Owned and Operated #186 - Turning Tow Trucks Into Business Success

Whether you're in the towing business, auto services, or any service business, this episode is a must-watch for business scaling, towing acquisitions, and operational optimization to ensure long-term business success.
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Owned and Operated #186 - Turning Tow Trucks Into Business Success

Looking to grow your towing business or break into the towing industry? In this episode, Jack Carr hosts Matt Saskin from East Coast Towing to explore proven towing business strategies, effective growth tactics, and the latest towing industry trends. Matt shares his unique journey from a tech background to becoming a successful towing company owner, covering topics like AI-powered call center solutions with Avoca, consensual vs. non-consensual towing, and much more.

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Episode Hosts: 🎤


Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X

🎙️ Episode Guest:🗣️

Matthew Saskin - LinkedIn

EP 186 Transcript

Matthew Saskin: [00:00:00] This business is not rocket science.

We spend about $750,000 a year on our fleet on repair and maintenance mechanics. A 1% budget. Big picture. This is a 50% gross margin business, and these are 20% EBITDA margin businesses. When properly run,

John Wilson: we're about eight months into using. Avoca and Avoca Hass been an awesome partner for us in our call center. So what Avoca does for us is they do two different things. One, they have their coach product, and coach has been helping us do what it says, coach our CSRs every single day. It listens to every call and uses AI technology to basically pick apart that call and tell us where we can improve.

And for the last eight months we've been consistently improving our scores, which has been awesome. The other product they have is just conventional booking, and it's an AI tool that books over the phone. A customer calls in and it either handles overflow as in our phones are [00:01:00] full, or it does nights and weekends for us, and a customer will call in and actually deal with an ai.

Agent all the way through booking and the savings Inside Call Center has allowed us to ramp up our marketing to continue to grow even more. Thank you, Avoca and thank you Tyson for your partnership. 

Jack Carr: Welcome back to Owned and Operated today, Jack Carr, me, I'm hosting this thing and we have the one, the only, Matt Saskin with East Coast Towing.

Matt, what's going on man? How 

Matthew Saskin: is it going? I'm, uh, I'm currently in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was down here for a, for a towing conference. Um, my family's flying down this afternoon, then we get on a cruise tomorrow, so all good. 

Jack Carr: You know. When, how exciting was the towing conference for you? 

Matthew Saskin: So, no, I, I've gotta say actually, um, there were a bunch, right?

So there's like, there are three or four around the country that are your sort of big trade shows, right? Like one is, yeah, the big one is in Baltimore. Every year it takes over the entire Baltimore Convention Center like. Super cool to go. Shiny objects like all the truck manufacturers there, lots of [00:02:00] stuff to look at like that is super cool, but from a practical standpoint.

You don't learn it on there. 'cause like, I, I think as I've said elsewhere, like this is a fairly unprofessional industry. Um, so you don't have a lot of people that are actually paying attention to their business. The, the, the thing I just went to, which is the Towing and Recovery Summit, was like highly recommended by a bunch of folk that I trust a lot.

Um mm-hmm. Small, like probably 80 people. Um, but you know, those might be the only 80 companies in the country where the owners are actually paying attention to like. How to actively make their business better, like some of the largest companies in the country are represented. So it was actually super, super valuable.

Um. So, yeah, like a total opposite from what the other towing conferences are. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. No, I enjoy it because we joke, um, my wife is specifically jokes at me when I'm saying, Hey, I'm going to the aca a a yeah, right. Or like one of these, these conferences and I get all excited and get, uh, like jittery about it.

And she's like, you're such a nerd. And I posted on Twitter [00:03:00] the other day. She calls all of us like these, these groups of Twitter, ex Twitter people like, yeah. Business buying nerds like you guys are all nerd. Yeah, it's, you're like weird internet friends nerd. Yeah, weird internet friends is very accurate, but like that's what this is what we love doing is talking about business.

Oh, for sure. And doing that. And the cool part, like. I actually looked at a lot of towing businesses in my personal search of like trying to buy a business. So much so that I was comfortable talking about it. Like on one of the first podcasts, I think John and I at like episode 1 0 2 or something. Okay.

Where I, I had just came on and we're business breakdowns. Like towing was one of the first ones we did. I, oh, very cool. I look back to that. I, I know this industry, it was more so from like the standpoint of they did like local residential towing for. Um, not like recovery, like, hey, police, um, like someone's parked illegally.

Yeah. Right, right, right. Or HOA, um, so kind of fun. I'm, I'm, I'm really excited to dig in. So can we start with, uh, your history? Like what were you before you, you bought the towing business and then why [00:04:00] towing and then like first six months of towing? 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, background is in the technology space, uh, in kind of everything from.

Technical sales and sales leadership. I've had general management and executive roles. Um, been at global enterprises and service providers. Worked at, you know, VC backed startups and some PE software turnaround. So done kind of a lot of things in the tech, tech space. Um, was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time doing, um, doing m and a.

In, in my corporate life, albeit at a very different scale. Like we're talking, you know, 50 million to $500 million ev, ev deals. Um, but, but still I had that exposure. Um, and then, you know, spent a bunch of time, uh, again with PE backed companies, um, which was sort of a, a super helpful experience. Um, so that, that had been, has been my career.

Um, we get to Covid and like my wife and I over. You know, the years had built up a fairly reasonable real estate portfolio. Took the [00:05:00] opportunity to sell everything over Covid because essentially got an unsolicited offer on one building we, we owned. Um, went. Wow, that's more than I would buy this for. So, okay, cool.

Let's go. Actively marketed the rest, sold the whole portfolio. Um, and then we were at this place of, okay, cool. What's, what's next? Like where, where, where we put some of that money, um, had talked through the idea of buying and operating business. Um, and then, you know, started, kind of started kinda looking and that would be mid.

22, like late spring, early summer. Um, the, the, the search was effectively, 

Jack Carr: let me ask you real quick. Yeah. So, so were you, were you industry agnostic? Like, Hey, I don't care what it is as long as it's like a cash flowing, boring industry, but I wanna stay in, in Raleigh specifically. Was that your, um, 

Matthew Saskin: not quite so.

Need to stay in Raleigh, like we're gonna pick up and move, needed to be, uh, of, you know, large enough. Right. We were broadly looking for something that was kind of in a million dollar EBITDA or larger range. Um mm-hmm. Uh, because, you know, it's a combination of [00:06:00] being big enough to be meaningful, but also something I could take down myself.

Like I, I don't have investors, it's just us. Yeah. And then the third was, I wouldn't call it industry agnostic so much as. There are certain industries that I did not want to invest in. So like right, I, I think everybody's right, like hospitality and retail and all that is just off the table. 'cause I just, I don't, I don't have what it takes to do that.

