Welcome to the very first Traxero On-The-Go Podcast! In this episode, we’re joined by Brad McIntosh – President, Towing Management Group, and Jeff Poquette – Owner, Southside Wrecker, who help us kick off our first podcast by celebrating 100 episodes of their own Tow Business Podcast. We also discuss their years of experience being in the towing industry, how the technology has evolved, and what towers can do to increase efficiency and be more profitable.

Transcription:

Laura Dolan:

Welcome to the TRAXERO-On-The-Go. A podcast for the heroes of the road. This podcast will feature amazing towing professionals as they share their experiences on what life is like out on the roadways, the challenges, successes, and everything it takes to ensure a towing business stays alive. Thank you for being here. Now let’s get this thing rolling.

Shelli Hawkins:

Thank you guys for joining us for our very first TRAXERO-On-The-Go podcast. We are super excited that you guys are here with us today. This is, like I said, our very first podcast.

We’ve got some amazing guests joining us from the towing industry, not only the towing industry, but also the podcast world. They’re going to be no strangers to you when I let them in. Mr. Jeff Poquette and also Brad McIntosh, they’re going to be joining us a little bit later.

But before we get started, Laura, we’re going to talk a little bit about what is in store for us in TRAXERO in the coming months. I think we’ve got some trade shows coming up. Are you headed to any of those trade shows?

Upcoming Trade Shows

Laura Dolan:

I am headed to Florida, the Florida Tow Show. I am sadly not going to San Diego, the Tow Summit that is happening next week. I believe our fearless leader, Pat Niersbach, our CMO will be going. I think you’ll be joining him as well, Shelli Hawkins, if I’m not mistaken?

Shelli Hawkins:

I will be going. Also, we’ve got Jillian Grassetti going, and then also we’ve got Jeff Pesnell from our TOPS group going as well. So going to be an exciting time. I caught up with Clarissa Powell last week while I was on the road. She is super excited. We’ve got a lot of fresh faces that are going to be there, so we certainly cannot wait for that to get rolling.

Laura Dolan:

That is the dream team right there. I love that. And rumor has it. We’re hosting a happy hour the first night, are we not?

Tow Business Podcast Guests

Shelli Hawkins:

We are, absolutely. For sure. Well, we’ve got some exciting things in store for us. Thank you guys for joining us, and with all that being said, we’re going to bring on Mr. Jeff Poquette and Brad McIntosh. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

Jeff Poquette:

Thank you for having us. And you said amazing guests. Me and Brad are sitting here wondering when they’re coming?

Brad McIntosh:

Who’s behind door number two, it’s not us, yeah?

Shelli Hawkins:

No. You guys are certainly amazing. You have had your podcast rolling, the Tow Business podcast, for how many seasons now and how many episodes have you recorded and published?

Jeff Poquette:

So earlier today we recorded show number 100. We do about, there you go.

Laura Dolan:

That’s our low budget applause.

Shelli Hawkins:

That is epic.

Laura Dolan:

Very, very nice.

Jeff Poquette:

That is some real applause in there for us.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, yeah. Put some real claps in there for us for sure.

Laura Dolan:

Absolutely. Congrats.

Jeff Poquette:

Thank you.

Shelli Hawkins:

We are going to have such a great time today. I cannot wait to dive in. We’ve got some basic questions for you guys to answer and then maybe some more challenging questions that are going to require a little bit more thinking.

But to get us started, Jeff first, then Brad, introduce yourselves and tell us what you do for the towing industry outside the podcast.

Jeff Poquette:

I am one of the owners, co-owner of Southside Wrecker Service in Atlanta, Georgia. We say Atlanta, we’ve got two locations, one in Union City, one in Newnan, but nobody knows where that is.

We’re just outside of Atlanta itself. So we keep it simple and it’s inevitable every time we put on our trucks, Atlanta, Union City, Newnan, somebody says, I didn’t know you had a location in Atlanta. Well, now it’s explained. Now you understand why it’s on our trucks. Easier, it’s what people know.

But yeah, been doing this, gosh, I’m closing in on 35 years. Started in Connecticut, moved down to Georgia a couple years later, and been stuck here ever since.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fantastic. How many trucks? How many employees?

Jeff Poquette:

I don’t don’t know these details.

Shelli Hawkins:

You do.

Jeff Poquette:

I guess. I guess like 30 trucks, 35 employees.

Shelli Hawkins:

Okay. That is plenty.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

That is plenty out there. Well, thanks Jeff. I appreciate that, Brad?

