For mobile diesel and road service owners

A Third Of Your Money Rings After Hours.

DispatchZap fixes that

  • Picks up your after-hours road calls and screens them with the information you actually need
  • You decide whether to take the job, off the screening
  • Schedules the callback for you
  • Live transfer or text. However you want it
  • No signup
  • No card
  • Your numbers stay on your screen
Text messageDispatchZap 2:14 AM
Road call captured

Answered in 41 seconds. Driver's holding, or he'll take a callback.

Unit
4471
Fleet
Redline Logistics
Caller
Danny, driver
Location
I-35 MM 218 S
Load
Loaded reefer, running
Symptom
No air, trailer brakes
Tow?
Mobile, driver says drivable
PO
Authorized to $1,500

No price was quoted. Take it or pass.

What's on your phone when you wake up.

As seen on Entrepreneurs on Fire 20 years in business 10,000+ businesses served Veteran-Owned and Operated
See what last month cost you
The math

What Did Last Night Cost You?

Put your own numbers in. Nothing gets sent anywhere, and there is no signup. The arithmetic is below the result, so you can check it.

40 Every call about a truck that is down. Not PMs.
$700 Labor, minimum, trip charge and parts. Before tax.
35% Nights, weekends, or while you are under another truck.
Be honest. Nobody sees this.
The bad news

Last month, about 8 road calls came in that you never got back to in time. Somebody else fixed those trucks.

$5,494
gone last month

Leave it alone for a year and that is $65,923.

The good news

It is the same number, pointed the other way. Catch 7 of those inside 5 minutes and here is what lands in your pocket, at a 48% gross margin.

$2,314
gross profit a month

$27,772 over twelve months.

At $497/mo, this pays for itself at 1.5 road calls a month.

Set up my 15 minutes
  • A phone call, not a video call
  • 15 minutes
  • No card
Show me the arithmetic and where the numbers come from

The formula, in order:

Your road calls split three ways, because they do not behave the same:

  daytime, you caught it live    ->  0.04 loss
  daytime, you missed it         ->  your callback speed
  after hours                    ->  0.60 loss, no matter what you picked

blended loss   = each bucket x its rate, added up
winnable       = road calls x 0.60
lost jobs      = winnable x blended loss
lost money     = lost jobs x your average invoice
recovered      = winnable x (blended loss - 0.04)
profit gained  = recovered x your invoice x 0.48 gross margin

Why after-hours calls ignore your callback speed: because you are asleep, or you are under another truck. Nobody calls back in 5 minutes at 2am. If you do, move the after-hours slider down and the number moves with it.

Now the study the loss rates are built on. You ran your own numbers first, so here is what is underneath them. Harvard Business Review published a study of 15,000+ leads. Call inside 5 minutes and you are 100x more likely to reach the person than at 30 minutes, and 21x more likely to qualify them.

MIT (Dr. James Oldroyd) and InsideSales, published by Harvard Business Review.

Where each constant comes from:

  • 0.60 winnable, and the loss-rate table (under 5 min 0.04 / 30 min 0.28 / 1 hr 0.42 / same or next day 0.60). This is our model, calibrated to the studies below. It is not published by Harvard or MIT and we do not claim it is.
  • 100x and 21x. MIT (Dr. James Oldroyd) and InsideSales, published by Harvard Business Review, 15,000+ leads. That one is theirs, not ours.
  • 48% gross margin. Median for heavy-duty mobile repair, from Fullbay's State of Heavy-Duty Repair, built on 3,400+ shops. Gross margin, not net: a road call you were going to miss anyway adds no new overhead, so what you recover drops at contribution margin.
  • 25% of daytime calls you cannot get to. Measured call analytics put unanswered calls at 20 to 30% across automotive service. That figure is from general auto service, not mobile diesel specifically. Nobody has measured this trade directly. We use the middle of the range and we are telling you it is borrowed.
  • Your after-hours share defaults to 35% because emergency and after-hours work runs 30 to 40% of revenue in this trade. That figure is from trade press, not a survey. Move the slider to your own number.

This is an estimate built on industry averages, not a promise about your shop. Your numbers are your own. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.