Home services in our market. I think it was not gonna be the play simply because like if you think about the value creation playbook and home services, at least as I understand it, in our market, companies have been doing that for the past decade. So I think there's really, like in, in the Raleigh area, there's, there wasn't any space to, to breathe there.

And from my vantage point, um, 

Jack Carr: it's a, it's a definitely a, the Raleigh. SA region in greater Raleigh. Yeah. Is definitely a market where it, it's the same. It's actually the issue that I ran into when I bought my business. It's You are a small fish. Yeah. Even at a million dollars in ebit, you're a small fish in a really big pond.

Yeah. With a lot of big [00:07:00] players and private equity and really smart individuals who've been running playbooks for five, 10 years. Right. Very, if I can 

Matthew Saskin: think of when, right. We've been in the area now 13, 14 years. But when we first moved down, like right there, the, the electrician showed up like with an iPad doing, doing all the thing, like doing, doing all the stuff, right?

Yeah. So, yeah, so, so industries that didn't wanna invest in, um, but was fairly open to you on that. Like, looked at some, some small manufacturers, looked at, um, looked at some construction businesses. Um, and then as it happened, there were two towing businesses on the market in Raleigh at the same time. Um, looked at both of them.

I'll, I'll, I'll share more about them 'cause they kind of explained the two sides of the tele industry. Um, but kind of one of them, uh, fit from a sort of size and all that perspective. Um, like the owners, uh, from my perspective, part of it had been de-risked in that it had already gone through an inadvertent ownership change seven or eight years prior when the, the founder passed away unexpectedly and his wife took over the business.

Um, so it had been through that [00:08:00] transfer once and also, um. The current owner, the the founder's wife, uh, and her father-in-law who she brought in to help run it, neither of them drove a truck, right? They weren't tow truck drivers by background. All those things combined. Let, I really like that business. And then, you know, spent a bunch of months going fairly deep on the industry.

Went up to the, the big tow show in Baltimore about a month before close as the final sanity check of like, okay, does this, you know, is everything I think about this industry actually accurate? Um, and, you know, kind of the water held so. Here we are. I mean the, the, the broad thesis such as it is, is like cars and trucks aren't gonna stop breaking down cars and trucks aren't gonna stop getting in accidents.

So let's go. 

Jack Carr: Very good thesis. Uh, and there's gonna be more and more cars and trucks in America. I mean, we, we don't look like we're going the other way in terms of trend. Very interesting. And so you looked at these two businesses. You bought one of 'em, or you bought both? Bought one, bought one 

Matthew Saskin: another.

Searcher Who bought the other? I know him. We talk regularly because. Because of the differences between these two businesses, we're [00:09:00] actually not, not competitors. Competitors, yeah. 

Jack Carr: So talk about the two different routes that, that towing can go. Yeah. And why they don't cross over. 

Matthew Saskin: Right. So broadly, the way we, the way we describe it in the industry is there is, there's consensual towing and there is non-consensual towing.

Um, right. Non-consensual towing is kind of what everyone immediate. That's a great way to put it, goes to it is private property impound or repo mm-hmm. Of vehicles. Right. So that's the snatching cars that are parking lots, illegal parking, that kind of thing. Um, and then consensual towing is, is the opposite, right?

Is, is customers, people, your individual consumers, businesses, et cetera, calling us to come and do a thing, move a broken down vehicle, relocate equipment from A to B deal, old accident, recovery, et cetera. And those two tend to not overlap for a bunch of reasons. Um, one is that the, the business models are fundamentally different.

Like one is a. One, your customer's, the person whose vehicle you're towing, the other, your customer is fundamentally like property managers and, and things like that. The second is that the, the profile of the drivers is very different. Like, [00:10:00] to be blunt, the guys that wanna run PPI, like they, they want permission to go steal cars.

Jack Carr: Yeah. 

Matthew Saskin: And those drivers, like, they don't wanna work for us and vice versa. Our guys don't wanna go work at a PPI or repo shop. Mm-hmm. Um, and there's all sorts of follow it from that. Right. The insurance is very, very different like. Uh, the, the, the other business in town. Um, like I said, I, I know I, I know Connor really well.

We get together all the time. The only similarity between our businesses is we own tow trucks. 

Jack Carr: What's the the difference in, because I would imagine that, don't get me wrong, right, the non-consensual towing, uh, definitely a part of it is, is emergency service. It is, i, I wouldn't say it's 24 7, but there is an after hours aspect, but I imagine that consensual towing has to be a 24 7.

Kind of gig? Is that, is that accurate? 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah, I mean, so they're actually, they're both 24 7. And in fact, the, the, the PPI businesses run like a true, you know, you might be running 8, 10, 12 trucks on a three shift, 24 7 basis because you're really getting busiest second and [00:11:00] third shift. Right. You know, you think like people are at, at bars and restaurants and parking.

Yeah, that makes sense. Um, whereas like we run 24 7, um, we've got, uh, we've got folks in trucks twenty four seven plus an on-call schedule over the top of it, but mm-hmm. At a much lower volume. Right. So during the day. On a given day, I may have 20 drivers in trucks, 25 drivers in trucks, um, overnight I've got, you know, two ready to go.

Mm-hmm. And then more that we can call in if something goes crazy, just 'cause the, the sort of ebbs and flows throughout the day. I. 

Jack Carr: Yeah, I imagine. That's awesome. So, so you bought this business, uh, you get inundated into the consensual to, I love that by the way, consensual. It's an easy way to describe it.

Like that actually makes a lot of sense. The content, consensual towing market, and you start, you close on this business and now you're running it. What does that first couple months look like? Like, 

Matthew Saskin: so the one thing I'd say is this is actually not. This business is not rocket science. Like this is not a particularly complicated business.

Right? [00:12:00] Like our, our largest costs are all things that are fairly straightforward to understand. 

Jack Carr: I'm, I'm stopping you, Matt, on that one. I think it is. I think this business is not for you, but there's a reason that it's stayed fragmented for so long. Like it is extremely, which you for sure. Yeah. I definitely want to, there 

Matthew Saskin: are challenges there, but they are.

They're not challenges in understanding how to operate the business fair. They're challenges in, in scale, like as we faced and how you grow it and, and how things maneuver, right? So, okay. Like. Not to dis not to distract from what the guys do. Like our, our operators are, are really well paid, highly skilled, tons of experience, especially the guys doing heavy towing.

