Increase Profits: Tighten Up Your Moving Operations

So if you notice what's happening here, the way I see it, you spend a little money on marketing. You get the phone to ring, you sell. Then the job goes to dispatch, right? To fulfill the move, to service. The move. Crew management, Who's caught movers working off the clock, okay. Who's never even really looked into it. If you don't have a tight control over your clock in and your clock out process on local moves. GPS on your trucks clocking out the jobs from in the office. Not like, hey, guys, here's the contracts. I'll see at the end of the day. Go ahead and let the customer know what the bill is and everything like that. You are hemorrhaging money. I'm telling you right now. I'm not a. I love people. I'm not a pessimistic person. But I can tell you if you leave the key in the door to the candy shop, they're gonna go in and they're gonna take the candy, period. And maybe it's only one out of a hundred, but they could clean you out over time. Grabbing 100 off this job, 200 off that job. Anybody ever have a. Find a bill of lading where they turn it in, and then the customer. Something goes on, and you find that you're copied a bill of lading, and the customer's copied a billing have a totally different amount on them? Yeah. You think that's the only customer that that one person was doing that to? No. These are your moves. This is your company. Don't allow crews to go out there and steal your money. Okay? This is big. This is very, very important. You could be putting in all these efforts, and if you have crews that are going out there, maybe you give them a fuel card to fuel up, and they're at the fuel station fueling up the truck and fueling up someone else and getting half the money in cash. I've seen it all. Doing a lot of moves in a lot of different cities. I've seen it all. And at some point, you guys will stumble upon it. But it's important to know that if you don't put things in place to prevent that from happening, it will happen. And you can't take a passive approach to it. Like a little bit here, a little bit there. Yeah, we have to. First of all, if you're giving cash, if you're giving a fuel card, however you're doing it, it needs to be Matt. It needs to be matched with the receipt, and it needs to come back like, you know, you can't just go, I got the receipt, and stick it in the drawer, right? It needs. You need to review the bill and match it all up, right. And make sure that it's. It's accurate. You know, we've done it a few way. We've done fuel cards, we've done cash. We've done a gas station right up the street from an office where we just set up an account and we just had vouchers. Right? Where it was a white and yellow form. We sent the driver there with it, signed by the dispatcher. They turned it in, and then we paid the gas station. I think once a week. I forget what it was. Equipment management. You ever have a customer call and say the movers left the dolly here? Think about all the customers that didn't call to say they left a dolly here. Or the customers that didn't call to say there's five pads here that I asked them to leave and I told them, don't worry, I'll take care of you with a good tip. Okay? Inventory control is huge. Every morning when the drivers go out, they need to fill out an inventory sheet. What's on that truck that needs to be compared to the day before? If it does not match up and there was a different driver in that truck, somebody from dispatch needs to walk out, open that truck, go out there and count those pads, because you're going to charge that driver from the day before, okay? You have to tighten up the inventory control. There's too much money that you're losing. There's no reason to buy pads and buy pads and buy pads. And the worst thing you could do, which I hear, is when you send a crew out with 30 pads and somebody's like, fuck that. I'm not buying them anything else because they lose everything. I've heard it, and I'm sure maybe some people in here felt that way. But what happens is who are you really hurting? Yeah, the customer. When the customer suffers, you suffer, period. Right? So that's not really the approach. The approach is have a system for inventory control. Don't let stuff go missing. What, when it does, charge them for it.

Right?

All these little things of tightening up the operation.

There's so much extra money.

People are like, you know, how did you. Out of one location that only did local, one location, by the way, there was six. And then long distance, one location. How are you profiting? $800,000 a year out of one office? This is how, right? Plug in the holes. Plug in the holes. I don't want to hear about Moving companies with these low profit margins. Because I know how hard you guys work. I know the stuff that you have to put up with. I know the stress. I know that you get it from both ends. Dealing with the movers, dealing with the customers, dealing with the bills, trying to figure out what marketing works. You need to make money, but these are the things that need to happen. Money management, do you have a process? Are you collecting cash? You collecting credit cards? What's happening? You know, do you reconcile the money every single month? Or do you just assume that the job, your dispatcher closed out the job, that money's in the account. Maybe they ran a card and maybe it didn't go through. Maybe they didn't realize it and they let it slide. Right. Is your bookkeeper going in and saying every single move, where's the money? Where's the money? Right. It's important you don't realize all the little stuff that could happen. 500 here, 700 there. It adds up. Upselling. You know, We talked about the different things that could be upsold in the confirmation call. Right? Again, these are areas in these departments where you could be increasing profit. I get a little excited and passionate about it because I really, truly feel the same way that when my offices were having these issues, I'd get so fired up and passionate. I feel that way about your businesses now. I don't want to see companies suffering from this type of stuff when it's not necessary. So if I'm getting a little excited, I'm kind of coming at you like that's what it is. Movers, customer satisfaction. You get five star reviews, helps your conversion rate. It's much easier to sell people when you're five stars on Yelp. Am I right? Okay. So if your movers aren't getting everything, everything in your business ties back to the money. All ties back to the money. So, you know, we look at it, we go, customer satisfaction, profits, two different things. It's not two different things. Customer satisfaction brings you repeat and referral customers brings you the good reviews that are going to help other people book with you quickly. All right, Claim reporting. You should be running reports on your claims. Who did it? What was it? What did it cost you? Okay. I was reviewing my profit and loss statement and noticed that the claims one month were way up. Okay. So at this point, I wasn't reviewing the claims report. I had someone else reviewing the claims report. But I would review it from the top down. We're going to go over how to do that too. And I noticed that the claims are substantially up. So we started drilling down into it, which basically means going from the P and L, putting that aside, picking up the claims report and saying, what's going on? Is it one person causing all this stuff? Well, what it turned out was there's a couple of crews that were damaging TVs and like marble tabletops or glass tabletops, they didn't know how to move them, they didn't know how to pack them right? Once you can identify that, you could fix that. Instead of like, you know, tearing everything apart and hiring new movers and doing a whole new training on everything, figure out what's getting damaged, who are the people damaging it, pull them aside and say, let's teach you how to handle these flat screens. Let's teach you how to handle these glass tops and these marble tops. Okay? Every dollar you pay out on a claim is one less dollar going in your pocket.

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