My Truck Buddy

Portland Movers...not so different than many DC movers...

2012-02-17T15:09:00.001-08:00

HIGHlarious Portlandia video that one of our guys noted:

Another reason Yelp sucks

2012-02-16T16:54:00.001-08:00

The mobile platform doesn't show owner responses to reviews. So, as more and more people migrate to mobile devices for their primary browsing experience, business owners are further marginalized. Psychotic negative review writers can't be challenged (which is the way they like it, of course).

Perhaps Yelp will fix that, but they've already admitted that their paying customers, business owners, are third in line of importance, so I doubt it.

Damn, I hate Yelp. Filthy, corrupt, dirty organization...

Unemployment isn't nearly as bad as they say...

2012-02-15T11:16:00.001-08:00

"Right on time -- to be fired!"

As we prepare for the crushing, soul-sucking, what's-left-of-our-hair on fire summer season, we're looking for new guys. It's really an amazing process, and provides all kinds of interesting and sometimes useful insights into the state of America's workforce. You've heard that it's officially around nine percent unemployment, right? Other estimates put it at somewhere near 20 percent when you account for the people who just aren't trying to find a job anymore.

I want to put America's fears to rest: there is no unemployment crisis. At least not according to my unofficial, anecdotal survey of the available labor pool. Apparently, everybody has jobs -- even the ones who apply for a job at MTB -- because they don't show up for interviews or, as often as not, fail to make basic plans to get to the interview on time. Or at all.

I recycled a Craigslist ad I frequently used for recruitment, but added a little more...ah...strong language. Here's a snippet:

Who we're NOT looking for
--Guys who can't show up on time -- or at all. Tardiness or failure to show up at all has been a constant problem, and one which I now have a "no tolerance" policy for. If you're late for the interview, you won't be interviewed. Of all the times to be late, THIS IS NOT IT. Let me repeat: if you show up late for the interview, that is the best sign I can have that it wouldn't have worked out anyway. I don't want to belabor the point, but right now the ratio is about 50/50. That's right -- roughly half the guys who I schedule for an interview don't show up. Of the half who DO show, half of them are late. Our customers don't tolerate that kind of track record; neither do I.

We've gotten quite a few responses, and I'm working my way through them. Today I blocked out three hours to do three interviews. The first guy showed up early, was personable, nervous but not spastic. All in all, an easy second interview. The second guy? His interview was scheduled for 10:00. He called at 10:01 to tell me his doctor's appointment was running long. In fact, he was still waiting for the doctor.

Now, I sympathize if he's at the doctor's office for a serious reason. But come on. Let's say he showed up early for an 8:00 or 8:30 appointment, but was kept waiting until 10:00. At some point he should have thought to call the potential employer to say he might be late. But if his appointment was for 9:00 or any point thereafter, he probably shouldn't have scheduled an interview for 10:00.

Not Truck Buddy material.

Oh, and the third guy? Fell off the face of the earth, I take it.

This is common. It's happened to us dozens of times, and all the other moving company owners I know joke about it. Only about 50 percent of potential new candidates show up. Maybe half of those show up on time. It's a joke.

Or, it's encouraging news. Based on these (albeit unofficial) statistics, it suggests that unemployment isn't nearly as bad as we've been told. It's a testament to the resilience of the American work ethic.

Valentine's Day -- our second anniversary

2012-02-14T07:16:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day! Is it okay to say that? I never know anymore. I get the feeling that this might be one of the last times we can say that without a permit of some kind. Maybe that's just my nearly cowed business owner mentality, but you never know if wishing someone a Happy Valentine's Day is going to invite a lecture about corporate holidays, the evils of men, despair over the state of love in the world, or even some sort of anti-Catholic rant. Can't it just be about the love? (Or St. Valentine?)

Whatever the culturally approved holiday is, let me take a moment to shoot some smooches at my wife. Valentine's Day is kind of like another anniversary for us. We've been married for about five-and-a-half years, dated about one-and-a-half before that. When we got married, both us had...concerns. I was an easy going slacker who couldn't manage a checkbook. She was a why-wait-until-later-when-you-can-do-taxes-right-now kind of person. My ideal weekend was waking up at noon, playing video games until 6:00, then heading downtown to check out some kind of Americana/roots rock band (local, of course.) She on the other hand, might wake up at 7:00 AM on a Saturday and work on her life plan for the rest of the year.

She won professional awards. I got fired a lot.

It was an odd relationship, and one that didn't really get started for some time after we met. But I was never able to shake, much less answer, a question came out of nowhere the night we met. At some happy hour thing for budding journalists and activists (yes, that's pretty incestuous, I know), the guy who basically enabled my moved to Washington saw her and and brought me over for introductions. "Hey, I think you two are going to be colleagues," he said. We were -- I'd just gotten a job as an editor, and she was on a different desk in the Metro section of the paper we worked. "I'll let you two chat."

We did. I think I was still feeling pretty much like a big DC hotshot. I'd just moved here from Montana, and through a series of conspicuously lucky events, landed a job I could brag about. She's a local girl, and worked her butt off to get her job. So, even as I was speaking, all I could hear was "blah, blah, blah." She didn't seem impressed, but when we finally said goodbye, that question leaped to my mind: Did I just meet my wife?

It was an odd, unprecedented thought. I mulled it over for a few years.

Our friendship grew out of 30 second conversations as I'd deliver a piece of paper to her desk every day. Eventually I made up other reasons to visit her desk. When I finally decided to sort of potentially think about making a plan to consider whether I should decide to ask her out, we more or less went out on an accidental date.

We were talking about skiing, and how there were no good places around here. She said she loved skiing (a lie, as it turned out). We made plans to go skiing that weekend. But then the water pump in my Jeep blew up, and she hit a pothole that took out her front wheel. "Ah, dang," I said, feeling like it was my fault. "How about if we just get dinner?"

To give you an idea of how clueless I am, I made plans for whatever the next day was. It was Valentine's Day. I had no idea until I looked at the calendar later. She knew which day it was, of course.

And that was our first date. We went to Mama Ayesha's in DC. Back then, it was a red-and-white checkered table kind of place, but still awesome. Since it's renovation, it's apparently gotten even more awesome. (As of right now, it has 191 reviews with a 4-star average on Yelp -- to have that many visible reviews and such a high rating, it's GOT to be good.)

I don't remember anything we talked about, but afterward I remember thinking "Uh oh. I'm dead. This wasn't in the plans..." (What plans?!?) It was still a while before we officially began dating, but like small comet caught in Jupiter's gravity well, impact was inevitable. Hah.

So, here's to my beautiful, intelligent, dedicated and inspirational wife. I'm so glad my Jeep blew up and you hit a pothole just before Valentine's Day. Love you, hon!

The Big Thing -- LivingSocial?

2012-02-13T06:13:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking for years that we need to do something Big to jump-start things. You know, like streaking across the field at a Nationals game Big. So far, nobody's volunteered for that, and I'm just too out of shape (hmm...maybe that would be good for marketing...) We've considered many other things, like, oh, some sort of viral video. Of course, the chances of infuriating some segment of the population are pretty high, and we're not quite ready for that kind of notoriety.

So, as we mulled things over, we succumbed to some (professional and friendly) pressure from LivingSocial.com and did one of those deals. Holy cow. This was big.

I should qualify that -- it's big for our little operation. We were scraping by with a couple hundred hits on the website, a few jobs per week, etc. Pretty much the usual slow season load. But when we launched a LivingSocial deal last week, we were buried. Website hits quadrupled. Facebook "likes" increased by about 50 new people, work orders poured in. It's amazing -- thank you, DC! (And, oddly enough, Portland -- who bought a voucher out there? You know we don't yet go cross country, right?)

The downside: LivingSocial takes a chunk of the sales of these vouchers, and since most of our jobs are pretty small, we are likely going to do a LOT of them for free. We've already done a few of these voucher jobs, and the net afterward has been in the $5 to $15 range -- and that's before payroll. So, this is going to obliterate our bottom line. We were fairly aggressive savers last year, so we have a small cushion to absorb the shortfall, but still...yikes.

The big plus side: more exposure, which is exactly what we were looking for. In fact, apparently one of the on-air people at the country station, WMZQ, bought a voucher and talked about us on the radio. We don't know who it was. We only know that happened because someone heard about it on the radio, she told her husband, he filled out a work request form on the website and mentioned it. WMZQ has 237 million monthly listeners in the U.S. according to their website. Again...yikes. We might need another truck.

Still, I'd like to do something even bigger. We've got some momentum now, so, when does the Nats season begin? I have plans...

Yelp sucks: By the numbers

2012-02-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

Honestly, most of the time I'm not obsessing about Yelp, but part of my daily duties is to monitor social media about MTB, of which Yelp is a big part. I had no intention of writing about Yelp today, but we just had yet another REAL 5-star review from a REAL person go "behind the veil," and it inspired me to run a report.

We've been tracking the lifespan of reviews for about a month now. We have about 200 other reviews yet to archive, but this snapshot is particularly interesting because it came right after we canceled our advertising contract with Yelp.

Summary of the data:

With one notable exception, none of our 5-star reviews stayed visible longer than five days.
The one that did stay up for 29 days was taken down three days after I cancelled the contract.
The average number of days 5-star reviews stayed up WITH the one outlier is 5.3 days.
The average number of days 5-star reviews stayed up WITHOUT the one outlier is 3.5 days.

Granted, this is a very small slice of data, but it's interesting when analyzed in light of our cancellation. I can't wait to dig in to the numbers when we can figure out how to track down the archive dates for our 200-some other archived reviews.

First pic: the cancellation email. I thought it was pretty friendly and to the point -- nothing antagonistic and straightforward. I wrote our Yelp rep on December 29th, 2011, and told her we wouldn't be renewing our contract. Since then, all but one positive review has remained, and that's only because, as of this writing, there's one recent five-star review since we declined to renew. Given the pattern, I expect it to be gone in the next day or two.


Thanks, buh-bye...

Now, here are the numbers. I plugged in all the reviews along with other information and ran a report.

Almost all of our 5-star reviews were archived within a week of being posted. The one exception is particularly interesting -- Justin S.'s review was "disappeared" three days after I canceled the contract. We only have somewhat-educated guesses as to why his review survived as long as it had -- other, more active reviewers' posts have disappeared more quickly, and about-as-active reviewers' posts have stayed longer -- but it seems just a little TOO coincidental that his review would be taken down right after I cancelled the contract. And since he posted his review, no other 5-star reviews lasted longer than five days.

Yelp is going to have to do some 'splainin' sometime soon. Even if their algorithm works correctly and they DON'T futz with the numbers or review placement, it APPEARS to be very shady. The backlash is growing, and I'm not the only business owner paying very close attention to the numbers. My guess is that they don't want anyone probing their servers too closely, even if everything's legitimate.

It's a girl! (Open forum for baby names...)

2012-01-31T11:18:00.000-08:00

We went to the doctor's office for a routine sonogram this morning. Well, not exactly routine -- this was the appointment where we could find out the sex of the baby if we wanted to. My wife and I have long been in agreement on that one -- we always want to know.

It's a girl!

I would have been happy either way, but the missus really could use a feminine presence around the house. We love our boys, but they DO tend to leave a smoking wasteland behind them. And everything is about trains, mud, breaking things and soon, we expect, a fascination with poop. (I wish I could say it was different around the office...) A girl...wow. Well, that's just another whole frontier for us.

I wish I'd gotten her reaction on film. On the drive over she downplayed it. I knew she wanted a little girl, but on my side of the family, at least, we appear to be single-gender producers. So far we've had two little boys, my brother has three little boys, and my sister has two little girls. Fate seemed to have predestined us to have another boy. "I really don't care," she said. (Which isn't to say that she was going to just put whatever it is in a box out in the garage with a bowl of gruel -- it just meant that, well, she'd be fine whichever way.) Her reaction, though, told the whole story -- she really, really, REALLY wanted a girl.

My reaction? "Wait--what? Huh? We just found out???"

I had taken my eyes off the ball in just that second because I was holding Boy #2, Kolbe, who was determined to either wreck the sonogram machine, or find out what was in the hazardous waste container. Also, at the precise second that the doctor decided to find the gender, I got a text from our operations manager asking about whether to buy some straps today.

Work always intrudes. I fully expect to be checking texts while at my kids' graduation from Harvard, Yale and the Hollywood Upstairs Medical School (I won't mention which kid THAT will be, but come on, we all know it's true, little one...)

Anyway, that's Baby #3. Not to be crass, but with each boy's arrival, MTB jumped to a new level (out of necessity, mostly -- I couldn't be moving, then running things on the admin side, AND taking care of little ones while my wife recovered). So, who knows, maybe this little arrival will herald a new franchising model. Just sayin'...

So, names. Right now we're fond of Cecilia, but we need to get some options. Thoughts?

Uh oh...Groundhog Day...

2012-01-30T05:28:00.000-08:00

Speaking of tech problems, here's an actual screenshot from my phone. Looks like Thursday is going to be a very, very long day...

More machine than man...

2012-01-30T04:13:00.000-08:00

Not my desk, but it could be...

The other day I tried to cut some text from a document and paste it on another page. It didn't work no matter how many times I tried. It wouldn't even select.

I tried checking the documentation, then realized that I'd thrown it out with all my other equipment's paperwork. Okay, I thought, it's time to put that college education to work. Come on, brain, we can figure this out!

The source of the problem didn't take long to find: The page was made of paper, my stylus was actually a ball-point pen.

The realization actually took less time than it took you to read those lines, but still, I had an actual, real impulse to copy text on paper and paste it to another page with my pen.

It occurred to me that I may have reached the point of technological overload.

The signs have been there for awhile. Almost everything I do relies on some form of technology. I use the Weather.com app so I'll know what to wear that day. I use GPS even on well-traveled routes so I can get (usually useless) traffic updates. My whole business relies on multiple levels of computer hardware and software. Without the Internet and the myriad services and systems therein, MTB just wouldn't exist.

I'm writing this on one of two monitors hooked to my computer. I needed the second monitor (so I reasoned) because it's much easier to manage the multiple open windows of data. It's so useful for things like editing the website on one screen, while monitoring the changes on the other. (Because, you know, Alt-tabbing between windows can give you rickets or something.) Or, I might be logging job data in a database on one screen, while reading it in the report form on the other screen. Add a layer of complexity if I need to check the online calendar for missing details.

To hook up the screens to the computer, I needed to get a new graphics card (also useful for video editing) that could handle two monitors. But then there were hours upon hours of trying to find the right frakking adapter to connect the extra monitor. Oh, and look at that! The new graphics card requires a bigger power supply. Might as well install some new RAM, too...

That video editing? It requires software, of course, but also an adapter to hook up the old Sony Handycam to import the video.

Meanwhile, I have a smart phone to be able to remotely access most of the stuff I need to operate such a highly mobile business, but, you know, sometimes that little screen isn't enough. Why, a tablet is the perfect solution.

Uh oh...not only is it illegal to use your phone while driving in many jurisdictions, it's also dangerous. So, a hands-free device is necessary. But not just any hands-free device -- I need one that won't fall out of my ear or cut the circulation off in my arm when the cord wraps around it. So, a rechargeable headset ought to do the trick!

All of this comes with cords, cords, cords! And cords, of course, require outlets. How many outlets? More than what you can find on the wall. Better go get a power strip...

I'm not complaining. (No really -- I'm not.) I actually love gadgets. It's a weakness. But there comes a point, probably long before you think, when you've long since blown past the usefulness of all your gadgets. I think I crossed that point in 2009. After all, a friend and mentor in this industry who more than doubled his gross revenue last year still does everything on paper. He runs about five crews, each of which are governed by a paper calendar. He looks at our operation, and the operations of some of my buddies in the industry, as being some kind of super tech-savvy NEXT GENERATION Web 7.0 stuff.

Then again, maybe he's patronizing us. While we're up to our eyeballs buggy databases, he's doubling his revenue -- effortlessly, apparently. Nice strategy, buddy.

Will I reduce my digital footprint. Most likely not. After all, I solved a calendar problem during the writing of this stupid blog post. Literally between paragraphs. I love and loathe my digital prison.

In other words, thanks, Greg!

2012-01-27T04:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's post turned into another mini-rant about Yelp, but the intended purpose was to thank Greg L. not only for the review, but for standing up for us vis a vis some negative feedback. And thanks, of course, to everyone else who wrote great feedback!

Cheers,
C.

More Yelp Shenanigans

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

As noted below, Yelp sucks, primarily because it's highly likely that there's some shady business going on. In the past, they'd promise business owners that negative reviews would be "shuffled" out of view, or at least moved to the last page or something. In some cases, it appears, they'd tell business owners they could remove negative reviews altogether. To be fair, we never received any such promises. They gave us the standard line that we'd have "much more" exposure with a paid ad at the top of page. (In actuality, we got maybe a ten percent bump in business page views).

The most common problem with Yelp is the well-documented tendency to filter positive reviews when business owners declined to advertise with them. It would go like this:

Company gets a few positive reviews, ergo, gets on Yelp's radar.
Aggressive account executives try to sell business owners advertising space on the website.
If the company accepts, it may, for a while, be left alone. If the company declines, their positive reviews start disappearing.
Yelp denies any wrong-doing.

It went much like that with us. We got a surge of good reviews that stayed on the site, unfiltered, for months at a time. Yelp called us, and in my naivety, I thought it might give us a little bit of an edge. I bought in to the advertising.

However, just as our contract was about to come up for renewal, we couldn't keep a positive review on the site longer than a couple of days. After I formally canceled the renewal, every review we received was archived (filtered) within two or three days.

Another recent example: Greg L. gave us a five-star review on the 19th, the same day that an angry customer gave us a one-star review. (That's a story in itself -- she admitted that we gave her five-star service, but a later assembly job went bad thanks to a very green employee we shouldn't have sent. She later upgraded the review in order to get some more of that five-star service, but when I declined, she downgraded it again. That comes pretty close to extortion, if you ask me.) Anyway, Greg wrote the positive review, then updated it later that day in response to the one-star review.

Here it is:

So it has been several months since I hired these guys to help me move last October. That's not a reflection on their service in any way. I'm just kind of lazy.

Anyway, these guys are great. I could call up the owner and actually speak with him. Booking was a breeze. Everyone was always very polite, and I wasn't charged anything for needing to cancel the move the day before because of a problem with the apartment I was moving into. When I rescheduled, they were great about that as well.

The three men I hired to help with the move were impeccably professional. My belongings were well-secured. They were careful with everything and didn't waste a second. Not once did they stop, not even for a breather. They worked very, very hard.

I plan on asking them to help me with my next move. There's not even a question in my mind about who to call.

[EDIT] I have just seen that there are some absurd negative reviews on here. I cannot imagine how someone could give these folks such a poor rating. Chris is fantastic person to deal with and very understanding. He really seems to care about providing excellent customer service. And like I mentioned above, the men who showed up for the move were very professional and polite. I cannot stress that enough -- I was very impressed. These are good people who work hard.

It was archived five days later.

Negative reviews, of course, are "evergreens" and stay on the site forever, presumably until I shell out more cash. As friend in the industry put it, "Yelp is a finely honed protection racket."

Agreed.

7 Things Your Employees Never Want to Hear

2012-01-19T06:15:00.000-08:00

Inc. online has an article called "7 Things Your Employees Never Want to Hear." It details alternatives that you, as a boss, might want to consider.

The advice is good, but it doesn't work for every industry. And anyway, I've found my own alternatives. In brief, here they are:

1. "Good idea -- now if we also..."
My alternative: "That's a horrible idea. Go fold those blankets."

2. "Look. I’m in charge here."
My alternative: Actually, that's pretty good.

3. "I have a great opportunity for you."
My alternative: "You don't look like you're doing anything. Go fold those blankets."

4. "Man, I’m looking forward to my trip to Europe."
My alternative: "I don't care where we take our vacation as long as I don't have to see you for two weeks."

5. "I’ve had enough. I’m out of here."
My alternative: "I'm gonna brainstorm in the boardroom." The boardroom, of course, is the Majestic Lounge around the corner. Great beer selection.

6. "No."
My alternative: Hahaha. "No."

7. "We."
My alternative: "Look. I'm in charge here."

Feel free to use any of these!

Rant of the Week: Yelp

2012-01-17T04:19:00.000-08:00

Mind if I rant a little bit?

Today I'd like to rant about Yelp, our harsh mistress, our abusive spouse, the source and summit of all our success and the cause of much of our stress.

