3 Big Moves: How to SCALE Your Moving Company

Hey, my friends, it's Luis Massaro. And welcome to a Three Big Moves edition of the Moving Mastery Podcast.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about how do you scale your moving company? You know, how do you grow it in a way where it's done without the extra stress, without the extra aggravation, without the extra problems that can sometimes go along with growing your business? You know, scaling your business is really about first developing something that works, something that's dependable, something that's duplicatable. And then, you know, you really need to be able to create some freedom for yourself to be able to back away from the current business. Before you could start thinking about growing into new cities, growing into new, you know, avenues. For example, if you're doing local and you want to go in the long distance, or maybe, maybe you're in long distance, but now you want to have a nationwide fleet of tractor trailers hauling moves all over the country. Whatever your definition of scale is, go back and listen to an earlier episode of Three Big Moves. It's called you'd next Level. And it's about deciding what your next level is.

Where are you going? Because before you start climbing the wall to success, you. You need to make sure that you have the ladder on the correct wall. Because if you have it on the wrong wall, you're going to do a lot of work, and it's not going to bear the fruit that you want it to bear. So in this episode of Three Big Moves, I want to talk to you about three big moves. Three things that you must do before you start scaling your business. And you know what? It's not something that a lot of people talk about. One day I want to open more locations. One day I want to franchise my business. One day I want the freedom to be able to take time off and have other people running my company. But you know what? That one day can be sooner than you think that one day can be one year from now, without a doubt. Because if you put the things in place, if you have a plan, if you know where you're headed and you stick to that plan, you can start scaling your company within a year from today. Okay, you might think that you could start doing it sooner, but I want to give you three. Three big moves that need to happen before you do that. So that's what we're going over today in this episode of Three Big Moves.

Part one, creating the blueprint. You know, before you start building a house, you don't just, you know, grab a hammer, some nails, and some wood and start building, right? You need to create a blueprint. You need to have a map, you need to have a system to guide you on exactly what it is that you're building. It's the same way with your business, right? You know, when I started, I didn't have the blueprint. I just, you know, was in this mindset of, you know what? I'm going to grow, I'm going to grow, I'm going to open more locations and more locations. I didn't really have it mapped out, and that's the mistake that I made early on. And I don't want to see you make that mistake. Because before, before you start to even think about scaling the business, there's really three steps that you need to take before that. And the first step is creating your blueprint. So if you've already gotten clear on what that next level is for you, and if you haven't, go back and listen to one of the earlier three big moves episodes called you'd next level, which will help you get clear on what that means for you. Just because you're in the moving business, just because you own a moving company doesn't mean that you share the same aspirations as everybody else that's looking to grow and scale their company, right? That can mean different things for different people. Some people say, you know what, I just want to be a local mover in multiple cities, right? Others want to be the biggest mover in their city. Or, you know, sometimes people want to franchise their business, right? They want to have people buy franchises from them. You know, others want to have an interstate fleet that's hauling shipments all around the country. Whatever it is for you, it's important that you get crystal, crystal clear on what that is. Because the problem with heading out into this, you know, adventure, if you will, of scaling your business without a map, right? You're essentially heading out into the woods, into the forest. Without a map of where you're going, you're going to get lost, you're going to get sidetracked, you're going to get distracted, you're going to see new shiny objects and opportunities that you think are the way to go. And you're going to constantly be zigzagging, chasing down opportunities. If you really want to grow, if you really want to have a business that you can run that's larger than your business now that runs without your input, and day to day, you know, being there right in the drudgery, in the day to day of the business, you need to get clear and not just assume that all growth is good growth. Okay? So the first thing you want to do is create yourself a blueprint, alright? And what that means is just get really clear on what you want. You know, sit down with a pen and a pad and just write out what the options are, what the possibilities are. You know, get this out of your head. I'm a big believer in putting pen to paper and getting things out of your head because it allows you to really organize your thoughts that you could otherwise not organize within your mind. If you get it on paper and you start writing it out, you could get clear on what it is you want. So, for example, you might say, well, I want to be the biggest moving company in my city. I want to do local moves, long distance moves, international moves, office moves. Well, that's great, but what's the actual outcome? How much money are you looking to make? Because you really want to back that into the effort that you're going to put into it. If your goal is to make.

