Speaker 1All right, everybody, welcome back to the Grow Your Moving Company podcast. I'm your host, Wade Sweichel, owner of Two College Brothers Moving Storage and Franchising based here in sunny Tampa Bay, Florida, as well as the co-founder of the Titan Retreat and Titan Up Training. And today I've got a guest that is long overdue, Mr. Tim Callahan, the president of Moversville. And Moversville has been the longest actively running sponsor that supports the Grow Your Moving Company podcast, something that I am extremely grateful for. We've had Tim build out our email campaigns. He's got his Moversville Connect. He's got his Moversville Mentor Program that he just launched, and I'll let him talk a little bit more about those things. But Tim, I can't believe that we have. We have not done a podcast together. I mean, we've connected since basically the day one, early days of this was just a recording on my laptop with a webcam and my computer speakers that it was very rudimentary in the early days. I was just so focused on just connecting with people and getting content that it wasn't until Mark Hershey came along and forced me to up my game a little bit in the moving space. Tied for number one podcast. According to the Smart Moving Conference last week, if you guys were there, you missed a good little show there at the end. But but Tim, thanks for coming on. Tell me a little bit about your background. I know you came from a family moving business, ABC Moving Systems out in Los Angeles. You you did a little bit of work with them, but decided that you wanted to focus mostly on the industry wide marketing. But but in your own words, give me a little rundown. What's your how did you get into this?
Speaker 2Yeah, so basically I grew up in the moving industry. I was that. I was a kid that was running around my dad's warehouse, running on four wheel dollies and jumping from vault to vault and box stack to box stack and playing wiffle ball in the in the warehouse and everything as a kid. Now you're speaking my language. Yeah, I remember you were you used to play wiffle ball, right? I still play wiffle ball.
Speaker 1There's a competitive league around here, so I love that. I've been wanting to turn my warehouse into a wiffle ball field, but my team won't let me.
Speaker 2I've been. I've. I've moved on to disc golf now is the fun one. That's that one's a really good one.
Speaker 1Your alternative sport of choice. I love it.
Speaker 2Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically grew up in the industry and watched my dad grow his moving business and the moving industry basically paid for our whole entire life. It fed us everything. And one day my dad was ready to get into something. And I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. then also start like an online business and at that time i was like 17 or 18 years old and he wanted to start like a moving quote engine type of thing kind of similar to like a movers.com 123movershomebulletin.net not sure if you remember those guys so we started our own at the time and it was doing very well and we kind of relied on google rankings to rank that website and that website had a bunch of landing pages in every city around the u.s we'd grab the clients information and then we sell them to moving companies and uh around 2012 or 13 google started uh running out a different update like the panda and penguin update that um changed the way websites ranked and uh kind of killed a lot of our websites it killed us it killed one two three movers movers.com um and then it started providing um moving company results and moving companies at that time would um they're actually starting to get good websites and build good websites and do good seo and um my dad did his own website and had great seo his website was is very old and he um had great seo and uh then i kind of got into more of the digital marketing and one day i asked him uh like hey like what do you need for your moving company like how can i help type of thing and he said well i have a list of like two to three thousand past clients that i've just never reached out to i have all of their email addresses and i'm like okay let's uh reach out to those past clients and uh we sent out just one email a basic hey thanks for your past business if you need us again we're here for you type of thing and uh within 20 minutes of sending that email he booked three jobs of of people from that list saying hey i can't believe like uh you know you knew i was moving type of thing and it was just a numbers game you know we like just blasting it out there and uh he's like yeah i'm so glad you reached out i can't believe you knew i was moving uh yeah like a quote like and it was it was some of the easiest um jobs that he'd booked because they've used it before and uh it was just kind of a slam dunk when it came to um booking those jobs and it kind of light bulb went off in my head like dang i can you know do this for other moving companies as well so I have a background in website building I've been building websites since I was probably 15 years old and put together a little website and started email marketing myself to moving companies and then that's kind of how it started and pretty quickly I think at the very beginning you were like one of our first clients at the beginning like maybe our fourth or fifth client or something like that back in i think it was like 2015 16 around there and um yeah reaching out to those past clients and then uh moving companies would give us their list a csv file and that was before before crms really existed um and we're collecting data and so a lot of moving companies didn't have that data and uh yeah from there it was just step by step and then at some point we made a partnership with smart moving and um started doing their drip campaign so when leads would come in to the moving company's crm we would set up email drip campaigns for the clients and that's what we did for for you as well and that's just a good way email is a good way to um you know keep in touch with those clients and it's um it's now starting to do super well with B2B, like realtors, property managers, and other businesses. The B2B email space is pretty fire right now.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's really interesting. When your dad sent out that first email to the past customers, how big was that list that immediately got basically three
Speaker 2jobs? It was like two to 3,000. Okay. So he had been in business for 10 years at that time, but we just went back like three or four years worth of, worth of emails.
Speaker 1Okay. And how are you keeping track of those emails in those early days before, you know, CRMs nowadays, it's super easy. You just download your customer lists from as long as you've had the CRM, but like, what was, you know, how did you get all of those?
Speaker 2He kept tracking a spreadsheet. He's, my dad's a very type type a type of guy keeping track of everything in spreadsheets. And, and I think it was a part of his accounting too. he'd keep track of all the email addresses.
Speaker 1Gotcha, that makes sense. What kind of copy did you have in that first email?
Speaker 2I'm curious. It was super plain text. It was a logo, four lines of sentences, and then, you know, a signature line type of thing.
