TowingBossPro Blog — Running a Towing Business

When to Add a Second Truck to Your Towing Business

The second truck is the biggest step most towing companies ever take. It doubles your capacity, but it also doubles a lot of your costs, and it changes your job from driving to managing. Get the timing right and it is the move that turns a one-man operation into a real company. Get it wrong and you end up with a truck payment and not enough calls to cover it.

There is no perfect moment, but there are clear signs, and there are things you can do to make the second truck pay from the first week.

The Signs You Are Turning Away Work

Once you are settled into one system, as covered in Switching Towing Business Software Without Missing a Call, you can actually see the signs instead of guessing. The biggest one is calls you could not take. If you are telling customers it will be two hours because you are on another hook, some of them are calling someone else.

Start tracking those. Every call you turn down or lose to wait time is money the second truck would have made. If you are losing several a week, especially during the same busy hours, you have a capacity problem, not a demand problem.

Other signs: you are running calls back to back all day with no slack, you are skipping roadside calls because a tow is waiting, or an account has asked if you can handle more of their work and you hesitated.

Check the Numbers Before the Truck

A second truck needs to pay its own way. Before you buy, look at what one truck brings in per week and what it costs to run, including fuel, insurance, maintenance and the payment. Then estimate how many extra calls a second truck would actually get.

Reports help here. If you can see revenue by category and by week, you can see whether the overflow is in light-duty tows, roadside, transports, or something else. That tells you what kind of truck to add. A second light-duty wheel-lift is a very different investment from a rollback or a heavy wrecker.

Insurance, licensing and permit requirements for a second truck vary a lot by area, so check your local requirements and talk to your agent before you commit.

Driver First, Truck Second

The truck is easy to find. A good driver is not. Many owners buy the truck and then scramble for someone to put in it, which leads to bad hires made in a hurry.

Start looking for the driver before the truck arrives. The guides on hiring and onboarding drivers later in this series cover what to look for. If you can, have the new driver ride along on your truck for a while first so he learns your customers, your accounts and how you want things done.

Set Up Dispatch for Two Trucks Before Day One

With one truck, dispatch is just you deciding what to do next. With two, someone has to decide which truck takes which call, and that decision happens dozens of times a day.

In TowingBossPro the dispatch board is laid out by truck and by day. Incoming calls land on the Waiting List shown on a live map, and you can circle nearby calls or select them and assign them to a driver and truck in one step. Set up both trucks and both drivers before the second truck goes out, so the first day is about driving, not learning software.

Start the Second Truck on the Easier Work

Do not send a brand-new driver on the hardest calls. Start the second truck on light-duty tows, roadside and transports, and keep accidents, recoveries and anything tricky on your truck until the new driver has proven himself.

Categories make this easy to manage. When calls come in tagged as Light-Duty Tows, Roadside, Transports, or Accident and Recovery, you can see at a glance which ones should go to which truck.

It also helps to decide how the two trucks will split the day before it starts. Some companies give the second truck a set area. Others let it float and pick up whatever is closest. Either works, as long as everyone knows the plan and the dispatcher can see both trucks on the same board.

Measure the First 90 Days

Give the second truck about three months before you judge it. Track how many calls it runs, what it brings in, and whether you stopped turning work away. Check whether average response time went down, because faster arrival is often what wins repeat business and accounts.

If the numbers work, you have the foundation for a third truck. If not, you will know exactly why. Either way, the next guide covers how to actually run two trucks day to day. For the bigger picture, see the towing business software page.