From the desk of: Ryan "RyMac" McKinney
Re: Your 2AM road calls

A Must-Read For Mobile Diesel Owners Who Are Tired Of Finding 2AM Road Calls In Their Voicemail

Dear Fellow Owner,

Let me know if this sounds like you:

  • Ever find a road call in your voicemail that somebody else already fixed?
  • Tired of turning your phone off to get four hours of sleep?
  • Handed a fleet to a "service finder" and never saw that account again?
  • Paying for a listing that sends calls to a phone you can't answer?
  • Watching a shop with worse techs land the fleet contract you wanted?

If so, you're not alone.

Thousands of mobile diesel operators lose their best-paying work every single night.

You want to sleep through the night and wake up to work already written down. You want the fleet accounts that call you first, not fifth.

You want to bill your shop rate without somebody arguing you down to a network price.

You want a Saturday where the phone doesn't own you. Hell, you want to sit through your kid's game without something buzzing on your hip.

It doesn't feel like too much to ask for. After all, you're good at what you do. Nobody outworks you under a truck.

But this morning you were elbow deep in an air system with grease to your wrists, and the phone went off in your pocket.

You heard it. You couldn't get to it.

By the time you washed up, that driver had already worked his way down the list. You were number two.

Then you're on the shoulder of the interstate in the rain, and it happens again.

That afternoon a "service finder" calls with a road call an hour out. You take it, because work is work. They pay you their rate, not yours, they audit your invoice, and the fleet never learns your name.

That night the phone buzzes at 2:14 in the morning. You don't hear it. Nobody does.

You find it at six, and it says exactly what you knew it would say:

"Can't even get anyone to answer the phone."

You start to feel less like a shop owner and more like a guy with a phone he's not allowed to answer.

Then, right when you sit down to eat, some kid calls to tell you about his AI receptionist. Third one this month. One of them was a robot.

Wake up. Rinse. Repeat. It's feast or famine, ain't it?

It's aggravating as fire. I get it.

I'm not an agency, I don't sell leads, and I'm not a network that takes a cut of your ticket.

My name is Ryan McKinney, and since boot camp everyone's called me RyMac. Half my platoon at Parris Island was on the buddy program out of Boston. Loud bunch. But…

I've spent 20 years helping owners turn a ringing phone into booked work. My very first client was Tom, a tree-removal guy.

He came to me desperate with his last $1,500, and he bet it all on himself by handing it to me. 90 days later, Tom landed a contract clearing a stretch of highway.

He called me with a vigor I'll never forget:

"I LANDED A $50,000 CONTRACT, THAT WAS YOUR LEAD FROM WHATEVER YOU DID!"

It felt damn good to make a difference for Tom. He grew into many locations, trucks, the whole nine.

I decided that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to help people. And since that day…

I've helped over 10,000 businesses turn traffic into leads, and leads into paid work.

Taking the low-value junk off an owner's plate so he can do the high-value stuff. Like fixing trucks, closing fleets, or taking his family somewhere for a week.

It led to Entrepreneurs on Fire tracking me down for an interview. I had no idea I'd done anything "special." I figured that's what everybody did.

Now my focus is one trade: mobile diesel and heavy-duty road service. Guys running one to five trucks, on call, in the weather, at 2am. Guys like you.

Here's what I found when I went looking. The two biggest names "supporting" your industry are the same company. Between them they'll build your website, run your ads, and manage your work orders.

Neither one of them will answer your phone. They'll sell you the call. Then they'll leave it ringing.

So I built the thing nobody built for you. It runs on "The 3 Laws of Landed Jobs". The first law is the only one that matters at 2am:

Reach them inside five minutes or lose them.

DispatchZap will:

  • Pick up every road call in under five minutes, at 2am, on Sunday, in the rain
  • Get the unit number, the mile marker, the load status, and what's actually wrong with it
  • Never quote a price, so nothing gets promised in your name
  • Text you the job so you take it or pass on it, your call, every time
  • Book the callback for the ones you'd rather handle in the morning
  • Chase the quotes you wrote and never got back to

And I'll set the whole thing up myself, tuned to your trucks, your service area, and what you actually do.