Speaker 1Now, how has that evolved today? And, you know, that would have been pre a lot of things. We've seen a huge change in the digital landscape over the years with AI especially, but social media, you've got, you know, everybody keeps multiple email addresses, I think, with, you know, some people have spam emails, some people have regular email. You know, I would imagine that most people that are actively moving or giving an email that they check, maybe during the lead process, they may not necessarily give that viable email. But later on, I mean, it's important to be able to receive quotes and things like that. But tell me a little bit about, like, what you've seen in the emailing landscape over the last decade or so.
Speaker 2Yeah, when it comes to past clients, it's one of those things. they're only going to need movers once every three to seven years or so. So the whole goal there is to keep your name in front of them. So they may not open every single email. And the whole thing is you don't want them to Google movers again. As long as you're sending those emails, you're in their face, they will remember you. And when it comes time to move again, they're going to Google your name instead of movers. Today, it's the same thing. Open rates, I would say, are a little lower, but at the same time, it's like email is so cheap to send. You got to be sending those emails. You got to be sending them out. But now, we're kind of moving into, and I'm you've kind of noticed with your own email being marketed in a plain text style where it looks like an actual email so they're like cold outreach and you kind of can't tell if like this person's just like reaching out to me or if it's you know a blast email you can tell those ones that are like asking you for you know business loans we have all this lines of credit blah blah blah but if you actually find something to connect with and especially like with realtors they actually need your services or they have clients that need your services so we found that reaching out to them in a very uh the first one a very soft approach no more than four lines of emails one thing that movers like to do that i've noticed is just pack in just everything about them and as soon as the end recipient sees that it's like okay i don't want to read this i don't have time this is a sales pitch blah blah blah but if you're reaching out to them in a networking fashion we have seen that that works a lot better because realtors a lot of the times they don't necessarily like to be sold to but they do like to network that's that's what they like to do so meeting them on their level uh we've seen that that works very well
Speaker 1interesting i like that four lines of of text uh what about like a subject line is there is there something i i saw a thing recently where it said i might have been wrong but i think it's something that i've seen a lot of been alex warmosi or somebody but basically they were like put the most important thing first that you're trying to get somebody to read whether it's the first line of the email or even the subject line i'm curious have you noticed any formula for subject lines that tend to get opened more frequently uh we
Speaker 2like the ellipses at the end the dot dot dot keeping it super short and then i also like that vertical bar um whether it be like you know their name and then vertical bar sharing my info or whatever it is um shorter the better we've seen and um because what what that is is when you're in the email inbox and you have a long subject line it kind of runs across the whole thing but if it's shorter it kind of stands out a little bit more most people try to pack in a lot of things but the shorter the better um keeping it kind of kind of um finding something that's important but kind of mysterious to get them to to want to open but we found the the biggest thing is landing in the inbox and not not the promotions folder most most people do um check most of their emails in the inbox so um that's what those plain text cold outreach style uh those mostly for the most part land in the inbox as long as the copy doesn't have a bunch of like um you know fifty dollars off or a hundred dollars off or you know any promotional thing google knows gmail knows it puts it in the promotions folder
Speaker 1that's interesting so i've got my inbox i just pulled it up to take a look uh i've got a primary folder which is the one that i that i you know that's where the number in my inbox is held so like i right now i have 68 emails in my primary folder so if you've sent me an email i'm getting to it but i always try to work that down to zero and my assistant helps me out with it and then i've got the promotions folder and then i have a social folder and then i have an updates folder and then there's like a forums one that i never checked that's like i think it used to be like internal communications but we use uh we use group me now for that more so um but the but i do catch some some things in the updates folder that can be important there's a lot of riffraff in there that isn't that important but how do you how do you like get the emails to land like in the process primary folder i'm sure some people out there have some different folders too that may be different from what i have i think this was just what gmail gave me when i like had it divided out hey movers it's wade swigel 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 i use usa home listings and i use usa home listings updated daily but now offers enhanced data that can eliminate vacant homes and give you phone numbers and emails for both homeowners and realtors giving you multiple ways to connect and close more jobs their vacancy ai tool removes empty homes so there are no more wasted mailing efforts and their tier 2 data takes it further providing highly accurate contact details for both homeowners and realtors 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 but what are you doing to try to get those emails into that primary folder i think you started to touch on it with like the promotion you know the advertisement type of fifty dollars off or whatever but yeah a lot of it yeah
Speaker 2a lot of it is the copy if what the copy says is promotional then it'll be put in the promotion but then also it's just um you know what you're sending from uh if you're sending from mailchimp a lot of the times they will go on the promotions um the when it comes to the plain text a lot of those from mailchimp still do land in the main folder but if you have like a bunch of links and a bunch of pictures and a bunch of stuff it likely will land in the promotion unless that person is constantly opening it and constantly clicking and you're sending constant things that they are interested in and you're sending constant things that they are interested in then it would land in um the primary but um hold outreach if you're first emailing them you want it quick you don't want too much promotion and you want it more of like a hey this is so and so reaching out type of thing not necessarily find my stuff find my stuff find my stuff
Speaker 1i like that i've always learned like to try to create value for the person that's opening it you know sometimes i'll subscribe to like a newsletter um i there was one that i might still be subscribed but the morning brew was one where i could get like a quick update on like whatever's happening in the world i mean i would look at those because it was interesting and there would usually be some sort of an offer a link to you know learn more about something that would take me away from the email um but but like what kind of value driven uh messages are you putting in that copy once you get the you know those four lines i guess is it different every time it's if it's to