Brad McIntosh:

Brad McIntosh, president of Towing Management Group, which owns and operates several different brands of towing companies here in Ohio.

A very different path to the industry than Jeff came to it fresh from the outside with a finance and marketing degree, and I’ve been here 15 years.

Outside of that I do a lot of speaking at seminars, tow shows, and write quite a few articles for Tow Times and try to contribute to the industry with financial advice and just overall operational advice, not so much the trucking equipment side.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fantastic. I am glad you guys are here. This is going to be a lot of fun. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. We appreciate it. For sure. Jeff, you’ve got a brand new grandbaby. How old is he?

Jeff Poquette:

He is just a little over three months at this point. And cute as he could be. And I am, I’m loving being a granddad.

Shelli Hawkins:

Are head over heels. This is your first grandbaby, correct?

Jeff Poquette:

It is. It is. And do I have a second to say something? Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

For sure.

Jeff Poquette:

Not long after I found out I was going to be a granddad, I’m riding my bike on the Atlanta belt line and two guys, they’re trying to pass off their CDs on people or something, and I just kind of went, I just kind of kept going by them.

I didn’t pay them any attention, and one of them starts yelling, “Yo! Yo! Grandpa! Grandpa, come back here!” And I started laughing because I was like, that’s no longer an insult.

Shelli Hawkins:

You have owned it. For sure.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah, loving it, loving it.

Shelli Hawkins:

So we’re coming out of the winter months into the spring. We just had our time change recently. How has this winter been compared to the past winters for you guys?

Jeff Poquette:

Let’s ask Mr. Winter.

Brad McIntosh:

Guess I’ll go first. I don’t count what Jeff has as winter. It was pretty mild. We didn’t have much snow. No ice storm really. Normally we get one good ice storm every winter. That wears us out pretty well.

But we stayed busy. I don’t know. We’ve seen a lot of attrition in the towing industry around here, so we’ve picked up a lot of volume that way. And we’ve stayed busy all year. Not so much that winter spike that everybody thinks of, but it was good. We stayed healthy, had a great year, wrapped up 2022, a good year.

Started off strong this year. We’re having winter right now. It sucks. We should be much warmer than we are right now. My, I’ve got a son that plays baseball, which is my background, so I love coaching him. And we’ve had two tournaments in a row canceled because it was 32 and rainy.

So ready to get out of the winter, but it was pretty mild. We had a lot of, our biggest snow of the year was right before Christmas, and it was also negative eight that week, so that was very, very busy. And it thawed out just in time to wrap up the year, so it wasn’t too bad.

Laura Dolan:

Where in Ohio are you?

Brad McIntosh:

Dayton.

Laura Dolan:

You’re in Dayton. Okay. I’m in Columbus. So yeah, we’re having the same exact experience. Yeah, very mild winter. We just had our first snow of 2023 earlier this week, and it’s snowed for about two inches. Yeah. So yeah, very mild to say the least. So that had to make things a little easier for you guys on the roadways, I would think.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah. I mean, like I said, we stayed busy, so it’s not like we had any downtime to really catch our breath, but it was a very non-eventful winter by our standards.

Shelli Hawkins:

Interesting. This is going to be my first winter season ever without a significant snowfall because the majority of my adult life, I’ve been in Wisconsin and Iowa, I moved to Wisconsin when I was 18 years old, and all of my winters have been in the northern part of Wisconsin or in the northeast corner of Iowa.

Up by AW Direct and Zip’s. So here I am near B/A Products in Columbia, Maryland. We have had hardly any snow at all, and it would dip maybe in the upper twenties a couple times this year. It’s very interesting. Jeff, I imagine that your weather’s probably going to be similar to mine.

Jeff Poquette:

It has been this year. Pretty mellow. We just, we’re actually coming out of what’s hopefully our final cold snap. So in Georgia you’ll have five, six days in the 70s during the winter, and then you’ll have a couple of days where it drops into the teens and then right back up again, which drives your sinuses [nuts].

But yeah, pretty mellow. And gosh, I have family in Connecticut and Vermont and it’s been the same way. They just got their first real significant snowfall in the past week, so very, very odd winter. Pretty mellow here.

We rely on the summer heat for stacking up calls. So when it’s mellow for months and months it has been this year, there’s not much going on. Steady, busy, but none of those events that really spike everything.

Preparing For Towing Weather

Laura Dolan:

Can I ask an ignorant question? I’m very new to this industry, Jeff and Brad. My first day at TRAXERO was January 30th of this year.

