Why I Stopped Calling Tow Trucks After Breakdowns and What I Do Instead

[Joseph Pinkham]

What is up everyone,

I want to talk about something that changed the way I handle every breakdown situation and saved me a significant amount of money in the process. For the first several years of my trucking career my default response to any roadside problem was to call a tow truck. It was what I knew. It was what everyone around me did. It felt like the responsible thing to do.

Then I started adding up what those tow calls were actually costing me. Not just the towing fee which for a commercial truck is never cheap. But the shop wait times, the rental costs while my truck sat in a queue, the deliveries I missed and the clients I had to explain myself to while my truck sat in a bay waiting for someone to look at it. The real cost of my towing habit was multiple times what showed up on the invoices.

The switch to mobile truck repair changed that math completely. When I started calling SRB Equipment instead of a tow truck I discovered that the vast majority of the breakdowns I had been towing for were completely fixable right where the truck sat. Brakes, tires, electrical issues, air system problems. All of it handled on site by a certified technician who arrived faster than any tow truck ever did and charged less than the tow alone used to cost.