to-day.

And so the biggest thing with this, and the biggest thing with delegation that comes with it, is fear. “What if the people don’t do it right? What if I’m not here and people take advantage of me? I’ve tried to delegate before and it didn’t go well. What if they do this wrong and they do that wrong? I’m the only one that could do that.”

And so that will keep us trapped. And I’m telling you this because I want you to be anticipating the things that will pop up for you as you make this journey and as you step up into that moving CEO role, by removing yourself from the day-to-day. It all depends on where you’re at. It all depends on your ability and knowledge of laying out processes and the systems of exactly what to set up, of how long this could take you. This could take you 30 days. This could take you three years. It really all depends on how much of a priority you make it, how much you follow the formula of stabilize first, systematize second, then scale. In order to scale, you need to remove yourself from the day-to-day.

But if you remove yourself from the day-to-day and the business isn’t stabilized and it’s not systematized, you’re just going to have more problems. You’re just going to have more problems. And when we talk about removing yourself from the day-to-day, not everybody has the vision, not everybody has the dream of building a massive company. I know a lot of you just want to enjoy your life. A lot of you just want to be able to go take a day off in the middle of the week and do whatever the hell you want to do. You want to spend time with your family? Great. You want to go party? Great. You just want to be able to actually live life.

And in order to do that, you’ve got to remove yourself from the day-to-day. In order to do that, you’ve got to have systems in place. In order to get the systems in place, you’ve got to first stabilize. And I’m just going over all this because I know not all of you have been here for all 14 days, and I just want you to really understand the process. When we think about something so big, when we think about, “Let’s build a $100 million moving business,” it seems overwhelming. But when we start to really break down the steps and realize, “Okay. This is possible. It could be done. I could do it. But I need to start where I’m supposed to start and I need to follow those steps. And it’s going to take some time. And I need to know that I’m headed to the right place, I’m on the right path. And I just need to do the work.” That’s it. So that’s the first thing, remove your yourself from the day-to-day.

Then you’re going to need a new set of reports, a new set of reports. Because now, when you remove yourself from the day-to-day, you need clarity and insight into what’s going on. And we’re talking about scaling. So let’s say you open another location. Well, if you’re not physically there, you’re essentially removed from the day-to-day anyways. So if you don’t have your systems and your processes set up to be able to run something where you are essentially removed from the day-to-day, that business is going to really hard time doing well.

But now you need to know what’s going on without being there and seeing it and feeling it. All the same tools that you use when you are running your current business, whether you’re working out of a truck rental yard, whether you’ve got a big warehouse, whether you work out of your house, whatever it might be, it’s totally different.

For me, when I was working out of the truck rental yard, that was a different way of controlling and managing what was going on. The reality was, at that point, I was just trying to keep it all together. Then, when you’re in an office, and you’ve got a staff, you’ve got a team, you’ve got people helping you out, you could see, you could hear. Something happens, somebody says something they’re not supposed to say, you’re on it right away. You’re able to hear that. But as you start to have locations that you can’t see and hear and smell and feel what’s going on, you need the numbers to do the talking.

If you guys see this painting behind me, I had this made years ago to remind myself that the numbers don’t lie. The numbers don’t lie. And I’m not a math person. If you ask me to do some type of equation or something, I would need a calculator, I would need a spreadsheet, I might even have to Google the formula to figure it out. You don’t have to be a numbers person. I don’t love numbers, but they’re the language of business. And I knew that in order to do well in business I needed to run things off of numbers and not run them off of my gut feeling.

So I had this painting in my office for years. People would come into my office and say, “Louis, we got this great idea,” or maybe my sales manager, one of my sales managers, or somebody in customer service or a dispatcher, they’d come talk to me about this idea or this problem. And I didn’t have it behind me, I had it over to the side. And I would just point at that picture and he’d be like, “Okay. I’ll come back with the numbers.” Because, without the numbers, it’s hard to manage. And it only becomes that way once you start to see the numbers.

And for those of you that might feel like, “Wow, Louis, that’s overwhelming. I don’t know what reports to look at. When I see the numbers, sometimes I pull reports, what do I do about them?” Just know that it’s something new. For me, it was something new. When I first started running reports, looking at numbers, figuring out metrics and KPIs and key performance indicators, I didn’t get it, I didn’t understand it. But I had no choice. I didn’t learn this until I already had several offices set up. And I’m like, “Oh my God, how do I know what’s happening over there? How do I know if things are getting done the way they’re supposed to get done?” And the way of trying to manage it any other way was just insane to me.

Next thing you’re going to need to step into your new role as moving CEO, new meetings, new meetings. You want to get to a place where you can run your business off of meetings and numbers. You meet with the key players in your team so that you could stay in the loop in what’s going on, and you have the numbers to be able to see what’s happening and what’s going on. And then these meetings essentially revolve around the numbers, they revolve around any assistance that your ops manager might need, or your general manager might need, or your partner in one of your other locations, or your franchisees, or your movers.

This isn’t a, you got to be at some big level. The sooner that you could get yourself to step into the moving CEO role, if you’re still on the truck yourself, step into this role. You don’t have to go announce it to everybody. You don’t have to say, “Guys, I’m moving CEO now.” It’s not about that. This has zero to do about what’s on your business card and what your title is. It’s more to do with how you conduct yourself and how you manage your business, and framing it for yourself that way.
I wish I had learned this earlier, much earlier, day one early. So no matter where you are, don’t think that you have to get to some level in order to be and step into this moving CEO. There’s a reason people will be like, “Louis, you didn’t spend all this time, you weren’t on the trucks.”
You know why I wasn’t on the trucks? I went a few times when it was absolutely necessary. But I knew, at least at that point, that I had to remove myself. If I kept throwing myself on the truck every time that we were short a mover, I wouldn’t get resourceful and find out other ways to make sure that that didn’t happen again.

So I just say that because some people will be like, “I’m not at that level.” You’re at that level. You’re at that level. The sooner that you start thinking that way, the better. And no matter what, somebody will always have something to say. I had six locations and a long distance division that I just opened up. Took over the second part of the warehouse, put another office next door, just for the long distance division. And caught employees talking behind my back, saying, “He thinks he’s running a Fortune 500 company. Doesn’t he know this is just a moving company?” Shortsighted.

But you can’t care. Somebody’s always going to have something to say about you. Somebody’s always going to look at you and try to pull you down, back down to their level so that they’re more comfortable. I don’t care if you’re just thinking about getting a moving company, getting started. I don’t care if you’re on the trucks. I don’t care if you’ve got one office, two offices, five offices. No matter what you do, people will try to pull you back.

And I don’t say that in a pessimistic way. I say that because sometimes people will feel uncomfortable stepping into this moving CEO role. And I’m here to tell you, if you’re watching this, there’s a reason you’re watching this, there’s a reason you’re here. Step into this role. And you might not get there today. It might take you a few years to get there. But I knew, early on, that I had to start removing myself from the day-to-day. I knew that if I would go on the trucks every time I was short a mover, how am I ever going to scale this business? Who’s going to man the ship?

So you’re going to have your new meetings. You’ve got your new reports and you’ve got your new meetings. Next thing you need to do, is you need a new schedule. We talked about it in stabilize your tech and your time, block time. So your schedule becomes everything for you now. Your calendar, if you will. Because you’ve now removed yourself from the day-to-day. So you don’t just show up to the office anymore and wait for problems and wait for fires. And just sit there with your fire extinguisher, looking to put stuff out. And open up your email and play email ping pong with people, back and forth. And let people come to you with stuff and then go home at the end day, “Oh man, that was a good day. I got a lot of stuff handled.” You’re working on stuff that is going to make a big impact, and you’re letting other people handle those other issues. You’re removing yourself from the day-to-day.

So now you’re like, “Well, what do I work on? What do I do?” Well, now you’re going to work on business development. Now you’re going to work on growing the business. Now you’re going to work on managing the business from a higher level. Think about it like you’re up in the owner suite at the football game and you’re no longer down on the field.

So you’ve got your reports. You’ve got your meetings strategically set up; daily, weekly, monthly meetings. And so now you’ve got to make sure that your schedule is built around those priorities, your calendar is built around these priorities. So you start to create blocks. “Okay. I know this meeting, it’s an important meeting. I need to have it once a week. When am I going to have it? Thursday’s at 11:00. Perfect. It’s on the calendar. This meeting, I need to have it once a month. Perfect. On the calendar. This report, I need to review it once a day. When? Put it on the calendar.”

Otherwise, you won’t do it. Because the reality is, only reactionary problems and situations catch our attention and make us act. Things that are needle movers, things that will actually make a big impact, they’re important but they’re not really urgent, like viewing a report. It’d be very easy … “I’m going to review the report today or this week at some point,” … to just not get to it because it’s not urgent. The report’s not screaming at you like, “Hey, pick up the phone, answer the email. I’m knocking at your door.” The report’s there, just … And maybe you don’t have the reports ready? Chances are, you don’t have these reports ready yet.

So you’ve got to have this stuff on your schedule. Your meetings and when you’re going to review your reports. And then your entire day, your week, your quarter, your year, it’s all revolving around this. Meaning, those blocks are taken, everything else you want to do, you’ve got the rest of the calendar. We’ve only got 24 hours in a day. Every single one of us only has 24 hours in the day.
And that’s the thing, that’s the paradox here. It’s like, we work hard, we grind, we work hard, we grind. And it only gets us so far. It’s so true when they say, “Work smarter, not harder.” The problem is nobody teaches you specifically what that means.

And the paradox is that all this hard work that you put in, yeah, it’s great, you get the momentum, you get going, you get your business to a certain place. And for a lot of you, that’s really far. I was on pure hustle and grind. I got to multimillion dollar, several location business. Some of you on hustle and grind, maybe you could get to 20 million. A lot of people on hustle and grind only have a really hard time even breaking that first million.

And when we switch to a different place, where we’re stabilized, we got systems, we’re able to delegate, we say to ourselves, “I have to fight for my time. And before I just insert myself, before I just get on the truck, before I just pick up the phone, I have to look for other ways to not put myself back into the day-to-day. I have to step into this role of moving CEO.” You’ve got to have a place where you’re looking to go.

And where you want to go, is you want to go to a place where you can run your entire business off of numbers and meetings. And then, from there, your mind is free to think, to strategize, to improve what’s going on, to see things exactly for what they are and not be in the trenches, just with the stress and the other people and the everything that goes on. And so if you’re not there, it’s okay, it’s okay, if you know you’re going to go there. You’ve got to know where you’re headed.

At any given time, you’ve got to be able to manage two businesses. You’ve got to be able to manage your business today as it is, and you’ve got to be able to manage the business that you’re becoming. Does that make sense? The business today, as it is, you’ve got to manage that wherever you’re at. You’re on the truck, you got to be on the truck. You’re dispatching, you got to be dispatching. You’re still in the office, essentially acting as your own general manager, you’ve got to do that. You’ve got to manage the business today. But then you’ve got to manage the business that you’re becoming and you’re moving towards, and you’ve got to start taking the steps to do that.

