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Needles & Ninjas by Nick Kemper

10/27/2014

I went in yesterday for my weekly acupuncture visit, which I am getting very addicted to, oddly enough. I have needle-phobia to a high extent, to the point that I went in for a recent doctor visit and respectfully declined to have my blood drawn for a cholesterol check. I was only there to get a referral for the acupuncture for my insurance, and to meet my new doctor. The nurse seemed shocked when I said, "No thanks."

"You're declining the test?"

"Yes."

It made me think about how we all just go along with whatever we're told to do in those cold, little exam rooms. Anyway, I don't like needles. When my wife got an epidural during childbirth, and they had her sit up and lean forward against me while they inserted a dagger-like needle into her spine, I almost fainted. And I couldn't even see the needle. Now THAT is the power of visualization. They made me sit on the floor until I could compose myself.

So it seems a little odd that I enjoy acupuncture. I went in originally for neck pain, and it does help for that, but more than that, it helps me with stress and energy and just an overall feeling of health and well-being. I highly recommend it. Yesterday I almost feel asleep lying face-down, needles in my neck, shoulders, back, hands, legs, and feet, with electrical pulses being pumped into a few of the needles, and a heat lamp a few inches over my upper back. It was serene.

It was always a challenge, when I drove tow truck every day, to stay in good shape. Driving is not a job that lends itself well to physical fitness. I remember joining a health club, and the health club rep interviewed me to design a program for me, and he asked my about my job, and I told him what I did, embellishing it as much as possible. You know, getting out of the truck, strapping the car, throwing the dollies, getting back in the truck, etc. "So," he said, "sedentary." Sedentary?!?! Sometimes I breathed hard and even sweated, when it was busy. The nerve. Sedentary.

Also, eating healthy is a challenge when you're a driver. You can bring your lunch, but you throw it behind the seat, and someone drops a lug wrench on it, or your tupperware leaks. Also, if you bring something to be warmed up, and you can't make it to the office microwave, cold pork chops sometimes just don't hit the spot. So you end up going through the drive-through a lot. If I were going to dine out while I was working, back before I had kids, when I had money of my own, I preferred gourmet take-out, like Escape From New York Pizza, or Lovejoy Deli sandwiches, or Yakitori Bento. That required time and getting out of the truck, however, so often I settled for Wendy's or Burger King or Carl's Jr. Last night I was driving my 8-year-old home from baseball practice, and I was changing CDs in my car: taking one out of the CD player, finding a CD case on the floor behind the passenger-seat, looking at the CDs in the door pocket, putting another CD in--and he asked me, "Dad, how did you get so ninja, doing all that stuff when you're driving?" Now, I've spent the better part of my life fumbling around in the dark, both figuratively and literally, but I'd have to attribute this skill set to my years in the tow truck, driving, eating, talking on the radio, reading the pager, changing the radio station, running the in-cab controls, holding a cup of coffee, writing up an invoice, and checking out the girls on the sidewalk simultaneously. The real trick is when you drop your pen, and it slides all the way across the bench seat and drops over next to the passenger door, and you have to unbuckle, slide over, use your left hand to steer and your left foot to work the pedals, reach way over and snag that pen without stopping, slowing down, or crashing into something. And it's REAL tricky when you have a Suburban on the hook. Now, I am in no way suggesting you do this. I cannot bear any legal, ethical, or philosophical responsibility for you not being as ninja as I am. Heck, I have driven a tow truck from outside the cab -- not intentionally, but it worked out that way, and no deaths resulted.

Eating is really the true test of your ninja-driving skills, I must admit. You don't want to eat too fast--it's bad for you, and you can't savor the flavor of the chemicals fast-food companies inject into their food for you. Too slow is just as bad--cold french fries can kill the mood of an entire work shift. You don't want to get grease on the steering wheel, window switch, door handle, seat, stereo knobs, or rear-view mirror. My recommendation is to eat only with the right hand, and use only the left hand for everything else, at least until the right hand can be property de-greased. This can be tough if you're driving a stick, but it can be done. Also, you want the burger and fries laid out on the flattened paper sack that it came in. This is why I don't eat Taco Bell. I don't need no stinking plastic bag sliding around on the seat. Flatten out that sack, place the burger on the downhill end, either in its box with the top open or on the open wrapper. Lay the fries container on its side, pointing uphill, so that the burger box keeps it from sliding down. Then, the coup de grace is getting the ketchup down onto the sack, touching the leading edge of the fries, so that when you grab a fry blind, you can sweep it through the ketchup, with a long, thin layering that prevents dripping, as you pull it out of the box. It's best to get the ketchup down before you leave the parking lot, but emptying the packets in motion can be done with the right combination of dexterity and frame of mind. Waste disposal involves simply picking up the sack, with the garbage on it, wadding it into a ball, and tossing it onto the passenger-side floor to forget about it when you finish your shift.

