M2 Towing Quick Stats

Established: 2015

1 Location in Garland, Texas

Employees: 11

Number Of Trucks: 10

Customer Since: 2015

Call Volume: 50-70 Calls Per Day

Products Used: Tracker & Dispatch Anywhere

M2 Towing recently made the upgrade from Tracker software to Dispatch Anywhere, which has made running their towing business so much smoother and their customers so much happier. 

Our Senior Content Marketing Manager, Laura Dolan, had a candid conversation with Meredith Martin, Co-Owner of M2 Towing. This is her story.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Meredith. Let’s start by going into a little history about M2. How long has it been around? How many locations do you have? Where are you based? All that fun stuff.

 

Meredith Martin:

We opened M2 Towing in July of 2015, and it was my husband’s third launch into a wrecker business. His family has been in the business since he was in his teens. His dad had a business and then he and his sister had a business, and then he and I went off on our own adventure in July of 2015.

 

We have one location based in Garland, Texas, but we run for all of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and we even do long haul towing for some of our customers. We have a diversified portfolio. We’re a little unique in the fashion that after so many years in the business, Gary believed that he could have a successful towing business and not necessarily go into police towing or repossession towing or things of that nature. So what we tell people, in short description, we do only consensual towing.

 

Laura Dolan:

Oh, I love that! So you’re not doing private property impound or anything like that.

 

Meredith Martin:

Exactly. No police towing. So, in turn, when he thought that he could build something like that, we weren’t sure. So we always had a hold back plan that if we needed to get onto some rotations for the police, we could. But we believed so much in the model that we have amazing employee retention for the fact that we are not a 24/7 operation.

 

Laura Dolan:

That’s great!

 

Meredith Martin:

Yes. So our dispatcher comes in at 7:00 AM, Monday through Friday, and we have someone on the phones dispatching from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, what we call in-house during the day.

 

Laura Dolan:

Sure.

 

Meredith Martin:

And then we do have a lead driver who then, at 6:00 PM, takes the phones until we wind down at 9:00 PM. Now, we would never tell a customer or a client, “No, we can’t go because we’re closed,” but obviously we’re very specific about the towing we do beyond 9:00 PM because we do like our drivers to have rest. Our insurance company loves that our drivers have rest. And then every other weekend they’re afforded the opportunity to be off. We have 10 trucks, so we run half a crew on Saturday and Sunday, and the other half runs the subsequent weekend as Saturday and Sunday. So it’s really a model that’s unique and one that I don’t know exists across the country, but in our specific peer group in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, it does not exist.

 

Laura Dolan:

That is unique. That’s the first I’ve ever heard of that kind of structure in a towing business. And is it sustainable? Are you able to get a steady stream of calls within those hours?

 

Meredith Martin:

Yes, our portfolio of customers includes large car dealerships, the Fords, the Chevys, Dodge, Cadillac, etc, around the metroplex. DFW is very large in our market. And then we have our relationship-based customers that we have right in our immediate area in Garland where [Gary’s] parents started their business 40 plus years ago. 

 

Laura Dolan:

Nice. So switching gears a little bit, when did you get word that you were going to be upgraded to from Tracker to Dispatch Anywhere?

 

Meredith Martin:

I think they contacted us late summer last year.

 

Laura Dolan:

And how did you feel about that when you got the news? 

 

Meredith Martin:

Well, it was sheer terror for me, because aside from the dispatching, which is the front and most important part, I am so meticulous about the billing and the payroll aspect. So it just was like I could not get my head around just making that change because so many pieces were going to be involved from dispatching, and we had just hired a new dispatcher in July, so we felt like we’d just gotten her up and running.

 

Laura Dolan:

And she would have to start to learn something new all over again.

 

Meredith Martin:

Oh my gosh, yeah. Then Gary was like, “Well, we have until January of 2025.” So we kind of set back after we spent a couple of weeks and said, “If the inevitable is coming, let’s just do it.”

 

Laura Dolan:

Oh, nice.

