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TOWING & RECOVERY February 2012 Keeping industry pros on their tows FOOTNOTES 3 ® AD Partn tow ers Se VI e P S ag O e 1 R www.trfootnotes.com SPREAD THE WORD! Email your press releases about new or improved equipment and services to the Footnotes editor! bill@trfootnotes.com Where Are Our Future Towers? don’t want to make a commitment. They just don’t care. In many cases it’s easier for them to collect unem-ployment, or work under the table for just enough to get by. If you don’t like how they’re doing, their attitude is Go ahead, fire me. I’d like to be able to hire younger people, and hope they would grow with the business, learn, and be the best they can be. But I don’t see that commitment. I’d rather hire an older person, who’s worked in a body shop or towing.” One of the things Glass believes in that can better the quality of employ-ees is training and education, and he is willing to provide that. “My older employees have loved it, and wanted to be a part of the process where they could better themselves, if for nothing else than to get a raise,” said Glass. “But the younger generation looks at it as a drudgery.” Towing, of course, has its special demands, requiring work after normal business hours. But here, Glass said, “They want to come in and work from eight to five for an hourly wage, then go home. Their personal life is more important to them than work.” T&R Footnotes Helps Build Better Business SPOTLIGHT Advertising See page 8 In The Towing In This Issue: Safety & Signals For April: For March: Motor Clubs Advertise Now! Call David Abraham 877-219-7734, Ext 1 Volume 22, Number 10 x $3.95 © 2012 Causey Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Hard work & long hours turn off today’s young people BY THOMAS G. DOLAN “With unemployment the way it’s been, I’m shocked we don’t have more quality people walking in the door looking for a job,” said John Glass, president of Morristown Auto Body, Morristown, NJ. “We’re still having dif-PRST STD U.S. POSTAGE PAID PEORIA, IL PERMIT NO. 315 Towing & Recovery Footnotes P .O. Box 64397 Virginia Beach, VA 23467 ® ficulty finding good employees.” Glass also speaks from the perspec-tive of serving as an officer for a number of industry associations, currently as president of the Garden State Towing Association, Red Bank, NJ, and as vice president of the Conference of North-east Towing Associations, Hartford, CT. So he speaks to a problem not limited to his company alone. John Glass of Morristown Auto Body “People ages of 32 or 30 and younger are be-coming a more and more difficult group for employ-ers,” said Glass. “For their skills and work ethic aren’t too good. And they Absence Of Values Towing, especially with its erratic hours, isn’t for everyone, Glass ac-knowledges. But he sees something in an analogous profession: firefighting. “Working long hours and working out-side in all kinds of weather does take its toll. It takes a certain type of person, like a fireman, who loves the challenge and the excitement. I always think of an older fireman I know, who was out of town for a big fire, and was really disappointed that he missed it. But I know that fire departments are not getting the same commitment from the younger men. They want to polish the trucks, play on the teams, get the trophies, but not the real job.” Glass said the problem is widespread, that he’s talked to manufacturers who have to close a facility or can’t expand both because they can’t compete with See FUTURE TOWERS, page 3

Where Are Our Future Towers?

