LIVE session with Louis!

Welcome to this special session I'm doing today. Moving company owners. This is really important. So I decided, let me go live. Let's have the conversation about what's happening, right? We are coming out of moving season. We are dealing with a housing market decline. We are dealing with a recession. And I wanted to get on today and talk about what you need to do to recession proof your moving company thrive in any economy and absolutely crush it, regardless of what's going on out in the world. Look, the reality is people are going to move regardless, right? I see you guys here on Instagram. What's happening? Good to see everybody. Welcome, welcome everybody. Here I see a LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube. Welcome, everybody. We are doing a special session today to discuss recession proofing your moving company. And why is that so important? Because, you know, except the obvious, right? That we need to make sure that we not only survive, but we thrive. So it brings me back. I go back to 2008, right? Having gone through the recession, I know that this is a critical point. And the decisions that you make right now, not to be dramatic, but could impact the rest of your life. I watched a lot of moving companies go out of business in 2008 and a lot like myself, gain market share and really be able to scale their business right through that time. So, you know, when I started my moving company, I was 19 years old. I had no idea what I was doing. I had a strong run for seven years, opening new offices, just really doing it, crushing it, right? Recession comes 2007, 2008, 2009, 1. This time period was also, for me, you know, a transition point in marketing. We're going to talk about marketing today because I was heavily, heavily invested in the yellow pages, right? At that point, I had five or six locations. By the time the recession hit in 2008, I was spending $250,000 a month on yellow pages. And what happened in 2007 was the iPhone came out, right? So for me, that. That's kind of marks the time that marketing really started changing, right? Becoming more of a digital marketing platform. And at the time, I was scrambling. I didn't know what to do, right? So you had the recession, you know, everybody was in a panic. It was the housing, you know, housing crash. And my marketing wasn't working. And that time I was, you know, juggling, scrambling this office, that office, just really trying to hold it all together. And, you know, a secret that, you know, not everybody knows, is that that first seven years of business, I didn't even know my numbers when I Say, I didn't know my numbers. I didn't have it dialed in. I didn't know my P and L, I didn't know my cash flow, my balance sheet. I didn't really know anything other than, hey, we made a bunch of money. After we paid all our expenses, there was money left over. So I was making money, right? But I wasn't set up to thrive in any economy. I was set up to thrive in good times. So it was a real gut check going back to 2000, 2008. Right. And so what happened? Well, for a good year, good 18 months, it was a complete scramble because here I was, I had this bill for 250,000amonth. Between all the Yellow Pages, things were slowing down. The talk on the news of the recession and what was happening was just, you know, starting to get in my mind and impact me. Everybody I would talk to, we were like, wow, this has got to be really impacting your business. You're in a moving business, right? This has got to be terrible. So there was just so much of that going on. And when I realized, like, I don't even know my numbers, that's when I dove in and I started to really understand those. And we'll talk about that in another session. But today I really wanted to talk about marketing, because at that time, what it did was it forced me to learn digital marketing. It forced me into a place where I was reliant on the Yellow Pages for years. It was, you know, it was kind of easy, right? You place the ad as long as you kind of had the guts to spend the money, right? I didn't start off at 250 grand. I was started off at 7,000 with my first location, which felt like seven. That felt like 700,000 when I was first starting and had nothing, right? But I put it in, the phone would ring, and you get the calls. Well, as we had to start shifting now, I had to learn SEO, pay per click, how to deal with leads, how to manage all of that stuff. And it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because that is what actually allowed me, you know, between identifying what numbers I needed to know and getting in a regular practice of reviewing those numbers and acting on them, understanding how marketing worked, and really systematizing my processes. That which was, you know, the recession was the catalyst for that. The recession is what really forced me into needing to do that stuff. I doubled my business, right? I was probably doing around 10 million a year at that point and went to 20 million a year based off the stuff. That I was able to discover at a necessity right out of what seemed like survival at the time. So I'm sharing this today because it's like, you know, there's a lot of talk, everybody's concerned, everybody's worried about what's going to happen in the recession. And my belief is this industry, the moving industry, is as close to recession proof as you get, right? People are going to need to move regardless. They're going to need to move in a good economy, in a bad economy, if they're moving to a new house because they're doing good or they're moving to a smaller house because things aren't so good and maybe they got laid off. Here's the thing. The market share might not be as much, right? There might