That requires being very proactive, but it also requires seeing what that is. And no matter what you want to do, this is the scaling series, you’ve got to get yourself in a place where you have removed yourself from the day-to-day. You’ve got the reports to know what’s going on, by looking at those reports. You have the meetings so that you could stay in touch with your people. They feel your presence, you know what’s going on, you hear it from them; on your schedule, on the time that you chose. Not when they’re running in your door, knocking on your door, coming in your office, interrupting you. Calling you nonstop all day, all night. You got to take control of your time. You got to take control of your schedule.

And so the thing to do is not to say, “But Louis, I’m not there. I don’t know how to do it.” I didn’t know how to do it either. But I knew that there was people out, there that that’s how they ran their business. If they could do it, why can’t I do it? The number one moving CEO mindset is, “If they can, I can. If there’s people out there doing it, I could do it. If Louis could do it, I could do it.”
You just got to figure it out. And figuring it out can be messy. Figuring it out can feel very uncomfortable. You’re going to have to figure it out. You’re going to have to do the work. You don’t have to do it alone. You’re in the moving business, you don’t have to do it alone.

I mean, it’s insane not to look for the better way. And it’s insane, in the world that we live, the speed of information, the speed of information, the speed of the scroll, the speed of the scroll. You go on TV and it’s like, “Oh my God.” Not only is there a million choices on cable, but then there’s like, “Oh, there’s Netflix. Oh, Prime’s got a TV too.” There’s so much information. The speed of information is nuts. You’ve got to slow down the speed of information and focus on the depth of information.

If you have an area that you need to master in your business and in your life, don’t skim 100 videos on YouTube. That could be a good start. But look at where you could go deep, get depth. That’s the key. That’s the key to get into that next level. That’s what I’ve luckily learned how to do in my life and in my career. And that’s why I do what I do …

Decisions to Make Before Scaling Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares eight decisions to make before scaling your moving company.

  • “What you were able to do with your tight-knit group before in your business, it’s going to become very different as you start to grow. So, there are some decisions that need to be made before you scale.”
  • “If you want to scale your business, open more locations, franchise, or if you just want to take what you have and build it up to a place where it’s making more money… I’m all for that. But, the thing is… I don’t want to see you prematurely go out and overextend or spread yourself too thin, and then be in a position where you have to scramble to hold onto everything.”
  • “Opening an additional location, or getting into long distance when you only do local, or whatever your version of scaling is, could put tremendous strain on you and your existing successful business, if these things aren’t set up right.”
  • “I’m giving you these eight things to think about in order to go in prepared and ready to go. You want to go in fully committed. The last thing you want to do is throw something against the wall to see if it sticks when it comes to scaling or expansion.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

HOT NEWS & DEALS!

  1. Join the Moving CEO Challenge: Official Louis Massaro Community Facebook Group! A place for moving company owners to connect, share ideas, and inspire one another. Click here to join!
  2. Latest Instagram!
    Check out @LouisMassaro for new announcements, valuable tips, and enlightening videos to take your moving company to the NEXT LEVEL!

RELATED POSTS

How To Know If Your Moving Company Is Scalable

Should You Scale Your Moving Company?

Stabilize Your Moving Company’s People and Processes

How to Make Your Moving Company Process-Driven

How to Gain Freedom to Scale Your Moving Company

TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
All right, what’s up, guys? We are back for the Moving CEO Scaling series, day 13, episode 13. This is an important time. It’s an important series. As we’re coming out of moving season, I know that many of you are still experiencing high demand. I know that there’s a lot of changes going on this year. COVID caused a lot of stuff to happen, interest rates, there’s a lot of factors for why it’s so busy right now. And as we come out of that, and hopefully it keeps going, I’m not a fortune teller, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but typically, this time of year, things start to slow down. I’m talking to private clients yesterday that are just crushing it. still October’s booked out. They’re having busier Octobers, that we’re not even halfway through, than they’ve had other summers previously. So it’s pretty awesome.

But at the same time, we need to make sure that we don’t allow the good times to give us a false sense of confidence to go and just start opening additional locations like it’s that easy. And that’s really what this whole series has been about. It’s look, you want to grow your business, you want to open more locations, you want to franchise, you just want to take what you have and build it up to a place where it’s making more money, you could hire some help, you could have some consistency? Great, I’m all for that. And the thing is, I don’t want to see somebody prematurely go out, overextend themselves, spread themselves too thin, and then be in a position where they have to scramble to hold onto everything. Because by opening an additional location, or maybe getting into long distance when you only do local, or whatever your version of scaling is, it could put tremendous, tremendous strain on you and your existing successful business, if these things aren’t set up right.

So those of you that have been with us since the beginning of this series, we’ve started off talking about what to stabilize in your current business. You got to get things stable and calm. Once you do that, then systematize it, so that anyone could do it, so that your team knows exactly what to do, so things are done the same way every single time. And you need that in order to be able to, let’s say, scale or open an additional office. Because when you bring on more people, and when you spread yourself out thinner, a lot of that gets lost in translation. What you’re able to do with your tight-knit group, it’s going to become very different as you start to scale. So the systematizing piece is very important. And now we’ve been talking about scaling.

So we are talking today about some decisions that need to be made before we scale. And I want to give you these eight decisions that you need to make, so that you start thinking about this stuff ahead of time and you don’t miss anything.

And I want to give you these eight things, so that as you’re starting to scale, as you’re starting to get into a new line of business, as you’re starting to open new locations, you don’t miss anything. So I’m kind of giving you the things to think about in order to go in, because we want to go in prepared, we want to go in ready to go, we want to go in fully committed. The last thing you want to do, the last thing you want to do, is throw something against the wall to see if it sticks when it comes to scaling or expansion. You have a new marketing idea, great. Throw it against the wall. Test it. Track it. Tweak it. See if it works. If not, get it out. But if you’re going to make a strategic move to open another office or a location, or get into long distance or get into commercial or get into junk calling or whatever it might be, you got to go in there with a plan and you got to go in there committed to that plan.

So I just don’t want you to miss anything that you could possibly miss without thinking about it. Always ask questions. Always ask yourself questions. Everything that I need to figure out, I get out either a note app on my phone or a pen and a paper and a notebook or journal, and just start writing and asking myself questions. “All right, what do I need to do to make this happen? Okay, what roadblocks am I going to run into? Okay.” And think through the scenario ahead of time so that you’re prepared. Let’s get into these questions here. First thing you need to ask yourself, and use these as a prompt, and then I want you to journal about them later or tuck them away in your notes if you’re not ready to scale right now, and have them ready when you are ready to scale. Have them ready.

I’ve said it before, never feel like there’s too much information coming at you if it’s good, valuable information that you’re choosing that’s going to actually help you. Just have a little system for file… You guys can see books up here, but I’ve got notebooks of all. I mean, my personal notes of stuff, plus digital files of all kinds of stuff, things that I’ve learned and I want to implement that I might not be ready to implement right now, but at some point, some day, I’ll be ready to do it, and I know where to go to find that information. So this is important, whether you’re ready to scale or not, keep this in mind.

All right, first question. Why open? Why? Why? And this is important because let’s say we’re talking about… Let’s just throw two scenarios out there. We’re talking about opening a new location, or we’re talking about opening a new division within our company, without going to another city. Why? Really think this through. Because a lot of times we feel… Maybe you’re here or for 13 days on this scaling series and somehow feel like you’re supposed to scale, you’re supposed to grow, and we talked about it earlier in the series is that you want to really make sure that the reason you do it is based upon the outcome. And the outcome is really based upon the life that you want to live. And the life that you want to live is based upon the money that it’s going to take to live that life and the free time that you want to have to enjoy that life.

I forget which episode that was, but go back… I think it was stabilize your money and mindset. Go watch the that if you haven’t seen it. And we need to make sure that we’re opening for the right reasons because more money isn’t always the answer because a lot of times there’s more money rate where you’re at. You’re standing on top of gold. You just need to dig a little deeper as opposed to digging a bunch of little shallow holes. And we’ve also got our ego to contend with. I was a young kid and when I started… I was only 22 when I started opening up additional locations. I was 19 when I started. 21, 22. And there was definitely some ego involved.

I have six offices. People say, “What do you do?” “I own a moving company.” “What do you do?” “I have moving companies. Six of them throughout the US. Long distance.” That’s ego. And we need to be careful of that because in this social media, look at me, flashing all my stuff, type world that we live in, we don’t want to make decisions from that place. Because when you do open that line of business, when you do open that additional location, it’s going to require much more of your time, money, and energy. Don’t just think it’s instant money. So just think about why you want to open. Is it it leading you towards your big plan? If you didn’t watch the episode on stabilize your mindset and your money, go watch that. It’s important. Because we want to build a business as a means to building a life and we want to establish what that life looks like, what we really want, and then figure out what it’s going to take, monetarily, money wise, what it’s going to take to live that life. Then we reverse engineer that into our plan with our business.

Why open another location and have more responsibility if your plan is set with the office you have? So just think through why. You don’t have to… I know people that are crushing it with one location. My first office, my first office failed, which was in Las Vegas. I was there six months, couldn’t get a license, then went to Denver. So I consider that my zero office. My first real office in Denver, just that location alone, I was profiting 800,000 a year. For me. One location, local moves and storage only. And I know people that are making over a million a year in one location. One location. I don’t know who’s watching, could be you. When I say over a million a year, for themselves. Take home for them as the owner to then go pay their taxes and live their life with.

So again, I’m drilling down on this, because as much as I’d love to see people expand, the expansion’s not the impressive part. It’s the controlled expansion with sustained profitability that’s the impressive part. How many trucks? Doesn’t matter. How many locations. Doesn’t matter. I’d rather you be happy, content with less stress… Eliminating stress altogether is very hard to do when you run a business. But reducing that stress to a very minimal level and make the money you want to make. Oftentimes complexity will lead to overwhelm and it will kill profits. So just think through why? Why do I want to open this? Don’t feel that pressure. Don’t feel the pressure from outside influences don’t feel the pressure like, “I need to grow. I need to be bigger. I need to be…”

Because let me tell you something, I was there and I know a lot of people that have been there, I’m working with some clients now that kind of reached on an office and are having a little bit of issues there and we’re working on unraveling those. And I could tell you that having a business that just runs smooth and efficient and then just making tweaks and adjustments to increase the profitability and the quality of your service, a long way. Then when you have that, then you’ve got a model business. You’ve got systems, you’ve got processes, you’re working. Now if you’re going to scale decisions to make before scaling, what model are you going to scale with? What model are you going to scale with?

We talked about this a couple days ago when we… I believe the episode was your moving company’s scalability, I think it was called. And just because you’ve got local, long distance, storage, you book all the moves from your office there currently, doesn’t mean that that’s what you add actually have to scale. Even if you’re like, “Hey, I want to get into long distance.” Well, there’s several ways to get into long distance. There’s five models, successful models to scale. Meaning you might say, “Louis, just tell me the one where I can make the most money?” I’m going to give you the five where you can make the most money and help you distinguish which one is right for you.

We’re all different. We all have different areas of the business that we like and dislike. We all have different monetary goals. We’ve all got different abilities to manage on the ground teams, remote teams. So I’m going to give you five models, but for now, think about what model you want to expand with. Meaning if you do local, long distance, you’re a van line agent, you’ve got commercial work, maybe you do military, but now you want to open up other offices. Do you need to actually take that model and open up? Or can you do a trimmed down model? What model are you going to actually move forward with? Because that’s the model you’ve got to have all your processes ready for.

