. Jobs are sometimes like boats - the two happiest days are the day you get it, and the day you get rid of it. For this person who decided to move on, someone I've worked closely with for 5 years now, it was a happy day. Will we be able to replace him? Yes. It won't be exactly the same. Each individual brings different strengths, skills, and work habits to a company, so when a key person leaves, it changes how the company operates.

I remember when I left my management job, I wondered how the company would survive without me. It seemed to me that I was keeping the boat afloat. Of course, when I left, things went right on like they always had. In a way, that was a testament to my results, because I had developed, trained, and nurtured a lower management staff precisely to do just that - take over when I left. Five years later, the company is still prospering, and I expect they will for a long time. Even though I was a key person, I was just one out of a team of 50+, so unless I had my finger in the dyke, it wasn't going to be doomsday when I left.

Employee turnover continues to be a major concern in the towing industry. One thing I did before I left that management job was to call in a staffing agency to assess our operation and to see if they could help us. The agency rep was quite candid when she pointed out that she couldn't provide a single qualified candidate for the open driver positions we had, based on the average wage of our drivers. We just weren't paying enough to get and keep good people. Because our drivers were on commission, the experienced, motivated drivers could do quite well, but the entry-level drivers struggled and inevitably left for the afore-mentioned greener pasture. Developing the skills to become a high-producing commission driver was a difficult proposition for us as a company - if the driver didn't do well within a few months of being hired, he would start looking elsewhere. And if he could take a $10/hour job and do better, who could blame him? So we often just hoped we would find the driver who already had what it took to be a high producer.

Employee turnover was probably my number-one headache when I was managing that tow company. I don't think I ever learned to accept it. And maybe that's what would have helped more than anything else. I've heard the analogy of the axe that was kept by its owner for 25 years and used every day. After 25 years, it was on its fifth handle and third head, but it was still the same axe. That's a pretty good analogy for a tow company. Don't keep swinging an axe with a broken handle or a dull head, or both. Replace and retool when necessary.

I used to be a fan of the TV show "The Apprentice." In fact, I dreamed of firing one employee every week. I thought I could make it one per month, just to make it more workable. Think about how much that would raise the level of performance for the employees in the lower half of the scale. If, no matter what, one employee were fired each month, most people would do almost anything to not be that person. I think it would really expose the potential of many workers who seem to guard that very closely.

I've been hearing the same statement for years: So many people are out there looking for work when there are plenty of jobs available. Maybe people are too picky, or maybe they are not looking in the right place. Every job I've ever had - and I mean EVERY job, except for two hours when I washed dishes in a restaurant in Caldwell, Idaho - I got through someone I knew. Family member, family friend, former colleague. I've tried to find work through classifieds, Monster.com, whatever, but like many things in business, nothing beats the efficiency of networking. I think that job-hunters sometimes bypass this simplest and most effective of approaches. Conversely, some of the best recruiting I've ever done was via networking, asking friends and employees and colleagues to recommend someone they knew. There are a lot of reasons for this working so well, not the least of which is trust. When you interview someone you don't know, and you don't even know anyone they know, there are a lot of things you will not find out until later down the road when circumstances bring them to the surface. I often called the manager of top competitor to ask for an unofficial reference on an applicant, and he did the same with me, because tow truck drivers seem to cycle in and out of many different companies in a single market. I encourage those of you who do the hiring to do the same. And be honest when someone asks you for a reference. You don't want to contribute to any surprises. What comes around, goes around, you know.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com

Recruitment and hiring have to be one of the most arduous tasks we face in this industry.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a daily task at times as we try to find and keep good employees.  In my time managing a tow company, I vacillated between hiring drivers with towing experience so that they could be trained quickly and hiring drivers without towing experience so that we didn't have to un-train their bad habits.

Many, many times I regretted the choices I made, usually the choice to find a warm body, but when you've covered extra shifts yourself and begged others to do so for weeks at a time, it is a very attractive option to hire anyone who can fog a mirror.  This is a conundrum that cannot be solved in a newsletter, or a year of newsletters for that matter, but now that I no longer face the problem, I can ponder it without a rise in my blood pressure.

I've worked with some shady individuals in this business, to be sure.  I'm all about forgiveness and fresh-starts (ask my wife), but in business sometimes you have to go by the numbers.  If someone has displayed a serious lack of judgment at some point in their life, the chances are better that they will do so again.  If they've done so enough times that the law actually caught up with them, there's a distinct possibility that it's become a habit.