Speaker 2realtors it's it's it's reaching out networking it's not really it's we're waiting for them to reply and then then from there after they reply once you reply back then you can put your value stuff in there and it'll land because they'll they already replied to one so when you reply back that's not gonna that reply back when the thread is there that's not gonna land in the promotions
Speaker 1gotcha makes sense and then for past customers are you mainly just checking in to say hey you know in case you need to move anytime soon we're here just kind of hi i'm over here
Speaker 2past customers is a little bit more simple um we send out the newsletters that have like helpful home tips moving tips and stuff like that some of those will land in promotions but at the end of the day when it comes to past customers even if they don't open if they see your name that's the goal you want them to remember your name remember your name remember your name so when it comes time to move again um yeah they're there yeah the past customers aren't necessarily going to open and you know move type of thing it's not like you're selling them shoes or something like that where you got to convince them to move you're simply staying in touch staying in touch and staying in touch and then you're doing it at a very affordable rate so it's not this huge expensive type of thing emails pretty cheap get them out keep in touch and that's it and then you can also move on to other forms of marketing as well yeah i
Speaker 1think that's super important because you know everybody's always asking like i need more leads i need more leads like how do i get more more business more marketing blah blah blah but people don't realize the power of their existing lists and their existing customer base and sometimes the existing base may not even be the ones moving but they may have had a good experience and their neighbor you know might be moving or their friend or their family member whoever it might be um and i i can't tell you how wild uh or customers that call in that don't remember the name of the company that they hired seven years ago when they moved and it's just like you know this was a big event in their life and maybe that company just did not do a good job of branding themselves when they were going out and people tend to commoditize movers a lot of the time whereas it's like oh it's just the movers and you know they just want to go get like the cheapest option or whatever but uh the higher up you go and like the value of the home and the more affluent the clientele like they care more about the value of the service and a reputable brand than they do about just the price um and and so i found that you know anything you can do to stay in touch with your existing list i mean at this point in time i mean we've got 15 maybe over 20 000 past customers that we've serviced and just statistically somebody there is moving and somebody there knows somebody who's moving so we could go spend all this money getting you know new leads people we've never worked with before uh that have no idea who who we are, or. we could leverage just the statistics of, you know, if 1% of 20,000 people's moving, that's 200 people at any given time that might be moving or know somebody who's moving. And it's probably more than 1% if you're breaking down.
Speaker 2Yeah. And it's a huge benefit if you've been in business for five years and you have that list. It's a little tough if, you know, you're just starting out and you don't have that list. Like, you know, marketing to your past clients may not be your first choice of marketing. But if you've been in business for five years and, you know, you've been servicing clients, especially clients with high dollar moves, you don't want to lose that client to Google, basically. You want to keep that client because they had a high dollar move. Once they're moving again, they're going to have another high dollar move. They have all the same furniture or probably even more, really.
Speaker 1Yeah. And if you can create that internal marketing strategy to your existing list, I mean, every move that you perform serves an opportunity to move. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good opportunity to multiply into more moves, whether that's a repeat client or somebody else who's moving because word of mouth and repeat clients are still, I think, the best way to grow any business. You have to provide a great service, obviously, but you also got to stay memorable and in a good way, assuming you provided a good service. You don't want to be memorable if you're if you if you don't have that part figured out. But I think most people that are listening to this do provide that service. And it's just such a powerful tool. How frequently are you sending out the emails both to the past customers, but also to the B2B realtors, referral partners and things
Speaker 2like that? Past customers we've found two times per month. One helpful newsletter, helpful tips, some local content. And then the and we also like to send a plain text style email for the for the past clients. So like if it's around the holidays, it'll be a quick little happy holidays message. If it's around moving season, it'll be more of a happy holidays message. More of like, hey, this is time to move. Like, here's a coupon. If our schedules might be getting busy, you know, give us a call type of thing. So we usually do one plain text style email and then one more email newsletter that has like list of services, helpful content, more pictures and stuff like that. And then for the realtors, what we'll do is we will cold outreach to them for those people listings. So we just grab those listings from, you know, the MLS. We have like a, you know, a data connection with the MLS. And then if you're already using like a USA home listings or moving letters, you can pull from they provide the realtor information also. And then we can go in there and pull from from those emails. So basically the cold outreach to the realtors, we pull every single week. And those are realtors who have active listings. And then we email them just three times. If they don't reply, we leave them alone for about 60 days. And then if they get another listing, then we we reach out to them again. The realtors, we do also put them into a MailChimp style campaign with more pictures and stuff because not everybody does respond to just text. Some people do like pictures and not everybody does have a promotions folder. Some get some people get all the emails. So we do like to send just as to make sure that every realtor is consistently getting some emails at least like every 20 days.
Speaker 1So with those cold lists, what kind of a open rate and what kind of a response rate do you typically see across the industry?
Speaker 2So the cold list, we don't track the open rate when you put the tracking on the open rate that that is another signal that it might go into promotions. But we do track the reply rate reply rate we're seeing anywhere, depending on the location, different locations are better than others. It's usually 2% to 7% is that reply rate. And it's a numbers game with realtors. It's one of those things where you can't expect to send 30 emails and get a bunch of business, you know, you need to send at least like 100 a day and you need to have a system for it. And we're, we're sending 100 a day. I do also recommend getting a different email address from yours. So like, you know, we would create an email, it wouldn't be wait at two college brothers.com, it would be like wait at two college brothers team or go to college brothers or something like that something that where the URL is different. And then there's different things, you got to warm them up, you got to do the DNS settings, make sure that they're the same as they are. And then you have to make sure that those are all correct. Before you start reaching out, and we recommend warming them up for at least three weeks before you really start doing that cold outreach.
