Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Jason Baginski, the founder and CEO of MoveIt Pro, a SaaS product that helps moving and storage companies to manage all aspects of their operations.
In 2011, Jason took over a moving and storage business in Orlando, Florida, which his grandparents had started in 1968.
He quickly became frustrated that the business was still being run with pen and paper instead of modern software, so he started looking for a solution.
When he couldn't find any software to do what he needed, he decided to hire a developer who could build the software for him.
It wasn't smooth sailing right away.
Jason went through five different teams before he found developers he could rely on to build what he needed.
But a couple of years later, he had spent over $75,000 on development and only built about 10% of the features that he thought his business needed.
It was at that point he realized there was an opportunity to build a software product he could sell to other moving and storage companies.
And so he made a really important decision at that point.
He decided he was going to put everything he was making from the moving and storage business into building this new software business.
What's surprising is that Jason spent five years building the software before he got his first paying customer.
But there's an interesting story behind that, which we talk about.
We also talk about how he got his first 50 or so customers from Yelp with a somewhat unusual but creative approach that helped to start paying the bills.
Today, Moovit Pro is closing in on $5 million in ARR and is completely self funded.
So it all paid off in the end.
But Jason was basically an accidental founder who never set out to build a SaaS business.
He just wanted better software for himself.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Bergenske (02:13.150)
Thank you.
Omer (02:13.510)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Jason Bergenske (02:17.470)
Yeah.
So I actually have one on my wall here, and it's one I kind of live by.
But it's the harder you work, the luckier you get.
A lot of people always say you're lucky if you're successful, and they don't really realize the work that's gone into it prior to bringing success.
Omer (02:33.470)
So tell us about Moovit Pro.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve.
Jason Bergenske (02:39.420)
So MoveIt Pro is a software CRM for moving and storage companies.
The majority of our customers are in the United States, although we do have customers also in Canada, Australia.
And it helps run literally everything from start to finish for moving companies.
So everything from their, you know, new customer comes to their website, you know, forms come in with their information, the, you know, estimating for customers, doing inventory on location, their billing, their dispatch, their GPS tracking, their payments, payroll, literally pretty much everything from start to finish for a moving company.
If you own a moving company, you know, you're either using our product or using a very similar product or a cluster of products to be able to get the same things done that we do.
Omer (03:23.710)
And can you give us a sense of the size of the business?
Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team, number of customers?
Jason Bergenske (03:29.910)
So right now we're right at about 35 employees.
We started selling end of 2016.
We just the end of this year we should hit 5 million in ARR.
Annual recurring revenue, correct?
Yep.
Omer (03:43.210)
And number of customers.
Jason Bergenske (03:44.650)
Yep.
We're right at about 800 moving and storage companies.
Yep.
Omer (03:48.250)
You started the business around 2011 or you started building the product around 2011, but it took five years to get your first paying customer.
And we're going to talk about that because there's an interesting story there.
Tell us what you were doing before 2011 and how did you get into the business of building software?
Jason Bergenske (04:07.730)
So my grandparents had originally started a moving and storage company here in Orlando, Florida back in 1968 called J.J. metro, still in business today.
And I kind of grew up in the moving and storage business.
My dad took it over in the 80s and you know, I was a little kid running around in the warehouses riding four wheel dollies and you know, helping wash trucks and stuff as a child.
And you know, it came a time when my dad was wanting to retire and I came into the business to take it over.
And this was in the, you know, 2008, 2009, right in that range.
And when I came in the business, you know, we've been as that business had been a business for over 40 years, was a multi million dollar company and everything they were doing was still on pen and paper which to me as a younger person the was absolutely insane.
This is stupid.
How are we running a business and we're literally still typing bill of ladings which essentially is their invoice that the guys go out with every day on a typewriter.
And so I said there's Gotta be a better way, you know, and the better way in my thought process is there has to be a software out there that does this, right?
And in my research in that time, you know, I had no intentions of wanting to build a software myself.
You know, I was trying to run a moving company.
I couldn't find anything that would do everything we needed.
And there was a couple companies out there, but they're stuff was built like in the mid-90s.
You needed servers in your office to run it.
It wasn't a SaaS product, they weren't good, they weren't updated anymore.
They were very outdated.
And I was honestly very frustrated with it.
