Best Of: Why You Need A Mover Database

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. 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 LewisMassaro.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.

You know, movers, drivers, helpers. It's becoming a little more challenging to find them these days, right? I mean, a driver can go and work for Uber and not have to lift furniture, just drive around in his car and, you know, make a living. That way. Right. You know, those of you who were involved in the H2B program where you brought people in from other countries during the summer, that's really tightened up due to the new administration and some changes that were made. So I know a lot of companies that. And even if you didn't participate in that program, let me tell you why it's going to affect you. So this program was where you bring in people from other countries, you know, for a temporary period, right. They get to come here, they get to work, and a lot of moving companies would use them in the summer. Well, now that that's tightened up, a lot of the companies that were counting on this labor force for their summer busy season don't have access to them anymore or don't have access to as many of them anymore. And let me tell you how that's going to affect everybody, because these companies, who a lot of them are big players and major markets, they're going to be out there looking for movers, right? They're going to be essentially competing with you for whoever's in your market that's not brought in from out of the country to be able to be a driver and to be a helper. Okay? So it's really important that you start looking at this now. Even if you don't necessarily need additional movers yet, now's the time to get them. Why?

Because.

January and February typically are slower months for moving companies, right? So, you know, when does a mover start looking for a new job? When they're not getting all the hours that they want, Right. So January and February, they're coming out of a couple of months where they might kind of be starving for hours, right. They might need, you know, they haven't been getting the hours and they're not thinking about it going, oh, it's January, I'm going to stick around until it's March, they'll start looking for new employment. Well, that's why it's important to start thinking about getting them now, even if you don't need them yet. Because any good mover, any trained and experienced mover.

That is still looking for a job come May or June to there's a problem there, right. If they have not secured work when things start getting busy, there's typically a problem there, Right. And it becomes harder to find good quality help because everybody's looking for them in May, everybody's looking for them in June. So I want to share with you a strategy on how to start getting them in the fold now to where you'll Be able to make sure you have movers when you need them. And this is not only for, you know, just March of every year, this is all year round strategy. All right, so I'm gonna share with you a few things that we did. And it really all starts with building a mover database. This is one of the most. I mean, this is probably the best thing I ever did for recruiting movers, drivers, helpers. Right? So a mover database is essentially, we did it. And those of you who follow me know I like Excel, Microsoft Excel, spreadsheets. Okay? We put them in Excel, right? Their name, whether they're a driver or helper, their pay range of what they're looking to be in. All right? Their status.

Right?

So are they a weekend only person? Are they a weekday only person? Are they casual labor? Right. Somebody you could just call as needed and, you know, pay them for the day. What's their phone number, what's their email address? So the idea here is that you start to build a database. So typically, what you normally probably do, and what I used to do was wait until I needed some movers, put an ad out and get them coming in, and you kind of needed them right away to get started. So with the mover database, the idea is this. So let me kind of paint the picture for you a little bit. So imagine you started this a year ago, and all year, every mover that you have working for you, every mover that.

Came through for an interview, every mover that called and said, are you guys hiring everybody that you came across, you put them in your database, okay? So now you have their names, you have their telephone numbers, you have their email address.

You need to treat your staffing of your, you know, how you get people on your trucks the same way you treat your sales, right? You need to gather the information and then as you need them, start sending emails. Okay? Hopefully a lot of you have set up your email automation right? Through mailchimp or a different service. You start sending emails, you start sending text messages, right? And this way you always have this database, Right. For me, it started with a sheet of paper that we had taped next to the dispatch desk. Right? And I'm sure the same for last of you. It was like a sheet of paper, and every time we had a mover, we just kind of wrote their name on it, right? We'd be like Tommy B. Right, with a phone number and that was it. And when we needed people, we just start calling off that list. So, you know, as things progressed, as we got more organized, as the technology also got a little bit better. Let's make a spreadsheet. Now, with a spreadsheet, you could sort that like even if you're.

Even if it's like, you know, the end of the month and you know you have two crews that don't show up, right? It happens. So you pull out your sheet, you pull out your database, right? You could sort it. Say you need drivers, you sort it by drivers, right? Maybe you want to find the casual labor, you sort it by the casual labor, right? You pick up the phone, you start calling them, or you send text messages. Or if you know in advance, you're going to be busy and you're going to start needing more help, you start sending emails out in advance, okay? So the database is huge. That's where we got to start. If you don't have a database, you start building one. Because think about this. How many times have you had movers work for you? They leave for whatever reason, usually they think the grass is greener somewhere else and then they end up coming back at some point, right? Well, think about if you have that reach, if you're able to email them, if you're able to text message them all with some automation, quite frankly. I don't mean you have to sit there and text them or personally email them. You could say, hey, email all these drivers that are still. And you can put another column. Maybe you have a blacklist column where you're like, this person can never work for us again. Either take them off. Or we left it on so that we knew if they ever tried to call back and work for us again, we'd look them up and we'd see that, no, we're not hiring them, right? And you start to have access to find the movers whenever you need them. Now why is that important and why do you need to start working on that now? Well, we talked about it.

Good.

Movers are going to be taken by May. That's it. Right now is like the time if you know you're going to need movers, you need to start the interview process. You need to start putting ads out, you need to start bringing them in to build your database and be okay with not hiring yet. This is where a lot of people get caught up, right? This is kind of like the sticking point for a lot of people where it's like, I don't have the work for them yet.

How can I put an ad out.

