TowingBossPro Blog — Running a Towing Business

Hiring Your First Dispatcher or Office Person in a Towing Business

For a long time, the owner is the dispatcher. He takes calls while driving, assigns trucks from the cab, and does invoices at night. At some point, that stops working. Calls get missed, invoices pile up, and the owner is too busy answering the phone to do the things only the owner can do.

Hiring your first dispatcher or office person is a big step. It is often the hire that changes the owner's job the most.

Signs You Need Office Help

Good communication, covered in Customer Communication That Sets Your Towing Business Apart, takes time, and that time has to come from somewhere. Some signs you need office help: you are missing calls because you are on a hook. Invoices go out days late. You spend your evenings on paperwork. Accounts complain they cannot reach you. You cannot take a day off without the business falling apart.

If several of those sound familiar, an office person will probably pay for themselves in captured calls and faster billing alone.

Some owners hire too late because they think of office help as overhead. But a dispatcher who catches calls you would have missed and gets invoices out faster is not overhead. It is a direct boost to what the company brings in.

Define the Role

Decide what the job is before you hire. A dispatcher answers calls, enters them, and assigns them to trucks. An office person might also handle invoicing, payment follow-ups, customer questions, and account communication. In a small company, one person often does both.

Write down what they will do every day. That makes hiring easier and gives the new person a clear picture of the job.

Decide the hours too. Do you need someone during the day while you drive, or nights and weekends when calls are busiest? Some companies start with a part-time dispatcher for the busiest shifts and expand as the business grows.

What to Look For

A good dispatcher is calm under pressure, organized, and good on the phone. They need to stay friendly with a stressed caller while also juggling three other calls and watching the trucks. Experience in dispatch or a busy front desk helps.

They do not need to know towing at first, but they need to learn quickly. A sense of local geography helps a lot. Someone who knows the area can estimate drive times and spot which truck is closest without thinking about it.

Consider having candidates take a few practice calls during the interview. Play an upset customer, a confused caller, and an account with an urgent request. How they handle those tells you far more than a resume.

Train Them on the System

Your dispatcher will live in the software, so train them well. Show them the Waiting List, where incoming calls land on a live map. Show them how to enter calls with the pickup and drop-off addresses and vehicle details. Show them how to circle calls on the map or select them and assign them to a driver and truck in one step. Show them the dispatch board by truck and day.

Then walk through the office side: invoicing, card on file, online payments, payment follow-ups, and two-way texting with customers. Have them shadow you for a few days before taking over.

Set Up the Right Access

Role-based users let you give the dispatcher the access they need without handing over everything. Because TowingBossPro is never billed per user, adding an office person does not change your monthly bill.

Decide what the dispatcher should be able to see and change, and what stays with you, like certain reports or settings.

As the office grows, you may add more people with different roles: a second dispatcher, someone focused on billing, someone handling accounts. Role-based users let each person see what they need, and the flat pricing means adding them never raises the bill.

Let Them Take Over

Once your dispatcher is trained, step back. Let them run the board. If you keep answering the phone and assigning trucks yourself, they will never really own the job, and you will never get your time back.

Check in on how things are going, look at the numbers in your weekly review, and give feedback. But let them do the job. That frees you to do the work only an owner can do, which is the subject of the next guide. More on the full system is on the towing business software page.

Expect mistakes in the first few weeks. A dispatcher will occasionally send the wrong truck or misjudge a wait time. Correct it calmly and explain your reasoning. Most of what you know about dispatch came from years of doing it, and they will get there faster with patient feedback.