[MUSIC] >> To the Grow Your Moving Company podcast, I'm your host, Wade Swykel, owner of Two College Brothers, moving storage and franchising, based here in beautiful Tampa Bay, Florida. And I'm also the co-founder of the Moving Titan retreat, which is coming up September 2nd to the 4th, on Clearwater Beach and co-founder of Titan up training as well. Today's guest is Dane Gatlin. He is the co-owner of Neon Giant Moving, located in Northern Washington, about 45 minutes north of Seattle. And Neon Giant is one of the coolest brands in the game. When I first connected with them over Instagram, I was like, first take that jumped out and I told Dane and his wife Valentina, who they co-run the business, co-own the business. And I was like, your guys' brand is on point, reminds me of last year's Moving Titan retreat shirts. But it's really cool. It's really catchy, eye-popping. So I can only imagine your truck's driving on the street. People know who you are. And you guys are pushing for $2 million in revenue this year. You've seen a lot of rapid growth. Just went through a rebrand. You had another partner that you decided to branch off from with a different name and start a new company with a new fresh brand. And that wasn't that long ago. So you guys are pretty much starting from scratch. I mean, not necessarily from scratch since you've been in the industry, but with the brand and really getting your name out there. So definitely want to talk about that. And I don't want to forget to mention that Dane and Valentina were at our most recent Moving Titan retreat mastermind in Scottsdale, Arizona. Got to spend a lot of time connecting with them and learning the ins and outs of their business. And from talking to Dane before we jumped on here and Valentina's recent episode, you guys have already been implementing a lot of the stuff that you took away from that event, which is so cool to see. But Dane, I'll kick it over to you. Tell us a little bit about your journey getting into the moving industry and how you got to where you're at and and a little bit about where Neon Giants at and where you guys are headed. Yeah, yeah, thanks so much for having me. Wade, I'm excited to be listening to your podcast class. Two or three years when I'm a marathon runner. So I run a lot. So I'll listen to it on my long runs like every Sunday. I'll listen to your stuff and you know, when I get really good things I'll have to stop and do some notes on my phone and it's been fun listening to you. Like being a sponge for new information and this has been also the resource for me. That's cool that you listen to all you run and that you do marathons. I know that I remember seeing you had just gone back from a run out there in Arizona and I don't even think we talked about it. But I come from a family of runners and ran my dad ran the Honolulu Marathon in 1982, I think and then I ran it in 2015. That was the first and only marathon that I've run. I then my brother Brett, he ran it a few years later. And so I'm proud to say that I have the second best time in the family. I beat my brother, which is the most important thing. My dad sees just the savage and he did all of us, but it was fun. And that's a tough one. You know, 70 to 82 degree temperatures. I remember at the peak of it up and down hills, up and down Diamondback Mountain. Probably do another marathon at some point again in the future. But but I listened to a ton of audiobooks when I was training for that thing. And even during the run, I remember I listened to Norman Vincent Peel's The Power of Positive Thinking. I think it was during the actual race in Honolulu. And I needed that. About mildly during the race. What's that? Yeah, during the race. That was my good too. Just trying to continue. You know, that's how I trained. So you know, just front it how you train and hadn't listened to that one yet. But but it helped me, it helped me just deep, dig deep when I got to mild 22 and still had to go up Diamondhead Mountain and get to the top of that. And then the last mile was pretty much all down hill. But that last few miles there, I got, I basically bombed, I think, is what they say in the running game. Funny. Yeah, I think my first marathon I ever ran, I listened to some, I only get myself like one month to train. And I was listening to some podcast David Goggins was on just like riffing. Like who's going to carry the boats and all this? And I don't know. I barely survived that one. But now I run like two a year. Now I can be with like without even music. So that's awesome, man. That's really cool. It's a it's a big undertaking. My done several triathlon since then and David Goggins was a big reason for a lot of that. He's definitely an inspirational guy. But let's talk moving, man. So let's, I mean, I guess if you want to tell me, tell me the story behind Neon Giant, how you came up with the name and what that rebrand process looked like when you decided to go off on your own with your wife and another partner and get, you know, get your own thing going after having worked alongside another moving company. Yeah, yeah. So we really, we have like, you know, 30 days when we were going through this separation there where we had to come up with a new brand, give a new LLC. We had to, we wanted to find something catchy. So I really liked anything related with the Sasquatch because we're in the Pacific Northwest. And but everything that kind of like Sasquatch moving, big foot moving was all taken. And then we're thinking even more and I really like this. I think I saw like an electrical company on the East Coast that used Neon. And it was so cool like their website, the bright lights and their brandy. And I was like, how could we somehow combine it? And then Neon Giant came and it's been super fun. Sense you can see here. We got the super bright colors. The trucks are cool. The guys love the uniforms and besides like a few, you know, older former customers in the beginning that gave us a little pushback. Now everybody kind of forgot the old name already is their kids are screaming at their parents. Like look at the neon giant when they drive by that people tell us because we got a big full size Sasquatch on the building. Cool. So he's walking and he's got the sunglasses. It's cool. We've been making some cool like AI videos that I've been making too with Hicks Fieldwork. I can get the giant like walking through the forest and carrying a couch on his back. Yeah, it's just been super fun. I love that. How long have you had the rebrand with it? So it was January 1st, 2026. So that's like, seven months now. Wow. Wow. And how has that, how has that brand led to business? Have you been able to track how much people see in your trucks or the giant Sasquatch on your building or, you know, just the name catching out to them? Like have you seen that rebrand pay off in terms of ROI just within the last seven, eight months? I would say like, honestly, the first six months was kind of hard because we had mixed rap tracks. We still had the old brand on half the tracks. It's where transition and improve and then we had to start fresh with a whole new website. We lost all of our SEO. We kept our Google My Business. We just had to change the name and we kept our reviewers. That all of that kind of led to this wall. For a little period of time, we did a April, a good day. June was a little down, but then I would say July, August, once we got past six months, we really started to take off now and we'd notice that we've done a ton of like sponsoring events and stuff in the community too. A ton of real-iter work. And now seems like, now we're to the fun part where everybody recognizes us. When I go to the grocery store that call you and look at the neon giant, like, I've seen your trucks. They're so cool. On the back of our trucks, we have a thing where you can call the report, Sasquatch, sightings. If you've seen the giant, we'll get print calls from kids. Everyone's following us. I mean, but yeah, it's starting to catch on around here. It's a small enough community where it's been memorable and it's fun. It makes me smile and laugh when people mess around with it too. I love that as like kind of a no pun intended guerilla marketing campaign. So like, have a Sasquatch reporting hotline or something like that. And like, who knows? Maybe you'll get some like real Sasquatch people that you know, think they see the real deal and you can, I don't know, send it over to the history channel or something. Maybe leverage that. That's a really interesting like like sticky campaign that I feel like you could you could do because of how you've positioned that. When you started the rebrand, you know, you had the other company name. How long was the other company in business that you were part of or at least the brand of it? So they've been in business like 15 years and I'd been a part of it since right before COVID. So like January of 2020, I started working there because my friend was an owner and I was actually living in Columbia from where my wife, Valentina, is from. And I lost my visa there. I was trying to start a smart home automation business in Columbia, which totally failed. But I got kicked out of Columbia basically and had to move back to my hometown for a short period of time and then kind of just said, do you need help, Jeff? Like, I just started working as a mover for, you know, six months or something. I was like, I think I could do this. Like, maybe let me go open up a new location up North where I can try it on my own. And I got a truck and I came up here and then started learning like on YouTube. I had no idea what I was doing. I would watch either Lewis, Mr. Arm videos on YouTube. I would go park my truck by the highway and then walk around and knock on doors.