It'll know a DPF from a wheel seal, and it'll know which one gets you out of bed. There's no "half-stepping" here.

It starts answering your phone the day it goes live.

Imagine sleeping through the night and waking up to a scheduled job.

Imagine never being number two on a driver's list again.

Imagine keeping the fleet instead of handing it to a network for their rate.

Let me give you back your nights, your weekends, and the accounts you already earned. For less than what one road call bills.

Let's have a 15-minute chat on the phone and see if it makes sense.

Not a demo. Not a video call. Two guys on the phone for fifteen minutes, figuring out whether this is worth either of our time.

Always got your back,
RyMac

Set up my 15 minutes
  • No contracts
  • No setup fees
  • It never quotes a price

P.S. You'd never let a driver diagnose his own air leak. He'd guess, he'd guess wrong, and you'd get the call anyway at midnight.

Same reason you shouldn't be the one trying to answer a phone with your hands inside an engine. Grab fifteen minutes here.

The mechanism

The 3 Laws Of Landed Jobs

This is the whole system. No sign-up, no email, nothing held back. Read it, score your shop against it, and go fix it yourself if you want to. Most of this trade breaks all three and has no idea.

  1. Law 1

    Speed

    Where you are bleeding

    The standard: reach a new caller in under 5 minutes.

    Harvard published it and the number is not close. At 5 minutes you are 100x more likely to reach the person than at 30, and 21x more likely to qualify them. 78% of buyers go with whoever answers first. Wait 5 to 10 minutes instead of 5 and your odds drop about 400%.

    Past 30 minutes you are getting ghosted. The average business takes over 40 hours.

    What this trade actually does

    20 to 30% of calls to automotive service go unanswered. After 7pm, 2 out of 3 callers hang up without leaving a voicemail. Of the ones who do leave one, 75% never call back, and more than half of those voicemails never get returned at all.

    Those figures are from general automotive service and dealer service departments. Nobody has ever measured mobile diesel directly. We are telling you that instead of pretending otherwise.

    Score yourself: pick up the phone log. Count how many road calls last month you returned the next morning. Every one of those is a truck somebody else fixed.

  2. Law 2

    Persistence

    The standard: the money is in touches 5 through 12.

    About 80% of deals need 5 to 12 touches to close. But 44% of people quit after ONE follow-up, and 92% quit before the fifth. Only 8% follow up more than five times.

    That 8% is where the work is. And 63% of people who ask about something will not buy for at least three months, so the guy who quits at touch two never finds out he had the job.

    What this trade actually does

    Only 16% of contractors follow up the same day on an estimate that did not sell. 50 to 60% of repair customers do not come back the following year. And only 22% of heavy-duty shops use VMRS codes, which means two thirds have no structured record of the job to follow up on in the first place.

    Follow-up figures are from roofing and general auto repair. The VMRS number is your trade.

    1 touchbottom 44%
    2 to 4the 92% who quit early
    5 to 12the money, top 8%

    Score yourself: think of the last quote you wrote that went quiet. How many times did you chase it? If the answer is once or none, you are in the bottom 44% and so is nearly everybody you compete with.

  3. Law 3

    The Right Message

    The standard: the message changes with every touch, runs on more than one channel, and matches where the buyer actually is.

    Only 3 to 5% of people are ready to buy right this second. The other 95% get hit with "ready to schedule?" and go cold, because that question was written for somebody else.

    A fleet manager who just had a truck go down needs something different than one who is shopping vendors for next quarter. Same shop, same service, two completely different conversations.

    What this trade actually does

    52% of repair shops do no customer targeting at all. 72% say their message is a discount, 3% name a specific service, 1% mention quality. And 31% still run on phone and paper only.

    General auto repair, 500 shops surveyed. Read it as: about 96% of shops have exactly one message and it is "we're cheaper."

    Score yourself: what does your second follow-up say? If it is the same voicemail as the first one, that is the whole problem, and it is the easiest of the three to fix.

