Best Of: Increasing Profits In Your Moving Company

Hey my friends, it's Louis Massaro and welcome to another best of edition of.

The Moving Mastery Podcast.

In this best of episode, you'll get.

A behind the scenes look at some of the live training that I do for moving companies. These might be clips from my three day live seminars or live online training that I do. Or they might be some of my Moving Mastery coaching trainings and highlights from those that I do every single month for our members.

I know you're really gonna like these.

Because it's more of a deep dive tactical training and a look at some.

Of the work that I do as.

A trainer and success coach.

I focus so much on helping you.

Take your moving business to that next level by implementing new processes and strategies all to help things run smoother while increasing profits. That's exactly what these special episodes are all about. These, these are my best of trainings right here and exclusively on the Moving Mastery Podcast. In these live trainings, a lot of times I'll have a presentation on the screen or a flip chart where I'll be drawing some stuff out. You won't be able to see that, but you'll still get an idea of what I'm talking about. So make sure you break out your notebook and pen for these episodes and.

Take some really good notes because there's.

Some valuable training on what you need to implement to grow your moving company.

And if you want to take a.

More of a, you know, deep dive training like this and be able to interact with me in this type of coaching, make sure you join our Moving Mastery Coaching program. This is the program where I go live with our members every single month and train on a new strategy or I coach you on what to implement in your business to reach that next level. This is our monthly subscription program where I do a live Q and A and actual live training with our members every single month. It's called Moving Mastery Coaching and you could Access it at LewisMassaro.com coaching that's LewisMassaro.com coaching. L O U I S M-A S S A R O.com coaching to get more deep dive training similar to this.

And I can tell you, if you.

Like this, you're going to love that coaching program, but I'll let you see for yourself.

So let's go ahead and jump into.

A Moving Mastery podcast. Best of training.

You're all in business. We're all in business to make money and not make money just in the sake of, you know, oh, my business did a million this year. My business did 2 million this year. How much money was left over after all of the expenses, right? That's really what it's all about. You want to provide good service to your customers, but you want to make a profit, all right? You want to have cash flow that's able to flow in through the top, take care of expenses and then have a good amount left over, all right? So that we're starting this week off with increasing profits. So we're going to, you know, talk about how to increase profits and we're going to talk about how to track profits. Let's talk about the movers profit circle, all right? We need to understand how the profits come into the company. And we know it's very basic, right? Money comes in, expenses go out, there's profits left over. But let's talk about how you can be increasing those profits because it's not all about doing more, okay? You might not need to actually do more moves. You might not actually need to increase your volume or your overall gross revenue. You might be able to keep it the same, but tighten up and have more money left over at the bottom, right? Because at the end of the day, like I said, it's really about what you're able to put in your pocket and take home. You're not in business to just build a business for the sake of building a business. You're in business because you want to create something great. And in order for it to be great, it needs to be profitable. I mean, that's the mark of a good business, okay? You provide good service and you're able to take care of yourself, your family, your employees and make some money. So it all starts with marketing, okay? And the reason it all starts with marketing is because if you were to just start from scratch, okay? And I know there's a lot of people, I saw some of the names on here, I know some of you, a lot of you, I don't know. But I know there's people on here that are doing multiple, multiple millions of dollars a year. And I'm sure there's people that are maybe just getting started as well. Everything we're going to talk about this week, all solid principles, okay? To get you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. It's all the same principles. It's just applying them at your specific level, okay? So if you don't have any business, you need to generate business, you need to generate leads, okay? So that all starts with marketing. So that's where the movers profit circle starts, all right? So when it Comes to marketing, first thing you need to do is test. Okay? It's all about testing. There are a lot of lead sources out there. There are a lot of, you know, different things you could do with direct mail, with SEO, with pay per click. You know, lead sources, Yelp, you know, Facebook ads. There's a lot that we could do. We're going to dive deep into marketing tomorrow. Okay. Today we're talking about how it all relates to profit. But the first thing you need to do is be willing to test everything. Okay? Because I can give you great lead sources, and I'm going to do that tomorrow. However, they work differently in different places, right? Certain, you know, lead sources might work really great in one city, but in another city, they don't work as well. But there's some different ones that work really well. All right, so these are the principles you want to follow, and it's test everything, right? Give it a shot. We're going to dive more into this tomorrow. Tracking. You have to track your return on investment for all of your marketing. Okay? This is something that, when I figured out that, you know, what if I know how much money each specific lead source is bringing, bringing the company, okay? And I could track that and know that I could tweak it and I can make adjustments, okay? When I first started, it was all about yellow pages, all right? We were spending a ton of money in yellow pages to the point where it was up to 250,000amonth between all my location and yellow pages. And you know what? When things shifted around 2008 and people started to move more online, really, you know, it was kind of when, you know, the iPhones came out and more and more people were doing online searches. That's when, you know, it was scary at first, right? Like, oh, my God, where are we going to get business from? However.

