Best Of: Organizational Chart, 4 Roles Of Sales, and Stepping Away From Sales

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 trainings that I do for moving companies to these might be clips from my moving Sales Academy, live three day seminars or live online training that I do. Or they might be some of my Moving Mastery Monthly trainings and highlights from those that I do every single month for our members. I know you're really going to 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 the next level by implementing new processes and strategies to help things run smoother while increasing profits. That's what these special episodes are all about. 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 stuff out. You won't be able to see that, but you'll still get an idea what I'm talking about. So make sure you break out your notebook and a pen for these episodes and take some really good notes because there's some really valuable training on what you need to implement to grow your business. And if you want to get more deep dive training like this and be able to interact with me in this type of training, make sure you join our Moving Mastery Monthly training program. This is the program where I go live with our students every single month and I train on a new topic or I teach a new marketing strategy. This is our monthly subscription program where I do live Q and A and actual live coaching with our members every single month. It's called Moving Mastery Monthly and you can Access it at luismassaro.com monthly that's louismasaro.com monthly L O U I S M A S-S-A-R-O.com monthly to get more deep dive training similar to this. And I could tell you if you like this, you're going to love that training program. But I'll let you see for yourself. So let's go ahead and jump in to a Moving Mastery Podcast. Best of training.

What's up guys? Welcome to Moving Mastery Monthly. I'm so excited. We have a lot of new members here this month, so those of you have not been here before. This is how it works. I'm going to dive into some really good stuff for about, you know, 40, 45 minutes. And then at the end, I'm going to go through the chat roll down below and I'm going to answer all your questions. All right? So if you have any questions along the way, make sure you're putting them in the chat roll. We also give away prizes and gifts to those that are asking questions because we want, this is a community. I want to make sure you guys have a chance every single month to come learn some new stuff, take it back to your business, implement, but also be able to share and ask some questions and, you know, let us know what's working for you, what you need help with. I want to make sure that we, you know, get that stuff answered for you. All right? Also, if you don't remember, you have two tuition free tickets to Moving Sales Academy live. And I'm sure you've seen my emails or, you know, see my posts about it, but you have for being part of this program, program, two tuition free waivers. All you need to DO is pay $97 for your materials and that covers you and your guests. You're not paying the ticket price. All right? If you can make it here, it's going to be impactful for your business. It's going to be a game changer for your business. If you take a look right now and say, like, what have I done over the past year to really, you know, start advancing my business to take it to the next level, first thing you could do is you could say, well, I enrolled in this course.

Right?

That's one. But what if you come spend three days, okay, less than 1% of your whole year and just totally focus, totally be immersed in sales marketing, profit increasing strategies. I know a lot of you in Moving Sales Academy. You know, it's going to be a lot more than is taught in Moving Sales Academy. It's not just going to be a live version of Moving Sales Academy. I'm also going to have Brian Bloom from Mover Search Marketing come and talk about SEO pay per click, digital marketing for movers specifically. And attorney Michael Garcia, who's the leading transportation attorney for the moving industry, is going to come and speak about how to make sure you're in compliance and that you're not in violation of any moving laws. And there's a lot of, you know, little intricacies that a lot of moving companies aren't aware of. So I want to make sure he's there to touch on that. Listen, it's going to be an amazing three days. If you can make it come. Alright? Allow yourself this opportunity. I know you've learned a lot in moving Sales Academy. I know you have this program every month. I know that there's videos on YouTube, but this is going to be more information that I've ever taught or has ever been released by me. And I want to make sure that you claim your tickets. All right, so click on the link. You can do it now, you can do it after the live cast. But just make sure that if you can go, take a look at why you can't go. Is it a real reason? Do you just feel like you're too busy at the office, you know, and you can't take away that time because I promise you, if that's the reason, you can take away the three days you can come. Because what you're going to learn is going to more than make up for those three days that you miss at the office. All right, so listen, I'd love to have you there, come and join us. Whoever's signed up already, let us know you're coming. Go ahead and let me know in the chat role that you're already signed up, that you're, you're already coming. I want to see you there. I look forward to meeting you guys. It's going to be an amazing three days. The weather's perfect. All right, so you have two tickets. If you want to bring your spouse or you want to bring a manager or somebody in your company, you know, you could even stay more than three days. Right? Make a vacation out of it too. So I want to touch on something this month that, you know, this week I was speaking to somebody, a new coaching client, and he was telling me he's doing $3 million a year and. But his profit margin is between 2 and 3%. All right? And I don't know about you, but to me that, that's a problem, all right? That's a lot of revenue to be bringing in for only that little bit of profit. All right? So as we start to talk about the roles and the people in his company and who, you know, what he does, what his partner does and the different roles, I mentioned an organization chart, alright? Every time I mention an organization chart and I go through this process with my coaching clients, my one on one clients, there's always resistance, all right? There's always a. That's not what I need. I need better people. I don't need an organization chart, okay? And I can relate because when I hired my first coach, my first mentor, that was the conversation at the Beginning, right. I was already successful. I already had multiple locations and I needed help getting to that next level. So I hired somebody. And one of the first conversations was he wanted to see my organizational chart. And to me, I kind of, you know, if you know my story, I started out of a truck rental yard. I just put things together along the way. I didn't have an organizational chart. You know, I just had some people that did certain things and this person did that. And, you know, some people helped each other do certain job roles and descriptions. And that's just how we did it, right? Even to the point where I already had five locations. So I resisted and I pushed back. And I'm like, all right, this guy's too corporate for me, right? This isn't like, I don't run it like that, you know, And I resisted. And I'm glad that he pushed me to sit down with the organizational chart and really make that a pillar in how I was going to grow my company. And so I did the same thing this week with this coaching client and made sure that we dove in and looked at the key roles for the company, who's going to fulfill those roles, and what the job descriptions and role responsibilities are behind those. All right, So I challenge you to stay with me if you're resisting right now. That's where I was, right? If you feel like, hey, I'm just a one man show, or hey, I already have a $5 million a year business and everything runs smooth, I don't need to hear this. If you want to get to the next level, which I know you do, or you would not be here right now on a Saturday watching me take out a piece of paper, take out a pen, and let's go through this organizational chart. All right? So I'm going to run down. This is a typical standard moving company organizational chart. And I'm going to tell you how you're going to use this to advance your business. All right? But first, let's go through it. So there's a CEO of the company. And this is more of. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to view yourself first as the owner of the business. If you have a partner, you both are owners of the business. Neither one of you right now are the CEO. You're just owners. You're up here, all right, above the tv, right? You're above the chart. What we're talking about here in the organizational chart is how your business is going to run, how it's going to be structured on a day to day basis to run. Because remember, you want to build systems, you want to build processes. If you're counting on people to run your business, you're always going to have chaos, all right? You're always going to have conflict. But if you have systems and you have processes, you're going to have clarity and you're going to have confidence to run your business. And that's what you want. You want to be able to have systems that run regardless of who is in that role and who is in that position, all right? So CEO, under the CEO, you're going to have vice president of operations, vice president of sales and marketing, and vice president of finance, all right? So now you and possibly your partner, if you have one, are going to decide who is going to fulfill these roles, all right? Who's the one person, if you have a partner that should be.

