In baseball, as in business: Brooks Fuller

Brooks Fuller is the founder and CEO of Room2Room Movers, a former member of the Auburn University Baseball Program. He is a 2022 Harbert College of Business graduate in finance.

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Curry Dyess. Brooks Fuller is the founder and CEO of Room to Room Movers, a former member of the Auburn University Baseball Program. He is a 2022 Harbert College of Business graduate in finance.

Currie Dyess:

Brooks Fuller, War Eagle, and welcome to the Harbert Podcast.

Brooks Fuller:

War Eagle. Guys, I appreciate y'all for having me. I've been a fan of this podcast for some time now, so this is pretty cool to be here.

Currie:

Yeah, yeah. It's such a pleasure to have you join us and share your story. Your journey is a bit unique. Can you just tell us how you ended up at Auburn University and became an entrepreneur at such a young age?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, so I think my journey starts with my parents, really. My grandparents, they graduated from Auburn probably sometime 1960 ish. Then my parents came to Auburn, graduated, fell in love here. My dad was a baseball player here. He met my mom, who was a diamond doll. They fell in love, moved away from Auburn for some time, but then my dad came back to coach baseball at Auburn in 2000, which is when I was born. So I was born and raised here, got the chance to go to Auburn High School. I really want to follow my dad's footsteps, playing for Auburn University as a baseball player. So upon graduation from Auburn High School, coach Thompson, who's now the head coach at Auburn, gave me a scholarship, got to come play baseball here for four years. My freshman year was 2019. We actually made it to Omaha for the first time in a while.

So that was really fun. And then my senior year was 2022, which was also an Omaha trip. So pretty cool experience playing baseball. Didn't come to school to be a business owner, didn't come to school to be a mover, if you will. Came to school to be a baseball player and made it to the big leagues. However, God had different plans for me, and room to room movers is where we're at today. It's a unique journey. It started during COVID-19, so I'm sure you guys can think back to March, 2020 and picture where you were at. I was at Auburn. It was spring break. The campus was pretty much closed down except for US baseball players. We were here in the height of our baseball season on March 18th. We finished up a midweek game against Wofford, got back to our dugout, and the ad at the time announced that our season was postponed.

We were going to go home for a couple weeks. The goal then was to keep training and be ready to come back to Auburn to finish up baseball season. Obviously COVID-19 continued and that the case, so for my teammates and some of my friends, they all went home. The funny part, and really how room, the room, how our story began was the fact that Auburn University was on spring break that week. So all the students were at the beach. They were back at home visiting their families, and when Covid hit Auburn, the students were not allowed to come back to their dorm rooms, pack up their items and take 'em home, because obviously they would probably spread covid throughout campus. So all the dorms were shut down. Lucky for me, I was in an off off-campus apartment. My parents were two miles down the road, so not too big of a change.

I just continue to work out and keep my body in shape for baseball season. But fast forward three or four weeks after that, COVID is continuing to cause harm, not just in Auburn, but across the world. And a big topic in about May of 2020 amongst some parents on Facebook groups was they're asking questions on how they were going to get their students stuff home from the dorms back to their houses, whether it be in Texas, Birmingham, California. I mean, there's people from around the country that go to Auburn. So they were just kind of curious, Hey, my son, my daughter's stuff still in the dorm room. It's locked up now, it's May. We haven't heard much. What can we do? My mom is on Facebook, she saw these comments. She's a local realtor. She is really an Auburn girl through and through. She definitely wanted to help.

So before long, people were shipping their keys to my mom and dad's house. My mom was organized in everything. And then my brother and I were the movers. So mom would get the keys to us. We would put mask on, put gloves on, grab some UPS boxes, go into each dorm room, pack 'em up, label 'em, take 'em to UPS and then ship 'em back to their owner, whether it be shipping it to Auburn or shipping it to California, I think was our farthest student that we assisted that summer. So there was no business, there was no model. In fact, there wasn't even a pricing structure. We were doing it for free because we were an Auburn family looking to help our fellow Auburn family. I think we were charging just the cost of UPS, and if some people wanted to tip us, they could, but there was no expectation there.

