Guides
Moving company plan outline
A practical moving company plan outline, organized by its readers and the sections to write first, from seasonality through money and growth.
What to take away
- A moving company plan is not one document with one audience. A lender, an insurer, a first employee, and you read it for different things, and a plan written for none of them in particular satisfies none of them.
- Build the financial section from assumptions you can trace to a source; a heading alone does not make a plan useful.
- The section that decides whether the plan is real is the one describing how you survey a home. Everything financial is downstream of it.
- Write the seasonality section before the revenue section. A mover's year is not twelve equal months, and a plan built on an average month will describe a business that does not exist.
The four readers
What they are looking for
- A lender or lessor
- Whether the debt can be serviced in the slow months
- An insurer or underwriter
- What you carry, where you drive, who drives it
- A first employee or crew lead
- What the job is and how the day runs
- You, in month nine
- Which assumption broke
The section they turn to first
- A lender or lessor
- Cash flow by month
- An insurer or underwriter
- Operations and fleet
- A first employee or crew lead
- Operations
- You, in month nine
- Assumptions and review dates
What makes them stop reading
- A lender or lessor
- An annual average with no seasonality
- An insurer or underwriter
- Vague answers on vehicle weight and radius
- A first employee or crew lead
- No written method for the move day
- You, in month nine
- Numbers with no source noted
Write once, then read the draft four times, once as each reader. The gaps show up quickly.
Four readers of the plan
Reader
- Lender or lessor
- Cash flow by month
- Insurer or underwriter
- Operations and fleet
- First employee
- Operations
- You, month nine
- Assumptions and review
First section
- Lender or lessor
- Annual average only
- Insurer or underwriter
- Vague weight, radius
- First employee
- No written move-day method
- You, month nine
- Numbers with no source
Stop-reading trigger
- Lender or lessor
- Insurer or underwriter
- First employee
- You, month nine
Building the financial section
List the assumptions behind the plan's financial picture and give each a source line. Leave values blank until you have evidence rather than presenting guesses as figures.
Six numbers every plan carries
- Average volume per job, in cubic feet
- Crew-hours per job, by job type
- Loaded cost per crew-hour
- Jobs per crew-day, peak and off-peak
- Fixed monthly cost
- Paid crew-days to break even
A plan that states a revenue target without showing how it follows from its underlying assumptions has skipped the work. Revenue is an output here, not an input.
The sections, in the order they should be written
Seasonality first. Household moving clusters at the end of the month and in the warm months, because leases and closings do. Describe your calendar in weeks, not months: which weeks are stacked, how many crews each stacked week needs, and what the crews do in the quiet weeks. Every later number depends on this shape.
Order to write the sections
- Seasonality first, in weeks
- The territorystreets and rules
- The service definition and exclusions
- Survey and pricing method
- Operationsthe move day method
The territory. Streets, building types, elevator and dock rules, housing turnover, and the largest truck the streets allow. This is the section the moving company startup and market guide treats as the real market research, and it cannot be filled in from a database.
The service definition. Exactly what is included, what is excluded, and what is sold separately. Packing is the usual ambiguity: it has its own day, its own materials, and its own claims exposure, so it belongs in the plan as a named service or a named exclusion.
The survey and pricing method. How a home is surveyed, what the survey records, which estimate type you offer, and how access charges are computed. State that no flat price is given without a survey, because that single rule is what keeps the rest of the plan honest.
Operations. The move day as a written method: walkthrough, inventory, loading, delivery, close-out. The equipment and setup guide supplies the vehicle and gear side of this section, and it should agree with the truck sizing implied by the territory.
People. Roles, how crews are staffed at peak without carrying them all winter, and what training is required before a person is on a truck. The hiring and training guide covers the sequence.
Compliance. Which body governs your moves, what you asked, and what they answered. For interstate work the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Protect Your Move materials define what customers must receive; for local moves the state regulator sets the rules. Cite the dated answers, not the general pages.
Money. Cash by month, break-even in crew-days, and the funding required to reach it. The Internal Revenue Service's guidance on starting a business covers entity choice, the employer identification number, and the tax obligations that belong in this section.
Growth, briefly. One page on what would have to be true before a second truck or a second market. The expansion and market guide sets the conditions; the plan only needs to name them.
The assumptions register
At the back, a short table: the assumption, its source, the date, and what would show it is wrong. Three lines are enough to start.
| Assumption | Source | Date | What proves it wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average job volume | Own surveys | Volume from the first twenty jobs | |
| Crew-hours per job | Own timed moves | Actual close-out hours | |
| Peak week count | Territory turnover | Booked calendar for the first season |
This register is the part you will actually reread. Everything else in the plan is written once; this is revised monthly, and the revisions are the record of what you learned.
What does not belong
Leave out the ranking of national carriers, the market-size figure taken from a press release, and the mission statement. None of them changes a decision. If a paragraph does not change what you buy, who you hire, or what you charge, it is taking up room that the assumptions register should have.
The step-by-step planning material in the Small Business Administration's business guide is a reasonable frame for the general sections; only you can write the moving-specific ones. A summary belongs in how to start a moving company, which sets out the stages this plan documents.
Common questions
How long should the plan be?
Short enough that you reread it. Ten pages with real numbers beats forty with borrowed ones.
Do I need a plan if I am not borrowing money?
You need traceable assumptions and the assumptions register. The lender-facing packaging is optional; the arithmetic is not.
What if I have no surveys yet and cannot fill in the numbers?
Write the plan with the sources named and the values blank, then fill them in as the first ten surveys come back. A blank with a named source is honest; a guess presented as a figure is not.
Should the plan state a target margin?
State the break-even in crew-days and the capacity above it. A target margin with no break-even behind it is a number chosen because it sounded reasonable.
