"Scaling a Moving Business with Storage and Staging" - with Joe Pucci

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the Grow Your Moving Company podcast. I'm your host, Wade Swykel, with two college brothers moving storage and franchising based here in Tampa Bay, Florida, as well as the co-host of the Moving Titan retreat and co-founder of Titan Up Training. And today's guest is a recent guest at our Moving Titan retreat mastermind that we just got done with in Scottsdale, Arizona about a week ago as of this recording. And we have Joe Pucci. It's like Gucci with a P, as he said. And he owns Choice Moving Company based in the Denver Metro and Northern Colorado area. Joe has been in business for 11 years now and he's on target to surpass the multi-million dollar mark with doing over 1300 annual moves, projecting 2.25 million this year, running six to eight trucks during the peak season that we're all in right now. Joe, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on today. - Thank you so much for having me, man. It's been great. - I like that hat that you got on there. That's like the old school kind of trucker hat. It's got the big, fluffy top on it. I need to get some hats like that with the rope on there. That's a good looking hat. So let me know what style that is. I'll have to talk to my vendor about that. - It's a Tanger the Link, no problem. - Sounds like a plan. Well, so we just wrapped up the Moving Titan retreat last week. It was an all comprehensive three day event. We all got in there on Wednesday, tour to Derek Green's warehouse over at Get Your Move On and Phoenix spent two immersive days doing breakout groups with all 30 plus people that were out there, brought our struggles or problems or bottlenecks, but also our ideas. And the transparency that everybody had was super valuable for me. I learned something from everybody, whether they were a $30 million company or a $250,000 company just getting started. I mean, they all had something amazing to bring to the table and everybody in between. But I'm curious what were some of your takeaways from the most recent Moving Titan retreat? - Jesus, I had a bunch. 'Cause like you said, there was a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge in that house. So it was awesome to learn from the guys who have been doing it longer, been doing it bigger. And in a different way, like everybody kind of has their niche in their wheelhouse they like to stay in. And for like 10 years, our wheelhouse was really great customer service. Make sure we were creating Raving Fans, getting five star views, but local moving and treating everything like that. The last this year, we got into Interstate. So we had a lot of like learning to do. We're like, we knew how to deliver a perfect move, but there are aspects of going long distance that are a lot different than a local move. So hearing from a lot of the guys who specialize in that and have really scaled that, that was super interesting. Both on like compliance and nuance, into just like overall numbers and margin and independence for his van lines and where their advantages are. So learned a lot there. We operate our Denver location out of a 10,000 square foot warehouse, but it's dedicated to our sister business, which is all about staging and design. And all we do is staging there. And so that whole space is filled with just the inventory for doing stages. And we really don't have a lot of capacity for internal storage. So we always have to contract and partner out our storage. So again, really eye opening and interesting to hear from some of the top players in the space about how to run storage, whether it's mobile, doing the, you know, mobile containers or pod program, or whether it's inside those big warehouses like we toured like Derek's. And that's really cool, really different ways to kind of run it. We've been on kind of the small and lean model as far as our infrastructure goes. And it just seems like a lot to want to jump in and get a big storage unit. But trying to figure out how to build the ability to monetize or at least forecast the monetization of the unit before you jump into it was very useful to hear and learn about. Absolutely. Storage is a big leap and it is expensive to get into up front. However, recurring revenue that you can generate from doing storage once you've got it, even 50% capacity is an amazing benefit. Typically, we'll pay for your space that you're in once you get up to a certain level. And then a lot of times, you know, depending on how much storage you have to offer, I can cover a lot of your fixed costs, your salaries, your operating expenses that are more on the fixed side. Because that is a big problem in the moving business with the seasonality that most people face once you get into January, February, but the beautiful thing about storage, you can market it to anybody anytime, even if they're not moving. And especially like you, you have the sister business that does a lot of designer receiving staging type things. And those are great lines of work to get into because it's a lot more evergreen than the family that waits till kids get out of school to move in the summertime. And you know, one of the things we just moved into where else that's about four times as big as our last one, which was 10,000 square feet. It's now got the ability to take over a thousand vaults and racking. And it's a big, it was a little scary. I'm not gonna lie, because our monthly nut, if you will, got a lot higher. And we have a lot of work to do to fill it. But I'm looking at campaigns specifically around the storage side of it going after more designers, more receiving accounts, more commercial, FF&E, because we can take on a lot of the stuff that we didn't used to be able to in our 10,000 square foot warehouse. And even direct mail just for storage in the immediate 15 minute radius around our office because Americans love having things. And a lot of times they have more things than they know what to do with. And if you can get a small move to go pick up anything that they need to get out of a property into storage, to create some extra living space, a lot of times that stuff will sit there for a long time. I mean, if it's gonna be there for a while, you could even go do a free move to go pick it up and put it in there because over time, it's going to more than pay for the cost of what that labor would have otherwise banned. But I'm curious to hear what, you know, tell me a little bit about this sister business with the staging or the receiving. You know, is that something that a moving company that has storage space to fill might be able to get into in their respective markets? - So yes, I think is the short answer. If you're market, if you're market can kind of deliver on that. So I can't say for everywhere, but, you know, Denver, Big Metropolitan area, Big Metro area, around it, surrounding it, and a lot of high net worth homes. And those realtors and a lot of those, you know, sellers, they understand the value of good staging to increase not only the potential price that's in the listing that they could be getting, but more so importantly, nobody wants their houses sitting 120 days, 80 days, 90 days, whatever. So the turnover time gets expedited. So much faster for sellers and gives buyers like a real idea of how to visualize a nice high end unit when you walk into it. If it was just empty, they don't know if they're looking at, you know, virtual online. It's hard to have that resonate. So if the market has a demand for staging in general, what we found is the staging industry has a massive scaling problem because so many people find themselves in the design or staging aspect, whether they're realitters who have the capacity to stage their own listings. That's like a lot of them, you know, an active realtor who might stage four or five things in a quarter or something like that. And they just don't really have the easiest way of like buying more inventory to be able to satisfy more stage jobs if they got them. And then if they got them when they are unloaded, like we're gonna store it all. And then does your husband have a bigger than a van to be able to get all this stuff around, you know? So a lot of stages in the Denver Metro area run into those little scaling bottlenecks and they stay small for that reason 'cause they're like just the idea of getting a truck, a team, and whatever, it's too much. So we're there as a resource to essentially try to help them. It was started originally by my mom. She was a stager, literally those same bottlenecks. And then what was our garage full of furniture became two storage units, became six storage units, became a small warehouse. And now 10,000 square foot and with the mezzanines is probably another five on there. And so yeah, the amount of furniture is really what takes the time component to be building that inventory and curating the stuff because if you just started a year ago, you're only gonna have like last years and this year's furniture models. You went to market, you spent a bunch of money, but you have like two looks. And so