For six years, Chad Coatney ran Master Movers at about $800,000 a year. He wore every hat, put out every fire and paid himself around $21,000. He was ready to walk away.
Today, Master Movers does $5 million. Chad didn't get there by working harder. He was already working as hard as a person can.
That's the trap most owners hit when they try to figure out how to grow a moving company. Revenue stalls, so they add hours. The hours don't fix it, because the thing holding them back isn't effort. It's a wall: a hiring problem, a system that lives in one person's head, a market that's tapped out.
We pulled eight of those walls from conversations with moving company owners on Smart Talk. For each one, you'll see how a real owner got past it. None of the fixes are hacks. They're habits. Plenty of owners know how to run a successful moving company. Far fewer know how to grow one.
👉 Want to see these habits in action? Watch how top movers run their day.
Most owners treat other movers like the enemy. So they solve every problem from scratch, alone, in a business where somebody else already solved it.
Chad Coatney broke out of his $800,000 rut when Wade Swikle invited him to a mastermind in Scottsdale with 16 other moving company owners. Chad went home, implemented what he heard, and grew from there.
What made it stick: hearing it from owners it had already worked for.
"Go get in the room with people. It's going to be the best three to five grand you've ever spent. You're going to turn it into three to five hundred grand."
– Chad Coatney, Owner, Master Movers
Wade has his own version. After a peer mastermind in Denver, the room told him to move his headquarters out of a small town and into Tampa. He did, and Tampa took off. For owners worried about giving away their secrets, Wade has news:
"There really aren't any groundbreaking secrets. It ultimately comes down to execution."
– Wade Swikle, CEO, 2 College Brothers
Prabh Heer, COO of You Move Me, puts a number on what going it alone cost him:
"If I would have talked to competitors 12 years ago, You Move Me would be a $100 million business by now."
– Prabh Heer, COO, You Move Me
The habit: Get in a room with owners ahead of you at least once a year. Masterminds, retreats, SmartMoving SUMMIT. Then actually implement what you hear.
One wrong hire in a leadership seat can stall a whole company. The hard part isn't spotting it. It's acting on it.
Chad hired an operations manager from outside the industry. He knew early it wasn't the right fit. But replacing him meant finding and training someone new, so Chad kept coaching and kept hoping. Meanwhile, the manager pushed his own work onto everyone else. Culture slipped. Then the numbers did.
"We just put up with it for too long."
– Chad Coatney, Owner, Master Movers
His rule now: once your gut tells you someone isn't who you need, it's time to make the call.
Cutting the wrong people only works if the right ones stick around. Chad treats crew pay like a home service company does. Movers earn commission when they upsell packing, unpacking, pads, crates or donation hauls. They earn a referral fee when a neighbor walks by and books a move. Add a 401(k) and full benefits, and the job stops looking temporary.
"We make it more of a career than just a job that they don't want to lose."
– Chad Coatney
The habit: When your gut says someone's wrong for the seat, act within weeks, not seasons. Then make sure your best people can see a future worth staying for.
If the business stops when you're gone, you don't have a business. You have a job with a lot of trucks. Figuring out how to run a successful moving company starts with making it run without you.
Moriel Hoffman, co-owner of Solomon and Sons, learned that from a hospital bed. She was in labor with payroll due in two days when her right-hand person called asking for more money, since she'd be out. Moriel let them go on the spot. Then she opened her laptop and ran payroll herself, because nobody else knew how.
"Ultimately what that lesson taught me was my SOP was terrible."
– Moriel Hoffman, Co-owner, Solomon and Sons
She rebuilt the department with two or three trained people behind every role. Then she did it everywhere else. Today Solomon and Sons has a written standard operating procedure for every department, from customer service to marketing, and she rewrites them as the business changes.
Two more habits keep it from sliding back:
Moriel’s warning for owners who assume next year’s growth will take care of itself:
"If you don't build the systems, it's not happening."
– Moriel Hoffman
The habit: If a process lives in one person's head, it's not a process. It's a gamble. Write it down, train a backup, and review it every year.
More leads sounds like the dream. Until your booking rate starts sliding because nobody can get to the phone.
Rooke Crouch runs three hometown brands: Cavalier Moving, Tidal Town Moving and Saltwater Moving. Leads jumped from 5,400 to 9,200 in a year. For five years, his booking rate had held at 45-50%. With the new volume, it dropped into the high 30s.
He didn't panic-hire. He fixed the flow first:
Split the calls. New customers route to sales. Existing customers route to operations. Nobody burns a sales slot on a claim call.
Never send a lead to voicemail. Smart Scout, SmartMoving's AI phone agent, answers calls Rooke's team can't get to. It qualifies the lead and tells the caller when to expect a callback: within an hour during the day, or the next morning if it's late. “We're not trying to kill our team.”
Hire on proof, not panic. Five sales agents cover all three brands. If fall volume holds, he adds more. Not before.
"Obviously you need to grow your team, but you gotta make sure you get the right ones in, because you can make a bad hire and take a huge step back."