At the top, all right? And this is a perfect time to take a step back, remove ego from the situation and say, you know what, who's the most accountable person that's going to hold this whole chart accountable for their role and their job description to make sure that they're doing it all right?

Vice president of operations, they're going to handle all the moves, all the customer service, they're going to be responsible for all of that, all right? Sales and marketing, sales and marketing, finance. Making sure all the bills are paid, making sure all the money's collected, making sure if you have any lines of credit, they're on top of that, all right? Someone needs to be defined for all of these. Now let me just stop again and remind you if you're a one person show, all right? At the end, I'm going to have you essentially put names in each one of these, all right? I'm going to want you to name who's going to fulfill all these roles. And if you're a one person show, like when I started, I was a one person show, my name would be in every single one of these boxes, all right? And I'm going to show you how this all comes together in a minute. So under vice president of operations, you're going to have customer satisfaction manager and operations manager. So customer satisfaction manager will have customer satisfaction reps underneath. Right? So this is your customer service. These are the people that are making sure your customers are happy, all right? Making sure your customers are satisfied, making sure your customers are giving reviews, okay? But you need somebody that's in charge of that, that reports to the vice president of operations. And then under the customer satisfaction manager, you have the Rep, okay? And you may have multiple reps. At one point I had 10 customer service reps that reported to a manager, that then reported to a vice president of operations. All right, so this could be multiple. Under here now you have operations manager. Under operations manager, you have your dispatcher or dispatchers, your movers and your warehousemen. All right? Under vice president of sales and marketing, you have your sales manager and you have your marketing manager. All right? Now remember, all of these roles. I don't care what size your company is, all of these roles, not people. So right now, if you're thinking about people, step back for a second and think about the role. Think about if you were recreating your company, right? You might be 20 years in, you might be, you know, you might have your systems in place. I'm challenge you to rethink this for a second. Take a step back as if you were, you know, re crafting your company. All of these roles have to be fulfilled. There are certain things a sales manager must do on a daily basis for the business to run. If you're a one man show, you're going to be the sales manager. You're also going to be the on site estimator, you're also going to be the sales team leader, and you're also going to be a moving consultant. You're going to be the one booking the jobs. You're going to be the one making sure that you're booking the jobs. You're going to be the one looking at the reports and you're going to be the one going out to do estimates if you need to. All right, Marketing manager, you're going to manage the outside sales reps, all right? So an outside sales rep is somebody that's going out drumming up business, going out pounding the pavement, going to real estate offices, things like that, bringing in account work and then your web marketing team, all right, Your SEO, your pay per click, whether that's in house or whether you outsource that, the marketing manager needs to oversee that. All right? So if you start to look at this right now and say, you know what? I do all of that, even if you have multiple people that work for you and you feel like I do all of that, that's okay. But it's important that you separate it out. And behind each one of these, you start to, you know, as the owner of the business, right? Because really what you want to do, you have to look at the end game. What's your endgame? What are you trying to accomplish with your business? You don't want to create a job for yourself, alright? And if that's what you intended at the beginning, I challenge you to step away from that. You're either going to want to sell your business, you're going to want to pass it down to your kids and let them run it. And maybe they pass it down for more generations, or maybe you want to franchise it, right? Maybe you want to duplicate it and start opening up into multiple cities, maybe you want to franchise. In order to do that, you have to have your systems down, all right? Because regardless of your exit strategy, if you want to sell your business, somebody that's coming in to buy your business, they don't want to buy a job. They want to buy a business that runs without them. They want to be up here and see that the system is running right? Not that you have some good people, because good people come and go. You need the systems. So basically, each one of these roles, you're going to need to create a job description and a role responsibility. And listen, I know this seems like it might be a lot of work right now, but stick with me and you'll see why this is so important.