Is it different prepping your trucks from winter to summer and how does that work for you? Are there different things that you need to do? Do you need change out the tires? Do you need to do any kind of maintenance on your trucks to make sure that they are prepared for each respective season?

Jeff Poquette:

For us, we don’t have those really extreme swings, so it’s really more about the operator being prepared for the current weather than the truck. I always like to remind them, I’m sure they get frustrated with me, Hey, we’re grownups so we can handle this. But when it starts getting really hot, hey, remember, keep a case of water in your truck.

All sorts of stuff you can do in the winter, I come from a place where when it gets cold out, you want to put a blanket in your truck and keep, just in case you have a breakdown, truck doesn’t run, it’s cold out. You know, just want to, just those basic preparations to deal with the hot or the cold. But really, as far as the trucks go, we don’t have a need for that down here for the most part.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah, it’s similar. It’s mainly the operator and his preparedness, but from a truck standpoint, really the only difference for us is fuel. We have to have fuel additive during when it’s really, really cold so the diesel doesn’t gel up.

Outside of that? No, not really. I mean, there’s no equipment we really need on the trucks during the winter that we don’t need in the summer. So pretty much everything stays the same.

Laura Dolan:

That’s good. It should make life a little easy.

Jeff Poquette:

Little bit.

Shelli Hawkins:

I think it’s safe to say that when we have extremes in weather, that’s going to spike our volume. So yesterday and the day before, I was out in Phoenix, Arizona with Western Towing, who’s a part of the RoadOne West group out of San Francisco. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that group out there, but he told me things that I never thought about. He said the bed of our rollbacks can get to 160 degrees, and that just made me pause.

Of course, it’s in the desert. So it’s a super arid climate, and for those out there that are towing for Teslas, they know that one of the first services you’re going to give for a Tesla is the tire change. And that tire on a really heavy car on an asphalt that is so hot just makes, again, the volume of calls out there spike.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah. So the only thing that gets 160 degrees around here is my air fryer. So we don’t have that.

Shelli Hawkins:

Can you imagine?

Brad McIntosh:

We don’t have that to deal with. I don’t envy that. Although I’d rather be hot than cold. I don’t envy that.

Shelli Hawkins:

Well, Phoenix is always waiting for you, Mr. Brad, for sure.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah, I doubt it.

Laura Dolan:

I lived in Phoenix for five years, don’t do it.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, the high when we were there was 80. I’m like, this is great. Let’s keep it this way. The whole year around.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah, this time of year it’s very pleasant, but once you start getting into June, July and it’s 120 degrees and they’re grounding planes because they can’t get lift, it’s maybe time to think about moving to the East coast, which is what we did.

The Tow Business Podcast

Shelli Hawkins:

Perfect. I love it. So 100 episodes you guys have had, that’s incredible. I want you to talk about your journey to even think about a podcast. Was this somebody lost a bet somewhere? Or where did this start? And more importantly, in my mind, what has kept you going and being so consistent because that’s really where the rubber meets the road. You got a great idea, you do it a few times and then schedules get complex. So how did you start it and how have you maintained it?

Brad McIntosh:

Well, we actually just told this whole story this morning when we recorded our Tow Business podcast. We kind of did a behind the scenes of how it all started, what the goal was and all of that. So it’s pretty fresh in our minds. So this should be pretty easy.

Shelli Hawkins:

Perfect.

Brad McIntosh:

From my standpoint, we had to disprove or correct each other this morning on how we each remembered how the story happened. But what we both agree on is we were both listening to podcasts. This was pre 2018, both listening to podcasts as our main form of in-the-truck entertainment.

And well, both of us had been attending the tow summits and tow shows and all the education, every educational seminar and talk we could get to in the towing industry. So I decided I was looking for towing podcast and couldn’t find anything. Again, this was 2018, so I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll start my own.”

So I started, came up with a name, decided how I wanted the show to look, sound. Then I quickly realized I had no idea what I’m doing. I had no idea how to start it, how to edit it, how to produce it, what equipment to use, none of that.

So I started looking around, I stumbled upon this little podcast called Above the Hook, and it was about towing, and it was a voice that I knew from seeing him at tow shows and these classes. So I listened to it and I’m like, there’s my guy there, there’s, I’ve got to get with him. He knows what he’s doing, he knows how to produce a podcast. We can combine forces and take over the world.

So reached out to him, said, “Hey, here’s what I want to do. I would love to partner up. I think the two of us can make it work.” And more or less said, “Ah, I don’t think I’m interested. Probably not for me.” So then I circled back. Long story short, he was traveling, finally responded to the email and said, “Okay, I think I’ve looked a little bit more into it. I think you have a good idea, let’s do it.”

