A few
Questions
asked during the process
There are two franchising options you can choose from. The first is the mod-market model has the minimal financial requirements of $80,000 in liquid assets and $150,000 in net worth. These numbers are designed to ensure that if you need to work with a bank or financial institution for lending, proper collateral can be provided for the business when obtaining a loan. When working through the process, you will develop a budget that estimates your business start-up expenses, insurance costs, licensing requirements, and all things needed to get your business up and running.
For the metro marketing area option, the minimum financial requirements are $160,000 in liquid assets and $400,000 in net worth. These numbers include the same start-up costs as the mod-market franchise, but on a larger scale to allow for more potential growth and a faster ramp up.
Both of these options are reasonable considering the cost of starting up your own business. The most valuable of these expenses is in licensing of the company name, which gives your customers a recognizable brand experience and customer service expectations.
Investment amounts can vary depending on the size of the market, availability, and where you plan to open a location.
Opening a franchise has many benefits over starting your own business. One of the biggest advantages is being part of a recognizable brand, allowing you to draw in more customers that are already familiar with the company’s services. Having a respected and proven name can boost your sales, and establish trust between your location and the customer. You will also have an exceptional operating system that is identical across the brand, allowing for comparable sales that can help you determine what you need to be doing to experience business growth. With more than 30 years of business knowledge and intelligence, we can help you in all areas of the business. Having comparable data can assist you with calculating the correct benchmarks and allow you to manage the expenses for your franchise location.
You can also share ideas or seek advice from your peers who have seen success as franchisees in the system. Additionally, contact with your home office business consultant, subject matter experts in all fields, and experienced business teams are factors that will put you on the path to success.
Moving is not as simple of an operation as you may think. Moving requires you to hire the best movers, drivers, and office staff to help create and establish a relationship with customers, ensuring the best moving experience possible. A knowledgeable and friendly staff is essential to the process. Customer service is what keeps customers coming back to your business, leaving good reviews and referring you to friends and family. As the franchise owner, you have the most important job of making sure all of your assets move together in a smooth, reliable manner. When all of your employees work together as a team to create the maximum potential for your franchise, your business will flourish!
Your trucks are your employees’ most important asset on the ground level of operations. Moving trucks take quite a beating from the repetitive loading and unloading of customers belonging. It’s crucial to ensure your trucks receive regular maintenance and checks to assure moves are safe for employees and customers’ belongings. Your trucks are moving billboards, and are one of the main business assets that need to constantly be assessed.
Here at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®, a strong team atmosphere has allowed us continue to hit milestones over and over again. With our talent, time, and tools, we continually strive to be the best! We implement business strategies that will keep us ahead of the competition and evaluate key performance indicators in both the franchising industry, as well as those in the moving space. We look at the highs and low of the company, and compare them to benchmarked data points and economic trends.
For new franchises it normally takes about 3-4 weeks to recruit and onboard mover/driver candidates. When it comes to office staff, we usually allow for 4-6 weeks to advertise, recruit, and onboard (depending on the market and level of position). Franchises that are coming into a brand new market where TWO MEN AND A TRUCK is less known, it normally takes a bit longer.
Typically we take the slow season to focus on re-training employees, as well as professional development, which we have a variety of different resources for training and development. It’s also not uncommon during the slow season to get frontline staff involved with local marketing initiatives and charitable events.
Our TWO MEN AND A TRUCK careers site, alongside job sites such as Glassdoor and Indeed are where we find the bulk of our candidates. However, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram can really boost recruiting efforts and not only drive candidates to apply online, but promote the great culture at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK.
As you prepare to open your doors, a recruiting specialist will work with you to build a customized plan to recruit movers/drivers, customer service representatives, and management staff to help you run your franchise. Our recruiting specialists work with existing locations to help them stay ahead of their hiring needs and will bring the expertise necessary to build your team. TWO MEN AND A TRUCK uses a cloud-based applicant tracking system to help you organize, track, and measure your recruiting, interviewing, and hiring processes.
Item 7 in the FDD spells out the amount needed to open a franchise. Total funding needed to open a franchise varies across the system from the low to the higher totals in Item 7’s cost ranges. There are many variables that determine the opening costs including owner’s decisions like buying versus leasing trucks, time of the year a franchise opens, and brand strength in the marketing area.
