We have been hard at work here at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® over the years. Here is an infographic showing what we have been up to and what moves us!
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® is the first and largest franchised moving company in the United States. Let us help move you forward! For more helpful tips and information on moving services subscribe to our blog and like us on Facebook.
Written by Claire Schneider
Before I began working at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc., I was one of the many people who thought the company only consists of movers, drivers and customer service representatives. When I first heard TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc. was hiring, I wasn’t interested because I knew I could not move heavy furniture. My husband then urged me to just see what types of positions they were looking for, so I did. I had heard of the company before, but I thought it was just a local business and didn’t realize, until I began looking at the positions, that it was actually something much greater.
I am now the Social Media Specialist at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc. and, unlike a lot of my friends, I am actually working in the field I got my college degree in and I love it! I have learned so much about this great company and feel really proud to be part of all it stands for.
Part of my job as Social Media Specialist is to work with the franchises on how to improve their social media presence. With Career Move Month approaching, there was one conversation that really stuck out to me and that was with TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® Troy’s Nicole Trice.
Nicole moved to Michigan last September from Nashville, Tennessee and has a communications degree from University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She is now working at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® Troy as a Customer Service Representative and manages their social media. I loved how eager Nicole was to learn how she could improve their social media presence. So when I was thinking of ideas to showcase Career Move month, I decided to ask Nicole to answer some questions for me for a blog post to show how there are so many opportunities and different positions at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®.
What was the position you applied for?
I applied for the Customer Service Representative position, which is the marketing one as well.
What made you decide to apply for a position at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®?
I decided to apply at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® because the position would give me an opportunity to apply the experience that I learned from years of customer service and to gain experience associated with my Communications degree.
How are you balancing both positions?
I like to think that I am a very organized person. I make a list each day of the tasks that I want to accomplish by the end of the day. As I go through the day, I mark the items off. I start the day off as a CSR and I do the social media aspect throughout the day.
What things do you like about being a CSR? And what have you learned?
Honestly, I was a server for 5 years and being a CSR is very similar. I have learned that there is a different approach when speaking to a customer over the phone compared to in person. I like that I don’t have to serve food to people!
What do you like about being in charge of social media? And what have you learned?
I like getting to expand our reach to people. I can let people see that we are real people that care about how we move the customer. I like that I get to see other people’s ideas and I learn something new every day. I have learned how important a Facebook and Twitter are to the business world today. I am learning how to manage websites, blogs and all aspects of social media.
What are some challenges you have been faced with having both positions?
It does get tough balancing both positions. I do wish I had a little bit more time to focus on conquering the social media aspect.
Is there anything else that you think people would like to know about how it is to work at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®?
We get to help one of the most stressful moments in a person’s life!
There are so many positions like mine and Nicole’s at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® and now with Career Move Month, we are looking to accomplish our goal of 10,000 applications during the month of April. If we reach our goal we will donate $5,000 to Dress for Success. Take a look at our new Career website for positions in your area!
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® is the first and largest franchised moving company in the United States. Let us help move you forward! For more helpful tips and information on moving services subscribe to our blog and like us on Facebook.
By Claire Schneider
Are you getting tired of the winter blues? Well it’s finally getting to be that time again for the ritual of spring cleaning; that is if Mother Nature ever decides to cooperate. Spring cleaning is a tradition that allows us to freshen up our homes and get a head start on the seasons of spring and summer so we can enjoy them with our friends and family. Here is more information on the ritual’s history, benefits and a checklist for spring cleaning:
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® is the first and largest franchised moving company in the United States. Let us help move you forward! For more helpful tips and information on moving services subscribe to our blog and like us on Facebook.
As we continue to grow as a company, so does the attendance at our TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® Annual Meeting. There were many highlights at this year’s four-day event filled with networking, education, and of course, celebration.
The first day started off with an inspiring speech by Keynote Speaker Scott Burrows. He shared his story of being a quadriplegic after a tragic car accident and how it changed his life forever. Even though he wasn’t able to take part in the activities he loved, he was determined to keep a positive outlook and decided to improve his life by focusing on his attitude and physical health.
He did a great job of tying his vision and how he worked to accomplish his goals, along with our company’s Vision 2018.
“When you start to believe, your mindset and grit will always be there to carry you through. If you’re looking to thrive, to beat the odds and achieve extraordinary results, don’t give up on your shared vision of where you want to be in 2018. Be willing to make adjustments along the way to get you back on course.”
