I have met a lot of station owners this year. At the Storefjell recovery fair in June we sat around the tables for three days, and one thing came up with nearly everyone I spoke to: everybody wants steadier earnings across the whole year. Not necessarily more jobs – but more left over from the jobs they already run.
Then October arrives. Then the first real snowfall, then November, and from that point everything is about getting people and trucks out the door. Nobody tidies up the customer register in the middle of a week of black ice. Nobody sits down with the numbers when the phone has already rung fifteen times before breakfast.
That is exactly why I am writing this now, in August. You have roughly nine weeks. That is plenty – if you use them.
Here are six jobs I think are worth your time this autumn. They are about the office, not the workshop. And they have one thing in common: they are far easier to do at a slow pace than at a fast one.
1. Find out what you actually earn money on
Most station owners I meet know exactly what a recovery truck costs per month. Far fewer can tell you which job types actually contribute, and which ones simply keep people busy.
Pull up the last twelve months. How many jobs did you run, for whom, and what were you left with per type? If you have to search through several systems to answer that, the searching itself is the answer to why this is worth doing.
This is the one job I would put first. Not because numbers are fun, but because every other decision – pricing, staffing, who you call – is guesswork without them.
How Assist helps: Every job sits in one place with customer, type, time and amount. You can pull reports and see the history regardless of who you were driving for. That is the whole point of having everything in one place.
2. Get every job into one place – including the ones you run for the chains
This is where I meet the most resistance: “I drive for a roadside assistance chain, so I put everything into their system.”
And you do have to. But then your history lives with somebody else. If you also drive for a second chain, plus some direct work, plus some heavy recovery – you have no single place that tells you what your year actually looked like. You have three half pictures.
The stations that have switched to registering everything with themselves all say the same thing: it takes a little more time at first, and it pays for itself the first time somebody asks “what did you run for us last year?”
How Assist helps: You paste in the job text you were sent, and the Job Interpreter creates the job for you in seconds. That is the feature that turns “everything in one place” from a good idea into something you can actually do in the middle of a busy day.
3. Clean up customers, products and prices before you need them
This is boring, which is why it never gets done. Old customers that changed their name. Agreed prices that live in one person's head. Missing product lines.
In November each of those small uncertainties costs you a phone call, a chase or an invoice that does not add up. In September it costs you an afternoon.
How Assist helps: We import your customers and products when you get started – you do not have to type them in. Regular customers can have their own agreed prices and discounts, so the right price follows the job automatically instead of depending on who makes the invoice.
4. Put your documentation in order now
Photos from the scene, time of arrival, time of departure, what was actually done. When things get busy, this is the first thing to slip – and it is also exactly what you need when somebody disputes an invoice in February.
Agree with your drivers on what must always be recorded, before the season. Not after the first argument with an insurance company.
How Assist helps: The driver documents on site from the phone, takes several photos at once, and everything stays attached to the job. That improvement came directly from requests we got at Storefjell in June – it shipped a few days after the fair.
5. Open a booking door for your regular customers
Your regular customers – workshops, dealerships, rental companies, the municipality – are the backbone when the emergency market swings. Today they call you. That works, right up until three others call at the same time.
Give them a link instead. Then the request arrives in writing, with address and contact person, without anyone having to remember to write it down.
How Assist helps: You can build booking forms and put them on your website or send them to a regular customer. The requests land straight in Assist. See how Rogaland Redning and Dal Auto have solved it on their own sites.
6. Spend an hour on training while you still have an hour
Our experience is that it takes about an hour to get an administrator up and running, plus half an hour on a video call with the drivers who want it. That is all.
But that hour exists in September. It does not exist in the week when four trucks are out and more snow is forecast. Whether it is Assist or something else entirely you need to get in place: do the training while it is calm enough for people to remember it afterwards.
One more thing
If the reason you keep postponing is that a fixed monthly fee feels wrong when your volume swings through the year – that is an objection we have heard so many times that we did something about it. In August we launched Assist Start: you pay per job, there is no monthly fee and no lock-in. No jobs, no bill. The details are on assist-it.no/pricing.
That is not the point of this post. The point is that autumn is the only stretch of the year when you have both the overview and the headroom to act. By Christmas it is too late, and by spring you will have forgotten what annoyed you.
Take one of the six above. Just one. Finish it before October.
Then you will notice the difference when it really counts.
Want to see what this looks like in practice? Get in touch for a no-obligation walkthrough – we spend half an hour showing you what is relevant for your station.
And one last thing – if you would like a reminder when we publish new posts, we share them on Facebook. Give our page a like and they will show up in your feed: Follow Assist on Facebook.
Best regards, Leif