just ask other businesses what they're doing, like they're the realitors, and slowly we figured it out, and did that for until the end of last year, so about four years with that brand, and then we got the opportunity to branch off, and then make this now, which is, it was a lot of work to get here, but now it's so worth it, now that we're past it. - So aside from like wrapping the trucks, and getting the logo and everything dialed in, did you do anything else to tap into the previous customer base to kind of let people know, like, hey, we're rebranding? I've done podcasts with other people who have rebranded, and for those of you guys who are listening, if you don't have a brand that is catchy, that has colors that people remember, if you don't have trademark logos and different brand standards that you have, it's definitely an important piece of playing the long game, but it's a lot of times not gonna lead to instant success. And transitioning to do a rebrand, and you know, a rebrand could be changing your name, or it could just be changing your logo and your art. There's different ways to do it. I did a podcast with Dan Antanelli, who's a branding expert for Home Service Businesses, and he's given some strategies on trying to inform the general public that this company's going through a change, inform your past customers, that this company's going through a change. Should you do anything to get the word out, and press releases, or sending letters to past customers, and letting them know, or anything like that, aside from just the logo side of things? Yeah, yeah, I mean, we did press releases, we notified the local paper, and they did an article, we did email blastouts to our former customer list. It was nice that we got a, like, it was kind of like a car about, so like, we got to keep the same assets we had, the trucks, the customer database, smart moving was super nice in the transition, they helped us migrate to a new account. We had to take the new account, but we got to import our old customers, so I still have all the past jobs and stuff. So we were able to email all of them, we sent out mailers, just whatever we could, and then of course, went around, hard core to every real estate agency around here, so there was no confusion bringing plenty of pliers and swag, and getting them signed up, and just, we've been hitting the pavement hard, because you always just assume people know, and then, like, they don't. Somebody could still come up to me, surprise, like, oh, when did you change the name? Jeez, I gotta keep going. Yeah, that's smart, that you've thought that through, especially with the past customers, because the repeat and referral business is so big in the moving industry, and if you've already got an established reputation, that's probably one of the scariest things about doing a rebrand is losing that when people realize that you're, if they try to find the old company, and they realize that it's no longer around, even though it is, it's just under a new name. That would be a scary piece for me, but what about the website and the SEO? Obviously, we've talked about rebranding simply because we're a lot bigger than two college brothers these days, and college was 15, 16 years ago for me, so I thought about it, but one of the other scary pieces of it is changing up the website and the Google My Business page, and losing all the SEO traction that we built over the last decade and a half. What was your approach to that? Yeah, I mean, we did lose the website in all of our SEOs, so that's still an ongoing thing here. Why do you use the same guy? He was super awesome and a rebranded. Build our old website, he built a new one, a new and improved one, and yeah, I mean, that is still an ongoing thing. We had a big dip in our traffic and all of that. I would say now, like in the summer, it's picked back up, but it kind of really forced the SEO to take a little bit of time, too. I can't just expect it to flip a switch over night, so I think that's really what led us into, we push super hard into our affiliate program with storage facilities, with our reliters, with everything, and that's when I built out a good way of tracking it and using cloud and AI to build this whole expansive relit or affiliate program. Before, that was part of our business, but it wasn't very organized, but I was just trying to think, what could I control? I couldn't really control it. SEO, and we needed money now, but I could control our word of mouth and the reliters referred us, so now I think I was just looking at smart moving in, like this summer, it's probably like 70% affiliates for our referral source, this summer, and then Google completely dropped off, and then we've been able to recover it a little bit, and then lately I've been diving in the meta ads and for ways, too, so I've just been trying to be creative to whatever I can do to bridge that gap, since we know that the SEO is gonna take a little bit to build a new website. - Hey, Movers, it's Wade Swagall, and you're listening to the Grow Your Moving Company podcast. If you've ever wasted money on marketing to the wrong homes, listen up. This is why I use USA Home listings. They're the only platform in the moving industry built by Movers, that not only has new home listings and under contract listings updated daily, but now offers enhanced data that can eliminate vacant homes and give you phone numbers and emails for both homeowners and reliters, giving you multiple ways to connect and close more jobs. Their vacant CAI tool removes empty homes, so there are no more wasted mailing efforts, and their tier two data takes it further, providing highly accurate contact details for both homeowners and reliters, for email, phone, and social outreach. The result, higher conversions, stronger ROI, and more book jobs with less spend. Check out USAHomeListings.com because it's where real movers get real leads. - Well, I definitely wanna talk about the affiliate program. Last question on the SEO, were you able to retain any of the reviews from your previous GMB profile? - Yeah, yeah, we gotta keep it, that's good. So we have all the same reviews. We just had to, hopefully they get flooded now with the new name, not the old name. - True. - Because when people are going through, that's a little bit confusing. Still, some of the old pictures are the old company logo, and then the old company continues to exist to it. It's not like they're not in existence. They're a little bit, they're like an hour and a half away, but they can still be kind of confused. You gotta kind of tell them over the phone a little bit. We're not gonna do that, we're this. - Makes total sense. Tell me about this affiliate program. So you mentioned earlier, when you were doing the rebrand, you pounded the pavement, you knocked on a lot of doors, you got out there, response or events, you got really involved in your community, and it certainly seems to be paying off with 70% affiliate programs. And I know you guys were showing me the app that you built to enhance the tracking from that beyond the smart moving capabilities, which smart moving does have a decent affiliate program to generate custom links and things like that, so I know knock on that, but you guys took it to the next level with Clawed, and it really seems like it's paying off. I mean, walk me through your whole approach with how you initiate those connections, and then how you basically nurture those relationships and track that data. - Yeah, yeah, so we still utilize the smart moving