That is the entire mechanism. Speed, then persistence, then the right thing at the right time. Nothing about it is secret and none of it needs us.

The reason almost nobody does it is not that it is complicated. It is that it happens at 2am, on a Sunday, on touch nine, while you are asleep or under a truck. That is the only part we are selling.

Set up my 15 minutes
  • A phone call, not a video call
  • 15 minutes
  • No card
What you would pay for the pieces

Buy This Separately And Here Is The Bill

Every price below is what these services actually cost on the open market today. Nothing is inflated to make the number look big. Two of the rows cannot be priced at all, and that is the interesting part.

What you getThe pain it killsMarket price
Road calls answered in under 5 minutes, around the clock Finding the call in your voicemail at six the next morning $300/mo
Nights, weekends and holidays covered Turning your phone off to get four hours of sleep $150/mo
Fleet-native intake: unit number, DOT, mile marker, load status, tow or mobile Sounding like an outsider to a dispatcher who knows trucks Nobody sells this
It never quotes a price Something promising a number in your name that you have to honor Nobody sells this
The job texted to you. Take it or pass Booking work you cannot get to $99/mo
Outbound callback inside 5 minutes on web and directory leads Being number two on a driver's list $750/mo
Multi-touch follow-up on the quotes that went quiet Writing an estimate and never chasing it $299/mo
Setup and intake tuned to your trucks and your service area A generic robot that cannot tell a DPF from a wheel seal $499 once
Sleeping through the night without wondering what you missed The one you actually care about Priceless
Buy the pieces separately $1,598/mo
plus $499 setup

Where those numbers come from: a live answering service starts around $250 to $395 a month for a small plan, and bills night and weekend shifts at 1.5x to 2x the day rate. Outbound calling services start at $750 a month. Local CRM and follow-up platforms run $299 to $599 a month. Setup fees in this category run $399 to $499. Those are published prices, not guesses.

Two rows on that list have no price, because no company sells them. Not to you, anyway.

The answering services will pick up, but they read a script and take a message. They do not know what a unit number is and they will not triage a tow. The AI phone products are built for a front desk at a car shop. None of them were built for a man on the shoulder of an interstate at 2am.

So what does the whole thing cost?

The price

Look at the setup fee on that list again. $499, one time, just to switch the thing on.

$497 a month

That is the whole thing. What the rest of this industry charges you once, before you have gotten a single call, is what we charge for all of it, every month.

  • No setup fee
  • No contract
  • Cancel any time
  • 600 minutes a month included

At your average road call, that is 1.5 jobs a month to break even. About half a day of normal work.

Most shops land at $497. If you are running four or five trucks the number goes up, and we will figure out which you are in about four questions on the phone.

Set up my 15 minutes
  • A phone call, not a video call
  • 15 minutes
  • No card
The ask

Fifteen Minutes On The Phone

Not a demo. Not a video call. I ask what your road calls run and how many come in after hours, you ask me whatever you want, and we both find out if this is worth doing. If it isn't, you got fifteen minutes with somebody who has built this before, for nothing.

  • A phone call, not a video call
  • 15 minutes
  • No card, no contract

I use this to call you about DispatchZap and nothing else. No list, no reselling, no drip you can't get out of. Privacy.

Straight answers

What's On Your Mind?

I need more techs, not more customers. Why would I want more calls?

You would not, and this does not do that. It does not go find you new work. It catches the work that already called you and went to somebody else.

That is a real difference. 54% of shops in this trade are understaffed and 40% say hiring got harder last year. Selling you more volume when you cannot staff what you have would be selling you a bigger problem.

What this does is stop you handing paid work to the next guy on the list at 2am. Same capacity, fewer leaks.

How is this different from the AI receptionist guys who keep calling me?

They sell a front desk. This is a road-call intake. That sounds like hair splitting until you hear one run.

A generic AI receptionist asks how it can help you today. This one asks for the unit number, the DOT number, the mile marker or exit, whether the trailer is loaded, and what the truck is doing. Then it works out whether you are rolling a truck or whether that thing needs a tow.

Ask the next one who calls you what a VMRS code is. You will have your answer in about four seconds.

