In this special edition of TRAXERO On-The-Go, Saga Of The Stolen Tow Truck, we welcomed P.J. Daly, Owner of P.J.’s Towing in Lansing, MI, who told us the incredible story of how his 2020 Kenworth T880, 1150 rotator was stolen right out of his bay in the middle of one late-summer night in 2023. P.J. takes us through the timeline of exactly what happened the night of the theft, how the tow truck community came together to help him with the search, and ultimately where the stolen truck ended up after one week’s time. You won’t want to miss this one! Click play to listen.

Laura Dolan:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of TRAXERO On-The-Go. I am your co-host, Laura Dolan.

Shelli Hawkins:

And I’m your other co-host, Shelli Hawkins.

Laura Dolan:

And we have a very special edition of this podcast that we are going to get right into today. There’s a lot to unpack with our guest. So Shelli, if you’d be so kind to please introduce our special guest today.

Shelli Hawkins:

Absolutely. Thank you, Laura. We are here today with Mr. P.J. Daly of Lansing, Michigan, P.J.’s Towing. Welcome to the podcast, P.J.

P.J. Daly:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Shelli Hawkins:

You are welcome. I think that with everyone seeing the title of our podcast, they kind of know what we’re going to be talking about. So we’re going to forego our introductions for this special edition of Episode 16 and just hop right into talking to you a little bit about what happened with the tow truck. We know, and I followed the journey as it unfolded on social media, but we’ll get into that a little bit later. So just give us a brief introduction.

P.J. Daly:

Yep. I’m P.J. Daly. I’m the owner of P.J.’s Towing here in Lansing, Michigan. We had a truck stolen here this fall. Really rough night, was actually the end of the summer. We went to a big truck show and we put the truck in the show and we actually won first place in our class and we brought the truck back and it was a Saturday night and woke up Sunday morning and somebody had broke into our building. I got a call that our padlock was gone off the gate and rushed to the shop and sure enough called the police department and we checked the bays, everything looked okay, checked the office, everything looked okay. Went over to the bay where our Mario Rotator was. We have a 2020 Kenworth T880, 1150 rotator, and it was taken out of our bay and stolen.

 

 

Laura Dolan:

Unbelievable.

P.J. Daly:

Pretty frustrating and nerve wracking. Never been through anything like that in my life. Initially I thought, well, the driver drove it, maybe he just took it home or something. And I looked and his vehicle wasn’t there, and I’m like, okay, well, you should have a vehicle here if he took my truck and kind of went through some stuff. And my operations manager, Matt, he went over to our office and we had a big couple big screen TVs on the wall and started looking at surveillance footage and saw the truck pull out of the building on a surveillance, and my heart just dropped. One of the worst things ever to see a truck with somebody that shouldn’t be in it, in it.

Laura Dolan:

Right. Did you see who was in it?

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we could see him. I mean, he had a mask. He was in black sweatpants with a black hoodie with some work boots, and then he had gloves and he had a mask over his face. The only thing you could see was basically his eyes. I’ve got surveillance of him coming into the office. He broke into the shop about 10:45 at night, and he didn’t end up pulling out and leaving until 12:22. He was there almost two hours into my building. I had a driver come in that ended of his shift at midnight, and he was there and dropping his truck off, and I was so thankful that nothing happened and my guy was okay, but he was inside our building, hiding while my guy came in and turned his keys in and his paperwork in at night. So super scary. I believe there was two people that came into the building.

What we had figured out was they jumped the fence. So to paint a picture of what the shop looks like, it’s kind of in an industrial area on a quiet road in a good part of Lansing, and it’s got four garage doors to the rear of the building. There’s a gate off to the left side. The person jumped the fence and got to the back of the building, and it had a window port that was probably about four foot in the air, and they pushed the window port through and then climbed into the building, and then they got into the building, and then he spent an hour plus, pulled the whole dash apart in the truck, disabled the GPS system on the truck from the factory. We had another GPS system from our house system. Disabled that too. But he disabled two different GPS systems so that the truck wouldn’t trigger where it’s at and trigger anything.

Checked out the shop a little bit. And then as he decided to leave, he opened up the garage door, pulled the truck out, and then he went on over to the gate, cut my lock off with a grinder, closed the garage door, closed the gate, and kind of gathered himself where he was going to go, and then we’d see him on camera and he ended up leaving the property at 12:22 at night. We called the Eaton County Sheriff’s Department the next morning when we had discovered it was stolen, and it was a wild ride. Luckily, we ended up finding the truck within a week, which I was so amazed and so proud that the towers of our community are just amazing. They came together and helped us. You don’t realize how vulnerable you are until you’re down and out and you see something like that and it’s taken from you.

But the guys were just amazing. I had people that I didn’t even know reach out and get together and try to help me look for the truck, put the word out. Right when I figured everything had happened, I went right to social media, figured what do I have to lose? So I made posts and put pictures of the truck of what it looked like, and that it was stolen, and we started getting leads pretty quickly. We had a couple fake leads that didn’t materialize into anything that were frustrating as part of the process that you go through with this situation, but we had leads of the truck going through the turnpike on the 8090 turnpike going through Ohio. Somebody said they’d spotted it Sunday. And then on Wednesday, Mike sent me a message. He owns a body shop in New Jersey. Him and his son were out Sunday evening.