So that’s how it started, just because we saw a void in the industry. We wanted to keep the conversations going that we have at Tow Summit, and other tow shows, which is the best part of those events is, you know, meet other towing company owners. Some you know, some you don’t, and you just talk about business for hours and hours outside of the classes, which are good on their own.

But we just wanted to make those types of conversations and that type of knowledge and information available all year, all year long, easily accessible for everybody to listen to at their own convenience. So that was the goal behind it was just to educate the industry, lift up the whole industry, put information out there, talk about what’s hot at the moment, legislative issues, trainings, all that kind of stuff. So more or less that’s how it started.

And then, like I said, episode 100, there’s been a lot of podcasts pop up here and there, and the consistency is the key. You know, have a good idea and you got to stick with it. I think people really like what we’re doing. It provides value, it’s not just talking shop, but it has a purpose. There’s something people can take away from every episode to improve their business.

Shelli Hawkins:

Exactly.

Jeff Poquette:

When you move forward to talking about how we keep it going, I think we’re both fairly disciplined. We’re both trying to go down the same road with the information we want to tackle. It is a lot more difficult going from just a solo podcast to two people. Scheduling, obviously outside of the podcast, we both have primary responsibilities above that.

So the podcast always has to get kind of wedged into an empty spot, and luckily we’re typically able to both find that same empty spot to record. On top of that, once we came up, when we started doing it, we really weren’t sure what we were going to do as far as how many episodes, how often, all that stuff.

We finally landed on what we call three seasons a year, which is basically seven episodes every other week. Then we take about a month, month and a half break, do another seven episodes every other week. So having, adding that little bit of normalcy that you could count on, we know we have a deadline here, we know we have a deadline. It kind of keeps you moving forward, keeps you on track. So that’s been helpful.

When it comes to editing, I’ve been able to get really efficient on the editing with, I have a template that I use with all the intro, outro, the commercials, all that good stuff, makes that flow a lot easier now.

So I’ve really worked on trying to streamline that end of it, the actual production of the show. So other than that, it’s just trying to keep things consistent and attention to sound quality. We have great equipment, we try, there’s been several towing related podcasts. The people who have hosted them, I bet there was some decent content in there, but the sound quality was just nails on a chalkboard to me and I couldn’t listen.

So I think it’s because I spend so many much time with these things on my ears. I hear every little thing, every little problem in a recording, so they just jump out at me. So if I can give a little advice to anybody starting the next towing podcast, please put some effort into sound quality so we can listen to it.

Brad McIntosh:

And it’s not easy and it takes a lot of work. It takes time, it takes as much prep time as it does speaking time. You got to find the topic. You can’t just get on there and talk about nonsense and expect people to listen. It’s finding a good topic, having some research, some information. It’s way more work than people probably think.

Shelli Hawkins:

That’s a great segue into the next question. How do you plan out your topics? That’s me assuming that you plan out your topics.

Jeff Poquette:

We don’t.

Shelli Hawkins:

That’s fine.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

I like the honesty.

Brad McIntosh:

That’s not completely true, but sometimes we have nothing planned, no real direction. Well, I say that. We normally at least have a direction. We normally at least have, hey, let’s talk about recovery billing. But that might be all we have. We don’t have any notes, bullet points, nothing. We don’t have anything scripted.

Sometimes we’ll have a guest. So obviously that kind of takes care of itself and what we’re going to talk about, their little corner of the industry. So a lot of times, like I said, we just have a topic and we get on there and we both log in and we’ll be like, man, I don’t know if we can stretch this out or make this interesting.

And then all of a sudden we’re an hour and a half deep and it ends up being the highest rated episode we had. So there is some method to it, but not a science, if that makes sense.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

For sure.

Jeff Poquette:

It’s a lot less structure than you might think. Luckily, so much news happens in our industry, so many new things come along. So many interesting guests pop up that it kind of feeds itself. The ball just keeps rolling.

And so sometimes, like you said, we start the show and we don’t really have well-defined topics to talk about, but we don’t know if we start talking it’s going to usually go in the right direction. So it’s worked well for us that way.

Shelli Hawkins:

100%.

Brad McIntosh:

I will say the first couple episodes I had outlines bullet points, how long each segment was going to last. Then we call and meet up. I’m like, so what do you have prepared for this again, I don’t know, nothing. I’m like, okay, well, so I guess that’s how this is going to be.

