2.2. ESTADÍSTICA INFERENCIAL 1. Hipótesis general
2.2.2. Hipótesis Específicas Hipótesis Especifica 1
Seymour had made his towing business the biggest in his area. But it still had plenty of possibilities for growth. I gave him five powerful marketing strategies, any one of which could double his income. These strategies can be applied to almost any business, and they don’t require risking large amounts of cash up front.
Jay: Tell me, do the police give the towing business exclusively to you, or do they rotate it? Give me an
overview of how you get a client.
Seymour: Okay. In the police business, no matter which town I’m operating in, all of it is shared, whether it’s
state patrol, county, or cities.
Jay: On what basis?
Seymour: On the basis of which towing companies are responsible, have the right equipment, the right drivers,
and the storage yards in those communities.
Jay: Let’s take a hypothetical situation to help clarify it for me. A car breaks down, or gets in an accident, or is
parked illegally. Give me those three scenarios. Why would they call you instead of somebody else, and why wouldn’t they?
Seymour: Okay. If a car breaks down, that owner is going to go to a phone. He’s either going to call a garage
and say, “Hey! I’m in trouble!” and they’ll recommend a towing company, or he’s going to look right in the Yellow Pages and decide which towing company to use.
Jay: And it may or may not be you?
Seymour: It may or may not be us. If he calls a towing company, he’s going to do it based on how he feels after
looking through the Yellow Pages. So the Yellow Pages are an important aspect of our advertising.
Jay: Parenthetically, when do you come due for your next Yellow Pages ad? Are the Yellow Pages pretty well
locked up for a while?
Seymour: No, it comes due in February. Jay: So it’s relatively soon?
Seymour: Yes.
Jay: Okay. What about a situation where the police get involved?
Seymour: If a car breaks down and is blocking a roadway in a city and the police come along, they’re going to
call for an immediate tow. They’ll call whoever’s on the rotation list at that given time in that city.
Jay: Okay. It presumably is just random — every third or fourth time the call goes to the next person, right? Seymour: Correct.
Jay: That applies whether it’s a breakdown, a blocking, an accident, an arrest for driving while intoxicated, or
Seymour: Yes. Now, the police business represents a pretty good portion of our business — probably 25% of
our income.
Jay: Okay. That would mean it’s shared... Seymour: I divide that with other people.
Jay: Is there any factor that would let you get more of the jobs from the police?
Seymour: No, other than if we service them really well and quickly, we’ll tend to get more officers making
private requests for us because the officer knows we’ll be there ahead of the other companies, and he doesn't want to fool around waiting. He’ll just say to his dispatcher, “It’s a private request for...” and they’ll call us.
Jay: Do you have any equipment that your competitors do not, or vice-versa?
Seymour: No, we’re all pretty much competitive, with late-model equipment. I’m usually leading the industry in
the style and type, but they’re pretty well caught up with me now.
Jay: Are your trucks actually Mack trucks?
Seymour: No, they’re Isuzus, Fords, and Chevys, primarily.
Jay: Okay. That’s one segment. That is 25% of your business. All you can do to enhance the city police-
engendered business is service them to the highest degree possible.
Seymour: Absolutely.
Jay: Which you very proudly do right now. So it’s not an area that needs a lot of concentration, or is it?
Seymour: Quite frankly, my men, because they own their own trucks the way we run it, are usually much
sharper than the average. We tend to get more private requests from the different police agencies because of the way we operate.
Jay: One of the nice things you could do, however, if it’s acceptable, is to prepare kits that the police could have
on them and disseminate to motorists who are choosing. The kit would tell what happens when the car is towed away, where it’ll usually go, how to handle it, the time wait, and so forth.
Seymour: That’s not a bad idea! We don’t do that.
Jay: All things being equal, if you could prepare a really neat, informative kit, that could tip them towards you. I
know from the few things I’ve had to have towed that it’s dehumanizing. You’re scared to death, you don’t know what the procedure is, you’re left on your own, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know whom to call. I had a breakdown on the way to Palm Springs and a very nice highway patrolman stopped. He took our information and called it in, but the towing people he called didn’t show. So we called them ourselves, and when they came, they didn’t know what to do.
If you could give the policemen something really informative that overcomes all that fear and confusion and trepidation and is clarifying — and no one else does that — it may only have little effect, or it may have a lot to do with them calling you, but it’s probably a wise investment. It would just be a nice, courteous touch. It would basically be a little, sealed kit they could give people.
Also, if the people need a ride somewhere, work out a special deal with a cab company or make a deal with your men. Maybe you’ll have a courtesy service. That may be the deal. Maybe you could give free courtesy transportation to the motorists within 20 miles of where you tow the car to?
Jay: Do the police know that? Seymour: No. Only superficially.
Jay: I think that’s a very important point. Whether you do it or not is not as relevant as whether it’s known that
you do it.
