Innovation Enabler - NOT!

There are still people using sling trucks. This design was championed way back in the very beginning when tow operators used a chain to hold the car up and a pole to keep it from swinging to and fro as the converted Cadillac car chassis drug it down the road.

There are towers that still use the sling today and I am one of those towers. It's an amazingly simple and effective tool. It was an innovation created by one individual that needed to move a car to the mechanic instead of bringing the mechanic to the car. This and my trip to the PWOF show last weekend led me to write this article. What have we gained in a hundred years of towing? Judging by what I see available now, design and innovation has left the towing industry behind. Our industry just doesn't seem to attract new ideas like it used to.

I had the occasion this weekend to make the trip to Mickey Mouse's house for the yearly PWOF tow show. The show was ok as shows go. Allstate and GE were there this year (under one flag) doing their BMW certification classes and handing out awards, CCAS was in usual form with their new ideas to attract towers to their outmoded and antiquated performance scoring system, Road America looked positively snappy in their spiffy blue shirts and Geico got stuck over in the corner with what seemed to be a total lack of the support they enjoyed in past shows. (has anyone seen George lately?) As usual with the PWOF show, there were many conspicuously missing individuals and companies because of the ongoing association wars in Florida.

Digital Dispatching software seemed to be a big hit this weekend with a very good showing by Beacon Software. The sky seems to be the limit if you want to get digital control of your company for maximized profits.

The PWOF show always seems to have a good selection of participants making it a fairly well rounded show. As usual however, he who has the most money seems to win and Miller took home the display prize by buying up the entire parking lot except for a few square inches over in the corner of lot B.

I really have come to expect this over the years though. Lets face it, Tow shows are towing support industry driven and their basic premise is to give manufacturers and vendors the ability to display and promote their products the best way they know how. We all know this going in so we tend to overlook all these little lop sided issues, enjoy the free long reach tools, eat $15 hot dogs and take pictures of the kids standing next to impossibly large and mostly unusable in every day life equipment. It's something different to do and more like a mini vacation that can be written off as a business expense. (Nobody will tell the IRS if you take the kids to one of Disneys theme parks for an afternoon of fun in the sun)

I took my usual 500 digital photos of everything, then came home & threw half of them away, published the other half on TowTalk of which there were really only 4 or 5 good shots. I gave new meaning to sore calf muscle pain and actually made gains in the weight loss department from the 500 miles I walked in a circle for two days.

Having said that, I am afraid there was one very sour note this weekend. His name was John Hawkins.

As the vice president of heavy duty sales of such a large company, you would expect that they would put a person in charge of that department that had a little class. I have had many towers tell me they don't really enjoy listening to John's demos because he has a tendency to run the other guy down in his presentations. I usually just shrug these kinds of comments off but this weekend, I experienced his sales technique first hand. I was not impressed. In fact, I was so unimpressed with his comments I lost all interest in anything else he had to say and left the demonstration.

"You can't blow out other peoples candles in an effort to make yours brighter. You'll just end up in a dimly lit room by yourself."

Quote: John Hawkins

"Don't go out and buy an inferior product like Aatac and I won't even begin to talk to you about the problems with Chinese steel!"

What can you say to a statement like this? If I had any respect for this man, it's gone now. I won't even come to the defense of those he attacked as the comments themselves are baseless in fact and any person above the age of 5 should be able to see them for what they really are.

Industry innovations cannot all come from one company. We are far better served if there are many smaller players involved in the game instead of just one overbearing monster of a participant. Inspecting the new trucks that were there this weekend only proves this and after 2 days I finally came to the following conclusions.

• The new cabs from Dodge, Ford, International, Hino and all the others had great new innovations and were very nice indeed. The vehicle manufacturers outdid themselves this year.
  
• The new wreckers that were displayed all had new paint but were exactly the same as last years units. Although they were made to look a little different, I saw ZERO innovation in everything they had to offer.

This year, I have been shopping for a self loader. I looked at the Century, The Vulcan, The Holmes and the Dynamic and except for slight differences in the wrecker body styling, they were the same. In fact, I was a little surprised to see the Holmes appeared to be the weaker of the four and from what I saw at the rest of the show, the only new ideas that were displayed weren't new ideas at all, like the enclosed flatbed. There was not one single change to these wreckers that affected how they worked or made the job of loading a car easier or safer. I was very disappointed.

Innovation is tricky business. New, smaller companies have to innovate to get their foot in the door and older, larger companies have to innovate to stay ahead of the curve. Also innovation is not always about coming up with new product ideas, but about coming up with solutions to the problems that towers already face. Many larger companies (like Miller) lose track of this mantra and start moving towards total industry dominance. This almost always results in those small innovators being muscled right out of existence. In my humble opinion, that is where Miller is today. If you don't believe me, just listen to one of John's sales demonstrations.

I've talked to dozens of smaller companies, many of which are outside the influence of the United States and they have all told me the same thing. Trying to get their products displayed in a major tow show in this country is an exercise in futility. Even if the tow show creators agree and give them the space, the price, because of Millers influence, can be staggering.

Tow shows were designed to be innovation enablers, providing a circuit with which new ideas could be presented and marketed. I am afraid that now, they have lost that designation and are just more of the same each year. Much of that is a result of the heavy handed way Miller goes about it's eternal quest to monopolize towing.

Next year, I think I'll target some of the smaller shows around the country. Maybe I can get away from all this heavy handed big guy stuff and see what some of the smaller guys have to offer. I would bet a dime to a dollar, I'm going to be surprised at whats hiding under the corporate carpet.

Ok, that's it for now. I'm off to Whittier California next week. I'm looking at adding some "Chinese Steel" to my fleet on the back of a couple Hinos. You can expect a full review of what I find.

Bill Weihrouch
TowTalk.net