How to Start a Towing Management Business

Whether it’s the case of breakdowns or illegal parking, a towing truck is responsible for transporting vehicles to repair shops, impound lots, or other locations as required. While some towing management businesses also provide emergency roadside assistance.

Over the last two decades, towing business has been one of the industries with a steady growth curve. According to the 2019 Motor Vehicle Towing Market Research Report, the industry grows by 4.7% every year.

If you’re interested in effectively managing a towing business, it will require a sense of consistency and diligence to successfully run operations and build profitability.

To begin, you first have to select the type of towing service you want to offer:

• Post-accident clean-up: Companies responsible for picking up wrecked and accidental cars.
• Roadside Assistance: Companies providing roadside assistance and towing services to vehicles.
• Oversized Load: Oversized loads exceed the standard weight limits for a truck to transport on a specified road. It includes transporting large construction machines, pre-built homes, containers, and construction equipment.  
• Vehicle Transport: Some towing businesses deal in transporting vehicles over long distances.

After you finalize the type of service, the next step is to create an actionable plan and develop your marketing strategy.

Creating a Business Plan

An efficient plan determines the rate of achieving your business objectives. In the case of a towing management business, it involves identifying the type of towing services you can offer, who will be your target audience, and whether to build an in-house team of drivers or outsourcing the work to a third party. 

It also includes creating an outline of your budget and how much investment you can make for branding, marketing, licensing, and purchasing material equipment.

After that, you will be able to determine your revenue model involving how much you are going to charge for your services.

Building a Successful Towing Management Business Strategy

Your brand is what gives your business a professional identity. Once you’ve finalized your target audience, you should focus on serving them while representing what your business has to offer.

A successful business strategy involves creating a brand persona around your core values with the end goal of connecting with your target customers and building brand loyalty. The process of marketing your towing services depends on whether you want to reach out to end-consumers or businesses. 

Since reliability is a huge factor in the towing industry, no matter if you adopt a B2B or B2C model, you have to be on the top of your game since it’s a time-sensitive industry. 

Hence, managing a towing business is a daunting task when you have to manually call your drivers and fleet vehicle operators, resulting in an inefficient and expensive workflow. Besides, the invoicing process is intransparent and complicated, and you also don’t have a reliable performance overview.

To address these issues, you need efficient Towing Management Software that can provide digital roadside assistance, automate operations like invoicing and billing, provide real-time performance analytics, and ensure full transparency through GPS-based tracking of your vehicles.

Let’s discuss the benefits of a towing management software solution in detail.

Real-time Tracking of Towing Fleet 

With towing dispatch software, you can quickly track vehicles in the field and reach out to the operators as needed. With automated reporting capabilities, you can get detailed data reports without spending hours pulling the information together.

Besides, with GPS-based tracking, you can know where your vehicles are, helping you minimize inefficiencies and reducing theft incidents by criminals. With Geofencing, you can also set up virtual parameters to monitor whenever a vehicle enters or leaves a particular area.

Proof of Delivery 

A towing dispatch software has the proof of delivery feature that establishes acknowledgment between the vehicle towing agent and the customer that the vehicle has been successfully delivered to the required function.

The feature serves dual functions–it tracks the delivery status to customers and managers, and it also lets the driver get a documented approval from customers after the delivery.

Customer Notifications

The towing dispatch software helps you to keep your customers constantly in touch with the help of notifications throughout the process of booking a towing service, the driver reaching the location of the vehicle, and after successfully delivering the vehicle.

The customers are updated through automated SMS, email, and in-app notifications. This improves both customer experience and retention. 

Minimizing the Costs of your Towing Fleet

Towing management software with fleet managing capabilities can reduce overhead costs and improve ROI for your business. Here’s how:

• Avoiding employee timecard errors: Manual entries can result in employee timecard errors and misreported information, resulting in incorrect allowance and payment issues. With automated invoicing and accurate driver scheduling  you get error-free billing of employee work hours, eliminating any discrepancies.
• Providing documented information: An effective fleet management software will provide documented information about driver behaviors that can be pivotal in the event of a lawsuit. 
• Ensuring preventative maintenance: With advanced analytics, you can track the number of miles a vehicle is driven, fuel costs, and breakdown history and create a maintenance record of your vehicles. This allows you to implement a preventative maintenance strategy, which in turn reduces your operational costs. 

Increasing Fleet Efficiency 

One of the biggest benefits of towing dispatch software is that it can help reach your tow trucks to the breakdown location in a limited time. With GPS-based live tracking and route optimization, your towing trucks get the shortest distance to the required location. Besides, you can also check if there are any tow vehicles in the proximity of the emergency, and send them to the location quickly. 

All these factors make your work more efficient and quick, which improves the visibility of your operations, helps you build brand credibility, and saves your business money. 

The NetworkON Advantage

NetworkON offers a comprehensive roadside and towing management business solution with accurate scheduling, efficient utilization of resources, and the capability to manage every process from a single dashboard. 

Service providers in the RSA industry can integrate our software solution and get the benefit of seamlessly handling assignments, tracking your towing vehicles in real-time, and making better decisions with accurate performance metrics. To know how our cloud-based truck dispatch solution can help your towing management business increase its productivity and efficiency, connect at info@networkon.ion or visit our website.

Frequently Asked Questions