They have CDLs, they have a ton of mechanical experience. Um, I want to get into that too 'cause I've seen some awesome 

Jack Carr: pictures that you have on Twitter. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's looks like a technical nightmare to try and get that truck for 

Matthew Saskin: sure. Um, no. Yeah, the running of the business fairly straightforward.

Okay. Like the big moving pieces, right. We have a lot of assets, right. There's a lot of trucks moving around and like mm-hmm. I, we spend a ton of money on insurance, fuel people, and maintenance of the trucks. Beyond that, yeah, it's all fairly straightforward stuff. And even there, what [00:13:00] you get, I, i is at a certain point, you know, the size of, of our business, right?

So it was 38 people at the time of acquisition, something like that, 35. There was no management layers because the prior ownership just, it was pure top-down command and control and that's it. Um, but you know, we've since promoted some folks into supervisor roles. Um, but there were enough people there that.

You know, I told everyone day one, and I, I'll still tell new, new folks this, like, I'm not driving a tow truck. Right. I've, I've driven our trucks, I know how to operate them, but the day that I have to go and sort of use a tow truck in anger, there's like 10 things, 12 things that have all had to go wrong along the way.

Yeah, definitely. And it's gonna a super, super bad day for everybody involved. Mm-hmm. Um, right. There were better things for me to be doing with my time. To make sure that our drivers and the operators and everybody else have the work for them to do. Right. So, so my focus is growing the business in a scalable way, making sure everybody has an opportunity to earn money, making sure that we can, you know, that we can continue to add to the benefits package [00:14:00] we offer to the team every, every year.

And, you know, I'm gonna focus on, on that piece of the puzzle. Um, I happen to, like, I am mechanically handy. I've built a bunch of cars. I know how to work on vehicles. So I think like. I was able to sort of jump in there and, and inherently understand what's going on from a truck standpoint. Um, but again, like I've got mechanics, we, we, there are people to do all of those things.

Um, yeah, there would not be at a much smaller business. Right. I know people, I was gonna say. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. And that makes sense. That's a great point though. 'cause we talk about that, especially in like SM b Twitter and mm-hmm. That a lot is like the size of the business you buy is extremely important to your skillset.

Yeah. Because if you bought a 12 person trucking company, like you would have to jump in a truck inevitably. Correct. Right, right, right. Or, 

Matthew Saskin: or you're behold you're, you're much more beholden to to, to everybody. Yeah, exactly. More cost involved in certain things. For sure. 

Jack Carr: Interesting. Okay, so you, you buy this, this large trucking business, you are, you're not driving trucks, but you're growing it and so what.

What does, what does scale? I like, I'm actually fascinated 'cause as I'm trying to like draw [00:15:00] linear, con like linear, um, congruencies between our businesses. I'm even thinking like from a scale perspective, marketing, like how do you do marketing? 'cause it's not actual lead gen in the way that we look at lead gen.

Yeah. Like you wouldn't. You wouldn't post on Facebook unless it's branding. Branding plays. Exactly. Yeah. Even like lead gen from Google, which has to be your number one, I would imagine. 'cause somebody's on the side of the road. They Google real quick towing company near me. Yeah. So it becomes like an like all you're focused on is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but mostly of what you're focused on is gonna be.

Um, Google, SEO, Google Optimization we're the most, and then like some branding on the back end to try and keep people top of mind. It important 

Matthew Saskin: to think about the who our customers are and, and kind of fundamentally we think about it as being three things, right? We've bought individual consumers who are customers.

Um, so that would be like. Someone broke down on the side of the road and they, they don't have AAA or don't have motor club or whatever, and they're just Googling, [00:16:00] you know, tow truck near me. The second is commercial customers, right? B2B type accounts. And those range from, um. A lot of searcher type businesses, right?

A lot of small mid-size home services businesses all the way up through the large national fleets who had, you know, 20,000 trucks around the country. And they, they call us if they break down in our market. And then the third would be municipalities, right? Police departments, highway patrol, accident, recovery type stuff.

Um, so if you look at those three, like. Police departments, municipal stuff is fundamentally a location based game, right? In order to, mm-hmm. To be on more government contracts, we need to be in those physical areas. So if I wanted to expand into a different county and join their rotations, their police and highway patrol, I'd have to physically be in that county, right?

I have to go and open up a storage yard, add some trucks in that county, and, and physically expand. Um, and that's why I write for a, okay. A relatively small business, right? We've got six physical locations because they all have to be sort of proximate to certain towns. Um, so that's one piece of the puzzle.

[00:17:00] Uh, the second, the commercial side of things is one where, um, frankly, we, we've still not cracked the code on organic growth there yet. Like we, we had a sales rep out in the market for about 12 months now. Um, in, in fairness, he's, he's having fairly mediocre results. So we're probably gonna make some changes there.

And, and, and a recent acquisition we made, I think, we'll, we'll, we'll change the direction we approach organic growth for commercial customers. Um, 

Jack Carr: and that looks like just typical B2B, like, hey, go out, pound pavement, meet people. Okay? 

Matthew Saskin: Yep. Yep. And, and, and it's a market, I imagine it's like others, right?

Where the amount that a fleet spends on towing is small. Right? Like 1% of the fleet budget, hopefully. Right? Right, right. So, so it's, it's hard to get people to switch. 'cause if they're a big fleet. Right? Mm-hmm. Like, to put it in perspective, we, after some acquisitions, we're 50 trucks ish. Um, we spend about $750,000 a year on our fleet on repair and maintenance mechanics, all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. And if, if we were to, like, if one of my things breaks down, we tow it ourselves. Um, but if I'm put a dollar on that, [00:18:00] we'd spend, yeah. 7,500 bucks a year, maybe on total. So 1% of budget. Hard to get someone to change where they're spending 1% of budget unless the other company just egregiously screws up.

Jack Carr: Yeah. It's not a, it's, it can't be a money play 'cause Right. If you come in at, Hey, we can do 5% better than it's like 5% of 1%. It's like Right, right, right. Nobody cares. I have a Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Matthew Saskin: And then on the, the, the cash call side of things, individual customers, and to be clear, that is not just like you with a broken down car.

That also is a lot of like. Owner operators that have a tra have one tractor trailer mm-hmm. And they happen to break down in market. Um, so that is a combination of SEO local Right. Google my business stuff. Um, we've, we've experimented with paid and paid works really well for heavy towing because mm-hmm.

The ticket size is larger and it's easier to convert. Paid for us works extraordinarily poorly for light duty. That is like passenger vehicle towing because. We just have too much competition, right? There's too many, like guys in a truck who will charge 70 bucks for something we'd charge [00:19:00] 150 bucks for.