They were outside and they do towing and body shop, and he saw our truck go by and his son thought it was a cool truck, and they caught their eye. The next day, so this was on Sunday night. On Wednesday, they were at a football game for one of his younger sons, and they saw my post, the truck was stolen. So they were so great. They went back to the shop. They found video surveillance of the truck, spotting the truck, showing it, driving by their repair shop on Sunday night and sent that video to me, which was so great because now I actually had proof of the truck and a timeline of the truck, and it was in New Jersey at that point. So our thoughts were that it was definitely going to be in New Jersey. And so on Wednesday when I got that information, I posted all that information and I had all these guys reach out to me.

They were so awesome and said, “Yeah, I know the ports. I know the security guys. I know the police departments,” and they just put the word out so good for us and just so many amazing people that were complete strangers. I mean, for hours and hours I was on my phone, call after call after call, messages. Forever thankful for the community of how amazing everybody was, and people shared everything they could for me, tried to help us. They went the next morning, this was Wednesday night, they went the next morning and they checked all the ports and we couldn’t find the truck. A little discouraged, but we thought, well, we’re going to find it. And so my son, at the time he was 16, he says, “Dad, make a TikTok video.” And I laughed. I said, “I don’t do TikTok.” And I’m like, what do I got to lose? So I make a TikTok video, my first TikTok video. It hit 26,000 people in eight hours.

Laura Dolan:

Wow!

Shelli Hawkins:

What? Wow.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, yeah. It got shared that many times in eight hours. Hawk from Hawk’s Towing in Trenton, New Jersey, happened to see my video. He was having coffee Friday morning and going through his phone, he said, and he said he saw the video and he was like, he goes, “Man, I just saw that truck on Wednesday.” He called me up and said, “Hey, that truck was on a dead end road in New Jersey in Trenton,” and it was blocking in this box truck that they went over to go get a call for to call this truck away. And the guy said, “Hey, if you don’t pick this truck up, you can come back and get this wrecker here if it’s still here in a day.”

So Hawk called me up, told me this. He drove right over to the scene where he remembers seeing the truck because he had a picture of it and the truck was gone, but he’s like, “It can’t be far.” So he started checking lots. He said he got about a mile down the road, he checked this big parking lot. There’s about rental spots where you can rent a parking space for your semi-truck and trailer in an industrial area. And he said, in the very back corner between semi-trucks, was my tow truck sitting there. They had taken the wrap off of it. It had a Super Mario themed wrap on it. They peeled the wrap off of it, but the truck was all there, all intact. He called the Trenton Police Department, Hamilton Police. They came out and they processed the truck for us and then Hawk told me, he’s like, “I found it.”

I was just so thankful, so thankful that we found it. He was so amazing. He’s like, “Whatever I got to do to help you, a fellow tower.” And so just really cool that we were able to get the truck. He was able to drive the truck back to his location, to his shop. The police department processed the vehicle. And then from there, we came out that night. We picked it up the next morning and we were able to drive it home. So we drove it back to Lansing from Friday night to Saturday morning. So Saturday afternoon we had it back home, so within a seven-day period it made it all the way to New Jersey, and then we made it all the way back home with it. We had the locks changed on the truck. They peeled a couple of the VIN tags off of the vehicle because I believe they were going to export it.

 

 

So I was able to get with Kenworth, we got all new factory tags. Everything is all completely factory. The truck looks as if nothing ever happened, didn’t have to do a big insurance claim. I had the truck rewrapped the next week, and the truck’s been in service now for about three months, four months, so.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow.

Laura Dolan:

Unbelievable story. And obviously whoever did this knew what they were doing.

P.J. Daly:

I don’t think this was the first truck. Yeah.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah. They disconnected the fleet tracking. They took the wrap off of it. They took the VIN tags. I mean, do you have any suspects in mind of who would want to do that? And was that person ever caught?

P.J. Daly:

That’s the sad part. Actually, I reached out to Eaton County. I do a lot of towing for that sheriff’s office, but I reached out to them a couple of weeks ago and I was checking with the detective, and he said, they had a couple leads, but nothing has come together yet. So I don’t think Hamilton Township Police actually fingerprinted the truck like they were supposed to. I mean, and then in the videos, the guy that stole it, he had gloves on. He had the disposable rubber gloves or latex gloves. He had gloves on. But yeah, I was just really thinking that there’s no way he drove it without having some sort of fingerprint or DNA in that truck.

Because it was a solid 10, 11 hours of driving to drive it. Because we drove it there and drove it back that next week. So yeah, I figured there’s got to be some sort of DNA or something in that truck from that guy. But yeah, hopefully they’ve checked video footage. They’ve checked turnpike footage, toll footage. They’re checking what they can. They’ve been working with the people in the parking lot, they had surveillance footage there, so they’re checking with them too. I still have hope. I mean, just as a justice system, I hate to see somebody be allowed to just break into somebody’s building and take an $800,000 truck and just have no repercussion of it. That’s just not fair.

Laura Dolan:

No, it’s not. And even if he didn’t have fingerprints, you think he would’ve left hair follicles or even skin follicles, something?

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, for sure.

Laura Dolan:

If he’s in that truck for an extended amount of time.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah.

Laura Dolan:

Wow.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, pretty wild.

Laura Dolan:

How long ago was this again, P.J.?

P.J. Daly:

I want to say it was in August.

Laura Dolan:

August of 2023. So this just passed?

P.J. Daly:

No, no, no, no. I’m sorry. It was September because the show was September 11th. It was September 11th. Yeah, so it was in September.

Laura Dolan:

Wow.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

Just listening to this-

P.J. Daly:

Can’t go anywhere without people asking me, talk about it. “Hey, I’m glad you got your truck back.” I mean, just the amount of support from our community, even locally was really cool too. And I’m not that guy. I don’t really love all that attention or having people talk about negative things like that. That’s not really my style. But I’m forever grateful though that everybody was helpful and helped me get our truck back.