I’ll take over the structure part of it, and you do the heavy lifting on the talking and editing, but even that didn’t last very long. We both just started showing up like, ah, we’ll figure it out.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

There you go. Perfect. Who has the record for the guest with the longest recorded Tow Business podcast? Who holds that record?

Jeff Poquette:

Oh, I don’t know. We try-

Brad McIntosh:

[inaudible 00:22:44] your question?

Shelli Hawkins:

[inaudible 00:22:45] all around an hour.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah, I feel like it is. What do you know that we don’t? Oh, you.

Shelli Hawkins:

Our podcast episode was one hour and 40 minutes long.

Jeff Poquette:

Was it?

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes. Yes it was. The great part was I didn’t do the talking, I just asked the questions.

Jeff Poquette:

Ah, that was a fun one.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh yeah, that was a blast for sure. That was just a right after Lee Roberts, I think.

Jeff Poquette:

Okay, yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

Right around in that time.

Jeff Poquette:

That was a good one too.

Brad McIntosh:

We’ll have to do that again because that was really easy for us. Show up and answer questions. Yep.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, I had to make the all outline on my side and give you the bullet points, but that was a blast. Laura, did you have a question?

Laura Dolan:

Oh, I was going to say the Shelli takeover. I listened to that podcast my second day at TRAXERO, and I loved every minute of it. I didn’t even realize it was an hour and 40 minutes. So that’s how, you know that it’s a very engaging, very interesting podcast. So that’s why it was a no-brainer when I thought, okay, Shelli’s going to host this one.

Shelli Hawkins:

Well, that’s the thing. I have an amazing appreciation for people that are entrepreneurs, for people that own or manage a business because there’s so many different spinning plates in the air every single day and it is, you can go from putting out fires or you can lay the groundwork to genuinely manage a business so that those fires are a lot less to manage.

So for the folks out there that have these towing businesses that want to have their own business and want to learn and grow and listen to your podcast faithfully, I have an amazing amount of respect for you. So it’s my opportunity to ask the questions and learn, and this is what I love doing.

Jeff Poquette:

And you’re pretty good at talking.

Shelli Hawkins:

Thank you. My dad did tell me one time he goes, “Shellbuck, baby, I think you could talk a bark off of the tree.” He’s probably not wrong. So Jeff and Brad, I know you, Brad said you’ve taken over in the position you’re in 15 years and Jeff, you’ve been around for 30 years, did you say in the beginning?

Jeff Poquette:

I’m closing in on 35. Yeah. So yeah, 1989, I believe it was October 1989 to now. So we’re getting there. We’re getting there.

Towing Management Software

Shelli Hawkins:

Talk about talk, I know you’re getting there. Talk about how software innovation has come into your businesses and just the evolution of what you’ve seen out there just for going from having a roll of quarters in the pocket and calling on the payphone to see if there’s any more jobs out there for you to do, to where you guys are now managing the business with the software that’s out there.

Jeff Poquette:

So I grew up with a dad that worked for IBM, and so we were like the first people in the neighborhood with an IBM PC in our house, and I almost immediately, I embraced it.

Immediately I’m tearing the thing open, wanted know how it works. So then you start getting into the software. So I’ve always been very pro-technology, pro-software. I’ve been very comfortable with it. I firmly believe it can make our lives so much easier, and it does.

So as things started coming along, like digital dispatching, move on forward into paperless billing, stuff like that. I mean, I was right there in front wanting to do it. So it was just a natural progression for me. And boy, it can be a struggle when you have a bunch of people around you, your drivers, your drivers, they’re not… I’m a secret nerd, I love this stuff. And most tow truck drivers are not.

So, man, when we started introducing the TOPS Driver app and everything, it was like, okay, we’re trying to reduce phone calls, trying to stay off that line because that’s for the customers to call in on this is how we’re going to communicate between the dispatch and the drivers now.

It was a little bit of a struggle, but it was like once people got a hang of it and they were like, oh, wait a minute, I don’t have to wait on hold for them to get off the phone anymore, and the information is right here and I don’t have to write it down.

I mean, just moving forward, I mean, it’s just such a natural thing now and people just assume everything’s so app oriented, you know, you used to tell a guy, here’s a phone, here’s the app you need to use. They’d look at you funny, they were clueless, they were intimidated. Now, heck, everybody’s doing something and everything on an app on their phone, so that that’s gotten much easier to handle.

Brad McIntosh:

We already had Tracker when I got in here, so I don’t know the prehistoric age like Jeff does of towing. But I mean, I’ve seen the changes and how it’s optimized over the years and I can’t imagine doing anything without it.