For the more advanced Ninja, you can reduce the grease transfer from the burger to your hand by balancing it on the tips of your thumb and first three fingers. As you bite, you rotate the hand to grip the burger ever-so-lightly, just enough to be able to break off the mouthful without disturbing the integrity of the burger assembly, then return the hand to underneath the burger, with the aforementioned fingertip method. This keeps the grease on the burger and then into your stomach, where it belongs.

You can sign up for my online Ninja courses, which include:

Peeling a Banana (related subject: Discarding the Peel)
Removing the Plastic Lid of your Full Coffee to Blow on it.
Pudding
Pistachios (prerequisite Course: Sunflower Seeds and Related Nut Products)
Unrolling your Burrito to apply Hot Sauce
The Dropped Pickle: Recovery Techniques
Found Food (Lab Course additional)
Where to Hang your Donut
Advanced Bowl of Cereal

And, outside of the Food realm:

The Glove Box
Visor: Not Just for Blocking the Sun
Clothes-Changing
Left My Invoice Book Behind the Seat, but Too Lazy to Stop to Retrieve It
Flashlight Battery Installation
Soda Can Toss into the Recovery Chain Bucket

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,

Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

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Applying the 80/20 Rule by Nick Kemper

10/21/2014

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Diversification and multiple revenue streams are terms thrown around quite loosely in the world of business. In the product business, we face decisions every day about expanding to include new products or removing products from our listings. Is it better to focus on doing a few things better, or doing as many things as well as you can? I read an article in Success magazine last week in which a business owner was interviewed and asked what business decision had the greatest impact on her business, and she said that when she focused on her best customers, that's when her business turned a corner toward success. She referenced the 80/20 rule that I'm sure most of you are familiar with. We often think about the 80/20 rule in terms of our labor force. You know, 20% of your people do 80% of the work, and, unfortunately, vice-versa.

I was curious to see how this applied to our customer base, so I ran some numbers. It didn't come out perfect, but I came up with this:
Our top 20% of customers, based on income, account for 65.5% of our business.
Our top 25% of customers, based on income, account for 71.4% of our business.
Our top 30% of customers, based on income, account for 76.2% of our business.

That's not quite 80/20, but it's amazingly close.

You might have similar numbers in your business. You might want to ask yourself, as I asked myself, why is the attention sometimes inverted? Shouldn't we be giving most of our attention to the small number of customers who account for the majority of our business? I guess that would lead to the next question: if you focus on your best customers, will that lead to increased business?

These are all tough questions. I hear about diversification in our industry, and it has taken on a different meaning than when I managed a tow company ten years ago. For us, diversification meant that we were going to try to do more of different types of tows. We did a lot of police work and a lot of private property impounds. We added a contract to tow all of the municipal abandons, which helped feed our vehicle auction and made better use of our carriers. We expanded our work for vehicle donation programs for the same reason. But it wasn't all about expansion. We had an agreement with two local cab companies to provide their towing, at a very low flat rate. The problem was that these tows were always urgent--when a cab is down, it's not producing revenue, so the owners naturally wanted it brought in as soon as possible. We determined that the amount of effort expended in towing these cabs fair outweighed the return we received from the low flat rate, so we simply ended the agreement. Our drivers were sometimes missing impounds due to slow response times, directly related to the cab tows. Now, if we had been so slow that drivers were sitting around, we probably wouldn't have been so quick to give that up, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have.

We did our own lien processing, so we marketed that arm of our business to other companies and built a division that brought in enough income to be profitable all on its own. That plan seemed to work fine. However, when I came on-board, we were dispatching for five other tow companies, and the burden on our dispatchers was tremendous. We calculated how much time each of these companies was drawing from our dispatch labor, and we compared it to how much revenue we were receiving, which from some of our customers was as little as $300 per month for night and weekend dispatching. Now, you don't have to screw up too many of your own calls to wipe out $300 worth of earnings. We studied how this work was affecting dispatch performance and decided that it was leading to increased dispatch times for our own calls. Throw on top of that the level of service that was expected for $300/month, and it was a no-brainer. We dropped all but one company, the most low-maintenance customer we had.

I've talked to companies who are making more money hauling scrap--not just scrap vehicles, but actual scrap, like old appliances--than they do towing cars. One of our customers just secured a dump box and a permit to haul refuse and is offering the service to property owners--turning their tow trucks into garbage trucks.

Another way to diversify is to expand your coverage area, another choice we faced where I worked. We were bringing in impounds from as far as 30 miles away from our centrally-located base, so we reasoned that it would be better to have satellite storage facilities. Where to place them was a major consideration. Ideally, they would be near a major freeway, midway between the central base and the furthest property we served, in a location that would make us eligible for more municipal tows. Our owner was looking at a property to purchase that was beyond any property we served, which meant that whenever one of our drivers towed a car there, he would have to go away from our central base (which is where all the trucks were stationed and where all the drivers reported for work) to drop the car, then further back to central base, if that was their next stop. Now, maybe the deal was sweet enough to make things inefficient, but we had to advise him that, logistically, it didn't make sense.