And again, there was no moving service. It was Brooks Brady and Ms. Lori helping out the Auburn students who were across the country. Pretty soon after that summer school starts, so now we're fall 2021. I'm still a baseball player, definitely not a mover at this point. We go back to class, we go back to practice. Didn't think much of it. However, the next spring, so almost a year from our initial Covid shutdown in March, spring 2021, I was at practice. I think it was like a Tuesday or a Wednesday. We were practicing for maybe a weekend series that was coming up. And I come back to my locker after practice and there was two or three texts from Parrots from the summer before they were texting me, Hey Brooks, can you help my daughter move her dorm room again? I heard you have a moving service, and I didn't have a moving service.

I'm in the height of my baseball season. I'm 21 years old. I didn't even text him back. Right. I was focused on being a baseball player, helping my team that weekend, and ultimately being a big leaguer. The next day I came back and there was probably five or six more texts from parents who had been referred by the other parents to this moving service for college kids, which didn't exist. So again, I didn't text them back. I was focused on baseball season. But after a few days of getting texts and phone calls, I had probably 30 or 40 parents that were interested in this moving service that didn't even exist. That's incredible. Yeah, that's really when my brain started to churn, I saw there was an issue. I did some market research on just the moving industry. I wasn't familiar with it. As a baseball player, especially in college, you have a lot of downtime on the road when you're on the bus, on the airplane, maybe in the hotel waiting for that day or that game to be played.

So I had time to do research. I didn't have time to physically do the moving. So what I had to do for the first time in my life really was manage. I had some friends in Auburn that I knew were blue collar guys that could handle clients, and I trusted them moving and just being good guys. So I set up the operation, I handled the payments. I got the phone numbers to the movers and coordinated, and then as I sat in my hotel at another college campus waiting for a baseball game to play, the move was carried out. So that was really neat. It was perfect. I think we had 12 or 13 moves, the first move out season, which was in May, and that's really when the idea of creating a college move in service began. My baseball season wrapped up shortly after May, 2021.

In June, 2021, we set up room to room movers from A to Z. So we hired a team, got some lawyers to draft our LLC documents, created a website, started renting U-Haul trucks, and hired our first 12 movers. So it wasn't just me and my brother anymore, it was a CFO, Mike Hayes. He was a good buddy of mine. I was raised to be a baseball player. His dad was a big time tax attorney and lawyer. So Mike naturally fell in love with accounting and want to be a CFO. So he was my age. He was a good friend of mine. And then my second and last partner at that time was Merrill Bowden. She's still with us today. She is our chief marketing officer. She handles all of our social media, our brand awareness. So it was the three of us and 12 movers. That was a really fun summer.

I think we serviced maybe 200 folks and maybe a 60 day timeframe before school started. And then I went back to school in the fall of 21. So now I'm a senior thinking about graduation, thinking about room to room a lot, thinking about how we can scale this operation to not just Auburn, not just moving, but maybe to places across the country. We did have to hire a full-time director of operations because now we had a company and I was still playing baseball. I was still a finance student, so I knew I couldn't actually juggle all three of those at the same time without some help. So Foster Deering came on. He was our director of operations, which meant I could still worry about the website and payments and our vision, but he was in control when I was at baseball of movers and logistics and coordinating trucks and stuff of that nature.

So that second summer was awesome. We went from 12 movers that first summer, now fosters in the mix. We had like 20, 25 movers a second summer, and I graduated. So now May 22. I had all the time in the world, right? No baseball practice, no finance to study for. It was just room to room, and that's really when things started to take off. We went from 25 movers to about 45 movers. We hired a full-time chief of staff. We began a storage operation, which we found at Camp or Eagle. So we were at camp or Eagle talking to parents for two or three summers in a row about room to room. They kept asking us, do we do storage? And we kept telling them we don't. But then finally the entrepreneur in me took over and said, Hey, we're going to try and help these students out and figure out the storage model, which we did.