Once you are able to test different things and track them, you're able to make adjustments. Why? Because, you know, back in the day, Yellow pages, you're stuck for the year. You committed for the year. Now, just about every marketing source that's out there, okay, you could start, see if it's working. If it's not working, back out of it. Okay? I'm going to show you how to do this tomorrow, and I'm also going to show you how to calculate your marketing roi. The actual formula for how to do that. That alone is what allowed me to take my business from 10 million a year, my moving company, to 20 million a year. Because when you have the confidence to know that you can Spend money on marketing and you know for certain whether it's working or it's not working, then it's just a matter of testing, tracking, and tweaking. Right? Making the adjustments necessary. You know, it's not just black and white. You know, let's say you're doing a pay per click campaign, right? Pay per click. For those of you that don't know, it's, you know, when you're on Google and you do a search and there's paid listings, okay? Before you get to the organic listings, you're paying for those. It's called pay per click. Well, just because you have pay per click, and I know a lot of people have tried it and don't like it because they lost money. And it's very easy to lose money with pay per click if it's not being done correctly. All right, Wednesday, we're going to talk about website strategies, pay per click, landing pages, and how to actually optimize your website to make money off of it. But the thing to understand here is that you have the ability to go into these campaigns and tweak them as necessary. Okay? I'm not going to spend too much time on marketing today because tomorrow we're going to dive deep into that. We're going to talk about exactly what to do to test track, tweak. And also I'm going to show you how to lay out your marketing ROI report and what the key metrics that you need are. Okay? The second portion of the mover's profit circle is sales, right? Because once you generate the lead, now you need to book the move, right now you need to sell. So that all starts with building a sales machine, right? Those of you that have been following me, maybe some of you are in moving sales academy. You know, it's all about creating that machine that's going to allow you to continuously have business. All right? Because once those systems are set up, once those things are in place, right, you could focus on what's really important, which is servicing your customers and, and overseeing your bottom line to make sure that you're making money. Okay? But if you're constantly worried about, you know, we don't have any moves. You know, the board is slow. I've got these trucks sitting in the yard. If you have that constant stress and struggle, it's going to be very difficult to focus on quality service. So building a sales machine is huge. All right? And here's some of the things that go into that lead management. All right? You know, all of your leads, a lead is A phone call. A lead is a lead from a lead provider. Third party lead provider like a, you know, Equate Media or Moving.com, you know, Yelp somebody you know contacts you through Yelp somebody calls in from your postcard. Anything that comes in that's an opportunity to book a move is a lead, okay? And the way that those leads come into your business and the way that you manage those leads and crucial to be able to succeed at that next level, to be able to make sure that you're not spending money and wasting money on marketing. So let me give you a quick tip on lead management. Okay? Let's say you have leads coming in but you're not sure when you should call. You're not sure.

You know how many times you should call, right? Let me kind of show you guys. Kris, let me go over to the flip chart here. Alright? So any lead that comes in, all right, you want to make sure that you're calling it enough times to where you're maximizing your opportunity. But you're not spending too much time calling a lead. That's a bad lead, right? I mean, how many times have you received the lead? And it's like, you know, nobody picks up, nobody responds to an email. You know, maybe the name's Elvis Presley, right? It could be anything, right? It's. You don't know that it's a real lead. So you have to have a system for doing that. So I want to give you something really quick. We're not diving deep in the sales today, but I want to give you something that you could use right away. And this is called two plus one cmet. Okay?

So what this means is when a lead comes in, okay? So the lead's going to come in. Here's the lead.

All right? So now day one.

You're going to want to contact this person two times on day one. That's what the two is. And you're going to want to contact them one more time the following day, okay?

CMET stands for call.

Message.

Email.

Text, okay? So every time you contact somebody, instead of just calling them, you cmit them, okay? Those of you in moving sales academy, you know all about this. So you pick up the phone, okay? Because if you get a lead, you have it right there in front of you, okay? In your CRM or maybe just through an email or whatever the case may be, you have it in front of you. So you want to make the most use of that time and be very, very efficient in how you're getting to that lead. So you're going to call them first. If they don't answer, you're going to leave a voicemail. Okay? So that's message. Then you're going to send an email, and then you're going to send a text.

Okay?

So call, message, email, text while you have that order up. That's four contacts right there. Okay. And this isn't too much, by the way, right? Anybody that ever says, well, Louis, that might be too much. I might be bombarding them. And then they actually try it, they reach back out to me and they let me know this works. And it's amazing, right? Anybody that's here, if you want to, you know, if you're using this already, you want to let me know in the chat role, that'd be great. With text, make sure you have permission to text them. Most lead providers are getting permission to do that. There's something called TCPA compliance where you can't just text people. You have to actually have to have their permission to do that. And that's done through your op in form, your.

Request and estimate form on your website. Okay? So you got cmat, right? So now when you place calls to people, you know, I'm going to call them, I'm going to leave them voicemail. Every time, every time you have to leave a voicemail, there's people that will say, but, Louis, I don't like leaving a voicemail, right? Because then when I call back, they don't know it's me. I'm like, what do you mean? Are you a bill collector? Why are you trying to hide from them? They requested information from you, okay? You need to make sure that they know that you called and you left them a message that shows diligence. Okay? So you have cmet, so on day one, okay, you're gonna basically cmet two times, okay? Ideally, as soon as you can, as soon as that lead comes in, okay. Either to your system or to your email. I highly recommend using a CRM, but get that in right away. And then I would wait about maybe four hours and cmet again on day one. Okay, so then.

Day two.

CMET.

One time, okay, Day one, two times. Day two, one time. Okay. So you got to realize, though, some of you may think, well, that's not. That's not a lot. Okay? I want to. I want to get to them. And the question I want to ask is, how much time are you spending on follow up? Okay? Because this is all about.

You know, this right here is all about when the lead comes in, okay?

This is just. You're trying to get ahold of somebody that you don't even know if they're a real person or not. Right? So this is all what's called lead, follow up.

Okay?

So if you think this isn't a lot, my question to you is, how much are you focusing on estimate.

Follow up.

Okay. Estimate, follow up is after you've actually spoken to them. Okay, so you got them on the phone or they called you. You were actually able to give them an estimate. You spoke to them. What's your process for following up with them after you give them an estimate? Too many people say, louis, you know, if they want to book with us, they'll, you know, they'll call us back. No, this right here.

Estimate, follow up, following up with them after. Okay, this is where the money's at. Okay? So before you decide to say, you know what, I want to have my people or myself, you know, you might be booking moves yourself. You might have 20 people on the phones. But before you decide that you want to spend more time tracking down leads that you don't even know if it's a real lead, focus on estimate, follow up, following up after you've actually given an estimate. All right? I go on and on about this all day. We have a whole formula for this. But I want to get through the profit circle and make sure that I give you guys what I promise you today. Sales scripts. All right, Sales scripts are crucial. You want to make sure that everyone in your company is saying the same thing. That takes the customer, answers all their questions, but then leads them by the hand to book their move with your company. Okay? And the idea is that with a sales script, you want to make sure that you're not just giving bullet points. Okay? And a lot of people say, yeah, but a sales script, it sounds like, you know, they've.