affiliates. We still have to match the affiliate and smart moving to the job, so we utilize that still. We just wanted to take a step further. In the past, it had been, we would go ahead, every Tuesday, say, go to a different territory, go around, pull the different offices, and try to keep, you know, handwritten notes, or in a Google spreadsheet somewhere, you know, this reliter, she has a dog name, name phones, and he's four, and like, you know, nice things, so the next time it's a little warmer, let me go in and introduce ourselves, and it's just trying to think how can we systemize it, and how can we take most advantage of the top reliters too? So I created like to start just kind of a tier system with a core port on my wall here of like, our tier one top referral partners, and then these are people I got to call or text like every week, and just see how they're doing. Like my tier ones had a certain criteria. Tier twos were like, who has, you know, used us and referred us before. Tier three, like, knows who we are, tier four is like recruits we want to get. And I got an email list from one of my reliter friends, and I could see the top transacting reliters, and then those are the ones I of course wanted, the target because the top, whatever they say, 10% of reliters too, like 90% of the business around here. So I really wanted to start building in a system where I could take back core port and like, okay, how could I digitize this? I was talking with my coach, and I started building out this program where it's basically a CRM for our affiliates and reliters, where they have a whole profile that we build out for them in there that's got their headshot, it's got their brokerage, they work out all their contact information. All of our notes in the past, and it's linked in with Clawed to show every past referral that they've given us in smart moving.
so you can sort all your affiliates by total revenue, their total jobs referred, everything. You can filter by whatever you want. You can see all the stats right in there. And then I plugged in email and text messaging through it. I got approved by Twilio. It's called. So now we can text the realtor's directly through with the CRM or the app on my phone from the company number. And within their profile too, we built it out. So I can click a button in a second and send them an instant portal where they can refer and track jobs with us. So when you're texting and I don't mean to cut you off, but I don't want to forget, is it showing up blue like an iPhone? If they have an iPhone, I know that's something that most CRMs in general, whether it's smart moving, go high level, whatever, it's going to show up as an SMS, which if you have an iPhone is green, but have you been able to configure it through your build on that you've created to be like a blue text at all? No, I haven't thought of that, but I want to look at it and make it now. Yeah, so I'm not an expert on it by any means. There's services that do it, but they're really expensive. And there's some great area on whether they're doing it the right way, or if they have like 100 iPhones or 1000 iPhones in India somewhere. But there is another way to do it that we actually just figured out. I want to chads, marketing guys, has been able to connect it to our go high level for the moving Titan stuff and using a Mac Mini can now show up as blue. And I think you have to buy like a cheap phone number line. You can only do up to a certain amount of days, so it doesn't get fly to spam. And, but I mean, you can have real conversations from a from a CRM and somehow leveraging an actual user line and iCloud account connected to a Mac Mini. There's a way to do it. So you can probably talk to Claude and figure it out yourself, but it is possible now. And I think that it would be definitely possible to connect it to smart moving in some capacity at the same time. So something that we're going to begin to do for the moving company after the upcoming retreat. But that's, you know, that's part of why I love doing the retreats and stuff like that too. Because you figure out all these other marketing sources and strategies for a totally different business in a different industry. That a lot of time can be crossed over to the moving business. So just the the act of putting on those events and running other side businesses can can a lot of times have some really cool effects in the aftermath. But I didn't mean to cut you off on the on the send blue or the blue text message stuff. So sorry about that, but continue. I know that's awesome. I made a note. I'm going to check it out when we get off here. I'm always just adding to it. But yeah, just some of the other features that I put in, you know, are there's like an instant link you can send them to create a portal form where they have their own URL where they just go there to refer and they can track the referrals and it goes straight into our smart moving it says exactly where it came from which realtor it's a portal lead from submitted by, you know, Susie Smith. And it goes straight into smart moving. That's just a touch of a button. It says send portal activate portal. Is there a top realtor I've a button to create a landing page on a website in the second. So it's pretty fun when I'm in like a realtor meeting and I want to give a demonstration. Because every Tuesday we're trying to hit a rate a realtor sales meeting around here. We learned that everybody around here meets on Tuesdays. So I'm reaching out to anybody connections with and just trying to load up every Tuesday more than we're going out. Whether it's five minutes, some people have given us an hour before. And if they give us a slide deck and I can show the CRM and then like, they check it out. You can track from beginning to end what stage the referrals at. Because I know when I refer somebody I would like to know, you know, is it books? What wins it book? When are they doing it? Is it completed? Are they happy? Because then we'll send screenshot of their five started video. We'll put it in the portal as well that they can see. And then we've automated payouts. So we'll send them a $50 digital reward card automatically. Because before I was just trying to like keep track on notes and get into the month mail out at gift card. This way it's just we get a ding on the thing. It says reward the gift card. Yes or no? And they click yes. What's the job? It's good. So it's pretty sweet. It's fun to show the meetings. Yeah. And I remember you showed it to us at the event and I didn't have time to go full in on it and see the entire demo of it. But just from the surface level it was very clean software. And you know, snowballed is very similar things out there for people that may not be tech savvy enough to build it themselves. You know, you can do the automated referral payouts and stuff like that. But you fully customize it. Did you just teach yourself all of that through cloud on how to build that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just YouTube and cloud. I got kind of obsessed with it at the start of the year around January and just started like talking to it and building things. And it's just super exciting because I can five and idea of anything really. I can just go in there and I don't even really type anymore. I use, I don't know if you know what whisper flow is. I'm familiar with the term whisper, but not if that's like a specific product I'm not familiar. Yeah. I think there's a couple like it. But it's addicting to me now. I don't type anymore. I just