Seymour: Right.
Jay: Start talking to the police and let them know that you don’t really care about promoting yourself — you’d
like it to help your business, but you think this is so good they should give it to everybody, even if it’s somebody not serviced by you. Anytime there is a problem, people should have this. They should know that as a service, you have courtesy transportation that’ll do one of two things. It’ll dispatch a courtesy vehicle, or it’ll see that the person is put up overnight. I think that’s fabulous, don’t you?
Seymour: I do, as a matter of fact! I follow you.
Jay: Little things make all the difference. I’ve done so many consultations on how to better educate contractors
who did only sealed bid work. By using a similar technique, one of my clients got offered so many more bids that his business doubled — even though it was a sealed bid type of business. I’m being very abstract, but just because he extended himself more in educating them, they gave him more service. If you extend yourself more than anybody else in the eyes of the police — first to help allay the fears of the person who’s immobilized in the middle of nowhere, and second, to see that the person gets shuttled somewhere, either to a relative’s home, a restaurant or whatever, at no cost — the police will tend to favor you. That, to me, is demonstrably superior in their eyes. I tend to believe, even though they have a callous public image, that policemen still care about other people.
Seymour: Oh, yes!
Jay: I just imagine that if you would show you’re going to extend yourself, all things being equal, even though
legally they’re not supposed to, you’ll get more of the calls than other people.
Seymour: I think you’re right there, because we already feel that just in the way we’re approaching people, we
get more private requests from the police than most.
Jay: You should have a wonderful little kit. I don’t know what it would entail. Where you are, it’s cold on the
side of the road. I don’t know what you could put in the kit for that, but probably there’s something. I wouldn’t spend a lot of money. Something for them to read, instructions. Big reflectors. Flares. I don’t know what it could be.
Seymour: I could think of something and so could my wife. She’s very good that way.
Jay: Did you read the Marketing Genius material I sent you? Don’t do anything without pretesting. Try a
couple of hundred. Go to the police and tell them you’re trying an experiment. Tell them that you think this is a noble service, that it’s very costly to you, but you think it’ll manifest itself in better service to the end-user from everybody. You think it will also help your business. You’d like their cooperation. The next 500 tows or 200 tows (or whatever you can afford) that they encounter, whether the jobs accrue to you or not, you’d like them to disseminate these kits and help you in a little research project. Tell them that you can’t speak for other people, but for every job that they give you, you’ll see to it that within a 20-mile radius, the stranded motorist and his or her family will get shuttled back to their home, to a relative’s home, or another safe place.
Seymour: A place where they’re safe. Jay: And comfortable.
Jay: There’s no charge. You don’t know if you can keep doing it, but you think that there’s value to this. Maybe
you can espouse it genuinely under the auspices of trying to extend a service to the end-user. My gut feeling is that it will do a profound job of increasing your chances of getting more calls than just one out of four.
Seymour: I think you’re right, because just the little additional service we have, the little edge we already have,
has already had some impact. We feel that and know that. This would certainly be just that much more positive.
Jay: You could take it to even loftier levels. I don’t know the level of cooperation you could get from the police,
but see if they’d let you put hot urns of coffee in the back of their trunks to give to these people on the road. You’ll furnish them and you’ll pay for it. I don’t know.
Seymour: That one I doubt, but it’s certainly something that we’ll follow up on.
Jay: Understand that with what I’ll teach you in this consultation, the specifics aren’t as important as the general
concepts. I don’t know the rigors with which you have to contend, but to the maximum level possible, if you extend yourself in the eyes of the police to try to serve the stranded motorist better, I think that will accrue great benefits for you.
Seymour: You bet. Jay: Let’s move on.
Seymour: The next 75% of my business comes from commercial accounts and the Yellow Pages. Jay: Let’s take commercial first. Yellow Pages we’ll cover later.
Seymour: Let’s say the next 40% of the business comes from commercial accounts. Jay: Which would be...?
Seymour: Garages, service stations, body shops, dealerships.
Jay: Okay. Let’s take every scenario. What do you charge? What are the criteria that get them to favor you
over somebody else?
Seymour: Price is rarely a factor. I can name the shops that are concerned about price. But the real factor to
most of them is service.
Jay: Can you be more specific?
Seymour: Okay. What they want when they call a towing company is to be well represented out there in the
field, because they don’t at that point have the real control of that customer. They want to know that the towing company’s going to get there soon, that they’re going to be dressed nicely, that their trucks are going to be good, that they’re going to do a top-notch job, and that they’re going to do a real personal job with the customer.
Jay: What do you charge for the tow?
Seymour: My basic tow is $32, plus $2 a mile from wherever we pick the car up to wherever we deliver it. We
are about the middle of the road in price.
Jay: Give me an average price total. Seymour: It generally runs about $45.
