Moving company operations audit Leads go cold by morning. Crews run long on the clock. We find where the money leaks.
Leads gone cold overnight, moves that lose money on labor, lead spend nobody can trace. In two weeks, from the moving software’s own records, we put a monthly dollar figure on each one.
- Fixed fee
- $4,500
- Length
- Two weeks
- Access to records
- Read-only
For moving and storage companies doing $1M a year and up.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.After hours? Book the call online: one form, no calendar
Sound familiar?
What moving company owners say about the money they can’t find.
01
Leads that go cold before anyone calls back
Overnight forms and voicemails wait for the office to open. A second call attempt is nobody’s job, so the move books with whoever answered first.
02
Moves that lose money on the clock
Flat-rate jobs run past the estimated hours and a two-person job gets four movers. Nobody sets crew hours against the price until the month closes.
03
No way to tell which moves made money
Jobs get booked first come, first served. Labor, truck rental and the invoice never meet on one page, so which moves paid is a guess.
04
Lead spend nobody can trace to a booked move
Lead sources get paid every month, but no report lines a source up with booked moves and collected cash, so the spend runs on feel.
05
Estimates that wait for the owner
When the owner is the only closer, surveys and estimates wait for a free afternoon, and a date booked with no deposit stays soft.
06
Every step runs through one person
Calls, dispatch, sales and driving sit with the owner. Whatever the owner doesn’t reach that day is nobody’s job.
Paraphrased from public owner forum threads and trade-press interviews — not from our clients.
None of this is fixed by bringing in more business. Each leak sits in work already on the books.
Where it stalls
From the first call to the cleared payment: where the money stalls.
- Inquiry
- Hand-off 01 to Estimate
- Hand-off 02 to Booked
- Hand-off 03 to Move day
- Hand-off 04 to Invoice
- Hand-off 05 to Paid
- Hand-off 06 to Margin
- Hand-off 01 · Inquiry → Estimate
Overnight forms and voicemails with no second call attempt.
- Hand-off 02 · Estimate → Booked
Estimates waiting on the owner, and dates booked with no deposit.
- Hand-off 04 · Move day → Invoice
Crew hours past the estimate on flat-rate moves, never set against the price.
- Hand-off 06 · Paid → Margin
Lead sources and moves never lined up against collected cash and job cost.
Before any new software
Large companies are spending heavily on AI. Few can show what it returned.
7%
of 2,145 senior leaders at companies with $100M+ in revenue reported having established a return on AI — while planning to spend an average of $188 million each on it.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Those are companies with their own IT departments and budgets. A smaller business that buys a tool on a hunch has less room for the same mistake.
Leaders with strong visibility into costs were five times as likely to report a return on AI (15% against 3%). The same release adds that without clear ownership, decisions fragment and impact gets harder to track.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Free · two taps · no email
Check one hand-off yourself, right now.
Three questions, from your own records
Of last month’s forms and voicemails that arrived after hours, how long did each wait for a first call, and how many got a second attempt?
On last month’s flat-rate moves, how many crew hours went in against the hours each estimate priced?
Which lead source cost the most last quarter, and how many booked moves and collected dollars trace back to it?
If an answer takes digging, note where the record lives. That is where the Review starts.
Free self-check · two taps · no email
Hand-off 1 of 6 · Inquiry → Quote
Choose the answer that sounds like your business.
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
How it runs
Two weeks, $4,500, one finding you can act on.
Day 0
A 20-minute call
Fit, not yet, or not us. No deck, no payment.
Days 1–14
We read the records
Read-only exports from the systems you already run. Nothing switched off, nothing to install.
Day 14
The findings, in writing
Each leak with a monthly dollar figure, the order to fix them in, and the first fix to start the next morning — the company’s to keep whatever the owner decides.
$2,250 to begin, the balance when the report arrives. The fee does not change with what the Review finds, and the written report is yours to keep.
What we price
Each leak gets a monthly dollar figure.