I said, this is stupid.
Why hasn't someone developed something?
Why hasn't someone continued to develop?
And so that's kind of how Move It Pro started, in the sense that we were trying to solve our own problem, or my own problem, my own problem of why are we using a typewriter, why are we handwriting?
When someone calls in over the phone and I'm not talking a couple customers a day, I mean, like this is a multi million dollar company.
We're handwriting stuff in the mid 2000s.
So that's kind of where Move It Pro started was that it was, it wasn't even named MoveIt Pro, right?
It was, we needed a software for our own internal business.
I had no intentions of ever selling it.
You know, it was, you know, I figured we'd spend stupidly.
I figured we'd spend, you know, 25, $50,000, hire a developer and write us something that would do everything we needed.
That was ambitious.
Right.
Omer (06:27.840)
And so you didn't, even when you thought about spending that money, you weren't thinking about building a product that you were going to sell to other people.
This was to run your own business.
Jason Bergenske (06:35.280)
To run our own business.
Correct.
Yeah.
And so we kind of went down that road and like we talked about, so there was a five year gap, right.
We started building the product and five years almost before we started selling it.
And part of that was, you know, we didn't take any venture money.
We weren't looking, we weren't looking at spending hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, A and B, we weren't trying to go into debt doing it.
You know, that was one thing that my grandparents and my father taught me is you never go in debt.
And that's part of what saved our moving company when the recession happened here in 2008, so many went out of business because they went in debt.
We did so.
So we started developing MoveIt Pro.
And we really realized after we had about $75,000 invested in it, that we weren't even 10% done with what we would need to be a workable project.
And it was over a couple years we were developing super slow.
We hired.
It was a husband and wife developers over in India that finally ended up working out and doing our project, which we're still in communication with nowadays.
And they're good people, but we realized that at the pace we were going and the money we are investing in it, we would either need to, as they say, you know, take this product behind the barn and shoot it and be done with it.
And I just lost all this money, or we needed to throw a ton more money at it and get it done and start selling it as a product.
Omer (07:57.740)
Did you have any background in software when you started, kind of set out to build this?
Jason Bergenske (08:01.340)
I did not.
No, I did not.
Omer (08:03.180)
And so you went through, I think, five different teams when you were kind of outsourcing until you found the right people to work with.
And now, as I understand, you still work with them, but most of your development is done in house and you have, you know, your own development team.
Tell me about that experience of finding the right developers or maybe the first four iterations of that.
What did you learn from that experience?
What were some of the problems that you had to overcome?
And I'm asking this from the perspective of, you know, somebody else who's, you know, in that similar position who's saying, hey, I'm not technical.
I want to go out and build some software.
I want to hire somebody.
I know I'm going to make some mistakes.
Can Jason help me avoid some of those things?
Jason Bergenske (08:43.520)
Yeah, absolutely.
So when we first started, and again, we were trying to do this inexpensively, and so our thought process was that we would get a developer that would kind of help us build our project and that if they wanted to start selling it one day, they could, and they could make money with it.
That was our first go at it.
Right.
We would pay them under market value for their time, and then they would own the project and be able to do with it what they wanted once we got what we needed.
And we would just stay updated.
So that was the first thought process for us, which I will say now, had that developer continued to do that, they would have made a decent amount of money now, and they'd have residuals coming in.
But the hard thing is when you're doing that with a project our size at that, you know, point had still even spent, you know, 25, $30,000 with them, but they'd probably done $100,000 worth of work and we weren't even, like I said, Barely 10% done.
So the thought process for them, which is completely understandable is, you know, what if I put all this time in and the project doesn't ever turn into money?
Omer (09:52.260)
Right, right.
Jason Bergenske (09:53.060)
You know, developers are a sought after career right now, as we all know, and they could go and get a paying customer that's going to pay them their full rate and not have the risk that our project wouldn't work out.
Omer (10:09.080)
And presumably you made that offer because you didn't think you'd be sitting here today with a four or five million dollars a year software business that's still growing.
It was like, well, this is maybe a good way to offset costs for a tool we're building for ourselves.
Jason Bergenske (10:22.760)
Correct, Yep.
And that was kind of our thought process because again we were running moving a storage company that was a very successful company.