They're going to know we're reading from a sales script, and that's just not true. Right? Maybe you've called somewhere, somebody's called you before, and you could just tell that they're, you know, working off a sales script. But if you have a good sales script, it'll take somebody, you know, less than a week to learn that script within a few days, and they can memorize it and just have it there as reference, and it flows, and it sounds really good. All right? And the key with a good sales script is you want to make sure you hit all your points, but you want to make sure that you also paint the picture for the customer. Okay? Too many people just give bullet points. You have to paint the picture. You have to get them emotionally engaged in the outcome of what you're going to be able to provide. So I'll give you an example. You know, like, as you're going through your whole script, you get to the portion that's, you know, paint the picture, and you'll say something along the lines of, you know, what we'll do is we'll send you out three professional movers, a truck and all the equipment. They'll come to your home, they'll quilt, pad, and wrap all of your furniture, load it onto the truck, and unload it at the new location. If there's anything that you may need disassembled and reassembled, they'll do that for you as well at no additional charge. You get the idea, right? So, like, that's painting the picture. Sales scripts are crucial and then overcoming objections. Right. When the customer says, yeah, your price is too high. Yeah, I need to speak to my husband. Right? Yeah. I saw a review online that said something. Right. Whatever their objection is, you and your team need to have what's called rebuttals for every one of those. Okay. So any reason that a customer gives you on why they can't move with your company, why they're not ready to book their move, you need to have a response for that. Okay. And these responses are not pushy. They're not, you know, it's formulated in a way where you make sense of your service and the customer's like, oh, okay, I see that. I can understand that. Right. So, like, for example, if customers, like, you know, your price is too high, you know, you want to explain to them that, you know, they're not comparing apples to apples. Right. Like, for example, like, you know, you could go to. If you were looking for a new TV or a new car, you could price that same TV or that same car. You know, let's just say TV at Best Buy and then at Walmart and find the cheapest one. But with movers, it's not. You're not comparing apples to apples because the quality of movers from one company to the next company is not the same. In order for us to be able to send you highly trained movers that are going to come out there and treat your belongings with care and not damage anything, we need to pay them a little bit more. It's not, you know, just. You don't just need someone that could come lift stuff, Right. You want highly trained professionals. And so these are the types of things where you're going to Want to justify your higher prices. All right. Because most people need to raise their prices. That's a huge part of, you know, people not being able to make enough profit is that they lower their prices to get more moves, but then they're not profitable. Right. So follow up. We talked about that. That was estimate, follow up and lead follow up training.

In order to bring somebody into your company and put them on the phones or set them up as an on site estimator, they need to be trained. Right. And moving Sales academy or, you know, either in the online course or at the seminars we teach how to bring them through a five day process of training them. You know, when someone doesn't know what they're doing, it's very hard for them to have the confidence to be able to actually close the deal. But when they're completely confident with taking an inventory, estimating a move, and they know what to say, that's when they become a rock star salesperson. All right? Because rock stars aren't just, you know, born. What makes a good salesperson is they just know what to say right during the front end the script and then they know what to say when the customer has any objection, the rebuttals. So if you give them what to say on both ends and they're trained to what they're confident, that's how you breed rock star salespeople that get jobs booked. Okay, so then there's upselling. So you have moving. Well, what else do your customers need?

Storage, packing, cleaning services. When they move into the new home, they're going to need, you know, Internet, cable, DirecTV, all of this stuff. These are all things that could either be sold by your company specifically or things that you can refer to somebody else and get commissions for. Okay. We're talking about increasing profits. And the reason I'm so passionate about this and the reason that we're starting the week off with profits is because I hear people talking about these low profit margins that they're getting. I hear people talking about the average in the industry is this and the average in the industry is that. Well, I don't know about you, but I never wanted to be average. And I'm sure if you're here, you don't want to be average. And just because there's a bunch of average people getting average results doesn't mean that higher results are not there for you. Okay, so we're going to talk about that in a minute when we go through the profit and loss statement. All right? So after sales, now you have to understand I'm going through this. I'm giving you the broad view here, right? Each one of these we could drill down into, and we could spend a lot, a lot of time. But, you know, we're here for, you know, an hour or so today, and I want to make sure that you have an overview. And then, you know, we could talk more about drilling down into each one. Then we go to dispatch. Okay? So you have the marketing, you sold the move. Then it goes to dispatch or operations. I call it dispatch. Okay? In dispatch, there is so much money to be made or lost in dispatch, all right? It starts with crew management.

You know, I'll give you an example. If you're sending out your crews, let's just say on local moves, okay? Just for simplicity sake, you're sending out your crews and you're saying, okay, hey, guys, here's the job. Here's your contract. Here's your keys. You know, I'll see you later. And they're going out there and they're calculating, let's say, an hourly rate.

With the customer, right? They're doing it themselves. And then they call you to let you know that they're done.

I could almost guarantee you that you're losing money, okay? You're either losing money or, you know, money's being stolen from you, okay? And movers are working off the clock. And, you know, those of you who have, you know, spent a lot of time or watch a lot of my videos, you know, I'm not a. I'm not a cynical person. I don't think people are out to get me. But I'm a realist, and I understand, and I've seen what happens if you leave the key in the door of the candy shop. People are going to go into candy shop and steal the candy. Right? But let's just say for a minute, we're not talking about that. We're just talking about running a loose operation, okay? I did a whole training yesterday for my members called run a tight dispatch operation. It was all about specifically how to run a tight dispatch operation. Because this right here is where the money could just be dripping out, okay? Where you're just losing money. The bottom, that should be yours. All right, so let me. I'm gonna go back over to the flip chart, Kris. I want to show you guys. I want to just give you an example of what I'm talking about here. So.

