How to Run a Virtual Moving Company - Louis Massaro

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to run your moving company virtually.

“Running your moving company virtually has advantages and it doesn’t mean that you have to lose any momentum or be less aggressive about selling and servicing moves.”
“Whether you have an established company with a full team of workers, or you are just coming up and looking to hire your first person, it’s no longer necessary to have a big office space where everyone can come to work every day.”
“Since the COVID pandemic, a lot of moving businesses have transitioned to having their teams work from home. And while this new way of working helps keep your overhead low by not having to own or lease a big building for your office, it also presents some new challenges for moving company owners to maintain control over their business and people.”
“There are advantages to running your company virtually, like having remote sales reps that don’t live in your city. Doing that can save you money on payroll and it really opens up your options for who you can hire. But, you’ve also got to know that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And you need to be able to feel confident and see what’s going on with your business from a distance. It’s totally possible to do that nowadays.”
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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
Whether you are an established company with a big office staff. You’ve got people in the building. You are coming up. Maybe you’re looking to hire your first person, but you’re like, man, where are they going to work? In order for me to hire somebody, I need to go out and get an office. Not necessarily. Right. Nowadays, it’s really important to make sure you keep that overhead low. So there’s a few things that we’re going to address today. We’re going to address, look, COVID’s a real thing, lockdowns are a real thing. We’ve got a lot of craziness going on in the world right now, but your business has to continue to thrive, right? You can’t be stuck. You can’t be fearful. You can’t be not doing the things you need to do. And when your people are at home, which they may have been forced to be at home for a while, or you may have made that decision to let everybody work from home, you want to make sure you’re still on top of them.
Right. You don’t want to lose that momentum. You don’t want to lose the aggressive approach to selling and servicing moves. And so I want to give you this layout here that I’ve been essentially helping private clients do with their business and break it down for you to show you that it doesn’t have to be where you see everything., right? So I want you to just think about how this will apply to you and your business, whether you’re like, hey, maybe I could start hiring some sales reps that aren’t in my city. Right. When you start talking about remote team, you broaden your reach on who you could have work for you. You might be in a city that… Maybe you’re in a big city and maybe the wages are really high, and maybe to find a good salesperson costs you a lot of money.
You might be able to find a rockstar in a smaller city somewhere in the country that’s not going to cost you as much. Right. Same thing with ops, or the reverse. Maybe you’re in a small town and you need someone that’s more of a fast talking salesperson to be able to do the sales. You’ll be able to find that. So, everything that you can do in your business, right. What we want to do is you just want to look at it and go, okay, how do we do the stuff that we do today in person at the office, but virtually? And the most important thing that you need, right, as the owner, is to maintain control and to feel control. When we talk about remote teams, that’s what most people, the feeling is, how am I going to control this?
How do I know that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do? Right. How am I going to be able to see what’s actually going on? And so that’s why we’re doing this today. So we’ve got sales, we’ve got ops. We’re going to talk everything from booking jobs to servicing moves with the premise of nobody is coming to the office. Okay? So, first thing we need to do is we need to set up what’s called your virtual command center. Okay? So if you think about when you’re at the office and you’re there, you have your way of sensing what’s going on. Right? You’re there, you walk around, you see some stuff on your computer. Maybe you call somebody on the Intercom on the phone and you talk to them. If somebody has a question, they come to your door. If you have a question, you go to their desk. Right?
That’s how you are running things day to day. So now we need to establish your virtual command center, right? And what you need to have basically up on your screen or up on your two screens on your computer to be able to run this. And so when we talk about the virtual command center, as the owner, you might have one version of this. As a sales manager, you might have another version. And as an operations manager, you might have another version. Okay? So I’m going to break all this down for you. But the thing to remember is, as an owner, that’s your CEO hat. Right? You have that hat. But if you’re also sales manager and you’re also operations manager, you’re wearing both hats, but you might have separate people for those teams. Right? So the way that everyone is set up is going to be a little bit different.
