Why the Fastest-Growing Movers Don't Scale Alone

Running a moving company can be a lonely job. The problems are specific, the hours are long, and the people closest to you rarely understand the business well enough to help. For years, most owners have carried that weight alone. The ones who grow fastest figured out they did not have to.

On the Snoball Effect Podcast, Wade Swikle of 2 College Brothers Moving & Storage and Chad Coatney of Master Movers described how a single room of other moving company owners changed the trajectory of both of their businesses, and why they built Moving Titan Retreats to give other owners the same thing.

The Room That Changed Everything

Chad’s breakthrough did not come from a book or a course. It came from a mastermind in Scottsdale that Wade invited him to, sitting in a circle with sixteen other owners running companies from $1 million to $12 million.

“It was very eye-opening to me to hear the stories of how everybody else was started and how they run their moving company,” Chad said. What made it land was trust. “These guys wanted nothing from me except for to help me, so you could trust the information that was coming from those guys.” The result was not incremental. “Everything changed for me after that,” he said. “I was able to 5X my business in just a couple years.”

Wade’s version came around year five, at a conference he could barely afford to attend. “It was like somebody had been, like I’d been living in the dark for the last five years and somebody had just flipped the light switch on and finally given me the blueprint that I was looking for,” he said. His conclusion was the same as Chad’s: “Getting into that room with other people that were in my position or ahead of me, and seeking out that mentorship was the magic bullet that I needed.”

The Cheat Code Is Who You Know

Both owners come back to the same idea, and Chad states it as a rule.

Chad’s favorite proof is a story about a booking fee. An owner running a $6 to $8 million company heard a $250,000 company mention a booking fee they charged, something he had never considered. He implemented it and now makes an extra $150,000 a year from it. “Would you spend five grand to go to a conference to make 150 grand a year?” Chad asked. “It’s little stuff like that you don’t even think about that you’ll pick up along the way just by being in the right room with the right people.” The lesson embedded in that story: value flows in every direction, and the biggest operators can still learn from the smallest.

Learn Up, Push Sideways, Help Down

Wade offered a framework for how to actually use a peer network. “You should spend 30% of your time learning from people that are ahead of you, 30% of your time pushing people that are at your level, and 30% of your time helping people that are below you because you were there at one point and people were helping you,” he said, with the last 10% spent reflecting and piecing it all together.

The peer-level relationships matter more than owners expect. “Chad and I are similarly sized companies, we push each other, and we don’t want the other one to pass us up,” Wade said. That friendly competition, plus genuine friendship, is what keeps both of them climbing.

The Part Nobody Talks About: It Is Therapeutic

Beyond tactics, Wade named a benefit most owners never admit they need. The isolation of the job is real, and the people in your life often cannot help. “A therapist doesn’t know about the moving industry. A lot of times your spouse doesn’t know about the moving industry,” he said. A peer who runs the same kind of company does. “I can call Chad with things that I can’t call anybody else about and get his take on it. It gives me an outlet to vent and to not have to carry that on my shoulders solo.”

This is also where the real value of an event lives. The speakers and workshops matter, Wade said, but “the magic really happens from those backroom conversations.” It is the dinners, the workouts, the pickleball tournament, and the late-night talks that build a contact in every corner of the country, someone to call when you want to know what is working in another market.

Why It Beats Going It Alone

The practical case is simple. The peer network is where owners learn to step off the trucks without the business falling apart, and it is where they collect the expensive lessons before paying full price for them. Both Wade and Chad spent years learning the hard way in isolation. The moment they joined a community, their timelines compressed dramatically. That contrast is the entire argument.

The Takeaway

The fastest-growing movers are not smarter or luckier. They are better connected. They put themselves in rooms with people ahead of them, push the peers beside them, and pull up the ones behind them. If you are still trying to figure it all out alone, the single highest-leverage move you can make is to stop. The next Moving Titan Retreats gathering runs September 2 to 4, 2026 at the Wyndham Grand Clearwater Beach in Florida, with tickets at movingtitanretreats.com.