When it comes to clocking crews in and out, let's just say on a local move. And this is the same for long distance. This is the same for everything, okay? But I'm going to give you a local move example of, you know, let's take a company.

Let'S take a company that does 200 moves a month.

All right? Some of you, that might be a lot, some of you, that's, you know, you might do double or triple that, all right? But let's take 200 moves a month and let's look at an example of a job where let's say, you know, start time.

Is 8 o', clock, okay? So the mover, your driver, your foreman, your crew lead, whatever you call them, they decided that their start time was 8 o' clock and they finished.

At 12. Okay?

So we're talking four hours.

Alright? So maybe four hours plus an hour for travel or your trip fees or your fuel surcharge, whatever it is. Let's just keep it really simple. Start time, finish time, all right? And this is the movers doing it themselves.

Okay? Now we want to have it actually done by dispatch.

In the office, okay? Every crew should be clocked in and clocked out in the office. Now you might say, Louis, that's a lot of work.

You know, do you want to put in a little extra work and make some more money or do you want to do what's easy and continue to probably have very low profit margins? Okay? And I say that with all due respect, that I know for a fact that, that if this is what's happening, if the movers are clocking crews in and out, you're leaving money on the table. Let me show you why that is. Okay? So if, you know, mover calls in and says, you know, they actually get there at like 7:47 and they're ready to start, you know, the mover's like, Ah, 8 o', clock, right? But when they call and they clock in and out with the office on the same clock and there's somebody, a dispatcher or you know, as a dispatcher, that could be you, the owner, somebody has to wear that hat. It could be an operations manager, whoever's handling the crews, okay? So they say, no, no, no, it's actually 7:45 is your start time. Oh, okay, 7:45. You give them the start time, they don't give you the start time. They'll tell you when they're there. You look at the clock, the same clock every single time, and, and you clock them in and out. So now you got 7:45am okay. Then they call the like, hey, it's 12 o', clock, we're done. They're like oh, you guys are about to leave the house? Well, no, we got a few more pieces. We're going to put some beds together, you know, this and that. Okay, so like when will the truck actually be leaving?

12:15. Okay, 12:15.

Because you need to get paid from the time you get to the house to the time that you leave the house. Okay? Not to when the movers decide we're going to clock them out. Alright? And a lot of times they do this just because they're with the customer and they're like, you know what, let me go ahead. It's 12 now we got a little bit of time. I'm going to clock you out at 12 o'. Clock. Just, you know, go ahead and take care of us. Give us a nice tip, right? So now we look at the difference here. This is four and a half hours, okay? Doesn't seem like a big deal, right? Doesn't seem like a big deal. But let's say your hourly rate.

Is $150 an hour for three guys.

Well, that's a half hour. Okay, so if we take half of this, all right, so we divide this up by two, then we got 75 bucks on this job. Okay, like okay, 75 bucks on this job. So now you get my calculator here. I know some of you could probably do this in your head, but let me get my calculator. 75 times, 200 jobs.

$15,000 a month. This is a big deal. This is a very big deal. This is $180,000 a year. Now this does not even include.

Upsell opportunities, packing opportunities. Things that if somebody in the office is controlling this and not just sending movers out, hey guys, go do the job. You know, clock out the customer. I'll see you when you get back. But somebody's in the office controlling it. This could very easily go to $20,000 a month on 200 jobs. And this will make a major, major impact. Now when you go to implement this, you are going to have guys, because I've taught this to a lot of people now that are doing this and you're going to have guys that are resistant to doing this. And the reason they're resistant is because you know, they're probably not going to be able to get away with some of the stuff they've been getting away with so far. So you've got to clock your crews out. Crew management is a huge, huge piece of the movers profit circle. Okay? Equipment management. So you know, how many of you have, you know, it's like all Of a sudden, you don't have enough pads on the trucks. You don't have enough dollies on the trucks. You're like, I just bought all this stuff. Where did it go? Well, you need to do an inventory with your trucks every single morning, all right? There's no reason that you should have to buy and buy and buy pads. And what you don't want to do. What's even worse than having to buy pads and bipads and bipads or dollies or whatever it is, straps, whatever. They're losing. You don't want to let the customer suffer.

By saying, you know what? I'm not. They lose all the pads anyways. I'm only. They got 28 pads on the truck. They're good. I'm not giving them any more pads. They're just gonna lose it, Right? A lot of people have that approach and have that attitude. Those are your customers, right? That truck needs to be stocked and not stocked because you have to keep replacing it because a. They either just left the dolly or right now, how many times have you got a call from a customer? It's like, hey, your guys left the dolly here. How many times do you think they left a dolly that you didn't get a call? Or all the pads that they left? You know, if a customer needs a pad to stay on something, that's okay. The mover calls, it speaks to the dispatcher who's controlling what's going on, and the dispatcher says, here's how much it is for them to purchase that pad. No problem. Give the customer as many pads as they need, get paid for it, and then go buy replacements. All right? Same thing with packing material. Boxes, shrink wrap. You know, you should have boxes of shrink wrap on each truck so you have the opportunity to upsell packing on jobs. But a lot of people won't do it because the boxes and the packing material go missing. Tight inventory control, okay? We're talking about plugging holes, right? When you pour money in the top of your business, there's a lot of holes in the bucket, if you will, with all your money that's being lost, okay? People are like, why aren't I making money? All this money. We're doing all these moves. Why aren't I making money? This is where it is, okay? This is the stuff. You know, people will ask me, you know, how did you. Out of one location, right? Forget about the fact I had six locations and long distance and all that. I mean, we were doing $20 million a year. Let's just Talk about one location.

