Path to 20% Net Profit: Inside Wildcat Movers' Strategy for Success

When he’s not leading the rockstar team at Wildcat Movers, you can find Zane Ponsetti riding through the hills of Durango, Colorado on his mountain bike.

From an old Bronco and a 16-foot trailer to a 7-figure moving business with 13 trucks, 30+ movers, and more than 1,800 customer reviews, Zane hasn’t just grown Wildcat’s sales and revenue. He’s successfully scaled profitability to the tune of 20% net margins — while working remotely.

But it wasn’t always about remote work and cush margins. Zane attributes much of Wildcat’s success to an unwavering focus on profitability, backed by rock-solid systems and mover training.

Zane shared all his profitability secrets in a recent fireside chat. Watch it here👇

From $400K to $2.7M with 20% net profit

Ten years ago, Zane had three trucks, no staff, and absolutely zero free time. “I was basically a one man show — taking the calls, dispatching trucks, doing it all” says Zane. He loved his work, but enough was enough. 

In 2014, he brought on his good friend Daniel Masih as his first hire and began building out his processes. Fast forward a few years, and although Zane had successfully grown Wildcat to a new level, it became clear that if he wanted to continue scaling — he’d need to tighten up their operations even further.

That’s when he found SmartMoving. With one hub for sales, operations, and reporting, Zane had a profit-led strategy he could scale and way more breathing room in his schedule. Today, Zane is never one to miss a Moving Titans Retreat. He even vacations with other moving company owners. Still, he never imagined he’d one day be able to lead his own 7-figure moving business remotely.

“Technology is really what allows me to not live where my business is. SmartMoving has been a big part of that.”

Before SmartMoving, Zane’s team was using a basic sales CRM to track leads and run them through the pipeline. “We had a spreadsheet that we were estimating jobs with, which was pretty near and dear to my heart. It did a really good job of giving us the right numbers, but having to upload that into our CRM just wasn’t efficient. We got to a point where my staff was like, ‘What are we doing here, man’?” laughs Zane.

Ultimately, Zane’s decision to invest in moving software went hand-in-hand with his profit-led approach and vision of becoming a premium mover. And he’s reached record numbers as a result.

“SmartMoving has added so many features. It got it to the point where we could just input all the variables and the system would spit out local and long distance quotes without us having to do anything external from an estimating standpoint. That's when we pulled the trigger.”

A profit-led approach to growing market share

For Zane, there’s no place in his business for “turn and burn” processes. He has a clear focus and goal: 20% net profit. With a defined strategy of fewer moves and more money, he’s ok with reduced booking ratios as long as it means higher margins.

“For me, if you're going to do moves, why not do fewer moves and make more money off of them?”

It’s a premium play, but one that’s working wonders for his bottom line. So, how does he do it? 

“The number one thing is charging premium rates to get that extra margin,” Zane explains. And he’s giving plenty back to customers in return. “We've kept that high standard, high mover pay, and high level of quality service,” he says.

He also keeps a close eye on his costs to identify any rogue “profitability killers” that could be creeping in. Here are Zane’s target cost percentages for each area of the business:

• Mover labor: 27-30%
• Sales team: 8-12%
• Ops team: 8-12%
• Trucks (incl. insurance, fuel, interest, payments, maintenance): 7-10%
• Claims: <1%

Back in the bootstrap days, things looked a lot different. But with the right benchmarks, Zane and his team always know where to focus in order to maximize resources. For example, after breaking down his rental costs, he realized they were rapidly eating away at his profitability. 

“That's where I see a lot of people killing their profitability. They're trying to do volume without considering the profitability of that job.” 

“Rental costs can kill a company, especially when you're trying to grow. It’s hard to turn down that work when the phone's ringing, but if you can't make money on it, or if you're going to lose money, take care of the customers you’ve got and focus on doing really good work,” he explains. 

Maintaining a quality service through quality training

Wildcat’s success is proof that Zane’s profit-first philosophy works, but only if you’ve got the quality service to back it up. 

“Our repeat referral rate can be as high as 40% in any given year. On a $1,000 job, that becomes $400 next year just by doing a good job for customers.”