Laura Dolan:

It’s so cool to hear how the community came together, how you put the post out on Facebook and people actually were on the lookout. They’re like, “Hey, I just saw it in this area.” And then people are sharing it on TikTok. It’s so cool to hear how much support you were able to get out of all of this. And through that, you found it. So that’s even more of a miracle.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah. The police were blown away. They said that the towing community’s social media presence is just something they’ve never seen before. They were just blown away in how much our community networked and worked together to help us find this truck. So I can’t take the credit. It’s the towing community that’s really helped us all together.

Shelli Hawkins:

I can’t imagine. The closest, P.J., that I ever came… No, I’m just going to back up and say I’ve never come close to anything like that. I had a backpack stolen at the Las Vegas Tow Show a couple of years ago. I had said it right behind the backdrop of what is the large presentation of the vendor booth that I was in, and I had put my backpack there. It contained my purse, credit cards, debit cards and all that. And when it came back from the bathroom, it was gone. It was gone. And it was actually returned. No, no, no. What was returned the next day was my purse with my ID in it and all the things that I needed to get back on the airplane.

Laura Dolan:

Oh, you’re so lucky.

Shelli Hawkins:

All of my credit cards were actually in there. I carry a debit card and I carry one credit card when I travel. And of course, all those had been canceled, and I was just so grateful to get my ID back because what a headache to go through. But goodness gracious, that pales in comparison to your experience, what a testimony to our towing industry, how they came together. And your son’s insight to build a TikTok also, so fantastic. We just never know when something is just going to go out there to the masses to help you find it. So great.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah. Great instincts on your son’s part. It’s that younger generation, they just know, “Put it here. Everyone will see it.”

P.J. Daly:

For sure. No, that TikTok generation, at that point, we were desperate. I got nothing to lose. I’m just so thankful and just the amount of people. I ended up going to the Baltimore show and I got to run into Mike. He was the guy that sent me the video, and I wanted to hug the guy. I mean, I was so thankful because for me to get a timestamp of where my truck was, and yeah, I was a couple of days behind schedule, but at least there’s no further east you can go. If not, you’re in the ocean. So Jersey’s as far east as you can go. So I knew that the truck had to be somewhere on that east coast, preferably probably in New Jersey, but we had checked with the Baltimore police, the ports, and we checked with a lot of the ports up and down the coast through there because we had this feeling, this gut feeling that somebody was trying to export the truck and try to sell it.

Shelli Hawkins:

With those VINs taken away, it’s a telltale sign that that’s where it was headed for sure.

P.J. Daly:

Absolutely. Yep.

Shelli Hawkins:

Seven days it took to bring it back. That was my question. That had just had to be a week of no sleep, a week of no sleep and phone calls, and wow. So fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, and we’re glad that your truck came back. Was anything stolen out of it, your rigging tools, any type of hand tools?

P.J. Daly:

Believe it or not, the truck was all intact.

Shelli Hawkins:

What?

P.J. Daly:

I wanted to start crying when I opened the door. As soon as I started opening up the toolbox doors, all my rigging, all my chains, all my straps, all my hand tools, even to the bag chair that we had, my driver had sat in there from the truck show the night before was still in the truck. The truck was completely… I mean, there was probably 75 to 100 grand in equipment in that truck, and it was all there. So very, very thankful.

Laura Dolan:

I don’t understand the motivation or the priorities of burglars sometimes because I had my car broken into on Halloween of 2007. I had a Honda Accord at the time, which unfortunately did not have an alarm system on it. And when I got in the car to go to work that morning, it’s just so jarring and violating when you look in your car and you see that it had been ransacked. But the weird thing, so they took stuff out of my trunk. They took a Tommy Hilfiger gym bag that I had that had gym clothes in it, which is gross, but they left this $400 leather jacket that I had in the backseat. They left that there, but they took everything out of my glove box that wasn’t my registration. They took my tire gauge and things like that, [weird] things. And all my CDs, but they left this leather jacket and it’s like.

Shelli Hawkins:

What?

Laura Dolan:

I don’t get it. And I’m glad they didn’t take it, but it’s the same thing where Shelli got her wallet back and P.J., all your rigging and stuff, everything was intact. It’s like, then what’s the point? What are you doing? It doesn’t make any sense.

P.J. Daly:

It makes no sense, doesn’t it? I’ve thought about that for the last few months, just like, and even when they took it, what’s your end game? What are you trying to do? I mean, I don’t know. I’m not a criminal, so I don’t know what the black market is for a stolen rotator tow truck, but I mean, I got lucky because this truck was very identifiable. I put a custom Super Mario wrap all over and it was a really cool design on the sides of it. But before that, it was this really ugly forest green with a light green color, kind of a two-tone. And it was very, very, very unique. It was not a truck that the colors are just not like normal. It wasn’t a basic white truck, red truck, blue truck that you see driving down the road. And so peeling the wrap off, it was just as identifiable as it was with the wrap on, which I feel like is part of the reason we found it, because if it was just a routine truck, I think it would’ve been so much harder to locate and find.

Shelli Hawkins:

Was it a 9055 XP?

P.J. Daly:

It was an XP, yes. So it had a big side puller unit on the side of it, which is really rare too. You don’t see very many. There’s not that many 880s with a side puller on it. 1150, it had five winches. It’s a beast of a truck. It’s an amazing truck.