So we basically, like, we get those coming in via mostly organic. Um, 'cause paid didn't work for us. Like basically we had, right? So big picture, this is a 50% gross margin business and we had kind of like two x ROAS on light duty paid. So we were effectively not making money. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. Awareness. Yeah. You need, you need it closer to like, what six to make it even work on paid.

Yeah. Have on heavy 

Matthew Saskin: towing, we run between seven and nine x roas. Um, then you go, the problem there is we run at a volume before we run out a budget. Right. I would, mm-hmm. I would throw as much money as I could at, at nine X roas. But we run, you know, we, we run it a budget or we run out of, uh, volume at like.

$700 in spend a month, something like that. It's not much. Mm-hmm. 

Jack Carr: And so walk me through percentage, right? You, you kind of put it into three big buckets. Walk me through percentage like I would, and I'm gonna say what I imagine first, I would imagine that you are probably 60% working on that residential or, or direct to consumer type than maybe 20% on commercial contracts in another.[00:20:00] 

What is that, 60, 70, another 20% on the municipality? Absolutely. Maybe higher municipality and lower residential. 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah. So we're, we're index the other way. Um, we're about. And it's also important to think about it in terms of volume versus revenue because Yes. Um, light duty, right? A passenger vehicle tow, our average across the board is like 180 bucks, give or take.

Oh yeah. Um, whereas Hemi Duty tow, our average is like $612, something like that. Mm-hmm. So much lower volume, much higher proportion of revenue. Um, yeah. So when I look at it from a revenue standpoint, we're. 35%, give or take, um, passenger vehicle cash call that sort of individual consumer. Okay? Um, we are 45, 50% commercial accounts.

And then the remaining, what is that? The remaining 20 ish percent or so? Oh, that's interesting. Are police, police rotations, accident recoveries, et cetera? And again, those numbers waiver, depending on whether you're looking at of course, volume or [00:21:00] revenue. Um, but yeah, like we index towards the heavy side of things, 

Jack Carr: uh, that I didn't, that's a big surprise to me.

I thought you were, were indexing more towards the residential side. But I mean, it makes sense, right? 'cause the commercial customers generally have bigger vehicles. It's gonna be more. Towards heavy towing, which has the bigger average tickets. Okay. And I, I bet it's more niche, right? In the sense that there's there's fewer competitors.

That's right. Yeah. Like we're in a dense 

Matthew Saskin: market. There's still a lot of competition, but, but substantially less on the heavy towing than there is on light duty. 'cause again, light duty, like you could go tomorrow by a used auto loader, which is the thing, if you close your eyes and picture a tow truck, what you're gonna picture, yeah.

You go by used auto loader for 40 or 50 grand and like. Go to work? 

Jack Carr: No, I, I picture the, the big one, the big boys that are pulling tractor trailers. That's what I love. I love you. Those 

Matthew Saskin: before your 50 grand, but you could still pick one if you had your 

Jack Carr: CDL and go to work. Yeah. No, those are, those are really cool.

I, I love, I love seeing those go. Sweet. And so, so, okay, so you buy this first one and then you get the wild hair, like, Hey, I'm gonna grow this thing. Yep. Which every small [00:22:00] owner does and imagines. Yeah, sure. And so the way that you, or one of the ways that you, you've, uh, identified and, and you kind of mentioned already is acquisitions.

So what. What was the, what did you optimize for there? What did that look like? 

Matthew Saskin: Spent the first. Six to 12 months, just kind of like letting dust settle, getting a sense of what's going on. Mm-hmm. Made a handful of changes. Nothing like, nothing mission critical, nothing hugely impactful to the employees aside from, you know, we put a ton of time and energy into safety process and procedure, things like that.

And those were just non-negotiable changes, right? Like people that weren't on board with that can have a nice day working somewhere else. Simultaneous to that, right. Started experimenting with marketing spend and, and doing a, a lot of tracking and attribution to where phone calls are coming from. 'cause fundamentally.

We only do things via phone call. Like customers don't text us. There's no chatting, there's no email. They call us. So, right. We, we use CallRail, spent a ton of time and energy on identifying all the different sources of phone calls and what's valuable mm-hmm. And what's not. Mm-hmm. Um, so that, that helped get a sense of things, started experimenting with [00:23:00] paid, spent, you know, three, four months on.

You know, can we make paid work discovered? Okay. Yes. For heavy duty, no for light duty, you know, throughout the, through the side of that. Also then, you know, brought on an outside sales rep and, and kind of watched, watched those motions and, you know, that was an investment I was prepared to make from there.

I, I sort of, there was a different, I. There's another business out there, um, in an adjacent industry, sort of, uh, oversized transport. So I think, um, right, those things you could see going down the road with like, you know, oversized load, whatever, construction equipment. Mm-hmm. Stuff like that. Um, that I looked at originally.

And it was just, it was too small as a standalone. Like it would not have made sense. It was only 10 people, 500,000 in SDE. Owner was driving a truck, new owner would've had to be driving a truck. Um, so like, looked at it, liked it, but threw it off, threw it into the pile, and like a year in, after buying East Coast towing, went and looked and saw that was still on the market.

So reached out to the broker, reached out to the seller, and, and just like started talking to them. 'cause it, it actually for a bunch of reasons makes a ton of sense as an adjacency to us. 

Jack Carr: And when you say adjacency, you mean like a secondary vertical? [00:24:00] So like, actually like Yeah. Transport. 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah. Like we view it, it's fully and.

Short, you know, fast forward we closed on that deal. No, that's neat. Um, but, but like we view it as a different service line. So, uh, yeah. Like started looking at that, um, wow. And we were at the probably 18 month mark when, you know, I sat down and like was talking on my GM and talking to some other folks, and I think we all realized like, okay, things are actually running.

Things are running well, like the, the supervisors, the folks that we promoted into roles. Um, the way I sort of describe it is at the three month mark when we put, you know, we put someone into a driver manager role, um, and if you presented him with a, with a challenge, just like something to deal with, it would get solved a hundred percent of the time, but 90% of the time it would get solved in the, what is the most expedient thing that eliminates this pain from in front of me.

Whereas 10% of the time, it's like what's the right way to solve this for the future? Knowing that scale, however I handle scale this for scale, I have to handle it the same way for 20 other drivers. And by that month, [00:25:00] 18 kind of what I realized is, okay, cool. When we present that person with the the A challenge now.

80% of the time it's getting solved in the way that is forward thinking. That is planning for like, okay, how does this set a precedent and how do we do this in the right way? Um, and that was a pretty good indicator that like, okay, cool. The, the team has started to mature. Some of the lessons are sailing in and we probably have the bandwidth and availability to really.