You know, my grandparents started it, my dad had a very successful career in it.
We had multiple like growing up, you know, my parents had several homes, we had a vacation house.
We had, the business had provided.
Right.
And so our target, our goal wasn't to sell this software to be able to make a living anymore.
Like it was never that point.
It was to help us with our existing business.
So after that developer didn't work out, we went to, we went through, I think three more developers that were overseas and none of them were bad.
But the problem when you're working with developers overseas, it's rough.
You're dealing with different times as far as time zones, they're working in your night versus you know, we're working during the day.
Communication is definitely a lot harder.
Language barrier, accents is sometimes hard.
And then just the, at the end of the day, the point of it's hard to hold them accountable to do the work that you need done because they're across the country and there's tools to see how many hours they worked and stuff like that.
But at the end of the day you're trusting them.
You're trusting that they're billing you for eight hours today.
Did they really work eight hours or do they work two?
And so we went through three more devs which again weren't terrible, but they just weren't to what we needed it to be.
They weren't seeing our vision, it just wasn't working.
And that's about the time when we hit, you know, where we had about $75,000 invested in it.
And we realized that if we were going to do this that two things need to happen.
One, we needed to dump a ton more money into it and two, we needed to get full time people that this is what they were going to be.
We needed to turn this into a business.
This isn't now a project for our existing company.
This is now going to be its own company.
And so that's when we found it was a husband and wife team that is in India.
And we hired them, starting both of them full time, which even then two developers for us then that's a lot of money because it's not usually in your budget that you're hiring two developers for a moving company that's doing a couple million dollars a year.
Right.
But you know, we started with them and then we went from 2 devs to 3 devs to 4 devs and all on their team and they're managing them and they honestly, they did a phenomenal job for years and years and we built a great relationship with them where they, you know, I think they counted on our business to provide for their family and their employees families that it, it always worked.
There never was a situation where they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing or they weren't available when we needed them because we became, you know, a good sized customer for them.
Omer (13:09.900)
So over that five year period of where you were building this product but not selling it to anybody, how much did you end up spending on this?
Was that the 75,000 or is it a lot more than that?
Jason Bergenske (13:20.280)
Yeah, so by the time we sold our first customer, we had about $700,000.
Omer (13:25.320)
So what kept you going and putting money into this product?
Like, you know, this is like a pretty expensive internal tool at this point.
Jason Bergenske (13:33.080)
The first 75,000, we were looking at it as only an internal tool.
We didn't think we'd make money on it.
And at that point is when I made the decision that I internally and myself, I have to make a decision whether I'm just gonna scrap this project and I lost $75,000 or I'm gonna go all in and I'm gonna put every last penny of every cent I have and every last cent of money I make over the next five years extra into this product to make it work.
And over that following four years is then where we put in another $600,000, which is a ton of money.
But you know, at that time in my life too, like all of my friends were buying houses, all of my friends were buying brand new fancy cars, all of my friends, I didn't have any of that.
I was making good money running a moving company.
I was doing several million dollars a year, but all of that money was going into Move It Pro.
And it's easy to say now, but I knew it was something.
I knew we were gonna make it.
And again, it's easy to say that now, but we just, we didn't have competitors.
There wasn't competitors.
And I knew from us running a moving company, my grandparents, my father, us running a moving company, I knew how much it could help the industry as a whole and how much it could help independently owned moving companies, which is the majority of our customers.
And I knew they'd pay for it.
And so that was kind of my thing was, yeah, I was putting a lot of money and it could have not worked.
Right.
A lot of SaaS products don't work out or, you know, there's not a good niche or whatever it is.
But, you know, I had a gut feeling that it was going to work and where I poured everything I had into it.
Omer (15:08.600)
What was the time between the day you made the decision that I'm going to go all in and build this as a software business to the day that you got your first paying customer?
Jason Bergenske (15:20.760)
So it was about four years.
Omer (15:22.280)
Wow.
Jason Bergenske (15:23.160)
Yeah, four years.
So we had started using Moveit Pro internally in about 2014, but it was bare bones.
I mean, it was nothing of what it is now.
You know, end of 2014 and then 2015, we finished doing pretty much like running a beta, right?
I mean, we, we, we tested and tested and tested and used it in our own business.
