TDR Way LLC

TDR Way LLC We help you train your call center how to create a relationship and make a sale in under 3 minutes. Stop losing leads and money.

If you take one thing from this week, take this. It costs twenty minutes and no money.Once a week, pull three calls.One ...
08/24/2026

If you take one thing from this week, take this. It costs twenty minutes and no money.

Once a week, pull three calls.

One you won. One you lost. And one completely ordinary call where nothing much happened.

That third one is the whole point, and it is the one everybody skips. When owners review calls at all, they pull the disaster — the complaint, the blowup. So the dispatcher learns that being reviewed means being in trouble, and you learn nothing about your operation, because a disaster is a rare event.

The ordinary call is your business. It is what happens two hundred times a week. Two seconds of dead air at the open, a question never asked, a close that just trails off — none of it is bad enough to notice on any single call. All of it is running two hundred times a week.

That is where the money is.

The won and lost calls have their own job: they keep you honest about what actually decided it. Most owners are convinced they lose on price. Sit with ten lost calls and you will find a good number of them were lost on tone, on hold time, or on a dispatcher who never asked one question that would have moved the conversation off of price at all.

Three calls. Twenty minutes. Same time every week so it survives a busy month.

That is a program. Most shops do not have one.

503-572-6438.

Two seats in Group 3. That is where this stands, and then I stop talking about it.I want to close this the way I would w...
08/24/2026

Two seats in Group 3. That is where this stands, and then I stop talking about it.

I want to close this the way I would want it closed for me.

If you have read this week and something in you keeps sitting up, that is worth ten minutes on the phone. Not a commitment. A conversation where I ask you about your business and you decide whether the room sounds like it is for you.

If you have read this week and felt nothing, that is a real answer and I would rather you keep your money.

The only outcome I would push back on is the third one — where you never quite decide, the seats fill, and next November you are running the same business with the same three questions you had this August. That is not a decision. That is a default, and defaults have been expensive for most of us.

So: yes, no, or not now. Any of the three is fine.

503-572-6438. Group 3 starts November.

If you take one of these two seats, here is what your first ninety days actually look like. Not the brochure version.Wee...
08/23/2026

If you take one of these two seats, here is what your first ninety days actually look like. Not the brochure version.

Weeks one through three, you will be annoyed with me. That is when you build a clean twelve months and map your accounts so they line up with everyone else's. Most owners discover during this stretch that they have been reading their own P&L wrong for years — not because they are careless, but because nobody ever made them define a term.

Somewhere in there is the phone call where you say "wait, is that supposed to be in cost of sales?" Good. That call is worth the whole quarter.

Then you submit, and you wait, and you get it back — your numbers in a column next to companies your size.

That afternoon is the one that changes people. I have watched owners go quiet reading it. Not because it is bad news. Because for the first time in twenty years of running the place, they can see where they actually sit.

Everything after that is just work you now know to do.

Two openings, November start. 503-572-6438.

You would never hand a new hire the keys to your rotator on day one. Nobody would. You would put them with somebody, wat...
08/23/2026

You would never hand a new hire the keys to your rotator on day one. Nobody would. You would put them with somebody, watch them, and let them earn it over months.

Now: who is answering your phone right now, and how did they get there?

In most shops the honest answer is that the phone went to whoever was available. New person, slow at the counter, needed something to do. We hand over the single highest-leverage seat in the building because it does not look like equipment.

But run the math. Your rotator produces revenue on the jobs it gets sent to. The phone decides how many jobs there are.

A dispatcher who converts seven out of ten calls and one who converts five, on the same call volume, are two entirely different companies at the end of a year. Same trucks. Same rates. Same yard.

That difference is not talent. It is training, and nobody gave it to them.

Here is what I would ask this weekend. Not "are they nice on the phone." Ask: what did we actually teach this person before we put them on the line? If the answer is that they listened to somebody else for a couple of days and figured it out, that is not training. That is inheritance, and whatever bad habits were on your phones five years ago are still on them.

503-572-6438.

We spend all our training energy on how a call starts. The greeting, the tone, the first impression.Then we let the call...
08/22/2026

We spend all our training energy on how a call starts. The greeting, the tone, the first impression.

Then we let the call end however it happens to end. "Okay, we will get somebody out there." Click.

The last ten seconds of a call are worth more than the first ten, and I will tell you why: the close is what determines whether they call you back twice in the next hour.

Here is the whole technique. Before you hang up, read it back.

"Silver Tahoe, northbound 5 near mile 42, you are at 555-1234. Truck is rolling, about forty minutes, and I will text you if that changes. Anything else on the vehicle I should tell my driver?"

Ten seconds. Watch what it does.

It catches errors while the customer is still on the line, which is the only time errors are cheap. Wrong direction on the highway, transposed digit in the phone number — those become a driver on a wild goose chase and a customer who is now furious about a mistake nobody caught.

It ends the two callbacks. They are not going to ring you back in fifteen minutes to ask if you have their number right, because you just told them.

And it lands the call on competence. That recap is the thing they repeat when somebody asks who they used.