Thomas G. Dolan

Hard work & long hours turn off today’s young people “With unemployment the way it’s been, I’m shocked we don’t have more quality people walking in the door looking for a job,” said John Glass, president of Morristown Auto Body, Morristown, NJ. “We’re still having difficulty finding good employees.” Glass also speaks from the perspective of serving as an officer for a number of industry associations, currently as president of the Garden State Towing Association, Red Bank, NJ, and as vice president of the Conference of Northeast Towing Associations, Hartford, CT. So he speaks to a problem not limited to his company alone. “People ages of 32 or 30 and younger are becoming a more and more difficult group for employers,” said Glass. “For their skills and work ethic aren’t too good. And they don’t want to make a commitment. They just don’t care. In many cases it’s easier for them to collect unemployment, or work under the table for just enough to get by. If you don’t like how they’re doing, their attitude is Go ahead, fire me. I’d like to be able to hire younger people, and hope they would grow with the business, learn, and be the best they can be. But I don’t see that commitment. I’d rather hire an older person, who’s worked in a body shop or towing.” One of the things Glass believes in that can better the quality of employees is training and education, and he is willing to provide that. “My older employees have loved it, and wanted to be a part of the process where they could better themselves, if for nothing else than to get a raise,” said Glass. “But the younger generation looks at it as a drudgery.” Towing, of course, has its special demands, requiring work after normal business hours. But here, Glass said, “They want to come in and work from eight to five for an hourly wage, then go home. Their personal life is more important to them than work.” Absence Of Values Towing, especially with its erratic hours, isn’t for everyone, Glass acknowledges. But he sees something in an analogous profession: firefighting. “Working long hours and working outside in all kinds of weather does take its toll. It takes a certain type of person, like a fireman, who loves the challenge and the excitement. I always think of an older fireman I know, who was out of town for a big fire, and was really disappointed that he missed it. But I know that fire departments are not getting the same commitment from the younger men. They want to polish the trucks, play on the teams, get the trophies, but not the real job.” Glass said the problem is widespread, that he’s talked to manufacturers who have to close a facility or can’t expand both because they can’t compete with overseas labor and also because they can’t find domestic help willing to work. “At one time if you were fired or didn’t have a job, that was the worst thing that could happen to you, you were scared to death,” Glass said. “Not anymore.” Glass said the lack of values manifests itself in other ways. He refers to too many younger people “solving problems with knives and guns, shooting someone over a parking place.” He decries the high-tech lifestyle in which people “spend so much time on smart phones and iPods, even at work.” He’s repulsed by the bodies of young men, and, especially women, being totally covered by tattoos, with jewelry in lips, noses, and other body parts. Glass said his company is doing all right at the moment through his reliance on older employees, but the future worries him. “When you think about the older towers retiring and this younger generation coming along, and also consider that this generation will someday be running the country, it scares the hell out of me!” No Good Answers What is the solution to finding good employees, especially among the younger generation? Jim Dusenberry, president of J&D Towing & Recovery, Helena, MT, responded, “I don’t have any good answers. Since we have 24/7 service, we have to have pretty dedicated people to make it work.” Dusenberry targets graduates from tech schools in his specific areas of repair and towing, hoping that he will find someone with both the skills and work ethics. Though he prefers older, more mature applicants, he is open to working with young people. Sometimes they work out, sometimes not. In his market area, Dusenberry explains, there would not be enough business to sustain a towing business alone, so he also has a repair shop. This works to his advantage in that he does not have to have someone dedicated to the long and unpredictable hours of towing. He hires someone to work in the shop, with the offer of learning the added skill in towing, with the added financial benefits. “It’s the towing after hours that creates the problem,” Dusenberry said. “When he first walks through the door, we have that discussion.” A positive response is a good signal to hire that person. But here Dusenberry admits he is sometimes in a dilemma. For when the time comes for the person to start the training for a towing certification and the person balks, Dusenberry, on the one hand, has saved money on training and certification and the person can remain in the shop if he functions well there. On the other hand, though it hasn’t happened yet, Dusenberry foresees the possibility of letting that employee go to find someone willing to do towing as well. Check & Test Motivations include, in addition to base pay, double time for after-hours wrecks, and time-and-a-half for regular after-hour tows, along with good health and insurance benefits that will encourage his good employees to stay around. “We pay the prevailing wage, which means we have to compete with our main competition, which are the mines and oil fields,” Dusenberry said. “It’s hard on the bottom line.” Dusenberry does background checks and drug testing to try to make sure the applicant doesn’t start another lifestyle after five pm. But DUIs are a special problem. “If the DUI is on his current record, I won’t hire him, but, if, after three years of good behavior, his record is clean, I try to give him the benefit of the doubt,” said Dusenberry. “We once hired someone who got a DUI after he started working for us, and he had to take three years to prove his good behavior. That’s a factor young kids don’t realize: How a DUI can really hurt them as well as be expensive for their employer.” Yet, despite the setbacks and uncertainties, Dusenberry said, “I think we’re on the right track. We don’t have a whole lot of turnover. Our oldest employee has been here about 24 years, and our youngest seven.” From Scratch Instead of searching for experienced towers or young people with technical training, Mike Wildman, president of Consolidated Towing, Inc. in Bend, OR, takes a very different and somewhat unusual approach. He advertises on Craigslist where he notes requirements such as pre-employment drug testing, but also that there’s “no experience necessary.” “We prefer to work with someone with no experience, someone who hasn’t driven