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

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Moving CEO Mindset – Part 1

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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 …

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.

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.