So let’s start by going through the tools that you’re going to need to be able to run this virtually. We’re in a whole different era here in 2020 of what we’re able to do without actually physically being at the office. And I could tell you from working remotely for the past few months, there are definitely areas where you become more efficient by not having that comfort of being able to just walk right up to somebody’s desk and say, hey, what’s going on, or come knock on my door if you need some help. So let’s talk about the tools that you’re going to need. First one is SmartMoving or whatever CRM that you use. You guys know that I’m co-founder of SmartMoving CRM software; runs your entire moving company. You need a CRM. Okay?
Doesn’t have to be SmartMoving. There’s other ones out there. Okay? This is obviously my recommendation, but you need to have that. Okay. So with sales, you’re going to be able to manage all of your leads, see what’s going on. You’re going to be able to watch all the follow up to see what’s all the… your remote sales team. Are they sending the emails? Are they making the calls? Are they sending the text messages? What are the notes in the system? How do they communicate that they need some help with this job? Once they book the move, where do they put the notes, so when it gets to operations, everybody knows what’s going on. Okay. So, we’re going to talk about how to use these tools in the different departments, but let me give you a general idea of what you’re going to need for your command center.
Second one is RingCentral or another phone system of your choice. You need something that is virtual. You need something that’s Voice over IP, so that people are able to run off of your phone system from home. You don’t want everybody at home working off their cell phones. Okay? You need to maintain control and distribution of calls from one central place. So, any phone system that could do this, great. Okay, if you don’t have, Ring… I’m not affiliated. RingCentral’s just a universal Voice over IP tool that’s pretty inexpensive, and allows you to have all the calls come into one place, and then you route them wherever you want them to go. You could have people all over the country. You could actually have people all over the world that are receiving calls, but they’re coming through and you’re able to monitor what’s going on.
Remember, this virtual command center, this is like what you as the either sales manager or operations manager has up on your screen to watch what’s going on. Okay? So what’s important here is that this is how you track what are your sales people really doing. Right. Are they making calls? Are they receiving calls? What about, can I listen to those calls and monitor those calls? You need a phone system that’s going to be able to allow you to do that with a dashboard that you could watch what’s happening in real time. Right. One of the keys to working from home is that anyone that is a inbound phone representative, meaning their role and function within the company is to receive calls. Okay? So whether it’s from customers or whether it’s to receive calls, maybe dispatch needs to receive calls from the movers. Anybody that needs to receive calls, whoever’s running the operation needs to be able to look and see what the status of each person is. Right.
In other words, if you’re working at home and you’re in sales and you need to step away for a minute, right, they need to put that phone in do not disturb. Their status needs to be do not disturb or their status needs to be available, or you’ll see they’re on the call, because that’s going to allow your phone system to distribute those calls evenly. Okay? Those of you that need help setting this up, go into your moving sales academy training in the foundation, there’s a whole lesson there on setting up your phone system on everything you need for the queues and how to route calls and what happens if nobody answers and all of that. That would take up this whole hour right here if we were to get into that. So, make sure you’ve got your CRM, you got your phone system, and then you need some kind of instant messenger tool. Okay.
I recommend slack. Okay. So Slack is basically just like a internal communication tool for in within your company. A lot of companies will replace the use of email internally and go to Slack instead. But how this works is basically anytime you need to communicate with your team, right, where normally maybe you’d look over and say, hey, what about this and what about that? Right. Or a salesperson might walk over to dispatch and say, hey, do we have availability for today? You could send a message through Slack. You could use any. You could literally use text messages if you wanted to, but with Slack, it allows you to set up different channels. Okay? So you could have a sales channel. You could have a dispatch channel. You could have a local dispatch, long distance dispatch, local sales, long distance sales, accounting.
So you could have different channels, so that there’s different communication going on between different people within the company. All right. I’ll even show you how we could use this with the movers as well, but you need some type of communication to where sales reps on the phone, they have a question for the manager. They have a question for dispatch. They’re able to send that message right away. And the reason I like Slack is there’s just a bunch of other cool add-on features that you could do automated bots that could ask your sales people automatically at the end of the day like what challenges did you have? How many jobs did you book? Are there any outstanding leads that we should follow up and do an authority takeover to get that job booked? So you could have that sent out automatically.