next season it's a different look. Like you either gotta be right on top of it or whatever and you can't really pluck from old inventory or curate from other, you know, spaces and designs, you have a weird one off, tuskeny home, you can't put mountain stuff in it, like you know, so you gotta have a range of stuff. And that took time and then you reach this point where you're like, can one person really satisfy how much inventory you have? So you have to start inviting in other real, excuse me, stages to benefit from all that inventory you have. Then you build in the logistics team and everything else and it becomes actually a pretty turnkey resource to help these other stages scale. So that's how we've started to pivot it. I came in a couple of years ago to try to just modernize it and help them build systems and processes 'cause the moving business was growing alongside them. And you know, my parents are getting older, they wanna have some kind of exit or some kind of plan for it at some point. I'm just trying to help them build out that framework before it's really needed. And a lot of that has been evidence that like we're trying to pivot it more towards a resource. We have all this space, we have all this stuff and we have the team to move it to and from. You just bring your book of business and your clients and you do your artistic design and what you do best as the stage or designer. and we'll see you next time. will handle the other parts of it. So it's essentially the rental of furniture is really what that business model is. You're renting furniture to people and then you're paying them for the two and from. So it's pretty, pretty synonymous with moving in some ways, but like we saw, even at Derrick's, other set up across the street. Like it's a different, it's kind of a different ballgame, dealing with designers and you're not dealing with the right employees, you're dealing with partnerships as, you know, they're coming in as a partner to use your stuff that you're not your employee, you're not training them, you're not telling them what to do. So, you know, you have to have good systems built in so that they can see what's advantageous about partnering with you, but also come in and it'd be real frictionless, it'd be real comfortable, it'd feel real seamless to them and just makes sense. It should be like a aha moment after they use you for one or two times. Or it's like, you guys have so much furniture and inventory. Oh my gosh, I want to pluck and pull and play here all the time. This is great. I just have to translate my costs, you know, your costs to my client and that's it. And you're like, yeah, so it's helped a lot of other stages grow their capacity and what they can take on 'cause they can transition more to sales and design, which is what I love about. - And a lot of designers and stages don't have a brick and mortar facility. I mean, a lot of designers work out of their home or they maybe they have a boutique shop. I mean, designers, you know, that's not really their core part of their business. It's just a piece. So if you can cross stock with them and do their receiving for them, that can be huge. And staging too, I mean, a lot of them might just keep their stuff in a self storage unit somewhere, but you're limited on all the different types of furniture and the models and the years and things like that and styles constantly change. And when you get into those more affluent clientele, they want custom furniture. They want stuff that fits the aesthetic of the home like you mentioned. You know, we deal with a lot of people that want to move all their furniture to the next home and they make it work. I mean, that's what probably the average middle class person in America does and even some more affluent people do that too. But you get these bougie high-end folks that they want the specific table to sit under that specific window or the sofa to fit perfectly in this room. And realtors love that because it helps the cell the house faster. I'm curious if you get a lot of crossover from referrals when you're going into these homes and connecting with these realtors and these designers. If your moving company is getting business from that high-end affluent clientele, like we're all trying to get because of this white glove type of business that you run as parallel to your moving company. Yes, is the short answer. Yeah, definitely. We try to cross-marriage like marketing material quite often, especially incentives. Okay, use us for staging, get 10% off your mover. Use us for moving, ask about our staging packages, both ways, whether it's on the website, backlinking or whatever. We try to make both services seem relatively in-house for both companies. So there's overlap on both of them and they're at different touch points in the experience. So the staging happens right at the beginning where you're thinking, I should probably, we want to move, we want to buy, we did buy, we need to sell staging. And then the move kind of happens at some point soon after. So staging is a really good foot in the door for by chance, need movers, do by chance, need. So especially because a lot of the people who we do work for, the stager, whether it's in-house or whether it's a partner, will go to the home. And during that consultation period, acknowledge that we can keep a lot of this stuff. It's great, but we do need the most of the living room swapped out and let's swap out the master bedroom. Well, where's that stuff gonna go? You gotta call a mover. So a lot of the times the next conversation is, for your heavy arm, wire, your hutch, and all your dressers, like here, give our other company a call, they'll come out, they can do a shuffle, put this all in the garage basement, whatever. Or we can bring it into storage if we think this is gonna be something that needs to sit for a while. So yeah, we do, there's a lot, there's a lot of cross between the two and then being able to even just like, that house is staged, it's staged by us. It has a little, this home is staged by us, thanks so much. Then right next to it, so are you moving soon, here's some moving, coupons, handouts, whatever. So again, even just from that aspect of like the physical presence of how they both overlap in a space where people are walking into them who are gonna be moving even if they're not buying this house and realtors are coming in, even if they haven't used you, this might be the third time they've seen a nice staged home that's paired with this moving company and all of a sudden it's kind of clicking that like, I think these are like a legit, isn't it? So you're just trying to again be like, creating that branding, it's hard and Denver. Denver is a big market, there's some serious brands, there's some legacy moving companies, fifth, fourth generation, whatever, they've been here since the Gold Rush, you're like, okay, so you gotta find your space and ours has been like you said, using our in-mastaging and our in-with really good high-end referrals and realtor partners to kind of have that niche of like more white glove, customer service focus moving and that's kind of where our staging is as well. People don't typically hire a higher end stager to do their lower end town home apartment, smaller home. Sometimes it happens and we do them, but a lot of the times that bits of one bedroom, it's a one bedroom on the 47th floor going for two-way in. So it's like, it doesn't require a lot of stuff, but the logistics of the elevator and the alleyway and the guy who's gotta manage the door and all that stuff requires a sophisticated move and a sophisticated stageer. And those buildings don't play around. If you burn that bridge once with their property management or whatever, you can get blacklisted like that or they'll put up really strict policies for like, like out of nowhere, they're like, yeah, anyone who operates here has to have a $2 million umbrella policy, you're like, what? And then you have it, so you're like, no problem, but then all these other moving companies who are like, well, I've got everything else legally, but not an umbrella, sorry, you can't operate here. So like, there's these barriers to entry that you have to learn for the high-end upper-end special on stuff and you know, jump through those hoops, go through that red tape and then be able to operate there 'cause everyone else who looks at it and is like, that's a lot of headache then they won't and that's great. - Hey, Movers, it's Wade Swykel 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 Homeless Things. 