Dispatch Your Crews From The Office To Increase Profits

Foreign.

It's Louis Massaro. And welcome to another episode of the Moving Mastery podcast.

What's up, Facebook? We are live today. Before I get started, you know, we got Moving Sales Academy live coming up March 15 through 17, Phoenix, Arizona. So if you want to build a sales machine for your company, learn how to generate leads on a consistent basis all year round, run a tight local and long distance operation, and learn how to run your business like a CEO and increase profits. Go to movingseminar.com and check that out. And today I want to talk to you about your dispatch operation and running a tight dispatch operation and how if the way that you go about it and the way that you approach it can make a huge difference between you making a lot of money and not making any money. There's a very thin, thin line in the moving business between making a ton of money and struggling to pay your bills. And a lot of that is in your operation. Right? So if we look at, you know, how it all works, first you have your marketing, then comes in, you sell the move, then it goes to dispatch. Right? And so, you know, a lot of companies.

It amazes me because, you know, when I hear that companies are letting their movers clock themselves in and out, in other words, they give them the moves for the day, they go out there to do the move, whether it's one move or two moves. Let's just say local moves. For now, let's just talk about local moves. And they give the crew the job and they go out and they do the move. Right. But then they let the crew estimate the charges, do the calculations, and present the customer with the bill and collect the money and then come back. And for a lot of companies, I find that the reason that they're doing it is because it's really one less thing to be bothered with, but also because they don't know that they could be hemorrhaging money in this way. All right.

It's such an important, important thing in a way that I've been able to help so many companies turn their entire business around by changing this one little detail of being able to go from, hey, movers, here's your contract for the day. Here's the jobs that you need to go do. Go take care of them. Let me know when you're done and come back to the office to, hey, call me with a start time. I'll let you know what it is. Call me when you're done. I'll let you know what the charges are. I'll let you know what to charge a customer. That's the difference. Okay, so by the way, if you're just joining us and you aren't already signed up for Moving Sales Academy Live, it's March 15th through the 17th, Phoenix, Arizona. We're going to be diving deep into sales, marketing operations, profit increasing strategies. Just go to moving seminar.com and check it out. But I want to talk to you about this because the point that I want to make is so strong and there's just so much money involved here, right? Why spend all this effort booking moves first, figuring out which lead sources to use, Then you book the move, then it has to go to dispatch to then turn around and make less money on that job. Let me tell you a story. Before I had all my systems and my processes in place, which really didn't happen entirely until after I opened five, five, maybe six locations, right? Because I realized at that point that running one office was totally different than running multiple offices, you know, and I just assumed that everyone was doing things the right way. But I had this one location that the numbers just weren't there, right. The average move was low. I could see that, you know, the packing material wasn't adding up to what we were collecting, right. So I went there, I flew there and I spent some time in this office. And what I discovered, again, this is before I laid out, you know, uniform processes across all my locations and put it in writing. And this is kind of part of the reason that I did that and decided to do that was because when I went to this location, you know, I was like, alright, let me sit and dispatch, right? Let me sit and dispatch. At this point, again, I had five or six locations already. We're probably doing, I don't know, we at least crossed the 10 million mark at this point. But there was something wrong at this particular location. So I go there and I sit and dispatch. I'm like, all right, let me just kind of like hang out and not say anything and just be there and see how things are going. And so when I do that process, which I've done a lot throughout my career in the business, you know, if I ever want to check on, you know, any department or a new office or somewhere where I feel out of touch, I'll go and I'll sit there for a couple of days and see what's going on. And I won't really say anything until the end. You know, I'll have my phone and I'll just kind of take notes. They don't know what I'm doing. I'M just kind of taking notes as to what's going on because I don't want to freak them out. But I sat there in this location and watched as the dispatcher sent out crews. And all of a sudden crews were just coming back to the office without ever calling in and saying, hey, I'm done. Here's the start time, here's the finish time. We charge by the hour at the time, and what's, what's the rate? What do I charge? Right? And they were just coming back and I'm like, what's going on? You know, he's like, oh, well, no, they, he's like, it was just easier to let them do it. They're good with math. Like they know how to figure it out. I got some really good guys, right?

