Run a Tight Local Moving Operation

Have you ever found yourself in a position where you just bought a bunch of equipment for your trucks, Dollies, pads, straps, and all of a sudden they're not there anymore. You need to buy more equipment. You have no idea where they went. Or maybe you've caught crews that are working off the clock, that may be clocked out at a certain time, but we're continuing to work for the customer or maybe just have, you know, jobs that you're getting too late every single morning because you don't have your, you know, dispatch and your. Your crew set up to be there at a specific time every single day. I want to share with you my dispatch process because I think it's one of the things that allowed us to be so successful with local moving over the years. And, you know, over the course of the last year, speaking to moving companies, I realized that a lot of companies do this differently. So I wanted to share with you my process of dispatching local crews in the morning. For those of you who don't know, dispatch is basically, for me, it's the process in the morning of giving the crews their job for the day and sending them out. All right? You would have a dispatcher that's the person that would be doing it. And this process usually happens every single day in the morning. You want to get your crews out, all right? So first thing you want to do is you want to dispatch at a set time every single day, all right? You want to avoid sending out crews at different times unless you really have to. And I know there are times when that happens. But let me give you an example of how to do this right? So let's say you have five trucks, but you only have three morning starts. Let's say you have three 8 o' clock jobs, all right? And the other jobs are scheduled for the afternoon. What you really should do is you should move the other jobs to the morning so that you could send out all five of your trucks. All right? You want to have all five trucks, if that's what you have, out in the morning, because what that does is that allows you to. To service more, right? If you have five trucks on the road, few things are happening. Number one, if those trucks are lettered up with your logo, that's more advertising out on the road for your company. Number two, if a customer calls in at the last minute, you're going to be able to have different trucks in different areas to be able to service that job. If somebody calls and says, can you move me today? You're more likely to be able to do that if you have five trucks out doing, let's just say five jobs. And if you had three trucks out trying to do five jobs, right, maybe one in the morning, and then they do another one in the afternoon. So you want to have dispatch at a set time every morning. You want to have your movers show up at that set time. You want to try to get every truck a morning start. If they also have an afternoon job, great. But always try to get a morning start for each truck and get them out on the road. You want your dispatcher to have one event in the morning. You don't want them dispatching crews at 6:30 in the morning and then having to do it again at 9:30. You want to get everybody out in the morning so that your dispatcher can do other things in the office during the day. And if your dispatcher is you, if you're, you know, if you're starting out like I did and you're working out of a truck rental yard, you know, you don't want to drive to that truck rental yard multiple times. You want to go there in the morning, get everybody out for the day, and then as they start coming back, they, you can meet them back there or they can come back to the office. All right. Second thing you want to make sure you're doing when you're dispatching your crews in the morning is you want to make sure you're doing a truck inventory every single day. We used to have truck inventory sheets, and the first thing driver would do in the morning is they would come in, they get a truck inventory sheet, they'd go out to their truck and they do an inventory of everything that they had on the back of the truck. How many pads, they'd have to count them, how many straps, how many dollies, how many four wheelers, brooms, everything that was on that truck, packing material, whatever it was, they had to do an inventory. When that inventory came back, we would take it and we would compare it to the day before. If there was any discrepancy at all, the dispatcher would go out and do a count for himself. So that if for some reason there was something missing from the day before and there was a different driver in that truck the day before, we would charge that driver for that missing equipment. We would need to be able to essentially prove that it was missing. All right, this is going to help your missing equipment problem tremendously. All right. It might seem like a lot of work every single morning to, you know, basically have them go out and do an inventory on the truck. They might not want to do it right away. You need to start doing an inventory every single morning. Listen, if you don't have a problem with missing equipment, and you've never had a problem with missing equipment, and you buy equipment and it just stays on the truck, and you know, you never have to buy new pads and you never have to buy new dollies, then you know what, you don't need to do it. But I doubt that's the problem because it's not that someone's stealing your equipment that can be the case, but it's also that they leave it at the house. You know, the customer says, can you just leave this padded for us? They're like, yeah, no problem. Just take care of us. Give us a tip instead of let me call the office and find out what the price is for that pad, right? Your inventory is expensive. Your pads are expensive, your dollies are expensive, your straps are expensive. And you cannot not have everything that you need on the truck. You don't want to penalize your customers because your lack of inventory control. And what I mean by that is there'll be companies that'll say, you know what, I'm not buying any more pads, I'm not buying any more equipment. And they'll tell their movers, go work with what you have. You can't do that. It's your company. You need to make sure that you have all the equipment, have your inventory control on point, and you won't have to worry about it. You'll always have what you need that's so important. If you're not doing that, start doing that right away. Number three, send crews out with extras. When I say extras, send them out with an extra couple of blank contracts, couple of blank bill of ladings, right? So that if you do pick up another job, you, you could just give them the information. They could write it in. They don't have to come back to the office to get a new bill of lading. They're out on the road. Someone calls in, they want to book a move, you could book it, give them the information, they're good, right? Send them out with storage contracts, right? What if that next job needs storage? What if the job they're going to now, they get to the new home, right? They go to the drop off and the customer realizes that something won't fit or they don't like the way that it looks. Wouldn't it be nice to say, well, we offer storage, we could store as little as one piece of furniture, one Room of furniture. Right. If you have your inventory sheets, if you have your storage paperwork, you'll be able to bring some stuff back to storage. Always have extra storage paperwork on the truck. The next extra you want to make sure you have is packing material. Always have extra packing material on the truck. You never know when you're gonna get to a