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 realtors, 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 realtors, for email, phone and social outreach. The result, higher conversions, stronger ROI and more book jobs with less spend. Check out USAHomelessThings.com because it's where real movers get real leads. - Mm-hmm, I love the high rises and some markets don't have them if you're in a smaller town like I was just on with Chad right before this and down in Venice there, but there's actually a few down by the beach but there's not a lot of high rises like we have in Tampa and St. Pete and Clearwater here, but those big apartment moves or even small apartment moves that are on the 47 floor or wherever it is are amazing because of all the reasons you just mentioned, the higher barrier to entry to be able to operate there, it weeds out 80% of the companies because you got all of these mom and pops that have small moving companies, maybe they do a great job, but they don't have the infrastructure, the insurance or the requirements that needed to get in there. So all of a sudden you're only competing against the smaller amount of companies, but like you said, it's typically not a whole lot of stuff. You just gotta know how to stage an elevator, you gotta know how to work with the rules, the times that they can reserve those elevators, which elevators they are, where to park the trucks, the long hallways. And I mean, I've seen one bedroom apartments going to another one bedroom apartment and another high rise. I mean, those can take eight hours. - Take a walk, that's a good job. - Yeah, yeah. - And usually you're selling three, four guys on those because of the long pushes and things like that to make them go faster, but they tend to be affluent customers, they tend to be good paying jobs, and there tends to be less competition fighting for those jobs. So that's fantastic. I love the fact that you're getting those small move outs 'cause you might have somebody that's been in there for 30 years and they've got furniture from 1996 to sit in the home, but now they gotta sell it or they want to sell it because it's time to enter the next phase of life and you gotta go in there and move all that stuff out, put it into storage, move all the staging stuff in, and then when it sells, you move all the staging stuff out and then you move the stuff to the new place. So you're getting theoretically four moves out of that, but I know the staging in your case is a little different, it's a different company. So two moves for your moving company and then a good staging job as well. And so yeah, no, that's awesome. I'm curious to how you get the staging and the interior designer client. Are you just cold-com people or are they finding you? - That's a great question that I wish I had a little more clarity on because that's our scaling bottle that get that business is the more people who sign up and show up and say I'd love to use your inventory on a weekly monthly whatever basis that kind of solves all of our problems. It's like great, then now you have the liquidity to go out and buy inventory. needed, you have the ability to look at taking on more space if all the sudden, like you're with all this stuff we're buying and all the people coming on, and you need more space, you can do those skills easier than you can bring in the people who need you and get the demand. So it's a challenge. It's a lot of like a stage will come and use us, word of mouth, she brings it back to her like group of other stages because again, these people are in a similar scenario. We're like they know who the few other people in our space that we're going up to compete against are and they're either already using them and coming to us because they've blown through that inventory. They kind of, you know, like I've done a few stage jobs there at 5,000 square feet and it's just I don't know what to choose now. So I need some variety. Everyone's thirsty for variety. So it doesn't matter if you have 5,000 or 25,000. If you use the same 25,000 for the last two years, you might want to look at another place and go like, yeah, oh cool, this was fresh. I've never found a green crush, velvet couch, yay. Whatever it is. So like that's the biggest reason and we find that yeah, just word of mouth like a good stage are coming in, being excited about this new experience in the process and then going out and telling some of the other people they've worked with are going back to the business that they've done work with and saying like, oh, there's another one I've been using and pulling from. That's just organically brought it in. We really haven't spent a lot in like marketing dollars to try to solicit towards referral partners because we've kind of been in this transition of building out the right processes, the inventory, the software, just like with moving, it's in a space that's changing every day, every week there's a new AI tracking thing and there's a new thing to whatever. So trying to like dial that in to make it attractive when someone wants to come in and go like, oh, I want to work here not just for partner with you, not just cause of the inventory, but like you guys have a nice dialed in again, frictionless seamless setup. So a lot of the the conflict we've seen in researching the market has been either lack of inventory or I get over it or just their process sucks or is hard to deal with. That's literally the basic plan. I love their inventory, but man, the way they do their checkout and whatever process is so archaic or whatever, confusing or so. We're just trying to like really get a good idea on the space and say like, what could we do a little bit better than a lot of these complaints are because they seem like low hanging fruit from most aspects. Nobody's saying like, they haven't figured out how to get this to Mars. It's just like basic stuff. Like, okay, if they're always late, why don't we figure out a better system for like time management and the logistics. You know, so simple things just try to attract the talent. Like you said, just trying to attract them and almost create a little bit of a buzz from the people who are already using us. It doesn't require a whole lot to start to grow. It's a funny thing because you could either have 10 or 20 stages who are only doing one stage job a month or you could have one who's doing 10 or 20. It just depends like realtors. Like, are you the one percent of stages who are crazy busy and it's not going to probably be the one percent? It's going to be somewhere lower because the one percent do exactly what my mom did in the one percent role and they go, I'm going to scale quickly. I can't just give you guys a portion of this every time I'm just going to start buying my own. So, you know, again, the top top staging businesses usually representing themselves with a smaller inventory or they're a part of what we're trying to grow. I'm a top-stager at this $20,000 hard, $20,000 square foot warehouse that has $2 million in inventory that I can play with all the time. So we're just trying to figure out what model is most attractive and then hopefully they kind of source over organically a little hummingbird feeders. Yeah, well, I can see it working both ways. I mean, you could almost create like a co-op where you have these stages that have their own inventory, but they want to cross stock it with you to save money so they don't have to go buy their own warehouse. And then maybe you even let them store it for free if they're open to allowing it to be part of the master inventory. That's an area that I can't tell you if that would work or not because we haven't ever done it. I'm a wheels attorney. Yeah, you could potentially create a co-op there or you just charge them monthly and they keep there, you know, nobody else uses their stuff, especially if it's nice stuff. It stays, you know, in their own segment that you just, you know, they save, they pay a fraction of what it would cost to go get their own warehouse and set that up correctly and hire a manager to manage it. And you're just basically charging, you know, film storage. I see a ton of potential with it. Yes, because even if it was a situation where their current storage or warehouse in situation is like a couple dollars a square foot, which it is all the time. And then we're able to increase our warehousing space by less than a dollar square foot. There's enough arbitrage there to still make it cheap and efficient for them and you're selling them on the idea of like, well, if you're already picking from our inventory, you could have your pre-selected stuff right next to our warehouse and our other warehouse. You're paying some rent, but then all of this, you know, you get a choose from either. That stuff's exclusive. This is common, but then like I said, to mix and match in a truck, you've got to have your inventory process very dialed in. Otherwise, you're going to have somebody very upset and expensive couch that was supposed to go in their private storage thing accidentally went into the public room and it took, got took in, got taken to some. Yeah, I can, I can see these presents. Just like you were thinking about, you know, and a lot of, like, this stuff can sit in houses for a long time. So there were guys at the mastermind talking about like tracking their pods and stuff all over town and like, same thing with stage and it can get kind of like, you know the house, but do you know exactly how many pieces of artwork and how many times you pull off artwork and you had 10 and you only come home with nine and like each month you're losing a couple pieces of art, a pillow here and there, a