So it’s a cool tool. And, yeah, anything you want to use for instant messenger, I recommend Slack. Again, no affiliation. Number four is Zoom. Okay. You guys know the past couple of months, we did our livecast, we did them on Zoom. And the reason Zoom is so good, it’s just like instantly you’re face to face with somebody. And when you get used to that and you start using that tool as in the same way you would, as if you were in person with somebody. Like past couple of months, my private client groups usually come here to my office and we spend two full days together. We’ve done those calls over Zoom for two full days. Right. So, and the feeling as if it’s like you’re there with the person. So if you’re, let’s say you want to pop in on somebody at the office normally. Right?
And the normal scenario, you want to go walk into accounting and talk to them about something, you send them a Slack message. Hey, can we jump on Zoom? Sure. You jump on. You’re face to face. You’re talking, you record the call if you want to train somebody on something. Right. When you’re hiring for sales, you could do the interviews on Zoom. I had, when was it, two months ago, private client lost a couple sales people; two sales people, because when everybody went home, right, work from home, they didn’t have a good setup there. They weren’t equipped for it. Everybody was home. The kids were home. There was homeschooling, there was too much going on and they just weren’t capable of doing it. So I was like, all right, listen, let’s get you some more sales people.
Let’s hire four, okay, remotely, and train them all through Zoom. Run them through the same training that you guys have in Moving Sales Academy. Run them through that same thing. Right. And so instead of training them in person, you’re doing it over Zoom. You’re running through the same PowerPoint or keynote slides that you would normally train somebody on. And so just look at this as your face to face. Right. This is your face to face for anything you need. It doesn’t have to be a meeting that you set up in advance. You could literally send somebody a message. Hey, could we jump on Zoom real quick? And you’re on face to face. All right. Last one here is your truck GPS. Okay? So for dispatch, you’ve got to make sure that you know where your trucks are. And this is whether you’re working from home, whether you’re at the office, you want to… This is your virtual command center.
Okay. So the main areas of focus for sales are going to be SmartMoving, RingCentral, Slack. They might have Zoom just to be able to if you, as the owner, want to speak to them directly, or you’re going to do enhancement training, which we’ll talk about. They have that ability. And then dispatch will have SmartMoving, RingCentral, Slack, Zoom, and truck GPS, right? So we’re not going to get into administrative staff today, but you could totally have all your customer service bookkeepers, all of that operating from home as well. Either they’re operating based on objectives that they… and milestones that they have to hit, certain things that they have to accomplish, so you could tell if they’re actually doing the work. Or you could monitor their work and see what they’re doing and track their time. There’s tools out there. I think they’re called Harvest or Toggl. Just you could Google how to track remote employees in their work.
And you could see what they’re doing all day if you’re concerned that you’re not going to be able to monitor what’s going on. All right. So this is essentially your virtual command center. And then of course, there’s other stuff as well. Like you’ve got QuickBooks online for your bookkeeping. You might have Dropbox or Google Drive to store all your documents, so everybody has access to them, so that you don’t have to actually have files of things. So, that’s going to give you your command center. All right. So start thinking right now real quick about what other tools you would want to have up on your screen to be able to monitor what’s going on remotely.
All right, let’s talk about sales next. All right. So, mornings Zoom huddle. Okay. So, those of you that are familiar with the morning huddle, right, it’s a five to seven minute meeting every morning that the sales manager performs. And remember, you don’t have to have a dedicated sales manager, but someone’s got to wear the sales manager’s hat. So if that’s you as the owner, if that’s somebody that you maybe they’re a team leader and you have them fulfill the roles as a sales manager, someone has to wear that hat, because there’s too many moving parts in sales and too many areas for jobs to get lost. So the morning huddles, that five to seven minute meeting where you’re just like, hey guys, yesterday Chris, you had a great day. You made all your dials. You did all your follow ups.