And how can I hire them? And I understand that it's a struggle and it's a challenge for sure. However, you know, you're gonna get busy. Why not work on building the database early right now at the latest? But you could start this in January. You could start this in February. You could start this in November, right?

When you start coming out of season, you could start building your database, and you might not be able to hire them just yet, but you have access to them directly when the time comes, right? And as you're building the database, like so right now, maybe you start doing some interviews. You bring them in, you talk to them. You're like, okay, they're gonna work.

And you just let them know, hey.

Listen, we're gonna be hiring in the next few weeks and the next few months, all right? I'm gonna go ahead. We're gonna call you when it's time. Whatever your situation is, right? It's gonna be super busy. You're gonna have, you know, unlimited hours. You're gonna be able to work as many hours, you know, as you could possibly work, get all kinds of overtime, whatever the case may be for you, and be okay with, you know, let them know we're not. We're not hiring immediately, okay? But what will happen is somebody will come into your office, and you'll be, like, amazed by them. You're like, I need them to start now, right? I want them to start immediately. I don't think these other guys, they're okay, right? I'm gonna call on them in the summer, but this one, I don't want to let them go, so. But you don't have the work, right? You don't have the extra work. You want to keep your current guys busy, so you need to rotate and just give enough hours, all right? This is a tough, tough thing to do, right? You know, it's tough, right? When things get slow, it's hard to look at your movers, and they're sitting there talking to you. I mean, I've had grown men cry to me because they don't have enough hours, right? Things slow down, and there's just not enough work. And you need to just do the best you can to help everybody make it through that slow time, while you also make it through that slower time, meaning.

You know, maybe the guys that are getting, you know, 60 hours a week overtime, all that, because they're your A team. Maybe you got to scale them back a little bit to make a little room to get some new people worked in there, right?

It's a juggling act, right? It's not easy, you know, it's not something. And it takes A lot of human emotional interaction and connection. It takes a leader to be able to have these conversations and make the rotation and kind of look at it and say, okay, let me not give them more jobs this week and let me put these new guys on a job because I need to kind of get them in the fold, because I know in a few weeks it's going to start getting really busy, and I need to make sure that they're here for me when I need them to.

Be here for me.

So it's a tough thing to do when someone's getting, you know, used to getting all those hours, but I don't really know a better way of doing it. So unless you want to pay people, right? Unless you want to pay movers to not work, right, Put them on salary and pay them to stick around. It becomes really challenging, and you have to rotate and look at it and say, you know what? Let me give them just enough hours where they can pay their bills. They could take care of their responsibilities. But for this next month in transition, they don't need to get all these overtime hours. They don't need to get all the jobs, right? Let me kind of work in some of these new guys.

So.

And then you train or you hire experienced, right? So if you have a training program in place, if you bring movers in, you bring them into your warehouse, you do some training, some official training, your, you know, workforce, the pool that you have to choose from is much larger, right? There's a lot of really good people out there that might not be experienced movers, but they have the physical capabilities of doing it, and they're like a great person, right? They're going to be great with your customer, they're going to be a great employee, but they need to be shown how to move furniture. So if you have a training program, then that opens it up, your possibilities even more, but otherwise hire experienced movers that know what they're doing.

So one of the quickest ways to know, for me, you might have your own ways. I'd love to hear about them.

Bring them in the warehouse or bring them. Listen, if you're working out of a truck rental yard, like I started to keep a chair in the back of your car or the back of your truck, okay?

And a pad.

And when you bring them there to hire them, say, here's a pad, here's a chair, pad it. Say it a little nicer than that. But, like, you know, have them pad the chair and see how they go about it, right? Because an experienced mover is going to take the pad, they're going to lay it on the floor, they're going to put the chair on the pad on its back and they're going to fold it up, right? Someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it's not an experienced mover, is going to take the pad and kind of drape it over the chair, right? So right there you could kind of right away kind of weed out like how experienced are they now? Just because they put the pad over the chair and didn't do it the traditional way of doing it, doesn't mean they won't be a good employee, doesn't mean they can't be trained, doesn't mean you can't show them how to properly pad a chair. And you know, 10 minutes or less, but you kind of can gauge, you know, what their real situation is. All right.

So.

Start building the database. Okay, so important. Google sheets, Excel spreadsheet. Listen, if you have to do it on the back of a napkin and staple it to the wall, it's better than nothing. However, it would be nice to be able to sort through it and kind of keep it ongoing. Think of this too, as a long term strategy. You're gonna see instant. You know, my coaching clients that I already gave this strategy to see instant results on this. Now you're going to get the instant results. But think about it a year from now, think about it two years from now, right? All your movers, people that worked for you, that left, people that came in for an interview but then decided to take another position, you kind of stay.

Relevant to them. If you want to send out an email that says we're hiring, we're offering a $500 whatever. It could be $100. Doesn't have to be $500. We're offering $100. If you bring somebody to us and we hire them and they stay 90 days and they work out, we'll give you $100, we'll give you $500. Because you know what, maybe the mover that came in is in a good position where they're at, right? Maybe they get all the good jobs, right? They get all the pack jobs. They get kind of first right of refusal on whatever, but they know somebody that's really good, that's not really at that level in that company or worked somewhere else, right? You kind of get more connected to all the movers and the ability to get them when you need them.

So important.

Start working on building a mover database.

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 it get the wheels turning?

Did you love it?

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Share this episode.

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Go check it out.

It's LouisMissaro.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 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.