That's a state one of our business today. We also began our handyman service. So if a college student needs us to hang a TV or maybe mount some furniture, stuff of that nature, that's a totally separate ordeal. And we have a team now. We have a board of advisors. We are quickly looking to expand through not just the southeast but the country, and that's kind of where we lied today. It was a long journey. We got a long way to go. It kind of fell on our lap, if you will, but we're very blessed to be here for sure. It's like a

Sarah Gascon:

Perfect story and totally explains the Auburn family and the experience that you had with your own family, but then just helping out other students that your mom didn't know anything about them.

Brooks Fuller:

And they didn't know anything about her either. Trust on both sides, which I mean us all people know is a big staple for the Auburn brand. So yeah, whether it's at the next campus or wherever we're at, I would've imagined we're going to take a lot of this culture that we've built from that first day when mom was on Facebook helping parents out. I think it's a core value for us, for sure.

Sarah:

What's critical for a startup is your first hires. So how did you determine who you were going to hire first and how do you continue to attract good young talent?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, so the first two hires we're partners and Mike Hayes, our CFOI had touched on him earlier, and Merrill Bowden, our CMO, Mike and I were good buddies. It made sense. I didn't know much about accounting at the time, which I would urge anyone looking to get into business and start their own business. You need to know accounting. I think it's pretty important. But at that time, I didn't know much. So Mike made a lot of sense. He was someone I trusted, someone my age. I felt like he was a really good partner. So I was blessed to have him by my side from day one. And then Merrill and I were good high school buddies. I hadn't seen her in three or four years. And as room was getting going, I was thinking about our marketing department. I knew that I love being creative. I think it's a natural trait that God's blessed me with to be able to be creative and come up with concepts.

But I'm probably the world's worst at making graphics. So that didn't translate. Our target market is a college student, 18 to 22. They're on social media, they're looking at graphics. I knew it was going to be very important for us to have a social media presence. I just didn't know where to start. So I happened to run into Merrill at the gym one day. Like I said, I hadn't seen her in a few years since high school. I asked her what she was doing, what she was up to. She told me she was looking to start a marketing company, that she had been doing marketing for Auburn for three or four years, and that she felt confident in her skills. And that was the same exact time I was looking for a marketing partner. So the rest is history there, but those two first hires fell in my lap. Again, God bless us with those two people and me and Mike. And then from there, I mean we've put in a lot of work on the HR side. So we work with our board of advisors really to shape the our HR structure, which has brought us Savannah Morgan, hunter Weston.

I mean, the list is long. All of our movers go through a pretty detailed, especially for a moving company, pretty detailed HR structure. We background check. We have videos you have to submit to us. We know that at the end of the day, this is about people. We're in a service business. We have to hire the right people. We're looking for a certain mold and a mover and a chief of staff and a director of operations. And there's no need just to hire anyone. It's really important, especially early on to hire the best of the best. So a lot of prayer, a lot of thought, a lot of patience. I would say we've been through several applicants in many positions before actually hiring. I think, like I said, it's very crucial that early days to have somewhat of an HR structure before you start hiring people.

Currie:

And just to kind of expand on that, I think that making critically important hires and making sure it's a good person to somebody who is a new entrepreneur, that can be an intimidating thing. So how did you come up with the criteria of what you were looking for, whether it be skills, experience, personality? How did you create that persona that you were looking for prior to finding that person?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, I tried to network, so I found people in the HR space. I found mentors who had owned businesses and hired and fired dozens if not hundreds of people. I try to find experience. Obviously you can find a lot on Google, and it's great what you can find, especially with AI now and chat, GPT, stuff of that nature. But I try to surround myself with as many people as possible, whether it be coffee or lunch or going to their office, maybe spending a weekend with them in the woods or going on a fishing trip, just trying to be around them, not necessarily just nagging them with questions about, Hey, should I hire this person? How do I do it? But just to try and soak up as much as I could about their experience and creating a business was really the biggest thing I think I did. And that never stops. I don't think I'll ever stop doing that. Now. We're two or three steps above where we started a couple years ago, and I'm still looking for mentors. And like I said, we have a board of advisors for a reason. I'm a young business fund. I feel like that was important for me to just surround myself with as much experience as possible.