I think I've written before about the most interesting of these examples, a driver who walked in one day claiming he'd been driving tow trucks in Australia for ten years and impressed my boss so much that he hired him immediately.  He was a crafty one--got in the truck and starting towing cars like he'd been doing it for 20 years.  Thing is, he hadn't ever driven a tow truck, and he was using the name and identity of a deceased person to elude warrants for Workers' Compensation fraud and writing some bad checks.  They nailed him when he applied for a Social Security card.

Sometime after 9/11, the County Sheriff's office started running background checks on our new and prospective employees, and this turned out to be a very valuable recruitment tool for us.  One of the Deputies would give me a call if there was anything unusual, and it kept us from hiring people who'd done time for drug offenses, sexual crimes, and armed robbery.  Some of these people interviewed quite well.  Some were related or married to other employees we already had.

One disturbing thing about this new policy was when it was first instituted and they ran the background checks on our current employees.  A few of them, it turned out, had quite interesting records, including a dispatcher with multiple drunk-driving convictions, and a bookkeeper who'd been convicted of stealing money from his former employer.  This was kind of tricky to deal with, but it was certainly valuable information.

I suppose we're not far away from the day when we do an eye scan or wave our hand over something and up will pop our criminal background, family history, credit rating, life expectancy, and favorite drink.  I'm ready.  I have nothing to hide. It will be interesting for me as well, since I don't remember a lot of things I've done.

One of the most interesting episodes from the County Sheriff background check program was the one they didn't give us the heads-up on.  After an employee passed the background check and was hired by us, within 30 days they had to go to the County facility and get a special photo ID, which they had to carry with them while working and present to any County employee upon request.  One driver I hired passed the background check, and started dragging his heels about getting the ID.  After a few weeks, the Deputy in charge of the program called and asked about this driver.  I assured him that it was simply a matter of convenience and reminded the driver that his employment hinged on this issue.  He kept coming up with excuses.  After the 30 days had passed, I gave him one last chance and restricted him from running any County calls.  A few days later, the Deputy called me and admitted that he had misled us.  The employee was wanted on open warrants in another state, for a variety of fraud-related activities.  They asked when his next scheduled shift started, and they were waiting for him when he arrived.  They had apparently wanted him to simply stroll into their facility to get his photo ID, where they would slap the scuffs on him (why are cuffs always "slapped").  My question: when the employee became aware that the County REALLY wanted to see him in person and kept calling me to ask when he would be in, wouldn't you get the idea that the jig was up?  My other question: didn't the Deputy care about the possibility of this wanted felon victimizing our business or our employees?  Talk about a liability issue.  I hate to say it, but I think it came down to an issue of territory--our main office was in downtown Portland, so the bust had to be carried out by the Portland PD, but if the employee went to the County facility, the County Sheriff would get to make the nab.

Of course, I made sure I was at work when the bust went down, just in case I needed to engage in the mayhem, and the employee cursed me up and down for my betrayal, claiming that the charges were trumped-up.  Someone had stolen his identity, he claimed, and had gone on a crime spree, and he had been on-the-lam for months trying to clear his name, not unlike Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, or Sir Charles Litton in Return of the Pink Panther.

It's these kinds of dramas that add a little spice to the workday, don't you think?

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

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Thinking today about mishaps.  Back in the eighties, the company I worked for had 3 Vulcan Super Cradles and 1 of the new Vulcan Scoop Wheellifts.  It was a joy to drive that Scoop truck, especially after hooking up cars on a Super Cradle.  One of the novelties at the time was the idea of the "strapless" wheellift, which is how the Scoops work, of course.  There was a lot of skepticism on the crew, and especially at rival companies.  My good friend Len, who was usually assigned to that truck, was fond of claiming that you could NOT lose a car out of that wheellift, even with no straps.  This was in the days before safety chains were fashionable.  Of course, if you go around making claims like that, the gods are going to make you the butt of a joke.  One evening Len took an exit off I5 south of Portland, pulled up to the light at the top of the exit, saw no traffic, and made a quick right turn.  When he did, the car jumped out of the scoops and rolled down into the bushes between the exit ramp and the freeway.  Fortunately no more harm that tracks through the landscaping occurred.  The car stopped before rolling into the freeway.  Len stopped, composed himself, cleaned up any mess that had taken place in the cab, and winched the car back up to the exit ramp.  He didn't talk as much smack about the "strapless" wheellift after that.

