TowingBossPro Blog — Running a Towing Business

A Storm and Bad-Weather Plan for Your Towing Business

Bad weather is the busiest time for most tow companies, and the most chaotic. An ice storm or a flash flood can bring more calls in a few hours than you normally see in a week. Cars in ditches, fender benders everywhere, dead batteries in the cold, vehicles stuck in water. The phone does not stop.

Storms are where a lot of money is made and a lot is lost. The companies that do well are the ones that planned before the weather hit.

Plan Before the Forecast Turns

After adding service lines like impound and storage, covered in Adding Impound and Storage to Your Towing Business, you have more ways to make money in a storm, and more ways for things to fall apart. The time to plan is in the calm months, not when the forecast turns.

Write down a simple storm plan. Who is on call? Which trucks go out first? Who answers the phone? What are your storm rates, if any? Which calls take priority? Where do towed vehicles go when the yard fills up? Having answers ready saves you from deciding everything at 3 a.m.

Review the plan after every major storm. What worked? What broke? Where did calls get lost? Update the plan while it is fresh. Each storm makes the next one go smoother if you take the time to learn from it.

Staff Up Before You Need It

When a storm is forecast, line up your drivers ahead of time. Confirm who is available, make sure trucks are fueled and maintained, and check equipment like chains, salt and recovery gear.

Phone coverage matters just as much as drivers. If you are driving, someone else needs to take calls. A family member, a part-time helper, or a dispatcher you call in for storm days. Because TowingBossPro is never billed per user, you can give a storm-day helper their own login without adding to your bill.

Triage the Calls

In a storm, not every call is equal. A car blocking a lane or a vehicle in water may be more urgent than a car in a parking lot with a dead battery. Decide your priorities ahead of time, and stick to them.

Categories help with triage. Calls tagged Accident and Recovery, Light-Duty Tows, Roadside, or Heavy-Duty Tows show up on the Waiting List map, so you can see what kind of work is where. Let callers know honestly how long it will be. A realistic wait time is better than a promise you cannot keep.

Be clear with yourself about what you will not take. In a big storm, some calls are better turned away or referred than accepted and left waiting for hours. Customers will forgive a company that says it cannot get there tonight. They do not forgive one that says an hour and shows up the next morning.

Dispatch in Batches

When calls pile up, dispatching them one at a time is too slow. Look at the map, find clusters of calls near each other, and send a truck to work through them in order.

In TowingBossPro you can circle a group of calls on the Waiting List map or select them and assign them to a driver and truck in one step. Auto-routing puts each truck's calls in a sensible order. Drivers see the calls in order in the app with the pickup, drop-off and vehicle details, so nobody needs to call in for addresses while the phone is already ringing off the hook.

Keep Customers Informed

During a storm, customers are cold, scared and impatient. The biggest source of complaints is not the wait, it is not knowing. An on-the-way text from the driver and an arrival text cut down on angry callbacks. Customers using the customer app can watch a live map of the driver on the way.

If a call has to wait longer than expected, two-way texting lets the office send an update without making a phone call. Fewer status calls means more time to take new calls.

Bill It All After the Storm

After a storm, there is a pile of completed calls, often with incomplete information because everyone was rushing. Do not let them sit. Go through them in the next day or two, make sure every call has its vehicle details and photos, and get invoices out.

Storage fills up fast after a storm. Make sure every vehicle that went into the yard is in the system with its start date so the daily rate is counted. Payment follow-ups help collect from customers who were in no mood to pay on the spot. Handling the rush on regular busy nights is a lot like a small storm, which the next guide covers. More on the full system is on the towing business software page.

Look back at the storm in your reports once things settle. How many calls came in? How many did you run? What did the storm bring in by category? Those numbers make the next storm plan sharper and tell you whether you need more trucks or more phone help.