click one key on my dashboard and then I just talk in and it types and edits it. And then I have the same app on my phone now. So whatever I text anyone, I'm just like talking to my phone all day. And I almost forgot how to text at this point. So I'm just like talking to it all day. I've noticed that becoming a trend with my employees, whether they're talking to the chat GPT or their texting like people, younger people, especially they're not really texting anymore. They're talking into AI and it's texting or you know, phones have had voice to text for a long time. But you know, for a while, it was a little clunky. It would get things wrong. It would get spellings and typos in there and you couldn't emphasize certain parts that you needed to emphasize. So, but I mean with AI now, I mean, it's just, it's crazy how far it's come. And I read an article recently that, you know, at first, this first wave of AI, people were getting lazy when it came to, you know, doing a lot of things because they could have AI do it. Whether it was writing a book report, if you're a student or, you know, whatever. And, you know, doing math, complicated situations that used to have to spend a lot of time and critically thinking. I think AI is a great tool because it can save you so much time if you're using it as a tool. But I think a lot of people started using it as a crutch and they were running things in AI to send text messages and emails and a lot of times it was a dead giveaway because you have DM dashes and it's just too clean. And so a lot of times, you know, you can see if somebody's just being lazy, but that being said, there's a ton of different ways that it can be a super valuable tool. For example, building out an app and learning how to do that. But I've heard this second wave is making it even easier and getting, you know, especially younger people even more lazy because now they don't even have to type things out and learn how to spell because they could just talk into things. And we'll be interesting to see how future generations do that just grow up with nothing but that and whatever else comes along. I still think that, you know, it's important to exercise your brain to an extent. I try to do, you know, small math equations or write, write out if I'm doing an application for an award or something. I try to write it all out myself. I might have AI clean it up, make sure it's grammatically correct, but it's still my words and my voice. And I think it's important to continue to use your brain and that'll ultimately be somewhat of a differentiator down the road. So that's, but that's really cool, but you're definitely leveraging it for the right reasons. And I think that is brilliant. You mentioned you do Tuesday meetings. You try to do them every Tuesday for the realtors. You know, before they ever get into your system, how are you going about having an organized, strategic approach to make these connections? And I know you can buy lists, you know, you can get lists of all the agents. Usually if you know an agent, they can download it off an MLS. You know, there's certain vendors that sell lists. There's like USA Home Listings, one of the partners on this show. I can give you lists of home data and the customer information and the realtor information for homes that are coming soon for sale, pending. There's a lot of functionalities you can do with that. So are you working with any lists that you haven't established a connection and putting them into some of these tools? Or are you actually going out of your way to reach out to these people to make the connection first? Or maybe a combination of the two? Like, how does the system, the process go for getting, you know, the backend software and tools to work? Yeah, yeah. So I mean initially, I just wanted to make sure I was looking in the right place. So I had one of my realtor friends just, I asked if he could give me the list of the last rolling 12 months of the top transactions by the three counties around here. And then I printed off the top 50 realtor's in each county. And then I was like, we know this one, this one, this one, we don't know this one was circling it. Like, now what do we do? Let's make a plan. So that was initially how we did it. And I have that list, like I uploaded in there. So we can click on the new, the realtor's that aren't quite in our network yet. And then I have it linked to something called right cast where it shows live listings. So I can click on the profile and see, look at active listings and say it's a new person.
in on the profile there and I have a talk to them before. We can either add them on social media, there's a button it'll search for their social media and start trying to interact with them there. Or if I see that there is a blistening in the neighborhood, I've got some text templates and email templates that we'll say sometimes like, "Hey, I was running by your awesome blistening on, you know, one, two, three, four marine drive and I was just thinking that, you know, an awesome house like that deserves an awesome moving company and I'm happy to be moving company at all. This is my number if you ever need anything or your customers need boxes or whatever. So that's kind of a fun tool that we have on there now too, is you can just click refresh and see the newest listings of the day and then see like, "Oh look, there's one from Kelly, our top referral partner that's the comment or just see if we can bring something over or just stay top of mine all the time." Hey everybody, Wade here and I've got an awesome game-changing announcement for you. Now I know a lot of you guys are constantly asking, "How do we get more leads? How do we get better leads?" You're tired of spending way too much money for paper click or buying leads or LSA, whatever it may be, only to get low paying customers that become a headache with small moves and you don't get an ROI on those jobs. Well, the exciting news is that our friends at Moversville have just launched a new product called the Realtor Referral Engine where they not only get in front of Realtors but they command direct response replies and referred business. I'm super pumped about this but don't just take my word for it. My friend Austin Yarborough over at Central Coast moving and Lucky Day moving and the moving army. I know he's got a bunch of them just like me. That's why we're friends. Has gotten over 40 direct replies from Realtors in his first month of using the Realtor Referral Engine from Moversville and then there's Scott with ABC moving systems. He's booked over $30,000 in work and made over 20 new realtor connections. What can an extra $30,000 a month do for your business? Here's what makes this kind of marketing different. These aren't just one in done jobs. These are realtor's who keep referring large jobs can introduce you to the other members of their brokerage and then those moves can start referring more and more jobs. You have to stay front of mind though. So if you want to learn more about the Realtor Referral Engine by Moversville head on over to Moversville.com and book a quick 15 minute call with my friend Tim who runs the place. He'll know exactly what your business needs to get set up. He can do it all to make sure that you're getting high ticket jobs at a fraction of the cost of other marketing sources. I think you're going to be happy that you did that. Don't sleep on this one. Go check out Moversville.com. Look for it. The 15 minute intro call with Tim and report back with your results so that I can talk