Another driver I worked with at the same company pulled into one of our service stations one afternoon with a customer vehicle on the hook and took a rather circuitous route through the parking lot and began to unhook the car in a remote corner of the station property.  This guy was normally a very jovial and talkative guy.  Usually he would arrive at a destination and, if he hadn't talked to someone in 10 minutes or so, he'd get out and gab for a half-hour before someone told him to get back to work.  This day he immediately began hurriedly unhooking the car.  The station manager thought maybe something was up, so we wandered over and casually inspected the vehicle.  On the passenger-side of the tow truck and the towed vehicle, there was dirt and vegetation, even some berry vines hanging.  There was also a huge dent in the trunk lid of the towed vehicle.  When questioned, the driver nervously blurted out the "it was like that when I got there" excuse.  After about eight seconds of intense interrogation, he caved and admitted the truth.  He had been in-tow, paying little attention to the traffic ahead, which was at a stop.  When he noticed this, it was too late to stop, so he veered into the ditch, where the push bumper of the tow truck struck a traffic sign of some sort, which flew up into the air and came down on the trunk lid of the towed vehicle.  He managed to get back onto the road, having cleared some of the brush out of the ditch.

In the "one that almost got away" category, my brother-in-law was asked to train a new driver how to run a sling truck.  This was back in the seventies.  The trainee was adamant that he already knew how, had been running a sling for years.  After some discussion, my brother-in-law gave up and headed out on his first call.  The new driver was given his own call soon afterward.  He completed the tow, a full-size van, and was sent on another.  After he was on this call for awhile, he radioed my brother-in-law to ask for some help.  When my brother-in-law arrived, the new driver said, "When I put the sling under the car and lift up, it just slides off."  My brother-in-law gave him a funny look and asked him if he'd tried using the j-hooks and chains WITH the sling.  He hadn't.  So the training that was supposed to have happened earlier that morning began at that point.  After the new driver had properly hooked up the vehicle, my brother-in-law remembered that the new driver had ALREADY TOWED A VEHICLE.  He asked the new driver how the other vehicle had stayed on the sling.  The full-size van had a trailer hitch, which caught on the lower bar of the sling and stayed on there for the duration of the tow.  Yikes!

Another Tow Sling disaster happened to a coworker of mine who was driving a light-duty wheellift with a tow sling.  For the first call of the day, he was dispatched to tow a brand-new BMW.  When he got to the car, he lowered the wheellift and slickly backed up to the front of the vehicle, coming to a quick stop as the wheellift closed to within inches of the BMW's tires.  Problem was, he had forgotten to secure the tow sling properly, which was flopped up to stay out of the way, and with the quick stop it flopped DOWN, right on the hood of the BMW.  We named the maneuver the McCain Technique, after the driver who inadvertently introduced it.

Unfortunately, for insurance companies everywhere, I could go on with these stories for days.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Going through my old journals the other day, from when I was a driver, I found a page-long gripe about fleet maintenance.  Hopefully I'm not going to alienate too many shop managers out there, but it struck me funny to read it, so I'm going to include some of it here:

"Every day I fill out a pre-trip checklist, on which I list problems or repairs needed, like, 'RDS brake locks at crucial moments--please install drag chute.'  My boss looks at the list every day and tosses it, sometimes saying to me, 'You don't have to write the same thing every day.  Just write a problem down once, and it'll get taken care of eventually.'  Right.  And monkeys might (you know what).  Now I just write, 'Please refer to 3-17, 3-21, 3-22, 3-23, 3-25, 3-30, and 4-1 lists for previously listed problems.'  Each one of those lists has at least one new repair needed, including the locking brake and other insignificant trifles like inexplicable loss of power and random pulling to the left or right while braking and the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light coming on and coolant and oil and power steering fluid leaks."  I think I was irritated when I wrote that.

I never engaged in truck repairs unless I had to.  The companies I worked for usually didn't want the drivers doing too much, because most of us knew only enough to break something worse.  I remember once when my boss hired a "Security Officer" to spy on the employees, and it was someone I knew, who immediately blew his cover by frightening me near to death on a late spooky night because he thought it would be funny.  Afterwards he thought the Ford Diesel I was driving "didn't sound right," so he started messing with the fuel/water mixture control or some such thing, and then it REALLY didn't sound right.  I had to explain to my boss that I let the yo-yo he hired to spy on us do an in-lot repair, which didn't go over well.  For either of us.

