Ep6: How to Setup Team Meetings in Your Moving Company

All right, we're back here with the moving game. Today we're going to talk about team meetings. When do you do them? How often? What do you talk about all the details? So this is what we found success, what big-lick moving. We hold our team meetings. These are full staff. So not just movers and drivers, but all of our admin as well. Full staff team meetings every two weeks. We do them on Wednesdays Wednesday mornings at 7am before we dispatch for jobs. The meeting lasts for an hour. And so what we do that morning is our dispatch is slightly later. So what we teach sales is try as best as we can not to book major, huge jobs on that day. Sometimes it doesn't go perfect, but we try. And we cook breakfast for everybody. If a guy is not scheduled for a move that day, he is still required to come in. It's only every two weeks. Everybody's paid for the one hour for the meeting. And so we pick Wednesdays because historically, Wednesdays is the slowest day of the week for moving. If you look at every week in your calendar year and you look at how many jobs or how many work hours there are, you'll find Wednesdays are going to be the slower day-- slowest day of the week-- so we pick Wednesdays. Now, as far as what you're doing in that meeting, we have a meeting agenda every time. Basically, the way ours goes is we cover numbers over the last two weeks. We'll highlight review rate, claim rate, how many jobs we completed, how many reviews we got, our percentage of dispatch on time and our percentage of return by 6 p.m. on time, which are two things we look at. We'll go over our review leaders. So for every month, we do an MVP bonus. And we rank out who has the most reviews for the month. We'll cover any promotions, new hires. Those are all celebrations. They're all recognizing, bringing people up to the room. Top of the room, stand up, recognizing them, letting them talk a little bit. But the big thing is you also want to cover some training full staff. So whether it's safety and compliance items, specific mover training items, now we're not normally like bringing a bunch of furniture in and doing a whole hands-on training. We may just be talking about process training. So we're talking a lot about, hey guys, remember, this is the process, 1, 2, 3. Hey guys, we've had problems with this over the last two weeks. This is what we have to work on this week. We also have our sales reps at that meeting as well, because it's full staff. So we do estimate feedback. So if our estimators are struggling, if they are unsure about, hey, I set this job up, but I didn't know if this was a good way to set it up. Well, it's a full team, so we can all talk about it. The other thing is we always try to hand out some cash. So we always try to celebrate and give away some cash. Every month, we do a hardest worker in the room. We do a self vote so that what that looks like is every team member gets a vote, but they can't vote for themselves or for me as a company owner. And they vote for the hardest worker in the room. And this is the person who's consistently above and beyond that month, and has been really the person that's moved the needle the most. And so it's about attitude, willingness, coachability, being ready at all times, being prepared, execution, all of the above. And so we pay out $200 every month for hardest worker in the room. Once a month, we pay out the MVP review bonus. We give a couple of hundred bucks for that. My executive assistant, Heather, she will cook breakfast. And so we'll do like big breakfast casserole, or sometimes we just have donuts. But it's going to be something-- sometimes we do like breakfast fajitas. And food is essential. So we used to do this meeting without food. And you get guys a little more groggy and a little more sleepy. But if you get some food in them, they're a little more willing to participate. And that's been effective for us. So anytime you break bread together, that's positive. We found this to be super successful every two weeks. If you do it once a month, in my opinion, there's too much stuff going on. And you can't do a one hour meeting. If you do it every week, I find that it's a little-- you can do that. And sometimes it's needed. If you have a lot of problems, maybe you do need to meet every week with your full staff. To just get it back on track, we find a sweet spot. It's every two weeks. And that's been a really great rhythm for us. And the expectation everybody knows it. Hey, you got to be at the meeting. The consequence of not coming to the meeting is they get a point, which is a write-up. And for us, a big lick, our consequence system is a three strike rule. Three points in 90 days or less, then we say goodbye. It also delays you from getting promotions and raises for 60 days. So if you get a point, you can't get a raise for 60 days immediately. So there's a consequence and reward system in the business. You have to have that in place for this to work. Otherwise, if somebody doesn't show up, what's the consequence? Well, if there is no consequence, then people are just not going to show up. And you've got to make it fun. You've got to bring some energy. We are customers of tighten up training. And so we play a tighten up video. Every team meeting will play one video. We really like the mover motivation videos. But we'll play a video as everybody's getting their breakfast. And it's a good icebreaker. It's good to just kind of get the thing going and kicked off. And then we'll jump into our agenda. So that's what works for us at big lick moving. That's our full staff team meeting, nuts and bolts, what we cover, how often we do it, what time. And the one pro tip I'll give you is it's super easy to go late. It's easy to make that meeting hour and a half, two hour meeting. But you got to remember you have jobs to go to. So you have to have someone has to run the meeting. And then you have to have somebody that's in charge of the time. And the person that's in charge of the time needs to hold accountability to the person running the meeting and say, hey, we've got 10 minutes. Hey, we've got five minutes. Because if you go 30, 45 minutes late, you're putting your team at risk for just a really late day. And that makes the next day harder in the next day. So that's everything we've got. If you're looking for A players, if you're stuck with not having first round draft picks, guys that are review fetters, crushing it every single day. If you're stuck with guys who have you handcuffed to your business, there's no control left. Hit up, move up. Move up can help you get rock star employees. Drive them straight to your doorstep, pre-vetted, qualified, ready to go. And it's a great system. We've been using it ever since we opened it. Big lick moving. They do a fantastic job. They get us great, great hires every single week we interview. We've got talent walking in the door. So if you're stuck and you're trying to upgrade your team, you're trying to top grade. Maybe get rid of a couple people who shouldn't be there and bring in some better people. Move up. Move up would be a great resource. If you're stuck, give them a buzz. You can go to moveupconsulting.com and fill out a quick form. They'll have a call with you and be able to get you information.