Moving Ahead Services, a growing 5-branch moving company, has branches in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Charlotte, and Pittsburgh. Across their locations, they have 30+ full time employees, and 25+ trucks.
We recently caught up with Adam Gurwell, VP of Moving Ahead Services, to learn about his journey from relying on internal processes to implementing SmartMoving.
The journey to partnering with SmartMoving goes further back for Adam and his team.
Before working within a CRM software, 'Moving Ahead Services' was using movingpro.net along with an online calendar to manage crew scheduling.
“There was a lot of potential for human error between scheduling and dispatch. We were still using carbon copies – and the generation of movers we have coming into the door these days – they are often seeing carbon copy sheets for the first time with us”, said Adam. “Technology is more familiar to our younger crew members than paper tracking. We knew that we had an outdated process and we needed something better”.
Before finding SmartMoving, 'Moving Ahead Services' had partnered with Supermove.
According to Adam, there were many reasons driving them to SmartMoving over Supermove.
“When we worked with Supermove, there were some instances of overpromising and underdelivering. Between that, needing more functionality for our branches, and other helpful features, SmartMoving stuck out. Price was also a big difference for us. SmartMoving offers a lot of advanced features at a better price, and the price was transparent,” said Adam.
A big reason for the switch were key functionality differences. Adam noted that in SmartMoving, the team is able to see how many crew members are available each day. Users can schedule, override, and edit the day based on availability of crew leaders, crew members, and trucks. It's an accurate view since it’s all located within SmartMoving, not across multiple platforms as it was previously.
For 'Moving Ahead Services', it was also key that SmartMoving provides the ability to toggle back and forth between different branches. They have 5 locations and found Supermove to be confusing as it didn’t support switching between branches, creating a large potential for error.
“The user interface is pretty smooth to use for such a complex system, and simple is always a better route for teams that aren’t software-savvy. The Crew app is so easy for my team to use and awesome for me with the reporting we can do through that with incentives, upsells and more.”
At SmartMoving, implementation begins with a dedicated specialist, and that allows for a more customized approach to getting acclimated to the software. The Moving Ahead Services team began implementation at the end of peak season, and it went smoothly alongside other internal changes to processes at the company. According to Adam, the ability to reference the recorded training sessions he had with his support specialist and the SmartMoving Academy video library has helped a lot with training his teams.
“Once we implemented and learned more, there were a few features that have stuck out to us a big plus. We are excited for the profitability feature, and the payroll system is so much smoother than the way we have done payroll in the past. The QuickBooks integration is something our accounting team is thrilled about.”
Adam also noted how often there are updates to the system, such as the class sorting capability, which really helped his team sort their data.
We are excited for the 'Moving Ahead Services' team to grow with SmartMoving, and applaud Adam Gurwell for making sure his team’s needs are met when it comes to a CRM partner.