not be as many people moving. And what's going to happen here over the next 12 months, 18 months, if this thing gets as bad as, you know, people are saying, I'm not an economist, guys. I'm not trying to pretend to be an economist and predict what's going to happen in the economy. I just know what I would be doing right now, what I'm advising my private clients, my inner circle and the people closest to me to be doing with their moving company. And you need to be thinking about gaining market share. So if there's only going to be so many moves, right? And think about this. This is something that you take forward beyond this little time, because a recession doesn't last forever. Let's not, let's not treat this like it's. It's doomsday, okay? It's going to be a little period that we go through. We'll need to do some things to make sure we're in, in the proper position to thrive and still grow our business and not just hold on for dear life, but we'll get through it. And, and the economy goes in cycles, right? And so what we need to do is we need to think about how do we make sure that if there's only so many people moving that we're the ones doing that. And one of the biggest things I see people doing right now, and I hear all this advice about, you know, cut back on expenses and, you know, buckle down and just really, you know, prepare to, like, weather the storm. And you'll see people cutting back on their marketing at a time when they need it the most, right? Like, right now is not the time to pull back, to retract, right? To try to, you know, play it safe. Right now is the time to really focus, to really get dialed in to really, you know, dig down deep and find the motivation that you need. Okay, whatever that is for you. Some people are motivated by the things they want to achieve in life, and some people are motivated by the fears of, I don't want to go out of business. I don't want to have to tell my family that, you know, that the business is failing. I don't want to have to let my employees go. Right. And most people, it's a combination of the two, right. They're getting pulled by the things they want, but they're also using the things they don't want to experience as the fire to get them going. Right. So you want to use that right now and focus, right? If you've been. Look, there was, there was a period there in 2020. Covid hit too. There's a lot going on, right? There's a lot going on that impacts the industry. So Covid came 2020, right when it first happened. Everybody's like, oh, what are we going to do? This, this is going to, this is going to really impact the industry. It's going to shut us down. That was the fear for about two months. And then what happened? Right? Everybody got really busy in 2020. Really busy. We didn't even really see a slowdown going into the off season. Really busy into 2021. Right. You had people that were now working from home that could move anywhere. You had low interest rates. You had people, you know, wanted a bigger house because they're at home. There was a lot of factors going on. But here's what, here's what happened in that two and a half year period. Little longer from, from about two and a half years, actually. Normally there'd be a certain amount of people that would move in that time. Well, the, the push of COVID right. When everybody felt so busy in 2020, 2021, what that did was the people that would normally move during that two and a half year stretch, a lot of them moved earlier than they normally would have. Right? So if you just look at the average over the span of time of the two and a half years, it's probably the same amount of people moving. Just a lot of them did it more on the front end. Right? So that's why we're experiencing a little, little drop off now. Right. And then you also, you have the housing market starting to slow down a little bit. People are kind of sitting on the sidelines saying, hey, our price is going to go down. What's going to happen? Let me wait. Not to mention the Interest rates going up, right? So regardless of all this, that's to understand where we're at, what's going on, right? But we need to work and focus on the things that we can control. Not the news headlines, not the fear, right? Not all your well meaning friends that are like, wow, this must be really hard as a moving company with this going on right now. How's your, how's your business surviving? And we need to focus on the things we can control. So today I want to talk about some marketing things that you need to be thinking about and focused on right now in order to make sure that you've got that lead flow coming in, okay? You've got to have consistent opportunities to be able to book jobs and you can't do it without marketing. If you get all your business from repeat and referral customers, congratulations, you're doing an amazing job. Right? But think about this. If you added some marketing to that, right, not only are you going to be getting the jobs that you get from the paid sources, right? From the direct response paid sources, but you're also going to now have another opportunity for repeat customers, referral customers, reviews, which is currency in this, in this day and age, right? Having those five star reviews. And so if you don't spend money on marketing, now's the time, right? If you're doing a great job, you've got to fuel that. So there's other factors that go into running a successful moving company. You guys know this, right? You've got to make sure you've got enough moves and you gotta make sure you got enough crews and you gotta make sure you have enough equipment. You gotta make sure they're not out there breaking everything, that the customers are happy. There's. And then there's all the back end stuff as