Sarah:

Okay. So early on, you said you had hired your movers first. How did you find access to capital in order to hire them?

Brooks Fuller:

Yes. So I made a few self investments. It didn't take much to get us off the ground. I really wanted to get in this business. I didn't think that it was necessary at the time to go raise money. Some businesses definitely calls for some fundraising. Ours didn't. All I had to do was sell a few moves and then book a U-Haul or a Penske, and we were profitable from day one. So for me, I think the first investment from my personal accounts were a couple thousand dollars to buy some moving blankets and ratchet straps, dollies build the website obviously. And then from there we did have to get some insurance, which you could pay monthly. So that wasn't a huge investment upfront. But after that, I mean all of our other costs were variable. So if I wasn't selling moves, I didn't have to worry about the cost of a mover or cost of a truck because I didn't want to go buy a truck at the time. I just wanted to rent and lease and feel comfortable going to bed at night. So that's how we started. And to this day, we still have bootstraps, and I'm not sure if that will change the near future. I would suggest it to tolerance for newer for looking to get into the space. But again, it really varies business to business.

Currie:

I think that that's an exceptional model to follow, especially for other young entrepreneurs. Don't spend the money until you have the money coming in. A lot of folks get in trouble. Otherwise,

Brooks Fuller:

I think it's really important to validate the concepts. For me, it was validated because of that Covid summer and then the next summer the parents called us back without anyone marketing anyone talking about it. So that was enough validation for me to feel comfortable making the small investment I did on the personal side, but for others that would look totally different. But I do think it's important to find some type of validation before you go spending too much money.

Currie:

How do you navigate the seasonality of college dorm room moving and keeping those good employees that we've talked about, keeping them on staff?

Brooks Fuller:

So it starts with getting creative, being an entrepreneur. The first fall we had nothing to do because we were just a college moving company, and we are still specializing in college moving services, including storage. But we do do more now. We do residential moves. We go long distance in the off season for those folks who need boat storage around Lake Martin, we can offer that since our college kids aren't storing with us during the year, we do some commercial work with high rises, setting up their furniture, install, stuff of that nature. So really just with time and with patience and with some creativity, we found some off season revenue streams to at the very least, make ends meet and keep these great people that we've found around the office.

Currie:

And with that, what would you say is the most challenging or difficult part of your job?

Brooks Fuller:

Just being so young and probably inexperienced in some ways. I make mistakes all the time. Fortunately, I haven't made big enough mistakes to put this in jeopardy, but just the experience or lack of experience, if you will, especially just managing a workforce and people that have families and depend on you as a 24-year-old. And a few years ago, I was a 21-year-old with a business, they really look to you to pay their bills and to support families. And so that's been the most challenging part. I think it's been a blessing. I think I've grown up from where I was a few years ago, just starting out as a startup. But yeah, it's tough and I'm sure it's tough for anyone, not just a young entrepreneur, but just managing people and really cultivating your workforce in a way that's positive and just creating a good culture.

Currie:

And to piggyback on that, Brooks, how do you measure success?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, so I would say for us how we would measure success is really depending on our culture. So how are the movers treating clients? What's the client feedback? Sure, dollars and revenue and expenses matter, but at the end of the day, how's the move treating our client? How easy is the move for the client? Is it as convenient as we strive for it to be? Or are there hiccups that we need to maybe invest in or straighten up before next moving season? So really any business comes down to the client. It's a little deeper than that because before the client is even involved, you have an office that is going to hopefully capture the sale. So what's their process like? Do we need to invest there? If that's good, how is the information getting moved to the mover so that the movers in a good spot before the move starts? And then lastly is the move being carried through in a manner that our culture would support. So just that client feedback is everything in us.