Speaker 1And that was actually going to be my next question. I'm glad you brought that up, like warming up the emails, because if you send an email out to 20,000 people at the same time from your email address, it's probably going to get flagged as spam. And then it's going to be hard to send like, like a direct person in email.
Speaker 2Yeah, so the cold outreach is a little different than like the Mailchimp style emails, the Mailchimp style emails, you do blast out like, you know, 2000 at a time or 20,000 at a time, the cold outreach, what that does is it sends like one every minute or two. So it's just boom, one, and then it waits like a minute, and then another, and then another, and then another. And then you can also, with the systems we use, we have different emails that go out. So we have the first email, we'll have like three different versions. of it. So you're not always sending that boom, same email, same email, same email. And then we warm them up in the background and keep them warming up, which warming up is essentially your emails talking with another emails in that system that's being warmed up by another random company. And it's just sending almost bot emails to each other. So the, so the email client, or the email like Gmail thing thinks that it, oh, this is like a legitimate email address type of thing.
Speaker 1Makes a lot of sense. And so your your company Moversville uses like some, some software, basically, that's probably not just like MailChimp, or just, you know, somebody's annually sitting there doing that. And that's kind of one of your proprietary secret sauces to getting that I've never actually heard that strategy of like sending emails to one another. That's really interesting.
Speaker 2Yeah, a lot of a lot of the programs do you have that built built in the warm up feature because it is it is an important thing to warm up those emails.
Speaker 1Okay, and so are those emails, so you set up about 100 emails a day, and like, they're going to be spread out like an email every couple minutes. And then it's from different URLs, different handles, does the does your do your clients need to go purchase those URLs? Or, or, you know, do they have to own it?
Speaker 2We do it? Yeah, we do it. We do it for them. And then we forward the URL to their main URL. people, you know, they'll see that URL and just copy it and go to the website that way. So we want to make sure that that URL is forwarded to the actual moving company email or website.
Speaker 1And so, yeah, that makes total sense. So, I mean, that's that in and of itself. I mean, like you said, it's a numbers game. And so if you're sending 100 a day from each URL, how many URLs are going that day? Like, so how many if I have 20,000 people, will that be spread out over the course of several days? Because it's a handful of URLs that are sending 100 a day and we want to get up to that 20,000.
Speaker 2So the 20,000, there wouldn't be like 20,000 active realtors in one. Right. I'm talking
Speaker 1more of like past customers.
Speaker 2Past customers, we're still using MailChimp style.
Speaker 1Okay. Got it. Okay. Because you've probably, if they've been a customer, they probably opened past emails. They've probably, you know, engaged with your company to some level and that makes more sense. And so it's, so it's a different approach. I mean, I know that in Tampa Bay, there are over 20,000 realtors across the different MLSs that we have. I mean, it's 5 million person population here. So, so there theoretically could be that many. Obviously, we all know that 10% of realtors do 90% of the business. So we'd probably want to crunch that down. We don't want to be burning through, you know, potential spams and different URLs and things like that for the ones that we have. Yeah. That aren't even going to send you a referral because they don't sell any houses anyway, but everybody weighed 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 pay-per-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 Moversville. It's a new product. It's 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 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 and done jobs. These are realtors 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 the 15-minute intro call with Tim, and report back with your results so that I can talk about them here on the show. Thanks for tuning in. But yeah, no, I mean, it's never been easier to get those lists. I mean, you've got USA Homeless things. You've got, you know, some other platforms out there. I mean, you could, we've hired a VA in the past in India to scrape, you know, all the interior designers and all the restoration companies and all the different, you know, builders and things like that to build out business development lists. And we've kind of been on an old school method with that to where we are having our sales team just basically try to reach out to one a day, call, text, message, email, send them a connection on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, send them a DM, like just trying to get in front of them just to, like you said, get the name out there. And I'll be honest, because it's all manual how we're doing it. It's not always getting done. It's, you know, things get busy, which is one of the things I love about what you guys do because of the automations. You know, you just take that guesswork out of it. It's like with postcards. I mean, a two to seven percent reply rate doesn't sound like a lot, but that's, like, better than postcards and direct mail, which if you're really if you have really good copy in a good market and you can get one and a half to three percent, like that's considered pretty decent for direct mail, whereas you can get up to seven percent, maybe even more with depending on your lists with with email. I mean, I would I would call that a huge win and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than, you know, close to a dollar of a mailer if you're sending out, you know, five thousand mailers and you're getting a lower response rate. So that's our
Speaker 2clients. How what they're seeing is they're just getting those two to seven replies every single day to their email inbox from a realtor that they haven't even heard of. So those replies would be things like, hey, how much do you charge? Or, hey, thanks. I added you to my vendors list or thanks. I added you to my contacts or some of them right then and there. I said, hey, I actually have a client right now. But what we do is with our clients, what we do is we give them first a recommended reply sheet. So like when they reply and they have like, hey, we sent you to the vendors list, blah, blah, blah. If it's like just a thank you, like we don't really want to stop the conversation there because sometimes it's just like a it's just a they're just being nice type of thing. So we want to then like if they added you to the vendors list, you want to send a reply. Oh, thank you so much for adding us to the vendors list. You know, if you do have clients, you kind of want to keep the conversation going a little bit. That's when you can kind of sell a little bit and say, hey, by the way, you know, we have this coupon for realtors or we have a realtor affiliate program or whatever, whatever you guys, you know, how you guys partnership with the realtors. We kind of set up that conversation and then every single day you get a couple of those replies and then you just feel those replies, build those relationships. And then every single month, send a report of all the email addresses of those people who replied. So then you can go at them on social media, DM them saying, hey, found you on social media, looking forward to seeing, you know, your content type of thing. So once you move from email or once you get their reply from email, you kind of want to move away a little bit. You want to keep in touch via email, but you don't want to keep like bombarding them with email. So that's why once you add them on social media and if they add you back, it's, it's a lot like they should follow you back when you've replied to them. They know who you are versus going in and just follow, follow, follow, follow, follow all the realtors. And then once they're following you and you're building your social, then they'll start seeing your content and they'll keep remembering you. And it's, it's just kind of like emails there to, to, to start the relationship. And then from that first connection, you want to, you know, connect with them on social media and stuff like that, or go to their events. A lot of, a lot of realtors too, we've seen on the replies, they will say, hey, we have this networking event or, hey, you know, come to our office and speak type of thing. And that's why it's like a numbers game because you can send out like a lot of movers. What they'll do is they'll send out 50 or a hundred, get nothing. And then they'll be like, oh, this isn't working type of thing. But if you're doing that every single day and you get one realtor to have, invite you to, this is what happened with my dad's company. When we, when I first started doing this is they invited him to like an office meeting of all of their realtors who had 30 realtors. And now a bunch of those realtors are referring them. So just that one connection is now getting him a bunch of referrals from that, that batch of realtors who, who, you know, he got that opportunity. So it's one of those things that I think is really, really important. Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like you're kind of digging for gold and you may not find anything, you may not find anything, you may not find anything, but boom, you find this huge gold nugget and that's just like, you know, makes your whole entire month type of thing. So that's kind of what we've seen happen.