 

Meredith Martin:

So instead of delaying the inevitable, and candidly, Tracker had started having its glitches on a daily basis, bumping us out of the system and whatnot. A call was freezing up or a change was made, and somehow it wasn’t transferred on. It was just the simple story of technology that is advancing and there’s only so much you can do to a platform that is so dated.

 

Laura Dolan:

Absolutely. And I appreciate that you actually embraced the change instead of delaying it, you’re like, “Let’s just grab the bull by the horns and let’s just lean into this.”

 

Meredith Martin:

Absolutely. And candidly, we did look at three different platforms, Dispatch Anywhere, and I can’t remember the other two.

 

But we said, “Okay, let’s take a look at it.” And then that’s when we did take the bull by the horns and said, “We’re going to make a decision and do this.” And then we wanted to leave ourselves enough time that we weren’t making a hasty transition. Even to the extent that when we kind of hung our hat on Dispatch Anywhere, we did it because of Nick, honestly. Nick [Hallett] was fabulous, but we even said, “If we don’t like how this demo starts going, then maybe we’ll just jump ship and do one of the other ones.” So we kind of went into it skeptical.

 

Laura Dolan:

Which is fair.

 

Meredith Martin:

Oh my goodness, yes. But just from the very get-go of having a few conversations with Nick and then him saying, “I’m going to help you build this,” we instantly said, “This is our platform. This is our guy.” We depended on Nick because he’s just so good. And he was that convincing when he said, “I will not abandon you. I will make sure you get through this.”

 

By November we had made our decision and then we started building. We took every bit of a month and a half, every two weeks, on calls with Nick to build our platform. And like I said in the beginning, we don’t do police towing or anything like that so we really wanted it to be finite and specific to how we run our customers. We do mileage and fuel, and some of those other add-ons that we needed to know with 100% surety that the formulas were correct, that it was going to price correctly, things like that.

 

So we took our time on that and then we did a little beta testing with our lead driver, and then we just said, “Let’s go. Let’s do this.” And by January, we went live. We took the better part of 60 days to build and then two weeks to beta test, and then we were up and running. From there, I would say two weeks, we had to tweak and redo a few things and Nick had to kind of help us and do this and do that. We did a payroll, we did a second payroll. So at the end of January we were running and we have not had one issue. Not a single issue.

 

Laura Dolan:

That’s so good to hear. That is wonderful!

 

Meredith Martin:

I was so dependent on Nick. He helped me do my payrolls. He helped me do that first billing cycle. And then he was like, “You got this. If you have any issues, I want you to call the help desk.” And I was like, “Oh, don’t get me to the help desk.” And then I was like, “Okay, well that’s not fair because he has another job.” And I have called the help desk a couple of times just to make sure I was doing something right and they are fabulous, too.

 

Laura Dolan:

Oh, good, it’s nice to have that extra support. 

 

Meredith Martin:

Yes. but I give Nick a lot of praise. Caece [Rodriguez], too. She orchestrated all of it, but the entire team has exceeded our expectations. Our drivers have nothing but good things to say. Our dispatcher transitioned in three days from Tracker to Dispatch Anywhere, and she loves it.

 

Laura Dolan:

That’s wonderful! And did Nick go over the similarities between Tracker and Dispatch Anywhere that kind of show like, hey, when you do this with Tracker, this is how it works with DA?

 

Meredith Martin:

Yes, he was that specific once we had made the decision to run on that horse. The transition for our drivers was nothing. It was only easier because they had already been in the Tracker app. And the reporting of Dispatch Anywhere is so robust. It’s so cool. I send different reports to different customers because they want to see different things. We quickly saw the similarities, but yes, he did say, “Here’s how you do something.” And he’s like, “You have that feature in Tracker.” Or Gary would say, “Oh yeah, we have that in Tracker.” And they would collaborate on the similarities. But Dispatch Anywhere is just so robust. That’s my favorite word to describe the difference between the two.

 

Laura Dolan:

It’s a good word.