We do not necessary promote a particular time of the year to open. The moving industry is a generally a cyclical business with a large amount of overall business happening during the summer months. This is the time people generally move which aligns with local school schedules. All times of the year have advantages and disadvantages from operational and financial perspectives.
The requirement for a new franchise is to operate two trucks and today, the average franchise has more than 12 trucks running. The beauty of this franchise concept, unlike other businesses, is that the size and sales potential can easily be increased just by adding trucks. Adding trucks increases capacity and we promote adding rental trucks locally to supplement demand. Adding trucks is a coordinated effort — TWO MEN AND A TRUCK has data to support you on when it’s best to add trucks and can point you in the right direction with vendors to provide you trucks to grow your franchise.
The mod-market model is a relatively new franchise concept for the TWO MEN AND A TRUCK system. Over the system’s more than 25 years as a franchisor, the size of a franchise marketing area has been honed down into a market size of approximately 420,000 to 600,000 in population and largely concentrated in major metro areas. These franchise sizes have performed very well for the system, but we realize that many great markets do not meet these population totals. We’re confident our concept would see success in smaller markets, so to further develop our system and expand across the U.S., we’ve carved out markets with populations less than a traditional market between 100,000 and 200,000 in population. Based on the smaller population sizes, a modified model was developed to promote growth and reduce costs for these franchise entrepreneurs.
The type of markets available vary in size and demographics. TWO MEN AND A TRUCK offers a variety of different franchise ownership options. The decisions on whether to buy an existing franchise or open a new market is a decision based on many factors and much of these decisions are based on cost and the personal preferences of the buyer, with each option having its advantages.
The Item 19 is a great reference that provides information on the financial performance of our franchises which can help you analyze how your potential franchise will do in the future. That being said, there’s an assortment of different representations of the franchise’s historical financial data. Many franchise concepts show just a small subsection of the franchises for a multitude of different reasons. They may not have the data from the entire franchise system or are highlighting only specific high-performing franchises. TWO MEN AND A TRUCK shows financial information that is based on all non-corporate owned franchises and their performance.
Once your agreement is signed, the work begins! But don’t worry, you aren’t alone. We offer one-on-one support throughout the startup process, where you are paired with a specialist to walk you through every step of the process. This also includes eight days of initial training available to you as the franchisee and any managers you might want to bring along.
After you open, the training opportunities continue. You can take advantage of continual education in the form of online classes, monthly webinars, and training events.
Our core purpose is to Move People Forward and we stand behind that. We’ve created a Career Development Program with the goal of developing your staff regardless of their position within the company: Whether it be developing frontline employees to become managers, or further developing your managers’ skills, we are fully invested in helping your employees develop personally and professionally during their time at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK.
Our core purpose is to Move People Forward. In the spirit of this, we offer a variety of career development options to every team member in the system. Franchise employees can take advantage of our Skills Advancement Program, which allows them to became certified in a specific role. They can also participate in the Career Development Program, which helps them to pursue their dreams of management or even franchising. Additionally, there are hundreds of online training classes, live and recorded webinars, and in-person training events team members can attend to further enhance their skills. Whatever their ambitions, we have a program to guide them along the way.
At TWO MEN AND A TRUCK, you are considered part of the family. That means you have the full support of the TWO MEN AND A TRUCK team at Home Office as well as your fellow franchisees to lean on and to bounce best practices off of. Our goal is to see you flourish in this family.
The length of time it takes to open the franchise varies from state to state and depends on multiple factors. On average, it takes three months from the time the agreement is signed until the franchise becomes operational.
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK franchises can operate with as little as three employees (excluding movers and drivers) but the answer to this question depends on many factors which include: if you’re planning on working in the business; how many trucks you’re starting with; if you intend to scale to multiple locations quickly; if you intend to hire employees with TWO MEN AND A TRUCK or moving experience. These are just a few variables that may play a large factor in how many employees you’ll need.