And then, you know, that kind of led into how we got our first several customers because we had friends that went to moving companies in other states that would, you know, what are you guys using for software?
Like, how are you guys doing it?
You've been in business so long and it's.
Oh yeah, we built our own.
And then that's when it started turning into, you know, can we get it?
How much is it?
And we hadn't thought of any of that yet.
We didn't know what the product was going to cost.
We didn't know what features we'd include for what.
It's just we knew we'd be able to make our money on it.
And you know, we knew that it was something and we knew we'd build it.
But our primary focus just focused was to get the product done so we could start showing people and get customers.
Omer (16:27.140)
But four years sounds like a crazy long time to wait to get that first sale was this.
When you look back, do you feel like you were delaying until you got to a point where you had a perfect product?
I mean, if it was good enough for you to use as a bare bones product for your business, surely you could have found other people who would have been happy to use it.
And, you know, it would improve over time.
Jason Bergenske (16:55.190)
So even us, we didn't start using it for three of that five years.
We were developing it, right?
But you have to remember in the beginning, we were not putting as much money towards it.
You know, in the last year there, we were putting $200,000, $300,000 into it before we started selling it.
So, you know, it was a, it was a twofold.
You know, one is it was very important to us that we knew the product would be stable enough to be able to not ruin our name if we started selling it and problems happened.
So, you know, when you're running a product like a CRM for businesses, you know, the last thing you could have happen is where you lose someone's data or you something that's a tragic thing that is very likely to happen in a new product without rigorous testing and it's been used and stuff like that.
And, you know, I think that was a big part of it.
A and B, you have to remember I was running another company too.
You know, I was running a moving company, which even at that point, I had no intentions of ever getting rid of the moving company.
You know, my grandparents started it in the 60s.
I grew up there.
It was in my blood.
You know, there's.
There's pictures of me like 4 or 5 years old wearing a uniform for JJ Metro, the moving company we own.
You know, I mean, so it was one of those that we knew we were gonna start selling it.
And our goal was to get the majority of the features we wanted that we knew we needed to launch.
It doesn't mean it's the right way.
It doesn't mean that we couldn't have launched it earlier, because I think we could have.
But it was more the approach we took, which obviously ended up working out well, but that's kind of where we're at.
Omer (18:36.380)
So let's talk about the first 10 customers.
So the product is, you feel like around 2016, you feel like it's ready to go out there and to start selling it.
How did you find those first 10 customers?
Jason Bergenske (18:48.940)
So the first couple were again, like I said, friends, people that we knew that owned moving companies that just kind of knew we were developing something.
The Hardest thing for any software company or any business is getting in front of the people that you need to get in front of that can make a decision on your product.
Calling their offices and talking to their receptionist.
You're never going to get anywhere.
So us owning a moving company, we knew that Yelp had, and they still have it.
They have a function where you as a business owner can claim your page.
We all know that.
And you can actually, as a moving company, you can have your customers request a quote on Yelp on your profile page on Yelp.
Which, that's no big deal.
But here's the thing.
When someone does request a quote on Yelp on your page, it sends a push notification directly to the owners of that page is cell phone.
And it goes a little further.
Yelp penalizes that owner if they do not respond to the message within a certain amount of time.
Omer (19:49.980)
I can see where this is going.
Jason Bergenske (19:52.940)
So our push was, you know, we probably, I hired a full time girl and that's what her job was.
Full time, year on Yelp.
This was how we started.
We had to get a VPN that changed our IP address to defeat Yelp's algorithm that knew that we were sending too many messages.
But that's how we started.
And we started messaging hundreds of moving companies throughout the United States.
And we probably signed up 50 moving companies in a matter of two months by doing this, because there's nothing better than being able to send a push notification to a prospect of your cell phone and it penalizes them if they don't reply to you.
And it was super nice.
We were very forward with what we were.
We say, hey, you know, my name's, you know, Samantha was her name.
My name's Samantha.
I'm with a company called Move It Pro.
Hey, I'm just curious, what moving software are you guys using?
That was it.
And then, you know, they would always reply.
And then she sent a link to our website and that was it.
But the point being is it got across to the right people.
They saw it, they looked at it and it's, it was the most effective advertising we've ever done.
Because, I mean, we all know text work, emails work, stuff like that.
