How a Towing Company Owner dealt with an employee death

Welcome to this week’s issue of SMB Community, where we interview Small Business owners about their most challenging problems and how they’ve dealt with them.

Today we’re talking with the owner of a towing business who had an employee killed on a job site.

Reading this article will teach you a few things:

1. How to make your employee’s feel safe and provided for after a major workplace accident

2. OSHA’s injury reporting requirements and odd lack of published safety practices in the towing industry

3. How to protect your business from personal injury attorneys

4. The advantages of paying for a Corporate Chaplain as a company benefit

Last thing… If someone forwarded you this you can Subscribe For Free Here to get more stories like this delivered to your email!

Okay, Here’s the interview:

Thanks for sitting down with me, please introduce yourself:

This will be an anonymous interview. I acquired a towing company in late 2022, we do >$5M in sales, and have 40 employees at this moment.

Now give us the facts about this accident… What happened?

About 5 months after we acquired this business, we had an employee killed in a freak accident.

This occurred on a Tuesday evening around 4:30pm. At the time I was working from home getting the day wrapped up when I received a call from my General Manager who told me we had an employee pass away on a job site and he was driving on his way there to figure out what happened.

How was this person killed?

We have relatively limited information here for a couple reasons:

a) our truck cameras only face forward and into the cab which didn’t catch anything

b) there are security cameras around that may have caught what happened, but that footage has been pulled by the police, released to OSHA and the DoL but not released to us.

So, what we think happened was this:

Our driver was called out to tow a large bus sitting in a parking lot.

From what we can tell, the driver was underneath the bus getting ready to strap it in when the bus rolled forward and pinned him.

(I’m sparing a lot of details here to keep this simple)

Okay, let's go back a bit… You’re on the way to the accident… I assume you’re calling people or trying to get some advice on what the hell you’re supposed to do here, right?

Very, very right.

There are a couple other tow company owners in our area I’ve spoken with in the past.

They’ve both had employees die in their companies before (personal injuries are unfortunately very common in this industry) and they offered me condolences then gave me some tactical advice.

What was that advice?

1. There are strict guidelines OSHA has on your requirements as an employer to report incidents. For fatalities it is within 8 hours from finding out about it.

2. How OSHA and DoL usually deals with these cases and what we can expect over the next few days/months.

3. Interestingly, OSHA has no published practices of safety in the towing industry. They have written encyclopedias about how to safely dig a hole or climb a ladder but nothing within our industry.

Let’s fast forward through the evening and next few days, what happens next?

Later that evening we got the truck back to our shop, by that time most of our employees had found out about what happened through the grapevine.

My GM, myself, and our safety manager sat down to write down everything about what we knew happened. We also talked to our Corporate Chaplain to get them to be extra available to talk to our employees over the next month to just listen/talk with them as a source of therapy/faith.

The next day, we had an all hands meeting with our team to inform everyone about what happened and gave them some options to work or not.

Also that next day, OSHA showed up to essentially grill us and investigate our property for safety hazards. Luckily we keep a clean shop.

Okay, let’s get to the heart of this problem… The part where other business owners can really learn something and take away actionable information.

Besides the obvious, these were the biggest problems I struggled with:

1. How do I ensure the affected employee’s family is provided for financially?

2. How do I ensure my employees feel safe in their work?

3. How do I protect my investment? I have a multi-million dollar SBA loan that I’m personally guaranteed to.

Let’s work step by step through problems 1, 2, and 3… How did you mitigate problem #1?

1. Fairly quickly, we had confirmation that our insurance company would be paying out a large sum to the family of the employee who died, so they were covered financially.

This is causing a different problem with our workers comp carrier not renewing with us, which is not surprising but it will make our insurance renewals more difficult and more expensive.

What about problem #2? — Ensuring employees feel safe in their work?

My GM and I workshopped ideas around for a while and this is what we came up with and presented at our all-hands meeting that Wednesday morning:

- We knew we wanted to give our employees the option to work or not over the next couple days. We wanted to give them time to grieve if they needed it.

- This created a work capacity problem because we didn’t know how many employees would take us up on this.

- So, we cut all of our non-obligatory work for the next 2 days. We’re still required by contract to help our commercial and police accounts, but we stopped handling consumer cash calls (so we cut our revenue by >50% for those 2 days).