How are you profiting? Local moves only $800,000 a year. This stuff that I'm showing you, all right, forget about those averages that people are talking about with profits and you know, these low, low numbers. It kills me to see companies, to talk to companies that are like, yeah, we're doing $4 million a year and we have a, you know, 3% profit. That's a lot of responsibility and a lot of liability. Make, what is that, $120,000 a year? You know, 120,000, that might be good money, but not to actually do $4 million a year. Right? So this is where it's at, right? So I'm not trying to just give you more work to do. I'm trying to help you plug those holes and take more money on money management. Alright? So you also need to make sure that all the money is being collected, that all, you know, everything's coming in, the, everything's being processed, cash is collected, right? Contracts that, you know, they're being closed out at the correct times and then all that money is making its way to accounting and then upselling as well. Right? Doing confirmation calls and dispatch is a great time to upsell additional services. Right? You should be doing a confirmation call with every single customer without exception. And I don't mean calling up and saying, you know, hey, I just want to confirm we're going to be there tomorrow at 8 o'. Clock. Yeah, okay, great, we'll see you then. No, the confirmation call is a golden opportunity to, number one, correct any mistakes that possibly were made by the salesperson. Right. Or any gaps in communication between the customer and the movers that show up. Right? Because the customer says, hey, I told everything to the salesperson. That's all they know. And they're expecting the movers to show up and know all of that information. The confirmation call is the time to go through a checklist and make sure you know everything about that move. But also say, you know, by the way, did you get a chance to get all your packing done? Right. Do you need us to send out some, you know, some material to get some packing done? Is there anything that you decided maybe you don't want to bring to the house, you want to bring to storage? Right. It's a great opportunity to upsell.

Then we move on to movers. Right? Because once dispatch gets the job, they give it to the movers. Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is huge when it comes to your profits, especially this day and age, especially how quick it is for a customer before they Even leave the house to go on and go to Yelp or go to Google reviews or wherever and post a bad review that is damaging your business. Okay.

Claim reporting. Claim reporting is. So I'll give you an example. I'm going to. I'm going to. We're going to go over a profit and loss statement here in a minute. But I was reviewing my profit and loss at one point and I saw that it got really, really high on claims. Paid out, right? And so when I say reviewing my profit and loss at the time, I was reviewing several of them for several different locations. But this one location, I'm like, why are we paying out all this money in claims? Right? And so I said, okay, well, let me put the profit and loss statement down. Let me pick up my claims report and let me drill down into this. All right? So we kept it all in our CRM and we could see what was going on. So I'm like, okay, I need to drill down and investigate a little bit. What did I find? I found out that it was, you know, one. A couple groups of guys, okay, that were damaging TVs, flat screen TVs, marble tabletops and glass tabletops. That was the bulk of it, okay. And it was just happening consistently for this period.

And so now I see that instead of, you know, doing this whole huge initiative to fix claims or, you know, try to hire new guys or just paying out claims and losing that money, right? Again, this is your money that's being paid out unnecessarily. And we took those guys and we trained them on how to move TVs, tabletops, right? And that was it. We resolved that problem. So by having good claim reporting and being able to drill down on who's causing it and what type of actual claims they are, you could fix the problem right away.

Training, Gotta train your movers. You know, I recommend at least one day of classroom style training, meaning you either have a presentation like this or, you know, a whiteboard, or you sit them down at a computer and let them watch something. But you are essentially presenting to them what your company policies are, right? What, what do they need to do? Like, what do you expect from them when they get to the office in the morning? What do you expect them to do and not do on their way to the move? What about when they arrive to the house? How do you want them to greet the customer? Right. When the driver goes up and the driver introduces themselves, you need to make sure that they know that's company policy and that the helpers need to Be right behind them with pads on their shoulders, ready to get to work, right? To give that good first impression. You do what you want to do. I'm giving you my examples of things that, you know, if you just assume that they're going to go out there and do what they need to do.

You might get lucky. But if you want to really have raving fan customers, train your movers on what it is you expect from them, and it'll make the world of difference. Mover rewards. You know, you want to have mover rewards, you want to take care of them. And, you know, don't just look at it and say, hey, they get paid to do their job. Let them go do their job. It's a hard job, right? I mean, those of you who were movers or still movers or, you know, had to go out on a truck, it's not a fun job. It's not an easy job. You know, if you're asking them to do all this additional stuff and make your customers happy so that you can make money, give them some incentive. Give them some reward, okay? Have a program. It's called mover bonus points. Okay? I'm not going to get into it now because I actually have an episode on my podcast that you can listen to, the Moving Mastery Podcast. By the way, if you haven't checked it out, definitely go check it out. It's on itunes, Google Play Stitcher on my website. But there's an episode on there where I go deep into the mover bonus points, and you can go listen to that for free. Then after the movers, you've moved the people, and then now you need to get repeat and referral customers. Okay? There's something called the R and R compound effect, which means if, you know, if you've ever heard of compound interest with money, like in investing, you know, it's similar to that. The more repeat and referral customers that you get, the lower it will drive down your marketing cost. You'll see that tomorrow when I show you the marketing ROI report. Okay? But it's going to lower your marketing ROI because these are customers that you are spending less money to get, okay? And so you're spending money to get them because you had to spend money to get the first move with marketing, but then you did a really good job. So that one move turned into more moves, right? So now your acquisition cost per move goes down. All right, I know you guys know this. Everybody. You know, repeat referral business is a huge part of a lot of your businesses, but it's not something you want to want to or should or can sustainably over the long term rely on. Only that you want to be able to make sure that you have marketing where you could bring it through this process and then start to really accelerate the amount of repeat and referral customers that you have. So you want to run through a process. It's called review fetching. Okay, those of you in moving sales academy, you know about this, I'm not going to spend too much time on it. But you know, basically instead of just waiting for customers to give you a review, review, you have a process of asking them for reviews. Let's just. It's as simple as that, right? So if you're at the job, ask them for a review. After the move, ask them for a review.

