From a Pickup Truck to Scale: Wade Swikle and Chad Coatney on Breaking Through

The Snoball Effect Podcast exists for one simple reason: to bring home service company owners practical insights they can use right now to grow their business.

In this episode, Todd Jensen sits down with two people who have lived the full arc of building a moving company. Chad Coatney is the Founder and CEO of Master Movers. Wade Swikle is the CEO of 2 College Brothers Moving & Storage and the host of the Grow Your Moving Company Podcast. Together they co-founded Moving Titan Retreats, the moving industry’s premier event for owners serious about scaling. Wade started with $600 and a pickup truck. Chad started with a trailer and, by his own correction, about $10,000 on his first truck. This is the story of what it actually took to get from there to running multimillion-dollar operations, and the mindset shifts that made the difference.

Key Takeaways

• Starting is easy, succeeding is not — Both owners agree the moving business has a low barrier to entry and a high barrier to success. Grit and obsession get you in. Systems and people get you out of the daily grind.
• The aha moment was other people — For both Wade and Chad, the turning point came the first time they sat in a room with other moving company owners who had already solved the problems they were stuck on.
• Customer experience is non-negotiable — Chad’s hardest-won lesson: even when you are right, you make the customer right, because raving fans compound and detractors slow you down.
• You cannot scale what you refuse to hand off — The owners who break through get off the trucks, out of dispatch, and out of sales, then bring in A players and pay for them.
• It is not what you know, it is who you know — The peer network is the cheat code. One connection or one idea can pay for a conference many times over.

Two Very Different Starts, One Shared Grind

Chad did not come from a business background. He taught himself the company as he built it, and he is candid that the person he had to beat first was himself. “I never ran my own company before. I never went to a college for business, so I was just trying to figure it out on the fly,” Chad said. “The only thing I had was grit and determination to never give up. I’m like a cockroach, you can’t kill me.”

He started doing furniture deliveries for $100 to $150 apiece and learned the cost of going it alone. “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.” Year three brought a tragedy, an accident with a fatality that he calls the hardest thing he has ever had to work through.

Wade’s start looked different but rhymed. He saved up $600 after working for another moving company long enough to get an insurance policy and a license, then leaned on a fraternity house full of labor. That model did not last. He describes managing his fraternity brothers as “herding a bunch of drunk cats,” and the economics never worked because “college students only move during, like, six weeks out of the year. They don’t have any money.”

What carried Wade through the early years was obsession. “I was obsessed with it for those first few years,” he said. “I think you kinda have to be obsessed, especially in the beginning because you just have to find those opportunities.” Even so, the climb was slow. “It probably took me five to seven years before we really actually started making any money,” he admitted. His verdict is one every owner should remember: “This business is relatively easy to get into, but it’s hard to succeed in.”

The Moment It Clicked for Both of Them

Chad’s first taste of traction was a pricing decision. For three years he paid himself $21,000 and profited maybe $1,000 a month. Then he hit a breaking point and raised his rate from $109 an hour to $149 an hour for two movers and a truck. “So the first month I did that, I made 20 grand that month,” he said. That was more than he used to make in a year.

But the real turning point was people. Wade invited Chad to a mastermind in Scottsdale with sixteen other owners, and it rewired how Chad saw the business.

The results were fast. “I was able to 5X my business in just a couple years,” Chad said, and along the way he learned a counterintuitive truth: “It was way easier running a $2 million company at that time than running a $800,000 company, ‘cause I was able to hire an ops manager, and a general manager, and have a sales team.”

Wade’s version happened around year five, at a conference he could barely afford. “It was 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. He went home and implemented nearly everything he had heard. “From there, it just changed the game.” His summary of the shift: “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 Most Expensive Lesson Each Wishes They’d Known

Asked what he would tell his younger self, Chad’s first answer is a joke with a serious core: he would slap the idea out of young Chad’s hands, because moving is a punishing business to build. But his real lesson is about the customer. “It’s all about the customer experience and making sure that is 100%,” he said. “Even if you are in the right, if the customer is wrong, you still make them right. It’s better to have raving fans than to have one person just talking crap behind your back.” His operating filter became a simple test: “Always look for the win, win, win. What’s a win for the customer? What’s a win for the guys? What’s a win for the company?”

Wade’s answer was about ego. “Setting my ego aside and not trying to reinvent the wheel,” he said, “and seeking mentorship and asking for help from people that had done what I was ultimately trying to do.” The cost of waiting was measurable: “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.” These are the kind of lessons they wish they had learned sooner. Wade also reframed the business itself: “Our people are our inventory, and it’s a very people-driven business. It’s a low barrier to entry business, but it’s a high barrier to success.”

Getting Out of Your Own Way

When Todd asked what separates movers who keep growing from those who plateau, both owners landed in the same place: the owner has to stop being the bottleneck. Wade put the mechanism plainly. “A lot of it comes down to getting out from working inside your business to being able to work on your business and developing systems and processes so that you can delegate, because that’s ultimately the only way to scale.”

The owners who break through, Wade said, “bring in great talent, they bring in A players, and they’re not afraid to pay for them,” because “A players run circles around B players. It can take four B players to create the same output as one A player.” Chad framed the same idea as a discipline of the calendar. “Work on the biz, not in the biz,” he said. “Your job as a CEO is to grow your company and you can’t do that if you’re handling sales, and marketing, and coaching the movers, and dispatching and all that stuff.” Learning to step back without the business falling apart is the whole game, and it is why some owners break through while others plateau at the same revenue year after year.

Why They Built Moving Titan Retreats

That Scottsdale mastermind planted a seed. The value was obvious, Chad said, but the format was loose, so he and Wade decided they could do it better. They added structure, started hosting, and it grew into a full conference that now draws around 300 moving company owners a year. His pitch for why an owner should come is characteristically direct: “First of all, your competition’s gonna be there, so you better get there.” The deeper argument is the one he keeps coming back to: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. You’re one connection away from the leveling up. You’re one nugget away from that aha moment that’s gonna take you to the next level, and you’re not gonna learn it at home by yourself surrounded by your movers.”

Wade says the real value is not on the stage. “The magic really happens from those backroom conversations,” he said. He offered a framework for how to spend your time in a room like that: “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,” plus 10% reflecting and piecing it all together. He also named a benefit owners rarely admit they need. “A therapist doesn’t know about the moving industry. A lot of times your spouse doesn’t know about the moving industry,” he said. “I can call Chad with things that I can’t call anybody else about and get his take on it.” That is the heart of the peer community that changed both of their businesses.

Connect with Wade and Chad

The next Moving Titan Retreats gathering runs September 2 to 4, 2026 at the Wyndham Grand Clearwater Beach in Florida, with sessions on marketing, sales, operations, dispatch, safety, compliance, and culture led largely by moving company owners themselves. You can grab tickets at movingtitanretreats.com. To reach Chad directly on insta at @coatney23. Wade is easy to find on social media at @wadeswikle, and his Grow Your Moving Company Podcast is the longest actively running podcast in the moving industry, worth a subscribe for owners who want more conversations like this one.