How to Manage an HHG Brokerage — The Daily Systems That Run the Whole Business

Getting licensed as an HHG broker is paperwork. Knowing how to manage an HHG brokerage is what determines whether the license ever produces income. The business runs on five repeating workflows — and a single person can run all of them from a laptop and a phone, if the systems underneath are right.

The five workflows: lead intake, quoting, carrier dispatch, payment collection, and payouts. Manage those five well and the operation is a 25–30 hour week. Manage them with spreadsheets, sticky notes, and a personal Venmo account, and the business breaks the first month volume picks up. This post walks through each workflow — what it involves, where brokers lose money in it, and how the software handles it.

The Five Workflows Every HHG Brokerage Runs On

Strip away everything else and a household goods brokerage is a routing system: leads come in one side, completed moves and payments come out the other. In between, five things happen on repeat:

• Lead intake — capturing every inquiry from realtors, web forms, and calls into one pipeline
• Quoting — pricing local jobs hourly and long-distance jobs by cubic foot, fast enough to win the booking
• Dispatch — assigning each booked job to a verified, insured carrier in your network
• Payment collection — taking customer money in a way that survives disputes
• Payouts — paying carriers on completion and paying realtor referral commissions on time

Every operational failure in this business is a failure in one of those five. Double-booked carriers are a dispatch failure. Chargebacks are a payment failure. Realtors who stop referring are a payout failure. The job of managing the brokerage is keeping all five running without any of them depending on your memory.

Lead Intake: One Pipeline or No Pipeline

Leads arrive from everywhere — a realtor texts you a client's number, a form submission comes in overnight, someone calls mid-quote with a competitor. The brokers who lose deals lose them here, before quoting ever starts, because a lead that sits four hours goes to whoever called back first.

The management rule: every lead enters one CRM pipeline the moment it exists, tagged with its source. MagickPlat's sales CRM is built around this — lead comes in, lands in the pipeline, and moves through stages (new, quoted, booked, dispatched, completed) so at any moment you can see exactly how many deals sit at each stage and which ones are going stale. Source tagging matters for a second reason: it tells you which realtors actually send business, which is who your retention effort should go to.

Quoting: Two Pricing Models, One Builder

HHG quoting runs on two different models, and managing them with one generic invoice tool is how brokers underprice jobs.

Local moves price hourly. Crew size × hourly rate × estimated hours, plus travel time. A two-person crew at $150/hour for a four-hour apartment move quotes around $600–$700 to the customer, with the carrier taking $400–$450 of it.

Long-distance moves price by cubic foot. Volume × rate per cubic foot for the lane, plus packing, stairs, shuttle, and storage line items. A 600-cubic-foot two-bedroom going interstate quotes in the $4,000–$5,500 range depending on distance — and this is where the $1,200 average broker margins live.

The quote builder in MagickPlat handles both modes natively, which does two things for the person managing the brokerage: quotes go out in minutes instead of hours, and the margin is calculated on every quote before it's sent — so you never discover after dispatch that you priced a job below the carrier's rate. Erica Dorsey brokered for ten years before building the platform, and the quote builder exists because she spent her first seasons rebuilding the same spreadsheet math on every single job.

Dispatch and Carrier Management: The Network Is the Asset

Once a job books, it needs a carrier — licensed, insured, available for the date, and right-sized for the move. Managing this manually means a call-around every time: three voicemails, two carriers already booked, one who lets you down on price. Managing it well means maintaining a network deep enough that dispatch is a selection, not a search.

• Verification on a schedule, not a vibe. Every carrier's FMCSA authority and insurance gets checked before their first job and rechecked quarterly. A lapsed-insurance carrier on one of your jobs is your problem, not just theirs. MagickPlat's carrier database is FMCSA-licensed and pre-loaded by state — that's the starting point; ongoing verification is part of running the network.
• Treat carriers as subscribers, not vendors. Carriers pay $99/month to be in your network and receive job flow, and you keep $89.10 of each subscription. That inverts the usual dynamic: carriers have a paid stake in answering your dispatch calls, and you have recurring income that arrives independent of job volume.

The built-in call scripts cover this side of the business too: there's a personalized script for every carrier in the database, which turns network-building from improvisation into a repeatable daily block of calls. Managing the brokerage includes managing this roster — onboarding new carriers monthly and replacing the ones who decline jobs repeatedly.

Payments: Escrow In, Automatic Payouts Out

Payment management is where new brokerages quietly die. The failure pattern: customer pays a deposit by card, something on the move disappoints them, they file a chargeback after completion, and the broker — who already paid the carrier — eats the full loss. A few of those in a season erases a month of margin.

The structural fix is escrow. MagickPlat runs payments through Stripe with escrow: the customer's money is collected up front and held, the carrier sees the job is funded before the truck rolls, and on job completion the carrier is paid automatically from escrow. The customer can't charge back money held against a documented, completed job, and you're never fronting carrier payments out of pocket. From a management standpoint this removes two recurring tasks entirely — chasing customer balances and cutting carrier checks — and replaces them with a status to monitor.

Realtor Commissions: The Payout That Protects Your Lead Flow

Realtors are the highest-quality lead channel in this business — every closing is a guaranteed move — but the channel only stays open if commission payouts are reliable. An agent who refers a client in March and is still asking about their commission in May refers the next client to someone else.

This is why payout automation is a management decision, not a convenience. MagickPlat's realtor referral network pays the 3–5% commission automatically when the referred job completes — no invoice from the agent, no reminder, no manual transfer. The agent sees money arrive within days of their client's move, which is the single strongest signal you can send that the next referral should also come to you. The realtor database and per-contact call scripts handle the recruiting side; automatic payouts handle retention.

What a Managed Week Actually Looks Like

Put the five workflows on a calendar and managing an HHG brokerage looks like this: mornings on the pipeline — respond to every new lead, send quotes, follow up on stale ones. A daily block of carrier and realtor calls using the scripts, growing both networks a few contacts at a time. Dispatch as jobs book, with carrier verification checks batched quarterly. Payments and payouts run themselves through escrow and automation — your job is reviewing the dashboard, not moving money.

At 10–15 jobs a month, that's a 25–30 hour week for one person, with income from both job margin and the subscription base. The income math post shows how those two streams stack month by month. If you're earlier in the process and the license isn't filed yet, start with the step-by-step guide to becoming a moving broker — the management systems above are exactly what you should be setting up during the 4–6 week FMCSA processing window.

Run the Whole Operation From One Platform

Every workflow in this post — pipeline, dual-mode quoting, carrier subscriptions, escrow payments, automatic realtor commissions — is built into MagickPlat because Erica Dorsey spent a decade running an HHG brokerage on tools that weren't built for one. The platform she needed didn't exist, so she built it.

The free trial at magickplat.com/get-started comes with a personal access code and full platform access: the carrier and realtor databases for your state, the call scripts, the quote builder, and the payment system. Set up the operation before your first job books, and managing the brokerage becomes the easy part.