Sarah:

You have several competitors. Why should people choose room to room? What's your unique value proposition?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, I mean there's moving companies across the world. I think room to room stands out just for me as our culture, our model of hiring college students to move college students. When your son or daughter goes off to college and you're a parent, whether you be out of state or in state, it's an emotional time. You have to trust someone to take care of your student in that moving and storage transition. And when you have a familiar face with a college mover showing up to your son or daughter's dorm room, apartment, and they're in a polo, they have a smile, can go on the website and look at them, you can find their Instagram. All of our movers are background checked. That's really safe. That's really convenient for the parent as opposed to having to hop on a flight from across the country and stay in a hotel and then move and then fly all the way back home and take a few days off of work in between. So I would say we found that niche market in the college students helping other college students and just being as a convenient of a service as possible for students from freshman year to when they graduate as a senior, as if they need us to take 'em to their new job across the country, we think we could do that as well. So that's kind of what we're finding right now, and I think we'll keep pushing that for sure.

Currie:

Yeah, that's a great formula. Room to removers has really flourished in the Auburn community. And you've mentioned your next step is expansion, and I think that's obvious next step. How have you and your team gone about identifying where your next campus is going to be? What kind of demographics or the size of the school or the size of the town? What's the process there?

Brooks Fuller:

So we think our model is beneficial or a college town, no doubt. I think it'd be tough for us to go to a town that doesn't have a school in it. I just don't think that would fit our brand and our model. So we're looking at demographics. Alright, Auburn is pretty successful right now, so how can we find what works in Auburn and then copy and paste it as good as we can in the new town? So we're looking at demographics like obviously population, but not only population, but once the students are gone, what's the local population? How does that compare? Contrast to Auburn? Median household income of a student is pretty important, right? That would change your pricing structure at a new campus. If the families, let's say at Alabama don't make quite as much at Auburn, can your prices be in the same spot as they are at Auburn or do they have to come down or can they increase to maximize profit?

So just looking at stuff like that. Also, it's important for us to get boots on the ground at the campus and talk to people and stay a few nights, go to dinner, try and grab lunch, try and find maybe the Brooks Fuller of that town who can connect you with people because he or she's been there for several years. So that's really important too, to really figure out what's the vibe around town? Is it similar to the Auburn family that we hold here? But those are all things that we're looking at and we're starting small. We're definitely still a work in progress at Auburn. We do think we have a model that can be replicated at different college campuses with the right team, but by all means we're still hyper-focused on serving the Auburn community.

Sarah:

Being a college athlete, your time is precious. You are a full-time student, full-time athlete. It's almost like you're working two full-time jobs. And then on top of that, you wanted to start this business. So student athletes that are in your position that have idea business ideas or even just regular students that are a part of clubs, what advice would you give them trying to balance their academics and their extracurricular activities while also wanting to start a business?

Brooks Fuller:

Right. I mean, it's important to know how much time is in the day. There's a lot of it. I don't know when people wake up when they go to sleep, but for me, I'm an early bird. So back in the day when I was playing baseball and doing finance and starting room, the room, I would start my day waking up after I got some quiet time with God, I start with room to room. So any emails I had for that day, any edits to the website, any business development was the first hour to the day that I went to class. So that was when school came to play. I was hyper-focused there. I had some time at launch to maybe check back in on room to room before baseball started, but then it was baseball or I couldn't try and juggle baseball and room to room in the same hour.

I had to definitely set my goals on baseball when it was baseball practice, baseball games, and then if I want to stay up after practice or a game and do some more room to room or do some more school, that was time for it then. But I would just say to anyone that's juggling 2, 3, 4 things and maybe sports is or isn't a part of that, just enjoy it. I miss it. To be honest with you, I have a lot of time and obviously it's dedicated toward room to room and family and friends now, but I really, really thoroughly enjoyed having a lot on my plate because life gets pretty simple in a way after you graduate, if you're playing sports, you don't have sports anymore and work out stuff of that nature. So just enjoy where you're at and just work as hard as you can.