job and the customer's not ready to go and they need some things packed. That's extra revenue. Right. A lot of companies won't put packing material on the truck. Why? Because it always goes missing. Do a truck inventory. You won't have to worry about that problem. All right? I'm just telling you, we ran a tight local dispatch operation. If any of this seems like a lot of work, don't do it. But if you want to run a tight ship, meaning you're out making money and you're not losing money. Right. You can't be in a position where the customer wants packing and you could actually sell them some boxes and you don't have the boxes because you won't put packing material on the truck because it's going missing. Do truck inventory every morning. Make sure everything that's supposed to be there is there. We used to go out in the shrink wrap that was on the truck. We used to get a ruler and measure how much shrink wrap was on that truck. True inventory of everything. Nothing was going missing. All right? Look at your profit and loss statement. Look at how much money you've spent on inventory and on boxes. Think about how much more money you could be bringing in from selling some of that stuff. And make sure you have it. Make sure you're prepared on every single job. All right? Here's another one that I know a lot of companies aren't doing. Have your driver call the office with a start time. Okay? Call the office to get a start time. Every job on an hourly rated local move should be clocked in and clocked out based on one clock. The clock in the office. All right? If your movers are clocking people in and out, you never know what the real time is going to be. You want to know when they get there. They need to call you and say, I'm here, I need a start time. You look at the clock and say, eight o' clock, start. They'll write it on the contract. They'll start the job, and you know that they're there. If all your jobs are supposed to start at 8:00 and 8:15, you still have drivers that haven't called you. You need to get them on the phone to find out where they are. Because if they're going to be late, someone needs to call that customer and let them know you're going to be late. Why set that move off on the wrong foot? Because nobody's contacting the customer. So as a dispatcher, and this could be, you know, the manager, the owner of the company, whatever role, whatever position you're in, you're still someone needs to, you know, facilitate that dispatcher role. The drivers aren't there at the time they're supposed to be there. Call, find out where they are, let the customers know they'll be running late. Number five, the driver clocks out with the office. Okay? We talked about the driver calling in and getting a start time. The driver needs to call in and get a finish time. They need to tell you when they're going to be complete. If there's any extras on the move, it needs to be calculated in the office. You don't need your movers to calculate this. You don't want your movers to calculate this. They need to ask you, they need to say we'll be done in 15 minutes or we're done now or we'll be done in a half hour. What's my finish time? You give them the finish time, they write it in, you give them the charges, okay? Then they go and they bring the paperwork to the customer and collect the charges. This is also a great time for you to get on the phone with the customer, find out how to move when, okay? Now there's a big, big reason why you want to clock your cruise in and out again. 99% of your movers are honest, good, hard working people, all right? But there are some that if you leave the key in the door to the candy shop, they're going to go in and they're going to take the candy, period. You need to run a tight ship or there's going to be money dripping out every which way. Movers working off the clock is one of the oldest tricks in the book, all right? Meaning they go there, they start at 8 o', clock, they call you, they say we're done at 1 o', clock, but they really stay there till 1:30, 2 o', clock, 2:30, 3 o', clock, working for the customer, either for tips or they're taking that difference in money. All right? I've seen movers come back where they write one price on the white part of the bill of lading and another price on the yellow part of the bill of lading that the customer gets, all right? And totally skim money off a job. Not only should you have GPS on your trucks, you need to be on the phone with them. The minute they say they're done, they need to be done and either on their way back to the office or on their way to the next job. So the finish time means we're done and we're ready to roll. So if the finish time is at 3:00', clock, by 3:05, that truck should be moving. When you do a finish time, that means the truck should be pads folded, ready to go the way that it showed up. All right? When you show up to the customer's house, your truck's neat, it's clean, the pads are folded when you leave, the truck should be neat, clean and pads folded. And that should be done on the time that the customer is paying for it. It should not be done after the fact. So how do you do that? You don't actually charge the customer for that time. You just pick up after yourself as you're going along. Meaning as you take a pad off a piece of furniture, it should get folded right away and stacked in the truck. Maybe you take a few, you know, three, four, five pads off, right? Then bring it into the house. Then fold those two, three, four, five pads, all right? But don't unload the truck. Have a big mound of pads that you then have to fold, that you're either going to fold on the customer's time, which isn't cool, or you're going to then leave and show up to the next job with all these pads a mess, or go back to the office with with the pads of mess. You need to keep a tight control over your movers. Too many companies are allowing a little too much rain, you know, to say, hey, here's your jobs for the day. Because they don't want to be bothered. I talk to companies left and right. They're getting taken advantage of. Movers are stealing, they're working off the clock, they're working side deals with the customers. You have to run a tight ship. This is you're in business to make money, right? You have to make as much money as you can coming in. You got to plug all the holes at the bottom from the money going out and try to keep as much as you can local. Dispatch needs to be run tight. Follow these five steps. I promise you you'll see a big difference in the way that your dispatch is operating. You'll see a big difference in the amount of money that you're making and also the amount of money that you're saving. Alright, Until I see you next week, go out there every single day. Profit in business, thrive in life. I'll see you soon. Hey, my friend. It's Louis. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do me two favors. Number one, subscribe to this channel so that you continue to get updates every time I release new training for you. And number two, if you'd like to get ahead a little bit faster and better, become more profitable in your business, what I'd like to do is give you a copy of my 10 rules of a Profitable Moving Company. These are the same 10 rules that I applied in my business that helped me grow it into a multimillion dollar nationwide company. Okay, so all you need to do is click on the link on this page or head over to louismasaro.com 10rules. So that's Louis L O U I S Massaro M A s s a r-o dot com. Just put in your name and email address and I'll email you out a copy. Okay? Until then, every single day, go out and profit in business and thrive in life. I'll see you later.