(Btw, check out our nearly complete Yelp archive here -- we've collected all the reviews we could, but we're a little behind. Still, the document is huge...)

First, the good: Yelp has been very good to us on one level. A few years ago, I noticed we were getting website traffic from this curiously named site called "Yelp.com." I asked TJ, my buddy who knows all things wine, food, travel and pop culture, (he worked for USA Today for a little while, writing about such things) if he he knew what that site was.

"You're getting good Yelp reviews?" he said, "That's great!" (I appreciated his optimism -- we WERE getting a few good reviews, but it was equally possible that we were getting negative reviews).

He told me it was one of these great new Web 2.0 websites or something, and that we might see some new exposure from it. That was welcome news, because back in those days, I was putting out flyers in coffee shops, putting ads on Craigslist, and hoping for the best. "The best" usually meant a couple of jobs per week.

"Good," I said. "That would be nice."

About a year later, somewhere around 90 percent of our business came from Yelp. I remember calling my dad, a fairly big bigshot businessman in his pond, to brag to him that his liberal arts major slacker son had amassed 15, that's fifteen reviews on Yelp.com.

"That's great!" he said, clearly not knowing what the hell Yelp was. "Keep up the good work. How's the weather?"

That's how all of our conversations go. [New business] + Weather + [Here's your mother.]

I was pretty frakking proud of that particular high water mark, and I couldn't have guessed or even hoped for much more. Still, we managed to shoot up to almost 90 reviews by the end of 2010. Most of which were 5-stars. The vast majority of which were 5-stars.

We weren't the only ones benefiting from great Yelp reviews. We have a little network of what I call our "Trusted Movers," of which there are about four companies. One of them, Bookstore Movers, was always our north star -- no matter how many reviews we received, we were always at LEAST ten reviews behind them. At one point, I think they had over 100 visible 5-star reviews.

The word "visible" is key there. Because not long after we started getting a lot of reviews, we started losing a few. Then a few more. And then many more. It didn't take long to discover that Yelp has an "automatic" (more on that later) filtering system that looks for bogus reviews and shuffles them to a filtered (or archived) section. You can still access them, but they don't show up in the rankings, and you have to scroll way down to the bottom of the page and click on an obscure, grayed-out link, and THEN do that annoying captcha thing.

So, for example, as of this writing we have 189 filtered reviews and 53 visible reviews, our overall ranking is based on those 53 reviews. We are currently the most-reviewed company in our category and area, but we show up on page two or three, depending on inscrutable factors.

Back in 2010, though, that wasn't as much of a concern. We had more business than we could handle, people were predisposed to love us (and be much more forgiving if we screwed up) because they knew they could trust us to at least try to do a good job and never screw them over. What could be better?

Well, aggressive account executives from Yelp convinced me that we could do better by paying for advertising. Benefits:

More exposure by:

Put up a slideshow of the images of your business.
Highlight a user’s review that you like the most (as the business owner)
Promote your business as a sponsored search result and on your competitors’ business pages. Target potential clients while they are making decisions about where to spend their money on a business like yours

Sounds great, right? It sounded like a nice little cushion of a lead -- our already numerically superior advantage bolstered by some good top-page placement on competitor's pages.

And, of course, the unspoken expectation that by becoming paying customers to Yelp, we'd get some...oh...less tangible pull with management when it came to regulating or monitoring our reviews. Surely someone paying thousands of dollars per year is going to get a little extra juice with Yelp, right?

Wrong. Almost immediately after beginning our advertising campaign, our reviews took a nosedive. It was epidemic -- every other company I'm friendly with had a similar problem. Bookstore Movers went from 100 reviews to around 25 in just a couple of months.

It was a slaughter. My Truck Buddy, Suburban Solutions, Haulzing, District Relocators and others all lost huge chunks of their reviews. It was panic time.

Worse, Yelp's algorithm was OVERLY aggressive. I mean Mike Tyson on a third date aggressive. 99.99 percent of our reviews are legitimate (one of our guys, in a fit of well-meaning but totally unsanctioned initiative wrote a review for us. It was filtered). So, new reviews were being archived (filtered) within days or weeks of posting. Curiously, bad reviews would stay on much, much longer. I don't have hard data for that time period, but more recently, we've lost at least eleven reviews in less than a month of posting -- actually, all but two were lost within a week:

Suzanne C.: 2 days
Jamie K.: 5 days
Sara D.: 3 days
Jeffrey C.: 3 days
Ricardo C.: 5 days
Desiree W.: 2 days
Jane E.: 2 days
Donna M.: 3 days
Jw.w.: 3 days
Justin S.: one month
Julie G.: 3 days

That's a tiny sample of the archive.

I now know I was naive to think that with no hard agreement we'd still have a little more pull at Yelp. As it happens, they don't give a damn. They get your money, and then, mysteriously, your reviews start dropping into the ether.

Yelp reps have a bad reputation among us business owners, at least in the moving industry. (Here's a good take-down of Yelp's shady practices from another industry.) Whenever any of us would call to get some clarification or HELP, we'd get the standard boilerplate "Our algorithm is designed to ensure people are reading only legitimate reviews blah blah blah." That's little comfort to a business owner who's worked extremely hard to build systems and practices that ensure customer satisfaction, only to see tangible, public, online proof disappear after a few days on the site.

And don't get me started on their near-refusal to do anything that comes close to redress for biz owners plagued by stalker psychopaths. Actually, too late, I started...

About six months ago we got a little backdraft from a situation involving one of our friends in the business. Long story short, the move went bad. Some of it was their fault, and some of it was their customer's fault. The situation became extremely acrimonious, and as best as we could tell, that customer got all of her friends to write negative (scathing, actually) reviews about them on Yelp. The problem: at least six of those reviews were totally bogus, as in THE COMPANY DIDN'T ACTUALLY SERVICE THEM IN ANYWAY. The reviews were pure fiction.

Because we'd referred that customer to our partners, we got a little of that wrath. Some jerk who we never helped wrote a negative review about us, accusing us of damage and theft. I take that very seriously, and I got to the bottom of it immediately. We had no record of that customer, he didn't respond to inquiries about it, and he never bothered to contact me directly. In other words, this was a completely and utterly bogus review.

Further proof: that guy reviewed about five other moving companies on the same day. Huh? Did he store up all his negative reviews from the past five years? And the only positive review he'd ever given was for a bike shop in Portland, OR.

I brought these facts to Yelp, and they said there wasn't much they could do: they weren't going to get into a "he said, she said" situation because they had no way of knowing who was telling the truth.

SAY WHAT?!? Their whole business is predicated on the veracity of their reviews!

Fortunately, that review was eventually flagged for content violations. It doesn't show up in our rankings or even the filtered section. But who knows what kind of damage that did?

I could go on (especially about over-zealous reviewers who seem to take pleasure in damaging companies' reputations over trivial things, or about customers who basically extort us for more goods and services while wielding the badge of "consumer advocate").

To all our customers who've reviewed us favorably (and even those who've LEGITIMATELY reviewed us negatively): thank you for taking the time to register your opinion. That aspect of Yelp is good -- a public forum where people can reward good customer service, and help companies improve when they've dropped the ball. But to business owners considering buying into Yelp's malicious business model, STEER CLEAR. It's not worth it. You'll spend thousands of dollars for maybe a 10 percent uptick in page views. As noted here, your money is spent far better on Adwords or really, anything else.

Rant fin.

Hire movers or move yourself? Part II

2012-01-11T06:11:00.000-08:00

Here's the second part of our reflection on whether to hire movers or do it yourself.

It's totally and completely unbiased, of course.

Get the article here.

Hire a mover or do it yourself?

2012-01-09T08:21:00.001-08:00

Whoops! I forgot to post this article here last week. It's Part 1 of a two-part article covering the first decision in the moving process. Check thou it out:

Do it! Do it now!

2012-01-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

The most expensive poster I've ever purchased.

Want to know how to get things done? Do them. Yeah, it's that simple.

If you're like me, though (and I feel sorry for you if you are), then you often feel like there's no better time to do those big, important things than "tomorrow."

There is no greater threat to getting things done than "tomorrow." I said "I'll do it tomorrow" for about thirty years, but I rarely did unless faced with the threat of painful financial or personal consequences, and even then, I could find a reason to put it off, whatever "it" was. You know what? Tomorrow always comes, and so does another one. And another one. And another one. There always seems to be an infinite series of tomorrows -- especially when you're young.

I've wanted to write a novel or two since I was fifteen years old. It's the one, single desire or motivation that I'd ever identified in my life. Everything else has been something like "I want to find meaning" or "Someday I'd like to travel the world." Blah, blah, blah. While I was searching for meaning and planning to plan to travel, I should have been putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or whatever. Instead, I lived lavishly on a huge stash of tomorrows.

"I'll get started on that novel tomorrow." Of course, my timing was always horrible -- it always seemed like the next day was Friday, and the guys are having a going-away party for so-and-so, and the next thing I know, it's Monday and my job isn't to write crappy knock-offs of Stephen King novels (my high school fiction specialty).

Things are a little different now. I have no choice but to set up tasks and knock them down. I'm ever mindful of tomorrow, but now that remote date isn't a repository of future hopes and dreams. It's actual, real, precious and dwindling time. It's finite. I have no idea if I have more of it left than what I've already spent, but it sure doesn't feel like it. So now I USE the hell out of it.

I have a print-out on my wall just above my desk reminding me that the best time to get something done is right now. It says "DO IT NOW! DO IT ONLY ONCE!." I got it from an efficiency expert who came in once a month or so to remind me how much of a slacker I was. I won't tell you what I paid for this irritating reminder, but it was a LOT, and that little poster is probably the sum total of what he taught me. It was expensive as hell, but if you've had a lifetime habit of doing the opposite of that, sometimes you need to pay for a jump start on reversing the habit.

Following that advice ("Do it now!") has been the single greatest change in the business. The last three months or so of 2011 were more productive than the prior three years. Until about September or so, I'd PLANNED a great many things, but the endless pressing minutia of a moving business (responding to emails, scheduling jobs, assigning crews, buying equipment and, of course, actually DOING the jobs) took up 20 hours per day. Meanwhile, the website languished, processes and procedures never left my head, and nothing got done. But once I started DOING those things that needed to be done instead of planning to do them, that's when we turned a corner.

So, that's your advice for the day. For a lot of people, this is obvious, but for many of us out there wondering why things never change, it's life-changing. I think the sum total of all "guru" advice is this: Do. Do it now. Like any bit of wisdom, it's the simplest things we already know that are the most effective, true and profitable.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T06:28:00.000-08:00

"The end of the beginning" is what one of my friends and colleagues in the business recently named one of his Facebook photo albums. It took me a second, but I got it soon enough. The album contained pictures of his new office building and headquarters. He was understandably proud of his achievement -- he got into the moving business around the same time we did, and our growth has been about the same. He went from renting an occasional truck -- and sleeping in it -- to having an office in which he could spread out. One phase of the business, the beginning, was coming to an end.

I feel the same way, although our office space remains as humble as before, although cleaner. My buddy has executive office space -- we have a new file cabinet, which I think is very cool for some reason. We also have four desks and a refrigerator. Starbucks would NEVER have let me bring my own mini-fridge to one of my "remote offices" back in the early days. So, in a way, this is the end of our beginning too.

Like it or not.

It's been a good year. A GREAT year. We tripled revenue over last year -- in a recession. We earned somewhere over 250 5-star reviews on Yelp, got a second Angie's List Super Service Award, got all our legal and regulatory ducks in a row, and it looks like we're going to survive the "dead zone" between September and February as long as the savings hold out. We have a budget in place for next year, a marketing plan or two, and the best guys in the industry to make some awesome things happen. A 30-year veteran and friend in the business thinks our 2012 goals are insane, and I respect him as a mentor, but I think we may just be able to achieve those goals.

This has all been possible thanks to people in the DC area. So, thank you, DC people! Thank you for your business, and for taking a chance on a new company trying to do what is typically not advisable, or even considered possible -- create a "new kind of business." Thanks especially to those of you who have written great reviews on Yelp and Angie's List. And, of course, thank you to everyone who's come back and used My Truck Buddy again and again.

I should also give a great big THANK YOU to my wife Judie, whose guidance and patience has inspired and allowed me to keep going when I thought I had nothing left.

I know this must read like an Academy Award speech, but I'm not laboring under any illusion that we've "made it." Hardly. The bills are bigger, the consequences for failing to be in compliance are much more expensive and possible, and we still have a couple of months to go before we can relax comfortably in the knowledge that whatever else happens, we know there will be jobs on the calendar. We're wrapping up a big, busy week, but next week the normal winter cycle continues -- a few jobs on the calendar because it's close to the end of the previous month, then second week, which is dead and empty, a few jobs the week after, and a mere five or so jobs in the last week.

In the past, this dearth of jobs would have me in panic mode, possibly blogging about the collapse of all my best efforts. Now, "meh." We've been here before. We survived. We will again, unless the economy finally collapses (a very real concern of mine.)

I think I'm going to take a week off, either next week or the one after that. Yesterday I think I got sick in a way I've never been sick before. It wasn't quite a cold and wasn't quite a flu. I don't know what it was, but it FELT a lot like I'd just burned the candle at both ends for 364 days, and I finally ran out of steam. I saw it coming, too. In the last few weeks, my 100 percent was more like my 25 percent of a few months ago. With great effort, I was barely able to concentrate on the day's objectives, and I was rarely able to achieve them.

It's time for a break.

Anyway, here's to 2012. We're ready to do some great things, and I hope people will continue to give us a shot. I hope that 2012 is everything you all want it to be, too. Cheers!

C.

My Truck Buddy lands second consecutive Angie's List Super Service Award

2011-12-15T07:16:00.000-08:00

MyTruckBuddy.com Earns Coveted Angie’s List SuperService Award Two Years in a Row

Award reflects businesses’ consistently high level ofcustomer service

MyTruckBuddy.comhas been awarded the prestigious 2011 Angie’s List Super Service Award, anhonor bestowed annually on approximately 5 percent of all the businesses ratedon the nation’s leading provider of consumer reviews on local service andhealth providers. This is the second consecutive year MyTruckBuddy.com hasreceived the Super Service Award.

“Weare extremely happy about the award,” said Christopher Jolma, founder andmanaging partner of MyTruckBuddy.com. “The business has tripled growth everyyear for the last three years, and while we’ve had a lot of growing pains,we’ve remained true to our core principle of service to the community. TheSuper Service Award is a welcome recognition of our daily efforts to servepeople in the most fair, safe and efficient manner possible.”

“Onlya fraction of the businesses rated on Angie’s List can claim the sterlingservice record of being a Super Service Award winner because we set a highbar,” said Angie’s List Founder Angie Hicks.“The fact that MyTruckBuddy.com can claim Super Service Award status speaksvolumes about its dedication to consumers.”

Angie’sList Super Service Award winners have met strict eligibility requirementsincluding earning a minimum number of reports, an exemplary rating from their clients and abiding by Angie’s Listoperational guidelines.

Ratings are updateddaily on Angie’s List, but members can find the 2011 Super Service Award logonext to business names in search results on AngiesList.com.

Christopher Jolmafounded MyTruckBuddy.com in 2008 in response to the downturn in the economy.Initially an emergency “job,” MTB has since grown from a “buddy with a truck”to a modest fleet of trucks helping people in the Washington, DC area with itsmoving and transportation needs.

###

Angie’s List collects consumer reviews on local contractorsand doctors in more than 500 service categories. Currently, more than 2 million consumers across the U.S. rely onAngie’s List to help them make the best hiring decisions. Members get unlimitedaccess to local ratings via Internet or phone, exclusive discounts, the Angie’s List magazine and help fromthe Angie’s List complaint resolution service. Take a quicktour of Angie’s List and view the latest Angie’sList news.

If only he knew what the scroll wheel on his mouse was for...

2011-12-02T09:01:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we received the most vicious email I've ever seen in MTB history. A potential customer was enraged, apparently, that we didn't include dollar amounts in our estimate. There was an exchange of emails, and he ended up writing a bad review on Angie's List.

Here's the problem: WE DID INCLUDE DOLLAR AMOUNTS. In fact, they were in a larger, bolder font. The customer knows this, but he's apparently an unstable person and decided to slander us anyway.

I wrote a response on Angie's List, and in it, I promised to include our full correspondence. After a little reflection, I've decided against it as the potential damage is relatively minimal. However, I will post the following two images as evidence that we did, in fact, give him a complete estimate. Furthermore, this has been our standard estimate template for about a year, given to literally thousands of people. In all that time, we've never had someone misunderstand the estimate so egregiously.

Here's the belligerent response we got from the customer after sending the estimate. Please note that this was the very first response we received from him after sending a full, complete estimate:

And here's the section he neglected to read. It appears in roughly the middle of the standard estimate we send out:

When I pointed out the misunderstanding, Randy said he was "deeply offended" that we didn't send a proper estimate, and that he'd be giving us an 'F' because of our dishonesty.

Too bad for us, I guess. All of this could have been avoided if we'd simply pointed out the scroll wheel in the middle of his mouse...

When the student is ready...EntreLeadership

2011-11-26T11:09:00.001-08:00

When I first realized I was probably going to "have to" take this little Truck Buddy idea to whatever conclusion I had to, I wished for a manual to tell me what the hell I needed to do. There was nothing out there. Sure, there were a million books about business, but nothing that gave me the bare bones "This-is-what-you-must-do" kind of book. That's because it hadn't been written yet. Now, fortunately, it has been: it's Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership.

Actually, I probably would have passed on the book had it existed four years ago. I was looking for a book specifically about the moving industry that didn't bore me to tears. I needed to know things like how to find insurance, what KIND of insurance I needed, what regulations applied to my kind of business, and, of course, where on earth do you find the things you need to comply with?!? (Let me tell you -- there's nothing more unnerving than knowing you don't know much about what to do, but knowing that that ignorance WILL sink you if you don't learn it fast.) EntreLeadership isn't that kind of book, but it's a must-have if you're interested in creating an authentic company culture, having some idea of where your company is going, and how to avoid letting little deficiencies turn into big, fatal problems later.

Reading it now, after four years of experience, I realize that it couldn't have come at a better time for me personally, and for the business. I might have dismissed it as theoretical fluff -- which would have been a huge mistake. It's not theory. It's as he says -- "20 years of practical business wisdom from the trenches." This is, as Ramsey says, they're playbook for their business. Four years ago I was pulling out my hair (with predictable consequences, as I'm now almost bald) trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of a new business while on a shoestring budget. (Actually, I had about half a shoestring). I didn't have the time or patience for such a book. Now, nothing is more valuable on my bookshelf.

As you might have gathered from the title, it's about leadership for entrepreneurs. It's all in there -- goal-setting, decision-making, marketing systems, personnel management and more. One theme runs through every chapter -- how to stay on target with your goals, and how to encourage everyone on your team to reach for that goal.

He stresses service in everything his company does -- service to both his customers and his staff. Not fluffy sloganeering, but actual, authentic service to everyone. As far as Ramsey is concerned, there's no other way to conduct business. I was particularly gratified to read that because I've tried to stick to the same principle with My Truck Buddy since Day 1. If you're not serving people, you may have some success, but not as much as you would otherwise.

He's an unapologetic Christian, and that might turn some people off, but he doesn't beat you over the head with the Bible. Whatever you might think of Christianity, the bits of the Faith he slips into the text are unarguably relevant to running a "socially conscious" business striving for a servant mentality.

I've been listening to the audiobook on my daily epic commute. I was thrilled to realize I've been doing about half of what he suggests. And, I was mortified to realize I'd neglected approximately the other half. In fact, some things I'd been doing I'd thought were really clever or shrewd were actually bad. EntreLeadership has re-aligned my whole mindset about my business, and business in general. We've already been busy preparing for 2012, but this book is giving us a much, much better foundation.

The book isn't for everyone. If you have no intention of ever running your own business, or you have no plans or expectations to ever be in charge of "team members," you won't get as much out of it. Don't get me wrong -- you'll get something out of it -- but, it's really for people who want to be the best leaders they can in all areas of their lives. God forbid I ever become some kind of business guru, but if I were to ever give anyone instruction in that area, this would easily be the first, perhaps only, book I'd ever recommend.

I want to hire this guy

2011-11-18T06:58:00.000-08:00

see more epicfails

Moving FAILs: Not saying this will definitely happen, but...

2011-10-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

see more That Will Buff Out

Moving FAILs: Just give us a call already, will you???

2011-10-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!