about him here on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Yeah, I think it's really important that every business is always looking for those opportunities and not just one person in the business, not just the owner. We've for a long time had a strategy where we encourage our entire team, at least our administrative team, and ideally we get the Movers up to speed on it too, but sometimes just want to be careful with getting the right people to be the face of your brand when it comes to connecting with high profile realtors. But say you have five people working in your office. If you reach out to one person a day, just make it a goal. Every working day that you do say 300 working days, that's 1500 contacts that your company can can make, you know, outreaches. And not everybody's going to respond. Not everybody's going to engage with you, but even if only 10 doing it's probably going to be a lot more than 10%. That's still 150 more potential partners. If 10% referral every year, that's 150 new referrals. And then if 10% of them send you a referral every month, that's 15 additional moves per month. And if the average ticket price is two or three or $1,000 or even more because they're high producing business partners, you can do the math on that, but it could be well into the, you know, six figures in additional business just by having everybody reach out to one person, make one connection every single day. And then what tends to happen is they'll introduce you to new opportunities that, you know, you get you get it whittled down to a core group. Maybe your top 50 referral partners that are just, you know, they're the connectors there. If you've ever read the book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Bladwell, he talks about like the connectors. And these are like a segment of the population that know a ton of people and they can, they know everybody basically. They're one degree of separation from pretty much anybody you want to meet. And that makes you basically two degrees of separation from pretty much anybody that you want to meet. And you can get your foot in the door with a lot more opportunities. And then you're servicing all these moves that they become raving fans and they talk everybody about you as well. And it just snowballs. But such a, such a great strategy. And I mean, I love the fact that you stick to the Tuesday presentations. How big is your market? I'm just curious. Like how many agents are in it or what's the population of like the market that you serve with those three counties that you mentioned? You know, I don't even, I would be lying if I said we're, you know, Seattle's big. There's a couple million people down there. But we're like 45 minutes from there. And there's a bunch of big boy moving companies down there. So we really don't really compete with price too much. But up here in Skagit, walk in county close to the Canadian border, there's a university town with a couple of hundred thousand people belly in him. I was up there yesterday doing our referral thing. And down here, there's probably a similar amount. So maybe like half a million people in this general area. I would just guess how loud. And that's honestly some of the most successful companies I know or the fastest growing companies I know are under a million dollars. You know, at some point, you know, they, they might cap out and they want to get into a bigger market, maybe open another location. I say a million dollars. I meant under a million residents. Yeah. You know what I mean? But they're under a million residents. I mean, you look at these like mid market areas or maybe it's a suburban area of a larger city like you're in. Like our San Antonio franchise started off in San Antonio, proper, but he lived in shirt. Our SEO company said that, you know, he should be in San Antonio. But because he was just starting out, out, there was a lot of noise to break through the SEO, you know, it took time to invest in. And so we actually ended up after about a year or so moving him out to a suburb there and immediately started ranking at the top because there was a lot less competition and he was a lot closer to actual residential people that make for ideal customers. They tend to a lot of times live in the suburbs, not say there's not opportunities in the actual cities, but but you're also competing against so much in the actual cities. Whereas the suburbs, a lot of times, you know, you might be the only one or one of the only ones. Same thing in those mid markets, like, you know, games will floor it as like a hundred thousand people. And there's like seven companies maybe there and and probably like three main court competitors where we started and it revolves heavily around the university, which has virtually unlimited funds and needs to move people. You know, whether they're doctors, professors, the student housing section during certain times of the years, but I love the mid markets because because the word just travels so fast, you know, it's just that there's usually less competition. It's a lot easier to start ranking and to meet people and to connect and know the who's who. And there's a ton of opportunity, even in a 500,000 person market to become a multi multi-million dollar business. So I think you guys are, or I don't know anything about your market outside of what you just told me, but I think that, you know, it's important for anybody listening to not be too quick to go and chase a shiny, shiny object with getting into a big city because a lot of times, you know, I learned that the hard way when we opened up our Tampa location in 2015 is it took three or four years to break through the noise in Tampa. And now, you know, we're in a better position with it because we've been here for a long time, but it was tough and considered, you know, closing it at multiple stages during that period. And Gainesville was having to float, you know, a lot of the expenses for the Tampa office and everything doubled, you know, in terms of the costs of everything. So, you know, that's a, that's a good place to be. You mentioned prior to us recording that you've started playing around with Meta and social media. And I've been hearing a lot about this, and this has been a lot of topics of conversation with other moving company owners, as well as with my own internal team, that Meta has recently launched a new algorithm called Andromeda. And I'm starting to hear these success stories from other moving company owners in different parts of the country that are absolutely crushing it with social media ads. And we've tried social media on and off for years. Had some success over the last, you know, year or two of going into it, but it's never been like, you know, a silver bullet marketing source, like some other things turn out to be. And, and, you know, it might provide a couple few jobs a month, the ROI is decent, so we keep it. But I'm hearing things where people are sent $5,000 spend budgets and generating $220,000 of trackable business in a month from, from the new algorithm. And, you know, some other companies that started within the last couple years are already at the $45 million mark. And they attribute a lot of that to, you know, working with good vendors and figuring out the, how, how to get business, actual business from Meta. And, you know, in the past, when we did it, I kind of looked at it more as like, you know, if we get a couple of moves out of it a month, great. It's kind of more of a branding play that I think is going to elevate our other.