Really contemplate, uh, uh, some add-ons. 

John Wilson: One of the benefits of working with Wilson is that we are basically a same day next day company. So what that means is if I sell a job today, I'm gonna aim to get it in today, tomorrow, or the next day. Like we aim for a really fast turnaround and because of that we have pretty high expectations of our suppliers.

Getting parts in time has been a real challenge, and Supply house.com has been a really awesome partner for us. Uh, because of that, they've got like a quarter of million SKUs. They've got it across plumbing, hvac, and electrical. So they cover all our different lines. And they can get stuff to you fast and they have a ton of it.

Plus, on top of that, they have best in class pricing and their New Trade Master program gives you [00:26:00] free shipping, free returns, and a bunch of discounts over retail on top of it. And the Trade Master Program is free to join. So check out supply house.com. Make sure to check out their Trade Master program.

Jack Carr: That's an interesting way, that's a really interesting perspective. I think really mature in terms of business ownership is like you focus on like, Hey, okay, now we can grow because the maturity of our managers are getting to a point where they can handle more. Here's the 

Matthew Saskin: thing, that's not gonna fall down, right?

Like before I go sign on the dotted line for a couple million dollars in additional debt like tg, I'd like to have a level of comfort that that. That the team is prepared for it. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. I, I don't think that's a normal, like, honestly, I don't think that's a normal thing that people like, talking with a lot of business owners, they're just like, eh, you know, like, I think we maxed out the market, so we're just gonna go build it, you know, go expand in another market.

And like, they still have all, including myself, I, you know, I did go down this road at one point, I was looking at a business two and a half hours away and ended up not doing it because it wasn't a smart move. Yeah. But like, point being is like, I still like. This isn't ready, but I'm still like over here looking for expansion opportunities and so even like moving into plumbing, [00:27:00] I don't think we were ready from a, a HVAC point of view.

Sure. Like our HVAC wasn't. Like running super smooth and we're like, okay, let's start up plumbing. It was like, we still have issues here, but this is a great growth opportunity. Let's just figure it out. Yeah. But 

Matthew Saskin: example applies the, the right it, it, it, those weaknesses. It definitely does. The, the cracks.

The cracks start to hurt after a while. Um, 

Jack Carr: they definitely do. So I mean that's a really awesome way to look at, is like, Hey, I think it's 

Matthew Saskin: helpful. Like, that's where having a long horizon and no particular mandate for growth, I think is helpful. Right. Like, I, I don't know. 'cause I don't, I don't have that pressure out there, but like, I don't, right.

I don't have investors, I don't have anybody to answer to about my family. Um, and, and our team and just making sure we're doing the right thing for everybody. So yeah, I'm in, I'm in no rush to do things that I'd much rather. Do it in a scalable manner, then see things blow up and cause pain because like, yeah, I don't want the headaches and pain, right.

I have enough stuff I have to deal with. Are you sure? I don't, I don't need more. Um, so yeah, like we felt we were ready, started pursuing that one. Yeah. Um, it took a long ass time to close for a [00:28:00] variety of reasons. That's a whole different discussion, but, um, mm-hmm. So I say got, got that done. We closed that deal in October of 24, October last year.

And, uh, in rapid fire succession, uh, right around that time in like September. Had another very small deal pop up in the market, fully, fully brokered, um, like tiny, like 200,000 in SDE, another adjacent service line. It's a, a mobile fleet service business. So, um, again, like a lot of our customers in that service line are, are searcher businesses, right?

10 to 50 vehicle home services, businesses, delivery, that kind of thing. Um, but that business, like we, we show up onsite. It, it operates 24 7. We do all the pre-scheduled maintenance of vehicles. So if you're a. Right. If you're an HVAC fleet of 20 transits, like we can show up at 7:00 PM or 10:00 PM on a Tuesday and do all your oil changes, brakes ship, tire changes.

Um, we work with all the fleet management companies so we can do all the billing for that. Uh, so that one popped up. Uh, price was extraordinarily reasonable. Um, very cool. So we, we, we moved super quick on [00:29:00] that as well. Yeah. Um, and closed on that in early December. Mm-hmm. Uh, and now here we are kind of letting.

Letting the dust settle and figuring out what, yeah. Figuring out what to do now. 

Jack Carr: That's awesome. We, I mean, we utilize one. We know, I know almost everyone that, that I know who owns a home service business utilizes one. 'cause it's just so inefficient to have to take individual vehicles out into like Right.

Jiffy Lube like we have, and we're having, having a meeting downstairs, like a sales meeting and we have the guys outside right now doing like three oil changes. So Yeah, I know, that's exactly, because everyone's cars here. That's, 

Matthew Saskin: that's why I love it. And you know, when I think about how we sell. Right. It's, that is both an easy pitch because the, the, the market or the potential targets are so, there's so many of them that mm-hmm.

The sales process really becomes, right. If someone is locked into the fact that, no, no, we just sent our text out to Jiffy Lube, then like, okay, cool. No problem. We'll, we'll, we'll come back in a month and talk to you. But if you hit someone right when they have that pain point, they're like, oh yeah, this makes a ton of sense.

We can go from a first cold meeting to a closed deal for service in two weeks 

Jack Carr: [00:30:00] and d do. Is there a syner? I, I mean, I would imagine there's a synergy in this business where if you're doing fleet ma, like the fleet maintenance for you know, a 50 person fleet and you let them know, Hey, by the way, if something does break down, we also have this towing company and we'll give you a 10% deal.

Like there you. A hundred percent holiday 

Matthew Saskin: billing. We give you the little cars and little stickers you can put inside your trucks to remind your techs if they get in an accident, call this number. You don't have to wait for the, whoever the police are gonna call. So we're, we're early days in that cross sell, but we're already, we are starting to see that have positive impact and we think we can really step on a right.

Like to your point, it's easier if, if you're spending 30 or 40% of your fleet budget with me a year, hell of a lot easier to get you to spend that 1% on towing with me as well. Just 'cause it's easier. 

Jack Carr: Yeah, I was talking to someone about this, uh, the other day. Uh, it was like junk removal or something. And the point was like, in, in home services, the goal is to always, to stay top of mind.

And so we do maintenances Yeah. And memberships and Yeah, you, we have branding plays and like there's, there's this really top of mind thing. But with these singular [00:31:00] services, it was with John 'cause it was with roofing. Okay. Yeah. It's like there's, there's no top of mind for roofing because Correct. Right.

