The Expensive Lessons Every Moving Company Owner Learns Too Late

The most expensive lessons in business are the ones you learn years after they would have helped. Ask any moving company owner who has been at it a decade what they wish they had known on day one, and you will get a list that could have saved them years of grind and a lot of money.

On the Snoball Effect Podcast, Wade Swikle of 2 College Brothers Moving & Storage and Chad Coatney of Master Movers were unusually candid about theirs. When host Todd Jensen asked what they would tell their younger selves, neither reached for a motivational cliche. They reached for the things that actually cost them.

Lesson One: Set Your Ego Aside and Ask for Help

Wade’s biggest regret is how long he tried to figure everything out alone. “Setting my ego aside and not trying to reinvent the wheel,” he said when asked what he would change, “and seeking mentorship and asking for help from people that had done what I was ultimately trying to do.”

The cost of waiting was concrete. “Finding that mentorship earlier on than I did would have saved me years and a lot of headache and made me a lot more money a lot faster,” Wade said. “It would’ve given me a much stronger foundation.” For roughly five years he treated business books as his only teacher, because there simply were not resources built for moving company owners at the time. The moment he sat in a room with people who had already done it, everything accelerated.

Chad learned the same lesson from the opposite direction. In his early years he guarded his ideas. “I kinda didn’t have that abundance mindset,” he said. “I thought I had to protect all my secrets, which I realized I didn’t have any secrets worth protecting.” The secrecy cost him the exact relationships that later transformed his business.

Lesson Two: Charge Properly From the Start

For three years Chad paid himself $21,000 a year and profited maybe $1,000 a month, if damage claims did not eat it first. The turnaround was a pricing decision he made at a breaking point, raising his rate from $109 to $149 an hour for two movers and a truck. “The first month I did that, I made 20 grand that month,” he said. That was more than he used to earn in a year.

The lesson underneath is that underpricing is not humility, it is a trap. Chad connects charging properly directly to quality. If you are not charging enough, he said, you cannot pay your employees enough, you cannot deliver a good customer experience, and you cannot handle claims properly when they come up. Price is what funds everything else that keeps customers happy.

Lesson Three: The Customer Is (Almost) Always Right

Chad names customer experience as the quality he most lacked at the start and now considers essential.

His practical filter is to look for the triple win. “Always look for the win, win, win,” he said. “What’s a win for the customer? What’s a win for the guys? What’s a win for the company?” In a business where a household moves once every six or seven years, reputation is the growth engine, and a single detractor can slow the whole thing down.

Lesson Four: Respect the Business Model for What It Is

Chad’s bluntest advice was that moving is genuinely hard, and pretending otherwise sets new owners up to quit. “You gotta get really good at getting punched in the face and then just smiling afterwards and saying, may I please have another,” he said. “That’s basically like what it’s like running a moving company.”

Wade agrees the barrier is not entry, it is survival. “It’s a low barrier to entry business,” he said. “But it’s a high barrier to success.” He reframes the notorious stigma around movers as opportunity: because so many operators do the bare minimum, simply raising your standard separates you from most of the competition. But he is equally clear that grit is table stakes. “You have to have a little bit of a mental illness, and be able to obsess and just keep going when everything hits the fan,” he said. “99% of people just don’t have that fortitude.”

Lesson Five: There Are No Real Secrets, Only Execution

Both owners landed on the same closing idea. The advantage is not hidden knowledge. “There’s no real secrets in this business,” Wade said. “It all comes down to execution, and your ability to lead multiple levels of people, and to be able to build trust in consumers.” The lessons are available. What is rare is the discipline to apply them, and the humility to learn them from someone else before you pay full price to learn them yourself.

That is why so much of what shortens the learning curve comes from other owners. The habits that keep companies climbing instead of stalling out are the same ones that keep owners from plateauing at the same revenue, and both Wade and Chad credit their fastest growth to learning alongside other movers rather than in isolation.

The Takeaway

Ask for help sooner than feels comfortable. Charge what the work is worth. Make the customer right even when they are wrong. Respect how hard the business is, and then out-execute everyone who does not. None of these lessons are complicated. They are just expensive to learn the slow way.