With a strong commitment to quality service, Zane’s built a solid base of loyal fans and customers, including nearly 2,000 positive reviews. “It all starts with doing a good job for your customers,” he says. 

Of course, to do a good job, you need good people behind you. Here’s Wildcat’s current team breakdown:

• ~30 movers
• 2 office managers
• 3 operations managers
• 5 salespeople

As the team has grown, it’s become clear that Zane’s obsession with systems is what makes it possible for him to spend time riding through the Colorado mountains during the offseason. 

What started as a rudimentary 10-page handbook has transformed into a crystal clear manual with detailed job descriptions and video trainings. 

“We make all the movers read the mover manual before they even get hired. The expectations are set on day one.” 

From the very beginning, Zane’s team is trained to deliver a five-star customer service, including a 3-5 hour mover training course where new movers go through the actual steps of padding and wrapping all the training furniture, loading it on a truck, unloading it, and re-stacking it.

At every step, Zane supplies his movers with quality pads, bands, shrink wrap, TV boxes, and more. “You’ve got to have all the things you need so that your movers can do a good job, and then you've got to train them,” says Zane.

But he doesn’t stop there. Zane also has clearly defined KPIs to track the performance of every department and help keep team members accountable.

Inspect what you expect

Zane avoids the Dallas heat during the summer months, but during spring, winter, and fall, he makes regular monthly or bimonthly trips to the office for face-to-face time with the team. 

How does he keep a firm grip on operations even when working remotely? The way he sees it, it’s all about the KPIs.

Zane’s favorite KPIs include:

• Daily, weekly and monthly moving company sales
• Web traffic and top converting pages
• Cost per lead source
• % of moves with claims
• Damage claims as a percentage of revenue
• % of claims with less than 1 week turnover time
• % of positive vs. negative reviews
• Number of new reviews
• Number of reviews with photos
• Mover turnover

By tracking his KPIs on a regular basis, Zane and his team can focus their efforts on the parts of the business making the biggest impact on the balance sheet.

“I just had an operations meeting this morning,” Zane explains. “Our damage rates are a little higher than we'd like, so I've got my ops team focused pretty intently on that. We're trying to figure out more training and different ways we can continue to improve that KPI.”

He’s also a big believer in spot checks. “We're out checking moves every single day,” says Zane. But it’s not about micromanaging. It’s about encouraging a process-oriented mindset that will benefit everyone on the team.

When it comes to booking, Zane is all about quality over quantity. He knows how to make more from less — and he's seen it in real numbers.

“If you do $1M dollars in sales at 7% net profit, that's $70K. But say you do $800K in sales at 20% net margin. Now you're making $160K. And those are real life numbers,” says Zane.

By focusing on quality, profit-first metrics in each area of the business, he’s been able to increase mover retention and keep his marketing profitable.

Today, about a quarter of Wildcat’s business comes from past clients and referrals. 

“We're premium movers, so we don't even do PPC. We were doing Google guarantee, but a few months ago that quit being profitable and became a negative — so we cut that.”

For Zane, it’s not enough to lump all your marketing sources together and aim for an arbitrary cost percentage. If he’s not getting a 4 or 5x return, he’s not afraid to cut that channel and invest in something else.

“It's an investment, but now I get huge returns on SEO because I've invested in it for so long,” explains Zane. He and the team also do their own internal email marketing with past clients at a cost of only $200 to $400 per month to do mail marketing. “You can't directly correlate that, but it's a huge ROI.”

Zane uses the marketing ROI reports inside SmartMoving to benchmark his top channels and adjust accordingly.

Let your profitability be your guide

Despite changes in the market, Zane has successfully grown his market share while continuing to make the business more profitable year after year. And after a decade of building profitable systems from the ground up, he’s ready to share his secrets. 

Zane launched the online mover training program, Pro Mover University. In it, he shares the exact training processes he uses with his team and even walks users through his entire P&L, marketing ROI, pricing strategy, and more. 

From a one-man show doing all the things, Zane now spends his days strategizing, sharing knowledge, and of course, mountain biking — and it’s just the beginning.

“SmartMoving has reduced a ton of admin. Now we’re not spending our time writing up and keeping track of invoices. Using the iPads and digital contracting has made all of that so much easier,” he says.

And we can’t wait to see where he goes next.