Overnight forms and voicemails, the hours each waited for a first call, and how many booked with another mover before a second call attempt
Crew hours on flat-rate jobs set against the hours the estimate priced — the two-person job that went out with four movers
Moves ranked by what they kept: labor, truck rental and drive time set against the invoice, job by job
Lead spend by source set against booked moves and collected cash, including shared and marketplace leads reached only after another mover had booked the survey
Surveys and estimates waiting on the owner for a free afternoon, and move dates held with no deposit on record
Who runs it
Small on purpose. Senior on purpose.
A team with ten-plus years in strategic consulting and business-process automation. Before Lumina, our people built and ran revenue operations inside a Fortune 500 US financial institution.
Tamara Stepanyan, founder
No client case studies yet — we would rather tell you that than invent one.
Before you call
Questions moving company owners ask first.
We already run SmartMoving (or Supermove). It has follow-up automation and reports. What would the Review find?
The software records the lead, the estimate, the crew hours and the payment, each in its own place. The Review reads those records against each other: forms with no second call, estimates with no outcome, crew hours past the price, lead sources with no booked moves behind them. An automated text that went out is not the same as a lead that ended in a recorded yes or no. Access is read-only; nothing gets switched off and nothing changes in dispatch.
The season is over and cash is tight until spring. Why now?
Because the off-season is when the season’s records are complete and still fresh enough to trace: every lead, estimate, bill of lading, claim and storage invoice from peak. The fee is flat, $4,500 for two weeks, paid in two parts as the terms set out, and it does not change with what the Review finds. The 20-minute call comes first, before any payment.
We’re a van-line agent. Doesn’t the van line handle the billing?
The van line settles the agent’s share of booking, hauling and origin or destination work through its statements. Local moves, storage, commercial work and the agent’s own estimates remain the agent’s own book, and a settlement deposit is not a reconciliation until each line is matched to its job. The Review reads both sides where the agent agreement permits sharing the van line’s statements, and the scope is confirmed on the first call.
Do the federal estimate rules apply to our local moves?
No, and the Review keeps the two apart. The household-goods rules in 49 CFR Part 375 cover interstate moves for individual shippers who pay their own charges, not commercial accounts or moves an employer or relocation company pays for. Moves within one state follow that state’s own rules, and a move inside one commercial zone falls outside the federal rules. The estimate rules are cited, with sources, further down this page. The Review reads records and prices what they show; it is not a compliance audit, and none of this is legal advice.
Our problem is leads, not process. Shouldn’t we just buy more?
No leads are sold here. The Review follows what happens to the leads already paid for, from the first call to collected cash. When an overnight form waits until morning, a new lead source pours into the same gap. The cheaper question comes first: how many forms and voicemails never got a second call, and what each source returned in booked moves.
Related reading
Nearby trades
In depth
The long version, for an owner who wants the detail.
The outside numbers, each with its source
Interstate binding estimate: once a shipment is loaded without a new binding or non-binding estimate, the original binding estimate is reaffirmed; impracticable-operations charges collectable at delivery may not exceed 15 percent of all other charges due at delivery.
Interstate non-binding estimate: the mover cannot require more than 110 percent of the estimate at delivery and bills any remaining charges after 30 days from delivery.
Source: 49 CFR Part 375, Appendix A
Moves that cross a state line within one commercial zone (example: Brooklyn, New York, to Hackensack, New Jersey) are not subject to FMCSA household goods regulations.
Interstate loss and damage claims: written acknowledgment within 30 days of receipt, unless the claim has been paid or declined in writing by then; pay, decline or make a firm written compromise offer within 120 days, or explain the delay in writing then and every 60 days after while the claim is pending.
Source: 49 CFR 370.5 and 370.9
11.8 percent of people moved to a different residence in 2024, lower than 12.1 percent in 2023; 2.1 percent moved to a different state, lower than 2.3 percent.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 1-year estimates, 2024
NAICS 484210 (Used Household and Office Goods Moving): 9,083 employer firms in 2022; 2,744 of them with enterprise receipts of $1M or more.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics of U.S. Businesses 2022, by enterprise receipts size
The next step
Tell us what isn’t getting followed up. We’ll tell you if we can help.
- Send the form beside this. A person reads it, not a bot or a ticket queue. We call you back the same business day.
- 20-minute call: fit, not yet, or not us.
- If it fits: the Revenue Review, $4,500 flat, two weeks.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.