well. I get all that. I'm going to be doing a few sessions here as we're coming out of moving season to give you some insight, just give you something to think about and kind of spark that idea in your mind of like, hey, I need to be focused right now. I need to be thinking about what's important, right? So when it comes to marketing, what are some of the things we need to consider? The first one is lead flow. Right? Lead flow. You need leads coming in. That's something you can control, right? So you've got different sources out there whether you're doing, you know, Google Ads, whether you're doing direct mail, whether you're doing lead providers like Equate media, right? You've got these different, you know, and then there's Angie's List, Home Advisor, Yelp, Nextdoor. I mean, the list goes on and on, Right? I'm sure you know of the marketing sources in your area that you could get involved with, right? Just maybe you haven't done it in the past, because maybe there's been one that's really worked well for you. Now's the time to start bringing in everything that you can and test, track, and tweak. That's it. With all your marketing, you got to test it, track it, and tweak it. And that starts with knowing what your ROI is. What's your return on investment, right? That's it. All the marketing. You don't have to be a marketer, you say, Louis, I'm not really a marketer, right? I just want to run my moving company. I want to do a good job for my customers. I want to make some money. I want to be able to have some time for myself. But I'm not really a marketer, and I'm going to challenge you today to look at it differently. Right? What is what? You know, marketing. At the end of the day, all it is is bringing in opportunities for you to be able to get somebody on the phone and book a move, right? And so there's a simple way of managing it, which is just like I said, testing, tracking, tweaking. So if you understand your ROI, meaning if you spend $10,000 a month in marketing, let's just say for some of you, that might be low. For some of you, that might be, you know, super high. But just for round numbers, let's just say it's 10,000amonth and you're able to bring in 100,000, right? So your ROI percentage, percentage of marketing spent, is 10%. So why is that number important? It's important because there's only 100% of the pie. When you go do a move, somebody pays you a thousand dollars. I know you. Most of you know what I'm talking about here. I'm just putting it in context, right? When you go do a move and it's $1,000, well, right off the bat, you've got your labor, you've got your fuel, you've got your truck, right? You've got some credit card processing fees. You know, maybe you've got commissions to your salespeople. You've got certain costs of just servicing that move, right? Then you've got to take care of your marketing, your administrative costs, you've got to take care of your rent. You've got to take care of your payroll for whatever office you have. You've got to, you got to get paid yourself, right? You've got to be able to take a salary, you know, hopefully have some profits to take distributions. So the point is, there's 100% of the pie. You don't want to be spending more than 10%, 12% on marketing, right? And the only way you're going to be able to determine that is by testing some stuff, right? So my recommendation is you get whatever you could get your hands on. Lead wise, it's the perfect time. Coming out of season with a natural slowdown. I'm sure you could look at your leads across the board. I mean, even if you're getting plenty still, maybe you had too many to handle in the summer. Maybe it was just, you know, you had too much, right? But now it's starting to slow down. Get some more leads, test them, see how they work, track them. Make sure you know where every single lead source is coming in from, whether it's tracking numbers, unique web forms on your website to help you identify exactly where it came from. So you could tie every lead back to an ROI directly to that lead source. And then the last part is tweak, right? Test, track, tweak. So now what you do is you go in after. You know, I like to give it 90 days, right? 90 days to try stuff out, 30 days in. You haven't really given a lead source an opportunity to see the value there, right? And so you give it 90 days and you go in and basically it's like, oh, this lead source, wow. You know, it's only costing me 6%. Amazing, right? This lead source, it's cost me 32%, meaning I do a job for a thousand bucks. It's essentially cost me $320 to get that job. Not good, right? So what do you do? You start looking at the ones that are high like that, and you say, well, let me take that budget and let me put that budget over on the one that's performing really well. You start reallocating your marketing funds. That right there, when you start doing that, it's major, major, right? So you've got. I'll give you an example. I had a, I had a client, I have a client that was doing $3 million a year, okay, in business, but was spending 50 grand a month to do it. We went in, we did a, you know, like an advanced version of what we're talking about today, and we're able to cut his marketing down to 25, 000 like, look, half of it is not even. It might be working, you might be getting jobs, but it's not converting profitably, right? So now you're doing all this extra work for what? Right, because more work is more trucks, more crews you need. The more crews you need, the less they're your A team, the more damages you have, the more damage you have. The more administrative work, the more headaches, the more stress it adds up, right? So more moves isn't always the answer. So we reduced by 25%. And what happened was. I'm sorry, we