How To Use Customer Service To Disrupt A Traditional Industry

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to Voyo Popovic, the founder and CEO of Piece of Cake, a fast-expanding moving company headquartered out of New York.

Before establishing Piece of Cake seven years ago, Popovic spent three years working for another moving firm in New York, first as a mover and then later in sales. Through his experience across the business and inspired by the examples of what companies like Starbucks, Google and Amazon were doing regarding customer experience, he saw lots of opportunities for how he could create a different type of moving company.

Starting with one truck, the business now employs 800 movers and drivers in five city hubs, including New York. Last year, it completed 100,000 moves.

Popovic’s story and approach are really interesting and offer some valuable lessons for other entrepreneurs looking to disrupt crowded, competitive and/or traditional sectors through the service and experience that they deliver to their customers.

Here are a few things that stood out for me from our conversation:

1. Guerilla and offline marketing still work.

When starting out and trying to drum up business, Popovic told me that he often spent hours walking around Manhattan placing business cards in the reception areas of apartment blocks. These cards would frequently get removed by the ‘Supers’ managing those blocks, but Popovic would return regularly to ensure the reception areas always had a stock of his cards. In addition, he made deals with lots of independent furniture retailers in places like Brooklyn, offering heavily discounted deals to customers who had just purchased a large piece of furniture, like a sofa, and needed help transporting it home. This, he calculated, would give him the opportunity to develop connections with potential future customers.

2. Visual branding matters.

Piece of Cake’s distinctive pink branding and all-pink trucks make them instantly recognizable when standing still on the street or out on the road. Their approach is reminiscent of easyJet’s launch in 1995 in Europe with its orange branding, which, in turn, helped it stand out in a crowded market and redefined how many people thought about air travel in Europe.

3. Investing in the employee experience and culture pays.

Having been a mover himself, Popovic knows what movers like and don’t like. As a result, he resolved to create the best workplace for his team of movers by investing heavily in training, providing them with the best equipment and paying the most competitive wages. As Popovic says, “Our product is our people.”

Over the last seven years, they have grown to 800 movers and drivers spread across five city hubs. But, given the investments that Popovic has made in his team, they have never needed to post a job advertisement for a new team member. Instead, all of their new recruits have come from referrals from existing team members. Each team member refers, on average, 10-15 people into the business who they believe would be a good fit with Piece of Cake, the service it provides and what it stands for. Finally, all of the new local hub leaders have come from their existing employees who have worked their way up through the firm.

4. A willingness to partner and to experiment

Popovic is always on the lookout for new ideas about how he can grow the business and develop new connections with customers. Two things from our conversation stand out in this regard. The first is their ‘moving’ partnership with the New York Knicks, which was established in 2022. This has given them a significant amount of brand awareness, particularly amongst the basketball community. It doesn’t hurt that Popovic is a Knicks fan too. Secondly, Popovic noticed a few years ago a number of brands that were having a lot of success working with influencers to help drive awareness and new business. Borrowing this idea and applying it to the moving industry, Piece of Cake started working with influencers, offering heavy discounts to help them move in exchange for promotional help for Piece of Cake on their channels. That has been very successful for them, and now they are moving 10-15 different types of influencers per day.

5. Customers are a source of innovation.

Piece of Cake now offers a White-Glove moving experience as part of its portfolio of services. This came about after several clients asked if they provided an end-to-end service that included packing, delivering, and unpacking. At the time, they didn’t, but they said yes anyway. It now represents 10% of its total business.

6. Service and human connection matters.

Of the 100,000 moves they conducted last year, 35% came from returning customers, and another 35% were from word-of-mouth referrals. This is a testament to the power and value of their approach.

What my conversation with Popovic highlights is that many seemingly competitive, crowded and/or traditional business sectors are ripe for disruption when businesses lead with the service and experience that they deliver to their customers.