Referral program. Referral program is key. All right. I see a lot of people that will go out and look to. Let me talk to some realtors, let me talk to some mortgage brokers, things like that, which is great, right? I mean, I started my business by literally going from a pro complex to apartment complex to apartment complex, you know, then at some point going to real estate offices. But I mean, the bulk of it was apartment complexes over and over and over at the beginning. And I didn't have a real referral program. It was like, okay, thanks for the move. Here's a hundred bucks. Oh, hey, there's a whole office full of women. Thanks. Send them some flowers, right? Cater some lunch. There was no real referral program. And because of that, it didn't allow me to scale it. But later on, once I created an actual referral program and I knew how it worked, there was a process to how you become a referral partner, how you get paid, what you get paid. And it was consistent then we were able to really go out and build up that referral network. So it all starts with a referral program.

Re engagement campaign. You know, this is something that.

You know, 40% might be higher now of Americans are renters, right? So when you move them, chances are a year later they're either going to resign their lease or they're going to be moving again. So how do you re engage them to be able to get that repeat customer, Right? So you do that by you start essentially an automated email sequence at about 10 months out, right? Where you start to engage them, knowing that there's a good chance that they're going to have a move coming up, right? And this is all set up on the front end, right? So you set up your email automation. You either do it through your CRM. You do it through, you know, service like mailchimp, but you have it all in there and it's just set up to automatically happen. It's not costing you any extra money and it's really not any extra effort other than the initial setup. And yeah, that's how you continue to bring more customers back in the door. Then the last piece, right, is networking. So, you know, for me, I felt like I didn't really, I didn't know all of this when I started, right? I was 19 years old, I didn't know. I, you know, I dispatched my crews out of a truck rental yard. I'm like, all right, what am I going to do now? I need to do something. I can't just go sit around. I'm going to go and I'm going to go apartment complex to apartment complex to apartment complex. So I was, you know, pounding the pavement is what I call it. I was networking. But now when you look at it, the ideal thing to do is really build your business and your processes and your structures in this way. And once all this is in place, then you're going to want to feed it, okay? And you're going to want to feed it by going to see realtors, going to see mortgage brokers, going to see builders, apartment complexes, self storage units, okay? This is all people that can refer you business, alright? These are all people that can refer you business. And you know what? Nowadays.

A few months ago I taught this to some of my members. A whole process on, you know, how to actually find them online through social media, target them and build your referral network without actually, actually even leaving your home. You know, you had to. There was none of that when I started, right? It was like literally get the car, go to this one, go to that one, go to this one, go to that one. Well now you could set up an entire campaign to do this online automated without all that, okay? But even if you are going to go out and you are going to pound the pavement, you are going to go see real estate agents, you're going to go see mortgage brokers, just go. You know, when I started I literally went. I had jeans, company sweatshirt, right, Baseball hat and a little crappy looking business card and that was it. Later on I got some material and some brochures. The first set of brochures looked awful. I need to try to find them and show you guys just so you could see, you know, that it doesn't have to be perfect right away, you know, but if you're Sitting around and you don't have anything else to do, you could go out there and start getting some repeat and referral business. Okay? So now this is the mover's profit circle at a high level view. This all now flows into accounting, alright? So now you need to be able to track your accounting to make sure that you know what's going on with your money.

Let's talk about your profit and loss statement. Okay? I know there's a lot of people that aren't reviewing this at every level, believe it or not. I mean, there's companies that are doing, you know, four, five, six billion dollars a year that aren't reviewing this on a regular basis, right? And that was me when I started. When I started it was like, you know, the money came in, I paid the bills and I looked at the bank account and I was like, okay, there's some money left over, cool. I could take some. There's still some money left over, cool. You know, my accountant would be like, we need to be removed. Reviewing this. And I looked at it early on, you know, and mind you, I was, you know, 19, 20, 21, 22, I was young and I was doing well, so I was like, why do I need to look at that? And you know, it wasn't really until the recession came, right? Until about 2008. And all of a sudden I'm like, where's the money? What's going on here, right? And at that point it became scary, right? It became like, you know, shit like, what am I going to do here? Because we've got all this money coming in, we've got all these moves, but where's the cash, right? That's when I knew I needed to get really serious about knowing my numbers to make sure that that never happened again. And I got to tell you, it was such a blessing in disguise because once you know your numbers, you have such a sense of, of calm and confidence and clarity into your business that you could not otherwise have. Okay, so I want to start with talking about the profit and loss statement. So you know, profit and loss statement, basically. I don't know that you could see this that well. But you know, it starts with all your income at the top. So you have it broken out by local move storage, you know, any refunds and chargebacks are up there. Okay, so this is your income then you have your cost of goods sold, right? So as a moving company, you don't necessarily have, you know, cost of goods. Like you're not, you know, manufacturing T shirts, but your cost of Goods would be your moving labor, your workers comp, your truck, fuel, tolls, boxes and materials, things like that. Okay? They're essentially expenses, but for the sake of reporting, you want to have them in their own section called cost of goods sold. All right? And then you have all your expenses down here, okay? Accounting services, advertising and marketing, bank charges, claims, paid claim service, customer satisfaction refunds, employment ads, insurance, Internet, legal fees, licenses and fees, miscellaneous moving CRM, moving equipment, office expense, office supplies. You guys get it, right? All this truck payments, phones, utilities, uniforms. So this particular One is for 2017, just an example, but we got $1.4 million, okay? You've got a gross profit of 744,000, which is 52%. And then you've got a net operating income, which is your net profit of $278,000 and some change, which is 19.41%. Okay? So this is your P and L.