marketing because they'll have seen us on their scrolling and then they'll, you know, they go to need a mover, they recognize us. But I'm curious, what are you finding about meta? I know it's relatively new that you've gone into it, but are you seeing some, some of those similar results and what's your overall approach with it? Yeah, yeah. So like thanks to, like you said, I've been hearing things just like you, I guess maybe from the moving tighten retreat and other people that made me want to take a closer look hearing some success stories because like you just said, I've just been told forever like, oh, it's just like a little bit of a branding play. Just have run some awareness ads, you know, when people are scrolling, they'll know you're there and I'd always been told that. And I started watching some YouTube stuff and Alex or Mosey stuff, he's super into it. And I just started, yeah, watching videos and all I did to start was I created a few little AI generated ads. Like there's one of our Sasquatch, like Karen, I couched through the woods, like like a trail cam and he stops and he's, and it like they caught him on camera and the Sasquatch and then there's one where these boxes are disappearing and then they go and do a new house and then they unpack themselves and that shows a happy family and all settled in a new home. All I've been doing is running it for like a week and I, but what I did was I put so that the quote form, they fill out a quote on that up like it into the ad instead of rerouting them to our website or anything. And since I just started running them, I mean, this is just last week, probably like seven days. I go out, I've already got like 10 or 12 actual moving qualified leads that have come through not like little junk removals or anything for us to do some of that. And we've already put four of them in service to them. And I was like, huh, I'm just going to keep. So right now on my goals for the week, it's like, I'm going to give one hour a day watching YouTube videos on Meta and trying to figure out how to dial this in. I called this kid that helps us to the videos and we're going to put out. I don't know, 10 or 12 different creative ads because from what I've been understanding about in drama and with the change they made like seven or eight months ago, it's like, you don't have to manually do as much of the filtering anymore. You don't have to put this exact demographic that's in these three interests. Now you kind of just let Meta do the work because it understands way more about, you know, our customer avatar, what we're looking for, it'll read through the ad and the copy and try to find that ideal customer and narrow it down to this small group, this niche group that's, you know, this age range in this area with these interests based on their Facebook profiles and stuff. I've definitely noticed on the consumer side that the algorithm has changed. I'm getting much more relevant ads to things that I, you know, I don't love, I don't think anybody like loves looking at ads unless you're in marketing or own a business to like, you know, pick it apart. But I love, I mean, I'm in that. So I do enjoy like seeing, you know, some of these things and these different approaches that people are taking to get my attention. And it used to be, you know, an ad that looked like every other ad, like a TV commercial or, you know, we're the best do business with us. I kind of thing, but it's just been fun to see how creative a lot of them are getting to the point where I'll be scrolling on something. And I have to look really closely to see if I'm watching an ad or if this is like an actual, like real or an actual, you know, thing. And sometimes it's informational. It's like, you know, it could be an infographic or somebody, you know, explaining something. Sometimes it's like a, like an AI music video that I literally was driving the other day. I shouldn't say this. I wasn't driving the other day. I was parked in my car and had my phone plaid and, uh, and I saw one of these, like AI music video that I watched like three minutes of the dang thing. And I had no interest in getting whatever it was. It was like some kind of, I don't know, it was for like, like middle aged men who are having hormonal changes, which I guess it thinks that I have. But, but the music video was so fun and it was like so good. And it was all AI, obviously, but, uh, but the algorithm is improving. And I have bought things from, from ads, uh, AI algorithm ads. So I want to take a second and tell you all about Titan up training. As a co founder, we've spent months and months and months and a lot of money pulling together resources from some of the best moving companies in the world. And we're excited to bring this to an online platform available to any mover to use at an affordable price. Titan up training has over 200 videos, including mover training, your highest turnover position so that you can reduce claims, streamline operations, give your team the tools to perform at the highest level of service that generate repeat and referral business and allow you to charge higher prices as well as sales training, marketing training, business development, leadership. We're adding more content as we speak. We've got legal training in there. We've even got door to door training for the moving industry. Thanks to Lenny Gray at the moving Titan retreat. We've seen a massive explosion of moving companies jumping on to Titan up training since the last retreat and people are loving it. And when you sign up and mention this podcast, we're going to give you a free six week onboarding course in order to learn how to hold your team accountable and get the entire team on the platform so that you can have the best off season and summer season that you've ever had. So go to TitanupTraining.com, schedule your free demo today and look forward to tightening up. One of the social media people I've spoken to said was it's important to test as many different creatives as you can, 100 creatives, let's say, and then narrow those down to the top performers and just maybe not all at once. But constantly AB testing and then when you have one that does well, you keep running that and you're testing other things against that and then eventually something else will run well and then you start testing new things against that. And sometimes it's all it is as a matter of changing up one piece of copy or one call to action or one element of the ad and the ROI explodes when that one little tweak is made and it's crazy because it's so hard to predict. Even like for our moving Titan retreat, the ads that we think are going to do the worst, like the afterthought ones where it's just me and Chad going down a slide with a phone in our hand tend to be sometimes the ones that do the best in terms of conversions or views or whatever. So you've got like 10 to 12, it sounds like currently, are you self managing that? Are you working with a company? No, I'm just trying to learn it on my own before I, because I don't know, sometimes when I talk to some agencies, we're talking like Chinese to me or they just tell me impossible that might work. So I've been diving into this myself right now. I have a guy that runs my Google ads but I don't know, he's up to indiment. The kid that does my video stuff is super into meta so he's giving me a bunch of little shorter cuts with different hooks like you're saying so we can test different creatives and then I'm hoping he's going to dive into it with me a little bit and then I can't do it forever if I want to grow the company but for right now I really want to understand it and see how much I can leverage it and that. Another cool thing I have it doing is so like each campaign I have it so it will immediately go straight into smart moving to rather than you know build. So our sales and stuff is looking in four different places for our leads. I use Zapier so that it will immediately populate into smart moving as a lead when that's filled out and then it'll say the exact ad campaign came from it will say Sasquatch, Trailcam, Virgin B. So I get kind of instant gratification when I see that ding or when I check in the morning there's three ads from the transformation ad overnight and maybe I could you know see if we could tweet that a little more or now I got to get some more to test so it's been exciting and fun for me. I like like that. That's really cool and I think you brought up a really good point to whether it's something like social media maybe it's SEO maybe it's PPC or some other marketing source maybe it's direct mail but learning how to do it on your own first before you go and hire a company because there's so many companies out there that just want to take your money they're overcharging under delivering they don't understand the nuances of your moving company and your business. You know we've probably spent a fortune learning that the hard way over the years we're very lucky to have a few really good vendors when it comes to SEO that we work with and we've worked with for several years now there's a few things that you know I've tried a lot of different companies with on you know aside from SEO with different you know other PPC type things like meta and whatever and it's just really hard to find out who the good players are that are actually going to understand your business and customize it to your CRM and and present the right strategy because a lot of these firms and agencies and you know companies that do that you know they have a cookie cutter approach because they're trying to grow business too they're trying to streamline things they're trying to you know train their staff to you know get really good at certain things but that a lot of times comes without the customization and then the best way to overcome it.
