When Mary Ellen Sheets founded Two Men and a Truck in 1988, she did so out of necessity. Her two sons had run a small moving business during high school, and after they left for college, the phone kept ringing. Not one to let somebody down, Sheets purchased an old moving truck for $350 and hired two movers to pick up the jobs.
Later that year, Sheets had a revelation. She noticed there were no local moving franchise companies in the U.S. and decided she would become the first. Today, more than 20 years later, her company boasts more than 1,300 trucks and more than 200 locations worldwide. Under her leadership, Two Men And A Truck has become one of the largest moving companies in the nation, raking in nearly $200 million in annual revenue.
For her entrepreneurial success, Sheets was named a 2005 Ernst & Young International Runner-up Entrepreneur Of The Year. She’s also developed a global reputation for forward thinking. Sheets sat down with Smart Business to discuss two initiatives that help drive her passion: education and corporate philanthropy.
How have your training programs changed since you first began franchising?
We started ongoing education many years ago when I was the only person there selling franchises and working with owners. At the time, our education process consisted of having franchisees come to our house, where I would sit on the couch and read my manuals to them for a week. It was pretty boring.
Since then, we’ve expanded what we do and now have online training and hands-on training. We also train franchisees on how to manage people.
One of the interesting things we do is, because we’re Two Men and a Truck, we drive trucks. We take all of our people out to a truck training facility in Michigan, where they take a semi and jackknife it with you in it. They also take you down into a deep ditch.
Training is critical. The more people are trained and the better they do, the more money will come back to us and we’ll all be successful. We want our franchisees to be as successful as possible.
Is it important that every franchisee goes through the training programs?
It’s really important that all of your people, especially in a franchise company, look as though they are part of one company. It’s important for our brand that we treat all our customers the same.