Listen to ten of your own calls and count how many end with a read-back. In most shops the honest number is zero.

503-572-6438.

Owners weigh the cost of the group. That is the right instinct and the wrong number.Here is the number I would run inste...
08/22/2026

Owners weigh the cost of the group. That is the right instinct and the wrong number.

Here is the number I would run instead.

Take your revenue. Find two points of margin. On a four million dollar company, that is eighty thousand dollars. On a one-and-a-half million dollar company, thirty thousand.

Now ask honestly: is there two points sitting somewhere in your business you have not found yet? In your labor percentage. In storage income you never separated out. In an account you have been unprofitable on for three years because nobody ever ran it by itself.

For most towing companies I look at, the answer is yes, and it is usually more than two points.

That is the real cost of another year of guessing. Not the fee. The gap you cannot see because you have never had anything to hold your numbers up against.

I am not telling you the room finds it for you. I am telling you that you are unlikely to find it alone, because you have already had every year up to now to try.

Two seats. 503-572-6438.

Most training covers the stranded motorist. Almost none of it covers the other call — the one that is already at a ten b...
08/21/2026

Most training covers the stranded motorist. Almost none of it covers the other call — the one that is already at a ten before your dispatcher finishes saying the company name.

The impound call. The one where somebody's vehicle is in your lot and they are certain you are the villain in this story.

Two things are true at once. You did nothing wrong, and none of that helps you on this call.

Here is what I have watched go wrong for twenty-five years. A dispatcher gets yelled at, so they defend the company. That is human and it is fatal. Explaining why the tow was legal to somebody at a ten is like reading the rulebook to somebody whose house is on fire. The facts are correct and completely useless in that moment.

You cannot argue a person down the scale. You can only sit lower than they are and let them come to you.

The sequence that works: acknowledge first, no defense attached. Then facts, flat and short. Then the path forward — exactly what it takes to get the vehicle back today, in order, no surprises later.

"I hear you, and I know this is not how you planned your day. Let me tell you exactly what it takes to get your car back this afternoon."

Notice you have not agreed you were wrong. You have just stopped fighting.

And the volume rule stands above all of it. Whatever they bring, come in under it. The quieter voice sets the room, on the phone the same as in person.

503-572-6438.

The number one reason owners tell me no is not price. It is this:"I would join, but my books are a mess."I have heard it...
08/21/2026

The number one reason owners tell me no is not price. It is this:

"I would join, but my books are a mess."

I have heard it enough times to tell you what it really is. It is not a reason. It is embarrassment wearing a reason's clothes.

So let me take the air out of it. In every group I have facilitated, I have never once seen a clean set of books walk in the door. Not one. There is always an owner's truck run through the wrong account, a suspense line nobody can explain, a related-party thing that got booked sideways in 2019.

Including mine. I could tell you stories about my own chart of accounts that would not flatter me.

Here is the part that matters. You cannot clean books you have never had to show anyone. The deadline is what does the work. Owners who join spend the first stretch fixing things they have driven past for years — not because I lectured them, but because they knew eight people were about to see it.

Messy books are not the thing keeping you out of the room. They are the reason to be in it.

503-572-6438.

I teach a framework for phone calls, so this may be an odd thing for me to say: reading a script out loud is worse than ...
08/20/2026

I teach a framework for phone calls, so this may be an odd thing for me to say: reading a script out loud is worse than having no script at all.

We have all been on the receiving end. You can hear it in about four words. The rhythm is off, the pauses land in the wrong places, and every question sounds like it is being asked of a form rather than of you.

The caller does not think "that is a script." They think "this person does not care."

Which is the exact opposite of what the script was written to accomplish.

Here is the distinction that fixes it. A script is words. What you actually want your dispatcher to own is beats — the handful of things that have to happen on every call, in roughly that order, in whatever words are theirs.

Beats survive a caller who goes off-script. Words do not. And every real call goes off-script within about ten seconds.

Here is a test that takes five minutes. Have your dispatcher read the script into their phone. Then have them put the paper down and explain the same thing to you as if you were a friend who called them.

Play both back. The second one is what you want on your phones. Now go write that one down.

503-572-6438.

Two seats open in Group 3, and I will say plainly what I am screening for. It is three things, and none of them are reve...
08/20/2026

Two seats open in Group 3, and I will say plainly what I am screening for. It is three things, and none of them are revenue size or years in business.

One: you will put real numbers on the table. Not a summary. The actual P&L, warts and all. If that makes your stomach turn, read tomorrow's post before you rule yourself out.

Two: you can be told something you do not want to hear without going quiet for three months. That sounds obvious. It is the single most common reason a member does not renew.

Three: you will do something between meetings. The room can hand you the answer. It cannot go back to your shop and implement it.

What I am not screening for: how big you are, how sharp your books are today, or whether you already know your numbers. Most owners who join do not.

If that sounds like you, let's talk — 503-572-6438. And if it does not, I would rather leave the seat empty. That is not a sales line. An empty chair costs one person. The wrong chair costs eight.

Address

14333 Ne Whitaker Way
Portland, OR
97230

Telephone

(503) 572-6438

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