bed sheet here and there and it's like, it'll add up because you can't have an air tag on every single thing. You got to have a process for it to go in and out that's dialed in. Yeah, I know that makes total sense and now that you mentioned that. So when I bought my home, it was staged by the previous sellers or the previous realtor and I'm pretty sure they left a couple of mirrors, a couple things, maybe they didn't mean to leave, you know, a mirror on the back of a door or, you know, a shandleer that, you know, I don't know if that was supposed to come with the house or not, but you know, nobody's anything. So like, all right, I guess they're just leaving it for me. I'll take it. But yeah, I noticed a few of those like months actually after I moved in like, oh, I don't remember buying this mirror on the back of my bedroom door, but I like it. So I could definitely see how that would be an issue though from your side with the, you know, keeping track of things. And I'm curious how you have that set up. Is it all like on racking that's displayed? So you could have a prospective client or even, you know, a, a, a, their clients client come walk through and kind of hand select what they want to stage it with. Is it on racks? And you use like a barcode system. That's one of the things where we're working on rolling out is a barcode system. Now that smart moving has that capacity, I saw, we saw Derek Greens warehouse with the QR codes that are stickers that go on every item, scan them in and then they scan it to the master QR on the vault. Are you doing anything like that and leveraging technology and how's it laid out in the facility? Yeah. So the layout is intuitively just like you said, like it's, it's floor space, racking on the sides and mezzanine above floor space. And big, home depot style ladders that, you know, you can go up to and have the hand rails on both sides if you need grab chairs or whatever. But things are usually like in rows and columns. So you can go down long aisles of dressers on both sides and they're stacked and wrapped and have like a pad near the top so they can be stacked. But still there's enough exposed out of stage. You can easily see the design style or whatever. And yeah, it's like just walk that aisle. You kind of have an idea of what you're looking for. I'm looking for, you know, Chesterfield sofa or whatever. You start walking down and you know where the leather sofa is are. They're in the back corner. And so there's some organization to it. And when you kind of know the layout, you know that the glass room is where all the glass is. There's a lamp room with all the lamps and the tops get taken off from the bases and a pillow room and a deco room. And we do deco by the bins so that they can basically just get small, medium, large and then like fill it. Because it's again to track it and to try to price it per item. Like that Buddha, that candle, that fake orchid, whatever. So they just do it by bin and then it comes out by bin. So it's pretty intuitive. It's easy to walk around and to figure out. But it hasn't been the best for having the infrastructure in place to have great park voting or tracking. So like you had mentioned with your business, we're in that phase too. And what keeps us from necessarily pulling the trigger with rapid speed is such an ever changing environment. Just when we're like, all right, I think that CRM with this inventory and the integration, it'll be perfect. And then like somebody's like, you know, I can just build an agent who can design that for you in the house. And you're like, oh really? Like let's talk on Monday. You know, so it's we keep having that. But I think we're going to end up getting to a system where it's either barcode QR or a mix because we have so many that will be the same like gray dining room chair, like 80 of them, you know? So it's like, it might be just image based like how there's the AI imaging tracking, the Yembo and live switch. They have these, they're starting to be able to make app integrations where like you can just have a photo of it. It knows what kind, what dimensions, and then your quantity of that style. And then you can just put a quick number change. Like we're taking out five, we're taking out eight of them, whatever. And that's tracking with how many you've logged in your master inventory. So long story short, no, it's not part of the process now. It's more old school way warehouse managers there with the stages facilitating letting them do as much walking and picking as they want. They go around with the thing to tag everything that they want for their project. That comes up with kind of the price point. And then the warehouse manager and that person goes around and actually pulls it to set it aside. And then that gives them a better idea of exactly [BLANK_AUDIO] much they've pulled. Everything's labeled in one area, then it gets itemized on a list, it gets checked off as it goes on the truck during delivery day, and then that exact list gets put into a clipboard where it's waiting essentially for the return, pulled out on return, checked that everything gets brought back, put back, cleared, signed off by both receiving and stator that everything that went out came back, and that that's where you address the damages too, because again, stuff sits in three at home for four months or something comes back and it's so this leg used to have four, or this chair has four legs on it, like you know what's going on here, big scratches or whatever, and you kind of have to figure it out, and there's like again, just like it is with moving in your own referral partners, like when there's an issue, it's like it's kind of our fault, might be kind of your fault, we don't really know, nobody wants to burn a bridge here, so let's just work on it, and again like a lot of those furniture pieces have paid for themselves have been fully depreciated, so there's only so mad he can get with basic wear and tear, but we have had some stuff that's like pretty silly, like people staying in homes when they're not supposed to, and you show up in a bed's obviously been used for like months, you like, go on here, yeah I could see that like reverse damage claims almost, where now you're getting them to pay the damage claim that's, yeah, because I mean again, at least you know the client or the person installing it, there's paperwork signed that says, you know, this isn't going to be a lived in home or whatever, and we've had scenarios where we know that, and we're pricing it differently in those scenarios, like working events out of convention centers or putting them in model homes that are going to sit for at least six months to a year, or when people want to buy it, we've had people so excited about the way that a house looks like, can I just buy the whole, I just want it like this, I don't want you to take any of this, and you figure out a price and you sell in the furniture, 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 pooling 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. That's funny because I actually, I like the staging so much when I moved in that I wanted to buy all the stuff that they had and they gave me a price like 20 grand, I was like, no, no way. But I mean, now I see why because they would have had to replace it with something else brand new and sometimes it's spreading it is hard. You might like it because they put a couple specialty items, they only have one or two of and you know that live edge coffee table, that all the stages want to grab or whatever. And if you're like, I want it, they're going to, they're going to for sure charge a premium for it because they're like, we can't just go out and find that who sells it. I think up that at that one vintage market that three years ago. So there's like an element to that that makes them price it a little higher versus discount because a lot of people think like, well, it's use furniture, hit me with a discount. I'm like, you know, understand the time commitment is the resource all this, track it, stock it, log it. So I get that. I understand where you're at. Makes total sense and I imagine that these stages probably have their own books of realtors and referral partners. Do you get to get in with those realtors that, you know, because I could see how it just would magnify like not only are you getting move jobs from the stages, but now you're potentially getting introductions to the realtors who have a lot of clients that may not even need stages. So now it's like kind of, you know, it's multiplying. Do you see a lot of that? Yes. Yep. We see a lot of that and it's there's no doubt that like somebody comes in with their own book of business and then they come in and start working with us and then some of that business might find us as a resource. It's just kind of inevitable that happens that way as well. So yeah, I mean, it's the coolest part about the both businesses is they have the same target referral partner like realtors, loan officers, people in the space. We both are looking for the exact same referral partners. So like we have really doubled down on