You get one roof every 20 years and like, you don't wanna think about your roof for the next 20 years. Yeah. And so you go on to Google, you find the, you know, the first person and that's who you go with. The first you call, you get quotes, best reviews. And I, I would imagine something similar with towing is like, we've towed two vehicles.

I. I don't even remember the name of the tow company we used, but I know the name of the, the uh, the maintenance, the fleet maintenance company that absolutely we use. So it's like if, if those could be the same Easy transit, so easy transition. Even for me as a, the business owner, I would love that. 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah.

'cause if you're a well-maintained fleet of 50 vans, let's say you might only need a tow. 2, 3, 4 times a year, if that. Right. So it is such an infrequent occurrence that, but yeah, if I'm, if I'm in your face or my trucks are in your face twice a month. Oil, doing oil changes, changing tires, all that. Mm-hmm.

Yes, absolutely. 

Jack Carr: A hundred percent. Sweet. So, so you now [00:32:00] you ha own these three verticals. You've expanded to six locations. Is that including those other two companies? Yeah, I need that. So 

Matthew Saskin: those both add a couple of, added some facilities for us. Yeah. Does that 

Jack Carr: also. Does that also drive, like can you utilize your, your, um, fleet maintenance facility as a tow yard to grab an extra municipality as well?

Yeah, 

Matthew Saskin: so the, the fleet maintenance one we yeah. Is, is not in a different enough market, so we're not leveraging it for there. But the, the, the heavy haul yard, um, the one we use for the oversized transport business is about an hour west of us in a more rural market. Um, we actually are just. This week, I think relocated three tow trucks out there and are gonna start sort of expanding the towing footprint into based out of there as well.

So yeah, we're, we're early days there, but I, I'd expect we have that, that county sort of fully running from a towing standpoint in the next 60 to 90 days. 

Jack Carr: That's so awesome. Very, 

Matthew Saskin: yeah, that one I'm excited about. 'cause like it's, it's a rural market right there. So we have one or two competitors versus like 20.

Mm-hmm. 

Jack Carr: And so speaking of that, like expansion and growth and, and next steps, [00:33:00] like what do the next steps look like for you? 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah, so, um, I would like to say that the plan is let the dust settle and kind of see how this year shakes out. And I, I think we can stick to that. Like unless something super cool comes along.

Um, and I've, like, I I, I look at deals all the time. I have a couple local owners who reached out to me 'cause they're interested in selling. And, um, there's one deal locally that I, that I really like, but the, the broker and seller are, um, out to lunch in terms of value. Uh, so, so super cool comes along. Yeah, we figure out a way to do it, but otherwise the goal is like, alright, let's get the, um, let's let the dust settle, let's get through this year and, and see where we land.

Um, I would like to at some point probably recap the debt only because. They'd probably save a percent or two. But more importantly I've got three different SBA loans and two SBA lines of credit. Yeah, it would just be really nice to like group that all together into one wire transfer app to send them up.

Jack Carr: Yeah. And I, 'cause I mean, I wasn't going to touch on it just because I, I, I imagine like [00:34:00] this, you could do an entire hour long episode on just like the way you have to think about financing and debt. Yes. And assets. Just because you have so many assets and like one, one vehicle expansion, especially in the heavy, like you're saying is a hundred, 200, maybe more thousand, more than 200,000.

And so like the debt on with more than that on the business. Ha. And it has to be crazy, especially if. Right. You, your average ticket is $600. Like I'm just doing math in my head and you know, some of those numbers, it's not No, 

Matthew Saskin: no. There's a lot of moving pieces. Um, yeah, but the flip side of that is these assets, especially on the heavy side, last a long time and right when you think about heavy towing, right?

The average ticket is, you know, 612 bucks, something like that. But. Uh, right. Like you were mentioning, if you, if you follow me on Twitter, like I post a bunch of stuff of, of very cool stuff, heavy recoveries, we do like, those are 20, 30, 40, $50,000 build jobs. Okay. Um, now they don't happen all that frequently in our market.

Again, 'cause of density and kind of where we are from a [00:35:00] truck throw fair standpoint. And in similar like a heady hall business, the oversized transport, like when you see me post a picture of like a bunch of our trucks moving a crawler crane for a customer, right? That is a job that takes. Six or seven trucks for three days.

Like we had a crew this week out. Like moving a crawler crane from Charlotte down to Augusta, and then immediately go into like Charleston to move something back up somewhere into North Carolina. So they moved two cranes last week. They'll jump immediately to two more cranes next week. Um, so those are, and those are bid ticket, right?

Those work, we're, we're talking 20, 30, $40,000 to move it. To move a crawler crane. 

Jack Carr: Still, still though, like, I mean from a standpoint of like, just the financing is just so different from home services. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. We have nothing, you know, like we had a truck, we had maybe a couple more thousand dollars in monthly debt on a Maverick.

Yeah. Like 2000 bucks a month. Right. And then we have to go through training and some hiring and like, there is cost, but nothing compared to like a, a huge, huge asset Yeah. Than half a million dollar [00:36:00] truck at a, at a clip. Yeah. So it's, it's just a different world. Like we hire fire. The upgrade layoff, like Yeah.

Anything like that is a much quicker movement versus like, if, if, yeah, for us, people are straightforward, like 

Matthew Saskin: it's, people are straightforward to do all the rest of it. Yeah. The dynamics are fine for us, the biggest moving on there is really just like the trucks are extraordinarily expensive, right? 

Jack Carr: Yeah.

No, that, that totally makes sense. And, and also it makes sense on the growth trajectory. Like, hey, I'm gonna let it settle just because Right. You are technically running three different businesses, even if some of them have similarities and synergies, like it still is three separate businesses that you have to Yeah.

There's 

Matthew Saskin: market and manage 

Jack Carr: in different ways. Yeah. 

Matthew Saskin: There's enough difference between them. Like we still, we're, we're now getting through sharing resources, so like our, mm-hmm. As an example, our, our fleet service techs are starting to spend some time in the towing shop just to learn how to work on bigger trucks.

'cause fleet service is fundamentally smaller, right? It's smaller scale vehicles, box trucks, transit van, yeah. Things like that. Um, so they're getting training on the big trucks on our fleet, a bunch of our drive, right. A bunch of the tow operators have CDLs so they can drive the heavy haul trucks and they have that [00:37:00] background so we can sort of cross pollinate there as we, as we need to fill in or have additional work, of course.

Um, but, but they are still fundamentally. Yeah. Similar customer base, but, but different businesses. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. The way I try to look at it at the end of the day, 'cause we, it's the same thing, like we're still in the same homes. You could run a pest control, a roofing, an HVAC, plumbing. But at the end of the day, like if I want to drive pest control leads for my plumbing company, like, or HVAC leads for my plumbing company, like I might have to do right now, um, at the end of the day, like it's still.

