Why Good People Leave

I have hired a lot of people over 17 years in this industry.

Some of them were excellent. Some of them were not. But the ones that stuck with me, the ones I think about when I think about what this industry can look like when it is working right, were not necessarily the most skilled dispatchers/ operators when they started. They were the ones who felt like the company they worked for gave a damn about them.

And the ones who left, the good ones, the ones I wished had stayed, almost never left because of the money.

That took me a while to understand. And I think it is one of the most expensive lessons this industry keeps teaching owners who are not paying attention.

The employee shortage nobody is talking about honestly

There is a shortage of good employees in the towing industry. Every owner knows it. Most of them are dealing with it right now, either scrambling to find people, working shorthanded, or watching their best operators get picked up by a competitor who offered something they didn't.

The conversation usually goes to recruitment. Where do you find them. How do you get them in the door. What do you put in the ad.

That is the wrong conversation to be having first.

Because the operators most companies are trying to recruit are already working somewhere. They are working for someone else who hired them, trained them, and then, at some point, gave them a reason to start looking.

Before you worry about where your next operator is coming from, it is worth asking why your last one left.

Why good employees actually leave.

Not why they say they leave. Why they actually leave.

They felt invisible.

This is the one nobody says out loud. An operator who goes out shift after shift, handling calls professionally, treating customers well, documenting everything correctly, and never hears a word about it will eventually start to wonder whether any of it matters. Not because they need constant praise. Because every human being needs to know that what they do is seen and that it counts.

The ones who feel invisible do not usually make a dramatic exit. They just quietly start looking. And one day they are gone.

They were set up to fail.

Sent on calls without the right training. Given equipment they did not know how to use correctly. Expected to figure out procedures that were never written down or explained. Put in front of customers with no guidance on how to handle the difficult ones.

A new operator or dispatcher who struggles in their first few months and gets no structured support does not think the job is hard. They think they are bad at it. And people do not stay in jobs where they feel like they are failing.

The job felt chaotic and disorganized.

No clear procedures. No consistent standards. Rules that changed depending on who you asked or what day it was. Dispatch that was unpredictable. Management that was reactive instead of steady.

Good employees, the ones with options will tolerate a certain amount of chaos. But there is a threshold. When the job starts to feel like nobody is steering the ship, the people with the most ability to leave are the first ones off.

They were not paid fairly or consistently. I was this boss. I made these mistakes.

This one is real and worth saying plainly. The towing industry has a history of paying operators less than the work demands. Late paycheques. Inconsistent commission structures. Promises about pay that did not materialize.

Money is not always the primary reason someone leaves. But it is almost always in the conversation. And an operator who does not trust that their paycheque will be right every time is already halfway out the door.

What actually makes good people stay

Not what sounds good in a job posting. What actually works.

Structure and clarity.

A good employee wants to know what is expected of them. Not in a controlling way, in a professional way. Clear procedures. Consistent standards. A training process that actually prepares them for the calls they are going to take. An onboarding experience that says: we take this seriously, and we expect you to as well.

When the job is structured, it is easier to do well. When it is easier to do well, people stay.

Being seen and acknowledged.

This does not require a formal recognition program or a plaque on the wall. It requires the person running the operation to pay attention and say something when they notice it.

"That was a tough call and you handled it well." Six words. Costs nothing. Worth more than most owners realize.

A company worth being part of.

They all talk to each other. They know which companies run well and which ones are a mess. They know which owners are straight with their people and which ones are not. Reputation inside the industry matters as much as reputation outside of it, maybe more.

The companies that keep their best operators are almost always the ones that operators are proud to work for. Not because the trucks are the newest or the pay is the highest. Because the place runs with integrity and the people running it treat their team like professionals.

Genuine investment in their development.

Training is not just for new hires. An experienced operator who is given the opportunity to learn something new, advanced recovery techniques, leadership skills, a path toward a senior role — is an operator who can see a future at the company.

When there is no path forward, the job has a ceiling. And people who are good at what they do will eventually hit it and leave to find something higher.

The math nobody is running

Turnover is expensive. Most towing company owners know this in a general sense but have never actually calculated it.

Think about what it costs to lose an experienced operator or dispatcher. The calls they were covering that now are not covered. The recruitment time to find someone new. The training investment to get that person functional. The mistakes a new operator makes in the first few months that an experienced one would not. The customer relationships that get disrupted in the transition.

A conservative estimate puts the cost of losing and replacing an experienced operator at several months of their salary, before you account for the intangibles.

Now think about what it would cost to keep them. A direct conversation. A raise that reflects the value they bring. A training program that shows them they have a future here. Basic acknowledgment that their work matters.

The math is not complicated. The execution is just harder than posting another job ad.

What I built and why

Module 12 of The Towing Playbook covers people management in depth hiring standards, onboarding, performance management, progressive discipline, difficult conversations, and how to build a team that actually stays.

But it starts where this post starts. With the understanding that retention is a strategy, not an accident. That the operators who stay at a company for years are not there by luck they are there because someone made decisions that gave them a reason to stay.

The towing industry is not going to solve its operator shortage by finding more people to burn through. It is going to solve it by building companies worth working for.

That is what The Towing Playbook is built around. Not just the systems and the forms and the SOPs — though all of that matters. The understanding that the people doing this work deserve a professional environment that takes them seriously.

Because when they have that — when the job is structured and the standards are clear and the work is acknowledged — they stay. And when they stay, everything else gets easier.

If this landed for you

The retention problem in this industry is real. But it is not unsolvable. It is just a set of decisions that most companies have not made yet.

If you are losing good people and you are not sure why or if you are trying to build something that operators actually want to be part of I would genuinely like to have that conversation.

Find everything at **thetowingplaybook.com**. And if this post resonated, share it with another owner in the industry. This is a conversation worth having more widely.

*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

covering operations, dispatch, training, HR, financial management, and everything in between.*

*thetowingplaybook.com*