the value of using like Maddie Mailers and some of the tier two listings that we get from him data wise, which gives us the client moving and the in the realtor to go great. We have cold calls, we have cold emails, we have marketing material, we can send them, we have lots of different ways to know exactly who our targeted audience is for both businesses using the exact same data that you're paying for for one or the other. So that's been tremendous for us just leveraging that being able to cut what would be those, you know, expenses individually down because you can combine them. So yeah, the overlap there in the harmony in the ecosystem is the best part of it. And like in a perfect world, if choice just kept growing and we had more locations that kept growing and the staging business turned into more of a resource, that could be a wonderful roll up someday or some kind of more ingrained partnership than just what it is now with like marriage marketing and referrals and stuff. And it could really try to like hone in on like a full integrated service that we're going to get them from the beginning all the way to the end. Who else can we incorporate in the system, you know, a cleaner, move cleaner before and out, they're involved in that. We're going to stage it, bring the stage about, bring the cleaner in, cleaner goes out, bring the touch up guy in, whatever, like start to finish sell this house in an expedited fashion. And then yeah, you totally could own that whole hometown Titan or hometown dominator model with all the ancillary pieces to it. A lot of people. Yeah, no, I mean, I love that. And I know you have a couple locations, but they're close enough to one another where they can kind of work together from time to time and share some resources. And you know, that's, you know, that's what it's all about. I think a lot of companies jump into wanting to open up too many locations too soon before they've owned and dominated their market and they're completely hands off the business and they've got a 20% plus profit margin. I mean, I had to learn that lesson the hard way is, you know, it doesn't really make sense to go and open another location and tell you dug as deep as you can into your existing location and you're basically hands off and you can go to that other market and give it some attention. But learn that lesson after the fact and I know you've got a couple locations and it sounds like they're both doing doing well, but you know how it is going back and forth and shifting your attention back and forth between those. But, but before we get into a little bit more on the moving company, I'm curious if you do any interior designer receiving an inspection and delivery with the capabilities that you have at the staging market or if that's something that you haven't really tapped into too much. Ironically, we've tapped into it, but in our Northern Colorado market, not the Denver one where the staging businesses, because of the fact that staging has been a bit separate from the moving and while we, as myself and the moving company, see all kinds of ways to keep doing overlap, the staging business wants to keep staging inventory staging. They don't want necessarily the people that have keys or entrance or other things. So it's been, you know, a bit of a growing pain trying to have them take on things that would be good additional revenue when they're kind of like our bread and butter is staging. We want to focus on bread and butter until just like what you're saying about scaling into other locations that we feel like we haven't even fully optimized our staging and that is putting our warehouse at full capacity all the time. You know, there's probably any given time like 25, 30 homes outstaged and there's probably another 50 or 60 homes that could be staged just from the inventory in there at that time. So at any one time, if it all came back, we'd be screwed because you'd have to find more place to put it, but also I look at that as an inefficiency because I'm like this needs to be like empty. I want to go into like a mostly empty, echoing warehouse and go yes, rentals are out, you know, like 70 homes being rented, then we're good in the warehouses. But because it's always been full, because it hasn't really been a system of like yeah, let's think of other things to bring in like that we haven't down there. But up here, yes, we operate a much smaller 2800 square foot warehouse, but we've got about a thousand square feet of it dedicated to interior designers who are here in town just like you said, they have a really nice little boutique shop. It's an old town. It's cute. That showroom is where they crush it. They sell all their value, but they don't get 18 wheelers driving down Main Street and then holding it up to unload. So they're like, where am I going to put your stuff? They come to our warehouse. We take it out. We inspect it. We receive it. We communicate. We send pictures, videos, whatever. We hold it. We wrap it, protect it. Keep it where it needs to be. And then they call us on install day and say, can you take that to 313 Wood Street? Yes. And then you move it. And then you just, we just fill it monthly. And that service here again, that lean and mean model, that service alone pays our rent here. That's amazing. And that's honestly the perfect size to really hone in on that niche because I mean, really to make money and storage to where it's going to cover your warehouse and your, you know, some of your fixed costs and make a little bit of money. 10,000 square feet going three high is typically kind of what you need for it to, for all the effort for to make sense, unless you're special you're putting to use that 20. 800 square feet where you can have some racking for vertical space and you have a dock where you can do the receiving and I love receiving clients because They tend to be affluent high ticket jobs You're getting money on the receiving so having the person there to pull the stuff and sign off on it on the truck You're getting money on the inspection if you're gonna do a hard inspect or a soft inspect You can have prices for that and then you're you're piecing out the items for the storage component to wear like with a client That's going into a vault, you know with a traditional storage You're you know you're just charging for the vault but with designer and receiving stuff You can actually charge a lot more because you're you know, maybe it's $15 for a small box $35 for you know regular box $55 for you know a large oversized box And then you can use those pallet bays and and all that stuff and you know What would normally be like a single client's $80 a month vault could be a $250 Or you know group ship and up 10 different items and each one has its own its own fee I mean you could do it the vaultway too, but with your 2800 square foot setup I mean that seems like a perfect niche with your background experience and staging and your connections in that space And then you get the move out, you know You you hold and then you get the storage fees to keep it there and then you get the move to To deliver it and set up and then you could even charge an extra fee from a hallway of all the debris and the materials from the disposal If it if it is a soft inspect if it's a hard inspect you're probably already taking that stuff apart and re wrapping it But yeah a lot of different a lot of different revenue streams with that to really drive it home Are you moving is your moving business relying mostly on its business that comes directly from those connections that you make with the Staging business or are you doing any other marketing that is is moving the needle up and you're moving just your moving company side for straight up You know straightforward moves Yeah, no for the longest time we kept them like fully separated so we do not spend any money really besides the physical marketing With the managing and partnership other than just organically like you said all the crossover and ways it happens or communication that goes Oh, you're the realtor who did that where the staging come oh yeah, okay But no we spend a most of our money marketing the moving company independently for itself and yeah We use everything everyone else does I mean we throw money into paper click we throw some budget into LSA has its times where that market works and doesn't We spend a little bit with meta more and re targeting and kind of presence and that kind of thing more so than like direct Programmatic ads with like the targeting from the tier two data listings We we use that stuff to to really get granular on targeting We use the Homeless things tier two data We use we use Matt young Moving letters AI That's who we get it from but same same exact concept you're paying you're getting all this daily data dump how you want to use it is up to you You know, we haven't really did don't deep into cold calling just hasn't really been part of our sales culture and Right now we're just happened to be fortunately at a point where right now Like lead acquisition and marketing spend is not our biggest problem it always