At the end of his speech. he revealed to everyone that hard work and determination really does pay off. He stood up and explained he is now able to walk and take part in activities he loves, such as golf.
One of the biggest announcements this year was the launch of Movers Who Care® 2, a technology system that automates the way franchises create estimates, book moves, etc. The new system was created to help us, as a company, get closer to growing as a system of one and improving the core purpose of moving people forward. At Annual Meeting, franchisees were able to sit down with the MWC2 panel and ask any questions they had about the new system. The panel also shared best practices and advice on the MWC2 conversion. Click here to view the Q & A session.
This year’s awards night had a Jimmy Buffet theme. Awards were given to celebrate the hard work and accomplishments of franchises strived for during 2012. And everyone did have a reason to celebrate as pointed out by Brig Sorber:
“Tonight you all have something to be proud of. With the system’s growth, we are continuing to set ourselves apart from other moving companies. At year end, we achieved 37 straight months of growth and 21 consecutive record months. Over the past three years, together, we have achieved 60% growth.”
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® is the first and largest franchised moving company in the United States. Let us help move you forward! For more helpful tips and information on moving services subscribe to our blog and like us on Facebook.
Janine Adams is the founder of Peace of Mind Organizing®
Written by guest blogger Janine Adams
As a professional organizer, I often help guide clients’ decisions about whether or not to keep or part with items. For some people, letting go is really tough. When they have more stuff than they can store, it can lead to some interesting conversations about why they want to hang on to things.
There are three common reasons I hear for wanting to keep items that are no longer used or loved. these reasons don’t hold water with me. If you hear yourself saying any of these things about items you don’t use or love, I encourage you to think twice about keeping them.
1. I paid a lot for that! You know what? You may have paid a lot, but the money’s gone. And the only way you might get any of it back is to sell the item or donate it and take a tax deduction. What’s more, there are hidden costs to keeping it: you probably beat yourself up when you see it, so there’s an emotional cost. If you trip over it, you could hurt yourself and pay a physical and monetary price. And if you pay to store it just because you paid a lot for it, things are starting to get ridiculous.
2. I might need it some day. You’re right, you might. But then again you might not. And if you can’t find it when you need it, then keeping it doesn’t do you much good. I think we all live in fear of discarding something and then discovering that we need it. It makes us feel stupid. But realistically, what’s the worse-case scenario? You get another one. In my opinion, if you have more stuff than you can store, the actual benefit of parting with an item you don’t need now (i.e. creating space) outweighs the potential benefit of having it on hand should you ever need it.
3. It was a gift. Gifts are tough. You hate to disappoint the gift giver by getting rid of something given in love. But, again, if you have more stuff than you can store, wouldn’t the gift giver prefer that you let it go? Regift it. Donate it. Just get it into the hands of someone who will actually use or love it. It gets even more tricky when the gift giver has passed away. But that unloved and unused gift won’t bring them back. Perhaps you have a mutual friend or family member who would treasure that item. If so, pass it along. It boils down to this: Just because someone gave you something doesn’t mean you have to hold on to it forever.
When you’re trying to conquer clutter, try not to fall into the trap of these excuses for keeping stuff you really don’t need. Once you let the excess go, I bet you’ll feel liberated.
Janine Adams is a certified professional organizer based in St. Louis, Missouri, and the founder of Peace of Mind Organizing®. She helps clients create order, harmony and, yes, peace of mind, by helping them declutter and create new systems and routines. The co-creator of Declutter Happy Hour, she is a blogger for Rubbermaid and has appeared on both A&E’s Hoarders and TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive documentary TV series.
Written by Claire Schneider
To celebrate National Women’s History Month, we want to take some time to honor Our Leading Ladies: TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc. Founder Mary Ellen Sheets and Chair Melanie Bergeron. Without their drive and passion for this company, we would not be where we are today!
In the early 1980’s, Mary Ellen’s sons, Brig and Jon, decided to start a moving company to help make some extra money. Being the supportive mother she is, Mary Ellen developed a logo and put an ad in the community newspaper. Who knew drawing a sketch on a napkin would one day be the logo for a growing international company!
Mary Ellen with the first fleet of trucks in 1991
When her sons left for college, Mary Ellen decided to continue the business while still working full-time as a data processor for the State of Michigan. After her first profitable year, Mary Ellen decided to donate her $1,000 profit to 10 different charities giving each $100. This generous act has led to the creation of one of TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®’s Core Values: Give Back to the Community.