to learn as much about it as you possibly can yourself. Maybe do it for a little while yourself. Maybe try to find a mentor. Elks for Mozy talks about reaching out to an expert. And then offering to pay them more than what they would otherwise charge with the stipulation that they're going to teach him how to do it. And teach somebody on, or probably now teach somebody on his team how to do it. And so maybe there are $2,000 a month. Maybe you offer to pay them $10,000 for three months. But you want them to show you exactly what they're doing, how they're doing it with the understanding that this is a three-month agreement. Maybe it's a six-month agreement. And that you probably will try to do it in-house. Or if you like what they're doing, maybe you do a hybrid approach where you got somebody on your team helping them to bring the cost down or you continue to work with them. But what's in it for them is they're going to get that higher up front ticket price, especially if you can pay it all up front. A lot of people, you know, the right person is going to jump at that. And then also, you know, you can now be an evangelist for their company and help to promote them to other companies to help grow their business. And, you know, that's -- I love that approach. But with Claude, with YouTube, with all these things right now, you don't even really need to do that. You can get a lot of this information for free or very little cost to fully understand the ins and outs. Because really, you know, only a moving company owner and really only you as the owner of your company are going to fully understand the nuances of the needs for your company or for a moving company where a lot of these agencies, they might know a lot about the tech side of it all. But they don't necessarily know the moving side. And they're not plugging it into your CRM. They're not hooking up the right UTM parameters. They're not, you know, doing those connections like you just mentioned. So, you know, I love that you're doing that. So you -- so you basically just -- so I'm clear, you got 10 to 12 ads, you're AB test in those. You made a lot of those with Higgs Field with AI, HiVideos, probably a few different other things that you got in there with different copy and images and whatnot. Those ads are presenting themselves on the algorithm. And then you have the form on the ad where people that see those ads can fill it out right there without even leaving Instagram. And then you use Zapier to connect to that two smart moving with a UTM parameter that tags exactly what ad that was. Am I right here and all that correctly with that flow? Yeah, that's the flow. And yeah, I don't know if anybody's made MasterM with Higgs Field that much before, but it's pretty cool too because I've had problems with like video generation before where it doesn't like consistently make a consistent character like the neon giant. You know, it's like different every time, but in Higgs Field now I've created this character that I can reuse doing different things. Like he's carrying the couch on that trail camp, the next time he could be in an open house like with a plate of hors d'oeuvres or a realtor event. Or it's going to be the same character mostly every time because I know what I have problems with that before. Like, oh, now that one looks different and he's talking weird. But yeah, it's cool because I've only made two kind of not very good ads. So I'm excited to see like now that I put more create about there with this the kid that's got all of our B-roll and videos actually putting our faces to it. I don't know what we can get, but if I would have just taken Meta's only a branding play which several people had told me before then, I wouldn't have got, you know, those leads in the last week. So who knows? I love it. What's your what's your current ad spend and about how many leads has that ad spend generated for you? For Meta. I'm only paying like $50 a day right now for those two ads. And it's yeah, it's just kind of an experiment right now. Overall for the company. What's it what's it doing like how many leads are you getting for $50 a day for $50 a day? It's been like one or two a day. I would say. It's not bad. That's good ROI. If you're booking if you're booking them. Yeah, and like I said, they've been quality leads so far too. So I hate to push everyone to this when I've such a small sample size, but. Well, you're not the you're not the first person that I'd seen success. I mean, I think that that I think you're you're early in the stages and I think you're doing all the right things. So, you know, and also you're not I wouldn't say you're pushing anything because you're not, you know, selling, you know, an agency or selling your services. You're figuring it out, but you're showing that it's possible. Yeah. And I've been there. Anybody wants to collaborate they can reach out to me too. More people trying it and learning than the better. And so Higgs field, you know, I've heard of it. I've not used it. I'm not super familiar, but I understand it's a video generating AI. Is that is it is it like another app like clawed or chat GPT? Is it, you know, is it expensive? Like how do you get started with Higgs field? Just go to a Higgs field. I think Higgs field. Polls from a bunch of different video platforms into one and utilizes it. What I did actually was I signed up for Higgs field, but I could connect it to a claw. So I'm just using it in clawed as a connector. So I have a conversation on my computer that's just video generation that I'm using it for. And it knows the past three videos I've generated and it just. So you did connect it to clod or you didn't connect it to clod? Oh, you did. Okay. So you just talk to clod. Clod talks to Higgs field, Higgs field pumps out the videos. Yeah. And then Higgs field will make like the actual. Video itself and then. So I don't burn a ton of tokens and credits. Clod can like edit it down or you're like, okay, now it'll put a voice over instead of the next time I have to spend like. $5 to generate a whole new video to tweak one thing. It'll make like a kind of a general video and then. Clod can go through and edit it without taking all those credits. They can add like the in card that shows neon giant with the offer and then change different. You know, change the offer five different ways so we can test five different things. You know, having to regenerate a new video. Every time or if you want to change the hook or something like that. Okay. Okay. Interesting. And how much are tokens with Higgs field? Like how like what does that cost to get? Get going to make a video. I think I signed up for like $20 a month allowance. But now of course I've already recharged it like two or three times because I was like, okay, I really want to find a version of this video that'll be good. I probably put like 60 to $80 into like the three cool videos that I made. That's amazing. I mean, even if they've, you know, had to re up you. I'm assuming that gets you a certain amount of tokens and every video is a certain amount of tokens. Yeah. That's I mean 60 80 bucks to make, you know, a good AI video. I mean, you can't you can't beat that. Yeah, videographer is going to charge you know, 800 bucks to come out for a content day and then $1500 for editing or whatever. Which I still think, you know, having real, real film content. It's great, but you can know all that on your phones these days with the how good camera phones have gotten and then probably does Higgs field edit or is there any AI platform