Shelli Hawkins:

Laura, I’d love for you to see one of these set up at a trade show. These wings come out behind the cab for stability, as you’re leaning, if you’re having to recover off either side, there’s these gigantic legs that go into the ground and give more stability to the unit.

Laura Dolan:

Nice.

P.J. Daly:

The leg slides out, that rotates over. There’s one on each side, and that leg is probably four foot tall, and it probably goes out an additional five or six feet from the side of the truck to help stabilize. It’s like a mini crane. It’s amazing. And that truck has five winches on it, so there’s two on the boom. There’s one on the back that’s a drag winch. And then each leg has a winch for each side, and you can actually even rig it so you can use two inches off the side, but there’s five working winches off of it. There’s a remote, so you can put yourself in the right spot safely and you can do some amazing recoveries with that truck.

Shelli Hawkins:

So I’m going to ask, did you buy this brand new or where did you find this truck with six winches? That’s not normal for that truck to have that many winches.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, I bought it used. I bought it, actually, I took delivery of it on my birthday that year, so it was in ’23. I got it on my birthday in ’23. I made a deal at the Baltimore Tow Show with some guys that are Miller Dealer, and they helped sell it to me. The guy special ordered the truck and was just wanted to downsize a little bit, so they sold a couple of his trucks and I happened to make a deal to buy it. And then like I said, took delivery of it in January and I had upgraded and bought. It was our second rotator, and I was pretty excited to be able to have that and add it to our fleet. And I was very specific on buying that truck because of having the multiple winches and the three-stage boom and then having the side puller. It just opens you up for so much more options for recovery wise.

Shelli Hawkins:

Absolutely. And the 9055 is one of the workhorses of the industry. I have no idea how many are out on the roads today, but it is just everywhere.

P.J. Daly:

Well, my truck actually is an 1150, so mine’s the rotator version.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh, is it? Okay.

P.J. Daly:

So the 1150 is the rotator version, and then the 9055 is the straight boom version. That’s a 50 ton straight boom. Mine’s a rotator.

Shelli Hawkins:

So the 9055 is an XP and the 1150 is an RXP. So you’re just actually the 1150 RXP?

P.J. Daly:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

Okay.

P.J. Daly:

I might be 1150 RXP. Yes, correct.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow, what a beast.

P.J. Daly:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

That is so great.

Laura Dolan:

I have another follow up question. P.J., were you able to replace the Super Mario wrap?

P.J. Daly:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

The importance.

P.J. Daly:

That was the first thing we did. We talked about that as a team. I brought in some staff and some of the drivers, and we talked about maybe making it something different, but we didn’t. This truck is forever Mario, so we made it. We went right back to, I have an amazing friend that we’ve become really good friends with. He owns 180 Designs in Carson City, Michigan. He does the best wraps in the country and he knocks it out. He’s done probably over 100 trucks for me over the years. He’s such an artist. He does such amazing work and good quality. And yeah, he had the wrap already had saved, so we just had him reprint it and put it back on. So within two weeks, the truck was totally back to in operation with the wrap on it and everything from when it was stolen.

Laura Dolan:

That makes bad me so happy. Because it’s like it didn’t happen.

P.J. Daly:

Yep.

Laura Dolan:

You tried.

P.J. Daly:

And you can’t tell.

Laura Dolan:

You can’t tell. And so please tell me, the truck is named Mario, right?

P.J. Daly:

Oh, it’s Mario, yeah, for sure.

Laura Dolan:

I love this so much.

Shelli Hawkins:

Do you wrap all of your trucks like this with a theme?

P.J. Daly:

My entire fleet is wrapped. We’ve got quite a few theme trucks. If you get on my website, I’ve got a lot of pictures of a lot of the trucks. We’ve actually added some new ones that I don’t know if they’ve got updated yet. But yeah, we’ve got about 35 tow trucks, and then we’ve got about seven, eight semi tractors, and we’ve got Landoll trailers, lowboys. I’ve got close to 50 vehicles in my fleet.

Laura Dolan:

Would it be okay if I posted some of those pictures in the podcast blog just so our audience see them?

P.J. Daly:

Absolutely.

Laura Dolan:

Okay, cool.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, absolutely.

Shelli Hawkins:

Do you have any Disney characters?

Laura Dolan:

Or Marvel?

P.J. Daly:

We do have some Marvels, yep. We’ve got a Thor flatbed, we’ve got a Captain America flatbed. Let’s see, what else do we have? We’ve got some Spider-Man. We had a Spider-Man truck. We had a Minion flatbed.

 

 

Laura Dolan:

A Minion flatbed.

P.J. Daly:

I just did a SpongeBob one.

Laura Dolan:

Yes!

P.J. Daly:

Yes, we have a SpongeBob flatbed. It’s pretty cool. It’s white with yellow and blue, and it’s got all the SpongeBob characters. That’s one of our newer ones that we just did.

Laura Dolan:

Love this so much. I love that you have a Minion truck. That’s my favorite.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, we’ve done a lot of the superheroes. We’ve got a little black quick loader and it’s got Batman all over it a little. We just have fun with it. People love the characters and I mean, to the point where I’ve got four or five year olds calling and saying, “Hey, can I come check out your trucks?” And they get all excited and we’ll take them for a ride or let them come check out the shop and we’ll have customers call and request a specific truck because they love the characters on the trucks.

Laura Dolan:

What a great way to market your brand. They just know that’s a P.J. Towing truck.