I would recommend getting QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, okay? And I'm going to show you how to go through all this and how to actually make sure it's recorded and be able to report on it as well. All right? So first thing you want to do to get this, okay? And the reason I'm talking about this today, first day, is like, we have a new year coming up. So if this isn't something that you been doing, that's okay, right? I mean, I didn't do it for seven, eight years into business. However, once I realized the power of it, I will never turn back from doing this consistently on a monthly basis, period. Okay? So you could start this at the beginning of the year, and you're 2019. That's my promise to you. Let's make 2019 your best year ever. This is something that needs to be done, okay? And, you know, as I say that, I feel like. I feel like, you know, my accountant that was saying it to me, my CPA that was saying it to me, and I'm like, nah, nah, nah. But now I look back at it, you know, years later, and he was so right, you know? So I'm hoping that it's resonating with you, and you're like, yeah, now's the perfect time for me to get started with this. So first thing you got to do is record all income and expenses. So if you have this in QuickBooks, right, QuickBooks Online, you can use whatever you want. That's what I use. That's what I recommend.

You know, you have all your bank accounts synced, all your credit cards synced, right? So it's just a matter of making sure that you record all the income and expenses. So every charge needs to be put in a specific category, okay? So that the report is correct. This report is not about just turning it in to do your taxes. This report is something that is going to allow you to have a clear picture of what's going on in your business. Okay? Next thing you're going to do is you're going to review a detailed P and L first. This one here is what's called a summary P and L. Okay? It just shows the categories, and that's it. A detailed P and L for this, you know, company doing about a million foreign business would probably be about 30, 40 pages, okay? Which basically will show each category, and then it'll have each and every transaction underneath it, right? Like, so every check paid, every credit card, you know, charged, you know, every income, all of that will be detailed out. And the reason you want to do that is because you want to verify that everything's in the correct spot, right? Because this report is only going to be useful to you if it's accurate information. Right? So, like, if you have.

You know, for example, let's say you went and rented a truck from Enterprise, but then you also went on vacation and on a business trip, right? And you rented a car at Enterprise, but you're, you know, whoever's doing the books kind of put them in the wrong category. It's going to throw your numbers off. So you just want to review it, make sure it's accurate. And then once it's accurate, you make the changes. Then you're going to review the summary P and L with a percentage of income. All right? So this is just a column that you could add when you run the report so you could see the percentage. The percentage is what's always going to give you the clearest picture of what's going on. But you can't just say, you know, hey, I'm spending, you know, 100,000 this year in marketing. That's a good number. I want to spend 100,000 every year in marketing. Well, it depends if you're doing 1.4 or you're doing 3 million or you dip down to 900,000, that 100,000 is going to be a very big, you know, indicator on how well you're doing. But when you could look at it and go, oh, okay, I'm at 7%, right? And you see that percentage? Those are. That's really what's going to give you the indicator of what's going on. Okay, so Then what you do is either print it out, okay, and mark it up and write all over it, or you could do it in Excel. You could, you know, bring it in Excel, whichever one you like. But I always took, like, a day or two, and I would go somewhere relaxing out of the office, and I would go through this. I would mark it up, I would identify areas of concern. I would identify areas of opportunity. Earlier, I told you about how I identified that we were spending a ton of money in claims. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on? Why are we paying all this money and claims that allowed me to go and solve a problem that was eating into my profits. Okay, so by reviewing this monthly, you're really familiar with your business. You know, we all feel like we know our business, right? We feel like. And I say this because I've gone through it and I've helped other people go through it. And at first you feel like you know what's going on. You're like, yeah, I know what comes in. I know what we pay out. Until you have it broken out like this, you really don't know. And here's something that I'm going to go over to the flip chart, Kris. I want to make sure that before you jump in here, this is really, really, really important about your P Ls, because you might say, you know what, Louis? I am running my. My profit on the loss statement, and.

It shows I have a profit, but where's the money? Where's the cash? It shows I'm profitable, but there's no money.

I've been there. I know the struggle. I know the problem. But let me explain what happens here. Okay? So.

First of all, there's two types of P&LS that you could do. Okay? So there's a P and L for you, but there's also what you're going to use to file your tax returns. Is your business going to be based on a cash basis or an accrual basis? Okay, cash basis or an accrual basis. So, you know, the difference is when you have.

You know, a cash basis is basically if money came in during. Let's just say, what are we in December? So let's say we're looking at November's profit or loss. Any money that came in during November or any money that got paid out during November would be reflected on a cash basis profit or loss statement. Okay? So it's just you're recording it based on when it comes in and when it goes out. It doesn't matter if that Invoice is from June and you're just now paying it in November. It's going to show up on November. It doesn't matter that maybe you had some payroll in October, right. That the movers worked in October, but you didn't pay them until November. It's going to show up in November. That's cash basis, okay? Now accrual basis is basically when the event happened. So it means if there was an invoice in June, whether you paid it or not, going to show up on your P and L. Okay? So it will show up on your June P and L. All right? And there's some major, you know, consequences here, tax wise, the different things. So it's important that you know these differences because I know that there's some information out there that I don't necessarily agree with. And I think it's leading movers in the wrong direction that they may not be able to come back from. So this is important. So accrual also means that if you have storage customers, let's say, and those storage customers are being billed X amount, you record that income, okay, Whether you collected the money or not. So basically what it means is whether you actually paid a bill, okay? You record that money whether you paid it or you didn't pay it. If you got invoiced, you record it. If you, you invoiced somebody for a move, let's say you do some account work or something like that and you don't actually get paid right away and you invoice them, but you don't get paid. You're showing that income whether you got paid or not. And you know what that means? That means at the end of the year, when you file your taxes, you're paying tax on that money that you might not even got, okay? So here's what I would say. There's cash and there's accrual, okay? Accrual will give you a more accurate.