I know you only booked four jobs, but they’re going to come back in today. Tommy, you got to step up the calls today. Yesterday your calls were low, the calls are what’s going to make you the money. Right. And you get everybody fired up for the morning, get the direction. Well, how many jobs are you going to book today? All right, good. Well, I’m working on that one big school job. I’m going to get that landed today. Great. What are you going to get done? You do that normally standing up in your office with your sales team. Get them fired up and get the direction going for the day. And the reason that you do it is because otherwise most people coming to work like [inaudible 00:15:53], I need a fourth cup of coffee. Right. And they get the coffee and they go back to their desk and they pull up SmartMoving and whatever you use.
And, right, that’s how they start the day. You’ve got to set the tone. These are your troops. They’re going out there to make you money. Somebody’s got to get them fired up. Right. And believe me, I didn’t want to do this back in the day. Right. You might say, Louis, but you seem enthusiastic. Because I realized that that’s what needs to be done to get to where we want to go. If you have people under you, people working for you, you have to lead those people. Right. So if you’re not going to be the person to do it, someone else has to do it. So the same way you would do it in the office with everybody standing up, you could do it in Zoom in the morning. You have a set time every morning. Everybody hops on Zoom. You have the communication. It’s like you’re face to face and you start the day. Okay.
Second one is monitor leads and calls. This right here is how you really start to manage the day-to-day of your sales operation remotely. The sales manager, whoever’s wearing that hat, is inside of SmartMoving and your phone system or your CRM, whatever you’re using and your phone system, and you’re watching. The same way you do now, right. The same way you go in now, and you go through all the leads and you see where people are. Are they doing their two plus one follow ups on the new leads? Right. Are they [cementing 00:17:27]? Are they calling messaging, email, texting? What about the jobs they quote? Are they following up five X follow up after the fact? What about when a job needs an authority takeover, right, on the third follow up so that they could get another voice and the sales manager could call and close that deal.
This all could be done remotely. Right. We just, what we do is we take away the comfort zone of being able to see everybody. But instead of seeing them, you’re now watching their actions. Right. Seeing them physically can be very deceiving. They might seem busy. They might seem like they’re on it, but what are their actions? Are they doing all their follow ups? Okay. Are they booking jobs? How about their calls? Are they making dials? Do they have talk time? My recommendation is that everyone makes a minimum of either 75 outbound calls per day, if they’re working a full eight hour shift. 75 outbound calls per day or four hours of talk time. Okay? And the reason for that is because if you’re working an eight hour day and your job is sales and your job is to call leads and take inbound calls. If you’re not getting four hours of talk time a day, what are you doing? What are you doing with that time, if half of your day isn’t spent doing the thing that your job is supposed to have you do? Right?
And the reason it’s either or is because some days the inbound calls aren’t coming in. Some days, the outbound calls are going out, but you can’t get anybody on the phone. Right. So if that’s the case, that’s where the more dials come in, right, because now what are they doing? They’re calling new leads. Right. Two times the first day. One more time the second day. Call, message, email, text. Plus, they’re also doing follow ups for people that they talk to. This is not an aggressive number. I know it might seem like a lot; 75 dials or four hours of talk time. If you work in a call center that’s doing outbound [cold 00:19:32] calling. It’s like a 200 call a day quota. Okay? So if that’s not where you are, start somewhere. Make it 50 calls a day, make it 30 calls a day.
The first step is to first identify what those numbers are and that’s why I recommend RingCentral, because you could get those numbers out of there. All right? So for sales, that’s how you really know, are they doing what they’re supposed to do? Because you’re monitoring their leads in SmartMoving. You’re monitoring their calls in RingCentral, you could see all the text messages they sent through here and the emails they sent through here because they go out automatically through SmartMoving. Right? So this way you make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do without feeling that you need to hear them and stand over them. Right? Third one is manage with reports. This whole thing, even if you just did this as an exercise where maybe you’re like, Louis, I don’t want to work remote. I like going to the office. I like my people in the office.