Vice President of finance, you may have a controller. All right, so at one point I had a controller, and under the controller I had four bookkeepers, right? Accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll and just an accounting clerk. So you have your accounts payable and accounts receivable. So when you look at people in your business, right, let's say you have five people in your business.

You look at that one person and then you craft responsibilities around that person and their responsibility and their capabilities, you're going to have chaos, you're going to have conflict. When you craft roles, when you say, you know what, someone needs to handle accounts receivable, somebody needs to make sure we're collecting all of our money, right? Someone needs to make sure that all of our storage customers are being billed and paying on time, all right? All of these roles need to be handled. So what I want you to do is draw this out, all right, and start putting names in here. If you're a one man show, I'll give you an example. Your name is going to be in every single one of these boxes. But the reason you're doing this is because you want to take your business to the next level, okay? So what you'll do, and this is another conversation I had with a different coaching client, which was if you want to start working on your business and not in your business, right, the first thing you need to do is start working in your business. If you don't have your systems and your processes and your SOPs, your standard operating procedures, and you want to step away from your business, it's going to be very difficult. If your people don't know exactly what you need them to do, it's going to be very hard to step away. So now that you have this, you want to start at the bottom. All right, let's take sales, for example. You want to start at the bottom. And what's the job description? What's the role for a moving sales consultant? What is it that they should be doing? So this is, you know, for those of you moving sales academy, this process is what led me to create the process that's in moving sales academy. That led me to putting the scripts together and the processes and the hiring guide and everything else was all starting with this. All right, so what I want you to do is create your own version of that, right? You have most of the sales stuff in moving sales academy, but you need that in other areas of your business. If you want to sell for top dollar, right, you need to show somebody that there's a business that they could step into and that's going to run without them. If you want to franchise or duplicate your model or if you want to even pass it down, you know, just when you step away from your business.

You'Re the glue that holds it together. If you don't have processes, you're the glue. So if you think that you could pass it down to your kids and that they're going to take it and run with it, it's a 50, 50 shot, regardless of how smart they are, regardless of how long they've been working with you in the business. So what you want to do is you want to start at the bottom and start creating, you know, go to work, right? Maybe for years you haven't answered the phone, but if you don't have your systems and your processes in writing, start answering the phone, start giving estimates, and as you're doing it, you're not doing it again to go back to work. You're doing it to create the process, all right? And as soon as you have that process and it's solid, then you move on, right? Then you create the process for sales team leader, right? So you become the sales team leader, you create that process, then you move on the sales manager, and you create that process. Before you know it, you have processes for all of these. Okay? You're not going to do this all in a weekend, but you need to start chipping away at this. If you want a business that can run without you, if you want a business that you can duplicate, I talk to a lot of companies that want to expand, they want to franchise their business, they want to open multiple locations. And I experienced the, you know what, what comes with that if you don't have systems and processes in place. My first location, we were crushing it. I mean, just, you know, bringing in three and a half, almost $4 million in one location in local moves before I even started expanding.

But guess what?