Speaker 1That is just like the past customers that each move can multiply each referral partner connection can multiply. You just need one realtor to get into the brokerage to introduce you to all of the other agents that are there who probably know other agents and other agents. So no, that's, that's huge. We need to, we need to get back on that, that program that you offer. I know, you know, we've worked together on a lot of different things. Another thing that you're really good about is automations within the CRM and building out the you know, the, the uptel move day process and then the followup after move day process with strategic value building templates. So, you know, you quote a cost, you quote a value building template, you quote a cost, you quote a customer, maybe they haven't booked yet. You've got campaigns that can be triggered to automate, you know, let's get them to book. Here's a bunch of value, value, value. It's like the Gary Vee thing. It's like, it's like jab, jab, jab, left hook to try to get them to close. But then you have the clients who have booked and now you're trying to just essentially educate them leading up till moving day so that, you know, they're prepared to have a great experience that they'll send you more repeat referral business after. And then there's that reengagement campaign afterwards. After the move is completed. And then if, you know, in the beginning, if there's a new lead that you can't get in touch with, it's just that good way to get, get that face time so that hopefully you can get them to respond. And you've done a really good job of optimizing those campaigns for whatever action they take, whether they just submitted a form and we haven't talked to him yet. We have talked to them and given them a quote. They haven't booked yet. They have booked. And then after the move, we've reengaged with them and we continue to try to provide that value. Is there a, I mean, I guess that that could be a whole, a whole, a whole thing. You can probably write a book on exactly, you know, the best copy and stuff like that. But after the move, I guess to try to maximize existing clients, is there a frequency that you should set up that automation so that you can try to stay front of mind with them to get a Google review maybe, or to get a referral down the road, or maybe, you know, if they're a renter, they might be moving in a year or in three years, like, is there is there a certain kind of flow that you found really works on capturing and staying front of mind with past customers from that standpoint?
Speaker 2Yeah, so obviously, after the move, you want to ask them for a review, that's huge. And then usually after like a month or two, ask for the referral and then keeping up with them on the 10 month mark, 11 month mark and 12 month mark, some people are just renting or, you know, sometimes they're just having a temporary move. So keeping in touch with that on that one year mark is, is also really good to do.
Speaker 1Yeah, no, I love that. Is there anything you can get one thing I see a lot of moving companies, ourselves included, we get a lot of form fills, that we can never get ahold of the client. And I think speed to lead is a big reason for that. And we try to stay on top of the speed to lead, but it's just it's crazy to me that somebody is filling out a form and going out of their way and it looks like a real person. And, and like, they're trying to get this move done. And even if we call them right away, sometimes and follow up a couple times, they don't respond like, you know, Why do you think that is and do you have anything that that has increased that rate of engagement to be able to quote those jobs?
