“It’s not complicated; we simply keep our promises and always do what we say we’re going to do.”

You Move Me is a professional, local moving company that moves people, not just their boxes. You Move Me is pioneering a new standard for the moving industry with a customer experience that is different from what’s expected.

This is Brian Scudamore’s third successful franchise system. Brian has received widespread recognition in the media and business community for his impressive serial entrepreneurial efforts.

Brian’s success has been recounted in such publications such as; Fortune Magazine, Business Week, New York Times, Huffington Post, and Wall Street Journal, to name just a few.

BusinessInterviews.com: What inspired you to tackle the moving industry? What gap did you spot in the market?

Brian: I was inspired to start You Move Me after a recent move with my family that went terribly. The movers I hired showed up late, were not friendly at all and had little regard for our belongings. They even broke a few things! I saw this as an opportunity to bring a professionalized, national brand to the moving industry that was focused on providing an exceptional customer experience. This is exactly what we did in the junk removal industry with 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and in the painting industry with my 2nd brand, WOW 1 DAY PAINTING. It’s not complicated; we simply keep our promises and always do what we say we’re going to do.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you share the inspiration behind the campaign that you are launching this year called Moving Moments?

Brian: With You Move Me, our mission is to move people, not just their boxes. We do this by providing exceptional customer service with small touches like morning coffee service and a house-warming plant at the end of your move. We felt that more was needed to achieve our mission and so we came up with Moving Moments which are random acts of kindness performed by our movers in their communities. Examples of Moving Moments we’ve done so far include putting change in expired parking meters, shoveling snow from someone’s driveway, helping an elderly lady cross the street, assisting a stranded motorist who had a flat tire and that’s just to name a few!

We track the number of Moving Moments we perform and hold them in the same regard as we do with other metrics we use to evaluate the performance of our business like revenue earned, sales calls answered, online visitors and so on.

BusinessInterviews.com: You have a gift for developing successful franchises. Can you talk about the process and what first attracted you to building franchise models and if your development process or approach has changed since your first business?

Brian: To me, franchising is about building something together, much bigger than any one of us could build on our own. As a system, we’re able to learn from each other and create best practices that can benefit everyone.
With the 2 new brands, we were fortunate enough to be able to apply the learnings and experience gained from building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? while avoiding any of the mistakes we had made. The core strengths of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? like our call center, marketing programs, PR expertise, technology systems and so on were all leveraged to help develop WOW 1 DAY PAINTING and You Move Me.
We also knew exactly who we were looking for in terms of Franchise Partners and have been very selective with who we bring on board, especially at this stage of our growth.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some common aspects of a move that tend to get overlooked?

Brian: I think the fact that moving is such an emotional process is overlooked by most companies. We make sure that we’re hiring movers with empathy and who understand that moving is one of the most stressful things a person can do and so they do anything they can to make the process easier. We aim to make the experience of moving almost fun.

BusinessInterviews.com: Congratulations on having the largest franchise launch in history in the spring of 2013, where franchisees made a spectacular entrance into the North American moving industry by launching 25 You Move Me moving franchises on the same day. What was the most challenging aspect of coordinating such a huge launch?

Brian: An essential part of our successful launch was ensuring we had the right people in place. We achieved this by only awarding You Move Me franchises to the top 25 Franchise Partners in the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? system.
Next, we had to make sure that all of our systems were set up and ready to effectively support our franchises right from the beginning. Everything had to be in place from having properly trained call center agents, an easy to use online booking engine, marketing programs as well as small details like having the right uniforms for our movers, boxes, supplies and so on. Anything and everything needed to run a You Move Me franchise had to be ready to go so that we were providing an exceptional customer experience right from day 1.

BusinessInterviews.com: What’s advice would you give to someone who thinks that they have a good idea for a franchise?

Brian: Before you decide to franchise, you should have 5 to 10 years’ experience with running your business, developing a proven and profitable model. Franchising is essentially creating a recipe for others to follow and you want to make sure that the recipe works!

I would recommend reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It taught me that people don’t fail, systems do. The key to a successful franchise is having established systems that will help you scale your business. Develop your systems by creating one-page best practice summaries for every activity required to run your business. As you grow, keep challenging and documenting these systems and soon you’ll have a well-oiled company that can be franchised.