Completely separate marketing budget. It's, it's, right, right. It's its own beast of like offers and, and like, it's just different. Even though a lot of the similarities and, and. Like technically right up. And they, they even have from a mechanical and licensing standpoint, like mechanical can do gas pipe, plumbing can do gas pipe.

So it's Right. Okay. It's like so much similarity but so different at the same time. So interesting. I wanna do a segment here. I. Called, is this business a piece of shit? Okay, [00:38:00] so, no, I'm just kidding. Sorry. To the broker who are gonna show this business. So everybody jump on YouTube. I'm gonna pull up a plumbing, or excuse me, ae towing business in my market.

I'm in a plumbing business market, but it won't be market. We have not, we have not, uh, pre-rehearsed this. So, um. Let's take a look, Matt. All right. I want to see if I should buy this towing business in my market. Cool. Let's do it. So, boom, I'm gonna open it up. Tennessee Hamilton County. We are looking at a, wait, is it?

Matthew Saskin: I've not seen this one yet. 

Jack Carr: Well, maybe you need to move, start diversifying where Statewise. Where is, where's Hamilton County? Just so I know. So it's South. South. Um, uh. Well, this actually says that it operates in Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. So it's looking like the I 65 all the way down. Got it.

Okay. Okay. Um, pretty much from Nashville to Atlanta is, look, looks like it's ownership based. 24 tow trucks. Um, 14 vendor codes across 60 zip codes, and 30 in Nashville and a hundred in in [00:39:00] Atlanta. I don't know what that means either. Okay. I was hoping you did. No, I dunno what the vendor code is. So 25 employees has a 4,000 square foot building, uh, two acre lot.

Okay. It doesn't say what, what kind of towing it does. Yeah. But I'm sure you could guesstimate based on, on looking at it. All right, so let's 

Matthew Saskin: see. They're asking 2.4 on 400,000 in cash flow. Two point I'm, I'm doing this. Super high speed, 2.8 million in revenue. I don't care about the real estate if it's not included, and they're calling it 1.8 million in trucks.

So, um, the things that come to mind immediately are, so, number one, the, the, the number of people kind of. Jives with the revenue. In fact, it's actually a little on the heavy side. I would, I would expect to see maybe a few, uh, fewer than 20. I think I said 24 employees, right? 25. Yeah. 25. Okay. Yeah, I'd expect to actually see fewer than that for kind of two and a half, 2.8 in revenue.

And that's actually a, that's a positive thing in that it might mean that unlike most towing companies this size, um, these guys actually kind of have some structure in place, right? Mm-hmm. [00:40:00] Dispatch. Mm-hmm. Might be, mm-hmm. Some dedicated dispatchers, not just the owner taking the phone calls on his cell phone in his truck.

And someone at the front office, probably his partner, uh, taking phone calls as well. And that would also lead to the second point. Um, this is producing quite a fair bit less cash flow and Oh, right. It's always hard to say. 'cause who knows what they're actually calling cash flow. But like 

Jack Carr: yeah. Is that SDE, is that ebitda?

Right. You know, what are they doing there 

Matthew Saskin: for consensual towing businesses, which I would imagine these guys are. 'cause otherwise they'd probably say it. Um, mm-hmm. These are 20% EBITDA margin businesses when kind of, when properly run. Right. So at at 2.8 million in revenue, I expect this to be in the $550,000 range, something like that.

So, mm-hmm. You know, that could just be them not properly doing add backs or it could be their kind of over staff, which is, is fine. It's not a terrible place to build, which 

Jack Carr: I mean. Based on what you said to start, it kind of sounds like 24 tow trucks, but 25 employees means maybe they're not [00:41:00] including the owner.

There's two employees in the office. Yep. 24 tow trucks on the road, but is running heavy. So either, and then that has one 

Matthew Saskin: more interesting point, which is these businesses are generally all. Over trucked, right? Everyone has far too many assets and the primary reason for that is, um, the owners drive the trucks.

The owners like buying shiny new trucks. Uh, a lot of the owners are under the impression that the only way you can attract and retain driver talent is by having shiny new trucks. Mm-hmm. Um, and what you end up with then is a cus is a company with a disproportionately high chunk of assets and that then leads us to.

This thing that's producing, let's assume, let's be generous and say it's actually doing what it should be and it's producing $550,000 in, in, in ebitda. It's still not worth, what is that? That that's 4.2 x off the top of my head. Something like that. Like, 

Jack Carr: yeah. Four, it's almost, it's almost five x if it was 2.5, right?

Five times five is [00:42:00] 20. Yeah. It's five x. Like s 

Matthew Saskin: don't sell for that. Just to be, to be very clear. Um. Mm-hmm. So like, interestingly enough. There's one major consolidator in the towing industry right now, um, called Guardian Fleet Services that based out of Florida. Mm-hmm. They're about 200 million in revenue today.

Their CEO presented at the conference I was just at, and he made abundantly clear their buy box. They are right now buying companies at between three and a half and four and a half x, and they are only doing deals larger than 10 million ev. So if the single consolidator right, the guy that's got a hundred million dollars on his balance sheet is saying he only paying four and a half X for $10 million.

Ev ev deals. So, so 2 million plus in ebitda. Your, your 400, $500,000 cash flow towing business is not worth four to five x. No, it's worth three x Basically, it's worth asset value. Maybe a little bit for the goodwill in there. That makes sense. And fundamentally, a problem with all these things I look at, like they all, they all look and feel like that people, because, but owners want, they.

They probably have some debt on the trucks, like they wanna get paid for the trucks and then they want [00:43:00] some value for the business over the top. And then they also want some more to, you know, put in their pocket or retire off of. 

Jack Carr: John and I actually talked about this, uh, uh, around the air, uh, air Pros. So in our industry we had a giant, um.

Uh, bankruptcy from a, that one just Unwounded, 

Matthew Saskin: right? 

Jack Carr: Yeah. $250 million bankruptcy, like huge company. 15 locations in nine states. And we're talking about like what the impact on the market is. And, and this exact topic came up if the biggest companies, 'cause on, on the other hand, right, Sila, which is another big consolidator.

Uh, it just sold for 20 x to JP Morgan. I think it was JP Morgan or sold from to Morgan Stanley one, one of the Morgans. Um, but point being is like us in the lower markets are looking at the higher market to ensure that, that they're trading at a higher rate, which keeps our rate up. But if they, if we have too many bankruptcies, what ends up happening is, Hey, bankruptcy and bankruptcy, bankruptcy.