Speaker 2Um, I honestly, I think some people just, they kind of get motivated, sometimes up now is a day they do it and the next day, it's like, I wasn't as motivated as I was earlier. And I mean, there's, there's really nothing better than a phone call. So like, if you're not reaching them phone call, then, like, kind of good luck. And then, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, if you're not reaching them
Speaker 1phone calls, then, like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, like, you're not reaching them phone calls. you know they're on the fly and and you just got to find ways to catch them where they are and sometimes that's at email if they're at work that might be the best way to do it or texting some you know more and more people are wanting to text now or email now than they want to talk on the phone i mean it's hard to it's hard to get people to to take a phone call that they don't recognize or to you know pick up the phone and call somebody these days it's just everybody wants
Speaker 2it's like hey you filled out a form to get contacted and and hey sometimes people are filling out the form thinking that they're just going to get a price right there true online and it doesn't it's like oh you're in our system now and it's like crap that's not really like because what do you when you say when it says get a quote you would think maybe like your system will give it to you right there so if you can give that price right there um that would be good too i think and especially if that like a lot of people are are for whatever reason i don't know if you're noticing this but i know my family's company is um noticing this um a lot of people are price shopping like sometimes they'll they'll give a quote for like 450 dollars and they'll be like no too expensive you know yeah that there's
Speaker 1always a there's always somebody that that's willing to do the move cheaper and race to the bottom and customers who you know just want the cheapest price usually aren't the best customers so you know just kind of not our customer in those situations
Speaker 2yeah i mean he's he's kind of because the la market is um it's tough right now there's a lot of movers and not a lot of people moving there and um you know he's been finding himself almost taking like break even on some moves just to grab the move to keep his his people busy and then just kind of kind of continue on that lead source so when that that ten thousand dollar move does come through he can capture that
Speaker 1as well absolutely what about ai and now you mentioned like we you get that response rate uh or the reply rate excuse me um are you guys handling any of the replies are you using ai for anything like that are you using it with any
Speaker 2copy um yeah well we use ai for some copy we don't like to use for the outreach we we don't like to use it too much because when you use ai just for that four line thing it does start sounding robotic versus like it's just four lines if you can type it how you would naturally type it i kind of like that when it comes to cold outreach to realtors um but for replies uh replies back we have the mover do it once we set up that thing we want to find movers for for our clients that are proactive who actually do want to do the networking because it's not one of those things where you get a reply and then immediately you get business like we want to find clients who do want the networking do you want to do the work we'll set it up for you but you know if you really want to do true networking and you want to have relationships with realtors like you got to do that work there's other things there's other things that you got to do to to actually build a relationship versus just sending one email one email starts the relationship
Speaker 1yeah i agree with that i mean you know we can automate everything we can get the grok bot or the claw bot or whatever it is you know all the all the different things online but people still want to do business with people and like that personal touch and i don't think that's ever really going to go away ai can be a good tool but it shouldn't be a crutch i i think people yeah
Speaker 2people are people especially realtors they're definitely people people that's why they're in that business i want
Speaker 1to take a second and tell you all about tighten 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 tighten 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 tighten 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 tighten up training.com schedule your free demo today and look forward to tightening up that's exactly right well let's switch gears a little bit i want to learn a little bit more about some of the other programs that you guys offer so you've got movers will connect which is an amazing database of uh you know all kinds of vendors informational resources podcasts seminars uh webinars conferences uh vendors for marketing vendors for all different sorts of things tell me a little bit about you know i mean movers will connect's been around for a little while but but in your own words like how you know what is that resource for movers who may not be familiar
Speaker 2with it so that's a database of other third-party service providers in different areas whether they're marketing or sales solutions or crms or moving insurance um those are people we've come across in in our networking and talking with um you know seeing online we'll connect with them or they'll connect with us to want to be in the database and it's just kind of a collection of all those sometimes it's hard to um for movers to find those resources so we had put that together a few years ago and it's it's coming up time um in the next probably six months for us we're going to be updating that there's more and more movers will want to do more techie things and become service providers um so that we're going to be building out even more and more and more which i'm excited to do but for right now it's um you know there are some great providers in there right
Speaker 1now yeah i think about it as like a one-stop hub whether you're just getting started or you're looking for you know the next insurance broker you're looking for a website seo company you're looking for more informational resources like this podcast you featured on there for a long time i love the emails that i get where it's highlighting a new episode that comes out and there's other great podcasts out now too i mean when i when i first started in this business there was like no resources for movers with what you've done and a lot of other people are now doing it's amazing i wish i could start all over today oh not really because it was a grind but but it would be a lot less of a grind if i had the resources like a moversville connected my like just googling trying to find something and there weren't really any video good videos on youtube there weren't like conferences aside from amsa which is now ata moving and storage conference but back then that was kind of the only dog in town that and it was all van lines mostly and and it wasn't really that useful of information for where i was um i had no idea who the best seo people were who the best you know whatever marketing i might need might be and it's such a helpful thing and i think it's a really good thing to be able to do that and i think it's a um so i'm i'm really excited that you put that together because somebody needed to and i don't know of anything else that exists like that as a resource
Speaker 2yeah and it's one of those things where um you know marketing landscapes change you know sales styles change the way people are searching change what motivates them change and it's very hard for a moving company to stay up with that with all the things you guys got to do with actually servicing the client and making the move to so it's almost on us marketers and us third-party vendors to kind of help the movers on that side because we can stay we can stay up to date with all the marketing trends and everything like that and and you know for you guys like that's our job you know that's how we make money so you guys can make money and then it's a good partnership like that yeah
Speaker 1one of the things i hear from most movers the number one complaint is it's hard to find good guys or good talent or a have you ever thought about providing like almost like a directory or a database of like talent basically yeah i have i
