Entrepreneurs love to make money, if there is an opportunity to do such we are all over it. When you are first starting your moving business cash flow is tight and offering services that aren’t your specialty becomes attractive. When you need to make payroll doing other services such as cleaning the house, shoveling snow, planting flowers, painting, etc. All seem attractive because it’s more chance to make money from your existing customers.
While this is sometimes essential to surviving the early years, later on as the company grows this can prove a distraction from growing your core service, moving. Each task by itself requires a different set of tools, type of employee, and way of operating to be most effective, this can come into conflict as you grow and increase the size of your company.
Do some trimming of your services list, remove anything that doesn’t use the same resources as moving. This will allow you to reduce your bottom line as you grow your company.
The restaurant industry is a very good example. Many times you have gone to a café and found your favorite menu item is gone. The reason is similar. The item most likely required unique ingredients (resources) to make. They weren’t selling well enough to justify the investment or the distraction of one more thing to train the cooks to make. So they removed it to reduce the resource cost.
Mix and Match to Create new services
One restaurant that handles this scenario well is Taco Bell. They have a finite set of resources (beef, chicken, tomatoes, burrito shells, taco shells, lettuce, etc) and they mix and match them to come up with new offerings. If you can find a way to use the same resources in a similar way you unlock a good mine.
Here are some services to offer that stick with the typical core focus.
- Residential Moving
- Office Moving
- Industrial Moving
- College dorm moving
- Packing
- Unpacking
- Packing Supplies
- Crating
- Storage
- Shipping and Receiving
- Cross-Docking
- Furniture/Merchandise delivery
- Overstock merchandise storage
- File Storage
3rd Party
Some services you may be asked a lot to do for your clients that aren’t your specialty. It’s highly recommended you work out a relationship with a 3rd party vendor and work out an agreement where any work they refer you they get a commission, and vice versa. This way you can still make money from the service without having to handle it yourself.
Spin off company/division
In some cases there may be a great opportunity in a secondary service that has the potential to surpass your main business. In this case, give it a try, but set it up as either a spin off business, or a stand-alone division. Try not to mix resources so they aren’t fighting for attention and weakening each other.
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