When to Expand Your Moving Company - Louis Massaro

SUMMARY

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

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

Louis Massaro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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