Speaker 2have thought about that um six or seven seven eight years ago it was i thought about that at that time and it was a little more difficult to do that with like wordpress plugins and kind of have it set up the way i wanted it set up um and plus you know i had to do my own you know the digital outreach service and everything like that sure and so it just never kind of happened but um now that we have ai and you can kind of build whatever app and whatever um program you want i'm like very very very excited um about that and just the the doors that are opening with ai with building things like we've already built and i'm sure a lot of you know movers and a lot of we've already built our own little personal crm and dashboard and little command center for our company and you know there's no crms for a moving service provider type of thing so i mean you can use you can use hubspot and stuff but no matter what crm you use like you're kind of modifying things a little bit so it works for you but with ai and being able to build your own crm and dashboard to work exactly how you want it to work is pretty incredible yeah
Speaker 1i i mean i've seen some amazing stuff just in my own company with claude i mean my my ops manager is really tech savvy and he's built out internal apps for inventory and mover bonuses and things like that that you know it's really cool to see like how many how much you can just do like vibe coding something i it's addictive too it is it is after one of our retreats i went down like a three-hour rabbit hole yeah and i vibe coded this interactive map of where all the attendees were from so you know we could push it out to the attendees to like say oh i got a truck headed to new jersey here's you can zoom in and see all the companies in new jersey that you know you could work with uh either try to pick up a backhaul or unload a truck and uh you know i thought that would be a really cool thing uh like that kind of a directory but also with our our moving tight and tighten up training um lms our our online training course we are rolling out a titan certified badge both for companies who have completed that so you know i can talk maybe there's something we could do with like having a directory of titan certified companies on there um but uh but yeah thank you for creating the moversville connect i don't know of any other resources that exist like that is that just moversville connect.com uh for people so right
Speaker 2now it's connects.moversville.com but like i said we're that's going to be our next thing we're updating and um we're hoping it's going to kick ass in the next six months to a year
Speaker 1and it's a free resource right for pretty much anybody to go and access i love it i love it now tell me uh what prompted this this conversation um to get you on the podcast was the moversville mentor program that you've recently rolled out and i'm really interested in that that's something that is another fantastic resource that i'm really excited about but tell me a little bit about what that
Speaker 2is so what that is is as you know is probably what six podcasts now seven there's somewhere around there um a few podcasts um in the moving industry and what we're doing is um when you guys publish a podcast we take that transcript and then create a five minute little article that outlines all of just like the bullet points and all the the key information in that article so movers can now basically if they don't time you know a lot of movers i know probably listen to this podcast if like they're running or they're driving or something like that but if they just want like a quick five minute read of some bullets bullet points of great information it's now accessible on our site and then we've also um went back and backfilled like four years worth of these podcasts there's um like 450 that have been backfilled on our website and uh they're all categorized by different category like um you know hiring and operations and marketing and leadership and you can kind of go through all of those and just get all of the information that's ever been said on your guys's podcasts and all the great information has been extracted out and people can learn so i gotta give a handout to you guys you guys are the freaking people that um are getting this information and then obviously all of your guests as well um sharing this information so what we've done is just kind of extracted that and put it in one place um in kind of an all-encompassing place uh for that information and then also um we've included for your guests now if they want to come on to your podcast or any other podcast we have a um a little everything's built with ai first of all so we have um a little script thing that it will read who the guest is find their company and it'll give them a backlink as well on our website and our websites it's about 15 years old it's a pretty high rate high page rank website so just that backlink is a little extra added bonus um for your guests to um to have on our website
Speaker 1love that so much because i've spent hundreds of hours recording these and like it's just so much information it's like drinking out of a fire hose uh and and like even you know i don't remember the conversation i had five years ago with you know so and so but every now and then i'll go back and i'll listen to one of those episodes i'm like dang i can't believe i totally forgot that we talked about this solution to this problem that i'm having now that i have the answers for and when i started the podcast i mean it was seeking out mentorship it was basically a calling card to try to get answers to the struggles that i faced personally at the time um you know i i started going to some conferences i got in on the the moving company owners unite facebook group and there was like just it was like the lights came on and and all of the the things that i was like i wonder how you do that because i was reading books i was listening to other podcasts that weren't moving specific trying to like read between the lines to get that information and it's and then i started to read and i started to read and i started to read you know what i'm just gonna call this company that seems like they're doing a really good job out in austin texas and just see if they'll talk to me and they did and i was like man like this is gold like i i need to like record this and that's really how this podcast started and it still operates that way today where i'm asking the questions that that i want answers to from people that have achieved that that model of success and whatever it is whether they're another moving company owner an expert in their field such as yourself like it's just the fact that you've aggregated all of that and you're like oh my god i'm gonna call this company and all of that now i've thought like man should i like try to publish a book based off of all these conversations should i like put it in a chat gpt project that i could search it but you've basically done all that heavy lifting now and it it'll be it'll start to get scraped by the llms too so when we're asking chat gpt or clod or whatever you use to you know help me work through this problem i imagine if it's not already it's going to start pulling from all of those conversations not only from you know myself 200 plus hours worth of convos to, you know, Mark's podcast, Winston's podcast. I mean, I need to know what the other three or four podcasts are that are in the moving space because, you know, I don't even necessarily know about all those. So it's a really good way to just, you know, hear those different points of view and those alternative perspectives. So thank you for doing that. Are you having any kind of like a search tool on there? I know you said you had it categorized, but we have we
Speaker 2have that in the works in terms of so we have the huge database of all the transcripts and everything. So putting a search tool would be pretty simple. We've thought of that as well to just be able to have a little search tool where any moving company can ask a question. And then it would it would make sure to pull from the transcripts and the information, because if you don't have that, then ChatGVT might just like or chat or clotter. They might just like pull from their own thing. So I would have to have it do it in a certain way where it makes sure to pull from these conversations.
Speaker 1Love that. So you've got your finger on the pulse with all the different podcasts. Obviously, you've got all the different vendors and resources. You talk to a lot of moving companies that are your clients. What what trends and what patterns are you seeing in the industry right now?
Speaker 2Right now, obviously, as you know, that the industry is somewhat hurting in different in certain markets. The the trends I'm seeing is making sure you're getting the most for every lead that you're buying, because the leads aren't just coming in like they used to and hoping that's going to change in the next couple of years. I've been in the industry, you know, for my whole life. I've always seen it to be about, you know, three good years and three bad years. And it's kind of just. Been like this always. And we're kind of been in that three bad years and hoping that the next couple of three years are going to be great. But we never know. So you do never know.