After I got into management, I became a little more self-sufficient, once even changing a broken PTO belt myself on a weekend.  There are times when the back-up truck is so frightening that you'll go to great lengths to get your regular truck back on the road.  Another time I got a screw in a front tire of my truck, and I was able to slow down the leak by screwing it in all the way.  I returned to the lot and was bemoaning the development to our graveyard-shift dispatcher, who also happened to be a supreme computer geek, designing websites, creating a lien package program out of market software, and developing a complete DOS-based dispatching/accounting/auction software program for our company (better than any market program I've seen since).  He said, "I can show you how to plug the tire."  Trust me, this seemed suspicious.  The guy had an extra long fingernail on each pinky, so you wouldn't think he could plug a tire.  Turns out he had watched one of the graveyard-shift drivers do it a few times, so we found the fixins in the mechanic's cage and he talked me through it.  Employees who pay attention are priceless.

The best tow truck mechanics, in my experience, are the ones who get emotional and start throwing heavy sharp things when things aren't going their way, and when you get your truck back from them, you get a 3-part seminar on where to look for weld cracks on your dollie frames and crossrails.  Admirable to try to teach preventive maintenance to the commission drivers, who are then going to run the equipment into the ground and whine non-stop while the truck is down.

Takes all types.  Makes life richer.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

When you go to one of the Tow Shows, they usually have some kind of recovery display--a truck on its top, and a big rig pulls it back onto its wheels.  A good way to show off the equipment, but I can't imagine how violence does not somehow erupt.  You can be out in the woods somewhere, miles from nowhere, doing a recovery, and some yahoo will walk up and tell you what you're doing wrong.  THAT is the REAL miracle of the Tow Show recovery displays.  You've got hundreds of "experts" walking around, many of them with a beer in hand, you've got a major city street blocked off, and somehow a fistfight (or worse) does not break out in the middle of the gig.  You would think that everyone and their dog would be hollering out advice, telling the guy next to them how they did the same thing with a 2-ton snatch block, some twine, and a golf cart.

The most improbable recovery I was a part of was early in my towing career, at an urban impound company that had 2 pickup-bed sling trucks with Holmes 220 Electric units in the back.  Unfortunately, there were forested areas within the city and county limits, so occasionally we got some nasty recovery just a few miles from the urban center.  Usually we'd sent one of the medium-duty or heavy-duty wreckers up, but one day we got a Stolen Recovery that someone had driven out a spur road along some power lines and then pushed over the edge down about a hundred feet into the clearcut cleared for the power lines.  The spur road was too narrow and overgrown for the medium-duty, so my boss (my brother-in-law, at the time) and I headed up there with one of the Holmes 220s.

We had enough cable, but the incline was very steep, so that electric winch was having a lot of trouble pulling the half-ton pickup with oversize tires back up the hill.  My brother-in-law went down the hill and stayed with the truck, because one of the main problems we were having was with stumps.  They were all over the place, and tying the steering off wasn't working well.  We needed to maneuver the truck around and through the stumps.  So he would turn the steering wheel of the truck as needed while I ran the winch.  It was very slow going.  I'd have to rev the motor on the wrecker to get enough pulling power to move the pickup at all.

Finally, we got the pickup wedged between two stumps and my brother-in-law couldn't get the steering wheel to turn the way he wanted.  He pulled so hard on it that he broke the steering.  Now we were in real trouble.  No way to control the steering of the pickup as we winched it up the hill.  We called for a second truck.  There was a dual-winch Holmes 440 in the fleet, and we asked for that, but instead they sent the other 220.  My brother-in-law called the driver on the radio and asked him to bring a 6-pack.  It was a hot day, and we'd been up there about 2 hours already.  When the driver showed up with Pepsi, I thought my brother-in-law was going to punch him.

While we were waiting for the second truck, he had gone back down the hill and chopped most of one of the stumps out of the way with a Dollie Activator Bar.  Unbelievable.