reduced it by 25,000, went from 50,000 to 25,000, and then tightened up the sales process. And with this 25,000, his sales actually went up to 5.8, close to $6 million. Almost doubled the business and reduced the marketing cost in half. Right? And I'm not. I'm saying it to put it in perspective, right? Because what happens is when you're not wasting time, because typically the leads that are not profitable are also don't have a high booking percentage, right? There's four metrics that you really want to look at, and that's two of them right there, the booking percentage and the roi. Well, if the ROI is not good, the booking percentage is probably low, which means your salespeople are wasting time on this stuff when they could be working other leads, other phone calls, other opportunities that book at a higher percentage, that probably have higher average moves because different lead sources have. You know, some lead sources bring you the small moves and some bring the big moves, right? So for your lead flow, go and test everything you can, right? Get your hands on it, get a hold of the. The lead providers. You've got, you know, equate media. It was another example. Got phone calls, exclusive leads, shared leads. You've got Google Ads, Bing ads, you've got direct mail. You've got Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, moving.com, right? There's. There's a ton of lead sources out there. Go look at some of my YouTube pages. You could find some of that there. Okay? But then here's. Here's what happens, right? So marketing doesn't bring you the customers. It just gives you the opportunity, right? The marketing doesn't bring you customers, it just brings you the opportunity. And so what a lot of people will do, and I see this all the time, right? We've got literally hundreds of clients in Moving Mastery and that we're helping to optimize their business. And we see it, we assess, we know what's happening. And I'll hear it. I'll say, wow, those leads don't work. Those leads don't work. Or, you know, I'm spending all this money on marketing, but we're not getting any business. The missing piece for that is your sales process. Right? Your sales process. Every moving company needs a sales process. You can't just wing it. This isn't back in the day with the Yellow Pages. I used to listen. I used to sit with my feet up on the desk answering the calls. It was like. It was easy, right? It was easy. But you also were committed to a big contract for a year. Now you've got the ultimate flexibility to do what we just talked about. Test, track, tweak. Something's not working, you can change it immediately, take that money, put it on something else that is working. So the flexibility and the opportunity now is bigger than it was, even though it's a little bit more complex until you start to grasp the concept. But once it comes into the sales process, that's where companies are just absolutely crushing it or struggling, right? Because every time you get a new lead, it's costing you money. So you've got to work on your booking percentage, how to book more of the opportunities that you get, more of the leads that you get. And the only way you're going to do that is by focusing on a sales process, right? Understanding what the lead flow is. Once it comes in, it goes from, you know, just coming into your system, how quick are you calling them? Or when a phone call comes in, or is it going to voicemail or somebody getting on it? Then what's your presentation like? Right? Your script, your emails, your texts, right. If you're doing on sites, your presentation folder, once you give the quote and they're coming back at you with, well, your price is a little high, which it should be. Right? In other words, you should make sure that you're not the lowest person in the market because that's the fastest way to. It's like a race to the bottom, right? Unfortunately, there are people that, you know, compete on price and don't realize that within a year they're going to be out of business. I've watched it happen for 21 years. So, you know, what do you do when they're like, well, your price is higher than everybody else's, or, I need to speak to my husband, or I need to speak to my wife or whatever their objection is. You need a way to handle that elegantly, right? When we talk about sales process, this isn't like, you know, Pounding the phones and just, you know, keeping them on the phone until they say yes or hang up on you. This, that's not what this is, you know, and moving there. It's not even really sales more than it is great customer service, right? Taking the customer by the hand, guiding them through the process, educating them along the way, right? On the call or on your on site, then making them see why your company is the best choice, the best one to go with, right? If you believe that you're gonna go do a good job for your customer, it's your responsibility to make them see that. And it doesn't have to feel salesy. It could be elegant. Okay, so once you get them through the process, then there's the follow up, right? We're talking about sales process now. The lead comes in your presentation, right? They don't want to book. What's your. How are you overcoming objections, right? You don't always do that on the first call. But then there's follow up, right? I'll give, I'll give you, I'll call it a million dollar tip right now. Because there's companies that, at their level, this is a million dollar tip. You know, if you're just getting started, don't expect a million dollars next week if you start doing this. But follow up with customers after you give them an estimate, right? You'd be amazed if you're like, yeah, duh, Louis, I get it. Yeah. Of course you're not telling me anything new. You'd