But something that's coming through that they think is a customer, right?
They think it's a customer asking for a quote.
They at least looked at it.
And so that was a big help with getting us started and getting us where we were, not in the red line anymore and covering our development costs.
Omer (21:19.350)
Let's talk about pricing.
How do you price the product today.
And then when you launched, what were you charging for the product and how did you figure out the right pricing?
Jason Bergenske (21:34.630)
When we first launched, we had customers and this plan did not work out as good because a lot of our customers weren't honest.
So I'll tell you how it worked.
So our first plan was revenue based.
So that was our goal, was to try and help moving companies.
So if you had a slow month, you paid us less.
If you had a busier than hell month, you paid us more.
And it went based on the jobs that are in their system when they marked them as completed.
There's still some companies that pay us this way and they're on our legacy plan and they're great companies.
And Guerrilla Movers out of Wisconsin is probably our fifth customer and it was found on Yelp.
Two College movers is another one in Colorado.
They found us on Yelp.
They're still on those plans and it works for them because they're honest about it.
But as you can probably assume a large majority of customers, when they realize that they could just delete a few jobs or say that the job canceled and then they weren't honest.
So we realized that plan wasn't going to work for what we wanted.
So we more switched to a per user plan.
And our current pricing we charged for three users or less is 285amonth.
For up to five users is $3.99 a month.
And then it just, you know, kind of goes from there.
If they have additional users and stuff, the majority of our customers I'd say are five users or less.
We do have some big, big guys like Black Tie Moving, who's partly owned by the lead singer of the Rascal Flats, Gary Levox.
So he owns part of that moving company.
So They've got about 70 users in 15 locations throughout the United States.
Omer (23:09.220)
So I think the revenue share pricing is interesting.
You don't see that that often.
And I don't know whether it's because you came from that background of running a moving company that you wanted to come up with more of a, a business friendly approach where you, you make less, you pay less kind of thing.
Do any of your competitors do any pricing like that?
Jason Bergenske (23:29.810)
So none of them do it like that.
Companies that we deal with now, there's a couple, Charge V. That's how theirs is.
So Charge V is who we do our billing through.
Theirs is based off of invoice volume, which works good for us.
Our struggle was with just getting people to be honest.
You know, if they're going to be honest.
The plan works beautifully in which we have a bunch of companies which are good sized companies and they're honest about it and it is what it is.
But I think the majority of the ones that weren't honest were small companies.
You know, there are two users and the guy's running out of a spare bedroom of his house.
And if he could save, you know, 100 bucks this month, paying us, even though it took him 20 minutes to go delete jobs and fudge stuff, he'd rather do that than his.
Than his bookkeeping guru.
Right, Right.
Omer (24:17.350)
Okay.
So the first 50 or 60 customers come through this interesting Yelp marketing channel.
Where did the others come from?
What else have you or did you do after that to to find customers?
Jason Bergenske (24:33.570)
Our biggest lead source would be Google AdWords.
Like a lot of businesses, you know, we spend, I don't know, $10,000 a month or so.
And that's been the same probably for, I don't know, the last four or five years about what we spend with Google AdWords.
So we on most keywords, we come up first for moving software software for moving companies, stuff like that.
We've done Capterra, which obviously I'm sure you're familiar with, but it's a review site similar to yelp, but for SaaS companies or software companies.
We've done industry specific trade shows before COVID We're very popular.
We do a couple of those a year, but that's the majority.
And then just referral customers.
Movers talk.
So once one of them's using it, then they kind of communicate to their friends that are in the industry and stuff like that.
So we pick up customers there.
Omer (25:26.400)
So 2016, first customer.
How long did it take you to get to the first million in ARR with this business?
Jason Bergenske (25:36.180)
Off the top of my head, I'm not exactly sure.
I'm thinking it was probably around three years before we hit our first million.
Omer (25:43.540)
So roughly, let's say around 2019 kind of time.
At what point did you decide that you were going to run this business full time and.
And basically exit from the family business that your grandparents had built since the 60s?
Jason Bergenske (26:03.670)
So it was right around when Covid happened.
So we sold it January 4th of 2020.
You know, it had been.
It just was a struggle.
You know, Move It Pro was doing better and better.
I was making more money.