Jay: On $45, you pay on a variable rate to the driver. What’s he going to get? Seymour: Fifty percent of whatever they do.
Jay: Of the remaining $22.50, you give nothing back to the garage?
Seymour: I give some. Some garages I give a 10% discount to and that’s not on the remaining $22.50 — that’s
on the whole bill.
Jay: So it costs you more? Seymour: Right.
Jay: Is that taken off the top prior to remitting to the operator, or do you just eat it? Seymour: I eat it. That’s my cost.
Jay: So on the $22.50 that you get, you take right off the top $4.50. Seymour: Or $9, because to some of the bigger shops I give 20%. Jay: How do you pay them? Who pays whom?
Seymour: The shops pay us directly, or if they pay the driver or if the customer pays the driver, he turns in all of
his receipts and sales.
Jay: Then you’ll remit to the garage or whatever.
Seymour: Then we bill the garage. We handle all the billing, all the receivables, all of the bad debts. Jay: Are receivables a problem in your business?
Seymour: Not too bad. I have a pretty high volume of receivables, but I don’t have much in the way of bad
debts.
Jay: So you may have a lot of money outstanding but it’s paid in a relatively timely manner? Seymour: Correct.
Jay: So you have big-volume people who would get between 10% and 20% and that’s for generating how
many...is there a dollar amount?
Seymour: Yes. If there’s $500 or more per month, that customer is given a 20% discount. Jay: Okay.
Seymour: They must pay it by the 10th of the following month. Jay: Okay. Interesting.
Seymour: The smaller ones get a 10% discount.
Jay: When you tow for repair shops, do they pass the towing fee on to the customers, or do they cover it
themselves?
Seymour: They all pass it on.
Jay: So if I go to a General Motors dealer when my GM car doesn’t work, they make me, the owner, pay the $45
towing fee. They don’t cover that if my repair bill’s $500 or something like that.
Jay: Those two commercial categories require you to remit back a percentage of the gross depending on volume. Seymour: Right.
Jay: Okay. What other commercial categories are there?
Seymour: Well, you’ve got dealerships and plain repair garages.
Jay: Let’s talk about dealerships. Of 100% of the dealerships in your marketing area, how many do you have
contracts with? And are your contracts exclusive or are they shared?
Seymour: Okay. First of all, I don’t have contracts with any of them as such. Jay: Because?
Seymour: Because it’s always been done on a handshake and, “Here’s what we offer,” and we tend to hold each
account because we give them such good service. We’ll do a lot of internal personal favors too. If they need a car moved, or a car goes out of their shop and breaks down right away, we’ll go pick it up and bring it back to the shop for nothing. Lots of private favors done.
Jay: And they all know that?
Seymour: Yes. Most of the dealers in our area do. We probably tow exclusively for 60% of them. Jay: And the other 40%?
Seymour: We’re either in the door sporadically or they’re exclusively with somebody else. Jay: Okay. And you got those 60% because you did what?
Seymour: Because I went out and sold initially, and then just plain serviced them — kept giving them good
service.
Jay: Do you, in fact, still go out frequently, or do you stay back in the office?
Seymour: Almost every day, I’m out at least two or three hours, or I take one of my driver-owners and we make
calls.
Jay: And when you make calls, are they to existing clients, new clients, or both?
Seymour: I usually make calls to the new accounts. I go with the drivers to get them into the habit of doing it. Jay: What’s your approach to the existing accounts?
Seymour: I’m on the phone a couple of hours in the morning and several hours at night, so I usually have a lot of
phone contact with the existing ones. Also, I personally drop in on them and talk just to see what’s happening. But the driver-owners do a lot of that, too, because each one has his own little given area, and they’re pretty jealous about them, they guard them well. In fact, one of the reasons I went to driver-owners is because they take a strong vested interest in keeping business good.
Jay: So they’re very covetous about it, and they take it very possessively.
Seymour: You bet! We have a very, very good rapport with all of our exclusive customers — almost a
friendship basis. If something goes wrong they tend to call us up and say, “Hey, I don’t like this,” or “This happened,” or “What can you do?” or “I need a favor.”
Jay: And the driver-owners have a high degree of stability with you? They don’t say they’re going to take that
Seymour: No. Because of their contracts with us. It’s a very open, up-front, and solid contract. Jay: So they can’t take your clients.
Seymour: That’s correct.
Jay: Let me ask another question. Right now, what is your utilization rate relative to the operators you have? Seymour: Almost 100%. In other words, if I add more business, I’m going to have to add another truck. Jay: Let me ask you another question. There are several competitors. How are they doing?
Seymour: There are four others that I consider solid competitors. Jay: Do you think they’re making money?
Seymour: Yes, they are.
Jay: Are they making good money? Seymour: I honestly couldn’t answer that.
Jay: One of the things I suggest to a lot of people, and it may seem funny, is that they go to their competitors and