Dean’s Towing Quick Stats:

Established: 1982

3 Locations: Owatonna, Faribault, and Albert Lea, Minnesota

Employees: 25

Number Of Trucks In Fleet: 35

Call Volume: ~50 calls per day minimum 

Most Recent Auction Ratio: Sold 35/47 vehicles 

Gross Income Of Most Recent Auction: $26,000

Dean’s Towing became a customer of our auction management software, Auction Simplified, just three months ago and in that time, they’ve already experienced much success with their very first auction.

Our Senior Content Marketing Manager, Laura Dolan, had a candid conversation with Josh Langerfeld, Auction Manager, Impound Lot Coordinator, and Dispatcher for Dean’s Towing. He described how he has fully leveraged our auction management software and taken full advantage of its best features to clear his impound lot. This is his story.

LD:

Thank you so much, Josh for jumping on and taking the time to speak with me today. Let’s start off by telling us what you were doing before Auction Simplified, and what changed? Give me the before and after.

JL:

So what we were doing before was basically when the lot would get full, we’d just start hauling cars to scrap, and getting whatever they felt that they wanted to give us. I worked for different towing companies prior to here. I’ve got probably 15 to 20 years of towing experience under my belt. And I’ve always wanted to do auctions or sell the cars, because I think that you can definitely get a lot more out of them doing that. 

That’s what I jumped on. I did a bunch of research and a bunch of graphs and scales to see what the long run cost would be versus the upfront cost, and it just seemed like the amount of support that I was going to get and assistance Auction Simplified provided definitely had the most bang for our buck. Andrea has been a huge help getting this started for us so that I understand what I need to do, where I need to put it, and how I get it done.

LD:

I’m really glad that she’s been there for you and that she’s been able to help you navigate through this since you are brand new to the product, 52 days in. That’s amazing! So she mentioned that you were running an auction, you had 45 days to set it up. And you ran 47 cars and sold 35, is that true?

JL:

Yeah.

LD:

Can you speak to that a little bit?

JL:

Well, being that it was the first auction I was extremely nervous, didn’t know how things were going to go. I thought to myself, “Well, if I start my own auction, I’m not going to have the clientele or bidders pool that I want.” And Andrea said, “We’ll reach out, but then you need to also reach out and try and get some bidders of your own.” So at that point I just started telling all the people in my contact lists that are interested in buying and selling cars, or scrapping out.

So I contacted them, and they started spreading the word. And then one of the biggest things that I noticed is I did a Facebook ad four days prior to our auction, and we had such a huge response of people coming in and asking questions about that. It just expanded from there. 

I looked at different auctions, and Andrea got me into different auctions that she does. Some of them only had one picture and a brief description, what the car is, mileage, etc. So I actually went through and took multiple pictures, there’s probably at least 15 to 20 pictures of each car. I try to capture every corner, every side, all the damage, as well as each tire, and the interior.

I want to try and express the most amount of information to each customer, and every detail that I can so that they totally know what they’re getting into. And I’ve done my best to make sure that all the instructions, the bidding process, our rules, our stipulations, our policies on how we’re going to do this, and basically the terms of use are very well written and clear, and there are no issues with it. 

We only had one person who did not end up buying a car, and I’ve already blocked them from going into another auction, you can’t bid on something and then have no contact. So that car will go back onto the next auction, and then they won’t get to bid on it. But everyone else has been really pleased with how it turned out, it went really quick and easy.

People like when you’re being completely honest and upfront with them, they respect you for that, and I’m sure they’ll be coming back again for the next auction.

LD:

That’s all you could do, just be upfront and try to give them as much information as you can. What was the format of your auction? 

JL:

It was a live online auction. We don’t allow anyone to be here during the bidding process, it’s all online. I do offer an inspection day the Monday before the auction. Our auctions are on Tuesdays, so I do the inspection days basically one to three hours depending on how many cars each site has, for people to come in and inspect. Because it is their due diligence to make sure that they see what they’re bidding on.  You put a bid on it, you buy it, it’s yours from there on.

LD:

So by using the Auction Simplified platform, were you able to customize your auction?

JL:

Yes. So we basically built it with our domain, we’ve got a picture of our big rotator that we take as our kind of flagship tow truck that we have, that’s shown. And then I put in as much information as I can, with many pictures, and for this round I’m going to try and do videos of the engine running and the car moving back and forth on its own to try and help those buyers understand that this car does run and drive, and it will move under its own power.

So I think I do step out differently than some of the other auctions; they might value their time a little better than I do because, “Oh, I don’t have time to go do all this.” They just snap one picture or put a brief description on there, and they can get their whole auction uploaded in say, 15 minutes, where it actually takes me six, seven, eight hours just to get everything uploaded and prepped. And I go through every single picture and edit it. I actually spend the time to make sure everything is as accurate as I can get it.