Currie:

Sarah and I are both athletes. We are both college athletes and continue to train and we have talked a lot and to other athletes, we've talked a lot about how we believe the qualities of what makes a good athlete good are the same things that make a good business person, a good business person. Where do you see that translation coming from your sports background? Do you kind of notice it occasionally or ever on a daily basis? Do you agree with that?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that athletes who transition into the business world, it should be fairly easy on 'em or fairly somewhat the same as what they're used to. You wake up and maybe have a cup of coffee and then you're getting in your email or you have some meetings in the morning very similar to some morning lift or workout. And then throughout the day you have meetings and film. And that's the same thing in the business world. You probably have some more meetings and I don't know if we're watching too much film at room to room in the afternoon, maybe the game could translate as the operation. I'll have some moves to go check on. I have to go check on my teammates and support them, bring some waters to some movers, check in and make sure our clients are in a good spot. So it translates very well. And I would just encourage any athlete who's maybe concerned about losing that vision and that goal of continuing to be an athlete when it starts coming to an end, you're going to be just fine because it's not too big of a difference from what you're used to on the baseball field or track basketball court, wherever, whatever sport it may be.

Sarah:

How would your employees describe you as a leader?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, we should bring 'em on and ask them. I would love people that it would make me a better leader to hear from them. No, but I think I love supporting people. I love investing time. I was a quarterback in high school, so I had to trust my receivers. Were going to run the right route and my lineman was going to pick up the defensive end coming to try and tackle me. So it is the same thing around here. I trust Hunter Weston, he's my director of operations that the movers are going to be on time and there are guys who are going to know what's going on. I trust that Savannah Morgan is going to take care of our clients when they call 'em, right? I trust that Mike, my CFO is going to handle our books and really strategize on the accounting side.

So like I said, I love supporting, I love letting people run their own show because I think that's really important. We're not just coming to work to come to work, we're coming to work to grow and to be a better person. So I enjoy all of that. And like I said, that experience with football and definitely baseball too, helped me translate over to band leader in the business world. I love it. Love it. And what advice would you give to current students or recent grads? Yeah, current students or recent grads. I would just tell you to go for, it doesn't matter how much money you have, how much money your parents have, what your parents did, what your investors are telling you to do, what your friends think. I just would say whatever you want to do, especially at our age or even if you're an MBA student who's graduating maybe later in life, go for it, right?

It's a great thing to have freedom. I graduated 22 and typically a 22-year-old sitting around trying to figure out life and think about what's next. I jumped into room to room immediately. I got back from Omaha on, I think on Monday, and I was right at work on probably Monday night, if not Tuesday morning. So I would just say, jump in, go for it. If you're thinking about raising money, think about it really hard before you do it. Make sure you have a good idea and make sure you really actually need that money before you raise it. Again, that's different from business to business, but just in my experience, it's really nice to be flexible and not have many people over us as a business telling us what to do with our money. But yeah, it's exciting. Entrepreneurship, being a business owner, being a manager, it's a blessing. Its probably one of the biggest blessings of my life and I'm thankful for it. So if you're thinking about it or want to do it, jump all in and don't look back.

Sarah:

Brooks, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. How can our listeners keep up with your journey and contact you?

Brooks Fuller:

Yeah, I would love for you guys to keep up with us and me personally. I have Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. You can find us on social media. Room to room is all over social media. Our website is on Google. You can just Google room to room movers, Auburn and find us there if you need an email or a phone number. But yeah, I would say social media, our website's the best way to keep up with us.

Currie:

Awesome. And what's that email?

Brooks Fuller:

M-O-V-E-S at R, the number two, R movers.com.  moves@r2rmovers.com

Currie:

Awesome. That's great. Thank you so much for your time, Brooks. There is a lot of information here for our listeners and certainly a lot of inspiration also, War Eagle.

Brooks Fuller:

War Eagle!

Narrator:

Harbert Inspiring Business.