We lined the two wreckers up side-by-side, ran both cables to the pickup, and alternately ran the winches.  The first truck was having real trouble, we had worked it so hard that when it died, the battery was dead, and we had to jump-start it with the other truck.  Both winches were smoking.  We would pull one truck, throttled up, until the front wheels came about 4 feet off the ground, then we'd pull with the other one till the first one went down and that one went up.  Then a police officer drove his cruiser down to see how we were doing and got stuck trying to back out.  We really didn't want to unhook either truck, so my brother-in-law asked if he could try getting it unstuck.  The officer was very reluctant, and I think he acquiesced simply to prove my brother-in-law couldn't get it out.  The road went down a ridge, so rather than trying to get turned around, my brother-in-law just gunned it downhill to get out of the muddy spot, and then took off down the road, which we had no idea where it went or what was down there.  The officer looked very concerned.  A few minutes later he came back up the road, fishtailing and throwing mud everywhere, right past us and up to the main road.  The officer started hiking up the muddy trail.

It was 6 hours from start to finish to get that pickup out and to the main road.   Other than the broken steering, it wasn't too much the worse for wear.  The wreckers looked a lot worse, mud everywhere, inside and out, cables and chains in disarray.  Those old V8 gas motors had worked extremely hard, and how those electric winches kept working through that much stress and extreme overuse is beyond me.  Later that night, at my sister and brother-in-law's house, we enjoyed the 6-pack of our choice.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Municipal Contracts are a part of our business, let's face it.  Here in Portland we have a Towing Coordinator whose name is Marian Gaylord, and Marian has been running the show here for at least 20 years.  She has completely revamped the system, including ushering in a new Municipal Contract for City Towers that many think is the bane of their existence.  Hopefully they realize that it keeps unprofessional, fly-by-night outfits from qualifying for a spot on the tow rotation.

I recently went to a company meeting for one of our sister companies, and the subject of Marian Gaylord came up, because one of the Tow Company Managers deals directly with her on formal complaints she issues on behalf of the Agencies or citizens.  There was some discussion about why there were so many complaints, and what to do about them.  This Manager told the GM, his boss, "I'm not trying to be condescending, but you don't have a clue."

I thought, that's pretty good for not trying.

It was funny.  That's partly why I mention it.  But I also mention it because there are probably many of you out there who are frustrated at dealing with Municipal Agencies who "don't have a clue" about the towing industry and, whether they are trying to or not, are making your business life difficult.  At a company where I managed and dealt directly with Marian, we had 3 Municipal Contracts and also had a good market share of Private Property Impounds, which were also regulated to an extent.  When I received a formal complaint from Marian, I usually followed this procedure:
1. Investigate the complaint internally to get all of the facts.
2. Send back a written response within the given timeframe (we usually had a few weeks to respond, I think), either agreeing to the terms requested (usually payment of a fine or reimbursement to the vehicle owner), or requesting a different resolution.
3. Institute or revisit an internal procedure with our staff to attempt to prevent another similar complaint.

My written responses all had a very similar format.  In fact, they were basically form letters that I changed the particulars for each time.  I'm sure Marian caught onto this early on, but she never seemed bugged by it, and I think that was partly because the standard introduction and conclusion were overly polite.  In the introduction, I always included the statement, "We have reviewed this complaint and all applicable policies and procedures with our staff."  This told her we were taking it seriously, and you know what?  It was true.  We DID always review complaints and all applicable policies and procedures with our staff.  The intro also always included this statement, "Thank you for the opportunity to resolve this in an informal manner."  This showed Marian that we were actually grateful to get the complaint.  And it was also genuine and true.  A complaint letter and maybe payment of a small fine was better than a lawsuit, or interruption or cancellation of our Contract, and it was certainly a more informal resolution.

The middle of the letter included information that I felt was pertinent to the complaint, so that was the part I had to actually write every time.  I dealt only in facts, not in emotions or speculation.  I didn't write anything that I "thought" was true and claim it was true.  If it was a "he said/she said" situation, I would write that "the driver reports that..." or "the dispatcher reports that...."  I would leave it to Marian to interpret which account was most accurate.

The conclusion was either acceptance of the terms of the complaint or a request for a different resolution.  Acceptance was, "Enclosed is a check for $xx.xx for penalty payment.  We apologize for any inconvenience caused to the vehicle owner and/or the Agency, and we are taking steps to prevent this problem from recurring."  A request was simply asking for the penalty to be waived or reduced.  Her complaint letters always left that option open, and if she still felt a penalty was warranted, there would be a follow-up final resolution letter.