When I started to expand, I was the glue that held all that together. So now the other locations weren't running exactly the same because I didn't have, although I thought I had some systems and processes, they were all based on me being there, right? But when you have systems and processes, when you have a manual for how you do everything in your business, that's how you become the McDonald's of moving. That's how you don't worry about hiring good people, right? Because it's not good people that run the systems. If you look at McDonald's, they don't go and hire the best people because they don't need the best people. Because when somebody comes in, they say, here's the system, here's exactly how you do it, step by step. So if you don't want to franchise your business, if you don't want to grow, if you don't, you know, at the bare minimum, if that's not your aspiration, I'm sure you'd like to make the same money, make more money and be able to step away, right? Enjoy your time. Think about what it would be like if you knew exactly how things should run. If the people in your office knew exactly how things should run, you'd be able to step away from your business, right? So this right here, if you don't have this, it's just going to be confusion, chaos, alright? So if you experience confusion and chaos now in your business, right? And if I were to ask you, you know, what do you need? And your response is, I need better people. It's not that you need better people. Better people is like, like a unicorn, right? We all think that we're going to hire this one person that's going to come in and like change our business for us. We just need to find that one person. No, you just need to create the system. And then you could bring in people with no experience, teach them your system and let them run it, right? So you know people that get in the moving sales Academy that are, you know, have multiple locations or they're, you know, a larger company and the owner doesn't necessarily want to dive in and do the training, no problem. Give this to your sales manager. Tell them to do that. Right? People that haven't had a sales manager, once they get into moving sales academy, then all of a sudden they can hire a sales manager because, like, wow, there's a lot of stuff for this person to do. Let me just hand them this and have them go do it. Well, you need that with all areas of your business. All right? So this is what it's going to take if you really want to get to that next level. Next level, like beyond where you're at. If you're hitting a wall constantly, if you're trying to grow but you feel like you're stuck, this is it. And I resisted this when somebody presented this to me. I'm like, this guy's corporate. He doesn't get it. He doesn't get the moving business. I'm just, you know, we're just. We do some sales, we have some trucks, we send out movers. It's different, right? But once I embrace this, once I saw the power of putting all this together, you know, that's when we probably went from 8 or 9 million a year, 10, maybe, to 20 million a year. All right? That's the power of stuff like this, you know? And as an owner, you have to step back once in a while, you know, you. Because you can. You're always going to want to remain the vice president of all these areas. You or your partner will always be this, right? So you'll always have a sales manager reporting to you. You'll always have your operations manager reporting to you or your partner. You'll always have your accounting department or controller reporting to you. So now your days become filled with overseeing your operation, right? Not in there, working your operation. So regardless of where you're at, this is something that you need to shoot for, all right? You need to be able to remove yourself. You're the owner of the business. You're up here. You're not even on this chart, all right? Consider yourself like a shareholder. You're just investing in a business. And if you invested in a business and you weren't in it every day, you'd want to make sure you had the right system in place. Because this can all. I don't care who your on site estimator is, they could be replaced. I don't care who the sales team leader is, they could be replaced. If you Bring somebody else in and you hand them. Here's what you're supposed to do. You have a set training that you put them through. You can replace any one of these positions quickly. You're not at the mercy of any employee that you know, maybe has been with you for a while. They're not really doing what they're supposed to do. But you feel like, I can't find somebody to replace them. I've been there. I know what it's like. You know, you feel stuck, you feel like, you know, I want somebody better, but I can't find somebody better. You don't need somebody. You don't need some person that's better. You just need the system, right? And it's really simple. It's not complicated. It might take you some time to put it together, but it's not complicated. Alright? So I want to show you how this all breaks down when it comes to sales. So there's four roles of sales, all right? So in your sales department, regardless of what size you are, there's four roles, okay? Moving consultant, your sales reps, okay? Sales team leader, which is basically before you get to a manager, you could have a team leader, which is someone that is a moving consultant. Right? But that's kind of your go to person. It helps you maybe assign some leads, right? Helps you oversee a few things. Maybe opens and closes the shop for you. Right? They're a sales team leader. You haven't necessarily given them the title of a manager because they don't have that kind of responsibility and you're not paying them that kind of money either. Then there's your sales manager and then there's your vice president of sales. All right? So let's look at phase one. All right? There's five phases of where your company is right now. And you're gonna know right away which phase you're in. And if you're at one or you're in five, it doesn't matter. There's no good or bad. They're just phases, alright? It's just where you happen to be at the given moment. And then you could decide what the progression is. But the Progression goes from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So regardless of where you are, you were at one at one point, I would imagine, unless you bought an existing company that already had a staff, you were at one, I was at one when I started. So I was the moving consultant, I was a team leader, I was the manager, I was a vice president of sales. All right? I did it all. And that's okay. That's a good way to start. But you're never going to grow your business, you're never going to scale your business in phase one. So after phase one, phase two.

You'Re still a moving consultant. You're still basically. So when I say moving consultant, you might be the owner of the company, but if you're giving estimates, if you're quoting customers, if you're calling leads, if you're answering the phones, you're still a moving consultant, all right, As a role within your company. But you also now hired Bob and you hired sue and you hired Andy, right? So phase two means you're still booking moves, you're still answering the calls, but you also have some team that's helping you do that, all right? So you're also still the sales team leader.

Still the manager, you're still vice president of sales, alright? A lot of companies, even mid sized companies are at this point, all right? You don't want to be answering calls, you don't want to be giving estimates. That's not the best use of your time. When we go back and we look at that organizational chart, you don't want to be spending your time on the phone giving estimates. You might be the best at it, all right? But if you're the best at it, create a system behind what you do, right? Put it on paper, craft it, right? When I, you know, if you're a moving sales academy, you have my moving script, right? My sales script. And you've had the worksheets to create your own sales script. Well, for me, that sales script was a matter of me being a moving consultant in phase one, into phase two and seeing what works and crafting it and tweaking it and getting it to a point where I felt that it was just right. And then I was able to train other people with that. All right? But you don't want to be spending your time booking moves. If that's where you're at now and that's where you need to be, that's okay. I'm not saying stop, but I want you to see the progression as you go through the phases. So you can remove yourself from, from the day to day and start running a business as opposed to, you know, being a worker or a doer or an employee within your business, all right? But just make sure when you're in this role.

You'Re not just doing it, but you're creating process. Make use of this time. Anytime you're fulfilling a role from the organizational chart, don't just do it. Ask yourself how can we do this better? Start documenting it, right? Start seeing ways that you can improve it and then finalize it and get that into your manual. That's what you're going to need to expand. That's what you're going to need to franchise. That's what you're going to need to get top dollar if you sell. Okay, Phase three, you got Bob, Sue, Andy, and you hire Jennifer now. So now you're not a moving consultant anymore. You have a team of moving consultants, however many that may be. So even if this is one or two people, doesn't have to be four. I just filled up the space here. But.

Phase three, you're not giving estimates anymore, right? But now you're, you're the team leader still. You're assigning leads, right? You're answering any questions for them. You're their, their point person on a day to day basis, right? So you're essentially still sitting with all of your sales team and making sure that they have all the answers that they need helping them close deals. Right? Authority. Take.

This is phase three. You're also still the sales manager and vice president of sales.

Phase four, same at the same four moving consultants.

You promoted Andy to a team leader, right? But he's still, remember a team leader is still booking moves also. Okay? So he's going to be booking moves, but overseeing. So he's more of a backup moving consultant, right? Where Bob, sue and Jennifer, their main role is selling and he's overseeing that. Help close deals, assign leads, making sure that people are calling all the leads. You're still the sales manager. You're still vice president of sales.

Phase five.

Bob, Sue, Andy, and he's a team leader. You brought in an outside salesperson, Roger.