P.J. Daly:

Every truck, a lot of our trucks we do kind of flames on, so they’ll have kind of a flame graphic on them. They’re pretty busy, but they’re all, my dad did this in the eighties when I was a kid, so I grew up in the towing business. My dad, every truck was white and blue. They were blue trucks with a white panel with our P.J.’s logo in the middle. But every truck was identical. And I don’t know, I just kind of wanted to just step out of the box a little bit. So every truck I’ve done, I try to make them where they all have similar designs, but they’re all different colors. And you know what, we always have our P.J.’s part of our logo is always blue, and then the towing we’ll do it as an accent color, so the towing will match an accent color in the graphics and the wrap of the vehicle. So we have a lot of fun with it.

 

Laura Dolan:

So much fun.

P.J. Daly:

I have a blast designing, coming up with cool different designs and graphics and it’s a lot of fun.

Shelli Hawkins:

Did you originally think about that when you started your towing company? Or how did you evolve into, “I’m going to put these wraps on my trucks?”

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, so probably eight, nine years ago I was able to buy my first new truck. Actually, it had like 4,000 miles on it. And I typically like white trucks. I’m kind of boring, but I like a white truck because my dad used to do blue and white, so I was looking for a white truck, and I found this truck and it was kind of this Ford. It was a 2015 Ford F550, and it was kind of this real pretty maroon color, kind of a red, candy red color, and it was a very beautiful color, but it was not my style or color for the company. So I looked into painting it and a buddy’s like, “Hey, have it wrapped.” And so I did a little homework and checked it out. And then I met Jason who owns 180 Designs, and he ended up doing the first wrap for me, and he wrapped it white and you couldn’t even tell.

And he put some red flames and red graphics on it and put an American flag, and it was so cool looking, and I had such a great response of people just loving that it wasn’t just a basic truck. And I’m like, “Well, that’s pretty cool. I got a good response from it.” So then the next truck I bought, I wrapped. The next truck I bought, and then just I’ve wrapped every truck since. So like I said, he’s done over 100 wraps for me of trucks in my fleet. Everything we get, we wrap.

Laura Dolan:

I love it.

P.J. Daly:

There’s a lot of perks to it too.

Laura Dolan:

It’s good to know a guy.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, and there’s perks to it too. I mean, honestly, it protects the paint. You can peel your wrap off the truck and the paint is perfect, especially when you buy a truck new. Typically, when I try to keep a truck for two to three years and I rotate them out, I like keeping new equipment on at all times. But the trucks, it keeps them in really, really good shape. Even if you have a little scuff or a little scratch, it protects it. There’s no stone chips. It’s like a big blanket that just covers it up and you peel it off. It’s like a big sticker.

Shelli Hawkins:

I was just going to ask that question.

P.J. Daly:

So it’s a really thick, heavy sticker and it peels right off. It’s not fun to take them on and off, but I mean, we’ve removed the wraps when we sell a truck quite often, so yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

So fantastic to know. I was just going to ask the question, does it protect the body? And you answered it. It does.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, it does. It does. He says they last four or five years or more in the elements. I’m really careful. I’m on my guys. We try to make sure the trucks are cleaned and washed every day, every couple of days. So the fleet always looks good. We actually just purchased a new shop that we’re super excited about, and so every truck will fit inside the building, which is amazing. So that’s the goal. We’re getting ready to start renovating the new shop, but we’ve got multiple shops around our area where we try to keep trucks inside and keep them out of the weather so that we don’t have to keep them nice and protected, safer and cleaner.

Shelli Hawkins:

Have you made any physical changes to your building as far as security goes since this incident happened?

P.J. Daly:

Definitely have a lot. We’ve definitely tried to make some better safety things. We’ve had meetings with the staff explaining the importance of just being more protective of our trucks and careful with the trucks and not letting the trucks sit in a parking lot idle, unattended running while you run into a gas station or run into a repair shop. And then at the shop, the same thing. We’ve added extra surveillance. We’ve added a lockbox that actually locks with the keys to put the keys in the truck. We’ve added extra security on the trucks with extra systems to try to help protect them. You don’t realize how stuff happens until it happens, sadly. And I’ve talked to a lot of towers. I belong to the Michigan Towing Association and shortly after that happened, we had a meeting and there was a million questions about, “Oh my gosh, this happened.”

And it’s wild. I still don’t understand necessarily why I was targeted in Lansing, Michigan. When you bring this truck all the way, 600 miles, 700 miles across the country, there’s so many other rotators that are just as pretty as mine. They’re a lot closer. And like you said, why do thieves do what they do? They took the truck. They didn’t get the truck. We were able to get it back. The equipment was still on the truck. I don’t really understand why it all went down other than just… But I’m thankful that we got it back and we’re just making the best out of it and try to learn from it and trying to, hopefully, this was a situation too, where it was inside our building. It was locked up. It was behind a gate. It was in a locked up building with cameras and footage. So I tried to do a lot of things right. It wasn’t like it was just sitting in the parking lot or I was sitting at a truck stop and I left it and went in to go get coffee or something. It was at home.

Shelli Hawkins:

Secure.

P.J. Daly:

Supposedly safe. That’s the [wild] things.

Laura Dolan:

And one of your employees was there when it happened. I mean, they’re lucky nothing happened to them.

P.J. Daly:

Absolutely. I’m so happy that nothing happened. Yeah, it was scary.

Laura Dolan:

But did you mention that the truck had won a contest or something earlier that day?

P.J. Daly:

It did. I mean, we love our trucks. I mean, I’m always trying to plug them and trying to promote business and yeah, we went to a good friend of ours, he puts on a big truck show and he had everybody out, and we won a plaque for Best Tow Truck at the show. It was an actual truck show, so it had all different types of trucks, not just necessarily just tow trucks, but they did have a tow truck class and we were able to win that class.