If I thought that the penalty or reimbursement was at all warranted, I almost always accepted the resolution, no questions asked.  You know what I found as a result?  If I did ask for a waiver or reduction, I almost always received it, or at least a partial reduction.

Then there was the most important part of the whole procedure, making sure we didn't screw up again.  We would go over the complaint with our staff--drivers, dispatchers, whoever was affected--and we would either figure out a new procedure to prevent the problem from happening again, or we would review the old procedure already in place that should have prevented the problem from happening in the first place.  Here's the deal: you can't prevent everything bad from happening.  Supposedly you have to tell a kid something 30 times before they completely understand it.  With an adult, it's probably twice that.  Why do you think they're called Drill Sergeants?  You have to drill things into your employees.  Don't fight it.  Just accept it, and do it.

If I saw Marian in person, I always tried to make her laugh--tell a joke or comment on something that I thought was funny.  I enjoyed working with her, and if I disagreed with her decisions, I was respectful.  In fact, I was somewhat mystified by some of the negative reports I heard from other tow companies about dealing with Marian.  Now, you might call all of this "buttering up" or "greasing the wheel."  Whatever.  I thought this was the most productive way to deal with a Municipal Agency, and I think the results bore that out.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

One of my former drivers called me a few weeks ago to tell me he was moving, and he asked me to write a letter-of-reference for him, which I did happily.  I was his supervisor for 5 years, and he was one of these guys who always stepped up when something extra needed to be done, always working extra shifts, running on-call from home, coming in early, staying late.  If we’re lucky, we all have drivers like this.  It's easy to take these people for granted, especially once we get used to them doing this for us.  We have to remember to say Thank You once in awhile, and usually that recognition means as much, if not more, than the extra money they earn by working extra.

It reminded me of one of this driver's quirks, and if he's reading this, hopefully he can laugh along with us as I tell you about it.  One of his pet phrases was, "It's a Catch-20."  Now, most of us know that the correct phrase is "Catch-22," from the Joseph Heller novel about a WWII fighter pilot who tries to get out of the service by claiming he's crazy, but the military reasons that no sane person would want to stay in the military flying missions, so because he wants out, he's not crazy.  So he can't win either way, which is what we now call a "Catch-22."  But this driver always said "Catch-20," and it was a point of humor for those of us who worked with him.  I'm sure someone corrected him at some point, but he kept saying "Catch-20."

At some point during my management time I heard that if you want to change or establish a habit, you have to do some new behavior for 21 days.  I don't know if it's true, but it made sense to me, and I was having trouble helping my drivers establish new habits, or changing old ones, so I decided to try the 21-day program.  The way it worked was this: say your drivers were having trouble remembering to lock and secure impounded vehicles in the storage lot.  I would go out every morning and check all the vehicles.  If anything was unlocked or unsecured, I would make a note of which driver towed it in, ask around to make sure that no one else opened it up to move it after it was towed in, and then I would give the driver an assignment.  For the next 21 work days, he or she would be responsible for checking ALL of the vehicles in the storage lot at some point during their shift, and if they found anything unlocked or unsecured, they would lock and secure the vehicle, and report it to me.

This way, I had other people checking the vehicles besides me, and reporting the problems, and most important, locking and securing the vehicles.  If the driver failed to do this successfully during their 21-day sentence, the sequence would RE-START.  If I found a vehicle unlocked or unsecured, and someone was in the middle of their 21-day sentence, and I could determine that the vehicle was in the lot for their entire previous shift, then the driver who towed the car in would start a 21-day sentence, PLUS the driver who was in the middle of their sentence would get to start over.

This became almost comical (for me), as I had multiple drivers out checking cars at all times of the day and night, and some of them went on and on for weeks on end, because they couldn't put together 21 work days in a row.  The look on a driver's face when I told him his 21 days was starting over, as he suddenly remembered what he forgot to do the day before, was p-r-i-c-e-l-e-s-s.

You could do it for other things to, like pre-trip inspections, for instance.  If they didn't do their pre-trip inspection one day, then they would be assigned to pre-trip at least one additional truck other than their own for the next 21 work days.  Then you'd have drivers checking trucks that they didn't normally check, which of course would turn up maintenance issues that the assigned drivers weren't reporting because they weren't really doing their own pre-trips thoroughly or properly.  Then they'd start on their own 21-day cycle.