And you are still vice president of sales. You're going to remain vice president of sales, you or your partner, right? So like as you take a look at the organizational chart and as you start to divide up who does what.

Someone'S going to be given this role. All right? Vice president of sales and marketing should go together. Vice president of operations should be something else. You shouldn't have someone handle. If you have two people in the business, two owners, two partners, you should have someone that handles operations, someone that handles sales. All right? Because you want to make sure sales keeps their, you know, foot on the gas. And if the same person's handling both, sometimes they get overwhelmed. Like we have too many jobs, I don't think we should book any more jobs. And then they slow down. That's not good. Alright, so these are the five phases and the four roles of sales. Alright? So basically what you want to do is you want to draw out your organizational chart, all right? That's step one. Then you want to decide who's going to fulfill those roles, okay? Then you want to basically write role responsibilities for each one. You want to take every single one of them. Let me go back to this, all right? Because this is. Let's get this up here for a second. So if you didn't get a chance, draw this out. I did it on the TV today because I didn't want you to have to read my chicken scratch again. If you're thinking that this is too much for you, that you're not at that level, you need to stop thinking that, all right? You have to see where you're going. Alright? Every time I start with a new coaching client, we start with, all right, where are you now? Where do you want to go? All right? Where do you see your business in five years? What's your end result? What are you after? Do you want to duplicate it? Do you want to create a model that you could franchise? Do you want to sell your business? What is it? Regardless of what it is, this is how it's going to run. Smooth. Now, if you're comfortable going to work every day overseeing stuff, being the glue that holds things together, and that's your comfort zone, I challenge you to come out of that, all right? I know it's hard to let go, but what's been hard to let go and what's been kind of, you know, drilled into our minds when I say us, because I was there. I didn't want. I resisted this so badly. It was just. I almost fired the coach over it. I just felt like I had the wrong guy. And when I really started to see where he was headed, I'm like, wow, here I am. I thought I knew everything, right? I'm like, oh, man, we're doing whatever the numbers were at the time. 8, 9, 10 million, multiple locations. I know what I'm doing. But.

There was so much more that I was missing, right? And it all starts with the clarity. It all starts with being able to understand what your business requires right now. Your business requires, requires all of these roles, okay? If you didn't have accounts receivable, then your money wouldn't be collected, all right? If you didn't have accounts payable, nobody would be paying the bills. They'd come repo your trucks, all right? If you didn't have dispatch. You get what I'm saying, right? But what Happens is we get overwhelmed as the business owner because we don't separate it out like this, right? We just kind of have it all in our heads that we handle all of this stuff, right? Or maybe we have, you know, a few people that are part of our team, and, you know, this person handles that and this person handles that. Or even worse, you know, maybe you have a partner, and sometimes one partner's handling sales, and maybe, you know, then. Then that partner handles operations and the other partner's handling sales, right? And it's like, oh, who's going to do the books this month? And one partner, I'll do the books this month, you do the books next month, right? And then you hire an employee to do the books. There's no accountability for the business to run like a. Like a business, right? You need to have accountability. I remember when I started doing all this stuff, I had people that work for me that, you know, behind my back were making fun of me and said, you know what? He thinks he's running a Fortune 500 company, right? We're just. We're a moving company, like he thinks he's running. I found out about it, right? And got them on board with it. I didn't just fire them because they were saying things, right? Because people will resist change the same way that you will resist this change the same way that I did. Right? But it's so powerful. And I know you have so many aspirations, right? I've talked to a lot of you, right? And I know you want to go to that next level. You're not happy with just having a moving company that runs and makes a few dollars, right? You want a company that runs without you. You want a company that makes a lot of dollars. And if you want to grow and you want to expand and you want to be able to, you know, really live into your entrepreneurial spirit and, like, take advantage of that without getting burnt out, frustrated, or going bankrupt. You have to have structure. Okay? I'm saying this to you because I brought in a coach at a point where I felt out of control with my business, right? I mean, the numbers were there. We were making so much money that all the inefficiencies were kind of.