Great. This is not me recommending that you go remote. Let me just clear that up real quick. I’m not recommending that you go remote. This is a convenience thing. It’s a cost savings thing. It’s a safety thing. And it’s a lifestyle thing. Right? I have a private client, she’s like, look, I don’t want to have an office. I want to have people working remotely and let them work from home. I want that to be my culture. Right. And let it be a benefit of working for my company. Cool, great. I’m not going to argue with that. It’s all about what you want. But even if you did this as just an exercise of, let me pretend everybody’s remote and force yourself to run it as if you can’t see them, as if you can’t walk over to them, you’ll probably tenfold the efficiency of your business, okay?
By managing with reports, it forces you to focus in on the metrics, okay, focus in on the numbers that really matter as opposed to what you hear and what you see, okay? Are they getting the talk times and dials? What is their booking percentage? How many new leads did they take, right? You might have a rep that’s taking too many leads. You need to dial that back, right? So you want to manage with reports, again, you guys have this in your moving sales academy training. I believe it’s called manage with reports. It’s a whole lesson on all the reports that you need to run. It’s in there, but just you’re dialing in everything to be able to run it, again, without those normal senses that we all feel so comfortable with. Right?
This is, when I open my first additional location to where I wasn’t there, it was a huge shock because all of a sudden, I couldn’t see what was going on. Right? So this is really helpful too, for opening additional locations. Weekly Zoom meetings. Okay? So I recommend that you do a weekly sales meeting. No more than an hour. You get everybody. This is whether you’re doing it remotely or in person. Okay. In this case you would just do it on Zoom instead of in person, right? I’m just showing you that everything you do in person, you could do remotely. So you have your weekly meeting.
You want to pick one to two topics for these meetings a week that are based upon booking more moves, right? One or two topics that you can train your team on and discuss and improve and make sure they get the perception of how you want them to see things. Or maybe there’s a new concept that you’ve learned that you want to implement, and you’ve got to have the time to set up and discuss it with your team. That’s what these weekly sales meetings are for. Okay? They’re not for like, Hey guys, tell me what’s going on. Right? You could go around and get victories from everybody as a good way to start it off. Tell me some victories you had this week. Tell me one great thing that happened.
And you could start it off that way, and you want to end it with some motivation. You want to end it with some encouragement and some inspiration to get out there and book some moves. But it’s about taking, if all of a sudden you implemented a new script or all of a sudden, you’re like, Hey, we’re going to start doing follow up, which I hope you guys are doing. Right? We’re going to start doing follow up. You need to talk to your team about it. You need to get feedback. You need that time. That’s the time you do it. In these weekly meetings, I always recommend that you try to bring your whole sales team in and do it at once. You might have to do two shifts or two separate meetings, depending on how big your team is and forward all the calls to operations, forward them to bookkeeping, forward them to accounting, forward them to your spouse. Right?
Get somebody to take the phones for that hour, once a week. So you don’t miss calls. Okay? You don’t want to miss calls and you don’t want to be in a meeting. And everybody’s like, it just won’t work. If you’ve tried it before, I’m sure you have, where you’ve had the sales meeting. You’re like, oh, phone’s ringing, Louis says their calls are gold. We got to get those calls. And somebody leaves and they go get the phone. It just disrupts the whole meeting. Okay? And enhancement training. Okay. Enhancement training is the process of taking your existing sales team and making them better. Okay? And the way that you do that is you start by listening to their calls, right, pick five random calls from each salesperson, listen to them. Right?
So now you’ve got RingCentral or another phone system that has these functionalities to where you can either monitor and listen to the calls live. While they’re on it, you could just click on the computer, listen, and now you’re listening to the call. You could actually even do what’s called a whisper feature to where, if you’re trying to train somebody, you can log in as whisper. And let’s say, they’re talking to a customer and you could go, offer them a three-man crew. Offer them a three-man crew. The rep will hear you. The customer won’t hear you. And you could guide them through the conversation. Right? So you want to listen to five calls and you could do it through recordings as well.