It was all so much fun.  I don't know if it worked, but it was one of those things that the veteran drivers would tell the new drivers about during their training, as if they were recounting tortures in a Turkish prison, thereby striking fear in the hearts of the newbies as they started to wonder about what this nice guy who hired them was really all about if he could come up with something so cruel and relentless.  As a manager, you KNOW something has value if it can do THAT.

When I first laid out the program at an Employee Meeting, I explained how it would work, which produced many groans and threats of legal action, then I told them, "We're calling it the Catch-21 Program."  This was extremely funny to a handful of employees who knew about the Catch-20/Catch-22 discrepancy, and they had great difficulty silencing their laughter.  Mr. Catch-20, who was listening intently, because he was someone who was very meticulous about his work and didn't much like people getting away with not being meticulous, said, "That's a great idea!"

I smiled. "I knew you'd like it," I told him.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/towpartsnow

At a customer's facility today, looking at a wrecked tow truck, and a gaze at the truck's interior reminded me of why I got out of managing tow truck drivers.  You would think that if you spend 8-18 hours a day in your workspace, you would want that workspace to look, feel, and smell as good as possible.  Some drivers take great pride in their assigned truck, keeping the outside and inside clean and professional-looking.  Some drivers... don't.  A good way to know how someone is going to take care of your equipment is to take a look at their personal vehicle.  Doing that sometimes made me cry.

At one point in my managing days, I resorted to monthly truck inspections.  At first, I scheduled them and told the driver when I was going to do the inspection.  This worked most of the time.  For at least one day every month, that truck was in good shape.  After several months, I made the inspections surprise inspections.  Wow, you've never heard such grumbling.  Inspection scores were figured into performance evaluations, so they were sensitive to this new concept of work performance actually having a direct effect on their compensation.  Crazy idea, I know.

 There was a good deal of competition between drivers to see who could get the highest score, or even a perfect score.  I think I only gave out one perfect score during the program, which lasted a year or so.  It was hard to sustain, doing 14 surprise inspections per month, especially in winter. 

My goal with tow truck cleanliness was not a perfect score on a surprise inspection, but just a general professional look and smell, and a tidiness, every day.  If you wouldn't want your mom to get in that truck, then that was a problem, because a lot of customers are someone's mom.  I don’t need to do the white-glove test.  I don’t need to feel Armor-All on the seat.  Those hard-to-reach spots between the bed and the cab don’t need to be polished, but every once in awhile you have to finish off an old wash mitt by reaching in there to wipe away the outer layer of grime.

 You have to appreciate the scars and marks that accumulate on a piece of equipment that’s been in circulation a long time.  I’m not talking about broken windshields or crushed fenders, but there really shouldn’t be new paint on your wheellift.  The bed and butt-plate should have a few scratches.  What you want are trucks that work, in more than one sense of the word.  And a truck like that deserves respect.  It can get dirty, muddy, whatever.  But when the day is done, it needs a little love.

 One of the tricky parts of getting your drivers to take care of their equipment is the simple dichotomy that applies to all aspects of your business.  They don’t own the truck. You do.  They don’t own the office space they’re working in, or the dollar passing through their hands from your customer to you.  If they don’t own it, they won’t care as much about it as you do.  Plain and simple.  The best thing you can do, the only thing you can do… is to put it in their interest.  What’s the definition of “put it in their interest?”  Could be a lot of things:  incentives, intimidation, freedom.  That’s your job:  to figure out what interests each one of your employees.  That’s one reason why no one said it would be easy.  And accept that your employee will not care as much as your truck, your money, your business as you do.  Why should they?

Vehicle owners can be kind of funny about tow damage complaints, especially owners of impounded vehicles.  I had one man insist we damaged the tires and suspension of his vehicle by towing it on the front wheels (it was a rear-wheel drive) with the steering locked.  He claimed it caused "dragging" of the tires as the vehicle went around corners, damaging the tread due to the increased friction causing by wheels in a straight position going around a corner.  I pointed out 2 things to him:
1. If the steering is not locked, that creates a major problem that will lead to the friction of cars bouncing off each other.
2. The rear wheels on his car are always straight, and probably went around corners every now and then.  What was the sporadic but frequent "friction" doing to those tires?
He wasn't buying any of it.  He claimed his attorney would be in touch, and spun his rear tires on the way out of the lot.