Washed out, right? I mean, it was like the money was coming in, so we didn't really see all the inefficiencies, but it was chaos. I was flying from this office to that office. I'd have to spend a month in an office because a person wasn't doing what they were supposed to do or a person quit. And I needed to go basically hire somebody new and get them trained. But once I realized that the system is what runs the business, the people, you just need people that run the system, right? So if your system's easy to understand, anybody can run it. If you've ever bought furniture from Ikea or, you know, something that comes in a box, right? It's like a million pieces. You're like, I don't know how I'm going to put this together. But you sit down with the instructions and you just follow them, right? Couldn't anybody do that? You're not a master carpenter because you put together a credenza from Ikea. You just followed the instructions. It's the same thing with your business. You just need the instructions to be able to bring somebody in. All right? The chaos is, first of all, it's not good for your business, it's not good for your employees, it's not good for your health, and it's not good for the bottom line, all right? You go to work every day because you want to make money, all right? You own a business because you have the American dream and you want to grow it and you want to, you know, sell it, franchise it, pass it down to your kids, whatever. Let me know if there's some other reason why you're in business. Put it in the chat roll. Let me know if you have any questions on putting them in the chat roll. I'm going to go to questions in a minute. I want to make sure that I answer them, that you guys are totally clear on this. If you have any other questions on other subjects, ask them in the chat roll below. But don't overlook this. All right? You might not be ready to tackle this today, Saturday, October 21st, right? But you should start looking at this before you go into the new year, alright? That's why I wanted to do it now. I wanted to give you time to really start looking at this and understanding that when you, you know, when you see all the pieces, even if your name is in each and every single one of these, right? So draw this out and then write the names of the people that are going to be in here. What this will do also is it'll let you know where you need to hire, right? I've had people ask me like, I don't know what I need to hire somebody. I'm overwhelmed. There's a lot going on, but I don't know who to hire, what position should I hire. When you lay this out and you see who's doing What? It'll be very, very clear to you. I can't tell you that, right? There's no. I can't just give you answers to a lot of stuff. You need to basically do the work. You need to look through this, and it's going to be crystal clear on who you need to hire. It's going to be crystal clear on who's doing more than they should be doing, and it's gonna be crystal clear on who's not doing enough. All right? So don't resist me on this. All right? Do this. You don't have to start immediately, but put it on your calendar and set aside some time. I would never bring this out and try to, you know, show you this in the middle of summer. We're not in summer anymore. And, you know, my thought process behind the off season, it's the people that take advantage of that time. It's the people that do the real. They go to that next level. All right? So I want that for you. Also, it's October. Start thinking about. We're done with this, right? Start thinking about what you can do to volunteer for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. All right? Every year, we were part of an organization where we gave out turkeys, right? We sent trucks. I went myself and literally drove a truck. I mean, a couple years ago, literally drove a truck with a few people. We had a few trucks that did it. We took bags of turkeys and Thanksgiving dinners, and we delivered them to families of kids that were in, you know, physically sick, okay? They were in a hospital with cancer, and the family didn't have money, and we delivered them turkeys and things like that. So not only is it great to do, right, It's a good use of your resources. We got a lot of business out of that, right? The people from that organization, I mean, it was like we didn't even ask for it. Started sending us a ton of customers. All right? Before that, every year, Thanksgiving time, we started giving out. You know, when I was in Denver, when I my first office, we started giving out turkeys, right? Because we had a little. Where the steps were outside of the office, there was kind of of these planters. They're supposed to be plants in there, but usually there was snow in there. So we just pile up turkeys and we give them to our movers, right? We make sure our movers had a turkey from us to go eat with their family on Thanksgiving. Later on in other offices in Florida, you can't leave turkeys outside, right? So we gave away gift cards to the grocery Store enough for them to go get a turkey for their family. Christmas time, we would donate trucks to toys for tots and we would go pick up toys and deliver them. Think about what you could start doing. All right, first of all, it's great to give back, all right? I'm sure. I hope you had a great summer. Hope you made a lot of money. It's great to give back, but you get a lot of business out of it, too. All right? Don't be, you know, don't be ashamed to post it on social media, to put it on your website to let people see that you do this type of stuff. It makes your company more human, right. And makes people want to do business with you. All right, so let's get the questions. If you have them, put them in the chat roll below.

Nick. What's up, Nick?

Oh, Nick's coming. Look forward to seeing you. He's coming to moving sales academy. Do you hire someone to write your job descriptions?

Great question.

I don't think you need to. I would say, you know, later on you can, right? But literally start with a word document and, like, simple bullet points, right? You don't have to be a. You know, I'm not really a good speller. I'm sure, you know, some of you in moving sales academy probably seen that maybe there's some words misspelled here and there, like, but I would sit and do it myself, right? Just bullet points and write them out. Go online, search job description templates. Right? You could definitely, definitely write them yourself. And then at some point, if you're ready to then franchise, right? And you're ready to, you know, start modeling or you want to bring in investors and you want, like, a nice, clean, presentable manual. You could hire somebody to do that. But if you're going to hire somebody to come in, they're going to have to come into your office and you're going to have to basically teach them what you do in order to do that. So you might even have someone in your office already that, you know, could kind of. You could tell them what you want and they could just type it. So I don't think it's necessary to. To hire somebody. Great question.

Eric. Eric. I think it's Eric. Eric, if you are coming to moving sales academy live.

We'Re going to go ahead and give you VIP ticket. All right, so let's make sure we give Eric a VIP upgrade to moving sales academy live. Jonas, can you give an example of a sales team leader's pay structure and responsibilities? Yeah. So A sales team leader can be, honestly, as little as you can get away with, right? So, you know, a sales team leader could be, you know, you give them an extra 50 bucks a week, right? Maybe you give them an extra hundred. Maybe you give them a quarter of a percent over the. You know, it doesn't have to be much because they're making most of their money off of selling, so it's just a little something extra. And their job responsibilities are, you know, if you have leads that come into your CRM that need to be assigned, that need to be assigned, they could be doing that. Right. Whereas your sales manager is more overseeing the operation. A sales team leader is kind of like an assistant to the sales manager. So if you're.

You know, if you personally are the sales manager or even if you have a sales manager, your team leader is kind of like your assistant that helps you with everything else that's going on. Great question. Jonas. I know you're coming to moving sales Academy. When you check in, we're gonna have something special for you for that question. All right, let's make sure that we. We have a little gift form when he checks in.

Trey, what are your thoughts on paying helpers as 1099? Trey? I did a video recently, so if you go on my website, Louis Massaro.com or you go on YouTube and you look for it 1099 versus W2, I lay it out there completely. It's pretty in depth.

I don't really have an opinion one way or the other. It's more like, here's everything you need to do if you're going to legitimately pay movers 1099. And here's everything that you need to do if you're going to pay them W2, you can't just hire somebody and say, I'm just going to pay you a 1099. You're a contractor, and there's a lot that they need to go into, a lot of criteria that they need to pass to make sure that they're legitimately a 1099 contractor. All right, so watch that video. I'm not deferring the question. It's just, you know, it gets very in depth, and I have a download in there from the IRS that'll really lay it out for you on which way to go.