Traditionally is what we're thinking about the most right now Peak of summer. It's a little bit less of the priority and more just like operational capacity of waiting burnout Well, OT, you know keeping everybody happy just trying to like continue to scale really good work without dropping margin And it's hard when you when you hit capacities and peak summer and everything else so yeah I'm probably right there with you then yeah, so but it swings and then in the Deep winner in the tail seasons you're thinking a lot more about marketing and we're going to spend the money to get the leads and stuff like that But you know, we did a good job a year or two back like revamping everything You know Travis over at rotate digital through his conferences and consultation like really getting dialed in with lead Attribution using the UTM parameters and tracking more accurately and like we talked a lot about at the mastermind over last weekend It was just like trying to get to a place where it's not dirty data You're relying on and you have confidence that your data is track well and clean That's helped a lot because we realized like our marketing efforts in our current marketing agency working for us Like they're doing a great job and where it's often times easy that like you're spending a lot of money So if you're not seeing crazy returns you're critical when you're upset and I like had to chill back a little bit and be like We'll look at the benchmarks Amos 3 average your benchmarks seem better this is sometimes like relax maybe think So yeah, like it's it's been good But we spend marketing dollars kind of everywhere because again like a lot of the people in our group would would say is It's necessary. We're trying to think of that on the presence Fort Collins more than Colorado slightly smaller slightly more homogenized market We want to be more brand aware top of mind hometown hero kind of by Denver We're trying to be more surgical in a niche and really focus on Organic growth high-end growth referral based growth and leads leads coming from affiliates and referrals at a way wider Funnel than what are normal and I think we're about 50 60% Affiliate referral word a mouth repeat and then you know 30 40 the marketing spend for Northern Colorado Denver It's like 80 20 Denver is like 80% like realtors organic and it's growing faster just because it's bigger There's more high-end. It's you're pretty strapped to find like a $10 million home in Fort Collins more than Colorado But Denver in the metro area there's plenty of them and so we're trying to like move those people into their second home in Aspen 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 paper click or buying leads or LSA whatever it may be only to get low-paying customers that you come ahead ache 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 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 gonna 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 When we we were in Gainesville first it's now an independently-owned franchise But that market, you know, there was a lot less competition It was a small tight-knit community, you know, it was a lot easier to kind of break through the noise and Get our name out there in a smaller radius with a hundred and twenty thousand people or whatever it was Whereas when we opened up in Tampa, we tried to do a lot of the same marketing I mean we could advertising Craigslist in Gainesville and get good paying jobs You know, that was you know 10-15 years ago, but but when we went to Tampa in 2015 We could not break through on those ways and it took a while to build the SEO that we had in Tampa Which has been a huge blessing for us. We work with mover search marketing on that they crush it for us in Tampa But we've done it for seven or eight years now and we put a lot of time and money and resources and strategy into that to break it through that noise And in the bigger markets like Denver in your case You've got a lot of legacy competition. You got franchises. You got Band lines. You got people that have been there since the gold rush as you put it and it's it's it's it's it's it takes time and money to break The noise there and really the best thing you can do is the grassroots stuff where you're building relationships and making those connections Just like you're doing where I would imagine Fort Collins probably a little bit less competition Tighter-knit community. It's easier to both build the relationships with the whole community But get your name in front of the whole community with different traditional marketing and probably a little less competition that you're You know having to compete on ad spend and things like that and the tracking is so important to you And I know Travis does a great job with his his his paid Google ad tracking I listened to his audiobook that he recently rolled out and Those UTM parameters because what happens is you get to the slow season you're looking to cut some costs and People are very quick to cut marketing But it's the absolute worst time to cut good marketing that delivers an ROI Because then you're just shooting yourself in the own foot Whereas you know, you got to know what marketing to cut what marketing to turn up and those UTM parameters And I see so many agencies and Travis. I don't think he's one of them I don't work with him But I know him and I've listened to his content and his books and things like that but So many other SEO or not SEO. I'm sorry PPC agencies are not doing a good job of tracking that those leads well or LSA You need to have somebody going into your CRM and and matching up the call that come into your LSA and correctly attributing those, listening to the calls if they need to, if their number doesn't pop up and you got to figure out who that customer I be, making sure that every single LSA lead is going into your CRM and that it's not just being attributed to Google or SEO or some other lead source or web form. That's my, I can't stand it when a lead gets stuck on web form because it's like, that's not how they heard about us. That was the end result in the funnel. How did they get to the funnel is what I want to know. And that's, and most just generic LSA agencies don't know smart maybe they don't know the moving CRMs if you use a different one and they don't know how to go in there and do that stuff so that it's getting properly attributed so you know how much it's actually making and then they're not going and looking at what the ticket on that was and then rating it in the LSA. So in LSA you can rate the quality of the lead whether you booked it or not and maybe you booked it but it was a $200 job and they're just marking that as booked or maybe they were just looking for moving services and they were a tire kicker looking for the cheapest price and they marked it as a good one but it may not be a good one. Meanwhile, you may have gotten an amazing five bedroom home moving you know from one city to another Interest state or interstate that that was worth $15,000 if you would have booked it and maybe you didn't book it but you still want to rate that high lead to Google so that you're training Google to send you more of those and then figure out your sales process so that you can book those but that's not a marketing problem. That is that's more of on the sales side with the set being a sales problem but we want more of those leads so that we can sell them and get more shots at them. As opposed to just somebody who's looking to move a you know a dresser for you know three miles away that's going to be a minimum that you know maybe you booked it but it's not the kind of thing you want to train Google to keep giving you because you're not going to get that ROI and then making sure that you're getting that ROI before you go and cut your span and if you're getting a 10X ROI on that stuff turn that dial and you just pump up that lead volume and you know especially in the off season but we've actually got our LSA turned off at the moment because we're over booked and some are people think summer is the time of the year to grow it's not the off season is the time to grow. That's where you experiment with the different marketing sources and you build your foundation so that you can take on more moves in the summertime. You see the fruits of that labor in the summertime because you're able to take on that extra work but if you're hitting capacity right now it's really hard to go and find a whole bunch of new people you know, train new people in operations, train new movers to be able to take on that work you're kind of just going to have to keep operating at capacity and wait it out and fortunately tell the slower time of the year to do that stuff and then turn up those lead sources because you're going to otherwise set be sending out a whole bunch of people that are green or you're going to be over booking and have an operational problems and claims and you can actually damage your reputation by trying to grow in the summertime. Summertime, you know, it's been set, you know you start growing in, you know, really September through the rest of the year but