 

Meredith Martin:

It really is. And our customers have given us that feedback. We didn’t really make a big deal with our customers. We told a few here and there, “Hey, we’re closing out Tracker. We need to get these open invoices shored up.” We kind of used it as a prompt to close the year-end and close out Tracker with 2023, get everybody paid up in full. And [Gary] said, “Oh, by the way, we’re starting a new platform, but it’s going to be so much better. But in the meantime, you’re going to get a statement that looks like this and a statement that looks like Dispatch Anywhere.”

 

We have not heard one negative thing about the different reporting. Our customers save the invoice that we send to them electronically, they love TowPay, that we can just send the link. Our drivers love that because they don’t have to feel responsible for the credit card numbers. We used to have a shredder right by our dispatcher’s desk. And we’d say, “As soon as you write someone’s credit card down and you key it in, shred it. We don’t want to be responsible.” Dispatch Anywhere’s just so robust. It’s so awesome!

 

Laura Dolan:

That is wonderful. I couldn’t ask for a better testimony, Meredith. I was going to ask if your customers have said anything? If they noticed a change? But it sounds like they’re embracing it, too.

 

Meredith Martin:

They are. And nobody likes change, so you try to tiptoe around it, but then when you deliver something that’s a change that is so much better, it’s like, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” And Gary and I said the same thing. We were just so complacent because [Tracker] was working, but this is “wow working.” It’s just so much easier.

 

Laura Dolan:

Something better than you could have imagined?

 

Meredith Martin:

So much better than we could have imagined. So I am thankful, too, that we just said, let’s do it. And Gary and I invested all the time on the front end. We even brought our lead driver in when building everything with Nick, and we let him do the beta testing and doing some calls and things like that. So, really, Gary and I wanted it built and we wanted to completely understand the mindset of where we were coming from and then deliver that out to our employees and our customers. So it’s great.

 

Laura Dolan:

That is wonderful feedback. This is amazing.

 

Meredith Martin:

I am so glad we transitioned and it’s done, and by the end of January we were like, yahoo!

 

Laura Dolan:

There it is! That is the pull quote right there. I love to hear you all say, “I wish we had done it sooner.” I commend you for facing the fear of the unknown. I know change is always daunting, but I’m glad that the transition was smooth and the experience has been positive for you. If you hear another Tracker customer say, “I would rather back out than do this upgrade,” what would you say to them?

 

Meredith Martin:

Oh, absolutely not. You have to just do this. It’s a game changer. It was a game changer for all of us. Every person that touched a facet of our business. Customers, to me doing accounting, to Gary managing and overseeing the day-to-day drivers, you just gotta do it.

 

Laura Dolan:

That says it all!

 

Meredith Martin:

Yes. Just do it.

 

Laura Dolan:

Awesome. Meredith, how can our audience find you? What is your website? What are your social handles if you’re on social media?

 

Meredith Martin:

We are at www.m2towing.com, and we do have Facebook and Instagram.

 

Laura Dolan:

Awesome. I’ll make sure to link those and your website in the blog in case somebody in the area is reading this, thinking, “Okay, I’ll keep them in mind just in case I need a tow sometime.”

 

Meredith Martin:

Absolutely. And like I told Caece and Nick, if y’all have anyone on the fence that wants to just have a sidebar conversation with somebody who’s gone through the transition and maybe doesn’t want the formality of everybody being involved, I’m happy to stand in for you guys and tell them how wonderful and seamless my transition was.

 

Laura Dolan:

Thank you, Meredith. We appreciate that so much. Thank you for being a loyal customer and an advocate for us. We really appreciate you taking the time to come on here today and tell us your story.

 

Meredith Martin:

You are so welcome, and thank you! Have a good one.

 

Laura Dolan:

You too. Bye.

 

Meredith Martin:

Bye-Bye.

We change the game when it comes to running a towing business. You saw how our digital dispatching solutions were able to do that for M2 Towing. Contact us to see how we can do the same for you.