Recordings is usually going to be easier because you don’t have to catch them while they’re on a call. You pick five random recordings. You’ll have your calls being recorded through your phone system. You’ll listen to them. Again, most of you are in Moving Sales Academy. There’s a lesson called Enhancement Training. Go watch it. Download the Moving Consultant Evaluation guide that’s in there, all right, that’s going to give you a whole checklist of what to listen for on the calls. And then once you identify areas where they could have improvement, you bring them in, you talk to them, you discuss those areas of improvement with them because that’s what’s going to make them better.
Too many people go and try to hire a sales team. And it’s like, Hey, go ahead. Do your thing. Let me see what you got. And they send them out there to swim or sink and wonder why their sales aren’t where they want them to be. All right? When I had 70 reps on the phone, it wasn’t because they were all rock stars, it was because Enhancement Training. We were working with them. We were coaching them. We were making them better. We were showing them the areas where they could have improvement. We’d pull up the recording of the call and we’ll say, you see right there at the end where you hesitated? And you’re like, okay, well, do you want to set it up with us? Or do you want to call around? You don’t say that. Here’s what you want to say. Okay. We actually have availability on that day. Do you want me to set you up in the morning or the afternoon? Right? Or you’re all set. Do you want to put that on a Visa or MasterCard? You want to roll into the reservation and other areas as well, right?
So when you’re listening to it and you have the evaluation guide and you’re able to identify where they can improve, you take somebody that’s okay on the phones and you turn them into a rock star. And so you have the whole conversation with them. You set up a Zoom call, right, and you have the whole Zoom call right there. You could pull up the recording, listen to it together. Everything you can do in person, okay, you could do through Zoom. All right? So you’re like, okay, Louis, that’s great and everything, but what about operations? What about movers? Right.
Now, of course, operations, movers, it’s not going to be as ideal of a situation or as easy of a transition. But if you’re forced to go on some kind of work from home or you just feel that that’s what you want to do for safety. Or you feel like, Hey, you know what? This might be a nice model that I can implement into my business to where I don’t need to go get that office and commit to that rent right now. Let me run this off of a very low overhead. You could still do your operations with it as well. So first thing is crew text confirmations, okay. This is something that you do it right out of SmartMoving. If you have crews that you want to see who’s coming in tomorrow. In other words, get confirmation that they’re going to be there. Let them know, Hey, you’re needed. These are the jobs you’re doing. I need confirmation.
SmartMoving will send a text message out to them. And all they have to do is reply I believe with just a C. You guys probably know if you let me know down in the chat. I think it’s just a C, it’ll show up in your system that, Hey, this mover confirmed that they’ll be there tomorrow when you need them to be there. Right? Save so much time instead of having to text everybody or call everybody or wait until they come back and talk to them. So you’ve got that going on, right? So now your crews will be there and remember your dispatcher, whoever’s wearing that hat, again, it might be you, is setting up the jobs and setting up the crews from home, right, in your virtual command center.
You send out the text, you know they’re coming in and now we’re talking about trying to go totally virtual. Right? So you don’t have to go all the way to the extreme. You could dial it back a little bit and have some stuff virtual and some stuff in person, but assign trucks. You probably already assign trucks to drivers, meaning this is your truck when you’re here. If you’re not here and we need to use the truck, I’m going to give it to somebody else. But, I always like to assign trucks to a particular driver because then they take care of it. Right? They make sure it’s clean. They make sure they’re more accountable for what’s going on. Well now you truly assign that truck to the driver, meaning you give them two sets of keys, right, and it’s like, you could check in on them periodically to see how the truck is or have them shoot a video and send it to you. But they’re responsible for that truck. Either they are parking it where they live, or there’s a yard that you have where you keep everything.
