How to price a moving company: discounts, revisions, and demand.

A 5% senior discount, free boxes, and the first month of storage free. It sounds generous. But the customer doesn’t feel three good deals. They feel that the price must have been inflated to begin with. Each discount you add makes the others worth less.

Instead of handing out discounts, tell the customer the truth about how your pricing works: you revise prices weekly based on demand, and the number they have today is valid for a few days.

For most moving companies this is simply true. The schedule fills, demand shifts, prices adjust. You’re being honest about it. And it works because people are far more sensitive to losing something they already hold than to gaining something of the same value.

Customers will still ask for discounts, especially if you’ve trained them to by advertising them. The answer is the same every time: no to the one you don’t offer, and a redirect to the one you do.

One discount. One reason. No stacking, no negotiating. Confidence in your own pricing is itself a differentiator, because most of your competitors don’t have it.

There is one place a bigger discount earns its keep, and it isn’t really a discount. It’s a tool you hand to someone else.

If your maximum public discount is 5%, make realtor referrals the only way to get 10%. The realtor can now tell their client: you can’t get this anywhere else. It costs the realtor nothing, makes them look good, and gives you a channel no competitor can undercut, because the offer is tied to the relationship rather than the price.

Why realtors don’t want a cash referral fee, and what they do want from a mover, is covered in the referral program playbook.

Everything above is about the number on one estimate. The bigger lever is how that number changes across the week. The most aggressive example I’ve seen is Piece of Cake, where the Saturday rate and the Sunday rate for the same crew sit more than 200% apart. In hourly terms, something like $80 an hour on the slowest days and $200 an hour on the busiest.

It’s the airline model: price on demand, not on cost. Fill seats on slow days by dropping the price, maximise revenue on peak days by raising it. Moving is one of the last service businesses to apply it.

A typical four-truck company gets around 1,000 leads a month, and they aren’t spread evenly. Here is roughly what a week looks like.

Early in the month it’s worse: under 10 leads a day Sunday to Thursday, and around 40 on Friday and Saturday. Too much demand on two days, too little on the other five.

Meanwhile your costs don’t move. The truck is paid for, the warehouse is paid for, the office is paid for, every day of the week. On a Tuesday you have all of that and ten leads.

The idea is to stop treating every day as the same sale. Slow days and busy days have different jobs to do.

Two things happen when you run it this way.

1. 1

   Demand moves into your slow days

   With a price gap that large, some customers rearrange their week to move on a Tuesday. You redistribute your own demand without spending a dollar on marketing.

2. 2

   Competitors are starved on weekdays

   Most movers can't match $80 an hour because they aren't making it back on the weekend. On slow days you take nearly everything in the market.

The danger is filling up too far ahead. If by the 17th of a busy month you’re fully booked to month end, you have to switch off your marketing, and next month’s leads stop coming with it.

This is a daily review, not a setting you choose once. Look at the calendar every morning and adjust.

Raising the price is the first filter on 80 Friday leads. You still want a way to keep the small jobs from taking a prime slot. Two levers do that without turning anyone away.

1. 1

   Raise the minimum crew

   Two-man minimum on weekdays, three-man minimum on Friday and Saturday. Studio apartments filter themselves out of the weekend.

2. 2

   Raise the minimum hours

   Two or three hours on weekdays, four hours on the weekend. You still quote everyone. The design does the sorting.

Piece of Cake quotes customers a flat rate and pays its owner operators a flat rate. Labour cost is fixed per job, so a cheap Tuesday is still a Tuesday with known margins.

If you charge hourly and pay your crews hourly, the math gets harder. Marketing cost goes down, but on slow days your labour cost rises relative to a price that low. The model works cleanly with flat rates on both sides. With hourly on both sides, expect a lot more tuning, and don’t assume the same spread.

• Stacked discounts cancel each other out. Pick one and drop the rest.
• The one discount needs a reason the customer can see. A 5% same-day booking discount has one. A 30% discount doesn't.
• Switch from discounts to weekly price revisions. "Valid until Friday" is honest, and the fear of losing today's price outweighs any coupon.
• When a customer asks for a discount you don't offer, say no and redirect to the one you do.
• The exception: a realtor-only offer better than anything public. It's a tool for the realtor, not a kickback.
• Leads pile up on Friday and Saturday while your costs are flat every day. Price the day, not just the job.
• Slow days: lower price, aim to book most leads, cover fixed costs. Busy days: higher price, take the best 8%.
• Keep around 40% of month-end capacity open at mid-month, or you have to switch off the marketing that feeds next month.
• Protect peak days with a three-man minimum crew and a four-hour minimum.
• This works cleanly with flat-rate pricing and flat-rate crews. Hourly operators should expect it to be harder, and use their own data.