especially January, February that's where you need to be getting as much new business as you can with by turning up those lead dials and getting good people hired good people trained, making sure that you've got a well-old machine because that sets your culture. It allows you to have more experienced guys to then train the new hires that you might bring on as you get closer to the busy season. So, you know, if you're listening to this right now in the summertime I would advise you, you know, it's still taken on as much work as you can push yourself, stretch yourself, hire new people but don't make any sweeping infrastructural changes until you can do it the right way or you could end up having a lot of expensive problems and just end up spinning your wheels and eventually cause some damage to your reputation. Yeah. Are you guys doing, are you guys doing direct mail or anything like that? Yeah, we do a little bit of direct mail. We were doing handwritten notes for a little while and then we kind of reallocated some of that spend and we do like a tri-fold and a buy-fold and again we've seen different success in different markets and so specifically those in Denver is where our marketing spend is. The buy-fold and the tri-fold hit it when it's first listed and then hit it when it goes under contract and we do both of those but we have a very small net that we're trying to attract with those cause we were spending money in large zip codes, large brackets and now it's small zip codes, high price points I think it starts at a million dollars so like it doesn't even send anything less than a million. So yeah, those, you know, we do not get a lot. I'll be the first to say. We do not get a lot of leads and we still close them a little higher than average so probably like 60% in office, we close those leads. So out of any given month we're getting a handful of them but they're huge average tickets comparatively. So that's why it always has stayed on. I always look at it and I'm like, man, only six leads, seven leads and we only close three of them and I look at it and I'm like, that was $22,000. Yeah, leave it on. You know, leave it on. Cause we're not spending that much there cause it is a small thing and we just wanted to have again a little bit of high-end branding and presence to these clients without taking out a billboard or being on the radio or whatever because it's just like you said, so expensive down there. Even the cost per click with like pay per click and stuff is at a way different price point than we got way more people bidding on keywords. So we're just trying to figure out how to stay in our lane efficiently down there. Yeah, well, you know, the TV billboard radio, those types of things, they only come once you've turned the dial all the way up on all of your other trackable stuff and you're big enough to float money for six months to a year to build a brand. I mean, there's a place for that mass media marketing, but it's not for the one, two, three, four, even $5 million moving company. Do the direct response, directly trackable stuff first, turn, keep, turn your dial all the way up on the LSA, turn it on the PVC, the meta, the postcards, the stuff that you know for sure works. And when you've run out of marketing sources that you can track, that you've got dialed in, then you can experiment with some of that stuff because then it becomes brand building and that can help all of the other things go up and your booking percentages go up and your referral business go up. But it's very expensive and it usually takes a very long time, you know, six months to a year at least, for that stuff to actually start to create enough brand impressions where people start to recognize your brand more. And so, you know, you see some, I've made the mistake where I've tried to advertise on TV or radio before we were ready to do it. And we do have a radio source that works really well for us but it took six months for it to get traction and now it's one of our best sources after four years of doing it. But you got to be ready to make a long-term play with those things. And direct mail, you know, it used to crush it. We used to book 80 to $100,000 a month in direct mail. That was pre-COVID or during COVID when interest rates were zero and not everybody else was doing it. Cats out of the bag, everybody's doing direct mail these days. It still works and we still do it. We actually revamped our entire strategy to where we're not just hitting newly listed impending anymore. We're going above and we're sending a lot more mailers now to stand out. And there are different messages for different price groups. And, you know, we got that strategy, you know, more involved, a lot more dialed in. And we've seen good results coming from that because we know that every other mover that's doing it is only doing the newly listed impending above $300,000. Well, we're doing it. We're doing it a little differently. I don't want to give all my secrets away right out but you can reach out to me if you want more information on how we've found direct mail. Just start to pick back up. But I'm curious. And then we got to wrap it up because we're running up on time. But what you're doing with the Tier 2 data, you mentioned a word that I've actually not heard before, programmatic cats with Tier 2. And I think I understand what you mean by that. But it sounds like you're not doing a ton of cold calling. You're doing automation, automations with that Tier 2 data. And when we say Tier 2, whether you use a USA homeless things like we do or Maddie Mailers like Joe's doing, you know, competing companies, a big fan of USA. But I know Matt does some awesome stuff too. That the Tier 2 data is the customer contact information and the real tour contact information and even the broker contact information. So numbers, phone numbers and email addresses. Are you do you have automation set up to work with that data? Yes. Yeah. So we have some automations, one of which we're not really doing much with the cold calling, but we do cold emailing through that listing and using that info. And we have both campaigns for realtor specific using the data and then for client specific, different messages, different emails, different contact points. But yeah, the goal is with the clients to try to solicit that like, hey, no, you have an upcoming move. Do you by chance need a box drop off? Be happy to drop off a, you know, dozen boxes and some tape or whatever for you. No, no pressure. Just want to see if you guys need help. Some people respond and say, that'd be great. Some people respond and say, no, thanks. We got to cover some people say, sure, can I get a quote while you're at it? And then some people say, take me off your list. And it's like, you've got to range for all of those. It is relatively automated in the sense that we have lots of options for quick response using the telegram app is where it comes in through and we can just respond through there or we can give that same task to a VA to be doing the exchange. But as soon as we can, we treat it like a lead where if it's a client asking for box drop or a quote or a shirt come by, pull that, put it into the CRM. And is now a lead. You have all their info and you've already started communication. Now you have the ability to shoot them a text through the CRM and say well is Monday an okay time for you and you know kind of now it's a lead in our CRM and it's being worked on in our pipeline. Realiter is the same way where if they responded all of those outreaches are more like hey saw you new listing. That's a beautiful $1.8 million home you got there whatever if your clients need a box drop let me know happy to do so and if you want to chat about our affiliate program I'd love to take you to coffee. That gets to the foot in the door in the exact same way someone say sounds great so I'm not in the office a lot but thanks some of them say kick me off your list and you just you play that numbers game but the volume has been good and we have really grown our affiliate program in referral because as soon as one of them say sure come by our office or I'll meet for coffee I actually do it so then it gets pulled right off and goes onto the phone calendar it put them on the coffee on Friday and now you're meeting I'm meeting like two to three new realtors every single week for coffees or lunches or beer one-on-one meetings and all that just to basically say I've never met before we've been in town over a decade how to buy not met you how long you've been doing real estate tell me more about where you're from by the way here's our affiliate program if you want 10% off your client's move a kickback for you every time it's all trackable it's all harmony if you have a problem you have my number the managers and that's the most important part and they go wow great no one's ever done this for me like no other member I was here in swine z with they never took me to coffee and told me their whole process and gave me their personal cell so like just doing that we've just been like I said that that funnel just keeps getting bigger and bigger