Two trucks, two businesses
Contribution per call is the number that separates them. A flatbed earns in volume: club calls, retail tows and account work at rates that reward keeping the truck moving. A heavy wrecker earns in events: fewer jobs, far larger tickets, and a purchase price, insurance premium and operator skill requirement that sit there costing money between those events. Averaging the two into one revenue line is how a yard convinces itself it is fine while one truck quietly subsidizes the other.
| The question | Flatbed | Heavy wrecker |
|---|---|---|
| Where the money comes from | Call volume at contract and retail rates | Recovery and commercial jobs, fewer and larger |
| The risk that kills it | Rates that stop clearing cost per call | Idle weeks against a heavy payment stack |
| The number the model must produce | Cost per call, and the calls a shift must run | The monthly floor the truck must bill before it earns |
| The decision it feeds | Which contracts deserve the hours | Buy, keep subcontracting the big jobs, or exit that class of work |
We build both models from your own dispatch and settlement history. The wrecker question in particular deserves arithmetic, because the down payment is real, the insurance is real, and the folklore about what heavy work pays is not evidence.
Club volume is a decision, not a default
Motor-club contracts guarantee calls at fixed rates, and the test is marginal: does the club rate clear the fuel, the driver's percentage and the wear of running that call, and how much of your capacity does club work consume in the exact hours when retail and insurer calls pay better. A club that fills the idle mid-afternoon is profit; a club that owns your trucks at peak is a discount you volunteered for. Concentration belongs in the same review, because a fleet built around one dispatcher's volume has handed its revenue to someone else's contract terms.
Driver pay sits inside this analysis too. A percentage grid that treats a club call and a retail call identically points your best drivers at the wrong work, so we test commissions against contribution per call and fix the incentive rather than the symptom.
Cash lives in the gap between the call and the cheque
A tow bill and its cash rarely arrive in the same month: retail pays at the truck, clubs settle on their cycle, insurers settle when the adjuster is done, and storage pays at release, if it pays at all. A growing yard can be profitable on paper while the account runs dry. The CFO instruments are unglamorous and decisive: a rolling cash forecast that shows the gap before it opens, receivable targets by payer with names on the follow-up list, and days-in-yard tracked as money, because a compound full of long-stay vehicles is revenue accrued and cash locked up at the same time.
The same numbers finance the next truck. Walla Assaf came to public practice from banking and corporate finance, so the wrecker file goes to lenders the way credit committees actually read it: utilization evidence from your dispatch data, the payment stack against the monthly floor, loan against lease priced side by side. That work runs through Business Financing Advisory inside the same mandate, on monthly numbers kept current by End-to-End Accounting rather than rebuilt for the application.
Overhead per call, compliance included
Since certificates arrived in 2024, a tow operation carries standing overhead that has nothing to do with any single call: certificate and renewal fees, driver screening, cameras and record-keeping, alongside insurance that follows your CVOR record and claims history, and a fuel line that follows nothing but discipline. Our Fractional CFO work totals that overhead into a per-call number, so quoting covers the whole cost of being in business and not just the cost of the tow.
The monthly pack stays short on purpose: revenue and contribution per truck, calls and revenue per driver, storage days and the cash they hold, receivables by payer, overhead per call. Each quarter we stress the plan against the loss of the biggest contract and a soft stretch for heavy work, so the response exists before the event does. We run this for towing companies across Mississauga and the GTA, scoped to the fleet rather than a template, with the fee quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