A quarter million dollars a year for yourself, you don't need to be the biggest mover in the city. You don't need to do local, long distance, international storage, office moves, right? So first you have to get clear on what you want so that you're not doing unnecessary work and you're not doing the wrong work. Right? You don't have the ladder leaned up against the wrong wall as you start climbing, because then all you have, then you're going to have to come back down the ladder, take the ladder, move it to the correct wall once you figure out what that is, and start climbing all over again. And this is a mistake a lot of people, including myself, make, which is, you know, we just start to grow without a clear plan of what we're going to do. I mean, that's something that I learned later on in my career as I started to get distracted. Right. My initial plan was to open local moving companies throughout the country, you know, and as I opened six moving companies, I said, you know what? I'm going to get into long distance. What was that? That was a distraction, right? That was a shiny object. That was not really part of my initial plan. My initial plan was to just open local moving companies. You know, you could tell that based on where I opened them. I mean, I had offices in, you know, Seattle, Denver, Orlando, Boston, South Florida. These weren't, you know, geographically positioned to handle long distance. The plan was, let's find cities that are going to be great markets for a local moving and storage company. Right? So what did I allow to happen? I allowed someone else, group of people working for me to essentially persuade me that we should start doing long distance. We were already getting all these leads, all these calls.

It looked like it would be an easy thing to do, not that it was wrong by any means. The point that I'm trying to illustrate here is that it wasn't part of my initial plan. And because I didn't have my initial plan crystal clear, and because I didn't understand the, you know, the obstacles and the booby traps that lay out there as you venture out into growing your business.

I decided to go for it, right? But if you're crystal clear on what it is you want, you know, you won't fall, you won't fall into the trap of all these different shiny objects. Cause let's face it, once you start becoming successful in your business, okay, at any level, you're going to have everyone that wants to come to you with their ideas with good intention. Or maybe they'll say, you know what, we should open this or we should franchise your business or we should do open up in this other city. I'll go there and I'll run it for you.

You need to be clear on what you want or you're just going to end up again. And I know I'm drilling in on this point, but it's really, really important that before you start building your empire, you have a blueprint of exactly what that looks like. And that doesn't mean that you can't make modifications along the way, but it does mean that before you make those modifications, you're going to refer back to that blueprint and you're going to make sure that if you're going to make those modifications, that there is a really good reason that you're going to steer away from your original game plan and decide to go in a different direction. And if that's the case, it's time to make a new blueprint, right? It's not time to throw out the old blueprint and go, oh, you know what, I'm going in a different direction. You need to make sure that if you want to modify that original blueprint that you create a new one. All right, you know, part of this initial phase of scaling your business, and you know, again, I'm going to say this, this could be done within a year. We have a high level group that I meet with four times a year. And basically it's this process that I'm talking to you about today, right? It's all about creating a Blueprint and the other steps that we're gonna go through on this podcast to be able to scale your business. If you're ready to do that, you could start today, lay out your blueprint, go into the next phase and within a year you'll be ready to scale. You don't wanna take the shortcuts. There are no shortcuts to success. And if there are, there, they'll be short lived and you'll be right back where you started. So again, just get clear, get out a piece of paper, get a pen, get really clear on what you want. It's not something you're gonna do in 10 minutes. Write out where you want to take your business, then look at it and say, you know what? Is that right for me? Is that feasible? Is this what I want? Or is this what somebody else is telling me I should have, or society's telling me I should have? Or am I influenced by social media and what other people are telling me I should have? You know, maybe you don't want to even go to the next level, right? Maybe you just want to have your business structured and set up in a way where you're making the same money you're making now, but it runs smooth, it runs without your day to day involvement in the business.

Part 2 the systems.