Multiples come down right. To, to account for that. So interesting. So [00:44:00] like you said, if, if the top tier guys are trading at four x five x Yep. Then you are not as a, as a $300,000 s st. Right. Right. Or EBITDA are gonna trade for the same we 

Matthew Saskin: as an industry. Right. That's the indicator. We, we, we have not hit a point of multiple extension.

'cause fundamentally we have no institutional buyer groups. So there's, there's a couple, but Yeah. But you know, again, when the biggest in the industry is only doing 200 mil, only is doing 200 million in revenue. Right, right. That's indicative that there's just like. There's another, another roll up I know of that just started, like I know the owners of the business that, that, that recapped, um, and they're doing 40 million in revenue.

Mm-hmm. Some, somewhere in that universe. So. Early, early days for that yet. But to the point, everyone wants too much for their businesses. I, I have this discussion with brokers in my market on a mm-hmm. Monthly basis. 

Jack Carr: Yeah. Right. The fragmentation of the market though is super interesting because it, it really leads to kind of a prime, prime example for a time where it can roll up, even though assets are a little bit higher.

It's very interesting market. I, I've always loved the towing market, so I think, I think it has big things ahead of it, and so. [00:45:00] Obviously not buying that business, uh, that's a no go. Where do you think that that one should actually come in at? I mean, obviously, right? Yeah. We're, we're looking at a shell of a CIM here.

Matthew Saskin: I mean, yeah, the problem, so the, the problem with that is also like, realistically call it three x, right? Call it a million and a half dollars, something like that. And the problem you have to get over there is. Convincing an owner that, uh, the business is worth less than that owner feels the assets are worth.

Now, I'd also bet the assets are not worth 1.8 million. And it's, I was 

Jack Carr: gonna ask you about that, because that, that comes out, it's hard to knowing 

Matthew Saskin: what those trucks are, right? Yeah. Like same 24 trucks, if you have 24 beat down auto loaders, you've got mm-hmm. I don't know, $500,000 in equipment. Um, if you've got 24 heavy tow trucks, even if they are 15 or 20 years old, and then on their last wins, yeah, they're still worth a hundred thousand dollars each on the open market.

Jack Carr: Yeah. 

Matthew Saskin: Right. So like, there's just such a range in fair market value. You, you need the asset list to really make sense of it. Yeah. [00:46:00] 

Jack Carr: The other part that that gets to me that I don't like about that business is right. It's only doing 2.8 only. It's only doing 2.8 million across 24 trucks. But technically it's in three markets.

Right? It's in Nashville, it's in Chattanooga, and it's down in Atlanta. That feels, I don't know the towing industry as well as you do, but that feels like a very large stretch. Yeah. It's like four hours of driving. Five hours of driving. Yeah, and I bet, 

Matthew Saskin: I bet that that is a bit of hand wagging to really say like.

I can credibly say we do business throughout the southeastern United States on any given day. I have trucks in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, but I'm still based in Raleigh and my location is in Raleigh. So I, you know, I, I might read into that, that they're not really in those markets, rather they do business into those markets because, yeah.

Jack Carr: Which would make sense. Like if I'm in Chattanooga and the business shop is in Chattanooga, like I would imagine that there's a high number of tows, consensual tows from chat up to Nashville. Yep. Two hours and down, two hours into Atlanta. That [00:47:00] would make sense. And what 

Matthew Saskin: you, what you end up with heavy towing is a lot of swap outs.

Right. So it's the mm-hmm. I have a fleet that is based out of Raleigh and one of my trucks is in Charleston and broke down. So me as the towing company in Raleigh, I'm gonna go to the yard. Pick up a working truck, tow it down to Charleston, give it to the driver, take a broken truck from Charleston back up to Raleigh and drop it off to the customer's yard.

Um, completely makes sense. So that's a, that's a fairly prominent occurrence with both owned assets as well as, um, leased or rented assets. Right. If you, if you lease your trucks through Penske or Ryer or whatnot mm-hmm. If, if it's the full wet lease, then like they're, they're covering all that stuff for you, right?

They're covering, getting you a working truck when the one you have breaks down. 

Jack Carr: Very cool. So, no, go on that one. Keep an eye on it. Wait for it to drop to lower than its assets. Yeah, because like I did the math, it's like, like 75 KA truck. I would at 1.8 

Matthew Saskin: and see, like, you know, maybe the answer is it's, there's actually a lot there that, that is not coming out in that teaser.

Of [00:48:00] course. Yeah. Um, or the answer is they're just, they're out to lunch and the only way you really figure that out is you go and have that first discussion. 

Jack Carr: Exactly, and, and a broker in on biz buy, sell, being out to lunch. No, that doesn't, doesn't happen very often. Doesn't. I appreciate it, Matt. So Matt, where if people wanna learn more about towing industry or.

You in general. Yeah. Where is the best place to just get in contact with you or, or follow you? 

Matthew Saskin: Yeah. Like you can track me down on, track me down on Twitter. Um, folks can also email me it's first initial, last name@eastcoasttowing.com. I'm always happy to hop on the phone and talk, talk, talk folks about the industry.

I don't even know how many deals I've reviewed with, with folks over the past year and a half. Mm-hmm. But always happy to do so. I've done, you know, I've done some consulting work with, with some, some groups that have, uh, looked at buying towing businesses. So like, always happy to look at deals, always happy to engage deeper and.

You know, I, I learned something selfishly out of all those as well. 'cause it, it gets me a view of stuck well outside of my market. Yeah. Like, I'm not gonna go buy a towing business in Missouri, but I've looked at a couple out there and it's all super helpful. [00:49:00] 

Jack Carr: Too cool. Very. Yeah. And for everyone listening, uh, kin's, uh, Twitter page, like very fun, lots of pictures, very fun.

For me as a, as a nerd for this kind of stuff is, you know, tow, tow trucks pulling giant. Semis off the side of the road. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just quote unquote, like the one at last I saw was like just backed up over the curb and like half of the Yeah. Crazy half thing is hanging out over the curb or like around a corner on a bend and it's down in the ditch and you guys are t like craning it up.

It's really cool stuff. Go ahead and jump on over Twitter. Follow him. Awesome, thank you. Today we learned a lot about the towing industry and we learned a lot about the, the acquisitions in the towing industry. Um, sweet. Thank you for listening. Leave us a five star review wherever you listen to your podcast.

Head on over to owned and operated.com for all of our owned and operated goodies. And, uh, thank you all for listening. See you next time.

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