Dispatching Your Moving Crews From The Office

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 get the crew the job and they go out and they do the move. Right. But then they let the crew estimate the charges. Right, 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, you know, 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. Before, I had all my systems and my processes in place, which really didn't happen entirely until after I opened five, maybe six locations, 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. So I went there, I flew there, and I spent some time in this office. And what I discovered, the dispatcher sent out crews. 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 the rate? What do I charge? Right. And they were just coming back. What happens is a 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. 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. 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 gonna. I'm gonna say to the customer, hey, you know what? I'm gonna. 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, you know, kind of take care of me and my crew. Give us a good tip, right? Then you have those. Those guys. 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. Basically skimming money off of every job. Right? And this is the kind of stuff that can. That will and does happen. The net result of this two month kind of turnaround from this location was an additional $20,000 a month. 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. 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.