So now you've laid out what it is you want to do. You know, we often end up as business owners, small business owners, we often end up feeling that, you know, the growth and the expansion and things like that will just come in time or come when, you know, an opportunity presents itself. And the reality is that could happen. But if you want to take control of your future, if you want to take control of the destination of your business and where you're headed, you need to set up and create systems. You need dependable and duplicatable systems that run your business without your personal input, without your personal effort, you know, and that's really the key to all of it, right? So I hear a lot of people say, you know what, I want to franchise my moving company. Well, one of the first things you need to do right after you create your blueprint is create the systems, right?

Exactly. How is your business going to run? You can't count on people to run your business. You need systems to run your business and then you find the people to run those systems, right? But if you're going to scale, it's crucial that you have dependable and duplicatable systems. Okay, let me explain where I went wrong with this. So I had My first location, I was in Denver, Colorado, which is what I consider to be my first real location.

But when I went there, you know, I was, you know, you've heard my story before, I'm sure I was working out of the truck rental yard and just figuring it out as I went along. And before long, I had good enough. What you what I thought I could call systems, where the business was running, right? The business was rocking. Within a few years, we were one of the largest moving companies in Denver. And it was great. We're making a ton of money, servicing a ton of moves, and I felt that I had the systems down. So I decided to expand. And what I soon realized is that the systems that I had were not the systems that I needed for expansion. Okay, Meaning it's one thing to have a quote unquote system when you're there every day overseeing it, when you see everything that's going on. But right now we're talking about scaling your company. And if you're going to scale your company, you don't want to scale it and have to watch everything that's going on, right? What's the point of doing that? You want to be able to scale it, remove yourself from the situation, watch the business from afar, essentially work on your business and not in your business. And in order to do that, you need solid, dependable, duplicatable systems. So how do you go about doing that? The easiest way to start creating your systems is to stop with everything that you're doing and ask, all right, is this something that is duplicatable? Is this something that works and can we just make it to where we do it this way every single time? Meaning like let's say your dispatch process, right? The way that you dispatch your crews in the morning, you send them out, put that, you know, write that down. What, step by step, what is the process for doing that? Write that down. And if that works, if you feel good about, you know, the way that you're doing it now, and it doesn't need to be modified, well, now you have a system for the way that you dispatch your moves, right? So that's just the beginning. Now you need that same system, that same process for every area of the business. And each area of the business needs to be able to tie in together with a certain level of synergy with the other areas of the business, right? Because if, you know, dispatch is doing things one way and sales is doing things a whole different way, and they don't mesh together, then you don't have a dependable duplicatable system in your company. What you have is some people off on one side of the office doing things one way, some people on the other side doing things a different way. And you're going to have a lot of balls dropping, if you will, a lot of issues, but you may not notice them because you're there. You're seeing what's going on. You're able to put out the fires.

The idea of all this is for you to stop being a firefighter, right? You may have been doing it for the last 20 years. You may have. You know, you may be doing $10 million a year. But you know, what. What if you were able to remove yourself from the situation? And I know that might sound scary, you know, if you've been there and you've been operating the business a certain way, and you're just used to having that control, it might sound scary to say, you know what? Let me create systems and let those systems run the business, and then get people to run those systems. It's really the only way. You know, you don't want to be there. I mean, you want to be able to step away from the business. You want to be able to watch it from afar, especially if you want to scale. If you want to scale or if you want to actually have a life, you need to be able to work on your business and not work in your business. So the point I'm trying to make is that because I, you know, went ahead and I started expanding without having the systems, the true systems that I needed, that would run without me being there to oversee it, without me being there to put out the fires. I ended up, you know, with. With, you know, but I opened up three, four locations. By the time I realized, oh, man, like, I need a different type of system here to run all these without being on top of them day to day. So think about it. Continue to think about it. But before you start taking the action, lay out your blueprint, get very clear on what it is you want to do, and then go to work on creating your systems. And you might say, louis, that sounds like a lot of work. But you know what? You're not just going to, you know, casually scale your business. You're not going to casually double your business. You're not going to casually start franchising and become the biggest mover in the country. There's going to be a lot of work involved. So after you create your blueprint, create your systems, take the time. Maybe it takes you six months, maybe it takes you a Year. But get really clear, get really focused, build those systems and then we can move on to the third step before you start scaling.