Laura Dolan:

I just wonder if somebody at that show was like, “I want that truck.” And then…

P.J. Daly:

I don’t know.

Laura Dolan:

… That night they go after it. It seems like a coincidence to me that that day, there was attention on it, and then that night, boom, someone takes it. It was just, I don’t know, very suspicious that the timing was a little close there. You know what I mean? Gosh. But I’m glad it was a happy ending because then when you talk about it’s like, “Here’s what we learned. Here’s what you can do to prevent it from happening to you.”

P.J. Daly:

We have multiple shops. So that was the wild part to me, is we’ve parked trucks at three or four of the locations.

Laura Dolan:

Oh wow.

P.J. Daly:

So how’d they know when it came to that shop to get that truck? That’s what’s wild to me.

Laura Dolan:

That’s scary.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, yeah. That’s what I thought. And that’s what I’m super excited because moving into this new big building and we’ll have 24-hour footage where somebody will be here around the clock. One of our big police departments that we towed for our contract, we have to have somebody on site 24/7. So we will have somebody here at all times, and the rotators where they park in that part of the shop are going to have extra footage so I can see who pulls them in. If they’re there, we’re going to have extra cameras and extra everything to make sure that we can keep an extra good eye on the bigger trucks like that.

Laura Dolan:

Right.

Shelli Hawkins:

What a whirlwind.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah, I’m like out of breath. Wow. So you said you had three to four locations in that area, P.J. Do you have any other locations in that area?

P.J. Daly:

We have five locations total in Lansing. I strategically put one in each side of town, so each side of town. We’ve got about 10 police agencies that we tow for. So each lot we have specific cars for that police agency, they have to go back to that lot, if that makes sense. So a couple of the lots are mainly just holding lots, but we have three of the shops. Three out of the five are actual shops, really parked equipment in it and stage stuff. And then now we’re looking to, we downsized one shop and we’re going to consolidate two into one. So we’ll have one big huge shop that will be our main headquarters, and we’ll do all our dispatching out of, and we’ll keep all the equipment at.

Shelli Hawkins:

Do you use all these properties as impound yards or do you have a main impound yard section?

P.J. Daly:

Yep. Each one of the properties was an impound lot, and then three of them that we had shops at also that we staged equipment at also. And like I said, so now we’re going to still have, instead of having five lots, we’re going to go down to four. But like I said, the one will be our main headquarters.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow, you just really, when something like this happens, you sit back and you examine so many different areas. I can only imagine the reflection that you have done since this happened and what could have gone wrong, what processes need to be changed and reminders to the employees on a regular basis, etc.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, yeah. Honestly, it’s nothing that I wish anybody to have to ever go through. So it’s not a fun process. I’m thankful the outcome was good. We got our truck back. I wanted to get our truck back. I didn’t want our truck stolen. So I’m very thankful that the towing community just blew me away. I love going to some of the shows. I go to Florida every year. I try to go to Baltimore every year. We’re in Michigan, so we have a picnic with our Towing Association or that I always attend every year. I like going to Ohio. I didn’t go this past year because they changed venues. But I definitely love being part of the community. I love our trucks. I’m passionate about it. So it makes it a little easier when you’re passionate about it.

Laura Dolan:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I am here in Ohio, so I was at the Midwest Tow Show, so hopefully you can make it next year. And we’ll also be in Florida, so we’d love to meet you in person and see, I don’t know if you’re going to bring any trucks down, but if not-

P.J. Daly:

I think I’m probably just going to fly down.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah, I think it’s worth the visit to Michigan to see your character trucks. That’d be a great field trip, right, Shelli?

Shelli Hawkins:

Yes, absolutely.

P.J. Daly:

I’ll send you some pictures of some of the trucks for you too.

Laura Dolan:

Please do.

P.J. Daly:

I’ll send to Shelli. Yep.

Shelli Hawkins:

Good. Did you start the business, P.J.?

P.J. Daly:

So my dad did this all through the eighties when I was a kid. I literally grew up in a tow truck. I’m the oldest of three kids. Mom and dad then were high school sweethearts and they started their own business. My dad was super young. He was 20, 21 years old when he started his business. He did it for over 10 years. And I grew up the first 10 years of my life in a tow truck. And this business just gets ahold of you. It just gets in your blood and it takes over. And it’s like no matter what part of your life, you still have that love for this business and this industry. And so my dad got out of the business and I bugged him. I was in my early twenties, mid-twenties. I bugged him for years to get back into the business.

GM went through their stuff, diesel went to five bucks a gallon. The economy went really bad. It was like ’07, ’08. And I talked my dad into getting into the business again. I said, “Dad,” I said, “Think about it. I’ll do all the work. You can hang in the office. You don’t have to do as much. I’ll go door to door. I’ll sell. I’ll do everything I can to try to grow this business.” And so I had no money invested right off the get go, just sweat equity, and worked my butt off and didn’t make much money for a lot of years, but I just knew in the end it would be what I want. And it was a goal that I had. And we just went door to door and started getting more accounts and more accounts. And I went full-time doing it as a career.

And my dad and I worked together for close to 10 years. And then in 2014, my dad just started having some health issues. He wasn’t feeling as good. Just the day-to-day toll of 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s exhausting. We had about 10 trucks and my dad just said, “Buddy, I just can’t do it no more. I’m beat up. I’m tired and I just don’t want to work this hard.” And totally understood and respect. So I begged him. I said, “Dad, I’ve worked the last 10 years of my life and I just don’t want to walk away from what I’ve built.” And we agreed on a deal and we made a deal together and I basically bought my dad out of the business and I put everything into my name into the P.J.’s Towing and started from April 17th, 2014 is when I first started. And yeah, I mean, I had literally no money. Stressed about everything.

We had four trucks left in the fleet that we had downsized to that we had a truck payment on. And I made a deal with my dad that I would continue the payments on them. Within the first year, I was able to get rid of all those trucks and get them all out of my dad’s name. And I was able to start buying my own equipment and I bought my own trucks. And within the first year or two, I bought some brand new trucks and had such a good response with the new trucks. And that kind of turned into my new business plan of just trying to run a newer truck for a couple of years, keep it under warranty. The drivers love driving a new truck. There’s nothing better than driving a truck that smells good, that’s still clean. It doesn’t have 600,000 miles on it, and it stinks and it’s gross to drive.

So we’ve just really put a good plan in place of trying to keep the trucks looking good and they’re run newer. Yeah, so then I was able to get a better driver and I was able to get some of the better drivers from the area that wanted to come drive a new truck. We started putting the wraps on the trucks, and that really marketed us differently than a lot of the other companies. I put a lot more lights on the trucks, so they light up really well, and there’re a lot more strobe lights, so you’re safer. We subscribe with the HAAS devices, so we try to put that on all the trucks.

Just try to do everything I can in my power to keep everybody safe so they can go home every night to their families, their friends. So important. But we just built one at a time and before you know it, I mean, it’s [wild] the amount of volume where we were and what we do now. I mean, I was looking at stuff, just put in comparison, we’ve had a crappy winter. We have not done the business we’ve done, but we’ve already done more in sales this first two months than what I did in 2017, just to put it in perspective. And ’17 is not that long ago.

Shelli Hawkins:

Like the entire year, you’re saying?

P.J. Daly:

The entire year. In the entire year. That’s how much my business is growing.

Shelli Hawkins:

Wow, wow.

P.J. Daly:

So I’m so proud and excited of the brand and what we’ve built as a company, and it’s been a team. I mean, I’ve got a great office girl, Ashley, that’s been with me for almost the whole time. She’s helped solidify the office and make sure that the staff is doing good, the accounts are good. I’ve got an amazing operations manager, Matt. He helps with the day-to-day operations while keeping track of all the drivers and the accounts and keeping everybody happy, which is a full-time job. I’ve hired a great heavy duty operator, Jeff, who’s our heavy duty manager, and he helps. He’s got a tremendous amount of knowledge of running the rotators and hauling equipment.

And it’s a team. It’s a team. And I run my business like a team. And when you can get a good player at this position and another good player at that position, and if you start getting all these good players, you build an all-star team. And that’s how I run my business. I want to run it like an all-star team and put the best players at each position to make us shine and make us look good. I don’t need a diva, I don’t need a superstar. Just need a bunch of good people with good attitudes. We take good care of people.

Laura Dolan:

I love it. Sounds like you’re doing an amazing job over there, P.J. You grew up in the industry, you’ve got the instinct, you know what it takes to make a successful business. So congrats on coming up on 10 years in April. Wow, that’s awesome.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, thank you. I was just going to say, with the last couple of years we’ve averaged about little over 30,000 cars a year that we’ve hauled the last two years. And this year we should be right on pace for same thing.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fantastic. Fantastic!

Laura Dolan:

Shelli’s favorite word.

Shelli Hawkins:

This is a great story. And just listening to you tell the story, chat with us, talk about your business, how you grew it, the management structure, the people that you have in place, your way of communicating is just so calming and I just don’t see you getting… I’m sure when you made the realization about the truck, you became highly emotional as anyone should to respond, but your employees have to love working for you. If I were to call Ashley, what is the guy in the office, Matt, that I’ve talked to before, they’re going to say, “Shelli, P.J. is perfect. He is an amazing human.”

P.J. Daly:

I don’t want to go that far, but I definitely try. I mean, I learned it a long time ago I guess that as my spot as the owner, I’m the coach and my job is to put people in the right positions to succeed. So not everybody can do every job. And I’ve realized that. So you got to look at some of their talents. You got to look at their strengths, look at their weaknesses, and sometimes you can’t cram that square into a round hole. I mean, you got to make sure you put the right person in the right spot and you can’t get mad at them because ultimately you almost got to be mad at yourself if you’re putting the wrong person in the wrong spot. So I don’t know, I just try to coach them up and try to look at the big picture of things.

I try to look at, if we have a problem, why do we have the problem? How do we fix the problem? Let’s fix the problem with a solution. Let’s not just yell at each other. Let’s fix it. Let’s get past this. And today, it’s even harder now than it was 10 years ago. It’s just the business has changed, the clientele has changed, the people are changing. As much as I love this business and as hard as I’m working at this business, it’s even more challenging today than it was 10 years ago when I started.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh, for sure.

Laura Dolan:

And why do you think that is? What are the changes you’re observing?

P.J. Daly:

I think people’s expectations are just different than they were 10 years ago. I think people are more entitled, I think, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful on any of that, but people I think just expect things now. That it should be the new norm.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah, immediate gratification too. Like if there’s the slightest delay on DoorDash or Uber, people lose it and it’s like, “Okay, calm down. It’s on its way.”