Speaker 1I know during covid, I mean, there was at the beginning of covid, there were a lot of companies that kind of just froze and they didn't know what to do. In some cities, it was a lot harder to operate and get people to work than other cities. We were very fortunate in Florida that I called the Free State of Florida, that they allow us. To, you know, they basically lifted a lot of restrictions early on, which was good, at least for business and the interest rates being as low as they were and all the stimulus money and everything that was coming in for everybody definitely made it, you know, some good times. And, you know, in that sense, obviously, it was a you know, that was a that was a whole fiasco. But but from a business standpoint, a lot of companies were thriving during that period. And I saw a lot of companies pop up during that period and just grabbing. All that low hanging fruit saying, man, this moving game is easy, and I think I've seen a lot of those companies start to fold up or sell or get out of the business or do something to where they pulled back the reins. a little bit. As the interest rates have gone up and less and less people have been moving, less people can work from home now than they could back then. So they're a little bit more stuck where they're at and they can't just go live wherever they want. And yeah, I hear that too. A lot of struggles. This year was an interesting year. And I've talked to a lot of companies that saw a really good start and we were all really hopeful this year was going to be just on the up and up. And then it kind of flatlined a little bit in the summer for a lot of people and maybe not everybody. But it seems like it's just been that roller coaster of a year for most of the industry. But a lot of people are very hopeful for the end of this year in twenty twenty seven. And I'm hoping I'm hoping that we see some change there. But, you know, like you said, capitalize on the leads that you're getting. Don't don't just wait for that low hanging fruit zero percent interest rate situation to come back because it probably never will be as good as it was from like twenty twenty one, like first half of twenty twenty three. That was very unprecedented. And so if you're hanging on by a thread waiting for that to come back, I got bad news that, you know, it's probably not, you know, prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And I've seen a lot of the companies that that were that were fundamentally strong just capitalize on that, that that boom. But they had been through the tough times to know how to weather the storm afterwards. And unfortunately, there's been companies that only saw that boom and then they saw the downside without the foundation under them. So but like Tim saying, capitalize on those past customer leads, capitalize on those B2B referrals and have an automated strategy. That's what I love about what you do, because it's automated. And, you know, we can all manually send out emails. We can all manually make phone calls. We can all manually send out direct mail. We can all do this stuff. But. But why would you? It's not going to happen in a turnkey approach unless you have a system for it and you work with the right vendors that can create that system. So that's that's you know, I just I love what you're doing. I wanted to give you a couple of minutes. I mean, what's next for for all things Moversville? What what do you have on the roadmap for the future?
Speaker 2It's, you know, continue to kind of tinker with Moversville mentor, get more clients for Moversville, the digital outreach with realtors and past clients, and then also build out Moversville Connect some more. We I anticipate with Moversville Connect, there's and one of the reasons I built it, too, is I know I know that there's going to be more and more service providers and 50 percent of them will be great and 50 percent of them, you know, they might struggle or whatever. But we want to make sure that we find these service providers. And, you know, give movers those opportunities to connect with them.
Speaker 1Yeah. If you if you're a service provider listening to this, what's the criteria that you look for to be featured on on that platform for other movers to find?
Speaker 2Right now, it's the first thing I ask is how many clients you guys have. If they're if they're already working with at least 10 or 20 clients, like that's a that's a good signal and how long they've been in business. But also, like little things like, you know, can you kind of build out your own website? Does it look decent, you know, type of thing? But a huge thing is, you know, what clients are you guys serving already and are you guys doing a good job?
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah, that's important. And I've looked at Moversville Connect and everybody that I've seen on there is is a is a legitimate vendor. So definitely go and check out.
Speaker 2And that's the thing, too, like where we source them is like we see from, you know, we. Your events, if they're at your events and stuff like that, it's like, OK, these guys are serious about about doing that.
Speaker 1So what are you looking for with movers? What how could movers who want to optimize and automate their email marketing to take advantage of these resources that you provide in the services that you provide? Who are you looking for and what is the best way for them to get started with all of the things that we discussed about to basically capitalize on more of. Their existing client base and their leads and connect with new referral partners and take advantage of all of the amazing services that Moversville offers?
Speaker 2Yeah, you can just head over to our website moversville.com if you're looking for staying connected with past clients or if you want to start some outreach with realtors, just go to moversville.com. And you'll see a form there. Fill it out and book a call with me if you want to get connected with. Others. If you're looking for service providers, then the directory is that connect dot moversville.com and then if you want to get all of the podcasts episodes that are written, you would go to moversville.com slash mentor.
Speaker 1I love it, Tim, thanks for all the work that that you've done for two college brothers helping us basically grow and take over Tampa Bay and open up franchise locations and all the different things that you've done with us. company podcast it honestly may not be have been possible without your support especially in the early days while we got some traction uh you've been an incredible resource not only for myself but for the moving industry and definitely if you guys aren't doing optimations that are professionally set up uh for your crm to capture all the different points that that a customer follows in their journey of working with you and then after they've worked with you to to grow your business check out moversville they are the only uh expert in this field that i would trust to automate everything that i have and to take advantage of capitalizing on past business and doing everything that you guys do and uh i go on your website frequently looking at the different resources and everything that you have so um check them out moversville.com you heard it here first uh moversville connect or connect.moversville.com if you want the resources uh tim's a great guy to work with super easy personable person so until next time we'll see you on the grow your moving company podcast and tighten up thanks wade thank you for tuning in to another episode of the grow 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 wade at two college brothers.com moving out have a great day Thank you.
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