Part three, Freedom. So the third step in scaling your business is creating freedom for yourself.

You might say, Louis, I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to scale, I want to hustle, I want to work. I'm not afraid of the work. Why would I want to create freedom? This isn't about creating freedom to just go on vacations, although you definitely want to make sure you do that as well. But the point of creating the freedom is the freedom of the day to day. Meaning, you know, you're no longer booking moves, you're no longer dispatching moves, you're no longer putting out fires. It's not that you're creating freedom not to go to work. You're creating freedom so that your work becomes working on the business. Your freedom creates space so that you could work on your plan to scale your business. The only way that you're going to be able to successfully scale your business. Okay, and this is something that it's very hard to see the work that's involved. It's very hard to see how things drastically change when maybe, let's say you have one office now and you want to go to two offices, or you have two offices, you want to go to five offices. Whatever the case may be, your current vantage point where you could see from now totally changes when the dynamic of your business changes. So in order for you to successfully scale the after you create your blueprint, after you create your systems, you need to create freedom for yourself. And what does that mean? That means removing yourself from the day to day drudgery of the day to day operations, right? Give yourself more time, more energy to really be clear and think through growing. You know, I know how much work goes into running a moving company. And it's very difficult to have that.

Mindset and that clarity if you're just grinding and grinding and grinding. You cannot see things clearly. You know, if you're in a football game and you're a player on the field, right, and you're getting tackled constantly, you can't see things clearly. You need to be able to remove yourself from the field. You need to be able to remove yourself from the sideline. You need to be able to get up in the owner's box with the binoculars and see what's going on without having to be on the field playing the game. Okay? At that point, you can make more strategic decisions about what your next move is going to be. How you're going to set up this new location, how you're going to develop this new franchise, how you're going to start this long distance fleet or international shipment division, whatever it may be. Creating freedom is that missing piece that a lot of people don't hit on their road to growing and scaling their business, right? And once I finally realized that, in order for me to really, truly successfully scale my business in a way where it wasn't just bigger, but it was bigger, it was making more money, and it required less and less and less of my involvement, like, that's when things changed, right? So it's important not to miss this step. Once you build your blueprint, once you create your systems, start removing yourself from the day to day, little by little, start delegating to the people you have on your team. Okay, we talked about first creating the systems, then having the people to run the systems. Well, now you need to look at everything you do. How do you take everything that's on your plate and put it on somebody else's plate? And, you know, when we talk about delegation, I hear a lot of people say, oh, you know, well, nobody could do it as good as me. And, you know, it's just going to be too much work to train them to do it. And, oh, my God, what if they mess up and they do something wrong? You know what? That's understandable that you might have those fears, but you need to get over them. And you can remove yourself from the day to day, and other people can do it as good as you. Other people can probably do it better than you in some circumstances. And even if they cannot, even if you're the best person to do it, do you want to continue to do it yourself forever? Because if you do, you're not going to scale. If you do, you're not going to grow. And if that's where you're at, cool. No judgment here, right? But this episode's about how do you scale your business? How do you grow your business? And if you can't delegate to other people, you're gonna have a really hard time scaling. So what you want to do is start with all the repetitive tasks that you do on a daily basis, look at all the simple things that you do and say, all right, this gets done the exact same way every single time. How can I document this process and have somebody else do it? Right? Maybe I could create a PDF with screenshots. Maybe I could do a, you know, I could do a video recording of my screen while I explain, you know, how to order supplies or, you know, how to pay the bills or, you know, anything that's like a repetitive task. How, how to confirm moves, right? Make a list of everything you do on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis. That's repetitive. That's gonna be your easiest, quickest way to have some quick victories in delegating is taking that stuff just again, you're creating a system for it and you're passing it on to somebody else. And don't make the mistake of saying, you know what, I can't explain how I do it. I just do it. Because you can, right? You can explain it. You just need to take the time and slow down and write it out and think about, okay, what do I do first, what do I do second? All right, you may have been doing it for 20 years and you don't really know how you do it, right? You just work magic. But if you sit and you deconstruct it, you could figure it out and start passing that stuff on. It's so important that you know before you start to scale, you remove yourself from the day to day. You know, I talk to companies all the time, I talk to owners all the time. And you know, the people I talk to are not the people that are.