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, I’ve got young guys that come in and want to do this as a career, but they don’t necessarily want to put in the work and the dedication and the hours that the senior guys that have been doing it for 10 years do. They want to make the money that they make, they want to go to on the good calls that they go on, but they don’t want to put the work in. And that’s hard. And so I’m trying really hard to really look at the big picture things, and I’m trying to figure out my best way of coaching everybody up. But it is not easy. The bigger you get, the more personalities you get, the more different attitudes you get. And you get certain people that are so good at certain things, but then they don’t like each other. And that just brings out a whole nother animal in your business of managing and running a business. So it’s been challenging, I’m not going to lie. It’s definitely been challenging.

Shelli Hawkins:

I bet.

P.J. Daly:

I’m trying my best to try to keep everybody happy and trying to keep the team united and work together.

Laura Dolan:

Unfortunately, that young mentality doesn’t just apply to the world of towing. I’ve seen it in the marketing world where entry level people are like, “When do I get to be a senior manager?” It’s like, “Well, do 20 years of work first.” I mean, it’s like they don’t want to do the work, they just want the promotion. They want the title, they want the salary. And it’s like, no, you’ve got to be gritty. You’ve got to work your way up in this business, no matter what industry you’re in. And I just feel the younger generation is like, for some reason, they feel like it’s going to be handed to them.

I don’t know if that’s something they’re being told at their college graduations or something, but it’s like, no, we’ve all had to work really hard to get where we are and towing community and the finance community, marketing community, whatever it is, you got to do the work, climb the ladder. But it sounds like, P.J., you have an amazing formula down for how to run a business. It is just the smartest thing that an owner can do is know how to employ the right people and know how to stay calm in a stressful situation and keep your staff calm in a stressful situation. So it sounds like you just have an amazing operation there.

P.J. Daly:

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Laura Dolan:

Of course.

Shelli Hawkins:

We would love to come and visit at some point in time.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully in a couple of months I’m hoping to have our new shop kind of finished up and I’d love for you guys to come check it out and see our operation. We’re pretty proud of it. I bought an old factory. This thing is 60,000 square feet.

Laura Dolan:

Wow.

Shelli Hawkins:

Cool.

P.J. Daly:

It’s on nine acres. It’s all fenced in. It’s all heavy industrial. They used to build big machine presses, and so it’s got the whole factory has all these big cranes on tracks and they slide across the building and huge big doors. And it’s just a massive shop. It’s got 13,000 square foot of office. So we are renovating that and getting it fit for our tow company. And I’m so excited. It has been a journey and a process, and I am beyond excited to try to take us to the next level. So it’s pretty exciting.

Shelli Hawkins:

Congratulations.

We will definitely make a field trip out there for sure.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And we love your system too. We’ve been with your system for, since the Dispatch Anywhere days, and we’ve been with them for a long time. I think it’s been with them for I think for all 10 years, so.

Laura Dolan:

Wow. Awesome. So you’re on Dispatch Anywhere. Do you have any other of the pieces of software that we offer, as far as like…

Shelli Hawkins:

TowPay?

P.J. Daly:

We use TowPay. It’s been fantastic. I love that. It’s worked really well. I was shorthanded dispatchers the other day and I went in the office and I got to dispatch for a couple of days and it was actually a lot of fun. I love dispatching. I love helping the customers, and I’m so busy with everything else, so I don’t have to worry about it every day. And I got great people in place, but it was really fun to get in there and get more familiar with some of the day-to-day stuff that I used to do on an everyday basis. But the TowPay works so easy and the customers loved it.

And just, I love the sign thing now where you can assign the closest truck and seeing the progression of them and seeing how this guy and how far away they are from the next call, because in your head is a good dispatcher. “Oh, okay. I got this guy dropping to this side of town. This car’s right over here, and it’s just a nice little loop for him,” but just to take the human think process out and put the data in front of you that shows it’s 1.2 miles. That’s an amazing feature, so I love that.

Laura Dolan:

P.J., are you able to pinpoint what your call volume is, either on a daily or weekly or even monthly basis?

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, I mean, we run anywhere from, during the week, we usually run between 100 and 150 calls a day, depending on the weather. And then on the weekends, we usually are in the 30 to 80 calls a day on the weekends, depending on how it is. It’s a big range. I mean, we run anywhere from six to 800 calls a month for the most part.

Laura Dolan:

That keeps you busy. How many drivers do you have or how many employees do you have on staff?

P.J. Daly:

A week, I mean.

Laura Dolan:

Oh, a week.

P.J. Daly:

A week, yeah. I’m sorry. Yeah, we run about six to 800 a week. Staff-wise, we have about 25 drivers. We’ve got about 10 or seven or eight dispatchers. And then we’ve got a couple of, four, five managers, and I’ve got 38 people together and we’ve got a couple that work in the shop that help maintain the trucks and keep the trucks on the road for us.

Laura Dolan:

That’s great. That’s a solid team.

P.J. Daly:

Last I checked it was 38 people. Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

What a wonderful story of you building up the business, your dad helping you get into it, buying it back from him, and the story of the stolen tow truck. P.J., thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Laura Dolan:

Yes.

P.J. Daly:

Yeah, well, thank you so much.

Laura Dolan:

Just thank you for coming on and it’s lessons we can all learn. Shelli will learn not to put her, she’ll put backpack in a cabinet now at tow shows. Best believe I had a car alarm installed right after I got robbed, and obviously I’ve had different cars since then, but you realize after the fact, “Well, shoot. We’re lucky this didn’t happen sooner.”

P.J. Daly:

Well, thank you so much ladies. Appreciate all your time and if you guys need anything else, feel free to reach out.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you very much. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of TRAXERO On-The-Go. We will see you next time.

Laura Dolan:

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.

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