a tow truck, or even a truck,” Wildman said. “For then we can teach him to drive our way. We find that that works a lot better than hiring somebody with experience, who often brings his bad habits.” Does this mean that Wildman won’t hire an experienced tower? Not necessarily. In fact, he’s had towers in San Francisco and other areas who want to move to a smaller town like Bend send in their resumes. But even this person has to drive with a trainer for one week, and then, the second week, to drive himself, but with the trainer in the cab with him, who has a say, yea or nay, whether that person gets hired. “In our industry there is a lot of arrogance among towers,” Wildman said, “so we watch out for that.” In this respect, working in a small-town market area works to his advantage. In larger cities companies often have dedicated and specialized heavy-duty towers, whereas at Consolidated, they do heavy duty but medium and light duty as well. “At times they’ll have to pick up a motorcycle behind a service truck,” Wildman said. “The light-duty operators have their own truck. But our five heavy-duty operators don’t. They pull everything from motorcycles to 18-wheelers.” Burning Out This, in itself, does a lot to engender humility. Yet Wildman also acknowledges that the heavy-duty operator in a big city, who drives only his big rig, becomes more skilled and efficient at what he does. To this, Wildman added, “What might be called the primadonna heavy-duty tower might also be attributed to the fact that he’s in the top one percent; he’s good, he knows he good, and he’s earned it.” In other words, while much of the problem with hiring good employees has to do with the immaturity and lack of the work ethic in the younger generation, there is also a deeper dynamic going on with the experienced tower. And that, Wildman explained, “is burnout. Burnout can affect anybody, but especially in our industry, in which towers are on call any time of the day or night, every day of the year.” Wildman said he has been in business for 24 years, but really saw this as a problem about 17 years ago, “when our general manager told me that the problems we were having with our drivers could simply be attributed to burnout. They were ground down by the demands of the job, with little time for their families and themselves, and their families resented it.” At that time Wildman initiated a new policy, first with towers getting two full days off a week, then that going to three. “In other words, they work only four days a week, and are only on call a maximum of two nights of that week,” Wildman said. Sometimes the solution to a problem is so obvious it’s not seen, but, once it is, and acted upon, the underlying problem goes away. Giving employees in a highly stressful occupation quality time away from the job largely solved Wildman’s troubles. Character Helps He’s taken additional measures as well. His background checks are more thorough than most. “In the old days an employer might give a glowing recommendation just to get rid of someone,” Wildman said. Now all references are checked, especially those with no experience in the industry. For what Wildman is looking for is character. “Our process involves much more than asking, ‘Can you drive this rig? Ok, you’re hired.’” Wildman looks for employees not only with character, but also communication skills, for they have to talk to people in often tense situations. Moreover, the interview process ferrets out an applicant’s understanding of and sensitivity toward liability and safety issues. In addition, Wildman said he has not personally hired anyone in some 15 years, “because it’s not what I do best.” Instead, he delegates that authority to his general manager, Lori Anton, who is very good at this task. After a thorough background check, Anton conducts two interviews with the applicant, prior to the pre-employment drug test, and the two-week pre-employment training. Finding good employees is not a problem for Wildman, for, he said, “We’re slow to hire, fast to fire.” Job Resources Footnotes: Tow company owners are invited to place “Help Wanted” classified ads for drivers in Footnotes’ classified section, on our website at trfootnotes. com/classified, and on our Facebook site at facebook.com/TRFootnotes. Note: Go there to seek and sell trucks and equipment as well! TowCareers.com, a great place to go for “online employment resources for job seekers and employers in the towing industry.” Tow411.net: Owners seeking drivers and drivers seeking jobs will find both Tow411. net and facebook.com/Tow411 to be useful employment resources. FindLocalTruckDrivingJobs.com, a new site that “allows truckers to quickly sign up for an account, review, and compare the offers of a wide variety of companies and agencies, find the right pay rate, and select the companies to which they’d like to apply.” “Trucking jobs.” Put these words in the Google “search” box and find many employment- related websites available to mostly long-haul truckers and company owners. CareersinGear.com specializes in recruitment solutions for the trucking industry, delivering a targeted advertising message to all types of drivers. IRS On The Prowl The government’s own figures indicate that the payroll tax and self-employment tax “gap,” the difference between taxes owned and those actually paid, amounts to more than $200 billion annually. One result: With little public fanfare and no advance warning, the Internal Revenue Service has begun a National Research Project (NRP), each year for the next three years, randomly selecting 2,000 small, large, and self-employed taxpayers from every geographic region, to examine their employment tax returns. Like a tsunami, the IRS will not be discriminatory regarding the taxpayers it engulfs. The audits are occurring in every geographic region of the country and will target both large and small taxpayers. Whether publicly traded or privately owned, large or small, in the red or in the black, for-profit or nonprofit, public sector or private sector, all are and will be potential targets. As if another audit threat were not scary enough, one of the nastiest and most feared taxes currently imposed is the “Trust Fund Penalty Tax,” a whopping 100 percent penalty on payroll taxes not withheld from a towing and recovery business’s employees, and/or not forwarded to the Federal government. The fear stems from the IRS’s authority to assess the penalty on all “responsible parties,” a label that can include the owners, shareholders, partners, members, managers and officers in a yarn business. Although there is no way to avoid the random employment tax audits of the NRP, there are guidelines and strategies that can help every towing and recovery professional correct employment tax mistakes and avoid potential trouble spots that might result in the whopping 100 percent “responsible person” tax. -Mark Battersby

Towing & Recovery Footnotes

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