I’m Mark Williams. I run Marmik Towing & Transport in Royersford, Pennsylvania: towing and equipment transport across PA, NJ, NY and Maryland.
Like most small carriers I priced by instinct. I knew what the last guy charged and I knew what the customer would wear. What I didn’t know was my own cost per mile, or what an hour of my time actually had to earn once you counted the hours nobody pays for: quoting, chasing invoices, wrenching, deadheading home.
So I sat down with the bills and costed one truck to the penny. Fuel, tires, the repair total for the year, insurance, the payment, plates. What I found was that I’d been quoting under my floor for years, and on some motor club calls I was paying to do the work.
Towbook tells you where the truck is. This tells you whether the job was worth taking.
Dispatch software couldn’t tell me this. It tells you where the truck is and who’s on the call. Nothing in it answers whether the job was worth taking. There’s no published rate for local towing the way there is for long-haul freight, so there was nothing to check against either.
Fleet Floor is the tool I wished I’d had. Every question in it is one I could answer about my own truck from the paper on my desk. It shows the arithmetic, it tells you when it’s guessing, and it never asks for a number an operator doesn’t have.
It’s early. If you run three to fifteen trucks and you’ve ever wondered which of them actually make money, I’d like you to try it and tell me what’s wrong with it.