be amazed how many people don't do that. How many people sit and they say, ah, you know what? If I gave them an estimate, if they want to do business with us, they'll call us back. That's just not how it works anymore. And there's a way to follow up with them that doesn't feel pushy, right? So you've got to establish that. Then you got to make sure you're, you're coaching your people, right? You're helping to guide them, to make them better. You know, when I, when I had my call center for, you know, all my offices, you know, we had now 60 plus people on the phones. They weren't all rock stars when we hired them, right? They sounded good on the phone. They met the criteria that we wanted them to meet, and then we worked with them, right? And so what you're doing for sales is you're really just managing the process, right? Once your process is dialed in, you manage the process and then you basically coach your people back to the process, right? You don't want the people running your business. You want good people, but you want systems running your business. Then you want the people running those systems using a set of processes. This is how you scale, this is how you predict consistent profitability, and this is how you gain back your life and freedom, right? So these are the things, these are, these are timeless. Regardless of the recession, regardless of, you know, coming out of moving season, October through the end of the year is the fourth quarter, right? I just spent 90 minutes with my inner circle diving deep just on sales, right? That's it. The whole time, just on sales. Like, this is what you need to be focused on in the fourth quarter. And the reason is because it's what we can control, it's what we can do. Right? And by the way, for those of you who aren't already signed up, you know, we are going live for three days back in person for Moving Mastery Summit this October. Right? So this stuff here, if you're like resonating with anything that I'm saying and you want to go deep on all of it, you want to get the strategies, the processes, the tools, the exact step by step blueprints to really take your business to whatever level you want, come and join us at Moving Mastery Summit. It's in October in Scottsdale, Arizona. We are back in person. So if you haven't gotten your tickets already, go get them. It's@moving seminar.com. yeah, moving seminar.com. go to moving seminar.com. get signed up right now. We've got a bonus through Monday where you get. I got a free online course called the recession proof Moving Company Masterclass where you get that as well now through Monday. So get signed up, come and join us. Like, now is not the time to be alone. Now's not the time to be in isolation trying to figure this thing out. Right Now's the time to be around people who are going through what you're going through, but that are actually committed to raising the bar for themselves and for their company and for the industry and taking it to another level. So come and join us. We'll have a great time. If this stuff helps, I'd love to see you guys there. But let's, let's wrap this up here today. So I want to give you some real takeaways, right? Some stuff you could do. And first one is you've got to make sure whatever you're doing, you know, get your marketing ROI figured out, figure out what you're spending versus what you're making, okay? Identify that per lead source all right, if you want the formulas and you want all the. All of that stuff, come and join us. All right? We're just doing a quick live today, but come and join us. I'm going to break all that down for you. Then start identifying what's working, what's not. Reallocate your money the same way a financial advisor or stockbroker would sit and go, okay, this one's not working. Let's move this here, let's move that there. The difference is you have control over this, right? You have control. I want to get that word, control. I want you to think about that. Because when you're sitting here and you're hearing the news and you're feeling the stress and you're feeling the worry, I get it, I get it. I've been there, right? I've been there. You need to switch to what can I control? And these are the things you can control. All right? And then your sales process, literally draw it out. You know, if you have to draw it out. Here, let me kind of show you this here. If you have to draw this out, Bear with me, guys. Just drawing this out for you. Real simple, simple version, right? So hopefully you can see this. Let's see. Hold on, hold on. There we go. I'll show you guys in a second. So new lead comes in, right? Then distribution, getting it to the right reps, right? You want to make sure you're getting it to them quickly. Then prez is presentation. Your script, right? Your emails, your text. If it was booked, great. If not, it needs to go to follow up. Take that. And then I make a list where you could tighten up, you know, where you could tighten up. But what happens is in between all these different steps, there's gaps, right? And when the handoff goes from one to the next and we're not aware of those gaps, guess what goes in those gaps? Your money, your profit, your future. Everything you want in your life, if you're in this business, is tied to your ability to generate customers at a profitable rate. Know your marketing roi. Get your sales process dialed in. Get focused, get motivated, and do not get left behind as there's going to be a shift in market share. Gain that market share and I promise you, you're going to be able to really, like, take it to the next level. As we get through this, as we come out of this, make sure you get your ticket for moving Mastery Summit. Go to moving seminar dot com. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this today. I thought I was able to do some chat. Oh, yeah, I do have some chat here. All right, so let's see if you guys have questions. I'm going to answer some questions here, if anybody's got it. Yeah. So Adriana and I'll come over to you guys in a minute if you guys have any on Instagram. Adriana, let me help you out. Adriana's on LinkedIn. What if some of the marketing is not paying off? Right? Hopefully. Hopefully you put that in before I was talking about it. But if the marketing's not paying off, you cut it off or you cut it back, right? Cut it off or you cut it back. Basically, it's like, you know, if you're at the blackjack table, right? If you're playing blackjack and you know, what do you do when something's working? If it's working, you press, right? You put more money up, right? So when the marketing sources are working, put more money on them. When they're not, you pull back, right? Or you just pull out completely. So if the marketing sources aren't working, that's what you do. And. But what I would start with is Adriana and anybody else here is I would start before we blame the lead sources. Look at the sales process, right? Because the lead sources are working for somebody somewhere at a profitable rate. So what's the difference? Excuse me one sec. What's the difference between what they're doing and what you're doing? Right? And a lot of it has to do with optimization. When you start getting into, you know, paid ads, Google, Facebook, things like that, there's a lot of optimization to the ads, to the landing page, to the conversion that needs to happen. So we're going to break all this down at Moving Mastery Summit. By the way, guys, we're going to three full days. We're going to dive into this. Come bring your team or whoever's in your inner circle that's helping you run the business, and we're going to go through all this. You'll get all the answers you need. I see a lot of faces here that I know and that I know will be there. Amber, what's up? What's up, James? Good to see you. Ted. What's happening, Larry? What's happening, Larry? All right, let's see here. I've got a few. All right, so noble, Noble moving, I got you here. What is a good cold calling strategy? And how long would you give an SEO company to see if they're paying off? Okay, so SEO, search engine optimization, and pay per click, right? Two different things. Typically, somebody will handle the same thing. Right. SEO is a long term strategy. It's a long term plan. Noble, right? So that means I wouldn't expect any results from SEO for somebody you're paying to get those results for. I'd give yourself nine months to a year before you see anything SEO, meaning they're doing specific back end stuff with keywords, with blogs, with, you know, links, and with the attempt to get you listed on, I'm sharing this for everybody. Maybe they don't understand what it is you obviously know to get you listed in organic listings below the ads. Right. And so what I would say is where pay per click, Google Ads is where you Google something, you see ads there. Google Ads gives you an instant, instant business, right? The problem is who's managing it and who's optimizing it. That's a big deal because I mean, you guys could go online right now and say, hey, Google, how do I run Google Ads? And Google will tell you how to do it because they want your money. The problem is the way that the keyword strategy set up the landing page, right. The way that that converts has a lot to do with what your cost per lead is, your cost per acquisition, which is going to determine your profitability. So I'm going to back up on that. I'm kind of hit, trying to hit that in a short little period of time. We're going to dive deep into that at Moving Mastery Summit. But think about it like this. If you're looking at pay per click and SEO, pay per click is something where you could turn it on and you could get instant results, right? So the money you spend, you should be getting instant results and you could work to optimize that campaign. As you're going SEO, you might pay somebody a couple thousand a month to be doing your SEO. But, but they, no matter how good they are, they're not gonna see any results for nine months to a year. And if that. Right. There's no guarantee, but when it starts to work, it's great, right? So I'm not saying SEO is not good. When it starts to work, it's great, but it's an investment. So noble. I wouldn't do any SEO until you're in a place where you feel like I could afford to do the investment, I could afford to spend whatever it's costing me to spend for the next year and not see any results for the long term sustainability of my business. Right. So I hope that helps. Let's see, we'll get a couple more here. All right, Mike, over on LinkedIn too which type of ads would you say work better on Facebook? Flyer ads or video ads? Mike? Definitely video ads, if you're running Facebook ads. But you could do image ads as well. I think that's what you mean with the flyer ads. You can do image ads as well, but typically those are gonna be a little bit better for, like, retargeting, right? But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let me give you the disclaimer. It's all testing with marketing, right? Especially. That's the beauty, right? That's the difference between, back in the day, Yellow Pages, yeah, it was easy. You made one decision, how big the, the ad was going to be, and you just paid the bill every month and the phone rang. Nothing to really tweak, right? But now you could be tweaking in real time, tweaking your, your, your ads to see what's working, right? You could run the video ad and an image ad, right? You could run the video ad with one version of copy, the words