Let's go ahead and get Trey. If Trey is.

If Trey's not already signed up for moving sales academy, let's. Let's take care of his registration fee for him and his guests. All right. If you're already signed up for moving Sales Academy live. And you already did pay your registration fee. I'm go ahead and refund it to you. All right, Trey, let's see. Asanu.

What are your thoughts on advertising and focusing on commercial office moves for the slow season rather than keep pushing towards residential? You know, for me, I was always focused on residential.

But we had office moving as part of, you know, whatever we do. So when you say advertise, I don't know if you mean, you know, maybe on pay per click use. Turn these sounds off here. You know, using.

You know, office movers. Right? Like maybe bidding on that keyword, if that's what you're talking about. If you're prepared to do office moves right, then, yeah, I mean, you could try it for us. We always stay focused on residential. I feel like the more spread out that you are, the more diluted your effort becomes. Right. So if you're totally on point with your residential business and you want to venture out to specifically target office moving, then go for it. But if you feel like there's room for improvement, if you feel like after enrolling and moving Sales Academy, if there's some areas that you can jump into and start tweaking, work on that and increase your booking percentage with the residential. There's nothing wrong with going over after office, but I would never get into a different line of work purposely and like, specifically. And go advertise for it now. If it falls in your lap, no problem. Right. I'm sure you get calls now for office moves, no problem. But I wouldn't go after a specific line of business. Right. So if you're only a local mover, going after long distance or going after office moves, unless you've mastered what's in front of you and you're mastered what you have there, tighten up the processes and then take on different lines of work.

Great question. Sano, if you're coming to moving Sales Academy, when you check in, we're going to have something special for you as well. Okay. All right. Putting all the. Sano is going to put the budget towards office and commercial. Cool. Let me know how that works out. Let's see, Scott, what would be your advice? Steering away advice, Steering away booking moves with coupons and dive into full rates. Let me make sure I have this right. What would be your advice? Steering away booking moves with coupons and dive into full rates. All right, so let me just address full rates and coupons. I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. You know, when you guys are asking these questions, Just know I'm kind of, I'm reading them, you know, in the text. You may mean something specifically, but unless it reads that way, it's hard for me to understand. But let's. As far as coupons, coupons are a tool to be used to book moves, right? Period. You shouldn't just offer coupons across the board. Now, if you're doing a direct mail campaign, have coupons on there. But you can have your.

10% off local moves. I prefer to do a $35 off local moves than a percentage. So when you're doing a coupon, I like to have a specific dollar amount because, you know, most people aren't that good at math. So when they look at the 10%, they don't really know how much that comes out to. Plus, when they see a specific dollar amount, like $35, that's real money in their hands. So it's more like a gift certificate, right. For the move. So I always had them on postcards, but then I would have them on my website as well. But I would have them in a place where they weren't that easy to find. And as a sales tool, instead of just giving somebody a discount, right. And feel like you're wheeling and dealing with them, like, you know, if they are like, oh, I got a better price, and you saying, hey, I'll give you 10% off, or I'll give you $50 off your move. Instead, say, you know, have your sales team say, you know what, go to my website, type this in. You'll be able to get a coupon right there. This way, you're giving them the inside scoop. And it doesn't feel like you're willing and dealing and they're. You're giving them a coupon. And here's something that's very, very important when you're doing coupons on your website. All right, so our coupon, we just had one page of coupons. It gave one or two months free storage, depending on where we were at. It gave $35 off local moves and $125 off long distance moves. All right, so they printed that out. When they print it out, they have to put their name. So when they go to basically pull up the coupon, they type in their name. And this way it prints it out. And you want to have your web guy do it to where it prints their name and the date and time that they printed it out. The reason we started doing this is because we found movers. We're going and printing out a bunch of coupons Bringing them to the jobs and basically working a deal with the customer, right. Like, oh, I have this coupon here. Just take care of us, right. So all of a sudden, customers that. That weren't really supposed to have a coupon had a coupon so that the movers were getting a better tip. So it's a simple adjustment. Just make sure you, you know, add the time on there, and as far as, you know, rates you can always use, you could always have in your coupons, too, that this coupon applies Monday through Thursday only. All right. It doesn't have to be across the board. You could have stipulations to it. Just make sure that it's clear for them to see what that is.

Trey, how do you feel about using leasing companies to gain worker comp? Yeah, I think that's a great idea. And sometimes it's the only option. You know, if you're going. I think you were asking about 1099. If you're using a leasing company, it would be a W2 employee, and the workers comp would be built into that. And a lot of times a percentage through a leasing company, employee leasing company will be a lot less than you can get for workers comp. Right. So, for example, maybe workers comp is, you know, 17 to 20%, right. Like from US insurance company employee leasing, you might be able to get it for 12 to 14%, all right. Depending on the company. And you can always negotiate that as well, right. With the employee leasing companies, because sometimes they put a little markup in there, so you could talk to them about that too. Now, when it comes to workers comp and employee leasing, here's something that I found to be very, very helpful. Instead of doing worker's comp as your normal.