My Truck Buddy then and now

2011-10-04T08:06:00.000-07:00

We're resuscitating our marketing efforts for the slow season, which means digging up all our old pictures in the archive. There are some good ones -- laughably naive, etc. For example, here's a picture I took in the very earliest days:

Look at me -- so proud, so slightly overweight. "Look at all these straps I have! And all these tarps! I'm prepared for anything."

Ah, stupid young Chris from 2008. How innocent you were. If someone went to a job with those things now I'd register him in the Truck Buddy "resume preparation class" by the end of the day.

Along those lines, we came across the following picture:

This was taken during the winter of '09 or so, I believe. It was my brilliant idea to go to some busy spot and hand out hot chocolate, cookies and business cards. Mission: unsuccessful, sort of. I picked the Masonic temple in Old Town to hand these things out. People were sledding down that big hill. Unfortunately, cookies and hot chocolate appealed primarily to all the children there. I gave a lot of business cards to the under-eight set. Occasionally a parent would stop by to make sure the nice man handing out treats to their children wasn't a child molester. The scary thing is that only a few parents did so.

It's too early to say because, in theory, one of those kids will call us in twenty years. But for now, that was a total bust of an effort.

Nowadays, though, we have our big trucks. I'd say we're showing signs of improvement. The next time we do an on-site marketing event, we're giving away beer. But not to children. We have standards.

Moving Fails: Question: How'd they get it in there?

2011-09-07T08:29:00.000-07:00


Yes, if this is your only option to move your fridge, MTB	can help

Some statistics: average move times

2011-09-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

After about four years of doing this, we're now doing some things we probably should have been doing all along. Things like, you know, keeping up-to-date customer records, doing more pro-active in-house marketing, and, analyzing data. Having never been a "numbers guy," I knew that in theory it was important to quantify and track everything we do, but there was always something more pressing to do (like fires to put out).

However, our "numbers guy" is back from a stint in Denver. In his life prior to MTB he was an analyst of some kind. My read on him is that if he's not crunching numbers, he has siezures. So, I gave him access to the database and let him go nuts. Here's one nugget of information he came up with. Some folks may be interested in what he found:

Average Job Times
N is the number of jobs observed. This data set is taken from all jobs (for which we have data) from around mid-February 2011 to now, September 5, 2011)

1 Room: 2.49 (n=21)

Studio Apartments: 2.83 (n=9)

1 Bedroom Apartments: 3.37 hr (n=64)

1 + Den Apartments: 3.25 hr (n=13)

2 Bedroom Apartments: 4.3055 (n=36)

3 Bedroom Apartments or houses: 4.72 (n=15)

What really surprises me here is how fast bigger jobs (2 and 3 bedroom places) are going, on average. We all have war stories about 11-hour jobs that usually involve the bigger places (sometimes people don't pack and a 1 BD takes all frakking day), but that is an astounding average. It makes me wonder if I need to eliminate our 5-8 hour estimate category altogether.

Questions, comments? Please, let us know!

Moving Fail: Part 1 of a series

2011-09-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you can take that "can-do" spirit too far...

The Mantis gets a makeover

2011-09-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year pre-literate vandals tagged our flagship truck, sometimes known as "The Mantis." She was a beauty before the tagging -- extremely low miles, tons of power, lots of room. She was kind of plain, but the big white box was clean. Then, this happened:

Since most of the time there's no room in the budget for a simple one-color paint job, we weren't able to do anything about it. But eventually, after getting pulled over a half-dozen times or so, I realized it was just a cop-magnet and slathered the sides in white Rustoleum. It almost restored the Mantis to her original sexiness, but she still wasn't quite there.

So, I pulled some change out of the couch cushions and gave her the makeover she deserved:

We thought about doing something funny for the back door, but that duty fell to me, and I'm not that great with "planned humor." So, I went with the safe route -- basic company info for our captive audiences trapped in traffic.

Anyway, she's a beaut. Woe to the hooligans who tag her now.

Happy anniversary, beautiful!

2011-09-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I try not to get too personal on this blog, but this is something I want to mention: yesterday my wife and I celebrated our 5th anniversary. Five years ago neither of us had a clue what we were getting in to, but a lifetime of life, love and a 26' International truck load with a 13' high box completely loaded with challenges later, I can safely say our relationship has been tested.

The state of our union is strong.

So, here's to my wife, who keeps me honest makes me strive for bigger and better things. And to another five years, and another five after that...

A bastard I can live with

2011-09-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

The toughest part of building a business when you have no previous business-building experience is dealing with the things you don't know. It's a lot like a swimming hole we knew about in a little river back home in Washington State. It was lined with massive boulders probably blown there from some volcanic activity millenia previously, had a fun waterfall, and a slow-running area for swimming. The water was deep and cold and perfect on those hot summer days. Places like that inspire country songs.

But there was one little hazard (aside from, you know, the raging waterfall): about six inches under the water in the prime diving location sat a hulking, flat-topped boulder usually submerged from view. It seems like someone was killed or crippled every year diving into that thing. If you weren't with locals who knew about it, you could demolish yourself.

That's a lot like what this is like. Donald Rumsfeld (in)famously talked about "known knowns," "known unknowns," and "unknown unknowns." When you have a liberal arts background, virtually everything falls into the "unknown unknown" category, often with painful consequences.

Take a recent licensing issue I had. I'd paid a lawyer an enormous sum of money (for me and this little business, anyway) to "take care of it." Have you ever tried to get simple, actionable information from a government website? It's ridiculous. And if you actually get a hold of a somewhat knowledgeable human in whatever government office, what they tell you seems to contradict everything on the website. So, for me, paying the lawyer was a great investment. "Here's money: make the problems go away."

Well, for whatever reason, he didn't take care of our City of Alexandria license, which resulted in a somewhat aggressive call from the city. "Come down here and fix it or we're going to charge you [$basically as much as the company grosses every day] every day until it's handled." It would have put us out of business which, the bureaucrat couldn't have known, wasn't exactly a threat. After four years of 14-hour days, my body beat to hell, my mind sludge, and finally, my oldest son asking whether he even had a daddy, I could probably live with packing it all in. But, out of some sense of duty and stupidity, I went down to City Hall for what would turn into a bi-weekly ritual probing.

Long story short, it's handled. We're fully licensed and insured. But the government worker mentioned that the licensing issue came up when one of my office neighbors informed on us. ("Bureaucrat" now seems too loaded a term for someone who, in the end, was very pleasant and helpful as long as I did exactly what she wanted immediately or sooner), It didn't take long to figure out who it was -- MTB World HQ is right next to a bigger, more established moving company. They've been in business for about 40 years -- and for most of it they've been in the same location.

I thought she was mistaken, because when I moved in to this office, I went next door to shake the owner's hand and introduce myself. I had a couple of goals:

First, I wanted to let him know that I probably wasn't a direct competitor, so please don't slash my tires.

Second, I wanted to extend to him the same courtesy I do with several "partner-competitors" in my Trusted Mover Network. We receive far more requests than we can handle, and I (perhaps naively) happily refer people to other companies I trust. They do the same. Even with five or so companies working together, we all STILL can't do all the jobs people need us to do. Since I needed another "big company" in my Trusted Mover Network, I thought my neighbor would be an excellent candidate.

So why would he just hand us over to the city like that? I needed to find out.

Surprisingly enough, I met the big guy (who I will now call "Big Guy") himself. Big Guy is older, and a gentlemen from the old school of business. Unlike us Truck Buddies who prize informality and a laid-back way of doing things, Big Guy wore a suit WITH jacket on in his office which, by the way, was immaculate. That alone astounded me. How could anyone run a brutal business like this for 40-some years and not have a bottle of Jack on his desk, an empty shot glass, and a clean revolver in his hand?

We had a good, but stiff meeting. His desk was high, and his chairs were low, which meant I felt like a four-year-old supplicant asking for a lollipop. He was cordial and polite, if uninterested in what I had to say. I chalked it up to the fact that this industry isn't exactly dominated by affable, friendly people. Based on recent events, I now realize he probably regarded me as a naive idiot.

I proposed my idea about sending him the big jobs and him sending me small jobs. "Do you do commercial moves?" he asked.

"Nope," I said. And it's true -- we don't like them.

"Well then, we're not competitors," he said. "Welcome to the business!"

And that was that.

Nine months later, the guy reported me to the City of Alexandria because of that licensing issue.

I took care of it, but the narc situation didn't sit well with me. I extended a hand of friendship and came back with nub. So, perhaps still idiotically naive, I went over there yesterday to ask him what the problem was.

I caught the Big Guy outside while he was walking his gigantic poodle-type dog. "I got a call from the city," I said, and I think there might be some mistake, but I think it was someone in your company--"

"It was me. I called."

Surprised, I tried to explain that it was an honest mistake, it was fixed, and that I was a little miffed that he'd call the law dogs on a company doing everything it could to A) stay in business, and B) stay in business legally. He didn't even care that this business came out of a need to provide for my family when I was laid off from my last job.

I would have gotten farther with the poodle. "So, what's the problem?" I asked.

As it happens, the problem was exactly what I deal with on a daily basis. He had just shelled out tens of thousands of dollars in taxes to the city. He has a bigger fleet both in size and number of trucks. The economy sucks, business is down, and people are finding alternate moving methods. However, the tax-man still cometh regardless. He didn't like the idea of an up-start company competing against him (even though we don't, which I tried to explain) and not paying their fair share.

That was it: "Everyone has to pay their dues, everyone has to pay their fair share."

I couldn't have agreed more. There are somewhere over 500 legal and semi-legal moving companies in the area. Competition is fierce. It's a ridiculously expensive industry. Overhead is way, WAY over head, which makes it difficult to pay for excellent people. We compete directly against hundreds, if not thousands of what we call "Craigslist Cowboys." You know exactly who I'm talking about -- guys who offer a ridiculously low rate and promise you the moon. But on move day, if they show up at all, they're late, they hit you with all kinds of hidden fees, and forget about getting compensation for damages. Even some the best ones have a fundamental dishonesty at the core of their business -- they present themselves as real companies, but the rates they charge can in no way cover the overhead. But they don't need to charge anything close to industry-standard rates -- they're not paying for workman's comp, cargo insurance, general liability insurance, taxes, etc.

I understood where the Big Guy was coming from. That he saw us as some of those "Craigslist Cowboys" (or move rustlers?) stung quite a bit, especially since I struggled for YEARS to get fully compliant, all the while trying to keep us in a home WITH enough food for two growing boys. And, of course, the dozen or so guys depending on the success of the company.

So, it was a real bastard move to simply inform on us instead of walking the 50 feet from his office to mine to mention his concern, but I understand. He's seen 'em come and he's seen 'em go. At some point, I'd love to buy the guy a beer and thank him for "raising my awareness" about the matter.

Please forgive our tardiness

2011-06-13T04:54:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone (assuming anyone actually reads this blog...),

We're very sorry for the delay in processing your work requests. I have literally worked six months to prepare for the summer rush to avoid exactly this situation, but it appears I've failed to anticipate just how many requests we'd get. Thank you! And, of course, please forgive us!

I have more work to do today than I ever did in the 15 years of previous work experience. Nonetheless, I'm going to fix this today. From now on, you'll receive an estimate within 24 hours. In the near future, we hope to provide instant estimates. We have all the data we need to figure out how to do that, and we've got a rock star coder waiting in the wings to do the project.

Thank you for your patience, and for your business, of course. We're working to serve you better.

Chris

Moving: I now feel your pain

2011-06-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

The rental market is so tough right now that THIS is a viable option.

As it happens, some of my marketing isn't just fluff. I remember reading somewhere that moving is in the top five most traumatic life experiences for a person. It's right up there with a break-up or losing a loved one. Public speaking may still be the number one traumatic experience in a person's life, but moving is still up there.

I bring this up because we have to move again. Our landlords decided not to renew our lease, instead opting to give the house back to their son who, by the way, they kicked out to put us in there.

I. Hate. Moving. Ironic, no? I actually love what we do, which is essentially acting as the Special Forces of the moving industry -- we drop in in our Huey (or 16' box truck, whichever is available that day) -- assess the situation, load up and roll out before the echo fades. (A line I've always loved from Patriot Games, which I've never gotten to incorporate until now). That part is fun. But actually moving myself? It's a horrible, horrible experience.

As you know, first you have to find a place. You have to sort through hundreds, if not thousands of potential listings. You find yourself looking at former meth labs and trying to convince yourself of things like "You know, with the right curtains, that nest of black widows doesn't look so bad." When you go out to see the potentials, you have to be nice and friendly with all the other irritated, often desperate people looking at the same houses.

"We could put the crib over here," you might say. "And this room could be the office."

The other couple might say "Oh, wow, this room would be perfect for a landlord gift-making station!"

Then there's the personal and financial probing -- the credit checks, the background checks, the reference checks... Thankfully nobody asks how many parking tickets I've gotten, otherwise we'd be homeless.

And then, when it's all settled, and you've found a place that will suffice with some new curtains and a toxic spread of Raid and bleach for just $100 or $200 over your top-end budget, the packing begins. Oh, the packing! Great Odin's Raven, the packing! We haven't even gotten to that point yet and I'm already about to curl up in the fetal position on my office floor. I could take a six-hour bath with scented candles and the collected works of Colbie Callait and I'd still be tense. (What?) Yes, I know that kids make you accumulate an astonishing amount of crap, but really? 50 boxes of kids stuff? Yeah, probably.

At least I'll be in complete control once the new place is secured, the house is packed, and we're ready to load the truck. I've done THAT part about 2,000 times. Until then, oh buddies, it's misery.

On the bright side, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to film every aspect of the moving process in order to show people some best practices. What to do about dressers...how to pack wardrobe boxes...what to do about lamps...etc. It'll be instructive. Maybe even fun! Keep an eye out for those.

Anyway, enough of this. I have to go find a crack house for my family.

Not Truck Buddy Material: Steve

2011-06-08T04:37:00.000-07:00

How could I have forgotten Steve? He was one of the first really shocking burn-outs of the modern MTB era.

Steve talked the talk like they all do. "I'm 100 percent reliable, a fast learner, a hard worker, etc..." Blah, blah, blah. He responded to an ad where I noted -- in some detail -- that I didn't want guys to come in here thinking they know everything about moving and refuse to learn our way. "No problem," Steve said. "I'll do it your way."

On his third job he showed up, took a look at the job, and declared that it was really more of a "two-man job." It may have been, but if I tell a customer three guys is likely to be better (as in, it'll save them money by completing the job more quickly), then that's what they expect and that's what they get. But not only did Steve decide to re-negotiate the terms of the job while on-site, he told the crew leader to "put him down for two hours" even though he'd only worked for a few minutes or so. And then he left.

So, by "I'll do it your way," he really meant "I'll do whatever the hell I want, and oh, by the way, I'm going to steal from you."

Thanks Steve. Good luck in life.

Not Truck Buddy Material: Kenneth (an update)

2011-06-08T04:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a hilarious update about Kenneth, one of our recent NTBM inductees:

Last week he was a no-show to an interview. I didn't think much of it at that point because that's what people do. We schedule interviews, and people just don't show up. That's the reality. Me expecting people to show up is me expecting a different reality. It would be like expecting it to rain donuts, or the Khardashians to become icons for style, taste, modesty and virtue.

Kenneth surprised me, though. He called yesterday and said he was coming in.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"Kenneth. I'm coming in to talk to you about the job."

Panicked, I checked the calendar. Maybe I'd screwed up. Maybe I'd put him on the NTBM Wall of Shame unjustly.

"I have it down for 10:00 AM last week, buddy," I said. "Did I make a mistake?"

"Something came up."

Something. Came. Up. Not even a "I had to take my grandma to the hospital," or "I was abducted and brainwashed by an al Qaeda sleeper cell. Allahu Akbar, by the way."

"You probably should have told me that," I said. After all this was one of the guys who responded to the latest ad on Craigslist. It was about 10 percent job description and 90 percent "Do NOT waste my time with unprofessional BS."

I told him not to come in, but he got testy. "But I'm already on the train!"

I told him we had it covered, "best of luck," and hung up. While it would be a fun exercise, I don't have the time to try to understand such a mentality. "Hey there! I'm a week late, but mind if I drop by anytime without an appointment for that interview?"

This kind of thing happens every single time I go on a recruiting jag. I fear for our country.

Not Truck Buddy Material: Kenneth

2011-06-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

Scheduled an interview with "Kenneth" for today between 10:00--11:00. It's now noon.

Kenneth, if you're reading this, please hit yourself in the head repeatedly until you pass out. When you wake up, repeat the procedure.

Thanks!
Grown-ups

NTBM: Not Truck Buddy Material -- a series

2011-05-31T20:19:00.000-07:00

This is the first of what will undoubtedly be a long series. I should have seen the bloggable pattern years ago, but it was only after being hit in the face with it so many times lately that I realized we have a real problem here.

Here's the problem: thousands of people move in the DC area every year. With just a tiny bit of marketing, we could be their movers. IF, that is, I could find enough halfway decent guys to do the work. The guys currently in MTB's employ are all fantastic. They embody the philosophy we're going for around here--they have brains, ingenuity, and the brawn to get it done. But in order to grow the company to a point where we're not just living paycheck to paycheck, we need to do more jobs or radically raise our prices. It's an expensive business to run, but I don't want to price ourselves right out of our target market. So, the plan is to make it up on volume.

Buuuut, how do you do that when new guys don't show up? Hell, I'd be somewhat happy with guys who just showed up to interviews.

In the last few weeks we've had some doozies. There have been a few losers in the past who've come our way, but comparatively speaking, not many. I think it has to do with simple numbers -- the more potential new guys we need, the more potential problems we'll have. We've NEVER had staffing issues like this before, and while our standards are high, they're not THAT high. All you need to do is show up on time, work hard and fast, be friendly and careful. It's that simple. In fact, that last sentence runs across the top of my whiteboard in the office. Every. Single. Guy who comes in for an interview (the ones who actually show up, that is), laughs and says, "Yeah, man, that's so obvious. Who can't do that?!?" Well, 75% of new candidates, apparently.

Some of the recent lowlights:

James
Scheduled for the first of three interviews in one day. No-show.

Rhys
Showed up for the interview, we hit it off, and I was thinking "Crew Leader material, all the way." On his first job, he showed up to the site, went to look for parking, and we never saw him again. Later he said his phone/GPS ran out of juice, and then he got lost. I gave him a second chance, but he never responded. Goodbye.

Andre
Scheduled for third interview of the day. No-show. I got an email from him later in which he claimed to have lost a family member in a head-on collision that I'd actually heard about in the news. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. I told him to come by whenever he felt up to it, but so far, no word.

Jeffrey
He was actually referred by one of our best guys who knew him through a Bible study. A Bible study!!! He was a decent enough worker (I didn't have a chance to observe him personally), but on his fourth job he went to the pizza place next door looking to pick up some delivery jobs. Cash was always tight for this guy, apparently, a situation I attribute to being unemployed for a long time while still owing money for a new Chrysler 300. Since the owner/manager had his own no-show that day, Jeffrey got the part-time job.

Well, on his fourth delivery, he decided to pocket the cash for change and the customer's payment. It was a stupid crime he attempted to cover up with numerous additional layers of stupid. The details are unimportant, but he was caught in a lie, and I fired him immediately. He never did understand why something that had "nothing to do with MTB" should get him fired. Yeah, goodbye.

Mark
Another referral (and the last) from the same guy who referred Jeffrey. (That same referrer now refuses to refer anyone else). I liked him immediately. He was friendly, personable, and looked like he could lift 300 pounds and carry on a conversation like it was nothing.

Mark had to bail halfway through a job because he needed to get to a job interview he didn't mention. He actually left the guys hanging to interview for a job where, I was told, he'd drive drunks home late at night from bars. Yeah. That was better than our work...how?!? He also said the commute was too much -- 30 minutes from his place to the office. I had to laugh at that one. I live five miles from the office and it sometimes takes me twice that long to get here. It's actually faster to bike, which I do all the time.

So, buh-bye, Mark.

Mike
The most recent example was another guy I was thinking might make a decent Crew Leader. He came over from one of our partner companies, and while there were some questions about him, I figured everyone deserved a second chance. After all, he'd been laid off and hadn't worked in 30 days...according to him. I told him we needed him on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This desperate, hungry-for-work guy said Thursday was out because of finals. Friday was fine, but he had something to do on Saturday -- the NCAA final four.

Okay...

Mike made it through most of the Friday job, but he got a migraine (allegedly, but plausibly since we were working in an alley under a vent that was spewing some sort of chemical that made us all dizzy). He had to leave. So, I booked him on a couple of jobs today. He did the first, but then, just...disappeared. No word, no text, no call. Nothing. So, he's gone.