Next question to ask yourself before you scale, where are you going to open? This is specifically for an additional location, but where are you going to open that office? Where and why? Maybe you’ve established a really good market somewhere near you or somewhere not near you, but you just know, “Hey, we could go there and we could make money.” What’s the reason? Is it you want to move there yourself? You’ve got someone that you could send there to open up? It’s part of your… Maybe you want to open locations so that you’ve got your little route for long distance that you could keep… You’ve got a little triangle or you’ve got an up and down or you’ve got a back and forth. You’ve got a strategic plan for long distance, so you want to put hubs in certain locations.

Then, when? When will you open this office? For me, my locations in the time period that I was opening up, yellow pages was the dominant marketing source. That was my number one source for a long time to the point we were spending $250,000 a month, a month on yellow pages between all the locations and… So when we talk about where to open, I was just thinking, I was like… I’m hearing myself say it, I’m like, “So crazy. So crazy.” The marketing today is so much more flexible. So much more dynamic. There’s so much you could do. It’s a little more complex to actually manage it and do it than just putting an ad in, but you’ve got so much flexibility and you’re not stuck with that, that overall nut every month, no matter what.

So anyways, I’ll be teacher marketing too at Moving CEO Virtual Summit, by the way, and what to be doing today, specifically what lead sources to use. So when to open. So with yellow pages, it was in different cities there was always a main Yellow Page book, you know? And then of course there was like these other yellow page books too, that you felt that you had to be in those as well, you were going to this out. And whenever the book dropped, that was the terminology, when the book drops, that’s when you want to open up, you want to open up right around when the book’s dropping. So for example, if the book’s dropping in October. You want to make sure that right there in a October or November, that you are open and ready for business, because that’s when you’re going to start receiving calls. But if we think about moving season and when things are slower and all that, that might not be an ideal time to open up. But when you’re basing it off the book, then you’ve got to open up when the book is.

But now you could turn on and off marketing at the press of a button any time of the year, wherever you want. There’s no restrictions. So now you’ve got to decide is the best time to open up? Meaning what time of the year, what month of the year will be your best time? Because there’s a lot that goes into this. There’s a busier part of the year, the summer. There’s a slower part of the year. There’s times of the year where you’re going into the holidays. There’s the beginning of the year. And when do we really want to get going? Because summertime, oh yeah, great, it’s busy, but it’s going to be really hard to hire movers. Wintertime, there’ll be a lot of movers available, but it’s going to be slower.

Next question before you scale, who’s going to run it. Whether it’s a new location or a new division, maybe long distance or whatever, who is going to run it? Let’s say we’re talking about a new location. Who’s going to run it, and then what is their situation? What is their comp like? Are they going to be a partner? Are they just going to be an employee? Are they going to be a franchisee? What happens if that person doesn’t work out? It happens all the time. What happens if that person doesn’t work out? What’s the contingency plan there? When you start making plans for expansion, we need to… Obviously we want to have a positive, we can make this happen outlook, but we don’t want to be blindly, overly optimistic and think that nothing can go wrong. We need to look at it and go, “What could go wrong? What’s going to happen if that person that we send there or that we hire to run that location just doesn’t turn out to be what we thought they were.” Or whatever.

Things happen to people and they change. Or they’re just not the person you thought they were going to be. So who’s going to run it? What’s their deal? Meaning are they going to be a partner? Are they going to be a franchisee? Are they going to be a licensee? Are they going to be a GM? Are you just going to hire a dispatcher? Are you going to hire just some movers and let them dispatch themselves? Who’s going to run that new location or that new division? Very important. Then how much time is this going to take from you? The most common thing I hear from people is, “Louis, I don’t have the time. I don’t have the time.” Which if that’s an issue, make sure you go back and watch in this series, stabilize your tech and time I believe it’s called. Stabilize your tech and time.

But how much time is it going to take? When you write this number down, whatever you think this number is, I want you to double it. If you’re like, “Oh, it’ll take me 10 hours a week to…” 20 hours a week. Everybody underestimates this. Everybody underestimates this. They think that the person I’m sending there or the person that’s going to run that division, they’ve got it. They’re going to handle it. No big deal. I could go about my regular business and I’ll just be handling it with some emails and whatever else. In order to get that business up and running and have the momentum to get out the gate quick and successfully build a sustainable business, you’re going to need to spend some time.

So you want to get clear on that and you want to make sure you have the time and you want to make sure then the time that you’re spending with this new venture, what’s getting dropped or what’s getting missed or what’s getting neglected or what needs to be passed off or delegated in your current business? I think it was yesterday, the day before we talked about you need to free yourself from the day to day. You need to be process driven. You need to delegate, you need to get things off your plate because you need freedom to scale. If you don’t have time right now, guys, I’m telling you, a new location or a new division is not going to solve your problems. If you’re like, “Money’s tight,” and you want to throw a Hail Mary and open another location. It’s a long, long, long shot.

Get your current operation working, make that profitable, get yourself some freedom from the day to day so you have the time to make sure that that office runs the way that it runs. And if it doesn’t require the double that I told you to add onto it, great, you’ve got extra time to go golf, fish, and hang out with your kids, take a nap, read a book, whatever you want to do. The idea is you need the freedom to scale. And before you scale, you’ve got to get real about how much time it’s going to take from you.

Next question here that you need to ask yourself. How much capital? How much money is it going to take to pull this venture off you’ve got to have that figured out going into it, and you’ve got to have that money aside. You can’t open another office. I mean, you can, but it’s going to be very stressful and it’s going to be very down to the wire a lot of the times, but you can’t open an office thinking that, “Oh, don’t worry. There’s a little extra money in our account. We’ll just spoon feed that office as it needs money.” In other words, “Oh, we need to put some advertising. Okay, there’s a little bit for that. Okay, we need to do this? There’s a little bit for that.” Before you know it, you’re way over budget. And now you’re hurting your existing business.

So we need to be really strategic and say how much capital is it going to require? You want to do a projection. You want to do a projection, so you can see how much you’re going to spend, what you’re going to do. I’m going to teach you what’s called the scaling matrix. And the scaling matrix will help you determine how much capital you need. Because there’s a few things, as you open an office that you need to consider. And you could spend more on one and less on the other, all depending on how much… You’re like, “Hey, I’ve got 20 grand,” or, “Hey, I’ve got 200 grand.” It’s going to be a different game plan for opening up. Totally. What type of office you get, or are you just working out of a truck yard? What type of marketing are you doing? What type of office staff and employees are you going to have? What about trucks? Are you buying? Are you leasing? Or are you just going to rent all of that?

That’s why it’s a scaling matrix, because depending on the amount of money that you have to open, you could tweak and modify those different areas to meet that budget and just understand what you’re gaining by spending more in certain areas and what you’re going to be lacking by saving in certain areas and being okay with that. You’ve got to know how much capital. And you want to take that capital and you want to put it in a totally separate account, because the next question you want to ask yourself is what entity? If you open a new location and that location is… Especially if it’s out of state, it needs to be its own corporation or LLC. So you want to basically take that capital that you’re committing to that business, put it into that entity’s bank account, and typically you would not do that from your existing business. You want to be very careful not to co-mingle funds. Because the whole reason you’re doing another entity is for the legal protection.

So essentially check with your CPAs and your lawyers and all that before you do it. I’ll get more in depth into this at the event. But you would essentially have money that’s your money that you would loan to this business. That’s the simple way of putting it. Money that you’ve earned from your other business that’s now in your name, and then you would loan it to this business and you’d have money here ready to go. So now you’ve got the money here. It doesn’t mean you’re going to use it all. But let’s say it’s $25,000, let’s say it’s $100,000, let’s say it’s $200,000.

When you know you have it, now you could start making your projections. You could lay out your spreadsheet with the projections of where you’re going. What month by month it’s going to look and now you have an idea of what you need to do, how many jobs you’re going to need to book, what you’re are going to be spending on marketing, when you’re going to decide to hire that first person, when you’re going to get that next truck. But you’ve got to have that separate entity. We’ll talk more about that at the summit, but when you have a separate entity, typically you would do… Talk to your lawyers. Make sure or you don’t take legal advice from me. I’m not an attorney. I’m not a CPA. I’m not a tax expert. But you would have an S corp, if it’s a company that you own by yourself, an LLC, if you own it with a partner or a wife. Because if you have a single member LLC, now you subject to self-employment tax, there’s other things that go along with that.

So picking which entity is a big deal, and it also matters in your overall asset protection plan. Because if you’re like, “Louis, I’m opening 50 locations, I’m franchising. I’ve got a plan to do this or that,” you’ve got to start thinking about your asset protection as well. You don’t want, god forbid, the truck gets in an accident and rolls over and people get hurt in one city or something happens and you get a really, really big lawsuit and they can now come after that company and all your other companies. You need to have isolation so that each company does not put the other companies at risk.

How to Make Your Moving Company Process-Driven

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to make your moving company process-driven.

  • “It is clear to me from my experience and what I’ve witnessed and helped other people go through, that in order to succeed at a high level without stress and overwhelm, you’ve got to focus on making your company process-driven.”
  • “Your moving company could either be a people-driven business or a process-driven business. The difference is a big deal. When you’ve got a people-driven business, you’ve got no consistency. One person does something one way, another person does something totally different.”
  • “Training can be a hassle because you’re basically training a person on how to do something, but you don’t have the process behind it. If you’ve ever been in a position where you feel like you’re afraid to fire somebody because they’re the only person that knows how to do what it is they do. I know you’ve been there.”
  • “If you’ve ever said, “Hey, I really wish I could just have robots run everything. I could program all the robots and have them do everything.” If you’ve got a process-driven business, the programming is the processes that are put in place. Then you get the people to run the processes. Simple.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
We have gone through the series of stabilization, systemization, systematizing, stabilizing, systematizing. Now we’re talking about scaling. We’ve been laying out what you’ve got to do to really scale, right? Take what’s working, bring it to that next level, grow your business, expand your business, franchise your business, bring it to a place where you could sell it, right? Bring it to a place where it runs consistently and predictably generating revenue for you without the headaches so that you can run it passively, if that’s what you choose to do. Scaling is different for everybody.

Everybody’s got a different vision of what they want with their business. I’m here to tell you that if you’re in the moving business, you are in the right business to make that happen. If you’re like, Louis, I’m in this business but I hate this business.

My answer to you is good. Get it in order, build a model business, spend a couple of years getting it on point, getting the profits where they need to be, sell it and go do what you want to do. You know, that’s just the reality of it. You’ve got something. You’ve got a money maker in your hand. Don’t let that go. Those of you that really think that there’s a cap on what could be achieved in the moving business, I’m here to tell you, there’s companies in the U.S. doing well over a hundred million dollars a year. Don’t think that you’re capped and a million dollars is the top mark or 10 million or I did 20 million. I don’t think that’s the top either. If you’ve got really big dreams, really big aspirations, really big goals of what you want to hit for whatever reason, right?