Mary Ellen received some help from another amazing lady, Grandma Helen Eberly. When Mary Ellen needed a place to keep her trucks, she turned to Grandma Eb who allowed her to park the trucks in her backyard. She not only provided a place for them, but she also helped with other business duties. At the end of the day, the movers would put their move sheets and money in a box on Grandma Eb’s back porch and she would retrieve the paperwork for Mary Ellen.
Grandma Eb has become a major part of TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® history and has led to one of the company’s Core Values: The Grandma Rule.
In 1989, Mary Ellen saw the potential of her company and decided to franchise. She awarded the first location to her daughter, Melanie.
Back in the 1980’s, Melanie was living in Atlanta and doing very well, but her mom, Mary Ellen, kept encouraging her to start a TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® location. Since neither of them knew if the business would make any money, Melanie decided to have the moving company as her hobby and ran it out of her apartment. Turns out people needed movers and her company began to grow!
Melanie’s first desk at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc. was a chair pulled up to the copier.
Soon though, Melanie began to grow homesick and decided to sell the franchise and move back to Michigan to start another TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® franchise.
In 1994 Mary Ellen decided to run for the State Senate and asked Melanie if she would like to become the President of TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®, a position that at the time, was unpaid. She made the tough decision to quit her pharmaceutical sales job and put all her energy toward growing the family business. And she did!
Thanks to Mary Ellen, Melanie and all the hard working people who helped develop TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® from the beginning; we would not be the largest franchised moving company in North America. The company is rapidly growing and we are very much looking forward to what is yet to come! We want to give a big thanks to Our Leading Ladies for all their hard work and dedication and for making history.
Rendering for TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc. plans for expansion.
“When I look back, I can’t believe this all happened. I am in shock and so grateful. I definitely think this is the American dream. We live in a wonderful country.” – Mary Ellen Sheets
By James Hartley, application/software tester Technology Support
Whenever I tell someone I work for TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®, they typically respond, “That must be really hard work”, to which I smile and respond, “Yes it is”. Many people assume that if I work for TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®, I must be a mover. This is because they do not realize the work that goes on behind the scenes to ensure our customers have the best possible moving experience possible.
For instance, our proprietary move management software (Movers Who Care® 2) is developed in-house. According to Corey Lasley, the application development manager here at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®, Movers Who Care® 2 consists of more than 228,252 lines of code and 8,174,736 characters. These numbers are very impressive, especially when taking into consideration that Movers Who Care® 2 was released just 17 months after development started.
This is the first blog in a series I am calling “More than Movers”. In this series I will write about the work being done behind the scenes that directly impacts the quality of service we provide to our customers. I will begin with a project that is being jointly developed by the Application Development and Quality Assurance teams.
Test automation is the use of special software to execute tests and then compare actual outcomes to expected outcome. There are several benefits to automating software testing.
1) It allows for the addition of test cases that would normally be too difficult to perform manually.
2) Automated testing is much faster than manually testing. Therefore, the Quality Assurance team can cover a larger portion of the software being tested on any given build cycle.
3) Automated testing can be more effective in finding certain classes of defects than manual testing. This allows for the delivery of more reliable software to the end users.
The Software Development Team at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® is known in the development community as a “Microsoft Shop”. This is because they are using Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) for all development. It turns out this was a huge benefit to our test automation project because we were able to fully leverage the testing capabilities built into TFS. Therefore we have one single integrated system for creating software and then testing its functionality.
Having a fully integrated system allows testers and developers to break through barriers that typically exist between the two teams. As a result the quality of software goes up. This is a good thing considering poor software quality costs the United States economy $59,500,000,000 every year. Lost revenue is not the only consequence of poor software quality. At TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® poor software quality affects our ability to deliver the best possible service to our customers. For example, if Movers Who Care® 2 is not functioning properly, it can affect the speed and accuracy of estimates we deliver to our customers.
So you see TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® is much more than a company of movers. We are developers, software testers, customer service representatives, movers, managers, etc. … all working together as one system. I think President Randy Shacka put it best:
“In everything we do we believe in moving people forward. We do this by living our core values, providing opportunities for employees, giving back to our communities, and treating each customer’s items as if they were our own with care and respect. We just happen to provide relocation services.”