The company was bringing in more revenue than I knew that I could bring in with the moving company.
The moving company, again, was a very successful company, but it required an owner to Be extremely devoted to the operations of the company.
And what I mean by that is it was one of those that you'd make a great living.
But you were at the office every morning at 7:30, you were there till 6:00 clock every night, 7:00 clock at night, which, that's not a big deal, right?
But when a truck broke down on a Saturday afternoon, you were the one getting the phone call.
When you.
When guys didn't show up because they were drunk or hungover or, you know, you're trying to scramble to get guys to cover jobs and stuff, it was a very stressful industry, which.
Right.
Those are all my customers now.
Like, those are, you know, so we know a lot and deal with them.
But, you know, being in the software, it was more about building an enterprise or building a corporate type environment where, you know, the goal is that when I come in, I'm able to work on growing the business, not having to deal with if an employee showed up or didn't show up.
And don't get me wrong, when the company was smaller, obviously I had to deal with those things.
But the ability to be able to grow this and scale this company was far superior than what a local moving company was.
And I think that was my biggest battle was because this company had been in my family for 50 years and it was kind of hard to let go of.
And that honestly, the last couple years, that was the hardest thing was letting go of it.
No, I don't want to let go of it, you know, even though my time's split between both and.
But it was the best thing that I could have done because being able to focus all of my time on building Move It Pro, building our product, building our team, getting the right people in the right place, you know, on our management team and stuff like that.
It was stuff I didn't have time to do before because I was trying to put up fires from that company, put up fires with this company.
It was exhausting.
Omer (28:18.180)
So eventually you make the break, you exit from that business, you go full time into Move It Pro.
What was the size of the team at the time?
Jason Bergenske (28:30.180)
We were like 10.
Omer (28:31.540)
And so you've basically almost more than tripled the size of the team since you've done that.
What's been going on?
I can understand the landscape back in 2011 when you look and say there isn't much in terms of moving software and they want you to stick a server under your desk if you want to build this thing.
But what's the landscape like today?
Is there More competition.
How much time do you spend thinking about what the competitors are doing versus focusing on the vision that you already have?
How do you, how do you spend your time thinking about that?
Jason Bergenske (29:09.640)
So, I mean, there's definitely more competitors than there were, you know, 10 years ago when we first started.
There's probably five total.
There's probably two or three that are really, you know, ones that are comparable to us.
Honestly, I love it.
I love having competitors because it helps push us to move further and further.
And that's a cliche thing to say, but it literally is the truth because that is what I think ruined the software's.
Before we built like, like we talked about, there was softwares that were built in the 90s.
There were softwares that were built in the early 2000s before we did, but they were so outdated because they had no competition.
And because they had no competition, they had no reason to update.
They had no reason to continue to spend money on development.
And so that's been something that from the beginning, once we realize we're turning this into a business, it's going to be ever evolving.
We're never going to say, all right, we're done, the software is done, let's just sell it now, let's just keep selling it and make money.
That's not our goal.
That's not our vision.
Our vision is to keep developers we have now keep the same amount or more and continually develop, adding new features, new functionality and more things that can help our customers grow their businesses and take care of their families.
Going back to competitors, obviously we look at what other competitors are doing to make sure that we are keeping up with times and making sure that we're staying relevant.
But the majority of our focus isn't on that.
It's, it's majority on our current roadmap, where we want to be at.
And the things that we're going to continue to push, push our team, push our leadership and push our development team to, to really keep us in the lead and keep us moving forward.
Omer (30:46.190)
One thing I want to go back to, we talked about this kind of, this crazy long period of about four years of, of going all in, building the product, getting to that first customer.
If you could magically go back in time, what would you do differently this time round?
Would you like to basically shrink that window and get from commitment to this business to first customer faster?
Jason Bergenske (31:15.070)
I mean, for sure, right off the bat would have been going all in from the beginning.
Like we talked about the first year, year and a half, we were only at 75,000 invested.
And it's because we were just, you know, I keep saying we, but I was, I was only putting in, you know, part of my extra money making from home, you know, from, from the moving company.
And had I obviously started from the get go that we knew we were going to sell this product, we were going to turn it into a product called Move It Pro and all this stuff, I think I would have been more aggressive from the beginning, which would have shaved at least a year and a half, two years off of it.