Maybe just you’re driven to succeed. You’re driven to get to the next level. Cool. Maybe you really, really want a jet. Maybe you really want to fly private, especially after all this COVID stuff. You’re like, you know what, I’m done going and standing in TSA, be around all those germs. I’m ready to fly private. I’m not saying that this is what everybody wants. I just want you to know that whatever is right for you, I’m not a believer in this world of we’ve got to keep up with other people. If this person is driving that or if this person’s dream is to have a jet that that’s got to be my dream, right. I really believe it’s so important that we get in touch with what our heart wants and not just what our mind wants, and then realize that it’s there for a reason.

You’ve got a desire for something like don’t extinguish that. Don’t put that out. That fire is there and it’s really here and it’s not in your mind, it’s not ego. I should have this because I need to feel a certain type of way. But you’re like, Hey, I like nice stuff. I like to go on nice trips. I like to drive nice cars. There’s nothing wrong with that. Right? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you go to work every day and you do your part to contribute to your community, which is what you are doing. I want you guys to realize that. You might not put the pieces together every day that you’re serving your community. They need a mover. If this was like back in the day, horse and buggy types of things, there would be a mover or two with the horse and the buggy in the community and they serve the people and they took care of the people. Right?

Now it’s a more competitive landscape but it doesn’t change the fact that you are providing a service to the people in your community, right? You want to provide a great service, you know that. But if you know that you have the ability to orchestrate the moving parts of the business to deliver a great service to customers, then isn’t it your job to get more of those customers, right? I don’t believe anyone should ever be capped by the amount of money that they can make if they are serving. The more you serve, the more you make. If you do a thousand moves a year, you are serving at that level and will make that kind of money. If you’re doing 12,000 moves a year, you’re serving at that level.

You’ll make that kind of money and so on. But it’s not that simple because it’s not as easy as just serve and the money will be there. We’ve also had to take into account the laws of business and what it takes to make that happen. Right. Because we could have all the intentions in our heart and that’s what we want.

We want to let that guide us as to where to go and what we want, but we do need to use our heads. We do need to use our minds to be able to strategically make that happen. Right. This series specifically is about scaling. Let’s talk about your processes and your people and how we need to relate to that in order to scale, right? Because without the stuff that we’re putting in place, without the stabilization that we did, right? The systematizing, and now talking about certain aspects of scaling, it won’t be scaling, it’ll suffering. Right. I know the feeling and I know what it’s like to be super excited. Whether it’s just you and your own dream or your spouse or your partner, you’re like, let’s do this. Let’s crush it. Let’s expand. Let’s open another office. We’re doing this here. Let’s do it there. We’re making X amount here.

Well, if we open five more offices, we could make five times the money. Right? Listen, I’ve been there. I know the whole thought process behind it all. After going through it, it is clear to me from my experience and the experience I’ve witnessed and helped other people go through, that in order to succeed at a high level. Okay. And at a high level that is without the stress and without the overwhelm or the level that you’re at without the stress and without the overwhelm, you’ve got to focus on making your company process-driven. Process-driven, meaning you could either have a people-driven business or a process-driven business. A people-driven business or a process-driven business. The difference is a big deal. Right? The difference when you’ve got a people-driven business, you’ve got no consistency, right? One person does something one way, another person does something totally different.

Training is a hassle because you’re basically training a person on how to do something, but you don’t have the process behind it. If you’ve ever been in a position where you feel like you’re afraid to fire somebody because they’re the only person that knows how to do what it is they do. I know you’ve been there. Right. If you haven’t been there before and you don’t have the process-driven organization, you will be there. You’ll be in a position where you’ve gotten somebody, they’re so good, they do what they need to do. They’re the one that knows how to do it but there’s a lot of reasons why somebody might not be a good fit for your company moving forward and it’s the worst feeling to know that they’re not a good culture fit, right. They’re bringing the rest of the company down, or they’re just not doing their job in other aspects, but they’re the only person that knows how to do something.

When you have a people-driven business like that, you can’t fire anybody. Right. Because they know how to do it. If we switch to a process-driven, right, this right here allows you to have your processes running the business. If you’ve ever said, Hey, I really wish I could just have robots run everything. I could program all the robots and have them run everything. If you’ve got a process-driven business, the programming is the processes that are put in place. Then what we do is we get the people to run the processes. Instead of having people running the day to day with their own thoughts of what should be done here and what should be done there, you’ve got processes of the best practices of how things should be handled. Then you have people running those process.

And of course, there’s going to be things that come up that will require the people that are involved with these to make those decisions. That’s why you also need process owners. For every process that you have, you want to assign an owner of that process. Let me give you an example. You’re like, Louis, what do you mean by process? A process would be morning dispatch, right? From getting the crews out, right? Maybe it’s from the minute the dispatcher comes into the office to the minute the crews get sent out. What is the step by step of how that needs to be handled every day? Right? What about processing payroll? That process, right? What about the process of a new claim comes in for damage? What’s that process step by step?

Each one of those processes needs to have an individual person by their role assigned as the owner of that to make sure that that happens. Like, Hey, look, this is your responsibility. Here it is in writing. It’s very black and white. If you’ve ever had the frustration of feeling like you’ve told somebody on your team something over and over and over and they still don’t do it right, it’s because they don’t have the clarity. The reality of human communication is that sometimes the words that come out of our mouth and the way we hear them as they’re coming out is totally different than the way somebody hears them coming in, right. For various reasons, we won’t get into that. But when you’ve got it written down black and white and then you explain it to somebody, you go over with them.

Once the processes are done, the owner of that process and everybody else in that process needs to read through that process. Whether it’s in writing, whether there’s screenshots, whether it’s video and needs to acknowledge everything there and make sure that you didn’t miss any steps, right. Assign a process owner for each individual process. Next thing, you need a process manager. When people talk about, I’m going to hire a GM, I’m going to hire a operations manager. I’m going to hire a COO. These different types of positions. I want you to start thinking about those roles as a process manager, right? Because it’s really the same thing where we don’t want people running our business.

We want the processes running our business and then we want the people to run those processes. You know, McDonald’s is the perfect example of that. They’re not the successful, I don’t even know how much money they do a year in business and how many stores they have because of the people that work there, no disrespect to the people, right? It’s the processes that are in place and they could kind of stick anybody in there to run those processes. And if those people aren’t working out, no problem, remove the people, bring in new people, the processes still keep going. There’s no inconsistencies in the food, inconsistencies in the service based on who happens to be working there at that time. What we’re talking about is we’re talking about scaling. We’re talking about opening additional locations. You might have a nice situation in your current business, right? You might have good people. Like you’ve got a nice little flow that just naturally came together and that’s awesome.

But as you open that second location, as you take on a different line of business, as you want to start franchising, it’s one of those things where you’ve got to really understand that you can’t manage all the people. You need to manage the processes. The way that you manage the processes, right, is by basically looking at the people to see if they’re running the processes. Now see the reason so many managers and GMs have a hard time. Like if you’re an owner of a business and you’ve had a hard time with a GM or with a manager and you feel like they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s because they’re trying to manage people. They’re trying to manage all these individual people and all the stuff these people have going on. Right?

We’re all different. We’ve all got different stuff going on. As opposed to saying, what’s the process that needs to be getting executed in this department, that department, this time of day, that time of day? Are the people doing that? And if they’re not, you bring them back to the process. You basically gently guide them back to the process. You have a definitive place to lead them back to. It’s very black and white at that point. It’s not a matter of like, Hey, what’s going on? I’ve asked you to do this thing several times. It’s like, here’s the process. Whether they are the process owner or just a participant in that process, they need to just be guided back. Right? When you shift your perspective of management from managing people, which sometimes could be a total nightmare if there’s a lot of people and you’re managing the people, it could feel overwhelming.

I mean, if you’re a manager, you know, it could feel very overwhelming. But if you just have a place to guide them back to, so much easier. Start thinking about who you would actually assign to be your process manager. Is that you or is that somebody else? Because as you grow and as you scale, think about opening another location. You’re like, okay, I’m going to go check out the other. I’m going to go fly down to that office or drive down to that office. I’m going to check that out. Or I’m going to send my manager down there to check on things. What are you going to have them check on? They’re just going to go and sit around. This used to be me by the way. I’m not mocking you. This was like when I first started going to check out my other offices or sent somebody there. I’m like, we need more of a method of how we do this. Right. Of when we go, what we look at, what we check, what we see if it’s working or not working.

If there’s processes that are being run by the people, or if the people are running the show and kicking the processes to the curve. You’ve got to be able to go in there and clearly see, are they running the processes? It makes it so much easier to train, manage, to scale. The reality is having a process-driven organization, this is your only competitive advantage in the moving business. Let me say it again. This is your only competitive advantage. I know some of you might have some really great innovative ideas and different things that you’re doing, but the reality is to the consumer, a mover is a mover is a mover is a mover. You could go out and provide great service and you could have five star reviews and the customer could be happy, but internally there is a lack of success due to the lack of process.

The people who get this, the people that apply this, the people who document and live their company’s mantra by like we’re a process-driven organization and we’ve got great people to help us run those processes, those are the ones who win. Those are the ones who make a lot of money. Those are the ones who sell their business. Those are the ones who are able to scale, franchise, and really do whatever they want to do. Right? We talked about processes in order to scale, right? We’re talking about what needs to be done to scale, right? And the reality is what needs to get done to scale is what needs to get done just to create order and peace and get rid of the chaos and the fires. Right? Even if you’re like, Louis, I don’t want to scale. Okay, get this stuff in place just to bring some harmony into your life and some stability and some consistency in the business and clarity.

Once you have that, your outlook on whether you want to scale or not scale may change completely, right? Because if something just feels really hard to do every day, you don’t want to go do more of it. You know, I realize that, I realize like I’m talking and people are like, I’m talking like grow your business. Some people are like, even if they’re not thinking it, their mind is going, I should grow my business. I know that’s what I should do. But subconsciously they’re like equating that to just more pain, more suffering, more stress, more problems. Right. That’s not a good place to be. That will destructively start to take you in the direction away from what you want. Everything we do is taking us either in a direction towards what we want or it’s taking us away from what we don’t want.

If what you don’t want is over here and what you want is over here, we’ve got to be very strategic to make sure that our moves and our actions and our thoughts are all in alignment heading towards what we want. When we’ve got that subconscious going, yeah, I don’t know if I want to grow. This is just going to be more stress. This is just going to be more problems. You’re going like this. You’re going over to the side of the area that you don’t want to be. Right. Without even realizing it. And so, again, I know we’re talking about scaling, but if you’re in a place where scaling sounds like, you know, that’s the tell sign right there. If you’re like scaling sounds stressful, it’s only because you don’t have some things in place. One of them being a process-driven business, right. When things are in order, I’m really just trying to paint a picture of what’s possible because I know so many of you are there already and I know so many of you are not.

It’s just such a big difference. If I sat down at a table with all of you and we had a conversation, it’s like, Hey, you’re in the moving business. You’re in the moving business. Let me hear about what your day is like, what your life is like, what your stress level is like. Maybe we pull up somebody that’s been to the event, we pull up somebody that’s private client, somebody that’s in my program, somebody that’s really implemented this stuff and really done the work. It’s going to be a totally different story than someone that’s still struggling day to day to just get past some of this stuff. The reality is, it’s not that it’s a different story because the person who’s climbed out of that was once the other person. I was once the other person. I was once the person that was scrambling and stressing and doing the same thing over and over where they say, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and thinking that you’re going to get a different result, right.