- This also created a compensation problem because giving them this time off would have cut their commission pay significantly over those days. (Over 95% of the towing industry pays their employees on a 100% commission basis).

- So, we gave them all an extra 16 hours of PTO to be used whenever they want this year, whether it was over those first 2 days or later.

By Friday we were nearly back to full capacity.

Was there anything else that helped your employees deal with this?

The last thing I’ll mention is that we offer a corporate chaplain to our employees as a company benefit, and this has been one of the most valuable things we’ve ever done for our employees.

A corporate chaplain is basically a non-denominational religious leader who provides spiritual support to a business’s employees.

We started the benefit one month before this accident, and during that month ~10% of our company used their services, and after the accident ~25% of our company used their services

It costs $360/mo for one chaplain to support our entire company of 40 people in a time of crisis, it’s been extremely valuable.

What about problem #3? — Protecting your investment?

So there were 3 things we had to worry about here:

1. Within a couple weeks after the accident we received a letter from a law firm that the affected family retained them as a personal injury attorney.

This is obviously a pretty shitty letter to receive, but for us this meant that we had to retain our own council so we interviewed a few business litigation/workers comp defense firms and chose one.

As a sidebar — Our law firm explained that the state our business is in has very strong employer liability protections, and for a business in our state to be liable for damages in excess of what worker’s compensation will pay for, there has to be proof that the employer knew of a risk and sent their employee into it regardless.

Because of this our firm did not feel our business was in jeopardy of being sued.

At this point, we haven’t heard anything from the other council in 4 months.

2. Because of this personal injury attorney issue, we had to have a few very uncomfortable conversations with employees.

We sat a few people down who were close with the family and stated our preference for them to not talk to the family about anything work related.

This was especially difficult because the son and the wife of the employee who died used to work in the business within a couple months before the incident occurred.

A couple employees left because we did this. Oddly enough, in previous conversations these employees also had shared their beliefs that my GM and I had implemented too many safety procedures.

To quote one of them “It’s getting too corporate around here.”

So these were employees that we were okay with losing.

3. OSHA and our State’s Department of Labor

The advice I received about dealing with OSHA from my peers was that “they would look for any and all reasons to issue any and all fines they could.”

So they showed up at our office the day after the accident around 9am and asked us 1,000 questions:

- What my GM and I understood to happen related to the accident

- They looked at the evidence and documentation of our safety procedures, for example we showed them the employee’s work schedule before the accident to see if he was overworked, we showed them evidence of him keeping records of his service, conducting pre driving inspections documented in our CRM system, etc.

- We also walked OSHA through a lot of towing industry safety 101 — because again they don’t know much about the industry.

When they were they they also said this:

“Hey, while we're here if you would like, we'd be happy to do a safety inspection of the rest of the premises and provide our feedback to you.”

My GM and I looked at each other and then said “no thank you, that’s okay” which they were fine with.

As it stands currently, we will get an official report about OSHA’s findings in less than a month

Thank you for letting me interview you today, is there anything else worth mentioning here?

Sure, here’s some bullet points:

- The truck our employee was using was a brand new $600,000 truck… We can’t just throw the truck away but we do have to make our employees feel safe operating it. So we had it inspected by Kenworth and the local JerrDan dealer (JerrDan is the manufacturer of the towing unit attached to the truck. We also let OSHA know we were putting the truck back in service and within a month it was back on the road

- The most emotionally difficult part about this was coming to the truth that we could not have done anything to prevent this. The first few months after the accident I went back and forth trying to figure out exactly what could have been done to prevent this… Another safety training, more safety procedures, more equipment inspections, etc… I assumed that this had to have been preventable and that I have the power to stop every single hazard in our industry. But now I’ve admitted to myself that we truly could not have done anything to prevent this.

- Everyone reading this should understand the basics of OSHA reporting. From what I was told this is where everyone screws up with OSHA and sets the tone of the conversation before it has happened. You as a business owner NEED TO KNOW the answers to these 3 questions:

1. What are the types of injuries you are required to report to OSHA

2. What is the deadline to notify OSHA (different for each specific injury)

3. How to actually notify OSHA (phone call, email, etc… also understand some technicalities like — in some cases if the injury is on the local news, you have already notified OSHA)