I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I don't think this bodes well for our country. Is THIS the typical American worker? In a time of at least nine percent unemployment, guys can't be bothered to show up to interviews -- or even complete a single day's worth of work? It blows my mind.

So, we're in permanent hiring mode. My inclination is to stop hiring altogether, but if not for the fact that we NEED to expand to survive, I'd give up entirely. Therefore, if you're looking for work, or know someone who is, please send them our way. Just make sure they can show up on time...

We do mighty deeds

2011-05-29T20:17:00.000-07:00

This weekend was a doozy. But then, so were the last 40 weekends. There was a time when I thought running two crews independently of my direct supervision was an irresponsible, greedy endeavor. Two crews making money while I sit in a coffee shop somewhere and work on the website? Where's my latte?

Eventually I realized I needed a third crew to help pay the bills. Then I realized that four crews was really the bare minimum necessary to break even. But then this weekend, I got a series of panicked emails from my wife and CFO (same woman) wondering when/where/why/how we were hemorrhaging so much cash. As far as I knew, I hadn't purchased any gold-plated flat screen TVs (TVs are among the most-donated items to MTB World HQ), and I still drive the same little Ford Ranger I started this insane project with, so all the money must be going back into the business. And as if I needed any more proof, I realized that no, five crews isn't what we need, it's more like ten.

Donald Trump I am not. But even I should have realized that paying guys what I do while charging customers as little as I do is a recipe for financial ruin. (Don't get me wrong -- I don't think I pay our Truck Buddies enough. They're among the best guys all-around in the industry.)

So, we've got a bit of a crisis here, which makes me question everything we're doing, where we're going, and if we'll have a company by the next slow season. It's made me a little reflective. I've got about five hours before I have to/get to go back to the office in the morning. I'll figure out what we need to do to survive then. But right now I'm thinking about all we've accomplished. What have we accomplished? Well, let's see...

* I built a million dollar business off of two paychecks after I was laid off. We may not have grossed $1 million yet, but the potential is there with just a little more effort.

* We've earned about 200 five-star reviews on a very popular review website. (Granted, as of this writing, the latest review is a one-star because we failed to answer a request in time. I'm not happy about it, but it's not a bad review for services rendered, so I can live with it -- for now).

* I've built a network of like-minded professionals I consider brothers-in-chaos.

* You name it, we've done it -- sleeper sofas up and over balconies, jobs completed despite overwhelming technical difficulties (tiny trucks, huge over-filled apartments), impossibly heavy entertainment centers carried a quarter mile around properties, jobs successfully completed despite one of my eyes being caked over in blood from an errant bungie cord coming loose... I could go on.

* Building all of this while still raising two little boys, and being at least an adequate husband.

Yeah, no matter what happens, we have done things we can be proud of. Through snowstorms, summer humidity, standstill traffic, and whatever else a city can throw at you, we've helped thousands of people move from one place to another. I may end up taking a job at Starbucks when it's all over with, but I can look at the last five years and be damn proud. Truck Buddies are the best, toughest guys in the industry.

Ah-HA!

2011-03-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

According to the city, one side of the street outside my office is zoned commercial, and the other side is zoned residential. Take THAT parking Nazi!

Who's the biggest threat to small business owners?

2011-03-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

I’m now officially more worried about government officials than the thousands of thugs in the area wielding everything from spray paint to AK-47s.

The other night our flagship truck, the “W3,” was “tagged” by someone. The street side of the truck was barely touched – just a few signs (symbols?) The other side was worked over hard, and it looks like the miscreants were interrupted. I discovered the vandalism Sunday morning and tried to make a report around 8:00 AM. It must have happened between 11:30 and 7:30 AM. When I tried to make the report, I was told that someone would call me back. I didn’t expect a call and didn’t receive one.

I stopped by the office Sunday night to check on the trucks just before dusk. Both of the trucks outside the office had tickets on the windshields.

So, to sum up, the cops won’t call you back when your business has been vandalized, but they WILL take every dollar from you they can get in parking violations. ALLEGED parking violations (more on that in a second.)

This was the straw the broke the camel’s back for me. I now fear the guys in police cars more than the gang-bangers who probably tagged my truck. (In fact, I’m thinking about making a deal with the vandals. As long as they can do good work and use my logo somehow, they can use the truck as a canvas. Might even be cool.) As for the authorities? I’m always scanning the road because I’m afraid I’ve forgotten some detail, haven’t gotten some sticker, might be driving six miles over the speed limit, missed a “no trucks” sign, etc. The state nickels-and-dimes my business to the point where I can’t afford necessary expansions or to hire to guys. I’m not even talking about taxes.

I don’t see myself as a victim here, but I know that I don’t have any friends out there. We’ve been robbed at least five times that I know about for sure, and probably many more times that I’m not. Employees have left the trucks unattended for mere minutes only to discover that customer checks, their cash and personal items were stolen. The last time was a few weeks ago. I’ve had big, hard-to-lift equipment stolen right off the deck of the truck. We’ve filed reports but, naturally, never heard anything again.

However, if our bumper is slightly over a crosswalk, some city or country drone will write us a ticket. I once got a ticket while stopped – NOT PARKED – in front of one of my guys’ houses the night before Thanksgiving. I was writing him a check for the day’s work, and the vigilant meter maid wouldn’t give me 30 seconds. Those 30 seconds cost me $75.

A couple of months ago, a girl slammed into the back of our truck and put one of my guys in the hospital. The truck was parked, and the guys were loading it. Jimmy hit the lift gate on the way down. I’m not sure if the cop gave Jimmy the ticket for parking in the “wrong” place as he was lying in a pool of his own blood or if he waited until he was safely in the ambulance, but that was another $50. We were told by the apartment complex to park on the street. The customer said we should park there. A random poll of residents indicated that EVERYONE was told to park on the street. But, because I wasn’t able to get an affidavit to Fairfax County in time, my LEGITIMATE case was completely dismissed by the county. I tried to press it, but like all government functionaries, the gatekeeper just kept repeating whatever lines were on her script. The thing is, THEY SENT ME THE FORM TOO LATE. I even have a recording of the front desk person telling me they tell everyone to park in the street.

The other day I stopped a meter man from writing a ticket for an “abandoned vehicle.” Someone had complained that one of our trucks was “abandoned,” and out come the authorities. This was for a truck that I use EVERY SINGLE DAY, that had been moved less than 12 hours previously, that was in perfect working order. But with no evidence, the city was going to issue a citation for an abandoned vehicle.

The funny thing is that I was hesitant to call the cops about the tagging that morning. I didn’t want them to show up and cite me for having too small of a DOT number on the side of the truck. (Got a citation for no DOT number the other day even though we have one). But I figured what the heck? Maybe someone at the station will care.

If I’d been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have bothered. Number of times I’ve been vandalized or ripped off? About a dozen. Number of parking tickets and other citations I’ve gotten? Probably hundreds. Who’s the bigger threat to legitimate business owners?

This raises all kinds of philosophical questions, but you know what? I’m not sure I even care anymore. I never thought I’d say this, but I think some fights are too big. I think law-abiding citizens have gotten far too used to “living in the city” or have made peace with diminishing civil liberties and crime. “It’s just something we have to live with” or something. Until last weekend, I would have said that’s insane, but I suppose there really is nothing we can do. You almost have to put yourself at risk of jail time just to get past the bored government gatekeepers whose primary duty in life seems to be to keep their days as effortless as possible.

For one reason or another, my wife and I have been talking about Arizona a lot lately. We’ll see how the business does this year, but we seem to be way past the point of diminishing returns. The better the business does, the more we’re ripped off, both from dirtbag passers-by and city officials.

Update: Alright, the “telephone reporting division” of the Alexandria police department finally got back to me. They took my report and said they’d have a unit patrol the area and be on the lookout. Heh, yeah, no doubt. I’m sure we’ll be within five inches of the legal distance from the fire hydrant and they’ll “tag” me for that, too.

The epitome of chaos

2011-02-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

If this business doesn't kill me, and Nietzsche's words are true, I will someday be the biggest, baddest, most ripped, "jacked" successful CEO the world has ever seen. FEAR my pecs!

I found a nifty little journal app for the iPhone. I've been keeping little notes here and there for the eventual book I'll write (Haha!). You can tag people, events, places, etc., and you can customize your own tags. I created one called "Crises." I knew it would be a common tag, but I had no idea how often it'd come in handy. Here's another one for the crisis files. It's a doozy.

I guess it started mid-day yesterday when the little "chest cold" I had blossomed into something like full-blown pneumonia. I tried to ignore it, but after a quick stop in to the Minute Clinic, I was referred to an Urgent Care facility in Springfield. I didn't want to drive the big 26 foot Penske I'd used that day, so I locked it up and took one of our smaller company rigs.

Everything turned out fine (no pneumonia, just a flu), and everything seemed fine as all the guys got to the office in the morning.

"Where's the Penske?" David asked.

You know how in some movies they slow the action sequence way down for some sort of effect? It was like that. I realized I hadn't seen it as I drove in, and NOBODY had the keys to it but me, and they were hanging on my hip. For a second I hoped my 103 degree fever the night before made me forget that I'd parked it around the corner, but nope, it was gone. It's kind of hard to miss -- 26 feet of 21 foot, 1 inch high yellow box truck.

Gone. If we were a thousand miles west, tumbleweeds would have blown across the side of the road where I'd left it.

I did a search of the neighborhood for any sign that would indicate who I should call. There were none. I started calling towing companies, but none of them had it. I called the police non-emergency line. Nothing.

I finally realized that it'd been stolen, so I filed a report with an officer who came out, and since we still had a job to do, we jumped in one of the guys' car and headed to Penske for a second truck. But, since all of our equipment was in the stolen truck, we had to go on a shopping spree. I estimated that the stolen equipment came to about $700. On top of an ER visit the night before, the weekend was getting really expensive.

Once we got the new Penske truck, I headed to New Haven Moving Supply to fill up with moving blankets, dollies, stretch wrap, whatever. We pull up and...they're closed.

Not quite panicking, but definitely feeling like the big move wasn't meant to happen today, we headed back to Penske to rent some of their cheap, flat blankets. All we really needed for the job were blankets and straps. There were no long walks or elevators. We could get by carrying everything. No dollies. It'd be a bare-bones, but just-as-effective move.

(I should probably mention that the customer who we were supposed to move was fine with the situation, and very understanding. We'd helped him before, so he knew that we were legitimate movers, and would do anything to make the situation right.)

Penske, as it happened, didn't have the blankets. Rather, they had them, but they were all wet. I suppose it was some sort of leak in the storage room. I wasn't about to slap wet blankets all over the customer's furniture, and besides, the back of the backup truck was so dusty that adding wet blankets to the move would turn the whole operation into a mud wrestling match with furniture.

That's when I realized that the feeling I had about the hopelessness of the move happening was true. We really weren't meant to do it today. I may never know why, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that I haven't seen my family in three days. I quarantined myself away from the kids, but little Joseph has been moody, crying "I need my daddy!"

So, I dropped the guys off and came back to the office. I'd been sort of laughing maniacally on-and-off to this point, (the laughter devolving into hacking coughs), but what I saw at the office plastered a rictus grin on my face.

The stolen truck was back.

For the love of all that is holy, the truck was back.

I thought whoever had stolen it must have had gigantic brass ones, but I had no idea. They stole it, used it for whatever criminal job they had going on, and then returned the damn truck?!?

I checked the back -- all of our equipment was still there. It was a disaster, with blankets strewn about, tools everywhere. But, it was all there. I didn't touch anything else and started taking pictures.

That's when the manager of the big bakery that shares a building with us came out.

"I'm really sorry," he said, "But my driver, who's an idiot, kind of borrowed your truck last night..."

I just stood there, grinning at him like a moron, until I finally found the words. "Did you gas it up?"

Apparently, the manager tossed a set of keys to the new driver and said the truck was outside. Miracle of miracles, the keys actually started MY Penske truck. Seeing nothing amiss, HE LOADED IT UP AND DROVE IT TO PENNSYLVANIA AND BACK.

I guess it was an honest mistake, and since he offered to pay for all the charges/fees/mileage/etc. associated with the screw-up, it all comes out alright in the end, although now we have to make up the canceled job on Sunday.

Lessons? I don't even know at this point. We're preparing for the busiest summer we've ever seen, and little wrinkles in the plan cause us a hell of a lot of grief. BIG wrinkles -- tsunamis -- like this destroy me. But what are our options?

1. Quit and get a regular 9-5 job?
2. Keep at it, trying for that rosy future where the business runs itself and we roll around in cash every night?

Option 1 did not appeal to me in the slightest until today. But now it's four or five percent possible that I'll polish my resume in the next few months.

Whatever. I'm going home now to see if I can kill this flu with Tylenol and gin.

How the Love Sack changed my life

2011-01-13T12:44:00.000-08:00

(I can only imagine what kind of traffic this is going to drive to the site...)

I'm constantly amazed at how random, seemingly insignificant events shape the course of our lives. Sometimes the big events do too, obviously. If not for 9/11, I never would have researched DC journalism internships, landed one, met my wife at a newspaper, had kids, and launched this business. But among those big branches are millions of smaller "twigs" of events, I suppose. Recently, a plush piece of furniture changed my whole way of doing things, making me much happier and appreciative of the wonders right in front of me.

Let me explain (if you care)...

I think I've already mentioned the Love Sack someone gave us. It was totally unexpected -- we FILLED someone's new apartment with their old furniture, and some of the stuff had to go. So, they donated the Love Sack, a humongous sofa bean bag. (I have no idea if it's actually filled with beans, but it's com-feeee. It could be filled with kittens and I'm not sure I'd ever give it up.*)

My wife surprised me and actually liked it, but she could tolerate only so much -- it was consigned to the kids' toy room which, if experience is any guide, meant it would be encrusted with half-chewed cookies, rotten bananas and sour milk (and other unmentionable effluvium) in a matter of days. That would not do for my precious.

So, I pulled the trigger and rented some office space I'd been looking at. Now, the office had become a necessity for all kinds of real, legitimate reasons, but I'll be completely honest: I wanted a man cave for the Love Sack. IT is the reason I took on essentially another rent in the slow season.

Some interesting things have come about as a result of this decision: I now have a guaranteed place of solitude for work anytime I need it. I have a place to store equipment. I have a place to store files and all that other administrative crap that come along with running a real, grown-up-type business.

The time this has saved me is unbelievable. Now there's far less equipment shuffling between trucks and the house, less truck shuffling between jobs, etc. Better yet, it's allowed me to have something like a normal work day. Because I have such a productive work space, I can now DOMINATE the thousand or so daily tasks that would put me weeks behind. No more dragging a laptop to jobs to monitor e-mails. No more getting home at 7:00 after a job, spending a couple of hours with the family, then secluding myself in the home office until 1:00 AM to catch up on a sliver of work. Nowadays, I can get more done in a solid day of effort and go home, able to shut off the daily grind.

And in that time after 6:00 or so, I can play with my sons, and maybe, just maybe, if Kolbe goes to bed at a decent time, spend a little time vegging with the wife watching TV. We've even had conversations over dinner!!! You have to understand that these are novelties. We've been in crisis mode so long that the things some people consider even boring are now precious gifts for us. Heck, I even noticed that my wife got a haircut the other day!

I owe it all to the Love Sack. I've tried automated processes, assistants, cutting services, adding services...everything. But a piece of plush furniture enabled something like a life.

Now, if I could just carve out a little bit of time to actually sit on the thing, I could die a happy man.

* Yes, I know, that's a horrible analogy, and no, I wouldn't keep it if it was filled with kittens. I'd throw it out after a month or two.

Happy Birthday, Jimmy!

2011-01-10T04:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks for a year of extremely hard work, fantastic leadership, and a consistently great attitude.

Another great review, but I'll have to let someone go because of it...

2011-01-07T15:35:00.000-08:00

Yelp.com is our lifeblood. We would be nowhere near where we are without it. We'd still be scrambling on Craigslist, or competing with people who think a low price is the only thing they have to offer (and they're often right...) I'm so thankful for everyone who has ever written a positive review about us.

So, I'm somewhat saddened by one of the most recent ones. It means I'll probably have to let someone go. Just read the review. You'll know what I mean. After this, there won't be a guy on the crew who'll want to work with Joe. Lol.

As many people probably have had happen (or not), I had a mover totally bail on me the day he was supposed to show up. I'm talking "you're supposed to be here at 10am and you called me at 10am to tell me that you're not coming because your truck won't start and you can do it tomorrow". To add insult to injury, when I very bluntly expressed my dissatisfaction with this new arrangement, suddenly he could not only make it "somewhat' on time (It's a miracle! The truck suddenly starts!), now we could have THREE men to do the job as opposed to the measly TWO I was going to get, and the price "wouldn't be much more." (It's a miracle! Not only does the truck start, but now it can accommodate more bodies!) JOY!

That was sarcasm.

After I very loudly (I tend to get loud when I am upset) and bluntly let it be known that there was no arrangement they could come up with that would work, this company proceeded to call me 5 times within the next 10 minutes in order to badger me into "keeping my commitment". And then had the balls to tell my loving father that he wouldn't get his credit card deposit back, since we "reneged on the deal". Uh, hello? YOU were the one who ADMITTED, on the day of "the commitment" you weren't going to be able to show up on the day of "the commitment"! At all! I'm supposed to have faith in you showing up tomorrow?

Daddy got loud too.

I digress. The point of that was to share just how desperate I was. I was recovering from a relatively major illness and thought, at the time, I would be moving out of the area to recover. I absolutely could not do this move by myself and I absolutely could not leave my things in the apartment. I needed to be out by a certain time, and was freaking out. Not good when you have been hospitalized for a week and are still in recovery.

Enter Truck Buddy. I called and **tried** to be relatively calm about my need for a move that weekend, with less than a week's notice. I explained what had happened, exactly what needed to go, and why this needed to happen with THEM. I had looked at their website and it looked like they had no room left (which Chris told me was actually an incorrect interpretation, and he stated he would work on that, Woo hoo for pro-activeness -- or is it pro-activity?? I don't know but I like it). Chris let me know that he thought he could do it, and gave me an exact time that he needed me to follow up on the phone (11:00am) since I had called at the crack of dawn, and told me to put everything that I just said in writing so he had everything down. Considering how early it was and that I could hear the his little ones in the background, he was quite gracious. He picked up the phone AND was nice!

Woo hoo for clarity and niceness!

The deal was sealed in less than two hours. No deposit needed. Confirmation email sent. Paranoid phone call from me to make sure they'd ACTUALLY show up was promptly and laughingly answered. And yes, they showed up. At 1:58pm for a 2:00pm move. I'm glad I was a believer, dressed and ready to go.

Two guys showed up with the truck, John and Joe. Joe is an impossibly attractive tall, blond, muscular Viking looking former crew team member who was very interesting, personable, and quite strong. (Hellloooo Thor!) John was equally cute, with striking green eyes and quick wit. No meat-heads here. To me, this is a good thing. Chris chooses people that can take direction and treat the "movee" with courtesy. What really got me was that the third guy, Rick, was late simply because his wallet was stolen from the coffee house where they had taken a break, and he went back to retrieve it, and he didn't find it, and he STILL came to do the job! I would have been quite bent outta shape if I had no wallet, cash or ID, but Rick was the consummate professional and showed up. Apologized profusely like he thought I would bite his head off. It was nice to see those bright blue eyes sparkle when he realized I wouldn't kill him for being late. Makes me wonder who the hell these movers are subjected to.

Anywho, Wow.

They got me out of my third floor walk-up apt and into my storage unit in less than 3 hours. Friendly, clean, intelligent, timely, and affordably priced. You can't beat it. So pleased was I, that I became lucid enough throughout all this stress to give a great tip on top of the fee. (and John made sure I saw the calculations. Woo hoo for conscientiousness!) These guys are good, they were worth the tip, and I felt I simply had to ensure they stay in business. Now that I am recovered and my job has made things so lucrative that I simply must return to the area, I hope Truck Bud will be available to move me into my new place. I simply do not want to go with anyone else!

Wait, that sounded wrong didn't it? Ah well, I get happy when I find a good business. You should get happy too. (But not too happy, I need to have a slot!)

Happy New Year!

2011-01-02T04:38:00.000-08:00

Wait--what? 2010 is over? I'm still preparing for the summer rush!

This has definitely been the fastest year of my life. At least since I've been paying attention to such things.There were a couple of slow periods, like the last month before our second son, Kolbe, was born, but most of the time we've been sprinting.

I thought about writing a long retrospective, but who has the time? I'm trying to knock this out in the few minutes I have before another couple of moves today. (And I failed -- it's now two days since I started writing this post. Events and jobs happened...) Also, I'm just not as sentimental as I used to be. (It's not productive. Lol). So, here are some quick highlights of 2010 for MTB:

The birth of our son Kolbe Alexander. While it wasn't the first thing in 2010, it's the most significant. I almost can't believe it was this year. He was born on June 7th, a little small, but happy and healthy. He's already crawling, although it's still kind of a "special forces" crawl. This isn't exactly an MTB milestone...but it is. It seems that whenever we have children, the business leaps forward in some way. When Joe was born, so was MTB. When Kolbe was born, I had to (and wanted to) stay home with my wife in order to help out. That meant I had to have a couple of crews run independently of my direct supervision. So, Kolbe was responsible for pushing MTB into a multiple truck/crew operation. A natural progression, I suppose, but a terrifying one I resisted until the last possible moment.

Here's a video of his older brother Joe meeting him for the first time:

We got trucks. Thanks to generous leasing terms by our partners and buddies at Suburban Solutions, we obtained three new trucks. The obvious advantage was that we wouldn't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to Penske anymore, and we don't have to deal with all of that irritating equipment-swapping that eats up so much time. But more than that, the trucks allowed us to obtain all the required forms of insurance. It was a vicious catch-22: Without all the layers of insurance, I couldn't get trucks. Without the trucks, I couldn't afford to get insurance. I was considering leasing from Penske, but every time I talked to their rep, the security deposit would go up by about $2,000.

In addition to enabling the business to get legal, the trucks also served as fantastic mobile billboards. Brian at Suburban Solutions has a "sign guy" who really "hooked us up," as the kids say.

Multiple crews. I mentioned this above, but I should flesh it out more. In fact, I'm embarrassed that I haven't talked about the guys more. The guys who currently work for, or who have worked for MTB really have built this thing. I took the business as far as I could by myself, but there's only so much one man can do with either a pickup truck or a rented Penske truck. It would be impossible to afford the business if it was just me and a couple of guys. Running two crews is now barely enough. (In fact, I think it isn't -- I'll know more once I see the end of the month numbers, which I'm dreading.) Finding reliable, professional guys who I can trust to take the trucks into DC's daily chaos finally opened my eyes to the possibility of taking this thing too new heights.

A new office. This is a really recent development. "Recent" as in "the last week of the year." It's not something I expected or can really afford at the moment, but here's what happened:

On a recent job, the customer had what is called a "love sack," i.e. a gigantic bean bag shaped roughly like a couch. She needed to just get rid of it. My dilemma: There was no WAY I was going to pass up an acquisition of such raw awesomeness, but I was positive my wife wasn't going to let it anywhere near a public place in our house. I'd been talking to a guy about renting some office space with parking (I was mainly interested in the parking for our growing fleet). The love sack did it for me. I called my future office landlord from the loading dock of the building where I got the love sack.

It might have been an impulsive move, but it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. In just the week or so that I've had the office, I've been able to get more done than in some months. It's more than just the solitude. It's a personal space, a productivity zone where all my vital documents and tools are parked in geosynchronous orbit around me, ready to be used for action.

I'm sure we've hit a few more milestones. In fact, there's no doubt. We've more than doubled last year's revenue (which, honestly, was pretty easy), we've lifted more sleeper sofas than last year, we've made new contacts and new friends, we've pushed ourselves to our physical and mental limits and have only gotten stronger. It's been a good year.

This year, however, is going to make 2010 look like amateur hour. Stay tuned. ;-)

MTB helps New Mexico Rep. Ben Lujan

2010-12-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

Driving home, I realized that I missed an opportunity to add to my "power wall." Sigh. Oh well, that's what blogs are for.

It was kind of funny, actually. Great Scott Moving was going to help him out, but they had a scheduling issue (it happens to all of us all the time), and asked if I could help "Ben" out. I had no idea I was going to move a Washington notable. Not that I get starstruck in D.C. anymore. I think that after I stood at a urinal next to former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, the bloom sort of came off the Washington rose...

Anyway, it was an easy job, and I did what I always do. I started asking him about himself, etc. "What brings you to D.C.?" I asked. He must have been taken aback by the question, because he said, "I'm a member of Congress."

I, feeling like an ignorant moron, scanning the mental databanks for everything I knew about Representative Ben Lujan, said, "So...for work then..."

I have to give him major credit. A lot of congressmen come to Washington just primed to be pompous windbags. (My wife worked for one of them, and while it's a great story, I probably shouldn't retell it here.) "Ben" was incredibly gracious and laughed about it. He was, in the parlance of Truck Buddy, "cool." In other words, one of those people we'd love to hang out with after the job.

Congress' approval ratings are in the toilet right now, but at least there's one guy on Capitol Hill who treats service providers with actual respect and graciousness. Washington needs a few more of them. He was such a pleasure to help that I'm not even going to look at his voting record.

MTB World Headquarters has moved into fancy new digs!

2010-12-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

For those of you who've received e-mails from me via my iPhone, no, I don't actually have an orbital command center...yet. No, until recently, when I was able to work on admin stuff (as opposed to being out in the field lifting), I worked out of several "remote offices." Caboose Cafe in Del Ray was my favorite. PerkUp in Old Town was also a good one. If I was really hard-up for private admin working time, you might have seen me parked somewhere, balancing my laptop and a cup of take-out coffee on the side of the road.

No more! At least, now while I can afford the new office. The new place is still in the Old Town, Alexandria area. I won't disclose the monthly rent, but its very affordable (assuming the same number of jobs keeps coming in), and it's more than adequate. Four walls, a window, and great access to our main routes of the day. Home is 15 minutes away.

Here are some pics!

It's easy to get sentimental about this. Noah, our de facto marketing guy, stood here and, I swear, almost shed a tear. "This is where it begins," he said. I guffawed a little bit because it actually began over three years and about three thousand moves ago. But, yeah, this is the beginning of the next phase, whichever it is. (Phase two? Three? Four? I dunno -- it all sort of blurs together.) It started with me and a pickup truck, and occasionally a buddy. Now we have three trucks, we're trying to expand into two new states, and the summer busy season is just a few short months away.

(Yeah, I know, if you're reading this on the day it's written, December 27th, 2010, and you're anywhere Washington, D.C., you're thinking "summer is about a hundred years away." It's 30 degrees outside, windchill brings it down to about zero, and there ain't no WAY you're going outside unless the building is on fire -- and only then if you can stand close enough to stay warm... But 2010 just warped past us, or rather, we went through it at warp factor 10. More on that in a post tomorrow or so, but for now, summer is coming up...fast.)

Anyway, here we are. The office is perfect for one guy, but I can envision another desk or two in here as we really get sophisticated. For now, I believe there's a toilet somewhere in the building, maybe a refrigerator, and there's plenty of blessed peace and quiet. That's more success than I ever expected to see.

Prepare for glory!

2010-12-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

Times are tough around MTB World Headquarters. Good, but tough. For the last six months, we've tried to prepare for the slow season. Now that it's upon us, I realize how far behind we are. We have a real fight ahead of us.

Here's the situation: We are fully licensed and insured. That costs a lot of money. From about November to March, the moving industry slows way down. I don't know why that is -- after all, don't people still have to sign leases and move in the winter? Do people actually plan to move in the summer time? I don't know. All I know is that for the third year in a row, business has increased significantly, but relative to most of the year, it's slowed way, way down.

That means we have high costs, low savings, and not as many jobs on the calendar as we need. Close, but not quite as many. And what we used to consider really busy (about four moves per day -- two moves for two crews), is what I now must consider slow. Two crews working roughly six hours per day brings in what I used to think of as a hell of a lot of money. But when you've got multiple thousands of dollars per month to pay for multiple millions of dollars of insurance, plus all the other repeating costs like gas, equipment, tools, etc., it's like a fire hose of cash going right out the back of the truck.

I'm not complaining -- it is what it is. It's business. In a lot of ways, I like it. I've been thinking of the first move I ever did lately. It was a storage unit clean-out job, and I felt horrible charging someone to do it. Even though it was a ridiculously low amount (about $35 to empty a 10X10 storage unit, lol), it seemed wrong to charge someone. No, that's not rational, but it was my first foray into wealth creation. I was timid, worried that I was going to screw it up somehow (and I did -- I should have brought two guys, a rental truck, and charged about five times as much, and even then it would have been a good deal).

Later, I bribed a buddy to help with a bigger job. And then later, I had to book four guys for an office move where I couldn't be on-site. That was a big milestone -- trusting other people to do a big job without my supervision.

Now, I'm regularly running two or three crews every day of the week, and looking to run five this summer. It's amazing! Until I started doing this, I couldn't have run a lemonade stand.

Fortunately, all this envelope-pushing has prepared me and the guys for one hell of a grueling winter. Not only are we facing a slow-down with increased bills to pay, we're losing a lot of guys to Christmas vacationing, and a couple of guys to Denver where they'll hopefully be duplicating the business out there. By the end of next week, it'll be down to me and Jimmy, pretty much (although we have a couple of new guys). That means we'll be training even more new guys while having less time to get anything else done.

And you know what? I'm excited. Nervous, of course, but excited. I don't think I've ever had anything quite as challenging before.

If we manage to get through the next few months, I'll know MTB is "the next big thing." We'll have rock-solid veterans working out there, a huge increase in business due to referrals and repeat customers, not to mention all the advertising we're doing. With any luck, we'll be able to buy a few trucks AND save a few more nuts for the 2011 slow-down.

For now, we just need to get through the holidays. One day at a time...one day at a time...

Man down...

2010-12-17T19:37:00.000-08:00

I suppose that when you run a business where you put vehicles on the road most of the day, it's inevitable. I worry constantly about it--when's it going to happen? Will we be carrying a load? Will we have to offload a truck into another truck? Will anybody be hurt?

I never thought much about one of the guys being hurt. After all, we're invincible! We're Truck Buddies. Last Thursday, however, reality hit us, though fortunately at only about 35 mph. Jimmy, who's been with us for about a year and is one of our best workers, and a good friend, got a little banged up.

Here are the facts I was able to gather: The guys were loading a truck around noon . A 19 year old girl doing about 35 mph came up the road, which was three lanes and wide enough to sail an aircraft carrier down with room on both sides to spare, came up and nailed the truck. Jimmy was flung from the lift gate, probably hit it on the way down, and landed in the street.

He called me before the paramedics arrived, and I never want to hear that kind of fear in his voice again. Jimmy's the kind of guy who, if I were to call from a Tijuana jail cell at 3 AM, he'd tell me he'd be there by 7:00 AM. He wouldn't ask for help unless he really needed it. That day, he needed it.

That's about all I can say at the moment. Until her insurance company and my insurance company settle things, I probably shouldn't comment further. There may be some complications, believe it or not, (seems like a pretty open-and-shut case, right?), but it's actually not. More on that as we go forward.

For now, Jimmy seems to be alright, although you never know with back injuries. His spine is alright, and he's able to drive a truck, so we'll see. I knew I was leaning on him pretty hard as we push the final bit through until we see real, undeniable success, but since he's been nearly completely out of commission, I feel like the company is on very shaky ground.

Dear Officer C. Mathieu

2010-12-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

Hey Officer!

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to say hello this morning. As you no doubt know, I was in bed at 7:30 this morning, although, to be fair, I was hitting the snooze button, and I did stay up until 1:00 processing work requests, catching up on e-mail and randomly tackling any of the thousand projects necessary to keep an operation like this going. But you know I would have sprung from bed to come out and see you if I'd known you were sticking another ticket under my work truck's wiper blade. After all, I feel a certain level of familiarity with you after all the other tickets.

You know, maybe I should address that before it sours our relationship. Do I know that I'm not supposed to park a commercial vehicle on the street outside my home? Yeah, you got me. Guilty as charged. I suppose I'm further guilty of presuming upon our relationship. After all, I park the truck there quite a bit seeing how it's 30 feet from my bedroom, and you haven't ticketed me every day. And I thought you'd looked the other way when my employees have left their cars and trucks there for days on end. If I've tested our relationship with that, I sincerely apologize.

But, if I may, please let me explain some extenuating circumstances. Again, I know -- you got me. But indulge me for a moment? I'm a big confused about some things, and it would make me feel a little less guilty if you know why I presumed to test your legitimate authority.

One point of confusion: the ticket seems to have a new offense on it: namely, that my commercial vehicle is over eight feet tall. You're right -- it is, but it's merely 10' 6" tall. In my work, this has been a constant source of trouble. See, people frequently have more stuff than indicated, or that "bookshelf" is actually from the private library of Zeus himself high atop his palatial estate on Mt. Olympus. I've long since ceased thinking of this as a "tall" truck. In fact, my guys regularly bemoan its diminutive height.

But more to the point, why is an 11' high truck a problem? I've asked all my neighbors, and to a person, none of them have a problem with the truck parked outside my house. It's clean, white, has all its lights and they all work... I imagine that it has something to do with the nearby flight pattern into Reagan National? I certainly hope my truck hasn't been an obstacle to arriving flights. If so, I sincerely apologize. I suppose I've made yet another assumption because all of the trees and power lines overshadow my truck by at least twenty feet.

I'll have to visit the ticket archive in the public storage unit I had to rent to warehouse them all, but I'm just confused as to why the height is a problem NOW. It never has been a problem before. I thought it was the mere presence of a blue-collar type vehicle that offended the public eye. And speaking of which, why the additional ticket for the "improperly" placed front license plate? Yeah, I know, it's been on the dash since the day we got it. We've had some trouble affixing it to the front for various reasons, but the new ticket makes me wonder if this was just a punitive act for my latest parking offense. Again, why is that all of a sudden a problem?

Now, please allow me to plead my case, if only to obtain just a little bit of lenience. God knows I'm just a little peon to the state, but I believe I have perhaps a legitimate point or two.

First, I would love to have a parking lot for my meager fleet. In fact, the business has grown to the point that one, single central location is more or less a necessity. The daily logistical headache of coordinating trucks, men and equipment is balding me prematurely, and what hair I have left is going white on the sides. I would LOVE to have a single, Metro-accessible location where we could all show up, coordinate the day, have meetings, and just perhaps, a beer or two. Alas, that is not yet possible. The state, in its infinite care and benevolence, has decreed that I must have more insurance coverage than I will ever need for the type of work I do. It doesn't matter that we focus on smaller jobs, or that we serve a client base that can't normally afford giant moving companies. Rather, in the interest of fairness, we have to carry multiple millions of dollars of insurance to cover the Ikea furniture we most frequently move.

Then there's taxes -- we've seen phenomenal growth in the last three years, which the state has not ignored. Our tax bills have grown phenomenally, too. And because we're approaching that magical $250,000 number that some seem to regard as "rich," (this I do not understand), I fear that further growth will be retarded as we struggle to find wheelbarrows big enough to carry all the cash to three different jurisdictions. (We'd use the trucks, but driving them costs a lot of money, and I don't think they pay you to deliver your tax haul.)

And, of course, ironically, it's tough to afford adequate, convenient office and parking space when your monthly parking ticket bill is around $500 or higher.

Why not just park the truck in my driveway? Good question, and I often DO. (I imagine you pass my little home on your morning rounds, nodding approvingly on those days). However, I get home late most nights, either from some remote park or public library when I'm doing admin work, or after the third move of the day. I'm usually drenched with sweat, or stupid with mental fatigue, and -- this is going to seem silly to you, no doubt -- sometimes the effort of figuring out the "car/truck-shuffle" in my driveway is simply too much. My wife parks her car in the driveway, you see, and in order to get my work truck in there, I have to move her car. I don't want it blocking our path if there's an emergency with one of our two young children. Naturally, we wouldn't want to risk a ticket, fine, or even jail time by packing a sick or injured child into whatever vehicle is most convenient. I know, I know. I grew up in a "cowboy" era in which we rode in the back of pickup trucks, seatbelts were optional, and expensive car seats were just for rich yuppies. It's a wonder that we survived the 70s, 80s or 90s at all!

Anyway, back to the parking situation...

There's another reason why I don't often park in the driveway. You see, my oldest son, Joseph, needs his daddy very much. And he has quite an imagination. So, when I get home, he's often sitting in the big bay window waiting for me. "Daddy's home!" he yells, and rushes outside. The road, to him, looks like a "river" in "Go Diego Go," his favorite cartoon. Daddy's truck is like a big ship, more often than not, just like a big truck. (In his world, it doesn't matter that big trucks drive on rivers.) Since he can now open the door by himself, he does so, and bolts outside. My wife can't always catch him -- particularly when she's nursing our youngest, Kolbe (who is showing signs of being even more athletic than Joseph). So, while I'd love to comply with the no-doubt brilliant law telling me where I can park outside of my own home, there's a very good chance that in doing the "truck shuffle" to arrange all the vehicles just right and compliant, I could run over my child.

Silly? Perhaps. But it's a funny thing -- perhaps you have young children and can understand -- when you have children, just beyond the periphery of every waking thought is a vivid image of some horrible fate befalling your children. At night, there are no buffers against these thoughts, and such nightmares keep my wife up every night.

One final point. (I apologize for the length of this letter because I'm sure you have a lot of tickets to write.) I hope I'm not being too melodramatic here, but it IS a point to consider: might it be worth looking the other way, at least for a little while, for the sake of the economy? You see, I started this business when I was laid off two years ago. (December 8th will be the two year anniversary of my sudden and unexpected "career change.") I had two paychecks left, and then I was on my own. Out of some desire to stay off the public dole, and a little bit of pride (and the lack of time to fill out the reams of paperwork), I didn't take any unemployment money. I built this little company from nothing, sweating (quite literally, most of the time) for every dime I've made. This is the kind of thing that makes the economy work, and what makes America great. Now, in a desperate dark time for the country, we need to remove the shackles from small business and let it thrive. I'm not asking for special favors or hand-outs, but it would be nice to have a few moments of financial relief once a month. We deal with miles and miles of red tape. The state tells us we can't do this or that, and we must do this or that, and so the parking ticket situation is, well, kind of an insult. After working extremely hard 15 hours per day, finding a little fine on my windshield is more than just a little fine -- it's the state telling me I'm a bad person for even trying.

Seems silly, I know. But that's the way I see it.

I have to run now. We're having a little going-away party for a couple of the guys who've had enough of D.C. and it's myriad tiny laws that make life just a little bit worse. I'm going to have to find some extra cash between the seats of the truck because money's tight this month (Christmas, new layers of insurance, and of course, $700 in parking tickets, among other things.) If I I don't see you tomorrow, just know that I wish you a merry Christmas!

Best,
Chris

MTB's directorial day-bew.

2010-11-13T06:26:00.000-08:00

Have you seen these Xtranormal videos popping up everywhere? I saw one on a message board somewhere and thought it was cute (it was about the hell a wedding singer goes though). Then I saw another one explaining some theological point, and I thought some Catholic geek really had a lot of time on his hands. But then I saw a Geico commercial using this technology, and I realized it was a trend. Having virtually no backbone of my own, I bowed to the trend, looked it up, and messed around with the software. The following is my first attempt at a commercial/video. It's kind of a hybrid -- too long for a commercial, and too commercial to be a stand-alone creative production.

Meh. More to come. Now that it's the slow season, I'll probably crank out a ton of these while stuck at home, the heat turned off, munching on any stale Trix we can find in the back of the pantry.

My wife, Moses

2010-11-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

I had no idea -- and I live with the woman -- that my wife had such a natural aptitude for crowd control, and when necessary, crowd CONTROL. We went down to the Stewart/Colbert Rally for Sanity/Fear with the kids. We knew what we were getting into, so the insane crowds didn't put me well over the edge like they usually do, but it was still a lot like walking through snow. While pulling a cart of anvils.

My wife ("Grace,") went into Momma Bear mode pretty fast, though. The boys: strapped down tight. If she'd had time, she would have gotten some of the ratcheting tie-downs from one of the trucks and triple-looped them around Joe and Kolbe. Grace took point and I drove the double-decker stroller. (Sorry about the ankles if you were on the Yellow line on Saturday.) But at one point, after being corralled into three elevators, faced with the prospect of crossing a crowd at least 50 people thick, she'd had enough. Politely, but forcefully, she yelled out over the crowd, "Excuse me! Stroller coming through!" I followed her, crimson-faced, but amazingly enough, the crowd parted like the Red Sea and were able to cross the Metro platform to the wide stroller-friendly "gateway" on the other side.

(The crowd, I must note, was incredibly friendly all day long. On numerous occasions people let us pass. I started feeling a little entitled after awhile, truth be told. Lol.)

Later, Grace said, "Bet you didn't know I could do that, did you?"

"No idea, honey."

I think I'm going to promote my wife to something like "Process Efficiency Expert" or something. After seeing how she went for the goal in the crowds, I bet she could reduce the business' complexity in about one afternoon.

Faith in humanity at all-time low

2010-10-23T20:48:00.000-07:00

I'll remember 2010 as the year we were robbed blind. In one week in particular this summer, the following things were stolen:

* Crew leader Jimmy's personal pickup truck. (He got it back pretty fast, fortunately).
* A tool bag with about $200 worth of tools inside.
* A scaffold (which we use inside the truck for maximizing space)

In addition to those things, one customer hid some groceries in her fridge and blamed us for losing them. (Yes, I'm convinced that it was intentional). That particularly hurt because I'd given her an unemployed-recent-college grad-fiance-dumped-her discount, but before we even knew what was happening, she was demanding $100 compensation for the groceries before all the facts were in. I'd given her a break, but she couldn't even bother to pause for a moment to ask why/if/when/how we'd steal groceries. (I found the missing groceries in her fridge after gaining access to her old place with the help of her landlord. When confronted with the evidence, no apology was forthcoming.)

It was a bad week.

But yesterday, we got the hardest punch to the jaw yet. Even though all the guys know my policy regarding leaving the truck unattended (if you must, make sure it's locked, no matter how good the neighborhood), in a moment of inattention -- 30 minutes at absolute most -- they left the truck unlocked in a loading area. In that time, someone got in and stole the crew leader's wallet. That's bad enough, but unfortunately for all of us, he happened to have the accrued revenue of a week's worth of work. In this case, about $5,000, at least half in cash.

So, because some sociopath merely had an opportunity, he deprived some very good, very hard-working guys of at least half a week's worth of pay. I'll do what I can to make sure they're paid, but in late October, the money just isn't there. It's our slow season, the calendar is pretty anemic in a few weeks, and that state is going to exist for about three more months. These guys have been out there busting their butts day after day and some asshole just ripped them off.

Personally, the theft threatens the livelihood of two little boys and my wife. No, nobody's going to starve, but it means we need to budget even more carefully to ensure we have enough for diapers, food, rent and gas. For me, this was an assault on my children.

Fortunately, me and the guys come across a great number of very cool, very human people. People who appreciate the very real hard work we put into making sure every move is fast, efficient, simple, stress-free, and inexpensive. Whenever I'm on a job, I ask people if they've ever read "The Five Love Languages" by Gary Chapman. I haven't read it myself, but I've heard enough about it that I have some familiarity with it. One of these "love languages" is "words of affirmation." I tell our customers that we FEED on it. I'm dead serious about that -- in those long, hard, grueling days when the water supply runs out early, there are more items than expected, the truck's transmission is "twitchy," and the ever-present pressure of time, time, time presses down on us like a Sword of Damocles, people who treat us like human beings instead of automatons capable of lifting objects and nothing more carry us through the day. So, fortunately, I'm not about to ditch this whole project for whatever job I can find for the most secular monastic existence possible. The vast majority of people are decent human beings.

And yet...

And yet, these punches, guts and kidneys take a hell of a lot out of us. $5,000 gone in one week? Devastating. Just devastating.

Even if I had no choice but to carry on, I would, but sometimes it's much tougher than other times.

I'll remember these things

2010-10-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

I often hear parents of older children say something like "It goes so fast. One day you're holding an infant, and the next day you're teaching your kid how to drive." More often than not they're simply remarking in wonder how unexpectedly swift life goes by, but just about as often, there's a tinge of regret in those statements. "If only I'd focused on the things that matter, I wouldn't have missed so much..."

I think I've been blessed. The pace of things has increased -- radically -- in the 2.5 years or so MTB has been in business. I don't think I've had a good night's sleep in at least three years. My list of responsibilities is loooong, and the necessary things I must do to keep us fed, clothed and housed would have turned my hair white just five years ago. (If I hadn't eased into it gradually, this thing would have killed me). Maybe that's what makes the little moments with Judie and the kids so memorable. No, I won't remember every little thing -- I have horrible recall -- but I'm not going to look back and regret not being around. It is this way and couldn't have been any other way. And so, when I'm able to set the chaos aside for a little bit, I know I'm in a Moment.

Me and Joe had one of those little Moments yesterday. We were walking away from the car in the Safeway parking lot. "Take my hand, little man?" I said. "Okay, Daddy," he replied. And just like that, this tiny little hand grabbed half of my comparatively huge hand. At once I remembered the tiny little creature who the doctor delivered to my arms 2.5 years ago. This is my son, I realized. My son, my little man, me-and-not-me. I looked down into his face, but he was looking intently to the west. "The moooon, Dadddy!" The infant was gone, and the little kid was there, but I could also see the 15-year-old. I couldn't see the adult yet, not quite, but I knew that these hand-holding days would be coming to a close much sooner than I'd like. It was a Moment.

I'm blessed because I realize these things right now, not in some not-too-distant future full of regret. There's cannon smoke all around us, but in the midst of the chaos, there's peace and more love than I could have imagined.

Advice...

2010-09-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

His plan went something like this:

"Here's what you do," one of my guys was telling me a few months back, "Start with three crews. Pay one guy $12 per hour. He's the 'donkey.' Pay the second guy $15 per hour. He's the 'stallion.' Pay the third guy, the crew leader, $20 per hour. The donkey doesn't talk to the customers, doesn't load the truck, doesn't do anything. He just stacks boxes. The stallion is like the crew leader in the apartment. He's in charge of customer relations while in the place. The crew leader stays in the truck. Not only does it organize things, but it saves you thousands of dollars every month in payroll."

From a bottom line perspective, I supposed he was right -- the numbers didn't lie. But there was just one little problem with the idea -- it was guaranteed to fail.

How did I know? Well, after having done around 2,000 moves at that point with dozens of different guys, I had some experience with how guys work and how jobs go. For one, such radical inequality in the pay scale wouldn't be tolerated for long, especially for the guy known as "the donkey." And the "donkey" might be a vastly better people person than this so-called "stallion." And the crew leader? He isn't just supposed to hang out in the truck for the duration of the job -- he had to be everywhere at once, overseeing the guys' actions in the house or apartment, as well as loading everything securely in the truck. He had to know the customer's disposition and, if necessary, be the magic man who untangles all complicated situations -- situations which inevitably arise. And EVERYONE has to pitch in at various points of the job or things bog down fast.

In other words, he had it all laid out with a guaranteed plan complete with spreadsheets. Very involved spreadsheets. "The numbers don't lie," he was fond of saying, and that's true, but the numbers don't have all the facts.

I get a ton of advice, and I try to take it gratefully. I try to reconsider ideas that I've had years ago and rejected because sometimes, just sometimes, those ideas might now possibly work. For example, one major worry of mine is that once we start expanding to other cities, the opportunities for unscrupulous managers to rip me off increase exponentially. What if they use a company truck for "freelancing?" Several of the guys have suggested putting GPS systems or Lojack in the trucks. Okay, fair idea, but who's going to monitor the GPS data? What would it cost to hire someone to compare the mileage reports to the GPS/Lojack route? What administrative systems would need to be put in place? How much would it all cost???

One of the guys is a veritable idea factory, but he's more of a "quantity" idea generator rather than a "quality" idea generator. (You know who you are buddy, and keep 'em coming. ;-)) One of his worst ideas aimed to solve the perennial problem of scheduling a largely voluntary workforce. "Limit everyone's hours to a certain maximum so they don't hog all the available slots."

Yeah, like I'm going to tell the most ambitious, productive and careful guys that they have to give up income for the guys who only want to work when it's convenient...

Still, I try to remain open to all the advice. You just have to when you run a business. Only exceptionally gifted people come up with great, new, profitable ideas on a daily basis by themselves. And I'm sure that even they start to believe they have some divine gift, only to slip into an echo chamber where the only good ideas are their own ideas. I want to avoid that at all costs, and I think I do, for the most part. It's easy when you know you've only had one good idea in your life (for me, it was MTB.) Lol.

Some days, though, I hear something like "What you need to do is hire more crews and make more money," it's all I can do to keep from slamming my head in the truck door repeatedly until I go nigh-nigh.

Blogging may be even lighter...for the next couple of months...

2010-08-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

I had really intended to turn my new managerial role into an opportunity for more writing -- serious writing -- but also blogging. This is not possible right now. Even with the help of a fantastic new assistant, I'm still killing 50-60 e-mails per night. What were once helpful, even funny emails are now brief to the point of incoherence. "Yeah, that'll work. C."

When people receive e-mails like that from me two days late, they may not know what the hell I'm talking about.

At any rate, we've learned a lot this summer, but perhaps the best lesson of all is that A GOOD ASSISTANT IS WORTH ANYTHING!

See you in the fall. (Just kidding -- I WILL turn this into one of D.C.'s funniest, most useful blogs!*)

C.

*See what I did there? That's SEO, baby.)

Ingenuity

2010-08-11T20:14:00.001-07:00

Now I know why people join suicide cults...

2010-07-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

I had that feeling this morning. That feeling that there was a message waiting for me on the phone telling me of some new crisis. Sure enough, Jimmy, one of my crew leaders, texted to inform me that one of the guys had said it was "too early" and he wasn't going to come to work. Now, granted, it was a new guy and he doesn't know the deal, or all that goes into streamlining a series of moves in a weekend, but still. Crisis.

Here's what happens when guys bail on us at the last second:

1. I call/text/e-mail everyone in the crew list for backup. This is now about 30 guys.
2. I prepare to go to a job and act as backup myself.
3. If it's a weekend, particularly a Sunday, I tell my wife and older son that I won't be able to do all those things we'd hope to do after all. There's usually crying.
4. I get maybe three responses from the 30 or so guys I contacted. Two can't make it. One can, but needs a ride from another time zone.
5. I call my partners in the industry. "Got another guy to spare?" To their credit, yes, they usually do.

The guys who have been with us the longest get one or two basic things down -- they know that if they want work, they have to show up. These are the guys in whom I entrust the entire reputation of the business, and I can't express my gratitude enough. The rookies never get beyond rookie status until they've proven they can show up on time, ready to work. Then they wonder why I never call them for work anymore. A catch-22? Maybe, but if you don't show up for work -- kind of an "Employment 101" thing, I used to think -- even one time, I'm far less likely to call them again.

I used to be very tolerant of no-shows. Lord knows we all have problems, or there are snags with Metro, or cars break down, or babies are being born. But after 2.5 years of this, I've come to realize that guys who bail on you at the last second will ALWAYS bail on you, with rare exceptions.

And this is just one of many daily crises.

I spoke with my friend and colleague Brian at Suburban Solutions this morning. He and I kind of treat each other's text inboxes as psychological dumping grounds. He called me after getting yet another "Can you effing believe this?" text from me.

"Chris," he said, "What keeps you from swallowing the barrel of a shotgun?"

"Right now?" I replied. "My wife and kids need me. Otherwise I'd go for the sweet release of cordite and gunpowder."

Needless to say, the slow season can't come fast enough.

A symptom of a larger problem?

2010-07-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

I was working at the Martha Washington public library yesterday, and I had to mail some letters. I figured they'd have a mailbox, so I went to the Information desk.

"Hey -- do you have a mailbox I can drop this into?"

The librarian, a middle-aged lady who looked very tired, looked at the other librarian. She was concerned, or so it appeared.

I raised my eyebrows and tried to maintain my smile. I was impatient. Another crisis had taken me away from the computer again, and e-mail was piling up.

The librarian finally said "we don't have a mailbox you can use here, but there's a drop box down by the road."

Somehow, I figured as much, thanked her, and set out for the road-box.

If that thing was still in use, then people risked tetanus every time they dropped letters into it. Rusted and crumbling, it probably first saw service in 1942. There was no way I was going to drop a letter into it.

Back in the library, I tracked down a different librarian. He too appeared irritated to have to talk to me.

"Can I just drop this into your mail?"

"I...don't think we can do that..." he said, and vaguely trailed off.

I wasn't feeling very smiley, but I tried to keep it light. "Hey, this letter doesn't have the hantavirus or anything. I just need to get it out and on the way."

"To be honest," he said, "I don't know how we'd do that."

I believe he was being honest -- the question seemed to be frying all his synapses.

"Okay," I said, "Let's say you had to mail a letter from the library. What would you do?"

"I'd put it in an envelope and send it to headquarters. They put a stamp on it and it takes about two weeks to get to the destination."

I gotta say -- I wasn't expecting that. It was horrifying. I know that my administrative duties suffer because I'm the only guy in my "office," but damn. They have to send the letter away to HQ so somebody can put a stamp on it? What do they have to do if the librarians need to use the bathroom? Fill out a requisition form for toilet paper? Do they streamline the process so it only takes a week?

This was just one little library in a D.C. suburb, but I suspect it's just a microcosm of the waste and inefficiency in Washington. Actually, when I worked for the TSA, it was a little MORE efficient than this tiny little library with the eco-friendly ethos. I'd have to get ten people to sign off on a press release, but at least I could usually get it done in one day. Two weeks for a freaking stamp, though?

Sheesh.

Sometimes you can take the simple pleasures too far...

2010-07-09T08:11:00.001-07:00

Yeah, shrooms, I think. Everyone agreed? Shrooms?

Is this a hard job? Is D.C. a political town?

2010-07-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, when I find it difficult to dive into the 100+ e-mails for the day, I like to procrastinate by reading traffic sources to my website. (What--like you don't do the same thing...) Oddly enough, the vast majority of MTB's traffic is from people typing the URL directly into the browser and hitting "enter." Still, though, I get the occasional "organic" source.

I've gotten some good ones. Among them: somebody once type into Google "Yes, this is my truck. No I won't help you move." (Got a huge number of people to MTB with that one.) I've also had not a few links from porn sites (at least they looked like porn sites -- I didn't check. If they weren't, then some people made some horrible website naming choices...) I always wonder about those -- what, people surf for some naughty pics and then line up a mover? I guess -- if there's anything I've learned doing this, it's that human beings are...odd. Odd and screwed up, very often. I won't divulge any details, but I have seriously -- seriously -- considered adding counseling services to our resume. At the very least I should be referring people to some good counselors.

At any rate, I got another funny search link to my site today. It was "Is being a mover a hard job?" I lol'd at that and sent it to my crew leaders. No matter how you look at it, yes, this is a hard job. Definitely the hardest I've ever done, not even including all the administrative nonsense. A typical day might involve moving a glass-heavy china hutch up a three-floor walk-up in the middle of a July heat wave. Or, sometimes we have to take a mattress out of a basement apartment, the customer forgot to get a mattress bag, and the entrance to her place is covered in black moss and/or mold. It's kind of like playing "Operation," only instead of setting off a buzzer, we would have to buy a new mattress. (This has never happened, fortunately).

On the managerial/admin side, let's just take the last two days, for example. I realized fairly early on that I was likely to be short-handed for six jobs this Saturday. I began the usual regimen of calling all Truck Buddies, only to realize that about half the work force would be gone. For the first time in two years, I was looking at the very real possibility of having to cancel at least one job -- a total rookie, half-ass maneuver. In the meantime, I have literally 21 voice messages and dozens upon dozens of e-mails coming in, some requesting work, some having to reschedule jobs at the last second (unfortunately, no reschedules for Saturday), or panicky messages about parking issues. I handled most of that and got to bed before midnight for a change, but my first thought this morning was -- after ensuring our infant son was still alive and breathing, a practice I got into with our first son and have never stopped doing -- "I wonder what this morning's crisis is going to be..."

One of my crew leaders, Jimmy, called to tell me about half an hour later: someone had crossed a couple of lanes of traffic, nearly cut him off, and hit our truck's rear bumper while he was on the way to a job.

My reaction: "Oh, that's today's first crisis. Next!" (Everyone was okay, btw, and our truck is fine.)

So, yeah, being a mover is hard work. If the guy who Googled that phrase decides to apply for a job, I might have to direct him to something a little more his speed. I hear the florist down the street is looking for a daisy tender...

Hah!

Our Independence Day

2010-07-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

Two years or so ago, we realized we'd made some cataclysmic miscalculations regarding mortgages, expanding the family, etc. Pretty much all the big stuff. My wife's car was dying (although it held on for quite a while longer), she was pregnant, couldn't work, I hated my job, and eventually was laid off anyway. We call that time of our lives "Crisis Mode," because almost every single day brought some new crisis, some new disappointment, some setback, some new challenge. So many times I thought we were done. Just done. But somehow, likely because of my wife's encouragement and level head (most of the time-- heh!), I summoned just enough strength to get through one more day.

Lately we've been able to breathe. Once, we even had some money left over at the end of the month! (And we're not big spenders -- I won't tell you our monthly budget, but friends and neighbors, it ain't much). I still pretty much work around the clock, but now I know that, even if a good chunk of everything were to fall apart, we'd be okay. Not "let's go to the Hamptons next week to brainstorm about which private jet we should get" okay, but normal people okay.

Last night we went to a birthday party / Independence Day party with our boys. We had to leave early because, well, they're both young enough to be confused about where the bathroom is (not the pants, boys), but on the way home our oldest reminded us in very clear terms that we'd promised BIG FIREWORKS. (You really need to hear how he says it -- he deepens his little voice with something like gravitas). "See...BIG FIREWORKS!"

There was still some light out, and there was no way in Hades I was about to drive into the city on the 4th of July with two babies. However, there was a long stretch of open road along the GW Parkway just south of Old Town, though, with a big grassy expanse teeming with fireflies even in the low light. Might work.

Little Joe and I killed the remaining daylight minutes chasing said fireflies. (Our newest little Truck Buddy kept my wife busy in the car with his 87th feeding of the day). "Geh...lie..buhs" Joe kept yelling, which roughly translates to "Get those punk-a$$ lightning bugs!" Which we did. En masse. With Joe riding on my shoulders. With Joe on my back. With me chasing after Joe after he chased the bugs toward the very busy GW Parkway.

The sunlight finally gave out, and the field by the side of the road (golf course, actually) was positively illuminated by fireflies. (Avatar fans might get a "Pandora" reference, were I to make it). And then, almost so perfectly that I wondered if Michael Bay was directing the scene, a bald eagle swooped in low from the Potomac and over the highway, right above our heads. He held a fish in his claws, or, as I thought about the fish, one of America's enemies. Hah!

The fireworks began a little bit later, but little Joe wasn't as interested in those after all. It was all about the fireflies. We all walked down the pathway (except for Joe, who, with complete disdain for anyone's safety, including his own, sprinted down the dark bike path amidst the legs of strangers and who-knows-who-else), and watched the night sky along the Potomac explode with color.

About that time I had what might be considered an ungrateful, or even self-centered thought: One could consider this our Independence Day too. I've been catching up on a little historical reading lately, and I'm very aware of the staggering risks and cost that bought America its independence. I haven't exactly pledged my life, my fortune (lol, "fortune") or property in defense of the nation. There are guys doing basically that right now in faraway hellholes where the people can't even conceive of an existence with true liberty. But this I know: we've been enslaved to a great number of fears, doubts, and even modes of thought. At least now, for hopefully a couple of months, two-and-a-half years of back-breaking labor have yielded a little reprieve from doubt and worry. Two-and-a-half years of risk and sacrifice allowed me to finally find some time to catch fireflies with my son, and take a little walk down a river-side path with my wife on a hot summer night.

Thank you God. And thank you to those who take the really big risks to ensure we civilians can have such summer night firefly walks.

Some people need to realize they're really not that important...

2010-06-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

An alternate title for this post might be "Anti-mover bigotry still strong in D.C. area." There's clearly an arrogance surplus in this area, but it shocks me at how some theoretically "tolerant and open-minded" people treat us like something on the floor of a gas station restroom. I suppose people think that we're a group of college or even high school drop-outs. After all, who but a drop-out would be working for a moving company in D.C.? What they don't realize is that most of my guys are professionals or on their way to being professionals. Byron, one of my crew leaders, is on his way to a Ph.D. in economics, for example. There's also a future Naval officer (he ships out in September), some journalists, and quite likely a PGA pro on the team (that's Jimmy, another crew leader.)

The only college drop out on the crew is me, and I've been a journalist, editor, PR guy for the government, and a staff writer with a couple of D.C.'s more well-known think tank/non-profits! And now I run this little company I built from scratch. Not bad for a guy who failed out of Latin class, huh?

What do I mean by "anti-mover bigotry?" Well, most of the time it's hilariously rude a-holes whose problems with us range from the petty to the nonsensical. Occasionally, I'll admit, we get a little cowboy with our parking jobs (you just have to sometimes), but we ALWAYS move the truck if we're in a bad spot, blocking people in. Other times, however, I respond with both barrels loaded for bear.

The latest incident happened yesterday. I got called out on a Sunday for an emergency job, so right there I was in no mood. One of the guys nearly had a diabetic seizure or something, and had to go home. No one else was available, and even though my wife wasn't one bit happy with it, I had to go out to the job.

We were coming to the end with the piece de resistance, a 200 pound armoire top. We had it on a dolly because the walk from the truck to the front door of the apartment was loooong. And, there was a garden hose in the way. I had moved the hose earlier, thinking that it had been shut off. (It sure looked like it to me). But as we approached the coiled up hose with the armoire, an older (not quite elderly) lady came walking by.

"Did you move the hose?" she asked the three of us.

Jimmy and I both replied affirmatively. "Just a few minutes ago," we said.

I continued, perhaps sensing what was about to happen, yet unable to stop: "It looked like it was off, but anyway, we had to roll this thing through here, and the hose was quite a speed bump."

And just like that she laid into us. "You can't turn a hose on full blast or you'll dig a huge hole!"

And just like that, my tolerance for rude idiots got the best of me. "It was an easy mistake," I said, not bothering to try to regulate my tone. "Look -- there's just a trickle from the hose."

"What would you know about watering trees!?!"

My exact response, I believe, was "Unbelievable! What is wrong with you people?!?" "You people," of course, meaning "All of you rude jerks who get bent out of shape over insignificant, pointless little things that shouldn't even register on the irritation scale."

She did an about-face and huffed to the spigot on her building, and that was pretty much that. It was a relatively tame incident, but still had all the characteristics of these inexplicably hostile, bizarro-world encounters. Another one happened a few months back where the rear-end of the truck was slightly over the cross-walk. A man walking by asked if there was any reason why we parked "in the crosswalk." I told him there was -- we were told to park RIGHT THERE by the building's management, and that another car had been in front of us.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen," he said, and then thought he'd chew me out about it, even though there was literally probably 300 yards of open sidewalk available to him. I, of course, returned verbal fire.

Back in February, a young guy gave us all kinds of eyeball rolling because he couldn't fit his car into a ten foot wide space between the truck and a pile of snow. We dug half that pile out for him (which we'd already created by digging someone else out as a courtesy) and he didn't once bother to get out of the car to help. And he had a problem with US? We'd already parked the ten ton truck too far down an icy embankment so as to leave space for the greatest number of cars to get out of that particular parking lot.

The other day I was accused of extortion by someone who couldn't figure out the booking system on the website.

Another time, we stopped in traffic by a guy loading his car on the side of the road. He asked if we "provided the lube" for our services. I'll let you figure that one out. There's more to the story, but let me just say it sounds like he...ah..."got screwed" by his movers in the past.

Examples abound. I've tried to understand where the rudeness comes from, but I recently gave up. So, just a fair warning to my neighbors in the Washington, D.C. area: if you have certain insecurities or particularly warped sensibilities concerning your "rights" that may lead you to take it out on men who make it their daily mission to make people happy, think twice before you open your mouth. We extend all the warmth and amicability we have toward normal people. We'll do just about anything ethical, moral and legal to ensure our customers' happiness. But if you feel duty-bound to rip into people you've never met over something as trivial as where we move a dripping hose, we will explain your faults to you, probably with pithy one-liners dripping in sarcasm and disdain.

And if you want to return fire, we'll come back and move your hose when you're not looking.

A Foundational Truck Buddy Principle as explained by Dan Kennedy

2010-06-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

I was in the only place I can get any reading done the other day, and the book of choice was “Time Management for Entrepreneurs.” (Longer title: “The Ultimate No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Guide to Time Productivity and Sanity.”) It’s by Dan Kennedy, who has a series of harsh but awesome books on marketing, entrepreneurship, etc.

He had a chapter called “The Number One Most Powerful Personal Discipline in All the World.” I’ve excerpted some relevant bits below, and I’ve got to say, it’s right on. Sometimes there are unforeseen factors that makes it impossible to always be punctual, but it reminds me that there ARE still processes we can employ to avoid those unforeseen factors.

I’ve said it again and again: half the reason we get good reviews – more than half, easily – is that 1) We show up, 2) We show up on time, 3) We show up on time ready to work. I can’t tell you how many calls and e-mails I get from panicky people whose movers failed to show up, or called the night before to cancel. Now, my record isn’t perfect, but knowing how low the bar is, it’s easy to shine.

***EXCERPT***

I'm sure there are exceptions somewhere, but so far, in 25-plus years of taking note of this, everybody I've met and gotten to know who devoutly adheres to this discipline becomes exceptionally successful AND everybody I've met and gotten to know who ignores this discipline fails. Is it possible that this one discipline alone is so powerful it literally determines success or failure?

The discipline that I am talking about is PUNCTUALITY. Being punctual. Being where you are supposed to be when you are supposed to be there, as promised, without exception, without excuse, every time, all the time. I cannot tell you how important I believe this is. But I'll tell you some of the reasons why I believe in its indescribably great importance.

First of all, being punctual gives you the right--the positioning--to expect and demand that others treat your time with utmost respect. You cannot reasonably hope to have others treat your time with respect if you show little or no respect for theirs. So, if you are not punctual, you have no leverage, no moral authority. But the punctual person gains that advantage over staff, associates, vendors, clients, everybody.

It is my conviction that a person who cannot keep appointments on time, cannot keep scheduled commitments, or cannot stick to a schedule cannot be trusted in other ways either.

Fundamental dishonesty expresses itself in many different ways, but this is definitely one of them. I think it is significant that the man I consider to be the most frequently and consistently dishonest and disreputable U.S. president of my lifetime, Bill Clinton--famous for his tortured deconstruction of the word "is"--was also notorious for being on "Clinton Time"--meaning anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours late to everything, thus being disrespectful to everyone.

There is a link between respect for others' time and respect for others' opinions, property, rights, other kinds of agreements, and contracts. A person reveals a great deal about himself by his punctuality or lack of punctuality. So, as a general rule of thumb, I use this as a means of determining whether or not I want to do business with someone. And, when I violate this, as I occasionally foolishly do, I always get burned.

Happy Birthday, Benjamin Gray!

2010-06-17T05:52:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to long-time Truck Buddy Brett, Liz, and their second son, Benjamin Gray. (Or is it "Grey?") They actually had Benjamin the day after we had Kolbe.

Can't wait to see the little guy!

Happy Birthday, Kolbe Alexander

2010-06-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

Our second child, Kolbe Alexander, was born at 8:30 this morning. He was 7lb 1oz, and 21 inches.

And that's all I have to say about it for now. Sooo tired.

C.

2010-06-06T16:11:00.001-07:00

Testing text blogging...

Five days and counting until Baby #2 arrives...

2010-06-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I'm able to look up from the computer or stack of boxes and armoires and realize that we're about to have another child.

Another. Child.

Today it really hit me as I was scheduling jobs for next week. "Let's see, we can move John Smith at 2:00 PM on the seventh, and...HOLY COW! WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A BABY THAT DAY!!!"

It's one of those common, everyday miracles, I suppose, but it still tends to throw a fist right into the gut.

So, the countdown is almost over. Next week, life changes again. Amazing.

I could take 25 Justin Biebers in a fight

2010-06-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

I just learned about him, but this is a fight I'd be willing to take on.

Remembering heroes...

2010-05-31T20:21:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day. Until I moved here about a decade ago, this was always just a day off. But since I've been here, I've gotten to know a lot of guys who have either served, are serving, or will soon ship out to places known and unknown (or places they can't tell us about) to serve. Nowadays, Memorial Day is nearly a holy day for me. Not because I love war or some such nonsense, but because just the close proximity to some of these guys takes the abstraction out of their service.

It's almost always a humbling experience to know that the man (I actually only know military men) standing next to me has been to war and has, in all likelihood, seen things we have never and will never see. Sometimes horrible things, sometimes noble things. Things out there on the edge of human nature.

Standing next to guys like that take the abstract out of this day and war. It's real. People die. People kill.

For the most part, the soldiers I've known have been clear-eyed, honorable men. I don't idolize them or raise them to an impossible standard -- they're human beings afflicted with the same nature as the rest of us. But they've gone to war knowing full-well that their lives may end in some faraway place for a particular cause they may or may not agree with. Many of them serve a higher cause than the particular reason for their deployment. Either way, they put their lives on the line so most of us don't have to.

So, thank you. Thank you for doing what most of us have either never thought to do, or were too afraid to do. Thank you for keeping America safe so that the highest ideals to which we aspire can flourish. Thank you.

My wife and I are both pregnant, due about the same day...

2010-05-12T19:47:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are, if all goes well, about to give birth to two healthy babies. Hers (ours, I know), is a human child. Mine is a big monster of a beast of a complicated business, at least for me.

One of the big differences is that my baby has been gestating for about two-and-a-half years.

I launched Phase I of MyTruckBuddy.com before I had any idea it was "Phase I." I just needed some extra cash so that "Grace" could stay home and take care of little Joseph. You could say that this business was "born" the same time he was. But now, just weeks away from the arrival of our second son, MTB is about to be "born again." Lol. I guess you could say that this a religious experience as well.

The goal for the last eight months has been to make the business as self-sufficient as possible, or rather, to automate enough of it so that I could stay home with Grace and the kids and help out more. We don't have any family in the area, and while we have numerous friends willing to help out, we aren't entirely comfortable relying on our busy group of friends to do so. Ideally, I'd be able to manage the business from my "command center," send reliable guys out to the jobs, and rest somewhat easily knowing that everything will be okay.

This is much easier planned than done.

There are so many details to take care of: regulatory issues, taxes, manpower, truck rentals, scheduling, scheduling, scheduling... (As I write this, I'm avoiding about 40 e-mails, most of which are new move requests). At some point, hopefully soon, I'll write a "typical day-in-the-life" page for the website. For many people, it would be horrifying. If I were dropped into this three years ago, the demands on my time and intellect (not to mention my body) would have turned me into a puddle of molten goo.

That said, after a lot of planning, hundreds (perhaps a thousand) moves, I've positioned the business to this point, the culmination of a LOT of work. In just a few weeks, I'll likely be able to manage things from my command center, confident that I have capable men of integrity running crews and/or moving people. Thanks to Suburban Solutions, we have the trucks. Thanks to the solid friends I've recruited, I've got an army of stand-up guys eager to work. Thanks to a handful of insurance agents, franchise consultants, and many others, I've got all my regulatory ducks in a row.

I still have a lot of work to do, but it looks like all the stars are aligning.

Thank you, God. It couldn't have come at a better time. I'm exhausted and the contractions are killing me.

Zen of Truck Buddy II

2010-05-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

In the moving industry, the bar is set so low there's no reason you shouldn't rock a customer's world.

Hell, half the time the bare minimum is just showing up...

Zen of Truck Buddy I

2010-05-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

A Truck Buddy doesn't need a list of procedures and policies. All that a Truck Buddy needs to know is summarized thusly: "Don't be an idiot."

If a newbie Truck Buddy finds himself asking any questions whatsoever, let him first refer to Zen of Truck Buddy I.

MTB: not just a buisness

2010-04-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

The business is getting to the point that people expect it to act like, you know, a business. Every now and then -- and more often than usual -- customers say things like "I called your office," or "Where are you based out of." They also ask if I have an assistant from time to time. Pretty soon, I may indeed have to get an actual office, assistant and the other accouterments of a "real" business. But for now, it's just me and my wife, supported by numerous buddies and their buddies.

What I'm trying to say is that there's a very bright, clear line from what I do for customers and our material well-being. There are virtually no layers or cushions between the service we provide and whether we eat or pay rent. This is a huge reason why I strive to keep getting five-star reviews on Yelp.com. It literally pays our bills.

What's this got to do with anything? Well, today we bought a car, and I can't help but be astonished and extremely grateful for this common event. I won't get into it too deeply, but the short story is that the last few years have been hellish. My wife and I have called it "Crisis Mode" during this time. It started when we realized that we'd bought too much house when we first got married, which coincided with the news of our first child. The numbers didn't lie -- we had been stupid, and unless something changed, we were going to go under.

And then I was laid off from my day job. And that was just one of many setbacks...

MTB was nowhere near ready to support our family, but through generous applications of literal blood, sweat and tears, we eventually dug ourselves out, and "Crisis Mode" gave way to something more normal. Everybody struggles, and at some point during the last few months, we realized that we were, in fact, going to make it.

At least until the next giant roadblock/hurdle/kick in the teeth. Lol.

Buying a car is huge. HUGE. And it's not a luxury expense. With Baby #2 on the way (due June 7th), we absolutely needed a new car. For one thing, the old car was falling apart. I had to refill the power steering fluid reservoir more often than changing the oil. The lights had long since given up any form of reliability. I think we replaced the axel on at least one wheel at least twice. And then there was the space -- two adults and one child filled the little Nissan to capacity. Throw in another child and a bigger stroller and, well, it just wasn't happening.

Until today, I couldn't even think about it, and I was worried that "Grace" was going to be stranded with little Joe somewhere. And now my pickup is showing signs of age...

Being able to buy a new (used, actually) car means that, for a little while, at least, we get a reprieve from one gigantic stress. If all else fails, at least we'll have reliable transportation for another 100,000 miles or so.

This is thanks to the many people who have used MTB over the last year, and who have told others about us. So, thank you. Thank you so much.

MTB partners with Square 3 Ventures to help get rid of your unwanted stuff!

2010-04-11T20:03:00.000-07:00

I get a lot of stuff from our customers. A LOT. More than half my house is furnished by discarded couches, bookcases, beds, etc. It got so bad recently that my wife had to sell off all the excess inventory cluttering the baby's room. (The future baby, that is. I didn't stock little Joseph's room with discarded merchandise.)

For awhile, I would sell this stuff through my web store. But as business grew, my time to manage the web store shrank. Fortunately, I now have a way to help people get rid of their stuff!

A former co-worker of mine and her roommate started a neat little "micro-consignment" company called Square 3 Ventures. They "simplify your life by making you money for items you no longer need nor want, all while keeping useful goods out of landfills."

And they do it at a really good rate, keeping only about 20 percent of the profit. The rest goes to you. You don't deal with Craigslist no-shows, haggling, etc. Just give them your stuff, they market and sell it, and give you cash.

Check out their site here if you need to get rid of some of your clutter. It could be gold!

An apology to all my past employers...

2010-04-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

Customers often ask me how I got into this. I usually give them this short version of the story, but sometimes I simply shake my head and say "I don't know. I have no business running any business more complicated than a lemonade stand."

And that's absolutely true. I never took a business class in college, and was never promoted higher than Third Assistant Urinal Scrubber at a pizza joint I used to work for.

So, the majority of the work I do is a learning experience. While the proverbial School of Hard Knocks is a fantastic educator, the mid-terms are brutal and I fear whatever the final is going to be. So, I look for educational resources wherever I can find them. one of these is Dan Kennedy's book called something like "The No B.S. Guide to Ruthless Management of People and Profits."

What an eye-opener. And to say it makes me a little uneasy would be a huge understatement. I've built this business on a few somewhat nebulous principles like having a "service mentality." Or, we Truck Buddies strive to do anything and everything you'd expect a good buddy to do for you on moving day. (Or any other day -- you need a tire fixed on the freeway? We'll be there if we're not on another job.) I've tried to find the right kind of guys who embody these principles. Fortunately, I have a lot of buddies who do. But, in order to handle the growing work load, I've had to go beyond my immediate circle of friends and bring "strangers" into the network.

I wanted this to be the "anti-job," a way for guys between jobs in this crappy economy to be able to live, or at least to be able to make a few extra bucks.This meant joyfully throwing normal professional conventions out the window. Of course I insisted on punctuality, a clean, if not professional appearance, and casual days every day. (Kind of tough to keep a suit clean in this biz anyway). Things I didn't insist on: regular schedules (I have a big network that ensures extra help is almost always available); uniforms; no taking personal calls when on the job, etc. Institutionalizing "slacker tendencies" may seem counter-intuitive, but it's not slackers I'm trying to cultivate. Anyone who's invited into the MTB network knows the deal -- we're here to work hard, wow customers, maybe even make them laugh, and get lots of referrals. It hasn't been easy, but it's worked.

Unfortunately, it's worked at the expense of my sanity and free time. That's why, gradually, bit by bit, I've moved from "Hey man, want to work tomorrow?" to "Yo -- I'm going to need you to meet me at the job by 9:00 or you're fired, even though you don't technically work for me..."

In a million other ways, I've gone from "cool (I hope) guy to work with," to "no-B.S., give-me-an-answer-now" BOSS. I'm not exactly comfortable with the transition, but hey, I just don't have the time to walk lightly anymore.

So, in reading Dan Kennedy's book on management, I find myself cheering at all the advice, and not a few times, nodding in agreement based on experience. For example, here are some of his No BX Ruthless Management Truths:

1. Employees are employees. I flagrantly violate this. My "employees" are my buddies! These are guys I BBQ with, golf with, ask to watch my son so my wife and I can have a date night occasionally. Nonetheless, I'm coming around to a more "stable" business model, and despite all my resistance to the idea, I may have to actually get employees. Sigh.

3. When food is no longer edible, it must be thrown out. When an employee is no longer profitable, he must go. I've had to disassociate with a few guys over the two years I've been doing this. One, because he hit on some of my customers, and while I'm not the morality police, I couldn't stomach working with a guy who would do such a thing because A) it's ridiculously unprofessional, and B) he was engaged. I had to let another guy go because his whole appearance and attitude made customers so uneasy they even said so.

5. Any broken window is one too many. ("Broken windows" refers to anything that makes a business look bad. It can be a literal broken window in a business' store front, or it can be a cluttered show room, disheveled employees, etc.) My "broken windows" are messy trucks, helpers who look like they just got out of prison, bad attitudes, etc. That's why I tolerate very few of these. (See above).

As I read through this book, I realize that I've been "that employee" all my life. I expected everything and offered nearly nothing in return. Oh, sure, I have some talents and skills which eventually translated into a little bit of experience, but now, I realize that I was coasting on my own sense of wonderfulness. What I thought were irrationally uptight supervisors were really frustrated bosses who couldn't understand why their carrots and sticks weren't working.

So, many apologies, former bosses. You should have fired my butt long before I quit. And for those of you who actually did the right thing and gave me the pink slip, good job! I get it now.

Oh yeah -- MyTruckBuddy.com had a makeover

2010-03-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Check out the new site! www.MyTruckBuddy.com. I finally threw in the towel and quit trying to build a new site by myself. I would spend days, literally days (if you spread out the few minutes I'd have to tweak it over weeks) trying to figure out how to move a box, or add a new background or whatever. So, I went to Elance.com, found someone who had experience with my system, and paid him a couple of hundred bucks. The result, I think, is pretty sweet. It's been getting lots of good feedback, too.

Of course, if you found this blog, you probably came here through the site, so you already know. Lol.

What do you think about it?

MTB gets its first one-star review

2010-03-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

I knew this day would come. How ironic that I was just talking about this with the guys last night at a rare "summit."

"I've been very lucky," I said. "I don't have to rely on marketing while I have good reviews on Yelp. It can't last forever, though..."

And it didn't. Less than 24 hours later, I get my first one-star review.

In a way, it's a good thing. Last summer was brutal, and I didn't have the resources or infrastructure to deal with it. By late August, I almost lost my mind. In fact, I did break down once. Let me tell you -- I had to go to Confession for that one... However, we've been doing summer-level work for about two months. What was hard last year is now what I consider standard. So, this review makes me realize that I still have some work to do to get ready for the summer rush, particularly in the area of customer communications.

Anyway, here's the one star review (found here):

After reading all the reviews on here I was pretty excited to contact this company. Unfortunately it took them 2 days to get back to me and then I asked them to contact me by phone and that was the last I heard from them. The 1 bedroom move was more than a month away so I'm not sure what the problem was. I quite disappointed but on the other hand glad I didn't schedule and then have this much problem with communication the day of the move.

Yelp allows only 600 character responses, so here's what I wrote:

Lance,

Many apologies if we've had a miscommunication. I've searched for a record of our correspondence, but as I haven't found anything, I wonder if you have the right company.