that edits actual footage for you like if I if I went and made a video. Is there an AI that I could plug that into to edit that video for me? You know, I think there is I don't have the answers to it right now, but I'll ask a lot of tragedy. I'm just glad it's right to. Valentina was telling me that she thinks you can tie in cap cut now to claw, which is the video editor. So I'm sure if you can't do it already that it's just right around the corner. Just being able to dump a bunch of B roll and everything in there and say making me. You know, 10 10 second promotional ad clips for. Yep, I just asked cloud will see what it spits out, but I know you can connect canva to jet gp and you know your Google drives and things like that. So yeah, clouds telling me cap cut V to dot IO opus clip. Descript. So a few things to check out there and it broke it down. I'm not going to bore everybody with the details you can do this part yourself, but there's some good references there. I mean, that's one of the beauties of AI, you know, if there's something you don't have an answer to just ask AI and one of these days I'm in the process. I downloaded all the transcripts from the last several years of this podcast, but I'm planning to upload all the transcripts into AI to try to make some kind of aggregated, you know, reference database for people that you know are fans of the show. But until I get that done. There is some still real life stuff that you can learn here. Well, Dane, this is this has been great. We're coming up on time, but I do want to ask. So we went over several things at the moving Titan retreat mastermind back in Arizona. That was just over two months ago now we're coming up on what probably the 60 or 70 day mark. Maybe the 60 day mark now. I think it was right around this time in June and awesome event that you were a part of and I know you had a lot of takeaways. Do you mind sharing some of the takeaways that you had from the event and what you've already been able to implement and how that's going for you? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I had a whole list. I kind of did what I said before I just brain downed all of my stuff that I took away from the event when I was on the plane and it kind of made it to do this stuff. A lot of it had to do with this. Our marketing was brilliant.
broken, especially like we weren't getting anything from Google, absolutely nothing from Meta. We weren't tracking lead after-cution or using UTM stuff. I dove hardcore into all of that and then that's been super awesome. I just told you what we're getting from Meta and everything. So we breathe out a bunch of that. We hired a salesperson since then and I was able to use a lot of people I met there. Chad was super open with me about sharing his offer letters to salespeople and operations managers. But I was just thinking yesterday, when I was on my run, actually I was like one of the coolest things that happened to me since the retreat was like my number one goal going into it was that I always know I can scale and that I'm going to, you know, I'm confident in my growth mindset where I'm going to build this thing. But like I haven't been able to see like the next steps or like what it is to get there. Now after seeing all you guys, people way ahead of me, a little bit ahead of me, I kind of have a roadmap and have some of the good resources with friends and people now that I can see like, now I can see them ahead, you know, like I got sales help here and now, you know, going into December, we're going to for sure finally get that operations manager hired that we've been meaning to for a long time and then followed by, you know, additional sales help here, you know, before the spring so we can next year get this and then like I can see it all and so it's just super exciting like the next steps where before I could, I knew where I wanted to get back and it's exactly the roadmap I guess. But that's what's exciting for me now. I got real dialed in goals. We got awesome connections with other moving company owners there. I've done the call with you guys, but then I organized a little side call with like four or five guys that we can catch up with and bounce ideas and yeah, I just love it. I would be connected with everyone in this industry and your podcast and everything's been super helpful for me to sponge everything in and just continue to learn and see how far we can take it. I love it. Well, thank you for sharing that. That's what it's all about is building those connections and you know, there's always going to be that four or five guys that you resonate with that, you know, you want to, you know, continue that conversation. We're friendships and bonds are made. So I really do appreciate you guys coming out and you guys are sending your other partner to the one in September, correct? Yeah, yeah. I'm stoked for my partner Jeff to get down there and get a part of the Titan communities and brings wife and he's never even been to a conference before. So I'm excited to see him come back with the excitement and for us to sort of kick and button, take in names in September and be on fire. And then we're going to go, we already signed up for, I think January, if you go down to the small group one in Texas. So that will be awesome as well. Yeah, that'll be a lot of fun. And you know, those smaller ones are great to really go deep into some of these things. I mean, the podcast we only have an hour conversation. The big events are so many people there that you want to talk to. It's sometimes, you know, you don't get to really drill in, but the mastermind groups, I mean, you spend three days with, with a group of like-minded people that are in the same shoes as you. So looking forward to seeing you guys down there in January and then you're meeting Jeff here in September for those of you guys who don't know, which I'm not sure how you want it now, but September, second to the fourth were just a few weeks away from our big moving tight and retreat at the Windham Grand and Clearwater Beach. And hoping to see as many new faces and familiar ones out there as possible. So, Dave, this has been a great podcast. Thank you for coming on board here. You guys are a power couple to the extreme. We didn't get to still talk about, you know, working with your spouse, but we'll save that one for maybe a maybe we'll do a like a spouse podcast with you and Valentina. We can we can focus on that. I think there's a lot of people out there that would benefit from hearing that. So thanks for coming on the Grower Your Moving Company podcast. Thank you all for listening and tuning in. And don't forget we are on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, basically wherever you get your podcasts and it would mean the world if you could leave a review. I don't think I've ever really asked for podcasts ratings and reviews, but I hear other podcasts are doing that. So I figure there's probably a reason. So I always appreciate those. But thanks again for coming on everybody and Dane, thank you for your time. And until next time, we'll see you in September, hopefully, so that we can all tighten up. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Grower Your Moving Company podcast. If you'd like to learn more about any of the sponsors listed on this show, want to apply for the next Moving Titan retreat or interested in owning or working for two college brothers franchise, drop me a line at
[email protected]. Moving out, have a great day.
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