Picture of exactly how your business is doing. However, and the reason that is is because it's going to show you like, hey, this month, even though you didn't pay this invoice, you were supposed to pay this invoice, right this month. Even though we didn't collect the money from this customer, you know, we billed them for this and we just need to do a better job. So it might give you more accurate picture. However, it's very challenging to do the accounting work for accrual basis, you know. Right. So if you have, you know, movers that maybe, you know, you don't pay them for a week after the hours they work. And some of those hours fall in October, and some of them fall in November. You have to go in and somebody, you know with some good accounting skills has to go in and do, like, journal entries to put some in October and put some in November. Okay? So if this sounds. If you're like, hey, I'm on accrual, we're good. Cool. If you're not doing this or you're unsure, start with cash basis until you can completely, you know, until you're, like, proficient in knowing all of this stuff. Because here's the reason. When it comes to the irs, you could be. And I'm not, by the way. Full disclosure, I'm not a cpa, not a lawyer. This isn't tax advice. This isn't legal advice. Seek out, talk to your accountant. Don't just, you know, don't get an audit and tell them, I told you to do it. But I'm telling you what I know. And that's if you are a cash basis accounting, that's what you declare with the IRS when you file your tax returns at some point down the road, right? You could switch and see, hey, I want to be an accrual basis, okay? You could switch at any time. But if you're an accrual and you want to switch back to cash, you cannot. You're stuck with accrual. Okay? So here's what I would tell you. Start with a cash basis until you have it totally dialed in, until you're like, super on point with it and you feel good and you've talked to your accountant. Do not switch to a accrual basis until you've mastered cash basis, okay? With that being said, let's talk about why. Sometimes you show a profit, but there are. There's no money, right? So you have your profit and loss.

Which we just looked at on the screen, okay? That's part of your financials, and you also have your balance sheet.

Okay? So let's talk about a couple of things. Truck payments, okay? Maybe you have some truck payments. Let's say they're not a lease. You finance some truck payments. Okay, well, let's say your truck payment is.

Let's see. Say we got a truck payment.

Of $1,000 a month.

Okay?

So you have to actually pay this out. That's your cash that you're paying out, okay? And it doesn't matter if you're accrual or you're cash, okay? That's. We're beyond that now. We're Just talking about paying this out. So when we looked at the P and L, you saw a bunch of expenses here. So you might think that that expense should show up and reduce your profit, okay? So when you're looking at profit, you have your income.

Minus expenses. Just to keep it simple.

Equal equals profit. Okay? It drills down a little deeper than that, but let's just say that that's for simplicity's sake. Okay, well, so if you have income minus expenses equals profit. So you think that your profit should equal what's in the bank account. However, a truck is not an expense. The payment is not an expense, okay? Because this is what's called a capital expense.

Asset.

Okay? So let's say this truck was 50,000.

Okay? So now that's 50,000 is a liability.

Okay? This means that on your balance sheet it's showing, you know, your balance sheet will show, like, how much money you have in the bank. You know, your equity, your liabilities. Things like that kind of shows, like how much your company's worth. Not for selling purposes, but just, you know, for getting a loan and things like that. So when you pay this thousand dollars, it doesn't go here. Where it goes is here, okay? And it'll actually, the only thing that will go here is like the interest, okay? So here, let's say the interest.

And let's just say the interest is like 200 bucks, okay? Just for the sake of the lesson, the interest is 200 bucks.

And 800 goes towards paying the loan down, okay? So that 800 will be deducted from here and then it'll bring this down to what, 49, 200, okay? So you know, somebody that. Let's say you go out and, you know, when I started by long distance, I went out and spent a million two on trucks, okay? We bought 12 trucks. They're about 100,000 a piece. Financed them, right? But all those payments weren't coming out of the income. So, you know, the profit looked really high, but the cash wasn't there because all it was doing was bringing down the liability, okay? So that's one thing. Another thing is if you ever take a distribution.

Okay? So a distribution is like as an owner, you know, if you have an S Corp or an LLC and you take a distribution right? Beyond your, you know, regular W2 payroll, you know, you're like, hey, we had a great, you know, great month, right? I'm going to take $25,000 dollars to myself as a distribution, okay? That entire distribution goes to the balance sheet. It doesn't deduct from here. Okay? So that's a big reason why your profit and loss statement might not reflect the actual cash. So, you know, there's something called cash flow.

Okay? So you have your profit and loss, but you also have cash flow. One of the easiest, simplest ways to figure out your real cash flow is to take your profit and loss out of QuickBooks. So export it. Export it to Excel. Okay? Put it in an Excel spreadsheet. Make some room for the truck payments. Make some room for any distributions. Add those back in, okay? This is for your own purposes. This isn't for filing taxes. Add those back in to that, you know, essentially your cash flow sheet. And that'll give you an idea of like, okay, here's all the money that came in and here's all the money that went out. This way you have a real picture because the profit and loss is a great place to start. You just want to make sure that you're not, you know, you didn't go out and buy a bunch of trucks or finance a bunch of equipment. Your profit's high, all right, and your expenses are low. Now you'll also have something called depreciation expense that will come from this capital asset that will come and reduce the profit a little bit. We're not going to get into a whole accounting lesson today. I just wanted to give you enough to make sure that I was very clear on that.

All right, my friend, what'd you think of that episode? Did you learn something new? Did it spark some ideas that you can implement in your business right away? Did you get the wheels turning?

Did you love it?

If so, I want to invite you to join us in our moving mastery coaching program. And you could do that by going to LewisMassaro.com coaching that's LewisMassaro.com coaching. That's the program where I go live every single month and do an in depth tactical training like the one you just heard. But I do it live for our members every single month.

And it's where I do live.

Q and A and coaching and giveaways. We give all of our members of this program tickets to my three day live seminars. We also give them extra training on leadership and productivity.

Go check it out.

It's louismassaro.com coaching. Thank you so much so much for.

Being a part of this community of.

So many people dedicated to improving the quality of their lives, improving their business.

I really appreciate you being here.

You could take your business to the next level, my friend. You can take your life to the next level. Sometimes all you need is just a bit more training, just a bit more inspiration, just a bit more consistency. And I hope by listening to this podcast, I'm able to provide that spark.

You need to make it happen.

I look forward to being here with you on the next episode of the Moving Mastery Podcast.