of affiliates referrals word-of-mouth and and that leads to more and more foot in the door opportunities do you want to sponsor our event you want to sponsor our mastermind you want to come to the golf tournament and then that leads to more and more so we're really just noticing this multiplier effect that happens by by focusing on business development and I couldn't really see that happen until I had the ability to stop wearing so many hats and focus on business development which is like you well harmony that is when you realize like oh me driving the business development for the growth of the business is the best thing I could do okay spend time doing that and it's because of finally having the systems processes managers in place to do what they need to do to keep saying Joe send us more work how do we grow when you more for a partner when you more leads I'm just trying to pull up just a pull for them all man good for you for doing that I mean I've been such a proponent of that stuff for for a long time I talk about it a lot in my book but it's so important and nobody's doing it because it takes work and it takes you getting putting your face on the brand and meeting somebody one to one and knowing that you're a real person because most realtors don't have that real person that stays front of mind with them and a coffee meeting can go so far in fact I just did one today with a concierge coordinator like a like a home management concierge coordinator this morning at Starbucks met her through my pickleball club for those of you know me a big pickleball guy we actually have a court sponsorship at our pickleball club where we have a court named two college brothers with a little plaque on it and we get some other other perks out of it and you know I was talking to Chad earlier about it I mean it's $5,000 a quarter $20,000 a year but it breaks down to like $1,200 a month if you do the math maybe a little more than that but he's like dude that's crazy like why are you wasting money on that I'm like because of this because it's networking I mean if you're not in the pickleball like join a country club or something like that and see how you can get a a corporate sponsored partnership where you're being displayed you get a membership and that's really where you can work the room and I always wear I got this hat custom designed it's a melon hat that I had embroidered on that I wear to play pickleball and that's why it's a little dirty but like it's like a higher end hat you know I got higher end like you know pickleball a pair also I'm always wrapping the brand every time I'm there and it starts conversations oh I sell your trucks you know all this stuff but I mean even just realtors I went into a coffee shop one day and I saw a realtor left their cards sitting on the little tables at the coffee shop which they're great aggressorites marketing and I honestly was very like impressed like I was like man I love this this hustle of this realtor like leaving out his card I'm gonna reach out to him and tell him that and I reached out to him he's actually become a friend of mine I've taken him out on the boat we've worked out like we've done these you know things together and he introduced me to his broker and now I let his broker also use the boat and they just sent us a two and a half million dollar high rise that was downtown we got to watch the Indy car racing up there because he had it as a listing and he's like yeah come over we're having a little party up here to showcase the place and also you know so we got like V.I. so there's little perks that come out of that and it was all because I just saw this realtor card on a coffee shop table reached out to him and I met him at that same place for coffee but realtors put their cards all over town and billboards at restaurants and you know just reach out to him and say hey I saw your advertiser when it's working like great job let's meet and they're more than willing to do that but I like your approach too I mean there's 10,000 realtors in Tampa Bay I don't know I'm sure they're similar in Denver and in Colorado there's so many of them and you can all you have to do is just make a concentrated effort you know couple two three days a week to reach out to these these folks I mean I tell my whole team to do it especially our sales team we have an extra commission percentage for business development business so essentially non company generated leads that they bring in through their networking and we encourage them to reach out to one potential business development partner each day and if you've got 10 people doing that over the course of 300 working days out of the year just reaching out you know that's 3,000 contacts that your company reaches out to a year and it's snowballs because that turns into more connections and more connections and even if 10 of them ever send you a move or agree to meet for coffee you're that's 300 moves and then if a certain percentage of them are sending you multiple moves a year then you know it just compounds and snowballs and so you're sending emails out through the through the tier two is that or are you doing ringless voicemails or texts or anything like that no not ringless voicemails we had turned on for a minute had some feedback that was a bit more like this bothers me more than traditional spam so like I keep it traditional spam we'll email you so we do the emailing for cold obviously we're scanning over the listing data as it comes in because it's also plugged into the API that is then daily updating what our efforts are for the retargeting fellows the programmatic ads and I could be I'm not a marketing specialist in digital space so I could be watching what they are or the nuance they operate in but I assume they're basically a form of retargeting that way that you can pump with the data of like the actual phone numbers so you can really get retargeting like on people's phones if you were paying for like Pulu ads or whatever like you can put that on their address at their house at their house using it but it's like it's very specific targeted using like geofences or phone numbers in spaces or the the phone numbers themselves so you know it's growing and our trackability for like how people are finding us using LLMs is growing as well every month more and more people found us using a AI search versus the traditional or whatever so those spaces are growing and like like we talked about for a lot of this like just lead attribution and diligent tracking is kind of an evolving space that keeps changing as how our marketing efforts are changing and you know where the current environment is changing so we're always trying to be focused on that and be as top of mind as we can but while still actively looking at what has the highest ROI let's put more money in it which one has the lowest do we want to cut it or just keep it as our lowest performer for a certain reason which is kind of our meta play like meta isn't huge conversion but you still have a little bit of snowballing that comes from that 100% 100% well Joe we're over time a little bit but I could keep talking about this for hours hope to see you in September at one of our future events and I'd love to come visit next time we're out there in Denver and and check out all the interesting stuff you got on with the staging and also check out your moving company love to our moving company so if anybody listening wants to set that up with me I'm open to it as well but thanks for coming on today man I know we talked a lot last week in our breakout groups and you know a little bit outside of that too but it's been really fun to stay connected and now build this relationship that you and I can talk going forward so again thank you for coming on to the greater moving company podcast and if anybody wants to get in touch with you is there a best way to do that yeah I mean you can always look up choice moving company online and google and that kind of thing in our company numbers we're we're actively available in all areas and so we're doing interstate now and we're partnering with people across the country so definitely reach out in any capacity and again wait thanks so much for having me on and appreciate it and you guys hosting everything you've set in it all up at the near zone it was awesome I'll definitely be to a more future events and if you guys ever decide to do a mountain one I want to man I want to chat it's not a big skier but I'd said that you know I'll do I'll take ownership of the ski tight and retreat so I hope in the snow yeah dude I'm down let's do it let's make it happen we'll stay tuned for that one because I want I definitely want to make that happen but until next time everybody thanks for tuning into the Grow Your Moving Company podcast we had Joe Pucci on with choice moving company in Denver and Northern Colorado until next time tighten up thank you for tuning into 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 tight and retreat or interested in owning or working for two college brothers franchise drop me on wine at [email protected]. Moving out, have a great day.