Estimate your premium right up front, and then pay a monthly premium based on your estimated workers comp and your estimated payroll. And then all of a sudden, you get slapped with that big bill for all the overage. What I like to do, and what I found works great, is if you talk to your workers comp company or your employee leasing company, and you let them know that you want to pay the exact amount monthly, right? So basically, they'll take your exact payroll every single month, and you pay it monthly. Now, some people are scared to do that because it's a higher monthly fee, right? But the lower fee is just an illusion because, remember, you're gonna get that big bill at the end, right? I mean, this happened to me when I first started. It was. It was a shock. I think the first time I Had a workers comp bill the overage, call it overage, the overage or whatever the premium was that we established at the beginning. I wanna say it was about 60 grand that they handed me a bill for and said just do in 30 days. Right. I'm sure a lot of you have experienced that. So if you have them bill you monthly on your specific payroll, you can now at least adjust your pricing and adjust your overhead to account for that. Right. It really builds it in to where you know what your real cost for each mover is. All right, you know where your pricing needs to be. When you're doing your move cost analysis to determine your pricing, you know where you need to be. That's. I would, all of you, I would talk to your workers comp companies and see if they can do that. All right.

Adrian.

I was wondering if you can give me advice in regards to how I should approach a realtor or via or VP, in this case century 21. In regards with long term referral program. What should I offer as a commission? All right, so let's just say you're meeting with any type of realtor or maybe you're going into a real estate office to establish yourself as their go to mover. First thing you want to do is really create your.

Referral program. Like what is that? Right? You know, same thing as, you know, when you put something like this together, you want to structure your referral program so that it's consistent across the board. Right. So then when you sign somebody up, you have a way to track it. Right. This is all a moving sales academy too, by the way. In week six, setting up a referral program. So I wouldn't treat it any differently than that. Go to week six moving sales academy, dive in. But essentially you need to look at what it's worth to you as far as how much to pay them. You know, what's your, you know what is, what is your acquisition cost? Now with your marketing, what does it cost you to get each and every move? A few months ago, if you haven't seen the replay, we talked about roi, how to determine your ROI on marketing. So go back, it's in your members area. Watch the replay on that. But essentially once you know your acquisition cost of what it costs you to get each move. So if you're paying on average $75 to get all of your, all of your marketing, right? So you're paying $75, that's your average from your postcards to your pay per click to whatever else you know that you have at least $75 to spend.

For a referral, right. But depending on the size of the homes, depending on what type of market, Right. So just because they're a VP 21, I don't. To me, that's not impressive that they're a VP. What's impressive is how many homes are you selling, right? What level homes are you selling? Are they selling $300,000 homes or are they selling 3 million dollar homes? Because you can pay more money on the 3 million dollar homes. So you could also pay them a percentage across the board too, so that it just stays consistent. You know, if you want to give them 10%, 5 to 10% on each move, you can do that. Or you could follow the moving points referral system in week six, which basically gives them $20 each time, plus points for every dollar spent to where they win prizes and gifts at the end of the year. That makes it fun, that makes it exciting. But the first step is just go talk to them, establish the relationship. If they don't like what you have to offer, they're not necessarily going to seek out a different mover. They'll say, you know, I need more than that. But they're usually just happy to have a company they could refer that does a good job. And the first customer that you don't do a good job for, you risk losing that relationship. All right? And that's why I like doing the moving points, right? And letting them accumulate points over the years. Over the year where in December, right, Holiday time, you let them go on your website and they look at the, they look at the catalog of everything that you offer and they see a flat screen tv, they see an iPhone, they see a brand new Mac and they're like, all right, it was just one customer. Let me keep referring them some jobs, right? The other ones have gone. Well, that's how I would handle that. Great question.

That was Adrian. Adrian, if you.

Let's go ahead and get Adrian a VIP upgrade to Moving Sales Academy. So when you sign up for Moving Sales Academy Live, right? Coming up, it's going to ask you if you want to upgrade the VIP. It's an extra 500 upgrade. Just hit no. And we're going to make sure that we go ahead and give you the vip, all right, you're going to be able to. It's two days worth of lunches that we're going to cater. There's a beautiful outdoor area where we're going to be having the VIP lunches. We were just there the other day taking a look at it. I'll be there answering questions, doing Q and A. It's going to be a great time. So guys, that's it. Thanks so much for showing up. Don't resist this, all right? Take a little time to absorb it, but this is going to get you to that next level, all right? This is going to allow you to take a step back and plan your business strategically so that you can grow it. Alright? Until next month, go out there. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. Have a good one.

Alright, my friend. What did 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 it get the wheels turning? Did you love it? If so, do me a favor, share this episode. Somewhere out there on social media where you know there's some people that will get value from it. Make sure you hashtag the Moving Mastery Podcast so that we'll be able to look you up and find you on Instagram. Sometimes we just randomly pick a few people and send them gifts like free training T shirts, hats, swag, tickets to our three day seminar. So make sure you let us know you're listening and share what you thought about this episode out there on social media. I also want to invite you to join us in our Moving Mastery monthly program. You could do that by going to Lewis massage.

Monthly. That's LewisMissaro.com monthly. 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 students of this program tickets to my live 3 day moving sales Academy seminar. We also give them extra training on leadership and productivity. Go check it out. It's LewisMassaro.com monthly. Thank you 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 can take your life to the next level. You can take your business to the next level. Sometimes you just need a little bit more time training, a little bit more inspiration, a little bit more consistency. And I hope that by listening to this podcast I'm able to provide that spark that you need to make it happen. I look forward to being here with you on the next episode of the Moving Mastery Podcast.