Everybody that’s successful in this business was once that person. The difference is though that a lot of people unfortunately will stay that person, stay with that same conversation, stay with those same excuses. The select few will say, no, I want to start heading the direction of what it is I want. If they could do it, I could do it. If Louis could do it, I could do it. Right. I know there’s additional stress right now, which is the way everything that’s going on in the world on top of the day to day. I’m just saying it because I want you to be able to recognize and self-diagnose that if scaling in your mind equates to suffering, it means there’s a little bit of work that needs to be done to clear the path for you. Right? Once you clear the path, then you get to decide what it is you want to do. I don’t push anybody to go open more… My first question with somebody is like, when I work with a private client, how much money do you want to make?

Let’s talk about the lifestyle you want to live. Then we reverse engineer the business into that. But no matter what that plan is, whether it’s, I want to fly private and work two days a week, or I don’t mind working five days a week and I just want to make X amount a year. No matter what it is, this is a requirement, process-driven. Right? It’s one of those things, we talked about it. If you don’t have the competence in creating processes and know how to do it, you will lack the confidence. If you lack the confidence, you won’t go seek the competence. But once you say, you know what, maybe if I just knew how to do that, maybe if I just knew how to write a process, it didn’t seem so overwhelming.

If somebody could just take it and chunk it down and break down the steps of how to do it for me, I could probably do it. If I took the time to do it, I’m clearing the path for myself. Right? No matter what you do in your business, it is to create a life for yourself, my friend. I don’t ever want you guys to forget that. It’s so hard to live a life with a people-driven organization, so hard, consistently, without getting sucked back in. Okay. All right. Now let’s talk about, that was my public service announcement for the day. Let’s get you guys back here to processes and people to scale. All right. Let’s talk about your people now, because we’re talking about scaling, we’ve got to think about the people that we have differently than we think about them currently. Right?

Let’s take the example of, because remember, scaling could be just taking what you have and doing more of it, right? Like you don’t have to go open more locations. You just ramp it up. It could be opening additional locations or franchising, or getting into long distance or getting into another line of business. Let’s take the example of opening another location for this purpose. What you want to do is before you do that, I want you to make a list of key position replacements, key position replacements. What does that mean? It means that whoever you have currently in your business, that’s a key position, right? Somebody, a manager or a salesperson or a bookkeeper or a dispatcher or the GM that you’re going to send to that new office. I want you to ask yourself what would happen, write everybody’s name down. Okay.

What would happen as we started to scale, as we open that new location if that person just no called no showed and you never heard from them again? You don’t even know what happened. They could have just went and got another job. They could have got hit by a bus. They could have just went off the deep end. I don’t know. Right. They just didn’t show up. It’s happened. Right. This kind of stuff happens. Or the more likely scenario is they stop working out. They’re disgruntled. You realize you need to get rid of them. You find them stealing. You need to fire them. They find another job. They move on. They have a life situation happened and they move on to something different. Write down all these people. I want you to write down a temporary replacement for that person if that happens. Because a lot of times we look at our ability to handle more based on the team that we have.

But I want you to recognize the vulnerability. I want you to recognize the points where things could go really wrong with just like one person leaving and what that’ll do with you, right? In other words, your name might be the replacement. You personally might be the replacement, or you might have other people that are the replacement. But the reality is if we don’t think through that, we might think we’re good. We’re good. Then one little, you know, you go make this big leap to open that other office. One person doesn’t show up again and it just throws everything off. Right? Not saying that you won’t be able to open up other offices if somebody leaves, but you need to know what you’re going to do. You need to know if this happens temporarily until we find a replacement, you’re moving to that position. I’m moving to this position. Here’s the contingency plan, right? You got to have that in place.

Then you want to establish who is your scaling team. Who is your scaling team? We’re going to use the example of opening an additional location, opening an additional office. You’ve got to realize that not everyone that works for you is as excited about this as you are. Not everybody’s needed. You know, if you’ve got a dispatcher, you’ve got a sales team, you’ve got a bookkeeper, you’ve got an office manager, you’ve got a warehouse person, and you’re going to go open another location. First of all, who needs to be involved in the opening of that other location? Right? Who is going to be on your scaling team? Who’s going to actually help with the day to day? Because here’s what happens. If we don’t establish who’s in those meetings, who’s not in those meetings, all of a sudden the message in the office becomes very convoluted.

The people that are truly aren’t really involved, like maybe a dispatcher that’s dispatching your local business, they really won’t have anything to do with the future location. You’re pulling them in conversations. You’re pulling them in meetings. They’re hearing about it. A lot of times the priorities of that office will get neglected as we’re focused on opening up and building the additional office. Right? You just got to establish. You don’t have to go make a big announcement. You don’t have to pass out t-shirts like scaling team. Just in your mind know like, okay, whose help do I need to do this? If you’re going to open another office and keep your office as the central sales hub and do all the sales from there, you’ll need your sales team. You’ll need your sales manager, right? You might need everybody in your office, but it’s really important to make that distinction and to clearly define who’s in and who’s out so that you could keep it really clear.
There needs to be a clear chain of command as well because here’s what’s happened. You have this tight knit business now, right? Or you should have this tight knit business before you’re scaling. Now you’re going to start dividing and conquering. Like all right, come on, let’s go out and conquer other territory. Let’s go open other offices. As that starts to happen, the structure and the hierarchy unravels a little bit. Just make sure that you keep it very clear what the chain of command is, who reports to who, who does what. This stuff is so important. I mean, I’ve got private clients that done an amazing job of putting all this stuff in place and just have been able to scale beautifully, right? Open an office, open another office, rebrand, just really put all this stuff together. It’s because they really remembered the most important part of this whole thing, which is we need to be process-driven.

This will save you so many issues, so problems. Take a little time today. Think about what processes you need to develop. Right? A lot of people will think that they need to go and create this giant process book of every little thing that happens in their company. You may get to that place, but start with the stuff that’s going to make biggest impact today. Where’s the ball getting dropped? Where’s there a new opportunity to do something new but you need everybody to do it the exact same way every single time? Those are the areas that you start to put processes together. Right? Go start working on this, figure out what processes you need. Who’s going to own those processes? Who’s going to be the process manager? If you’re going to scale, think about any key players you have, who would replace them, and decide who your scaling team is and go make this stuff happen. Right? Go make this stuff happen.

How to Gain Freedom to Scale Your Moving Company

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to gain freedom to scale your moving company.

  • “In order to scale, you’ve got to have freedom from the day-to-day of your business.”
  • “You’re looking to attain freedom in your business for a few reasons. One, you want freedom to live the life that you want to live. And that’s what most people are thinking when they say, “I want freedom from my business.” But the reality is, if you’re looking to scale, open up additional locations, get into different lines of business you need to have freedom from the day-to-day.”
  • “To get on the path of scaling your business, you need a substantial amount of time to focus on business development. And you can’t focus on business development when you’re putting out fires and dealing with stuff every day.”
  • “Listen, I’m all for expanding, growing, getting to that next level, making all the money you want to make… But do it right. You’ve got to get things in order, stabilize, systematize, and commit to making it happen.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis:

Today, we’re going to continue our scaling series of how to take your moving company and scale what’s working, take it to the next level. Those of you that have been with us since the beginning, you know that we started off by first talking about stabilizing certain areas of your business, because in order to scale we first have to stabilize what we’ve already got going on. If there’s some blue screws, or the wheels feel like they’re falling off the bus, we’ve got to get that in order, before we start scaling. Then we moved on to systematizing. Because you really can’t scale anything until there’s systems and processes behind it. Otherwise, it turns from scaling to suffering, to total chaos.

Today is a really important one. And it’s perfect that it’s on a Sunday, because when we think about a Sunday, it’s more laid back, it’s more chill. And in order to scale, you’ve got to have freedom from the day to day of your business. So we’re looking to attain freedom in our business for a few reasons. I mean, number one, we want freedom to live the life that we want to live. And that’s what most people are thinking when they think, “I want freedom from my business, I want freedom.” But the reality is, if you’re looking to scale, if you’re looking to open up additional locations, if you’re looking to get into different lines of business, maybe you do local you want to get into long distance, or you want to get into commercial, and maybe you want to franchise, whatever it is, you want to become a hometown dominator. You just want to take what’s working and grow it, you need to have freedom from the day to day.

So important, to get on the path of scaling your business, you need a substantial amount of time to focus on business development. And you can’t focus on business development when you’re putting out fires and dealing with stuff every day. So we want to get you to a place where you’ve got the freedom to go expand. Let’s say you want to open another office. It’s so easy, and I see it happen to so many people. It happened to me where we think, “Wow, my existing office is working really well. This will be easy. I’ve got somebody, they’re pretty good. They’ve been with me. They kind of know the deal. They’re hungry, I’m going to send them to that location. They’ll run it. It’ll be fine.”

And the reality is that is rarely the case. Rarely the case. What typically happens is it doesn’t go as smooth as you expected. That person needs more support, they need more guidance. If you think about what it took to really get your business up and running and off the ground to go and open another one, to go and open another one, you have to overestimate the time that it’s going to take out of your life to make sure that that office gets up and running with the right momentum successfully.

I see too many people open an additional location. Like they’re throwing what at the wall to see if it sticks, expand, grow, get to that next level, make all the money you want to make, but do it. Get things in order, stabilize, systematize, commit, “I’m opening this location and I’m going to make it happen.” And in order to do that and keep your sanity at the same time, you need freedom from the day to day.

So let’s talk about that today because that’s really what we’re all after. And people that want to talk about scaling, getting to the next level, first let’s get you freedom from the day to day. You’d be surprised how many people I work with who want to open more locations. And once we get them the freedom, and once we get them the profits that they want out of the one location, they’re like, “Okay, why go and throw myself back in the fire. I’m making the money I want to make. I’ve got the freedom.” But it’s really, really hard to get to that place, to make that call, and make that decision until you are standing on that pedestal of freedom for yourself.

Once you’re there, you have such clarity to say, “You know what, I’m enjoying this extra time for myself.” Or, “You know what? I’m bored, I’ve got this extra time, let’s start this mission, let’s go open 50 locations, let’s build a hundred million moving company.” Whatever your aspirations are, they’ll become very clear when you have the freedom. Because a lot of times I also see companies that they’re so burdened by what’s going on, that the idea of scaling and growing in their mind equates to stress, it equates to burden. We’re talking about scaling like that’s something everybody wants. And I know, and I realize that a lot of people, even if it’s subconsciously the thought of that stresses them out.

When we take action in life, we take action because we’re either going towards something we want, or we’re going away from something that we don’t want. We’re going towards something we want, or we’re going away from something we don’t want. So when we think about scaling, if our mind associates that with more stress, more trouble, more money, more problems. If that’s where the mind goes, then you’re not going to want to scale. But if we could get you to that place of freedom, that place of the business is running smooth, there’s consistency. Now, all of a sudden, you may say, “Huh, wow. I could actually grow this business. Be twice, three times, 10 times the size, 20 times the size I am now and do it in a way that’s actually easier than it’s happening for me now.”