Equipment is another way to diversify. A medium-duty truck might lead to more work for your company but with enough versatility to justify the addition. A heavy wrecker, on the other hand, might be unwarranted, no matter how cool it looks.

I guess the bottom line is that no approach is going to work the same for every company or every situation. Each opportunity to diversify or expand must be approached with as much accurate forecasting as possible, and it must be measured for return on investment. I do think we can agree, however, that it is unwise to take for granted our best customers--those top 20% or 25% who are responsible for the bulk of our business. This might be the answer in itself to the question of whether or not to diversify, or how to diversify. Maybe those customers are the ones who should be advising you on those decisions.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

http://www.hub911.com

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Impounds and Potential Business by Nick Kemper

10/8/2014

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I do a lot of driving, in my little Honda Civic. Quite a change from the days of running impounds. I'm still conditioned to recognize potential impound business, however. When I drive around, I notice cars parked in fire lanes, or crowded lots in busy business districts, or cars in disabled parking without permits. I also notice private lots without signs, or with signs that are broken or covered with graffiti. These were things I looked for when I was a driver and later a manager. When I was a swing-shift driver, I would write notes and give them to our sales staff as leads. Sometimes I would stop in and inquire myself, if it wasn't too late in the day. When I moved into management, I routinely made sales calls. At one time, in the market I worked in, there was one company that did about 90% of the private property impounds (our company).

When I started working there in 1986, we had no salesman. A few years later, a shoe salesman came into our office one day and convinced our boss that he could increase our business. And he did. The PPI business grew probably 100% over 2-3 years. It also gave our competition the idea that they could put their own salesmen out in the field, which they did, though not with nearly as much success.

Over the next 5-10 years, the PPI business became very competitive in our market. A lot of small companies popped up, many of them owned by our former employees. Some gained a significant market share. I often wondered how the growth appeared from the perspective of the customer. Our primary customer was the property owner or manager. Most of them dealt with parking problems in a low-key manner for years. There were properties that had major problems, like a Safeway in downtown Portland that would generate maybe 10 impounds on a busy Friday or Saturday night. Some properties had never been visited by an impound company rep. Now, suddenly, you might have reps from four different companies wander in to your office in one week. If you had a parking problem, it could be worse. How did those property managers see those reps--as saviors, or pests?

The impound market, I've often said, is unique in that it is created by the illegal parker. If no one parks illegally, there are no impounds to be done. Simple as that. As soon as someone parks illegally, the potential for an impound tow is created. It's a reasonable--and convenient--rationalization. I won't backtrack from that claim. However, when competition between impound towers becomes hot and heavy, the market is expanded by the companies providing the service. This is illustrated by a sales tactic we used routinely: you don't have to take business away from someone else to increase your business. There are properties everywhere that could generate impound tows if the property owner were aware of the problem and the solution you present. You just have to educate them. Sometimes there are good reasons for doing this. If a business is losing customers because they have limited space for customer parking, and another business' customers are in their lot, you are doing the business owner a favor by presenting a solution. If a property is in danger of having action taken by the Fire Marshall for vehicles in fire lanes, you are helping them by presenting a solution.

Let's think about a different scenario. Say there is a residential property with maybe 200 units, and you drive through there on a weeknight, and the lot is maybe 60% full. Now, if you make friends with the property manager and convince them to implement a permit system, with tow trucks patrolling at random times for violators, and the property generates 20 tows the first month, then settles down to maybe five or six per month, have you presented a solution that has helped their business? Hard to say. You've presented a solution that helps YOUR business, for sure. Who is getting towed? Visitors of the residents? So now the lot is 53% full every night. Maybe you're taking advantage of something there.

As I drive around now and see properties that might generate 40, or 14, or four impounds a month, I sometimes catch myself and think about how the impound business preys upon the misfortune of others. I use "misfortune" loosely, but it is misfortune to not pay attention to where you're supposed to be parking. I warn everyone I know to NEVER take a chance with where you park. Make sure you KNOW you're okay in that spot, I tell them. I know, first-hand, of too many cases in which the impound company got around the law or used a loophole to justify a tow, and got away with it. No signs? Well, you parked on a government property, and the government isn't required to have signs. Permit fell off the rear-view mirror? Well, that's unfortunate, and unfortunately your fault, even if the driver has seen your car there with the permit displayed every night for the last 2 years.

Towers who are in the impound industry have an obligation to the both the industry itself and the general public to conduct their business ethically and responsibly. The businesses I worked for were ethical and responsible, but sometimes their employees weren't, and when that happens, it's innocent till proven guilty, right? I don't have a solution for this. The solution is NOT regulation, I know that. Self-regulation is the only regulation that works. One thing is for sure--it's an interesting topic of conversation.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

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Needles & Ninjas by Nick Kemper

Applying the 80/20 Rule by Nick Kemper

Impounds and Potential Business by Nick Kemper

Hub911.com

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