I mean, obviously I’ve seen the development of the apps and the add-ons, the lean processing, all the stuff that is digital dispatch, all that stuff that has evolved over the years and just like anything, there’s a little bit of resistance just because it’s different in the beginning.

But now once people get used to it and see what it does and how important it is, they can’t live without it. They’re crying if their app goes down now versus when they’re crying that you were forcing them to use it. So that shift has been good. I can’t imagine not being able to click a few buttons to find out the information you need to run your business, the reporting, all that kind of stuff.

So that’s the viewpoint or the mindset that I brought when I came here. It was just coming from an outsider standpoint, financial mindset that I didn’t know how things were done in the past. I didn’t know how we’ve always done it. So I started asking the questions, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do this? Why is it so hard to get this? It should be easier.

And that really improved things, and there’s always ways to improve, but everything that’s happened recently, receiving your calls digitally is awesome. I hate the phone, I hate phone calls and that’s obviously just going to keep improving. So all that has been great, and I can’t imagine operating any other way.

Towing Revenue Optimization

Laura Dolan:

I’m really glad you used the word optimize, because that kind of segues perfectly into my next question with the software that TRAXERO has. So it’s obviously, it’s almost a one-stop shop. You’ve got your fleet tracking, you’ve got your impound, auction management, credit card processing, everything in one place, so you could run your whole business from basically one entity.

Going along with that, we are introducing the concept of towing revenue optimization or TRO as it were, and for two towers in the business, I wanted to ask you both point-blank if you think this would be valuable to you.

Now, the whole concept of TRO is basically, it’s a mindset shift. It’s helping towers look at their business basically from 50 feet up, what can they do to increase efficiency and profitability? And it’s basically helping towers look at their jobs. It’s no longer good enough just to look at your business as job by job, it’s providing general managers a complete view of their business.

This is a new concept that we are introducing. It’s not a product, it’s just something that we are hoping our software helps towers apply to their business and let them see where can they be more efficient, where can they be more profitable?

I know that was a very bare bones explanation of that, but if you learn more about it, do you think something like that can really help you improve your business and be more efficient going forward?

Jeff Poquette:

So is this kind of just more of a detailed reporting that we can look at, kind of big picture type of thing? What?

Shelli Hawkins:

You guys really, I believe are doing this today because it’s the front end is the dispatching. Call comes in, gets assigned, completed, go on to the next job, that’s the dispatching side, and then all of the data that is housed in these towing management softwares that are out there, use that data to see how efficient and profitable you are.

You can look at by the driver, by the unit number, by the whatever to see, am I making money? When I look at every single business segment, all that data is there. And so we really want our industry to embrace using this data to run reports, however that looks to you in the type of towing that you’re doing to be more efficient and profitable. So talk a little bit about what kind of reporting do you guys look at on a regular basis already to optimize?

Jeff Poquette:

As far as me and what I actually handle at the company, basically trying to figure out the profitability of each segment, the PD stuff, and then, well, as soon as you talk PD, if you’ve got any size to your company at all, you’re probably talking 5, 10, 15 different contracts with different regulations, different rates, all that stuff. One starts storage when it hits a lot, the other ones 24 hours later, stuff like that. So to be able to look at all that stuff and figure it out…

When we have a change in a contract, they rewrite a contract with different rates, well that’s the time you have to dive in and see is this new version of the contract going to be profitable for us? Does this work for us?

Because moving forward, we have no interest in going backwards when they rewrite that contract. If it’s not at least as lucrative as the previous one, then you’re looking at ducking out possibly, depending on how severe that change is.

So looking at all stuff like that, we’ve been going through a lot of reassessments of accounts and PD contracts lately, so that’s most of the reporting I’m using.

But I know the girl that handles our payroll, she uses, she uses it to reconcile the information the drivers hand in, what they want to be paid on, make sure everything jives together. So really there’s probably three or four people in our office that rely heavily on reporting.

Shelli Hawkins:

Perfect. Brad, I think that being on the financial side of things and the management side of things, what kind of reports are you looking at on a regular basis?

Brad McIntosh:

Well, obviously I look at the full set of financials every month, not just profit loss, but I look at, we evaluate our operators on a contribution margin method, basically how much revenue they bring in versus what we pay out to them and what that gap is in the middle, how much they contribute back to the company.

That’s kind of how we evaluate productivity. Now, that doesn’t tell the full story, but it gives us a good idea. Obviously we’re looking at trends and revenue, we’re looking at reports that tell us if a customer has dropped off volume, if maybe there’s a problem, an issue. And we look at fuel as a percentage of revenue reports, fuel reports, fuels obviously a huge variable in our industry.