– Rooke Crouch, Co-owner, Cavalier Moving
👉See how Rooke caught 9,200 leads without a bigger sales team in the Cavalier Moving case study.
If you're working out how to get more customers for your moving company, start by asking where your current ones came from. Rooke's sales team asks every customer how they heard about the company and logs it in SmartMoving. Google drives about half his leads. The rest come from people: two field marketers working realtors, apartment complexes and storage facilities, plus past-customer outreach that brings in referrals and reviews.
The habit: Track the source of every lead, every time. And when volume spikes, fix the flow before you add headcount.
Growth doesn't always mean more jobs. Sometimes the money is already sitting in the moves you book. You're just not collecting it.
Brazos Fuller found that money in valuation coverage. After nearly 25 years in business, Firefighting's Finest was still selling it the old way. A salesperson mentioned it on the booking call. The customer said they'd think about it. Ninety-eight percent of the time, they never called back.
That left the crew supervisor pitching coverage on move day, right when the customer was signing paperwork and the clock was running. It rarely worked.
"We knew we could do better. Streamline it, be transparent. Ultimately, sell more valuation."
– Brazos Fuller, Director of Corporate Operations, Firefighting's Finest
So Brazos rebuilt the process top to bottom. New name, new price points, new coverage levels. Then the big change: every estimate now includes valuation by default, at the lowest coverage tier. Before customers can sign, they have to pick an option in their portal. They can decline it, keep the base level or upgrade, and plenty upgrade. Their choice updates the estimate and the contract automatically.
The result: valuation sales grew 4x from October to November 2025, right at the start of the slow season.
The habit: Build the upsell into every quote so it can't be forgotten.
Bought leads fill the schedule in peak season. But the day you stop paying, they stop coming. If that's your only channel, you're renting your growth.
Alex Bernard went all in on search engine optimization two years into running his company, well before most owners think they're ready for it. His case for it:
"If you want to take on more jobs… and survive winter better, being able to take on an SEO channel and develop it into something fruitful becomes very important."
– Alex Bernard, Owner, Direct Moving Group
SEO can take six months to a year to pay off. Alex had hundreds of leads within six months of committing.
Your brand keeps working when you stop paying, too. Eighteen months after Allison Endicott rebranded Wirks Moving & Storage, their Google ads agency told her Wirks was seeing results faster than any company he'd worked with, and credited the brand.
Chad Coatney, who spent years not spending on marketing, has a name for that mistake:
"I was penny smart, dollar stupid."
– Chad Coatney, Owner, Master Movers
The habit: Keep paying for the leads that fill this month. But put steady money every month into at least one channel that keeps working when you stop: search, your brand, your referral partners.
At some point, growing bigger in one city costs more than it's worth. More managers, more trucks, more risk, all in one basket.
Austin Yarborough saw that wall coming at Central Coast Moving in California. He could get to $5 million there. He just wasn't sure he should, if it meant thinner margins and every egg in one market. Arizona was where his long-distance customers kept moving, and where he wanted to grow.
But starting from zero in a new state means buying trucks, a warehouse, equipment and, hardest of all, finding people. So he bought a company instead.
"I could just jump on to a vehicle moving 60 miles an hour and then go to 120 with it."
– Austin Yarborough, Owner, Central Coast Moving and Lucky Day Moving
He bought a seven-figure Arizona mover with three trucks and zero dollars down: half owner financing, half line of credit. The seller already ran on SmartMoving, so the handoff was plug and play. Austin invested first in equipment, then rebranded the company as Lucky Day Moving.
It didn't take off overnight. February through April were slow. Then June hit $100,000 and July hit $200,000.
"Growth takes time. Just remember that you are farming."
– Austin Yarbrough
The habit: Decide how you'll grow before the market decides for you. Deeper in your city, a new city, or buying one that's already rolling.
The best new revenue lines don't start from scratch. They use something you already have: empty space, a trained crew, a process that works or customers who already trust you.
Sabrina Jones started Movher in 2010 with something no local mover offered: move-out cleaning. When customers kept asking for weekly cleaning too, she spun it off in 2018 as a separate company, Maids of Movher.
She's kept finding money in what she already owns:
New services aren't the only way to raise the ceiling. Moriel Hoffman got Solomon and Sons its international license about three years ago, and the company is now building more corporate accounts.
Diversifying isn't always the answer. You Move Me looked hard at adjacent home services: house cleaning, window cleaning, gutters, lawn care. Prabh and his team passed. Instead, they doubled down on long-distance moving. Two years after getting serious about it, it's their fastest-growing segment.
👉 More examples: see how Elle Nesher and Taylor Lydon built warehousing revenue in the 2026 All-Star Lineup.
The habit: Before you add a service, ask what it uses that you already own: space, crews or customers. Then run it in the same system as your moves, so you can see what it’s really earning.
Nobody here grew by adding more hours.
What changed was the system. A peer group that told the truth. A process written down. A quote that sells coverage on its own. A report checked every morning.
Pick the wall you're hitting right now. Fix that one. Then turn the fix into something your team does every day, whether you're there or not.
Systems beat hustle. Good business is a daily habit.