How 2 College Brothers 4X'd Revenue with SmartMoving

As founder and CEO at 2 College Brothers and host of the Grow Your Moving Company podcast, Wade Swikle has become something of a household name for movers.

From part-time college mover to the proud owner of a multi-location franchise business, his passion for elevating the moving experience has led to massive wins.

“I was looking at our year-to-date profitability and it looks like we're more profitable than we've ever been. Close to 30%."

Most moving companies make 7% net profit, but with SmartMoving, 2 College Brothers has been able to achieve their highest profitability at over three times that number. But getting there was a journey.

In 2020, after dominating the Gainesville market and opening a new location in Tampa, Wade realized his legacy systems weren’t keeping up. He needed an all-in-one moving platform. One that wouldn’t just keep pace, but accelerate the growth of the business.

Legacy tools were limiting growth

Today, Wade leads a rockstar moving crew consisting of 17 trucks and over 60 movers doing about $6 million in annual revenue.

His operation includes three primary locations in Tampa, Gainesville, and San Antonio, plus two phantom locations (Orlando and St. Petersburg) covered out of Tampa, and two independently owned franchises in Gainesville and San Antonio. 

In terms of expansion, Wade’s made major strides since those early days on Craigslist. But the road to growth definitely had its learning curves. When Wade acquired 2 College Brothers in 2013, he had zero idea what to look for in terms of systems.

“They weren't using any kind of a CRM, they just had things on Google Sheets, Google Drive, the early iterations of Google Drive calendar,” he explains. “I mean, it worked for us, but we struggled to get enough business on the books.”

Ask Wade for the secret to success, and he’ll tell you much of it comes down to having the right systems in place. But back then? He was just trying to keep the wheels turning and the lights on.

“For the first several years, we just had a calendar we shared with the whole team. Movers would basically pick what jobs they wanted to work and text us to get onto those jobs. We kept all job records on long Google Sheets."

The team's sales process was just as clunky. There was no centralization, no follow-up, and loads of missed opportunities. And profits? They were stuck at 10-13% in a good year.

“If leads came in through our website, we'd get an email notification. If we called them and they didn't answer, that was pretty much the end of it."

Fast forward a few years, and Wade and his team had dominated their local Gainesville market and opened a new location in Tampa. The growth was thrilling. But with two locations two hours apart, it quickly became clear that Wade’s “good enough” system would no longer cut it.

“No CRM, everything's on Google Sheets, just running myself ragged,” he recalls. That all changed when Wade attended a Louis Massaro conference and heard about the benefits other movers were seeing from using a CRM.

Switching from MoveitPro to SmartMoving

Wade’s first CRM was MoveitPro. In the beginning, it was a big step up from his patchwork Google calendar system. “It was better than nothing, but it had a lot of issues,” he explains. “It also wasn't very intuitive at the time.”

When Wade found out that Louis had partnered with SmartMoving to tailor its features to the exact systems he teaches in Moving Sales Academy, he was hooked.

“SmartMoving started to integrate all of these ways to follow up, better templates for calls, text, email, and voicemail. We now have a moving industry specific CRM that's tailored to operate a moving company at the highest level.”

Wade knew he wanted to keep growing. But he had no idea how much higher he could reach with a unified platform.

“I demoed SmartMoving and there's no going back after that. It was so user-friendly and had such powerful follow-up capabilities—the automated email campaigns, the dispatching features, and the reports were huge. I love the different reports we can run and the KPIs we can track to ultimately make better decisions."

And the user experience far surpassed anything else he’d tried before.

“SmartMoving was like using an iPhone for the first time. It just had that clean look and feel. It worked. And that was really important to me.”

With SmartMoving, Wade and the team at 2 College Brothers were finally able to fully embrace the systems and processes they were building the company around. “It's been a game changer,” says Wade.

“We just had three consecutive record-booking months this year (February, March, April), despite lead volume being down about 50% from last year. I look back and I'm like, how did we ever run a business without a CRM?”

Scaling growth with a unified platform

With a central command center for his entire business, Wade was ready to buckle in and grow. Here are some of his favorite SmartMoving features.

Profitability management

“Before, we would do jobs that were fundamentally unprofitable because of the volume they would bring in. But on some of them we were just flat out losing money. Now, we can catch that in real time,” says Wade. 

Wade knows immediately if they’ve booked a job for too low and can address it with the sales team before it becomes a problem. With a central, high-visibility system, he’s not just scaling his operations—he’s also scaling his profitability.

“SmartMoving makes it really easy to track profits on a job-by-job basis, which is huge because you don't have to wait until the end of the month to figure out if you're doing something fundamentally wrong.”

Systemized sales

With centralized sales and client communication, Wade can get new sales members onboarded in a week and make sure the team has everything they need to book more jobs in less time.

“Our salespeople are able to do their follow-ups much more effectively. We can see why we're marking leads as lost. We know if we’re losing them to a certain company, or if there are other reasons that we can build into our unique selling points to minimize that."

Smart reporting

Wade and his team use the reporting inside SmartMoving to break down each individual marketing source by leads and drill deeper into their profits per channel.

“The market has slowed down, but our bookings continue to go up. I attribute a lot of that to the powerful tools in SmartMoving, from follow-ups and lead tracking to being able to track our referral sources and run our affiliate program—which is now our biggest source of new business."

Rules-based pricing

Wade uses the pricing feature to take the guesswork out of pricing and easily override prices by availability, dates on calendar, and tariffs.

“If we have slow periods, we can lower prices just for those periods without having to do it permanently across the board, which could ultimately cost us business if our cost is too low when we should be charging more."

Franchise drop-in

“We just opened a new franchise in San Antonio this year and the business just continues to grow,” says Wade.

“SmartMoving allows me to keep tabs on my franchises and with a centralized call center model, franchise partners don't have to build out their own inside sales team. SmartMoving allows us to seamlessly field leads and book moves for those locations.”

Even if a franchisee decides to build their own sales team, Wade still has transparency into the business. “I can still check in and see how they're doing, how they compare to our sales team, what their KPIs are looking like, their booking percentages, and how many leads they’re getting,” he explains.

From $1.5M to $6M with plenty of room to grow

“When we signed on with SmartMoving, we were doing $1.5M in revenue. Last year, we did $6M. We literally quadrupled our revenue. I don't think that would've been possible with a CRM that doesn't have the all capabilities SmartMoving has."

With the right systems in place, Wade has gone from reacting to every new curveball to taking full control of his current and future profitability. He’s excited to test SmartMoving’s upcoming integrations with LiveSwitch and open API. 

But for now, he’s taking it day by day.

“If you do things right for every little job, every single day, it'll compound to produce significantly better results, even if it's a small change here or there. It's like a captain. Just make minor adjustments to keep the ship going towards the final target. It allows you to operate a lot more efficiently and a lot more profitably,” says Wade.