But to answer, kind of get back to your question about the TRO and would it be valuable? Any information is valuable and especially if you don’t have to compile it. I have a lot of reporting and a lot of templates I use to come up with information I need, but some of them do require some effort.

So anything that I could get me to where the information I need without having to do anything, click a button or just look at a dashboard that tells me where I’m at on certain metrics, and that would be huge.

Laura Dolan:

Path of least resistance. That’s what we’re going for, what yeah, we want our customers to take away from that.

Shelli Hawkins:

I remember when I was in a sales role, I was always looking at my regular customers as well, just like you guys are looking at your commercial customers when the numbers are off and when they’re not doing a volume or all of a sudden you’ve not heard from them an entire month, you have a red flag that goes up and you’re like, what? What’s happening? Has the business been taken away from me? Have I done something wrong? Or has one of my operators done something wrong I’m not aware of?

And so you start drilling down and taking a look, and I had this one larger account that purchased significant amount for me every month on a regular basis, and a month went by and there was no phone call. So I called him up and I said, how’s it going? And I thought maybe I had lost the business. I wasn’t for sure.

So I asked the hard questions. He said, “No, Shelli, do you remember last month you did a quote for us for outfitting a light duty tow truck, a rollback and a wrecker?” I said, I do. He said, we use those two lists now to have our operators sign essentially a contract, not necessarily a formal contract, but say, here is the total of everything that goes on a brand new rollback.

We take X amount of dollars out of every paycheck, and now that driver owns this equipment. So we are churning through less because we’ve found that when this driver takes ownership, this two and a half ton jack is yours. This junk box is yours, these lockout kits, they are yours, and we don’t want you to ever leave, but should you leave, they belong to you. So they’re churning through them less.

And that was just something that I was analyzing on a monthly basis that gave me the red flag to figure that out. And consequently, he was also optimizing his business. So he’s spending less and making his operators more responsible.

But that’s great that you guys are running those reports. One of the biggest challenges I see in our industry is that the mentality of busy equals profitable. All my trucks are out. I can’t keep up with the volume, I can’t keep up with all these contracts that I have going on, and we can never catch up with our paperwork. We can never catch up. So we must be profitable.

Brad McIntosh:

Volume is the reason for success and failure in this industry.

Shelli Hawkins:

It’s a fine line, isn’t it? Because you spin your wheels to do all the jobs and you have to analyze that more on a regular basis.

Brad McIntosh:

It’ll help you grow fastest and it’ll put you out of business fastest.

Shelli Hawkins:

Good words.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah, joke jokingly. I always say I want to do the least amount of calls possible for the most amount of money.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh, that’s another great phrase. We might put you up on a campaign for that one, Jeff. I love it. No, wise words for sure. But the towing revenue optimization is just TRAXERO’s way of helping you guys manage reports, showing you the reports available to you so that you can take that great big picture look at the business, to see the health of the business, to manage on a regular basis. Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff Poquette:

There’s so many company owners out there that aren’t looking at reports, don’t have any of this data. Well, it’s there. They’re just not looking at it. What’s the possibility this repackages that in a way that is a little less intimidating to those people where they’re?

Shelli Hawkins:

100%. Yeah, it is. I’ve got dispatching software. What does your software do? Well, it helps me dispatch.

So we want to shine a great big gigantic spotlight on all the other benefits and features that we have already built out. It’s already there, it’s in TOPS, it’s in Tracker, it’s in all of our platforms that we have.

So yes, it’s going to repackage it, we’re going to highlight it, shine a great big spotlight on it, maybe put some neon glow sticks around it, whatever we need to do.

Jeff Poquette:

So quick question. You guys have any idea across the board, any of the Tracker, TOPS, whatever, do you know what percent of those programs are people truly using?

Shelli Hawkins:

So I wouldn’t say that we know a percentage of what they’re using. When we take a look at our clients and how they are using our systems, we do see a significant number of them running the backend reports on a regular basis, not just utilizing the integrations with QuickBooks and other accounting type softwares, but we know that they’re out there doing it. We just want to help them do more.

Jeff Poquette:

Right? Because I had a company owner make the comment not too long ago, he was calling up to ask me about questions about TOPS, and there’s actually a few of those people calling with those questions lately. They said, we use so-and-so right now, but I know darn well I’m not using 20% of what’s available to me in that program. So it just got me thinking about that.