That’s what happened to me. Early on, it was a grind. It was a struggle. It was a grind. It was a struggle. But once I learned this stuff that I’m going to teach you today, the climb from zero to a million was so much harder than the climb, the 20 million. That’s just the reality of it.

So let me walk you through these steps today. Okay. First thing I want you to do is I want you to do this little exercise with me that I call the One Year Vacation Exercise. One Year Vacation Exercise. I want you to imagine that you are getting ready to go on vacation for a year. Wherever you want, wherever that is to do whatever it is you want to do. But you’re going to be away from your business, there’s going to be very limited contact. You’ll have email. You could check in once, maybe once a week on a zoom call, something like that, but you’re going to be on a year long vacation. What needs to happen in order for you to feel good about that? What needs to happen in order for you to feel like the whole business is not going to just fall apart when you leave?

And look, this is extreme. I get it. I get it. Some of you, it’s like the idea going away for a weekend is crazy. My first trips in the business, I was in Denver. My first trips were like fly to Vegas on a Saturday night, go to dinner, go out, the next day hit the pool, hit the spa, fly back Sunday. That was the extent of it. When I took my first week long vacation, I felt like I didn’t know what was going to happen. And later on to the point where in my busiest months, in the middle of the summer, I would just be gone for months at a time, spend the summer in the mountain somewhere, spend a month in Europe. So I understand that this may seem like a hard thing to do.

So let me give you some key areas that you need to think about in order to be able to pull this off. Now, I’m not telling you to go on vacation for a year. I want you to put yourself in this place mentally to say, “If I was going to go away for a year, what do I need to get tightened up to make that happen? What do I need to get tightened up to make that happen?” If somebody came tomorrow and gave you the chance of a lifetime to go somewhere, to do something and you’re saying, “I can’t pass this up.” You’ve got to a week to sort everything out in your business to get it to a place where you feel good leaving, and it’s not going to fall apart.

So the first thing you want to ask yourself is what do I need to do to feel a sense of control? Because, isn’t that all it really is when we think about delegating, when we think about hiring more people, when we think about training staff, when we think about going away? Isn’t it that we just feel like we don’t have that control, we need to control it? And this is a good thing. People would be like … It gets the connotation. Like someone’s a control freak. Well, when you’re in business, you need to have a sense of control over that business. When you’re behind the wheel of your car, you need to have a sense of control over that car. When you are responsible for manning the ship of your business and your life and your family’s life, you need to have control over what’s going on.
So instead of having the typical control freak stereotype of like, “Oh, oh, I got to do this. I got to do this.” We do this by setting up systems and setting up processes and setting up people to run those systems and processes and having certain checks and balances and certain metrics that we’re able to see in our business. So in order to … I want you to do this later on today, do this one year vacation exercise. What do you need to do in order to feel a sense of control. And just write and see what it is. Just write and see what it is in order to feel a sense of control.

And don’t allow your mind to go. “Yeah, but that person’s not capable of that.” Okay, so imagine, again, we’ve got to play tricks on our mind, our mind plays tricks on us. We’ve got to play those tricks back to get it to do what we want it to do, to tame it, to be able to put it in a position where we could think through scenarios that are going to help us break through the blocks that are holding us back.

Imagine that I’m going to give you anybody you need, I’ll hire and pay for somebody you need for the year. Imagine that, I’m not doing it. But just imagine that you’re like, “Man, I would really need a general manager, or I would need a sales manager, or I would need this, or I would need that.” Then write that down as part of what you need. Don’t worry about how much it’s going to cost to get it. That’s kind of the next step in the evolution there.

Next thing in the one year vacation exercise is, what are you going to for this year to feel and have clarity, clarity into what’s going on? Because when you have one location, your clarity could come from walking into the office, see what’s going on, hear what’s going on, smell what’s going on, sense what’s going on. When you open another location, all those senses are gone.

And if you don’t have the ability to have clear insight to what’s happening in your current location, you’re not going to have clear insight into what’s happening in your new location. So part of this one year vacation exercise is to just start thinking through the stuff that you’ve got to get in order now to free yourself up from the day to day. Remember, once we get to a place of freedom, then we have really ultimate clarity. But in order to have the freedom, you’ve got to have clarity as to what’s going on in the business. So what reports? What metrics? Just think about it like, “If I’m gone …” You got to fight the urge to be like, “I need to be there,” and say, “Well, what information do I need to be there for? What if there was a way to find out that information? Maybe I could pull it up in, in my CRM and, and look at that once a week. Maybe somebody could send me a report. What do I need to get the clarity to go away for one year?”

All right. So we’ve got control. All right, we’ve got clarity. Now we’ve got to take a look at consistency, consistency. What needs to happen while you’re away for one year for your business to have of consistency, consistency with your lead generation, consistency with booking moves, consistency with servicing moves, consistency with creating raving fans and getting on to give you five star reviews, consistency with your accounting and your numbers, and making sure that the bills are getting paid and make sure that you are getting paid. What needs to happen to create consistency?
Guys, don’t under estimate this, like you might say, “Louis, why? Tell me what it’s going to take.” I’m telling you what it’s going to take. I’m talking to many of you and I’m giving you … My biggest secret of figuring stuff out is doing certain exercises, walking through, what do I need to get this? What do I need to get that right. Essentially, what do I want? Why do I want it? How do I get it? So, that’s what we’re doing right here. So I’m walking you through this exercise of figuring out what it’s going to take to actually have the freedom in your business to do whatever you want to do.

This happens to be the scaling series, so we’re talking about scaling, but it’s to give you the freedom from the day to day, you didn’t open a business because you wanted a job for yourself. It may have been the first motivation behind it. Like, “I don’t want to work for anybody anymore. I want to work for myself.” A lot of you have felt that. And many of you probably at some point were like, “Man, I should have just stayed working for somebody. It was a lot easier, and the money was consistent.” But we do this to make the money and have the freedom.

And we have to fight for those. We have to make that the intention and go after it, if that’s not the objective, if every day the mind is just focused on book move, service moves, book move, service moves. That’s what it to be. And that’s okay early on. That’s what I did early on, but at some point you’ve got to change the trajectory of where you’re headed and where you’re going. And there needs to be freedom in that equation. Simple. Whether you want to increase the profit or you want to increase the thrive in your life, you need freedom to do both. That’s what we’re talking about here.

So next thing that we need to make sure of while we are on this one year imaginary vacation. And by the way, I’ve done this exercise with somebody who then turned around and … We did this and drilled a little deeper, but then went to Europe for, it was about a year. Managed the whole business off the iPad.

Like this is possible. I know it’s hard to think about sometimes and you’re like, “But how, there’s trucks, there’s mover.” And maybe you’re still a few years away from that, but it’s about laying the groundwork to get there. It’s about laying the groundwork to get to that place. I do not sell pipe dreams. I do not say that this moving business is get rich quick. I don’t even go out and say, “Hey, people, let me teach you how to get into the moving business.” It’s more like, “You’re in the moving business? Cool, let’s go, let’s do this the right way. Let’s get you to the place you want to be. Let’s get you to the life you want to be.”

Freedom is the answer. We’ve got to get you the freedom. And I just want to get you guys thinking differently. So let’s get back to freedom. Freedom, one year vacation exercise. Those of you just joining us we’re imagining that we are taking a year long vacation and we’re figuring out what is it we need to do in order for the business to not just survive but thrive while we’re gone.

Next one is cash. What do we need to do while we’re gone for the year to make sure the cash keeps flowing. There’s still money coming in, and there’s still plenty of money left over at the bottom, being sent to you wherever you are on vacation.

We’re doing this to prepare in this series for scaling. It’s the same thing and you just really want to go on the year long vacation. But this is specifically for scaling. Don’t think that you could go open another office and that other office is going to solve all your money problems. If your current office isn’t consistently producing this cash flow that you need, you’re going to run into a really, really tight spot at some point. And that tight spot can put a tremendous, tremendous strain if not choke-hold on your current business, a tremendous strain or choke-hold on your current business if you don’t have the cash flow and the cash to open up that other location, and you’re trying to float it all month by month, it’s not going to happen. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s going to be really stressful and such a bumpy road that it’s completely unnecessary. So we need to make sure in this one year vacation exercise that you’ve got the cash and a consistent means of getting this cash out of the business that whole year.

The next one is confidence. You need the confidence to go. If we had to sum it up, like if I said, “Come on, we’re going to go away for a year.” I mean, I told you I was in Europe for a month in one of my busiest months ever in the middle of the summer. And it literally was a friend that called me up. He was like, “Come on, come let’s go. Let’s go.” And it was like, I left in less than a week’s notice. And it was because I had the confidence in my business, the confidence that I had the controls in place, the confidence that I had the clarity to be able to see everything that was going on from my iPad, the consistency in the business to know that it was going to keep running and it wasn’t going to fall apart, and the cash to make it all happen.

So how do we get this confidence? The confidence comes over time with experience in having gone through things. But it also comes from confidence. In psychology, they teach something called the confidence – competence loop. Competence meaning you’re competent at something, you’re good at something. And so if you’ve never scaled a business, if you’ve never opened additional locations, if you’ve never franchised, if you’ve never taken it from the level that feels comfortable and gone up a notch, it’s because you don’t yet have the competence to do that. Doesn’t mean you can’t gain it. As you gain the competence through learning, you gain competence by learning and applying.

And when you do that, you gain more confidence in your ability to do it. And once you gain more confidence, you’ll seek more competence. I know that a lot of people that are on the fence about coming to the event, it’s because they don’t have the confidence because they haven’t reached a certain level of competence in the business and they feel like, you know what? I don’t know enough to go learn that advanced stuff.

But that’s like saying, “I haven’t made it to the stop sign at the end of the street. So I don’t want to know what’s beyond that stop sign.” We need to have this competence-confidence loop going all the time. Simple as that, simple as that, the better you get at doing something, the more confident you’ll be. You’ll do it more. The more you do it, the better you get at it, the better you get at it, the more you want to do it. I look at this as like golf. Those of you play golf you know, at some point, nobody just started and was really good, so you lacked confidence. For years I allowed myself to just be kind of a dabbler playing golf and play here and there.

And I got to tell you, it destroyed my confidence. Like being out there with people that knew how to play. I went on to the course with tremendous confidence of just being a confident person and confident in business, confident in life. But then my competence level wasn’t there in golf. And so my confidence just went [inaudible 00:23:03], but as I got better because I played more, I got more confidence. As I got more confidence I was like, “I want to play more because it’s more enjoyable.” The confidence-competence loop. So, whatever you feel that you are not prepared for in this whole journey of scaling and getting to that next level in your business and in your life, just know that you’ve got to go do more of the thing that you know that you need to do that’s outside of your comfort zone.

You’ve got to go gain skills. You’ve got to have skill development as a major part and area of focus in your business. What are you working on? What skills specifically, are you working on to break through those comfort zones? Because once you have the tools and once you have the know how, now you’ve got the confidence. And so if you’ve got the confidence, you’ve got the cash, you’ve got the consistency, you’ve got the clarity of what’s going on in your business, the reports and metrics, you’ve got a sense of control, meaning you could be on a computer and be like, “I know that if I need to know this, I look here. I know that if I need to find out what’s going on there, I call this person. I’ve got these meetings set up on my calendar as block time, once a week, in order for me to stay in touch, I’ve got a sense of control.” You could really go on this one year vacation.

I mean, really, so start with, what do I need to do to make this happen? Because we need that freedom in order to do anything we want to do in our life, period. We need to get free from the day to day of the business. That’s the truth. Let me know, who needs some freedom from the day to day of the business? If you’re in a place where you’re like, “Louis, I want to get into a different business. I hate this business. I can’t stand this business. It’s so hard.”

That same hate, and difficulty, and all that, chances are unless you find something you truly love, it’s going to carry over into another business. So, I gave this advice to somebody a long time ago, while I was still in the business that wanted to get out of the moving business and get into something different. And I said, “Why don’t you just get this so on point that you could sell it, that you could get somebody else to run it. Because if you’d think that you’re going to go get into a different business and all these same problems, aren’t going to of follow you, it’s not the moving business that’s the problem it’s you that’s the problem.”

And I said this to him. And I said, “I don’t say that to put you down. I say that to hold the mirror and say, ‘look, like whatever’s failing in the business, the number one thing, the moving CEO mindset is I am responsible for the results here. I’m responsible for what happens.” So what I would to anyone who is struggling in their business in any type of way, maybe you got money coming in, but things are chaotic. Maybe there’s no money coming in, but things are running smooth. Maybe you got a mixture of all of it, I’ve heard it all.

What I would say to you is this, focus on getting business to a place where you could go away for a year and it would still run, make that your mission, or my true honest, straight up advice is, go get a job and there’s no shame in that. Go work for somebody, because business is business, and there’s some general principles that go into running a successful business. And even if your desire is to get out of the moving business, use this as your training ground to become that business person that you need to be, build the business to a place where you could actually sell it and get top dollar instead of walking away from it. And then go do the thing that you want to do. Then go do the thing that you love.

I know the struggles, I wasn’t given this business. I didn’t come from money. I started out of a truck rental yard with two rental trucks and a yellow page ad and nothing, and worked my way up to 20 million. And so wherever you’re at, unless you’re beyond that, I’ve been where you are. And I know the different struggles along the way. And there was a lot of them along the way, but that’s part of growth, never look and go, “I thought the struggles would be behind me.” Because as you start to climb, there’s just new struggles. But what happens is you get the confidence of saying, “Hey, all I need is a little bit more competence. All I need is to learn a bit more about that.” Maybe you’re in local and you want to get into long distance and the idea of it scares you. Well, if you learn about long distance and then you get a little practice with it in competence, you’ll no longer be scared of it and you’ll move on, and you’ll continue to do it.

How To Know If Your Moving Company Is Scalable

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to know if your moving company is scalable.