They're not like, oh, poor me, my business is so hard. The people I speak to are the people that want to grow. That's how they become clients. That's how I end up working with them because they want to grow.

Their thing is they're so busy, they're so swamped, but they want to grow. When I say we need to create freedom for you, and I explain what I'm explaining to you now, it all starts to make sense. And that been the missing link. You know, a lot of times people feel like, work, work, work, hustle, hustle, hustle is the way to do it. But if you can't leave, if you can't go on a three week vacation without your office falling apart, I shouldn't even say without your office falling apart, if you can't go on a three week vacation and things don't continue to run as smooth as they run when you're there, then you're not ready yet to start scaling your business. All right, disagree with me. If you want, go out and do it and you know, take that next step if you want. But I'm telling you, these are the steps if you want to do it successfully, because it doesn't matter how many offices you open, it doesn't matter how many trucks you get it doesn't matter how many franchises you sell if you can't keep them running successfully and profitably. I know a lot of people out there with multiple locations that aren't making any money, all right? Or they have one location that was the breadwinner and other locations that are sucking that location dry. Don't let that be you. If you open another office and that office starts having problems and you don't have the freedom to get in a car, to get on a plane and go to that office and resolve those problems, you're gonna have, you're gonna have a big headache on your hands, right? When you open a new location, when you open a new division, you need to be free to be able to spend the time there, if needed, the same way you did when you opened your first business. All right? So again, before you start scaling, create your blueprint of exactly where you want to go. Then spend the time, whether it's six months, whether it's a year, and develop your systems. I can't stress this enough. Develop your systems. Your business will be made up of your systems. Right now, if you're, if you're crushing it and you're doing great and you don't have systems, and I can tell you your business is made up of you. And you may be a genius, you may be the, you know, the best operator within the moving business, and that's great. But if you want to scale, you need to remove that from yourself and from you being the, the bottleneck for everything that happens in your business. And you need to create systems that are dependable, that are duplicatable, and that don't need your personal input or effort. And then you have to start delegating. You have to start inch by inch removing yourself from the situation. You should look to remove yourself from some kind of task every single week. At least one thing, you should be moving on to somebody else's plate. Moving on to somebody else's plate. Your time is more valuable. That's why you hire people to work for you, right? So if you need to hire more people, if you need to hire a virtual assistant, you know, you could hire a virtual assistant maybe just for, you know, 10 hours a week to take care of some of the small, repetitive tasks. You need to create freedom before you could start to scale.