written in there, the image ad with another version of the copy, and then kind of switch those, right? Hang on one second. I'm getting a little notice here. Okay. And you could switch those to test it out. You could literally put some money in, test it, keep it moving. So I hope that helps. Mike, I think I had some questions here on Instagram. Jeff. Jeff Alleg. Jeff Leg. What are the slow season strategies to be profitable? Jeff, I think everything we're talking about right now is what you've got to be focused on. Like, the off season to me is about systematizing and scaling. Depending on where you're at. You don't want to start scaling until you're systematized, meaning you've got all your systems dialed in. They're documented. You've got a proven method for the way you do things, then you scale. But in the off season, it's about ramping up, right? Like, ramping up. Maybe in the summer you weren't able to handle as many moves. Well, now go get the marketing. Focus your days, like on building the sales process, right? A lot of people resist this. And then it's one of those things that it's, you know, it's one of those things where. Sorry, guys, I'm getting a pop up here. All right? One of those things where you, you know, you don't know where to start, right? That's literally why we're doing moving Mastery Summit in October. There's a reason we do it in October. It's because that, to me, is the Time to start building your processes, systematizing your business, and getting ready for the next off season. So, Jeff, ramp up your marketing. Dial in your sales process. Don't let any leads go to waste. And when it comes to. Because your question leads to. When people think profitability, you go, you think of your P and L, right? You think of your profit and loss and. Which is good. But when you're going through the profit and loss, when you're reviewing your numbers, look at each item and say, is this an expense? I don't care what it's categorized as. Right? Cost of goods, sold, expense, Is this an expense, or is this actually an investment into my business? Right. Something that's, like, necessary, right? The extra special coffee machine in the office, maybe you could cut that out. But the marketing, you don't cut out the marketing. And this is where so many people really cut themselves off at the knees is because they don't understand the ROI on the marketing, which takes a little time, right, to figure it out. And so they just cut off everything. They look at it like, oh, it's, you know, or they continue with a source that they're spending a lot of money on because it's bringing in business without realizing that every time they do one of those jobs, they're actually losing money. So, Jeff, I hope that helped. And if I missed anybody here, Cody, I can't wait to see in Arizona too. And let's see, Aslan Beck, what's the best lead provider at the moment? As I would say, honestly, the best one at the moment is really the equate media, phone calls and exclusive leads. You know, if anybody's done leads in the past, I, you know, was an early adopter to doing leads during that time when I had to transition out of yellow Pages. And, you know, you get these leads and then five other companies get the leads and you have to compete on them. And they could be good. If you've got a good sales process, they could be profitable. Right? It's not as easy as somebody calling from your website and you just take. Take the call. Right? But they could be profitable. But Equate's doing a great job of kind of changing that up and making it better for you guys, where you could either get a call of a live customer transferred to you, or you could get an exclusive lead. You pay a little more for the lead, but there's nobody competing. So at the end of the day, it's not about how much you're paying for it. It's about what the ROI is at the end of the day. So I can't help myself but to answer some more questions here. So, express haulers, what is better, Facebook ads or Google Ads? For a company that is starting off, it's going to be easier to target with Google Ads than it will be with Facebook ads. But again, you want to test and track all of it, right? Because you think Google Ads, somebody's going to Google to search for a local mover, how much is a moving job or whatever they search for, Right. And Facebook, you've got to be able to directly target people that you know will be moving soon. Right. So I would say start with, start with Google Ads for sure. Who's that? That was Express hall, guys. Hopefully this was helpful today. If you're joining me for the first time, my what I say all the time and my belief in this world is you've got a profit in your business and thrive in your life. And what that means is you can't just go out there and focus on business, business, business, business, money, money, money, money. You've got to take care of yourself, you've got to take care of your health, you've got to take care of your wealth, your family, your connections, your relationships, your contribution. So go out there every single day. Profit in your business, thrive in your life. If you like this, leave me a comment down below. I'm going to be doing this a little bit more over the next couple of weeks. I want to make sure I'm here for you guys during these times because, you know, it could get rough out there and now's the time to control the things you can. Get focused, get dialed in. Come and join us at Moving Mastery Summit, October 18th through the 20th in Scottsdale, Arizona. We will sell out. We're like more than halfway there. We've already got. Just come and join us. I'm not going to try to sell you too hard on it. If it sounds good, I'll see you there and I'll talk to you guys later. Take it easy.