  • “There’s definitely a very close line between scaling and suffering. And if we don’t get some of this other stuff in place first, it’s going to feel like suffering for sure.”
  • “We want to kind of break down and look at the different parts of the business, because you might have local moves and long distance moves and packing and storage and commercial moves, warehousing, cleaning, junk removal. Like, whatever aspects of moving you do, we’ve got to break down each and every one of those because it’s not always wise to scale everything that you currently do.”
  • “Just because you want to open more locations, just because you want to franchise doesn’t mean that you have to take this entire model that you’ve created and duplicate it all. We want to actually look at which pieces of that model are really scalable.”
  • “Start looking at it as individual segments of your business that can be grown, as opposed to, do I have to take this entire thing and do more it? And even if you don’t want to open more locations, well, there’s certain areas of your business that you’ll find out are more beneficial for you, and where you want to go and the person you are, that are worth growing, and other areas of the business that could be left alone or even killed off.”
  • Watch the video to get full training.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis:
All right. What’s up, guys. Welcome back to the Moving CEO Scaling Series. We are on day 10 of this 14-day journey together. We’ve been talking about what you need to do to scale your moving company. Take what’s working, bring it to that next level, take what’s working, grow it, take what’s working and expand it. And in order to do that, we’ve started off this series talking about stabilizing.
We got to first stabilize the areas of the business where it might feel like there’s a few loose screws, or the wheels are falling off the bus, or things just every day feel a little chaotic. And that’s what we spent the first few days of this series doing. Then we went into systematizing, because before you can start to scale, you’ve really got to systematize your processes and make everything just streamline and simple in order to make the scaling process much, much easier and enjoyable.
There’s definitely a very close line between scaling and suffering. And if we don’t get some of this other stuff in place first, it’s going to feel like suffering for sure. I’m excited today, because today we’re getting into scaling. Finally, we’re getting into scaling. I haven’t been holding out on the scaling aspect of this series, I’ve just laid the foundation for what it really takes to scale a business. Because I’ve watched so many people make that attempt and make that leap and fail, or struggle, or just be totally miserable and stressed out and that was me.
I was scaled before I was really truly ready. Like I was young, I was 22, 23 when I started opening additional locations, and I didn’t really have all this stuff that I’m talking to you about in place with those first few locations. And it was just hard and stressful and unnecessary suffering. Unnecessary stress, unnecessary problems, and that’s why we’ve been really laying this out step by step. it’s,
When I was younger, it was like, you’d hear people say like, slow and steady. Anybody, yeah, yeah, no, no. That guy’s got no ambition, he’s got no hustle. I’m going after it. Let me go. Just let me just let me out of the cage, I’m ready to go get it. All right. I know a lot of you can relate to that. I’m all for growth. I’m all for expansion. I’m all for whatever it is you want to do with your business to get your life to that next level. Let’s do it. But let’s just lay the groundwork first. So that’s what we’ve done.
And now today, we start talking about scaling. So if you are somewhere that you can get a pen and paper, make sure you do that, because today we’re talking about your moving company’s scalability. And what that means is we need to take a look at each aspect of your moving business and break it down, And not just look at the whole thing and say, is this whole thing scalable?
We want to kind of break down and look at the different parts of the business, because you might have local moves and long distance moves and packing and storage and commercial moves, warehousing, cleaning, junk removal. Like, whatever aspects of moving you do, we’ve got to break down each and every one of those because it’s not always wise to scale everything that you currently do. Right?
You might have your business the way it is now, the way you’ve structured it, maybe you’ve got local, long distance, maybe you’re an agent for a van line, maybe you’ve got some commercial jobs that you do as well, you’ve got a lot of stuff that you have going on. Well, just because you want to open more locations, just because you want to franchise doesn’t mean that you have to take this entire model that you’ve created and duplicate it all. We want to actually look at which pieces of that model are really scalable, really scalable. And so we’re going to assess that today. I take all my private clients through a process, it’s called the scalability assessment, where we look at every aspect of their business to determine what’s really scalable and what’s not.
And so today, I want to take you through a light version of that process so you can start thinking about this in a different way. Start looking at it as individual segments of your business that can be grown, as opposed to, do I have to take this entire thing and do more it? And even if you don’t want to open more locations, well, there’s certain areas of your business that you’ll find out are more beneficial for you, and where you want to go and the person you are, that are worth growing, and other areas of the business that could be left alone or even killed off.
There might be areas of your business, you’re like, no, let’s just not do that anymore. It just creates too much complexity. It’s not making any money. And it’s just a drag. That’s an important, important distinction in business and a great sign of business maturity to be able to look at something and say, you know what, it’s not worth the time, money, energy and effort to do it. So I want to take you through that process today. Because there’s one thing that I’ve learned when it comes to scaling is that complexity usually kills profits, especially in this business. This business does not have to be so complex. But oftentimes, we’ll make it complex, because we think that it’s going to bring in all this additional revenue. When in reality, if we could simplify what we do, there’s more money there.
Meaning, if we’re looking for gold, or we’re looking for oil, and we found a spot where we know there’s gold, and we know there’s oil, there’s both there. And we start digging in that spot, and we did like a little two-foot hole. And then we’re like, wait, somebody told me there’s also gold and oil over there and over there, and we run off, and we dig another little two-foot hole over there, and we run off and we dig another. The commercial moves, let’s dig another little two-foot hole over there. Where if we just stay focused on where we know there’s money, and we dig a deep hole, and we plant our roots there, that’s where the money is. And it’s simple, it’s straight. It’s not all this stuff all over the place, all these different areas of the business that we’ve got a tie together.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s not good to do more than one … If you do local moves, that it’s not good to do long distance, or it’s not good to do commercial, but we’ve got to master each one. And this series, we’re talking about scaling. So we want to determine what’s really worth scaling and what’s not worth scaling. Okay. So remember that, complexity kills profits. Let’s keep things simple, let’s keep things manageable, and let’s make them profitable. So there are six areas that I want you to think about. And when you’re thinking about these, I want you to, if you do have a pen, start writing down all the different areas of business that you’re in, or thinking about getting in.
So for example, local moving, long distance moving, commercial, storage, packing. Packing is part of moving, but we need to break all this out, we need to break it all out, maybe cleaning, junk removal, international moves. Whatever you do, or thinking about doing, that’s the list that I want you to have in mind right now. Okay? I want you have the list of all these different areas. And again, the reason that we’re doing this is we’re doing this to make sure that before you start scaling, you don’t bring unnecessary luggage with you on the journey.
You’re about to go on a trip, you’re about to go on a journey, why not keep it light, keep it simple and take the stuff that’s going to make the big impact? Like if we could establish, hey, you’re making all your money in local moves, and you’re not making any money in commercial, and it’s causing all kinds of complexity. Do you really want to scale all of the business? We want to start breaking it down and look at different areas. Let’s talk about these six areas that I want you to start rating yourself on. Okay?
We’re going to do a little mini assessment here today, if that’s cool with you guys. We’re going to do a little mini assessment to determine what aspect of your business is scalable. So if you do have a pen and you do have paper, all right, at the end of this, we’re going to kind of take all this and put it together. So I’m going to give you the six areas that we want to look at. And we’re looking at each of these six areas. So like, let’s say you’re doing this on a sheet or in a spreadsheet, on a whiteboard, maybe you list all the areas down the side, like in rows. You’ve got local moving, long distance moving, storage, packing, commercial, whatever lines of business you do. And then across the top, you’re going to want to put these six areas so that we could do this little mini assessment here. All right?
The first area that we’re going to want to put is net profit. Net profit. So when you’re looking at your local moves, I’m just going to use the same ones. Remember, you want to use whatever lines of business either you’re in currently or you’re thinking about getting in. And I want you to put net profit at the top, and then you’re going to rate all of them from a one to five. Okay. You’re going to give them a score one to five. Just based on, right now, like I said, we’ll do a simple mini assessment. One to five, where do you rate that line of business in net profit? Okay.
And maybe you’re like, Louis, I don’t really know the packing. I don’t really know specifically the long distance broken out versus the local. Well, then for this purpose of today, just to get it going, take your best guess. But take what we’re talking about today, go get the numbers, and then come back and do this assessment. This is really, really important. I don’t want to see you guys scale something that’s not worth scaling. Okay. So net profit.
The next column, essentially, an area that we’re going to assess for each line of business that you’re in, is the ease of service. Ease of service. So let’s look at local moves versus long distance moves. Which one would you say is easier to service? Maybe for you long distances easier. But typically, it would be local would be easier. Is packing easy to service? Easy to perform? How about commercial moves, are those easy? Is storage easy? So you basically want to rate this, give it a one to five, on the ease of service of each one of these areas of the business. Okay.
For those of you just joining us, it is areas of the business that you currently do like local, long distance, interstate, maybe military, commercial. Maybe do cleaning, junk removal, whatever it is you do or that you’re thinking about doing. Okay. What’s the easiest service? Give it a score of one to five. Then let’s look at the ease of sale, the ease of sale, how easy is it to sell. If you’re booking local moves, and you’re doing them over the phone, maybe you’re given an hourly rate, versus contract moves that you’ve got to go give a bid on.
You’ve got maybe military moves that you’ve got to get certain ratings done. Even long distance, you’re going out, you’re doing your on site estimates, what’s the ease of sale? Packing, storage, they’re already in on the move, now they want additional services. How easy is each one of those lines of business to actually sell? We’re assessing each area of the business right now. Give it a score of one to five.
Now, let’s talk about next column is energizing. For you personally, on a scale of one to five, how energizing is each one of those areas of business? When you think about long distance moves, maybe you get really excited and you get energized and it kind of like lights you up, you get excited. But when you think of the idea of handling storage and bringing stuff in the warehouse, it kind of drains your energy. We need to take this into consideration. Because let me explain something, when you start scaling, you are building a giant creature and you want that to be a giant, kind, nice creature. You don’t want it to be King Kong stomping on your head. You want it to be like the Big Friendly Giant.
And so, if there’s areas of your business that you just can’t stand, for some reason, they don’t energize you, they drain you. Like think about it, are they like the battery charger that help charge me up? Or are they draining me of energy? Think about that. Give it a score of one to five. Okay. Now again, you might have a one in one of these areas doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be scalable. We’re going to tie all this together. How energizing is it?
Then we look at scalability. How much can you really scale this area of the business? And if you’re looking at doing … If you’re doing local moves, and you don’t want to open up additional locations, you’re limited to the area that you’re in. If you’re doing local moves and you are willing and want to open up additional locations, then it becomes very scalable. There’s a lot of markets wherever you are that you can open up and scale it. Long distance, you could handle long distance for the entire country. So you got to look at How scalable is it? Because we don’t want to have visions and dreams of scaling this huge, huge business, and then scale parts that can only get so far and then we’re maxed out. So give it a score, one to five on scalability.
Then we’ve got to look at sustainability. Sustainability. Like when I first started, I was working out of the truck rental yard. After a few months, I was able to get an office. And the thought process was like, never turn down business. Like, we booked everything, and we’ll figure out how to service it later. I learned that that wasn’t the best way to do it. But what we did was we booked a ton of jobs and had late start times. We would start jobs 5:00, 7:00 at night at the end of the month in the summer because the jobs were going on all day. Like, I would sleep at the office three to five nights in a row because there was so much business and we weren’t turning down anything, and we were taking it all on and our sales process was strong. But it wasn’t sustainable.
Like, I couldn’t do that for a long, long period of time. So we’ve got to look at how sustainable is the business. Like maybe you have an area of the business that requires a lot of your personal time, energy, like what I was just explaining, you can’t sustain that for a long time. You can’t sustain that for a long time. So these are the six areas that we’ve got to look at. So let’s talk about how to tie all this together now. Okay. And let me just kind of give you an idea of how this works.
So what we’re talking about is we’re talking about taking different areas of your business and assessing them to decide what is scalable and what’s not. I’ve got a client, started working with him, he’s like, “Look, I want to scale I want to grow.” At the time he had, still has, but had a really good size local and long distance company storage, he was a van line agent for a major van line, and he wanted to scale, he wanted to grow and open more locations. So we had to kind of take a look at each area of the business because he was firmly rooted in what he was doing.
He was in, those of you that are van line agents you know like, you’d be a van line agent, and then you’re like on the inner circle in the van line, and you’re deep rooted, and you’re getting a lot of priority treatment. And he was one of those guys. So like, he was deep-rooted in the van line culture. But he wanted to scale, he wanted to grow. And so as we started to look at it, as we went through this process, and we looked at each line, we’re like, okay, you’re local, you’re long distance, you’re a storage, you’re a commercial. They were doing warehousing and receiving for some delivery places and some designers. What else was he doing? Packing, of course. We really drilled it down to load onlys and unload onlys.
And we took all those areas, and then we went through, we went through these six categories. We’re like, okay, let’s … Basically, I’m giving you guys a simple version of this assessment. But let’s look at the net profit for each one of those. Okay. Let’s give it a score. Let’s give it a score of one to five. This is what I want you guys do too. So give each line of work that you have a score of one to five. Then, let’s look at how easy it is to service. This is a big deal.
As we’re making a decision to grow something, we’re going to decide what’s the ease of service? And then what’s the ease of sale? How easy is it to sell this thing, this line of business? Because if something’s really hard to sell, and it takes a long time to sell, and the profitability is not there, and it’s also hard to service, this all seems simple, but it’s amazing how we don’t see something that we do every day. We’re doing it every day. And we just think that we have to keep doing it because maybe it’s bringing in a few $100,000 a year, this line of business. And we’re like, no, no, we got to keep that going. But when we really break it down, and we really look at it, we’re like, man, do I even need to keep doing that? Especially do I need to scale it? So how easy is it to scale?
Then energizing. And this is something that when I was younger, you’d hear the phrase, you got to love what you do. You go to love what you do. I’m just like, whatever. Like, I just want to make some money. And it’s so true that you might not be completely in love to where you’re living that, I don’t work a day in my life thing, right? I mean, work is work. I mean, the reality of its work is work. But you could make sure that certain aspects of what you do that you can pick and choose what areas of the business energize you, what don’t. Maybe you do long distance moves and requires you to be available all hours of the night for drivers making deliveries, doing stuff all over the country, they need fuel, they need guys.
I’m not knocking any line of business. And the reason that you’re doing this is because it is totally different for everybody. What energizes you might totally drain somebody else and they might hate it. What you like hate and don’t enjoy doing, somebody else might wake up excited to do in the morning. So we’ve got to look at this. So I had them go through this and take a look at what areas energize them. And then the scalability, how much can we actually scale this particular line? Like, where’s the cap? How duplicatable is it? How much of that piece of the model can we take and start duplicating?
And then sustainability. Can you do this for the long term. We need to start thinking about the long term. No matter what you do in your business, you want to create a model business no matter what. So whether you want to scale or not, you still have to build your business as if you were going to skip. And what that means is, you’re building a model. When you have a model, something that works really good, like a prototype, then it runs good, it’s profitable, you don’t have to be there all the time, it’s predictable, it’s sellable. So when you create a model business, you create options for yourself. You create the ability to say like … Maybe you don’t know what you want to do. And that’s totally okay.
Like, the old you’ve got to have a plan and a business plan and it’s got to all be in writing. That’s all bullshit. Like that might work … I don’t know who it works for. But the reality is, you’ve got to get to one mountaintop so that you could get to that mountaintop, and then see, okay, what’s next? Where do I want to go now. Because when you’re at that place, you’re going to feel and see completely different than when you’re at this place. And so, when you create a model, that’s what we’re doing here. That’s why we talked about stabilizing, that’s why we talked about systematizing. That’s part of creating a model.
When you do that, you get it on point, you can make the decision. You know what, this is great. I’m making the money I want to make every year, I don’t have to work that much, it runs smooth. I could go pursue other things or enjoy my life. Or you can say, what, great. Now I’ve got a business it’s worth something. Because it’s a model, right? People want to buy a model. People want to buy processes, they want to buy a turnkey business. They don’t want to buy a business that requires you to run it. They want to buy a business that they can see clearly that as the owner, they’re not going to have to buy themselves a job.
You’ll get somebody to take a business off your hands for a low dollar amount. But if you want top dollar, you want someone that has the money and understands investment and their return on their investment. And they look at, if I’m going to take this money and put it into this business, how does that weigh out to taking that money and putting it in the stock market or taking that money and putting it into real estate? They’re not saying, let me buy your business like to come run a moving company. There are those people, but that’s not where you get top dollar. But the people that have top dollar, they want to see it’s turnkey, they want to see that runs without you. Model business.
So you want to pass it down to your kids, or somebody, or maybe you’ve got a really awesome right-hand person that you want to, pass it down to, pass them down something that’s functional, something that works, something that’s sustainable over the long term. You want a franchise. You want a franchise, you need a model. If you want a franchise, you are basically saying to people, hey, don’t worry about trying to figure out how to run a moving company, I have the model. You pay me, I’ll show you the model, I’ll give you everything you need. You go run it and you continue to pay me.
So all of this stuff requires you to build a model and a sustainable model. Not something that’s going to make you money in this moving season, although, getting money quick is important. You need to build something that’s sustainable. So after I did this with this client and we went through this assessment, remember, he’s got a kind of a really good size, moving company, in a good city, van line agent, local moves, long distance moves, commercial moves, warehouse and delivery, storage, packing. I don’t know if I said commercial, commercial.
After all of that, the decision was for him, remember, this is different for everybody, the decision was, let’s keep this as is because it works as is. But moving forward, let’s just open local moving and storage companies. Streamline, no long distance, no van line affiliation, no commercial, no warehouse and delivery. Let’s keep it simple. Because as he went through the assessment, it was clear for him to see what was going to make sense moving forward. There was nothing that he wanted to … I’ve done this with other people too, and they look at it and like, man, I just need to stop doing that thing right now.
Actually, I’ll give you a perfect example. Somebody was doing military moves. And after doing this assessment with them … Again, I’m not saying military is good, I’m not saying military’s bad. It’s all about the person. It’s all about how synergistically all this stuff works with you and what you enjoy. Again, what he enjoyed and dislike is different than what other people enjoy and dislike. But he decided right away, just drop militaries. Like, it’s not giving me the net profit. It’s not easy to service. The ease of sale, it doesn’t energize me. Scalability is not there. And the sustainability wasn’t there. It was like super clear to him. Okay.
This is important. Spend a little time this weekend, work on this. The thing that separates the people that really excel in this business and in life is the difference between someone that’s committed to mastery, typically people like you that are here watching this stuff, sticking with me till the end of the video, and the people that are dabblers. The people that will go online and look for the quick hacks, the quick little fix. What’s the one little marketing source that’s going to give me the leads? I’m going to give you all the marketing sources that you need at the event, but I’m also going to teach you how to handle and manage and strategize and plan and execute real marketing strategies.
Louis, what do I say to book a job? I’m going to teach you that. I’m going to teach you the scripts. But I’m also going to teach you how to set up the systems and the processes to where jobs are being booked consistently, profitably, all year. So you’re doing it based on job costings, so every job you book is profitable. That you’re not booking a bunch of jobs, and at the end of the day, the money’s not there. My mission is to serve. My mission is to help you get what you want out of this business. Specifically, if I’ve got one skill that I’ve been able to develop in my life, it’s to be able to build a sustainable, successful, profitable, non-stressful, predictable moving company. Could I maybe do it in another business? Maybe. But you know what, I’ve got a mission for you.