So like, all right, well, that's not how we do it. And I kind of went through the process of bringing it back in to make it more uniform of how we did it in every other location. And here's what happened. Let me, let me tell you just the moral of the story here is that I changed this, right? Stayed in this location for a good two months, right? Had to fly back for a few things, but for the most part, I was there for two months. And we started dispatching the crews and clocking them out from the office, okay? Meaning we use the same clock to clock them in, same clock to clock them out. Crew arrives at the job, they call in and say, what's my start time? I'm here. You look at the clock, you give them a start time, right? When they're finishing, they call in and either say, I'm done or I'll be done in 30 minutes. What's my finish time? You give them the finish time, you calculate the charges, you ask them if there's any additional packing, any additional, you know, anything that needs to be added onto the bill, right? And you calculate those charges from the office, okay? And if you're charging by the hour, it needs to be, you know, that crew, if they clock out for, let's say, 2 o' clock, at 2:05, that truck should be rolling, gone, on the road, right? So what happens is, couple of things, you've got, you know, movers that, you know, it's just, you know, they have good intentions but they, you know, aren't really paying attention to what 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there can actually do to the bill because we charge by the quarter hour, right? So, you know, they would get there and, you know, maybe it was like, you know, it's 140 here now where I'm at. And they're like, oh, it's 1:40 and we'll start the time at, you know, 1:45 or 2:00'. Clock. They're not really, you know, it's not that big a deal to them. They're not looking at it as the whole. They're thinking about, you know, maybe they're thinking about their hourly wage and what they're getting. But you know, they just want to do the right thing by the customer because, you know, a lot of times that just means a good tip for them. Right? And you know, as a company you want to do the right thing by the customer as well. But the right thing is not to give them free service, Right? The right thing is to charge them appropriately for the service that you're giving them. So, you know, you have movers that, hey, they're just not really paying attention and they clock in and they clock out sooner than they should. And you're missing time there, right? Maybe you're missing 15 minutes on the front end and 15 minutes on the back end. That's a half hour job. If you're charging $150 an hour, let's say for three men, that's $75 a job. Okay? Then you have movers that are like, hey, you know what I'm going to say to the customer, hey, you know what, I'm going to let me go ahead and clock you in at this time. Let me go out and clock you out at that time. Just don't worry, just kind of take care of me and my crew. Give us a good tip, right? Then you have those guys and same thing as a company, you're still, let's just say on the small end here, you're missing 15 minutes on the front, you're missing 15 minutes on THE BACK. Again, 30 minutes a job, okay? Half an hour if you're charging 150 or whatever you charge. If you charge $100 an hour, half of that's $50 an hour, right? So the key is to clock the cruise in and out from the office. Okay, and now what you'll have and I'll tell you to continue the story of when I went to this location and the dispatcher was there and he was letting the crews kind of do their own clocking in and clocking out. And we reined it in over a two month period. We also found crews that were intentionally clocking in and clocking out early. Right. But keeping the money, meaning they were Clocking in and out, telling the office one price, telling the customer a different price, and then keeping the difference and then changing. You know, at the time we had, you know, white contract and then yellow like the carbon paper, right. Two part forms and basically skimming money off of every job. Right? And this is the kind of stuff that can, that will and does happen. I know you might not want to believe it. You might say, hey, listen, I've got some really good guys. You know, they're honest, they're hard working, and I'm sure they are. This is not me saying, hey, when movers are all thieves and they're gonna steal from you, or they're all careless, or they're all just trying to get a tip from the customer and they don't really care about the company. It's not that. However, okay, there's a reason that you have an alarm on your house, right? There's a reason that.

The mall has a security guard. It's not cause every person that comes in there is gonna rob the place. But just in case there's. There is, there's a security guard there, right? So the point is you've got to run a tight, tight dispatch operation. And that starts. It just starts with clocking crews in and out from within the office. All right, so I'll give you an example.

So by the way, if you wanted the net result of this two month, you know, kind of turnaround from this location was an additional $20,000 a month.

$20,000 a month difference between the same amount of jobs that we're getting serviced versus booking them correctly now, I'm sorry, dispatching them correctly from the office with control, is it more work? Yes, it's more work. But you can't just delegate everything in your company. There needs to be a level of control. There needs to be a sense of things getting done the right way. So if you're talking about $20,000 a month, right. We happen to be doing a lot of moves. And part of that was not just the clock in and the clock out that we were correcting, right. Part of that was also being able to charge for packing, charge for shrink wrap, charge for.

Mirror packs, right? Being able to pack mirrors and pictures, things that may have been getting done, but not even getting charged for. Right? So it all starts again with clocking that crew in and out. So quick tip. If you are allowing your crews to go out there and just kind of clock in and clock out, you've got to start. I'm telling you, you're going to get some resistance from your guys, right? At first, because it's change. If you have a dispatcher or dispatchers, you're going to get resistance from them because now it's more work on them. But this is your company. This is your business, right? You have the same liability on every single job for that customer's goods. You have the same liability for the movers that you send out there. Whether you're clocking that job in, out, in and out, and it's 800 or it's 950 for the job, it makes a big, big difference to your bottom line. And it's so important that you start doing it right away. Especially now, before you get in the season, before things start getting busy. Look, now's the time to start getting your operational processes in order. Now's the time to start tightening up those screws and plugging all those holes where the money could be dripping out. And, you know, listen, you work too hard. I know it, right? I spent 16 years, day in and day out working in this business. I know how tough it is. There's no reason that you should be losing money unnecessarily because there's some gaps and there's some holes. This, because I know that there's a lot of people that haven't even thought about this, right? They just run their business and go, you know what? It's easier for me to just give it to the guys, but I've experienced it. I've seen it for myself. I've seen it with my clients and people that we've helped turn this around in their business. But, you know, you will get some resistance. You will get people that, you know, won't want to do it. Right? And the people that really don't want to do it are probably the movers that are, you know, kind of taking advantage of the system. All right, listen, if you want to learn how to take your moving company to the next level, you need to be at moving sales academy. Live tickets are going fast. We're probably going to sell out early. Just go to moving seminar.com we're going to. By the way, it's called Moving sales academy. Moving Sales academy. However, it's every area of your moving business that we're going to be diving into to help you set up the processes and the systems so that you could avoid unnecessary mistakes, so that you could take advantage of opportunities that are there in front of you already and be able to make more money. Listen, it's not too late to make 2019 your best year ever. But sometimes all you need is a few new tweaks, a few new adjustments, like what we're talking about today. All right? I want to hear back from you. Send me a message. Send me a DM comment on one of these lives. Let me know that you actually took this piece of information, all right? I'm talking to you right now as if you're my business partner in a different city, alright? You're out there, you're doing your thing, and I'm like, look, I can't stand to see you losing money. I want to see you make more for the effort that you're putting in what I'm giving you today. Don't just take this as just a piece of advice and go, oh, yeah, that's. That's a nice concept. Implement this, all right? Start clocking your crews in and out from the office. Take control over your money, and watch how things start to skyrocket for you, all right? Until I see you next time, make sure you go out there every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. I'll see you later. Make sure you go to moving seminar.com. check that out, click on the link and I'll see you guys later. All right.

Sam.