Alright, so now you're ready to scale. You've created your blueprint, you've created your systems, which have taken you time. You've created the freedom for yourself which has taken you more time. Now you're in a position now, you could see things from a whole different vantage point, right? It's easier to see where you're headed if you're standing at the top of the mountain. And if you're in a position right now where you don't have the clarity on where you're going, you don't have the systems, you don't have the freedom. It's like standing at the base of a mountain and trying to see what's on the other side of the mountain. But once you have those three things in place, now you're standing at the top of the mountain, and you could decide, all right, what is my next move? What is it that I want to do? How do I want to scale? And now you start to craft that plan for really rolling that out. You know, this is. And I can tell you this is something that you could do in a year, you know, and for some of you, that may sound like a long time, and for some of you, that may sound like, you know, not a lot of time at all, right? I have a small group that I work with. They come to my office. It's, you know, limited to 10 people. They come to my office four times a year. We go through these, you know, the blueprint, the systems freedom and scaling. Each one of those, we spend one full day working on that specifically. I speak to them every month. They speak to one of my accountability coaches every week. And within a year, we guide them on this path of scaling their business. You know, I wanted to share it with you here today because, you know, it's a very limited program. It's very expensive. We limit the groups to 10 people each. And if it is something that you might be interested in, you could go to louismassaro.com mastermind I don't know when the next opening will be or what the availability is, but it is really expensive. But if it's something, you know, you're really at that point where you're looking to scale, you could definitely check that out. But the point here is that I see so many companies fail. I watched myself almost fail. You know, I shouldn't say that I did fail, right? I recovered, but I failed several times. And it's really out of the lack of having a plan, right? We all know if you have a plan and you stick to it and you remain focused, it's really hard to lose, right? And in this day and age especially, you know, you go on social media and everyone's talking about hustle, hustle, grind, grind, work, work, grow, Grow, you know. You know, I talk about getting to the next level, too, but I want to clarify that it takes work. I want to clarify that it takes a plan. And you know what? There's so many people that I've talked to that are crystal clear on where they want to go. They're building their systems, they're creating their freedom, and they are scaling their business. You know, the question is, are you going to be one of those people or do you want to accept, you know, accept your business where it is today? Which is totally cool, right? Totally cool. You don't have to grow your business, you don't have to scale your business, but don't, you know, beat your head against the wall trying to figure out why you can't scale your business when you're not putting the fundamentals in place, when you're not laying the foundation before you even lay the foundation, creating the blueprint of where you want to go. So create your blueprint, create your systems, create your freedom, and you will scale your business to whatever it is that you decide that you're going to do. Listen, I hope this was helpful until I talk to you guys next time, make sure you go out there every single day. Profit in your business and thrive in your life. Thrive in your life. I'll talk to you soon. Take it easy.

All right, my friend, that's it for this week's episode of Three Big Moves. I'd really love to know what you guys are thinking about this particular episode. Do me a favor, jump onto itunes real quick and leave me a review about this episode. I look at my Apple podcast reviews to get an idea what you guys are thinking, what you're liking, what you're not liking. So please go there and leave me a review. It really helps more people to discover the podcast and really shows engagement in the community and lets me know what you're thinking. I'd love to know what you're thinking and be able to interact with you. And I do that through Apple podcast reviews and also through Instagram. So hit me up. TheMovingMasteryPodcast. I'd love to see where you're listening to this right now, what device you're listening on, and what you learned from this particular episode. So take a screenshot of you listening to this right now. Drop me a message on Instagram. TheMovingMastery podcast. I'm always giving shout outs to those that are listening and returning direct messages to those that are listening. So make sure you show me you're listening to the Moving Mastery podcast. It really helps me keep this thing going and not feel like I'm just sitting here talking to myself. So thanks so much for being a part of this one. If you're looking to make some big moves in your business, you definitely need to check out my Moving Mastery Monthly Training program. This is where I do a live broadcast training every single month for our members on increasing profits and running a smoother running moving company. Everything from the latest marketing and what's working today for moving companies to the systems and processes for running a smooth, smoother and more profitable business. I'm live with you every single month, taking your questions and coaching you to the next level. And right now you can get the last three months of the program for just $1. That's $300 worth of training for a $1 trial when you try out our Moving Mastery Monthly program. Because I want you to get in there and I want you to see the quality of training so you get those three trainings unlocked right away. Then every single month we go live where I do a live Q and A and coaching. Plus you'll get all the recordings in your members area to watch at any time. That's live training, Q and A and coaching with me every single month plus all the recordings in your members area and you get all that for just 97 bucks a month. You'll get a brand new training every single month on things like marketing, sales, operations and dispatch, finance, leadership. All specifically for your moving business. All that every single month in your members area. LewisMassaro.com monthly that's Louis L O U I S Massaro M A S s a r o.com monthly that's a dollar trial and it's a limited time only so I'm not sure when you're listening to this. So if you go there and it's gone, I apologize because there's hundreds of students in there right now and this is your opportunity to join them and take your moving company to the next level. LewisMassaro.com monthly.

Sa.