LD:

I love that. I love how thorough you are, that’s great.

JL:

Well, it makes it so that there are no mistakes on the backend after the car is sold and whatnot.

LD:

True. They can’t come back and say, “Hey, you didn’t disclose this or that.” What they see is what they get, right?

JL:

Yeah, exactly.

LD:

And as far as the software itself, can you talk about the ease of use and your experience with the learning curve of it? Did you find it was simple to use?

JL:

Oh, it’s really simple! Once Andrea walked me through the basic couple of training sessions that she did… even in the training, we made a mock auction with some Hot Wheels cars that I had. She thought that was really cool. Because I took all the stampings on the bottom of the cars, made that their VIN, and gave a description of each car and everything, and then had all of our employees sign up and try and bid on some of these Hot Wheels. 

When that got done, she’s like, “All right, you can start doing your cars and everything.” A week later, she went to do another training with me, and she got on, and she’s like, “Oh my gosh, you got all the pictures on here, you got all this on there and everything.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, you just look, you see what it says, you follow it, and you do it.” 

LD:

That’s great! And what a fun way to learn how to use the platform. So it was easy to navigate?

JL:

Yeah, everything’s really kind of self-explanatory. As I go through being able to upload the photos, edit them and redact them, I add the descriptions, type out everything that I can, and then it’s got the quick link feature where I can just put all the quick links that the vehicle options have. Then there’s the VIN decode button on there, where I can actually type in a VIN, hit that, and then it basically auto-populates as much information as it knows, which is super cool, because it saves me time.

LD:

I love that feature! So if you were to talk to another tower, and they were kind of on the fence as to whether or not they should use this product, how would you explain what it did for your business and what it could do for theirs?

JL:

I would say that every towing company should take advantage of trying to do auctions with their impound cars. If we would’ve done our previous way of disposing of the vehicles, I think a total of $11,000 is what we would’ve got. And then after everything with the fees and whatnot, the gross of what the last auction was, was $26,000. We definitely made way more money than what we would have, almost doubled what we would have on the previous way of disposing cars.

So it’s a great way to get rid of cars, and it’s “simplified.” And you can make it way more simpler than what I do, you don’t have to go through and be as thorough as I do. I mean, if you just take four corner pictures and post what the car is, it’s as simple as that. I think it’s a great program, and it’s actually really cost-effective for what you get out of it, with the background help and then the software and the domain. As far as the software goes, I really like it the way it is.

LD:

That’s great! So glad it’s working for you! And you mentioned that you have an auction coming up soon, did you say there was one next week?

JL:

Yeah. Next Tuesday the 19th is our second auction.

LD:

And how many cars are you anticipating for that one?

JL:

I’m anticipating that we’re going to have probably close to 35, 40 vehicles under this auction.

LD:

That’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes. Josh, how can our audience find you? What’s your website? What are your social handles?

JL:

So we’re at deanstowing.com, and then our auction is deanstowingauction.com. And then we are on Facebook and Instagram at Dean’s Towing.

LD:

Excellent, thank you. Is there anything else that you would like to add that we didn’t cover before we wrap up?

JL:

One thing that I would say to each person that’s getting into this, you can use this platform to start trying to auction off some of your own personal equipment. I’m also working on doing an abandoned pallet auction for all the cars. We clean out all the stuff that’s in them, so that when I take pictures of them, they’re all cleaned out, they look nicer than what they are. But all of that stuff, we’re just going to put on a pallet and basically have a storage unit auction.

LD:

Nice!

JL:

We’re just going to shrink wrap it, and it’s kind of like a surprise goodie bag, but you get a whole pallet. There are speaker boxes, there are radios. The one I have, there’s a bunch of really cool antique coins from Mexico and Russia. So we’re just going to put it all onto a pallet and try and auction it off. 

Then also I’m working on potentially seeing if smaller towing companies want to use us to auction off their cars, because maybe they can’t afford their own platform, or domain. But I’ll just get their location and auction off their cars for them through our platform, and then just take a little bit off of their fees so that we can help them out and get the most bang for their buck.

LD:

Awesome, that’s a great idea! Well, thank you for your time, Josh and thank you so much for being a part of the TRAXERO family. We’ll look forward to hearing more about your other auction experiences going forward.

JL:

All right, cool. Thank you, Laura.

LD:

Thanks, have a great day.

JL:

Yeah, you too. Bye-bye.

LD:

Thanks, bye.

We change the game when it comes to running a towing business. You saw how our auction solutions were able to do that for Dean’s Towing. Contact us to see how we can do the same for you.