Nobody Talks About This Part of Owning a Towing Company

I have been in this industry for 17 years.

I have worked nights in January when it was 40 below and the calls did not stop. I have worked the aftermath of fatal accidents and driven home with things I could not unsee. I have managed operators who were burning out, made payroll decisions that kept me up at night, and dealt with customers who treated me like I was less than human because their car was in a ditch and they were having a bad day.

Nobody warned me about any of that when I started.

They told me about trucks. They told me about insurance. They told me about motor clubs and rotation lists and how to hook up a wheel lift. Nobody sat me down and said — this job is going to cost you something emotionally. And if you do not have a plan for that, it will collect what it is owed whether you are ready or not.

The part nobody says out loud

Towing is not just a physically demanding job. It is emotionally demanding in ways that most people outside the industry do not understand — and that a lot of people inside the industry have never been given the language to describe.

You are called to scenes that emergency services have already left. You are the last professional on scene. You are dealing with people at some of the worst moments of their lives — stranded, scared, sometimes injured, sometimes grieving. You do this call after call, shift after shift, year after year.

And then you go home and someone asks how your day was, and what do you say?

Most business owners say fine. Most operators say fine. Because what else do you say? Because the job is the job and you signed up for it and showing that it gets to you feels like weakness in an industry that does not reward that kind of honesty.

So it accumulates. Quietly. Until it doesn't.

What burnout actually looks like in this industry

It does not always look like a breakdown. In towing, burnout usually looks like something else first.

It looks like an operator who used to be reliable starting to call in. It looks like a business owner who used to love the work starting to resent every call. It looks like irritability that was not there before. Shorter fuse with customers, with employees, with family. It looks like the thing you built starting to feel like a trap.

It looks like you telling yourself you just need a good week, a good month, a slow season — and the good week comes and goes and nothing actually resets.

That is not weakness. That is what happens when you absorb a high emotional load for years without a system for managing it.

What I wish someone had told me earlier

You cannot outwork this one.

The owners who last in this industry — who actually build something sustainable and still feel like themselves a decade in — are not the toughest ones. They are the ones who figured out that the job has a cost, and they built something into their life to offset it.

That looks different for everyone. For some people it is a hard boundary around days off — actual days off, not days where you are still on the phone. For some people it is exercise, or time with family that is genuinely protected. For some people it is a conversation they have regularly with someone they trust — not venting, actual processing.

What it is not is ignoring it and hoping the next busy season fixes it.

Why I am writing about this

When I started building The Towing Playbook — a business education resource for towing business owners — I knew it had to cover operations, dispatch, financial management, HR, legal compliance. All of it.

But I also knew it had to cover this.

Because I have seen what happens when it doesn't get covered. I have watched good owners leave the industry not because the business failed, but because they ran out of themselves. I have watched operators who were excellent at the work walk away because nobody ever acknowledged what the work actually cost them.

Module 15 of The Towing Playbook is called Operator Mental Health and Burnout. It is probably the module I am most proud of, and it is definitely the one nobody else thought to include.

It covers the specific emotional dynamics of running a towing operation — what accumulates, what the warning signs look like, and what practical things you can actually do about it. Not generic wellness advice. Towing-specific, owner-specific, operator-specific content written by someone who has lived it.

If this landed for you

You are not alone in it. That is the most important thing I can tell you.

This industry is full of people carrying more than they show. If this post resonated — if you recognized yourself or someone you work with in something above — I would genuinely like to hear from you.

Not to sell you anything. Just to have the conversation that does not happen enough in this industry.

You can find me and The Towing Playbook at thetowingplaybook.com The site is still growing, but it is there. More is coming.

And if you know another operator who needs to read this — send it to them. Some conversations start with someone just passing something along.

Bob Cook has 17 years of experience in the towing industry. The Towing Playbook is a business education resource built specifically for towing business owners — from the ground up, by someone who has operated from the ground up.

*thetowingplaybook.com*