Veterans Towing saves on fuel and maintenance with vehicle tracking

Transitioning from the military to civilian life wasn’t easy for Bruce Mofid and Ryan Barbour, owners of Veterans Towing. After establishing their new business in 2016, they looked to Verizon Connect to help streamline their fleet operations and help keep their business profitable using GPS fleet tracking. Adopting fleet management technology gave them the tools they needed to help reduce costs by monitoring driver behavior, setting up proactive maintenance alerts and improving routing.

The challenge

As a young and growing business, Veterans Towing understood the need to keep costs low, knowing that every expense would impact their bottom line. They quickly found that manual vehicle tracking and phone calls to drivers were wasting both time and money. Bruce Mofid explained what it was like before Verizon Connect. “You play the telephone game when it comes to Excel and writing things down. You tell the driver, ‘Hey, you got to go here,’ and he hears something else.”

Another issue they faced was that their tow trucks and drivers, a major expense, were not being monitored as closely as they could have been. Barbour and Mofid had a hard time identifying fuel-wasting and unsafe driving behaviors, like hard braking and excessive speeding, as well as addressing maintenance in an efficient and timely manner. In addition, trucks that were idling unnecessarily while out on jobs were raising their already high monthly fuel spend.

The solution

Verizon Connect Reveal gave Veterans Towing more visibility into their trucks, drivers and jobs, helping them save money on fuel and maintenance. Mofid was impressed by the speed of the system and said, “Once you load up the app, it’s instantaneous, almost two, three seconds, you know where 20 vehicles are, what’s their speed, what’s their status, how long they’ve been there.”

Veterans Towing also found a major source of cost savings in tracking how long vehicles were idling: “Talking about reducing cost, sitting there idling for a half hour or an hour burns quite a bit of money when the vehicle doesn’t need to be on,” said Barbour. This seemingly simple feature of Reveal gave them a great ROI and cost saving measure.

"I like the fact that the GPS is very accurate. It’s up to date. It integrates with a live feed of traffic. Obviously in towing, we get paid per mile so the faster we burn those miles, the more we get paid. So, we live and die by the traffic.” Ryan Barbour, Managing Partner of Veterans Towing

The results

In addition to faster, clearer communication, Veterans Towing was seeing benefits across other parts of their business—namely, cost savings.

Reveal gave Veterans Towing a better process for vehicle maintenance. They were able to easily track costs and be alerted with reminders when their fleet vehicles needed proactive maintenance. “I can tell, per vehicle, what maintenance has been completed, what maintenance is due, so we can be a little more proactive instead of me chasing my tail, trying to maintain 20 trucks myself,” said Barbour. Having details in one place also saved their fleet mechanic time by knowing what had been done to each vehicle and when.

Being a service company, helping out customers is paramount to the success of Veterans Towing. With live maps of their vehicles, they can efficiently route drivers to their customers who often need help quickly.

Veterans Towing sees a bright future for their business with the help of Verizon Connect, continuing their mission to help people get where they need to go.