Will it sound stupid to a fleet manager?

That is the right question to ask, and it is the one we built around. Your caller is a dispatcher or a fleet manager who knows trucks. If the thing on your phone fumbles a unit number, you have not just lost the call, you have told a commercial buyer you are not serious.

So the intake is tuned to your trucks and your service area before it takes a single call, and it is built to gather information rather than make conversation. It asks what a good service writer would ask, writes it down, and gets off the phone.

Will it quote a price or commit me to a job?

No. It never quotes a price, and it never commits you to anything. That is a hard rule, not a setting.

There is real case law now about companies being held to what their bot told a customer. We are not putting you anywhere near that. The intake gathers the job and hands it to you. You take it or you pass. Every time.

How much does an AI answering service for a diesel shop cost?

DispatchZap starts at $497 a month, with no setup fee and no contract. That includes 600 minutes.

For comparison, a live human answering service runs $250 to $395 a month for a small plan and bills nights at 1.5x to 2x. Outbound calling services start around $750 a month. Setup fees in this category run $399 to $499 before you have taken a single call.

At a typical road call, $497 is about 1.5 jobs a month to break even.

Do I have to switch off Fullbay or whatever I already run?

No. This does not replace your shop software. It sits in front of it, on the phone, which is the part your shop software does not touch.

Worth knowing: Fullbay bought Dieselmatic in April 2022, so the shop software most of this trade runs and the marketing agency most of this trade hires are now the same company. Between them they will build your site, run your ads and manage your work orders. Neither one answers your phone. We are not competing with them, we are covering the gap they left.

I am not a tech guy. How much work is this for me?

Setup is on us, and there is nothing for you to manage after. We tune the intake to your trucks, your service radius and what you actually do.

Your side of it is a phone that stops going to voicemail and a text that shows up with the job on it. There is no dashboard you have to live in. If you wanted another screen to babysit you would have bought one by now.

My regulars just text me. Does this get in the way of that?

No. Your regulars keep texting you exactly like they do now. This is for the calls you are not getting to.

Here is the part worth thinking about though. Word of mouth is real and it built your business. It is also a set of individual people. Fleet managers retire, get promoted, or lose their own accounts, and when they go the phone just gets quieter with nothing to tell you why.

What if I already answer my phone fast?

Then run the calculator and put your honest number in, because it will show you a smaller figure. We would rather show you that than talk you into something.

The one thing to be straight about: nobody calls back in five minutes at 2am. If a third of your work comes in after hours, "I answer fast" is true during the day and not true at night, and the night calls are the ones billing at 1.5x to 2.5x.

What about text messaging and A2P registration?

You register your own A2P brand and you buy your own number. We walk you through it, but it stays in your name.

Two reasons, and both are for your benefit. You own the number, so if you ever leave you take it with you. And the carrier compliance stays where it belongs rather than us holding it over you.

Can I cancel?

Any time, and there is no contract to get out of. No setup fee to recover, no early termination anything.

If it is not catching work worth more than it costs, you should cancel. That is the whole test.

What actually happens on the 15-minute call?

I ask what your road calls run and how many come in after hours. You ask me whatever you want. Fifteen minutes on the phone.

It is not a demo and it is not a video call. If it makes sense to work together we will both know by the end of it. If it does not, you got fifteen minutes with somebody who has built this before, for nothing.

Still got a question that is not up there? That is what the fifteen minutes is for.

Set up my 15 minutes
  • A phone call, not a video call
  • 15 minutes
  • No card

The Page Can't Scroll Any Further.
So What's The Move?

Path one

You close this tab and go back to it. The phone rings at 2am on a Thursday and you do not hear it. You find it at six, and the truck is already fixed.

Nothing bad happens. That is the problem with it. It just keeps costing you the same money, quietly, every month, and it never shows up on a statement.

Path two

You give me fifteen minutes on the phone. I ask what your road calls run and how many come in after hours. You ask me anything you want.

Worst case, you spent fifteen minutes and you know exactly what the leak is costing you. You can go fix it yourself. The whole method is up the page.

Set up my 15 minutes

It answers. You decide.