Every new franchise is assigned a field trainer and development specialist who will walk you through the process from beginning to end. You’ll receive a start-up playbook which details all of the tasks necessary to open a franchise. You’ll also have weekly calls with your field trainer as well as other home office subject matter experts to ensure your franchise is moving in the right direction. Two field trainers will visit your franchise the week of your first scheduled move and help train all employees (Office/sales staff, management, movers and drivers) and make sure the correct processes are implemented to maximize efficiency and profitability. Following the field visit, your field trainer will continue to offer consulting support, helping you review important franchise metrics and benchmarks to ensure continued success.
Many of our departments will schedule on-site visits to your franchise once you’re operational to further assist you in building a solid operational foundation.
As a TWO MEN AND A TRUCK franchisee, we’ll help you take advantage of the different revenue sources within the moving industry. Besides local moves within the city, our support team will assist you in taking advantage of other sources of revenue such as long-distance moving, short-term and long-term storage, boxes and packing supplies, business moving, and packing/unpacking services. Additionally, our national accounts team coordinates unique opportunities that franchises would necessarily capture such as furniture installation and last-mile delivery from national retail chains.
Your trucks are your employees’ most important asset on the ground level of operations. Through the opening phase and beyond, our network of preferred vendors, along with our Home Office teams, will help you make the right choices to fit your needs and will share the necessary processes to help keep your investment rolling safely. It’s crucial to ensure your trucks receive regular maintenance and checks to assure moves are safe for employees and customers’ belongings. Your trucks are moving billboards, and are one of the main business assets that need to constantly be assessed.
Within your first year, the field trainers who supported you throughout the opening phase will transition your franchise to a specific centralized consulting group consisting of subject matter experts to ensure success in areas such as operations, recruiting, marketing, sales, accounting, and safety and risk.
At TWO MEN AND A TRUCK, customer cultivation is executed at both national AND local levels. National marketing is funded by the National Ad Fund and managed by the Home Office marketing team, while local marketing efforts are funded by the individual franchise’s marketing budget and executed by franchise management personnel.
Each franchise is expected to execute a local marketing strategy plan, designed to build brand awareness and generate leads for moving services. The cost of any local marketing tactics are funded by the franchise. Planning and execution of local tactics are also the responsibility of the local franchise management team. Minimum marketing spending standards are also enforced.
The National Ad Fund covers marketing costs which include: system-wide website development, hosting and management; SEO activities; research, development and testing of new lead generation strategies; and production of new TV commercials and videos. The National Ad Fund also covers the Home Office marketing team personnel costs, promotion and coordination of cause marketing programs such as Movers for Moms®, as well as internal and external communications and public relations efforts.
Every franchise has access to the Marketing Playbook which outlines 12 Key Local Tactics that should be included in your local marketing strategic plan. These tactics include awareness advertising, paid search advertising, reputation management, grassroots marketing efforts, social media, cause marketing, public relations, local website content management, and recruiting. Of course, there may be many other marketing tactics a franchise may wish to employ. There are also a variety of resources, graphics, and other marketing templates franchises have access to through the company’s intranet.
Working closely with the Home Office marketing team will help ensure a franchise is making the best use of marketing dollars and other resources to build top-of-mind awareness of the TWO MEN AND A TRUCK brand as well as drive leads for actual moves. Additionally, each franchise is assigned a franchise marketing specialist as their main marketing point of contact.
The FMCSA has a system in place known as Dataq, which allows the motor carrier to request a review of the data and upload supporting documents to support their argument.
Sometimes we can overturn the violations/citations without completing a DataQ by first reaching out to the issuing authority or law enforcement agency.
The sooner the franchise reaches out to us, the better the chances of having the violation or citation voided all together.
We have the ability provide training online and onsite.
The online training we conduct is through the WebEx platform. The trainee can speak one-on-one with their fleet safety specialist and listen as documents and PowerPoint presentations are given.
We also have the ability to travel out to your location to provide onsite training and mock audits much like the Federal Motor Carrier Administration does.
Lastly, we have online Stick men university® fleet safety courses so you can log in anytime and brush up on your knowledge.
"I believe our franchise system is as strong as it ever has been. The communication and support offerings have been outstanding even with the COVID situation that is going on in the U.S.."Anthony Clendenen - Multi-unit franchisee
Speak to a franchise development team member today about this exciting opportunity. We will walk you through more detailed franchise information, have you meet the team at our corporate headquarters, and if you choose to move forward, work with you to get resources in place, leading to a successful experience for everyone.