But for the most part, they’ve got the truck, they’re responsible for it. And there’s no need to be there in the morning to assign trucks. But then you’re like, Louis, what about boxes? And what about equipment? All of that. And my take is, ideally I want them in my warehouse. Ideally, for me, I’d like to be working at the office. Okay? But we’ve got to be able to adapt to the times. Right? We’ve got to be able to be in a position where we’re not scared to do this if we need to, to where, if we go on lockdown again, you’re like, Hey, I’m on it. I’m going to make the shift. I’m going to pivot. We’re not going to slow down because of this.
Well, if you can’t have your equipment and your boxes and everything they might need locked up in the office, you could do an equipment container, okay, with camera. So this would be like a storage, I hate to use the word pod because I got to trademark on that. But basically a storage unit that you deliver to the customer’s house, right? So even if you don’t have your own, you could literally rent one, put it where your trucks are parked. Or if you park your trucks in a self-storage unit, you could even put one in there. Now you can get a camera that operates off battery. You could even do a ring, if you’ve seen the rings where basically you monitor a whole thing from your phone, somebody rings the doorbell and you could go on your phone, pull up the app, see them and have a talk with them.
I don’t know how much they are, but they’re cheap, okay, for what they are. You could put one of those in there on battery and say, Hey guys, when you get there, you put the storage unit or the container on a combination lock. When you get there, hit the ring from the inside, let me know what it is. Let me know what you’re taking. You want to make sure you’re getting truck inventory. All right? So we talked about slack before. You could have it set up in there where there’s already a template set up for truck inventory. Those of you that have my truck inventory sheet know that actually all of you should have it. It’s in the operations training under dispatch. Okay. That you need to have them every morning. How many pads? How many straps? How many two wheelers? How many four wheelers. How many 1.5s? How many 3.0s? What’s on the truck?
Well, when they go take new equipment, they’re going to need to let you know what they’re taking. You could have it all set up in a template. They could go to the app on their phone, fill out their inventory, let you know what they’re taking. Okay. They could even communicate with you right there in that very cost effective, battery operated camera that you could talk to them from your phone, wherever you are. So you’re not even stuck at your desk, and figure out what’s going on. So that’s an option there. Then electronic paperwork. You’ve got all of your… you have no need to get them paper bill of ladings. You’ve got all your bill of ladings if you do storage, all of that is electronic. You assign them a truck. You assign them a tablet. That’s all run again through SmartMoving, and all the paperwork your customer signs, is done electronically. There’s no need to have them somehow scan copies of paperwork to you, or bring paperwork to the office. It’s all electronic.
And then perfect move pictures. So in the operations training, there’s a less called the perfect move and what this is it’s, I give you a checklist in there of what the movers should do the minute they get to the job, the minute they’re ready to leave for the drop off. Right? When they’re done with the drop off, all of that. And the idea is that you create what is your ideal, perfect move and train your movers on it. Instead of like, Hey guys, go out there and do a good job for this person. No, train them on customer service, train them on as soon as they walk up to the door, you want the driver to shake hands of the customer. Maybe not right now with all this going on. But you might have different protocol.
You might have had to update your perfect move currently. You show up, maybe they got the gloves and the mask, just to show that concern. Whatever it is, you’ve got to have that outlined and in the perfect move, what I like to do in there is once you get to the house and you put down your floor runners, and you cover the rails and you protect the door jams, I like to have them take a picture of that and send it to dispatch. This way you know it’s done. So this takes away the need, I still think spot checks are really important going out and checking on your movers. But if you’re in lockdown, people are working from home or you don’t have that ability because you have the whole team working from home, they send pictures of stuff like that.
Once the truck is loaded, I want to see how the back of the truck is loaded. Take a picture, send it to dispatch. Right? Once the truck’s empty, take a picture, send it to dispatch. So this is if you’re like Louis, we’re operating remotely now. It’s been tough. Implement all this. If you’re like, look, I want to scale, but I don’t want to go get an office. This is how you could do it. If you’re like Louis, I want to continue to work in my office. Great. Pretend that you can’t see the people. Or maybe your office is set up to where you’re maintaining six feet. I’m maintaining six feet from only Chris and I in the office. Nobody else is here. So I’m maintaining the six feet. You could still use all these tools.