Right.
And then the other thing being is just, you know, I held on, like I said, I held on too long to our family business.
And even though my heart wasn't in it, my heart was in Move It Pro.
But because the emotional attachment to a family owned business and making my dad happy and keeping it in our family and those are things that you struggle back and forth with until I finally made the decision like, no, I can't do both well.
Well is not okay for me.
I need to do it great and I can't do both great.
You know, if I do both of them, I'm only going to get them both.
You know, they're going to, both can be here and I need one of them to be here and I can't do that with both.
And that's finally where, you know, having the ability to fully focus on Move It Pro and push and hire and hire and hire and get the right people is when, you know why we've grown so fast.
Once we started selling and once we, you know, started hitting, you know, mile marker points.
Omer (32:52.670)
Yeah, I mean, I think looking back it's, and having that perspective and clarity, it's obviously easier to see what you should have done or shouldn't have done.
But when you're in the trenches and you know, you've got all of these things going on and there's uncertainty and there's emotions and all of these things, it's, it's a very difficult thing to do real time.
Then, you know, I think there's always some lessons when we sort of look back and you know, you sharing that perspective, I think maybe that might be helpful for somebody else who's, who knows what they need to do but maybe is struggling to pull the trigger.
So we should wrap up, we should get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Jason Bergenske (33:37.180)
You got it?
Omer (33:38.540)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Jason Bergenske (33:41.210)
Work Harder than everyone else.
Omer (33:42.650)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jason Bergenske (33:45.930)
The 10x rulebook by Grant Cardone.
It's just a good motivational.
I mean it's a good, it's a good book to try and build a brand or business with and takes the excuses out of what we're all programmed to have.
You know, whether it's call reluctance, picking up the phone, whether it's presenting to someone, whether it's, you know, whatever the things are.
It's, it's, it's a rule book, it's a rulebook to go by and it's, it's, you know, something to aspire to be.
Omer (34:15.470)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Jason Bergenske (34:19.110)
Being a leader.
There's a difference between being a, you know, a boss and being a leader.
Omer (34:23.830)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jason Bergenske (34:27.190)
I think, you know, the biggest habit that I have is just to try and wake up early every morning and try and, you know, really get through everything that I need to do in the day before the day starts.
Because once I get to the office, it's hard.
You got, you know, 100 emails, you got slack messages from everyone, you got all this stuff.
And a lot of times as a founder or manager, you know, essentially you end up getting bogged down with all those things and you're not able to get to the things that you need to be able to grow your company.
Omer (34:55.920)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Jason Bergenske (34:59.920)
So probably another app.
It says if you have more time.
So at some point I think we will be doing this.
You know, we obviously built a CRM for moving and storage companies and there's a tremendous amount of code that we could use for building a CRM for like service based customers, you know, electricians, plumbers, stuff like that.
It's not something that's in my roadmap that's going to be in the next couple years, but at some point I think that may be something that we want to look at.
Omer (35:26.700)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jason Bergenske (35:29.900)
I love being on the water.
You know, luckily with this business, you know, it's provided well for us.
About a year and a half ago I bought a 70 foot yacht and we've taken that to the Bahamas and the Keys and Savannah, Georgia and we actually will spend Christmas and New Year's in St. Augustine this year on the boat.
Omer (35:51.500)
Very nice.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work and
Jason Bergenske (35:56.100)
other than your boat, honestly, is family man.
I got a seven year old daughter and I would honestly say she's my passion for living.
So I'm getting married also November 5th, so I got three weeks.
Omer (36:07.860)
Congratulations.
Jason Bergenske (36:09.060)
Thank you very much.
So between the two of them keeps me busy.
Omer (36:13.300)
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure talking and thanks for sharing your story and just kind of reflecting on some of the lessons that you've learned along the way and how this you basically are an accidental SaaS founder who never set out to build a SaaS business.
I love that.
And if people want to find out more about Move It Pro, they can go to moovitpro.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jason Bergenske (36:40.580)
So best way is probably email.
So that's Jason J A S O n dot Berginski B E R G E N S k e@moveitpro.com thank you so much Jason.
Omer (36:53.600)
It's been a pleasure and wish you and the team the best of success.
Jason Bergenske (36:56.480)
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