I had another woman claim that towing a car backward with the front tires on the ground would cause "loosening" of the suspension that would lead to pieces falling off soon after she left our property.  Her brother-in-law, who owned a body shop, had told her that would happen.  I think she had heard something about the old "knock-off" wheels at some point.  I asked her how she dared to back her car into parking spaces, or out of a driveway.  She thought about it a moment and said the damage could only happen when the rear wheels were off the ground, because ALL of the weight of the vehicle was on the front wheels at that point.  A new towing technique, I guess:  Levitation.  I gave her a written guarantee that her suspension would not spontaneously fall apart for at least the next 1000 miles, with the exclusion of front-wheel-only driving.

Possibly one of the craziest claims was from a man who insisted we had damaged his door locks while unlocking his car to impound it for the police.  He wouldn't let me get a word in to explain.  How did we tow the car when it was in gear?  Didn't we get in the car to get it out of gear?  Did I know that those kind of vehicles were lockout-proof, and that ANY attempt to unlock them would result in damage?  That was one of the reasons he had bought that model--it was impenetrable to lockout attempts.  This was all BEFORE he paid his bill and inspected his car.  After several attempts to explain to him how his vehicle was towed, I just gave up and let him rant.  Finally, he paid his bill, and I handed him his receipt... AND his keys.  It was a DUI tow, and he didn't "remember" that the police had given us the keys.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com

 

I have had many Dollie Adventure in my time behind the wheel of a tow truck.  On one Sunday, I was sent out to impound an old Datsun 510, and when I got there I found that it had no wheels.  Other than it being an annoyance, it wasn’t  a terribly big deal, because I had towed many vehicles without wheels with a wrecker and dollies by that point in my career. Usually I would strap or chain the vehicle to the dollie, but it was a Sunday afternoon, so the traffic was light, and I was being lazy, so I centered  the Datsun on the dollie and headed for the impound lot (securing the vehicle  to the dollie prevents the load from moving in the dollie, which can happen with steel wheels on steel dollie crossrails). 

At that time, we had fixed-length steel crossrails on our trucks, which turned out to be important, as you will see. I got onto I-84 about 5 miles east of downtown Portland, and the 58th Avenue onramp went under the freeway and made a hard left just outside of the short tunnel.  I was going slow, but not slow enough apparently, because when I made the turn, the Datsun slid on the crossrails all the way to the right and slammed against the dollie frame.  The two dollie tires on the left came up off the ground about 2” and then rested back
onto the pavement.  I swallowed hard to get my heart out of my throat, and waited for the crossrails to fall out of the rail pockets.  I knew that only the weight of the car keeps the crossrails in the rail pockets, and since one side was temporarily hovering, even pulling the dollie tires up into midair, we were now defying the laws of science.  I was on the freeway now, with no emergency lane to work with, so I kept
going cautiously.  The left dollie tires were now sticking out about three feet past the wrecker bed, but everything held together, so I kept
  going.

If the crossrails had been telescoping crossrails, I think the Datsun’s suspension would not have slid so far or so easily, because the fixed-length crossrails are perfectly smooth.   As I approached the split to I-5, I remembered that the Steel Bridge offramp had nice right-turn angle to it, so I could correct the positioning of the Datsun on the dollie by swinging hard into the turn. These are the kinds of ideas that come into you head when you’re 25 years old, as I was at the time.

I tried the maneuver, but the exact reverse of the first shift took place, with the Datsun sliding all the way to the left, slamming against the left dollie frame, and the right dollie tires lifting off the ground and then settling.  Now the dollies were tracking three feet to the right of the wrecker bed. I was off the freeway now, so I could have stopped to make adjustments and maybe splash some water in my face,
but I was also close to the impound lot, so I just kept going.

When I got to the lot, I pulled in, put the truck in park, stepped out of the truck, and the rear crossrail fell out of both dollie frames and went “clink” as it hit the pavement.  Both ends had apparently been sitting on the “ledge,” waiting to pop out and make the entire dollie fly apart, but for some reason, neither end decided to do that.  The rest of the dollie stayed intact, with the wheelless Datsun still sitting on the front
crossrail.

I think I used up a whole lot of good luck that day, probably way more than an abandoned Datsun 510 with no wheels warranted.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
 www.TowPartsNow.com