That said, it's entirely possible I dropped the ball here, but let's keep in mind what a typical day looks like for me: Up at 6:30, on the job by 8:00, work a grueling 12 hours or so, come home, spend an hour with my family, then work until midnight e-mailing and scheduling. Six days per week. That I only drop the ball once or twice every six months is miraculous.

At any rate, many apologies.

Chris

And that's just a sliver of what I do. I'm not complaining -- even though this "job" was thrust upon me, I've since chosen to take it as far as I can go several times. Every time I update my resume and look for jobs, I realize what a great thing I have here. Yes, I work around the clock. But I set the hours. I also get to choose my co-workers, the direction of the company, and sometimes, when Truck Buddy Brett lets me, I get to choose where we go to lunch.

Heh.

I've never been happier doing what I do. As Truck Buddy Jimmy frequently says, "Words of affirmation" make our day. Yeah, we usually get really good tips, but even if we don't, "You rock!" and "You guys are awesome!" make our whole day. Maybe I should be concerned at just how much we need that kind of compliment, but the reality is we LIVE for them. Personally, I've received more praise like that in the last two years (the MTB years) than in my entire professional history. It's addictive.

As for Lance's dropped communications, I truly regret that. I can't find any record of our correspondence, but I don't doubt I lost track of him. I often put "Call so-and-so back" on my calendar, forget to set a 15-minute reminder, and then let things pass by. Fortunately, I almost always catch those missed appointments when I check the calendar at the end of the day.

My response to his one-star review, which is my first ever? Well, it's totally unnecessary and probably not a little bit vindictive, but here's the fact: it's a one-star review for pre-move communications, NOT services rendered. I'm sorry I made him mad (no, really!), but I didn't make him mad by doing a crappy job, overcharging, or anything like that.

Communications and other organizational/admin stuff will be a priority going forward, and not "forward" in some distant future. I need to streamline the process NOW, and I've already been working on some things. I can't hire anyone yet, and that's not off the table, but like I said, I'm working on some things. In fact, I should probably get to it. I've got another job in about an hour and a half...

Going out of my mind with emails...

2010-03-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

Please be patient, everyone. I'm trying to get through a hundred or so e-mails going back to Friday, the day we had a total of 15 hours worth of work. (Two four-floor walk-ups, among other things...)

I'll get to your work requests. Let me just pop another top and get through 'em...

C.

Golfing for sanity

2010-03-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday MTB went "off the grid" for most of the day. Oh, I was monitoring electronic chatter, as our Langley buddies might say, but for the sake of my mental health, I stayed off the phone and out of my inbox. I was golfing.

Normally you wouldn't expect that golf would be a good, relaxing diversion from hundreds of e-mails and complex scheduling duties, but it was. In fact, not to complain, but for a guy with limited cranial resources like me, running through a gauntlet of flaming chainsaws would be less stressful than keeping on top of administrative duties. So, 18 holes of golf was cathartic despite my bowling-like score.

<--That's a rabid, three-legged fox sneaking up on Jimmy, by the way.

I think I'm going to make bi-weekly golf trips mandatory for the "core" group of Truck Buddies. That would include Brett, TJ, Jimmy, Gary and David. But if possible, I'd like to include the golfing members of the extended network, too. This job makes it easy to forget that there are other things in life, at least for me. I'm the guy organizing everything and doing nearly 100 percent of the moves. I do enjoy the work, for the most part, but it is a time-consuming gig. If I let it, I could easily work 24 hours per day moving, e-mailing, answering questions, answering phone calls, scheduling, etc. The few hours I forced myself to take off yesterday reminded me that I can, if I choose to accept that mission, have a life.

And no, Facebooking doesn't count.

Yeah, this is a rambling, mostly non-sensical post. Many apologies. I'm still just a little euphoric after breathing free air again. Lol.

I now officially know everyone in the DC area

2010-02-05T19:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday me and my crew were unloading a truck at an apartment complex in southwest. As I was handing an armoire off to someone (I can do that now) I recognized a woman walking a couple into the building.

“T.!” I said.

“Sweetie!” she replied.

It was the same woman who got us into our last apartment building. She’s some kind of rep for the parent company. Very cool chick, very nice. It was good seeing her again, even if she chided me for not networking with her. Hey, I’ve been swamped for nine months…

On the second job of the day, I ended up moving the couple into an apartment I’d moved someone else into. Kind of a sad situation, though — the previous tenants broke up and I was supposed to move him to a new place. We couldn’t get our schedules to sync up, though, so he kind of drifted away.

This is beginning to happen a lot now. Not only can I tell you what the loading docks are like for 99 percent of the city’s buildings, I know who lives in half of them. Is this success? Maybe. The U.S. Census Bureau ought to talk to me.

What's up with My Truck Buddy in 2010?

2010-01-20T06:47:00.000-08:00

Lots!

Perhaps I should expand on that, but first a little background...

If you've read much of my website, you know that MTB is an accidental business. I didn't come to Washington looking to start a moving business ("moving assistance service!"), or to become an entrepreneur, but for other reasons. I came here to become a columnist...or something. I don't know, I never had well-defined goals before I got married and had a child and had to become responsible. And anyway, it turned out that they're not handing out columns to politically ignorant guys with strong opinions, particularly in a time when journalism as we know it is dying.

Anyway, one thing led to another and I found myself lifting couches for a living. Surprisingly, I found I enjoyed the honest work. (It's particularly honest when compared with some of my other jobs -- fundraising, PR for the government, etc.) So, instead of treating it like a "lifeboat job," I decided to make a go of it late last year. In 2010, MTB will become a more deliberate thing, a planned thing. Or so I hope.

What will it look like? Well, in broad strokes, something like this:

I'm going to end up getting a box truck. For the vast majority of apartment moves, a box truck just makes things easier on everyone and cheaper for my customers.
I'll be expanding my network of reliable "Truck Buddies," i.e. guys who I trust to provide the same level of customer service that I do. I have a couple of guys in the network already who've become big believers in the "service mentality" of MTB. That is, they understand that they succeed only when they go far above and beyond the usual moving credo, which seems to be "bitch and moan when the work gets hard." These guys are buying their own trucks and trailers and getting ready for the busy summer to come.
Redesigning the website to both look better, and be more "fun." I have no illusions that transforming a website whose primary focus is moving to something fun and interesting will be easy, but hey, I like challenges. I'd love to make MyTruckBuddy.com a place where people can go to discuss things happening in Washington, get tips on the best restaurants, etc., or find guys with unique talents and skills that they need.

That's just a couple of ideas I have. But basically, I need to get this thing automated so that I'll be able to spend more time with family, particularly because in June, we've got another baby due, and my wife is going to need me at home. We don't have any family in the area, and it therefore feels like we're on the frontier. Everything we do, we do almost alone (although we've been building quite a network of good friends lately).

I welcome any ideas you have about how to make MTB more useful, fun or interesting. We're here to serve!

Thanks,
Chris

What should be the official beer of MTB?

2009-12-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

If Mystic Monk is the official coffee of MTB, what should be the official beer? Discuss here.

Mystic Monk Coffee now the official coffee of MTB

2009-12-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

Do you drink coffee? Do you like good coffee? I mean really, really good coffee? The kind that doesn't taste like a compromise between awareness and taste? Then you'll love Mystic Monk Coffee. I found it about a year ago, and I've tried a handful of the brews. I can recommend Mystic Monk wholeheartedly. Click the logo below to check out their different flavors.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

2009-12-24T18:16:00.001-08:00

I hope it's joyful and all that stuff. ;-)

Testing

2009-11-09T20:45:00.001-08:00

This is a test of blogging on the iPhone.

Moving is a fresh start

2009-08-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

This has been one hell of a summer. Here's a very special 'Thank you' going out to all my customers: Thank you!

Most of the business details are pretty boring, but suffice it to say I've learned a ton about how to run a little operation, management, organizational skills, and most importantly, how to provide excellent customer service. MTB has a great Yelp.com rating (currently five stars), and I'm working on plans to expand the business nationwide. It'll be a pretty simple thing, this expansion, but ideally there will be Truck Buddies in every major city by next summer.

I've fallen flat on my face a few times, too -- literally and figuratively. I've dropped a couple of appointments due to scheduling snafus (all my fault), and I've woefully underestimated a couple of jobs, resulting in insufficient manpower and many, many hours over what we planned on. (One customer even refused to pay for half the move, and honestly, I had a hard time arguing with her about that one. Again, my fault, but it still hurts to realize I basically worked for six hours for free. Ouch.)

Now, we've got about a month and a half of peak moving time, but it definitely feels like change is a-comin'. Probably because we're moving this Friday.

I don't recall ever being so excited about a move before. In many ways it's going to suck -- I have a LOT more stuff than most of my customers have. (Lol. Of course, a lot of my stuff is giveaway stuff from my customers.) I can only afford to pay a few of my guys for a few hours, and I don't expect them to work for free. So, I'll be doing most of the heavy lifting.

Still and all, it's an awesome little place. We're escaping our "filing cabinet for people," a seven-storey apartment building, and heading to a nice little Cape Cod single family home south of Old Town. Here are some pics:

This apartment building was a compromise. We didn't know what we were going to do, and it was near an area we liked, and it was clean. But apartment living was never our thing. It became less so over the last year -- long hallways, sporadically working elevators, parking stickers and tow trucks. Don't get me started on the partiers above, across, and below us. One of them called my wife a vile term when she asked them to be quiet. (He got a visit from Arlington's finest after that).

But now we're moving to this nice, quiet street. We'll have MUCH more room -- including a gigantic upstairs office area. No more doing my work in the bedroom!

It's amazing what a difference a new place makes. Whatever's coming up next, I think I'm ready.

It's not the recession, it's you...

2009-05-13T15:23:00.000-07:00

Found an awesome motivational post on a new blog today (new to me, like almost everything).

http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/you-just-suck/

An excerpt:

Entrepreneurs are ruling this recession.

Why? Because they’re hungry and they’re motivated. That means they can’t spend their whole day getting caught in the fame game or in office politics. It means when they go to a conference or a networking event, they’re not there for the booze. They’re grabbing handfuls of business cards, talking to people, and then following up. And they don’t just say they’ll email you after the show. They really do. Actually, they email you as soon as they get home. They’re nurturing leads and finding clients and creating opportunities. They’re marketing themselves. They’re not tuning in to Oprah this afternoon to get Twitter tips from Ashton Kutcher.

In fact, there’s not even time to whine about how unfair the world is and how this recession is taking away their business. Because they’re out there finding business from places you wouldn’t have even thought to look. Or maybe you would have, if you worked as hard as they do. That’s the thing, people don’t want to work. They want a job and a paycheck. And those cushy jobs with those cushy paychecks are the first to go. Because really all those people are doing is taking up space. So it’s not so much that the recession came around and took your job, it’s that you allowed yourself to become expendable.

Have I said thank you lately?

2009-04-28T16:46:00.001-07:00

No? Well, thank you, DC area people. You're keeping me busy and helping me to keep the family fed and clothed.

In all sincerity, thank you.

It's cute baby time...

2009-04-18T20:06:00.001-07:00

I shirked my work duties and took little Joe to the zoo yesterday. He went nuts, of course, especially when he realized that the animals in his books are freakin' REAL.

I have to admit--until I saw the hippo, I wasn't sure it was real either...

Not many animals in these pics, but it was tough to get any good animal shots with his face in them. Nonetheless, I think you'll be able to see that his cuteness has grown by at least 53 percent.

Why I won't be marketing with Twitter

2009-04-14T06:40:00.001-07:00

This video explains my feelings about Twitter perfectly:

Big moves...

2009-04-11T05:34:00.001-07:00

Moving with the big truck today. Everyone stay off the roads!

First newsletter--out!

2009-04-08T08:30:00.001-07:00

Last night I sent my first newsletter to a list of about 190 people. It should have been much more because my e-mail list is up around 260.

Sigh...one more thing for The List.

If anyone got it, please feel free to tell me what you think of it, even if your first response is "Don't send me anymore spam, you free market capitalist spamming pig!" Seriously--I want to know what you think.

If you're reading this and want to get the newsletter, which is full of useful info and even a way to make some cash on the side (with no obligation on your part), can sign up on the home page. It's on the right-hand side "below the fold," as they say. Here's the link: MyTruckBuddy.com.

Get yer boxes here!

2009-04-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Guess what--MyTruckBuddy.com now offers boxes delivered right to your door. No more dumpster diving, spamming your friends, or using crushed up old boxes from five years ago that saw their first action five years before that.

Just think about it--new, crisp, strong boxes. Mmmm... They're strong, they're reliable -- just like your Truck Buddy.

;-)

Okay, enough cheese. Bottom line? The prices are good, they're delivered right to your door, and you'll be helping me to keep my son diapered and fed. (I get a small percentage of the sale, and it's VERY small).

Go here to get your boxes now!

48 moves in March

2009-04-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

That's a new record.

The amount of money I made is also a new record, but for modesty's sake, I won't brag about it here. Besides, it's not THAT much money...

I have a roster of about 12 guys and -- get this -- one girl. She's an intern at a nearby organization. In fact, I got three interns from that organization. I have no idea why I'm paying them what I do. After all, they get to see a free market capitalism experiment up close and personal.

One of my guys--my main guy, in fact--just got a truck so he can be my first franchisee.

Another guy I had to get off of Craigslist (when all my regular guys were busy) is seriously considering getting a truck this weekend. I've worked with him twice, and I like his entrepreneurial spirit. His eyes lit up both times someone stopped us on the street while we were working to ask if we had any cards.

I have a good system in place for generating leads, scheduling, executing moves, pricing, processing payments, and processing contact info.

I've learned Web design.

I'm about to launch my newsletter, and I have several small businesses to feature.

And you know what? I'm tired.

I love what I do, but I'm tired. I'm at the point I've been working toward for a year and a half--the "too much business" stage. My marketing efforts are beginning to pay off, and I've only begun to implement them. And yet, it's almost more than I can manage by myself. This is a very good thing, but it means that long-worked-for time has arrived: I have to expand. Even with 48 moves, it's barely enough to support my family. A slight price increase will help, but I can't rely on that alone. I need to spread the work around.

One problem: I'm woefully ill-prepared. It's not a roadblock, though. I just need to figure it out like I've been figuring everything else out all this time.

As I write this, I have these work-related injuries:

* A bruised back from where I wedged myself into a doorway with a box. (Kind of hilarious, but painful too...)

* A sliced calf from where I didn't clear the trailer when I stepped over it--while holding a couch.

* A bruised torso of indeterminate origin.

* A stomach problem that feels like an ulcer.

* Miscellaneous hand-scrapes, cuts and bruises from various things.

And yet, I'm very, very happy. I don't think I'll ever have to work for anyone else ever again. I now realize how easy it is to create wealth on your own.

I knew that doing this would never pay all the bills, and that's why I've been working on Project B, or what I'm loosely calling my "Small business marketing plans." At first it just involved copywriting. But I quickly realized that small businesses need Search Engine Optimization, a complement of communication devices like newsletters, special reports and social networking updates. And I'm getting interested potential clients like crazy.

I helped a repeat customer move to and re-move her stuff from the Home & Garden Show in D.C. a few weeks ago. As an experiment (because I had the time) I wandered the cavernous convention hall and stopped at the booths of various business owners.

"How's your Website working for you?" I'd ask. Most said "Fine," and didn't want to pursue my obvious pitching. But a few were almost begging for marketing help. One guy liked my off-the-cuff suggestions so much he repeatedly asked for more consultation. (He needed my help, too. I can't disclose the domain name for his site, but it had the word "fart" in it so prominently that nobody could miss it. Totally by accident, too.) Another is interested in how I can help her sales copy.

And there are more...

Who knows where all this will lead, but I'm telling you, if you want something, it's there for the taking. Just go and do it. DO IT. "Waiting for your ship to come in" is for losers. Building your own damn fleet IS possible, and easier than you think once you get started.

Thank you, God, for teaching me the right things at the right time in this, what has turned out to be the right place. Thank you.

Need a graphic designer?

2009-03-31T20:04:00.000-07:00

Check out Stephanie Greewald at Greenwald Designs. If/when I update all my marketing materials, I'll definitely use her services. FANTASTIC work. A sample:

Department of "Labor?"

2009-03-31T06:17:00.001-07:00

Just took a load to the Department of Labor. Lots of guys just sitting around at the loading dock. Lol.

Here's an odd one...

2009-03-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

I enter an elevator--with a couch--and an old miner follows me in. No, he probably wasn't actually a miner, but he looked like someone named "Cooky" and he's adamant there's gold in them thar hills.

Anyway, completely un-prompted, he tells the story of his buddy who works at the Smithsonian who has a pine cone that looks just like, in his words, "a turd." With great gusto, he recounted how his friend would put the pine cone in his pants while on his rounds, and then, in a crowd of people, grunt and shudder until the pine cone fell out of his pant leg.

Cooky thought this story was hilarious. My customer and I looked at each other as though the elevator opened to Wonderland, and I could tell he was also holding his breath. Whiskey fumes, I think it was, filled the elevator.

When the door opened we went our separate ways.

I don't think I'm going to the Smithsonian for awhile...

Wow

2009-03-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

I've done 37 moves this month. 37. Thirty-seven.

That's a lot of moves.

In other news, I've lost 20 pounds since December.

Sweet irony

2009-03-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday I had to return the pants my buddy left in my truck.

Hmm...that came out wrong. Let me explain...

One of my TRUCK BUDDIES who HELPS ME WITH LARGER PROJECTS left his CHANGE OF CLOTHES in my truck. I'm referring to Stu, whose picture and bio you may now view on the MyTruckBuddy.com staff page. Stu works for the organization I worked for until recently. Despite his traitorous allegiance to said organization, from which I was laid off with about a dozen others, I still value him as a trusted partner and buddy.

Anyway, he left his work clothes in my truck, so I kindly offered to bring them by the old office.

The receptionist let me in without much more than a glance. (So much for security--I'm, as Limbaugh says, a harmless, lovable little fuzzball. But I am a former employee who was laid off with no more than five minutes of notice). I ran up there, met Stu in his office, and dropped off his clothes. We "duded it up" for a minute, as my wife says, and I headed back toward the front door. That's when I heard the voice of the organization's president.

I paused. This guy is like many men who've built an organization up from nothing--in his case, with just a rented closet of an office and a rented computer and VCR. Now it's a $12 million dollar organization. He's brusque, intimidating, no-nonsense, and the object of scorn for quite a few people in Washington on the other side of the political fence. In other words, a kind of guy I can respect, but one who it's no fun to work for. While in his employ I was a writer. Not a particularly good writer, but not particularly bad, either. But this man is a relation to one of Washington's celebrated literati, a man known and respected for his mastery of the English language. In fact, my former boss studied under that giant. Once, my boss called me into his office to rip something I wrote to shreds. He did, however, leave one paragraph which he said was "quite good."

Anyway, I heard this man's voice and I paused. But then I caught myself and thought "What the hell am I nervous about? What's he going to do now...fire me?"

So, I just walked around the corner into his view, said "Howdy," and started down the stairs. He and a vice president were joking around, and as I passed by he yelled down the stairwell, "Anybody who gets me a bailout gets a bonus!"

To the man I could barely ever muster a few feeble words while looking at my feet, I said, "I don't think the government gives bailouts to organizations like this!" (That would have been funnier if I could elaborate on the character of the organization).

He was somewhat confused about how or why I was in the building, but I don't think he recognized me. "I'll give you a bonus if you get me a bailout!"

Funny. "I'd rather have a salary, if it's all the same to you," I said.

He snickered and I went down the stairs.

Hey, I thought it was funny.

Some pics from Lucketts Store

2009-03-17T07:14:00.000-07:00

I said I'd add some pics from Lucketts Store, and here they are. This is all I got, though. I felt weird bringing my camera in there like I was some kind of photojournalist, so, I took these pics with my phone's camera. All the rest were crap. But, you can see some of the inventory they have:

That hutch is only $425 or so, by the way. Me and TJ, one of MTB's main moving dudes, both thought it was a really good deal for such a nice piece.

Perhaps I should mention that I don't often go "antiquing" with my guy friends. Or by myself. Or with "girlfriends." We had to go to Lucketts Store for very manly reasons--the lifting and delivering of two GIGANTIC bookcases to McLean. It involved heavy lifting and grunting and smashed fingers WITH BLOOD. So what if we were excited about lovely home furnishings. You got a problem with that?