The Chairman's Corner

By Former CMSA Chairman Rick Hosea (2012-2013)

February 2022

Editor's Note: With CMSA Chairman John Chipman Jr. serving as chair for two years, CMSA has scheduled several guest columnists to replace half of his Chairman's Columns. We thank Chairman Chipman and look forward to his column next month.

I was honored when I was asked by Steve Weitekamp to contribute as a surrogate for the February Chair’s Corner article. I thought how fitting it was that he asked since it was 10 years ago when I served as the Chairman of the CMSA. My very next thought was, “What to say?” because I know well that all who have served and written in the past put great effort into their monthly articles. It didn’t take long or much thought for me to decide what I would write about since a lot has happened since my last article back in 2013.

To begin, back in 2012/2013 serving as then Chairman, I was an employee of one of the best Moving and Storage companies in the Bay Area. I spent 26 years in one capacity or another, beginning as a Van Operator (The Best Job Ever!), then as a Sales Rep, General Manager, and finally as President of their Domestic Division. Every position had its challenges and rewards, but the one common denominator was that each one of those allowed me to take good care of my family, which is the goal for any job we do in life. Today, I have my own business with my wife, Claret, and our partners, Rick and Kim Soeder.  We started from the ground up back in August of 2018, and although Rick and I had some 50 years of collective experience between us, it was not an easy endeavor.  The work I did as an employee and now an owner differs little, but the responsibilities are worlds apart. Until you have shouldered the accountability to ensure timely payroll for your staff and van operators and contractors, you do realize how the two roles differ from each other. Now with three locations, over 85 employees, and multiple contractors both local and van operators, our responsibilities have increased.

As we continued to grow over the first year and a half, I remember thinking that each day got just a little bit easier until COVID-19 entered the picture. Yup, enter stage left a full-blown pandemic the likes of which no one had seen before, at least in my lifetime. Surely, that was going to be what brought down this house of cards, I remember thinking back in early 2020. I knew this was bad for any business, not just those who had started up 18 months earlier. I knew we didn’t have the resources to weather this storm. Our debt at that time alone would surely have thrown us into a tailspin if we had to shut down our operations for even a short period of time. We did what we could, stayed safe by using face coverings, temperature checks on employees, cleaned our facility daily, and prayed a lot. Each day, like most of you, we focused on the safety of our staff and our customers. We became flexible, we had staff working from home, when possible, we endured long absences, even my own as COVID affected my ability to go in for nearly 22 days. Frankly, we took things day by day which again was all we could do with the hopes that we would someday see the other side of this most unfortunate time in our lives.

As an industry, our customers were affected by this pandemic as well. We saw capacity tighten up like never before. Entire crews were home sick or infected with COVID. Van Operators found themselves alienated with many agents closing up and restaurants no longer serving food. The simple act of showering became an even greater challenge with truck stops’ staff reductions. Even though our teams had to wear face coverings, customers would lock themselves in rooms to limit contact with the crews. To be completely honest, life and business back then were a complete mess. I wish I could report that this is finally behind us, but we know that we are just one more variant away from the next set of challenges. The good news is that we have learned to be resilient, we’ve learned to be flexible, we have also learned that the human will is stronger than any pandemic placed in our way.

As I think back to how all of us have been affected during the past two years, no one customer group has been affected as much as our U.S. Military service members. The men and women serving our country have seen their lives turned upside down by this pandemic. Our military is the single largest customer we have in the moving and storage business. When they receive their PCS (Permanent Change of Station) orders, they don’t have a choice to go or not to go. They must report as ordered to their new duty station on time or risk being charged with being AWOL (Absent Without Leave). Many scheduled moves to only find out that there were no movers to handle their relocation, some only finding out at the last minute. 

According to the slides provided during the USTC scheduled calls and confirmed by Dan Bradly of IAM, there are some 313,830 PCS, ETS (Expiration Term of Service) booked by the military each year. While I can’t say how many moves went un-serviced due to a lack of capacity or blackouts, I do know that there were many families who had to come up with a DIY (Do It Yourself) move last minute and without prior notice. The other alternative was rebooking the shipment as Short Fuse. Caleb Mixon, Director of Network Development of Suddath Government Services (SGS), was able to provide some insight as SGS books roughly 35,000-38,000 shipments a year. In addition to the return of Unlimited Refusals and Short Fuse shipments to manage some of these capacity limitations, Caleb added that essentially “demand smoothing” forcefully happened as a result. He went on to mention that they recognize the demand for quality service is met with pricing. He acknowledges the reluctance of agencies overbooking business in jeopardy of service failure to the member, which essentially created the mass number of blackouts USTC and the service members witnessed this past peak. “You won’t find an agency who intentionally wants to do a bad job. Service failures are often happening out of the control of the agent, and that causes triage processes to take place. Labor, of course, being a massive issue. We saw TMOs, TSPs, and agents working together at a high level to create solutions for last-minute changes.” Caleb recognizes the tireless work of the agent network and their partners around the U.S. and abroad to diligently keep our service members well served during this time of COVID and added that it couldn’t be done if TSPs and agents weren’t aligned. He also brought to light the revelations surrounding several new hurdles that could impact future DoD capacity such as new rules and regulations set by USTC and new tracking technology such as “Air Tags,” obviously a conversation for future articles. This is something we will hear more and more of as we enter into 2022’s peak season which is only 75 days or so away from the release of this article.

What I will say is, if we focus on our “Say/Do” ratio, we should really have little to worry about. Honesty and transparency are the keys to overcoming our industry challenges. I can’t wait to see you all in Reno for the 104th Annual CMSA Convention, April 19- 24, at the Peppermill Reno Resort Spa & Casino.

Safe Travels!

February 2022- CMSA Communicator