Shelli Hawkins:

For sure. And when I have been at a client with someone from our customer supporter success teams, they’ll sit with a dispatcher, they’ll sit with someone that’s back in accounting or someone that’s running all the reports for the police entities, and our employee will say, “Did you know that Beacon will do this? No idea that it would do that.”

So it just takes, we are reaching out and educating, but you folks out there are also welcome to give our teams a call any day like, “Can I do this? Is this possible?” But you guys are a shining example to the towing industry. You really, truly are. Take pride in that, that you want to run a profitable business.

And I often think, like Brad said, it is a fine line of knowing about the high volume jobs and which ones to take and how to stay profitable. Brad taught me a phrase that I’m not forgotten in a long time since we recorded the podcast. And that was, “Not just cash flow, but positive cash flow.” He said there’s, that is a major difference.

Brad McIntosh:

Oh yeah, you want to be positive.

Shelli Hawkins:

And not in the negative or not in the red.

Brad McIntosh:

Not good. No.

Shelli Hawkins:

100%. I think that we are getting more savvy as an industry, maybe. I hope we are. There’s this some confidence that I have that because of the technology that’s out there that wasn’t out there before, you can take a deeper dive into the business.

Brad McIntosh:

And our goal is just kind of plant those seeds. We can’t teach everybody everything or make decisions for them, but kind of plant those seeds on what they might need to be thinking about or different ways to look at things to help them improve.

Because if everybody’s company gets better, then we all get better. I mean, we all rise and fall in the same tide. So if we’re all doing well, that means we’re all pricing the way we need to. We’re all making money and we all do better.

Shelli Hawkins:

100% agree. So how do folks listen to your podcast? Where can they find you or what is the website?

Jeff Poquette:

It is towbusinesspodcast.com. You can go there. There’s a link to the show that goes up on the website, but it’s a lot easier just to subscribe on Stitcher, Apple, whatever you use to listen to some [inaudible 00:42:31]

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah, Spotify.

Jeff Poquette:

So yeah, you can find it. I don’t know that I’ve looked on a platform and not found us listed. I think when I publish, I think initially when I publish a show, it probably goes out to 10 to 15 destinations all [inaudible 00:42:49] so it’s pretty widespread. You could find it pretty easily at this point.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah, I think the Apple Podcast app is our main, our biggest outlet that comes standard on all iPhones now. Oh, it’ll alert you when a new episode comes out if you’re subscribed, so that’s a good way. Spotify is I think second. I mean that’s where most people listen to podcasts nowadays, but there’s Stitcher app, Google Podcasts, straight on the website. iHeartRadio is another one. I mean, it’s everywhere.

Shelli Hawkins:

Outstanding. I can clearly remember the first podcast that I listened to you guys. Someone told me about the podcast and I tuned in and I heard the story of Sam Johnson and Capitol out in Sacramento, California, and the testimony that he’s been over the years and the highs and lows that he went through, and I’m like, man, this is amazing.

The next one that I listened to that I significantly remember was Mr. Lynn Hurst, Hurst Towing down in Alabama. He went through the tornado and lost so much and what an amazing testimony of resilience. Both of those gentlemen, I’m probably going to hurt some feelings because I can’t remember them all. But then mostly most recently, the one, the story about Flagman Safety with Cindy Iodice, I listened to it twice and I cried two times. I think Laura listened to that one too also.

Laura Dolan:

I did, I did. And I also cried twice. So, very compelling.

Shelli Hawkins:

It’s information that’s out there. You’ve done a ton about insurance, a ton about the supply chain, but it’s also the real story of real people every day.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah. If you throw Lee Roberts in there, you probably just named my four top favorite episodes that we’ve done.

Brad McIntosh:

Yeah, those are all the episodes where we talked the least, by the way.

Laura Dolan:

It’s funny. That’s what I consider my most successful podcast as well, when I don’t talk.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, what was that, Brad?

Brad McIntosh:

I said, for what that’s worth. I guess people like the show, but don’t necessarily like us.

Shelli Hawkins:

You just bring creative, interesting folks that certainly have a very big influence on all of us. So you said we will see you next week at the summit? Yes?

Brad McIntosh:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

We are super excited about that. That will be a great time, and we are so appreciative for you to join us on our very first podcast for TRAXERO On-The-Go.

Jeff Poquette:

Yeah. Very cool. Thank you very much.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you both so much for your time.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the TRAXERO-On-The-Go podcast. For more episodes, go to traxero.com/podcast and to find out more about how we can hook your towing business up with our towing management software and impound yard solutions, please visit traxero.com or go to the contact page linked at the bottom of this podcast blog.

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay